Grammar 2 – Up, up and away!

Amit Agarwal, I hear, gets paid for spotting errors. I am too, with two major differences.  My area of operation is different. What I get as fee is probably what Amit spends on making calls on a day.

Correcting English papers (from grade II to PhD) for more than a quarter century has not been without its  compensation. Some of those papers were written in a language that could only be called “creative”. Some were simply brilliant. What I have got from reading them is this: I have become skilled in finding mistakes (a tendency I need to keep in check as a mother-in-law).

I am “looking” for errors only in students’ papers.  The rest of the time, they seem to stare at me. Should I be picking on a couple of innocent mistakes while what is being said is original and relevant? That is the whole point. Sometimes errors mess up what the author means. As an author, you want to reach your thoughts to your readers, right?

Take the expression “double up” that is doing the rounds now.  As I said in Grammar 1,   someone comes up with an expression and others pick it up effortlessly. We are a trusting lot. We think, “Hey, that’s what I read in the paper yesterday, and that’s what I understood it to mean”, and the next time we write, hey presto, the phrase has found its way into our sentence.

Now, “double up” means “to bend suddenly, as in pain or laughter”. He doubled up in pain and fell to the ground.  So, what is it doing in this sentence? Politicians in the state double up as garba organisers. (TOI, 24 September). The sentence should be written without the pesky, two-lettered upstart “up”. Politicians in the state double up as garba organisers. Politicians double, triple and quadruple, have as many avatars as there are garba nights, but one rarely sees them “doubling up” in pain or shame. Of course, they might be doubling up in laughter, but that is in private.

“To double” means, among other things, “to be two things at the same time”. So a knife doubles as a butter spreader. You are a programmer who doubles as a stock broker; she is a teacher who doubles as a tourist guide. He is a mobile phone user who doubles as a social moron… you get the drift.

We make a similar mistake with “cope”. For some reason, everyone now adds the u-word to it. “I have learnt to cope up”, people sigh in speech and writing.  “Cope” means “to manage, sometimes with success”. Most of you are coping with a full-time job and raising hyper-active kids, aren’t you?

Learn to cope with this fact: “cope up” simply does not exist. Unless we are going in for some form of Indlish.

Grammar 1 – Don’t tell me!

Basab Pradhan, in his blog on Business English wonders why people answer a phone call with this new expression “Tell me”. He wrote:

“Tell me is a literal translation of Bolo in Hindi or something equivalent in other Indian languages. This is a uniquely Indian phrase. Good English would require Tell me to have an object at the end of it. Like Tell me why or Tell me something.”
Here is my take on this.
Grammatically, “Tell me” is on a sound base.

Verbs take on an object in a particular context so that their intended meaning becomes clear. Ex: I bought. The obvious question here is, “bought what”? The sentence is incomplete. To complete it, the writer adds an object, say, “a book”.
So it is the verb, the basic verb (give, buy, sing, see) that takes on an object.
How do you know whether the verb has an object or not? Pick the verb and ask: what or whom. “What” is for inanimate objects and “whom” is for animate objects.
Ex: I bought the baby a doll.
“a doll” answers “what” and is known as direct object.
“the baby” answers “whom” and is known as indirect object.

“Tell” is the verb and “me” (whom?) is the object.

“Tell me” here is short for, “Tell me what you want”. So “what you want” is the second object Basab is looking for.
“Tell me” is informal and is used in speech. Look at this example.
A: Sir, please tell me what went wrong.
B: No, YOU tell me! (that’s correct, isn’t it?)
The phrase “Tell me” is the flavour of the season. Earlier it used to be “work out” in various combinations. “Let’s work it out”, “It’s not working out”, “It won’t work out”, “Let’s work out something”.

Another example is “Enjoy!” This again is used in speech. In writing it has to be “enjoy yourself”, “he enjoyed himself”, “enjoy this”, etc.
Someone imports a phrase and begins using it and it catches like wildfire.
Yes, the phrase “tell me” is unique. In our frenetic pace of work, we have learned to come to the point. We no longer start the conversation with the polite, leisurely, “How are you?” (I hear the Japanese and the Chinese do this too.) This amounts to a cultural shift. Also, if you are working on a project and are consulting someone constantly on your mobile, saying “How are you” every time sounds silly.
The complete sentence here is, “Tell me what you want”. The last three words sound rude to us. We still can’t bring ourselves to utter them. So as politely as the pitch of our voice will allow us, we say, “Tell me”.

Now try this: “What do you want? TELL ME!”