Decades ago, normative dictionaries were the norm.  A dictionary told you what was right and wrong.  Nowadays many dictionaries have adopted the policy of legitimating semantic and syntactic deviations merely because they have come to enjoy wide currency.  For example, The American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) now opines that ‘media’ may be treated as a singular noun, and that the sentence, “Just because you have money doesn’t mean you’re happy,” is acceptable, allowing, however, that it has a “colloquial flavor”.  In this new, liberal spirit of the most recent dictionaries, Tom Pain may be able to excuse himself on some of the errors I’ve listed below.  My view, however, is that, if one construction is debatable and another 100% correct, it makes sense to use the latter.  Using the dubious construction leaves you open to the accusation that you didn’t know that there was a debate in the first place and have chosen to rationalize only after being caught making the error.

Here are three sentences from a recent article by Pain:

“Again and again, I was told that the trip was only undertaken due to a request by Dick Cheney, and that she did not offer her husband, his name came up after she was asked to suggest someone by her superiors.”  ‘Due’ is an adjective, not an adverb, but has no governing noun.  ‘Only’ should follow ‘undertaken’.  Therefore we might reword the phrase ‘undertaken only because of’.  It is noticed that AHD tends to accept ‘due to’ in this context, acknowledging only that many still consider it substandard.

“Such is the ugly world of politics, where snakes like Plame and Wilson can lay hidden in the grass and bite anyone they want, but no one can point out their presence without going to jail…It appears that he is only guilty of loyalty – he did as he was told, and fighting back against those cowardly liars Plame and Wilson could not have seemed wrong.”  I doubt that any dictionary will allow ‘lay’ to be used where ‘lie’ is meant.  This is a very common error.  ‘Only guilty’ is less acceptable here than ‘guilty only’.

In another article, we may read the following sentence:

“Their insults of me won’t drive me away, but parading up and down the site like idiots, such that anyone associated herein takes on that odor as well, will.”  I’m not thoroughly convinced that ‘of’ shouldn’t be ‘to’, but the real mistake is using ‘such’ for ‘so’.  ‘Such’ is an adjective without a noun, intended to modify ‘parading’, and so should be an adverb.

You will have to read the first paragraph of this article to understand that the sentence, “There were no injuries reported to Ms. Norwood,” should be, “There were no injuries to Ms. Norwood reported.”

In another article, we find another very common blunder, one that I’m surprised that Tom Pain would make:

“I appreciate Pat Hurley’s offer of peace and accept it gladly. Reading his heartfelt remarks and plea for compassion towards the fragile egos of some Useless Knowledge writers, one cannot help but be touched.”  There are two acceptable alternatives, ‘cannot but be touched’ and ‘cannot help being touched’.  Saying ‘cannot help but be touched’ is like saying ‘cannot avoid but be touched’, when we should rather say ‘cannot avoid being touched’.

The same article has this sentence:

“It has, instead, been consistently wrested away again and again from me, despite my admirable work ethic, acknowledged talents, and respect for others.”  The sequence ‘wrested away…from’ should be simply ‘wrested…from’.

In this article, ‘awhile’, fulfilling the place of the direct object of ‘take’, should be two words, ‘a while’, just as if we were to say, “It’ll take a minute.”

“It’ll take awhile since the Koran does not teach Spanish and Arabic, but do it anyway.”

An earlier post showed three blunders:

“It appears that the money is a being wasted due to willful inaction.”  ‘Because of’ would be better than ‘due to’.  We would say, “The waste of money is due to inaction,” but not, “The money was wasted due to inaction,” unless, with AHD, we accept that a time-honored error is now probably acceptable in an informal context.

Below, in the same article, Pain continues with this sentence:

“The worst part – certain elements in this country are encouraging them, and as this audit proved, our law enforcement agencies could care less.”  This self-evident blunder has great popular currency, but Pain would have us believe he rises above the masses.  Of course, it should be ‘could not care less’.

Then we find this one:

“America should have the right to decide whom they let in, and they should decide based on the value that alien could bring to our country.”  Here again, we have an adjective without a noun governing it.  ‘Based on’ should be ‘on the basis of’.  We say, “The decision was based on facts,” but not, “We decided based on facts.”

Elsewhere, Pain drops another couple of clinkers:

“For the last two decades, every statewide election (Governor, Lt. Governor, U.S. Senators, etc.) has resulted in a Republican being elected.”  Here ‘being elected’ is a gerund, and a gerund is a noun, so the possessive of ‘Republican’ is required, as ‘a Republican’s being elected’.  If this sounds awkward, we can always say ‘the election of a Republican’.

The following sentence from the same post, though not technically wrong, is misleading:

“Every article I clicked did not mention that he was a Democrat.”  The sequence ‘Every article…did not’ makes one wonder if some articles did.  It would be better had Pain said, “No article I clicked mentioned that he was a Democrat.”  I think that that was his meaning.

In another article, Pain calls adverbs adjectives, but of course that is not a grammatical error.  It is either a slip or an instance of grammatical ignorance.  Furthermore, in grammars the word ‘indefinite’ is not ordinarily applied to the word ‘very’, which is considered an ‘intensive’.

“While the question seems easy, respondents were forced to decide – quickly, because of the tendency to want to end an interrupting phone call – between the indefinite adjectives ‘somewhat’ and ‘very’ if they did, in fact, lean one way or the other.”

At this point, I feel that I have covered enough illustrative cases to establish that Pain, though a very capable writer, still needs to go some before he reaches the pinnacle.  In this last example, Pain again uses an adverb, ‘awhile’, instead of the noun pair ‘a while’, which is required in view of its being the object of the preposition ‘for’:

“There, that probably gave me some room in the Rebuttal Section for awhile.”

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