May I Quote You on That?: a Guide to Grammar and Usage
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May I Quote You on That? May I Quote You on That? A Guide to Grammar and Usage STEPHEN‘ SPECTOR 1’ 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form, and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available ISBN 978-0-19-021528-6 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Mary, who makes everything possible and everything better Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi About the Companion Website xix 1. What Is Standard English, and Who Gets to Decide What’s Proper English Today? 1 2. Some Really Basic Grammar Terms 5 3. Tricky Words,‘ Usage, and Grammar 18 4. Tricky Words of the Twentieth Century and Today 177 5. Look-Alikes 211 6. Plurals 350 Notes 369 Select Bibliography 387 Index 389 ✻ Acknowledgments‘’ I want to thank first of all the great scholars who taught me the history of the English language. My deep gratitude and warm appreciation go to Marie Borroff. I found her course on the history of the language to be inspirational, I’ve valued her mentorship, and I’ve treasured her friend- ship. I’m profoundly indebted to Talbot Donaldson. His brilliance and humor in reading Chaucer made Middle English a delight. I’m very grateful to John Pope, Traugott Lawler, and Dorothee Metlitzki for sharing their immense knowledge of Old and Middle English and for modeling personal kindness and generosity. I deeply appreciate Norman Davis’s patience and good humor in advising me when I was just out of graduate school, in the hope that I wouldn’t embarrass the Early English Text Society too badly. Some of them are gone now, but what I learned from all of them enlivens this little book. Through the entire process of writing this book, my wife, Mary, has been a wise and loving support and comfort, as she always is. My son, Dave, and my daughter-in-law, Şebnem, gave me great advice from first to last, drawing on their experience in English language instruction and their excellent judgment and cleverness. I’m very grateful to Leigh Ann Hirschman and Betsy Amster for helping me find the right voice for the book. It turned out to be my own voice, the one in which I actually speak to my students. After I’d written the manuscript, I couldn’t have asked for more talented, learned, and helpful friends than the ones who kindly read it and suggested changes: Henry Abelove, Paul Dolan, x Acknowledgments Traugott Lawler, Lila Naydan, Roger Rosenblatt, and Howie Schneider. I’m very grateful to the terrific editors at Oxford University Press, Cynthia Read, who encouraged me to submit the book to OUP, and Hallie Stebbins, who believed in it, edited it wisely, and shepherded it to publication. Thanks also to Marcela Maxfield, my former student who now works at OUP, for reading the manuscript and making comments that made the book better and saved me from big and small mistakes. ✻ Introduction‘’ Imagine for a moment that your boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse went away for a week and forgot to call you. You’re pretty annoyed. What kind of language will the two of you use when you see each other? Your significant other might begin with something loving, in a very informal, intimate style, like this: “Hey, sweetheart. Love you. Miss me?” You might reply in a similar style, but a lot less sweetly, like this: “Yeah, right! How come you didn’t call or text, you jerk?” Now imagine how you’d talk in a job interview at Google. You’d prob- ably use a much more formal level of speech. You might say, “Good morning. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Thanks so much for inviting me here today.” The interviewer might respond, “We’re very impressed with your credentials.” xii Introduction We all use language in different styles, depending on the situation.1 You wouldn’t talk to a congressman the same way that you would to a misbehaving child, for example—though that depends on the con- gressman, of course. And if you write a college application essay, your language should be a lot more formal than it would be if you and your friends were watching your team blow a lead in the ninth inning of a playoff game. The more formal the context, the more appropriate it is to use a formal level of Standard English, the style of writing and speech that we’ll explore in this book. My goal is to make the conventions of formal English easier and more fun to learn than traditional approaches usually do. It’s the product of my forty years of teaching courses on the English language, and it differs from most other usage and style guides in several ways: • It teaches by example, so you can learn from context. The lessons start with quotations, not with rules or definitions. Reading these sentences may be enough for you to infer the usage rules or the word meanings for yourself.2 You may find that some of these quotations are memorable. That’s good, because if you remember them, you can model your own sentences on them. An incidental benefit is that these illustrations can be useful for new learners of English. • Many of the quotations are funny, interesting, or instructive (I hope). Most are from celebrities, great writers, or historical figures. Mark Twain is cited often. Jerry Seinfeld appears, as do Groucho Marx, Woody Allen, Billy Crystal, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert. Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift are quoted, as are Jennifer Lawrence, Scarlett Johansson, and George Clooney. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Tolkien are represented. So are Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Sigmund Freud, Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Dalai Lama. Babe Ruth, Yogi Berra, and Michael Jordan appear. So do Marilyn Monroe, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, and many others. Introduction xiii • Each lesson includes a mini-essay telling the history of the rules or the words being discussed. These discussions are written in a clear, accessible style. They put the traditional rules in the context of historical changes and informal or nonstandard speech today. And they illustrate the fact that the “right” usage is often a moving target and a personal choice. A living language changes over time, and so do ideas about what is appropriate in formal use. You may be surprised by what you learn about the current views on some of the usage rules. • This is a book for the twenty-first century, and it includes many frequently misunderstood words that are relevant today. Just as H. W. Fowler’s old standby, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, included terms that were especially significant for its time (1926), such as atom, electron, communism, and anarchism, this book addresses tricky words that are part of our current experience. It covers, for example, the difference between extremism and fanaticism, the Holocaust and a holocaust, the Internet and the Web, and the terms Islamic and Islamist. It also discusses the history and meaning of words like avatar, fundamentalism, jihad, metadata, racism, schizophrenia, and terrorism. • The book has a dedicated website containing practice drills. You can find it at www.oup.com/us/MayIQuoteYou. To master and retain Standard English grammar and usage rules, most of us need to learn them, then relearn them, with practice and guidance. In that sense, writing a Standard English sentence is like doing a ballroom dance. Both involve graceful, varied, rhythmic movement. Done right, both can be beautiful. But each has patterns that aren’t familiar from everyday experience. When writers or dancers become technically skillful, we describe them as literate. Those moves don’t always come naturally, though, so both require practice and guidance. I’ve had over thirty ballroom dance lessons (to please my wife, who’s a literate dancer). At the start of every lesson my wife has had to remind me about the basic steps. When she whispers in my ear as we begin to dance, she’s not saying sweet nothings; she’s giving me the rhythm: “Quick, quick, xiv Introduction slow. Quick, quick, slow.” Then I catch the beat and the dance moves come back to me. Many of my students have a similar experience with grammar and usage: through relearning, guidance, and practice they gain confidence, grace, and mastery.