His Errors Are Just This Side of Correct

I am chagrined to learn that I have committed my second error of the year, which brings me up to my quota of two. I am always quick to admit my errors, unless I am able to find some way to wriggle out of them, but in these two cases the readers have me dead to rights.

Earlier this year, Michael J. Elliott noted that in writing of a Brentwood football game, I said: “The enthusiasm and energy of the Junior Varsity Cheerleading Squad was boundless.” As any Brentwood student could point out, I should have written “ were boundless.”

Strike one!

My former colleague, Marshall Lumsden, nails me on an incorrect attribution. I recalled that it was an English novelist, Kingsley Amis, who told of the young minister who slid a hand down the back of a young woman in a backless dress, while dancing, and confessed later to his elders, “I felt a perfect ass.”

Lumsden points out that while Amis may have used the story, it also appeared in Peter De Vries’ comic novel “Mackerel Plaza.” Yes. And that fact came to me before I received Lumsden’s note.

For the record, Otto Almasy of Marina del Rey also pointed out this blunder.

Strike two!

Having used up my quota, I am going to be very hard to trip up from now on.

At the risk of wearying those who have had enough of my crusade for the propriety of ending a sentence with a preposition, I will note that Fred A. Glienna of South Pasadena buries those critics who argued that my example, “Let a little sunshine in,” does not count because the in is not a preposition but an adverb.

Glienna writes: “ In does not function as an adverb in the phrase ‘Let a little sunshine in.’ It is what linguists call a word particle, and this particular particle is attached to the verb to complete its meaning. The word in is a preposition. Period. Full stop. End of story. -30-.

“Many similar phrases come to mind,” he continues: “Write him up, turn it off, send it up, let it out, hold it in, putting one on, doing something over. These are not adverbs; they are prepositions, which shape, contour, complete and modify not the verbs, but the meaning of the entire phrases in question.

“Aarrghh,” he finishes.

I have meanwhile received numerous comments and addenda on my column dealing with the word ass and its derivatives. Some are scholarly; none is pejorative.

Edna D. Myers of Huntington Beach and several others have sent me various versions of a little verse that has been around for years. I quote Myers’ version because I like it the best.

Mary donned her figure skates

Upon the ice to frisk.

Now wasn’t she a foolish girl

Her little * ?

Edric Cane of La Canada writes to dispute my notion that there are so many words in a dictionary it is unlikely anyone could come across an obscene one by chance.

“Just the other day,” she writes, “I was checking up on the spelling of my favorite flower, the fuchsia, when my eyes wandered just below and landed on a word labeled as obscene--a word, I must admit, I had never heard before. The definition clearly identified it as a word that I do not want next to my dear fuchsia.”

If Cane has been so sheltered that she has never heard that word before, my advice to her is not to let her eyes wander when she’s looking in a dictionary.

Peter Coppen of Newport Beach notes the difference between our ass and the British arse . “ Ass , our word for the human fundament, as you put it, can be used in Britain quite properly in refined speech; the equivalent word over there is the four-letter word arse . Expressions such as perfect ass , or my very proper mother’s favorite, silly ass , are therefore perfectly innocent. . . .”

I suppose I ought to come clean and admit to a couple of other complaints, although I consider them trivial if not pedantic.

A. B. Silver quotes this sentence of mine: “According to ‘Modern English’ (Lazarus, MacLeish and Smith), this form of dangling modifier is called a dangling elliptical because subject and verb (he is) are missing. They call ‘danglers’ the most notorious of sentence structure faults.”

He asks: “To what antecedent does the They refer: ‘Modern English’ or the authors?” Obviously, since the book is not a plural, the They refers to the authors.

Bob Sontag of San Juan Capistrano quotes a fragment: “the censorious right, which routinely scrutinizes books in search of what they consider. . . .”

At the same time, he notes that the headline reads, “Censorious Right Has It All Wrong,” and asks, “Should you have written ‘what it considers . . . ‘ or should the headline have read ‘Censorious Right Have It All Wrong’?”

AARRGHH!

Jack Smith’s column is published Mondays.