The Case of the Invisible Verb

There was another sad case last year in Vancouver of a disturbed person who settled his grievances with his ex-boss by using a shotgun. The killer is on trial now, and the story of the disgruntled* warehouse employee's workplace relationships during his employment is coming to light, as described in this excerpt from a Province report.

Several employees took the stand Monday to testify that Kirkpatrick, who was much older than them, was often testy and impatient.

There is an invisible verb hiding at the end of one clause there--an implied verb, I believe they call it--and once it reveals itself, the error becomes strikingly apparent. You wouldn't say, "Kirkpatrick, who was much older than them were, was often..." Rather, it should be, "who was much older than they," or, if that sounds too Charles Emerson Winchester for you, you can make the implicit verb explicit and say "who was much older than they were..."

Sure, you can make the claim that "older than them" has gained colloquial currency, but remember there are instances where the difference between the objective and the subjective pronoun makes a world of difference in meaning.

For instance, if I say "I hate Ben Affleck more than her" I could be trying to indicate that I have a lower regard for Ben Affleck's "talent" than my wife does. But it could also mean that I hate Ben Affleck more than I hate Kim, when the fact is I don't hate Kim at all--even when she puts my iPod in the washing machine. However, when I say, "I hate Ben Affleck more than she (does)," there is no mistaking who is being hated, and who is doing the hating.

* "I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled."--P.G. Wodehouse.

To Mock A Capote Bird

In a semi-interesting story from the Daily Mail in Britain about Harper Lee, the famous--and famously reclusive-- author of To Kill a Mockingbird, her path to publication is attributed in part to her childhood friend, the famous--and famously not reclusive--Truman Capote:

The young Capote had already begun to work on stories. "I convinced [Harper] she ought to write too," he said later. "She didn't really want to but I held her to it."

 The issue here is with the word convinced. To quote Bill Bryson on the difference between convince and persuade:

Although often used interchangeably, the words are not quite the same. Briefly, you convince someone that he should believe but persuade him to act...Another distinction is that persuade may be followed by an infinitive but convince may not.

So, in other words, you can convince people that Ben Affleck's acting is execrable, and they may be convinced of his execrableness, but you persuade them to avoid watching his "acting" in future films.

At least that is the pedantic grammar snob line. The American Heritage Dictionary, however, while noting that this is the "traditional rule," is more forgiving:

In a 1981 survey, 61% of the Usage Panel rejected the use of convince with an infinitive. But the tide of sentiment against the construction appears to be turning. In a 1996 survey, 74% accepted it in the sentence I tried to convince him to chip in a few dollars, but he refused. 

That's how it starts, you know. First you start using persuade and convince interchangeably; then, before long, you're impacting with reckless abandon, and eventually you lose all sense of restraint and become a self-indulgent, louche, besotted shell of your former self, living out your final years in a fog of gin fumes. Happens all the time. Just look at Truman Capote.

An Enormity of Enormous Proportions

In today's "Dear Prudence" advice column on Slate, Prudie counsels a young woman who's having difficulty relating to a father who has been incapacitated by a stroke. She reminds the letter-writer to offer support to her mother as well:

Being a caretaker is arduous work, made all the harder by the enormity of your father's losses. 

Here we find one of the more common word mis-usages. Enormity does not refer to amplitude. Rather, it denotes, to quote the American Heritage Dictionary, "a monstrous offense or evil; an outrage." So, to be accurate, we can speak of the enormity of the injustice that occurred when Ben Affleck was awarded an Oscar. But we can only bemoan the enormousness of the pain the movie-going public has been subjected to by his performances.

Foregone Conclusions

The local Tri-City News weekly paper features a regular editorial showdown where a foaming-at-the-mouth right wing columnist faces off against a woolly-headed liberal rival on a news topic of recent interest. Every time I read it I'm reminded of the Dan Ackroyd/Jane Curtin "Point-Counterpoint" segments ("Jane, you ignorant slut...") from the early "Saturday Night Live" days.

In any case, there was no newsprint battle of the predictable viewpoints last week. The point-counterpoint space in that issue (which I am just catching up on now) bears this introductory editor's note:

Following a tradition started several years ago, columnists Terry O"Neill and Mary Woo Sims are foregoing their usual format for this, their final column before Christmas, to write a combined column on things they agree on.

A debateless debate? Boring. Besides that, however, we have a word choice mix-up here. "Foregoing" means preceding ("the foregoing performance by the lobotomized Ben Affleck gave me gas"). The word needed here is forgoing, which means to do without ("for the sake of my intestinal health, I will be forgoing any future performances by the execrable Ben Affleck"). Choosing the right one is easy when you recall that foregoing refers to things that have gone before.

A Fiery, But Boring, Debate

A tour through Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish, turns up a link to this Evergreen Review article, "The Electronic Book Burning"--an over-the-top cri de coeur by Alan Kaufman on the decline of books and bookstores that features paragraphs such as this (as excerpted on Sullivan's blog):

The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now Der Book. Hi-tech propogandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that society would simply be better-off altogether if we euthanized it even as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries in our pockets, downloaded on the Uber-Kindle.

My goodness. I'm as passionate a book-fondler as the next guy--hell, I'd rather spend a lazy afternoon in a thoughtfully-curated bookstore than an evening of debauchery in a cathouse--but I think I would stop short of comparing enthusiasts of electronically-delivered literature to murderous Nazis. (Although if the book is truly becoming "the despised Jew of our culture" I am currently harboring a few hundred Anne Franks on my shelves, which makes me feel rather heroic.)

But that's not the excerpt under examination today (although "propagandists" is misspelled back there--and really, you don't need a proofreader to catch that: the squiggly red line in Word does all the work.) No, the usage in question comes in this passage:

According to reports coming in from other parts of the country, the awful scene is reoccuring everywhere: venerable, much beloved bookstores closing and that portion of the populace who cherish books—an ever-shrinking minority—left baffled and bereft; a silent corporate Krystallnacht decimating the world of literacy.

Believe it or not, a lot of very passionate (but very boring) people have spent endless man-hours engaged in a very passionate (but achingly dull) argument over the word "reoccur" and its variants. In fact, those among them whose bowties are cinched particularly tightly refuse to recognize its very existence, insisting the word to be used here can only be "recurring." Then there are the moderates who argue that "reoccur" is indeed a "real" word, but that it should be used to indicate a one-time repetition ("I hope my cancer doesn't re-occur") while "recur" denotes an ongoing repeating phenomena ("Ben Affleck is a recurring cancer in American cinema"). Finally, there are those who don't give a whistling woodchuck one way or the other and declare that either is fine. In any case, I think all of these factions (and every dictionary I consulted) agree that if you are going to use "reoccurring" it ought to have a double "r."

And speaking of The Daily Dish--and of the allure of books--it was on that blog that I came across this beautifully compelling ad that says more than a thousand earnest words about the raptures of reading:

And Farthermore...

Last night, while watching and reading The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (I've mentioned before my fetish for watching movies with the subtitles activated), I came across this contentious usage:

It has always been my understanding that all moral and attractive people observe the distinction that says "farther" refers to literal distance ("Brad Pitt is standing no farther than ten feet from Ben Affleck") while "further" is reserved for conceptual or metaphorical uses and matters of degree ("Watching a Ben Affleck movie is the furthest thing from my idea of a good time.")

It turns out, though, that the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, while acknowledging this distinction, says that there are many instances "in which the choice between the two forms is arbitrary." And even the famously persnickety H.W. Fowler (of Fowler's Modern English Usage) was uncharacteristically wishy-washy on the subject, maintaining that it was just a matter of individual preference, and that eventually "further" would carry the day for all instances. Harumph!

I like the idea of different words performing different functions, so I'm going to continue to acknowledge a difference, and to question the character of those who don't.

Riddle Me This, Professor Dawkins

Far be it from me to critique the semantic choices of an eminent scientist and graceful writer like Richard Dawkins. Well, maybe not too far, because here goes. On page 241 of his recent bestseller, The Greatest Show on Earth, Dawkins writes:

As so often when we are faced with the riddle of how complex and improbable things can arise in evolution, it is a fallacy to assume that the final perfection that we see today is the way it always was.

He's talking here about enzyme molecules, not animals, but nevertheless it has been my understanding (from reading the work of Richard Dawkins, among others) that it is a fallacy to assume that anything that evolves ever reaches a point of "final perfection"--with the possible exception of Ben Affleck's crapitude.