The Grammar Logs
#604

When stating a person's height in written form is it acceptable to write "John is 4 foot 3 inches" or to be correct would one write "John is 4 feet 3 inches"? The debate is foot versus feet

We use the plural form there. John might live under a 7-foot-8-inch ceiling (note all the hyphens and the singular terms of measurement), but he is 4 feet 3 inches tall (no commas, no hyphens, plural terms).

Authority: The Gregg Reference Manual by William A. Sabin. 9th Edition. McGraw-Hill: New York. 2001. Used with the consent of Glencoe/McGraw-Hill. p. 122.

What is wrong with the following?

You can contact me at the above telephone number, and please, leave a message if necessary.

Grammatically, it's OK. There's something weird about "leave a message if necessary." Why would you leave a message if it's not necessary?

Here's the original line:

"Is one of you idiots playing the game as "Mr. Man" on the server?"

I maintain that it should "Are one of you idiots...." It is argued otherwise that it should be "is" because "one" is singular and the subject.

Otherwise wins. "One" is a singular subject (not altered by the fact that a plural "of you idiots" follows) and needs a singular verb, "is."

Can "fraught" be used by itself, or is it used only in conjunction with "with?" For isnstance:

• The situation is fraught. or
• The situation is fraught with tension.

Almost always, the word "fraught" will be closely accompanied by its little sidekick, "with" — "fraught with Freudian undertone," "fraught with human frailty." You will occasionally see "fraught" used adjectivally by itself: "a morally fraught situation," meaning that we are uneasy about the morals of this situation, or "she describes a fraught scene in her mother's kitchen" (from a review in the online Atlantic), meaning "uneasy" or "emotionally complicated." It's a wonderful word, a descendent of a Middle English word, "freight," meaning "load."

The proper use of the word "facilitate." Which is the correct way of writing this sentence?

• Thank you for facilitating this meeting OR
• Thank you for facilitating at this meeting.

You can omit the "at" to good effect, but consider using "leading" or "helping" or "teaching" or "moderating" or some other such word. "To facilitate" (to describe the process by which a meeting is made possible or managed) has become commonplace, but it still gives some people, like me, the willies.

Please tell me which is right.

• 1) He would have rather committed suicide than bow to the plotters.
• 2) He would have rather committed suicide than have bowed to the plotters.
• 3) He would have rather committed suicide than bowed to the plotters.

You can't give me a "none of the above"? I would write this: "He would rather have committed suicide than bow to the plotters." The two subordinators, "rather than" and "sooner than" introduce clauses using the bare infinitive ("to bow," in this case, without the "to"). I'll give you another example (from Mother Jones Magazine): "These teachers, school principals, and janitors would rather have kept their schools, their jobs, and their positions of power and influence than see their charges bused to white schools run by white principals … ." And this sentence from Nicholas Humphrey: "General Wolfe said of Gray's "Elegy," "I would rather have written that poem than [to] take Quebec". "

Authority: A Grammar of Contemporary English by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. Longman Group: London. 1978. p. 756.

Would you please tell us which is correct.

"How may I help you?" or "How can I help you?"

The traditional distinction between "can" and "may" is that "can" shows ability or power to do something and "may" shows the permission to do something. This distinction is often blurred, especially in oral language, and sometimes it's just plain hard to tell whether you're talking about ability or permission. In the question at hand, "How may/can I help you," are you asking in what way do you have the ability to assist someone or are you seeking permission to assist someone in some way? Oddly enough, a search on Google for these two phrases indicates that "can" outnumbers "may" at a 5.4 to 3.2 ratio. If we assume that the intent of the speaker or writer is to convey the tentative nature of all such polite offers of assistance, the verb "may" is preferred. If you say "How can I help you," some stickler for form is apt to respond "Yes, you may." If you say "How may I help you," everyone, including the stickler for grammatical form, will be impressed by your politeness and charm.

I work in an office environment in which a "job" is actually a computer program that processes files. At a user's request, certain people can manually start jobs that perform various functions, and it's called running a job.

I am pretty sure that

"Could I please have this job run?"

is more grammatical than

"Could I please have this job ran?"

but I cannot explain why. I think it concerns tense and mood. Could you please explain? Thank you!

This sentence is actually working the same way as a sentence like "Let's make this horse run." In that sentence "make" is what you call a causative verb — it designates an action that cause another action to happen. In your sentence, "have" works in the same way. The verb that follows a causative verb is always in the "bare infinitive" form (i.e., an infinitive, like "to run," without the particle "to"). So the "run" you see at the end of your sentence is actually an infinitive form, the base form of the verb (whereas "ran" is an inflected irregular verb, past tense). I hope that response is not too confusing or overwhelming.

Which is correct, him or himself in the following sentence:

His outstanding performance of duty reflects great credit upon himself, the Red Lions Battalion, and the United States Army.

The use of "himself" in that sentence is what is called an "untriggered reflexive pronoun." For a reflexive pronoun to work properly, it must "reflect upon" the subject, as in "HE wrote HIMSELF a letter," and in your sentence, you don't have a "he"; instead, you have "his performance." Technically, "him" would be more appropriate. Having said all that, however, I do not personally object strongly to the use of "himself" here. For one thing, the verb "reflects" nearly cries out for a reflexive pronoun and the close association of "his performance of duty" and an understood "he" is very close, of course. I think your use of "himself" would please everyone but the stickler for grammar in the back row of the auditorium, and he's just jealous.

My friend is creating a site for our church and used this sentence:

I told him there is no such word as "enthused," and the sentence should read "We are enthusiastic about . . ."

He insists that I'm wrong. Can you settle the argument?

My (2003) Merriam-Webster's does contain the word, but also cautions that the word is largely disapproved even though it seems to flourish on both sides of the Atlantic. Burchfield notes that "Wilfred Owen used it in a letter that he wrote in 1912 ('I cannot enthuse over these things as Leslie does'), and one day it may be taken out of the drawer marked "use with caution" and form part of the unopposed vocabulary of the language."

In any prose that pretends to some level beyond the most casual, use "be enthusiastic about" instead of "enthuse."

Authority: The New Fowler's Modern English Usage edited by R.W. Burchfield. Clarendon Press: Oxford, England. 1996. Used with the permission of Oxford University Press.

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