After the water panic, city officials may want to take my advice on emergency alerts

Top rule of writing: If you’re using a problematic word, read it again and again to make sure you’re not misusing it.

Writing about public school? Triple-check that you haven’t typed pubic school. Mentioning Philadelphia? Are you sure you didn’t spell it Philadlephia? Take it from an editor: These errors are both frequent and easy to miss.

And if you’re alerting the public about a possible water crisis, don’t use the one word that caused your teachers to admonish you time and again. Because you might be screwing it up.

“Out of an abundance of caution, residents in the impacted areas may want to switch to bottled water,” the Philadelphia Water Department tweeted at 12:03 p.m. on Sunday, March 26, as it notified the public about possible contamination of our drinking water.

Cue the panic.

» READ MORE: ‘Shifting blame backfires every time’ and other takeaways from the city's botched chemical spill response

Why did that one sentence set off a spree of bottled-water-hoarding across the region? The key lies in a squishy auxiliary verb that abdicated responsibility for decision-making: may.

Anyone who’s ever asked if they “can” do something and received the hectoring reply, “I don’t know — can you?” knows that may and can make minefields. Even though the Water Department’s tweet couldn’t have replaced its may with can, the presence of any may at all should have given PWD’s communications team a clue as to how catastrophically bad its advice was about to be. They should have seen may and paused to think: Is may what we actually want to say? Maybe not.

Both may and can are known as modal auxiliary verbs that soften or modify the main verbs that they work with. Auxiliary verbs are often useful and necessary; they express mood or tense or voice, among other things. But they also sometimes weaken the sentences they inhabit by making writing less precise and less concise.

Witness the difference between “you want to drink bottled water” and “you may want to drink bottled water.” The former is direct and declarative, and it tells you what to do; the latter is wishy-washy.

Auxiliary verbs aren’t always bad.

Auxiliary verbs aren’t always bad, of course. For example, can and should are both auxiliary verbs, but there’s an important difference between “you can eat that bug” and “you should eat that bug” — a difference you don’t want to lose. So don’t go nuts eliminating every auxiliary verb you can find; also known as helping verbs, they help.

But in the Water Department’s tweet, may was a clear giveaway that the advice they were giving was as clear as the Delaware River — on a good day.

If you spot an auxiliary verb, try removing it just for fun. Had the Water Department done so, it would have been offering direct, unambiguous advice: “residents in the impacted areas want to switch to bottled water.” Not what you were trying to say? Great — now you know that, and you can course correct. Because in a crisis, hysteria takes over chiefly when people don’t know what to do.

It doesn’t help that this contaminated word usage came in a sentence that also misused impacted, which should generally be reserved for references to teeth. Affected is more precise, and in a crisis, that precision makes all the difference.

After all, you don’t want everyone in Philadlephia to panic.

For that matter, Philadelphia, too. (See? Told you it was easy to miss.)

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and factitive verbs to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.