Language Log

In a comment on my post about the president's subordinators, "Jimbino" identified himself as an editor of medical articles, and asserted that

Of course, the most common error committed by physicians and nurses (and the NYT) is the use of "at risk for [cancer]" when they mean "at risk of [cancer]."

Challenged on this point by other commenters, he added that

A person who says, "… at risk for …" show misunderstanding of the careful use of prepositions that distinguishes persons educated in English from those who merely grew up in an English-speaking country. Your ability to catch this error will enable you to avoid docs and nurses who are incompetent and probably not careful about washing their hands.

And in response to some additional negative feedback, he explained himself further:

I am a prescriptivist who believes that "you are judged by the words you use," and who has little use for prescribing descriptivism or for those who do not take care to understand the correct use of prepositions and soap.

I occasionally wonder whether people might be picking up the wrong idea about the descriptive orientation we tend to promote here on Language Log: because we so often point out that edicts defended by conservative usage pundits lack support from either decent writing or common sense, people might imagine that if college papers were graded by a linguist everyone would get an A+, because the instructor would endorse and excuse all their mistakes. Well, Ben Yagoda is a real live English professor (he's at the University of Delaware, where he mostly teaches journalistic writing), and a couple of months ago he published an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about college writing and the changing kinds of awfulness that he sees in it. (One or two points from it were discussed here on Language Log, and Ben responded in the first comment below it.) He can surely serve as some kind of example of the prescriptive curmudgeonliness of writing instructors. He goes through this (possibly invented) sample of what he sees as error-stuffed prose to pick out its mistakes:

For our one year anniversary, my girlfriend and myself are going to a Yankees game, with whomever amongst our friends can go. But, the Weather Channel just changed their forecast and the skies are grey, so we might go with the girl that lives next door to see the movie, "Iron Man 2".

So let's check with a real live descriptive linguist and see if there is agreement, shall we?

The conclusion of Jonathan Yardley's otherwise favorable review of Michael Frayn’s “My Father’s Fortune” in the Washington Post:

What a pity it is, therefore, that from beginning to end “My Father’s Fortune” is marred by Frayn’s apparent inability to distinguish between subject and object, or, as grammarians have it, between the nominative and objective cases. To wit: “John, ten years older than me. . .,” “with as much aplomb as Lane and me,” “she’s thirty years younger than him.” Really, what are they teaching at Cambridge these days? Are editorial pencils no longer used at Faber & Faber, Frayn’s British publisher, or Metropolitan, his American one? This may seem mere nitpicking, but it’s not. These are basic, rudimentary grammatical errors, and the ones I’ve cited are merely three among many. For a writer of Frayn’s reputation and accomplishment, they are inexcusable.

Numerous Language Log posts by me, Mark Liberman, and Arnold Zwicky among others have been devoted to mocking people who denigrate the passive without being able to identify it (see this comprehensive list of Language Log posts about the passive). It is clear that some people think The bus blew up is in the passive; that The case took on racial overtones is in the passive; that Dr. Reuben deeply regrets that this happened is in the passive; and so on.

Our grumbling about how these people don't know their passive from a hole in the ground has inspired many people to send us email asking for a clear and simple explanation of what a passive clause is. In this post I respond to those many requests. I'll make it as clear and simple as I can, but it will be a 2500-word essay; I can't make things simpler than they are. There is no hope of figuring out the meaning of grammatical terms from common sense, or by looking in a dictionary. Passive (like its opposite, active) is a technical term. Its use in syntax has nothing to do with lacking energy or initiative, or assuming a receptive and non-directive role. And the dictionary definitions are often utterly inadequate (Webster's, for example, is simply hopeless on the grammatical sense of the word). I will try to explain things accurately, and also simply (though this is not for kids; I am writing this for grownups). If I fail, then of course the whole of your money will be refunded.

The image on the right reproduces a brief passage from a letter that Robert Southey wrote to his friend Grosvenor C. Bedford, on October 1, 1795. (Click on the image for a larger version, as usual.)

Read it, and see if you can figure out what aspect of it Richard Grant White in 1869 called the worst of "those intruders in language … which, about seventy or eighty years ago, began to affront the eye, torment the ear, and assault the common sense of the speaker of plain and idiomatic English".

Looking over the comments on Geoff Pullum's recent post "Stupid less/fewer automatism at the WSJ", I see one point — implicit in many contributions, and explicit in a few — that deserves to be underlined with some empirical evidence. When a numerically-quantified plural noun phrase refers to an amount that may be fractionally divided (grams, seconds, meters, dollars, etc.), it's generally incorrect to follow it with or fewer rather than or less. And even when the counted units are not normally divisible, but are being considered as a mass-like quantity (points, votes, cents, items, soldiers), less may also be permitted or even preferred in formal writing.

Spot the horrible effect introduced here by an over-picky Wall Street Journal subeditor:

Quite often, these games don't even turn out to be good: Fewer than half of them have been decided by 10 points or fewer.

That "10 points or fewer" phrase on the end is a desperate and quite ridiculous effort at obeying the prescriptive rule that you should use fewer for all things that can be counted, and less only for mass quantities.

From Ben Zimmer, who got it from Mike Klaas, who found it on the Wonder-Tonic site ("Written, Graphical, and Interactive Sundries by Mike Lacher") of 3/31/10, here:

In his short but cutting review of Simon Heffer's Strictly English, Steven Poole remarks that the book "condemns hanging participles yet perpetrates a monster (on p165, too tedious to quote here)." What was this tedious monster, I feel sure you Language Log readers are asking? The sentence in question is the second one in this quotation (from the beginning of a section; I underline the relevant phrase):

Partridge has a long entry in Usage and Abusage on the word got – he could as easily have made the entry about the word get – but, if anything, this unusually strict grammarian lets the promiscuous and often thoughtless use of this term off lightly.³ Without detracting from Fowler's point that the Anglo-Saxon is to be preferred to the Romance at all times, the use of the verb to get in an increasing number of contexts is not merely "slovenly" (Partridge's word): it is downright confusing.

---

3. Usage and Abusage, p136.

Is that really a mistake?

"The problem with people who want to impose their linguistic tastes on others," says David Crystal, "is that they never do so consistently." I'm not so sure I agree that's the problem. Consistency wouldn't be quite enough to excuse grammar fascism. I'd say the problem with people who want to impose their linguistic tastes on others by writing books on how to write is that they are so bad at it: though often they are good enough at writing (I have never said that E. B. White or George Orwell couldn't write), they actually don't know how they do what they do, and they are clueless about the grammar of the language in which they do it, and they offer recommendations on how you should write that are unfollowed, unfollowable, or utterly insane.

Both Crystal and I have been suffering the same painful experience — reviewing the same ghastly, insufferable, obnoxious, appallingly incompetent book. It is by Simon Heffer, the associate editor of the UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph, who imagined that he could improve the world by offering 350 pages of his thoughts on grammatical usage, uninformed by any work since he was in college thirty years ago — in fact pretty much innocent of acquaintance with any work on English grammar published in more than half a century.

Lady Bracknell, in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, is one of the most terrifyingly pedantic and correctly spoken characters in all of English theater ("a monster," Jack Worthing says of her, "without being a myth, which is rather unfair"). And I have mentioned her usage in lectures on numerous occasions to point out, when talking about preposition stranding, that she does strand prepositions. But as I watched Mark Thomson's wonderful production of the play at Edinburgh's Lyceum Theatre last Friday night (get tickets now, readers in eastern Scotland), I suddenly noticed something new about what she says when Jack Worthing gives his age:

LADY BRACKNELL: … How old are you?
JACK: Twenty-nine.
LADY BRACKNELL: A very good age to be married at.

A preposition phrase (PP) like at the age of 29 is very clearly an temporal adjunct, not a complement. So Lady Bracknell is prepared to strand a preposition even in a temporal adjunct PP!

Every time a post or comment on Language Log mentions, in any context, the prescriptive disapproval of preposition stranding (where a preposition is separated from its logically associated complement, as in What are you looking at?), e.g. in this post, we get commenters (who, incidentally, seem never to have read the site before) tussling with each other to be the first to inscribe two routinized types of comment.

One type says "I think a preposition is a fine thing to end a sentence with!", or words very much to that effect (unaware that instances of this lame "look-I'm-violating-the-rule" joke have been going on since at least the 1700s). The other type says, "This is nonsense up with which I shall not put!" (invariably thinking that they are quoting Sir Winston Churchill, though Ben Zimmer definitively refuted that misattribution years ago in a post that Mark and I subsequently included in our book, and it is enormously annoying to us that still no one is aware of Ben's discovery).

Unable to bear any longer the tedious work of seeking out all the instances of these two comment types so I can delete them, I have decided that from now on I will hunt down the relevant commenters and kill them.

John McIntyre notes on his blog You Don't Say that a man named Rod Gelatt, a retired professor of journalism who taught at the Missouri School of Journalism, writes in a letter to the Columbia Missourian newspaper (responding to an article calling for more attention to correcting grammar errors in online content):

in the announcement of the invitation for us to become grammar police, I found two errors: "….who wants to generously point out…" (splitting an infinitive) and "Spell check won't help you when you have the wrong word to start with" (ending sentence with preposition).

I ignore the first point (split infinitives have always been grammatically correct in English; see for example this page). And as for the second, stranded prepositions have also always been grammatical in general, of course; but with respect to Mr Gelatt's example, I wonder what he thought the "correction" would be? The common phrases to start with and to begin with are among the (numerous) cases where stranding the preposition at the end of the phrase is not just permitted in Standard English, it's obligatory.