ER for January 2010

Second Series
Volume II, Number 1
January, 2010


WHOM GOES THEIR? -- Using the right pronoun isn't hard, if a little thought is put to the problem. One suggestion: Substitute "him" and if the phrase still makes sense, the "m" form is what you want. Otherwise, the matching pair is "who" and "he." (With appropriate gender matching, of course.) Phrasings of the type "... whom the author thought was not a strong enough leader..." are common, and also wrong. Try this: Take out the words "the author thought" and the sentence reads "whom was not a strong enough leader." And this, to those with a reasonable ear, is the wrong choice. In more technical grammatical terms, "whom" is the objective form. That is, it's the target of something else, usually words like "to," or "about."

BUMPER STICKER -- "I am the grammarian about whom your mother warned you."

GOOD HEADLINE -- Remember the story about the woman who was charged with prostitution for allegedly offering herself in exchange for two World Series tickets? The story went viral last October, but the charges did not go away. Last month, The Intelligencer of Doylestown PA reported a hearing day with this headline: "Take Her Out to the Court Room."

STICKY FINGERS -- TV ad for the new James Patterson novel calls the book "unputdownable." Does that mean they used Crazy Glue in the binding?

DECADES OF CONFUSION -- The Philadelphia Inquirer ran an excellent series on the problems of the local criminal justice system, and a post-series analysis noted that the paper ran a similar series in 1973, pointing out that there has been no change since. But while the text called the time frame "nearly four decades" (true), the headline called it "40 years" (not quite). A decade is, indeed, 10 years, but from 1973 to 2009 is 36 years, not 40. Sports writers are especially fond of using the two terms interchangeably, so that someone who was active in 1989 can be said to have played in the '80s. And if that person were still active in 2000, that qualifies as another decade, making for three decades. But that's not the same as 30 years. For example, if the player begins in late December, 1989, and stops in early January, 2000, that's 10 years and a few days. So while it would be correct to say the player was active "during three decades," it would not be correct to say he or she played "for three decades."

MEAN ARITHMETIC -- In the Economist for December 19th, columnist Lexington was mistaken when he wrote: "Half of American children must, mathematically, be below average." In any number series, half will be below the median, but this is not derived mathematically; rather, it is positional. If five students take a test and one scores 65 and the others score 75, the average is 73. Thus, only one student (20 percent of the population) is below average. Unless, of course, the students are from Garrison Keillor's (fictional) Lake Wobegon, where "all the children are above average."

RULE NUMBER ONE -- Get the name right. The governor of New Jersey is Jon Corzine, without an "h." Likewise the putative star in the reality TV show "Jon and Kate Plus Eight." And in the New York Times for Dec. 31, the headline in the Business Section referred to the "Import-Export Bank." The second paragraph of the text had it right: The Export-Import Bank of the United States, also known as the "Ex-Im Bank."

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Editor's Revenge is a free monthly newsletter on the use, misuse and abuse of the English language in America. Logomachist: J.T. Harding. To subscribe, send your email address to: j.t.harding@comcast.net.