Maybe it’s time for a little grammar review. (What else would The Grammar Doctor say?)

For the past couple of months I’ve been substituting in a sixth-grade English class in a private school. There have been a couple of surprises. One is that these youngsters are studying grammar concepts that I once taught to high school seniors. Since I don’t see them all the time, I don’t have a grasp of how much they really understand.

Much more eye-opening is the fact that I’ve already found two significant mistakes in the textbook, one dealing with pronouns and the other with verbs. Let me share them with you.

The text stated that the relative pronouns are who, whom, whose, which, what, and that. One of those is wrong. Without peeking, do you know which one? It’s what.

Why? Relative pronouns must have antecedents (words that these pronouns refer back to). For example: “The man who heard me say ‘shut up’ didn’t realize I was just kidding.” In this sentence the word who replaces and refers back to man.

Here’s a sentence with what: “She doesn’t understand what I’m talking about.” You’ll notice that what doesn’t have an antecedent or replace anything; thus it can’t be a relative pronoun. In fact, you can’t craft a sentence with what as a relative pronoun. What were those textbook writers thinking?

The second mistake on the part of the textbook “experts” is much more subtle. First here’s the sentence: “Two hundred passengers on the cruise ship were lost.”

This sentence appeared in an exercise asking students to determine whether the verb was an action verb or a linking verb (thus followed by a predicate adjective modifying the subject (The weather looks perfect) or a predicate nominative that renames the subject (He is not a person of interest).

In the sentence “Two hundred passengers on the cruise ship were lost,” the teacher’s key said that this sentence contained a linking verb. If that were true, it would test rational thought. It is difficult to imagine that this number of people could get lost on a ship. By contrast, it would be logical to say, “The child was lost for two hours.” In this case the word lost describes the child, just as you could say “The child was cranky” or “The child was “tired.”

The original sentence has to mean that two hundred passengers drowned or otherwise died. It would be similar to saying, “Two hundred passengers on the cruise ship were killed (lost) when the ship capsized.”

In this sentence and the original, the verb is indeed an action verb, but it technically has no direct object. The object of the action is the subject of the sentence, passengers. In other words, this sentence contains a passive verb, as in the Washington, D.C., way of speaking: “Mistakes were made.”

That’s a topic for another tip.

MAY 2007 TIPS

Last month I ended on a cliff-hanger, hinting that the topic of passive verbs would be explored in a later tip. Well, sooner is better than later, and I know what I’m about to do will greatly upset my grammar checker. 

Interestingly, it accepted my passive verb in the first sentence above: would be explored. That bursts my balloon, as I thought it would fuss at me every time I wrote one. In any event, here’s a review of passive verbs, as you have to understand them in order to understand when to use them. 

Passive verbs can be identified by their form. Each one has at least a be verb and a past participle of the verb. In the first sentence of this paragraph, the verb phrase is can be identified. The be verb is of course be, and the past participle (one that always requires a helping verb) is identified. 

An example from last month’s tip: “Mistakes have been made.” The be verb is been, and the past participle is made. 

A second way to identify passive verbs is that their subjects are NOT doing the action. In the first example above, “Passive verbs can be identified,” the verbs are not identifying anything. In fact, the subject is the receiver of the action. 

Here’s a simpler example: “The white dog chased the squirrel.” This sentence doesn’t have a passive verb, but it can be rewritten so that it does: “The squirrel was chased by the white dog.”  

The meaning is the same, but squirrel is now the subject. The doer of the action is still the white dog, but it now appears in a by phrase. With passive verbs, that’s where the doer of the action usually appears. 

OR (as in “Mistakes have been made”) the doer of the action is nowhere to be seen. That’s convenient when people don’t want to take responsibility for or assign responsibility to the doer of an action. Watch out for those kinds of folks! A lot of them hold government positions.

However, passive verbs do have their place. I’ve addressed that truth before, so you can check it out on my archives.

JUNE 2007 TIPS

Last month I won a ribbon and a money prize in an adult spelling bee. When the pronouncer couldn’t trip up the three finalists with “ordinary” words, she hit us with the arcane ones. I went down on the first of these: xeriphilous. The final two both missed several similarly difficult words, so the pronouncer went back to the eventual winner, which I could spell: corroboration

 Since then I’ve been mentally compiling a list of “hard” words that fall somewhere between corroboration and xeriphilous and corroboration. These are commonly misspelled in business writing or have a “surprise” in their spelling. Try these on your friends.

restaurateur (notice the “missing” n)

environment (the second n is usually omitted)

vignette (not a typical English spelling/pronunciation)

impugn (silent g)

government (the first n is usually omitted)

convenience (often spelled convience for reasons that escape me)

accommodate (either of the double consonants can be a stumbling block)

grievous (an i is often added before ous to match mispronunciation)

gnome (silent g)

ptarmigan (silent p)

phlegm (Greek origin)

ingratiate (the t sounds like an sh)

facetious (the i may be omitted)

inimitable (too many syllables!)

knowledgeable (keep that silent e: it follows the rule; that’s another story)

irascible (the sc is the problem)

gnostic (silent g)

xeriscape (Greek prefix)

recommend (the c is often doubled, though the word is just re + commend)

aphasia (too technical)

meringue (“foreign” word with different spelling style)

schism (“foreign” word)

xylophone (another “foreign” word)

eleemosynary (the double e is only one of the mysteries)

separate (the first a is usually spelled e)

renowned (usually misspelled reknowned)

peaceable (this is just peace + able)

conscience (and this is just con + science)

plagiarism (the first i or a isn’t pronounced)

psoriasis (silent p)

forgo (usually misspelled forego)

fantasy (usually misspelled cy)

commitment (usually misspelled committment for reasons unknown to me)

challenge (it’s difficult to know what vowel to use before the n; a is the most common incorrect choice)