Common English Blunders

“… for the both of us.”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Conjunctions, Hypercorrection, Pronouns

My wife heard this a couple of days ago on television.

Problem:
The definite article “the” is incorrect in this phrase.

Explanation:
The word “both” is an adjective that means two together (e.g., “I saw both suspects.”), a pronoun that means the one as well as the other (e.g., “Both of them were flying to Paris.”, or a conjunction that means alike or equally (e.g., “Jim is both tall and handsome.”).

It’s clear, then, that the word “both” was used as a pronoun in the phrase that my wife heard.

Pronouns do not take articles in front of them, so “the both” is always incorrect.

Beyond that, one can see that “the” (or “a”) should never precede “both” in a sentence.

For fun, I searched Google for “the both” (with quotation marks) and got about 2,130,000 matches. Some of those matches were for grammatically correct forms such as “the Both Sides Now album”; most, though, were incorrect.

I believe that this common English blunder sometimes indicates hypercorrection: if “both” is good, then “the both” must be better. Wrong!

Solution:
“… for both of us.”

“Accessable”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Mispronunciations, Misspellings

I saw this in a PowerPoint document.

Problem:
This adjective is misspelled.

Explanation:
I believe that the misspelling of the adjective “accessible” is mostly due to the common mispronunciation — as “accessable” — of that adjective.

Other adjectives that use “ible” instead of “able” include “visible” and “horrible”.

The suffix “ible” is a variation of the suffix “able”; most people use memorization to know which suffix to use.

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

  • “accessible” — 130,000,000 matches
  • “accessable” — 2,170,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 59.9:1, which is good, but the fact that the Web contains more than two million instances of “accessable” is disappointing.

Solution:
“Accessible”

“They brought back little momentos …”

Common English Blunders, Devolution toward Simpler, Nouns

I heard this yesterday during an HGTV “Design on a Dime” program.

Problem:
The noun is misspelled.

Explanation:
The noun “momento” is a Spanish word and means moment.

The noun “memento” is an English word and means keepsake or souvenir.

The host of the TV program was talking about how the interior designer was influenced by the souvenirs that the home owners brought home from their vacations, so “mementos” would have been the correct noun.

I believe that the use of “mementos” in place of “momentos” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to say the initial “o” in “momentos” than to say the initial “e” in “mementos” (try it).

Solution:
“They brought back little mementos …”