Language Log

According to John Metcalfe, "The Self-appointed Twitter Scolds", NYT 4/29/2010:

A small but vocal subculture has emerged on Twitter of grammar and taste vigilantes who spend their time policing other people’s tweets — celebrities and nobodies alike. These are people who build their own algorithms to sniff out Twitter messages that are distasteful to them — tweets with typos or flawed grammar, or written in ALLCAPS — and then send scolding notes to the offenders. They see themselves as the guardians of an emerging behavior code: Twetiquette.

Allie Brosh, over at Hyperbole and a Half, is annoyed by people who leave out the space in "a lot" ("The Alot is Better Than You at Everything", 4/13/2010):

A few days ago at the Guardian, David Marsh brought out the stuffed body of George Orwell and propped it up in the pulpit ("Election 2010 – vote for the cliche you hate the most", 4/9/2010):

George Orwell, in his brilliant 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, wrote: "When one watches some tired [political] hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases … one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy." He memorably argued that "if thought corrupts language, language can often corrupt thought" and proposed six rules of good writing:

• Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

The result was shocking.

The latest xkcd:

(For more on non-literal literally, see here, here, and here.)

Four years ago I wrote a Language Log post looking into the use of podium as a verb at the Winter Olympics in Torino — and the often extreme reactions that the usage provoked. Now with the Vancouver Olympics coming up, I return to the theme in my latest On Language column in the New York Times Magazine. It is no doubt the first (and last) article in the Times to cite both a senior editor of Ski Racing magazine and Eve & Herbert Clark's crucial study of denominal verbs.

The little bird..Tweets to its mate a tiny loving note (George Meredith, Pastorals, 1851, as cited in OED2)

In my last posting, I reported on Lake Superior State University's 2010 "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness" (for the year 2009), but reserving tweet (verb or noun) for separate treatment.

It's the beginning of a new year, so Lake Superior State University has come out with its annual list of words (well, expressions) to be banished from English. (We've had brief Language Log postings on earlier LSSU lists — at least, here, here, and here.) Yes, it's a publicity stunt, and yes, it's a steaming pile of intemperate peeving (on the evidence of the comments selected for the entries on the site), and yes, the hyperbolic conceit of the site is that not only are the compilers declaring that they despise these expressions but they are proposing that everyone should be prohibited from ever using them (not that such opinions could have any real effect on what people do; the site is all show and no consequence.)

William Safire's On Language column used to feature regular reports from the Squad Squad, readers who wrote to him with examples of redundant language. His column from 11/5/1989, for example, cites the  Isis construction, the phrase ad hoc task force ("as if all task forces were not by their nature ad hoc"), references to the Negev desert ("Negev means 'desert' (as well as 'south') in Hebrew"), a menu listing for cold Gazpacho ("all Gazpacho is cold"), and Safire's own use of the idiom shrug our shoulders ("only shoulders are for shrugging; you cannot shrug your eyebrows, even though you can lift them").

Bill is gone, but a little Squad Squad lives on in all of us, it seems.  We notice usage that strikes us as redundant, and we feel the urge to share our insights.  Few of us get as intense about it as the Pilotless Drone Man did — but maybe, somewhere in the amygdala of every Squad Squad member, there's a little Drone Man fighting to emerge.

According to John "Hindrocket" Hinderaker, "Snuck?", Powerline 11/27/2009:

Regular readers know that I have little regard for the New York Times. But I assumed that, no matter how misguided the paper's politics might be, it did have some standards relating to grammar and punctuation. So I was astonished to see this, on the front page of the Times' web site:

["The celebrity-seeking couple who snuck into a state dinner this week came face-to-face with President Obama and his wife, Michelle, the White House said Friday.]

My fifth-grade teacher, Miss Klock, would be spinning in her grave, except that she was a Republican and probably never had much faith in the Times in the first place. The reporters evidently knew better; here is how their piece begins:

The celebrity-seeking couple who sneaked into a state dinner this week came face-to-face with President Obama and his wife, Michelle, the White House said Friday in a disclosure that underscored the seriousness of the security breach and prompted an abject apology from the Secret Service.

Reader Ileana D. asks about the use of concerning to mean "giving cause for anxiety or distress", in examples like.

I find her behavior very concerning.
The growing National Debt is concerning to me.

She notes that she sees this as a substitute for "of concern", says that she finds it "grating", and suggests that

This usage is increasing. I first heard it used in this way many years ago, but only by southerners. It has been creeping into formal usage (on the news, on NPR).

I'll leave the "grating"  part aside for now — that sort of thing is between you and your spiritual and aesthetic advisors — and get right to the history.

Fans of "word rage" may be interested in the collection of responses that Stanley Fish got to his call for "phrases and announcements that make your heart sink and make you want to commit mayhem" ("And the Winner: 'No Problem'", 11/23/2009).  The resulting collection is a bit different from the usual exercise in meta-linguistic naming and shaming, since in  his selected examples, it's generally the (insincerity or offensiveness of the) content that sets people off, not the (alleged) ungrammaticality, modishness, illogicality, or redundancy of the form.

I haven't read Jack Lynch's The Lexicographer's Dilemma yet — all I know about it comes from Laura Miller's review in Salon, "Memo to grammar cops: Back off!", 10/25/2009. But on the basis of her description, it seems to me that one of his claims is not quite right:

According to Lynch, the very notion of correct English is only 300 years old; in the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the idea that native English speakers could be accused of using their own language improperly would have seemed absurd. The advent of printing — and, especially, the growth of general literacy — led to efforts to establish authoritative standards of spelling and usage in the 18th century.

It's certainly true that Tudor and Elizabethan spelling was catch-as-catch-can, and it's also true that prescriptive rules of usage blossomed in the 18th century, along with the standardization of spelling. But it's not true that native speakers in Shakespeare's time never accused one another of using their own language improperly.

From Doghouse Diaries: