Excuse me, Sorry, I beg your pardon

We use the following words and phrases, Excuse me, Sorry and I beg your pardon almost every day, but most times we interchange them for each other and they still sound nice to the listener.

Well, that might be allowed semantically, but for proper representation and for the sake of good writing we have to align them properly in terms of the syntax structure. So, the onus is on us to properly know how and when to use them, either in the British or American context. Please follow us as we clearly distinguish their usage.

We say excuse me to someone if we want to get the person’s attention or before we do something that might disturb him/her, interrupt him/her, push him/her in a crowd or disagree with him/her.

    1 .   Excuse me; can I get past, please?

We say sorry (formally) or I beg your pardon when we need to apologise for something:

    2.    Sorry, I did tread on your toe.

    3.  I beg your pardon. I think you were next in queue.

But in American English, pardon me and excuse me are used as apologies.

We say pardon? When we did not hear what someone has said and want them to repeat it. In this case, sorry?  is also used in the British English and excuse me? or pardon me? in American English.

We hope we have been able to shed some light on the different contexts of usage of “excuse me”, “sorry” and “I beg your pardon”.

This is the second building block; do keep in touch with us as we intend to lay a solid foundation in the use of English as it relates to problematic words.

PROBLEMATIC WORDS IN EVERYDAY USAGE

When building a house it becomes necessary to put the right blocks in the right place otherwise, the house will not align with the layout or design in the original plan. The foundation is the most important part of a building because it carries the weight of the whole building. That is how it is when it comes to our everyday use of grammar.

There are words that look simple, yet they are problematic. If we don’t have a proper understanding of these words, it might affect our writing and the information we intend to pass across to our readers.

Standard text on the use of English are in two-denominations: the first one is that most books on English language present formal ideas of how the language should be written, that’s not  bad but it is the grammar of the language  which most times we find hard to conform to because of the various ‘shifting lattices’ of the usage. Secondly and more importantly, because of their continuous insistence on the grammar, some books usually fail to capture and describe how people use the language. In this perspective, we have decided for the next few weeks to point the way to linguistically correct and socially acceptable form of the language. So, please stay with us:

 (1) EFFECTIVE, EFFICIENT 

 If somebody works without wasting time or energy, and in a well-organized way, we say that he is efficient. For instance, a good secretary is efficient; an inefficient secretary puts paper in the wrong place, forgets things or takes too long to do small jobs. A machine or a system that works well is also described as efficient. Let us consider these examples:

1. She has sorted out all my letters and filed them alphabetically; I think this new secretary is efficient.

2. The Nigerian Telephone System is becoming efficient.

When we say that something is effective, we mean that it solves a particular problem that we have, or gets the result we want:

3. My aunt only gets weaker by the day; those drugs are not effective at all.

4. I think a black belt would look very effective with that dress.

We hope we have shed some light on the difference between “efficient” and “effective”. This is the first building block that we want you to lay.

Please share this with friends so they also can put it in use.