Week 14 - How about some French?

Still busy working on that project, but every once in awhile, I get the itch to blog, so here goes....

A couple of people now have pointed me toward a very comprehensive grammar blog, from Paul Brian at Washington State University: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/index.html

Paul's blog leaves few stones unturned, so if you really want the definitive word on words, that's the place to go. I was also impressed by his treatment of the delicate question that I tiptoed around in my Week 1 post, i.e. why is it important to use correct grammar in the first place? Paul doesn't beat around the bush at all on this topic:

"The aim of this site is to help you avoid low grades, lost employment
opportunities, lost business, and titters of amusement at the way you write or
speak." and

"...if your standard usage causes other people to consider you stupid or
ignorant, you may want to consider changing it."

Delicately put, if I do say so myself!

OK, first a couple of word-for-words:

Farther vs. further

A lot of times, "farther" and "further" seem pretty interchangeable, but as it turns out, "farther" has to do with physical distance, and "further" refers to more metaphorical separation. As my friend Dawn's mother always used to tell her,

Furthermore, it's farther away.


Comparatives and superlatives

Lots of people are using superlatives these days when they should really be using comparatives. Here's a typical (incorrect) example:

Chris is the oldest of my two children.

Comparatives ("older" in this case) are used when there are two items (or people) being compared, and superlatives (like "oldest") are for more than two items.


Through vs. thru

"Thru" is an example of a common contraction that has its place (in cellphone text messages and other notes in shorthand) but should be avoided in any formal written communication. [I admit I've taken to text messaging quite enthusiastically, and it's fun to see how clearly you can communicate with as few letters as possible.] So in a text message you might say

R u thru w/ that book?

and you might forgive the signmakers who say

New York Thruway 10 Miles

since they'd have to make a bigger sign to have room for "Throughway,"

but in regular old written English, you should say

When you're through with that vampire novel, I'd love to read it.


I want to get to French pronunciation in a minute, but by way of transition, let's take a brief digression into Italian. Almost all the Italian I know is related to music, and I've been thinking about music quite a lot recently because three of the people I work with most closely are in a band together (how many people think the "Grateful Deadlines" is a terrific name for a bunch of research administrators?). Anyway, my current bugbear from the music world is people's misuse of the word "crescendo," which is Italian for an increase in the volume of a musical phrase. The typical misuse is in sentences like

As the music built to a crescendo, the audience became more and more excited.

I realize it doesn't sound as fancy to say

As the music got louder, so did the audience.

but there's no such thing as "building to a crescendo."

French Pronunciation 101

OK, now for some French. I studied French for quite a while, long enough to be willing to try my accent on some real French people in France (with mixed success, I might add, because they can be pretty fussy about pronunciation), and I really like France and my friends there. There are times, though, when I wish that the French hadn't colonized the USA with restaurants whose names are so hard for Americans to pronounce. Yes, I'm talking about Au Bon Pain, which has two words with sounds that don't exist in English and a third that's widely mispronounced. I'm not even going to try to describe in writing how to say that nasal "on" or "ain" sound in French, but I will say, for those of you who try so hard to get it right, that in general (with hundreds of exceptions, of course), you don't pronounce final consonants in French. So in this case, "bon" is not pronounced like the English word "Bond" without the "d," nor is "Pain" pronounced like the English word of the same spelling. All is not lost, though, because Americans are perfectly capable, without years of study, of pronouncing "Au" correctly -- it sounds just like the word "oh" in English (but not like the word "aw").

One more (pretty good) generalization about French consonants -- when a word of French descent ends in "er," "et," or "ez," it's almost always pronounced as if there's a long "a" (and no consonant) at the end of the word. This is one case where they've made it easier for us -- all three endings sound the same, and that sound is one we use all the time in English.