'That' and 'which'

Here’s a little reminder about “that” and “which”: Editing styles have some strict rules on their usage, but they’re not universal grammar rules, just a style thing.

Here’s the rule, according to the Associated Press Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style: “which” can’t be used for restrictive clauses. Only “that” can introduce restrictive clauses.

Restrictive clauses narrow down the things they refer to. Compare:

The hats that have feathers sell the best

with

The hats, which have feathers, sell the best.

In the first example, the clause beginning with “that” actually narrows down which hats we’re talking about. Only the ones that have feathers are being discussed. In the second example, all the hats are being referred to. The “which” clause lets us know that they all have feathers.

So a restrictive clause restricts — narrows down or specifies — its subject. A nonrestrictive clause does not: It can be lifted right out of the sentence without losing specificity of your subject.

And AP and Chicago agree that you can’t use “which” for a restrictive clause. 

“The hats which have feathers sell the best.” That, according to the style guides, is wrong because the clause is supposed to be restrictive. How do we know that the writer meant this clause to be restrictive? The lack of commas. Commas set off nonrestrictive information. To the lack of commas around the clause makes it restrictive.

There’s some logic at the heart of the style rule: Most American English speakers usually use “which” only for nonrestrictive clauses, leaving the other job to “that.” You can also see that keeping these two separate can clear up the potential ambiguity of sentences like “The hats which have feathers will sell best.” (That is, if you doubt the writer’s punctuation skills, you couldn’t be sure whether she meant only the hats that have feathers sell best or whether she meant all the hats sell better than other merchandise and oh, by the way, they all have feathers.)

But unless you’re editing in one of those two styles, you don’t have to worry about this. In my experience, most people manage “that” and “which” clauses well, leaving no question as to what they meant.

Not grieving the demise of the semicolon

Semicolon use is down, and its slide is making headlines. In the U.S., these punctuation marks are appearing in published books about half as often as they did 25 years ago. The same trend can be seen in the U.K., where only 11% of students surveyed reported that they regularly use semicolons.

Some people say this decline is a tragedy. But before you take their word for it, consider who’s not saying this: readers.

You can listen to a thousand laments about the death of the semicolon and never hear a single complaint from the reader’s point of view. No one says they would have enjoyed a piece of writing more if it contained more semicolons. No one says they struggled to understand short sentences because they weren’t mashed together into longer, more complicated sentences. No one searches an e-book sample to make sure it has enough semicolons before they buy it.

Semicolon love is purely a supply-side phenomenon. Here’s one example of an impassioned pro-semicolon argument: “I’d be reading an article about a flood in Mexico, which would lead me to thinking about a wedding I once went to in Cancun, which would lead me to thinking about marriage, which would lead to gay marriage, which would lead to the presidential election, which would lead to swing states, which would lead to a fascinatingly terrible country song called ‘Swing’ — and I’d be three songs into a Trace Adkins YouTube marathon before I’d glance back down at the newspaper on the table. It’s in honoring this movement of mind, this tendency of thoughts to proliferate like yeast, that I find semicolons so useful.”

Honoring the movement of mind. Whose mind? Not the reader’s.

I don’t know about you, but when I read a story, an article or an essay, I’m not in it to honor the author. The very idea runs counter to the writer’s job, which is to transform information and ideas into something valuable to the reader. To honor the reader’s needs over one’s own.

Most of the semicolons I see in my editing work amount to simple showing off. The writers, it seems, are so proud they know how to use semicolons they forget it’s not about them. One writer I’ve been editing for years puts exactly one semicolon in almost every feature article she writes. What are the odds that somewhere between 50 and 100 articles she’s submitted all needed exactly one semicolon? Far lower than the odds that she just wanted to use one.

Semicolons between independent clauses are unnecessary about 99% of the time. Yes, they show that the clauses are closely related. But would that be any less clear if each clause was its own sentence?

Semicolons are silliest in paragraphs containing just two clauses. Those clauses’ relationship to each other is already crystal clear. What is gained by making those two sentences into one?

Besides connecting independent clauses, semicolons have another job: organizing lists too unwieldy for commas to manage. Usually, this means lists of things that contain their own commas: “They traveled to Dubuque, Iowa; Butte, Montana; and Santa Fe, New Mexico.”

In these cases, semicolons are more than justified. They’re essential. But they’re also dangerous. They make it easy to cram too many bits of information into a single sentence instead of doling out the facts in more easily digestible short sentences. “They traveled to Dubuque, Iowa, where they visited a museum; Butte, Montana, which is stunningly beautiful; and Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they had fun shopping for one-of-a-kind works by local artisans.”  The semicolon lets you do that, but that doesn’t mean it’s your friend.

Anytime you’re tempted to lean on semicolons to make sense of your sentence, try breaking it up into shorter sentences instead. It’s the right thing to do for your reader.

ChatGPT can't do me

At a time when people refuse to believe doctors, journalists and anyone who says we went to the moon, everyone accepts the AI industry’s claims about AI. It’s genius. It’s going to revolutionize life as we know it. It’s going to render all us workers obsolete so we’ll be unemployed and homeless but at least we’ll be wowed by TikToks of Jennifer Lawrence talking through Steve Buscemi’s face.

First on the chopping block, they say: editors and writers. Like me.

To check the ETA of my bleak future, I asked ChatGPT to write a grammar book in the style of June Casagrande.

The software cheerily obliged, promising to “channel my inner June Casagrande and create a grammar book that’s fun, fierce, and friendly — just like ‘Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies.’” Minus the cash advance for me, of course. Minus even the cover price of two books I wrote that another AI program literally stole, according to an Atlantic magazine database.

The ChatGPT book begins: “Let’s face it: grammar has trust issues. Not because it’s sneaky or complicated — though we’ll admit, it has its moods — but because you were probably introduced to it by someone who thought diagramming sentences was a fun Friday activity. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.”

Smooth, well-structured, accessible. At first, the writing seems impressive. But wait, “trust issues”? ChatGPT meant that people don’t trust grammar, which itself is a little off. But to “have trust issues” means to be incapable of trusting others. So the first sentence doesn’t make sense.

The word “complicated” is also odd. Being complicated doesn’t undermine trust, exactly. “Spoiler alert” means something you have yet to learn, not something you learned decades ago. Then there’s “we’ll admit.”  Who’s “we”? This isn’t an article in a sassy magazine in which the writer is speaking on behalf of the editorial staff. This is a book by just one author — an author who has written five books and over 1,000 columns without once writing in the plural first person. (Nice job channeling me, ChatGPT.)

“We” appears a lot in the first few pages, like after saying grammar has a bad reputation, adding: “We’re going to clear that up.” Then, while talking about the voice in your head that makes you fear grammar, adding: “To that voice we say: shut up.”

Check every book on your shelf and you probably won’t find a single one written in the plural first person — and definitely not if the book has just one author.

Then, this “intelligence” gets even less intelligent by switching to the singular first person a few pages later: “I’m going to give you the tools you need.”

ChatGPT’s manuscript contained lots of illogical statements, like the example sentence “My cat screams at 3 a.m.,” the assertion that verbs are “the Beyonce of grammar” (with no explanation why) and, my favorite, this bit about comma splices: “Grammar says, ‘not today, Satan.’”

ChatGPT got facts wrong, too. It said the “are” in “We are never getting back together” is a linking verb. It’s not. It’s an auxiliary verb.

I could go on. But in the middle of writing this column, and I swear this is true, I was given a freelance assignment to revise a short video script written by AI and to “make it sound more natural.”

The script wasn’t just unnatural sounding. It was illogical, misguided and utterly clueless about what to focus on. It boasted at length about an AI writing program that could take “P.R. pitches” and instantly transform them into newspaper articles.

That might sound great to P.R. firms making the pitches, but this script was promoting a technology to benefit newspapers and their readers — oblivious to the fact that journalism doesn’t mean printing whatever P.R. firms want.

I rewrote the whole script, emphasizing the important work reporters do and how the new AI tools could support their journalism. The editor who assigned me the project wrote back, “Your version is SO GOOD” (emphasis hers).

I’m still reeling from the irony. A human writer did an objectively better job than AI at writing advertising copy to promote … an AI writing program.

So the next time you hear tech billionaires boasting about AI products destined to change life as you know it, remember their own words: Not today, Satan.

Swam/swum, lay/lain? The answers are in the dictionary

The dictionary is gaslighting me. I know I sound crazy, but that’s just proof of gaslighting, right?

Let me explain.

For years I’ve been telling people that they never have to agonize over whether to use “swam” or “swum,” “laid” or “lain,” “drank” or “drunk,” or “dreamed” or “dreamt” because the answers are in the dictionary. But only if you know how to find them.

Most dictionaries contain instructions on how to use the dictionary. Of course, no one ever reads this section because they think they already know how to use a dictionary: Look up the word you want. Ignore those weird little schwas and other stuff after the word. Read its definition. Then continue to wonder what mysterious corner of the universe contains the answers to the “laid” vs. “lain” mystery.

Not so fast, I say.

Turn to the front of a physical dictionary or look under the Help section of an online dictionary, and you’ll find information about “inflected forms.” That term means the different forms of a word for different situations, like past tense. “Thought,” for example, is an inflected form of “think.”

Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary tells you inflected forms “are covered explicitly or by implication at the main entry for the base form. These are the plurals of nouns, the principal parts of verbs (the past tense, the past participle when it differs from the past tense, and the present participle), and the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives and adverbs. In general, it may be said that when these inflected forms are created in a manner considered regular in English (as by adding -s or -es to nouns, -ed and -ing to verbs, and -er and -est to adjectives and adverbs) and when it seems that there is nothing about the formation likely to give the dictionary user doubts, the inflected form is not shown in order to save space.”

Catch that? For regular verbs, past forms are not shown. So an irregular verb like “swim” will have after it “swam,” indicating the simple past tense, then “swum,” the past participle. But a regular verb like “walk,” which everyone knows takes -ed for both its past tense forms, doesn’t mention it. The dictionary tells you this “by implication” — if nothing’s there, you know to use -ed.

Over the years, I’ve noticed this multiple times. When I look up regular verbs like “walk,” there are no past tense forms listed. At least, there weren’t. But suddenly, in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, under “walk” it says “walked.” After “talk” it says “talked.” After “call” it says “called.” After “realize” it says “realized.”  Those weren’t there before.

That’s all the evidence I need to prove that Merriam’s is trying to drive me crazy by making me think I’m crazy. But I am not a crackpot.

Confronted with this puzzling information, I did what any former reporter who lacked the chops to cut it as a long-term reporter would do: I contacted the source through social media asking what’s up with that? I got no answer and, true to my didn’t-cut-it-as-a-long-term-reporter skills, I gave up.

But Merriam made one fatal error. They left in that stuff in the Help section about inflected forms of regular verbs being covered “by implication” — evidence of a hasty cover-up of their gaslighting campaign. Busted.

What does all this mean for you? Two things.

First, you can easily find out that the simple past tense of “swim” is “swam,” and the past participle (the one that goes after a form of “have”) is “swum.” “Laid” is the past tense and past participle of the transitive verb “lay,” while “lain” is the past participle of the intransitive verb “lie.” It’s correct to say “yesterday he drank” but “in the past he has drunk.” Also, “dreamed” is correct but “dreamt” is also an option.

And second, your humble grammar columnist is not crazy (in any way relevant to this column).