35. Good English and Bad

Consider the parts of speech. In Latin, the verb has up to 120 inflections. In

English it never has more than five (e.g., see, sees, saw, seeing, seen) and often it

gets by with just three (hit, hits, hitting). Instead of using loads of different verb

forms, we use just a few forms but employ them in loads of ways. We need just

five inflections to deal with the act of propelling a car—drive, drives, drove,

driving, and driven—yet with these we can express quite complex and subtle

variations of tense: "I drive to work every day," "I have been driving since I was

sixteen," "I will have driven 20,000 miles by the end of this year."

This system, for all its ease of use, makes labeling difficult. According to any

textbook, the present tense of the verb drive is drive. Every junior high school

pupil knows that. Yet if we say, "I used to drive to work but now I don't," we are

clearly using the present tense drive in a past tense sense. Equally if we say, "I

will drive you to work tomorrow," we are using it in a future sense. And if we

say, "I would drive if I could afford to," we are using it in a conditional sense. In

fact, almost the only form of sentence in which we cannot use the present tense

form of drive is, yes, the present tense. When we need to indicate an action

going on right now, we must use the participial form driving. We don't say, "I

drive the car now," but rather "I'm driving the car now." Not to put too fine a

point on it, the labels are largely meaningless.

We seldom stop to think about it, but some of the most basic concepts in English

are naggingly difficult to define. What, for instance, is a sentence? Most

dictionaries define it broadly as a group of words constituting a full thought and

containing, at a minimum, a subject (basically a noun) and predicate (basically a

verb). Yet if I inform you that I have just crashed your car and you reply,

"What!" or "Where?" or "How!" you have clearly expressed a complete thought,

uttered a sentence. But where are the subject and predicate? Where are the noun

and verb, not to mention the prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and other

components that we normally expect to find in a sentence? To get around this

problem, grammarians pretend that such sentences contain words that aren't

there. "What!" they would say, really means "What are you telling me—you

crashed my car?" while "Where?" is a shorthand rendering of "Where did you

crash it?" and "How?" translates as "How on earth did you manage to do that,you old devil you?" or words to that effect. The process is called ellipsis and is

certainly very nifty. Would that I could do the same with my bank account. Yet

the inescapable fact is that it is possible to make such sentences conform to

grammatical precepts only by bending the rules. When I was growing up we

called that cheating.

In English, in short, we possess a language in which the parts of speech are

almost entirely notional. A noun is a noun and a verb is a verb largely because

the grammarians say they are. In the sentence "I am suffering terribly" suffering

is a verb, but in "My suffering is terrible," it is a noun. Yet both sentences use

precisely the same word to express precisely the same idea. Quickly and sleepily

are adverbs but sickly and deadly are adjectives. Breaking is a present tense

participle, but as often as not it is used in a past tense sense ("He was breaking

the window when I saw him").

Broken, on the other hand, is a past tense participle but as often as not it is

employed in a present tense sense ("I think I've just broken my toe") or even

future tense sense ("If he wins the next race, he'll have broken the school

record"). To deal with all the anomalies, the parts of speech must be so broadly

defined as to be almost meaningless. A noun, for example, is generally said to be

a word that denotes a person, place, thing, action, or quality. That would seem to

cover almost everything, yet clearly most actions are verbs and many words that

denote qualities—brave, foolish, good—are adjectives.

The complexities of English are such that the authorities themselves often

stumble. Each of the following, penned by an expert, contains a usage that at

least some of his colleagues would consider quite wrong.

"Prestige is one of the few words that has had an experience opposite to that

described in 'Worsened Words.' " (H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern

English Usage, second edition) It should be "one of the few words that have

had."

"Each of the variants indicated in boldface type count as an entry." (The Harper

Dictionary of Contemporary Usage) It should be "each … counts."

"A range of sentences forming statements, commands, questions and

exclamations cause us to draw on a more sophisticated battery of orderings and

arrangements."

"The prevalence of incorrect instances of the use of the apostrophe … together

with the abandonment of it by many business firms … suggest that the time is

close at hand when this moderately useful device should be abandoned."

The verb should be suggests.

"If a lot of the available dialect data is obsolete or almost so, a lot more of it is

far too sparse to support any sort of reliable conclusion." (Robert Claiborne, Our

Marvelous Native Tongue) Data is a plural.