Language Log

I got a message from a former teacher who said her friend had sent her my article about Strunk and White and it had stimulated her to ask me the following question:

For 31 years, this is the rule I taught to all of my elementary school students: do not put a comma before "because." Since I noticed that you did so at least twice in your article, I am wondering if I taught the students incorrectly (I hope not) or rather if Scots follow another rule (I hope so). I'd really like to know.

Oh, dear. The problem was not how to answer the question; the problem was how to do so kindly and gently. I did not do well enough

The big news in Beijing last week was the theft of millions of dollars worth of artwork from the heavily guarded Forbidden City.  The Telegraph reported that "The seven stolen items had come from a temporary exhibition of early 20th century Chinese furniture, jewellery boxes and bags from the collections of the privately-run Liangyicang Museum in Hong Kong."

According to the BBC, "The Beijing News reported that the Hong Kong museum had not insured the items for as much as it could have because it believed they would be safe in Beijing."

The daring theft occurred during the wee hours of the morning on Monday the 9th.  By Wednesday night, Beijing police announced that they had apprehended a person whom they declared was the suspected culprit and had recovered most of the missing objects.

While there was much hand-wringing and soul-searching over how such a brazen robbery could have occurred under the very noses and cameras of the massive security apparatus inside of the Forbidden City, the real fun began after the apprehension of the suspected criminal, and it has a cause that is rooted in the misuse of characters.

In "The Case for Cursive," (NYT [April 28, 2011]), Katie Zezima states that:

For centuries, cursive handwriting has been an art. To a growing number of young people, it is a mystery.

The sinuous letters of the cursive alphabet, swirled on countless love letters, credit card slips and banners above elementary school chalk boards are going the way of the quill and inkwell. With computer keyboards and smartphones increasingly occupying young fingers, the gradual death of the fancier ABC’s is revealing some unforeseen challenges.

I occasionally wonder whether people might be picking up the wrong idea about the descriptive orientation we tend to promote here on Language Log: because we so often point out that edicts defended by conservative usage pundits lack support from either decent writing or common sense, people might imagine that if college papers were graded by a linguist everyone would get an A+, because the instructor would endorse and excuse all their mistakes. Well, Ben Yagoda is a real live English professor (he's at the University of Delaware, where he mostly teaches journalistic writing), and a couple of months ago he published an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about college writing and the changing kinds of awfulness that he sees in it. (One or two points from it were discussed here on Language Log, and Ben responded in the first comment below it.) He can surely serve as some kind of example of the prescriptive curmudgeonliness of writing instructors. He goes through this (possibly invented) sample of what he sees as error-stuffed prose to pick out its mistakes:

For our one year anniversary, my girlfriend and myself are going to a Yankees game, with whomever amongst our friends can go. But, the Weather Channel just changed their forecast and the skies are grey, so we might go with the girl that lives next door to see the movie, "Iron Man 2".

So let's check with a real live descriptive linguist and see if there is agreement, shall we?

In a post here last June I asked for editorial staff at The New Yorker to come forward, anonymously if they wish, and explain something to me. Why do they so resolutely refuse to employ subject-verb inversion with reporting frames, even when the policy drives them to print sentences that are not just inept but almost incomprehensible?

Chris Potts first documented the strange practice in one of the earliest Language Log posts back in 2003.) Nobody from the magazine came forward to explain, either then or last year. Instead, New Yorker staff redoubled their efforts to show that nothing could make them consider verb-subject order. On March 21 (p. 54, left column) they published what I think is the worst example yet, buried in the middle of an article by Dana Goodyear about Hollywood writer's-block therapists Barry Michels and Phil Stutz:

"We're like carnies, always out there trying to sell some idea," another writer, who sees Michels, and whose husband, also a writer, sees Stutz, told me.

I continue to wonder, what the hell is wrong with them that they could believe this is fine prose style?

If you stay in Hong Kong for a few days, you're bound to notice the frequent use of Roman letters mixed in with Chinese characters. Of course, one often encounters whole English words or phrases as well. In this post, however, I will concentrate on the use of individual letters, usually standing in for Cantonese morphemes, but occasionally also for English words. Here are a few examples:

Three days ago, I asked the students in one of my classes to tell me all the languages they knew.  One of the female students listed Northeastern Mandarin among her languages.  When I asked her to say a sample sentence in that language, she said something like "Ni de blaji hen haokan" (Your blaji is pretty).  Her sentence surprised me for two reasons.  First, I didn't know the meaning of blaji; second, I was stunned that she used what sounded like a bl- consonant cluster at the beginning of the word with which I was unfamiliar, since Mandarin — at least proper, standard Mandarin — does not have consonant clusters.

Mark Twain, from his recently-published Autobiography:

As I have said before, I never had any large respect for good spelling. That is my feeling yet. Before the spelling book came with its arbitrary forms, men unconsciously revealed shades of their characters, and also added enlightening shades of expression to what they wrote by their spelling, and so it is possible that the spelling book has been a doubtful benevolence to us.

Elisabeth Malkin, "Rebelling Against Spain, This Time With Words", NYT 11/25/2010:

The Royal Spanish Academy is lopping two letters off the Spanish alphabet, reducing it to 27.

Out go “ch” and “ll,” along with lots of annoying accents and hyphens.

The simplified spelling from the academy, a musty Madrid institution that is the chief arbiter of all things grammatical, should be welcome news to the world’s 450 million Spanish-speakers, not to mention anybody struggling to learn the language.

But no. Everyone, it seems, has a bone to pick with the academy — starting with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

If the academy no longer considers “ch” a separate letter, Mr. Chávez chortled to his cabinet, then he would henceforth be known simply as “Ávez.” (In fact, his name will stay the same, though his place in the alphabetic order will change, because “ch” used to be the letter after “c.”)

In his short but cutting review of Simon Heffer's Strictly English, Steven Poole remarks that the book "condemns hanging participles yet perpetrates a monster (on p165, too tedious to quote here)." What was this tedious monster, I feel sure you Language Log readers are asking? The sentence in question is the second one in this quotation (from the beginning of a section; I underline the relevant phrase):

Partridge has a long entry in Usage and Abusage on the word got – he could as easily have made the entry about the word get – but, if anything, this unusually strict grammarian lets the promiscuous and often thoughtless use of this term off lightly.³ Without detracting from Fowler's point that the Anglo-Saxon is to be preferred to the Romance at all times, the use of the verb to get in an increasing number of contexts is not merely "slovenly" (Partridge's word): it is downright confusing.

---

3. Usage and Abusage, p136.

Is that really a mistake?

I have a piece on "Fresh Air" today on the Was-Jane-Austen-Edited-and-Why-Would-It-Matter-Anyway kerfuffle that Geoff Pullum discussed in a post a couple of weeks ago. After looking over the Austen manuscripts online, I concluded that the whole business was meretricious nonsense. What's most interesting is the extraordinary attention given the claims. It testifies to Austen's Gagaesque (Gagantuan?) celebrity (whose history is recounted in the recent, very readable Jane's Fame by Claire Harman — see below). But it also says something about the common wisdom about punctuation that sends items like Eats Shoots and Leaves to the top of the bestseller list.

In fact the two points are connected.

"The problem with people who want to impose their linguistic tastes on others," says David Crystal, "is that they never do so consistently." I'm not so sure I agree that's the problem. Consistency wouldn't be quite enough to excuse grammar fascism. I'd say the problem with people who want to impose their linguistic tastes on others by writing books on how to write is that they are so bad at it: though often they are good enough at writing (I have never said that E. B. White or George Orwell couldn't write), they actually don't know how they do what they do, and they are clueless about the grammar of the language in which they do it, and they offer recommendations on how you should write that are unfollowed, unfollowable, or utterly insane.

Both Crystal and I have been suffering the same painful experience — reviewing the same ghastly, insufferable, obnoxious, appallingly incompetent book. It is by Simon Heffer, the associate editor of the UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph, who imagined that he could improve the world by offering 350 pages of his thoughts on grammatical usage, uninformed by any work since he was in college thirty years ago — in fact pretty much innocent of acquaintance with any work on English grammar published in more than half a century.

There has been a flurry of recent news stories suggesting that Jane Austen's famous style was not all her own but owed a lot to her editor.

I'm not at all sure that there is anything substantial in these stories. So far, the radio pieces I've heard and the newspaper write-ups I've seen have been extremely light on actual examples.