The Grammar Logs
#532

About the word,"responsible". Which is right?

1. Responsible people were punished.
2. People responsible were punished.

There's quite a difference. In the second sentence, we would precede "people responsible" with a definite article, "the." It would mean that the people at fault for the misdeed were punished. The first sentence, on the other hand, means that people who normally take responsibility for their deeds (which includes most good citizens) were punished. (Number one sounds like the wrong people got their heads handed to them.) It's an interesting shift in meaning.

Is it incorrect to use after all in a negative construction? Specifically, is the following sentence correct? By the way, is it incorrect to use in light of this way?

I have decided not to leave after all in light of the heavy traffic.

There's certainly nothing wrong with using "after all" in such a sentence, but I would suggest that we avoid that string of prepositional phrases by putting one of them at the beginning:

In light of the heavy traffic, I have decided not to leave after all.

I am looking for the correct use of "myriad". I have seen it two ways: The files contain a myriad of correspondence. AND The files contain myriad correspondence. Can you tell me the correct usage?

In either case, "myriad" should be used with something countable, and "correspondence," being a mass noun, doesn't lend itself to a plural form very easily. You could, however, say "a myriad of letters" (where it is a noun) or "myriad letters" (where it is an adjective). Garner says that the word myriad is more concise as an adjective.

From The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Styleby Bryan Garner. Copyright 1995 by Bryan A. Garner. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., www.oup-usa.org, and used with the gracious consent of Oxford University Press.

In the use of an elipsis (…) or ( . . . ) are there spaces between the dots? This has become an ongoing argument in my office and I'm tired of it.

With modern word processors, you can type in a code or hold down the option key and hit the apostrophe (or such such combination) and get an unbreakable ellipsis (it won't break if it comes at the end of a line, a very handy thing). An ellipsis made that way (…)will be more "compact" than an ellipsis made the usual way (by putting a space between the three dots — . . . ). You can make it one way or the other, but you can't make it simply by typing three periods one after the other.

In the following sentence what word is the prepositional phrase "to people" modifying? Is it look or blurry?

Distant objects look blurry to people with myopia.

Thank you.

I would say it's modifying the verb, "look." It's a bit more obvious if we reverse the order of the sentence and write "To people with myopia, distant objects look blurry."

I'm not quite sure why this prepositional phrase is faulty:

Velocity, to which I will have more to speak about later, becomes the crucial element in the construction of contemporary reality.

Any help you may be able to give me would be great.

Don't you want "about"? You're really not going to speak to velocity, are you? And I think "say" would be an improvement over "speak." And then we can eliminate "about later," maybe changing it to "later on." Or consider leaving out that intervening phrase altogether, come to think of it; if it's really all that important, you better get to it right away.

I am tired of seeing "verbal & written communication skills" in the newspapers as well as educational material from almost everyone in the country. I was taught it is "oral & written communicaton", even the news media has reduced themselves to illiterates. HELP! Am I not correct? If I am incorrect, please explain.

Theodore Bernstein puts the case quite nicely: "…it cannot be denied that much would be gained in the cause of precision if writers would use oral when they mean spoken words and written when they mean words committed to paper. Verbal might well be confined to those situations in which it is desired to distinguish communication by words from other forms of communication like gestures, smoke signals, and the light that shines from lovers' eyes. To speak of a verbal agreement may leave some doubt whether the agreement was made in a conversation or signed in a lawyer's office."

I recently read a headline in a major publication that read " Cruise-ship dumping poisons seas, frustrates U.S. enforcers." I was thinking that there should be a comma after dumping. Is this correct or do I need to go back to school ?

I'm sure you wouldn't have to read very far into this article to discover that the story is about the effluent dumped in the seas by cruise ships. If the headline has a problem, though, it's that the reader is apt to be momentarily perplexed by the notion of "cruise-ship dumping." Does it mean the abandonment of cruise ships? Doubtful. So we read on into the damp effluvium. A comma after "dumping," however, violates one of the most reliable rules about comma usage: that we don't want to put a single comma between a subject ("dumping," in this case) and its verb ("poisons" and "frustrates").

To form the past perfect tense, we place "had" before the participle of all actions completed in the earlier time frame. Once the first sentence of a paragraph is written in past perfect tense, must we continue throughout the paragraph to use "had." I find this extremely confusing. Example:

We "had" a good time at the legion last night. We "had" danced until our feet were sore. We "had" driven home before the storm "had" made driving too dangerous.

Thank you. I just can't understand this tense form.

For a perfect antidote, read Ernest Hemingway's short story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," and look carefully at his use of the past perfect tense. The past perfect is used to signal the reader that a time shift is happening, that you're moving from one fictive present scene to an earlier one (and then, later on, back again). But after a couple of sentences using the past perfect tense, Hemingway lets go of it and moves back to his regular past tense. In other words, he uses the past perfect to nudge the reader into another time frame, and then shifts into his regular past tense again (which feels like the present as the story unfolds before our eyes). In short, you needn't stay in that past perfect tense for the rest of your narrative (or essay, or whatever).

Q: Is it permissible to interject other words between a group of words that form a verb (I don't know what such a group is called), or between other words that should go together?

Example 1: "If your grades are consistently higher than average, you should go to college."

I think "are higher" should be kept together, because it's a comparative, right? But it sounds awkward to say, "If your grades consistently are higher than..." However, I think that's how the Oregonian does it, and it's a Pulitzer-winning newspaper. What do you say?

Example 1: "This gun could potentially be used for harm."

As far as I understand, the group of words "could be used" form the verb, so in most cases, I believe it is best to keep them together. Interjecting other words seems awkward to me, but sometimes it is more awkward not to.

Once I saw a guideline that stated it might be OK to interject one word, but not more than one. What would you say?

I can't speak for what the Oregonian does, but it is perfectly legitimate and more than acceptable to insert an adverb after the first auxiliary verb in a verb string (in other words, to put "potentially" between the "could" and the rest of the verb string, "be used"). In your first sentence, the adverb quite clearly modifies the comparative adjective "higher"; there's absolutely nothing wrong with its coming between "are" and "higher." In fact, I would prefer it there.

You might be confusing this issue of adverb placement (in relation to a helping verb or a linking verb) with the ancient stricture forbidding split infinitives. Relax on both accounts.

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