I checked Merriam-Webster first, but it was no help; all it says is “according to the clock,” though its example sentence is “the time is three o’clock.” I then pulled out my copy of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, but it didn’t even have an entry for o’clock or clock. So then, because my wife was on the computer and I couldn’t access the OED online, I pulled out my compact OED and magnifying glass to see if it had anything to say.

Once I had flipped to the entry and scanned through the minuscule type, I found this one line: “The hour of the day is expressed by a cardinal numeral, followed by a phrase which was originally of the clock, now only retained in formal phraseology; shortened subsequently to . . . o’clock.” The citations begin with Chaucer and continue up to modern English.

And then, out of curiosity, I checked the Corpus of Contemporary American English, but I couldn’t find any examples of x:30 o’clock. Google, however, turned up plenty of examples, including a thread on Amazon’s Askville asking why you can’t say “11:30 o’clock.” The best explanation there seems to be that since the clock hands aren’t pointing at a specific hour, it can’t be anything-o’clock.

This answer doesn’t seem quite satisfying to me—it doesn’t explain why the hour hand has to be pointing directly at a number or why the minute hand doesn’t matter. But then I remembered that clock originally meant “bell” and that early clocks chimed on the hour (well, I suppose some modern clocks do too, but you see where I’m going). Early mechanical clocks were rather large, and most people measured time not by checking the clock face to see where the hands were, but by counting the number of chimes on the hour. So I would assume that this is why it sounds strange to use “o’clock” with fractions of hours. Thoughts, anyone?

I checked the source of the quote, and it turned out that it was actually a grammatically normal “Quite possibly” that the author of the article I was editing had accidentally changed (or intentionally fixed?). My suspicion was that the author was extending the pseudo-rule against the sentence adverb more importantly and was thus avoiding sentence adverbs more generally.

This particular article is for inclusion in a sociology book, so I thought that perhaps there was a broader rule against sentence adverbs in the APA style guide. I didn’t find any such rule there, but I did find something interesting when I did a search on the string “. Not surprising,” in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and found sixteen relevant hits. All the hits appeared to occur in social science or journalistic works, ranging from the New York Times to PBS New Hour to the journal Military History. A similar search for the string “. Not surprisingly,” returned over 1200 hits. (I did not bother to sort through these to determine their relevancy.)

I’m not quite sure what’s going on here. As I said above, the only explanation I can come up with is that someone has extended the rule against more importantly or perhaps other sentence adverbs like hopefully that don’t modify anything in the sentence. Not that the sentence adjective version modifies anything either, of course, but that’s a different issue.

If anyone has any alternative explanation for or justification of this construction, I’d be interested to hear it. It still strikes me as a rather awkward bit of English.

The explicit rule is this: use fewer for count nouns (things that can be numbered), and use less for mass nouns (things that are typically measured). So you’d say fewer eggs but less milk, fewer books but less information. Units of time, money, distance, and so on are usually treated as mass nouns (so you’d say less than ten years old, not fewer than ten years old. One handy (but overly simplistic) way to tell mass nouns and count nouns apart (save for the exception I just noted) is this: if you can make it plural and use a numeral in front of it (five eggs), then it’s a count noun and it takes fewer.

The only problem with this rule is that it was invented by Robert Baker in 1770, and it contradicts historical and present-day usage. In actual practice, fewer has always been restricted to count nouns, but less is often used with count nouns, too, especially in certain constructions like twenty-five words or less, no less than one hundred people, and one less problem to worry about. It used to be that people used less when it sounded natural and nobody worried about it, but then some guy in the eighteenth century got the bright idea that we should always use one word for count nouns and one word for mass nouns, and people have been freaking out about it ever since.

Baker’s rule is appealing because it’s simple and (in my opinion) because it allows people to judge others who don’t know grammar. It makes a certain kind of sense to use one word for one thing and another word for another thing, but the fact is that language is seldom so neat and tidy. Real language is full of complexities and exceptions to rules, and the amazing thing is that we learn all of these rules naturally just by listening to and talking with other people. Breaking Baker’s rule is not a sign of lazy thinking or sloppy grammar or anything else negative—it’s just a sign that you’re a native speaker.

The fact that not everybody follows the simple, explicit rule, nearly 240 years after it was created, shows you just how hard it is to get people to change their linguistic habits. Is there any advantage to following the made-up rule? Probably not, aside from avoiding stigma from people who like to look down their noses at those who they deem to have poor grammar. So if you want to please the fussy grammarian types, be sure to use follow Baker’s made-up rule. If you don’t care about those types, use whatever comes naturally to you.

A lot of people hate the verb impact because they say that it should only be a noun or a participial adjective (impacted). The verb seems to be a fairly recent innovation, and it’s often stigmatized because it’s strongly associated with business-speak. (Though it’s worth pointing out that the verb contact is also a relatively recent business-speak derivation from a noun, and nobody gets up in arms about that one.)

I’m not a big fan of impact meaning “affect,” but as far as crimes against the language go, I think it’s pretty inconsequential. I think it waters down the original sense of “impinge upon” or “strike,” but such is the way language goes—words change, and there’s not a whole lot we can do to stop it.

But the participial adjective impacted is something different, at least in my mind. I don’t think it has really gained the “affected” sense that the verb impact has. It seems to me that impacted is only ever used to refer to two things: wisdom teeth and feces lodged in someone’s colon.

These are, to say the least, not exactly the associations one wants to evoke when referring to computer systems. Now, I just want to point out that this association in no way hindered my understanding of the e-mail from my bank; I knew exactly what they meant and did not have to spend any extra time figuring it out. I did, however, do a mental double-take when I read it, and that’s presumably not the reaction they were hoping for.

This is the point where a die-hard prescriptivist would rail against the abomination that is impacted meaning “affected,” but I’m not going to do that. My only point is this: feel free to use whatever words you think are best, but be aware of how they will impact your readers.

It was a gradual progression, starting with my class in modern American usage. Our textbook was Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, which is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in editing or the English language in general. The class opened my eyes to the complexities of usage issues and made me realize that few issues are as black-and-white as most prescriptivists would have you believe. And this was in a class in the editing minor of all places.

My classes in the English language major did even more to change my opinions about prescriptivism and descriptivism. Classes in Old English and the history of the English language showed me that although the language has changed dramatically over the centuries, it has never fallen into a state of chaos and decay. There has been clear, beautiful, compelling writing in every stage of the language (well, as long as there have been literate Anglo-Saxons, anyway).

But I think the final straw was annoyance with a lot of my fellow editors. Almost none of them seemed interested in doing anything other than following the strictures laid out in style guides and usage manuals (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage was somehow exempt from reference). And far too often, the changes they made did nothing to improve the clarity, readability, or accuracy of the text. Without any depth of knowledge about the issues, they were left without the ability to make informed judgements about what should be changed.

In fact, I would say that you can’t be a truly great editor unless you learn to approach things from a descriptivist perspective. And in the end, you’re still deciding how the text should be instead of simply talking about how it is, so you haven’t fully left prescriptivism behind. But it will be an informed prescriptivism, based on facts about current and historical usage, with a healthy dose of skepticism towards the rhetoric coming from the more fundamentalist prescriptivists.

And best of all, you’ll find that the sky won’t fall and the language won’t rapidly devolve into caveman grunts just because you stopped correcting all the instances of figurative over to more than. Everybody wins.

I found a very lovely example of hypercorrection the other day in The New York Times: “The figures are adjusted for one fewer selling day this September than a year ago.” Not even stuffy constructions like “10 items or fewer” make me cringe the way that made me cringe.

No usage or style guide that I know of recommends this usage. In my experience, most guides that enforce the less/fewer distinction grant exceptions when dealing with things like money, distance, or time or when following the word one. And why, exactly, is one an exception? I’m really not sure, but my best guess is that it sounds so strange that even the most strictly logical prescriptivists admit that less must be the correct choice.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage has an excellent entry on less/fewer, but surprisingly, regarding the “one fewer” issue it says only, “And of course [less] follows one.” Perhaps the use of “one fewer” is so rare that the editors didn’t think to say more about it. Obviously someone should’ve said something to the copy editor at The New York Times.

The real head-scratcher is that the sentence “It has some very nice features” is not one that can easily be made into a passive. Yes, it is transitive, so it meets the basic requirements, but I can’t imagine that any native English speaker would produce the sentence “Some very nice features are had [by it]” unless they were intentionally trying to create an example of when the passive voice is a poor choice.

More likely, I think, is that Buzzword misidentified some other type of construction—perhaps there is/are—as the passive voice and then corrected it. There’s a lot of grammatical advice out there right now that makes the same sort of mistakes. Heck, even Brian Garner and staff members of the Chicago Manual of Style get it wrong.

Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the trial of Buzzword, so I can’t test out its grammar checker to see if this is the case. If anyone knows more about it, please let me know.

The second was more surprising and much more rare: “pictures mound” for “pitcher’s mound.” The pronunciation of “picture” as “pitcher” is fairly common, but I would’ve expected the error to run in the other direction. Google only showed 53 hits for “the pictures mound.” A few were irrelevant, and most were obviously duplicates that had been cribbed from a baseball facts site.

I’ll let you know if and when they’re accepted into the database. Oh, and if you have no idea what an eggcorn is, check out the About Page at the Eggcorn Database and the Language Log post that started it all.

What’s going on here? My instinct is that the speaker (or author of the line) is uncomfortable with that stranded preposition, but the traditionally correct alternative sounds so stuffy and wordy as to be unacceptable. Instead the preposition quietly disappears, like when children hide their vegetables or feed them to the dog instead of choosing between the unacceptable alternatives of either eating them or leaving them on the plate.

Unfortunately there’s not really a way to test this hypothesis. After all, when a word is missing, it doesn’t exactly leave an indication of where it went or why it went there, and most people are so unaware of their own linguistic impulses that you could never get a reliable response by asking people. Plus, I’ve found that most people don’t really like being cornered by linguists and interrogated about their missing words. I can’t imagine why.

Hated though it may be, grammar is an important subject, especially in a world that relies more and more on written communication. So, first off, let’s define some terms. Grammar is the study of word forms (morphology) and sentence structure (syntax). These are fields that native speakers typically have no problems with. We all know how form plurals and past tenses and how to string words together to form a sentence. Usage is the far more relevant field, the one that tells us not to use ain’t or double negatives. Style is the set of rules governing more aesthetic issues like punctuation and capitalization.

The problem is that usage rules are not handed down from on high (unless you consider teachers and editors to be prophets, that is). In many ways, usage rules are like fashion rules: they are a generally accepted set of guidelines intended to keep you from looking stupid. Of course, usage guidelines are far more enduring than fashion rules. Unfortunately, many of those long-lived rules are more apocryphal than canonical, and many of the self-proclaimed prophets are false.

So it is with hesitation and much hemming and hawing that I answer questions like the recent one from my sister: “Should it be ‘than I’ instead of ‘than me’?” To me, these are never simple yes-or-no questions. It all depends on the context, the level of formality, the preferences of the speaker, and so on. When speaking to friends, it would sound odd—nay, wrong—to use the more formal “than I.” Grammar is a fairly straightforward field, but usage is a quagmire of history, context, pontification, and pedanticism.

But how can an editor and a graduate in English language speak such blasphemy? Shouldn’t I be the one defending good wholesome rules like “than I”? Again, this is not a simple yes-or-no question. I may be a defender of the language, but I defend what I have come to believe is right, not what outdated textbooks, fastidious English teachers, or long-dead pedagogues decreed as correct.

The English I defend is good and simple. It is not full of Latinate rules that never applied to English. It is not full of petty distinctions that fly in the face of the usage of educated speakers. It is elegant, simple, clear, and free from awkwardness. It is English as it is and should be, not English as it never was.

And that, my friends, is my standard of usage.