Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation states that any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror
And here, via Language Log, is a truly remarkable example of it in action:
And here, via Language Log, is a truly remarkable example of it in action:
The Collins Good Writing Guide (HarperCollins, 2003; anonymous according to the title page but copyrighted by the estate of Graham King; ISBN-13 978-0-00-720868-5, ISBN-10 0-00-720868-5) is a successor to an earlier book by Graham King called The Times Writer's Guide (2001). On page 52 it points out that this sentence is an error:
It follows this up by telling you why the sentence is not acceptable:
That's right: the verb ask is claimed to be the subject of this imperative clause. Graham King simply didn't have any idea what "subject of a clause" means! Yet he wrote a best-selling book, republished after his death in 1999! You could do likewise (not dying, I mean publishing a best-seller).
The remark above isn't a typo or anything. Graham King really was clueless about the notion of a grammatical subject, and so are the editors at HarperCollins. On page 20 of the book, King defines SUBJECT as "what it is" and defines PREDICATE as "what we're saying about it", and his first illustrative example is this:
SUBJECT PREDICATE
My word!
That's right; he thinks that when you say My word! (as perhaps you do, if you are over about 70 and somewhat conservative of disposition), the thing you are talking about is my, and the thing you're saying about it is word. And he thinks that means that the genitive pronoun my in this expression (which has the form of a noun phrase) is the subject. This man simply had no idea what he was doing.
Just an embarrassing but isolated slip by an editor, you are thinking? No, he really didn't get the concept. Lower down on the same page he claims that lots of English sentences have the predicate before the subject. And his first example is this one:
PREDICATE SUBJECT
It gradually became apparent that it was the odour of death
That's quite a predicate, isn't it? (Putting the alleged subject and predicate back in the normal order yields *The odour of death it gradually became apparent that it was. Doesn't sound so good, does it?) In the sentence as given, of course, the odour of death is a complement to the copular verb be (preterite form was); it is not the subject.
Ask Tony and I for any further information you need.
To correct this you need to recognise that Ask is the subject and the phrase Tony and I is the direct object, because Tony and I are receiving the action as the result of the verb ask.
The remark above isn't a typo or anything. Graham King really was clueless about the notion of a grammatical subject, and so are the editors at HarperCollins. On page 20 of the book, King defines SUBJECT as "what it is" and defines PREDICATE as "what we're saying about it", and his first illustrative example is this:
SUBJECT PREDICATE
My word!
That's right; he thinks that when you say My word! (as perhaps you do, if you are over about 70 and somewhat conservative of disposition), the thing you are talking about is my, and the thing you're saying about it is word. And he thinks that means that the genitive pronoun my in this expression (which has the form of a noun phrase) is the subject. This man simply had no idea what he was doing.
Just an embarrassing but isolated slip by an editor, you are thinking? No, he really didn't get the concept. Lower down on the same page he claims that lots of English sentences have the predicate before the subject. And his first example is this one:
PREDICATE SUBJECT
It gradually became apparent that it was the odour of death
That's quite a predicate, isn't it? (Putting the alleged subject and predicate back in the normal order yields *The odour of death it gradually became apparent that it was. Doesn't sound so good, does it?) In the sentence as given, of course, the odour of death is a complement to the copular verb be (preterite form was); it is not the subject.
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