It's not an easy language,

English, even American English, which reportedly has been allowed to deteriorate

a trifle from the finely honed instrument it was in the hands of Shakespeare

and Shaw.

We were reminded of this again

when our German friend Rainer was here recently. Like most Europeans,

he learned British English in school, and is very proficient. But he strives

for perfection and asks Mary to correct him when he errs.

"Say, 'Don't have to,'"

she will suddenly interrupt. "You said, 'haven't to' again."

English-speakers use "have to" where Germans would stick with

"must," so in Rainerspeak it comes out "We haven't to go

so early," and "Hasn't she to rehearse tomorrow?"

There is also the matter of

our pronouncing certain consonants and vowels inconsistently. The bugaboo

this visit was the "s" in closer. "Which is closer, Chattanooga

or Columbus?" It sounded as though he meant, "Which is our closer,

Remlinger or Smoltz?"

Why not? The "s"

sounds like a "z," after all, in wiser, busy, was, is, does,

closed and closing.

We found Rainer's mistakes

endearing, if we noticed them at all. His use or misuse of English is

just part of who he is.

Written English mangled by

native speakers, however, by those who should know better, offends me

most.

I hasten to disclaim any pretense

that I never make mistakes. But I try hard not to, and pride myself on

turning in clean copy, i.e., stories free of spelling, punctuation or

syntactical errors. I tremble to find a misusage of mine featured in my

beloved editor's Nag Report, a brief e-mailed seminar he sends semi-regularly

to his stable of writers.

You might not always believe

that newspaper people care a lot about language, as evidenced by the doubtful

syntax and punctuation you sometimes find at the end of your driveway.

We do care. We really do. Most

professional writers consider themselves "custodians of the language,"

as Richard Dowis and Richard Lederer put it in their useful guide, The

Write Way. Most often the errors that get by do so because of relentless

time pressure on people with deadlines to meet, either writers or editors.

Sometimes they're simply the bad habits of which most of us are guilty,

usually habits of speech, where language is less carefully guarded.

I think the one that sets the

teeth of writers and teachers on edge more than any other is the misuse

of the apostrophe. That blight showed up in both this past week's Nag

Report and the current SPELL/Binder, newsletter of the Society for the

Preservation of English Language and Literature, which reports that a

retired copy editor in London, of all places, is so incensed about it

that he has formed the Apostrophe Protection Society.

His first victory was a sign

in his local library proclaiming the availability of CD's .

A quick review. The apostrophe

is used almost exclusively in only two applications: to signify the omission

of letters (can't, y'all, rock 'n' roll) and to show possession. Same

thing, one could argue, since possessive was once formed by adding the

possessive pronoun to the noun. William his book became William's book.

The commonest apostrophe catastrophe,

the one that gives careful writers the vapors, is that of poor, misunderstood

it's and its. Rather than accept identical construction in such different

applications, the contraction it's won out and got the apostrophe signifying

the letter missing from it is.

Its, the possessive of it,

then, gets no apostrophe making it nicely consistent with yours and ours,

which are also possessive pronouns lacking apostrophes.

Apostrophes are not used to

make proper nouns plural, another vapor-inducing horror. The Smiths shouldn't

have had The Smith's painted on their mailbox, and the Joneses

have to put up with the addition of -es to their name to make it plural.

But no apostrophe unless to add that the Smiths' dog and the Joneses'

iguana also live there.

Similarly, numerals like "the

1980s" and "a man in his 40s," both meaning blocks of years,

have to stand on their own, although the Associated Press Stylebook, the

bible of all exemplary rags, differs from Webster's Dictionary in this

case. AP says no apostrophe in pluralizing numerals; Webster's makes it

optional.

A rare exception permits an

apostrophe to form the plural of a letter: Mind your p's and q's, and

try to earn all A's. But multiple letters lose it: They are not VIPs,

after all.

This month's edition of SPELL/Binder

includes what Dowis and Lederer call the "World's Toughest Grammar

Test." It touched on a couple of fine points I often pause to ponder.

Wisdom comes to whomever/whoever

seeks it.

A wave of technological innovations

are/is crashing on the shore of our culture.

She is one of those drab homebodies

who reads/read McCall's.

All she ever wears are/is

dresses.

Defenders of the language negotiate

carefully the hazards of matching verbs to subjects. Rainer's British

English prefers plural verbs with collective nouns, as in "The committee

are meeting now," whereas we American practitioners of the same language

would consider this the action of a single group.

Dowis and Lederer relate how

New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley insisted reporters treat news as

a plural noun (which is about as awkward as we find doing the same for

data and bacteria.)

"Are there any news?"

he cabled a field reporter.

The reporter fired back: "No,

not a single new."

Answers to quiz: In each pair

of words, the second is correct.

Back

to the Top of the Page