Ask the English Teacher

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!

Holiday Wishes

Christmas Eve is not yet here in North America, and when it arrives I'm going to be very busy. We have family and friends coming for dinner, so I won't have much chance to blog.

But the first thing I'll do in the morning is to start a batch of pulla, a Finnish coffee bread that for decades has been our Christmas breakfast. You're welcome to make it yourself:

Download recipe_for_pulla.pdf

My old friend Merlin and I take this opportunity to wish you a very happy holiday and a new year full of surprises that make you laugh.

An odd English usage

Fang Yi writes:
I came across a phrase "it bears repeating," and I also looked it up in the dictionary. I still don't get it because the word "bear" has many definitions.

Here is the original sentence:

"At the same time, it bears repeating that each new set of mnemonic curriculum adaptations needs to be examined under controlled conditions before any effectiveness claims can be made."

I am not sure if "bears" here is something like "needs" to represent that there is something important and needs to be repeated.

This is a very good question.

Yes, “bear” has many meanings In this case, it simply means “carry.” When you are very unhappy about something, you say: “I can’t bear it!” The problem is too heavy for you.

So “it bears repeating” means that something is so important that we can say it more than once.

We have another similar expression, used by people in Britain more than in North America: “It doesn’t bear thinking about.” That is, we will get upset if we think about something unpleasant and dangerous: “It doesn’t bear thinking about how he fell off the cliff.” “It doesn’t bear thinking about catching a fatal disease.”

By the way, the sentence using “it bears repeating” is not a very good one! It has too much use of the passive voice. I would revise it:

“At the same time, it bears repeating that we must examine each new set of mnemonic curriculum adaptations under controlled conditions before we can say they're effective.”

"Mnemonic" (pronounced ne-MON-ic) is from a Greek word mnenomikos, from mnemon, "mindful," meaning memory. In this case, it sounds like a way to make people remember something—like "I before E except after C," or "Thirty days has September, April, June, and November."

Problems with the Past Perfect Tense

Vareok asks:
I have a problem:

Eliza remembers everything exactly as if it ______ yesterday.
A. was happening B. happens
C. had happened D. happened

I think C is right,but the suggested answer is D. I just don't know why it should be D. What's your idea about it?

I agree with you. Eliza remembers events from a long time ago, but they seem fresh and recent. So we are talking about two points in the past: long ago, and yesterday. This is when we need the past perfect tense: When he called me, I had already left (before he called).

In casual conversation, we might say “as if it happened yesterday,” but in formal speech or writing, I would say “as if it had happened yesterday.”