Language Log

When The New York Times asked me to contribute to the discussion of The Elements of Style on their "Room for Debate" blog, I figured they would dredge up a bunch of aged worthies of the New York literati who would pother on about the virtues of the little book, and I would be alone out there in saying that it did not deserve our respect and could actually be educationally harmful. But it was not as I thought: all of the other four invited commenters (Patricia T. O'Conner of Grammarphobia.com, Stephen Dodson of Language Hat, Ben Yagoda of BenYagoda.com, and Mignon Fogarty the Grammar Girl) are distinctly critical. Elements gets a rough ride. Perhaps not as rough as I would like, but never mind, there is a developing consensus here that I approve of. (And E. B. White himself might even have approved; he thought that no smooth ride is as valuable as a rough ride.) Dodson reminds us that on Language Hat he has called Elements "the mangiest of stuffed owls", a book that has been "undercooked and overpraised" (I knew I liked this guy). Check it out.

Poor Sam Roberts. He begins his New York Times article "'The Elements of Style' turns 50" (April 21) thus:

How does a professional writer discuss "The Elements of Style" without nervously looking over his shoulder and seeing Will Strunk and E. B. White (or thousands of readers of their book) second-guessing him? (Is "second-guessing" hyphenated or not? Is posing a question the same as using the passive voice?)

Is posing a question the same as using the passive voice? Great Caesar's ghost, it is just as bad as I thought out there, or worse.

In the world of linguistic peevery, there are several levels of hell. On the lowest reside expressions that incite some people to rage, the symptoms of which are frothing at the mouth, extreme physical revulsion, and an inclination towards violence (up to homicide) against the perpetrator. You hope that all of this is merely verbally hyperbolic, but it's nevertheless disturbing. (We've posted on Language Log a number of times about word rage.)

One circle up are the cringe expressions, which merely make some people shrink back, but not puke or attack with weaponry. (Again, we've posted a number of times on Language Log about cringe words.)

And then we have the circle of prejudices, expressions that some people merely disapprove of.

(Some of these dislikes are widely shared, disseminating from one person to another or through advice givers of one sort or another. Others are more idiosyncratic, apparently arising from individual experiences with the expressions in question, which gave rise to unpleasant associations — a topic I hope to blog about eventually. There are people, for example, who dislike frankly as a sentence adverbial.)

A little while back, Jan Freeman posted on her Boston Globe column "The Word" on prejudice against foreground as a verb.

My appearance on NPR nearly caused a car crash. Sarah Ferrell wrote in the NPR comments area: "I was in the car and rushed in to comment–I am gobsmacked." I can just see that Volvo careening around the corners on the way back from the supermarket and screeching to a halt in the driveway, and Sarah leaping out of it screaming, running to the house and dashing up the stairs to the computer…

But a willingness to drive dangerously in one's lust to get home and write comments doesn't always go along with a willingness to think or write carefully. Her comment goes on:

Pullam's explanation of why "none" should NOT be followed by the singular "is," but rather "are" or "were" is ABSURD!! One of the basic tenets of English grammar is to achieve subject verb agreement--just because his favorite authors used "were" and "are," does NOT mean that WE should. I for ONE have no problemm with the concept that verbs should match their subjects!! English is a very complex, fluid language and I assert that this rule STILL STANDS. It has been the cutsom for some time now.

Strunk and White's Elements of Style, first published in 1959, has now been reissued in a leather-bound, gold-embossed 50th anniversary edition (with testimonials from famous literary figures and an afterword by Charles Osgood of CBS). An AP article by William Kates about the event has been printed in dozens of places; here I'll quote from the version in The Ithaca Journal (hat tip to Marilyn Martin). (Strunk taught at Cornell and White went to college there, so it's no surprise that the Journal has a story. There are stories by other writers in the Cornell Chronicle and the Cornell Daily Sun.)

Bill Walderman asked

Is it possible that the "rule" requiring the placement of "however" as the second element of a sentence (or at least not the first element) … originated as an attempt to impose Latin and Greek syntax or word order on English? In Latin, there are a number of particles such as "autem" that can't be placed at the beginning of a clause and usually appear as the second element. And Ancient Greek is extremely exuberant in particles that must be placed as the second element of a clause and can't stand as the first element.

This is an interesting suggestion, which hadn't occurred to me before. On reflection, it seems quite plausible that the odd grammatical myth forbidding initial however was originally a transfer from the treatment of autem and some other words in Latin, beaten into Will Strunk in his youth.

Back in 2005, Mark Liberman and I (here and here and here) both took a look at certain issues relating to placement of clause adjuncts, and we touched on William Strunk's prejudice against sentence-initial however as an adjunct, as set forth in The Elements of Style. I suggested in "Fossilized prejudices about however" that Strunk had some basis for his prejudices, since novels of the time really did seem to prefer however in second position. This was a modest defense of Strunk, whose horrid little book I regard as almost entirely mistaken in the grammatical advice it purveys. Michael Stillwell has now discovered that my defense evidence was flagrantly mistaken.

A reader of the Baltimore Sun wrote recently to slam the paper for its headlines. As quoted by John McIntyre on his blog:

Your headlines repeatedly use forms of the verb "to be".

For example, a headline on the homepage of the website right now reads, "Two men are slain in shooting at city carryout".

As I'm sure your copy editors understand, this is a newspaper no-no because:

1) It slows down the reader;

2) It takes up precious headline space;

3) It's just plain not classy; and most importantly

4) It undermines the credibility of the reporter and, ultimately, the newspaper.

If your editors are having difficulty writing long-enough headlines, they find a solution that avoids the lazy decision of using a "to be" filler.

There's just so much here, not all of it touched on by McIntyre and the commenters on this posting.

Linguists sometimes have run-ins with copy editors over points of usage: the linguists use variants that they know to be standard, but the editors edit them out in obedience to some fancied "rule of grammar". Frustration ensues.

On to John McWhorter (in Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English (2008)) on "singular they", a topic we've returned to many times on Language Log. The short version is that in certain (not all) contexts, singular they is entirely standard and has been so for a very long time. Yet many people believe, passionately, that it is always wrong, because it offends "logic".

In a comment yesterday, Emily asked:

I tutor the SATs, including the writing section, in addition to helping students with other kinds of writing.

What am I supposed to tell my students about zombie rules? The fact is that some misguided teachers and graders may enforce them. (SAT graders not so much, though–-I think I'm close to getting a handle on what those people are looking out for.)

When I was in school I breezed happily by all this nonsense because I had smart teachers and a strong authorial voice. But not all of my students do. So what to say?

Let me start by quoting Rob Balder's PartiallyClips for 2/17/2009, which celebrates all of us who, like Emily, escaped from school with our souls intact:

(Click on the image for a larger version)

Today's Grand Avenue:

If you've ever found yourself thinking that Language Log writers seem concerned with form rather than function — that they obsess about the details of how things are put, to the exclusion of concern with the core content that really matters, and that they will probably miss the historic excitement of this January 20 grubbing around for prepositions — you need to take a look at the following passage by Jill Lepore of Harvard. It's from her article in the January 12 New Yorker on the language of presidential inaugural addresses. Lepore makes reference to claims in Elvin Lim's book The Anti-Intellectual Presidency that American presidential inaugural addresses have been getting stupider, with stupidity being measured by Flesch Readability Test word- and sentence-length criteria:

The past half century of speechwriters, most of whom trained as journalists, do favor small words and short sentences, as do many people whose English teachers made them read Strunk and White's 1959 "Elements of Style" ("Omit needless words") and Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English language" ("Never use a long word where a short one will do"). Lim gets this, but only sort of. Harding's inaugural comes in at a college reading level, George H. W. Bush's at about a sixth-grade level. Harding's isn't smarter or subtler, it's just more flowery. They are both empty-headed; both suffer from what Orwell called "slovenliness." The problem doesn't lie in the length of their sentences or the number of their syllables. It lies in the absence of precision, the paucity of ideas, and the evasion of every species of argument.

A beautiful expression of a point we have often tried to emphasize. It's not so much that the superficial rules for writing promulgated Orwell and by Strunk and White are toxic and meretricious (though they do poison young minds, and should be condemned for that); it's that if you think they are deep and important and determinative of quality, it is YOU that will get hung up on trivialities of form rather than important aspects of content.