Kirk Mahoney . com

Americans would say any of these statements:

* “Are you going to church?”

* “He went to school.”

* “They drove to town.”

But nearly no American would say, “She went to hospital.”

Nearly all Americans would say instead, “She went to the hospital.”

In contrast, probably everyone from Great Britain would say, “She went to hospital.”

What fascinates me is that Americans use “the hospital” — with the definite article “the” — to refer vaguely to any hospital, just as they use “church” or “school” or “town” without the definite article “the” to refer vaguely to any church, school, or town, respectively.

Telephone companies refer to an entry in a telephone book as a “listing”.

Real-estate agents refer to an item in a list of for-sale properties as a “listing”.

But the noun “listing” describes the process of creating a list.

I wonder why such an entry in a list is not called a “listed” instead.

The word “listed” makes as much sense as the word “listing” to refer to an entry in a list.

Perhaps the use of “listing” in place of “listed” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

After all, it is simpler to say “listing” than it is to say “listed”.

This is a popular statement in American English now.

For fun, I searched Google for “It is a quality product.” (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 30,100 exact matches.

But this statement means nothing except for the positive implication that speakers and writers want to give it.

Someone usually says “It is a quality product.” to tell the listener that “it” is a high-quality product.

But the noun “quality” by itself has no positive or negative value.

Can you imagine someone, such as a non-native-English speaker, first reading or hearing “It is a quality product.”?

This statement would be meaningless to such a person.

The noun “quality” must be hyphenated with an adjective to form a compound adjective that can indicate the value of the noun — in this case, “product” — that the compound adjective modifies.

In contrast to the inherently meaningless statement “It is a quality product.”, here are some meaningful statements:

• “It is a high-quality product.”
• “It is a low-quality product.”
• “It is a good-quality product.”
• “It is a bad-quality product.”

So respond with a “Huh?” the next time that someone says to you a statement such as “It is a quality product.”, and see what happens.

This is a popular statement in American English now.

For fun, I searched Google for “You have an attitude.” (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 46,200 matches.

But this statement means nothing except for the negative connotation beneath its euphemistic form.

Someone usually says “You have an attitude.” to tell the listener that he or she has a bad or negative attitude.

But the noun “attitude” by itself has no positive or negative value.

Can you imagine someone, such as a non-native-English speaker, first reading or hearing “You have an attitude.”?

The statement would be meaningless to such a person.

The noun “attitude” must be modified by an adjective to give it value.

Otherwise, you are speaking in euphemisms.

This is a bastardization of a nautical phrase.

Problem:
The word “in” is incorrect in this phrase.

Explanation:
The Phrase Finder has a complete explanation of the correct phrase, which is “by and large”, not “by in large”.

Here are the highlights from that superb explanation of “by and large”.

Regarding “large”: The wind is said to be “large” when it is blowing behind a ship’s travel direction.

For example, if you want to sail to the east and the wind is coming out of the west, then “large” is the correct label for the wind.

Regarding “by”: In contrast, to be “by the wind” is to be facing into the wind.

Although many non-sailors see this as a sailing disadvantage, the physics of sailing show that it is advantageous to sail into the wind.

So being able to sail “by and large” means being able to sail not only downwind (the “large” part) but also into the wind (the “up” part).

This explains why the phrase means on the whole.

And one can understand how “by in large” resulted from a lack of understanding about this nautical phrase and a misinterpretation, upon hearing it, of the conjunction “and” as the preposition “in”.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “by and large” — with the conjunction “and” — 5,090,000 matches
• “by in large” — with the preposition “in” — 44,400 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct “by and large” versus the incorrect “by in large” by a ratio of 115-to-1, which is excellent.

Solution:
“by and large”

I heard this yesterday morning on National Public Radio.

Problem:
The possessive form was wrong.

Explanation:
An NPR reporter had recorded someone saying to a group of people, “I went through your guys’s notes.”

Without any more context to help you, you can see that there are two possible interpretations for this statement:

1. The speaker was saying that he had read the notes of the guys who belonged to or were associated with his listeners.
2. The speaker was saying that he had read the notes that belonged to his listeners.

If the full context were such that interpretation #1 were correct, then the solution would be to remove the final “s” from “guys’s” in the statement.

However, the full context of the recording was someone speaking directly to a group and not referring to anyone else.

So interpretation #2 is the correct one.

One can then almost see the train of thought of the speaker when he started to say, “I went through your guys’s notes.”

Step 1: The speaker usually says “you guys” instead of “you” for the plural, second-person pronoun.

Step 2: Starting to make a possessive out of “you guys”, the speaker changed “you” to “yours”.

Step 3: Realizing that “your guys” sounded as if he were referring to people other than his listeners, the speaker added the possessive apostrophe-”s” to “guys” to create “your guys’s”.

Now here is the sad part about this NPR report: The man who was recorded saying the statement “I went through your guys’s notes.” was directly involved in a job-interviewing activity.

Ouch!

Solution:
“I went through your notes.”

I was on a conference call yesterday in which a woman was reporting the results of a survey.

She said something to the effect that 78.23% of those surveyed had chosen “X”.

The four-digit percentage struck me as overkill.

There are two problems with reporting a percentage such as “78.23%” on a telephone call, in a podcast, or on the radio.

1. Numbers generally are difficult to follow when the audience can only listen to the numbers (and cannot see the numbers, too).
2. Higher-precision numbers are more difficult to follow than are lower-precision numbers.

Sure, higher-precision numbers (such as “78.23%”) sound more authoritative than do lower-precision numbers (such as “78%”).

But better communication often means simpler communication.

So take a load off your listeners when you next give an oral report: Report percentages as one- or two-digit numbers instead as three- or four-digit numbers.

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A few years ago I noticed something odd about the television ads, billboards, and signs for the Church’s Chicken restaurant chain.

The logo read “Churchs Chicken” without the required possessive apostrophe between the name “Church” and the letter “s”.

Here is an example of the apostrophe-less logo used by Church’s Chicken up until just a few years ago:

The absence of the apostrophe bugged me but also made me wonder whether the company was omitting the apostrophe for some sort of branding or legal reason.

For example, many trademark experts recommend against using possessives in brand names — and definitely against using a brand name (such as “Kodak”) as a possessive noun (such as “Kodak’s”).

Well the folks at Church’s Chicken apparently realized that the apostrophe-less logo was actually a mistake.

For example, here is an older logo that I found for Church’s Chicken:

As you can see, the older logo did have the apostrophe.

And here is how the Church’s Chicken logo appears at this writing — again with the possessive apostrophe:

So the restaurant chain had the possessive apostrophe, dropped it (for who knows why), and re-added it.

Thank you, Church’s Chicken, for saving the apostrophe!

I could have used “How to get people to stop following you on Twitter” as the title of this blog post.

Yesterday I got eight email messages from UseQwitter.com that various followers of me on Twitter had quit following me.

And get this: All eight quit for the same reason!

“What was the reason?,” you might ask.

I wrote four days ago my first only-personal tweet on Twitter.

All that I wrote was something to the effect of: “Go figure. Weather in Houston is spectacular, but I am sick.”

By the way: Do not look for this tweet now; I deleted it after realizing the error of my ways!

I was imitating someone whom I follow in Austin, who had tweeted something about Austin weather that same day.

But his tweet was not as personal as mine; he simply celebrated the beautiful weather that day.

What those eight Twitter followers of me did — that is, quit following me — actually matches my own behavior about a month ago, when I stopped following a woman who was tweeting like crazy and mostly about personal stuff such as boarding an airplane, going to dinner with someone, and looking for a nightclub to go dancing.

After she started to follow me, I started to follow her because she seemed to have some interesting ideas related to Internet marketing.

But the dominance of her personal tweets over her business tweets made me stop following her.

This is my personal proof that Twitter has become more commercial than personal: I will stop following others when they tweet too much about personal matters, and others stopped following me when I tweeted about one personal matter after my seventy tweets about various business matters.

So my advice to anyone is to take care with the subject matter of one’s tweets.