The line: from Algini: “—we shall track it, and we will act.”
I’ll almost lay you money a copyeditor is going to come to a screeching halt and try to draw both statements into uniformity. Which will remove a layer of meaning. And which I shall have to stet. So, I think I WILL insert the [sic] (Latin for ‘thus’) into the text and hope the copyeditor does not fail to strike THAT printer’s notation before it’s set in print.
Do you read that the quality of copyediting is going down by the stern? You’d be right.
Here’s the grammar involved, and it’s really quite simple.
The present tense of the verb ‘track’.
First person means “I,” and “we” (closest to you.)
Second person means “you singular” and “you plural”, ie one, and more than one.
Third person means “he, she, it” and “they” farthest from you, over there.
The rule of shall and will is simple. Shall is only first person when it means future action. “I shall track” and “we shall track.”
Will is second and third person when it means future action. “you will track,” “you pl. will track,” “he will track, she will track, it will track, and they will track.”
NOW, the tricky and subtle bit. The rule totally reverses when it indicates determination about the act.
If you say, “I will track,” it’s as good as italicizing ‘will’ and speaking it with emphasis. It is a subtlety of expression which expresses Intent. 😉
So it becomes, by reversing the above rule: for Intent: I will track, we will track. Then: you shall track, you pl. shall track becomes an Order, isn’t that clever?
And yet one more trick: he shall track, she shall track, it shall track, and they shall track become a Legal Directive.
If you remotely think this is a distinction without meaning, well, the State of Oklahoma managed to void its inheritance law by screwing up the “he shall track” bit. Instead of “he shall track”, they wrote “he will track,” which made it legally ineffective, and unenforcable by the law.
Just one more of the little slippery slopes American English has been skating down ever since it abandoned grammar instruction in favor of the “people naturally talk right” rule of teaching English.
English is a marvelous edged weapon if you know how to wield it.
Yup. It was dinned into me in school, NOT an American school. And the current generation of girls at that school have just as rigorous a grounding in grammar as I did. And they have great pride in it.
…and here I’d been feeling moderately well educated. (Ivy League English degree.) You’d think someone might have mentioned this before. Sigh. The older I get, the stupider I feel…
A famous (in Sweden) poet once wrote (approximate translation) – “as a young one I had all the answers, now I’m old only the questions are left”. So you’re no alone 😉
Sometimes you need to know a lot of things to understand how little you in reality know.
But now you are wise, mrgawe! And never stupid!…
Edit: I should say, now you are informed—you continue, of course, to be wise. 😉
I never got the legal distinction before. Hmph. Explains a lot about how the Revised Statutes for my state are written (I’ve been chewing through them with an eye to finding out just how much home improvement I can do without needing a permit. Right now, it appears I need a permit for anything more than changing a light switch. Silly.)
I pulled up an old English grammar book that I had from college in the 1970s. If you are speaking about more than two parties, there is a comma between each of the parties mentioned, including the third party.
For example, John, Mary, and I went to the zoo. But modern writing now has it as, John, Mary and I went to the zoo. I don’t know who made this change, I don’t understand why, but I did have an argument about it with the Executive Officer on my last ship. I said it was incorrect grammar, he said it was Executive Officer’s grammar, and that trumped any other grammar. Being that I didn’t want to carry the argument to its logical end (me getting thrown out of his office in disgrace), I let it slide.
The people do NOT use proper grammar naturally. There is a vast difference between the written and the spoken words. Remember the flap about teaching Eubonics in inner city schools. An insidious plot to destroy English grammar, somewhat like the Chicago School of Whatever They Are has done.
joe can you tell me if that rule is universal or only applies to proper nouns and/or personal pronouns? The rule that I recall from the dim mists of the early 60’s was that each item in the list was supposed to be set off by commas except cases where the penultimate item in the list consisted of a single word as in: “coffee, sugar and cream” versus “cups, saucers, soup bowls, and plates”. I think that you’ll find that the differences in punctuation will agree to the timing of the spoken phrases as it is necessary to pause before soup and after bowls in order to cue the listener that the phrase represents a single item on the list. In the second case, the speaker will probably surround the “and” with much shorter pauses in the natural cadence of the language.
I learned the same rule, Joe, the infamous Oxford comma, and immediately got a high school teacher who must have learned from Eton (the other old British school).
brennan, your use of commas is interesting. Coffee, sugar and cream is not the same as coffee, sugar, and cream. 😉
Punctuation aside, I think that you’ll find that the spoken cadence of the last three words of “coffee / sugar / and / cream” is far different from that of “coffee / brown sugar / and cream”. “brown sugar” is almost pronouced as if it were one word and the pause following sugar is exaggerated so that hte listener will know that one is to take the two words as a single entity. My example was inapt since sugar and cream are so strongly associated. May I offer “Flour made from wheat, oats, barley or rye can all be used for the making of breads”? The pauses after “wheat” and “oats” are much longer than the pauses between “barley” and “or” and “or” and “rye”. In fact, those latter two intervals are virtually equal in length so that the use of a comma after “barley” would violate the basic grammatical rationale for the use of one in the first place, which is to indicate a point at which a person speaking would naturally pause momentarily when uttering the phrase. [dons his pedant hat and blushes]
btw you’ll find the same convention in sheet music for voices or wind instruments. If there is a specific point in a sustained passage that an arranger wants the musician to pause for a quick breath, it will be indicated in the score by a comma or perhaps an apostrophe, it’s been too long since I’ve played for me to remember exactly.
😆 That’s the ‘forces a reading’ rule. 😉
I haven’t got the grammar, mostly just picked up a feel for the language from reading, but even so the determination underlying ‘We will act’ comes through very clearly, whereas ‘We shall track’ sounds more like business-as-usual. That ‘you shall do this or that’ can be an order I have felt, but ‘You shall have porridge for breakfast’ feels more like a promise, and the legal directive I’d not have picked up, ever. Also, the lessening of intent in the case of ‘You will …’ hadn’t really registered clearly.
Thanks for the explanation!
@joe, somewhere (I think in Gaudy Night) I’ve read about that last comma, and it was called the ‘Oxford comma’ because only the people from that university used it, and people from other universities did not and regarded it as ungrammatical. Was your grammar book published in Oxford, or was that debate already long past and won?
Speaking of copyeditors… a heads up:
Whoever has been doing final proofing of the last *three* (and possibly four) Foreigner books has a thing about “resistence” [sic] — “resistance” is misspelled, thusly and very consistently, from Deliverer onward. If I see it many more times, *I’ll* get confused…
Still, that’s not as bad as an earlier copyeditor who consistently mixed up “principal” and “principle”. *That* mistake hasn’t turned up recently, thank goodness.
The Oxford comma! I love it!
And, Hanneke, your English is better than the average American’s. Perhaps than the average Englishman’s, one cannot say. But George Bernard Shaw’s *Pygmalion*, aka *My Fair Lady*, made the point. I loved the quote from the musical: “Whenever one Englishman opens his mouth, he makes some other Englishman despise him…” —It does not cease to be true in the States, where Henry ‘Iggins could well ply his trade: I’ve moved about so much, and taken diction instruction AND learned several languages, so I’m hard to pin down: in Washington DC it’s assumed I’m from Virginia, in Oklahoma, they think I’m from the East Coast, and my Italian—in Cremona, up in the top of the boot, they think for certain I’m from Rome, and in Rome they’re sure I’m from Cremona, while a traffic policeman in Milan was sure I was French. The central French decry my Picard accent, and God help me, nobody mistakes my modern Greek for anything—except the gaggle of giggling ladies in a shop in Thebes, in which I addressed the shop owner by a mediaeval salutation for a bishop’s wife.
So I have profound respect for anybody who can handle language well. Anybody’s language. Including their own.
Ahh, grammar. Come to the jolly old UK, where it’s all optional, along with spelling and punctuation. You’ll go mad, believe me.
Lol—I couldn’t believe it when I saw British books dropping the comma in front of direct address! I think the Chicago Book of Style people must have run to Britain to try to sell it all over again, with all the bits and bobs they couldn’t get into our version!
Another Bernard Shaw/or Oscar Wilde quote, re American and England: “Two countries divided by a common language.”
I learned most of my grammar from pre-war Britain. My local library had all the old British children’s books they could nab. And then I kept getting checked wrong for my spelling—theatre, harbour, colour, plough… I was stubborn. I liked the fancier look of the words, so I was willing to lose a few points to maintain them. I still do, now and again, when typing rapidly.
Ahh, yes – don’t let’s even get started on the spelling. I’m doing a PhD in the UK, so I’m required to spell things as they do over here. Imagine the joys of spell-check, when allowing for quotations from both the US and the UK, and having the primary text required to be written in UK English only.
My commas, though, will be properly deployed. And: they shall be properly deployed, as well.
I learned the majority of my English grammar from Latin, French, and German. Now in school, at least in college, it’s all about “style.” MLA. APA. Chicago. Etc. Sometimes that applies to the shape of your bibliography, and sometimes extends into grammar, too.
@joekc6nlx: every grammar book I currently own, published between 80-something and ten minutes ago, shows that last comma as correct, with the caveat “unless you are following a publication which has another convention of comma usage.” Executive Officer Grammar must be just such a convention. I have also heard that the dropped comma is heavily used in journalism, where one must conserve the page for more important things than commas and spaces.
My favorite part of the rules of English in Webster’s International Dictionary, the huge one [it has the shortest English style book there is, right at the front in fine print]—is ‘forces a reading.’ That means you can say anything if you can punctuate it correctly. 😉
And yours truly was, of course, a Latin major.
Honestly, I don’t remember from where the book came, because that has been almost 20 years since the incident of which I wrote. I am fairly certain it was not a British publication, since I went to school in Ohio. We were taught grammar, as well as spelling, at least until the 8th grade.
I don’t recall the rule of proper nouns and commas. However, the “coffee, sugar and cream” almost sounds as if it needs something after the word cream. Sugar and cream in coffee is a combination, in my mind, like cakes and ale, tea and scones, peanut butter and jelly. But, being as it is a separate item from the sugar, I’ll just leave it at that.
It was so much easier with Latin, because the editors of the textbooks inserted the commas and periods, whereas in Latin as the Romans wrote it, there was no punctuation, and grammar was fairly simple, compared to modern English.
What an interesting discussion! I was taught from the very first (60s) to use that last comma, and later was told it had become optional. Pfui! But I am an odd bird, one of that seemingly small group of engineers who speaks and writes English fairly well (notwithstanding the ninetyleven errors, gaffes, and misteaks I probably made in this post! 😉 ).
Lately use of ‘would’ has been driving me nuts. I commonly hear sentences like, “If I would have known, I would have gone” Instead of ,”If I had known, I would have gone.” The first is ‘then/then’ the second is ‘if/then’. Have I missed something? I was taught (to put it mildly) that ‘then/then’ was *not* correct!
That drives me crazy too. Also incorrect past participles. “I should’ve went” ARGH!
OOOHHH!! My ears cringe and my brain cramps when I hear that one. How about using objective when subjective should be used, or vice versa? ‘ Him and me will be there. They gave it to him and I.’ I think people use ‘myself’ so often because they aren’t sure about ‘I and me”. (Dismounting from hobby horse now.)
Proge was in a college latin class with a fellow classmate who simply could *not* grasp that me is the objective form of I. This was twenty years ago; the more things change…..etc.
How about ‘He goes,’ for ‘he said…?
[mounts hobby horse, stumbles over soap box & proceeds to lash deceased equine thoroughly] The ultimate and only truly useful purpose of punctuation, and typographic conventions for that matter, is to allow the reader to interpret the text exactly as if the author were speaking it instead to the greatest extent possible within reason. Punctuation gives the reader cues about the intended cadence and tone of the text. Cadence primarily indicates the intended grouping or association of the language elements, as commas, semicolons and periods each indicate increasingly long pauses respectively. Other elements such as the quotation mark, exclamation point, or question mark provide vocal and emotional tone instead of or as well as signaling the end of a complete thought. In the hands of the Master, for instance Marc Antony’s funeral oration for Julius Caesar in the Shakespeare play, cadence alone can convey more emotional impact than the tone itself.
As a point of example, “air quotes” are absolutley redundant unless the user lacks the wit to convey his emotional tone in any other way. Anyone can tell when a speaker is quoting someone, there will always be cues; a difference in pitch, cadence, tone or even facial expression and personal carriage especially when the speaker is well noted for wicked mimicry. My fundamental assertion is that any punctuation, regardless of whether it is mandated by the grammatical gods, whose insertion or omission would cause a trained reader to stumble over, either aloud or mentally, or to misinterpret the author’s meaning oif a phrase is incorrect according to such use. I think that all of us have experienced occasions when as we blissfully ride the cadence and import of the text silently or aloud, find that the author or the copy editor, infelicitous two, has violated this dictum and we are suddenly desparately hauling at the reins and trying to regain our balance as our mount has discovered without warning that there is a gopher hole where it expected level ground. Anything that allows the reader to better appreciate the import and/or artistry of the author is good and anything else is either superfluous or out-and-out wrong. [ducks decayed fruits and scurries up alley]
I agree!
One of the highest compliments I got from Jim Baen was when he was editing Paladin. He said he had the whole ms. yellow and shaggy with Post-it stickies for challenges to my grammar—and then got caught up in the story, began hearing the ‘voice’, and solemnly went back and pulled off every single sticky, leaving one, and only one query, on which I agreed with him.
A skilled writer is qualified to judge when to ‘force a reading.’
Since we’re deploring stuff, I’ll deplore the fall of the distinction between may and can. And that’s a completely easy distinction, unlike the confusing will/shall.
I do understand the will/shall distinction, but it’s like, “Feed a fever, and starve a cold;” or is it, “Feed a cold, and starve a fever”? Why hasn’t someone invented a mnemonic? Yes, someone came up with, “A suicide says, ‘I will drown; they shall not save me,’ while a desperate victim says, ‘I shall drown; they will not save me'”–but if I got that in the right order it’s either an epic accident, or I looked at the top of the page and cheated.
CJ, any comment on the (urban myth?) that the will/shall reversal was foisted on English/Saxon/French solely because it was the rule in Latin? Do German and French have this?
I doubt that will/shall was inflicted on English solely because of its Latin antecedents. English is an omnivorous language, and owes as much to Norsemen as it does to Romans. A friend has a shirt I covet: “English is a language which follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over the head, and goes through their pockets for spare gerunds.”
From Wikiquote: “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” –James Davis Nicoll
You wouldn’t happen to have the reference for Oklahoma’s inheritance law, would you? I’ve tried searching for it, but can’t seem to find it.
I was traumatised by a teacher using may/can without explanation when I was about 8 and hadn’t had the benefit of Latin and French grammar (still haven’t had any English).
Me: Miss, can I go to the toilet?
Miss: You can.
Miss: But you may not.
(at this point I can’t remember if she explained or if I had to wait until I got home and asked my parents, but I lean towards the latter.)