Passive voice correctly characterized in the media!

Numerous linguabloggers, especially at the Log, have spent a lot of time on what Geoffrey Pullum (in the link just given) reasonably calls a "campaign to get journalists to stop using the term 'passive' in its grammatical sense when they have no idea what it means." The blunder is so common that I was taken aback this morning to read this in a discussion of the Iowa Caucus results:

Mr. Romney eliminated Rick Perry from the nomination contest. Of course, Mr. Romney got a lot of help from Mr. Perry himself. Maybe we should use the passive voice — Mr. Perry was eliminated from the nomination contest.

YES. That is actually the passive voice. Of course, the passage comes from Nate Silver of FiveThiryEight, who actually seems to know actual stuff, like numbers. If anybody's gonna recognize a passive, it's probably him.

I doubt that this will cheer Pullum, who's in deep on this battle, but I'm encouraged to see that it is not impossible for someone to refer to 'passive voice' in the media in a way that is consistent with how people who actually study things like the passive voice use the term.

Image from here, from the Village Voice.

It's about We the People

Here's a wrap-up note from C-PAC posted at Wonkette, along with the picture they ran …

So, the question is, which sounds better to you with the fixed phrase here?

It's about we the people …
It's about us the people …

Please discuss.

PYUtativ, Keith

Oh. My. God. I. am. so. prescriptive. But Keith Olbermann just said puTAtive, not once but twice.

But I checked it, and did like this note from the online etymology dictionary, "At first esp. in putative marriage, one which, though legally invalid, was contracted in good faith by at least one party." I hate when that happens!

Unquestioned authority and language

In a comment on a recent post, The Ridger asks a question that probably eats at all of us who work with language in a scientific way:

Gosh, why can't people just accept that the -ING form has five functions, including if you insist on Latin terms the gerund and the participle but also forms that Latin just doesn't have? Why is that so hard? Last month I fought for five days with a student who insisted on clinging to the terms he learned in the 1950s ... People let other fields of science advance, refine, and develop. Why must grammar remain unchanged?

That last sentence gets at something about linguistic prescriptions that a lot of people have commented on, like Deborah Cameron in Verbal Hygiene (1995:12):

Within the privileged space of the academy … where it is normally a sign of intellectual competence to broach the question ‘why?’, questioning the minutiae of linguistic conventions is a sign of incomplete or faulty socialization.

Lately, I've taken a new tack with some non-linguist colleagues in such discussions: I've tried stressing that the standard has a real role, that I try hard to use standard forms in formal writing, etc., but … [fill in standard rhetoric]. That's proven stunningly ineffective … on the next linguistic feature that comes up, discussion quickly seems to loop back around "but what's the proper word/form/structure?" Sigh.