The Grammar Logs
#503

In the following sentence, is the use of "myself" correct or should it be "me"? And is this an example of the nominative vs. the objective case?

"I had no intention of inflicting on you, my family, my renter, and myself the stress..."

That "myself" would be an appropriate use of the reflexive pronoun form. The earlier use of the first person "I" makes it acceptable. (Try elminating the "you, my familiy, my renter" and you'll see how nicely it fits.)

I'm having a few problems with this sentence:

"His superb management skills and his ability to anticipate potential problem areas or external factors which impact on squadron operations has resulted in timely actions to prevent any negative impact."

It seems to me that there are a few things wrong: (1) subject-verb agreement, "has" should be "have" (2) misuse of "which" with an non-restrictive clause when "that" seems appropriate and (3) unnecessary word "on" in the phrase "impact on squadron operations." However, I've been told that all of these corrections are wrong, and the sentence is grammatically correct as it is. Am I not understanding these grammar principles correctly?

You have a compounded subject, so yes, you want the plural "have," and I concur with what you say about using "that" instead of "which." I would change "impact on" to "affect," myself, and avoid the weird double use of "impact" in that sentence. Even so, you're going to be left with a ponderous sentence, and frankly, I'm not sure what "actions to prevent any negative impact" could mean. Can we hack it down a bit?

We commend his superb management skills and his ability to anticipate problems in squadron operations.

Come to think of it, what's wrong with "We commend his superb management skills"?

In an editorial in a local paper, the editor wrote:

"They awaited he and his wife's frst child"

A family friend disputes this usage insisting that it would be correct to just say "their first child" I disagree, insisting that this could be the couple's first child together and they could have other chidren with different partners. Could you please help. Was the editor correct in his usagae and if so, why?

Thank you!

The sentence makes me think that the writer wanted to make it clear that this fellow's wife's first child is not his child (at least not biologically). But it doesn't work very well. If the child is not his first child (biologically or chronologically), that needs to be made clear. Otherwise, we're left wondering, with your friend, why the writer didn't use "their." The correct form of this sentence is "his and his wife's first child," but that sounds like "his" refers to "first child," and there is no reason, therefore, not to change it to "their." In short, it's a terribly constructed and very confusing sentence, and sometimes it's better to blow to smithereens a sentence like this and start over from scratch.

I am diagramming sentences and can't figure out how to diagram the following verb construction:

Conner will try out for the Olympic team.

I think that the verb should be "will be" and "out" should be on a diagonal line below it as an adverb, but I'm not sure.

I would regard "try out" as a phrasal verb, meaning that it is one unit. Keep the entire verb string, then, together on one line, as one unit: "will try out." The prepositional phrase "for the Olympic team" is modifying the verb, specifying the conditions of Connor's "trying out," so I would put that under the verb as an adverbial modifier.

My boss keeps using the following sentence.

"I would be grateful for your sending me details."

I know this is wrong but he says it is perfectly correct and will continue to use "your" until I prove that it is wrong.

Can you explain to me why it is wrong. I think it is something to do with possessive pronouns, but I need a technical answer.

Many thanks

I agree with you that it is wrong, but I'm having a hard time coming up with the reason why. If we changed "grateful for" to "appreciate," the "your sending" sounds OK:

I would very much appreciate your sending me details.

I think that what has happened is that your boss is technically correct, but that the "your" coming after "grateful" brings in a person, and we are used to being grateful to persons, not for them (according to my Merriam-Webster's). Now technically, your boss hasn't said that he is grateful for someone; he has said that he is grateful for some benefit provided by this "you." Nonetheless, the presence of the pronoun form make the "grateful for" seem odd and misplaced. Your boss would be better off with a sentence saying that he is grateful TO someone for some service.

• The garbage was disposed at a landfill.
or

• The garbage was disposed of at a landfill.

I'm glad you didn't ask why this is so, but we always need the preposition "of" to accompany the verb dispose when we want it to mean "get rid of" (and there's that "of" again!). There other meanings of dispose that do not require the "of": a general can "dispose his trooops" (meaning to arrange them); and a matter can be disposed in a legal sense (meaning to settle finally); and we can be disposed to illness (meaning to be inclined).

Authority: Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Electronic Edition, Version 1.5. 1996. Used with permission.

I wrote you about two years ago and now have another question. My CEO is questioning our usage of the plural versus singular verb in the following:

Honeywell [NYSE: HON] said today its second-quarter ongoing earnings per share (EPS) were X....

Reported second-quarter EPS was X

When EPS is spelled out I use plural were, when used as an acronym I use was.

Is this technically correct or is it a style issue? Thanks for your advice...

The verb that goes with an acronym is determined as if you heard what the acronym stands for. Because "earnings" takes a plural verb, you want to use the plural "were" even when you're using an acronym for it. In fact, you can do a search for "EPS were" on Google.com (use the quotation marks) and find many examples of this usage.

What part of speech is the word "fishing" as used in the following sentence? We are going fishing tomorrow.

I am going to say that "fishing" is a gerund acting as the direct object (in the form of a gerund) of this sentence ("tomorrow" being an adverb modifying the verb "are going"). We know that a gerund can act as a direct object in a sentence such as "He likes fshing," but the trick here is whether or not the verb "are going" (or any form of the verb "go," for that matter) can take an object. The e-mail icon here indicates that I am not terribly sure of this response, and I would welcome someone else writing in to offer an opinion.

Recently I received feedback on some grammar issues from the UK and there was this comment "make sure to use open punctuation". I'd like to know what is meant by open punctuation and where or how it comes into play. Could you provide an example if possible?

I don't have any references to "open punctuation" in my various writing manuals, but I have heard of it, and I know that it refers to the purposeful absence of commas and end-marks, especially in correspondence, after abbreviations, initials, titles, degrees, salutations, etc. For instance, I might want to designate my Ph.D. after my name and normally I would use those two periods in the abbreviation for that degree; in open punctuation, there would be no periods. There are some examples of business correspondence using open punctuation at http://www.kent.k12.wa.us/KSD/KR/WRITE/LETTER/sample.html (from Kent High School in Kent, Washington). The U.S. Post Office apparently prefers open punctuation in envelope addresses, although I don't think this is as important to the machine readers as it was a few years ago.

Should there be a comma after P.C. in the following example?

The vision of P.M. Brooks Associates, P.C. is to provide clients with the best value in environmental services, no matter how small the project.

(The P.C. stands for Private Corporation which is part of the name of the company.)

If you do a search for "Associates, P.C.," on Google.com, you'll find all kinds of online advertisements for professional groups, mostly confederations of lawyers. You'll also find that most of the time, they've left out the periods in the abbreviation (using "open punctuation" — see the question before this one), and using every possible combination of commas, no commas, just one comma, etc. If we used an analogy with "Inc.," we could believe that the more common practice nowadays is to drop the comma that sets off this part of the name. (In fact, the Chicago Manual of Style would have us drop the "Inc." altogether from normal text.) In short, the common practice seems to be " . . . P.M. Brooks Associates PC is to provide. . . " (which, incidentally, seems rather an odd thing for a vision to do).

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