Question by Mrs. Hill Roberts in Spain (September 12, 2009):Greetings from Spain!
In recent months, I’ve been following your articles online and I’d like to thank you for clarifying many supposedly correctly written sentences.
Over the years, I’ve also noticed that when people talk or speak about being “invited” to a party, the verb “to invite” becomes a noun.
Example: “Hi, hmmmm… oh, yes, thanks for the invite.”
I grew up thinking that to say, “Thanks for the invitation” was proper and correct. Why is it that saying “invite” instead of the noun “invitation” has become acceptable, or is it because people nowadays don’t bother to say whether it’s correct or not?
The double negative, as in “I don’t know nothing...” Many Filipinos think that it’s correct grammar because the expression happens to be spoken by Americans in US-made TV sitcoms.
Another example: “I cannot cope up with...”, a common mistake among English-speaking Filipinos.
Also the split infinitive, as in “...I’d like to honestly kill that rat ...”
How can these examples be rectified?
My reply:Dear Mrs. Roberts:
You’re most welcome! I’m delighted to know that my weekly English-usage columns in
The Manila Times are able to clarify grammar and usage matters for you even in faraway Spain.
Now let’s take up your grammar and usage concerns one by one:
The use of the word “invite” as a nounWOULD YOU EVER USE THE WORD “INVITE” AS A NOUN IN SOCIAL NOTES LIKE THESE?
I share your discomfort with the increasing usage of the word “invite” as a noun, as in the example you gave: “Hi, hmmmm… Oh, yes, thanks for the
invite.” The same thing seems to be happening in the Philippines. Just a few weeks ago, in fact, I received e-mail from a former university English instructor with the following opening sentence: “Thanks! I just received your formal
invite to your book launching.” And every now and then, a generic invitation to some function or event would reach me with the following opening sentence: “Attached is our
formal invite to the…” Frankly, like you, I find this usage of “invite” awful!
(I know of one other questionable usage that’s parallel to this: the use of the word “listen” as a noun in the expression “let’s give a listen” that many radio disc jockeys have been using for God knows how long now, as in “Now let’s
give a listen to Michael Jackson’s original runaway hit…” My
Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary does list “listen” as a noun that means “an act of listening”—a usage that dates back to the year 1788. Perhaps some disc jockey had taken the cue from that dictionary entry and blithely started propagating the usage through the airwaves. Still, for the life of me, I wouldn’t be caught using “listen” as noun whether in speech or in writing. It’s just too colloquial for comfort!)
But the big question is: Is it grammatically correct or acceptable to use “invite” as a noun instead of the verb that we know it to be? My gut feel tells me that even at a colloquial level, “invite” is a very awkward word choice for the purpose; at the very least, it seems to me a very lazy and indiscriminate person’s way of spelling “invitation.” If so, why then are more and more people using “invite” as a noun these days?
I would imagine that “invite” as a noun is just another manifestation of the texting syndrome in recent years. You know how that syndrome goes: mobile phone users get used to shortening words to as few keystrokes as possible to save on both time and effort. “Invite” is four letters or 40 percent shorter than “invitation”—a great inducement indeed to go short if you are too busy or in such a hurry!
Still, I think it’s entirely a different matter when it comes to letters and other forms of written communication, whether formal or informal. In such cases, I think using “invite” as a noun is nothing less than a grammatical outrage; in fact, whenever I get a formal invitation that uses “invite” as a noun instead of as a verb, my estimation of the quality of the English of the message source plunges several notches lower—and the temptation to decline the invitation becomes almost irresistible to me!
In fairness to the “invite”-as-noun converts, though, there’s an entry in my digital
Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate that lists “invite” as a noun in the sense of ”the act of inviting.” The usage dates back to 1659, and I gathered from other sources this citation from the
Oxford English Dictionary, which marks the noun “invite” as colloquial (italicizations mine):
1659 H. L’ESTRANGE
Alliance Div. Off. 326 Bishop Cranmer…gives him an earnest
invite to England.
1778 F. BURNEY
Diary (1842) I. 105 Everybody bowed and accepted the
invite but me…for I have no intention of snapping at
invites from the eminent.
Thereafter, however, there seems to be hardly any reference to it being used again on a notable scale. It looks like it’s only now, with the texting language revolution underway, that there has been a resurgence of its usage.
All in all, however, if you ask me if the above justifications confer grammatical legitimacy to the formal usage of “invite” as a noun, my answer is a firm “No!” For me, it’s “invitation” anytime and every time.
The double negative in “I don’t know nothing...”You’re right; I often hear not a few Filipinos say that misguided expression with such prideful flourish—as if mouthing it magically transforms them into full-blooded Americans themselves. But no matter if a thousand and one American TV sitcoms use “I don’t know nothing” as a staple expression, there’s no way for it to be accepted as good English. The correct, educated expression will always be “I don’t know anything”—and the earlier people get to know this, the better for their English.
The expression “I cannot cope up with”As I always emphasize in the my English grammar seminar-workshops, verb phrases or phrasal verbs are idiomatic expressions with a fixed preposition working in tandem with them. We can’t always find an overt logic as to why this or that preposition came to be used in such expressions; the verb phrase just established itself as such through repeated use by native English speakers over decades or even centuries. In the particular verb phrase in question here, for instance, “cope up with” comes with one preposition too many; it should simply be “cope with,” as in “I cannot
cope with the workload at the office.”
There really are no ifs and buts about this; it’s either you know the idiom or you don’t. So if someone persists in adding the “up” every time to “cope with,” it’s a sure sign that the speaker or writer is clueless or isn’t really conversant with the idiom.
Splitting the infinitive in “I’d like to honestly kill that rat ...”I must admit that I sometimes split infinitives myself if I find that doing it clarifies the idea I want to say. For instance, I would do that in this sentence, “The school principal decided
to actually enforce the speak-English-only rule inside the campus.” I think you’ll agree that it sounds more natural than these three other constructions that scrupulously avoid splitting the infinitive “to enforce”:
(1) “The school principal decided
actually to enforce the speak-English-only rule inside the campus.”
(2) “The school principal decided
to enforce the speak-English-only rule
actually inside the campus.”
(3) “The school principal
actually decided
to enforce the speak-English-only rule inside the campus.”
In the expression “I’d like to honestly kill that rat ...”, however, it’s no so much the splitting of the infinitive “to kill” that I strongly object to but the misplacement of the adverb “honestly.” In that sentence, “honestly” is intended to modify the verb phrase “would like,” but it is positioned in such a way that it wrongly modifies the verb “kill” instead. Indeed, the grammatically correct construction of that sentence is as follows: “
Honestly,
I’d like to kill that rat ...” Another correct way: “I
honestly would like to kill that rat…” Both constructions, as we can see, get rid neatly of the split infinitive.
So what’s the best way to deal with split infinitives? In
The Elements of Style, Strunk and White wisely make this suggestion: “The split infinitive is another trick of rhetoric in which the ear must be quicker than the handbook.” I think we can very well be guided by that.
