Is that a real word or did you just make it up?

How many times have you guffawed - out loud or smothered behind a cough - at someone's verbal gaffe? In particular, when they use a word that you know doesn't exist. Do you experience a moment of amused superiority or, at the very least, save it up to share with friends afterwards? But why do we laugh or sneer at people who unintentionally utter new words? After all, isn't our language built on the creativity of fearless word-building folk?


Our English medieval ancestors spoke a language that was already a bit of a hotchpotch thanks to various invading tribes in the preceding centuries. Then Shakespeare came along and, seeing a need, merrily invented words to suit. He added prefixes and suffixes to existing words, was an early adopter of verbing nouns, copied the Germans by running two words together to make a new one, and dreamed up totally new and different creations. A hundred or so years later pseudo-Latin words were all the rage because people thought it made them look clever. In the 1800s some smart young things thought it was amusing to invent new words such as discombobulate, presumably so that you could discombobulate those who weren't in the know.

So, if English is made up of so many made-up words why are we so quick to laugh at people who use made up words unintentionally? Some made up words are really quite useful. For instance, when a little boy in a swim class couldn't swim along the bottom of the pool, try as he might, his teacher said, 'He's really quite floatacious'. How apt. The boy was not keen to dive either and his teacher decided not to push him too far in case he decided to rebaliate. I know what she means! Once he rebaliates it's all over, believe me! At a local club a committee member thought an unhealthy tree would need to be seen by an arbitrist. Sounds like the right person to make a decision about trees.

When did I first hear of comfortability? I'm not sure, but for me it comes under the heading of 'ugly but out there' words. It's not recognised by any major dictionaries but it's definitely out there on Google. These are the words that are based on something familiar but you can't believe they are for real. In fifty years, the progress of English being what it is, I expect to experience total comfortability with these types of words. In the meantime, I'll leave that one for you to use.

Some words have caught me out. I still cannot come to terms with impactful. I read it for the first time only a few months ago and was all ready to get superior but thought I had better look it up first. It turns out that impactful has been around since the 1950s and has made it into reputable dictionaries. Who knew? Not me. Kanye West did, though. He said 'I am the Number One most impactful artist of our generation.' If you say so, Kanye.

And sometimes it's an education. In a sound bite I heard on the radio, John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, referred to occupated land in Aleppo. What a clanger, right? Er, wrong. Those of you who knew the word already can laugh at me now. 

So when you hear someone utter a word you think is made up, look it up before you snortle. There are more words out there than you can ever know and, after all, our language is built on yesterday's 'ugly but out there' offerings.

Do you go extinct or become extinct?

This is a captivating image. Well, for me it is. Where I come from we don't talk about things going extinct or that something has went extinct. In my part of the world things become or became extinct.

Yet, there it was, in my morning paper: an article on how Neanderthals went extinct. My first reaction was that this article was written by a five-year-old who hadn't quite grasped the basics of which verbs to use and when. Surely this wasn't written by a trained journalist? All my (mostly) latent grammar and language snobbishness came scrabbling to the surface but I womanfully pushed it back down and looked at this from a more investigative point of view.

Further into the article I discovered that the journalist was reporting the work done by some researchers who had published their findings in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. After using the search engine of my choice to do a little research of my own, I discovered that some North Americans commonly use went extinct or go extinct or whatever the tense of the verb to go is required. Some people in the United Kingdom got quite defensive about their use of go extinct as well.

I dug some more and discovered that among professional editors the preferred usage was to become extinct. All the online dictionaries included sentence samples using the verb to become. Very few included a sentence sample with to go extinct. 

Editors were of the opinion that the use of to go extinct might be in common parlance in some parts of the world but it wasn't the correct usage. Certainly 26,775,000 online search results for become extinct or became extinct suggests that it is the preferred choice. Go extinct and went extinct only managed 1,585,000. So, where does this leave us? I would suggest that you stick with become extinct if you want to look like you know what you are talking about.

As for the newspaper article, perhaps the research paper was peer-reviewed but never passed in front of the eyes of a professional proofreader. And perhaps the journalist lifted some sentences or snippets intact from the published findings. However it occurred, it is indicative of the change in the way journalists must work. More and more errors slip through as the pace at which they work speeds up. As we see more errors in print I wonder: if they aren't getting enough time to get the basics right (grammar, spelling) then what else are they getting wrong that we don't know about?

A number of vs the number of

I'm going to let you into a little secret: proofreaders don't remember everything and sometimes we have to look things up. And we double-check a lot because people like to point their fingers in a superior way when a proofreader makes a mistake. Consequently, I take twice as long as anyone else does to send emails and texts (was that double check, double-check or doublecheck?).

That's written English, though. Spoken English is quite another thing. When I'm speaking I'm more worried about getting my idea across (before someone talks over the top of me) and less concerned with being absolutely and grammatically correct all the time. So, late one evening, after watching an episode of War and Peace and still recovering from the amputation scene at Borodino, my mind wasn't quite up to the casual question thrown at me by a family member. I chickened out and said 'I dunno, I'll look it up.'

Here's the question:

When I'm using 'a number of' do I use a singular or a plural verb?

 Well, you could add another question to that one.

When I'm using 'the number of' do I use a singular or a plural verb?

Did you see the subtle difference? 'A number of' and 'the number of'. Don't be fooled by how alike they look. We treat them differently.

A number of

A number of soldiers are in the medical tent.
(Not a number of soldiers is in the medical tent.)

The soldiers (more than one so it's a plural noun) are what we need the verb to agree with (match). For one soldier we would use the singular form of the verb ('a soldier is...'). For more than one soldier we use the plural form ('the soldiers are').

The number of

The number of soldiers in the medical tent is horrifying.
(Not the number of soldiers in the medical tent are horrifying.)

This time the noun we want the verb to agree with is 'the number of' and this is a singular noun. So we use the singular form of the verb ('the number of...is...).

Simple Rule

A number of needs a plural verb.

The number of needs a singular verb.

Handy tip:
If you are having trouble with what the singular form of a verb is for this situation then just use the verb that goes with 'he/she'.   he runs, she congratulates, he was, she has
For a plural form of the verb use the form that goes with 'they'.   they run, they congratulate, they were, they had