Grammar rules you can forget ... if you knew them

The Guardian has this piece out about "10 grammar rules you can forget: how to stop worrying and write proper" by their style guide author, David Marsh (pictured).

What I'm curious about is the status of these as 'rules' in contemporary English, whether British or otherwise. I know some of these only barely and as historical curiosities.

Look at the 10 rules and think about (1) how many you know of and (2) how many you take seriously. Just curious.

HT to CG.

Texting "might be making us less intelligent"

The NYT has a big ad this morning for paperbecause.com, about the threat that texting poses to not only language but even intelligence, laid out in detail on this page. The site is owned by Domtar, "the largest integrated manufacturer and marketer of uncoated freesheet paper in North America and the second largest in the world".

The blurb says that "The severity of the educational repercussions of texting is hotly debated among the experts", and they argue that "Reports ... suggest that the younger generation is not as smart as it used to be when it comes to basic decorum for important life skills such as applying to college or for a job." But I was wondering how far they'd have to stretch to make it an ad for paper …

Indeed, in a professional context, the “laziness of language” exhibited in texting could be considered, at best, as a level of familiarity that might not be appreciated by a recruiter. At worst, it could be viewed as reflection of a lax attitude in other areas – also something you don’t want to put forward when you’re asking for a job.

So, how can paper help with this distinctly modern conundrum? Paper is a classic, commanding its own form of respect and inherently conveying formality. To print out correspondence like a resumé or college entrance essay subtly imparts the message that a candidate has taken the time to consider their application and that they are serious about achieving their aspirations. Putting a document down on paper, sealing it in an envelope and addressing it to a key contact also demonstrates an ability to properly adapt forms of communication to the right setting so you get the optimal result.

Did pen and pencil manufacturers pursue similar strategies when computers started to build a big market? Whatever, in my world, nothing says formality like vellum (image from here).

The real complaint about language is the supposed retreat of formal language. If that's happening (and that's a plausible thing), it's an interesting question what that means culturally, but I'm pretty sure it's not causing stupidity.

"If proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go."

That's Elmore Leonard, quoted here in Olen Steinhauer's piece about Leonard's new novel, Raylan. Here's the fuller quote:

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the ­narrative.

I like it.  Steinhauer, though, doesn't. Or at least he's torn by it:

Jazzy prose that occasionally lets go of “proper usage” is Leonard’s trademark. He’s a stylist of forward motion, placing narrative acceleration above inconveniences like pronouns and helping verbs. While this creates in most readers a heightened sense of excitement, newcomers may find the transition from complete sentences daunting; it may take a little time to accept Leonard’s prose before you allow it to do its work on you. I’ll admit to having to make such an adjustment when beginning “Raylan.” At the same time, I’m also a novelist who lives in fear of my copy editor; being such a coward, I can’t help respecting Leonard’s grammatical bravery. 

It's been a long time since I read him, so help me out here Elmore Leonard fans: I think I get the notion of 'narrative acceleration' and that sounds like a good description of Leonard's writing. But does he somehow omit pronouns and helping verbs in ways that English speakers don't?

May just have to read that book …

This is not linguistics

To who it may concern:
This is not linguistics:

when Justice Sonia Sotomayor was having trouble with an Italian word Monday, she turned to Scalia, the court's resident language maven.

Nor is it 'language maven' material. It's pronouncing names in a foreign language, nothing more:

Sotomayor hesitated as she was about to say the name of an Italian cruise line that figured in the opinion she was summarizing involving a woman who broke her leg on a cruise.

"Costa Cruises responded that she should have sued a related company called Costa – I'm going to ask my colleague Justice Scalia to say it right," Sotomayor said. The company's name is Costa Crociere.

"Kroo-chee-ER-ay," said Scalia, the son of a professor of Romance languages at Brooklyn College.

It's nice that he helped her out, don't get me wrong, but don't make too much of it ...


Image, and it's a brilliant and beautiful one, n'est-ce pas?, from here.

Ambrose Bierce

I don't know about you, but I'm probably enjoying Safire's vacation more than he is. The set of stand-ins this week has Jan Freeman doing On Language, talking about the author of one of the first books about language and usage — maybe the first, actually — I ever owned, Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary. (Have been looking for my ancient copy, in fact, but haven't turned it up yet.)

The inventor of the term peevology (and related forms, I guess) gives pretty compelling reminder that language does change and that we have to deal with it by showing that 100 years ago, peeves were often things that make no sense to us today, like finding the word dirt "disagreeable". Bottom line:

But when did you last make a distinction between necessities and necessaries, or various and several? Half of our pet peeves could seem equally arcane by 2109 — and we don’t know which half.

Yup. You need to read the piece.

"Gone missing" gone wild

Over on ADS-L, there's a big thread rolling about the supposed current popularity of gone/went missing.

The view of one of the loudest peevologists around — and author of a dictionary specifically for dimwits (see image) — has now appeared there:

"Gone" or "went" missing is dreadfully popular today. Everyone from reporters on "CNN" to detectives (or their writers) on "Without a Trace" now prefer it.

People are so dull-witted and impressionable that, today, in this country, the popularity of "gone" or "went missing" has soared. Words like "disappeared," "vanished," "misplaced," "stolen," "lost," "deserted," "absconded" are seldom heard today because "went missing" has less meaning, or less exact meaning, than any of them, and people, especially the media, perhaps, are afraid of expressing meaning. What's more, "went missing" sounds willful or deliberate, and, indeed, sometimes that connotation is accurate, but the child who has been kidnapped is hardly agreeable to having been so.

From "Silence, Language, & Society" by Robert Hartwell Fiske

Wow, those words are dying out because of gone/went missing? Hard to believe. And amazing that Fiske made a claim that can be checked empirically. I just ran a quick QueryGoogle word count and found this:

Now, that isn't controlled for date and it doesn't filter out references to the TV show Lost (surely 600,000,000 hits), but getting about 750 million hits for the words Fiske thinks are "seldom heard" and just over 2.5 for the marauding gone/went missing doesn't look promising.

A quick and dirty Google advanced search for the missing forms limited to the last month shows 42,700 g-hits, while disappeared is at 1,160,000 for the same period and vanished at 335,000. In both cases, the ratio of gone/went missing is lower over the last month than in the general Google search. For instance, overall, disappeared is roughly 20x more common than gone/went missing and in the last month it's almost 30x more common. Gone/went missing may be in the process of going missing.

I don't have time for a closer look right now, but it would be easy enough to run this with somewhat cleaned up data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English over the last couple of decades and see how the numbers look there. I bet it's the same as we see here.

Maybe it's not "the people" who are "dull-witted and impressionable" here.

"The need for more canons"

Mr. Verb isn't working much these days, but a bunch of the Madison crew -- including several members of Team Verb -- are up here in beautiful Banff at the Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference, meeting with the Forum for the Study of Germanic Languages (our British sister organization) and SHEL (Studies in the History of the English Language).

I just heard a talk about usage by Don Chapman called "Lost battles and the wrong end of the canon: Attrition among usage prescriptions". He started by noting that linguists normally simply dismiss the usage canon as crazy, 'screwball', 'unprincipled', and consisting of 'undemonstrated' stuff. He figures, though, that this is a subject for linguistic study. So, he then asks this: How much does the canon change over time? Interesting question.

Half of the prescriptions, he finds, are 'one-offs' -- found once and not again. I'm more surprised to see that huge numbers of old prescriptions have changes in the last decade or so: Chapman finds that the canon is very volatile, with less than a quarter of those proposed in manuals being maintained over time. In fact, two of the biggest manuals (Garner and Peters) show lots of change. (The ppt went by too fast to get the numbers down systematically.)

That is, while prescriptivists often see themselves as fighting a 'lost battle', the target is constantly changing. And the prescribers seem to assume a static canon and we linguists too ignore change in the prescriptions. Chapman argues that prescribers are starting to justify what they include. He's actually optimistic, concluding that this could lead to a better fit between usage and advice.

Obama's "between you and I": A moment of reason in the media?

When I saw this on the OpEd page of this morning's Times, my blood pressure started to edge up:

The I’s Have It
WHEN President Obama speaks before Congress and the nation tonight, he will be facing some of his toughest critics.
Grammar junkies.

The piece is by Patricia O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman, of grammarphobia.com and books like Woe is I. In fact, it mostly lays out some of the long history of between you and I type constructions and what some people think of as the 'politician's reflexive', as in “a substantive conversation between myself and the president.” So, that isn't so bad. But you might cringe at the tone of the last paragraph:

But an educated speaker is expected to keep his pronouns in line. Here, then, is a tip, Mr. President. Nobody chooses the wrong pronoun when it’s standing on its own. If you’re tempted to say “for Michelle and I” in tonight’s speech, just mentally omit Michelle (sorry, Mrs. Obama), and you’ll get it right. And no one will get on your case.

Do you really think that President Obama doesn't have control of the prescriptive grammar on these points? These are things he does — exactly like millions of us do — occasionally in speaking, but I'll bet you a keg of Wisconsin beer that he doesn't do this in writing. Probably not in his most careful speech either.

Palin nickname poll results

Caribou Barbie wins with a plurality of the vote. Failin and June Cleavage trailed well behind. I don't think anybody noted this moniker:

Palinocchio

Of course there's a lot more out there now on her speech, including over at the Log. One new feature jumped out at me yesterday, in this quip about looking forward to debating Biden:

I’ve been hearing about his Senate speeches since I was like in the second grade.

Somehow I didn't expect this kind of like from her. Its use by older national politicians is well documented. Was this a way of emphasizing her youth in contrast to Old Joe Biden? Or maybe the joke (?) that she was hearing about senate speeches in second grade is what's really jarring.

Concerning, adj. = 'worrisome'

Well, I haven't tilted at the usage windmills much of late, so …

I've noticed several times lately the use of 'concerning' for 'worrisome', like "our enrollments are concerning". (That's a real example but UNrelated to linguistics at UW, where enrollments are very very healthy.)

It's not new, for sure, and it isn't quite flying under the usage radar (see here). Still, I don't recall the Peevologists going after it. Have I been asleep at the wheel?*


*Yeah, OK, that's how I ended up in the hospital, missing a month of blogging, but that's another post.

The Verb agree(s)

Luz wrote in a few days ago with this question (sorry to be so slow — been swamped):

In the following sentence, is the correct verb is or are?

Your positive attitude, great spirit, and enthusiasm towards your internship is greatly appreciated.

Prescriptively, that is plural for sure — the structure is "X, Y, and Z are". But this sounds pretty normal to me, the sort of thing you'd all but expect to read in a letter of this type in business.

But "towards your internship" seems like it applies to all three traits, and I wonder if that might make it feel more like that whole chunk is singular. Our contributor Monica points out that when the last element in a list like that is heavy, you get a kind of 'recency effect': The first two items as very short, but the third one is pretty long ("enthusiasm towards your internship"), so that people might be inclined to make the verb agree just with that part. Anyway, whatever the verb agreement, the recipient of that letter should be one happy intern.

Image from the cover of my favorite Dilbert book. Oh who am I kidding … I love them all equally.

Grammatical judgment poll results

Well, the grammaticality judgment poll closed mere minutes ago. (All the comments happened to end up on a short follow-up post, here.) Here are the results:

“He’s seen as a true conservative, which McCain is seen as less than.” That sentence …

• sounds utterly fine 21 (29%)
• sounds fine with 'being ' added ('as being less than') 7 (9%)
• needs more help than that but isn't too bad 36 (50%)
• cannot be made into English 8 (11%)

Of course, we like the visuals here on Team Verb, so here's another view:


I posted the query with a poll for a simple reason: I thought it was probably idiosyncratic or maybe a performance error, not something that would sound right to lots of people. I expected almost all responses to be negative.

Well, I was wrong. I'm in the "it just ain't English" camp. But the Ridger's suggestion (in earlier comments) that a listener could reasonably supply the info is fair enough, and there's a kind of Strunk & White motivation for doing it for some. But it sounds really bad to me.

Oh yeah, I hope that Laura, of A Walk in the Words, will now reveal her vote and comment on it, at her blog or here.

Safire on misogyny

William Safire's On Language this morning has a chunk on misogynist, and I'm pretty surprised by it. The opneing sentence got my attention:

Senator Hillary Clinton used a word recently that has been changing its meaning.

She didn't "debase" or "misuse" the word, but "used" it. He notes that it's not her doing the changing but using a changing form. That's a full-stride step toward sanity in talking about language. Later comes the shocker:

When I looked up the word she chose in the Oxford English Dictionary online, however, I noted that the meaning of misogynist had changed slightly but significantly. In 1989, the definition was “hatred of women”; in the 2002 revision, the definition was broadened to “hatred or dislike of, or prejudice against women.”

I never, ever though Safire would have somebody actually check facts (yeah, I know, but I mean really check facts), let alone do it himself. That he'd do it online, well, I'm floored. I would have figured he wouldn't mock the notion of a woman running for president; the rest is gravy.

You would say that pigs are flying somewhere, but southern Wisconsin is being swept by so many tornadoes and dangerously high winds at this moment that it's probably literally true.

Gratuitous affixation: To preference

This afternoon, I heard a very distinguished scholar at the University, someone who's held high political office and is really at the top of the academic world, say this:

I strongly preference the former solution.

He used the form twice, in fact, a bit apart within the same presentation. I don't think I know this usage, and I poked around quickly and didn't see it. (I tried both to preference and strongly preference and scrolled through a few.) But it seems like a natural analogical extension of something peevologists love to hate: to reference for to refer.

I expected morphological blocking here — if you have the word to prefer, you don't expect people to coin a morphologically complex form. A contributor to this blog, Monica, refers to this (or maybe she references this) as gratuitous affixation. I'm figuring that it's this kind of formula:

more syllables = more learned

But I haven't really thought about this.

The strongification movement

A set of Wisconsin students have announced to me and probably others that they're starting a movement to make English weak verbs strong. They're calling this strongification (a word which shows up on google once for verbs) or, alternatively, verbal fortition.

Now, I'm not hearing them change their actual usage yet, but on Wednesday, one of them said basically this before class started:

I heard somebody say fitted for the past tense of fit. I was thinking, you know, fat would sound so much better.

That actually does kind of work.

Image of Charles Atlas from here.

Lax societies, lax languages

When this blog was young and curious, we poked sticks at the bizarre stuff language mavens, peevologists and other cranks were leaving on the sidewalk of public dialogue about language. That quickly got old and, besides, the stuff is icky and stinky. Still, every so often, I find a specimen so odd that it warrants passing mention.

Take the Vocabula Review and today's announcement titled "Language Guardian" — a title taken from a piece about them in the WSJ. First, look at that banner … seven flags with this claim below it:

A society is generally as lax as its language.

This makes a clear prediction, but one that's hard to test. How can we gauge the laxness of a language or of a society? I'm happy to gather the data and run the test if somebody can suggest how to measure these things. Is it slackness of the vocal folds (say, measured by muscle activity over a particular utterance) and the corruptness of politicians (measured by the wealth they accumulate in office)? Is it the looseness of the requirement that subjects of clauses be agents (cf. "the dollar doesn't buy much right now") correlated with having loose bowels? (Sorry but that's actually the first definition of lax in Merriam-Webster's.)

I want to know who ranks where – does the wheel on the Indian flag reflect the steady motion of an orderly society where careful usage is respected? Does the amount of spilled beer on Melbourne pub tables compared to that found in Newcastle mean that our friends in Oz are lagging far behind the Pommies linguistically? (Or maybe I'm misjudging barkeeping in those places?)

What does it mean that the more visually appealing flags of officially English-speaking countries aren't represented? I like the flag of the Bahamas and South Africa's bold design. Are those societies being implicitly considered too lax to merit inclusion? If so, I'd protest that pretty vigorously.

Then, consider this, excerpted from the WSJ article about the magazine:

Despite what linguists and lexicographers have been spouting for some years now, people -- including Wall Street Journal readers -- are interested in reading and writing and hearing clear, expressive, inspiring English.

Now, some of my best friends are linguists and lexicographers, and I pay some attention to what they spout. When and where has a linguist or lexicographer argued that people aren't interested in reading, writing and/or hearing "clear, expressive, inspiring English"? Do they even deal with such matters? Maybe the LSA should just own up and start a crusade for muddy, dull, deadening English? (Or did I miss something in the last Bulletin?)

Finally, here's the closing plea to subscribe:

Do you, too, prize well-spoken, well-written language? Do you believe all right is correct and alright is nonsense, that predominant is an adjective and predominate a verb, that blithering politicians ought not to be elected to higher office, that a society is generally as lax as its language?

Finally, we've got examples of usage, and I do love data, but is alright less clear, expressive or inspiring than all right? I'm deeply opposed to blithering politicians, but are we more worried about pols splitting infinitives or lying us into war?

All in all, the substance of the argument looks pretty incoherent and the Vocabula's own prose is deader than Strunk, but it's without a single copy-editing glitch or misspelling that I can find.

Yo, peeps: Pronoun news

It always gets crazier, doesn't it? Like most of you, I chuckled at stories on the gender-neutral pronoun yo among Baltimore kids. Not everybody is laughing. Our CapTimes (no link to this, it seems like, maybe for the better) ran Word Court with this headline:

Peep this: 'Yo' won't cut it

OK, I'm not going into a rant here, but I gotta note the level of argument used. Beyond the complaint that it was actually the teachers who promoted this, the examples are these:

Yo is tuckin' in his shirt.
Peep yo.

The objections? These aren't really gender-neutral sentences. And the pronoun sounds 'disrespectful'. (Say whut? Because yo qua discourse marker is associated with African-American speech?) The 'his' later in the first example betrays the gender of the referent. That's a little usage issue, not a flaw of the pronoun. In the second, it is — hang with me here — that the speaker sees the person in question, so that somebody can tell the gender of the person referred to. Therefore, this doesn't count as 'gender-neutral'. Yo, judge! (That's the discourse yo not the pronoun, fyi.) A zillion languages lack gender marking on pronouns and they don't mark gender whether you know it or not. The Judge apparently wants something that is specifically restricted to cases where we want to be vague about gender.

But it goes off the cliff from there. Yo is part of a 'private language', namely youth language, followed by some outrage that teachers are documenting "this stuff" instead of teaching Standard English.

Oh. My. God.

to cohere, transitive

An alert reader (a card-carrying non-prescriptivist, non-peevologist) writes with alarm …

It's come to this -- cohere as a transitive verb ...

The reference is to David Brooks in his NYT column yesterday:

Social tribes rally for and against certain candidates. Rush Limbaugh is currently going bananas because Mike Huckabee threatens to disrupt the community of conservative dittoheads he has spent decades cohering.

Yeah, that's jarring, if not as jarring as what Brooks has said about science (see here, for example). The verb does have a transitive form, in both Merriam-Webster's and OED, it turns out, "to cause to stick together or cohere" (my paraphrase). In both works, it is the last item given, seventh in the OED, so pretty obscure.

Using the most obscure meaning/sense/form of a word is surely a kind of language snob dog whistle, making it classic Brooks. But note the stylistic whiplash: transitive cohere in the same sentence as going bananas and dittoheads, maybe that's what's odd.

"Inflection"

A while back, Jan Freeman was asking a few linguist bloggers about what their own language peeves were. I think at the time I may well have denied having any and at least don't think I came up with anything plausible. Recently, though, I've noticed a usage that actually bugs me in the way that peevologists have peeves: The use of inflection for intonation. Now, if you talk and think about language a lot, you may use inflection in its morphological sense pretty often and this other meaning is disconcerting.

This came into focus pretty sharply a couple weeks ago with a Safire column where he uses the word in this way a few times. This morning, waiting for the Packers to face the Lions, I finally got around to looking at what dictionaries say about it, figuring that I was just stodgy here and that it's an utterly unremarkable use. Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate suggests as much; it has this meaning second, after only the really basic historical meaning of 'to bend or curve':

change in pitch or loudness of the voice

I really wouldn't have included 'loudness' in here, just pitch, but pitch, loudness and duration are so intertwined in prosodic stuff that it's hard to object. But the Oxford English Dictionary On-line doesn't get to this until its fifth entry:

Modulation of the voice; in speaking or singing: a change in the pitch or tone of the voice.

Maybe this is more common American usage than British? (Separated by a Common Language hasn't treated it that I see.)

I've asked a couple of other linguists, and they seem to agree that this is a less than fortunate accident of lexical semantics, but it doesn't seem to bother anybody like it does me. Haven't talked to non-linguists about it, mostly just assuming that there's not much to say there.

Go Pack go!

Bad verb

Tom Delay, in case you hadn't heard, has said that he'd like to bitch-slap Paul Krugman, NYT op-ed columnist and object of lots of bile from the right. Keith Olbermann tonight defined 'to bitch slap' as to slap someone like a bitch would. In fact, there's ambiguity in how people have come to understand the word, like in the Urban Dictionary entries, here: For some, the agent is the bitch and for others it's the recipient of the slap. I don't use the term myself and don't have any idea.