Grabbing for Mrs. Sward's bottle

“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”
— H.G. Wells

When I was an eighth-grader, my favorite subject in school was English, in spite of the old biddy who taught the class. Mrs. Sward, who taught many, many miles from here and has been dead for decades, would keep small bottles of whiskey in her drawer, and every time she’d read something in our essays that mortified her — say, a misplaced modifier or subject-verb disagreement — she’d take a gulp from the bottle and clear her throat.

I know the feeling.

I grew up to be a fanatic about the English language. In my years as editor, I’ve been known to wrestle with a pressman over a page that was about to go to press with a grammar gaffe in the lead story. I’ve pulled out perfectly good strands of hair (my own) over a faulty apostrophe that made it into the paper — you know, an “it’s” that was supposed to be an “its,” or vice versa.

A run-on sentence like the one on the front page of Saturday’s Tracy Press — “Daylight-saving time begins Sunday, move clocks forward one hour at 2 a.m.” — can put a damper on an entire day for me. If only I’d stayed up a little longer Friday night to proof pages, I could’ve turned that comma into a semi-colon.

Truly, my newspaper-reader-soulmates are the ones who stop me on the street or e-mail me when they’ve found an especially egregious language error in the paper (not to be confused with fact errors, which are another story.)

Just last week, Aaron Carter e-mailed with angst after he read the tease on the front page of Friday’s paper: In 1906, an earthquake and fire devastated the city by the bay. One hundred years later, officials are preparing for another terrible “tremblor.”

“I’m certain the person making the entry intended to use the word ‘temblor,’ which is defined as ‘a quaking,’” he wrote. “I am hopeful the writer did not intend to use the word “trembler,” which is a noun used to describe a person who trembles or who has trembled, or who, by nature, is a trembler.”

He’s right, and I'm trembling just thinking about that misspelled temblor.

Jane Devlin, another Tracy Press reader, called me recently to tell me that we should have corrected a source’s grammar rather than repeat the mistaken use of the word “like” in a direct quote. You know, we were, like, adults, speaking like kids, and we should, like, know better.

That just warmed her up to talk about other modern-day problems with the language.

“You know what really sends me over the edge?” she said. “When someone replaces the word ‘said’ with ‘go.’ That, to me, is a crime.”

Jane and Aaron remind me of another astute reader named Mike Blake, who started e-mailing me in 2002 with lists of annoying mistakes from our paper — words that sound the same but mean something different, like “patients” used in place of “patience,” and typos that change meanings, like “math lab” rather than “meth lab.”

I’d dutifully pass them on to my young staff (all college graduates who majored in English, journalism, rhetoric, history or political science, mind you) as Lessons From The Outside, which always carry more weight, you know, than those from ever-picky editors.

I eventually convinced Mike to work as a part-time copy editor for us. By day, he wrote software over the hill, and by night, he’d proof our pages — and save our bacon.

Alas, he moved on and bought a farm in Vermont. His wife, Margaret, recently asked about the New Year’s baby who weighed 15 pounds, 14 ounces, as she’d read on the Tracy Press Web site. She was pretty sure we’d meant to write 5 pounds, 14 ounces.

Uh, yeah. We ran a correction on that slip-of-the-finger on the keyboard.

Meanwhile, I’ll have three other editors read this column before it hits the press, so I’m pretty sure it will be typo-free.

Rest in peace, Mrs. Sward.

Posted by cmatthews at April 5, 2006 07:33 AM

This piece was quite revealing. It is quite a relief to know that even those who are native English speakers and consider English as the primary language also grapple with the tricky problems of grammar and usage, and even with such petty stuff as spelling. For those of us who have English as a secondary language, mostly because we originated from another country, jousting with the intricacies of the language is a continuing battle.

And English is such a dynamic and complicated language to be good at, much less to be a master at. What with all the countless rules and exceptions to the rule to be learned, remembered, and used properly. Partial thanks go to any spell-checker in any word-processing application for the valuable assistance that it provides.

I am by no means a linguist or a grammarian, but I do have a deep interest in the language and how it continues to evolve.

Thus, aside from those mentioned and narrated, I find another area where “errors” or call them, changes, may also be quite common. And it is in deviation from standard usage or meaning. Take the phrase, beg the question. Its standard usage is supposed to refer to a logical fallacy, but the common usage would now suggest that it means that a statement made prompts the question, or begs the question.

And to illustrate a classic change in meaning which I believe is universally accepted is the verb, to cleave. In olden times, the word meant to unite or join together, but now it’s quite the opposite, to break apart or separate, as in cleavage.

And lastly, regarding the inadvertent use of tremblor. I find this word easily confused because another common but correct word aside from temblor is the word, tremor, which also means an earthquake. Thus, if one puts the three words together and shakes them, it is understandable to see why at times it could come out as tremblor, instead of temblor or tremor.

Though, there is still the bigger issue in the use or over-use of clichés or bromides. But save that for another time.

And unfortunately, I have neither proofreader nor editor to go over this comment.

Posted by: Amadeo at April 5, 2006 11:42 AM

Dear Cheri,
Thanks so much for your April 5 article about the proper use of the English language - it struck a real resonance with me.
I also had a Mrs. Sward in my schooling days. Mine was named Mrs. Cook, also from many miles away and also long dead. Unlike Mrs. Sward, I don't remember Mrs. Cook having a bottle in her desk to help her cope with our butchery of English. Instead, she'd roll her eyes upward, looking perhaps for divine guidance to help us mend our ways.
For me, her methods worked as well as Mrs. Sward's apparently worked for you - I also grew up to be a fanatic about the English language. I was certainly in the minority of those in my chosen profession of engineering. I'm retired now, but as an engineering manager in the last years of my employment, I had ample opportunity to grit my teeth and make grammar and spelling corrections in the many draft reports I reviewed. My biggest pet peeves were the constant confusion of its/it's, your/you're, to/too, their/there, etc.
I think the situation actually worsened with the advent of word processing software with spell checkers, probably because many writers believed they no longer had to think about correct usage. Unfortunately, most of the errors are real words - they're just the wrong words.
Anyhow, I'm thankful for what the Mrs. Swards and Mrs. Cooks did for some of us. I just wish there were more of them and more of us.
Gus Carlson