Why We Get Words Wrong, Part 4: Regionalisms

This fourth of a ten-part series on why we get words wrong looks at cultural differences. 

With all due respect to my family and friends across the Atlantic, the deleted words in the image represent the British spelling and the rewrites the American spelling. Regionalisms extend far beyond these examples (e.g., or/our and ize/ise word endings), but we should not consider such preferences as mistakes. Rather, we should just know for which audience we are writing.

Choose the preferred regional spelling on your word processor, but more than anything else, read material from both sides of the Atlantic to know the differences.  

Why We Get Words Wrong, Part 3: Short Cuts

For this third of a ten-part series on why we get words wrong, think about how you actually speak when you are at your leisure. Do you really pronounce the t's in "We want to go to lunch" or the g's in "We're going swimming"? I know some people who do, but most of us do not. I admit that I don't, although I try harder when speaking in front of a professional group. At my casual best, I probably say, "We wannagoda lunch" and "We're goin swimmin." Linguists have a theory called grammaticalization to account for how some words morph over time as we look for short cuts when speaking.

Of course, we would claim that such pronunciation does not excuse us from misspelling want to, go to, going, and swimming. But this does account for spelling climactic as climatic, could've as could of, formerly as formally, ordinance as ordnance, and supposedly as supposively.

For the third time, I'll say we will get these words right by modeling from what we read, not what we hear.

Why We Get Words Wrong, Part 2: Popular Culture

In this ten-part series, we look at why some of us have so much trouble with getting words right in English. Part 1 mentioned the schwa, a vowel in an unaccented syllable which sounds unlike its short or long sounds. We mess up for many other reasons, one of them being popular culture. Here are three examples.

Bring vs. Take - The rule says you bring to a point and you take from a point, meaning you should take your laptop from work and bring it home. Yet we hear the popular fighting challenge, "You wanna take it outside?" Think about it: If Buddy issues that statement to Guy in a bar, he is taking the fight from inside the bar and bringing it outside the bar. The same holds true with the Doobie Brothers' song "Taking It to the Streets"; once again, they are taking it from wherever they are and bringing it to the streets. If everyone else is saying it that way, who are we to change it?

Alright vs. All Right - How many songs in your music collection spell all right as alright? Some might include "It's Gonna Be Alright" by the Gerry and the Pacemakers, the same-title-different-song later by the Ramones, "Well Alright" by Blind Faith, and the triple threat "Alright Alright Alright" by Mungo Jerry. True, Bob Dylan got it right with "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" as did the film The Kids Are All Right. But the other evidence remains powerful, so many people are amazed when they learn that alright is not Standard English.

Fewer vs. Less - The sign in the supermarket usually says, "This aisle is for 10 items or less," although the rule tells us to use fewer with plurals. For this reason, we might understandably but incorrectly say, "I made less mistakes."

Again, how will we get these words right? Not by speaking more but by reading more.

Why We Get Words Wrong, Part 1: The Schwa

So many people often misspell or confuse words in English, as the image here shows. But is it any wonder? Each post of this ten-part series covers a different reason why we get words wrong. Let's start with how we pronounce words. Consider what the red letters in the names below have in common:

• Adam
• Evelyn
• Philip
• Anthony
• Ursula 

Have you figured it out? They sound identical. They are unstressed sounds in an unaccented syllable. All the vowels are in the list (a, e, i, o, and u), yet they hardly have a sound, nothing like their accented short sound (appetizer, evidence, incident, community, and understand) or long sound (ace, evil, iron, over, and usurp), as we were taught in elementary school. We call this unstressed sound a schwa.

Latin languages and many others do not use a schwa, but native English speakers do. So words like affect and effect, council and counsel, and principal and principle sound the same. As writers, we will get these words right not by listening but by reading.  

BOOK BRIEF: "Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace" by Joseph M. Williams

Serious students of the writing craft should read Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, now in its eleventh edition. Used widely in university composition classes, Joseph Williams's classic book explains the reasoning that drives writing excellence and offers practical advice in cultivating a quality style. (Style is now coauthored with Joseph Bizup since Williams passed away in 2008.)

The ten in-depth chapters of Style focus on specific, well-structured rhetorical lessons, including clarity, cohesion, emphasis, concision, elegance, and usage. The tips are practical, and the illustrative passages come from a broad range of contemporary disciplines. Those who are experienced enough to know that many writing "rules" are little more than picayune encumbrances will take pleasure where Williams debunks these silly standards: 

• Don't begin a sentence with and or but.
• Don't end a sentence with a preposition.
• Don't split infinitives.
• Don't use double negatives.

Many more rule-breakers appear in this guidebook. For the sake of freshness, Williams seems comfortable with employing the comma splice, as in "Women have always been underpaid, they are now doing something about it," and omitting the comma between two grammatical sentences with a conjunction, as in "Oscar Wilde brazenly violated one of the fundamental laws of British society and we all know what happened to him." While you may not agree with all he has to say about clarity and grace, you will surely concede that he sensibly navigates through the politics of prose.

BOOK BRIEF: "Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews"

The Paris Review Interviews is a perfect start for learning about or deepening your understanding of (1) the history of twentieth and twenty-first century literature, (2) the most enriching books to read, (3) biographies of master writers, (4) varied approaches to the writing process, and (5) insights into the human condition. This four-volume collection, each featuring 16 interviews, will cover a full summer of beach reading and never fail to entertain, educate, and inspire. Here is the all-star, eclectic list of 64 critics, essayists, novelists, playwrights, poets, and screenwriters included in the series:

• Volume 1 (2006): Dorothy Parker (1956). Truman Capote (1957), Ernest Hemingway (1958), T. S. Eliot (1959), Saul Bellow (1966), Jorge Luis Borges (1967), Kurt Vonnegut (1977), James M. Cain (1978), Rebecca West (1981), Elizabeth Bishop (1981), Robert Stone (1984), Robert Gottlieb (1994), Richard Price (1996), Billy Wilder (1996), Jack Gilbert (2005), and Joan Didion (2006).
• Volume 2 (2007): Graham Greene (1953), James Thurber (1955), William Faulkner (1956), Robert Lowell (1961), Isaac Bashevis Singer (1968), Eudora Welty (172), John Gardner (1979), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1981), Philip larking (1982), James Baldwin (1984), William Gaddis (1987), Harold Bloom (1991), Tony Morrison (1993), Alice Munro (1994), Peter Carey (2006), and Stephen King (2006).
• Volume 3 (2008): Ralph Ellison (1955) George Simenon (1955), Isak Dinesen (1956), Evelyn Waugh (1963), William Carlos Williams (1964), Harold Pinter (1966), John Cheever (1976), Joyce Carol Oates (1978), Jean Rhys (1979), Raymond Carver (1983), Chinua Achebe (1984), Ted Hughes (1995), Jan Morris (1997), Martin Amis (1998), Salman Rushdie (2005), and Norman Mailer (2007).
• Volume 4 (2009): William Styron (1954), Marianne Moore (1960), Ezra Pound (1962), Jack Kerouac (1968), E. B. White (1969),  P. G. Wodehouse (1975), John Ashbery (1983), Philip Roth (1984), Maya Angelou (1990), Stephen Sondheim (1997), V. S. Naipaul (1998), Paul Auster (2003), Haruki Murakami (2004), Orhan Pamuk (2005), David Grossman (2007), and Marilynne Robinson (2008). 

You can sample these interviews and many more--a total of 427 since 1953 as of this post--at the legendary Paris Review website.  

BOOK BRIEF: "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker

You cannot go wrong by reading a Steven Pinker book on language because you're bound to learn something. The Sense of Style has plenty to offer to those who have always felt that many English grammar rules border on the ridiculous as well as to those grammar snobs who wish to restrain prose writers in a linguistic straitjacket devoid of all imagination and elegance. 

Early in this book, which serves as both an argument for clear reasoning about language issues and a writing style guide, Pinker makes the revelatory statement that all successful writers he knows do not use a style guide such as The Elements of Style, The Business Writer's Handbook, or The Gregg Reference Manual. In fact, they learn to write by reading relentlessly, co-opting the style of admired authors until they cultivate their own.

As he does in The Language Instinct, Pinker cogently explains that grammar rules are arbitrary, therefore inviting the professional writer to take liberties with them in the name of original, fluent style. He takes on many of the myths about "correct" grammar, comparing popular belief with expert opinion and concluding with his own practical solutions. This book is worth a patient read.