I agree, sometimes you do need a lot of guys. Maybe a lot of just guys. Maybe some guys who are just Justices of the Peace, called Justin.

On the word front, I overdo “just” also and find myself going back and deleting it when I’ve gone a “just” too far. I used to write a column that was a humorous take on single life; I opened one up at random and found the word “guy” about 10 times in a 1,000 word piece. Sometimes you just need a lot of guys, I guess. And a few justs.

Or something like that.

But the passive voice is something completely different—it would be, in your example, “my hand was held by him”. Which also has “was” in it. But it’s not the “was” that makes it passive, it’s the action itself.

I just hear that “don’t use ‘was’ because it’s passive” argument all the time, by people who think it’s gospel, and in fact it’s grammatically inaccurate and just plain wrong, and I’m a damn English teacher at heart so I can’t help it.

Sorry to jump on it. I do in fact agree with what you meant.

To write, “He was holding my hand when I stumbled,” is fine, and that’s where it belongs. Or to have my heroine rambling on (they do this) and then noticing, “He was staring into the distance,” also works. But I had passive little bits like, “He was holding my hand,” without anything else. What I needed was the action of him taking her hand.

Argh. It makes sense to me. (This is the part where I wish I’d learned more about Eng lang so I could actually explain the sentence parts I’m talking about. I understand how it works, but I don’t know the names for it. Stupid modern education.)

PS – it’s won ton. Wanton soup is what you get when you forget your safe word…

It sort of drives me crazy when people condemn the use of the verb “was” in these situations, because it’s a perfectly legitimate verb tense, and doesn’t imply lack of action.

Sure, use active verbs rather than “to be” or “to seem” or “to become” as much as you can. That’s a good recommendation. But to toss out the past continuous tense, just because it requires an auxiliary verb, is silly. You might as well toss out the future tense because you have to use the word “will” to form it.

“Was thinking” has a completely different meaning than “thought”, and is no less active.

Right. Sorry. Rant over.

“Wanton” can be over-used, I’m sure. Unless you’re talking about the soup kind. Because that is really tasty.

Or is that won ton?

Then again, once I got told off for using the word ‘wanton’ too much. Says something, I’m sure, but what it says I don’t think I want to know!