These Ones

(Paraphrased listener question) When my son was in elementary school, I started hearing kids use the phrases “these ones” and “those ones,” and that doesn't sound right to me. It should be “that one” or “those over there,” not “those ones.” But I've also heard other people use the phrases “these ones” and "those ones.” Is that now acceptable English, or even used?

You aren’t the first person to complain about “these ones” and “those ones” sounding wrong, and I’m sure you won’t be the last. So you’re not alone, but there’s no real rule against using those phrases except that sometimes they’re redundant, and redundancy can bother people.

‘These Ones’: Emphasis

To start, the word "ones" can be plural, as in "I like the red ones." So the plurality isn’t a problem.

And to many people, it even sounds OK to say “these ones” when you modify the word “ones.” 

For example, imagine you’re with a friend in a flower shop, and there are lots of different kinds of roses. You could point to a bouquet you particularly like and say, "I like these red ones." Since you’re pointing, you could just say, “I like these,” but by saying “I like these red ones,” you could be implying that of all the red roses, these are your favorites, or you could just be emphasizing their redness (“I like these red ones”). 

Alternatively, if you’re not standing particularly close to the roses, and you point and simply say, “I like these,” your friend could misunderstand and think you mean all the roses in that section. 

In other words, saying “these red ones” instead of just “these” adds information for your friend.

‘These Ones’: Redundancy

“These ones” and “those ones” seem to bother people more when there isn’t a modifier like “red” in “these red ones.” When someone says, “I like these ones,” you could imagine “ones” standing in for “roses”: If someone says, “I like these roses,” nobody ever objects (unless maybe they want to get carnations instead), but if someone says, “I like these ones,” it can seem redundant and annoying, probably because the word “ones” isn’t adding information the way the word “roses” does. Most of the time, it feels like you get the same information with essentially the same emphasis from “I like these,” and “I like...

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What's a Double Negative? 5 Ways to Use Them Correctly

I made an embarrassing mistake the other day. I wrote "I can't hardly believe..." when I should have written "I can hardly believe..."

"Can't hardly" is an example of a double negative—something many writing experts say you should avoid—and it also doesn't make much sense if you look at it logically. Often double negatives mean the opposite of what you are trying to say. (But you may have heard me say before that English isn’t always a logical language, and you’ll see that’s the case here too.)

Double Negatives in Chaucer and Shakespeare

Double negatives used to be much more common in English than they are today, and Chaucer seemed to like them. For example, he describes the Knight in “The Canterbury Tales" by saying, “He never yet no vileness didn’t say.” That’s more than a double  negative! That’s a multiple negative.

Shakespeare also used double negatives. For example, in “As You Like It,” Celia says, “I cannot go no further.” If “you can go no further” was negative, then “you can’t go no further” was even more negative or emphatic.

In Shakespeare’s and Chaucer’s time, it was normal to use double and triple negatives to add emphasis, and even today, other languages, such as Spanish and French, also use double negatives to add emphasis to the negativity. 

In some dialects today, people still use double negatives for emphasis. For example, “I’m not doing nothing” can seem stronger than “I’m not doing anything.” But double negatives like that aren’t considered Standard English anymore. In other words, some people will look down on you if you use them.

The Original Rules Against Double Negatives

It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that prescriptivist grammarians started saying we shouldn’t use double negatives in English because they aren’t logical. Robert Lowth, a bishop and toweringly influential grammarian of his time, and who is also known for promoting the idea that we shouldn’t...

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Interesting Language Stories in the News

 

Click the player to hear the interview. This is a summary of the topics we discussed.

Language Influences Memory

We talked about two new studies suggesting that language can influence people, at least in small ways, and we talk about Neal's previous article that includes an anecdote about how people in some cultures have an east arm and a west arm instead of a right and left arm.

Word order predicts a native speakers' working memory. The language we speak affects the way we process, store, and retrieve information. via "Science Daily"

Our language affects what we see. A new look at “the Russian Blues” demonstrates the power of words to shape perception. via "Scientific American"

One Form, One Meaning (OFOM)

Neal and Mignon have both noticed that when there are two spellings of a word (such as "gray" and "grey" and "whoa" and "woah"), some people will assign different meanings to them. For example, people have repeatedly commented that they think "gray" and "grey" are different colors. Neal says linguists know this as the "one form, one meaning" concept, a name given to it by Arnold Zwicky. To paraphrase another linguist, Dwight Bolinger, if two words seem to be synonyms, speakers are drawn to make up stuff in order to preserve OFOM.

Neal explains why he thought suckers and lollipops are different when he was young. 

Universities Are Cutting Foreign Language Programs

Foreign language programs are being cut at an alarming rate. According to CNN, citing a report by the Modern Language Association, "651 foreign language offerings had been terminated between 2013 and 2016," and we find that discouraging because learning foreign languages helped both of us develope a better understanding of English grammar.

Squiggly, Aardvark, and Fenster

We reveal the origins of the...

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An Interview with Benjamin Dreyer

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Benjamin Dreyer's book, "Dreyer's English," became a surprise bestseller and is already on its fifth printing just two weeks after the publication date. Dreyer, vice president, executive managing editor and copy chief of Random House, worked on the book for years, and it shows. The kernel of the book started with a New Year's resolution to write every day, and developed into a modern blend of "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" and "Words into Type" (Dreyer's favorite style guide) that allows Dreyer's entertaining voice and many years of copy editing expertise shine through.

In this interview, we talked about 

• How Benjamin found his voice.
• Benjamin's reaction to some out-of-context coverage of the book.
• What he does as a copy chief.
• House styles.
• Why his book largely ignores AP style.
• Some of our favorite tidbits from the fabulous section on fiction writing.
• His unusual pet peeves.
• How book design has evolved to accomodate digital marketing.
• Why the paper used for his book jacket is called "gritty Capote."
• The story behind the title of the book.
• Why "glamour" still has a U in American English even though most similar words have lost their U.

Click the player above to hear the whole interview or click through to read the entire (rough) transcript.

 

 

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Reduplication: Would You Like Milk-Milk With Your Salad-Salad?

One of our recent advertisers, The Real Real, made me think of a cool language thing that’s been on my radar for a few years but that I haven’t covered yet. It’s the doubling of words to show that something is, well, real. I think the first time I heard it was in this ad for the 2015 Ikea catalog: The announcer describes the print catalog as a “book-book.”

Introducing the 2015 Ikea catalog. It’s not a digital book or an ebook, it’s a book-book. The first thing to note is no cables. Not even a power cable. The 2015 Ikea catalog comes fully charged and the battery life is eternal. 

He goes on to talk about tactile technology—turning the page with your finger—and how the content comes preinstalled. It’s fabulous. My husband and I both loved it, and because he prefers print books, and I usually prefer ebooks, to this day we still use “book-book” a lot in our house when we’re talking about his books or when I get a physical book in the mail. “Ooh look! You got a book-book!” (It might be a stretch for Ikea to consider its catalog a book, but the point that they were talking about a physical publication was still abundantly clear.)

'Milk-Milk'

Then, a couple of months ago, the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. was debating whether it would allow producers to use the word “milk” for products like almond milk and soy milk. According to CNBC, people are drinking a lot more of these kinds of plant-based milks, so the dairy industry has spent more than $2 million lobbying this year, which I imagine could be a reason the FDA is suddenly worried that consumers are being misled about the nutritional value of these non-dairy “milk” products. 

And the way I immediately thought about that story was that the FDA was considering limiting the word “milk” so producers could only use it to refer to “milk-milk.” In other words, the original liquid people think of when they think of milk. From what I understand, a law was passed in the EU in 2017 that does stop marketers from using the word “milk” for what some people refer to as—the word fun never stops—“cow-nterfeits.”

Contrastive Focus Reduplication

But doublets like “book-...

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Never Forget How to Spell 'Bureaucracy' Again

 

I’ve been interviewing authors for the podcast lately, and one question we always ask is what words give them trouble, and I think more than half of the authors—successful, and in many cases New York Times bestselling authors—more than half of the authors say they can’t spell “bureaucracy,” so if you struggle with it, don’t feel bad. You’re not alone. It’s just a tough word.

First, let’s stipulate that most people don’t have a problem with the “cracy” part at the end. We’re familiar with that from “democracy,” “theocracy” and so on.

So we need help with the “bureau” part.

If you trace it all the way back to Latin, “bureau” shares a root with “burro”—the donkey. Weird, right? The relationship a little convoluted, so I won’t go into it for our purposes, but it’s easy to imagine that a bureaucrat not helping you from behind a desk is a stubborn donkey, a stubborn burro who won’t help you. And “burro” is a lot easier to spell: B-U-R-R-O.

Now, imagine that donkey not only stubbornly not helping you, but also putting on perfume while ignoring you and not helping you. A stubborn burrow putting perfume behind its ears. “Eau de obstruction.” How rude! 

This part might be a little tougher, but anyone who has shopped for perfume should have encountered phrases like “eau de toilette” and “eau de cologne.” The spelling of that “eau" part is what’s in the middle of “bureaucracy.” So imagine a stubborn burro dotting perfume behind its ears, and take the “bur” part from “burro,” (B-U-R) and the “eau” part from “eau de obstruction.” (E-A-U) Add a “cracy” on the end, and you have “bureaucracy.” 

It may seem silly—I know it does!—but I used to never be able to spell this word, and I’ve gotten it right every time since I came up with that little story, so I hope it helps you too.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock. 

Mignon Fogarty is Grammar Girl and the founder of Quick and Dirty Tips. Check out her New York Times best-seller, “Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.”

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Paula Brackston on Names, Language, and Life as a Writer

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Paula Brackston writes a successful book series that started with the New York Times bestseller "The Witch's Daughter," and now she's embarking on another series with her new book, "The Little Shop of Found Things." The new series is set in Wiltshire country in England and follows the story of Xanthe as she uses her gift for connecting with the history of objects to travel through time. In this first book, Xanthe travels back to 1605 to solve a mystery that involves a chatelaine.

Despite the fact that the books have fantasy elements, Brackston says she still does a lot of research to make sure all the historical elements are accurate, and she talks about using language stragetically to set a tone for her books. "When I’m writing 1605," she says, "obviously, people speak very differently. I can't have them speaking exactly as they would have because it would be hard work for the reader, so I have a stylized version, and it’s the same when I'm doing the descriptive writing whether it’s in the present day or the past. I'm trying to give a flavor of that time, a sense of something other, something historical, something different, and I think you can't really do that using everyday words too much."

Here's an example from the first paragraph of the book:

It’s a commonly held belief that the most likely place to find a ghost is beneath a shadowy moon, among the ruins of a castle, or perhaps an abandoned house where the living have fled leaving only spirits to drift from room to room. To believe so is to acknowledge but half a truth, for there is a connection with those passed over to be found much nearer home. Every soul that once trod this brutal earth leaves their imprint upon the things that mattered to them.

Brackston's characters' names also lend a mysterious feel to the book. For example, the main character, Xanthe, gets her name from a Greek word that means "the golden one" or "fair haired." Brackston says, "I like the sound of it. I like the look of it on the page. I liked the fact that it wasn't going to get muddled up with anybody else." She adds, "To see the shape of the word is quite interesting to me. I like that."

Brackston laughed as she described her career and getting her first novel published. "I was one of those overnight successes that takes about 10 years." "The Witch's Daughter" was first picked up by a small British publisher and then discovered by Peter Wolverton, an editor at Thomas Dunne at St....

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