The Grammar Logs
#506

In our reports, I constantly see constructions with "being":

• The product is being field-tested.
• The survey was being conducted while..."
• Although the system is still being developed..."

It is a passive construction, and that might create a knee-jerk reaction against it. We can avoid that by naming the real "agent" in the matter: "Our analysis team is field-testing this product and will report on its salability by mid-March." But passive constructions have their uses and to object to them always is to write with handcuffs.

Which is right between the two following sentences?

• Was it she you were talking about?
• Was it her you were talking about?

In that sentence you want to establish the predicate first, "Was it she. . . " The "she" and the "it" are linked by the verb "was" (inverted in order here because it's a question). Then the predicate is modified by another clause. You could pretend, in fact, that there is a missing "whom," as in "Was it she whom you were talking about?"

When you type a proper name, such as John Q. Public, or a date, such as August 2, 2002, where is it permissible to have a soft return, thus placing a portion of the name or date on the next line? I have learned to put a hard space between the first name and middle initial and also between the middle initial and last name so that the complete name is on one line. The same would be true for a date. Another person says that it is permissible to have John Q. on one line and Public on the next line. What is the rule?

Sometimes forcing an entire date or person's name onto the same line will create aesthetic problems in your text, especially if you're using justified margins. If necessary, you can insert a break between the date and year as in December 21,
1944, and between an initial and a last name, as in Ronald E.
Pepin. If a name is preceded by a title, try to insert the break between the name and title or between words within the title. In addresses, by the way, try the keep the number and the first word of the address together, but if the street name consists of more than one word, you can break between words.

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. 229.

How do I write fractions as words? Do I hyphenate between the numerator and denominator?

You put fractions between the words of the numerator and the denominator, as in three-eighths, fifteen thirty-seconds, forty-five sixty-fourths.

For simple fractions, we use a hyphen when the word is used as a modifier but not as a noun: a two-thirds majority, but two thirds of the votes.

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

Which of the following is correct. We need clarification for a headstone.

• "His love and greatness lives on."
or

• "His love and greatness live on."

I don't know if I can accept this level of responsibility — for something to be set, literally, in stone. Those two things, "love" and "greatness," though, feel like discrete elements to me, so I think we're safe with the plural "live on." If you feel that his love and his greatness are one and the same, though, you can feel justified in using the singular "lives." I doubt that some English teacher, some ages hence, will try to scratch out the "s."

I've just read an interesting entry in a book called "Questions of English" published by the OUP. Somebody asks whether there is any way to pose a question which will prompt an answer containing an ordinal number, such as 'Lincoln was the "sixteenth" president of the US'. The Oxford team's answer is, to my surprise, no. They say, "We are often asked this question, especially by Indian correspondents. There is no idiomatic way of asking a question of this kind..." And they proceed to suggest "oblique" ways such as "How many presidents were there before Lincoln?"

But isn't it possible to phrase it this way: "Where did Lincoln come in line of all the US presidents?" Is it specific enough or does it give rise to different possible answers? Really interested to know. Thanks a lot!

Can you add the word "numerically" to your question? "Were did Lincoln come, numerically, in the line of all U.S. presidents." (Otherwise, the answer could be "between Buchanan and Johnson?) The answer to the Oxford team's question is a simple "fifteen," isn't it (unless I'm missing something)? It's an interesting question, and I'm certainly perplexed about why this question would come most often from India.

The sentence is below:

People with heart disease suffer chest pains that make simple activities, such as walking, shaving, or taking a shower, difficult.

I find the commas confusing, so I rewrite it as:

People with heart disease suffer chest pains that make simple activities- such as walking, shaving, or taking a shower- difficult.

But I am not sure that my sentence is acceptable or not. I want your help. Thank you a lot.

Those dashes are creating a heavy-duty break, one that hardly seems necessary given the context of the sentence. What if we avoid the problem created by breaking the phrase "make difficult."

People with heart disease suffer chest pains that make difficult or even impossible the simplest of daily activities — walking, shaving, or taking a shower.

The sentence I am writing reads......"Neither Kathleen nor Ben are available to help us at this time". The grammar checker is telling me to change "nor" to "or".

Your grammar checker needs a vacation. When neither-nor constructions, the number of the verb is determined by the subject closer to the verb — in this case, "Ben." So we want the singular "is" (not "are") in that sentence. Turning "nor" to "or" is neither helpful nor appropriate.

Would you explain the grammatical reason why "he" is used in the following expression, rather than "him"?

"All things come to he who waits."

No, because there is none. "Who waits" is a clause that modifies (but does not alter the form of) the objective pronoun "him": "All things come to him who waits."

In a report that I am reviewing, I am concerned about whether "their" and "they" (plural) can be used when the antecedent is "proportion" or "population" (singular). The following sentences are examples of what is worrying me:

1. In 2000, the largest proportion of the Old City population, 85%, reported their race as White alone.
2. Five percent of the population indicated they were Asian or Pacific Islander.
3. Sixty-nine percent of the population categorized their race as White Alone, followed by 19% who indicated their race was Black or African American.

When you are dealing with statistics like this, mathematical concepts such as proportion and percentage can end up taking either singular or plural pronouns depending on how they are being used, as representing singular masses of people or groups of individuals acting individually. Here, you're talking about people filling out a form, as individuals, and "their" and "they" are perfectly appropriate. You might, however, have a sentence like "Sixty-nine percent of the population is African American."

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