“We had a verbal agreement,” you hear people say all the time when they’re asked if they had a contract with someone. What the person usually means is, “We had an oral agreement.” That is, we had a spoken agreement. Oral is the antonym of written, but written isn’t the antonym of verbal. Both oral and written agreements are verbal, because verbal simply means “composed of words.” If you have a verbal agreement, it could be either oral or written. [Read more…]

Preparing a post for the other blog I write—about professor-on-student sexual harassment and assault—I was searching through Davidson College’s policy on faculty-student fraternization when I came upon this grammatical error from section 2.5.10.E.:

E. Employee / Student Dating and Relationships (also listed as part of the Consensual Relationships Policy)
In addition to the above restrictions on workplace dating and relationships, faculty members and staff are prohibited from dating students, asking students for dates, engaging in amorous or sexual activities with students, asking students to engage in amorous or sexual activities, or engaging in any activities designed to encourage or which does encourage an amorous or sexual relationship with a student when:
1. The student is enrolled in a course being taught by the faculty member; or
2. The student’s academic work, admissions, enrollment, athletic, or other educational participation or programming is being supervised or subject to review in any way by the faculty member or staff. (p.80)

The error (bolded) is one referred to as “agreement in number”: the “does” before the colon should be the plural “do,” since the noun it pairs with, “activities,” is plural. [Read more…]

Conceited now means stuck-up, but if you’ve ever taken a literature course, you may have heard the noun conceit used to refer to an elaborate metaphor. Edmund Spenser’s late sixteenth-century epic poem, The Faerie Queene, for example, is not only full of conceits, but is itself a great big conceit. As such, it represents the founding of the grand empire, Britain, through its Tudor monarch, Queen Elizabeth I. Even today, you might hear a person in a normal conversation referring to the conceit of a book, movie, or TV show. The conceit of Breaking Bad—cooking and distributing meth by Walter White, one of the least likely figures imaginable—represents the capacity of anyone, no matter how virtuous in the past, to turn evil and callous. Even for a high school chemistry teacher just trying to look out for his family after he dies of lung cancer, criminal behavior can be habit-forming. [Read more…]

A colleague of mine uses an out-of-office email message that reads something like, “I shall be out of the office until Monday, October 14, and will respond then.” She’s a rare exception these days. Almost nobody distinguishes between shall and will anymore. In my own case, although I understand the difference, I’d feel too self-conscious and stuffy using shall correctly. That’s where contractions come in handy: if I write, “I’ll be out of the office until Monday, October 14 . . .,” I don’t have to deal with the now virtually extinct difference between shall and will. [Read more…]