Writing, Clear and Simple

If you think the plural of octopus is octopi, you have another think coming. Patricia T. O’Connor explains in Woe is I:

Plurals can be singularly interesting. Take the octopus—a remarkable creature, grammatically as well as biologically. Octopus is from the Greek and means “eight-footed.” The original plural was octopides, Anglicized over the years to octopuses. Along the way, someone substituted the Latin ending pi for the Greek podes and came up with the polyglot octopi. Though it’s technically incorrect, octopi is now so common that dictionaries list it as a second choice after octopuses, the preferred plural. Octopi is for suckers.

(And I’m a sucker for wordplay like “Octopi is for suckers.”)

Lesson one: Stick with octopuses as the plural of octopus.

Lesson two: Don’t make guesses about how to formulate the plurals of foreign-sounding nouns, or how to conjugate foreign-sounding verbs. Look them up! (I’m reminded of an old Charles Schultz Peanuts cartoon, in which Linus confidently told his sister Lucy that the plural of igloo is igli.)

Carisa e-mailed with a question:

I have a question about verb placement that I think is a matter of proper syntax vs. a more readable, colloquial style.  Here’s the sentence:

“This document will reveal how close was the decision to change the current policy.”

I sense that this is correct, but I can’t come up with the rule to explain why.  However, colloquially, I think people would expect this:

“This document will reveal how close the decision was to change the current policy.”

Then, there’s this, which I think is colloquially common but just plain wrong:

“This document will reveal how close the decision to change the current policy was.”

Do you know what the rules applying to such a sentence would be?

Before I give my answer, let’s hear from some of you. What do you think the answer to Carisa’s question is? 

I’m heading out of town for the weekend, so post your thoughts in the comments, and we’ll talk about it on Monday. 

Did you ever wonder why the Beach Boys sang about the Little Old Lady from Pasadena, and not the Old Little Lady from Pasadena? Have you ever sat in a comfortable brown leather recliner, or do you prefer leather brown comfortable recliners?

Unless you’re not a native English speaker, you’ve probably never given much thought to the order we put adjectives and adverbs in, but there are rules about it. I’ve never thought about it either, until I read this article by Ruth Walker. According to those who have studied this, the correct order is this:

Opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material :: purpose

I don’t think this is a hierarchy that everyone adheres to rigidly at all times. For example, if I wanted to describe a statue as being both unsightly (opinion) and large (size), I think I’d be more likely to call it a big ugly statue than an ugly big statue. But I wouldn’t blink to hear someone else say it the other way around. 

Like I said, unless you’re not a native English speaker, this isn’t a rule anyone needed to teach you.

“Don’t let anyone bully you into avoiding sentences with a preposition at the end! It’s an arbitrary rule that most great writers took no notice of. The Authorized Version and E. Burke thought a preposition a very good word to end with. So there!”

—C.S. Lewis

Hat tip to Lars Walker at Brandywine Books.

I’ll always remember the children’s story, The House that Jack Built, which has such a simple premise: Start with a sentence that includes a restrictive clause, and then turn that sentence into a restrictive clause (those are the ones that begin with that) and tack it onto another sentence.

This is the house that Jack built.

This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built. 

This is the mouse that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

And so on. (You’re probably reciting the next line now; the pattern is so memorable.) It makes a great story for children because of the natural meter that arises from the structure.

It’s not so good when you begin to find this structure appearing in your own writing (unless you’re writing a children’s book.) I recently edited a software manual that included this phrase:

Notifications are message templates that contain the text that will appear in the e-mail messages that documents are attached to.

Three restrictive clauses in one sentence. I can live with two, but three just seems a bit much. And it would be simple to get rid of one of those restrictive clauses.

 Notifications are message templates; they contain the text that will appear in the e-mail messages that documents are attached to.

With all three restrictive clauses, there was no natural break, no place for the reader to pause and let the information soak in. By the time we get to the end, we’re quite out of breath, and have likely lost track of exactly what’s being described here. Adding the semicolon gives us a place to stop momentarily. We read that first phrase and absorb the fact that these notification thingies are templates. Then we move along to the fuller definition.

Look for strings of restrictive clauses—remember, they begin with that and add essential information to the sentence—and think about ways to rewrite the sentence, or perhaps break it into two sentences.