Grammar Notes 1

Some time ago, the denizens of a news group sidetracked themselves into a discussion about grammar. Here’s part of the exchange, between "Richard" and myself, slightly edited for clarity.

"Richard" posted this example of a bad sentence:

“Me and him went to see the dog wag it's tail.”
How many errors in that sentence?



I replied:
Three.


"Richard" also offered this as the corrected sentence:

“He and I went to see the dog wag its tail.”

I continued:


But there are no grammar errors whatsoever. (And that's a complete utterance, albeit not a complete sentence.)

a) Its/it's is a spelling error, not a grammar error. Just read the sentence out loud, and you'll hear why that's so. (1)

b) "Me and him" is a usage error. Not acceptable in "standard" usage, is all. "Standard usage", like any other, is in constant flux. That's why an earlier observation is spot on: "for Sue and me" is beginning to sound down-market. (2)

Want to see real grammar errors? Look at (and speak) this:

c) "He and I see a dog its tail wag went to."

Only one phrase in c) is in its correct position, and two phrases are in correct sequence. Also, all phrases are correctly formed, so (oddly enough) most native speakers of English can and will figure out what the speaker intended to say. (3)

Here's the same string of words ordered by two non-grammar rules:

d) "A I he to and dog its see wag tail went"

At this point, there's no grammar there, so it would be somewhat pointless to talk about it having errors of grammar.

Footnotes:
     (1) The focus on the written language that shows up in a newsgroup is understandable, but it leads to subtle and not so subtle errors. Writing is of course not merely a record of speech, because it has inherently fewer codable features than speech. But speech is primary, and forgetting that can cause even very clever people to make serious mistakes. For example, Noam Chomsky's positing a "surface and deep structure" to account for ambiguities is pointless. In speech there is no ambiguity in the examples he gives, because intonation, which shapes the syntax of a sentence, disambiguates what in the written language is not (and cannot) be indicated.
      The primacy of speech is the reason that so-called “computer languages” are not languages: they are written codes, with strict rules, which are necessary precisely because these "languages" are actually codes. We use actual words and conventional math symbols to make it easier for humans to decode. One could just as well replace the terms and symbols with colour terms. Or coloured shapes.

(2) Another example: For me, pronouncing "herb" as erb is a solecism. But in US  usage it's correct, and herb would be judged down-market. Unfortunately, Canadians are adopting US usage. Sigh.

(3) When we hear fractured utterances, we automatically correct them as we interpret them. Most of what we speak and hear is fractured, more or less badly. Speech formed of complete and correctly formed sentences sounds odd. When my wife first heard a colleague at the University, she said, "He sounds like a book."

Garry Ryan. The Lucky Elephant Restaurant (2006)

     Garry Ryan. The Lucky Elephant Restaurant (2006) Ryan lives in Calgary, and makes that city the setting for his books. This is a police procedural with a social conscience: D.I. Lane is gay, and has an extensive social/family network, which to some extent interferes with his police work. His partner Arthur’s sister is dying of cancer, so they will have to adopt her son Matt. Jay, the prime suspect's brother, has been hiding from her, but finds a substitute family in the Vietnamese community. Because Matt is enrolled in minor hockey, Lane becomes a ref, and tangles with a hockey parent who’s a jerk. And so on. These vignettes extend the story to book length, and plotwise delay the action enough that it takes some time for Lane and sidekick Harper to close the case. They also intersect with the actions of the prime suspect, who is attempting to get the case closed quickly, and if possible eliminate Lane as well.
     Plot: a man and his daughter are found dead in the foothills bush west of Calgary. There are “anomalies” that suggest murder. The ex-wife/mother is a suspect early on. It’s pretty obvious that she done it, so the plot turns on how Lane and Harper will get sufficient evidence to make the case, and whether they'll be able to do so before she does more damage. In the end, she over-reaches, attempting another arson, but is caught in the act, and shot when she attacks the police who are guarding Lane’s house.
     Ryan handles the various levels of ignorance and knowledge, lies and truth, past and present skilfully enough that the narrative tension keeps us reading. In style and structure, the novel is cinematic: chapters of varying length, jump-cuts and montage-like snippets of scene, miscellaneous information, dialogue, sidelights on character. It wouldn’t take much to turn this book into a script; I think it would make a good series. Like many late 20th/early 21st century crime novels, the mood is elegiac and dark. There is hope and joy in family life and friendship, but these treasures must be jealously protected from attacks by bigots, egotists, jerks, power seekers, and other social riffraff.
     All in all, an above average example of the genre.**½ (2012)

Model Railroader, June 1950

     Model Railroader, June 1950 I rescued this issue from the trash at the club. Apparently it was too out-of-date to interest the members. But it’s a fascinating look at the state of the hobby in 1950, by which time the post-war boom had prompted innovations that with surprisingly few additions and enhancements are still with us. The major change since then is the miniaturisation of electronics and the improvements in plastics, both accompanied by large reductions in costs. The price/quality ratio of model trains has improved by at least an order of magnitude.
     Income has also improved since the 1950s and 60s, so that real prices are much lower than back then. For example, at minimum wage, I would have had to work about four hours to buy an Athearn boxcar kit. Now, an Accurail boxcar kit costs about 1½ hours. And it comes with metal wheels, a KD compatible coupler, and more and better details.
     Skills have also improved, for although there’s proportionally much less scratch-building and kit-building than there was back then, the quality is higher. The biggest visible change is in the look of the models and the layouts. Modellers these days expect scenic realism and take prototype fidelity for granted, so much so that they carp at minor discrepancies that wouldn’t have rated even a passing comment in 1950.
     The how-to articles took a lot for granted. An article on building a S scale hopper consists of two photos, one large and two small drawings, and text to fill up 5 columns of a two-page spread. It includes instructions such as “Spot and drill No. 67 holes for the grab-irons.” The drawing calls out the dimensions of the grab irons, but not their positions. A knowledgeable modeller might be able to place the grab irons correctly, but clearly accuracy was not a major concern.
     The lead article by Frank Ellison discusses where to locate industries. This and many others he wrote where gathered into a book in 1954. I still have my copy, much worn, and rebound to protect its precious pages. Ellison was a pioneer of operation. His articles did a lot to help modellers operate their trains in a railway-like manner. The second major article shows how to super-detail a Yard Bird switcher (made by John English). Lots of advice, and several photos from different angles with the details called out. The author has obviously taken care to research the details to be added, something that also helped improve modelling skills and raise the bar on prototype fidelity.
     Most of the articles are short, and consist essentially of collections of workshop tips. They show that at the time modellers wanted to know about ways of adapting whatever was available to make better models as cheaply as possible. Hobbies were still a somewhat suspect pastime. Improvements in leisure time and disposable income would eventually create the craft and hobby industry that we know today, but back then money and time was supposed to be used for more useful pursuits, such as renovating kitchens.
     I enjoyed re-reading this old magazine. ** to *** (2012)

Stuart McLean. Home From the Vinyl Cafe (1998)

     Stuart McLean. Home From the Vinyl Cafe (1998) The 2nd Vinyl Cafe collection. It includes Dave Cooks the Turkey, probably the most requested of the Dave & Morley stories. The seasonal arrangement gives the effect of an episodic novel. As before (see Vinyl Cafe Unplugged), I found reading the stories more of a pleasure than hearing Stuart McLean read them. Recommended. *** (2012)

Stephen Hawking. The Theory of Everything (2002)

     Stephen Hawking. The Theory of Everything (2002) I like reading Hawking. His disability makes writing tedious and slow, and encourages an economy of words that makes for astonishing clarification of difficult ideas. The style also shows that these ideas are difficult only in that they are unfamiliar and often counterintuitive. Simplicity is more difficult to grasp than complexity. Hawking has a playful and sometimes mordant wit, which adds to the pleasure.
     The book outlines the current state of cosmology, reminding us how tentative such theories must be. The result is a vision of the Universe as a grand drama, whose plot we discover as we live through it (at least in the minuscule scenes in which we play a part), but which has no purpose beyond its own existence. As recently as the 1990s, that existence was guessed to be limited; time would eventually have a stop. Now, it’s not so obvious what may happen. The latest theories suggest that the Universe is much larger than what we can or could observe, though what “larger” means in this context is somewhat less than clear. Highly recommended, but if this is your first excursion into this realm of ideas, you will have to read the book at least twice to make sense of it. **** (2012)

John Toland. Hitler: the Pictorial Documentary of his Life (1978)

     John Toland. Hitler: the Pictorial Documentary of his Life (1978) Well, it’s a documentary, and a good one for giving an overview of the man. Toland begins each chapter with an excerpt from his biography, and captions round out the narrative. The book is apparently intended for an audience of students and the casually interested, and for them it fulfills its limited purposes.
     However, by presenting a chronicle rather than a story, the book may encourage deeper study. It raises questions. For example, why and how was Hitler able to achieve his goal of political power and domination of Germany? This question unanswered tends to perpetuate the popular misconception that he used some kind of force (never specified in this story, however). For us, the most important lesson is that Hitler ensured that at every step he had at least quasi-legitimate justification for what he did. Legality mattered.
     The political images are almost meaningless without knowledge of the events they portray, but the private, personal life is intelligible to anyone aware of his own milieu. The overall impression is that Hitler’s personal life was that of a man with limited taste who yearned for the apparent sophistication of the moneyed classes. An odd miasma of lower-middleclass respectability hangs over it all.
     The reproduction of the photos is average. Many original photos were of poor quality, or apparently exist only as poor copies of the originals, which doesn’t help. ** (2012)

Wendy Northcutt. Darwin Awards II (2001)

     Wendy Northcutt. Darwin Awards II (2001) Another collection of confirmed and unconfirmed reports of people voluntarily removing themselves from the gene pool and so reducing the stupidity quotient a minuscule amount. There are also a number of urban legends. Good if gruesome fun. One wonders how the families and friends of the fools reacted. My usual reaction to stupid avoidance of safety rules is anger. **½ (2012)

Omer Lavallee & Ronald Ritchie. Narrow Gauge Railways of Canada (2005)

     Omer Lavallee & Ronald Ritchie. Narrow Gauge Railways of Canada (2005) Since Lavallee wrote the book, much additional information has been found about Canada’s narrow gauge railways. Ritchie provides some of it, and many added photos. Most interesting are the obscure, short, and short-lived lumber and mining railways in the Maritimes. It’s a pity that for many of these all that’s known are a few written references or old maps; no pictures. For some (eg, the Kaslo & Slocan) I have data in my clippings collections, which I will insert. A well done book, a pleasure to leaf through, a pleasure to read, and a pleasure to consult. *** (2012)

John Mortimer. Charade (1947)

     John Mortimer. Charade (1947) Mortimer’s first novel, reissued in 1987 around the time the Rumpole TV series peaked. The plot concerns a young man who is given a job with a documentary film unit charged with making a film about soldiers training for the assault on Europe. The boy thinks an accident that kills a disliked sergeant was murder, but it’s left up to the reader to figure out the answer, if any. Cryptic hints about prior relationships may be clues, or then again maybe not. It’s possible that Mortimer avoided details that might have made the characters more interesting. The book is loosely based on his experiences with the Crown Film Unit, and too much detail might have allowed identification of the innocent.
     If you know only Rumpole of the Bailey, this book will confound you. It is not nearly as well written, with thin characters, and insufficient background and backstory to clarify motives. It does generate enough mysteries that I kept on reading just to find the answers to the questions. There were precious few, however. ** (2012)

Michael Macrone. Brush up Your Shakespeare! (1991)

     Michael Macrone. Brush up Your Shakespeare! (1991) If you like compilations of odd facts, you’ll like this book, even if Shakespeare’s not your favourite playwright. It’s a dictionary of Shakespeare quotes. Macrone gives you the speech, the context, original meanings of words, how we’ve misunderstood or misappropriated Shakespeare’s words, and occasionally puns or other witticisms. He also reminds Shakespeare and theatre lovers why they keep returning to this most archaic of story-telling modes. There are a few typos of the kind that spell-checking software misses, but they don’t detract from the score: *** (2012)

Update 20230621: Reread this recently, enjoyed it perhaps even more than the first time. Made me go back to the scripts, read most of Richard III.

Ursula Leguin. Orsinian Tales (1976)

    Ursula  Leguin. Orsinian Tales (1976) Leguin’s tales sketch an outline history of Orsinia: a central/east European country at the mercy of its more powerful neighbours to the east and west. Leguin’s skill at evoking a whole culture makes these more like documents than fictions, and like documents, we are somewhat distanced from the characters. In this, she reminds me of Mavis Gallant, but Gallant’s stories have the ring of experienced truth, while Leguin’s feel more like case histories. But both exhibit a certain ruthlessness: both external and internal forces construct a person’s fate. There’s no Hollywood-style happy endings here. ** to *** (2012)

Jack Womack. Terraplane (1988)

     Jack Womack. Terraplane (1988) Womack wants us to take his dystopian future seriously. He uses a version of English as he imagine it might evolve, but his sense of linguistics is laughable: the dialect is impossible. The setting is late 20th century US with a few gadgets thrown in. The story is basic gangsterism and thuggishness, with some kind of multi-national spy-thriller plot tossed into the mix. I read the first 20 or so pages, and lost interest: maybe if I were 50 years younger I’d find it intriguing, but I’ve read too much of this stuff. I sampled a dozen other pages here and there, which merely confirmed my first impression. The cover blurbs praise the book, I don’t. * (2012)

Jay Ingram. The Science of Everyday Life (1989)

     Jay Ingram. The Science of Everyday Life (1989) Jay Ingram hosted CBC’s Quirks and Quarks for many years. Here, he’s written a number of essays on questions that a curious mind might ask about its immediate surroundings: walking, cocktail parties, asparagus, swarming insects, yawning, and so on. The essays are clear, explain what can be explained, and indicate what’s not (yet?) understood. Bite-sized chunks, ideal for casual reading; I enjoyed this book, and read it faster than was likely good for my appreciation of the universe’s enduring mystery. **½ (2012)