Posts by Don Hauptman

A reader of this column asked about the proper use of who and that.

Here’s an often-cited quip by George Bernard Shaw: "The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."

Shaw is regarded as a skilled writer. But is his use of who correct? Not according to language guru Charles Harrington Elster. In his useful and entertaining style guide What in the Word?, Elster writes: "It is a grave sin to use who of things, as in ‘the company who.’"

On National Public Radio recently, I heard the words “news journalists.” This is a quintessential redundancy. My hunch is that the commentator’s intended meaning was “print journalists,” in contrast to those who work in broadcasting or online.

Here are a few more redundant expressions I encountered recently in the pages of newspapers and online:

• “Does it put a negative stigma on a company? I think the answer is definitely.”

I’ve long been fascinated by unintentionally amusing mistakes in the media. For years, I’ve sought and saved such howlers, appending snappy comebacks. I’m now assembling my collection into a book. Below are a few recently culled specimens.

English has rules that should be respected. One purpose of this column is to encourage proper use of the language. But a problem sometimes arises: People try to apply a rule with excessive conscientiousness and wind up, ironically, committing another kind of error. This phenomenon is called hypercorrection.

Whenever I encounter an interesting linguistic error, I toss it into a folder. When the collection becomes large enough — which doesn’t take long — I have the raw material for a column like this one.

Review the following mistakes, and you’ll avoid committing them.

• “We’re in the halcyon days of smartphone growth, and it won’t last forever.”
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Not long ago, an editor e-mailed a document to me, but it somehow went astray. When I told her that it hadn’t arrived, she responded with the words: “I resent it.” I wrote back, jokingly, “What do you resent?”

This is a case of a linguistic ambiguity. Because English is filled with double meanings and puns, such confusions can easily occur. The results can be amusing or tragic — or both.

Here are some classic ambiguous headlines, all alleged to be genuine mistakes. (The first became the title of a book that immortalized such errors.)

I titled a recent column “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope.”   An eagle-eyed reader pointed out that the sentence contains an error called a “comma splice.” Because the two phrases could be complete sentences, they should be separated by a semicolon, not a comma. But as I noted, I was quoting the title of…

When I studied French in high school, we were taught the phrase faux amis, or “false friends.” The expression refers to foreign-language words whose meanings you think you know but which can lead you astray if you’re not careful. A similar phenomenon occurs in English, as demonstrated by the many pairs of “confusables” regularly featured…

Can you see anything wrong with the following sentences? “No longer able to cope, she reluctantly decides to leave.” “I just can’t cope anymore…. Most of the time I can cope pretty well.” “Homer and the rest of the family have trouble coping without Marge.” Or how about the title of this column, which is…

Recently, a grammatical point made in an essay posted on a friend’s website generated a spirited disagreement from a reader. My friend asked me to mediate. The essay told the story of a student who was rebuked by his teacher for saying “He is taller than me.” The teacher sternly told him that the sentence…