Kirk Mahoney . com

Yesterday I wrote about days that I like to label as “Prepositions Gone Wild”.

Today I want to discuss the complement to this: what I like to label as “Prepositions Gone Missing”.

Again, I have to wonder when, where, why, and how American instruction about English prepositions went astray.

There seems to be a growing trend for many Americans to omit necessary prepositions.

And this trend seems to be consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. Omitting prepositions is simpler than including them.

The “Prepositions Gone Missing” label applies to any of these expressions:

• “arrived home”
• “graduated high school”
• “graduated college”
• “graduated university”

I wrote a blog post more than a year ago about “graduated college”. Similar discussions would apply for “graduated high school” and “graduated university”.

The travel-related use of the verb “arrive” requires a preposition between the verb and the destination.

Just as one does not “arrive the Moon” or “arrive England”, one does not “arrive home”.

Instead, one “arrives on the Moon”, “arrives in England”, or “arrives at home”.

Have you noticed any other common expressions with necessary prepositions that have been omitted? Please contact me, and I will write about them here!

Some days I can barely contain myself.

Those are the days that I like to label as “Prepositions Gone Wild”.

As with the barely-legal women who flaunt more than they should in the “Girls Gone Wild” videos, it seems that many Americans like to flaunt more prepositions than they should.

When, where, why, and how did American instruction about prepositions go astray?

In particular, why are so many Americans prone to inserting extraneous prepositions into their speech and writing? How did they learn to do this? When and where did this happen? Were they absent that day from school? Did they not get the memo?

A “Prepositions Gone Wild” day is a day that I hear at least two of these phrases:

• “for free”
• “on yesterday”
• “on today”
• “on tomorrow”
• “where at“

Here is a blog post about each of the above phrases:

• “Download it for free.”
• “I saw him on yesterday.”
• “It will start on today.”
• “I’ll bring that to you on tomorrow.”
• “… where it has a scar at now.”

Have you noticed any other common phrases with extraneous prepositions? Please contact me, and I will write about them here!

I overheard this yesterday.

Problem:
The adverb “back” in “report back” is redundant.

Explanation:
The verb “report” comes from the Latin verb “reportare”, which means to carry back.

So the meaning of “report back” would be to carry back back.

Because the “re” in “report” means back, one could argue that those who “report back” would never reach their intended audience.

For fun, I searched Google for the expression “report back” (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 3,740,000 matches.

This is depressing.

Solution:
“They dotted-line report to Becky.”

I often hear one of these expressions when the other one is required.

Problem:
These two expressions are not synonyms.

Explanation:
My wife recently heard a man say, “I will wait on you in the car.”

The preposition “on” bothered her, and we discussed how frequently each of us has heard “wait on” when “wait for” was required.

The common English blunder seems to be to use a form of “wait on” when a form of “wait for” is required.

Someone who “waits on” someone else is acting as a waiter or waitress.

So “I will wait on you in the car.” literally means “I will act as your waiter (or waitress) in the car.”

The man whom my wife heard should have said “I will wait for you in the car.” because that person was not saying that he would act as a waiter in “the car”.

Solution:
Use “… wait on you …” when you are a waiter or waitress; otherwise use “… wait for you …”.

When it comes to language, beware of “language groupthink”.

Wikipedia says that the term “groupthink” was coined in 1952 by William H. Whyte in the magazine Fortune and that it is “a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas”.

Perhaps I am using the word “groupthink” differently than what Mr. Whyte intended, but I also see groupthink as applicable to the language that a group of people uses.

“Language groupthink” would be my term for this phenomenon.

For example, when I encounter a new acronym and ask people in the group that coined the acronym about that acronym, I often will get the general meaning of the acronym but often will not get the words behind the letters in the acronym.

In other words, a language groupthink overtakes the members of the group to the extent that nobody or almost nobody questions the origins of the group’s acronyms!

Another example relates to a misused word. It is extremely common in the telecommunications industry to use the noun “premise” to refer to a customer’s physical location.

As I wrote fifteen months ago, the correct noun for referring to a location is “premises”, not “premise”.

In other words, a language groupthink apparently overtook the telecommunications industry years ago to the point that many in the industry today continue to use “premise” when they mean “premises”.

You may have encountered other examples of language groupthink. If you have an example that might be of interest to fellow readers of this blog, then please send it to me and let me know whether you want me to give you attribution for the example.

Happy Language Non-Groupthinking!

I often hear people use one word when they mean the other.

Problem:
These two nouns are not synonyms.

Explanation:
I often hear people say something like “I have a theory about …”, such as “about why Janey stays out late” or “about why Jim does not like his boss” or “about why women generally have more close friends than do men”.

The primary definition of the noun “theory” is a substantiated group of statements that explain a set of phenomena.

In contrast, the primary meaning of the noun “hypothesis” is a proposed, tentative explanation for an observation or phenomenon.

As noted at Wikipedia, “A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.”

So one starts with observations, then formulates hypotheses to explain those observations, and then tests those hypotheses. Once those hypotheses have been validated, one can create a theory.

I believe that the common English blunder of using the word “theory” where the word “hypothesis” is required is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. (Note that I call this a hypothesis, not a theory!)

It is simpler to say or write the two-syllable, six-letter “theory” than it is to say or write the four-syllable, ten-letter “hypothesis”.

Solution:
Use “hypothesis” for a proposition to explain an observation. Use “theory” to refer to an analysis of a collection of facts and their relation to each other.

I saw this today in a Vonage commercial.

Problem:
The adverb does not match the tense of the verb.

Explanation:
The adverb “yet” means at the present time.

The expression “didn’t leave” is in the past tense, so “yet” does not go with “didn’t leave” (or any other expression in the past tense).

In other words, it makes no sense to say, “Hope you didn’t leave at the present time.”

To fix this, one must change the expression to the present tense.

Solution:
“Hope you have not left yet.”

I heard this expression last evening on a Travel Channel television program.

Problems:
1. The verbs are incorrect.
2. A preposition is missing.

Explanation:
The TV program was reviewing night life in Las Vegas.

One of the featured locations was a night club in which performers sit and stand on swings hung from the ceiling.

The narrator claimed that an exciting feature was that the club had “swings that raise and lower from the ceiling”.

The first problem is that the verbs “raise” and “lower” are transitive verbs — that is, verbs that require both a direct subject and one or more objects — whereas intransitive verbs — that is, verbs that do not take an object — are required here.

Examples of transitive verbs include “cut” and “hit” and “put”.

Examples of intransitive verbs include “die” and “rot” and “sit”.

“Swings that raise and lower from the ceiling” requires intransitive verbs, and “rise” and “fall” are the appropriate corrections to “raise” and “lower”, respectively.

These corrections give us “swings that rise and fall from the ceiling”.

I believe that this use of “raise” and “lower” as intransitive verbs is connected to the use of “lay” as an intransitive verb — as in “Please lay down now!” — through a popular but incorrect assumption that transitive verbs are interchangeable with intransitive verbs.

The second problem is a lack of parallelism. It makes no sense to say “rise from the ceiling”, so the first and second verbs may not share the preposition “from”.

Instead, the verb “rise” requires its own preposition in relation to “the ceiling”. That required preposition is “to”.

I believe that the omission of “to” after the first verb is related to the common English blunder of omitting all prepositions but the final one in a list of verbs in a sentence. My impression is that this blunder comes from speakers and writers not thinking ahead, perhaps because they were not taught about the importance of parallelism in sentences.

Solution:
“swings that rise to and fall from the ceiling”

I often see these two words used interchangeably.

Problem:
These two nouns are not synonyms.

Explanation:
Identical pronunciation of these two nouns makes them homophones, as noted at Wikipedia.

The word “calorie” — with a lowercase “c” — means an amount of heat equal to 4.184 joules.

In case you do not remember your basic physics, one “joule” refers to the work done by a force of one newton acts through a distance of one meter or to the current of one ampere passed for one second through a resistance of one ohm.

The word “Calorie” — with a capital “C” — means 1000 calories (with a lowercase “c”), also known as a “kilocalorie” (also with a lowercase “c”).

The common English blunder is to write “Calorie” — with a capital “C” — as “calorie” — with a lowercase “c” — when referring to the energy value of a food item.

For example, a “2000-calories-per-day diet” — with a lowercase “c” — would provide almost no energy and might have been suitable for Mahatma Gandhi when he was on a hunger strike.

Aside: I recently saw a beautifully shot movie titled “Water” that weaves Gandhi into a story set in India. The story was fascinating and touching, and the acting was excellent. I highly recommend it!

In contrast, a “2000-Calories-per-day diet” — with a capital “C” — would be on the order of magnitude of what many adults require to maintain their body weights.

Solution:
Remember that capital “C” is larger than lowercase “c”, just as “Calorie” with a capital “C” is larger — in fact, one thousand times larger — than “calorie” with a lowercase or small “c”. When referring to the energy value of food, use “Calorie” with a capital “C”.

I thought about these nouns after seeing what I considered to be a misuse of one of them the other day.

Problem:
Many people are confused about which noun to use for which group of people.

Explanation:
My wife received in the mail two days ago a publication by her undergraduate and graduate-school alma mater.

The publication had a page devoted to one of its graduates.

The graduate was a woman, and the title on the page was “Alumni Profile” followed by her name.

I consider “Alumni” in the title to be inappropriate. I would have used “Alumna” instead. Here is the explanation.

The noun “alumnus” means a male graduate or former student of a particular university, college, or school.

The noun “alumna” means a female graduate or former student of a particular university, college, or school.

The noun “alumni” means male graduates or former students of a particular university, college, or school.

The noun “alumnae” means female graduates or former students of a particular university, college, or school.

Many colleges and universities use “alumni” to refer to males and females. This is analogous to the use of the masculine plural form in Spanish when referring to a group of only males or to a group of males and females.

Historically female colleges and universities that now accept males take a different tack: they use “alumnae and alumni” or “alumnae/i” to refer to their collective group of female and male graduates.

Solution:
Use “alumna” for a woman. Use “alumnae” for a group of women. Use “alumnus” for a man. Use “alumni” for a group of men or for a group of men and women. Never call an individual “an alumni” of a school, college, or university.