Grammar for Grown-ups by Katherine Fry & Rowena Kirton

Author:Katherine Fry & Rowena Kirton [Fry, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781448138708
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

Irritating expressions

Avoid these even more than clichés (see above). At least clichés were at one time original, and they do have a purpose when reiterating a timeless truism. Irritating expressions, however, are either irritating because they add nothing to what is being said or written, or because they are so overused. A brief pause is better than the pointless ‘at the end of the day’, ‘at this moment in time’, ‘best practice’, ‘blue-sky thinking’, ‘due to the fact that’, ‘grass roots’, ‘have a nice day’ (if you’re British), ‘heads-up’, ‘I’m going to give you 150 per cent’ (and variations thereof), ‘in my humble opinion’, ‘in the final analysis’, ‘it’s a game of two halves’, ‘it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other’, ‘step up to the plate’, ‘the fact of the matter is’, ‘think outside the box’, ‘when push comes to shove’. And yes, OK, like, basically, we all say them, like, but ‘absolutely’, ‘basically’, ‘empowered’, ‘gutted’, ‘iconic’, ‘like’, ‘like, you know’, ‘literally’, ‘second-guess’, ‘totally’, ‘you know’, ‘you know what I mean’ are pretty trite.

I was sat / sitting

It is either ‘I sat’ or ‘I was sitting’ – not a combination of the two, so no ‘I was sat’ please, and definitely no ‘I was sat sitting’. Likewise, it’s not ‘you were stood waiting for the number 12 bus’; it should be ‘you stood waiting’, or ‘you were standing waiting’. See more on auxiliary verbs in Chapter 1, here.

Kind of, sort of, type of

To be grammatically correct, the pronoun should dictate whether ‘kind’, ‘sort’, ‘type’ is singular or plural. ‘This kind of chair is comfortable’ or ‘these kinds of chairs are comfortable’, rather than ‘these kind of chairs are comfortable’. However, all sorts of (or sort of) highly regarded writers have used that last type of construction for hundreds of years, so while it’s best to avoid if possible, it wouldn’t be the worst grammatical error to commit. (But ‘kinda’, ‘sorta’, ‘typa’ come close.)

Lend / borrow

‘Lend’ means to give something and ‘borrow’ means to take something. So ‘I lent her a fiver’ or ‘she lent me a fiver’ would mean, correctly, ‘I gave her a fiver’ and ‘she gave me a fiver’ (though hopefully I’ll / she’ll get it back). Similarly, ‘I borrowed a fiver’ or ‘She borrowed a fiver from me’ would mean ‘I took a fiver’ and ‘she took a fiver from me’ – again, correct. But to say ‘I borrowed her a fiver’ or ‘she borrowed me a fiver’ or ‘I lent a fiver from her’ wouldn’t be correct, as well as sounding rather horrible.

Lie, lay, laid, lain

‘Lie’, meaning to be horizontal, is a simple word, as is ‘lay’, meaning to put things down, but they seem to cause a bit of confusion in their various tenses. These are the correct forms: ‘I lie down’ (present), ‘I am lying down’ (present continuous), ‘I lay down’ (past), ‘I had lain down’ (pluperfect); ‘I lay the table’ (present), ‘I am laying the table’ (present continuous), ‘I laid the table’ (past), ‘I had laid the table’ (pluperfect).

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