Ask the English Teacher

What kind or Which kind?

Carla writes:
I have a question. Which are the differences between which kind, and what kind? I think the correct way is which kind. Also, interesting or intresting?

This was such a good question I really had to think about it for a few days. It seems to me that they're largely interchangeable--but not completely.

You can say "Which kind of ice cream would you like?" or "What kind of ice cream..." No real difference.

But a classic song is titled "What Kind of Fool Am I?" and it would sound odd as "Which Kind"! Same with "What kind of monster would do such a thing to a harmless puppy?"

The difference is that the last two questions are rhetorical--we don't really want someone to answer by saying what kind fool I am, or to name the kind of monster. We're really making a statement in the form of a question: I'm a fool. He's a monster.

So if you're asking a rhetorical question, use "What kind." If you really want to know the answer, use "Which kind" or "What kind."

As for your second question, it's interesting. That's two e's, so you can remind yourself of the correct spelling by telling yourself, "I can spell interesting with e's."

Crapspeak

Usually I post only visitors' question and my answers, but this story in The Globe and Mail is worth reading: Going forward, rise up against crapspeak. Here's an except, but you should read the whole thing:

More evidence that the worm turns: A positive rebellion is under way in Britain against the worst excesses of crapspeak, that cleverly metaphorical slang that corporate types and bureaucrats like to speak. (You know the guy who must always say “challenges” instead of problems, or “stakeholders” instead of customers; he's proficient in crapspeak.)

Recently, a decree went around to local authorities in England and Wales – town and county councils, mostly – from the body that governs them, forbidding use of a long list of popular crapspeak terms. The Local Government Association sent out a list last week of 100 “non-words” for councils to avoid.

According to The Associated Press, the list exhorted government officials to replace “revenue stream” with income and to avoid cryptic code words such as “coterminosity,” meaning an overlap of administrations.

“Stakeholder engagement” can easily be replaced by “talking to people,” the chairman of the association said.

Almost simultaneously, a writer for the BBC's online magazine posted a rant about the mindless cheeriness of the most popular catchphrases in business.

Lucy Kellaway is on a campaign against “going forward” in particular, which, as we have noted, is used by every inarticulate person who wants to make some reference to the future. She accuses business folk, with their optimistic blue-skying and reaching out, and leveraging, all their synergies and passionate commitments to visions, of being brainlessly upbeat.

“All the celebrating, the reaching out, the sharing, and the championing, in fact, grind one down,” she writes. “The reality is that business is the most brutal it has been for half a century.”

The rest of the Kellaway article is here, and you should read it also.

Whether you're a native English speaker, or learning English as a second or third language, you need to think about this problem. Yes, "crapspeak" is a rude word. But it's also an accurate word.

Is good grammar a "white" thing?

I enjoy the blog Stuff White People Like. It's a witty satire—not on white people, but on a certain kind of educated middle-class person like me who deserves an occasional elbow in the ribs.

Earlier this month, it published an item on grammar. Here's an excerpt:

When asking someone about their biggest annoyances in life, you might expect responses like “hunger,” “being poor,” or “getting shot.”

If you ask a white person, the most common response will likely be “people who use ‘their’ when they mean ‘there.’ Maybe comma splices, I’m not sure but it’s definitely one of the two.”

If you wish to gain the respect of a white person, it’s probably a good idea that you find an obscure and debated grammar rule such as the “Oxford Comma” and take a firm stance on what you believe is correct. This is seen as more productive and forward thinking than simply stating your anger at the improper use of “it’s."

Another important thing to know is that when white people read magazines and books they are always looking for grammar and spelling mistakes.

In fact, one of the greatest joys a white person can experience is to catch a grammar mistake in a major publication. Finding one allows a white person to believe that they are better than the writer and the publication since they would have caught the mistake.

The more respected the publication, the greater the thrill. If a white person were to catch a mistake in The New Yorker, it would be a sufficient reason for a large party.

Though they reserve the harshest judgment for professional, do not assume that white people will cast a blind eye to your grammar mistakes in email and official documents. They will judge you and make a general assessment about your intelligence after the first infraction.

Fortunately, this situation can be improved if you ask a white person to proof read your work before you send it out. “Hey Jill, I’m sorry to do this, but I have a business degree and I’m a terrible writer. Can you look this over for me?”

This deft maneuver will allow the white person to feel as though their liberal arts degree has a purpose and allow you to do something more interesting.

Don’t worry, it is impossible for a white person to turn down the opportunity to proofread.

It's impossible, alas, to escape the need to proofread. And The New Yorker is full of mistakes, especially over-use of commas. I'd rather hold a wake than a party about such goofs in the magazine that used to publish E.B. White.

I'm retiring this summer after 41 years of correcting people's English, and maybe that's why I can't read anything without also proofreading it. I wish I weren't so picky about English errors, but I'm not really concerned about the writers who make them. I'm concerned about the readers who have to deal with them.

I've taught my students that the writer's job is to make the reader's job effortless. Anything that makes the reader wonder what I really mean is a distraction and a burden. That includes mistakes in spelling (their or they're?), punctuation, and anything else that slows down understanding.

Some people get very defensive when someone corrects their English. That's understandable, but it tells me that they don't write for their readers, but for themselves. They write to be loved, not to be understood.

"Standard" English is just one dialect among hundreds or thousands. Actually, it's several dialects: American Standard, Canadian Standard, New Zealand Standard. People who may not comfortably speak or write Standard will still understand it, and that's the important thing—to be understood no matter what dialect you speak in your own kitchen.

I wish I could speak and write more dialects of English than I do—especially the musical Englishes of Jamaica and Scotland. But as long as I can share my ideas with Jamaicans and Scots, and they can share theirs with me, I'm content.

Compound Adjective Problems

Oksana in Russia writes:
I've been teaching EFL for about 4 years, and the longer I teach it the more complicated it seems, the more lacunae in my knowledge I discover.

That’s exactly my experience...and I’ve been teaching English for 41 years! :-)

The problem I'm struggling with now, is whether there are any rules regulating the choice between
A + Numeral + Noun (a sixteen-week semester, a two-bedroom flat)
and
A+Numeral+Noun+ed (a one-layered disk, a three-headed monster)
constructions used as noun modifiers.
Is it the nature of the defined noun, the relations between the noun and the attribute or something else that tells us what construction to choose? And what would be the right way to say: a three-storey house or a three-storeyed house?

I try to explain to my students that it’s not a two flat and also a bedroom flat, but a two-bedroom flat: the two words take a hyphen to show that we should read them as a single adjective. The compounds can get even longer: day-to-day routine, six-and-a-half-year-old child, and so on.

We do have an exception: If part of the compound is an adverb ending in –ly, we don’t hyphenate: a truly sincere man, a really talented dancer.

As for your second question, someone else recently asked me about this and I realized something: When we use a part of a body as part of an adjective, we add –ed. For example:
a three-headed monster
a one-eyed man
a three-legged stool
a four-footed animal
a tight-fisted miser

But for other terms, we don’t use –ed. And we don't use a plural form of the noun in the compound adjective! For example:
a three-storey house (three-story house in North America!)
a one-layer disk (and a seven-layer cake)
a two-car garage
a six-and-a-half-year-old child
an eleven-man team

And here's another confusing problem: When "body" parts are also units of measurement, we don't add -ed. A six-foot man is a tall man; a six-footed man would be a monster. (If you live in a country that uses the metric system, this is just more proof that the English and North Americans are crazy.)

The Use of "There"

I've recently received two very different questions, but they both deal with the use of "there" at the beginning of a sentence. Here's the question from Linda:

Of seventeen English translations of the Qur’an, ten interpret Surah 20: 8 using “He”:
“God! There is no god but He. The most beautiful names are His.”
Seven use “Him”:
“God! There is no god but Him. The most beautiful names are His.”
Translators using “He” include Arberry and George Sale, whose first language was English.
Translators using “Him” include Pickthal, an educated Englishman.

So which is correct? Is it ‘He’ as a predicate nominative? Or is it ‘Him’ in the objective case? What is the rule?

Not having read the Qur’an in over 40 years, I hesitate to rush in where translators fear to tread. But...here goes.

The problem really arises from one of my pet peeves: Sentences beginning with “There is” and “There are.” Long ago an editor taught me what a problem such sentences are, since “there” is an expletive, doing nothing in the sentence except introducing what it’s about. Shame on all those translators for creating a problem where (I suspect) none exists in Arabic.

Could you translate the passage as: “God! Only He is God”? Or: “God! He is the only God”?

If you feel you must stick with “There is,” then treat “but” as a preposition synonymous with “except,” which would require “him” as the pronoun.

Then Gabriela in Bucharest wrote:

In my teaching activity I have often come across sentences of this type:

There have been published no documents regarding this event.
There have been made a lot of changes in this system.

I find these sentences wrong but they are probably used in spoken English/ American English, in films, and so on. Am I right in correcting my students or can I accept these forms? In my opinion the sentences shoud be:

No documents have been published.....
A lot of changes have been made....

I explained the "expletive" problem to Gabriela, and then added:

Even more important, the beginning of an English sentence is a “hot spot,” where readers pay the most attention and react most strongly to what they read. They may understand the content of the middle of the sentence, but they don’t respond as much. (The same is true for sentences in the middle of a paragraph...we aren’t paying as much attention as we do to the beginning and end of the paragraph.)

Here is another problem: “There” is at the beginning of the sentence, so many speakers and writers think of it as the subject. And it sounds singular, so they often make a big mistake in subject-verb agreement: “There is two people here to see you.” “There’s a lot of problems facing us.” No, they should be: “There are two people...” and “There are a lot...”

So I urge my students to write sentences like “No documents have been published,” "Two people are here to see you," "We face a lot of problems"--and sometimes they listen to me!

Propensity

Michael asks:
I recently had the following question marked wrong on a homework assignment where, among other words, we were required to use the word propensity, so I used the following sentence: "Many claim poor handwriting is a propensity for being a doctor." However, the student teacher who marked it wrong was unable to give an explanation as to why it was marked wrong, so I was wondering if you could help me with explaining why it was marked incorrectly.

Propensity, my dictionary tells me, means "a natural disposition or tendency...a liking for; partiality." So it's got to be a trait of a person, not of a skill like handwriting. If you turned the sentence around, however, it could work: "Doctors have a propensity for bad handwriting."

Drop out or drop off?

A reader in Singapore recently wrote to ask about some differences in common English expressions:

1) drop out & drop off?
He dropped out of school (he stopped going to classes).
I’ll have to drop out of the team (I can’t play any more).
To drop off means to fall, or to fall asleep: The ball dropped off the table. He dropped off after dinner (he fell asleep).

2) fall off, fall down & fall over(eg; patient falls down or patient falls off)?
She hit a hole in the road and fell off her bike (she lost her balance).
He fell off the cliff and died (he fell a long distance).
I don’t want to fall down the stairs (lose my balance and roll down the stairs).
He is falling down on the job (he’s not doing what he should).
In the dark, I tripped and fell over a chair (it was in my way).

3) fill in, fill up or fill out the form?
You can fill in the form (put words in the blanks), or you can fill out the form (same thing).
You can’t fill up a form, but you can fill up the gas tank of your car.

4) in the bed or on the bed?
When you are in the bed, you have covers over you.
When you are on the bed, you are lying on top of the covers.

Some English terms with "as"

A friend in India asks about some "as" expressions in English:

as well as
This means “in addition to”: As well as playing football, he also played volleyball.
She traveled to Italy as well as Greece.

as long as
This means “for a certain time”: As long as I am healthy, I will keep working. (If I become ill, I will quit.)
She listened to his boring conversation for as long as she could. (Then she walked away.)

It can also mean “provided” or “if” or “but only”:
I will go to the party as long as I can leave early. (I don’t want to stay all night.)
We will support our team as long as they keep winning. (If they lose, we’ll reject them.)

as far as
This also has a couple of meanings:
“a certain distance”: We climbed the mountain as far as we could. (Then we couldn’t climb any higher.)
It can also introduce a subject:
As far as my family is concerned, they all like the idea. (In some cases, people drop the “in concerned”)

as soon as
When something can happen: We will leave as soon as he calls.
Please reply as soon as possible.
I came as soon as I could.

Banished Words

As I promised in my last post, here's the Lake Superior State University list of banished words.

I don't always agree with them, but they remind me to think carefully before using a popular new expression. It may already be a cliché.

The New Words of 2007

The New York Times has an article on new words and expressions that gained attention in the past year: All We Are Saying. Some of them may become generally accepted. Others will be forgotten almost at once. And some will become clichés—widely used, but not really very helpful.

Lake Superior State University in the US publishes a list of "banned words" every January. These are expressions that people shouldn't use, even if the expressions are popular. I'll post a link to them when the list is announced.

In the meantime, I hope everyone is having a very happy holiday season, and I wish you all a very successful new year!