Shakespeare and the Bible keep alive one meaning of the old word “hence”: “away from here” (“get thee hence”). There’s no need to add “from” to the word, though you often see “from hence” in pretentious writing, and it’s not likely to bother many readers.
But another sense of the word “hence” (“therefore”) causes more trouble because writers often add “why” to it: “I got tired of mowing the lawn, hence why I bought the goat.” “Hence” and “why” serve the same function in a sentence like this; use just one or the other, not both: “hence I bought the goat” or “that’s why I bought the goat.”
___________
This is the tenth year of the Common Errors in English Usage calendar. To celebrate, we are bringing back some of our favorite interesting, funny, but sometimes merely silly entries through the years before going on hiatus in 2016.
Enjoy the calendar? Buy the book! (http://tinyurl.com/commonerrorsbook)
No comments:
Post a Comment