Their use and abuse

Now and then I catch myself writing such long, winding sentences that by the time I’ve stopped it with a period, I have to look at the beginning to see if both ends are relevant to each other. If not, I start hacking into them mercilessly. Few are the paragraphs that would not benefit from a thorough pruning. My best guide is how it sounds when read aloud.

Then I catch “real” writers publishing grafs like the following. I promise you no one read this specimen aloud:

“After five days of searching through rain, snow and subfreezing temperatures by some 145 trained personnel in [a] national park, a ribbon and a nearby spot where a tracking dog picked up his scent are the only signs of the boy since he ran away Saturday afternoon from his father's car while parked along the road circling the lake formed in a collapsed volcano at the crest of the Cascade Range.”

Whew. I feel breathless. There are 71 words, and I think nine of them are prepositions.

On behalf of legitimate journalists everywhere, I urge forbearance.

Covering a story, especially one with an ongoing investigation and earlier errors, sometimes requires writing on site just to get the story filed on time and then kept up-to-date. Mistakes happen.

The Citizen’s John Munford is my hero. I almost wrote “role model,” but that would be a lie. I don’t want to write eight or ten stories each week, as John does routinely. I’ve never seen him type, but I have seen him taking notes in a large, lazy script, simultaneously talking about something else, as though there are no connections among hands, eyes and mouth.

Such a single-minded Munfordian wrote one of the earliest reports on the Hawaiian earthquake last week. (I think it was an AP stringer; in any case, it was corrected later.)

The correspondent wrote that there were “no reports of serious fatalities.” For which I am grateful, but I do grieve for possible minor fatalities.

About the time I think there’s not much more for me to learn about English, I discover that there is. The word “expletive” took me by surprise this week. I did not know it had a meaning other than these from the Microsoft Word dictionary: curse, oath, invective, exclamation. Like most people, I guess, I tend to see it paired with the word “deleted.”

The expletive not deleted is one of several words used to fill a spot in a sentence where nothing else will quite do. “There” is an example in the paragraph above: “There is not much more to learn.” In this case, “there” does not mean “that place over yonder,” but acts as a sort of prop to keep the sentence from flying apart.

“It” is another expletive, as in “It is important” or “It’s too late now” or “It’s raining.”

As long as I am belaboring you with erudition, let me add an explanation of the oft-misused prefixes “for-” and “fore-” by Gene Owens in the May-June 2006 edition of SPELL/Binder.

The article in the newsletter of the Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature was headlined “Bubba urges folks: Forswear bad grammar.” The prefix “for-” denotes prohibition, abstention, neglect or renunciation, Owens writes. “Fore-” means in front or going ahead.

“Therefore, ‘forswear’ means to renounce, repudiate, disavow, or swear
falsely.”

“Foreswear” would have rather limited usage, as “to swear in advance.”

It’s a little bit clearer when you sort out “forego” and “forgo.” Owens offers: “’Forgo’ means to go without. ‘Forego’ means to go ahead. A ‘foregone conclusion’ is a result known in advance. A ‘forgone opportunity’ is an opportunity passed up. A ‘forebear’ is an ancestor. To ‘forbear’ is to hold oneself back.”

Clear?

One of my little peccadilloes, as Dave likes to call them, is avoiding the first person singular when I begin writing a column. When I worked (briefly) at the “Big paper” a copy editor from downtown corrected me none to gently about my starting every column with “I.”

I mentioned it to our late beloved editor, Dave Hamrick, and he said he too recalled such a mandate while in a journalism class. He said I made him self-conscious after our conversation because he hadn’t realized how often he used what he called “the vertical pronoun.”

To my knowledge I’ve committed that atrocity only once or twice, usually in the heat of anger. I’m so careful about it, I eschew even to use “we” or allowing the pronoun to be invisible, as in, “Went to the store this morning.” The “I” is understood to be there.

Thank you for reading, and keep it up. I’ll keep writing.