Language Log

From Philip Taylor:

Just received this in an e-mail message — sender: American male, born (maybe) early to mid sixties, attended Dartmouth 1984 (or thereabouts) onwards.

Thanks Hilmar. I'll review/install soonly. -k

Seeking clarification, I asked Philip:

The man's name is Hilmar?

What's he going to review/install?

Philip replied:

Hilmar is the name of the addressee (Hilmar Preuße)— the sender was "k", a.k.a. Karl Berry.  "k" is going to review "another set of patches for manual pages".

Just edited a piece mentioning the companies Hays, Schroders and Lloyds. They were named for men called Hay, Schröder and Lloyd but all (I checked) officially lack an apostrophe.

People occasionally throw a fit—illiteracy triumphant!—but it does not seem to have done any harm whatsoever.

— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) November 25, 2024 at 7:03 AM

For the past five years or so, Jeffrey Barg has been writing a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer called "The Angry Grammarian". The last one appeared on February 23 of this year, and Barg moved his peeves to Substack. At about the same time, his musical rom-com premiered at Theatre Exile in Philadelphia.

Linguists are prone to feel that the word "grammarian" should belong to them, not to prescriptivist scolds like the one in Elle Cordova's skit. And we often object even more strongly to "grammar" being used as the justification for condemnation of non-standard spellings, punctuation, word usage, etc., both because of the prescriptivist stance and also because the issues involved belong to aspects of usage (like orthography and lexical semantics) that are not part of what we call grammar.

But the OED's primary definition for grammarian is

An expert or specialist in grammar; a person who studies, writes about, or teaches grammar. Also more generally: an expert in or student of language; a linguist, a philologist; (formerly also) †a person of great learning (obsolete).

Sometimes (esp. from the 17th to early 19th centuries) somewhat depreciative, implying that a person is pedantic, too focused on minutiae, or overly concerned with rules and conventions.

The depreciative sense is illustrated in an 1806 citation from Henry Kirke White:

All that arithmeticians know, Or stiff grammarians quaintly teach.

Yesterday's guest post by Andreas Stolcke, "English influence on German spelling", covered Duden's grudging admission that 's is allowed in certain restricted contexts, and noted the widespread negative reaction attributing this "Deppenapostrophe" (= "idiot's apostrophe") to the malign influence of English.

But Heike Wiese, via Joan Maling, sent a link to Anatol Stefanowitsch, "Apostrophenschutz", Sprachlog 4/26/2007, which offers a very different take.

A relative's new refrigerator magnet:

Most rhetorical devices have classical Greek names, arriving in English through Latin and French: analepsis, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, … But there are some common cases, like personification, where the English word is entirely Latinate, although the Greeks certainly used knew and used the technique. The OED's etymology is "Formed within English, by derivation", and the earliest OED citation is from 1728.

They mostly start out clever, cute, and catchy:  e.g., "curated".  The problem is that they soon go viral, and then just never go away, even after they have become banal and overused, as with "perfect storm":

I'm campaigning to have "perfect storm" added to peeve polls in the future. As in "at the end of the day it was a perfect storm." It's not unheard of for a book title to turn into a catch[22]phrase, and maybe perfect storm will become a permanent part of the language, but it smacks of fad to me. I feel like I hear it at least three times a week in NPR interviews.

[Comment by Dick Margulis to "'Annoying word' poll results: Whatever!" (10/9/09)]

That was 2009, but "perfect storm" is still with us, and so is "curated", which begins to appear with increasing frequency in the early 70s and really takes off in the 80s.

Now we're facing a veritable onslaught from "journey":

In a recent article in Psychology Today, Nick Morgan proposes a new theory about the psychodynamics of prescriptivist peeving ("Why Bad Grammar Activates Our Fight-or-Flight Response", 12/14/2023):

Does grammar matter? And did you have a teacher in your youth who insisted on drumming the rules of good grammar into you—and was that teacher on the stern and grumpy side of the instructional continuum?

My anecdotal research into these questions over the years has gradually built a composite picture of a somewhat terrifying authority figure, either male or female, who insisted on good grammar as the essential basis of a sound education. They managed to impart enough of it to you so that you cringe when someone uses "among" and "between" interchangeably—or flubs the distinction between 'that" and "which" because of a fatal lack of understanding of the difference between an independent and dependent clause.

Now, a study reveals that your response to those solecisms (and your bad-tempered teacher's response) is indeed physiological: The grammar of language affects us viscerally.

When we hear bad grammar, our pupils dilate, and our heart rate increases, indicating a fight-or-flight response.

Back in the fall of 2022, I asked "What happened to all the, like, prescriptivists?". I still don't have any actual counts, but I continue to find fewer instances of prescriptivist peeving in my various media feeds and foraging.

Email from Florent Moncomble [links added]:

A few months ago, the distinguished member of the Académie française Alain Finkielkraut was featured in a video where he deplored the loss of “a word which used to exist in the [French] language and disappeared from it”, ie. “compersion”. Apparently, little does he know that “compersion” was actually coined in the 1970s by the Kerista Community of San Francisco, in the context of polyamory, to describe the joy felt in knowing that your better half finds pleasure and happiness with other sexual partners! So that, far from being the old French word that he thinks it is, it is actually an English borrowing from the late 20th century… in other terms, the very nemesis of the Académie — not to mention the moral overtones of the term, quite the antithesis of the conservatism of that institution…

Laelia Veron, a colleague from the Université d’Orléans, Christophe Benzitoun from the Université de Lorraine and I worked together on debunking Finkielkraut’s claim for an academically informed yet humorous biweekly spot that Laelia has on French public radio France Inter.

[Following up on the previous post…] David Owen wrote the following as empirical support for his claim that sentence-initial appositives ("Bad Things") are a recent innovation:

I reread most of Samuel Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets,” and skimmed as much as a modern reader can stand of “The Rambler,” and penetrated as far as it’s humanly possible to penetrate into “Rasselas,” and found no examples.

So I downloaded Volume 1 of Lives of the Poets, sentencized it, ran the simple search for sentence-initial participles, removed the non-appositives, and found 36 remaining examples of this "Bad Things" subset:

David Owen, "The Objectively Objectionable Grammatical Pet Peeve", The New Yorker 1/12/2023:

Usage preferences are preferences, not laws, and I sometimes switch sides. […]

But some common practices are objectively objectionable, in my opinion. Here’s an example of a sentence type that I think no writer should ever use:

A former resident of Brooklyn, Mrs. Jones is survived by three daughters and five grandchildren.

The first phrase is an appositive—typically a noun or noun phrase that modifies another noun or noun phrase, which appears next to it in the sentence. (“A former resident of Brooklyn” and “Mrs. Jones” refer to the same person, so they are said to be “in apposition.”) Appositives almost always follow the noun they modify, and are set off by commas; the kind I don’t like come first. I also don’t like sentences that, to me, seem closely related to my “Mrs. Jones” example, but are syntactically different, as in this paragraph from National Geographic:

Known affectionately as “the girls,” Ruth and Emily have a lot of fun for two Asian elephants. Ages 54 and 48, they spend their days tinkering with an array of special toys at the Buttonwood Park Zoo in Massachusetts. No mere plastic playthings, these toys have been engineered to appeal to the pachyderms’ social nature, psychology, and intelligence.

My problem with all such sentences is that they seem to have been turned inside out: they start in one direction, then swerve in another.  […] Grammatical terms are hard to keep straight, even for grammarians. For the sake of simplicity, therefore, I will refer to all such front-loaded, somersaulting sentences as Bad Things.