should intentionally misspelled words be in quotations?

When we use intentionally misspelled words for effect, should the misspelled word be in quotations?

grammar - Subject–Predicate Errors

The following quotes all seem to contain agreement errors between their subjects and predicates:

A total of five youths were arrested in both incidents.

Shouldn't it be "A total . . . was"? The sense is plural overall, but the subject is the singular "total." The object of the preposition is "five youths." Nonetheless, the verb should be the singular "was," agreed?

Early returns from rural areas indicated that support from the Communists remain strong.

Shouldn't it be ". . . support . . . remains strong"?

A group of neighborhood volunteers are identifying these houses and forcing owners to fix them up or tear them down.

Shouldn't it be "A group . . . is"?

The council's actions, concluding more than six hours of testimony on the matter, effectively nullifies a city hearings officer's decision.

Shouldn't it be "The council's actions . . . nullify"?

grammar - Do you want/ Will you want?

What is the difference between "Do you want to eat xxx tomorrow" and "Will you want to eat xxx tomorrow", and which is correct?

Answer

Both are correct.

"Do you want to eat xxx tomorrow?"
Do is the present tense, and is being used in a question about the listener's present desire (i.e. what he or she wants today, regarding tomorrow).

"Will you want to eat xxx tomorrow"
Will is the future tense, and is being used in a question about the listener's future desire (i.e. what he or she will want tomorrow). We do not always know what we will want in the future, but a question about a meal tomorrow is likely to get a useful answer. In reality, this is a question about a present desire, but phrased as a question about the future.

The practical result will be the same in either case, as the speaker will know, from the answer, whether to prepare a meal of xxx tomorrow.

meaning - "Why don't they help him?" Why do we use simple present here?

CONTEXT

You are walking in the street and you see an old man on the other side stumble and fall to the ground. He tries to get up but he can’t. Nobody is helping him.

You say, to no-one in particular,

Why don’t they help him?!”

• Why is the simple present acceptable here?

I am not concerned with the difference in meaning between using present simple and present continuous in this case. What I would like to understand what generalisable rule allows us to use the simple present here. We wouldn't say:

Look over there, the old man lies on the ground!

so why is it acceptable to use present simple with the question:

"Why don’t they help him?"

Please see the section on "Possible explanations". This is not a suggestion like "Why doesn’t he take an aspirin?/Why don’t you go to the doctor?" It’s something happening right now, when you’d normally use present continuous, not in the future, or regularly. Present continuous would be possible, but I think this usage would be more common.

POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS

• I thought it’s because there is an inferred "...when/if people can see he needs help" and that the "when/if" is influencing the tense? Is this somehow related to conditional? Somehow, I feel this might be the best explanation: "Why don't they help him? If they help him, he will be all right".




• Related to "performative present"? But this is nothing like "I warn you: don’t come back here".




• Is it somehow present simple in commentary? You are viewing a scene and describing it as it happens, like a football match? But it doesn’t feel like that.




• Is it just a ‘special case’? An answer in another post suggested that the construction “why don’t you (just)…” 'can be used as a rhetorical question basically equivalent to a rather crude and exasperated-sounding imperative'. The more detailed explanation goes over my head, and somehow I feel there must be a simpler explanation.

OTHER EXAMPLES (some of these may not be the same problem)

• Why doesn’t the bus come?


• Why don’t they overthrow the government?! I don’t understand!


• Why doesn’t he accept the offer?

word order - "tried so far" vs. "so far tried"

These two sound quite different, and the second form even sounds more sophisticated, but is there any real difference?

Answer

I have tried three strategies so far.

I have so far tried three strategies.

The two are equivalent.

Think of "so far" as acting as an adverb. Substitute now and you can say:

I have tried three strategies now.

I have now tried three strategies.

Same difference.

But if you are following it with a list, I would suggest you use the latter construction.

I have now tried three strategies: studying my rivals, cultivating new friends, and bribing public officials.

That way you put the noun that represents the list in apposition to the list itself.

nouns - "The news is good." Why?

We use "the news is good" instead of "the news are good."

What is the rationale behind this? Are there similar situations in English?

Answer

News is uncountable and is used with singular verbs. The -s is there because etymologically, it used to be a plural form. Etymonline says:

late 14c., plural of new (n.) "new thing," from new (adj.), q.v.; after Fr. nouvelles, used in Bible translations to render M.L. nova (neut. pl.) "news," lit. "new things." Sometimes still regarded as plural, 17c.-19c.

As to other nouns like this, I have looked through a number of Wiktionary and Wikipedia categories, and the closest I could come to similar examples is measles and billiards.

Yet another interesting (but not really similar) case is species. Wikipedia says:

Specie and species make a fascinating case. Both words come from a Latin word meaning "kind", but they do not form a singular-plural pair. In Latin, specie is the ablative singular form, while species is the nominative form, which happens to be the same in both singular and plural. In English, species behaves similarly—as a noun with identical singular and plural—while specie is treated as a mass noun, referring to money in the form of coins (the idea is of "[payment] in kind").

word order - Can “sui generis” be placed before the noun?

I came across sui generis in the following paragraph of today’s New York Times (April 27) Restaurant Review section headlined "Chef’s table at Brooklyn Fair."

César Ramirez's restaurant in downtown Brooklyn is a kind of sui generis exercise in personal expression, and one of the more extraordinary restaurants in New York City.

As I was unfamiliar with the expression, "sui generic," I consulted two English Japanese dictionaries (Japanese publications) at hand; both of which gave the meaning of “unique, of its own kind,” by defining the word as an adjective to be placed after the noun as postposition.

However, Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines it simply as an adjective. Which is right? Is it right to place "sui generis" in the way of "sui generis exercise"?

Answer

I've seen it both before and after the noun. Here are two examples of its usage I found from a Google search:

"sui generis works like Mary Chestnut's Civil War diary."

"This man, in fact, was sui generis , a true original."

As a note, I would use Latin phrases like this with caution. As you may have experienced, they tend to cause issues with how clearly the point is conveyed. George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language has an excellent way of critiquing this kind of pretentious word choice:

Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.