Month: January 2009

“It can be cast in an heroic way.”

Adjectives, Hypercorrection

I heard this yesterday on NPR.

Problem:
The indefinite article is incorrect.

Explanation:
I was listening yesterday to an interview on NPR’s “Morning Edition” about Barack Obama’s pending presidential inauguration when I heard, “It can be cast in an heroic way.”

The problem with this sentence is that the “h” in the adjective “heroic” is never silent.

So just as one should not say or write “an helpful man”, one should not say or write “an heroic way”.

I believe that the tendency among some speakers of American English to use the indefinite article “an” in front of the adjective “heroic” is a form of hypercorrection — as if to say, “If ‘a’ is correct, then ‘an’ must be more correct.”

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • ” a heroic” — 1,330,000 matches
  • ” an heroic” — 184,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct ” a heroic” versus the incorrect ” an heroic” by a ratio of 22.6-to-1, which is good but not great.

Solution:
“It can be cast in a heroic way.”

“Hypothesis” vs. “Theory”

Common English Blunders, Devolution toward Simpler, Nouns, Versus

I often hear people use one word when they mean the other.

Problem:
These two nouns are not synonyms.

Explanation:
I often hear people say something like “I have a theory about …”, such as “about why Janey stays out late” or “about why Jim does not like his boss” or “about why women generally have more close friends than do men”.

The primary definition of the noun “theory” is a substantiated group of statements that explain a set of phenomena.

In contrast, the primary meaning of the noun “hypothesis” is a proposed, tentative explanation for an observation or phenomenon.

As noted at Wikipedia, “A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.”

So one starts with observations, then formulates hypotheses to explain those observations, and then tests those hypotheses. Once those hypotheses have been validated, one can create a theory.

I believe that the common English blunder of using the word “theory” where the word “hypothesis” is required is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. (Note that I call this a hypothesis, not a theory!)

It is simpler to say or write the two-syllable, six-letter “theory” than it is to say or write the four-syllable, ten-letter “hypothesis”.

Solution:
Use “hypothesis” for a proposition to explain an observation. Use “theory” to refer to an analysis of a collection of facts and their relation to each other.

“The streets compromising the start line …”

Verbs

I saw this yesterday in the 2009 entry confirmation for the Houston Marathon.

Problem:
The author should not have used “compromising” in the confirmation.

Explanation:
The 2009 Chevron Houston Marathon, which I am completing today, sent to me an “entry confirmation” booklet.

One of the booklet’s pages showed a map of sixteen blocks near the start of the marathon.

One sentence on that page was “The streets compromising the start line will close at 12:00 a.m.”

Yikes!

Streets to be used for the line of some 18,000 people starting the Houston Marathon cannot “compromise” that line.

Instead, those streets can comprise that start line.

Solution:
“The streets comprising the start line …”