Proofreading Service - Pain in the English
Proofreading Service - Pain in the English

Your Pain Is Our Pleasure

24-Hour Proofreading Service—We proofread your Google Docs or Microsoft Word files. We hate grammatical errors with a passion. Learn More

Proofreading Service - Pain in the English
Proofreading Service - Pain in the English

Your Pain Is Our Pleasure

24-Hour Proofreading Service—We proofread your Google Docs or Microsoft Word files. We hate grammatical errors with a passion. Learn More

Username

Warsaw Will

Member Since

December 3, 2010

Total number of comments

1371

Total number of votes received

2086

Bio

I'm a TEFL teacher working in Poland. I have a blog - Random Idea English - where I do some grammar stuff for advanced students and have the occasional rant against pedantry.

Latest Comments

“up on top” vs. “up top”

  • May 28, 2014, 2:51am

As a Brit, I'd just say fridge. But if it was a very, very tall fridge, I might just conceivably say 'up on top of'.

“Between you and I...”

  • May 28, 2014, 2:47am

Oops! Grammar fail caused by incomplete editing - please ignore the 'by' in the second sentence.

“Between you and I...”

  • May 28, 2014, 2:36am

There's been quite a lot of talk about the use of I in object position recently, as Obama is quite fond of doing it - "a very personal decision for Michelle and I". But the insistence on 'me' seems relatively recent, and in an Op-Ed in the NYT, by the pair who run 'The Grammarphobia Blog' quote these earlier examples of objective 'I':

“All debts are cleared between you and I.” - Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
“which, between you and I, I wish was swallowed up by an earthquake, provided my eloquent mother was not in it.” - Byron

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/opinion/24oconner.html?_r=0

Google "President Bush graciously invited Michelle and I to meet with him and first lady Laura Bush.” and you'll find the grammar police out in force - and as usual they're Oh so smug about it, like this one - http://bradfordschmidt.com/bitf/grammar-and-vocabulary/

Pronunciation: aunt

  • May 28, 2014, 2:20am

@Brus - I'm fascinated to know who in Britain pronounces the au in aunt even approximately like the au in authentic. Or perhaps I should say pronounced, seeing it's on British Railways, which (for non-Brits) hasn't existed for twenty years or so.

fewer / less

  • May 27, 2014, 1:56pm

@Skeeter Lewis - "More than, larger in amount or greater in rate, as in My new car can do better than 100 miles an hour , or The new plan will cut better than 15 percent of costs . Some authorities consider this usage colloquial and advise that it be avoided in formal writing. " Dictionary.com

So you're certainly right about the American usage, although it seems to be a bit controversial. But I'm not sure why anyone would want to advertise something as 'more than half price', and I doubt Americans would use it this way.

All the entries on the first two pages of a Google.com (not co.uk) search for 'better than half price' are British, and it's much the same at Google Images, so this seems to be primarily a British usage. And it definitely means 'less than' (although admittedly in some cases just less than).

This is from Tescos' website - Better Than Half Price - Was £3.00 Now £1.49 (tinned salmon).

Boots and Superdrug both use 'better than half price' too, and they also definitely mean 'less than':

Boots - Better than 1/2 price - £3.60, Save £6.40, Was £10.00 (moisturising cream)
Superdrug - Better than 1/2 price > 1.48, save £1.51, was £2.99 (anti-perspirant)

Team names — singular or plural

  • May 26, 2014, 4:20pm

@jayles - 'Incidentally there seems to be a rule of thumb for "number of":

"a number of * " takes a plural verb
"the number of * " takes a singular verb. '

I think that's more or less what I just said. :)

With majority of, I agree with you, it's like the other 'of' ones, but without 'of'?

"The majority was/were in favour of banning smoking." OALD - I think was might be seen as more formal.

Team names — singular or plural

  • May 26, 2014, 12:16pm

@jayles - I agree, that's why I put the question about majority, a number of, the young couple etc on the other thread

There is a school of thought that a number of X should always be used with a plural verb, and only with a singular verb when it is the actual number that is being referred to (usually with 'the'):

"A plural verb is needed after 'a/an (large, small, etc.) number of…'" - Oxford Learner's

"A small number of people were unable to make the meeting"
"But the number attending was still larger than last year"

I blogged about "a (small) number of" a couple of years ago:
http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2011/07/small-number-of-quantifiers-are-bit.html

and also "a (wide) range of:"
http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2013/07/some-random-thoughts-on-wide-range-of.html

and "a succession of":
http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2013/03/can-succession-of-take-plural-verb.html

What interests me is what happens to couple and majority when they don't follow "of". I simply cannot bring myself to say "The majority was in favour" or "The couple on the backseat was kissing" - I go notional here, so I guess I must be deviant. But I'm in good company:

"But, the happy couple were not going to part with him in that way" - Our Mutual Friend
"as that unhappy pair were discovered" - Sketches by Boz.
"and it was to be inferred that the majority were in favour of it" - Thomas Hansard

“It is I” vs. “It is me”

  • May 26, 2014, 11:50am

@BGriffin - "sorry, but" is usually seen as a polite way of introducing the fact that you're going to disagree, like a less formal way of saying "I regret to tell you", but if you'd rather dispense with the niceties, that's fine by me.

I have no idea what all that stuff about the grocery stores and the law had to do with anything - I was talking about logic and language, not the law.

"It and I are me/I" is like saying 1 + 1 = 1, a + b = b, red and blue = blue, it makes no sense, unless you add in "both". But in any case you've left me off the hook, as although I don't teach creative writing, I do teach foreigners English, and I will just say that if one of my students presented a sentence such as 'It and I are me/I', I would mark it wrong. Why? Because it's not a sentence the average native speaker would find acceptable. I remind you that these short simple sentences appear nowhere on the Internet.

Word in question: Conversate

  • May 25, 2014, 2:28pm

@Scotsman - I'm quite happy to go along with your 'why not' idea and the general gist of your argument, but I think your notion about how dictionaries decide on what goes in and what stays out is a bit wide of the mark. Dictionaries are firmly descriptive these days (the OED boasts that it always was), and are largely based on corpus linguistics, and in a few cases, user panels.

Really, only three things concern them - is the word Standard English, does it have enough usage and acceptance amongst educated speakers in Standard English, and is it likely to be anything more than a passing fad?

One of the few dictionaries that does list it - Dictionary.com - calls it non-standard except in certain dialects - http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/conversate?r=66 - and it does seem at the moment to be particularly associated with Black American English, which could be considered a dialect. However, at the rate its use is increasing, it could well make it into a few dictionaries soon.

It's well worth following dictionary blogs to see how lexicographers think:

Oxford - http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/02/when-does-wrong-become-right/

Macmillan - http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/

And finally, Harmless Drudgery, the blog of Kory Stamper, an editor at Merriam-Webster -
http://korystamper.wordpress.com/

Team names — singular or plural

  • May 25, 2014, 11:07am

Well, I for one have learnt quite a lot in the course of this discussion. For one, that there is even less disagreement amongst grammarians than I thought there was. And that we Brits use plural verbs with some types of collective nouns more than others. While they are pretty common with team and band names, and with the words family, couple and pair, use with company names is more limited to informal usage.

If anyone is interested in the history of this usage and how it is and has been treated in grammar books, usage guides etc, together with examples from Dickens and the eighteenth century, I've put together most of what I've found in a post on my blog.

http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-team-are-collective-nouns-in.html

Questions

When “one of” many things is itself plural November 27, 2011
You’ve got another think/thing coming September 29, 2012
Fit as a butcher’s dog May 22, 2013
“reach out” May 25, 2013
Tell About October 18, 2013
tonne vs ton January 25, 2014
apostrophe with expressions of distance or time February 2, 2014
Natural as an adverb April 13, 2014
fewer / less May 3, 2014
Opposition to “pretty” March 7, 2015