弗爵爺:糾正同事的語病
I don’t know if anyone would be brave enough to take on Sir Alex Ferguson, who recently denied he planned to sell Wayne Rooney by saying: “There’s no issue between Wayne and I.”
我不知道是否有人膽敢找亞歷克斯•弗格森爵士(Sir Alex Ferguson)的碴。最近，他在否認出售韋恩•魯尼(Wayne Rooney)的計劃時說：“There’s no issue between Wayne and I.”（韋恩和我之間沒有問題。）Sir Alex, manager of Manchester United football club and subject of a Harvard Business School case study, had already banned two newspapers from his press conference for reporting that Rooney would be leaving. He is also famous for subjecting players to “hair dryer” tirades.
作爲曼聯(Manchester United)足球俱樂部的主教練和哈佛商學院(Harvard Business School)一項案例分析的研究對象，弗格森禁止兩家報道魯尼將離隊的報紙出席自己的新聞發佈會。他還以對球員的“吹風機”式痛罵而聞名。His “between Wayne and I” mistake is a common one. As an Oxford Dictionaries online writing tip explains: “A preposition such as ‘between’ should be followed by an objective pronoun (such as ‘me’, ‘him’, ‘her’, and ‘us’) rather than a subjective pronoun (such as ‘I’, ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘we’). Saying ‘between you and I’ is grammatically equivalent to saying ‘between him and she’, or ‘between we’, which are both clearly wrong. People make this mistake because they know it’s not correct to say, for example, ‘John and me went to the shops’. They know that the correct sentence would be ‘John and I went to the shops’. But they then mistakenly assume that the words ‘and me’ should be replaced by ‘and I’ in all cases.”
而他的“between Wayne and I”是人們常犯的錯誤。牛津詞典在線(Oxford Dictionaries online)的寫作技巧提示解釋道：“between等介詞後應搭配賓語代詞（如me、him、her、us）而不是主語代詞（如I、he、she、we）。說‘between you and I’，在語法上等同於說‘between him and she’或‘between we’，後兩種說法都是明顯的錯誤。人們之所以犯這種錯誤，是因爲他們知道說‘John and me went to the shops’是不對的。他們明白，正確的句子是‘John and I went to the shops’。但他們錯誤地以爲在所有情況下‘and me’均應被替換爲‘and I’。”
Successful football managers can get away with it. What about ordinary wage slaves? Employers and professors say grammatical lapses and poor writing are everywhere, and have been for a long time.
成功的足球教練犯這種錯誤不會被追究。但對於普通的“薪奴”呢？僱主和教授們稱，語法錯誤和糟糕文筆隨處可見，而且長期如此。Aïda Alaka, a US law professor, wrote in a 2010 article in the Journal of Legal Education: “Many of my brightest students have, by their own admission, no grasp of the rules governing writing.”
美國法學教授阿依達•阿拉卡(Aïda Alaka)在2010年《法律教育學報》(Journal of Legal Education)的一篇文章中寫道：“我有許多優秀學生自己承認，他們沒有掌握寫作規範。”Human resources directors at leading US companies told a 2004 survey that up to a third of their employees could not write properly.
在2004年的一項調查中，美國大公司的人力資源主管表示，寫不出像樣語句的員工比例多達三分之一。But can HR directors write? A reader sent me an internal memo from her head of HR, complete with misplaced apostrophes and singular subjects matched with plural verbs. This is the man in charge of our recruitment, she said despairingly.
但人力資源主管就擅長寫作嗎？一位讀者發給我一份來自她的人力資源主管的內部備忘錄，裏面充斥着撇號使用不當和單數主語搭配複數動詞的現象。她絕望地說，此人負責公司的招聘。What should you do if one of your staff or, worse, one of your bosses, emails a customer saying “thank you for meeting Rob and I last week”?
如果一位同事或（更糟的是）上司在給客戶的電子郵件中寫道“thank you for meeting Rob and I last week”，你應該怎麼做？The first option is to lighten up. Even people who know the rules don’t always follow them. If you have forgotten your keys, do you really ring the doorbell and shout to your spouse “it’s I”?
第一種選擇是放輕鬆。即便是知曉規則的人也不一定總能遵守規則。如果你忘帶了鑰匙，你在按響門鈴時，會不會對着你的另一半大喊“it's I”？Yes, people may be sending out semi-literate correspondence, but the teaching of grammar has been poor for so long that most of the customers probably don’t notice.
沒錯，人們或許會發出“半文盲”的信件，但語法教學長期不盡如人意，因此大多數客戶很可能根本注意不到。This won’t do, of course. There are still plenty who do notice. And if you have read this far you are probably one of those who reacts to an email saying “your wrong about that” the way Sir Alex does to a final whistle when his team is a goal behind.
當然，這不夠好。仍有很多人的確能注意到錯誤。而且，既然你已經讀到本文此處，那麼你很可能會對一封寫有“your wrong about that”的郵件大動肝火，就像弗格森在球隊一球落後時面對終場哨響的反應一樣。So what should you do? If the errant employee reports to you, it is fairly easy. You say: “It’s not your fault, because you probably weren’t taught this at school, but I would like to show you how apostrophes work.” Or how to decide whether to use ‘I’ or ‘me’. (The answer is to remove the other person. If you say “they spoke to me”, then you say “they spoke to Gerard and me”, not “Gerard and I”.)
那麼你應當怎麼辦？如果犯錯的員工是你的下屬，處理起來並不難。你可以說：“這不是你的錯，因爲你上學時很可能沒有學過這個，但我想教教你如何使用撇號。”或是指導應該用“I”還是“me”。（答案是，排除句中另一個人的干擾。如果你說“they spoke to me”，那麼就應該說“they spoke to Gerard and me”，而不是“Gerard and I”。）Many managers find recipients of such advice grateful. They often ask: “Why didn’t anyone tell me this before?”
很多經理髮現，獲得這些建議的人心存感激。他們常常問道：“爲何之前沒有人告訴我？”After that, explaining to staff members how to improve their writing becomes harder. As Prof Alaka says, they “might not know what we are talking about when we suggest that they eliminate the passive voice or the improper use of gerunds”. Concentrating on discrete improvements is more effective. Proper use of apostrophes is not the same as decent writing, but at least it eliminates the worst offences.
之後，向員工解釋如何提高寫作水平就有些難度了。正如阿拉卡教授所說，“當我們建議他們避免使用被動語態或不恰當的動名詞時，他們可能覺得不知所云”。注重零零碎碎的提高更加有效。正確使用撇號與像樣的寫作不是一回事，但它至少能消除那些最糟糕的錯誤。What if the miscreant is someone senior? You could send the offending missive back, adding: “I fear this may have become garbled in transmission.” But this is unlikely to enlighten the culprit or endear you to him or her. You still have to work together. The same goes for: “How on earth did you get any job, let alone the one you’ve got?”
如果犯錯者的級別比你更高呢？你可以將出錯的郵件發回對方，並補充一行字：“恐怕這封信的表達有些含混。”但這可能既無法開導犯錯者，也不會博得他/她對你的好感。你還不如說：“你究竟是怎麼得到任何工作的，更別說是這份工作了？”Probably the safest way is to suggest a writing course for all employees, pointing out some of the mistakes they keep making.
或許最保險的方式是提議爲所有員工開設寫作課，同時指出他們常犯的一些錯誤。None of these options is easy. Few people like a pedant. But I do. If I have made any mistakes, or if you think I can improve my writing style, please don’t hold back.
這幾種選擇都有難處。沒有幾個人喜歡學究。但我喜歡。如果我犯下任何錯誤，或是你認爲我能夠改善我的寫作風格，請大膽地說出來And between you and me, if you told all your colleagues and underlings the same, they would probably respect you for it.
再告訴你一條祕籍：如果你對同事和下屬說這句話，他們很可能會因此敬佩你。
