Language Log

As BBC Radio 4 reported the death of Senator Kennedy on the news, I heard a line about how his career had been blighted by the incident at the bridge at Chappaquiddick where "he failed immediately to report an accident". You can see what has happened: in an inadvisable attempt to avoid a split infinitive, the adverb has been placed before to, but this puts it next to failed, so we get interference from a distracting and unintended meaning that involves immediate failure (whatever that might mean). It was the reporting that should have been immediate. The right word order to pick would have been "he failed to immediately report an accident". But you just can't stop writers of news copy from being worried (falsely) that splitting an infinitive is some kind of mistake.

You just can't stop people putting themselves in harm's way. If they're not walking into the buzzsaw they're crashing like bugs into the windshield… As the previously referenced discussion about usage in The Guardian's online pages developed a bit further, a commenter called scherfig responded to Steve Jones's devastating piece of evidence about Mark Twain not obeying Fowler's which/that rule by saying this:

OK, steve, let's forget Mark Twain and Fowler (old hat) and take a giant leap forward to George Orwell in the 30's and 40's. In my opinion, in his essays, the finest writer of the English language ever . Check out his use of English – it is, after all, several decades after Twain and still 70 years ago, and he has actually written sensibly about language (quite a lot).

What Steve immediately did, of course, was to take a relevant piece of Orwell's work and look at it; scherfig, the Orwell fan, astonishingly, had been too lazy to do this. And again his result was total and almost instant annihilation of the opponent.

Michael Bulley made a profoundly incautious comment in a discussion in the Guardian newspaper's "Comment is free" online section today. He was following up a pathetic column on usage by the paper's style guide editor, David Marsh. Unsurprisingly, Marsh had attempted to defend the totally fake which–that rule for integrated (or ‘defining’) relative clauses, which we have so often critiqued here at Language Log. Wrote Bulley, rather pompously:

No one would deny that there are numerous examples of "which" introducing a relative clause that defines (if they weren't any, no one would object to them as being bad style!), but are you just going to say to someone "This is what lots of people do, so it's OK for you to do it as well"? I'm reading Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad. I haven't checked, but I'd bet he never uses "which" as a defining relative.

Oh, no! It was like watching someone walking backwards toward a buzzsaw. I could hardly bear to look. You don't say things like that in the age of We-Can-Fact-Check-Your-Ass!

If you want to see all the illogic and angst of the prescriptive poppycock merchants on display, Howard Jacobson provides one-stop shopping. I don't think the UK has a more unprepossessing columnist of the foaming-at-the-mouth language-is-going-to-the-dogs persuasion. Oddly, he is not in the Telegraph but in the relatively liberal Independent. You might (or you might not) want to look at the way his last piece of rambling, ranting, frothing bitterness ends. It is entitled "In the face of overwhelming ignorance, it is the pedant's duty to keep battling on". Read on if that title holds any appeal…

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh commented on an odd sentence from the Las Vegas Sun:

He said he was not aware that any of the companies were already engaged in illegal activity at the time that he helped to set up them. [emphasis added]

Eugene's analysis:

The author or the copyeditor was enforcing some (entirely spurious) rule against splitting an idiom such as "set up," and as a result replaced a perfectly normal construction ("set them up") with a weird and jarring one.

Every so often, here at Language Log Plaza we come across usage advice that's new to us. Today's find comes from Tim Moon, who's working on my OI! project at Stanford this summer. It's from Robert Burchfield's The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1998), on the expression by the hundreds and the like:

the unidiomatic with plural; either by the hundred or by hundreds (p. 775)

Notice the usage label: "unidiomatic". Where does this come from? Not from a search of texts, to see which variant is most used, especially by "good writers". Instead, this is an expression of Burchfield's personal taste in the matter (a lot of usage advice is expressions of personal taste). As it happens, this is not Tim Moon's taste, or mine; both of us judge by the hundreds to be the most natural of the three, though all of them are acceptable. We now have some evidence that there are others agree with us, and have so far been unable to find any other handbook that takes a position — any position — on the matter.

A nice example of the way singular they works was overlooked (like health care, the economy, and everything else in the past week of "racial politics") during the brouhaha over President Obama's press conference remarks about the arrest in Cambridge, Massachusetts of Professor Henry Louis Gates. Obama said:

. . . the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.

Why would he use they and their, when the antecedent, somebody, is syntactically singular, and we actually know that the somebody he is talking about in this case was Professor Henry Louis Gates, who is male? Why did he not say proof that he was in his own home?

Back on June 6, in his post "Drinking the Strunkian Kool-Aid: victims of page 18", Geoff Pullum wrote:

I am not a style doctor or writing adviser, and (unlike Strunk and White) I don't think everyone should write like me. My interest here is solely in the fact that we need an explanation for the fact that educated Americans today have scarcely any clue what "passive clause" means. [emphasis added]

A few days ago, on July 21, (someone going by the name of) David Walker happened on this post and added a comment:

"I don't think everyone should write like me." Me? Is that correct?

The short answer, of course, is "yes". But if you were interested in short answers, you wouldn't be reading Language Log. So after the jump, you'll find a longer one.

According to David Skinner, "Ain't that the truth", Humanities 30(4), July/August 2009:

In 1961 a new edition of an old and esteemed dictionary was released. The publisher courted publicity, noting the great expense ($3.5 million) and amount of work (757 editor years) that went into its making.

That would be \$4,623.51 per editor-year,  if none of the \$3.5M went for typesetters, pencils, rent, or other expenses.  And if I'm reading this CPI table right, the ratio of today's prices to those of 1960 is around 213.856/29.5, or about 7.25 to 1; so in today's dollars, the yearly per-editor costs would be around \$33,520. Apparently lexicographers worked cheap in those days.

The new dictionary in question was Webster's Third New International (Unabridged), and as Skinner explains,

It was judged “subversive” and denounced in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Life, and dozens of other newspapers, magazines, and professional journals.

The party to have been at last night, I mean the place for a linguist to be seen, was Larry Hyman's house in Berkeley for the gathering that welcomed the faculty of the Linguistic Institute that the Linguistic Society of America is running on the Berkeley campus of the University of California for the next six weeks. Mingling in this star-studded cast of what seemed like hundreds and was certainly scores of the finest linguists in the world, I ran across George Lakoff, who told me the best Dumb Copy Editor story I have ever heard. I like Dumb Copy Editor stories, as you know; but this one is so good I think it takes the prize. I will reveal all below the jump.

People have begun to ask why Language Log hasn't yet commented on the remarks of Sonia Sotomayor about the sterling value of (you guessed it) Strunk & White. One recent commenter (here) actually seems to imply that we have jumped all over Charles Krauthammer solely because he is conservative, and shielded Sotomayor from criticism because she is the nominee of a Democratic president! Come on, you know us better than that. Sotomayor has come up in the comments area a few times (here and here, for example), and the only reason there hasn't been a full post on her remarks is — speaking for myself — lack of time (I don't know if you have any idea what early June is like for academics with administrative duties) plus a dearth of interesting things to say. You can read this piece on The National Review site for quotes and links to the relevant speeches. What she said about grammar in one speech (PDF here) was this:

If you have read Strunk and White, Elements of Style, reread it every two years. If you have never read it, do so now. This book is only 77 pages and it manages, succinctly, precisely and elegantly to convey the essence of good writing. Go back and read a couple of basic grammar books. Most people never go back to basic principles of grammar after their first six years in elementary school. Each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister. These are basic errors that with self-editing, more often than not, are avoidable.

"My toothbrush is one of four standing upright in a cup on the bathroom sink," wrote Ada Brunstein in ‘The House of No Personal Pronouns’, a 2007 piece in the New York Times Fashion & Style section. "These toothbrushes belong to me, my boyfriend, his wife and her lover."

Brunstein often stays at the house with her married boyfriend, who co-owns it with his estranged wife, who also sometimes lives in the house, together with her boyfriend. This edgy domestic relationship between two couples, one half of each of which had together once formed a different couple, depends on a delicate avoidance of topics such as the evidence of the still-undissolved marriage. There have been negotiations concerning phone calls and visits, and in addition (for this is Language Log, not Open Marriage Lifestyle Log) linguistic negotiations. Brunstein's boyfriend says "the house" now, not "our house"; and:

He has adopted the passive voice to make it easier on me. I once stood in front of a bookcase in the kitchen, three shelves of which hold an impressive collection of salt and pepper shakers from across the country.

"You collect salt and pepper shakers?" I asked.

"There are salt and pepper shakers that have come into the house over the years," he said.

Yes, it's that elusive butterfly of passivity again.

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky has forwarded to me a site with (yet another) little "grammar test" (a "Google Grammar Test", from Tyler Cowen) — this one has only two items — that makes me scratch my head.

(I guess I should remind you that in some quarters, "grammar" covers absolutely anything in language that can be regulated: discourse organization, syntax, word choice, morphological forms, stylistic choices, politeness formulas, punctuation, spelling, whatever. So, ahead of time, I had no idea which features of this very short passage might be seen as reprehensible. Was it, for instance, spelling homepage as a solid word, rather than as two separated words?)

Here's the passage:

Here’s what’s on Google’s home page on May 16, 2009:
  Over 28,000 children drew doodles for our homepage.
  Vote for the one that will appear here!
Test yourself: Can you find the two grammar errors?

and here are the answers (from Penelope Trunk):

The AP Stylebook says "over" is a way to move—a preposition. And “more than” must precede a number. Also, if you are voting for one, specific doodle, then the AP Stylebook tells you to use “which” rather than “that.”

Here I'm going to talk about the which/that issue. I'll save a return to the adverbial-over question for another time.