Nouns

“We need to error on the safe side.”

Common English Blunders, Mispronunciations, Nouns, Verbs

I overheard a conference call in which someone said this a few days ago.

Problem:
The speaker used the wrong word for the verb after “We need to” in this statement.

Explanation:
The speaker who said “We need to error on the safe side.” was discussing a company policy with others on the conference call.

The word “error” is a noun and not a verb.

What the speaker should have used is the word “err”, which looks like “error” but is a verb that means to be mistaken or incorrect.

Perhaps the speaker simply mispronounced “err” (the verb) as “error” (the noun).

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:

  • “err on the safe side” — 23,600 matches
  • “error on the safe side” — 1,260 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used “err on the safe side” versus “error on the safe side” by a ratio of 18.7-to-1, which is good by not great.

Solution:
“We need to err on the side of caution.”

“Alumni” Revisited

Common English Blunders, Nouns, Plurals

I got an interesting email message last Monday from one of your fellow readers of this blog.

I will refer to her simply as “Paula” because I don’t have permission to use her surname.

Paula had read “Alumnus” vs. “Alumna” vs. “Alumni” vs. “Alumnae”.

She also had seen a link named “Miss ND Alumni” at the top of the Miss North Dakota website.

Paula told me, “I had just dashed off a note to the webmaster of the Miss North Dakota pageant where the menu item is Miss ND Alumni, and I listed the masculine and feminine singular and plural forms of Alumnus.”.

She thanked me for “defending correct English usage”.

Thank you, Paula, for defending correct English usage, too!

And, in case my statement in the earlier post was unclear, let me stress here that it is correct to use the masculine plural form when referring to a group of males and females.

In contrast, because the Miss North Dakota contest is only for women, “Miss ND Alumnae” — not “Miss ND Alumni” — is the correct name for the link on the Miss North Dakota website.

“If we all row in the same directions, …”

Adjectives, Nouns, Plurals

I saw this in a corporate announcement.

Problem:
The noun should be singular, not plural.

Explanation:
The full sentence was “If we all row in the same directions, we will ultimately climb the mountains and be successful.”

Beyond this sentence’s mixed metaphor (more on that in tomorrow’s post), there is a problem with the “If” clause.

First, we must agree that anyone can row in only one direction at any given time.

Now, suppose that you are rowing in a direction and that I am rowing in a direction.

Suppose further that these two directions are identical.

Then there is one and only one direction in which the two of us are rowing.

We would call this “the same direction”.

By the way, it is incorrect to say that the adjective “same” always modifies a singular noun.

An example of the adjective “same” correctly modifying a plural noun appears in “Jack and Jill like the same fruits.”

Solution:
“If we all row in the same direction, …”