A Word, Please: Casagrande: When editors strike, some words may not be safe

Not familiar with the term? That’s OK because you’re already a master at using dummy operators. For example, you can easily transform the statement “You like peas” into a question: “Do you like peas?” You do that with dummy operators.

In grammar, an operator is an auxiliary verb that gets moved around to form questions, negate sentences and perform a few other special jobs. As a reminder, auxiliary verbs are little verbs, mainly forms of “have” and “be,” that work with other verbs, as in “I have eaten all the cake” and “He is yelling because he wanted some.”

They become operators when we move them around, usually to form questions: “Have I eaten all the cake?” makes the “have” and the “I” trade places. “Is he yelling because he wanted some?” moves the “he” and the “is” to turn a statement into a question.

This is basic stuff. But there’s another operator that works differently: do.

Here’s how the Oxford English Grammar explains it: “Auxiliary ‘do’ is a dummy operator, since it functions as an operator in the absence of any other auxiliary when an operator is required to form questions, to make the sentence negative, or to form an abbreviated clause, as in ‘My sister likes them, and I do, too.”

Unlike “have” and “be,” which swap places with the subject to make a question, “do” just appears out of nowhere. That is, to make “They have a dog” into a question, you don’t move words around. You add one that wasn’t there before: “Do they have a dog?”

Technically, instead of using “do,” you can sometimes choose to invert the verb and subject to make a question. Other languages do it this way: Vous voulez danser” (French for “You want to dance”) becomes a question in “Voulez-vous danser?” But in modern American English, inverting the subject and verb to make a question is often unnatural-sounding: “Have they a dog?” Other times, it’s absurd: “Walk they a dog?”

We also use dummy operators to make positive statements negative: “She goes to school” becomes “She does not go to school.” And we use them as a shorthand for verbs we’re omitting because the listener or reader already knows which verb we mean. “Do you take this man to hog the TV remote every day for the rest of your life?” “I do.”

But the role of “do” that comes up most in editing is described this way in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary: “used with the infinitive without ‘to’ to form present and past tenses expressing emphasis.”

Merriam’s examples are “I do say” and “Do be careful.” But this use of “do” is far more common than these slightly literary-sounding examples suggest. The one I came across in my editing work was “Pricing does vary by service provider.” And while this might be perfectly natural in speech, in print it violates one of the most sacred editor codes: Omit needless words. When used for emphasis, “do” is as needless as adverbs like “totally” and “truly” and “indeed,” which I usually obliterate on sight.

So I killed “does,” and I’m sure I’ll do it again.

— June Casagrande is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.

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