June 17, 2013

Event Goer, Eventgoer, or Event-Goer?

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When it comes to combining "goer" with other words, there should be a clear answer on whether and how to attach it. There isn't. Here's how to make good choices anyway ...

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The Teacher Who Condemned 'Got'
Posted by June on June 17, 2013
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I never used to believe in ghosts. The idea of hauntings sounded ridiculous to me. Then I started writing about grammar. Now I know better.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been hearing bone-chilling tales of undead teachers haunting former students from the great beyond with bad information: You can’t end a sentence with a preposition. You can't use healthy to mean healthful. You can't start a sentence with but.

The stubborn persistence of these bad teachings never ceases to amaze me. But from time to time these chilling tales go beyond the pale, wowing me with just how bad bad information can be.

Case in point, an e-mail I got recently:

Dear June. Today, in your column from the Pasadena Sun section of the L.A. Times, you used "the writer got bogged down." I will never forget several teachers, including one particularly memorable Mrs. Hamilton, telling me that using "got" in any sentence anytime was simply being lazy, that it was bad English, uncouth, uneducated, etc. You get the point.

Yup, there was once a teacher who took it upon herself to single-handedly condemn a well established and highly useful word. I particularly like that “uneducated” part -- and the irony of how it came from someone who needed only to open a dictionary to see that she was misinforming her own students. Of course, I didn’t say so to the poor guy in so many words. Instead, here’s what I wrote: 

The most common objection to got is that have and got are redundant in phrases like "I have got quite a few friends." Yes, it's inefficient, but it's accepted as an idiom. Every major language authority I know of agrees it's a valid option. 

We editors usually trim the gots out. Especially in news writing, which prizes efficiency, "He has got $20'" is a poor alternative to "He has $20." But that's an aesthetic. Not a grammar rule.

 From what you're saying, your teacher was condemning the word got in all its uses. And, yes, that's extreme to the point of being illogical. Got is the past tense of get, which can be both a regular verb and an auxiliary verb: "They got married."

It sounds as though Mrs. Hamilton would have everyone say, "They were married." But if so, that's just a personal preference she was trying to pass off as a rule. There isn't a dictionary under the sun that would back her up.

"I hear a lot of stories about teachers who used to lay down laws that weren't laws. (It's wrong to end a sentence with a preposition. It's wrong to split an infinitive. It's wrong to begin a sentence with and.) These kinds of unfounded prohibitions were very fashionable in educational circles for a while. But they never were rules. It's unfortunate kids got so much bad information.

 Hope that helps! - June

 

June Casagrande is a writer and journalist whose weekly grammar/humor column, “A Word, Please,” appears in community newspapers in California, Florida, and Texas. more

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    June Richard: I'm so sorry it took so long to see and respond to your very fascinating comments! (Not long ago we changed this website so that I no longer have to approve most comments. So I haven't been staying on top of them as well.) You raise some excellent questions and have given me a lot to think about. However, my most basic answer is this: Imperatives are unique. When I said that they leave the subject implied, I may have put it a bit imprecisely. What if we were to say, instead, "Imperatives CONTAIN a subject"? When we say "beautiful" instead of "The sunrise is beautiful," leaving the other stuff implied is a choice. But in "Stop!" the lack of an express subject is the standard form, not the speaker's exercising an option to stray from a more basic form. I think that the question of sentence fragments isn't necessarily subject to the prescriptivist-descriptivist categorization - no more than passive and active voice are. It's not prescriptivist to say that "The coffee was made by Joe" is passive. It just is. That's my off-the-cuff take on it, anyway. As I said, these insights and questions put the whole subject in a new and very interesting light! So thanks for taking the time to write. You actually got me thinking!

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    Richard Craswell I love your work, and I don’t blame you at all for not wanting to get into a descriptivist vs. prescriptionist slugfest. I’m not sure you can avoid that battle, though, at least on the issue you address in this blog entry. Let me try to recapitulate your own argument, just to make sure I’ve got it right. Consider the following one-word utterances: (1) John (to a child who is pulling a dog’s tail): “Stop!” (2) Mary (standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon at sunrise): “Beautiful!” If I understand you, the first of these (“Stop!”) is a complete sentence. To reach this conclusion, you posit that every complete sentence must contain at least one clause, and every clause must have both a subject and a verb (two premises that I whole-heartedly share). You then turn to the question that is relevant here: whether the clause and its component parts must all be stated explicitly, or whether some can be left implicit, to be inferred from the context. On this question (if I understand you), your answer is that the component parts of a clause can indeed be left implicit -- but only in the special case of the subjects of a second-person imperative statement, where the subject of the clause (you) is almost always left implicit. In all other cases, I take it, you see the requirements of a complete sentence as demanding that both the subject and the verb of that sentence’s clause be stated explicitly, rather than merely being left for implication. If I’m right in this, then I think I also understand why you do not believe that a complete sentence is formed by the second remark above (“Beautiful!”). In this case, let us assume that the context strongly suggests that Mary really means something like “[That sunrise] [is] beautiful.” The problem, though, is that Mary’s only explicit statement leaves implicit not only the subject of the clause (the sunrise), but it even leaves out the verb (is) as well. Moreover, Mary’s statement is not a second-person imperative, so it won’t qualify for the special “exception” discussed above, which allows us to sometimes count subjects that are merely implicit (but only in the special case of second-person imperative statements). And when some of your readers object that “Everybody knows what Mary meant,” your response is that even sentence fragments can often be understood, so someone’s ability to understand what is meant is not the test of whether a remark is a complete sentence. Well, all right. I was trained as a lawyer, so I’ve no objection in principle to having some rules that apply only in one particular case, or to only one kind of statement. However, I think this is where the descriptivists and prescriptivists might have something to say. In particular, if most speakers understand, correctly and with equal ease, just what subjects and verbs are implied by expressions like “Stop!” or “Beautiful,” by what criterion can we decide that there is an exception that applies to one of these statements, but not to the other? To be sure, if the rules of grammar exist independently from peoples’ actual usage, as some prescriptivists would have it, then yes, we can continue to describe “Beautiful!” as an incomplete sentence, even though people persist in using it as if it were complete. But if the rules of grammar are instead to be derived from how people actually use their language, as some descriptivists would have it, what can we look to in any actual usage to distinguish those sentences that are complete (“Stop!”) from those utterances that are actually only sentence fragments (“Beautiful!), but which are nevertheless used in an indistinguishable way? Mind you, I don’t know the answer to these questions, and that’s why I usually try to avoid the whole prescriptivist/descriptiveness controversy. In any case, [you] please keep up the good work!

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