Usage Guide
Copyright, RMS, 2000. All rights reserved . Na, na-na, na-na, na!
NOTE: The usage section is under construction, which is Internet
jargon for "ain't done yet" (and you wonder how teenagers can create miltimillion-dollar
corporations overnight!). Further entries will be added regularly. Watch
the New Releases section on the home page for news of updates.
Affect, Effect
The similarity between these two words affects even doctors, lawyers,
and accountants, and the effect is effective. There is, however, a simple,
effective rule for dealing with the two words. If your meaning is influence
and you want a verb, use the verb influence. If, on the other hand,
your meaning is influence and you need a noun, use the noun influence.
Is that hard? Likewise, if you are looking for a word meaning to bring
about or to put into practice, then for the sake of Noah Webster,
use to bring about or to put into practice, and stop
wasting everybody's time.
(As you can see, a little prudence in word
choice can help one avoid many of the conflicts that editors and writers
normally spend months developing ulcers over.)
Then again, if you are looking for an obscure
noun used in psychology, and you don't know which of these two it is, it
is sincerely hoped that you are not a doctor, in whose care people have
trusted their lives and sanity.
ULCERS: Effecting the plan will have the effect of affecting
everyone.
EASIER: Putting the plan into practice will have the influence
of influencing everyone.
ULCERS: Effecting the effect, we saw that the effect of the effect
was that the effective effect effectively affects all the affects, showing
their effectiveness. That's a fact, but an effective fact.
Alright All Right?
In the spring of 1817, a student at Oxford University began what has
now been two centuries of stormy and sometimes bloody controversy when
he wrote the phrase "Alright now" on a test paper.* The quarrel, of course,
is over the one-word form (alright) of all right, which the
majority of authorities say is not at all right or at all all right, all
right already?
The anti-alright camp point out that
there is no need for a one-word form. The pro-alright camp replies
that there is too. The anti's say, "There is not," and the pro's
say, "There is, too!" Inevidibly, they become too loud and the police
are called in. An officer pounds on the door and says, in a heavy Irish
accent, "Alright, open this door!"—to which they all fall silent and, yes,
ask "Would that be all right spelled as one word or two?" Police
officers, who find it helpful to sound tough and who think it sounds tough
to sound uneducated (which is usually true) answer that it is all right
as one word. This invariably upsets the general public and gets the police
chief fired for bad spelling on the force (a great plot for a Starsky
and Hutch episode). As a result, in most municipalities, it is now
illegal to say all right in any form. You are supposed to say OK
instead
(which unfortunately has already led to the great Gunfight at OK Corral,
between the OK camp, the O.K. camp, the Okay camp, the okie dokie camp,
and the people of the State of Oklahoma, who claimed exclusive rights to
the phrase.
And this is only the stormy part of the not-alright
problem. There is also the bloody part. In 1848, riots broke out across
Europe over the issue and thousands of English teachers were killed or
injured in the chaos. Similar problems, at times bordering on civil war,
have erupted frequently since.
In America in the 1960s, a whole youth culture
developed as a result of the conflict. To spite their parents, the establishment,
society, convention, and everyone over thirty, young people grew their
hair frighteningly long, wore torn-up old clothes, and went around making
victory signs and saying in loud, taunting voices, "Alright!" By their
intonation, the listener could tell their meaning was clearly the one-word
form, and not the two-.
The horrible alright dispute, along
with all the trouble it has caused over time, is made all the more tragic
by the fact that the original Oxford student who tried to spell it as one
word was actually trying to spell not all right now but all write
now,
a command in the imperative. (It was spring, after all, and students
tend to blunder a lot.)
Had his professors known of the stupid blunder,
they would simply have taken him out back and shot him. But they discovered
it too late. Blood had already been shed; newspaper copy editors and English
teachers were already doomed to an eternity of "Is too!" "Is not."
And if the professors had tried to spare the world and tell the truth,
Oxford would have lost its standing as the center of learning in the English-speaking
world, and so the professors kept quiet. They did, all the same, take the
student out back and shoot him.
OLL KORRECT: "OK, turn right here and left there." "Left
there?" "Right." "Oh, all right. I get it." "No, left!" "All right and
no left. Right."
ALL RIGHT: After they all write all right as "alright," the teacher
makes them all write all right so that all the alls and all the rights
were all right.
ALL WRONG: After they alright alright as alright . . .
ALRIGHT!: Kurt Vonnegut has a new volume of collected short stories
out.
ALL WIGHT: Alwight, silly wabbit, hands up!
ALL RIGHT: A bunch of Republicans
ALL LEFT: Ralph's attempt to make beef stew. Do not buy his forthcoming
cookbook.
* The famous blunder was remembered in the Rolling Stones' hit
song Jumpin' Jack Flash ("It's alright now"), which sounds much better
when played by Johnny Winter, the lyrics replaced by guitar lead.
Anglo-Saxon vs. Latin
If you want to make something sound very clear and easily acceptable
to the average English speaker's ear, use mainly words of Anglo-Saxon origin.
Do this also if you want to continue driving a 1973 Ford Pinto and living
in a trailer-park suburb of Buttonwillow, California.
If, on the other hand, earning big bucks,
driving a nice automobile, and, possibly, buying a home in Beverly Hills,
are more important to you than making a piece of text—which may well be
garbage anyhow—easily readable, then replace as many of the Anglo-Saxon
words as possible with words of Latin or Old French origin.
Take the following phrase for example.
ANGLO-SAXON: The basic hope of cows to eat coconuts
. . .
This, of course, sounds ridiculous. This is the sort of thing you get from
a writer or editor who drives a 1973 Ford Pinto. However, if said using
stuffier-sounding words, of Latin or Old French origin, that Ford Pinto
might be traded in for at least a Buick:
STUFFILY PUT: The fundamental desire of cattle to consume
Cocos
nucifera fruit . . .
Of course, it is not always easy to think up words from extinct languages
and dialects, and looking up the etymologies of each word you come across
is too troublesome a task (which is part of the reason why the examples
above are phrases, not sentences; the other part of the reason is, well
. . . you look; you finish those sentences). Therefore, you will
do best simply to guess, choosing those words with more syllables, prefixes
and suffixes, and snobbish-sounding tones.
In addition, you need not restrict yourself
to words of Latin and Old French origin. Words from many other languages
also sound amply formal and pretentious. Slavic words, for example, can
sound very official, and words from Japanese can raise the syllable count
considerably. Notice how official the words pivos spaciba (beer,
please) sound. And look at how many syllables we get in the Japanese domo
arigato gozaimashita—eleven, if one bothers to pronounce them all,
which the Japanese don't—which means, basically, "thanks."
Remember also, foreign words or Latin terms
can be set in italics, which looks extremely sophisticated.
Another interesting device is to use both
the Anglo-Saxon term and the Latin or Norman French term together.
Lawyers do this all the time. Try: first and foremost, full and complete,
basic and fundamental, will and testament, indemnify and hold harmless,
lamb and mutton, Suntory Rare and Old, cow and cattle. To have even
more fun, add a third term from yet another language, say, Chinese: first,
foremost, and diyi; full, complete, and wanzhengge; basic, fundamental,
and jibende . . .
Then again, there are a whole lot of average
English speakers who speak no second language (and there are some
who, it could be argued, do not speak a first one very well). If you are
one of these, or if you are certain that most of your readership ARE, then
try making up some awe-inspiring words. This is guaranteed to circuminsulate
you in cases of mesmerization where you are phenindentally undisposated
to verigitate the migloberitation of efves.
WRONG: The kids did not get the teacher's lesson on
church history.
RIGHT: The youthful scholars failed to fully comprehend the professor's
lecture on antidisestablishmentarianism.
WRONG: I wanna buy a new suit.
RIGHT: It is my considered intention to procure recently produced
and unused attire.
A While and Awhile and A-While
Many people write to Ralph's asking the difference between a while
and
awhile. We find this terribly surprising. If these people cannot see
the difference between these two terms (i.e., a space after the A—hello!),
it is highly surprising that they are able to write in the first place,
and then manage to put the piece of paper they have written on into a box
bearing the words "Mail Box," as opposed to, say, "Garbage Can," "Book
Return," or "Rest in Peace."
Far too many of such letters, however, have
made it to us, and thus it cannot be just a case (cases) of dumb luck.
Sure, some of them spelled
Ralph with an F, wrote the return
address backward, accidentally sealed one of their fingers inside the envelope,
or abbreviated California not to CA but to COLIFLR., but the fact is, there
seems to be some genuine confusion over these two terms.
And it is, first and foremost [see Anglo-Saxon
entry], confusion, of all things, that interests Ralph's Manual of Style.
But instead of offering a bunch of drab grammar
nonsense about the separated
a being the indefinite article, thus
signifying the coming of a noun, which is likely to be used after a preposition,
which in this case is for . . . and the one-word form obviously
being one of these closed, bastardized adverbs, which would be truly nonstandard
(linguist PC speak for "stupid Neanderthal") after a preposition . . .
instead of going into this, we will offer a more ear-pleasing sort of Dr.
Suess-like rule for people to memorize and refer to when they find themselves
sitting up at three in the morning, pen over a blank piece of paper, wondering,
"Should I use
awhile or a while?" See below.
While a while is a while one whiles away, awhile
is a way in which one whiles, but while the while which one whiles away
would wear wonderfully a word like for, the one which is a way in
which one whiles would be full of wonder as to where such a word would
go, and thus the while which one whiles away and which would wear wonderfully
a word like for is wegularly worded with such a one, whereas the
one which is a way in which one whiles and which would be full of wonder
as to where such a word would go, such a one would not wisely be worded
this way—it would in fact thus be worded wongly, wacky wabbit.
This may seem like a lengthy rhyme, but remember,
the goal is not so much clarity of statement as clarity of bank
statement. Give the employer a simple, clear grammar explanation and he/she
is going to say "Oh, I see; thanks," and walk away whistling. On the other
hand, recite this little ditty, and the employer is going to whistle, hand
you a bonus for hard work and devotion, and tell you to go home and get
some west.
Lastly, there is no convention for using a
hyphen (a-while). But we were worried that too many people would
see the one- and two-word forms in the title, and think, "Yeah, yeah, I
know that," and then not read the entry. So we added the hyphen version
to try to grab their attention. And if they—you—are reading this, the last
paragraph, then it worked.
Between vs. Among
The rule is simple. You learned it in the second grade—which is between
the first and third grades and among those early grades in which you first
learn that acquiring knowledge is truly a pain in the ass, and that knowledge
is, largely, a pile of facts that a select few keep among themselves
to maintain the distance between the classes.
The rule is this: Between is used for
two things and among is used for three or more. See the examples
below.
They were the perfect loving couple: The love between them
would never die.
They were the perfect love triangle: The love among them would never
die.
Midway Island is roughly midway between America and Japan.
Midway Island is roughly midway among America, Japan, and the Philippines.
With simple rules like this, there can be little discrepancy between what
ought to be, what makes sense, and what is, and the relationships between
editors, writers, and publishers will bettered, as these people will be
spared the need to argue over the various conflicts between the many various
pairs of words.
Compare with with Compare To (if you dare to)
Use compare to when likening something to a summer's day and
compare with for all other uses.
A: Hey, Fred! Compare thy new Buick to a summer's day!
B: Gee, Ralph, it's a good thing you didn't say compare with,
or you would have really been in trouble.
A: Hey, Fred. Compare thee to a summer's day.
B: Yeah, Ralph, whatever you say. Don't sit so close.
A: Oh, Julietta! Compare thee to a summer's day.
B: Summer's the monsoon season, Ralph!
A: Ouch! That hurt.
Copy and Replica
A copy is not the same as a replica. This is a replica.
This is a replica. Again, this is a—no it isn't. As soon as we add again
and use a lowercase t, we are no longer talking about replicas,
unless perhaps it is an extremely poor replica. In any case, restrict the
use of replica for those things that are exact copies, and restrict
the use of copy for pieces of text that you have to edit at work.
For all other uses, stick to whom.
A: Thee are just like a replica of a summer's day.
B: I copy. Ten-four. But there's a little duplication among the replica
and the like, there, Ralph. Agreed?
A: Ditto.
B: Whom!
Due to, Owing to, and Because
Due to circumstances beyond our control, it is not all right to use
due
to however you might wish, due to some unduly dull usage rules, which,
to give credit where due, at least keeps the copy editor's bills from becoming
past due. In fact, free use of due might even aggravate some people.
The problem is this: Going back to the time
of Alexander the Great,
due was used solely an adjective, a trend
that remained steady until the time of Ethelred the Unready, when steadiness
wavered, morals faltered, civilized behavior slipped, and due to
(cover your eyes, children) was occasionally uttered as the base of a prepositional
phrase:
HORRIFICALLY WRONG: Her library card duly expired due
to its due date.
HONORABLY RIGHT: That her library card duly expired was due to
its due date.
Fortunately, time-honored tradition held true and the free use of due
to has been duly outlawed in most industrialized countries. In some
southern U.S. states, transgressions are treated as felony offenses. All
the same, there are still pockets in South America where drug kingpins
sit about on Sunday afternoons, taking aspirin with Coca-Cola (often novelties
in cocaine-producing regions) and shamelessly and maliciously use due
wrong.
Ly. Example: "Clinton was impeached due to poor taste in cigars." (. .
. a point on which further exploration would be in unduly poor taste.)
Those who enforce this particular usage rule, often
called due-due's or due-due heads, say that it is better
to use owing to, owing to the fact that, despite owing'salso
being an adjective, it sounds more educated.
The real reason owe is preferred, however,
is simply that it seems more natural to the brain. You see, the majority
of people in the world today—particularly English teachers, grammarians,
and copy editors, who spend their lives fussing over usage rules—earn far
less than they spend, and each day as they come home, they pull from their
mailboxes a pile of neatly folded and packaged papers that say, basically,
"due, due, due." What reads in the minds of the recipients, however, is
not "due, due, due," but rather, "owe, owe, owe."
This leads the editors at Ralph's to suspect
there is some sort of conspiracy going on where the bill collectors of
lawyers, doctors, and accountants are secretly working to subvert our language
to make us more punctual at paying our bills.
With this in mind, Ralph's Manual of Style
offers the following recommendation for the problem phrase due to:
Replace all instances of due to and owing to with because,
because it does not in any way refer to the fact that you owe huge amounts
of money due and are being unduly underpaid for hanging around looking
for illegal uses to due when you could be outside getting some fresh
air and sun, as intelligent people are. In addition, for each instance
of due to that you come across in any manuscript, tear up at least
one envelope marked due or you owe.
When writing up the bill for your own
work, though, remember the proper style. Whereas due or you owe
would come before the amount, you now write the amount, with its many zeros,
first—and after that, in big, ugly, the hand-scrawled word "Because!"
Remember also to add an extra zero due to
and owing to your just having learned yet another obscure usage rule. And
when scorning useless grammar, remember to give credit where credit is
due, and if it helps you keep your creditors duly off your back, praise
is
due.
Each Other and One Another
People sometimes argue with one another over the use of each
other, saying that each of these two terms should only be used at one
or another time. For example, some say that if you are talking about each
other person in the room, then you should use one, and if you are talking
about each other person in another room, then you should use another.
They are, of course, all wrong. The rule is
this: Use each other for two people or things, and among
for three or more.
The couple were in love with each other.
But each of them loved one other.
This caused a lot of trouble among them.
They each wanted to see one, another, and two, each other.
If only the other could also love each of them, then they would have
a love triangle who loved one another.
[—Ralph]
They are one person.
They are two alone.
They are three together.
They are for each other.
[—Stephan Stills; Gold Hill]
Like, Which You Are Likely Using Wrongly
By a traditional, conservative, "purist" viewpoint,* like should
be used only as, like, you know, one of those preposition-like things,
when the meaning is, like, "likeness." Likewise, it should not be used
with like meaning as a conjunction and the like—not for the likes of you.
This means that like with like meaning (meaning "likeness") should
be followed by a noun or a like phrase and not by a clause. Is this, like,
confusing?
In all likelihood, it is. It should be. A
good copy editor must learn to be like a good grammarian (note previous
correct use of like)—that is to say, one in the business of confusing
people. That is how lawyers get rich. That is how doctors get rich. As
for accountants, they get rich by confusing the lawyers and doctors they
work for. As for grammarians, they seem to enjoy confusing people for no
reason whatsoever.
Anyhow, the following examples illustrate
the incorrect and correct uses of like.
GRAMMATICAL BOOBOO: Do not use like like it is
a conjunction.
GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT: Use like like a conjunction.
With further investigation, though, one will see that like has been
used wrongly like in the first example above, as, like, a conjunction,
since the time of Shakespeare, which is, like, well, practically the time
of Adam and Eve as far as modern English is concerned. See the following
authentic example from Shakespeare's time:
A: Like, hey! Compare thee to, like, a summer's day.
B: Come, come, you paraquito, that be not the proper usage.
A: Oh, gee, right, my Lady. Uh, thou lookest like a summer's day?
B: Fool! An ox hath not such a deal of dung as thy brain is tossed with.
That be not a clause.
A: Oh. Well, ah, like, thou lookest like a summer's day has dawned upon
the world for the first time, shedding rays of brilliant light through
the green morning's trees and dew, awakening every creature that crawleth.
B: Oh . . . Thou sayeth well and it holds well, too.
But let's face it. No one wants to talk like these two clowns, even if
they do get some of their phrases from the Bard, and even if they do get
to break sternly enforced grammar rules. So be smart. Just say no to using
like
as a conjunction.
* The traditional, conservative, "purist" viewpoint and the ban against
like as a conjunction began with the puritanical views of aging grammarians
and librarians who felt that only love was sufficient for a conjunction.
Like was acceptable as a preposition ("Hey, feel like goin' to my place?"),
but never for an actual conjunction.
* These same grammarians were in fact, and their descendants still
are, working toward a total ban on conjunctions. Think about it. The word
has sex written all over it. Conjunction, clearly related to conjugal,
is formed from con, meaning "together, possibly fraudulently," junct, meaning
"join," but in a very nasty-sounding way, and tion, which, considering
the first two parts, must cause the end product to mean something unimaginably
horrible! Put it this way: Another related word, conjugation, is defined
as "the act of being conjugated," which must certainly be illegal in most
states. So be prudent and prude. If you are an editor, delete all conjunctions
you come across, before they spread, and if you are a teacher, get your
students to watch TV instead.
Pluperfect
Two years ago, the American Society of Editors and Grammar Freaks (ASEGF,
pronounced ass-ee-give) voted pluperfect the coolest word
in their trade lexicon. It is obviously a very cool word, for no one, except
grammar freaks and (some) editors, knows what it means. And even those
who do have absolutely no occasion when they must use the word.
They will instead use past perfect tense, etc. But they still throw
it out from time to time because, face it, it sounds really cool and official.
It sounds like all those Latin terms that lawyers and diplomats use.
A: Quid pro quo.
B: Well, pluperfect to you.
A: Au bout de son latin!
B: You should be. Rather shallow supply to being with.
RMS suggests that editors use this word as often as possible, even
when it is not called for. No one knows its meaning, anyhow, and the editor
who uses it frequently will sound highly educated. More important, he or
she might be able to charge more.
Also, if using the word orally, RMS
suggests mispronunciation, putting the stress on the first instead of the
second syllable. This throws people even further off and makes the word
sound even cooler. And if using the word in writing, italicize it. It is
not actually a foreign word, but few people are likely to realize this,
and foreign words in italics look exceptionally sophisticated.
SPOKEN: "This work makes good use of the pluperfect."
WRITTEN: Note: You would be well advised to pursue further reliance
on the pluperfect, and in the future I will be charging you forty
dollars per hour.
The Serial Comma
If you want to cause strife at a rival publication, sneak to up the
doorway of their editing pool or office, and yell out, "Serial comma!"
This is the editing equivalent of walking
into a joint meeting of the American Feminist Association and the American
Southern Evangelist Society and yelling, "Roe versus Wade!"
In either case, it would be prudent to escape
hastily afterward.
This history of the serial comma is this:
In the early part of the twentieth century, there was a mysterious series
of grisly murders around the United States. All of the victims were prominent
American journalists, and they all . . . well, it is just too gruesome
to write about.
Anyway, New York police finally caught the
murderer as he was prowling the offices of the New York Times late
one night, sniffing typewriters, wrapping himself in typewriter ribbons,
and giggling wildly. The murderer was one Quincy Fester Hollingsworth,
a native of Boise, Idaho.
After hours of interrogation under questionable
conditions—the police were said to have taunted the suspect with stamp-pad
ink—Hollingsworth confessed to a total of twenty-six murders in fourteen
states.
What was the motive for these grisly murders?
As psychiatrists later learned, it was an omitted comma in a newspaper
article.
The article, part of a series entitled "Amazing
People" in the daily newspaper the Idaho Statesman, began, "In bringing
you more interesting facts from wildly different people for next week's
column, our reporter interviewed Quincy Fester Hollingsworth, a Satanist
and a cross-dresser. Be sure to catch our series next week."
Unfortunately for Hollingsworth, Boise in
the 1920s was not the cultural and entertainment capital of the Untied
States, and everybody, and I mean
everybody, spent their Sunday
afternoons reading things like the series "Amazing People." And everybody
read about the upcoming interview, and, of course, learned that Quincy
Fester Hollingsworth was a Satanic transvestite.
In reality, the reporter in question had interviewed
not one wildly different person, but three, one of whom was wildly different
because he was a Satin worshiper, one of whom was wildly different because
he preferred silk nightgowns to jeans and a T-shirt, and one of whom was
wildly different because he had a rather peculiar name. (In Boise of the
1920s, one often had to stretch the definition of different
to interview three wildly different people in one week.)
Again unfortunate for Hollingsworth, no one
would learn this until the following Sunday, and by then, it would be too
late.
During the week that followed the ill-edited
article, Hollingsworth was to get a promotion, get married, and be awarded
a membership to an exclusive local country club. However, on seeing the
article, his fiancée broke off their marriage plans, his boss fired
him, and the country club gave the open membership slot to a door-to-door
storm-drain salesman.
In addition, he was evicted from his apartment,
spurned by his friends, excommunicated from his church (especially brutal
considering he was a Unitarian), replaced on his bowling team, eighty-sixed
at his local illegal bar, beat up by local thugs, expelled from the Sons
and Daughters of the Potato Pioneers Society, refused service in restaurants,
refused credit at his neighborhood grocer, offered credit at a nearby women's
fashion boutique, and proposed to by a neighbor named Herbert.
When the actual interview was published that
next Sunday, all these people who had spurned Hollingsworth had a very
good laugh. However, Hollingsworth had already gone berserk, and had already
killed the Boise journalist who had written the offending article.
And for the next six month, journalists throughout
the land lived in terror, as one by one, anti-serial comma advocates began
to turn up disfigured, dismembered, disemboweled, disjointed, displaced,
disturbed, disintegrated, dislodged, disordered, and generally disgusted,
disenchanted, and disgruntled (quite an unsung prefix, dis is).
To report the series of murders, newspapers
around the country took to calling them the "serial murders" and Hollingsworth
the "serial murderer."
When he was caught and the press learned of
the motive behind the murders—a missing comma—they began referring to the
missing comma as "the serial comma." Thus did the comma get its name.
And to this day, debate over whether or not
to use this comma continues. There is probably no other Quincy Fester Hollingsworth
walking around out there, but there are, no doubt, others who have been
harmed by the omission of such a comma, lurking in the shadows outside
of newspaper buildings, and waiting . . .
RMS does not suggest, however, that
those who are opposed to the serial comma should weaken under such threat
and drop their opposition to the controversial mark.
As for those of us here at Ralph's, we certainly
would never break under any pressure other than that from the search for
clarity, quality editing . . ., and of course security.
Whom
The who-whom question (or is it whom-who?) is possibly
the most brilliant idea copy editors, grammarians, and English teachers
have ever promoted. It has done more to elevate them in social and economic
status, toward that of the doctor, the lawyer, and the accountant, than
anything since the dangling participle.
The brilliance appears right from the start:
Any dictionary or grammar and usage book that approaches the subject will
begin with something along these lines: "The distinction between who
and whom is actually quite simple." It will then drone and dribble
on about objective and subjective cases smeared with nominative overtones
and generally end on a note to the effect that even the best of writers
cannot get their whos and whoms right all the time—leaving only one logical
solution, that of sending the work to a professional copy editor.
The fact is, the majority of people, though
filled with memorized rules, get confused the moment they begin thinking
about the distinction, an enigma that stumped even Albert Einstein:
Einstein: "E equals MC squared, who . . . or is it whom
. . .
The world never did learn the second half of his famous equation. It is
said that, being stumped on the choice of pronouns, he became depressed,
left the room, and spent the rest of the day trying to disprove quantum
physics.
It is certainly a wonder that all the doctors,
lawyers, and accountants, and the public in general, have never figured
out that the average copy editor, grammarian, and English teacher cannot
make an ounce of sense out of the countless rules governing the use of
these two pronouns, either.
But of course, as it is so elementary a rule
of the trade, and something that is mastered by small schoolchildren in
England —or so we are told—no self-respecting copy editor, grammarian,
or English teacher would ever let on that they were confused as
hell. It is far better just to raise an eyebrow, smile knowingly, and say
"Tsk, tsk!"
Meanwhile, the doctors, lawyers, and accountants
continue to rip their hair out as they try to decide which pronoun to use
in each instance, their countless years of schooling and student-loan debt
offering them no help whatsoever.
The question, of course goes all the way back
to Shakespeare, with the Bard's famous quote:
For whom the bell tolls . . .
And to help perpetuate the whom-who distinction (and in the process
help further build respect for and elevate the social status of editors,
grammarians, and English teachers) Ralph's Manual of Style offers
the following rules for the use of who and whom.
First, randomly replace approximately 40 percent
of all instances of
who with whom. Try to make most of the
replacements in the middle of declarative sentences and at the beginning
of interrogative sentences. And try not to let anyone see you doing it.
Second, randomly replace around 10 percent
of all whoever's with
whomever's. If asked what the rule
behind this is, reply: "Whomever would ask such a question is not for whom
to argue." If you receive a blank stare from this, repeat the rule, this
time in Latin, and then inform the person that any further explanation
with have to go on your bill.
For further
assistance, RMS has added the following etymology of who
and whom.
The Etymology of Whom
According to the famous legend, it so happened that the Angles said
who
and the Saxons said whom. When the Angles landed on the southeastern
shores of Britain to "colonize" (loot, pillage, etc.) the wild land, another
invading army (the Saxons) was the last thing they expected to find. It
complicated things to no end.
The massive Angle army, having assembled on
one end of the beach, and the massive Saxon army, having assembled on the
other, slowly approached each other for their historic meeting.
When they were no more than fifteen yards
apart, they stopped and stared at each other meanly—tensions high, teeth
gritted. The Angles glared at the Saxons, fingering their swords. The Saxons
glared at the Angles, fingering their axes.
The Angle leader stepped forward and demanded:
"Who, may I ask, are you?"
To this, the Saxons fell to the ground en
mass, laughing so hard that their sides hurt. After they had collected
themselves and stood up, they smiled knowingly and looked down their noses
at their Angle foes and replied stuffily, "Whom!"
This of course resulted in the Slaughter of
Wessex, in which 80 percent of the Saxon invaders were wiped out, their
grammarians among them.
As for the origin of the who-whom distinction in English, scholars
believe its roots are in the ancient proto-Indo-European tongue, which
one night was burned by a hot chicken leg at a barbecue and, injured, started
getting in the speaker's way, forcing her to close her lips some of the
time when she made the ooo sound, and thus creating the word whom
from who.
Her ancient Indo-European friends and colleagues
took this as an omen and made her their priestess, and soon an entire religion
evolved around the two words. (The ancient Indo-Europeans were not terribly
bright.) In time, they wrote a detailed philosophy based on the pair of
words. (The Chinese would rewrite this under the name of yin and
yang.)
One day, however, a terrible calamity befell
the ancient Indo-Europeans, and they packed their bags and went their separate
directions. The who-whom cult went to north-central Europe, but
many of the groups assimilated with local populations or gave up their
old religions to worship trees, which required no pronouns whatsoever.
Before long, only one people were left who
followed the old religion: the Saxons. And in the Early Middle Ages, as
Christianity began to spread out across the continent, the who-whom
believers
were forced to flee in order to practice their religion freely. Since Massachusetts
had not yet been discovered, they had to settle for Brighton.
And on that very tragic Saturday morning on
a beach in Wessex, the morning of the Slaughter of Wessex, the last of
the grammarians who knew the ancient and mysterious distinction between
who
and whom—knowledge which, some said, could bring eternal life—died
horrible deaths and took their secret with them.
A few hours after the battle, the Angles and
the Saxons, hungry and tired from a hard day's fighting, discovered Britain's
wonderful pubs, and over pints and darts, they decided that their foes
of the morning were not so bad, after all. Later, when the pubs started
closing down because of silly laws regulating drinking hours, the two groups
found a common purpose and joined forces to conquer much of island in little
more than an evening.
It was not until two nights later—when the
new friends decided to create a new language in a single generation, one
that would within a millennium go on to rule the world, or at least piss
off the French—that the terrible loss of some very important grammatical
rules was discovered. (The decision to create a new language also set the
stage for the Second Slaughter of Wessex, which began over the question
of whether the new language would be called Anglo-Saxon or Saxo-Angle,
but that is another story.)
(A little-known third group, the Jutes, who
also wanted in on the action, landed on the southern shores of Britain
at about the same time. This group, however, being particularly "barbarian"
[Neanderthal], thought the only difference between who and whom
was how many pints you had drunk before attempting to pronounce something
so difficult, and as a result, this group was not even invited to the Second
Slaughter of Wessex.)
Despite the loss of the original grammatical
and spiritual distinctions between the pronouns, they continued to cause
problems. Frequently, when an Angle let out a who, some Saxon would
inevitably lose control of his manners and blurt out whom, whom, whom!—but
not be able to explain why.
The corrected but furious Angle would then,
typically, whip out his sword and slice the offending Saxon into bacon.
In no time at all, the Saxon half of the population was becoming frighteningly
small—or thin, which is to say, thinly sliced—and if this had continued,
the new language might well have had to be called Danish. Clearly, a solution
was needed.
And so it was, one morning, that the Angles'
wisest man and the Saxons' wisest woman set out into the mountains leading
three horses loaded with gin, to find some way to settle the question.
Wise as they were, and noticing their different sexes and the load of gin,
they put off the terrible problems before them and wasted two weeks on
a bear rug in front of a fireplace, but two weeks later, hungover and tired
of each other's breath (there was neither toothpaste nor mouthwash in those
days), they began to seek a solution.
And what they found was indeed a Solomon solution.
They decided that both words were proper and they relegated each to particular
uses. They then sat down over shots of gin and, laughing hysterically,
competed to see who could come up with the most ridiculous rules governing
the use of the words.
And, as they predicted, once the new grammar
rules were introduced to the general population, all enthusiasm for whom
was
lost immediately, by Angle and Saxon alike.
Interest in the word whom was not revived until the Norman conquest,
in the eleventh century, when the Anglo-Saxons began looking for ways to
annoy the French-speaking Normans.
History records that over time, Britain's
new rulers eventually assimilated and the ethnic distinction between Norman
and Anglo-Saxon was largely lost. In actuality, most of the Normans returned
to France within a decade because they could not get the hang of the local
language, which caused people to laugh at them when they were trying to
make friends in the inns and pubs. "Excuse I," a dim-witted Norman would
say with a nasal french accent. "Hasn't me knoweth yous from some-where
afore? Hey, you am a Libra, ain't you? Yous' place nor me's'?" To this,
the bar-full of Anglo-Saxons would begin wildly laughing and taunting the
unsuspecting Norman, who had been as good as set up, because the Anglo-Saxons
had developed many of these grammar rules (Subject-object case? . . . Pah-lease!
What nonsense!) for the express purpose of making the Normans' angry.
From that time forward, the distinction between
who
and whom has been seen as the cornerstone of English grammar (who
[whom?] says grammar can't have a conerstone?). It gained further
distinction (pun or especially good word choice?) in modern times when
it again became fashionable to use complicated grammar in English (even
importing inappropriate bits from Latin), in order to piss off the French,
who were demanding that their language be the international tongue. The
British were not happy with this, since non-native speakers of French had
to burn their tongues on chicken bones to pronounce many of the words.
So the next time someone exclaims, "Who the
hell are you?" smile knowingly at that person, look down your nose, and
say, "Not who! As if, you Neanderthal!"
To be continued, which is a polite way of saying
later. |
Contents
Affect, Effect
Alright All Right?
Anglo-Saxon vs.
Latin
A While and Awhile and A-While
Between vs. Among
Compare with with
Compare To
Copy and Replica
Due to, Owing to,
and Because
Each Other and One Another
Like, Which You Are Likely Using Wrongly
Pluperfect
The Serial Comma
Whom
Whom, a History |
