Month: April 2008

“BABY LETS MAKE LOVE.”

Apostrophes, Commas, Common English Blunders, Devolution toward Simpler

I saw this in the closed captioning on Usher’s “Make Love in this Club” video on one of my gym’s TV sets this morning.

Problems:
A comma and an apostrophe are missing.

Explanation:
First, there is a natural pause when one says someone’s name and then says the rest of the sentence. This pause should be indicated by a comma, so there should be a comma between “BABY” and “LETS” (sic).

Second, “LETS” is a contraction of “LET US”. A contraction requires an apostrophe to indicate the omission of one of more letters, so the omitted “U” in the contraction requires the apostrophe as its substitute.

Granted, closed captioning for live events will have typographical errors.

A music video, on the other hand, should have no typographical errors, given that it is not live and that producers spend small fortunes to produce them.

I searched Google for the lyrics and found them — with the same errors — here and here (among many sites).

This shows that the omissions in the closed captioning were not typographical errors; the omissions are in the original lyrics.

I believe that both of these omissions are consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It’s simpler to omit the comma and the apostrophe than to include them.

Solution:
“BABY, LET’S MAKE LOVE.”

“She makes more than him.”

Common English Blunders, Devolution toward Simpler, Pronouns

I heard a caller say this yesterday on “The Dave Ramsey Show” radio program.

Problem:
The pronoun “him” should not go after “more than” in this sentence.

Explanation:
This sentence is of the form “She makes more than X.”, where ‘X’ defines some amount of money (and optionally when).

The pronoun “him” is not a suitable substitution for ‘X’ because “him” does not define some amount of money.

Suitable substitutions for ‘X’ include:

  • “$100,000”;
  • “$50,000 annually”;
  • “what he makes”.

I believe that the speaker’s use of “him” in place of “what he makes” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It’s simpler to say one monosyllabic pronoun than to say three words.

Solution:
“She makes more than what he makes.”

“We need to accelerate this pace.”

Common English Blunders, Verbs

I heard this during an audio broadcast about a company’s first-quarter results.

Problem:
The word “accelerate” is the wrong verb for this sentence.

Explanation:
Putting aside for this blog post the problematic misuse of “need” (a throwback to the pop-psychology movement of the 1960s), “accelerated” is problematic here and most probably is not what was intended.

I heard “We need to accelerate this pace.” from a group president talking about the growth in the number of subscribers to his company’s services.

The verb “accelerate” means to increase the speed of. One of the meanings of the noun “pace” is the rate of growth.

We get “We need to increase the speed of the rate of growth.” when we apply these meanings to the statement.

The “speed of the rate” is nonsensical.

What the speaker was trying to say, as he revealed in subsequent statements, was that he wanted his company to increase the growth rate, not “increase the speed of the rate of growth”.

I suspect that he made this common English blunder because he wanted to sound more sophisticated — using a four-syllable word instead of a two-syllable word.

Solution:
“We need to increase this pace.”