Language Log

See Plethoric Pundigrions¹ for screen shots showing a version of Microsoft Word (I don't know which one) that for levelheaded suggests correcting it to level-headed and for level-headed suggests correcting it to levelheaded. That should give rise to a frustrating morning of trying to finalize the draft, shouldn't it?

¹ Hat tip to Bob Ladd.

Working on a paper today, my partner Barbara found that Microsoft Word objected to her use of the word relativizing as nonexistent or misspelled, and suggested firmly that she should change it to the most plausible nearly similar word: gelatinizing. But she is wise to the extraordinarily bad advice Word gives on spelling and grammar, and firmly resisted what could have been one of the worst cupertinos in the history of philosophy.

Following up on Mark Liberman's "2010" posting (and on an earlier "rigid complementarity" posting of mine), I've written a series of postings on my blog about year names, number names, and related matters:

on "bald assertion" here;
on decimal 'decimal point' here;
and on a cluster of issues surrounding these topics here.

Over on my blog, I've been coming down hard on Ned Halley's Dictionary of Modern English Grammar, a dreadful volume purporting to be a guide to "grammar, syntax and style for the 21st century" (postings here, here, and here). When I find myself engaging with such a book, I usually try to read something more satisfying along with it. This time it was Jack Lynch's recently published The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of "Proper" English, from Shakespeare to South Park, which I recommend enthusiastically.

Oxford University Press has published A Dictionary of Modern English Usage: The Classic First Edition. Nothing especially notable in that, except for bibliophiles and usage scholars. But what sets this publication apart is David Crystal's introduction to the volume, an assessment of Fowler's entries.

From Joel Stickley at how to write badly well:

Another notice of a recent book, this time Nathan Bierma's Eclectic Encyclopedia of English (William, James & Co.), an assortment of material from five years of his "On Language" column in the Chicago Tribune (no longer a regular feature in the paper, alas). It's meant for a general audience; in fact, a number of the entries originated as responses to queries from readers.

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky writes to me, following up on my Maurice Sendak "half-sentence" posting (which I'll have more to say about in a while):

… if I knew how to encourage sentence fragments, I would go for that. Opal's sentences go on for*ev*er. And if I type them for her, and she's watching, and I try to put a period in, so there's a shorter sentence even though it starts with "And"? She says "No, that's not right, it's part of the same sentence. Didn't you hear the 'and'?" Fortunately she doesn't usually watch me type, allowing me to punctuate things as I see fit.

"Thought for the Day" is a four-minute reflective sermon delivered each morning on BBC Radio 4 at about ten to eight by some representative of one of the country's many religious faiths. On the first day of October the speaker was the Reverend Angela Tilby, Vicar of St Bene't's in Cambridge, England. (Bene't is an archaic shortened form of Benedict.) Developing a familiar theme from prescriptivist literature, she preached against adjectives. It was perhaps the most pathetic little piece of inspirational prattle I have ever heard from the BBC (read the whole misbegotten text here).

"Adjectives advertise," claims the Rev. Tilby, and "brighten up the prose of officialdom", but she was always "encouraged to be a bit suspicious" of them when she was a girl: "Rules of syntax kept them firmly in their place" (as if the rules of syntax left everything else to do what it wanted!). This was good, she seems to think, because "For all their flamboyance they don't really tell you much." Adjectives "float free of concrete reality" like balloons, and are guilty of "not delivering anything except, perhaps, hot air." Which aptly describes her babbling thus far. But now, inflated with overconfidence, she risks some factual statements. And steps from the insubstantial froth of metaphor into the stodgy bullshit of unchecked empirical claims about language use.

Recently, we've been talking, here and here, about the choice of preposition to go with the adjective bored: the older with (or by) or the innovative (and now spreading) of. Commenters added some other choices of of where another preposition might have been expected: with the adjectives concerned, embarrassed, and fed up; and with verbs in appreciate of and succumb of. There are several possible routes to these usages — analogy with P choice for semantically similar words (bored of on analogy with tired of), blending (bored of = bored with x tired of), and reversion to of as the default P in English — but the cases are at least superficially similar (though they are probably not related at a deeper level; people with one of these usages can't be expected to have any, or all, of the others).

And then a commenter (on the first of these postings) moved to a very different case; dw asked about off of, adding, "It drives me nuts". The only thing that this case — of what some handbooks term "intrusive" of in combination with certain prepositions — has to do with things like bored of is that the word of is involved. Still, people like dw, and a great many usage critics as well, are inclined to "bundle" disparate phenomena under a single heading for no reason beyond the involvement of a particular word. As I said recently, people are inclined to "blame it on a word".

Some corrections to and clarifications of my posting on by the hundreds / by hundreds / by the hundred.

On ADS-L, Fred Shapiro (following up on a lead from Barry Popik) has posted the following antedating of Father's Day, which the OED currently has from 1943:

1908 Boston Globe 19 May 10 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers)  Why doesn't somebody suggest the idea of having a "Father's day," when everybody in the country shall wear a modest violet in honor of poor Father?

I don't know why the writer suggested a "modest violet", but the idea seems never to have caught on. Instead, as the holiday was commercialized, the celebration came to center on giving "poor Father" characteristically "masculine" gifts: tools, gadgets, golf equipment, grilling equipment, supplies for hunting, fishing, and camping, items associated with sports (especially football), stock car racing, and beer drinking, and so on.

But this is Language Log, not Culture Log. So the main point of interest is the shall in the 1908 quote. First, however, some background on the holiday.

You readers are not going to like this, because you've heard too much on the topic already, and you are begging for relief; but I am going to report it anyway. My job is not to be merciful; my job is to get stuff out there, on the record. Charles Krauthammer, whom the Financial Times in 2006 described as the most influential commentator in America, is yet one more major figure who doesn't know his passive from a hole in the ground. His June 12 column in the Washington Post, "Obama Hovers From On High", says:

"On religious tolerance, he gently referenced the Christians of Lebanon and Egypt, then lamented that the 'divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence' (note the use of the passive voice)."

No, Mr Krauthammer, we do not note the use of the passive voice: clauses of the form X has/have/had led to Y are in the active voice. Now, your defenders, I know, are going to say that all you meant was that Obama did not specify the agents of the tragic violence. But tragic violence is simply a noun phrase, like mythic affluence or comic indolence. The passive has nothing to do with it. If you are noting a reluctance to come out and say who commits violence, then say that. Don't lurk behind a putative linguistic observation because you think it will sound more like someone who went to college. Did you want Obama to make the agent fully explicit? Did you want him to stand there in Cairo and say, "divisions between Sunni and Shia have led you dogma-crazed towelheads to unloose brutal violence and large-scale war on each other, killing millions of your own people, you insane bastards"? Then just say so. (And recommend a comparable-sized bit that he could have cut: this version is about 20 words longer.) Because I am getting really tired of these mealy-mouthed, misinformed, pseudo-syntactic grumblings about the passive voice. And Language Log readers, I know, are getting really sick of me saying so.