LANGUAGE CORNER
by Evan Jenkins

Danglers
Memoirs Don't Write
This construction, called a dangler, is as common as the flowers that bloom in the spring: "A first-time author at age 66, McCourt's memoir has topped best-seller lists and won critical acclaim." What that says, literally, is that the memoir is a first-time author. That's because the first clause describes the subject of the second, and the subject is "memoir." (The possessive "McCourt's" functions as an adjective here, not a noun.) The sentence needs to be reworked. Maybe "McCourt, a first-time author at age 66, finds his memoir atop..." Or "McCourt, etc., has written a memoir that..." However we work it out, we can't make the opus its own writer.

"Decimate"
It Takes Ten, Roughly
The word "decimate" literally means to reduce by a tenth, from the legendary Roman practice of killing every tenth man in a mutinous or otherwise dicey military outfit on the ground that at all costs, discipline must be maintained. The word has come to mean to destroy, put out of action or seriously damage a large part of a body of people or things -- "the U.S. fleet had been decimated at Pearl Harbor" works, as does "the tree-chomping beetles that decimated Greenpoint, Brooklyn, two years ago." But it seemed a real stretch when the eloquent elder statesman said the scandal of our times had "decimated" the president's family, which numbered three. How, then, account for the review that said a performance let a play's audience walk "right into the mind of its decimated hero"? Applying "decimate" to an individual person or thing is more than a stretch. It makes meaningless a word with a clear and honorable pedigree. (CJR, May/June 1999)

Declined to comment
But Who Offered?
"Committee Democrats," the article reported, "declined comment until they could discuss Mr. Hyde's plan." A frequent goof, "declined comment" in this case says somebody asked, "Hey, Democrats, want some comment?" and the Democrats replied, "No thanks." Make it, as generations of news folk have been taught, "declined to comment."

Democratic, adj.
No Taking Sides
"Some of the Democrat ferment is positioning for the 2000 election," the analytical story said, and that was partisan (no doubt inadvertently so). "Democrat" as an adjective is relatively recent Republican coinage, designed to head off any subconscious inference that the opposition is truly "democratic." But that word is part of the party's official name, and using the shorter form -- which even some Democratic politicians do in error on occasion -- endorses a political position, however inadvertently.

"While I appreciate that you recognize the difference between the printed and spoken word," he e-mailed, "I hope and pray that you will admonish sportscasters who use 'differential' when the word 'difference' would seem to suffice for describing the score of a sporting event."

Suffice it does. And "differential" indeed has a drumbeat quality in sports broadcasts -- one of those awful things some of us do when we want to sound fancy. But the abuse of "differential" is not new, or limited to one medium.

Many decades ago, the inimitable H. W. Fowler discussed the legitimate use of the word, as noun and adjective, not to mean "difference" but to denote something based on a difference -- differential rates of pay, for instance, varying by the skills required for a job. (Some of us remember the night differential -- extra remuneration to compensate for the inconvenience of working when most of one's colleagues were resting from their labors.)

"But then," Fowler wrote, "the rot sets in. Differentials ...is increasingly used, under the influence of LOVE OF THE LONG WORD, as an imposing synonym for differences of all sorts...Perhaps the rot might be stopped if everyone were to bear in mind that Ophelia did not say You must bear your rue with a differential, nor did Wordsworth write But she is in her grave, and O the differential to me."

Heavenly. And when the Knicks lead the Spurs 101-99, that's not a two-point differential. It's just a difference.

Double Possessive
Possessed, but only Once
"His best glove work," the sports story said, "is equal to that of Ozzie Smith's." Nah. We don't need two possessives. "That of" is a possessive, and so is "Smith's." Make it "equal to that of Ozzie Smith" or "equal to Ozzie Smith's."

Due To
Making Due
One synonym for "due" is "attributable," and that was the rough idea the writer had in mind in this sentence: "The last such blip occurred in 1990 due to fears that the Gulf War would cut oil supplies." But we wouldn't say the "blip occurred attributable to fears," would we? The writer wanted "because of" or "as a result of." With "due to," some form of the verb "to be," or verbs that function like it, is usually needed. "The power failure was due to a lightning strike" would be okay. So would, "Their exhaustion seemed due to the humidity rather than the heat." Or, for fans of the polysyllabic, attributable to it.

BACK TO INDEX PAGE