Shibboleth schmibboleth

OK, it's a fair cop. Pedantry is not a stranger to  me.  I've dealt, often in this blog, with linguistic pedantry; one of my more visited posts is this one, the first of two trottings out of one of my most cherished bons mots, about "pedants of the world having nothing to lose but their chains" (make that three trottings out).

<background>
New readers start here: it's an etymological joke (i.e. absolutely hilarious), about the root of the word "pedant": Greek pedai (which means "chains").
</background>

I'm not a fan of this sort of pedantry; not that that spares me from being prey to it from time to time. It's hard not to be , the way people throw words around quite disirregardless of their proper meaning,

<irony_warning>
And, as they say in the UNIX world, send complaints about that use of "proper" to /dev/null/.
</irony_warning>

A bridge between linguistic pedantry and the sort of pedantry I want to address now is somewhere in this (which I have no time to trawl through just now for the sake of a spot reference, and besides, "no names, no pack drill") someone who had put together a virtual choir said that the effort involved increased exponentially with the number of recordings and he or she...

<parenthesis>
(well, I know which, but to specify which would spill the beans as – apart from the ring-mistress – there was only one wo..[oops])
</parenthesis>

... said "and I don't need to explain about exponential growth" (or words to that effect). And it's clear that the speaker wouldn't have been able to explain it. My savings, with varying interest rates (averaging not much more than than 1.5%), grow exponentially, but the exponent in question is about 1.0015. With an exponent of significantly more than one, exponential growth is indeed very fast and getting faster and faster (roughly what people mean when they use the word), but if the exponent is one-and-a-smidgen the growth rate is nugatory, and when the exponent is less than one....

<home_study_recommendation>
Somewhere on the net you'll find a story about someone doing a service for a Chinese emperor (aren't they always?) who says – do they never learn? – "Ask of me anything you want". And the doer of the service spots a chessboard (there's usually one lying around) and asks the emperor to give him one grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth etc. doubling all the way to 64, and aggregating all the contents of the previous squares. The total is (as I remember) astronomical (really) – anyway, it's huge (not that all those kilos of rice would fit on the squares, if I'm being honest). There the exponent is 2, and the growth really is great.
</home_study_recommendation>

...But she knew what she meant. and everybody else did . So I should give her a break.

Anyway, this is the sort of pedantry I want to address: arithmetical pedantry – usually influenced by a teacher or teachers. At my primary school, when we started adding and taking away ...

<autobiographical_note type="Oh, the naivety">
At secondary school "taking away" was scorned in favour of "subtracting". I still have a vision of Doc Lewis's withering scorn...

<tangent>
Excuse the cliché: is there any other sort? <blush />
</tangent>

 ...when people on Countdown say "times it by..."; "The word is multiply, boy."
</autobiographical_note> 

 ... we were told to label the columns "H/T/U". A "1" in the H column stood for "100". In fact, although we hadn't yet thought about the wonders of this new-fangled zero thing (the Romans managed without it), that's what the zeros in 100 are doing – making sure the "1" stays in the H column and doesn't migrate to somewhere else where it would mean something different.

/More next week

AOB

I must get on.... But my mind has been occupied of late with this carol competition. I've been following this on Radio 3 Breakfast for a few years now, but it's always seemed beyond me. People submitted complex 4-part settings of modern poems.

But  numbers must have been falling off...

<rant>
 (one could ask a woeful succession of Education Ministers why, I suspect; but is there any wonder that people in this benighted country couldn't tell a melisma from a melanoma? )
</rant>

..., and now they've moved the goalposts; the competition people simply want a melody, which I  can just about do ("Has ability but is disinclined to use it musically" wrote my music master, in the days when teachers were allowed to put what they liked in school reports.)

The rules require a melody for one verse, suitable for all the others.  How can you do any word-painting when you don't control the arrangement?

Still, it's done now:

Well, I'm not holding my breath, although for other reasons I'm counting down the days to 18 November...

Bye for now

b

Update: 2020.11.07.16:20  – Added PS

PS: Another prejudice...

<parenthesis>
(by which I don't mean to deprecate the belief; thinking about it I find it innumerate, lazy, and misleading. I'm simply saying I feel this antipathy without thinking about it.)
</parenthesis>

 ...ingrained in me by Doc Lewis  is the habit of many commentators (particularly sports commentators) to keep the HTU words even after the decimal point: "reducing the world record to nine point twenty-four seconds". No. no, no. in the expression "9.24 seconds" the 24 isn't twenty-four; twenty is represented by a 2 in the Tens column; in 9.24 the .24 stands for two tenths and four hundredths. Calling that sort of 2 "twenty" is making the same mistake as calling 31 "twenty eleven", because when you get 11 in the Units column you put down a one and carry a one – every fule no that.

Of course, there is a language that – while not saying "twenty eleven" – does say "sixty eleven": soixante onze: a Guardian Notes & Queries page explores the tip of the septante huitante nonante issue,  which is partly (as far as quatre vingts is concerned) due to the fact that the Celtic language spoken in Gallia Transalpina before the Romans came and taught them how to speak proper used a vigesimal (base 20) counting system. In fact, that vigesimal counting system affects English dialects as well. A friend of mine with a holiday home in Swaffham once heard a farmer talking about "half a score of pigs".  (The word score itself suggests a vigesimal counting system, but the phrase "half a score" seems to me more persuasive, as it deliberately avoids the word "ten".)

Still more numerical navel-gazing to come, but I must show my face in the Real World.

 

b

That's that

I have referred many times to the problems thrown up by the relative adjective/pronoun that.

<digression>
Incidentally, this relative  that, though spelt the same as the subordinating conjunction, is phonologically distinct as it's always pronounced /ðæt/: examples – "I want thAt one"; "Don't give me thAt"), with the vowel never reduced to /ə/. The subordinating conjunction is often reduced to /ðət/: examples – "She told me that she had gone" (/ðət/) but "She told me that (/ðæt/) she had gone, not why".  My guess is that the /ðət/ form is the more often used, and that the chief exception is when there's contrastive ...

<aside>
Ho-ho. The infernal machine has given that word a red underline, and helpfully suggested I might mean contraceptive.
</aside>

...stress (as in my second example). Machine-generated speech often gets this wrong. The latest example I've noticed  was in the first of the new series of Ability.
</digression>

I've  mentioned the which/that controversy here :

<grammar_point importance="negligible" skip="yes, if you value your sanity" status="shibboleth"> 

Suppose I have two lawn mowers. The green one is in the shed and the red one ... is in the garage. Woe betide you if you refer to the green one as 'the mower which is in the shed'. However, you will have Mrs Thistlebottom*'s blessing if you say 'The red mower, which is newer, is in the garage.' 

</grammar_point>

And earlier I had written here about the grammatical inflexibility, as a relative, of THAT in contrast to WHO and WHICH:

The mower that is in the garage is red 

The mower thats power source is petrol... 

The mower on that you can sit while mowing...

To sum it up, here's a table: (I'm not proud of the layout, but still...)

Case	THAT	WHO	WHICH
Subject	that	who	which
Object	that	whom (with or without preposition)	which  (with or without preposition)
Possessive	–	whose	whose (a rather old fashioned-sounding borrowing from WHO; most speakers today – especially younger ones – say of which)

This area of syntactical inflexibility  causes much grief. One can forgive Paul McCartney for "this cold and hungry world in which we live in"; in fact for years I gave him the benefit of the doubt and heard it as "... in which we're livin'". But people with a more thoughtful (if less creative) approach to the language are often left with egg on their faces. In a recent BBC News interview Jacob Rees-Mogg said (right at the start of that recording, about 14 seconds in) that "the EU should be careful for what it wishes for".

<possible_extenuation>
When I first heard it on the radio I thought he had just changed horses in mid-stream; the linguist's word for this is anacoluthon (mentioned before in early posts, here for example: the song I  mentioned in the last para of that post starts like this: [to the tune of Anna*, of course] 

Ana... [backing vocals continue: "...coluthon"] 

Is when a sentence starts one way

But then it begins to stray; 

You start out with one sentence structure 

But it's really different 

In the end  

[Some critics may notice that "structure" and "different" don't rhyme; delivery of this non-rhyme is a matter of performance: a degree of self-editing may be suggested.]

). He started out with the Mrs Thistlebottom version ("for what it wishes"), realized it sounded prissy, and went for the more demotic "what it wishes for"; so that what he said was "be careful f... (thinks: "no, that sounds like a caricature of an Old-Etonian prig") what it wishes for". 

But on a second hearing (recycled on the TV news) I decided my initial generosity of spirit was misplaced; he just got it wrong.
</possible_extenuation>

Enough for now.

b

* Incidentally, the attribution of the song to "J.P. McCartney" on that clip is wrong. This track was on the Beatles' first album, before they had settled on their default setting of <all-songs-home-grown>. In fact the idea of singers writing their own songs was so out of the ordinary that the pop media of the early '60s were full of the word "self-penned", new to me at the time (although, as so often with suspected neologisms, it had a long history before the 1960s – more than 100 years, according to Merriam-Webster). Some of their promotional literature at the time gushed  that Lennon and McCartney had written enough new material to keep them in the charts until 1975!!! (HD: as Wikipedia might say, "citation needed").

Wringing out the old

Another of my occasional State of the Blog posts giving you a chance to see a stat display that is normally reserved for the blogger...

<so_whats_new>
(not unlike all the other stats I've blogged about over the years... But what makes these different is that the others have been the default Overview,  whereas these indicate which posts rank in the top 10 of all time [Year Zero being 2012].)
</so_whats_new>

Far and away the most visited, in spite of its age, is one about Latin phrases. It's coming up to six years old, and last time I looked the screen capture it was based on was missing. I've no idea what  makes it nearly nine times as popular as no. 2 on the list. I expect some Influencer has spread the word; maybe it's on a syllabus somewhere perish the thought.

The remaining nine fall into 4 broad groups:

• Two that use the same Pedants of the world unite joke (2 and 6)
• Three on various philological points  (3-5)
• Three relatively recent ones (7-9)
• One that, being on its own at ^no 10, is in no way a broad group; so sue me :-)

In an update (after the New Year's dust has settled) I'll add some links (though in the meantime you can search using dates (or guessed themes, if you're feeling really adventurous)  :-) But I want to get this out there before December 2018 goes down as The Month of the Solitary Post,

Happy 2019!

b

Update – 2019.01.02.16:55: Here are the links and a few descriptive pointers. I've also fixed a pretty gross typo, in blue.

• ^no 1 The web page this originally pointed to is gone now but here‘s the jpg it used.
• ^no 2  and  ^no 6 These are the two on pedantry.
• ^no 3 ,  ^no 4, and ^no 5 These are quite old (but rather fun,  TISIAS) philological stories.
• ^no 7  , ^no 8 , and ^no 9   These three, despite their recency, make the top 10 because I plugged them in an MFL Teachers' group that, for reasons best known to Facebook (and I've given up beating my head on that cyber wall), I can no longer access.
• ^no 10 On a machine translation boo-boo.

Frites or crêpes? Who cares?

A few days ago the usually unruffled calm of French grammar was rudely disturbed by a pair of teachers in Belgium, who wanted a change:

Currently, the rule is that the past participle of a verb does not agree with the direct object of a sentence if it comes after it, but it does when the object comes before the participle.

So for instance, in the sentence j'ai mangé des frites (I ate chips), mangé remains the same. But in the sentence les frites que j'ai mangées (the chips that I have eaten), the participle agrees with the word chips, which is feminine and plural.

...The rule was imported from Italy by pedants in the 16th Century and is being dropped in everyday use, the pair argue.

BBC source

There are three things about the original Libération article  that struck me:

• Those Italian pedants in the 16th Century had a name, and it started with only one:
  

  Au XVI^e siècle, Clément Marot, constatant le même phénomène en italien, en fait la promotion à l’aide d’un joli poème, ce qui fera dire à Voltaire : «Il a ramené deux choses d’Italie : la vérole [HD: smallpox] et l’accord du participe passé. Je pense que c’est le deuxième qui a fait le plus de ravages [HD: I think the latter did the most damage]».

  This is reminiscent of the history of English, which is littered with pedantic attempts at "tidying up" by introducing rules that cause more trouble than they solve.
   
• The "80 hours of teaching time" claim looks very odd, not to say iffy. I suspect some strange extrapolation of Wallonia's version of OFSTED accounting methods. Before anyone believes this, or worse still acts on it, I recommend a closer inspection of this figure. (On a related topic, I wonder what proof there is of the "being dropped in everyday usage" claim. It seems credible, and should be easy enough to prove, but I'd be happier not relying on what a couple of Belgian teachers ARGUE [I wonder what universe the BBC plucked that verb out of]).
  
  
• The example has changed. This is not a serious counter argument; indeed, it's just not a counter-argument – simply an object of passing interest. The writer of the BBC article seems to have decided that frites was a more telling example than crêpes:
  

  «Employé avec l’auxiliaire avoir, le participe passé s’accorde en genre et en nombre avec le complément d’objet direct quand celui-ci le précède (les crêpes que j’ai mangées). Mais si le complément suit le participe, il reste invariable (j’ai mangé les crêpes).» [HD: my underline, just to make navigation a bit easier.]
  

This sparked off an irrelevant memory:

<autobiographical_note date="1968">
After my O-levels [HD: fore-runner of GCSEs] I went hitch-hiking around Europe with a friend. When we arrived outside Paris (at the Auberge de Jeunesse in the unpromisingly-named Châtenay-Malabry [surely bon abri would have been a more attractive-sounding name]), we ate from a stall that sold crêpes. The crêperie was set up a bit like a fish-and chip stall. But this apparent similarity was  a faux-ami. The bottle on the counter, tipped with a pouring spout, was not for free use of the customer.

<meta_digression\>
While I'm on the subect of "false friends", an ongoing cycle repair has alerted me to fact that rubber solution is not solution de caoutchouc but dissolution de caoutchouc; not exactly a false friend, but something that's just not friendly at all.
</meta_digression\>

I ordered and paid for a crêpe and reached for a bottle of Grand Marnier, standing on the counter like a vinegar bottle in a fish and chip stall. The stall-holder was not amused, and gave me an earful. She no doubt agreed with de Gaulle, who for some years had remained obdurate about keeping la perfide Albion out of the EEC.
</autobiographical_note>

I'm glad that the English have avoided this sort of wrangling by the simple expedient of not having a supreme arbiter of correctness. If the rule is being used in practice less and less, that will be it. The Académie (or some more relevant body, as the Académie doesn't really do syntax) can keep its finger in the dyke if it likes, but it won't have much bearing on the linguistic facts.  We are left with a twale twold by a twidiot:

The BBC article translates this: "why not also drop the offside rule in football? That way ... schoolchildren will be able to spell phonetically and football players will be able to play with their hands.

I'm not sure about the "that way", but la règle du hors-jeu will make a useful new entry in my Vocab. Book.

b

Captain Corelli‘s Egg-Slicer - Pedants of the world unite, Part the second

In last week‘s Review (one of the many pull-outs of The Times that almost ALWAYS goes astray on the way from the warehouse and it‘s not the shop‘s fault, honest, there‘s nothing we can do, it‘s the wholesaler) someone had taken the trouble to write in with a bit of misplaced pedantry that I used to be a believer in myself. (And if you're a fan of  "in which", read this – you're damned if you do invert and damned if you don't; I've chosen my route to damnation.)

In a letter to the Feedback column, a correspondent said he was writing ‘as a science student‘, but I suspect he meant ‘as a schoolboy who did GCSE Physics' or – depending on his age – O-level Physics, or even (as in my case) O-level Physics with Chem (that hasty genuflection at the altar of Mammon that, at one time, we Lotus Eaters were allowed to make on the way to a Greek class).

I first wrote about pedantry over four years ago here (well, I‘m sure I had written about it many times before,  but that early blog post was my first airing  for the PEDAI gag: "you have nothing  to lose but your PEDAI [=‘chains' {Greek – I wasn't kidding in my opening para]" – geddit? It‘s an etymological joke... Oh well}):

One of the grammar checker's shibboleths [BobK 2017: the object of my disdain at the time was grammar checkers – particularly Microsoft Word's: "a sort of Strunk & White incarnate"] is 'that in defining relative clauses' (and now the gloves are off – the underline is RED.)

<grammar_point importance="negligible" skip="yes, if you value your sanity" status="shibboleth">
Suppose I have two lawn mowers. The green one is in the shed and the red one ... is in the garage. Woe betide you if you refer to the green one as 'the mower which is in the shed'. However, you will have Mrs Thistlebottom*'s blessing if you say 'The red mower, which is newer, is in the garage.'
</grammar_point>

... I know the rule is hooey, but... 

And speaking of hooey, the other thing about using that in subordinate clauses is that it forces you to 'break' another 'rule', by relegating a phrasal verb's particle to the end. (I have mentioned this before, in the red excursus in the middle of this post).

And that is the point on which I shall end. 

*Mrs T is not my invention; I have mentioned her before. She haunted Dave Barry's Mister Language Person columns, which have gone the (sorely lamented) way of the songs of Tom Lehrer.

As I said, I was – until quite recently – a participant in this oft-repeated nitpick ("Quanta are really small, look at the ignoramus suggesting it's big"). But then I saw this explanation in a UsingEnglish forum:

According to quantum theory, electromagnetic radiation can only exist in certain values as opposed to being on a continuous scale. Passing from one value to another is taking a 'quantum leap'.

This has entered the language as a metaphor for abrupt or significant change in something rather than a gradual evolution.

Another response offered further clarification (together with a helpful link to more detailed stuff at Wikipedia):

The electron can't gradually change. It is either at one energy level or another. No inbetween.

As it moves from one level to another it emits or absorbs photons. The "color" (wavelength) of the photon depends upon the size of the leap.

So the  metaphor works perfectly: the nature of the electron changes suddenly and radically because of the quantum jiggery-pokery going on inside it, and as a result there's a significant change in the behaviour of the atom it haunts (I doubt if that's the right word... But what do electrons do? Whizz?).

Quantum Leap may well be, as the Times Style Guide says, a cliché (to be avoided like the plague [my silliness, not their word]). But it makes sense.

But the season of mists (chemical clouds?) and mellow fruitfulness is nearly upon us. The drive-by fruitings of the unreasonably prolific pear-tree are coming to an end, but things need doing to the apple-tree. I am going out, and may be some time...

b

PS: A couple of new clues:

• Immerse lowest ranker reportedly in the shallows here. (7)
• After play,  M. S. Dhoni gets a talking to. (8)

Update: 2017.10.20.10:55

Answers: DUNKIRK, ADMONISH

Speaking truth unto power...

...ful FOLLY.

Earlier this week, on Woman's Hour, I heard Sarah Vine being interviewed, and towards the end Jane Garvey [showing remarkable self-restraint] revealed that Ms Vine was married to Michael Gove. The interviewer (who no doubt knew that Gove and grammar were in the news) asked 'Does he correct your grammar'. And my hackles rose: what did she mean by correct; what did she mean by grammar? [She didn't use those words, but that was the gist. And that was the 'quote' that I chose to use as a peg to hang my outrage on. (I expect Gove would want me to say 'peg on which I chose to hang my outrage' –  )] I have ranted about this inhuman DISMEMBERMENT of phrasal verbs more than once; I think this is the UrRant.

Later I learnt the background. Gove had done a Churchill.

<digression theme="Doing a Churchill"> 

When Churchill first briefed the newly-set-up War Cabinet, he did something similar (but without so many obvious and trivial and self-evidently ridiculous bees in his bonnet). In a TES Resource that's been viewed well over once a day since I posted it four years ago I used Churchill's memo as input to the Text Analyser provided by UsingEnglish.com. As I say in the introduction for that resource: 

This handout looks at a memo written by Churchill to his wartime cabinet on the subject of plain writing. Opposite Churchill's original there is a parody breaking all the rules he mentions (and a few more). On the reverse, there is a textual analysis done by the tool available at http://www.usingenglish.com/resources/text-statistics.php, showing the quantifiable effects of using woolly language. This could be a basis for web research into writing skills. 

(In fact the link is to a newer version of the Text Analyser.) 

The parody is not nearly complete. To make the two analyses comparable I wanted to have similar word-counts. (I also got bored.) I begin my introduction to the parody: 

This is a version of Churchill’s memo, using unnecessarily long and obscure words, redundancy,  deadwood…any bad writing practice. Sadly, it wasn’t difficult; bad writing isn’t.

</digression>

Many a commentator has commented on Mr Gove's FOLLY, notably David Crystal who started thus (on the very morning of the FOLLY, so immediate was his disgust – and I'm choosing my words carefully here: I expect Gove's FOLLY left a bad taste in Crystal‘s mouth; it did in mine. And I expect that's not the last of it. I look forward to Oliver Kamm's reaction in Saturday's The Times.

Here's the beginning of Crystal's piece:

On being a pedant with power'Michael Gove is instructing his civil servants on grammar' said the headline in today's Independent. And Mark Leftly went on to describe how instructions posted on the Ministry of Justice intranet, after Gove was appointed Lord Chancellor last month, warned officials about the kind of English they shouldn't be using. Nicholas Lezard in the Observer made a similar point. His headline read: 'Has Michael Gove dreamed up these grammar rules just for our entertainment?

I'm not going to make much of a contribution to the tsunami of ridicule; my views on  this sort of nonsense are well-known; here's one of my earlier posts on pedantry (and interestingly, the word's  origin). The word cloud on the right will guide you to others.

But one particularly silly nostrum leapt out; I can't conceive of Gove's reasons; is he satirising himself?

 ...the phrases best-placed and high-quality are joined with a dash, very few others are ...

Wha..? Where to begin? I could fight pedantry with pedantry and ask whether he means a hyphen – but that‘s the sort of quibble that springs too easily to the lips of an erstwhile Editorial Assistant.*

Rather than this I went to OneLook:

And I only got it down to 33 by selecting Common Words and Phrases. Without that filter there are well over 1,000. (I gave up after 10 pages.)

b

Update 2015,06,26.12.45 – Serendipitous PS

Tale from the Word Face

The importance of the hyphen was just underlined for me by an ad that appeared on my screen while I was  looking into the word "well-versed":

On a first reading I imagined a miracle cure  – showers that make the disabled walk. With a heavy heart I diagnosed the missing hyphen.

Update 2015,06,28.11.05 – Added footnote;

* Not to mention the comma splice. Gove seems to inhabit a string of glass houses.

Pedants of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your PEDAI

I recently came across this question in the Using English Ask a Teacher forum:

Are those three sentences correct? all the same? Thanks!

This is the room in which we stayed.

This is the room which we stayed in.

This is the room where we stayed.

After a helpful and correct answer from a fellow teacher, I added:

And some pedants would prefer a fourth option:

This is the room that we stayed in.

The trouble for these people is that they are forced to apply one of two groundless prescriptive rules that are mutually exclusive "(that for a defining subordinate clause" and "not ending a sentence with a preposition")

b
PS People interested in etymology may like to imagine chains attached to each arm of the person choosing between the two 'rules'. The Greek for chains is πεδαι (pedai).

Not wanting to be one of those teachers with bees in their bonnets, which they sick onto unsuspecting students, I didn't add my further thoughts on this issue. You've guessed it – here they are.

I wrote here about phrasal verbs and what happens to them when they get used in subordinate clauses; the 'preposition' part, more commonly called the 'particle', gets moved to the end of the  clause (more often than not, to the end of the sentence).

Users of Microsoft Word will have (perhaps unwittingly) crossed swords with the little Hitler that is Word's built-in 'grammar checker' – a sort of 'Strunk and White incarnate'. For example, section II.14 of that book has the title 'Use the active voice'; Word's 'grammar checker' duly objects whenever it catches the merest whiff of a passive. It wields a green underline rather as Mrs Thistlebottom† wielded a ruler in the English classroom, and helpfully suggests 'Consider rewriting' (code for 'Unless you rewrite, I'll keep nagging you as long as I have breath.')

One of the grammar checker's shibboleths is 'that in defining relative clauses' (and now the gloves are off – the underline is RED.)

<grammar_point importance="negligible" skip="yes, if you value your sanity" status="shibboleth">
Suppose I have two lawn mowers. The green one is in the shed and the red one (a 'ride-on' job), is in the garage. Woe betide you if you refer to the green one as 'the mower which is in the shed'. However, you will have Mrs Thistlebottom's blessing if you say 'The red mower, which is newer, is in the garage.'
</grammar_point>

Now which  has a full complement of inflexions: which for the subject, whose (borrowed from who) for the possessive, and the same form can be used in all sorts of object positions – by which, to which, from which ... and so on. Who is similar: who (subject) whose (possessive), whom for all kinds of object. That doesn't enjoy any of this flexibility:

The mower that is in the garage is red

 <inline-ps>
"That" in subject position is fine, but as any kind of object it doesn't work:
 </inline-ps>

The mower thats power source is petrol...
The mower on that you can sit while mowing...

There is the obviously/(apparently?)  related word what [I am doing this,/What are you doing/Don't do that.], but it couldn't be pressed into service to bolster that.

The mower whats power source is petrol...
The mower on what you can sit while mowing...

No improvement on the that versions.

Personally – though not for reasons of 'correctness' – I try to use that (or nothing) for defining subordinate clauses: 'the mower I'm sitting on' rather than 'the mower on which I'm sitting'. I am cursed by a premonition of what Word's 'grammar checker' would say; all around me I see red underlines that I have to ignore. [For some reason  – just contrary, I suppose – a vision came to me just then of Lulu singing The boat which I row.] But because of the grammatical inflexibility of that I find myself from time to time having to fall back on which. I know the rule is hooey, but...

And speaking of hooey, the other thing about using that in subordinate clauses is that it forces you to 'break' another 'rule', by relegating a phrasal verb's particle to the end. (I have mentioned this before, in the red excursus in the middle of this post).

And that is the point on which I shall end.

b
† Mrs T is not my invention; I have mentioned her before. She haunted Dave Barry's Mister Language Person columns, which have gone the (sorely lamented) way of the songs of Tom Lehrer.


PS #WVGTbook update. I've finished OA, OE, and OI as far as the raw data is concerned. Now for the HTML bit! The scheduled 3.1 release is looking good for next month.

Update 2017.09.01.10:55 – Removed old footer

Update 2024.03.01.20:55 –  Added <inline-ps />