Better and Best

Matthew Watson asks:

For some time, I have been wondering about constructions like “He better tell me,” which use “better” as a modal verb. I have always used a separate auxiliary like “had” (e.g. “He had better tell me”) and parsed the sentence as a truncated sort of comparative statement (e.g. short for “He had better tell me than not”). However, I have read so many good writers now that use “better” by itself that I am beginning to think the construction has become an idiom.

Do you know what’s correct - should I use “had” with “better,” and how do you parse a solitary “better”?

Let’s Be Safe Than Sorry

Here’s a post that’s been sitting in my pile of drafts for more than two years. I know it’s been that long; just look at the “current events” item from January 2006 that it starts out with:

Last week, David Lee Roth’s morning radio show in New York (a replacement for Howard Stern’s program) was canceled, after less than four months, following bad reviews, low ratings, and conflict with the station management. I learned about the situation in an AP story the week before the cancelation. In it, the editor of a radio trade publication was quoted as saying:

I think the radio industry expects this will end sooner than later.

FDR RNW

They played a clip on NPR yesterday of Franklin Roosevelt’s first fireside chat, which had taken place exactly 71 years earlier, March 12, 1933. At the end of the address he said:

We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system; it is up to you to support and make it work.

A 71-year-old right-node wrapping (aka “Friends in Low Places” coordination). To refresh the memory: an RNW has the form

A and B C D

but means the same thing as “A C and B C D” — not, as you’d expect in a completely parallel coordinate structure, “A C D and B C D”. In this case:

• A = support
• B = make
• C = it
• D = work

and the meaning is “support it and make it work”, not “support it work and make it work”.

One other thing I noticed in the excerpt on NPR was that Roosevelt said:

You people must have faith.

I guess you people hadn’t acquired the strong connotations of reprimand, disapproval, or prejudice that it does today. (Or maybe it had, and that’s the tone FDR wanted to take, but that doesn’t seem very likely, given that FDR was trying to encourage the citizenry.) I wonder when that happened?

Jump-Roping

There was an eye-catching action shot on the front page of a community newspaper this week. It was taken in an elementary school gym, and showed a first-grade girl jumping rope. (It seems all the local elementary schools do a unit on jumping rope around this time of year.) The photographer had caught her in mid-air, legs bent, arms out, red hair flying out horizontally, and a grin on her face (the usual place for grins to appear, I believe). It was such a neat shot that I showed it to Doug and Adam.

“What’s she doing?” asked Doug as he took the paper. “Oh, she’s jump-roping.”

“Jump-roping, huh?” I said. “Is that how you say it?” I handed the paper to Adam. “What would you say she’s doing, Adam? Jumping rope, or jump-roping?”

Adam thought for a second, then said, “Jumping rope.”

“Well, jump-roping is what all my friends say,” Doug told us.

I get 418K Google hits for “jumping rope”, and 127K for “jumproping”, “jump roping”, and “jump ropeing” combined. There were enough hits for jump-roping compared to jumping rope that my suspicion is that jump-roping has been around for quite a while. I don’t have any data correlating these forms with age, so I can’t say if jump-roping is something that’s only recently caught on. However, if Doug’s friends are representative of the general population of American English-speaking kids, I’m getting a feeling of deja vu.

On or By Accident

In my last post, I mentioned an episode of Grammar Girl’s podcast that I had found particularly interesting, about by accident and on accident. In case you haven’t listened to that episode or read the transcript, here it is again. (Also interesting: this post at Mother Tongue Annoyances on the same topic.) In this episode, Grammar Girl summarizes the findings of Leslie Barratt of Indiana State University, which can be found here (watch out, one of the tables is messed up, and doesn’t match the graph it goes with). In short, Barratt finds that:

1. speakers born before about 1970 hardly use on accident at all;
2. speakers born between 1970 and 1995 use on accident and by accident (sometimes even an individual speaker will use both);
3. speakers born after 1995 use on accident to the near exclusion of by accident.

This is not just speakers in one region; she surveyed speakers in Indiana, Michigan, California, and Georgia, from different socioeconomic classes.

What could have caused such a sudden shift to the almost complete displacement of by accident in speakers born after 1995? Barratt doesn’t know, but she does know one thing:

It’s a Word! It’s a Phrase! It’s Grammar Girl!

For a while I’d been noticing a podcast called Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Clean Up Your Writing when I browsed through the podcasts at iTunes. I never subscribed to it because first of all, I’m pretty comfortable with my grammar, and second, I figured it would be the same old things grammar and writing guides are always telling you: don’t use the passive voice; don’t use hopefully as a sentential adverb; in fact, avoid adverbs wherever possible. But I finally got curious enough to check out a few episodes, and what a surprise! The podcasts present traditional grammar rules, provide nonjudgmental observations of what’s actually happening in the language when the rules don’t reflect common usage, and give practical advice on what to do when faced with these mismatches. Even better, Grammar Girl will get into linguistic topics when doing so will help explain a grammar point. And just a couple of episodes ago, she talked about a linguistic topic apparently just because it was interesting all by itself.

I Love The

Since October, Doug and Adam’s piano teacher has been assigning them exclusively Christmas songs. Each week she’s assigned a couple more, and told them to keep playing the ones they’ve mastered so that they can play them at an informal recital. By now they have a repertoire of about a dozen songs each, but Doug strives to do his daily practice in the same amount of time as he took when he tackled his first two Christmas songs. He’s been treating us to “Jingle Bells,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and “Joy to the World” as fast as he can play them. As loud as he can, too. It’s even weirder when he plays his fast, loud versions of “Silent Night” and “Away in a Manger.”

Ah, yes, “Away in a Manger.” The song I played a crummy rendition of on the xylophone in front of my second grade class. Source of “till morning is night”. And come to think of it, source of another misheard lyric.

Whomever Is Never Actually Right

My wife and I watched this week’s episode of The Office last night, which featured the following scene (20:55 into the online version, accessible here):

Ryan: What I really want, honestly Michael, is for you to know it, so that you can communicate it to the people here, to your clients, to whomever.
Michael: [chuckle] OK.
Ryan: What?
Michael: It’s whoever, not whomever.
Ryan: No, it’s whomever.
Michael: No, whomever is never actually right.

Appendix Contamination

No, this isn’t about bacteria; it’s about back matter. Back in July, Doug was on spoiler alert even after he’d finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Articles about Harry Potter and J. K. Rowling kept mentioning The Lord of the Rings, so Doug quit reading them to avoid running into a LOTR spoiler. He decided he’d better start reading the series now, before a spoiler got through his defenses.

I warned him: He’d better be prepared to plow through the boring parts fast to get to the good stuff. When I first tried to read The Two Towers, I got so bored with what was going on with Aragorn et al. that I skipped ahead to see what Frodo and Sam were up to. Before I knew it, I’d reached the end of the book, and couldn’t bring myself to go back and finish reading the other part. But Doug has prevailed: He read The Hobbit and got all the way through books one and two of LOTR.

Now he’s on book three, which isn’t as long as it looks because the back is stuffed with not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, but six appendices and an index. Doug was flipping through the back, and asked me:

What’s an appindex?

“It’s an ap-pen-dix,” I told him, and explained it was where you put details on things some readers might find interesting, but which would slow down the story. Doug started looking at them more closely: “Appindex A: Annals of the Kings and Rulers.”

There it was again: appindex. Looks like Adam’s not the only one in our family to have produced a contaminated linguistic form. Two words with a phonetic resemblance, index and appendix, dragged into even closer phonetic resemblance because of their semantic commonality: “stuff in the back of a book.” That’s contamination, all right.

Addendum: I’ve learned that appindex is a real word, a compound of app(lication) and index.

Choose to Make Good Choices

Doug and I were reading the rule book for his school earlier this month. We had to sign a form saying we’d each read and understood it, so we read every last page of it over the course of a few suppertimes. Ah, yes, I remember it like it was just a few weeks ago…

We’d reached the section on playground rules. “Hmmm…” I said. “‘Students must go up on ladders.’ So, does that mean if you want to go up, you have to do it on a ladder? Or does it mean that if you are on a ladder, you can only go up and not down?”