Common English Blunders

“… when one of the levees breached.”

Common English Blunders, Passive Voice, Verbs

I heard this on Fox News Channel yesterday.

Problem:
The verb “breach” requires an object.

Explanation:
The word “breach” — spelled with an E and an A — is both a noun and a verb.

Its meaning as a verb is to make an opening in.

In other words, the verb “breach” is a transitive verb — a verb that takes a direct object.

Examples of transitive verbs include “open” and “hit”.

The expression that I heard on television yesterday used “breached” as if it were an intransitive verb — a verb that does not require or cannot take a direct object.

Examples of intransitive verbs include “sleep” and “rain”.

“Breach” is a transitive verb. “The water breached the levee.” is a grammatically correct example.

I believe that the grammatically incorrect expression “… when one of the levees breached” comes from speakers who hear the grammatically correct, passive-voice expression “… when one of the levees was breached” but do not notice the “was” in such a passive-voice expression.

As a result, these speakers — and writers — drop the “was” and get an active-voice but grammatically incorrect expression.

Solution:
“… when one of the levees was breached.”

“Anecdote” vs. “Antidote”

Common English Blunders, Mispronunciations, Nouns, Versus

I sometimes hear people mispronounce one of these words as if it were equivalent to the other word.

Problem:
These two nouns are not synonyms.

Explanation:
The noun “anecdote” means a short account of an incident as an unpublished narrative.

The noun “antidote” means a medicine for counteracting a poison.

Those who confuse these two nouns probably are distracted by the fact that both nouns have “dote” — D-O-T-E — in them, the fact that both nouns start with A-N, and the fact that both nouns are eight letters long.

The noun “antidote” is constructed from the prefix “anti-“, which means against, and “dote”, whose origin essentially means given. In other words, the roots of “antidote” when assembled mean given against.

The noun “anecdote” is constructed from the prefix “an-“, which means not, and “ecdote”. The “ecdote” part of “anecdote” is a combination of “ec”, which means out, and “dote”, whose origin, as just noted, means given.

So the “ecdote” part of “anecdote” essentially means published. In other words, the roots of “anecdote” when assembled mean not published.

Solution:
Use “anecdote” when referring to a spoken story; use “antidote” when referring to a remedy for poison.

“Congradulations!”

Common English Blunders, Devolution toward Simpler, Imperatives

My wife saw this on a banner in a grocery store years ago, and I have seen this increasingly often over the years.

Problem:
There is no such (properly spelled) word.

Explanation:
When my wife told a manager in the grocery store that the word on the banner was misspelled and even showed him where it was misspelled, the manager insisted, “No, it isn’t!”

Also, the manager did not suggest to my wife that it was a play on words — as in “ConGRADulations, GRADUATES!”

Instead, the manager argued that this was a properly spelled word.

I believe that spelling “congratulations” as “congradulations” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

Because it’s simpler to say the ‘d’ in “congradulations” than to say the first ‘t’ in “congratulations”, many American English speakers mispronounce and hear it this way and subsequently believe that the ‘d’ belongs where the ‘t’ should go.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (without the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “congratulations” — 74,300,000 matches
  • “congradulations” — 1,360,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors favor “congratulations” over “congradulations” by a ratio of 54.6:1 — good, but not great, especially given the more than one million matches for the misspelled word, and even assuming that some of the instances of “congradulations” were a play on words.

Solution:
“Congratulations!”