Language Log

In "Prepositionssss…" (9/2/2011), we quoted from the 1995 Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage,

Members of the never-end-a-sentence-with-a-preposition school are still with us and are not reluctant to make themselves known…

This follows M-W's note that

…recent commentators — at least since Fowler 1926 — are unanimous in their rejection of the notion that ending a sentence with a preposition is an error or an offense against propriety. Fowler terms the idea a "cherished superstition."

And that same 2011 post ends with a list of links discussing the superstition's origin and progress, going back to John Dryden's 1672 attempt to demonstrate that "he is a better poet and playwright than Jonson, Fletcher and Shakespeare were".

Today I observed this superstition rising again from the grave.

An email recently informed me that the American Psychological Association has created an online version of the APA Style Guide (technically the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Seventh Edition, and that Penn's library has licensed it. A quick skim turned up a prescriptive rule that's new to me, forbidding the use of commas to separate conjoined that-clauses unless there are at least three of them:

In earlier posts and comments ("Between you and I"; "Barriers between you and I"), there have been many opinions about the possibility of  various English subject and object pronouns in the two positions of "between X and Y".  So I've done a quick tally of  counts from five of the English-language corpora at English-Corpora.org:

Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
News on the Web (NOW)
Corpus of American Soap Operas
The TV Corpus
The Movie Corpus

(Though for now I've tested only the patterns in which Y = I/me.)

In "'Between you and I'" (10/5/2025), I quoted three theories that Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage offers as possible explanations for the confusion over "between you and I" vs. "between you and me". The third of those theories cites Noam Chomsky, whose work is not usually part of usage discussion:

Another possible explanation (unnoticed by the comentaros) comes from the linguist Noam Chomsky. In his Barriers, 1986, he says that compound phrases like you and I are barriers to the assignment of grammatical case. This means that between can assign case only to the whole phrase and not to the individual words that make it up. Thus the individual pronouns are free to be nominative or objective or even reflexives. Chomsky's theory would also explain some other irregularities in pronoun use (See PRONOUNS); it's the best that has been offered so far.

I expressed skepticism about this theory, "for reasons to be discussed another time".

Politics aside, there's been some prescriptivist reaction to (part of) a Signal exchange between White House aides Anthony Salisbury and Patrick Weaver about the idea of deploying the 82nd Airborne to Portland. From  The Guardian :

“Between you and I, I think Pete just wants the top cover from the boss if anything goes sideways with the troops there,” Weaver said.

For some people, it should be "between you and me", and "between you and I" is annoyingly wrong. I've gotten a couple of emails about this. So here's the (complicated) story.

The word "exceedances" occurs 7 times in this relatively short article:

"Lead in water at Perth Children's Hospital no risk to patient safety, WA health minister says"
Mya Kordic, ABC News (Australia), 9/10/25

Here are two examples:

"Exceedances are decommissioned while they undergo remediation," Ms Hammat said.

"I have been advised by the Chief Health Officer that there is no risk to the safety of patients or staff as a result of these exceedances."

Or maybe "adverbial noun"? Or "adverbial verb"? Anyhow, "Long-closed Calif. mountain route surprise reopens after years", SFGate 9/2/2025:

A long-shuttered stretch of highway that cuts straight through Angeles National Forest above Los Angeles has finally reopened.

A roughly 10-mile stretch of Angeles Crest Highway, which runs roughly east-west through the national forest for over 60 miles from the wealthy suburb of La Cañada Flintridge to the small mountain town of Wrightwood, reopened with little notice on Friday after being closed for several years. Before the surprise return on Friday, the portion of the two-lane highway had been closed since the winter of 2022-2023, when “relentless storms” collapsed roadways, caused rockslides and damaged retaining walls, according to Caltrans.

There's a big fuss and furor over the logo change at Cracker Barrel:

Below is a guest post by Bob Ladd:

A few days ago I received an editorial decision letter from a journal, which included a request to deal with a few typos. I had begun a sentence with the phrase “In the interests of brevity,” and the editor wanted me to remove the final -s from the word “interests”. Since I know that the editor is not a native speaker of English, my first reaction was to ignore the request, but I thought I should back up my insistence that this was not a typo with some sort of evidence, so I searched for the phrases “in the interests of” and “in the interest of” on Google n-grams. To my surprise, I discovered that both versions of the expression occur, with a roughly 60:40 preference for the version with “interest”, and that this proportion has been roughly stable since the early 20th century. Since Google’s book corpus permits the user to distinguish British and American English, I could also see that the version with “interests” is more common in BrEng and the version with “interest” in AmEng, but that both versions occur in both varieties.

Over the years, we've taken many self-appointed usage authorities to task for ignorant pronouncements presenting their personal reactions as facts of the standard language, or even as logical necessities. But everybody has similar reactions, and the point is not to deny the existence of usage conventions, or to pretend that you don't ever perceive something as a violation.  As in all areas of cultural judgment, however, it's a good idea to examine the foundations of your responses, because sometimes it turns out that you're wrong about the facts or the logic.

I recently documented an experience of that general kind in a June 20 post "Incredulous, incredible, whatever…", where a usage that I perceived as a malapropism turned out to go back to Shakespeare.

This morning's example is even more surprising to me — "cut and dry" where I expected "cut and dried".

I thought this use of incredulous in a recent Forbes article was a malapropism for incredible:

If you thought that my May 23 report, confirming the leak of login data totaling an astonishing 184 million compromised credentials, was frightening, I hope you are sitting down now. Researchers have just confirmed what is also certainly the largest data breach ever, with an almost incredulous 16 billion login credentials, including passwords, exposed. As part of an ongoing investigation that started at the beginning of the year, the researchers have postulated that the massive password leak is the work of multiple infostealers. [emphasis added]

From Adam Rasgon and Natan Odenheimer, "U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem Braces for Possible Israeli Strike on Iran" NYT 6/12/2025:

More recently, however, Mr. Trump has said he was less convinced that talks with Iran would yield a new nuclear deal.

“I’m getting more and more less confident about it,” he told The New York Post in a podcast broadcast on Wednesday.

Email from a reader:

In the last several years, when receiving instructive information from gen Z in places of business, I have noticed a regular use of the FUTURE tense, when the present would perfectly suffice. Sometimes, but not always, this is combined with telling me what I WILL WANT to do. To wit,

– "you WILL WANT TO ____"
– "the beverages WILL BE on the back of the menu"

There is nothing "wrong" grammatically or logically with any of this (as if there could be). It is perfectly accurate and cromulent. But these forms are relatively new, I conjecture. Even a little jarring.

I can posit my own hypotheses regarding how and why these usages increased in prevalence in recent tears. Is there a literature on it, perhaps already covered by Language Log?