Sometime ago, when I went to a dental clinic in a big Metro Manila mall to have a tooth filling restored, the front-desk clerk asked me to fill out a patient’s ledger card. The card was one those 5”x 8” affairs that ask for your name, address, telephone number, age, marital status, occupation, and allergies, but it had this curious final item in the all-noun information-gathering array: “
Complain.”
“Something’s wrong with this ledger card,” I told the clerk. “It spells ‘complaint’ without the ‘t’ so it makes the word a command, which is grammatically and semantically wrong. The correct word is ‘complaint,’ a noun that has the added virtue of being in parallel with the all-noun elements in the set.”
“Never mind that, sir,” the clerk said. “Those ledger cards are only supplied to us for free by a drug company and they all use the same word. Anyway, sir, ‘complain’ and ‘complaint’ are the same thing anyway, so why all the fuss?”
“But I do mind, miss, because those two words don’t mean the same thing, “ I said. “You better tell the dentist to tell that drug company to tell its supplier to tell its printer to correct that word to ‘complaint.’ And right now, before I even fill out this form, I’m crossing out that wrong word and replacing it with the right one, OK?”
“Go ahead, sir,” the clerk replied huffily. “I just don’t understand why you waste your time on such petty matters.”
Since it so happened that the dentist was ready to see me, I didn’t get the chance to explain to the clerk why all users of English should mind such errors and correct them. As my long-time favorite quotable about language goes, “A society is generally as lax as its language.”
In retrospect, though, I can see more clearly now why some people simply couldn’t fathom why the noun form of the verb “complain” should end with a “t.” The word “complaint” just happens to be one of the very few English nouns—there are actually only four of them—that had been formed by adding the suffix “t” to a verb ending in “-ain.” All of French derivation, those nouns are “complaint,” “constraint,” “distraint,” and “restraint.”
Most English verbs that became nouns took the present participle or “-ing” form, which made them gerunds, such as “undertaking” (from the verb “undertake”), “launching” (from “launch”), and “rating” (from “rate”). Many other verbs took the suffix “-ion” or “-age” to become nouns, such as “abstraction” (from “abstract”), “rotation” (from “rotate”), “marriage” (from “marry”), and “carriage” (from “carry”).
Of course, there are also several nouns formed by adding the suffix “-al” to the verb, such as “acquittal” (from “acquit”), “rebuttal” (from “rebut”), and “referral” (from “refer”), but in such cases, note that when the verb ends in a consonant, that consonant is repeated before the suffix is added. And finally, some abstract nouns had been formed by adding the suffix “-ence” to the verb, such as “insistence” (from “insist”), “existence” (from “exist”), and “difference” (from “differ”).
But even granting that people knew these characteristics and peculiarities of English nouns, many of them would still likely make the mistake of including the verb “complain” in all-noun array if they were clueless about parallelism. Thus, in situations like this, it’s very important to remember this basic parallelism rule: all elements in a list—whether nouns, verbs, infinitives, gerunds, and participles—should take the same grammatical form.
Thus, in that patient’s ledger card where all the elements are nouns (“name,” “address,” “telephone number,” “age,” “marital status,” and so forth), only another noun—“complaint” in this case—can be added to the list to keep the parallelism among them intact.
This essay, 2118th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the September 29, 2022 digital edition of The Manila Times
, ©2022 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.Read this essay online in
The Manila Times:
The importance of grammar-perfect English(Next week:
The grammar of numbers and time) October 6, 2022
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
