Copyright, Ralph, 2000. All rights reserved. And revered. 
 

Introduction

Editors and English teachers have ingeniously created a wide variety of words and terms guaranteed to confuse others and make the person who is using them sound educated and alert.

     Some of these words and terms are taken from Old French and ancient Latin. This is especially appropriate considering that many of the English characteristics that they describe also come from those extinct tongues.

     Picture the room full of admiring eyes when one says, “Oh, yeah, that’s the passive voice with the future perfect tense, where the passive voice is expressed with the past participle of the verb preceded by a form of the verb to be showing tense, which in this case is the future perfect, which is expressed by adding the auxiliary verb have, along with past participle form of the verb, showing that an action will have been completed at a given point in time. Boy, it sure is a shame that you can’t have the future perfect continuous in the passive voice.”

     These words don’t have to make any sense. The purpose is indirect: They will make the person speaking look and sound impressive.

     These editors and English teachers can further pad the impression they make by loading their desk with large volumes bearing such names as An Examination of the Principles of English Grammar and Twenty Thousand Rules of English Syntax. (Throw in a volume such as Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and the Sickness unto Death for good measure.)

     These volumes need not actually be read, but at any one time, at least three should be opened and arranged sloppily about the desk’s flat surfaces to make others think they are currently in use. (These open books must, of course, be rotated quite frequently, and the constant arranging can be as effective in impressing others as actual reading them.)

     Certainly the majority of editors and teachers can get by without knowing much more about the English language than its origins (it was created by the Anglos in Anglo County, New Jersey, and the Saxons, a bebop band once lead by Charlie Christian). But should the editor or teacher wish to get paid as much as those who actually bother to write and try to make themselves understood, it is necessary to look, and speak, like a person who actually stayed awake through (and attended) high school English class.

     With this in mind, Ralph’s manual of Style offers the following glossary of terms to help the editor or teacher sound as if they had studied something other than the habits of the opposite sex while in college.

Subject-Verb Agreement

It is incumbent upon the editor to ensure that the subject and the verb in each sentence agree—in number, in gender, and in preferred color of wallpaper. In sentences where they do not agree, people will laugh hysterically at the subject, the verb, and the editor, and never take it or it or her or him seriously again. See the following examples.

(SUBJECT-VERB DISAGREEMENT)

Subject: Hey, let’s do sashimi for dinner tonight.

Verb: Forget it! I hate sashimi. They never cook it right.

Subject: They do, too! How about Mexican, then? I love Mexican.

Verb: I hate Mexican. We’ll have French.

Subject: No!!! Too snobbish!

Verb: You have to listen to me.

Subject: Dooo not!

Verb: Do tooo! The subject must change to meet the person, gender, and neck size of the verb. I read it in a book.

Subject: Wrong! Books suck, anyway. I am the subject, and, I quoteth, “The subject determines the verb in a sentence.”

Verb: Where’d you read that, in Dr. Spock?

Subject: It’s true. It was IN WRITING. So you have to listen.

Verb: Dooo not! In fact, you are the subject, and that makes me the ruler. You are subject to my commands, my disloyal little subject.

Subject: You’re gonna be subject to my fist!

Editor: Stop that, you two! Put a lid on it! You’re having frozen fish sticks for dinner tonight, and if you don’t behave, I won’t thaw them out and cook them before I give them to you.

(SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT)

Subject: . . .

Verb:  . . .

Subject: I say editor be of questionable family line!

Verb: I agree. I believe a proper description would involve a donkey.

Subject: Wanna play checkers?

Verb: OK.

pronoun

This means ‘in favor of nouns’, as opposed to ‘opposed to nouns’. See also proverb.

antecedent

This is a particularly cool- (and impressive-) sounding word describing, simply, the noun that a pronoun refers to. Imagine that.

procedent

This means ‘in favor of cedents’. Should people ask what a cedent is, recite in Latin the first five paragraphs of Genesis and tell them to consult a librarian for further information. Ensure them all the same, though, that if they knew what one was, they would very certainly support it.

case

Now here’s a word that you can use to get on people’s cases about. In case you are unaware, we explain: The case is the form of a noun showing how that noun is used in a sentence. Of course, if we are to be honest, this is completely unnecessary. A sentence would be just as easily comprehended without them in most cases. (People would call a sentence without no cases crude, but other languages get by just fine without them.) Still, the case in point—these are the complexities that add dollars onto editors’ paychecks.

     And now for a case study: There are the subjective case, the objective case, the possessive case, the book case, the lost case, the space case, and the Case of the Missing Jewels. The last two are particularly common among people who write for the Internet.

     Remember, it is not what you say, but how you case it

mood

Let’s be frank: If we want to discuss mood, we should be exploring what Miles Davis has over Dizzy Gillespie. But for a group of people who describe punctuation, capitalization, and how to write numbers as style, it is probably acceptable that we describe the intent of a verb (fact, possibility, or command) as mood. Miles Davis would not have approved of our profession anyhow.

     Anyway, the moods sound particularly impressive: the indicative mood, the subjunctive mood, and the imperative mood. And for those who are currently in the imperative mood, see the following examples.

          indicative mood: The wild cows moo moodily at the moon.

          imperative mood: Moo moodily at the moon.

          subjunctive mood: Had only you mooed moodily at the moon . . .

hyperbole

This is a tremendously superb term, one which delights millions. And while it does not call to mind anything profound to say (it means, simply, ‘exaggeration’), it does call to mind an enjoyable sci-fi novel: The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons. This book described an extremely imaginative and alluring universe which, like a child rampaging on a beautiful house of cards or an intricate sand castle just completed, the author proceeds to tear apart. Good reading, but the sequels did not have much to work with.

interjection

Uh, you see, these, um, interjection things are the little utterances, you know, like, sometimes, words, sometimes sounds. They have no, uh, grammatical influence over other parts of speech, and so are not modifiers. And they have no substance and describe no action, so they are not nouns or verbs. And they are not function words (except in that the often accompany various bodily functions). That makes them, uh, interjections, for lack of better ideas, since they are interjected into speech.

     Language people are embarrassed both by this part of speech’s lame label and by their not being able to assign any grandiose rules to it. Still, to the common person, the name sounds impressive, especially when put into different forms: (e.g., The word is used interjectionally.)

     This embarrassment is made worse by the influence that interjections have over our words. Consider the two examples below, one without interjections and two with, to see how strong that influence is.

                  Without: Is that your girlfriend?

                  With: Whoa, boy! is that your, ooh, girlfriend, eh, eh, 

                            know what I mean, say no more?

     Clearly, the interjections add substantial meaning to the sentence. And that is the end of this, uh . . . explanation.

Pronouns (revisited)

All editors and writers should be pronouns. Although there are many who are proverbs and antinouns, nouns are the substance of the language, and thus pronoun editors are also procreation, and renowns editors are recreations. Do not bother to reread the sentence that precedes; frankly it is hard to write anything meaningful about pronouns.      

     And if you wonder why editors are paid so little, ask yourself, “What is the worth of a person who spends nights and weekends reading about  pronouns, let alone sitting up at midnight on Lunar New Year day writing about them. That is what the editors at Ralph’s have come up.

Subjective and Objective Pronouns

Subjective pronouns tend to shout out at people: “Me, me, me!” It is all very one-sided. Objective pronouns, on the other hand, lend a more fair-minded flavor to a sentence. They say, “Me, or possibly him, which could, of course, be her. Let’s discuss it over lunch.”

     With this in mind, the editor interested in politeness and manners in speech will avoid the subjective pronoun, choosing instead long, colorful descriptions, which will distract the reader from noticing that the sentence refers to no subject in particular—a politically correct way of not paying anything any special notice, lest something not spoken of cries out “Affirmative action now!” which really breaks up the rhythm of a sentence.

Pronouns and Their Antecedents

There is one thing you can say for the term antecedent: it is a really cool word. It is long, it is made up of recognizable word parts, and most people, while they seem to recognize the parts, do not actually know what the word means. The only people who use it are grammarians, schoolteachers, and editors.

     For instance, you rarely hear bar chatter along the lines of “What antecedent is this objective pronoun referring to, anyway, Frank?” The word simply does not come up in everyday conversation.

     Why is this good? It is good because it is one more word that copy editors can regularly throw around the office to make themselves look specially educated, and to quiet writers and other staff who think they know better. Consider the following example.

          Writer: I think this they  should  be themselves. It sounds more correct.

          Copy Editor: Sounds better? Hogwash! Clearly, considering the

                              antecedent, a reflexive pronoun would be completely inappropriate.

          Writer: Ah . . . what?

          Copy Editor: I spent years studying the complex relationships between

                                  pronouns and their antecedents and now some junior writer 

                                  is going to step off the boat and tell me about reflexive pronouns?!

          Writer: I, uh . . .

          Copy Editor: Leave the editing to the editors, please.

          Writer: Right. Sorry.

     But what really makes the word antecedent cool is the fact that it does not have an impressive meaning, as one would expect. It simply means the thing a pronoun refers to. But most people will ever figure this out, because most people could never imagine ever needing this thought, yet along this word.