Grammar Patrol: English has a way of doing more than one thing... with only one thing!

Contributed By:Dorothy Nevils

If someone asked me the most difficult tangled grammar mess to straighten out, I’d say right, off the bat, the comma… and the “S mess.”

So how does such a mess get started, and then continue for years on end – in face of all efforts to isolate and eradicate it – for the same eternity? The answer, me thinks, is duplicity. English has a way of doing more than one thing… with only one thing!

Consider, if you will, the S. If you were asked the job description of that letter, your first response might be “to pluralize” a noun: From one shoe to two or more shoes. Add an s makes one shoe more than one. That’s not really a problem… IF we’d leave it there; but we don’t. We have to go further and add another variable: We have to introduce something completely off the drawing board, in a completely different category.

Enter the verb: We don’t pluralize the verb. On the contrary, we deal with just the opposite, verbs to go with singular nouns. Those singular fellas need an s on any verb they “hook up” with; and that’s the bed of a host of problems. Lots of people, especially urban dwellers, simply ignore that rule…no matter what the grammar books say!

I can’t claim to know why this is the case, but I’m thinking it’s a matter of short-changing, of “getting over” – yes, of laziness, learned laziness. It seems that there is a segment of the population who opt for taking the easiest route… the ones who, as I likened in speech class, cut corners across the lawn, rather than taking the 3 or 4 seconds to go to the corner and make a right angle turn. Saving a couple of seconds is not worth “the ugly”created by the shortcut!

Then, we take a legitimate s off a legitimate word and stick an apostrophe where it legitimately lived, and move that s down to the end of the word… instead of letting the original s do its duty by adding an apostrophe and another s to make it possessive.

But, darn it, we don’t even stop there! We have to bring in that ol’ crooked fella, the apostrophe, and we just stick it wherever, and omit it whenever! How many times have you read a Facebook entry proclaiming something “in Jesus name,” omitting both the apostrophe, and the s that should be added to an already complete word!

If you look back, you’ll see that I’ve tackled these two ornery cases several times, teachers have no doubt tackled them, and grammar books have pages and pages with these very simple instructions.

Evidently there is an abundance of nonbelievers who refuse to submit to all of these, marching along stubbornly down the road of bad grammar… and loving it! It’s not too late, however, to turn from your ungrammatical ways. Do it today!

Story Posted:07/09/2017