Allow me to proffer one more sphere of activity for parents to worry about when contemplating their teenagers’ sometimes self-destructive on-line activity. I do not speak here of pedophiles or pornographers. Rather, I speak of the nefarious purveyors of bad grammar advice who populate internet grammar-help sites where they dispense their perversely incorrect insights upon the subtleties of English grammar. To prove my point, let’s take, for example, the rather straight forward problem posed by the dual past-participle forms of the verb prove.* Googling proven vrs proved, children very likely (and innocently) would arrive at a site called WordReference Forums where they would be led astray by such fatuous banter as follows (This is actually posted on the site; I could not have made this up):
- Proved or proven: Any difference between them?
- Of course, prove is a verb, so proved is the preterite.
- Proven is an adjective.
- Some examples of the difference between them: She proved him wrong; He proved she was wrong; It was proven that he was wrong.
- Proven is used passively.
- Proven is an adjective.
- Hope that’s useful.
Hope that’s useful? The use-value of such advise roughly corresponds to that of someone earnestly advising one to disregard the sophisticated harmony of ingredients in a recipe from a Charlie Trotter Cookbook and substitute spam for swordfish.Hope that’s useful? Where are the grammar police? Or at least the goodly schoolmarms of yore with a stinging ruler to bring these wammarians (hip-hop lingo for people who want to be grammarians; analogous to wankstas for people who want to be gangstas) to justice? Who is patrolling the internet and protecting our teens when they innocently wander like virtual Hansels and Gretels through the dark forests of bad internet grammar looking for the right answers to their questions only to stumble upon the saccharine gingerbread houses of such bad grammatical advice?Parents! Sit down with your children and have a talk with them about the importance of grammar, about the predatory lowlifes who lurk in the dark corners of dimly illuminated internet grammar sites, and about where they might best seek out the good grammarians who will lead them out of the forest into the luminous and open fields of clear and correct prose.[*By the way, proved and proven are both correct forms of the past participle of the verb prove; however, proved is the preferred form as past participle: He has proved himself ignorant of the finer points of grammar. Spam has proved itself a poor substitute for swordfish. The alternate proven is, according the The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, acceptable to only 27% of its Usage Panel in such examples. But proven is the more widely employed form as an attributive adjective (used before a noun): a proven wanksta. It is also used in the phrase not proven.]
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That was delightful! Now, as a proven wammarian who’s been tortured by a few dilemmas that have never been proved–with adequate satisfaction–correct or incorrect, I have a question for the grammar gurus on this blog: what’s the difference between among and amongst? After the post above, I dare not slurk through google for advice!
Standard usage accepts both “among” and “amongst.” However, beware of imprecise usage that confuses among(st) and between. For a concise explanation of proper usage, I refer you to the usage note under the entry for “between” in The American Heritage Dictionary. Between is used for two, and among(st) for more than two. This decree of grammar may still echo in your old classroom, but you would be wise to consider other reverberations as well. It is true that between is the only choice when exactly two entities are specified. For example, you must say the choice between (not among) good and evil and the rivalry between (not among) Great Britain and France. But when more than two entities are involved or when the number of entities is unspecified, the word choice depends on what you want to say. You use between when the entities are considered as distinct individuals and among when they are considered as a mass or collectivity. Thus in the sentence The balloon landed between the houses, the houses are seen as points that define the boundaries of the area where the balloon touched down. We assume, therefore, that the balloon did not land on any of the individual houses. In The balloon landed among the houses, the area of landing is considered to be the general location of the houses, taken together. It leaves open the possibility that the balloon came down on one of the houses. By the same token, we may speak of a series of wars between the Greek cities, which suggests that each city was an independent participant in the hostilities, or of a series of wars among the Greek cities, which allows for the possibility that the participants were shifting alliances of cities. For this reason, among is used to indicate inclusion in a group: She is among the best of our young sculptors. There is a spy among you. Use between when the entities are seen as determining the limits or endpoints of a range: They searched the area between the river, the farmhouse, and the woods. The truck driver had obviously been drinking between stops.
I used to teach ESL, and took to sending students to MICASE, or BNC for real-world, or literary, usage of any word or form. I don’t take any ‘authority’ on grammar very seriously anymore. Many academic linguists even seem to delight in talking real crappy just to come off it.
–Dan