A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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simply does not work. Perhaps for these reasons 53 percent of the Usage Panel finds the phrase men making acceptable in this sentence, and another 36 percent find it acceptable in informal contexts. Only 11 percent reject it outright.
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However, when the construction is more complicated so that a word or phrase intervenes between the noun and the gerund, the panel is less sanguine. Only 25 percent accept the sentence I can understand him not wanting to go, where the negative not intervenes between the pronoun and the gerund. Thirty-one percent say this sentence is acceptable in informal contexts, leaving 44 percent who are naysayers. Panel acceptance drops even further when the syntax gets more complicated. Only 16 percent accept the sentence Imagine a child with an ear infection who cannot get penicillin losing his hearing, where both a phrase and a clause intervene between the noun child and the gerund losing. And only 17 percent find this sentence acceptable in informal contexts, so that 66 percent reject it roundly.
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Be aware that sometimes nouns ending in -s can be confused with a singular noun in the possessive. Thus I don’t approve of your friend’s going there indicates one friend is going, and I don’t approve of your friends going there indicates that more than one friend is going.
Had better is an idiomatic verb phrase meaning “ought to, must.” It resembles an auxiliary verb in that its form never changes to show person or tense and that it can’t follow another verb in a phrase (that is, you can’t say He will had better leave, for example).
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When speaking, people have a tendency to leave out had: You better clean up your room! But in writing, you had better keep had, either in full or as a contraction: You had better not do that or You’d better not do that.
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hardly
In Standard English, hardly, scarcely, and similar adverbs cannot be used with a negative. You cannot say I couldn’t hardly see him. This violation of the double negative rule is curious because these adverbs are not truly negative in meaning. The sentence Mary hardly laughed means that Mary did laugh a little, not that she kept from laughing altogether. So why should hardly and scarcely be banned from use with a negative like not
? Adverbs like hardly and scarcely may not have purely negative meaning, but they share some important features of negative adverbs. They combine with any and at all, which are characteristically associated with negative contexts. Thus you can say I hardly saw him at all or I never saw him at all but not I occasionally saw him at all. Similarly, you can say I hardly had any time or I didn’t have any time but not I had any time, and so on. Like other negative adverbs, hardly, scarcely, and their companions cause inversion of the subject and auxiliary verb when they begin a sentence. Thus we say Hardly had I arrived when she left on the pattern of Never have I read such a book or At no time has he condemned the movement. Other adverbs do not cause this kind of inversion. You would never say Occasionally has he addressed this question or To a slight degree have they changed their position. What’s more, adverbs such as hardly can be
