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Usage Guide
Copyright 2005 by Ralph. All rights reserved.
Na,
na-na, na-na, na!
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, then 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 verb 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 do not know which of these two it is, it
is sincerely hoped that you are not a doctor, in whose care
people trust 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, and an effective fact at
that.
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 reply 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 tragic Gunfight at the 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 all forms of the abbreviation).
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 world war, have erupted
frequently since. (It is rumored that the pro-alright
camp may have mobile chemical-weapons
laboratories.)
In America in the
1960s, a youth culture developed. To spite their parents, the
establishment, society, convention, people over thirty, and
the makers of frozen fish sticks, young people grew their hair
frighteningly long, wore torn-up clothes, and went around
making victory signs and saying in loud, taunting voices,
"Alright!"—with, of course, an intonation that made it
clear they were thinking the one-word form.
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 in the
spring.)
Had his professors
known of the stupid blunder, they would have simply 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 (the Nixon White House could have
learned much from these professors). 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." "Left!!!"
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 alllllllright
now"), which sounds much better when played by the blues
guitarist Johnny Winter.
Anglo-Saxon vs. Latin
If
you want to make text 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 drivel anyhow—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 this is 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 come up
words from extinct languages (not a lot of barroom
conversations take place in Old French), and looking up the
etymologies of each word is too troublesome a task (which is
part of the reason why the examples above are phrases, not
whole sentences; the other part of the reason is, well . . . 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. Note how official-sounding are the words
pivos spaciba (beer, please). 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 do not—which means, basically, "thanks."
Remember also, foreign words or
Latin terms can be set in italics. This looks very
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; cow, cattle, and niu . . .
Then again, there are a whole lot
of English speakers, particularly in the United States, who do
not speak a second language (and there are some who, it could
be argued, do not speak a first very well). If you are one of
these, or you are certain that most of your readership
is, then try making up some words. This is guaranteed
to circuminsulate you in cases of mesmerization where you are
phenindentally undisposated to verigitate the migloberitation
of elves.
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.
RIGHT: Kleptography has proved microlasms to be
less than 1 milihoffer in fannability.
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 a piece of
paper into a box bearing the label "Mailbox," as opposed to,
say, "Garbage Can," "Book Return," or "Rest in Peace."
However, far too many of such
letters 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 that interests
Ralph's Manual of Style.
But instead of offering a bunch of drab grammar rules 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 instead 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 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 an 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 or common mistake of 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,
that is—are reading this last paragraph, then it worked.
Between vs. Among
This 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 left kneecap, and that knowledge is, largely, a pile of
facts that a select few keep among themselves to
maintain the distance between themselves and the
less-desirable portion of the population (everyone else).
The rule is this: Between
is used for two things and among is used for three
or more. Except of course anywhere where breaking this rule
would sound better. 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 among what ought to be, what
makes sense, and what is; and the relationships between
editors, writers, and publishers (whoops) will be bettered,
as they will all be spared the need to argue over the various
conflicts between the many various pairs of words among our
speech. (This previous sentence serves as an example of just
how clear writing can be if you follow simple little rules
like this one.)
Compare with with Compare To
(if
you dare to)
The rule is this: 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! Swat!
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 to those things that are exact copies, and
restrict the use of copy to the back page on a credit
card receipt. For all other needs, 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 an adverb phrase:
HORRIFICALLY WRONG: Her library card duly
expired due to the books' due date.
HONORABLY RIGHT: That her library card duly
expired was due to the books' 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 American 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 (novelties in
cocaine-producing regions) and shamelessly and maliciously
use due wrongly. 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's also being an adjective, it
sounds more educated.
Those who
argue for the free use of due, the do-dues, (a bunch of
tree-hugging liberals) say that due has been so widely
unduly used that it has paid its dues and is not getting due
credit or due respect for its effectiveness, due to all that
the due-due heads do to do it in. They ask, do you do with
due all that you want to do? Or do you due to the
due-dues do only what they tell you to do?
If you have read this far, then
regardless of which side of the due-due war you previously did
call your own, you now understand just how silly such
arguments can get, and you will now agree that it is smartest
to replace all instances of due to, owing to,
and because of with as a result of the fact that
there was. Now the only trick is getting the people you
are arguing with to read this, too.
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 time or another. For example, some
say that if you are talking about each other person in
the room, you should use one another and that if you
are talking about one or another person in the room,
then you should use each other. Go
figure.
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. (can't
be "was")
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"
Of course, say the tree-huggers,
some of the best of writers have ignored this rule, so none of
this really matters, but everyone keeps it in the usage guides
because it is yet one more bit of specialized knowledge that
we editors and English teachers can use to make other people
look silly.
Like, Which You Are Likely Using
Wrong
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 such like meaning
(meaning "likeness") should be followed by a noun 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, like, the time of Shakespeare (American Heritage
Dictionary, second edition) and possibly Chaucer
(American Heritage Dictionary, third edition),
which is, like, a likable argument among the pro-conjunction
like. (We predict that by the time of AH7, the conjunction use
of like will have been traced back to, like, Moses: "Thou
shalt not, like, covet thy neighbor's sheep like it was . .
.")
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 dew -covered
trees, awakening every creature that crawleth.
B: Ooooohhhhh . . . Thou sayeth well and it holds well,
too. Like, oooh . . .
But let's face it. No
one wants to talk like these two, even if they do get to break
sternly enforced grammar rules, or even if an ox has not such
a deal of dung as their brains are tossed with. So be
smart:
Say no to 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 conjunction. Like was
acceptable as a preposition (like, "Hey, feel like goin' to my
place?"), but never for an actual conjunction.
These purists were, 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 immoral! 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 worrying
over such things, lest they wind up spending their idle time
reading things like this (when they could be watching reality
TV), or, worse, writing it.
Pluperfect
Two years ago,
the American Society of Editors and Grammar Freaks (ASEGF,
pronounced ass-ee-giff) 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. It sounds like all those Latin terms that
lawyers and diplomats use. And it might even attract groupies
(editorees?).
A: Quid pro quo.
B: Well, pluperfect to you.
A: Au bout de son latin!
B: Pluperfect, pluperfect,
pluperfect!
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 mispronouncing it, putting the stress on
the first instead of the second syllable. This throws people
off even farther. 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 up to the
doorway of its 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.
The history of the serial comma
is this: In the early part of the twentieth century, there was
a series of mysterious and grisly murders around the United
States. All of the victims were prominent American
journalists, and they
all . . . well, it was just too gruesome
to write about.
Hanged by a typewriter ribbon, run through the press, wrapped in rolls of newsprint . . . it was all too horrible to imagine.
Anyway, the
New York City police finally caught the murderer as he was
prowling the offices of the New York Dates 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
Statesperson, 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 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 unfortunately for Hollingsworth, no one would learn this
until the following Sunday, but by then, it would be too late.
During the week that followed the
ill-edited article, Hollingsworth was supposed 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, Hollingsworth 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 speakeasy, beat up by local thugs,
expelled from the Sons and Daughters of the Potato Pioneers, 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 was already stalking the Boise
journalist who had written the offending article.
And for the next six months,
journalists throughout the land lived in terror, as one by
one, anti-serial comma advocates turned up disfigured,
dismembered, disemboweled, disjointed, displaced, disturbed,
disintegrated, dislodged, disordered, and generally disgusted,
disenchanted, and disgruntled (quite an unsung prefix,
dis- is).
In reporting 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
killings—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, and who are
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 at 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 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 over the choice of pronouns, he became depressed, left
the room, and spent the rest of the day trying to disprove
quantum physics.
But of
course, it is so elementary a rule—one mastered by small
schoolchildren in England, or so we are told—that no
self-respecting editor would ever let on that he or she
was also confused. It is far better just to raise an eyebrow,
smile knowingly, and say, "Tsk, tsk!"
Meanwhile, doctors, lawyers, and
accountants continue to rip their hair out as they try to
decide which pronoun to use, their countless years of
schooling and student-loan debt offering 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 elevate editors in social status) 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 will 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
the two armies 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, 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 that 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, 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 believers 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 who
still followed the old religion was left: the Saxons. 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 to
the grave.
A few hours after the
battle, the hungry and tired Angles and Saxons 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 cause 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 tragic loss of some very important
grammar 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, they were 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 become known as 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 the 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.
As they predicted, once the new
grammar rules were introduced to the general population, all
enthusiasm for whom was immediately lost, 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 was 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 especially unhappy
with this, since nonnative 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, you
Neanderthal! It's as if!"
To be continued . .
.
Copyright 2005, by Ralph.
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