The ghosts of teachers past

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 dead 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 a while back:

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 my correspondent was saying, the teacher was condemning the word "got" in all its uses. 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 long-ago 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 of yesterday continue to be haunted by bad information.

Hark back, harken back, hearken back

Most people use “hark back,” “hearken back” and “harken back” to mean “recall” or “refer back to” some previous event. But the original meaning of “hark,” “harken” and “hearken” was not to recall but to hear or to listen carefully. Think: “Hark! The herald angels sing.” In fact, you can still use them that way today: Hark my words. Hearken my words. Harken my words.

“Hark” is the youngest of the three, dating back to the 14th century, with “hearken” and “harken” going back another two centuries or so.

Sometime in the 1800s, people started adding “back” to “hark” for the purpose of giving it what was then a figurative meaning: to recall or refer back to. Soon, “hark back,” “hearken back” and “harken back” would become full-fledged phrasal verbs — word combinations that have a different meaning than the root verb they’re based on. For more examples of phrasal verbs, think about the difference between “give” and “give up”; “break” and “break in”; “cut” and “cut off.” In every case, the word combo means something different from the verb when it stands alone. That’s what makes them phrasal verbs.

So unlike “hark,” “hearken” and “harken,” which mean to listen or listen carefully, “hark back,” “hearken back” and “harken back” are phrasal verbs meaning “to go back to or recall to mind something in the past,” according to Merriam’s dictionary.

Merriam’s usage guide claims that, though “hark” is now rare in the meaning of to listen, “harken” and “hearken” are still used that way. Personally, outside of one old Christmas song, I’ve never heard any form of hark or hearken used to mean “listen.” But when I search a books database to compare “hearken” with “hearken back,” “harken with harken back,” and “hark” with “hark back,” I see that all three words often stand alone and “back”-less. They’re all correct, with or without “back.”

So which is the most widely accepted in edited published writing? It’s “hark back” — my friend’s preference. My preference, “hearken back,” which the dictionary prefers, comes in last place in terms of popularity, and it has for most of the last century. Here's more in my recent column.

The poor, the meek, the red: Nominal adjectives

Think for a moment about the following adjectives: poor, downtrodden, wealthy, well-to-do, meek.

They’re definitely adjectives, right?

Well, here’s a cool thing about English: Sometimes you can use adjectives as nouns (and, I should add, vice-versa). And when you do, there’s even a name for them. They’re called nominal adjectives.

That is, poor people can be referred to as the poor. And that can work as a noun in a sentence: The poor often live in bad school districts.

Ditto that for the wealthy. The wealthy often live in good school districts.

And everyone knows who shall inherit the earth: the meek.

Even the following use can be considered an example of a nominal adjective in use:

I tried on the blue shirt but bought the red. Here, the red is functioning as a noun — the object of the verb bought — even though it’s just shorthand for the red shirt or the red one.

That’s a little different because the red isn’t as substantive a noun as the poor, which is well-known to be a thing (“things” being members in good standing of the group known as nouns).

And there you have yet another interesting (to some people) trait about the English language …

Rally goer, rally-goer, rallygoer?

Goers drive me nuts. I’m not talking about the kind of goers that so fascinated Eric Idle in an old Monty Python sketch. I’m talking about the goers you add at the end of words like party, beach, festival, mall — you name it. Any place people go, you can tack a “goers” on the end of.

Because I edit feature articles, goers come up quite a bit. And no two writers “goer” alike.

“Festival goers can also check out the 40-plus carnival rides.”

“Beach-goers flock to Santa Monica ever weekend.”

“Partygoers enjoyed cocktails and hors d’oeuvres.”

Some terms ending in “goer,” for example “moviegoer,” are in the dictionary. Those are easy to deal with. Just do what the dictionary says and make them one word. But when you’re sort of manufacturing a less common term, like if you’re talking about someone who goes to a rally, you won’t find that in the dictionary.

The Associated Press Stylebook, which I have to follow for most of my work, usually has answers for stuff that isn’t in the dictionary. But doesn’t have an entry for “goers.” So after years of working as an editor, I still wasn’t confident in whether to hyphenate “goers,” make attach it to the other word, or make it a separate word.

Then I got the online edition of AP’s guide and everything changed. Unlike the hard copy, which has only official entries, the online version has an “Ask the Editor” function, whose answers come up when you search the site. So when you search for “goer,” you come upon this exchange from 2018:

Question: If we write moviegoer, do we also write rallygoer?

Answer: Yes.

In other words, treat “goer” like a suffix and tack it on to the end of any noun someone is going to: festivalgoer, mallgoer, beachgoer. They’re all correct in closed form, at least in AP style.