A reader in India, Surajit Dasgupta, had asked me for advice on how to deal with the problems he was encountering with long noun forms:

“Would you please take up how to deal with sentences with long subjects in your column? I frequently come across this situation, as in this example: ‘Isolated instances of terrorist outfits manipulating the stock markets to raise funds for their operations have been reported.’

“How do I reduce the length of the subject?

“In one of your past columns that briefly dealt with this topic, you suggested that the long subject be broken up. I tried it with the sentence above, but the resulting sentence doesn’t sound natural. Look: ‘Isolated instances have been reported of terrorist outfits manipulating the stockmarkets to raise funds for their operations.’”

My open reply to Surajit:

The problem with sentences with a very long noun form as subject is that the operative verb comes too late to execute the action, making such sentences confusing and difficult to read.

Let’s closely examine the example presented: “Isolated instances of terrorist outfits manipulating the stock markets to raise funds for their operations have been reported.”

Here, the subject is this 15-word noun phrase, “isolated instances of terrorist outfits manipulating the stock markets to raise funds for their operations,” and the operative verb is “have been reported.” By the time we reach the last word of that noun phrase, of course, we may already be gasping for air and may have already forgotten what the subject was all about. We then have to go back to the beginning of the noun phrase to regain our semantic bearings, thus losing time and reading momentum.

This early, however, I must strongly caution against reducing the length of the noun phrase to solve this problem, for it can alter the semantics of the sentence very seriously.

Instead, we should first consider breaking the long noun form into what is called a discontinuous phrase. This will allow the operative verb to be introduced earlier in the sentence so it can execute its action sooner, as was done in the following sentence: “A report without attribution reached the newsroom that the high-flying finance company was about the declare bankruptcy.” This sentence has a little rough edge to it, but it reads and sounds better than the original sentence that allowed the 14-word noun phrase to run its full course before coming up with its operative verb: “A report without attribution that the high-flying finance company was about the declare bankruptcy reached the newsroom.”

The discontinuous-phrase rewrite of Surajit’s sentence, though, doesn’t do as well: “Isolated instances have been reported of terrorist outfits manipulating the stockmarkets to raise funds for their operations.” It is confusing and it sounds bad because the long noun phrase got disjointed semantically when it was made into a discontinuous phrase.

A much better option in this case is to construct the sentence by using the much-maligned expletive “there” up front: “There have been reports of isolated instances of terrorist outfits manipulating the stockmarkets to raise funds for their operations.” This is semantically and structurally superior to the discontinuous-phrase option, but expect many grammarians to frown on it on the ground that using the expletive “there” weakens the action of the operative verb.

That leaves us only one other option: using the active voice for the problematic sentence. It’s the best option really, but it will require the sentence to specify the doer of the action. Assuming that it’s the ANC (the ABS-CBN news channel), we can do the following straightforward construction: “The ANC has reported isolated instances of terrorist outfits manipulating the stock markets to raise funds for their operations.”

That sentence looks good and reads very well—strong proof that putting sentences in the active voice is our best option for dealing with problems with long noun forms. (June 18, 2007)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, June 18, 2007 issue © 2007 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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A friend of mine, the award-winning writer Ed Maranan, e-mailed me this lament sometime back: “I can’t stand it any more, Joe! Over the last two years, I have seen its use proliferate, and I don’t know when it started becoming fashionable or grammatically acceptable, or both. I am referring to ‘off of,’ as in this example: ‘The priest said, “No, but it will wipe that smile off of your face.”

“Aren’t we allowed to just say ‘wipe that smile off your face’? I’m angry and tongue-twisted!”

The following day, Ed made this follow-up: “Hi, Joe! Here’s one more, among countless others:

“‘All of those grocery store mailers and catalogs are pretty pointless to receive if you are like most people and really hate junk mail. You can help get rid of this by removing yourself off of random mailing lists.’

“Seems like mostly North American usage, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already in use across the Atlantic.”

Seven minutes later Ed was back again: “I just had to Google it up, Joe. It’s worse than I thought. It’s pandemic. As far as I’m concerned, the only time the two can be used together is ‘the send-off of the troops,’ etc. I wonder how long it would be before the sign says ‘Keep off of the grass’...”

I must say that I had felt queasy myself over the growing use of “off of,” but the feeling turned to alarm when I did my own Google check. As of May 13, 2009, the web already had over 107,000,000 entries for “off of.” Ed is right: its usage has become pandemic.

Here are a few more usages of “off of” that stuck like fishbone in my throat: “Get this bug off of me!” “The Internet is taking the shine off of Apple.” “When moms criticize, dads back off of baby care.” “I can’t take my eyes off of you.”

Like most people of my generation, I have long known that “off of” in constructions like “I can’t take my eyes off of you” is bad English—to be tolerated only as an exercise in lyrical license, as in that line from the 1967 hit single “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You.” The scrupulously correct usage is, of course, “I can’t take my eyes away from you,” and whenever this correction was challenged, we simply invoked good English grammar and that was that.

So why today’s “off of” pandemic?

My theory is that this bad-grammar contagion started in England itself way back in 1965. In September of that year, the British rock-band Rolling Stones released their song “Get Off My Cloud,” whose lyrics repeat these aggressive bad-grammar lines four times: “I said, Hey! You! Get off of my cloud / Hey! You! Get off of my cloud / Hey! You! Get off of my cloud / Don’t hang around ’cause two’s a crowd / On my cloud baby…”

A blockbuster in both the United Kingdom and the United States, “Get Off My Cloud” went on to become one of the two bestselling back-to-back single releases in music history. I daresay that over the next 42 years, it’s been primarily responsible for legitimizing the “off of” usage in both mind and tongue all over the world.

The lesson here, I think, is to never underestimate the power of song in modern times to propagate bad grammar and make it de facto acceptable usage. As Patricia O’Conner, former editor of The New York Times Book Review and author of the bestselling grammar book Woe is I, has observed about who decides what good grammar is, “The answer is we all do. Everybody has a vote. The ‘rules’ are simply what educated speakers generally accept as right or wrong at a given time. When enough of us decide that ‘cool’ can mean ‘hot,’ change happens.” (May 16, 2009)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, May 16, 2009 issues © 2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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