Language Log

George Orwell, in his hugely overrated essay "Politics and the English language", famously insists you should "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." He thinks modern writing "consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else" (only he doesn't mean "long") — joining togther "ready-made phrases" instead of thinking out what to say. His hope is that one can occasionally, "if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase … into the dustbin, where it belongs." That is, one can eliminate some popular phrase from the language by mocking it out of existence. In effect, he wants us to collaborate in getting rid of the most widely-used phrases in the language. In a Lingua Franca post published today I called his program elimination of the fittest (tongue in cheek, of course: the proposal is actually just to depopularize the most popular).

For a while, after I began thinking about this, I wondered what would be the ultimate fate of a language in which this policy was consistently and iteratively implemented. I even spoke to a distinguished theoretical computer scientist about how one might represent the problem mathematically. But eventually I realized it was really quite simple; at least in a simplified ideal case, I knew what would happen, and I could do the proof myself.

From reader Q.C.:

I'm writing to you as your article "The SAT Fails a Grammar Test" came to my mind the other day when I happened to stumble on the following Identifying Sentence Error question from a PSAT:

Opposite to the opinion of several respected literary critics, Jane Austen does not make good taste or manners in themselves sure signs of virtue in her characters.

I came up with three possible answers. The College Board people may feel that the phrase "opposite to" should be replaced by a more idiomatic expression, such as "opposed to" or "contrary to;" or that Jane Austen, being deceased, should be described with the past tense, thus faulting "does not;" or they may believe that there's no error, since dictionaries agree that "opposite" can mean "contrary", and the so-called "historical present tense" is quite common in literary review and literary criticism.

My post at Lingua Franca this week critiqued the following extraordinarily dumb piece of writing advice from Macmillan Dictionary Blog:

Try this exercise: Go through a piece of writing, ideally an essay of your own. Delete all adverbs and adverbial phrases, all those "surprisingly", "interestingly", "very", "extremely", "fortunately", "on the other hand", "almost invariably". (While you are at it, also score out those clauses that frame the content, like "we may consider that", "it is likely that", "there is a possibility that".)

Question 1: have you lost any content?
Question 2: is it easier to read?

Usually the meaning is still exactly the same but the piece is far easier to read.

As you might expect, I concentrated on adverbs. I didn't comment on the fact that one of the "adverbs and adverbial phrases" cited is nothing of the sort.

Professor Heinz Giegerich has pointed out to me that in the wake of Pope Benedict's resignation of his position at least two BBC reporters have been referring to the next pope, whoever that might be, using singular they. I don't have specific word-for-word quotations, but (apparently) reporters have been using phrases like The next pope will find that they…, or Anyone who expects the cardinals to elect them, and so on. Further evidence (to be added to evidence like the case of "They are a prophet") that singular they is not motivated solely or necessarily by ignorance or indecision about which gender is appropriate. The next pope, whoever they may be, will surely be a man, so the pronoun he would be appropriate and unobjectionable. But we have no idea which man, so singular they also feels entirely appropriate, contrary to what all the dumb usage pontificators say.

One week from tomorrow (Tuesday) night I give my Jesse and John Danz Lecture at the University of Washington in Seattle. And although the summary published on the registration page is entirely accurate, I would still conjecture that as many as half the people planning to attend will think that the scandal is people who write bad. They will assume that I will be dinging ordinary folks for writing (and speaking) ungrammatically. Little will they know what lies in store: that my target is the grammarians. It is the rule-givers and knuckle-rappers and nitpickers that I will be castigating for their ignorance of the content of the principles of English syntax.

Reddit, for those few who might not know, is a popular bulletin-board site for posting and discussing links and texts. A voting system determines the order and position of entries. The site is divided into "subreddits" devoted to paticular topics, of which there are now tens of thousands.

One of these countless subreddits is /r/grammar. Here "grammar", as usual, is mostly taken to mean "spelling, punctuation, and word usage" — but the items posted are generally questions rather than peeves, and the questions are sincere and sometimes interesting. Like other subreddits, /r/grammar has moderators, and they've chosen a few select links for the right-hand top of the page:

The five selected topics seem a bit random, but at least the first four of them (a vs. an, sentence-ending prepositions, I vs. me, Compound possession) link to plausible discussions of the cited issues. The fifth one, however, points to a grammatical disaster: a page on "That Versus Which" from Marc A. Grinker's "The Legal Writing Teaching Assistant: The Law Student's Guide to Good Writing" (1994).

The "split verb rule" says that an adverb must not be placed between an auxiliary and the following verb. On this account, you should never write "you should never write", but rather "you never should write". In an earlier post, I followed (what I thought was) the lead of James Lindgren ("Fear of Writing", California Law Review 78(6):1677-1702, 1990) in attributing this bizarre idea to The Texas Law Review Manual on Style. But in a comment this evening, Jon Weinberg cited Allen Black, "Judge Wisdom, the Great Teacher and Careful Writer", 109 Yale L.J. 1267 (1999-2000):

He was death on split infinitives and split verbs. A sentence such as "The burdened vessel was slowly proceeding down river at the time of the collision" would never survive.

Since John Minor Wisdom would have learned his attitudes towards such things in the 1920s, and the Texas Law Review's Manual does not seem to have appeared until the 1950s, Jon suggested that we need to look elsewhere for the source of this peculiar prejudice. And indeed, a quick Google Books search turns up a more promising source — Henry Watson Fowler and Francis George Fowler, The King's English, 1908, section 46 on "'Split' Auxiliaries":

Some writers, holding that there is the same objection to split compound verbs as to split infinitives, prefer to place any adverb or qualifying phrase not between the auxiliary and the other component, but before both.

Tim Parks, "Learning to Speak American", NYR:

In 1993 I translated all 450 pages of Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus & Harmony without ever using the past participle of the verb “get.” The book was to be published simultaneously by Knopf in New York and Jonathan Cape in London; to save money both editions were to be printed from the same galleys; so it would be important, I was told, to avoid any usages that might strike American readers as distractingly English or English readers as distractingly American. To my English ear “gotten” yells America and alters the whole feel of a sentence. I presumed it would be the same the other way round for Americans. Fortunately, given the high register of Calasso’s prose, “get” was not difficult to avoid.

Now in 2012 I am obliged to sign up to “gotten.” Commissioned by an American publisher to write a book that explores the Italian national character through an account of thirty years’ commuting and traveling on the country’s rail network, I am looking at an edit that transforms my English prose into American. […]

Or again, does a “newsagent” really need to become a “news dealer,” a “flyover” an “overpass,” a “parcel” a “package,” or in certain circumstances “between” “among” and “like” “such as”? Does the position of “also” really need to be moved in front of the verb “to be” in sentences like “Trains also were useful during the 1908 earthquake in Catania,” when to me it looked much better after it?

A food writer recently tried to find an effective euphemism for moist, in order to avoid the associated word-aversion problems (Hate Moist? You're Not Alone", Huffington Post 12/10/2012):

At HuffPost Taste, the word moist comes up a lot in our work and, we have to admit, it nauseates us. It's an occupational hazard we can't seem to avoid. We inevitably come across the word as positive descriptors for cakes and cookies every day. Sometimes, we even have to write it (like right now, which makes us feel a little dirty). […]

Because we can no longer use a word to describe a perfectly cooked cupcake that can also be interpreted to mean clammy and water-logged, we've come up with 5 great alternatives.

On both sides of the War of the Iptivists, many people seem to believe that opinions about linguistic usage reflect attitudes towards innovation.  The story goes like this: A new word, a new form, or a new construction is invented; at first, most people reject the innovation and deprecate the innovators; but the innovation spreads all the same; eventually it becomes normal and accepted, and no one even remembers that there was a problem. While this process is underway, one side supports tradition, insists on standards, and mutters about Kids Today; the other side supports innovation, points out that many of the Best People Are Doing It, and mutters about peevish old snoots.

Historical processes of that kind certainly do happen — see "In this day of slack style…", 9/2/2012, for a couple of examples. But overall, as an explanation of attitudes towards linguistic variation, this story is a failure. Usage peeving, though usually claiming to protect traditional usage, in fact aims to eliminate older forms at least as often as it tries to hold the line against newer ones. We've documented many examples of this over the years — see "At a loss for lexicons" (2/9/2004), "'Singular they': God said it, I believe it, that settles it" (9/13/2006), "Hot Dryden-on-Jonson action" (5/1/2007), "Preaching the incontrovertible to the unconvertible" (12/6/2012).

In the third edition of Garner's Modern American Usage, Bryan Garner has adopted a form of the linguistic rags-to-riches story as the basis of his five-step "Language-Change Index", whose "purpose is to measure how widely accepted various linguistic innovations have become". And unfortunately, he sometimes applies this scale to characterize the status of cases where the innovation-to-acceptance history just doesn't apply.

Reader ST writes to draw our attention to Bryan Garner's 1/2/2012 note on  "regardless whether":

Language-Change Index — “regardless whether”* for “regardless of whether”: Stage 2.

*Invariably inferior forms.

I guess that if doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, it is insane for me to imagine that I could do any good by telling the readers of The Chronicle of Higher Education that the rule banning which from restrictive relative clauses is "a time-wasting early-20th-century fetish, a bogeyman rule undeserving of the attention of intelligent grownups." But that's what I do in the post published at one minute past midnight on the 71st anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. "A Rule Which Will Live in Infamy," I called it. I blame Stan Carey for infecting me with my false optimism about changing people's minds: on his blog "Sentence first" last year he actually reported getting some traction: according to a Twitter message he saw, he actually converted an editor.

A post by Joe Fruehwald ("To take "Zombie Nouns" seriously, you must've had your brains eaten", Val Systems 11/27/2012) motivated me to take a second look at Helen Sword's ideas about style, which I discussed earlier in "The Redemption of Zombie Nouns", 7/26/2012. In particular, I decided to take her "Writer's Diet Test" out for a spin.

For test material, I choose a few selections from E.B. White, co-author of The Elements of Style. Although we've occasionally expressed skeptical and even negative opinions about The Elements of Style, I have nothing but admiration for E.B. White as a writer. And so I was distressed to learn that Ms. Sword consistently judges his writing to be "Flabby". [Update — In fairness I should note that she gives her own writing the same evaluation…]