Month: March 2009

“You have an attitude.”

Adjectives, Euphemisms, Nouns, Outsider's Perspective

This is a popular statement in American English now.

For fun, I searched Google for “You have an attitude.” (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 46,200 matches.

But this statement means nothing except for the negative connotation beneath its euphemistic form.

Someone usually says “You have an attitude.” to tell the listener that he or she has a bad or negative attitude.

But the noun “attitude” by itself has no positive or negative value.

Can you imagine someone, such as a non-native-English speaker, first reading or hearing “You have an attitude.”?

The statement would be meaningless to such a person.

The noun “attitude” must be modified by an adjective to give it value.

Otherwise, you are speaking in euphemisms.

“by in large”

Common English Blunders, Conjunctions

This is a bastardization of a nautical phrase.

Problem:
The word “in” is incorrect in this phrase.

Explanation:
The Phrase Finder has a complete explanation of the correct phrase, which is “by and large”, not “by in large”.

Here are the highlights from that superb explanation of “by and large”.

Regarding “large”: The wind is said to be “large” when it is blowing behind a ship’s travel direction.

For example, if you want to sail to the east and the wind is coming out of the west, then “large” is the correct label for the wind.

Regarding “by”: In contrast, to be “by the wind” is to be facing into the wind.

Although many non-sailors see this as a sailing disadvantage, the physics of sailing show that it is advantageous to sail into the wind.

So being able to sail “by and large” means being able to sail not only downwind (the “large” part) but also into the wind (the “up” part).

This explains why the phrase means on the whole.

And one can understand how “by in large” resulted from a lack of understanding about this nautical phrase and a misinterpretation, upon hearing it, of the conjunction “and” as the preposition “in”.

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:

  • “by and large” — with the conjunction “and” — 5,090,000 matches
  • “by in large” — with the preposition “in” — 44,400 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct “by and large” versus the incorrect “by in large” by a ratio of 115-to-1, which is excellent.

Solution:
“by and large”

“I went through your guys’s notes.”

Apostrophes, Possessives

I heard this yesterday morning on National Public Radio.

Problem:
The possessive form was wrong.

Explanation:
An NPR reporter had recorded someone saying to a group of people, “I went through your guys’s notes.”

Without any more context to help you, you can see that there are two possible interpretations for this statement:

  1. The speaker was saying that he had read the notes of the guys who belonged to or were associated with his listeners.
  2. The speaker was saying that he had read the notes that belonged to his listeners.

If the full context were such that interpretation #1 were correct, then the solution would be to remove the final “s” from “guys’s” in the statement.

However, the full context of the recording was someone speaking directly to a group and not referring to anyone else.

So interpretation #2 is the correct one.

One can then almost see the train of thought of the speaker when he started to say, “I went through your guys’s notes.”

Step 1: The speaker usually says “you guys” instead of “you” for the plural, second-person pronoun.

Step 2: Starting to make a possessive out of “you guys”, the speaker changed “you” to “yours”.

Step 3: Realizing that “your guys” sounded as if he were referring to people other than his listeners, the speaker added the possessive apostrophe-“s” to “guys” to create “your guys’s”.

Now here is the sad part about this NPR report: The man who was recorded saying the statement “I went through your guys’s notes.” was directly involved in a job-interviewing activity.

Ouch!

Solution:
“I went through your notes.”