The Grammar Logs
#511

I was making a bulletin board for a sixth grade classroom *I'm not the teacher* and I wanted it to say "Sail on in to sixth grade." Is it completely wrong for me to write "in to" or should it ALWAYS be "into"?

In this case, "on in" is a compound preposition and taking the "in" and making it part of "into" changes the meaning of things. You might consider "Sail into sixth grade" so you can keep the "into" and reduce the mind-bending string of three prepositions to one. But I don't see anything wrong with the way that you've got it. You're asking students to "sail on in" and where should they sail on in to? to sixth grade. (Maybe the three prepositions in a row is a bit much? Something like "Sail on in! Welcome to sixth grade!"?)

1.Should I say :
Wildlife uses the trails.
OR
Wildlife use the trails.

2.Why?
3.What kind of noun is wildlife? (a collective noun?)

The word wildlife is used more frequently as an attributive noun, as in "What are the wildlife uses of this territory?" In those uncommon situations where it is used as a noun, it is a collective noun and takes a singular verb ("uses" in this case).

My question relates to how I would use "up to date" as an adverb, as opposed to as adjective (up-to-date). Are hyphens dropped for adverbial use? Thank you.

When it's used as an adjective, as in "up-to-date equipment," we use hyphens. When the phrase does not appear pre-noun, we drop the hyphens, as in "keeping the President up to date" or "you're constantly being briefed and brought up to date on this, that or the other" (Quoting George W. Bush in the New York Times).

I am a technical writer/editor for our group and recently, something has come to my attention that I hope you can help with. The sentence in question is,

"Any of the products listed below that are using firmware version 1.1:"

The section is called the "Scope," and it is used in our advisories. The customer checks the Scope to see if his or her particular product is affected by the problem documented in the advisory. In this advisory, the colon is followed by a list of aboutÝ 12 products. All of the Scope sections begin with "any" and then usually a written out or bulleted list of products.

One of our engineers insists that he was taught that Any implies "any ONE" and that therefore, the verb should be is not are. I said that any is an adjective which could mean one but could also mean more than one, and that "products," not "Any" or even "any ONE" is be the subject of the sentence and the subject and verb must always agree. Therefore, if he uses "products," which is plural, he must also use "are," not the singular "is." If the subject, "products," became singular, he could then use "is" as in, "any product listed below that IS"

Was I correct in what I told him?

The word any can serve as a determiner (a kind of adjective), as in "Any child would know that"), but in the sentence you give us it is a pronoun serving as the subject of the sentence. The prepositional phrase "of the products" then modifies the pronoun. Your engineer friend is wrong about the implications of "any"; it does not imply "any one" of anything. In fact, it is usually plural in meaning, as it is in that sentence. Use "are." (You're probably aware that that is not really a sentence as it stands right now. . . .)

What would be the correct way to title a children's educational program, Child Developmental Center or Child Development Center? Please explain your answer.

It is, I take it, a Center devoted to the study of Child Development, so I would call it a Child Development Center. (You don't want to give the word "developmental" a chance to modify the word "center" because the center isn't developing.) [Please note, too, the spelling of the word in question.]

Recently, I received a voice mail at work requesting technical information. Before returning the call, I consulted one of my colleagues to obtain some background information on the project. During the conversation, I said to my colleague:

"I must return Marty's call but I wanted to speak to you before I did."

My colleague challenged my verb tense. He claims that my use of the word "did" suggests that I have already made the return call. I feel that my grammar is correct. Any comments?

Thanks

I thought that we could justify your tense choice on the basis of logic alone, but an ESL-teacher colleague tells me that we use the past tense with "wanted" because it is an appropriate use of the subjunctive mood. When you decided to say "wanted" instead of "want," you were simpy indicating that slightly backed-off attitude that we use when we mean to be sort of polite, sort of tentative. We use it in conditional situations, too, where we always step back in time to indicate uncertain or contested possibilities: "If you really loved me, you'd let me eat tofu." But here, there's no "if," just the difference between "I want to call you first" and "I wanted to call you first." And then, once, we've used "wanted," we stick with the past, the "did," for the sake of tense coherence and consistency.

I am doing my grammar homework and I don't see how these sentences use the word scathing differently.

• The principal administered a scathing rebuke to the two bullies.
• She gave the students who had cheated a scathing that they never forgot.
• The book contains a scathing attack on his country's foreign policy.

In the first and third sentences, the word "scathing" is used as an adjective meaning "bitterly severe." The middle sentence uses "scathing" as if the verb "scathe" were ever used (it used to be used [meaning "to attack with withering denunciation"], but it is very seldom used as a verb nowadays), and the verb in your second sentence has been transformed to its gerund or noun form, "scathing" (meaning a severe or savage rebuke). This usage is rather archaic, but there's really nothing wrong with it. So you've got the same word being used twice as an adjective and once as a verb form, a gerund.

An outstanding contemporary prose stylist, Christopher Hitchens, wrote:

"The mother had, at the time of his conception, been reduced to selling her body for money."

Are the commas correctly placed? Why not maintain the verb phrase, 'had been reduced," intact?

The prepositional phrase in question is adverbial; it's telling us when this happened. Adverbs of time frequently appear after the first auxiliary verb and before the main verb. A simpler example (one that would not require a pair of commas) would be something like "John has already sold his car" or "Jane is now planning a trip to Paris." Here, though, the phrases in question (two linked prepositional phrases, "at the time of his conception"), are disjunctive enough to be treated as a parenthetical element and need to be set off with the pair of commas.

Is there a plural form for the word "shrimp"? I have heard some people adding a "S" at the end of shrimp, and other people saying "shrimp" when they meant more than 1 shrimp. Also, is there a list of nouns that do NOT change in the plural form? Thank you.

It seems to me that someone in Mississippi ought to know the answer to this better than someone in Connecticut. Or are those enormous, delicious shrimp limited to Louisiana? Anyway, you can form the plural for this little seabeast with either shrimp or shrimps. Here's a brief list of words that don't change form when they become plural: aircraft, cod, deer, pike, salmon, series, sheep, species. Notice that some very fishy nouns show up in this list. I don't know why.

How do you know if a sentence is declarative or exclamatory if it doesn't have a period or question mark?

• How miserable I was to sleep in a hollow tree
• What I wouldn't have given for some matches

Most exclamatory sentences (meant to convey strong emotion, which is why they seldom show up in academic text), are built in the same manner as normal declarative sentences. Thus "He dropped the ball." (ending with a period) can become, in a moment of excitement, "He dropped the ball!" There is, however, another manner in which an exclamatory sentences are built. In sentences of this type, the exclamatory adjectives what and such and the exclamatory adverb how come in the initial position of the sentence, and then the remainder of the sentence follows in normal declarative order. Some examples:

• What a scholarly professor we have!
• How dark the countryside was just before the dawn!
• What a mess his room was in!
• Such a pig he's turned into!

Notice how the word order successfully concentrates the sentence's energy on the complement (on the "scholarly professor" or "dark") as opposed to the subject ("we" and "countryside"). The exclamation mark is one signal to the reader that the intonation of the sentence will change, and I would put one after the sentences you give us. However, the sentences are exclamatory in structure with or without the exclamation mark.

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