Rhys on Rules

 RHYS BOWEN: Like most writers I’ve always been fascinated with words. My degree was in modern languages and I took French, Latin, German and Spanish at school. Since then I’ve dabbled in Welsh and Italian.  I love to see how different languages handle construction. I used to love Latin prose when everything was one long, long sentence with the verb at the end. Reading one was like reading a crossword puzzle! I loved teaching German because there is a neat and tidy rule for everything. If you use this preposition then this always follows…

Obviously I had English grammar drilled into me during all those years of schooling. Diagraming sentences, learning tenses… English seemed a language of so few rules, compared with German, for example. And yet I was reading an article recently by Tim Dowling in the Guardian that explains there are strict rules for English descriptions. We all know them but we were never taught them:

Fascinating.

It seems if you are using more than one adjective before a noun they have to be in a particular order and the rule is: opinion, size, age ,shape, color, origin, material, purpose.  Who knew?

So you can have the lovely little old  round pink French straw sun bonnet.

Try saying this differently and you sound weird.

If we change this order it sounds wrong. So you can’t say, as is quoted in the article: My Greek fat big wedding.

And another unspoken rule is that we deviate from the first rule when we say the big bad wolf.

Why is this? Apparently vowels have to follow a set order I, then A, then O.

So big bad.

Chit chat.

Flip flop.

Sing song.

All of this is in a book called THE ELEMENTS OF ELOQUENCE by Mark Forsyth. I’m going to order it asap. I’m not sure whether I want to thank him or not. Now, as I write, I am obsessed by whether I have all my adjectives in the correct order. The sweet little old lady, not the little old sweet lady (she’s someone who sells candy, I suspect). But it’s certainly fascinating that we all grow up learning this rule that we are never taught, isn’t it?

Can you think of any other rules for English we all know but were never taught?

Truckling: Not our forte

HALLIE EPHRON: Truckle. Verb. A new word for me, it was in last week’s Boston Globe talking about a certain politician's willingness to act in a subservient manner.

I looked it up (thank you Google), and truckle can also be a noun meaning a barrel-shaped cheese or a low bed that slides under another bed.

I posted this earth shaking discovery -- a new word! -- on Facebook and my dear writer friend Cajsa Baldini commented that truckle was a variant of trundle, as in trundle bed. A waggish friend pictured a truck laughing. For me the word conjures a person trudging truculently. Or perhaps some kind of British pudding.

A designer friend was moved to share her pet peeve: “Those fabrics you put on and around windows are NOT drapes, they are draperies. The ‘folds’ you get when scrunching up fabrics are drapes. Drives me nuts when people even my design industry insist upon using it incorrectly.”

I, of course, was clueless about this and have been misusing drapes my entire writing life. From now on, it's curtains.

My mother, a writer and English major, used to be driven nuts by people who said "off of" - apparently it should just be "off" (get off the couch). Also on her hit list were people who pronounced forte forTAY. Wrong wrong wrong. According to her, it's simply pronounced FORT.

She was formidable. I was inclined to truckle when she corrected my grammar or pronunciation and most of her rules (biases?) have become mine. Though I try never to say "forte" aloud since she's the only person I've ever heard pronounce it her way. Avoidance has always been my strong suit.

What are your pet peeves when it comes to usage or pronunciation in the world of words, AKA a writer’s playground.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: At a restaurant, when people order, they sometimes say: “I’ll take the truckle (for instance) rare, with…” It is NOT “I’ll take.”

It’s “I’d like” or “I’ll try” or even “I’ll have” Or “May I have.” It is also most emphatically, NOT: “I’ll DO the truckle…” NO no no, not DO. Not TAKE.

Argh.

Also I wonder about “for free.” It’s not “for free,” it’s simply free. You can get that for free? Nope, you can get that free.

(There’s also material. Rolls of thing that you make clothing from is not material. It’s “fabric.”)

Also, and probably not finally, where did “out of” come from? “He’s out of Oklahoma.” You mean--from there?

JENN McKINLAY: Truckle - that is an unexpected word! It sounds like something I would make up while playing Scrabble and staunchly insist it’s real.

I’m okay with mispronunciations because people mispronounce words when they learn them while reading (the librarian in me gives a double thumbs up on that). As for my own grammar weaknesses, well, my copyeditor always has to lop the “ofs” from my “offs” - your mother would be quite appalled - because I can’t seem to break that habit.

The one that grates on my nerves is when people say “he goes” instead of “he said” -- it’s maddening! The speaker is SPEAKING they’re not GOING anywhere. Argh!

HANK: Oh, Jenn, I agree on mispronunciations...that’s a different thing. (For a long time I really thought it was muncipal). (No to mention misled,which clearly is myzled.)

And going. Ahhhh…

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Agreed with Jenn - as a young person (and by this I mean well into my twenties) I would mispronounce words because my reading vocabulary was so much larger than what I heard spoken around me. My daughters do the same now, and they bristle when I correct them, but I figure better your mom than a fellow guest at a dinner party. Which happened to me, when I pronounced “detritus” wrong (I put the emphasis on the initial syllable instead of the middle.)

There’s one common pronunciation that irks me, however, and that’s err rhyming with air. Yes, folks, I know it’s become increasingly accepted over the past 50 years and that way of saying it is even okayed in most American dictionaries. It still chaps my you-know-what. Err should rhyme with her, and that’s that.

Do not even get me STARTED on substituting impact for effect unless you have time for my fifteen minute rant on why effect versus affect is not that damn hard, come on.

LUCY BURDETTE: Hank, you would hate going out with our neighbors--they always “do” the steak etc.

How about the word versus? Drives me crazy when people pronounce it as “verse.”

RHYS BOWEN: Hank, it also drives me mad when people ask for things in a rude way. Perhaps their parents didn’t instill in them that one says , “Please may I have…”

Do you want my whole list of pet peeves? I think my hands would get tired of typing first. Lay and lie. Now even newscasters get it wrong (except Hank, of course, who is always perfectly correct in everything). It’s so easy too. If there is an object it’s a transitive verb. You lay something. I lay down the book. Lay is also the past tense of lie. I lie on the bed. Yesterday I lay on the bed. But I think the damage has already been done and lay will become acceptable.

And simple grammar of parts of speech. How many people say between you and I? Prepositions take the accusative or dative. That’s why it’s so useful to have learned foreign languages. My degree is in German and French and I love German especially as it has rules. When you see this, you always do this. It’s great to teach German… except that now so much English has crept into the German language. Everything to do with computers, lots of slang words. I wrote a thesis on the foreign word in the German language. Now it would be several pages longer!

And don’t get me started on irregardless!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: When I think English is going to grammar hell I keep reminding myself that language is always changing and evolving. Still, the misuse of pronouns, even though ubiquitous, drives me bonkers. People who are educated and know better say "Me and John are going to do--" I have to fan myself…

But on a more writerly note, I have a serious peeve about the misuse of "may" and "might." It's a very subtle thing, I know. "May" is more definite than "might," so how likely something is to happen is subjective. Still, so often "may" is used when it really should be "might." I "may" go to the store later as we are out of bread. However, I "might" run into Daniel Craig in the pub next time I am in London.

HALLIE: So are we preaching to the choir, or do you think we take our words entirely too seriously?