Just How Many Collarbones Do You Have?

In Pilates class this morning, the instructor at one point said, “You should all have your arms in front of your collarbones.” My thoughts immediately wandered from the state of my core to the vexations of grammar. The instructor, Cathy, had wandered into a syntactical briar patch that I had often found myself in, never once escaping without multiple scratches.

The problem, as you might have discerned, lies in that word collarbones. It sounds as if she were saying that we each had more than one of them, as when she says, “Pull your arms back next to your [two] ears.” Homo sapiens is a one-collarbone-per-body species, however. So should she have told the class, “Everybody should have their arms in front of their collarbone”? That’s no good either. It suggests (to me, at least), a Gogolesque scenario in which the class shares one giant collarbone.

The issue comes up with surprising frequency. “All the students brought their mothers to class.” Sure, some people have two moms, but everybody? “All the students brought their mother to class.” One mother for the whole class??

It always seems that both options are problematic. In the Pilates case, to eliminate all ambiguity, Cathy would have had to say something like, “Each class member should make sure that his or her arms are in front of his or her collarbone,” and that’s obviously no good. She chose her poison, as I and everybody else always has to end up doing.

Another grammatical question that comes up a lot, and that never seems to me to have a good answer, relates to the so-called sequence of tenses. H.W. Fowler described it in 1926, in his A Dictionary of Modern English Usage:

A certain assimilation normally takes place in many forms of sentences, by which the tense of their verbs is changed to the past when they are made into clauses dependent on another sentence whose verb is past, even though no notion of past time needs to be introduced into the clause.

That sounds complicated but it’s really a simple choice, as you can see from one of Fowler’s examples. Do you say, “I wish I knew what relativity meant” or “I wish I knew what relativity means”? Here’s an example from my own life. A friend and his son are coming to these parts to look at colleges, and my wife asked their schedule. Should I say, “Michael said they are going to Haverford Thursday and Swarthmore Friday” or “Michael said they were going to Haverford Thursday and Swarthmore Friday”?

In contrast to the collarbone example, both choices feel, sound, and I believe are OK. But which to pick? Fowler’s language, I have to say, isn’t especially helpful: “The change to the past tense ["what relativity meant"]  is normal sequence, & the keeping of the present (called vivid sequence…) is, though common & often preferable, abnormal.” So the abnormal is common, eh?

R.W. Burchfield, whose New Fowler’s Modern English Usage came out in 1996, observed,

The waters are deep and muddy. … The main point to be noticed is that a change of tense or mood is often obligatory, sometimes optional, and sometimes mistaken in sentences containing such verbs as “thought,” “believed” or “imagined.”

Bryan Garner, as is his wont, is more definitive. Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016) asserts, “When the principal clause is in past tense … the subordinate cause has a past-tense verb.” So Garner would prescribe: “Michael said they were going … ”

However, he allows for one exception: “When a subordinate clause states an ongoing or general truth, it should be in the present tense regardless of the tense in the principal clause — thus, He said yesterday that he is Jewish, not *He said yesterday that he was Jewish.” The asterisk indicates an example of what Garner calls “invariably inferior forms.” (Thus he would go for “what relativity means.”) The second sentence doesn’t seem so invariably inferior to me, but, as the saying goes, Garner’s gonna Garner.

As usual, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage provides some relief. The editors note that most readers would accept both “The Lone Ranger said that crime doesn’t pay” and “The Lone Ranger said that crime didn’t pay,” even though the second clause describes an ongoing state. Their conclusion about such choices: “We suggest you will be a lot happier if you simply do not worry about them.”

What about you, readers? Any grammatical situations where you always find it hard to pick between two choices?