Ask the English Teacher

Quotation Marks to Set Off Unusual Terms

Mike asks:
During an online game session I used single quotes in the following manner:

"Where can I find 'Saarkod'?"

(Saarkod being the name of a fictional character in the game.) I thought it warranted quotes because it is an esoteric or non-standard term and should be noted that it was part of a non-standard vocabulary. Another player told me that it was misuse of quotes and that,

"Where can I find Saarkod?"

was the acceptable form of the question. I used quotes to indicate that from reading the word 'Saarkod' you would not immediately be aware of its definition. Much in the way that if I had been told to travel to the Eiffel Tower and I did not know what or where the Eiffel Tower was, I would say, "Where can I find the 'Eiffel Tower'?"

The other player told me that it would be acceptable to say, "Where can I find the man they call 'Saarkod'?" but isn't that just a needlessly lengthy rewording of my initial statement?

Am I wrong to use single quotes in the manner I described?

In some ways, the answer depends on where you live and which style manual you follow.

Can "antagonist" be plural?

Dr. Ric asks:
A reader of an article of mine called my attention to what may be my (perhaps) misuse of the word "antagonist."

Here is what I wrote: "I can just imagine some strange movie in which the "bad guys" (or the antagonist) take the "good guy" (the protagonist) and tie him to a chair."

The reader then wrote: Shouldn't that be the "bad guys" (or the antagonists)?

To which I replied: 

Blessings to you, and I will do my research to see if the word "antagonist" can be used as a collective noun as I used it (without checking first, I might add).
=======================
So, can it be as I had it originally, as a collective noun, or should it be as the reader suggests?

What an interesting question! The answers will take us back to the ancient Greeks and the Old Testament.

Greek drama started as a kind of monologue by the "protagonist," with comments by the chorus. "Protagonist" literally means "first struggler" (proto=first, agon=struggle). Some avant-garde dramatist with a big budget then added an "antagonist" (the "struggler against"). This led inevitably to modern movies with their casts of thousands and budgets of billions.

We still use "protagonist" to mean the hero or central figure of a story (dramatic or otherwise). Some people misuse it to mean "proponent" or "advocate." And of course the villain of the story is the antagonist—a singular noun. If the protagonist faces several enemies, then they're antagonists.

But another word for antagonist is "adversary," and here perhaps Dr. Ric (who is the president of an evangelical seminary) may be able to confirm my belief that some translations of the Bible use "adversary" as a term for the Devil—especially in the Book of Job.

"Adversary," like "enemy," can be used as singular or plural, at least in the sense of treating a group of enemies as a single unit: "The enemy is in range of our guns" doesn't mean one poor unlucky soldier, but a sizable number of soldiers. During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union regarded each other as "the adversary," and again the singular usage really meant a plural.

In the example Dr. Ric gives, "antagonists" would be the preferable usage. But with some rewriting, he might have said: "I can imagine some strange movie in which the good guy (the protagonist) faces an adversary (antagonists) prepared to tie him into a chair."

Taking a Holiday

I'm away on Wednesday, June 21 for a week in the Canadian Rockies. I won't have much access to a computer, so if you send me email I won't be able to answer (or post here) until the very end of June or the beginning of July.

Hope your week will be as happy and surprising as mine will be. Jasper National Park is an amazing place, even after visiting it every summer for almost thirty years!

Forty or Fourty?

Susan asks:
We are having a great discussion at work as to the correct Canadian spelling of the word forty. My colleague and I remember learning to spell it 'fourty' - about 40 years ago at school in Toronto! Other officemates as old or older than us have always spelled it 'forty' (schooled in Montreal and Cape Breton).

Do you have the official word on this spelling? I know the Americans spell it forty - I was hoping we didn't!

Canadians generally follow the British "our" spelling for words like labour and neighbour and harbour. But forty is forty everywhere. I've certainly seen it spelled "fourty" by many of my students here in British Columbia, but it's as wrong in Canada as it is in the US, Australia, and everywhere else.

Logically, "fourty" makes sense: four, fourteen, fourty. But English and logic don't always agree, and this is one of those cases.

I is?

Pam writes with an interesting question:
In a dictionary, the verb 'BE' is described as:
BE [verb]
first and third person singular past indicative: was
second person singular and plural and first and third person
plural past indicative: were
past subjunctive: were
past participle: been
present participle: being
first person singular present indicative: am
second person singular and plural and first and third person
plural present indicative: are
third person singular present indicative: is
present subjunctive: be

Therefore you can correctly say 'I am', 'she is', 'you are', etc.

Is it ever grammatically correct to say 'I is'?

The short answer is "No." The long answer is "It depends."

"Be" is a very old, very irregular verb. As languages age, they tend to become more regular in their grammar. Toddlers routinely do this as they learn English. They tend to say, "I seed him," and "She readed me a story," and "I is tired." Then we routinely correct them, conservatively protecting the grammar of the 9th century.

Of course, many of our ancestors failed to correct their children sternly enough, so we don't speak English as they did in the 9th century. (Spare the rod and spoil the language!)

But some dialects will change, and often in the direction of regularity. So-called Black English uses the verb "to be" in ways very different from Standard English, and generally in more regular forms. These usages are not bad, or incorrect—just different. Some versions of Black English will use "I is," and within those versions the usage is not only accepted, it's required.

Think of? Think to?

A reader asks:
What did you think to the game? Is this correct way to ask the question?

It should be “What did you think of the game?” We usually think OF things:
I think of you often.
She thought of him sadly.
We didn’t think of that.
Think of what people will say!

“Think to” is rare and includes a verb, making it an infinitive:
I didn’t think to warn you.
You should have thought to plan for this.

Capitals in Job Titles

Tanya asks:
I am having a bit of a time finding a definitive answer to my grammar question. I have seen several different ways of this being written but not sure which is correct.

I work in the telecommunications field and we have "clients" that are Service Providers. Because it is a "title", in my opinion, I think it should be capitalized. However, I have seen it a few ways.

Example of a sentence:

This product allows Service Providers to deliver to small business customers a unique and highly functional product.

In general, we capitalize only proper names, including those of businesses: Acme Service Providers, for example.

But in internal business documents, like memos and minutes of meetings, it's very common to capitalize the titles of senior officers in the organization: "The report of the Treasurer was accepted by the Chair and Chief Operating Officer."

In my college, we refer to ourselves as "the College," to distinguish ourselves from all those other lower-case colleges. We capitalize titles in formal documents: "The President and the Deans attended Convocation." But I would write "Crawford Kilian, Instructor" only in the signature block of a letter I was writing.

So in Tanya's case, I would use lower case when I talked about service providers...unless I were talking about them in an internal document.

Negative Adjectives

Raquel writes:
I am comparing two groups of students. One of the groups enrolled at a certain school, the other was admitted but did not enrolled.

When I refer to the students who did not enrolled, should I write/say 'not-enrolled students' or 'not-enrolled group'??

I just read online your explanation of compound adjectives and I think these two instances are exactly like the examples you mentioned....but I wanted to make sure.

To be precise, if someone applies to a school but doesn't enroll, that person is not a student. We might confuse readers with an adject like "not-enrolled," because we usually use a prefix like "un" or "non" to indicate a negative.

So I would use an expression like "unenrolled applicants." I might even say, "applicants who were accepted but did not enroll."

Swindle

Frédéric asks:
Recently, I've used the word "swindle" with my students and they had a blank face. Is that so uncommon? Are there any connotations to it?

To swindle means to defraud someone by taking money without providing something of equal value. If Frédéric pays me $100,000 dollars for a house in Vancouver, and finds that it's actually a ruined log cabin 500 kilometres from Vancouver, he can say, "Crawford swindled me!"

The word isn't rare, but in ordinary conversation Frédéric would probably say, "Crawford scammed me! Crawford ripped me off! Crawford defrauded me!" And most North Americans would understand at once that poor Frédéric had been swindled.

Here's a related word with a very specific meaning. A "confidence man" is a swindler who takes your money by promising you will get even more money—but dishonestly. (If you have received email from a Nigerian who wants to share millions of dollars with you, you have met a confidence man.)

Such a dishonest scheme is usually called a "con," and the swindler is a "con man." If you actually give him your money, you've been "conned."

This is why North Americans have an old saying: "You can't cheat an honest man." You can't con him because he refuses to do anything dishonest.

Than

David writes:
I am confused with these sentences with "than":

The Eastern Pacific is cooler than usual, and the cool water extends farther westward than is usual.

When the growing season in such areas is warmer than usual , the fruit produced is riper and better balanced than is usual in cool seasons.

Does your child need or use more medical care, mental health, or educational services than is usual for most children of the same age?

If more cloud cover occurs than is expected during the daylight, the surface temperature will generally be cooler than expected.

'I'm having more fun than is legal,' says Friend of Bush

It had more than fifty times the amount of bacteria than is expected in prepared foods.

I think I understand the meaning of the above sentences, but I just cannot figure out why sometimes it is "than", sometimes it is "than is". Could you please explain and tell me when to use "than is" or "than" in writing?

"Than" is a conjunction, like "and" and "but," and we use it to compare one thing with another: I am taller than my wife.

I could have said "than my wife is," but the verb is understood. So I don't need to include it. The same is true, I think, in most of the sentences you offer. For example, you could write, "The Eastern Pacific is cooler than is usual, and the cool water extends farther westward than is usual." But a repeated "is" would sound awkward, and would draw attention to itself. So we can drop one verb.

In other cases, we say more than we need to with this usage: "Does your child need or use more medical care, mental health, or educational services than is usual for most children of the same age?" I would simply drop "is usual" and write "than most children."

Sometimes we can really confuse the reader: "I like computers more than my wife." Oh dear! I could get in big trouble saying that. What I mean to say is, "I like computers more than my wife does."