Less is more. Or is it fewer is more?

OK, here’s a quiz.  You’re in the grocery store.  You have a small number of items in your cart–maybe a dozen plus about six yogurts.  You’re on your way home from work and very tired and hungry, and the lines are all long.  You spy the express lane.  You make a dash for it even though you’re over the limit.  What does it say? 

Odds are it says “Ten items or less.”   Or 12 or some other small number.  But the great crime here is not that you are sneaking too many groceries on the belt in the interest of avoiding the temptation of those fruit flavored Mentos or the trashy magazines in the impulse aisle.  It’s the grammar on the checkout line itself.

Here’s the thing.  Countable nouns take the word “fewer.”  Uncountable nouns take “less.”  So, if you can count the number of groceries (note: not if you’re too lazy to count them, but if it’s theoretically possible for them to be counted), the rule is: 10 items or fewer.  Not 10 items or less.  If we’re talking about feelings or other abstractions, we use less.  For example, “I love you less than I love this cookie-dough ice cream I have in my cart.”  We can’t apply numerical values to our feelings.

Earlier in this post I mentioned having a “small number of items in your cart.” Note that I said “number,”  not “amount.”  Again, countable nouns need to be referred to as a “number” (you have a number of ideas for improving grocery store checkout efficiency) while uncountable nouns need to be referred to as amounts (I have a large amount of impatience when I am in the grocery store).

Now, I realize that this may seem nit-picky.  All my topics are, really.  But as a grammar nag, I think the checkout line grammar sin is so egregious that it justifies going through it with 15 or even 20 items.  After all, they seem to think that your items are uncountable–so why count them?

i before e except after c and never instead of me

This is really a post about two different topics.  The first, the old “i before e” rule, has always been the bane of my existence. I think I was in college before I could spell “friend.”  Naturally, I married someone whose last name has an “ie” in it.

I learned from a Polish acquaintance that in Polish, “ie” takes the long “e” sound (as in geese) and “ei” takes the long “i” sound (as in eye).  That has gone a long way to helping me pronounce names that seem Germanic, like my husband’s.  It might explain fiend, but not friend.  

Basically, you just have to memorize the words.  The ole “i before e” rule is pretty much defined by its exceptions, which are many.  As I wrote in a previous post, English is a language of borrowings, and American English is especially so.  I grew up in the terrible era prior to spell-checkers and personal computers, so I suppose my being scarred for life by words like friend and liege and believe is a thing of the past.  Thank goodness for the red squiggly line on my word-processor!

The other topic I wanted to broach is the one most of our parents spent years trying to beat into our heads: the old “me and Joe” vs. the more grammatical “Joe and I.”  Or was it “Joe and me?”  While it’s fairly easy to remember to put Joe first–we can do that by remembering basic manners (one always lets others in the door first or off the elevator first), it’s not as easy to remember when to use “me” or “I” in the sentence after we mention our compatriot’s name.

Well, it is easy to remember.  There’s a trick I learned that makes it easy and you don’t even have to know the parts of speech to remember it: take yourself out of the equation all together:

“Joe and (I/me) went to the store.”  Take Joe out, and you’ll realize quickly that “me went to the store” sounds like Neanderthal-talk.  Thus, you know that the correct choice is “I.” (“Joe and I went to the store.”)

“Give the tickets to Joe and (I/me).”  This one’s trickier.  I routinely hear people mess this one up, assuming they are being grammatically precise–many people would say “Give the tickets to Joe and I.”  But if you take Joe out again, “give the tickets to I” is obviously wrong.  Put Joe back and use me instead. 

So remember: 1) be polite and always let the other person go first in the sentence, and 2) take that person out of the sentence altogether to figure out whether it’s I or me who belongs with him or her.  As for “him or her” versus “them,” well, that’s another post . . .

Go ahead, it’s ok to like, totally, split that infinitive. At.

Once upon a time English grammarians sat perched on their teacher’s desk chairs, red pen at the ready, nearly drooling in anticipation of marking a student’s infinitive splitting.  It was a crime nearly unparalleled, a sin so egregious that points were instantly docked from the composition in question, and the margins were sullied with the teacher’s scrawled code: “spl inf” or some such other abbreviation that the student was expected to look up in the style manual.  

Having studied Latin and Spanish a bit before eventually earning my Ph.D. in English, I learned that an infinitive is the core form of a verb.  In English, it’s translated as the “to” form: to be, to swim, to err.  But in languages like Latin and Spanish, there is no separate “to” in the verb’s form; it’s a single work: hacer (to do); vivir (to live); laudare (to praise).  The problem in English is that people have a tendency to put words between the “to” and the verb–for example, “to boldly go where no man has gone before.”  That’s technically grammatically wrong.  It should read “To go boldly.”

But the tides are changing–my father recently pointed out to me that the Chicago Manual of Style, one of the most respected style manuals in use in the U.S., now okays splitting infinitives.  It’s now ok to, like, put words in the middle of the infinitive “to” form of a word. Hallelujah! Every American child will shout with glee as their essays will now all be graded 3 or more points higher.

But seriously.  I think it’s great that grammarians have caught up with standard use.  In my opinion, grammar really ought to serve as a guide to ensure clarity, not a tool with which we punish young learners (and old academics).  Language is a living thing, constantly changing to suit its users.  I am certain that Shakespeare never used the words “giga” or “biggie-size.”  That doesn’t make those words wrong in modern day English.

That being said, there are some language changes going on that I just can’t seem to deal with.  Take prepositions for example.  These days it’s perfectly acceptable, in everyday talk, to end sentences with prepositions–it feels awkward to say “from where are you?”  We just say “hey, where’re you from?”  Sure, I probably wouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition in a paper I was writing for publication, but is there any question about what I mean if I say “which TV does this remote go to?”  I think not.  However, along with this laxity about prepositions has come the erroneous, and I think obnoxious, tendency to drop the preposition “at” where it was never meant to go.  While the current norm is to take prepositions that were originally supposed to go early in the sentence and put them at the end (ie: “to whom should I direct this call” becomes “who should I refer this person to”), people drop “at” in sentences it never existed in in the first place.  

Example of nice, normal sentence: “Where is my hat?”

Awkward prepositional drop-in: “Where is my hat at?”

This is not a case of language changing, this is a case of taking a changing rule and misapplying a part of speech.  I am a firm believer in brevity, and cannot understand why you’d just throw a word in to a sentence that never had a place there to begin with.  The sentence stands alone perfectly well without the at.  In one of the other examples, you can’t just dump the preposition: “from where are you?” can’t become “where are you?” That’s a totally different sentence, asking where a person is now rather than where the person’s origins are.

So, if you happen to see me somewhere and ask me where something is at, you can count on me to say, “after the t.”

Why sometimes Y?

Why is “y” a vowel only sometimes? And why bother when the vowels is replaces work just fine? I mean, millions of american parents have proven that kelly can be just as happy, maybe even more so, as “Kelli,” Christy can be Kristi (oh, that c/k thing is a whole other post).  So why the y? 

The short answer is that the English language has as mixed a heritage as most Americans; our language has ancient influences from Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French and others, and more modern influences from African, European, and other cultures.  But since English spelling wasn’t codified until 1604 (Robert Cawdry) or in the 18th century (Samuel Johnson), depending on who you ask, the language was hardly carved in stone till then.   Prior to that everything from proper nouns to adjectives could be spelled in varying ways–remember, western society has not always been a literate one!  

It’s also important to remember that English comes from, well, England! And England is a geographical place that’s relatively small but strategically well-placed so that it suffered numerous invasions over the centuries, which resulted in a lot of linguistic variations from the invading countries.  

Wikipedia tells us that what we call “y” is an amalgam of u and i (say u and i smooshed together–yoo-eye) which became “y” after the Great Vowel Shift (another utterly fascinating topic I’ll cover another day).  At any rate, changes in usage from Old English with its Latin influences to Middle English with some French influences to Modern English meant that there has been overlap in usage.  So Y, which is generally thought to be a hardworking consonant in such treasures as yodel, yuck, and yippee ki yi yay, is also a replacement for both long i (Wyeth) and short (myth) and long e (happy).  Yikes!

Try explaining all this to a first grader who’s trying to demystify (there’s that pesky y again, twice in one word with two different sounds!) reading. 

Which brings me to the first linguistic pet peeve I’ll share in the opening of this blog: American’s freewheeling and totally unnecessary use–I dare say abuse–of the poor old Y as a vowel.  Apparently, perfectly good boys’ names that have been around for ages (usually as surnames originally) are appealing to many parents as girls’ names.  Well, that’s all well and good (and I better say that, since I’ve got an Arden at home).  But taking a name like Hayden or Jordan and flinging a y in there doesn’t make it any more feminine–it just makes life more confusing, especially for the poor kid who’s got to go to school and learn to write it! 

If that weren’t enough, parents who just feel utterly compelled to choose one of the top three most popular girl names (oh, let’s throw Madison out there), but don’t want to give their child a “common” name, change the spelling a little, thinking that will somehow uniquify the child.  Let’s face it, Madisyn sounds no different than Madison and making this change just subjects the poor child to a life time of saying “no, that’s with an s-y-n actually.”   Same goes for Lauryn, Brandyn, Justyn, and so on.  I truly hate to see the poor y used this way. Maybe we should all be given an allotment of ys at birth and once we use them, we’re done.  

Remember, folks, it’s sometimes Y.  Not when-I-think-it-might-look-cute y.