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Get a stronger grasp of frequent English grammar misuses

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Joe Carillo:
GET A STRONGER GRASP OF FREQUENT ENGLISH GRAMMAR MISUSES

To further reinforce your English grammar footing in 2025, Jose Carillo’s English Forum will run every Tuesday starting today (January 28, 2025) a series of very common English grammar misuse even by not just a few of its native speakers. We’ll start with six such misuses from about 480 that have been taken up in the Forum’s Use and Misuse board over the years, mostly in response to questions raised by Forum members and readers.

1. “The workings of the three kinds of grammatical objects in English”



After reading a Forum posting about English noun clauses in October 2014, Forum member Ivan Ivanov raised these baffling questions: What specifically is the function of the pronoun “me” in these three sentences—“She gave it to me,” “She did it for me.” “She told me about her dog.” In each, is “me” working as a direct object, an indirect object, or an object of the preposition?
 
2. “Differentiating the use of ‘than of’ and ‘than that of’”



Forum Member Forces20 asked in March 2017: “When should ‘than that of’ be used instead of ‘than of’? Consider this sentence: “As a teacher, his salary is even less than that of a driver.’ Why shouldn’t this sentence be written instead as “As a teacher, his salary is even less than of a driver’?

3. “Should the word ‘each’ always be treated as singular no matter how it is positioned or used in a sentence?”



This is a persistent usage notion that I myself got stuck with in the past—one that at one time I even recommended in the Forum as the right thing. However, as I discovered much, much later when I looked deeper into the subject, this rule gets completely overturned when “each”, working as an adjective, comes before—not after—a plural subject. This caveat is provided by the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and by the Random House Dictionary, and likewise by the Oxford Dictionary in its example for “each” as a determiner.

4. “The perils of using double negative constructions”



Due to the irrational fear that I might be haled to court for doing so, I rarely yield to the temptation of correcting the written English of lawyers. In December 2013, however, I couldn’t let pass this awful double negative construction in a Filipino lawyer’s provocative rant posted in a newspaper opinion section: “No law (or anything lower than that) cannot be passed by the Congress to prevent or suppress our right to communication and free speech...”

Read my critique of that sentence in the Forum.

5. “Wrong or willfully violated mall parking signs in English”



Sometime in April 2017, right after I parked my car facing the wall in the basement of a then still unfinished extension of a shopping mall in Mandaluyong City, a guard tapped my side window and asked me to park the other way around. I remonstrated against that demand because the signage on the wall couldn’t have been clearer—“PLEASE PARK FACING THE WALL”—but the guard politely insisted. He explained in Tagalog that he was just enforcing management’s order, pointing to the rows of cars that were all parked facing away from the wall. The contradiction grated on my nerves so I critiqued that blatantly wrong parking signage soon after in the Forum.

6. The need to avoid confusing fused or run-on sentences

In January 2018 Forum member GlorHate sent to the Forum the photo below and asked: “I am just wondering why there’s a comma after ‘unhealthiness’ (in the attached poster statement).”



My reply: That statement says “19. United Kingdom. The UK ranks 19th for unhealthiness, with its residents being the ninth heaviest drinkers in the world. Take note that the prepositional phrase “with its residents being the ninth heaviest drinkers in the world” is intended to modify the whole main clause before it and not just the preceding word “unhealthiness” right before it. The comma right after that prepositional phrase provides soft punctuation, both visually and audibly, to demarcate that main clause from that modifying phrase. Without that comma, the result would be a confusing fused or run-on sentence.
 
Watch out for the next set of English Use and Misuse lessons and insights next Monday (February 3, 2025)!

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