Language Log

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.

By Mitchell and Webb:

[Hat tip to Steve Fitzpatrick]

Stan Carey at Sentence First links to an unusually campy usage fight between The Awl and The Paris Review, and offers a thorough survey of snuckological scholarship. Read, as they say, the whole thing.

Several readers have drawn my attention to the domain and web site "loginisnotaverb.com", and the on-going discussion of this question at Hacker News.

I don't really have much to add to all the fuss. The origin of "log in" as an idiomatic combination of a verb and an intransitive preposition is obvious. There's nothing unusual in the transformation of this V+P combination into a noun, or in the tendency to write the noun (and sometimes the verb) without an internal space. The list of analogous cases is a long one: "strike out", "show off", "make up" — or "strike-out", "show-off", "make-up" — or "strikeout", "showoff", "makeup". Etc.  Nothing to see here, move along please.

Over at You Don't Say, John McIntyre has been attending to the Queen's English Society (and other "people who set themselves up as morally superior to you"): "Minutes of the Academy"; "A nice mess"; "The self-righteous shall inherit the earth"; "Speak proper, or else". John links to Stan Carey's post at Sentence First, "The Queen's English Society deplores your impurities".

John and Stan — and Graham and Dogberry and Paul — were stimulated by two articles at The Times (of London), "Pedants’ revolt aims to protect English from spell of txt spk", 6/7/2010, and "Do we need an Academy of English? The experts argue for and against", 6/7/2010.

If you follow all those links — and I hope that you do, because every one of them is worth the trouble — you'll learn that the QES is even more illogical, hypocritical and badly informed than you'd expect them to be.  I'll just add three (at best semi-coherent) thoughts, which I'd develop into LL posts if I had the time.

Via David Mitchell's soap box, an excellent explanation, with inhabitable graphics, of why "could care less" seems illogical to those who haven't accepted it as an idiom:

The latest PhD comic:

As John McIntyre explains, "You've got to be carefully taught", citing Stan Carey's "Mind your peeves and cures".

In case anyone fails to notice what W. Kiernan has pointed out in the comments following this post, we now know that Jan Dawson was wrong about the intended meaning of the phrase practitioner of diversity in the quote from law professor Pamela Harris, and I was wrong (and others including Barbara Partee were wrong) to agree with her interpretation. Briefly, the people who read of diversity as a complement of the noun practitioner were right, and the people like Jan and me who interpreted it as a modifier were wrong — not about the grammatical possibilities, but about the writer's intent in this particular case.

Language Log reader Jan Dawson saw the preposition phrase of diversity in this passage, and knew immediately what it meant:

"Any practitioner of diversity will tell you that you can't bring in a few token people and get a real diversity of viewpoint," said Pamela Harris, the executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at the Georgetown Law Center. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/us/politics/11women.html)

It seemed fairly clear to Jan (and I think she's right) that of diversity here means something like "belonging to one of the formerly excluded groups associated with references to diversity such as women, Hispanics, African Americans, etc." — it's analogous to the common meaning of the phrase of color in phrases like person of color.