Random notes on Grammar and Word Study
If you have questions and need answers, try these excellent sites: Grammarist or Grammar Girl . The notes here are just random thoughts and explorations of mine.
Word Study: More honored in the breach...
The New York Times corrects us on "more honored in the breach:" "The passage more honored in the breach than the observance, from “Hamlet,” refers to a custom that is more honorablyignored than followed — not one that is more often ignored."
Word Study: Comprised of...
...is a phrase that has always made me vaguely uneasy, to the point of drafting with it, but usually cutting it during editing. I finally took the radical step of looking up the phrase and found a medium-long article on the Merriam-Webster usage page that essentially says it is considered standard, but hated and argued against by many, including a Wikipedian who has excised around 10,000 instances on Wikipedia and written a long article explaining why. Wow.
Word Study: Different than, different from
Two articles that explain it all about how "different than" is different from "different from:"
Shorter, from Dictionary.com and longer, but says the same thing from Grammar.com.
Word Study: Nonplussed
I went through a period of looking up a lot of words, especially for their etymology. I loved Indo-European roots, and discoveries like the fact that the words "black" in English and "blanco" in Spanish go way back to the same Indo-European word for lightning or maybe blaze: brilliant white light that leaves things charred black.
I was less interested in usage, which brings up judgements about right and wrong and when change is good and when it is only inevitable.
Recently I was going over a manuscript for a colleague, and came across a passage in which the narrator is on a walking pilgrimage and bares her feet to protect a developing blister with moleskin: "The other pilgrims were nonplussed," she writes. "One nodded sympathetically and one asked to borrow my scissors." These sentences completely nonplussed me. They didn't seem to match. If the other pilgrims were so shocked by her bare feet, why were they calmly asking to borrow the scissors?
Looking up words in the Internet age is far quicker than it used to be, although it has lost some of the comforting ritual that came with dragging down Eric Partridge's Origins or pulling out the magnifying glass for the compact OED. Within seconds, I had Googled "nonplussed," and the first definition was just what I expected, suggesting that my colleague was misusing the word: "surprised and confused so much that they are unsure how to react."
But wait! There was a second definition, labeled as a "North American" usage. Since my colleague is Canadian, I thought maybe that was going to be the explanation, a Canadian usage. The second definition was "not disconcerted, unperturbed"– pretty much the opposite of how I understood the word. I looked a little further and found a usage note saying that while in standard use "nonplussed" means "surprised and confused," a new use has developed in recent years, meaning "unperturbed." The new use may have arisen from an assumption that "non" is the normal negative prefix and must therefore have a negative meaning. The second "nonplussed" is not (yet) considered part of standard English.
Is this word is in the process of slipping over to its opposite meaning the way many people use "drone?" "Drone" seems well on its way from leaving its meaning of "non worker male bee" to something more like "drudge," possibly because of the boring sameness of the sound denoted by another version of "drone."
In the end, the writer decided to go with "unperturbed" just to make sure her narrative wasn't misread.
Re: "that" in clauses: I always think of "that" as formal and probably unnecessary, but there are definitely times when it is needed for clarity: The mayor announced June 1 the fund would be exhausted. Is the mayor making the announcement on June 1 or will the fund be exhausted on June 1?
In a lot of fiction writing, you can cut it--it's how people speak. It's never incorrect, but sometimes wordy (here's a page online that discusses it nicely: https://web.ku.edu/~edit/that.html).
Mini-lesson on Lie versus Lay
– Today I lie in my bed; yesterday, I lay in my bed. In the past, I have lain in bed till noon.
– As we speak, I lay the paintbrush on the table. I laid it there yesterday too, and, in fact, I have laid it there many times.
– As we speak, I lay it down, and then the paintbrush just lies there.. But when I laid it down yesterday, it rolled off the table and lay on the floor.
Confused? Paintbrushes "lie" on the table or floor, but you "lay" the paintbrush down on the table. Then of course, it just "lies" there.
The really confusing part is the past tenses: "I laid the brush down beside the paints, and it just lay there." One verb has an object; one doesn't. Many, many people do this in a grammatically incorrect way.
For those of you who hate grammar and don't really care, take heart: there is an excellent chance that in another ten or twenty years, usage will have changed.
One current dictionary ( Random House Unabridged Second Edition) explains, "...forms of LAY are commonly heard in senses normally associated with LIE. In edited written English, [however,] such uses of LAY are rare and are usually considered nonstandard."
More and Links
Three Good Places to Have Your Grammar Questions Answered: The Grammarist; Grammar Girl; The Center for Writing Studies
A Journal of Practical Writing: Tips from Writers
Writing Tips
Some Hints on Structuring a Murder Mystery Novel
Point-of-View Characters Whose Gender Is Not Yours
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The newsletter is also online at Books for Readers .
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