Language Log

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:

Several readers have recommended Wednesday's Non Sequitur:

Proving once again that peevology is the most popular form of metalinguistic discourse in the U.S., the media yesterday was all over a poll from the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, purporting to reveal the words and phrases that Americans find most annoying. As was widely reported, whatever won with 47%, followed by you know (25%), it is what it is (11%), anyway (7%), and at the end of the day (2%). As was not so widely reported, those were the only options that respondents to the poll were given, so it's not like half of Americans are really tearing their hair out about whatever.

For more on the poll and its media reception, see my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus. And check out recent Language Log posts on whatever (here) and at the end of the day (here, here, and here).

That's what I called my own piece on William Safire, which runs today on "Fresh Air" and is online here. I cover some of the same ground that Ben does in his pitch-perfect Times magazine piece, mentioning his generosity to his critics and his willingness to acknowledge his mistakes. A very different tenor from his weekday columns — I think his Sunday readers got the best of him. I also pay tribute to his disinclination to engage in the rhetorical high jinks of other popular grammarians:

He was no snob. You can't imagine him comparing a poet who confused between and among with someone picking his nose at a party, the way John Simon once did. And he wasn't susceptible to the grammatical vapors that affect writers like Lynne Truss — the people who like to describe lapses of grammar as setting their teeth on edge, making their skin crawl, or leaving them gasping for breath, as if they'd spent all their lives up till now closeted with Elizabeth and Darcy in the morning room at Pemberley. 

Above all, there was his ability to convey his pleasure in ruminating on language: "It wasn't just that he loved words — who doesn't? But he really, really liked them."

Other things on Safire worth looking at include Jan Freeman's piece in the Boston Globe (if I had read this before I wrote mine I probably wouldn't have bothered) and Todd Gitlin's in the New Republic, as well as a Newsweek reminiscence by Aaron Britt, who served as Safire's assistant for a while. (The New Republic also posted part of a 1987 review of one of Safire's language books by Louis Menand.) For a more unforgiving take, see David Bromwich's "Wars Made Out Of Words." Feel free to add links to other pieces in the comments.

Following up on this morning's post about phrases that some people find irritating, I thought that I'd take a look at the recent history of one of them, "At the end of the day", which was the Plain English Campaign's 2004 "most irritating phrase in the language". Geoff Pullum ("Irritating cliches? Get a life", 3/25/2004) took this phrase to "have a meaning somewhere in the same region as after all, all in all, the bottom line is, and when the chips are down", and he observes that it "may shock people by its complete bleaching away of temporal meaning", resulting in things like "at the end of the day, you've got to get up in the morning".

A Google News Archive search for "at the end of the day" shows a rapid recent rise in hits from around 1985 onward.  But so do some similar phrases, like  "when all is said and done", which doesn't seem to have incurred the ire of peevers to nearly the same extent. So I thought I'd look at the relative frequency of four phrases with similar meanings: "in the last analysis", "in the final analysis", "when all is said and done", and "at the end of the day".  I queried the Google News archive in 5-year increments from 1951 to 2009.

John McIntyre at You Don't Say considers a hypothetical Museé des Peevologies. The curator's job is apparently open, or will be once a founding donor is located.

Just a pointer to Jan Freeman's "On Language" column — she was subbing for Bill Safire — in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, about Ambrose Bierce's advice on English usage in Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults (1909), which Jan characterizes as "often mysterious, perverse and bizarre". With examples.

… the result is a grammatical bar brawl.  An excellent example is on display over at Ask MetaFilter, where someone innocently asked

So which sentence is proper English grammar: "If you eat like Bob and me, you will be healthy." or "If you eat like Bob and I, you will be healthy."

KA-POW: "it's the second one…" WHAAM: "No, it's the first…" BIFF: "The verb 'do' is implied…" DOINK: "'like' … is indisputably a preposition in this case. It can't even function as a conjunction."