Language Log

In a comment on Geoff Nunberg's "The data are" post, Jo wryly reminds us that the data-is-plural-dammit peevers need to consider their position on the word agenda. The OED's (historically) first sense of agenda is

1. With pl. concord. Things to be done, viewed collectively; matters of practice, as distinguished from belief or theory. Sometimes opposed to credenda. Obs.

with citations like this:

1860 M. F. Maury Physical Geogr. Sea (ed. 8) i. §67   But notwithstanding all that has been done..for human progress, there still remain many agenda. There is both room and need for further research.

Plural agenda is of course etymologically correct:

< classical Latin agenda (neuter plural) business, affairs, in post-classical Latin also divine office (4th cent.), legal proceedings (12th cent. in British sources), plural of agendum thing which is to be done (usually in plural), neuter gerundive of agere to do

Reader PS has written to alert us to an instructive drama unfolding at tv tropes, a wiki that is "a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction". As of about two months ago,  "titular" became a forbidden word at tv tropes. The site's software now simply deletes all (new) attempted uses of that string of letters.  PS explains:

This is not a Scunthorpe problem with "tit."  Someone on the site (presumably site co-founder Fast Eddie) decided that "titular" is a synonym for "nominal" but not "eponymous."  (I wish I had a better citation than that, but the best link I can find says that the previous discussion about using "titular" was deleted.)

Kory Stamper at harm·less drudg·ery responds to a correspondent who is sincerely troubled by the illogic of irregardless ("No Logic in 'Etymological': A Response I Actually Sent",  10/24/2012):

English is a little bit like a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned light sockets. We put it in nice clothes and tell it to make friends, and it comes home covered in mud, with its underwear on its head and someone else’s socks on its feet. We ask it to clean up or to take out the garbage, and instead it hollers at us that we don’t run its life, man. Then it stomps off to its room to listen to The Smiths in the dark.

Everything we’ve done to and for English is for its own good, we tell it (angrily, as it slouches in its chair and writes “irregardless” all over itself in ballpoint pen). This is to help you grow into a language people will respect! Are you listening to me? Why aren’t you listening to me??

Like  well-adjusted children eventually do, English lives its own life. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like one of the Classical languages (I bet Latin doesn’t sneak German in through its bedroom window, does it?). We can threaten, cajole, wheedle, beg, yell, throw tantrums, and start learning French instead. But no matter what we do, we will never really be the boss of it. And that, frankly, is what makes it so beautiful.

Randall Munroe's latest xkcd strip:

From the After Deadline blog of Phil Corbett, style guru at the New York Times, comes this 1924 letter to the editor calling for a Congressional investigation into the imperiled state of the English subjunctive:

Reading Geoff Pullum's post about Harold E. Palmer's 1935 Gilbert & Sullivan adaptation, I wondered about the spelling of "vocal chords" in the passage

I wish to call attention to the tactics and the strategy
Exemplified in all the work produced by Dr. Chatterji,
To ascertain what happens at the back of people's pharynxes
And analyse the vocal chords in artificial larynxes.

The "vocal cords" are so named from the resemblance of the vocal ligaments to strings or cords, so I wondered whether the "vocal chords" spelling might be an antique eggcorn. The answer turns out to be "yes", but with a twist: cord and chord participated in a rare reciprocal swap.

Local Dallas newscaster said "where we're at" twice just now. Would a national newscaster get away with this? I consider it uneducated.

— Bryan A. Garner (@BryanAGarner) August 11, 2012

The entry for where . . . at in Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage notes that

The use of at following where was first noted in 1859 by Bartlett, who observed in his Dictionary of Americanisms that it was "often used superfluously in the South and West, as in the question 'Where is he at?'" Such usage first drew the attention of critics at about the turn of the century, and they have routinely prescribed against it since. Although fairly common in speech, this construction rarely occurred in writing until the 1960s, when the idiomatic phrases where it's at and where one is at came into widespread use by jazz and rock musicians, hippies, and others […]

These phrases continue to be used today, although they have some of the passé quality of old slang. They are most likely to occur when the language and attitudes of the 1960s and early 1970s are being deliverately evoked or mimicked. Other than in these phrases, at almost never occurs after where in writing from standard sources.

But in this case, I believe that the facts are against both Mr. Garner and the editors of MWDEU.

As I write these words, the number of comments posted below Kyle Wiens's strangely contentless piece in Harvard Business Review, "I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here's Why", is just coasting up toward 1200 (yes, one thousand two hundred; that's not a typo). This cannot be out of any enthusiasm for grammar: the number of grammar issues mentioned in the piece is zero. Wiens says or implies that he wants employees who know the difference between apostrophes and apostles; between semicolons and colons; between to and too; between its and it's; and between their, there, and they're. But this isn't about grammar; these are just elementary vocabulary and spelling distinctions. How could it possibly be of interest to Harvard Business Review readers that the CEO of a technical documentation company expects his employees to be able to spell different words differently? I like literacy too, but why this fiddling with spelling shibboleths while the economy burns?

The words and phrases that annoy people are typically criticized as over-used, illogical, fashionable among a disliked group, or shifted in a confusing way from an earlier meaning.  It's often true that such irksome usages have indeed increased in frequency — thus "at the end of the day", which was the Plain English Campaign's choice for "most irritating phrase" in 2004, was then towards the end of a rapid rise in relative frequency ("Memetic dynamics of summative clichés", 9/26/2009):

In "Anti-fascist impact" (6/25/2012), I briefly took up the question of where William Strunk might have gotten his 1918 prescription about the use of however:

In the meaning nevertheless, not to come first in its sentence or clause.

When however comes first, it means in whatever way or to whatever extent.

If you don't hang out with millennial hipsters, you might not have noticed that the cool kids are listening to music on turntables playing old-fashioned vinyl records, with many of these records being newly released rather than rescued from thrift shops. And you might also have missed a fascinating case of peeve emergence: the "rule" that one of these objects is called a "vinyl", while (say) three of them should be called "three vinyl", never "three vinyls". According to this"rule", instead of "many of these records", I could have written "many of these vinyl", but not "many of these vinyls". This is an issue that some people feel very strongly about.

Thus Dave Segal, "What Is the Plural of Vinyl?", 12/28/2010:

This issue came to my attention twice yesterday: once on Twitter, where someone griped about people using the term "vinyls" to describe more than one record; the other instance occurred while perusing Sonic Boom's holiday zine, in which a clerk informed its readers that vinyl is indeed the plural term for vinyl (the same principle applies to fish, buffalo, and sperm).

I am guilty of occasionally using vinyls, but it's always deployed in a tongue-in-cheek manner. When you know the rules, you can break them—but only once every three months. It's in the manual. Trust me.

I have a piece airing on "Fresh Air" today on hopefully. I recorded it about a month ago and it has been sitting in the can since then, so I didn't have the opportunity to profit from the observations made by Mark in his recent posts here, here and here; if I had, I would have mentioned his points about the changing frequency of the word, among other things, and some of the points made by Arnold in a one-stop-shopping post at his blog. I simply described the usage as "floating hopefully," so as not to tax the radio audience's limited patience for grammatical pilpul. Mostly, I wanted to stress a couple of things that seem to me to make hopefully sui generis in the canon of linguistic infractions.

Start with its elevation to a shibboleth and the overwrought tenor of the denunciations, so disproportionate to the imagined offense:

On my personal blog, an inventory of postings (mostly from Language Log) on IAG (It's All Grammar) — here — with the proposed technical term garmmra.