Promotional Offers

Most people are familiar with the various types of promotional offer that companies make in order to boost sales - for example, "buy one - get one free" or "buy two and get a third at half-price".

Nowadays, many business models involve giving something away 'for free' in
order to promote the sale of some other commodity. One example of this is reflected in the following slogan: "Free laptop when you take out mobile Internet on an 18-month contract".

I recently saw the following entry in my local newspaper:


My immediate reaction was: are they giving away free phones?

My dilemma was partly resolved when I saw the '0800' number underneath the 'Free Phone ' offer. I guess what the advertiser really means is: you can make a free phone-call in order to find out more. Maybe I should ring the number and check this out - my opening line being "Are you really giving away free phones?".

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Sounds Alike: Patients, Patient's and Patience

These three words all sound exactly the same. It is little wonder therefore, why people get them confused and often use them incorrectly - when it comes to writing them out on paper or typing them for display on a computer screen.

Over the years, I have noticed a number of mis-uses of these words. I cite below a few examples of these to illustrate some of the variants. I also pose the question of whether knowledge of context should allow us to break the rules of grammar when moving from spoken to written communication.

Example 1:
I recently received an email from a computer system administrator apologising for a breakdown in online service. At the end of the email, the administrator wrote: "... thank you for your patients ...". Its pretty obvious which of the three sound-alikes should have been used!

Example 2:
Patients were also mentioned in another email that I recently received. In this case the sender wrote: " ... The new pill will improve patient treatment ...". So, I then wondered, what exactly is 'patient treatment' - is it treatment that is administered very slowly and without hassle? Of course, I then realised that the sender should really have used the possessive form of the noun 'patient' rather than the adjective! What he really meant to write was " ... The new pill will improve patients' treatment ..."

Example 3:
This example is also related to medical therapy - the use of an ingestible event marker within orally taken medication. A report that I recently read contained the following phrases: " ... It would be useful in monitoring patient adherence and the data collected ... there are, however, some concerns about the safety of patient data ...". This usage is, of course, very similar to that reported in the previous example.

In the second and third of the above examples, I was able to deduce what the senders of the messages meant from the context of the messages - medications and the taking of pills. This, of course, begs the question of whether or not we can break the rules of written grammar when the context of usage is clear. Of course, in a vocal exchange (as might have taken place in a face-to-face conversation or one that was mediated by a mobile phone), I would not have been able to spot the sender's mis-use of grammar since patients, patient's and patients' all sound the same.

What a Difference an 'e' Makes!

I was recently browsing through some of the comments held within a weblog that I run for my local rambling club. In the entries that I make on this blog, I give details of walks that the club organises: where they start from and where they finish. I also provide a very brief 'route description' and a map.

For one of my walk postings, one person had taken issue with my incorrect spelling of a place name ("Carlin Howe") - which I should have spelled (correctly) as "Carlin How" (without a terminal 'e').

Here is the entry concerned.

Of course, my correspondent was perfectly correct. Within the geographical area concerned, there are indeed two places with very similar spellings - separated from each other by a distance of about 6 miles ('as the crow flies'!). Carlin Howe {NZ 608 181} lies roughly due west of Carlin How {NZ 707 192} - as shown in the following diagram. The items in parentheses following these place names are grid references - as discussed below.


My correspondent was therefore concerned that people reading my walk description would start their walking expedition in the wrong place. I disagreed with him, on the basis that words and names are usually so imprecise that they cannot be relied upon to identify, in an accurate way, the correct location where a walk actually starts. Instead, this information is given by means of a grid reference - using either a national or an international method of specifying geographical locations. In my postings to the rambling club blog, I use the UK's national grid system - alternatively, a latitude and longitude specification would do equally well.

So, although I had spelled the place-name for the start of the walk incorrectly, because there was not an error in the grid reference, there should not be a problem.

Addendum
Interestingly, I checked out the spelling of the place-names discussed above on the UK's Ordnance Survey Web site and found that the spelling of the place-name of the location at grid reference NZ 608 181 actually changes - depending upon the scale of the map used. As can be seen in the following diagram, the 1:50000 map uses Carlin Howe while the 1:25000 scale map adds an extra letter 'g' - making it Carling Howe!


I thought this was quite remarkable since it appears that through the 'magic' of computers, it seems possible to make the spelling of a place-name change by means of a simple mouse-button click. The above spelling anomaly is also echoed in the 'paper' versions of the maps for this area.

Green-Leaf Theory

I once fell into a conversation with a young lad who told me that he had an interesting theory about the seasons. He said that he new why the seasons changed; it was all to do with the number of green leaves on the trees. The lad lived in the UK and so he observed the changing leaf-colours and made an interesting correlation between the number and colour of leaves on deciduous trees and how this varied from season to season. This observation and correlation would have been more difficult to make had he lived in an equatorial region. He then went on to advance his theory: when the leaves are green, there is active removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as a result of photosynthesis; however, when there are no leaves on the trees, there is no photosynthesis. This means that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases and prevents the sun’s heat getting to us. This is why it is cold in the winter and warm in the summer. Interesting theory I thought.

Making a 'Thud'

Here are two interesting sentences that differ only in respect to one word:

The boy hit the wall with a hammer.
The boy hit the wall with a thud.

The Oxford Dictionary of English (Second Edition, page 1840) uses the following example in its definition of the word 'thud': 'he hit the wall with a terrific thud'. Hmmm! I thought. This is an interesting sentence since it conjured up visions in my mind of someone actually hitting a wall with an object called a thud. But what then is a thud? A thud is a type of noise - so how can a thud be used to hit a wall? I guess what people would normally mean is 'He hit the wall making a thud'. Alternatively, 'he hit the wall and his impact was accompanied by a thud'. But each of these also conjures up interesting pictures in the mind. For example, one can envisage a person hitting a wall to manufacture a thud - as happens when someone bangs a big base-drum. I suppose the problem is that there are always hidden implications in the words and sentences that people use and these implications become an inherent aspect of the language that we use in conducting our day to day activities. Naturally, these implications can introduce ambiguity, fuzziness and absurdity unless one is 'in the know'. And, there I go!

Nouns as Adjectives

Why is it that so many people are fond of using nouns as adjectives? I think it is probably due to laziness in relation to the correct use of punctuation - usually a missing apostrophe or hyphen. For example, people who work in education often talk about ‘the learner experience’. What do they mean?

They probably wish to express the meaning “the experience (or experiences) that one or more learners is/are exposed to” - in which case, they should probably write one or other of the following expressions:

the learner’s experience (for a single learner having a single experience)
the learner’s experiences (for a single learner having multiple experiences)

the learners’ experience (for a group of learners having a single experience)
the learners’ experiences (for a group of learner having multiple experiences)

On the other hand, we could talk about the ‘learner-experience’ as a single experience that one or more learners are exposed to. The plural form of this composite would now be ‘learner-experiences’ - this would describe multiple experiences that one or more learners have. The problem with this composite is that it does not give any indication of the number of learners involved - one or many? It is interesting to speculate on whether four forms of the composite are needed in order to cover each of the possibilities listed above: (1) learner-experience, (2) learner-experiences, (3) learners-experience and (4) learners-experiences. Interesting!

Someone I know will tell me ...

I was recently listening to a radio programme. At one point in his delivery the presenter was not very sure about something he said, and so, he remarked "Someone I know will tell me". I took some time to think about this remark because I was not really sure about the meaning of what he said. What did he mean? Was he implying that somone he was acquainted with would tell him? Or, on the other hand, was he suggesting that he had the knowledge that someone would tell him? The interesting problem is, of course, how should the written sentence be punctuated or modified in order to remove the ambiguity that it embeds?

Of course, a slight re-wording of the sentence would remove any possible mis-interpretations. Here are some examples of disambiguated sentences that the broadcaster might have used:

I know someone who will tell me.
Someone who I know will tell me.
Someone will tell me I know.

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