Peeves Beget Peeves
by Robert C. Cumbow
One good peeve deserves another. My last column, listing a few of my pet peeves in English usage, drew more mail than any other in the nearly six years I’ve been writing on language for the Bar News. It’s amazing — and encouraging — how many people out there are eager (not anxious) to adopt a curmudgeonly insistence upon clear and correct use of the English language, to reaffirm (or question) some of my peeves, and to share their own. Here’s a quick grab bag of some I found especially worth passing along:
Other People’s Peeves
“10 items or less”: Those signs in the quick-checkout line should say “10 items or fewer” — and I once saw one that actually got it right. When we are enumerating individual items, the opposite of “more” is “fewer”; only when we are speaking of indivisible substances or qualities is “less” the correct term.
“Myself”: This pronoun should be used more rarely than it is. Its correct uses are relatively few. “Speaking for myself” is a correct construction, as are “I built it myself” (reflexive) and “I myself built it” (intensive). Common misuses include substituting “myself” for “me” (“The firm threw a party for my wife and myself”) and substituting it for “I” (“My partner and myself want to welcome you”).
The objective “I”: Even worse than using “myself” for “me” is using “I” for “me.” It’s distressingly common to hear something like “He brought the most beautiful gift for my husband and I.” This happens when people don’t think about what they are saying. Whether you’ve learned the difference between the subjective (or nominative) and the objective (or accusative), you should certainly know that you’d never say “he brought a gift for I” or “he gave I a gift”—so why on earth would you use “my husband and I” instead of “my husband and me” in the same construction?
Advice v. advise: You rarely hear anyone saying “let me advice you.” But it’s very common to hear (and see in writing) “let me give you some advise.” The noun is “advice,” the verb “advise.”
Historic v. historical: I confess to some inconsistency in the way I use these words myself. The rule (which always confuses me) is that “historical” means simply “in the past,” while “historic” means “history-making” or “important.”
“Equally as”: You can say “She runs as fast as he does,” or “She and he run equally fast,” but to say “equally as” is redundant. Use “equally” or “as,” not both.
“The hoi polloi”: It’s common for Americans to lace their conversation with foreign words and phrases. Unfortunately, it’s equally common for them not to know the meaning of the terms they’re using. In trying to sound clever, we often risk sounding ignorant. The phrase “hoi polloi” is Greek for “the people” (often used condescendingly in the sense of “the masses” or “the great unwashed”). “Hoi” means “the” and “polloi” means “people.” So if you’re going to use the phrase “hoi polloi” correctly, don’t precede it with the word “the,” lest someone who knows a little Greek recognize that you do not.
“Your welcome”: The pronoun “your” is the possessive form of “you”; the contraction “you’re” is a short form of “you are.” An astonishing number of people today don’t seem to know the difference.
“Alot” and “alright”: Say “a lot,” not “alot.” “All right” is all right; “alright” is not. The misconception that “alright” is a word may be based on “already,” which is a word, but has an entirely different meaning from “all ready.” By contrast, “alright” is simply a misspelling of “all right.”
“Con’t”: The word “continued” is long and annoying, so we often like to abbreviate it. “Cont.” is one such abbreviation; another is “cont’d.” In “cont’d,” the apostrophe stands in for the string of letters we’ve removed to shorten the word. But in recent years the misconstruction “con’t” has begun to appear — an attempt to abbreviate “continued” confounded by a faulty recollection of where the apostrophe goes and what its purpose is.
Adverbs: Hopefully, happily, and thankfully are frequently misused adverbs. An adverb describes the way in which something is done. “The child looked up hopefully” means that the child looked up with hope in his eyes or his heart, looked up in a hopeful manner, looked up in a way that suggested he was hoping for something. The person who says “Hopefully, next quarter will be better” misuses the adverb. He should say “I hope” or “let’s hope,” not “hopefully.” Use “hopefully,” “thankfully,” or “happily” to modify a verb when you want to indicate that the action was done with hope, gratitude, or joy, not as a substitute for “I hope,” “I’m thankful,” or “I’m happy to say …”
“Literally”: Another commonly misused adverb, “literally” is often used to mean exactly its opposite (which is “metaphorically”). The comment that “people were literally rolling in the aisles” is an incorrect use of the adverb, unless audience members actually rose from their seats and tumbled around in the aisles. Generally people misuse “literally” when they wish to intensify or emphasize a word or phrase that is in fact a metaphor or an exaggeration and not “literally” true at all. However, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I was pleased to see this rare example of a correct use of “literally” as an intensifier: “Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, credit cards, and other personal documents are literally floating around New Orleans, raising the prospect that some hurricane survivors could be victimized again, this time by identity thieves.”
“Grille”: A lot of new restaurants are calling themselves “grilles” these days, apparently in the belief that putting an “e” on the end of “grill” makes a diner into a fancy steakhouse. In fact, a grill is what you use to broil a steak; a grille is what’s on the front end of your car — though, to be fair, both terms ultimately come from the same root word meaning a criss-cross pattern.
Rules That Don’t Exist
Some of the peeve-sharing correspondence also revealed widespread belief in a few imagined rules of English that are not actually rules at all. Some of these we are familiar with: the “rule” against ending a sentence with a preposition was never a rule of English grammar, though it was repeated by several generations of schoolmarms who wanted English to behave as if it were Latin, until people who cared about the language finally had enough. Today, it’s widely recognized that ending a sentence with a preposition does not violate any rule of English. Nevertheless, it’s good policy to scour your writing for sentences ending with prepositions, since that kind of construction often signals a sentence that might have been more effectively composed.
Similarly, there is nothing wrong in starting a sentence with a conjunction. But that’s also something you shouldn’t do lightly or often. It can provide an effective transition to your next sentence. But too much of it can make your writing sound breathless. And fragmented.
There’s also nothing wrong with using “since” or “as” to mean “because.” The sentence “I missed the meeting as I was sick in bed” is grammatically sound. Using “since” or “as” for “because” is, however, conversational. In formal persuasive writing, “because” is preferred. Still, you don’t want to make your writing dull with repetitious “because” constructions, so “since” and “as” can sometimes be your friends.
Finally, there is no formal rule against using the passive voice. Most sentences that express an action whose subject and object are both known are more effective in the active voice, so it’s good policy to limit your use of the passive; too much of it makes your writing dull, wordy, and cumbersome. But the passive is not automatically wrong, and sometimes it’s necessary or simply more effective.
Most Common Errors That Make Us Look/Sound Stupid
The whole peeves exercise has heightened my awareness of the speaking and writing mannerisms that most often harm lawyers’ ability to communicate effectively, and sometimes make us look like windbags or just downright stupid. Here’s the current list of top offenders:
Redundancy: Don’t talk about “adding additional terms” to a contract, or refer to “a whole panoply,” or insist on “preventing harm before it occurs.” Read your own writing critically, and rewrite ruthlessly, before unleashing your words on an unsuspecting world.
Misusing ordinary English words: Lawyers and judges seem to feel that it is their privilege to twist ordinary English words to uses that are improper, misleading, or downright wrong. We use “negative” as a verb, instead of calling on “negate” or “deny” or “obviate.” We speak of a court’s having “implied” a meaning in a contract term when in fact what the court did was to infer such a meaning, or find that the parties to the contract had implied it. We think “anticipate” means the same thing as “expect,” and that the past tense of “plead” is spelled “plead.” We confuse “i.e.” with “e.g.” We’ve forgotten what “enormity” means, turning it into just one more word for “something big” (of which we have too many already, even without such jocular coinages as “humongous” and “ginormous”). In a recent announcement of rulemaking, the Federal Communications Commission quoted the Washington Legal Foundation as having argued that a proposed rule would “so greatly interfere with [television] programming that it would be paramount to a governmental ban.” It wasn’t clear whether it was the FCC or the WLF or both that didn’t know the difference between “paramount” and “tantamount.”
Misusing legal terminology: If anything is less forgivable than what lawyers do to the ordinary English language, it’s our too-frequent failure to use correctly even the arcane, specialized terms of our own profession. We claim that an unreasonable offer is “blackmail” when the right word is “extortion.” We misuse the term “monopoly” as if it referred to any kind of exclusive right. We can’t seem to figure out that “dictum” is singular and “dicta” is plural, or that “de minimis” is not spelled “de minimus.” Having a special language of one’s own confers responsibility as well as honor. Get it right.
Agreement: Many of us still insist on using the word “their” to form the possessive of a singular pronoun. “Someone forgot their briefcase” means that one person left behind a briefcase that belonged to two or more people.
Comma errors: The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (do a Web search for these folks and start reading them regularly) recently noted a startling example of what a difference a comma can make: “The state Board of Elections decided today to adopt a ban on clothing, including buttons and hats that directly endorse a candidate or issue.” Without a comma after “hats,” the Board is not banning the wearing of things that promote political causes but is banning apparel altogether.
Forming the possessive: We all need to read Strunk and White’s Rule #1 in The Elements of Style repeatedly until we have it clear in our heads that it’s James’s car and the Joneses’ house, not “James’ car” and “the Jones’ house.”
Which-that: Many lawyers still have no idea there’s a difference between “which” and “that”; many more seem to know there’s a difference, but get it wrong:
There are no agreements currently in effect, which significantly limit the company’s rights to use or license the use of the Trademarks in any material manner.
This contractual representation, which says the opposite of what it means, might have come from following a recommendation in a grammar-checking software, or from trying to follow the rule in a place where it didn’t apply, causing the writer to get it exactly backwards (much like the curious phenomenon in some regional British and Massachusetts pronunciation whereby the speaker drops an “r” where it is needed and carefully adds one where it is not, as in “Dianer is a good teacha”). The sentence was intended to say:
There are no agreements currently in effect that significantly limit the Company’s rights to use or license the use of the Trademarks in any material manner.
Likely the writer mistakenly used “which” instead of that, and then dimly remembered the rule that a “which” clause needs to be set off with a comma, thus compounding the problem by creating the doubly false impression that there are no agreements of any kind currently in effect, and that the company is therefore materially limited in the way it uses its trademarks.
As an aside, this may be an example of a case in which the passive voice would have been helpful to the emphasis and clarity of the sentence:
The Company’s rights to use or license the Trademarks is not materially limited by any agreements currently in effect.
And still in First Place, the undisputed champion of grammatical errors that make everyone look stupid, including a shocking number of members of the legal profession:
The grocer’s apostrophe: No, the plural of tort is not “tort’s.”
Robert C. Cumbow is a shareholder at the Seattle firm of Graham & Dunn PC. He teaches at Seattle University School of Law and writes on law, language, and movies. He gratefully acknowledges the thoughtful contributions and generous encouragement of Doug Berry, John Bitting, Tim Borchers, David Byers, James Dickens, Ninamaria Fuller, Judge Elaine Houghton, Judge Robin Hunt, Philip Jones, Sean Lewis, Derek Linke, John Moffat, Patrick Judd Murray, Jim Pidduck, Cheryl Rife, Ray Siderius, and Bob Welden.
