Month: September 2008

“… disposing the body …”

Devolution toward Simpler, Prepositions, Verbs

I heard this a couple of weeks ago on a Discovery Channel program.

Problem:
A preposition is missing.

Explanation:
I heard a detective say “… disposing the body …” while discussing a homicide during a Discovery Channel television program.

The correct expression is “… disposing of the body …” because “dispose of” is the verb phrase that means to get rid of or to discard.

I believe that the homicide detective’s omission of the preposition “of” after the verb “dispose” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to omit “of” than to include it.

Another possible reason for omission of the preposition “of” is that the detective mistakenly equated the verb “dispose” with the verb “discard”, the latter of which does not take the preposition.

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:

  • “disposing of the body” — 165,000 matches
  • “disposing the body” — 4,400 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used these three spellings by a ratio of 37.5-to-1, which is good but not excellent.

Solution:
“… disposing of the body …”

“The new manager, John Smith is …”

Commas

I saw a sentence that started like this in an email message yesterday.

Problem:
A comma is missing.

Explanation:
The name “John Smith” is essentially an aside in the sentence.

In other words, the sentence could also have been written to begin as “The new manager is …”.

Therefore, inserting “John Smith” in the sentence requires a comma on either side.

Solution:
“The new manager, John Smith, is …”

“They are the people which pay the bill.”

Pronouns

I read this somewhere recently.

Problem:
The sentence uses the wrong relative pronoun.

Explanation:
The word “which” — spelled W-H-I-C-H — can be used as a relative pronoun to represent a specified antecedent.

Here are two examples of the correct use of “which” as as relative pronoun:

  • In a nonrestrictive clause: “The movie, which I saw last night, was boring.”
  • In a restrictive clause: “The religion which John preached was unacceptable to many.”

The problem with “which” as a relative pronoun in “They are the people which pay the bill.” is that “which” is supposed to refer to inanimate objects and to animals but not to humans.

The correct relative pronoun for referring to humans is “who”. This gives us the solution.

Solution:
“They are the people who pay the bill.”