grammar | Richard Bowker

Here is some prose Ernest Hemingway scribbled on the envelope of a letter he wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald:

What about The Sun also and the movies? Any chance? I dint put in about the good parts. You know how good they are. You’re write about the book of stories. I wanted to hold it for more. That last one I had in Cosmopolitan would have made it.

(The letter itself is wonderful, and you can read it here.)

I dint put in? You’re write? Of course, Fitzgerald was a notoriously bad speller himself.

If you are as good a writer as Fitzgerald and Hemingway, you can spell however you please. Why are you paying any attention to me? Go back to your novel! But if you’re not, do yourself a favor and learn how to spell. And learn the rules of grammar, even if you choose to break them. Clearly I’m still learning. But this stuff matters. The site I linked to above says of Hemingway:

Whenever his newspaper editors complained about [his poor spelling], he’d retort, “Well, that’s what you’re hired to correct!”

But editors aren’t doing that anymore! The editors didn’t pick up the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Harvard English professor’s misspelling of “Ptolemy.” No one noticed the grammatical errors and the misspelling of “rarefied” in Lisa Randall’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door. I was looking at the résumé for a technical editor a few months ago, and I noticed he had misspelled the name of the college from which he had graduated. “Rutgers” just isn’t that hard to get right! Even when their spelling is OK, some of these editors don’t seem to notice when they use the serial comma in one sentence and don’t use it in the next. Make up your minds already! Microsoft Word helps, but notice that its spellchecker wouldn’t have picked up “dint” or “write” in the Hemingway quote. (It did pick up “Rutgars” though — the “editor” didn’t even bother to spellcheck his own résumé!)

Writers are pretty much on their own nowadays, particularly if they are going the self-publishing route with ebooks. And that means it’s up to them to get the basics right. If they don’t bother, they better hope they are as talented as Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

I may not be the world’s best grammarian, but some things just bother me. Here are two.

“This doesn’t jive with the facts.” Should be jibe, right? Jibe is pretty much only used in this idiom, and I suppose people don’t really know the word, mishear it, and end up thinking it’s jive. People also tend to misspell gibe (meaning a taunt) as jibe.

“He honed in on the central problem.” Should be homed instead of honed, right? Like homing pigeons. In this case, honed makes a bit of sense, since to hone something is to sharpen it, and maybe you could think of the idiom as one of sharpening something to a point, rather than aiming for a target.

Anyway, language is always changing. And the nice folks at Google have given us a way of tracking these changes via the Ngram Viewer, which is simply the most awesome time-waster ever. Here we see the history of “doesn’t jibe with” vs. “doesn’t jive with” in American books from 1800 to 2000 (click the link to see a bigger version):

The data shows that “doesn’t jibe with” starts taking off around 1900, and “doesn’t jive with” doesn’t show up until the 1970s. My guess is that the slope of “doesn’t jive with” has gone up considerably since 2000, when the Google data ends.

Here we see what’s going on with “home in on” vs. “hone in on”, again in a couple of centuries’ worth of American books:

In this case, nothing much was happening with “home in on” until the late 50s, and “hone in on” followed about 20 years later. Both have exploded in popularity since then.

You can also change the corpus. If we look at British English instead of American English, we see that both phrases started up about 20 years after the American version, and “home in on” is still much more popular:

I wonder why. Was Britain picking up the American idiom?

Anyway, I could keep doing this all night! But instead, let’s listen to the Bee Gees. Can anyone tell me what the time signature is here? It’s a pretty complicated rhythm for a pop song.