Language Log

When I give lectures on why you should not listen to prescriptivists' dimwitted prattle about the wrongness of constructions that are fully grammatical and always were, people sometimes ask me what I would regard as bad grammar, as if such cases were going to be hard to find. So occasionally I note down striking cases of failure to get English syntax right (especially written English, naturally enough), and discuss them here.

A friend (don't make me say who) with a middle-rank managerial position in a large bureaucratic organization (don't make me say which) recently received a memo informing him about which of his recommendations for staff promotions and pay increases had been successful, and part of it said:

…it is strongly recommended that you meet with staff, whom have been unsuccessful, in order to provide support after their receiving the disappointing news.

That's a rather astonishing ungrammatical case of whom, used without a shred of justification as subject of a tensed verb to which it is immediately adjacent; but also a crashingly salient case of punctuating a restrictive relative incorrectly. And the email version of the memo, amazingly, was even worse.

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"Second best"? We'll come to that.

According to Andreas Ulrich and Alfred Weinzierl, "German Trainers Describe Pitiful State of Afghan Police", Der Spiegel, 4/7/2010:

A functioning police force is seen as a prerequisite for a Western withdrawal from Afghanistan. German trainers, however, paint a disastrous picture of the quality of Afghan security forces. Too many police, they say, can't read or write, can't shoot straight or take bribes.

What is the connection between (a) successfully executing something tricky that not everyone could get away with, like an escape or an acrobatic maneuver or a daring sartorial fashion statement, and (b) removing by tugging, stripping, or peeling?

There are some nice examples in Leah Rozen, "Hey, Ryan, Talk to the Dress", NYT 2/10/2010:

RYAN, Ryan, Ryan. It’s Journalism 101: who, what, when, where and why, as in, “Who are you wearing?” […]

Susan Kaufman, editor of People StyleWatch, said she lost it when Mr. Seacrest didn’t immediately quiz an elegant-looking Sandra Bullock — who would later win as Best Actress — about her shimmery frock (by Marchesa). “I’m screaming at the TV: ‘Ask her who’s she wearing!’ ” Ms. Kaufman said. “I was so angry, my husband was laughing at me.”

Reading Dana Stevens "Ferguson and Fry Rock Late Night by Having Actual Conversation", Slate 2/24/2010, Mark Paris came across this sentence:

There was no part of their chat that wasn't something one might not overhear at an interesting dinner party.

His reaction, in email to me, was "I know what was meant, but didn't it go one negation too far?"

From Paul Kay, this passage from an email recently sent by the Chair of the UC Berkeley Academic Senate:

As background, the state continues to anticipate a very large deficit this year.  While the Governor's budget did call for restoring approximately $300M in funds cut last year from the UC budget, it would probably not be prudent – in my view – to assume that our budgetary situation for 2010-11 will be better than 2009-10.  In addition, the Governor's proposed constitutional amendment, which called for shifting money to higher education by privatizing the state prison system, has attracted no political support (and a great deal of criticism as a policy proposal).  While UCOP has been apparently working with to develop alternative constitutional amendments, it would again be imprudent not to expect a silver bullet.

An interesting misnegation was broadcast today on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, in a segment under the title "Exactly How Do We Go Forth and Innovate".  Liane Hansen quoted president Obama's SOTU passage about innovation and leadership in science and technology, including the phrase "Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America".

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And she asked Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, "The president referred to innovation several times in his speech. What did you think? Was there anything new there?"

His response began:

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There wasn't a- a lot new there,  I think I- I- what I was most impressed with was when he said "we can't be second to none".

"Just because you collect them doesn't make them collectibles," says a wife to a dopey-looking husband in the cartoon that Bob Ladd peeled off his New Yorker calendar last December 23. And she's right. There's a difference in meaning between the -ible suffix, which attaches mainly to roots with a Latin origin, and the word possible: what is possible for you to X may not meet the standard for being Xible. As so often, the cartoonist (Barbara Smaller in this case) draws on not just a familiarity with life and relationships but also a pretty good implicit analytical knowledge of semantics and derivational morphology.

Ismael Tohari emailed me from Saudi Arabia to ask this:

Sorry to bother you but… I really find it very hard to pinpoint any difference between the two sentences below:

[1]   He was playing a violin when the visitor arrived.

[2]   He was playing the violin when the visitor arrived.

A fascinating question. I wonder if you can see what the difference in meaning is, and why it is so tricky to specify?

In the current (Jan 4, 2010) issue of The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead has a comment that is partly about what to call the previous decade:

Arguably, a grudging agreement has been reached on calling the decade "the aughts," but that unfortunate term is rooted in a linguistic error. The use of "aught" to mean "nothing," "zero," or "cipher" is a nineteenth-century corruption of the word "naught," which actually does mean nothing, and which, as in the phrase "all for naught," is still in current usage. Meanwhile, the adoption of "the aughts" as the decade’s name only accelerates the almost complete obsolescence of the actual English word "aught," a concise and poetic near-synonym for "anything" that has for centuries well served writers, including Shakespeare ("I never gave you aught," Hamlet says to Ophelia, in an especially ungenerous moment, before she goes off and drowns) and Milton ("To do aught good never will be our task / But ever to do ill our sole delight," Satan declares near the beginning of "Paradise Lost," before slinking up to tempt Eve).

I don't know whether Mead is right that we've settled on the aughts, and I won't comment directly on whether anyone has committed any errors. Instead, I'll try to explicate why a word like aught might take on senses close to that of nothing.

Andrew Dowd sends me a genuine, attested case of the kind of sentence that I have elsewhere called plausible angloid gibberish. It is a particular kind of mangled comparative that somehow seems English when it isn't. It has absolutely no right to be called grammatical, and nothing can explain why it is that we (falsely) believe that it has a meaning that could be accounted for in the regular way — it doesn't and it couldn't. No syntacticians that I know of can say why it sort of slips by, in comprehension and sometimes (as here) even in production. The sentence came from http://www.backspace.com/notes/2004/06/, citing AdAge, and it reads thus:

In Michigan and Minnesota, more people found Mr Bush's ads negative than they did Mr Kerry's.

Complete and utter syntactic nonsense. And yet when you read it you see what they meant long before you realize that they couldn't have meant it.

Following up on my post about the often-puzzling semantics of the pattern "No NOUN is too ADJECTIVE to VERB", here's an up-to-date list of LL postings on a cluster of related topics, which I will keep updated as the years roll by: