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Increasingly

Don’t use this word.

Adverbs can be suspect in the best of circumstances. Use them sparingly Be frugal in their usage. One adverb in particular, ‘increasingly‘, gives the writer up as lazy. But for some reason, ‘increasingly’ crept into the lexicon two or three decades ago, used by newspaper reporters as an easy way to reference a trend, even if the trend had just developed over the past few hours instead of, say, months or years.

Most of the aides who had been wandering around the convention center had found refuge backstage, away from the crowds staring at big screens hoping for a victory. “The path kept narrowing and narrowing and narrowing until there wasn’t one,” Parkhomenko recalled. “The mood behind the stage became increasingly grim.” – The Hill

The following trend ‘increased’ over years, until it was ‘resounding’.

Increasingly, leading cities are hiring “data people.” Whether with the title chief data officer, chief innovation officer, performance stat program director, or data scientist, these individuals are looking at government in a new way and using data to increase efficiency. Are these hires worth the investment? Resoundingly, the answer is yes. – GovTech

But why is gradualism so revered by the writer? It is not how the world works. And it might stand in the way of clarity: does she mean that each city is hiring more ‘data people’? Or that more cities are doing the hiring?

  • Increasingly, leading cities are hiring “data people.”
  • Leading cities are hiring more “data people” than ever before.
  • Leading cities are hiring “data people” in record numbers.
  • More leading cities are hiring “data people”.

Perhaps ‘data people’ should be in the lead.

  • Increasingly, leading cities are hiring “data people.”
  • “Data people” are in demand in leading cities.

You have so many options. Don’t use ‘increasingly’, ever. And for sure don’t use it in a song.

Long blends of days
Stream into nights
Consciousness barely coping
The land going by seems level
But really the tracks are
Increasingly sloping.
– ‘Slice of Time’ by David Crosby

Just don’t.

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Combine

Unlike combat, the verb-noun ‘combine‘ has come under no pressure to extinguish the stress difference between its noun and verb forms. Mispronunciations are rare (and perhaps nonexistent).

The verb has the stress on the second syllable:

Com-bine’. (v)

Platform 22, Floyd County Public Arts’ first project, combines history, education, and fine art in a series of 11 art installations located in nine public parks and two public buildings. – News and Tribune

Then there is the elegant noun, with stress on the first syllable, describing a common piece of farm equipment:

Com’bine. (n)

Scott Short of Sycamore drives past corn and soybean fields every day, but until Saturday, he had never been inside a tractor or a combine.

It’s true.

On Oct. 21, Short and about 80 others took combine rides coordinated by the DeKalb County Farm Bureau. Three local farmers, Vince Faivre of DeKalb, Steve Bemis of DeKalb and Rob Wessels of Waterman, allowed passengers to ride along in their combine cab to get a firsthand look at corn harvesting. – Daily Chronicle

Then there is another use of the noun, to denote a group ‘acting together for a commercial purpose’, again with the stress on the first syllable:

Obi Melifonwu left no doubts about his athleticism on the final day of the NFL Scouting Combine. The former UConn safety broad-jumped 11 feet, 9 inches and recorded a 44-inch vertical jump on Monday, marks that were the best of the combine. – NFL.com

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Stanch / staunch

You may have thought that stanch meant to stop the flow (usually of blood), and that staunch is what described an ardent supporter (often of a political cause). And you would be right, on paper.

To stanch the rhetorical bleeding:

The federal Liberal government says it will lower the small business tax rate to 10 per cent in January and to nine per cent in 2019, the start of a week-long effort to stanch the bleeding from a self-inflicted political wound. – The Canadian Press

To stanch a meltdown:

Dudley was a principal player in Fed decisions concerning the demise of Lehman Brothers, AIG and Bear Stearns, along with emergency measures taken by the central bank to stanch a meltdown in the financial system. – CNBC

A staunch feminist disappointing her friends:

Friends who described Hofmeister as a staunch feminist, generous friend and promoter of young professional women, say they are disappointed that she has become the public “apologist” for Weinstein. – PageSix

There are clear differences in meaning. We run into a problem when it comes to pronunciation. It may not be self-evident, but stanch and staunch are the same word. We need to hit the dictionaries for this one. We found the following on this excellent page in Collins English Dictionary:

Stanch in American English
(stɑntʃ; stänch; stæntʃ; stanch; stɔntʃ; stônch)

Stanch in British English
(stɑːntʃ) or staunch (stɔːntʃ)

As you can see by the intimidating vocal spellings, eight (8) different pronunciations of stanch are offered; five of these are accompanied by brief audible recordings. Some of them sound like staunch.

Staunch
(stȯnch; stänch)

Make that nine (9) possible pronunciations.

. . .

Stanch made it as the word of the day in Merriam-Webster on 10/07/2009. Here is the podcast (did podcasts exist in 2009?):

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NPR embeds

NPR embed. The embed is an iframe. There is a large gap after the embed, about 150 px on a big screen. It does not go away by declaring margin or padding parameters. NPR embeds ideally should be included in short posts, with all text preceding the embed.

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Block quote

A tyre is a tire that is located in the U.K. while a tire is a tyre that is located in the U.S. And the yellow “highlighter class” is new.

Meanwhile, Thirteen’s suspenders are reminiscent of those worn (albeit briefly) by the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy), and their mustard color, as well as the colored stripes of her shirt, also call to mind Seven’s colorful sweater vest. – Outer Places

Then resume talking. A tyre is a tire that is located in the U.K. while a tire is a tyre that is located in the U.S. And the yellow “highlighter class” is a link to the reference post.

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Perfect

We won’t bother with the adjectival form of perfect, it is everywhere. Let’s jump right to the verb.

UC Berkeley will conduct research to perfect a microbial factory for the compound artemisinin, currently the most effective treatment for malaria. – UC Berkeley News

Per-fect’. (v) To improve or refine.

Brendan Gleeson has told RTÉ Entertainment that several takes were needed to perfect scenes in Paddington 2, and admits it was challenging trying to “keep the energy up” during filming. – RTE

It seems that the verb is almost always in its infinitive form: ‘to perfect‘ something or other. Perhaps it appears otherwise, but we stopped looking.

Zhang, 25, has been working to perfect her English for several years and now speaks the language with little difficulty. – China Daily

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NGRAMs

Wikipedia defines n-gram like this:

In the fields of computational linguistics and probability, an n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sample of text or speech. When the items are words, n-grams may also be called shingles.

An n-gram shows how often a word or phrase appears (e.g., in books, or in newspapers) over time. Google describes their NGRAM program as follows:

When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how [often] those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., “British English”, “English Fiction”, “French”) over the selected years.

That’s where we get our data.

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Verb position

I think the entire country assumed that Mugabe was going to get on state television and announce that he was resigning as president. Instead, he gave a meandering speech that led to no resignation at all. So as far as anyone understands, he is still the president. He’s the president with diminishing support by the day. But until he resigns or until he’s forced out of power or until the country finds a legal path to dismissing him, he remains the president of Zimbabwe. – NPR

Let’s take a look at the highlighted sentence, in which ‘diminishing‘ appears to be an adjective.

He’s the president with diminishing support by the day.

Well, it’s not meant to be an adjective. Here are the same words, different order.

He’s the president with support diminishing by the day.

Without a doubt, ‘diminishing‘ is a verb, an action word. The dude’s support is shrinking, a little (or a lot) each day. Soon it will be gone. That makes sense. He has been in power since the beginning of (Zimbabwe) time. The following, however, does not make sense.

He’s the president with diminishing support by the day.

That’s why it is in red.

When a sentence contains two verbs, the second verb should not be a shrinking violet, a wallflower. It should be leaning forward, spring-loaded, ready to pop.

He’s the president with support diminishing by the day.

I mean, in a dependent clause the verb should follow, not lead, its subject whenever possible. Now that you know this, you have to cringe a little (e.g., at the 1:20 mark here) whenever you hear a verb unwittingly adjectivized.

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To not split the infinitive

An editor at Britannica pointed out an artful use of ‘not’ when splitting an infinitive:

Be aware that putting “not” or another adverb between “to” and its verb adds some emphasis to that adverb. For example, in the sentence “They decided not to stay another night” the phrase “they decided” is the most important information, but the sentence “They decided to not stay another night” tells us that maybe they decided to stay another night before, but now it is important that they will not stay.

An excellent use of ‘not’, this is. Often, however, there are more expressive, positive alternatives to a negative splitting of the infinitive:

Jack hoped to not need another surgery.

Jack hoped to avoid another surgery.

Jack hoped to forego surgery by taking a holistic approach.

Jack hoped that proper rest and exercise would make additional surgery unnecessary.

It is best to pair ‘hope’ with some sort of positive action, not ‘not’. After all, Jack had plenty of work to do on the farm. He had no time for negativity.

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Combat

Combat, the noun, has the stress on the first syllable.

Com’bat. (n)
First, military training and exposure to combat does not create the wacko battle-scarred soldier so often depicted by Hollywood, nor does it translate into criminal behavior. – Albuquerque Journal

Combat, the verb, has stress on . . . either syllable. It is tempting to get all purist here and insist on stressing the second syllable in the verb, but both forms have been widely adopted.

Com’bat. (v)
Com-bat’. (v)
A beefed-up corporate law enforcement unit, a new anti-fraud agency and more efficient criminal cases are among a suite of measures to be introduced to combat white-collar crime. –Irish Examiner

For combat, the verb, the stress distinction may be heading for extinction.

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Myriad

We have myriad possibilities.

The painting’s installation elements — including a plastic vacuum tube filled with “alphabet dice” — hint at myriad possibilities. – Seattle Times

We have a myriad of possibilities.

Thanksgiving is almost here, and with it comes huge platters of delicious food, pies as far as the eye can see, candy dishes full to the brim, and a myriad of choking hazards that no one ever told you about. – Romper

Which one is it?

“‘Myriad of’ is older than myriad with the noun,” [Prof.] Curzan explains. “Myriad comes into English in the 16th century when the word originally means 10,000, a specific number.” The word changed from referring to 10,000 of something, to meaning a countless number of something.

While ‘myriad possibilities’ is taut, succinct … ‘a myriad of possibilities’ is the original form. Either one is fine. Click on the link below to listen to this interesting discussion with Professor Anne Curzan at Michigan Public Radio.