Language Log

Clark Whelton  ("What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness: The decline and fall of American English, and stuff", The City Journal, Winter 2011) has an unusually precise idea about when American English went to the dogs:

[It] began in the 1980s, that distant decade when Edward I. Koch was mayor of New York and I was writing his speeches. The mayor’s speechwriting staff was small, and I welcomed the chance to hire an intern. Applications arrived from NYU, Columbia, Pace, and the senior colleges of the City University of New York. I interviewed four or five candidates and was happily surprised. The students were articulate and well informed on civic affairs. Their writing samples were excellent. The young woman whom I selected was easy to train and a pleasure to work with. Everything went so well that I hired interns at every opportunity.

Then came 1985.

In a recent post at Jezebel, Sadie Stein documents the usage of literally as in intensifier, and the often-intense negative reaction, both to the word-sense itself and to its sometimes-spectacularly-frequent deployment ("Saying 'Literally' All The Time Is Literally An Issue").

Jan Freeman, "I could care less: A loathed phrase turns 50", The Boston Globe, 10/24/2010:

It was 50 years ago this month — Oct. 20, 1960 — that one of America’s favorite language disputes showed up in print, in the form of a letter to Ann Landers. A reader wanted Ann to settle a dispute with his girlfriend: “You know that common expression: ‘I couldn’t care less,’ ” he wrote. “Well, she says it’s ‘I COULD care less.’

Ann voted with her reader — “the expression as I understand it is ‘I couldn’t care less’ ” — but she thought the question was trivial. “To be honest,” she concluded, “this is a waste of valuable newspaper space and I couldn’t care less.”

She couldn’t have known it at the time, but her reader’s trivial question would be wasting newspaper space (and bandwidth, too) for decades, as it blossomed into one of the great language peeves of our time.

A couple of years ago, Ben Zimmer took a look at Stephen Fry's change of heart on things like  "none of these are of importance to me" ("Fry on the pleasure of language", 11/7/2008). Ben closed by quoting from the inaugural post on Fry's weblog, "Don't Mind Your Language", 11/4/2008. A couple of weeks ago, Matt Rogers created a typographical animation of the same passage, to the accompaniment of audio from Fry's podcast version:

The BBC is doing a day or two of filming on the roof terrace of the building that houses my department, and the parking lot below our windows is thick with dressing room trailers and wardrobe trailers and generator trucks. Plus there is one other vehicle: parked directly below the windows of the room where the faculty of the country's finest department of Linguistics and English Language hold their staff meetings is a large catering truck to provide lunch for the crew, and it is labeled DeluxDiner's.

The company that owns it is called "DeluxDiners". They have a website at http://www.deluxdiners.co.uk/. As you can see from that page, the company name is a regular plural. There is no trace of an apostrophe in the web page text. But there is a photograph of one of their lunch trucks, with the offending apostrophe up there in red.

John McIntyre writes a column in the Baltimore Sun's online content pages called "Leave it lay" in which he discusses the perennial difficulty of getting students to distinguish the verbs lie and lay in their writing. (See my post Lie or lay? Some disastrously unhelpful guidance for the details of the two horribly intertwined paradigms.) He recommends giving the topic a rest, since teaching it is such a dead loss as regards imparting really valuable information. And a commenter named Tom (the second commenter on the post) immediately pipes up to say this:

The point you make is indeed true, however the example of lie and lay is a curious one. In Australia, the word lie not only survives, but has not become confused with lay in the slightest. The two retain their distinct meanings more or less unabated, forming a sharp contrast to the developments in the US. I would imagine the same would be true of most other English-speaking countries and those learning English as a second language outside the US.

When will people learn that nowadays everyone can fact-check linguistic claims of this sort?

Recent mixtures of English into everyday use in other languages evoke mixed reactions, from amusement through annoyance to alarm.  It's important to recognize that this sort of thing has been going on for a long time — probably just as about as long as there have been languages to mix. And it's likely that reactions towards the negative end of the spectrum have also been around for many thousands of years.

Over the next few weeks, I'll post a few older examples. But I'll start with a relatively recent instance: the role of French in the speech of educated Russians of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Business Diary of a UK newspaper, The Independent (see it here) complains:

Taking liberties with language

Debenhams is a much-loved high-street institution, but surely it can't just reinvent the English language? The retailer seems to think it is acceptable to use the word "anniversary" as a verb. "This will anniversary as we move into the first quarter of 2011," its market update says of one of its businesses. Worse, the idea is catching on. Here's Investec on Marks & Spencer's progress: "Better-balanced autumn ranges should allow M&S to anniversary tougher comparisons". Stop it please.

If you know Language Log, you are probably thinking that I will point out that anniversary has often been used as a verb and the writer is a dope with no sense of how to check an empirical claim, and that in the comments after I have said what I think Mark Liberman will chime in with several examples from 18th century poetry. Isn't that right?

Various Language Log readers have been sending me to this BBC report about a British columnist called Simon Heffer, who has a book about the decline of proper language use coming out, and in order to promote it recently visited a school and talked to the children about his prescriptive notions. The BBC used this sentence as a hook, claiming that it is ungrammatical and Mr Heffer can tell you exactly why:

[1]   The Prime Minister has warned that spending cuts are necessary.

Now, set on one side the issue of whether this truly exemplifies a grammatical mistake: of course it doesn't. What interests me here is the psychological question of what could possibly, even in principle, convince someone like Simon Heffer that he was wrong.

From the August 30 New Yorker:

Undeterred by their conviction in Federal court, Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson of the Typo Vigilantes Typo Eradication Advancement League are in Philly.

They're on tour to promote their book, The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time, which chronicles their epic saga of peevish vandalism heroic resistance to "the creeping menace of carelessness".

Here's a mystery for you. Last summer, the weekly radio show Studio 360 recorded an episode at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The show, which originally aired on 7/17/2009 and ran again yesterday, included a segment about the list of things that members of They Might be Giants "are not allowed to say within the band".

There's a weblog associated with Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution is True. A couple of days ago, Jerry (or whoever writes on the blog under the name "whyevolutionistrue") posted a couple of familiar eggcorns, described as "two solecisms [that] have recently appeared on this site", and invited readers to "Feel free to contribute those mistakes that most irk you, making sure that—for our mutual edification—you give the correct usage as well."

The result, so far, is an outpouring of 251 comments. This is towards the upper end of the distribution for that weblog — the previous half-dozen posts posts are "Gnu atheism" (31 comments), "New York Times to readers: of course you have free will" (174 comments), "Frogmouths!" (14 comments), 'The free will experiment" (94 comments), "Vacation reading from Nature" (31 comments), "Interview with Hitchens" (12 comments), "Space pix" (13 comments) — confirming again that people love to share and discuss their linguistic crotchets and irks.