The preposition with which you are filling it in

I am currently mired in marking. As you know, I keep note of which mistakes are currently popular. One that I spotted recently was a sort of preposition doubling but with two different prepositions. Let me explain.

So, there are two things English can do. You can either move your preposition (in, in this example) along with your wh-word:

It depends on the newspapers in which you are reading them.

or you can leave it where it is:

It depends on the newspapers which you are reading them in.

It's a stylistic choice nowadays (used to be frowned upon, not so much now, and the first sounds a bit stuffy in casual conversation). Ignore the fact that which probably ought to be that in the second example (incidentally, that's evidence that this which/that rule is a bit daft). English is unusual in allowing this choice: most languages can't 'strand' the preposition and have to move it, as in the first example.

Sometimes, people get halfway through the sentence and forget they moved the preposition, and stick it in at the end as well:

It depends on the newspapers in which you are reading them in. 

Oh well - no problem. Speech error. It happens. Paul McCartney is sometimes said to have sung 'this ever-changing world in which we live in' (though he thinks maybe it was actually 'in which we're living').

But today I read sentences like this from two different students:

It depends on the newspapers with which you are reading them in. 

How exciting! So I think here, the student has left the preposition at the end on purpose, because that's fine, but also felt like there really ought to be something in that space before the which, so stuck in another preposition (with) that sounds OK there. Add it to the list of 'more words = better' mistakes.

Maximal destruct of pairing

I get occasional spam comments on my post about spam comments. I got this one today:


I'm glad to know that Mary is in position to support me with the maximal destruct of pairing in essay penning. But I really think she should employ a good exclusive educator writer to impact on her own naming.

Quantifier fail

This is an illustration of yellow.

When the UGs at my university hand in their essays, we have a big massive 'handing in day' where two-thirds of the School turns up within 4 hours and they submit all their work to one of four PhD students (one of them being me). It's a bit manic because there's so many of them, and because there's a lot of form-filling to be done, and UG students may be bright but they certainly aren't good at following instructions.

They have to fill in one white form for each piece of work they're submitting, which has the details of that essay on it, and then there's a yellow form which is a global cover sheet and lists all the modules they're submitting work for. Simple. Er... no.

So lots of them apparently haven't read the careful instructions they've been given, and come to ask us what forms they need to fill in. We say to them,

You need one white form for each essay and one yellow one for all of them.

This leads a number of them to think that they need a yellow one for each essay too (if we meant that we'd be violating at least one of Grice's maxims - perhaps the maxim of quantity?). We tried calling it a 'global sheet' instead but that didn't seem to help that much. The trouble is the word all. If I was to say that

all of the essays need a yellow form,

I think that would fairly unambiguously mean that they needed one for each of them. What about this:

You need a yellow one for all of them.

I think that's probably ambiguous too - but not if it follows the instruction about the white forms. Then if you add in the word one, I think the contrast between each and all should really be clear. And yet, for many people (admittedly sleep-deprived and stressed people), it isn't clear at all.

I can't quite work out, actually, if it's a problem with the quantifier or with the article. Perhaps it's because we have two possible interpretations of the indefinite a yellow form: generic or specific. On the sense we mean, a yellow form refers to one yellow form; on the misunderstanding, it refers to multiple instances of a generic type of yellow form. Then compounded by the fact that all can mean 'a set as a whole' or 'every member of a set', we have an issue.

Hey - everyone got their work handed in (apart from one poor chap who turned up ten minutes late), I drank two cups of coffee and ate two chocolate biscuits, and we'll do the same thing all over again in the spring.