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Error ID Number: 60
URL: <http://dedalvs.com/guide/search_english.php?word=60> Problem(s):- Ice cream has become to be something more than just a dessert to me.
Solution(s):- Ice cream has come to be something more than just a dessert to me.
Ice cream has become something more than just a dessert to me.
Explanation:- You only get one "be", so use it wisely!
(Note that "become" and "come to be" are not always interchangeable. Consider: "He became a teacher" ≠ "He came to be a teacher." Oh, and how about "You're becoming a nuisance" vs. "You're coming to be a nuisance"?)
Categories: | 6 / 2 / 2009 |
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Error ID Number: 53
URL: <http://dedalvs.com/guide/search_english.php?word=53> Problem(s):- All hard working men love ice cream.
Solution(s):- All hard-working men love ice cream.
Explanation:- No, I am not being persnickety: this is a real problem. Take a gander at that problem sentence. Can you think of another interpretation than the sense given in the solution sentence? Any other interpretation? Perhaps instead of "men that are hard-working", you might read "working men that are..." Well. Ahem.
So. Presuming that is not what you meant to say, this is the reason we have hyphens! No, they're not just for breaking up long words at the end of a line (and they most certainly are not dashes!), they actually serve a regular purpose. Whenever we come up with a coinage like "hard-working" that, for whatever reason, hasn't been accepted as a single word (see if Google auto-corrects your word, and you'll know if it's been accepted [and what do you know! "Hardworking" has been accepted! But let's pretend for the sake of argument that it hasn't been yet]), the elements that comprise it must be separated by a hyphen. This is crucial when the interpretation of those elements as a string would lend the sentence a different meaning. In order to keep those interpretations separate, we must use a hyphen with one, and a space with the other.
In case you're wondering why we don't run into this problem in speech, let me remind you that writing is nothing but an approximation of spoken language, an its most obvious deficiency lies in its representation of intonation. The phrases "hard working men" and "hard-working men" have distinct intonational patterns, and would never be confused by a native English speaker (or listener). In writing, all we have to go on is the absence or presence of a hyphen. Since little bits like hyphens, commas, dots on i's, etc., are the likeliest to be left out, what we're confronted with, more often than not, is an absent hyphen. Consequently, confusion can arise—even if the context would otherwise make it clear.
But, hey, I'm a reasonable guy. If I look at the problem sentence above, I'll probably interpret it correctly. (Well, if I feel like it.) But know ye this: internet humor is puerile. Desire ye that your written words be made a mockery of on internet fora and blog posts? Nay? Methinks my case resteth.
Categories: | 10 / 27 / 2008 |
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Error ID Number: 52
URL: <http://dedalvs.com/guide/search_english.php?word=52> Problem(s):- The world in which we live in is full of ice cream.
Solution(s):- The world in which we live is full of ice cream.
- The world we live in is full of ice cream.
Explanation:- I think what's happening in the problem sentence above is a kind of garden path effect. Specifically, the writer is in the process of writing the sentence, writes "in which", and then by the time s/he gets to the end of "we live", working memory fails, and another "in" is inserted. Oops!
Since English allows us to use prepositions either as post-verbal particles (or adverbs) or as true prepositions, we have two options when we create a relative clause. The first solution sentence gives us one option: a preposed preposition with a relative pronoun; and the second solution sentence gives us the other option: no relative pronoun of any kind, and the preposition "in" used adverbially. If a writer forgets (working memory, remember) which strategy they've chosen, though, problems like this can occur. It happens to everyone every now and again, so try to look out for these before they happen.
Categories: | 9 / 15 / 2008 |
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Error ID Number: 50
URL: <http://dedalvs.com/guide/search_english.php?word=50> Problem(s):- But to me, who know what it really is, its transformation makes no matter, for I will have it repaired at the first village where I can find a smith in such a way that it will not be surpassed or even equaled by the one that the god of smiths himself made and forged for the god of battles.
Solution(s):- But to me, who knows what it really is, its transformation makes no matter, for I will have it repaired at the first village where I can find a smith in such a way that it will not be surpassed or even equaled by the one that the god of smiths himself made and forged for the god of battles.
Explanation:- The astute reader of the above will note that the problem sentence comes from Don Quixote by Cervantes (Don Quixote here is talking about a brass barber's basin he fancies to be a helmet). That sentence was written (i.e., translated) by Walter Starkie, the famed Irish scholar. Notice anything odd about it? If you do, you're not alone; if you don't, you're not alone.
English, like any number of old, abandoned bicycles rusting on the side of the road, is broken, and the problem and solution sentences above are prime examples of its sorry state. (Don't believe me? Here's further evidence.) When we use "who", generally there is no problem, because we're usually talking about someone else, e.g., "The guy who's on the phone dropped his hat in that volcano." When the target of relativization (in this case, "the guy") is a third party (pretty much any noun or a pronoun like "he", "she", "it", or even "they"), the verb that follows "who" is conjugated in the third person, and we don't give it another thought. When, for whatever odd reason, though, you want to relativize "I", the mighty capitalized pronoun, you immediately run into a dilemma. Consider:
- "I eat cake." (Good!)
- "I eats cake." (Bad!)
- "I who eat cake." (Good?)
- "I who eats cake." (Probably bad?)
- "Give the cake to me, who eat cake." (Good?!)
- "Give the cake to me, who eats cake." (Suddenly not so bad anymore?!)
- "Who eats cake?" "I do." (Good!)
- "Who eat cake?" "I do." (Bad!)
It gets a bit confusing. Is "who" a third person pronoun? How could it possibly be a first person pronoun? Does "I" pass some of its first-person-ness onto the "who" by means of some nightmarish Chomskyan mechanism? The amusing thing is it doesn't matter, because whatever explanation one comes up with, the data is bound to be refuted by the next passerby. And why? Because English is broken!
So, what to do? If you're writing an essay for, I don't know, school, I'd say just never, ever relativize "I" or "me". I bet you can get through every essay you'll ever write for school without having to do it. If you have to, try to do it in the past tense where English forgets that verbs can agree in person and/or number (the sole exception being that dirty verb "was", which, truth be told, probably isn't a true conjugation of the verb "to be" at all, if you go back far enough). If you absolutely have to, ask your professor and/or teacher: make them fix English.
Categories: | 8 / 10 / 2008 |
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Error ID Number: 42
URL: <http://dedalvs.com/guide/search_english.php?word=42> Problem(s):- Is the tightrope walker that stole my ice cream!
Solution(s):- It's the tightrope walker that stole my ice cream!
Explanation:- (Let's pretend I've already been writing for awhile.)
...and to make matters worse, "it's" even kind of sounds like "is", if you devoice the "s" in "is"! I mean, what is one to do?!
For those learning English as a second (or third or fourth) language, you may find something like the solution sentence above—something which comes so naturally to a native English speaker—to be rather perplexing. Allow me to reassure you: it is, indeed, bizarre. Here's the story.
Linguists (wrongly) assumed for many years that all well-formed sentences in all languages required subjects. In a sentence like, "Estoy ocupado", Spanish for "I'm busy", then, there is an implied subject. Never mind that "Yo estoy ocupado" doesn't mean the same thing as "Estoy ocupado": the linguists always know what's best. Why? Because (and this was especially true in the 1950's and 1960's) linguists reasoned that there was a magical thing in our heads called Universal Grammar (important enough to be capitalized). This magical device, identical in all human beings, is what we use to comprehend and produce language. As a result, the actual languages we encounter (Spanish, English, French, Tamil, Georgian, Moro, etc.) are mere manifestations of the underlying mechanism known as Universal Grammar.
Here's what that has to do with anything (this response presupposes I specific question I hope you asked yourself). If (get ready for this) all humans possess Universal Grammar, and all languages are mere manifestations of it, then the goal of the linguist is to describe Universal Grammar. How do you do that? Well, since it's all the same, you can just study one language thoroughly, and you should get there. The result? Linguists pretty much just studied English. It's the fanciest argument I have ever heard for being lazy. And though this attitude no longer prevails, we're left with its remnants.
So here's one of the major reasons linguists thought all sentences in all languages need subjects (this was the question I was supposed to be answering, right?). In English, all sentences need subjects. (Except for those that don't, but those need not concern us presently.) Seems sensible. Or does it?!
- It's so good of you to drop by.
- There's room for you here.
- It's cold outside.
- It's raining.
What the hell is raining?! The sky?! Unbelievable!
So, what is this subject doing? Nothing. What does it mean? Nothing. What is the pronoun standing in for? Nothing. This thing is devoid of semantics. Linguists have a word for it: expletive. The "it" in those sentences up there is an expletive (a strange word to use, considering how we use the word in normal speech). In English, we need that "it". Why? I don't know. To hold the tense? Consider that the verb in English, impoverished though it may be, must agree with its subject in number in the present tense (and certain verbs in the past). If there's no subject, what does it agree with? You have to have something there to tell it what to do, or it's lost! And since "it" does so much anyway (cf. "About my going to your grandmother's surprise party, it's something I just can't do" [it = going to your grandmother's surprise party]), might as well have it explete, right? (No, that's not a real word.)
So here's what to keep in mind:
- All English sentences need a subject.
- If you don't have one, you'll need an expletive subject.
- If you devoice the "s" in "is", the first word of a sentence that starts with "is" instead of "it's" sounds an awful like like the Spanish word "es". Consider the Spanish translation of our problem sentence: "Es el funámbulo que me robó el helado." (Yes, I created the above problem sentence just so I could use the word "funámbulo".)
If you're learning English (and especially if you have a language like Spanish, whose verbs are mighty, as your first language), you'll want to watch out for this. It won't prevent anyone from understanding you're writing (as I mentioned above, these expletives are contentless), but it will make you sound like a non-native speaker. If this is something you wish to avoid, then start getting down with expletives. It's just good clean fun.
Categories: | 3 / 14 / 2008 |
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Error ID Number: 40
URL: <http://dedalvs.com/guide/search_english.php?word=40> Problem(s):- In the book Great Ice Cream Flavors, lists just about every fantastic flavor you can imagine.
Solution(s):- In the book Great Ice Cream Flavors, the author lists just about every fantastic flavor you can imagine.
- In the book Great Ice Cream Flavors, there is a list of just about every fantastic flavor you can imagine.
- The book Great Ice Cream Flavors lists just about every fantastic flavor you can imagine.
Explanation:- I see this error a lot, and I think it has to do with working memory. The brain is much faster than the fingers, and, in certain cases, it's even faster than the brain—that is, whatever part of the brain actually comes up with stuff is faster and stronger than working memory.
Consider the problem sentence below:
In the book Great Ice Cream Flavors, lists just about every fantastic flavor you can imagine.
If you leave out the first word of the sentence (and ignore the problematic comma. I included it because I see the comma more often than not), you get a grammatical sentence:
The book Great Ice Cream Flavors lists just about every fantastic flavor you can imagine.
Considering that we compose sentences in linear time, we type the first word, then the second, then the third, etc. Thus, each word we type is fresher in our mind. The more we type, the easier it is to forget the earliest words we composed. As a result, it's easy, in the problem sentence, to forget about the "in". Once you do that, you kind of just proceed with the sentence as grammatically as possible.
The best way to fix these is simply to proofread. When you read over your writing, you don't have to worry about composition, so your attention is focused purely on wording. In theory. (Hopefully?)
Categories: | 3 / 6 / 2008 |
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Error ID Number: 32
URL: <http://dedalvs.com/guide/search_english.php?word=32> Problem(s):- By eating ice cream allows me to get my work done more efficiently.
Solution(s):- Eating ice cream allows me to get my work done more efficiently.
- By eating ice cream, I'm able to get my work done more efficiently.
Explanation:- The problem sentence illustrates what can be called a garden path effect. The sentence begins just fine, but by the time you get past "ice cream", you forget that you wrote "by", and so you proceed as if you hadn't. Thus, you get an ungrammatical sentence.
There are, in reality, three ways to avoid an error such as this one in your writing:
- Hire a full-time editor to edit everything you write (even e-mails, memos and grocery lists).
- Write to the director the English language and have him recognize the grammaticality of the problem sentence above.
- Proofread.
I know it's a pain in the tukhus, but usually if you just reread what you've written, you'll catch stuff like this.
Conversely, though, I'd like to add that if you come across a sentence like this written by somebody else, I implore to be understanding. I guarantee you you have written (and will once again write) a sentence like this. It just happens sometimes; it's nearly unavoidable. So don't be all up in they grill about it, or whatever; just point it out, and move on. When it comes to typos (or write-o's), we're all in it together. We humans are allies in the fight: our enemies are our lousy brains and clumsy fingers and hands. Always remember that, and we shall prevail!
Categories: | 12 / 10 / 2007 |
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Error ID Number: 30
URL: <http://dedalvs.com/guide/search_english.php?word=30> Problem(s):- My friends see it fit that they continue to eat inferior quality ice cream.
Solution(s):- My friends see fit to continue to eat inferior quality ice cream.
Explanation:- Expressions possess the unique quality of being completely un- (or a-) grammatical. "See fit" is one such expression. Don't try to make grammatical sense of it (especially if you're a Chomskyan linguist): you will fail. Instead, simply memorize that it's "see fit to x", and be done with it. In the problem sentence, the proposition "continue to eat inferior quality ice cream" is kind of coindexed with that expletive pronoun, and "fit" has been reanalyzed as an adjective/adverb—probably on analogy with something like, "He made it known that". In other words, what happened was a speaker of English looked at this broken expression and thought to themselves, "There's no way English can be this broken! Let me see if I can make sense of this expression..."
People like this will try to fool you into thinking that English is not broken. Don't you listen to their honey-sweet words! They like to think that English is like a pair of fine slacks. Anyone can put them on, but some will spill food on them, dirty them up without washing them, wrinkle them and not iron them, and generally mistreat them. If they could, those pants-wearers would make it so no one could wear their precious English and muck it (them?) up. Alas, they can't, so they make their millions criticizing those that abuse their holy trousers. This metaphor is misleading. First of all, English is not a thing apart from its speakers. Second, whereas one speaker will see (x+7)/(4x-3), another speaker will see y. In other words, there existed speakers that saw "see fit" as perfectly grammatical, and probably had similar constructions to it that they could play with and elaborate upon. We, however, can no longer recover the grammaticality. Thus, we're stuck with this lump of words that we can't do anything with.
The moral of the story is this: if you don't know what to do with an expression, google it. If the expression is still being used "correctly", most of the hits you'll get will use the expression the same way. As more uncertainty creeps in, you'll get more varied results. In that case, go with a source you trust (e.g., a newspaper, a favorite author, me). Whatever you do, though, always remember that English is a broken-down heap of a language: handle with care, and buyer beware!
Categories: | 11 / 28 / 2007 |
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Error ID Number: 28
URL: <http://dedalvs.com/guide/search_english.php?word=28> Problem(s):- But Mary befell tragedy when her ice cream slipped from her hand.
Solution(s):- But tragedy befell Mary when her ice cream slipped from her hand.
Explanation:- Things befall people, not the other way around. Why? Because that's simply how this word works. Think of "befall" as "fall upon". I am so almost tempted to call that "be-" prefix an applicative prefix. But I won't. Don't quote me as saying that it is an applicative prefix...yet. There may come a time when you can quote me as saying (or having said) that, but that time is yet distant. Until that time, you can take my word for it: tragedy can befall you, but you cannot befall tragedy (at least, such is the case in this concrete world of ours).
Categories: | 11 / 6 / 2007 |
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Error ID Number: 10
URL: <http://dedalvs.com/guide/search_english.php?word=10> Problem(s):- I would hate to have him eat ice cream, and it not be good.
Solution(s):- I would hate to have him eat ice cream and not enjoy it.
- I would hate to have him eat ice cream, only to (have him) find out that the ice cream isn't good.
Explanation:- Since English is a nominative-accusative language, the second of two verb phrases that are conjoined by "and" will inherit the subject of the first verb phrase, not the object. In non-linguistic terms, that means if you say, "I saw Bill and ran", the person who ran is you (or "I"), not Bill. To make it clear that Bill was the one who ran, you'd have to say, "I saw Bill and he ran".
That's pretty intuitive, probably. Less intuitive is the problem with the error sentence above. The second clause (the part after "and") doesn't actually have a finite verb at all. If you think about it like a math problem, you can think of "eat and not enjoy" as a kind of super verb that may crucially take only one subject. Imagine saying, "I don't want to make you eat and me run" for a situation in which you invite someone over for dinner, but you discover you have to leave right away. That just wouldn't sound right.
The only way to resolve this problem is to totally change the second clause so that it has a verb that can take the same subject. Notice that the "problem" sentence and the first "solution" sentence are not identical—someone not enjoying something is different from that thing not being good. To make an equivalent expression, you really have to get wordy. It's unfortunate, but that's the way it has to be, I'm afraid. (Note that the "have him" is optional.) So if you encounter a sentence like this, I'd consider trying first to change the verb to see if you can make a sentence like the first one, before resorting to a convoluted structure similar to the one used in the second sentence.
Oh, as a final note, I don't think there should be a comma in the problem sentence. That's largely a matter of personal preference, though.
Categories: | 3 / 6 / 2007 |
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