Casagrande: How a single word can change the meaning of your sentence

Do you ever stop to think about where you put the word “only”? If you’re like most people, you probably use it the same way you use every word: by instinct.

But “only” — and especially where you put it — are worth thinking about because even if you don’t pay it much attention, others do.

Reader Don is among them.

“One of my own pet peeves is the frequent misuse of ‘only’ by sticking it into a sentence anywhere,” he wrote, offering this example of how that practice can go sideways: “‘I only speak English,’ for example, means that the speaker cannot read or write it, but they probably meant, ‘I speak only English’ which means that they speak no other language.”

It’s true that “only” has the power to drastically alter the meaning of a sentence based on where it’s placed.

“I only have eyes for you,” if taken ridiculously literally, could mean I don’t blink eyes for you or donate eyes for you or gouge out eyes for you.

“I have only eyes for you” means you can’t have my ears, elbows or liver.

“I have eyes only for you,” in an absurdly literal interpretation, could mean I don’t have eyes from you.

“I have eyes for only you” means the nice thing that the other sentences probably wanted to say.

“I have eyes for you only” means exactly the same thing as “I have eyes for only you.”

“Only I have eyes for you” means nobody else is into you.

Because “only” has such power to change the meaning of a sentence, some people believe there’s just one right place for it — usually immediately before the word it applies to. But as we can see in our “eyes” examples, some sentences can mean precisely the same thing with “only” in multiple places.

Top language authorities are more flexible on this matter than you might guess. “The position of ‘only’ in standard spoken English is not fixed,” Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says.

Sometimes even sloppy use of “only” works out OK because people still get your meaning. That is, if someone speaks to me in Swedish and I say, “I only speak English,” there’s no chance they’ll think I meant I can’t read or write English.

“Fowler’s Modern English Usage” goes even further, arguing that there are many cases where “only” works better in places where it’s not logical because sometimes it’s more natural there. For example, in “He only died a week ago,” the risk of misunderstanding is almost nonexistent.

Even the famously strict guide “The Careful Writer” by Theodore Bernstein agrees, arguing that in many cases the right choice is idiomatic even if it’s not logical.

Bernstein’s example is “What is happening now can only be called a paperback book explosion.” And he shows that putting “only” closer to the term it describes creates an awkward and distracting sentence: “What is happening now can be called only a paperback book explosion.”

In some cases, the experts point out, putting the “only” in an illogical place isn’t just more conversational. It helps your reader understand what you’re saying. This is true mainly in cases where you need the reader to understand early in the sentence that something you say later will be limited by the word “only.”

H.W. Fowler’s example was: “It would only be safe to prophesy success to this heroic enterprise if reward and merit always correspond.”

If you put the “only” later, before the “if,” the reader spends a good deal of the sentence thinking that something is safe when in fact it’s safe only in the specified scenario.

So, yes, use “only” as precisely as possible. But if it’s more natural someplace else and there’s no risk of misunderstanding, that’s probably the best place for it.

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