A friend got an email the other day from his bank. The subject line read, "Tips for Protecting Your Business' Information From American Bank."
He messaged me about this, noting, "My question is: Why do we have to protect our business' information from American Bank? I thought they were on our side."
The Grammar Police send me sentences like this all the time, so I thought this was a good occasion to share a bunch of them. It seems to me that the grab-bag explanation for them is a problem with structural ambiguity, sometimes involving misplaced modifiers. In this case, the phrase "from American Bank," intended to modify "tips," is in the wrong place.
The most famous example of this comes from the movie "Mary Poppins," where this problem figures in one of several jokes.
While chimney sweep Bert, Uncle Albert and the children are floating on the ceiling, Bert remarks, "Speakin' o' names, I know a man with a wooden leg named Smith."
Uncle Albert replies, "What's the name of his other leg?"
(I preferred an earlier joke in which a man inadvertently runs over a family's cat — that's not the part I like, of course — and comes to their door, where he tells the woman who answers, "I'd like to replace your cat." She replies, "That's all right with me, but how are you with catching mice?")
Here's a sampling of other sentences people have sent me in recent months, all sufficiently ambiguous that they reasonably can be read to say something the writer didn't intend.
• From a story about the state Farm Show: "He's a purveyor of poultry with unruly black and gray whiskers …" The reader who sent me that one commented, "Oh, the purveyor had the whiskers! Somehow the mental picture from my first reading was more fascinating."
• From the subject line on a daily e-newsletter: "Teen Punches Fly at Roller Rink …" The reader wrote, "Was it a fatal blow or did the fly continue to harass the poor teen?"
• A headline, sent to me by a few people: "Allentown woman ran into a barn during snow, police say." One of the readers wrote, "I wonder if they found her by following her footsteps?"
• Another headline: "Ex-state lawmaker admits beating wife and DUI." The reader wrote, "He didn't beat the DUI; he got three to 23 months in the clink!"
• From a police story, actually sent to me for an unrelated error in which people named Stephanie and Victoria were referred to as though they were men: "The charge arose for allegedly tossing an object from a vehicle which struck a pedestrian …" I suspect the object, not the vehicle, struck the pedestrian.
Moving on to another familiar subject, I got an email about nouns being hijacked as verbs. This is something of an obsession with this particular reader, but he always sends me good ones. Here's what he wrote:
"The hot new one seems to be 'primaried,' as in, 'Republican members of Congress are afraid to cooperate with Obama for fear of being primaried in 2014.' This will allow reporters to combine two hot nouns as verbs: 'Party leaders will be tasked with determining which wayward members should be primaried in 2014.'" We should dialogue further about that.
Several readers pointed out a Morning Call promotional ad that offered "Season's Reading's." Since I've been harping on plurals inadvertently turned into plurals, they were justified in calling us on Reading's, which shouldn't have that apostrophe.
Speaking of punctuation, here's an oddity that a reader recalled after seeing my "Let's Eat, Grandma/Let's Eat Grandma" T-shirt photo and one of my Christmas quiz questions.
He wrote, "Back in the early '70s a bunch of us were going through some trivia, and this question came up: Where do you place the comma in the Christmas hymn 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen'? We all thought it should go between the words 'Ye' and 'Merry,' but the correct answer is between the words 'Merry' and 'Gentlemen'. It seems the phrase 'God rest ye merry' is an old English greeting. I even checked it out again at Christmas in our church hymnal."
I checked it, too, and he's right. Next time I use it in a quiz, I'll make sure it's punctuated correctly.
By the way, there's more than one grammar-oriented T-shirt out there. A reader told me about one that says, "Grammar Police: To Correct and Serve." I looked it up and found them on coffee cups, bags, hats and buttons, too.
Another reader pointed out a further/farther gaffe in a New York Times column. The sentence read: "It was a society in which you could travel much further and faster than ever before …" The reader explained, "I remember learning to think 'far' for 'farther,' meaning physical distance."
Finally, a reader sent me a newspaper ad for Apple iPods, which it said are "Engineered for maximum funness." The reader questioned whether Apple would pay a college graduate to write "such a piece of bullbleep … Steve Jobs must be turning in his grave, and clawing to get out."
He added, "Besides, everyone knows that it's funosity."
bill.white@mcall.com 610-820-6105
Bill White's commentary appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
