Nice sift....going to look for more of this show.

The English language transforms over time and I've got to say that the majority of English people would say "none of them work". The majority are the ones in the right because it's their language. Stephen Fry's right about it being changed out of ignorance, but it's irrelevant, it's changed now.

Can't get into these types of comedies. I didn't even chuckle.

It wasn't supposed to be funny, it was supposed to be a lesson in English.

Majority schmajority. It's still a mistake and it never hurts to shoot for precision of speech.

Oh dear. This is sort of what I do for a living, so I probably will write too much, but I can't resist.

In essence, I agree with Johnald_Chaffinch, although there are caveats. That is, you must write to audiences, and people judge you by your writing. If you write to one audience using the manner of another, they will be more resistant to your message. I assure you, the number of people who will think less of you for using a plural verb with a singular noun is not small. Not that I necessarily like this (I hate it that my colleagues think less of someone who says "the data is..." instead of "the data are..." but they do), but I don't make the rules. No one person makes the rules. In some sense, the rules change like a probability wave, and deciding when you don't care to follow an old rule is not a simple thing to do consciously, though it is often very simple if you do it unconsciously.

Now grammar proscribers are often annoying, and often ill-informed (such as when people in America started railing against the word "hopefully" being used as a sentential adverb meaning "it is to be hoped" when it had been used in that manner for, literally, centuries), but not everyone who wants to talk about historically correct usage of words is wrong, and some are very entertaining. For people who like that sort of thing, Bill Bryson, the Fowler Brothers, and Lynn Truss are pretty darn entertaining, and knowing what they have to say will never hurt you when it comes to communication.

It's true. I thought much less of you, oxy, when you said "Case in point, Arvana, who I adore, had a post...."

It should be "whom I adore".



_{I kid because I love.}

Touche!

Yes, but the manner of this place is not formal. In fact, when I wrote my comment above, I originally wrote "If you write to one audience using the shibboleths of another," instead of "If you write to one audience using the manner of another," before I realized that the only thing I could inspire by using the word "shibboleth" in this context is hostility, or possibly just the end of paying any attention to me, assuming anyone other than Arvana reads what I say as it is...

But yes, assuredly, were I writing formally, I would make sure I said "...whom I love." Have you read "Woe is I," Arvana? It's a hoot. Not quite as funny as "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves," but pretty good.

Amusing for Alan's reaction, but the fact is that Fry is dead wrong. A quick Google search for "none singular plural" will confirm that. http://www.bartleby.com/64/C001/039.html

Great sift, and thread as well. Ah, where's Westy when you need him?

Whenever I hear people say between you and I, irregardless, or it's instead of its, I am constantly resisting the urge to correct them. Of course, we can all be a language Nazi, but words and their usage will always evolve, as Ferdinand de Saussure first noted; he classified language study into two groups—the static (a snapshot of a language at a given moment in time, which we call a dictionary) and the dynamic (the fluid usage of words, which changes so quickly that it's impossible to put into a dictionary). Unless you are working with an artificial language like Esperanto or mathematics, where its definitions are clearly explained from the outset, every word's etymology will be a Frankenstein to some degree. For instance, when should we use "that" instead of "which"? There is no One True Answer, only a messy history of usage which we must dig through to agree one usage is better than the others because... well, because we like the sound of it.

Still, it's frustrating. Why do we bother learning grammar and spelling rules if it's okay to suddenly not follow them? Here's a poem I wrote about exactly that:


Ode to Our Mislaid Apostrophes

O wonderful, mischievous, slippery mark:
I want to punctuate, but youre location is stark.
My meanings are loose, my intentions skewed—
my editors pens could leave me quite screwed!
They often complain that theyre English is good
while my typewritten words barely understood
If only Id divine when its was not it's
they just might be able to keep all there wits
Or not mistake they're when it really is there,
or swap out a your when you're is somewhere...
I find it so silly. Cant you understand my thought?
Is my english so bad that new laws must be wrought?
I suppose who and whom can go fly with the dodo
for who really cares, but Gandalf and Frodo
In fact, I will drop all punctuation at once
and no one around will suspect me a dunce
for they too will know what I mean with my word
so why need I try its so pointless absurd
lets assassinate all grammer and speling as well
im sure every school kid would love to us tell
how much they hate engish and other dim arts
no need to learn standards when its old pompous farts
insisting they bend to the will of those rules
like all human beings are grammatical mules
o wunderful mischevious slipery mark
i would use you if only i knew where you park
but no one cares now if youre lost to the wind
since apostrofe rules they wish to recind
its a simple mater of its usage you kno
wheter your is correct in your sentance flow
ah who cares no one maybe only a fyew
i do wish theyd speek up oh how I doo


P.S. And "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" is actually "Eats, Shoots & Leaves". Normally, I wouldn't say anything, but in this case, the author's comma placement is explicitly intentional. Tee hee.

P.P.S. I also agree with oxdottir that neither the internet nor this forum is a formal medium; we are not paid editors and nobody is expected to write as if they are paid journalists (least of all those for whom English is a second language). So, sorry in advance to anyone if I reach out and tag you. Westy, of course, is exempt.

Bartleby isn't the only authority, though I like Bartleby, and the argument is good. But basically, what Bartleby says is that *sometimes* none means "not one" and sometimes it means "not any". I think "none of them works" clearly is "not one of them works" and honestly, "not one of them work" sounds, as Mr. Fry said, pig ignorant.

"None but the oldest of them" is clearly plural, and the plural verb sounds fine. I suspect Mr. Fry could have gone on about the variations had he wanted to.

nice poem! Thanks for correcting Ms Truss's title. I am not a good copy editor, and I can only do it at all if I am seriously in the zone. One of my heroes told me that, "A writer is someone for whom writing is harder than for normal people."

Here is my favorite comment on apostrophes: http://www.angryflower.com/aposter.html

Yes, excellent Sift, Oxdottir. I are happy you post it. I love to be corrected of my bad grammar usage, because I hate using bad grammar. Of course, as you say, this place is an exception, of course. And, I love hearing the correct usages, which is why I loved this Sift.

In the past year or two, I got into a discussion with a handful of coworkers about singular possessives ending in "s". I would write, "the glass' handle", for instance, and they corrected me saying it should be "the glass's handle". I argued with them, but after doing a bit of Googling I discovered a site that claimed the correct usage was "glass's", though the correct usage used to be "glass'" - Do you have an opinion?

Well, life isn't easy. You can find authorities who claim either position, which is that probability wave I was talking about. Personally, I will use "the glass's handle," but I am aware there are some idiomatic expressions in which adding an apostrophe to the end of an s-word just looks right all by itself. I wish I could remember them now. Oh, I know: Mr. Jones' cat.

Oh, and you are funny, my dear blankfist.

Thanks for the opinion on that, oxdottir. And, for the record, it's "touché", not "touche".

I kid, I kid.

I love Q.I. and Stephen Fry. So good.

Concerning apostrophes with words ending in S, I know this one by heart because my first name is Ross. "Ross's books", while technically correct, looks silly and so the S can be safely dropped since it is understood. So, I totally agree with Oxy.

FYI, I moonlight as a script supervisor on films so I'm cursed with an eye to notice the things nobody else does... if there's a typo in a magazine article, I'll likely spot it. It's no surprise, then, I was offered a job to do quality assurance for a web site; it uses much of the same skillsets.

Actually, it's "touchée" because "oxdottir" means "daughter of an ox," and with daughters being feminine, the adjective must agree in gender, hence the trailing "e" and... wait a minute, an ox with a daughter????

Somebody's trying too hard!

I teach writing sometimes, and I have to copy-edit student papers (though mostly to find it when they haven't had it copy-edited, since it isn't my job to copy-edit their papers, and they are allowed to get help with that, but I digress). I'm good at the big picture stuff when editing, but I suck at an important class of small details: I miss whatever switch in the brain allows a person to spell well. In fact, I type quickly, and I often type homonyms--even to using several words to make the same sound as one word, and vice versa. I've always read a ton, but I'm dyslexic, and spelling feels finicking and cabalistic to me. When I was a graduate student, I was the teaching assistant for a writing class, and I told the professor (who I idolized) how hard spelling, and catching spelling mistakes, was for me, and he told me to just keep trying. I told him about a Piet Hein poem I liked, and showed him where I had written it inside my notebook:

The road to wisdom?
Well, it's plain
and simple to express:

Err and err
and err again
but less and less and less.

And while we're at it,

It should be "whom I adore".

"Whom" is almost always optional. One exception is when it's acting as a relative pronoun preceded by a preposition, as:

"...Arvana, to whom I direct this missive..." not "...Arvana, to who I direct this missive..."

Compare with, "Arvana, who I direct this missive to..." No problem.

And punctuation goes inside quotes, "whom I adore."

And don't start up with the rule about not ending sentences with prepositions either. That rule was never historically reflected in the language, only in old grammar books and English teachers' minds.

For languages with symbolic characters (Chinese etc.) instead of roman, how do the ideas of spelling/grammar apply? Does the concept of punctuation apply? (I'm deeply ignorant on this issue)

@messenger: After years of posting, you're the first one to pick up on my punctuation outside of quotes! Well done.

It is a rule I purposefully ignore because it is confusing and stupid.

Why? Because whatever is written between quotes is being quoted and punctuation is usually not part of that quote. Which, for example, appeals more to your common sense:

Did she say, "the book is there?"
or
Did she say, "the book is there"?

I believe the British follow this rule (though I'm not sure).

As for who/whom, this is a perfect example of how language evolves—to say "whom is optional" may be commonly accepted now, but only because the majority follows this usage today (the writing and implementation of dictionaries is different according to culture: if a new word is put in a German dictionary, everyone immediately accepts it while in more rebellious cultures, that same word might be met with derision. Discuss.). "Whom" denotes an object while "who" denotes a subject, so saying "whom" is technically incorrect. Finally, it's imprecise... and I'm not a fan of moving away from precision in language.

But as I said, it's an example of language evolving and you can only scream against the wind for so long.

I'm with you about the punctuation and quotes rule. I don't like it either, and wouldn't bother mentioning it except it was the right thread, and I mostly only pick on the grammar of those who pick on the grammar of others.

I didn't mean to suggest the usage of "whom" was willy-nilly. Rather, that it is rarely mandatory. In the first example I gave above, you must use "whom." In any other example I can think of where you could use "whom," you can also use "who." And clearly, "whom" can never represent the subject of a sentence, only an object.

The fact that the majority follows this rule is the very reason it's correct usage. Rules derive from standard usage, describing the way it's commonly used. This is called "descriptive grammar," and is the study of linguistics. If you do it the other way around, teaching native and non-native speakers how to speak "correctly" based on a set of rules passed down that are either outdated or were never reflective of the common usage of the language to begin with, that's called "prescriptive grammar," and serves no purpose. In fact, it's a waste of energy because no benefit comes from it.

E.B. White said it well:

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay in the narrow path she helped make, following the contour of the land, but she often profits by staying with it and she would be handicapped if she didn’t know where it was or where it led to.

Just to take a wee break from pedantry, has anyone got a QI playlist? I just found another great one:

http://www.videosift.com/video/Stephen-Fry-takes-some-ribbing-on-QI

I may have to start such a playlist if nobody else does.

P.S. Thanks for the book tip, doctor oxy -- I'll have to pick up a copy!

@messenger: Agreed! I tip my hat to you, sir.

this sift is the best english lesson i've ever had.

My grammar has always been lousy... I blame the fact I went to French Immersion school...that is where you dont learn english until you are 14yrs old because they are busy teaching english kids French instead...bloody confusing

To Raytrace: Except that half of the people are just saying, "grammar doesn't matter as long as it's understood. Language, like, changes, dude." Feh.

Ant didn't think something was funny. SHOCKING! STOP THE PRESSES!

Thanks for taking the time to come here and telling us you didn't think it was funny. Though, not really sure what we're suppose to do with that little tidbit of information.

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As brilliant as Stephen Fry may be, he looks to be a terrible teacher. Reiterating the previous failed lesson over and over won't magically make the student understand what you're talking about.

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