John Berenberg writes: An article by Joan Acocella in the February 9, 2017 issue of The New York Review of Books makes a 'no word for X' claim about Japanese and goes even further by quoting a native speaker who happily reports that learning to swear in English and Spanish allows him to say things […]
In recent years, The New Yorker's coverage of the "descriptivist vs. prescriptivist" divide in English usage has been, shall we say, problematic. In 2012, we had Joan Acocella's "The English Wars," critiqued by Mark Liberman here and here. That was followed up by Ryan Bloom's Page-Turner piece, "Inescapably, You're Judged By Language," which I tackled […]
Jeffrey Toobin, "So you think you know the second amendment?", The New Yorker 12/18/2012: The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not […]
In 1917, The Nation's book reviewer objected to "the inexcusable irregularity of the style" in Helen Marie Bennett's Women and work: the economic value of college training, listing a number of specific "blunders" as evidence. One of these "blunders" can be found in the following passage: College girls may not realize why it is that many […]
In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Jane Mayer has a profile of Bryan Fischer ("BULLY PULPIT: An evangelist talk-show host’s campaign to control the Republican Party", The New Yorker, 6/18/2012), which starts this way: Tupelo, Mississippi, is best known as the birthplace of Elvis Presley, and his childhood home remains the town’s top […]
Steven Pinker strikes back: "False Fronts in the Language Wars: Why New Yorker writers and others keep pushing bogus controversies", Slate 5/31/2012. Nature or nurture. Love it or leave it. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit. If you didn’t already know that euphonious dichotomies are usually phony dichotomies, you need only check out the […]
Readers of The New Yorker might be getting the impression that the magazine has it in for a nefarious group of people known as "descriptivists." They're a terrible bunch, as far as I can tell. First came Joan Acocella's "The English Wars" in the May 14 issue (see Mark Liberman's posts, "Rules and 'rules'," "A […]
In her review of Henry Hitchings' The Language Wars: A History of Proper English, Joan Acocella expressed some annoyance that Hitchings could dare to suggest "that the “who”/“whom” distinction may be on its way out". As evidence that this distinction was already in some difficulty almost 20 years before Ms. Acocella was born, I reprint […]
Yesterday, I discussed Joan Acocella's strange misreading of two essays introducing the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary ("Rules and 'rules'", 5/11/2012). John Rickford wrote that "the patterns of variation and change … are regular rather than random, governed by unconscious, language-internal rules and restrictions" — but Ms. Acocella took this defense of "vernaculars […]
Philipp Sebastian Angermeyer writes: Is there going to be a language log comment on the article "The English Wars" in the current issue of the New Yorker? I find it completely shocking to see that an author who purports to be writing about prescriptivism vs. descriptivism has so little understanding of the subject, and that […]