The Grammarnator has recently had difficulty sending e-mail to The Insider, but the problem was solved last week. Here are a few belated items for which his fans have no doubt been waiting.
One devoted reader submits this quandary: A salesperson says, “You get a rebate for free with that.” Is this correct? Shouldn't it simply be “You get a rebate free with that” or even “You get a free rebate with that”? Since free (words referred to as words belong in italics) is an adjective, putting a preposition (for) in front of it is, indeed, senseless. I suspect this usage derives from an exchange like this: “You get a rebate for nothing with that.” “You mean for free?” Nothing is a noun, so the preposition is correct. Since, in this context, nothing = free, why not put a preposition there?
This strikes me as an example of colloquial usage that is incorrect but not worth correcting. My preferred version, however, is simply: “You get a rebate with that.” Free is redundant, since all rebates are free. What you're paying for is the item to which the rebate applies; charging an additional amount for the rebate itself would be outrageous.
And here are two more from the Black Ice issue of a couple of weeks ago: “When we were just wee little Insiders, sitting on our papa's knee, we remember thinking Tara Mounsey was pretty awesome.” Surely the remembering didn't happen when you were sitting on that knee. It happens now, and is a memory of what you thought back then. In other words, the modifying adverb clause (“When we. . .”) is misplaced. Try something like: “We remember being little Insiders, sitting on our papa's knee and thinking that Tara Mounsey was pretty awesome.”
Of course, if that's a plural rather than a royal we (as the plural Insiders indicates), you should write: “We remember being wee little Insiders, sitting on our papas' knees . . .” (I assume that these Insiders aren't from the same family.)
Finally, the advertising supplement noted that “there are no Zambonies in pond hockey.” People seem adverse to simply put s on a word ending in i – witness all those bar menus that describe specialty martini's. The apostrophe, however, is uncalled for, and so is the ies ending on the ice-smoothing machine. Martinis and Zambonis are the correct plurals.
