Grammar Moses: That's all I have to say about 'that'

A co-worker who fancies himself a gastronome posted a photo and description of his dinner the other night on Facebook.

The heart of his meal was a "rib-eye marinaded overnight in 2tbsp olive oil, fresh garlic, oregano, salt and pepper, finished with butter on the grill."

Sounds scrumptious, but one of our copy editors posted: "Mmmmm, marinated steak."

I inquired whether use of "marinated" was a passive-aggressive spelling correction.

Her response: "Nope. I love marinated steak and steak with marinade equally."

So diplomatic. She clearly won that battle of quips.

It should be noted "marinade" traditionally was a noun and "marinate" the verb form, but in the past decade or so "marinade" has been gaining acceptance as a verb.

Just don't tell me you're stopping by the store to pick up a "marinate" for the chicken.

You might wonder why I chose "gastronome" to describe my Facebook friend. First, I dislike the word "gourmet," which once upon a time described someone with an appreciation for fine wine but has evolved into a noun for someone with an appreciation for good food and an adjective describing fine food and wine.

When I plugged "gourmet" into the Google machine, it spit out pizza, burgers and popcorn as its first "gourmet" food items. And those are decidedly proletarian staples. Basically, "gourmet" has lost any real meaning and is used primarily to lure potential dates, justify high prices and maximize search engine optimization.

When describing someone, it's important to be careful about word choice, because if you pick the wrong word you run the risk of needing that marinated steak - "Three Stooges" style - to soothe your newly blackened eye.

A "gastronome" is one who enjoys good food. Gee, I don't know a lot of people who don't qualify.

If you make the mistake of calling someone a "gourmand," then getting stuck with the bill after he leaves the restaurant in a huff will be the least of your concerns.

It's a word I hear misused all of the time. A "gourmand" is someone who will eat his steak and then yours, chow down the shared side of smoked Gouda and bacon potatoes au gratin by himself and never pass the wine bottle. Gourmands are gluttonous.

It wasn't always this way. Gourmets used to be, specifically, wine connoisseurs. And being a gourmand carried no shame.

As always, language is fluid.

Now kindly pass the cabernet.

That's just not enough

Reader Scott Zapel weighed in on last weekend's column about my affinity for "that."

He noted that (there I go again) "which" is not a synonym, and he appreciated my restrictive/nonrestrictive tutorial. But my work, he said, was not done.

"Another place those readers suggested dropping 'that' is when it is a relative pronoun or relative adverb," he wrote. "Many people think of the 'that' in these cases as optional (especially in nonformal communications). But, as (linguist Bryan) Garner notes in his 'Wrongly suppressed that' entry, there is often a risk of a momentary confusion in the reader's mind when 'that' is omitted."

Let me go back a few weeks to the column that started this discussion of "that."

"The Ngram Viewer illustrates that since 1800 'because' has always held an edge over 'since.'"

If I were to remove the "that," you might think - if just for a moment - that Google's Ngram Viewer existed in 1800. I assure you that is not the case. It merely includes statistics about words and phrases from books published since then.

Another example from that column: "I was taught long ago that when choosing between 'because' and 'since,' the former connotes causality, while the latter suggests a sense of time."

Again, if I were to remove the "that," you might think I was taught something while I was choosing between two words.

As Garner notes, the momentary confusion takes up more time than reading "that."

And as Forrest Gump famously said, "That's all I have to say about that."

Write carefully!

• Jim Baumann is vice president/managing editor of the Daily Herald. Write him at jbaumann@dailyherald.com. Put Grammar Moses in the subject line. You also can friend or follow Jim at facebook.com/baumannjim.