Author: Kirk

“He wanted to play so bad …”

Adjectives, Adverbs, Common English Blunders

I heard this the other day when a woman was talking about her son having a strong desire to play baseball.

Problems:
1. The adjective should be an adverb.
2. What would be the adverbial phrase is adjacent to the wrong verb.

Explanation:
This sentence illustrates two common English blunders:

  1. The speaker used an adjective as an adverb.
  2. The speaker put the (defective) adverbial phrase next to the wrong verb.

The word “bad” is an adjective; one must add “ly” to make it an adverb (“badly”), which is required to modify a verb.

The meaning of “badly” when modifying “play” could easily be the first definition of the adverb: in an undesirable way.

In contrast, another meaning of the adverb “badly” is very much, and this definition would make sense when “badly” modifies “wanted” in the sentence.

The word “so” is used informally as an adverb to mean extremely or very.

So the meaning of “so badly” is very, very much when this adverbial phrase follows the verb “wanted”.

“He wanted very, very much to play …” makes more sense than “He wanted to play in an undesirable way …” when someone is talking about a strong desire instead of a poor performance.

Solution:
“He wanted so badly to play …”

“… for the both of us.”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Conjunctions, Hypercorrection, Pronouns

My wife heard this a couple of days ago on television.

Problem:
The definite article “the” is incorrect in this phrase.

Explanation:
The word “both” is an adjective that means two together (e.g., “I saw both suspects.”), a pronoun that means the one as well as the other (e.g., “Both of them were flying to Paris.”, or a conjunction that means alike or equally (e.g., “Jim is both tall and handsome.”).

It’s clear, then, that the word “both” was used as a pronoun in the phrase that my wife heard.

Pronouns do not take articles in front of them, so “the both” is always incorrect.

Beyond that, one can see that “the” (or “a”) should never precede “both” in a sentence.

For fun, I searched Google for “the both” (with quotation marks) and got about 2,130,000 matches. Some of those matches were for grammatically correct forms such as “the Both Sides Now album”; most, though, were incorrect.

I believe that this common English blunder sometimes indicates hypercorrection: if “both” is good, then “the both” must be better. Wrong!

Solution:
“… for both of us.”

“Do to limitations …”

Devolution toward Simpler, Idioms

I saw this in a technical document.

Problem:
“Do” is the wrong word here.

Explanation:
“Due” is the right word here because “due to” is an idiom that means attributable to.

The writer could have missed the mistake because “do” and “due” sound alike to most Americans.

The writer could have made the mistake because he or she did not know that “due” is the correct word.

In any case, I believe that use of “do” in place of “due” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It’s simpler to write “do” (two letters) than to write “due” (three letters).

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

  • “due to limitations” — 703,000 matches
  • “do to limitations” — 505 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the idiom correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 1,392:1, which is excellent!

Solution:
“Due to limitations …”