It’s ‘toward’, not ‘towards’!

There’s this restaurant on the island that my friends and I frequent because of the great food, the excellent service, and the bottomless drinks that make for a convivial repast. I have a problem, however, when it comes time for me to use the restroom. Oh, it’s clean enough and the smell of fresh potpourri is a balm for harried souls. And my friends believe that I am just being my usual anal self. However, I just can’t shake off the jarring feeling I get whenever I go to the restroom and see this sign: “Please don’t throw paper towel in the toilet bowl.” Okay, I am all for hygiene and the proper disposal of waste but can we also be grammatical about it? When you throw something, particularly if there is a specific target or a directional context, it is always “into” something. Yes, you throw the towel “to” the floor, but your throw the towel “into” the ring or the trash “into” the trash bin. In this case, the sign should read: “Please don’t throw paper towels into the toilet bowl.”

And while we’re at it, it is always “toward”, not “towards”. “Towards” is British English, while “toward” is its American version. Compare the British and American editions of the Harry Potter series and you’ll see the difference. Since the CNMI considers itself a part of the American family and subscribes to American English, can we be consistent and use the proper term?

And then there’s the much-abused “basically”. This term has been flogged and beaten to submission so much that it is already way past the point of being a cliché, yet it is still being trotted out by politicians and talking heads with the regularity of a metronome, like a doomed love affair that they have a hard time letting go of. Why start a sentence with it? Why even use it at all? The term and its siblings such as “the fact that” are way overdue for retirement and should be avoided.

This is not to say that the “Saipan Tribune” is a paragon of good grammar or that I am above the occasional grammatical boo-boo. Good heavens, we can’t even claim to be a shining example of good English, what with most of us not being native speakers of the tongue. Our grasp of the language’s structure, syntax, and context are taken from textbooks, while pronunciation is based on what we hear in the movies and television, so we tend to lack the mellifluous insouciance that native speakers of the English language have. Native speakers are doubly blessed with the right to bastardize the language since they literally own it and can make it up as they go along. For us second language speakers, we have to memorize a bunch of rules, watch out for dangling participles, and be especially wary of split infinitives. Most don’t get themselves all lathered up over a misstep or two but it just so happens that I am one of those demented kind of people who carry with us imaginary blue pencils, marking and correcting hideous copy and misspelling inside our heads whenever we encounter them.

Of course, there are times when I am just being arbitrary. Consider “advisor” and “adviser”. Grammar books and any number of dictionaries will tell you that there is no distinction between the two, that they are both the same. I, however, prefer “adviser”, not because it looks or sounds better but because the root word, advise, ends in an “e” and it therefore makes sense that one retain this form when adding a suffix.

Sometime, even when the rules are clear on a certain matter, I only accede because the sources are authoritative and are smarter than I am but even then, I do so grudgingly, resentfully. A perfect example of an ongoing fight I have with word mavens is the phrase “compared” to and “compared with”. The Associated Press stylebook will tell you that you use “compared to” when the intent is to assert, without the need for elaboration, that two or more items are similar, while “compared with” is used when juxtaposing two or more items to illustrate similarities and/or differences. The rule is clear enough and I should concede that I am stuck in a losing fight and should just shut up. In fact, when editing my reporters’ stories, I inevitably end up using “compared with” for stories that contrast data but the phrase always rings false in my mental ear, like a made-up word that lacks the panache, the naturalness of compared to.

Anyway, the point of is…well…there really is no point to all this, except perhaps to vent over what a lot of people would consider petty and esoteric frustrations but that should give you a brief idea of what sets wordsmiths’ teeth on edge. Most of the time, grammatical issues just fly over our heads and issues of syntax get lost in a morass of bad English but, from time to time, we do spot those mistakes and we try our best not to be an embarrassment to Shakespeare’s English.

(The views expressed are strictly that of the author. Vallejera is the editor of the Saipan Tribune.)