Language Studies

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THERE’S A SERIOUS CRISIS in communication between girlfriends and their respective boyfriends. In fact, this is also playing havoc with marriage.

Deborah Tannen, a best-selling author and expert in interpersonal communication, explains that this crisis is best represented by “the stereotypical cartoon scene of a man sitting at the breakfast table with a newspaper held up in front of his face, while a woman glares at the back of it, wanting to talk.” It is observed that although men tend to talk more than women in public situations, they often talk less when with girlfriend or wife and not with other people. This often becomes a crucial problem because “most wives [and girlfriends] want their husbands [boyfriends] to be, first and foremost, conversational partners, but few [of them] share this expectation of their [partners].”

WELL, TEACHERS TOO sometimes commit them. And these errors occur not just in students’ papers but also during recitations and in answering essay questions during exams.

Tim O’Keefe of University of Minnesota at Morris, in his article “Some Common Grammar and Usage Mistakes in Undergraduate Philosophy Papers” (© 2001 Tim O'Keefe), explains how the following terms are properly used:

 1. “They” and “their”

This sentence is grammatically incorrect: “Billy exclaims that someone has to be responsible for their actions, they have to be accountable to their own deeds.” O’Keefe explains that “’they’ and ‘their’ are plural pronouns, not singular ones.” Since “someone” is a singular pronoun, “their” and “they” are not supposed to be used in the sentence.  O’Keefe gives, as an example, the following sentence that contains a similar mistake: “A person who cares only about their own happiness will not achieve happiness.”

The Encarta Dictionary Tools (Microsoft® Encarta® 2006. © 1993-2005 Microsoft Corporation) clarifies the correct distinctive usage for each term:

“fewer or less?

As a general rule, fewer is used with things you can count (fewer meetings, fewer people), whereas less is used with things you cannot count (less time, less money). The same difference applies to the use of fewer than and less than: fewer than twenty people, less than an hour.

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DID YOU KNOW THAT COW is the animal that had something to do with the death of  Abraham Lincoln's mother? Or, that there's a country that has Bill of Rights for cows? ...