Language Log

Geoff Pullum's recent posting on the sentence

(1) Kansas hasn't had executed anyone since 1965.

has elicited comments going off in several different directions. I'll try to clarify three things, each in one posting. [Correction: actually, I won't, since Geoff Pullum has now appended responses on things two and three within some of the comments.] This one is on the occurrences of (forms of) HAVE in (1). Start by asking what the writer (or editors) at the Wall Street Journal might have been aiming at with (1); what were they trying to say?

A few days ago, Geoff Pullum posted a meditation on the role of The Elements of Style in befuddling Americans about the nature of the passive voice ("Drinking the Strunkian Kool-Aid: victims of page 18", 6/6/2009). His point of departure was a passage illustrating the confusion, taken from a 2007 article by Ada Brunstein ("The House of No Personal Pronouns", NYT, 7/22/2007).

Last night, Ms. Brunstein sent me the letter reproduced below, in which she corrects Geoff's  conjecture that Strunk and White were directly responsible for her slip, and graciously offers to enlist (or more exactly, to be hired) as "an active proper-passive promoter".

The Language Log marketing department, bored with refunding the subscription fees of disgruntled readers, is delirious with enthusiasm (or would be, if it existed). But Ms. Brunstein's stated price is a copy of Strunk and White's book, signed and dedicated by Geoff, whose agent is also ontologically challenged. So it may take some time to set up the proposed promotional campaign.

It is clear that *Kansas hasn't had executed anyone since 1965 is ungrammatical. What was responsible for the editing mistake that led to its appearing in this page on the Wall Street Journal's law blog? Quite possibly, suggested Victor Steinbok to the American Dialect Society mailing list early this morning, a sentence-planning botch that resulted from an attempt at obeying the Strunkian imperative to use the active voice.

"My toothbrush is one of four standing upright in a cup on the bathroom sink," wrote Ada Brunstein in ‘The House of No Personal Pronouns’, a 2007 piece in the New York Times Fashion & Style section. "These toothbrushes belong to me, my boyfriend, his wife and her lover."

Brunstein often stays at the house with her married boyfriend, who co-owns it with his estranged wife, who also sometimes lives in the house, together with her boyfriend. This edgy domestic relationship between two couples, one half of each of which had together once formed a different couple, depends on a delicate avoidance of topics such as the evidence of the still-undissolved marriage. There have been negotiations concerning phone calls and visits, and in addition (for this is Language Log, not Open Marriage Lifestyle Log) linguistic negotiations. Brunstein's boyfriend says "the house" now, not "our house"; and:

He has adopted the passive voice to make it easier on me. I once stood in front of a bookcase in the kitchen, three shelves of which hold an impressive collection of salt and pepper shakers from across the country.

"You collect salt and pepper shakers?" I asked.

"There are salt and pepper shakers that have come into the house over the years," he said.

Yes, it's that elusive butterfly of passivity again.

A letter to the public editor of the NYT, in the "Week in Review" section yesterday, from Dave Bruce of Hoboken, began:

Crediting two bloggers doesn't justify copying and pasting the words of a third. The words were clearly not Maureen Dowd's, and even the punctuation was the same as Josh Marshall's. [Language Log discussion of the affair here.] Mr. Marshall isn't pressing the issue and considers the matter closed, but that doesn't justify letting Ms. Dowd off the hook with just a correction. The passive-voice note that she "failed to attribute a paragraph" seems to play down what actually occurred.

The correction in question, published in the NYT on 18 May:

Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday, about torture, failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.

But passive voice? Both failed and attribute are active-voice verbs (the first in the past tense, the second in the base form; the first with an infinitival complement, the second with a direct object; but both active voice). Once again (as observed many times here on Language Log), someone has criticized a clause by identifying it as "in the passive voice", meaning by that that it is low in the expression of (human) agency or low in the expression of activity. I'm guessing that it's activity that's at the root of Bruce's complaint: failing to attribute is not an activity. Maybe Bruce would have preferred a correction that said, flat out, that Dowd plagiarized a paragraph from Marshall; plagiarizing is an activity.

It's time once again for our semi-regular feature, "Mr. Payack Bamboozles the Media." Paul J.J. Payack, as Language Log readers know, is the assiduously self-promoting president of the Global Language Monitor who has managed to hoodwink unsuspecting journalists on a range of pseudoscientific claims, most notably the number of words in the English language. (He now claims we're 2,248 words away from the millionth word, a progression that he turns on and off based on his publicity needs.) During the U.S. presidential election season, he's attracted media attention for "linguistic analysis" of key debates and speeches. Last month, CNN trumpeted his findings about the Biden/Palin vice-presidential debate: Palin spoke at a tenth-grade level and Biden at an eighth-grade level, and Palin used passives to deflect responsibility. That nonsense went unremarked here (except briefly in the comments), but Payack's latest round of flapdoodle, pegged to Barack Obama's victory speech on election night, is deserving of mention, even if it helps to fuel his cynical promotional machine.

A SpinSpotter tool — a plugin for the Firefox browser — has been announced in a credulous article by Jon Fine in Business Week. It will (its inventors claim) scan the text of web pages that you view, and identify passages of untrustworthy spinspeak. Our experts at Language Log's research laboratory have run it through our secret multi-million-dollar bullshit detector, and we got a strong positive. Having written several times before on Language Log about people who publish claims about language, and mention the passive voice, when they are completely unable to tell an active clause from a passive clause, I was delighted to see one more instance. Look at this description, from Jon Fine's description of SpinSpotter, detailing the "tenets" (i.e., diagnostics) that enable SpinSpotter to spot spin:

The tenets are: reporter's voice (adjectives used by a journalist that go beyond the supporting evidence in the article); passive voice (example: a story says "bombs land" without stating which party is responsible for them); a biased source (a quoted source's partisanship is not clearly identified); disregarded context (a political rally's attendance is reported to be "massive," but would it have been so huge had the surviving members of the Beatles not played?); and lack of balance (a news story on a controversial topic gives much more credence to one side's claims).

Bombs land is of course an active clause. Passive clauses always have a participial form of the verb, in almost all cases (setting aside "concealed passives" like "This needs looking at") a past participle. The past particple of land has the form landed. So quite independently of the absurdity of an algorithm running on raw text being able to spot things as subtle as strength of supporting evidence or balance on controversial topics, the inventors of this crucially linguistic tool (or the people who wrote their press release) don't know even the most elementary things about English grammar. Caveat downloader.