grammar

Yeah, I Seen Her (That is to say I Saw Her…)

Niall O'Donnell 4 Comments

 I seen that guy yesterday.

I done a lot of work yesterday.

Reading those sentences in your head might drive you crazy. Such terrible grammar!, you might say to yourself. And yes, they are grammatically incorrect. They should be, of course:

I saw that guy yesterday.

I did a lot of work yesterday.

What interests me about such utterances is: how wrong are they really, and why do people get so annoyed by them? First, let’s look at how exactly they’re wrong.

The two sentences are examples of the past simple tense, referring to a discrete action in the past. To construct this tense, we need a subject (I in both these cases) and a past simple form of a verb (to see becomes saw, to do becomes did). We might also have an object of that verb, and quite possibly a time indicator like yesterday. Continue reading →

How do You be Doing?

Niall O'Donnell 18 Comments

When does English sound like jazz?

When you’re Irish.

When I was a younger man I thought nothing of talking about my habits and routines in such terms:

I do be going to the park regularly.

I do be often working on Saturdays. 

If I were to translate that into more standard English, it would be:

I go to the park regularly.

I often work on Saturdays.

These latter sentences are in the present simple tense, which we use to talk about routines, habits, and general truths. So why would I choose a more convoluted form instead of something more… simple? Well, you can’t change where you’re born. Such a structure (I do be +-ing), while not so common anymore, was a common part of Irish English (or Hiberno-English). Continue reading →

He Had Had Good Grammar, Had he?

Niall O'Donnell 12 Comments

What does it really mean to be grammatically correct? Is it important? People often tell you that you shouldn’t get bogged down in grammar when learning a language, and should aim for real communication. And I agree about that whole communication thing, but you still need good fundamental grammar to do so. Grammar and natural use of English don’t have to be enemies. Continue reading →

The Ten Most Common Words in the English Language

Niall O'Donnell 20 Comments

Before finding out what they are, please have a guess at what you think the ten most common words in the English language are (note that by word I mean the main word form, which includes other forms of that word. For example, only dog would appear in the list, not dogs; or have might appear but not has, had or having). So you can’t see the list by mistake, here’s a picture of some puppies. Scroll past them (if you can) for the list. Continue reading →

I Shall be Released

Niall O'Donnell 5 Comments

Browsing the internet yesterday, I noticed an article headlined thus: Marvel’s Dr. Strange has already released in the UK (and here in Ireland too, so I might catch it soon). Nothing  too strange (no pun intended, but gladly accepted) there, you might think. But that has already released… really bothers me. It shouldn’t, but it does. Why? Because every fibre of my pedantic being tells me that it should be:

Marvel’s Dr. Strange has already been released in the UK.

Let’s step back for a moment and look at the grammar behind that feeling. Continue reading →

S: the Story of a Letter

Niall O'Donnell 19 Comments

If you’re a native English speaker, you probably don’t think about individual letters too often. Why would you? You use them pretty much automatically. So if I asked you to talk about the letter s, you might not have much to say. But for people who have to learn English, it’s quite important, and can prove to be a tricky little customer.

The first area of confusion is with plurals. Most languages don’t add s to make a plural, like English does, so it can be very hard for speakers of those languages to remember to add the s. Even when some languages do add an s, it’s in a slightly different way. Portuguese and Spanish, for example, often add an s to a noun to make it plural. But, they also add an s to adjectives describing those nouns, leading a lot of Portuguese and Spanish speakers to do the same thing in English. French is similar, but the s is generally silent, meaning that a lot of French speakers don’t pronounce it even if they write it.

But the most common area of error is with third-person singular verbs. That might sound like gibberish, but let me demonstrate: Continue reading →

How to Use Apostrophes

Niall O'Donnell 22 Comments

‘

That little  chap there is by far and away the punctuation mark that causes people the most consternation, for a variety of reasons. Some hate it because they have no idea what to do with it, and others hate it because those first people have no idea what to do with it, and it drives them crazy to see it misused or not used at all. Before getting into why people have difficulties with it, and why that infuriates others, let’s look at the basic rules of using the apostrophe. It has three basic functions: Continue reading →