The Grammar Logs
#558

What part of speech is the word earnest in the following sentence:

On Easter Monday the rain began again in earnest.

Earnest is a noun in that sentence, the object of the preposition in. The prepositional phrase in earnest modifies the verb began, so it's behaving as an adverb.

Is the phrase "regardless whether" ever correct?

I looked through your FAQ and found that "regardless of whether" is used in responses, also regardless of how.

I thought that "regardless of" was used with nouns, e.g. regardless of logic, regardless of the fact, but I found that your site uses "regardless of" regardless whether it is followed by a noun.

According to Bryan Garner, "regardless whether" is unidiomatic for "regardless of whether" (and then he gives several examples in which "regardless of whether" should be substituted for "regardless whether").

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.

I sneaked out or I snuck out? I say sneaked, but people just look at me!

According to Bryan Garner, "sneaked" is the standard past tense and past participle form. However, he then adds, "snuck" keeps sneaking in there in American English and is apt to appear nearly half as often as "sneaked." So you can continue to use sneaked and have people look at you funny or you can incorrectly use snuck and go along with a growing crowd.

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.

I need the correct use of Athletics or Athletic. Is there a college— Athletic Office or Athletics Office Put another way, would it be an Athletic Awards Banquet or and Athletics Award Banquet?

Your office is not athletic. Probably a lot of people who are athletic go to that office, but the office is the office of athletics (having to do with the practice, the study of athletic activities). I would call it the Athletics Awards Banquet because the prizes, again, are not athletic.

We are having a problem with deciding which form of verb to use with the name of our fundraising board. Do we say "Baraga Boosters present..." or "Baraga Boosters presents..." ? (What we are presenting is a gala fundraiser). Thanks for your help.

Baraga Boosters is the name of a club, a singular entity, so you want a singular verb, "presents." If it sounds odd, could you use "Baraga Boosters Club presents"?

Is the use of commas and semicolons correct?

Team members shown here are Kristi Ford, Team Leader; and Monica Johnson; Sherri Mills; and Nancy Roman, Customer Support Specialists.

All of these people are customer support specialists, so that tag being set off with Nancy Roman is confusing. Can we put their title first and then give Kristi her due at the end? as in "Customer Support Specialists Monica Johnson, Sherri Mills, Nancy Roman, and Team Leader Kristi Ford." At any rate, putting the titles first might solve your punctuation problem.

When should from be used or not used?

• I graduated from High School in 1975.
or

• I graduated High School in 1975.

Also, which of the following is correct.

• I departed from London on Tuesday.
or

• I departed London Tuesday.

Use the "from" in both cases. According to Burchfield, "depart" has been used as a transitive verb since the fourteenth century (as in "The clergy were ordered to depart the kingdom"), but nowadays, except for the literary and formal "he departed this life," we use the preposition "from," always, with that verb.

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.

An EFL student noted the following 2 pairs of examples:

• A1 - He comes home tired. (Sounds natural.)
• A2 - He watches TV tired. (Sounds awkward.)
• B1 - He is sitting in the chair asleep. (Sounds natural.)
• B2 - He is sitting in the chair happy. (Maybe sounds awkward?)

The question is, what determines when we can put an adjective that modifies the subject at the end of a sentence that does not use a copulative verb? I wasn't able to generalize from those examples to any sort of "rule." Maybe it depends more on meaning than grammatical structure. Can you help?

I asked a colleague of mine who teaches ESL about these sentences and suggested that "tired" (or "happy") might be working adverbially in some contexts, adjectivally in others, but she advised that they're all adjectives, all correct, and all probably reflect a "deep structure" that might include [understood] words clarifiying the relationship between subject and adjective:

• He comes home (feeling) tired.
• OR He watches TV (feeling) tired.
• He is sitting in the chair (while being) asleep.
• OR He is sitting in the chair (while being) happy.

Or something like that. The two marked as awkward are just less common elisions than the others. I think it's just a matter of usage frequency.

… a lack of thank you's and smiles …

I think you're asking about the plural for the noun, a "thank you," right? The Shorter OED comes to our rescue and says to use many "thank-yous" (no apostrophe).

Authority for this note: Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Fifth Edition. Oxford University Press, New York. 2002.

What is the proper wording for this sentence?

• All passengers will be subject to a security check. Or
• All passengers will be subjected to a security check.

The adjective form of "subject" (followed invariably by "to") means that the person so described is "under the control of" or "bound to" (in the sense of jurisdiction). The Shorter OED gives the example of "Felling of trees is subject to licensing by the Forestry Commission," and that seems to correspond to your sentence. If there were something negative, onerous, about this security check, we might say that the people were subjected to it. That verb form often has that connotation of making something subservient or dependent.

Authority for this note: Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Fifth Edition. Oxford University Press, New York. 2002.

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