By: Monica Gupta,
on 7/21/2016
मेरा देश बदल रहा है ये गीत नही बल्कि प्रश्नवाचक चिन्ह लिए है ?सडक पर हो या टीवी पर.मार काट, लडाई झगडा, जातीय हिंसा, राजनीति, अमर्यादित शर्मनाक बोल, महिला असुरक्षा, भटकता युवा, दलित मुद्दा, असहिष्णुता और भी न जाने क्या क्या मुद्दे हमारे भारत देश में छाए हुए है.. लग रहा है कभी सोने की चिडिया […]
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By: Lauren,
on 1/26/2011
I have collected many examples about which I would like to hear the opinion of our correspondents. Perhaps I should even start an occasional column under the title “A Word Lover’s Complaint.”
Hanging as. Everybody must have seen sentences like the following: “…as the president, our cares must be your concern.” This syntax seems to be acceptable in American English, for it occurs everywhere, from the most carefully edited newspapers to essays by undergraduate students. The idea of the sentence given above is obvious: “you, being the president…” or “since you are the president…” but doesn’t the whole sound odd? Don’t we expect something like “as the president, you should (are expected to)….” And I find the following passage highly ambiguous: “As a baby, his mother strapped him into the car seat and drove around St. Paul in the middle of the night to lull her boy back to sleep.” Who was the baby: the mother or her son? Wouldn’t it have been better to begin with: “When he was a baby…”?
Splitting all the way. Rather long ago, I wrote a post on the epidemic of split infinitives (the post was titled: “To Be Or To Not Be”). I should reiterate that I am not an enemy of the split infinitive if putting an adverb somewhere at the end of the sentence produces awkward results. But I see no virtue in to not be, and today I would like to offer a few more of my choicest examples. When to get up late became to late get up, writers (or even speakers?) got into the habit of splitting everything they could lay hands on. Naturally, if one may say the court asked the prosecutors to not make the name public and it is better to not think why these things happen (the second quote is from an article by David Brooks; I bet ten or fifteen years ago he would have written it is better not to think, but who is he not to jump—to not jump—on the bandwagon?), it is also legitimate to say giants gave birth to not only the giant race but also…, even though there is no infinitive around. The rest is trivial (more of the same): we made a promise to never surrender and kept it; …might be able to also intervene to help her companions; this word is thought to perhaps stem from baby talk, and staff members also were advised to always call “a data projector” a “Datenprojektor…” (this horror happened in Germany, where there is a movement to substitute native computer terms for the English ones, but the ugly sentence, with its also were…always and to always call, was produced in the United States), and so it goes. Why not might also be able to intervene, never to surrender, is thought to stem perhaps, and always to call? I understand that in long sentences like it’s hard to spontaneously generate a bubble, when… or and ordered the Department of Defense to immediately stop any ongoing effort to
