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Several readers have been kind enough to share their thoughts recently about language use or misuse. Here are some selected issues of theirs that you might relate to.
Ironic vs. coincidental. One reader wrote, “One night several years ago my husband and I were watching the local Atlanta news and in the one hour we watched, the word ironic was used three times, and not one time was the situation ironic.” Ironic and coincidental are not synonyms. Here’s the difference: It’s ironic that jogger Jim Fixx, who encouraged people to jog as a way to stay healthy, died of a heart attack while jogging. On the other hand, if two cars are involved in an accident and both drivers are 59 years old and fat and bald, that’s merely coincidental.
I vs. me. A reader offered these examples of this annoying misuse of I: “The ball was thrown to Bill and I.” “This trip was a treat for my wife and I.” In each case, the I should be me.
You may have read our discussion here some months ago about the similar misuse of the reflexive pronouns (“Give it to Joe Ann and myself.”) and about the easy test to determine whether myself is correct: Leave out the other person’s name and see if it makes sense.
Let’s try it here, leaving out Joe Ann: Since you would never say “Give it to myself,” you would therefore never say “Give it to Joe Ann and myself.” “Give it to Joe Ann and me” is correct.
The test is exactly the same in the I vs. me situations: If you leave the other person out of the phrase, how would you say it? Obviously, “The ball was thrown to me” (not “to I”). But many people feel that the “me” sounds uneducated here.
Changing the correct me to the incorrect I, or the correct me to the incorrect myself, is what’s often called hypercorrection. One linguist defines hypercorrection as “making a change from something that is grammatical to something that is not, because of an over-anxious attempt to apply a rule without fully understanding how it works.” Check out Wikipedia.org’s entry on hypercorrection for more.
Fish is. A Blairsville reader passed along something she’d read somewhere: “Most fish now consumed in America is raised like most beef....” She wondered why it was Most fish is instead of Most fish are, but took a guess that fish was perhaps being used as a collective noun. That’s at least part of the answer, since in American English a collective noun typically takes a singular verb, as in “The class is away on a field trip.”
But I think there may be something else at work in the reader’s example as well. There, fish is being used to mean fish the food, not fish the swimming creature. Since animal-flesh-as-food nouns (beef, pork, veal, lobster, and the like) are typically singular, singular fish was correctly used as the subject of the sentence.
Wait, what?
Exactly. You caught that, I see. What’s causing the slight stumble in our reading of the original example is the fact that the word fish can be either singular or plural. The usage is clearer if we switch to a different food animal, one with a name that has both a singular and a plural form. A sign saying “Chicken is on sale today” refers to chicken-the-food and probably means you’re at the grocery store. “Chickens are on sale today” means chicken-the-animal and suggests you’re at the hatchery. Happy shopping.
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