Woe Is I The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English

by O'Conner, Patricia T.

• ISBN13: 9781573226257
• ISBN10: 1573226254
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-08-01
• Publisher: Riverhead Trade

Summary

Unlike, say, Latin, English is a livinglanguage - and, like all living things, it grows, it changes, and it can be messy and confusing. With this witty, best-selling guide to grammar, you can get a grasp on the subtleties of the language - without the kind of jargon that tempted you to cut your high-school English class. Former New York Times Book Revieweditor Patricia O'Conner offers a delightfully down-to-earth course for anyone who wants to speak and write more clearly, in ten easy lessons. 'Light-hearted and funny... It's like Strunk and White combined with S. J. Perelman - none of whom would have had the slightest objection.' Daniel Pinkwater, The New York Times Book Review 'Wow! Who would have thought that you could have such a delicious time with a grammar book? Woe is Iis great fun.' Susan Isaacs

Excerpts

Chapter 1Woe Is ITherapy for Pronoun AnxietyWhen a tiny word gives you a big headache, it's probably a pronoun. Pronouns are usually small (I, me, he, she, it), but they're among the biggest troublemakers in the language. If you've ever been picked on by the pronoun police, don't despair. You're in good company. Hundreds of years after the first Ophelia cried "Woe is me," only a pedant would argue that Shakespeare should have written "Woe is I" or "Woe is unto me." (Never mind that the rules of English grammar weren't even formalized in Shakespeare's day.) The point is that no one is exempt from having his pronouns second-guessed. Put simply, a pronoun is an understudy for a noun. Hemay stand in for "Ralph," shefor "Alice," theyfor "the Kramdens," and itfor "the stuffed piranha." Why do we need them? Take the following sentence: Ralph smuggled his stuffed piranha into the Kramdens' apartment, sneaked it out of his jacket, and was slipping it into his wife's curio cabinet, when suddenly Alice walked into their living room, clutched her heart, and screamed, "You get that out of my house!"If no one had invented pronouns, here's how that sentence would look: Ralph smuggled Ralph's stuffed piranha into the Kramdens' apartment, sneaked the stuffed piranha out of Ralph's jacket, and was slipping the stuffed piranha into Ralph's wife's curio cabinet, when suddenly Alice walked into the Kramdens' living room, clutched Alice's heart, and screamed, "Ralph, get the stuffed piranha out of Alice's house!"See how much time pronouns save? Simple substitutions (like hisfor Ralph's) are easy enough. Things get complicated when a pronoun, like any good understudy, takes on different guises, depending on the roles it plays in the sentence. Some pronouns are so well disguised that you may not be able to tell one from another. Enter thatand which; it'sand its; who'sand whose; whoand whom; everybodyand nobody; and their, they're, and theirs. Now let's round up the usual suspects, as well as a few other shady characters. The Which Trials: That or Which?Bite on one of these: Nobody likes a dog that bitesor Nobody likes a dog which bites. If they both sound right, you've been spooked by whiches(the first example is the correct one). The old that-versus-whichproblem haunts everybody sooner or later. Here are two rules to help you figure out whether a clause (a group of words with its own subject and verb) should start with thator which. l If you can drop the clause and not lose the point of the sentence, use which. If you can't, use that. l A whichclause goes inside commas. A thatclause doesn't. Now let's put the rules to work. Look at these two sentences: Buster's bulldog, which had one white ear, won best in show.The dog that won best in show was Buster's bulldog.The point of each sentence is that Buster's dog won. What happens when we remove the thator whichclause? In the first example, the whichclause (which had one white ear) is disposable-without it, we still have the gist of the sentence: Buster's bulldog won best in show. But in the second example, the thatclause (that won best in show) is essential. The sentence misses the point without it: The dog was Buster's bulldog. Some people consider whichmo