Language Log

If you've ever found yourself thinking that Language Log writers seem concerned with form rather than function — that they obsess about the details of how things are put, to the exclusion of concern with the core content that really matters, and that they will probably miss the historic excitement of this January 20 grubbing around for prepositions — you need to take a look at the following passage by Jill Lepore of Harvard. It's from her article in the January 12 New Yorker on the language of presidential inaugural addresses. Lepore makes reference to claims in Elvin Lim's book The Anti-Intellectual Presidency that American presidential inaugural addresses have been getting stupider, with stupidity being measured by Flesch Readability Test word- and sentence-length criteria:

The past half century of speechwriters, most of whom trained as journalists, do favor small words and short sentences, as do many people whose English teachers made them read Strunk and White's 1959 "Elements of Style" ("Omit needless words") and Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English language" ("Never use a long word where a short one will do"). Lim gets this, but only sort of. Harding's inaugural comes in at a college reading level, George H. W. Bush's at about a sixth-grade level. Harding's isn't smarter or subtler, it's just more flowery. They are both empty-headed; both suffer from what Orwell called "slovenliness." The problem doesn't lie in the length of their sentences or the number of their syllables. It lies in the absence of precision, the paucity of ideas, and the evasion of every species of argument.

A beautiful expression of a point we have often tried to emphasize. It's not so much that the superficial rules for writing promulgated Orwell and by Strunk and White are toxic and meretricious (though they do poison young minds, and should be condemned for that); it's that if you think they are deep and important and determinative of quality, it is YOU that will get hung up on trivialities of form rather than important aspects of content.

In the comments to my post Orwell's Liar, Beth posted a link to Joseph William's article The Phenomonology of Error, and Mark reposted the link in a follow-up post here.

Well, I just finished reading the Williams article, and what I want to know is how the fuck an article riddled with errors could ever be published in a respectable journal…

Among the 39 comments on David Beaver's post "Orwell's Liar",  comments that were often impassioned and mostly long, the best one was calm and short:

Joseph Williams makes related points in his influential article, "The Phenomenology of Error," published in College Composition and Communication in 1981. That essay has an unforgettable surprise ending. You can read it online here.

This was contributed by Beth, and the link to Williams' article is valuable enough to be displayed more prominently.

Orwell's Politics and the English Language is a beautifully written language crime, though it pretends to lay down the law. Furthermore I just noticed that its final law is rather curious. We'll get to that shortly.

Orwell begins with the unjustified premise that language is in decline – unjustified because while he viciously attacks contemporary cases of poor writing, he provides no evidence that earlier times had been perennially populated by paragons of literary virtue. He proceeds to shore up the declining language with style suggestions that, regrettably enough, have never turned a Dan Brown into a George Orwell.  

Customers who buy into Orwell's shit also buy Strunk and White, and further milquetoast simulacra of one or the other, so it's worth looking more closely at what he proposes. Let's start off in time honored Language Log style, by seeing how Orwell breaks his own rules. Showing a lack of imagination that would be worthy of someone who lacked imagination, Orwell suggests the following rule, his fourth rule, a rule that in various forms has been heard many times both before and since. Verily shall I yawn unto you Orwell's unoriginal original (c.f. this discussion of how it predates Orwell):

I posted yesterday about (among other things) the idea that that should never be omitted as the mark of a complement to a verb, as in the putatively offending

(1) I know he is a good man.

versus the prescribed

(2) I know that he is a good man.

Now Geoff Pullum reminds me that he posted back in 2004 on the opposed advice (a student of his had been taught this), according to which (2) is unacceptable and (1) is the prescribed alternative: complementizer that must be omitted wherever possible.

Both proscriptions — of zero as in (1), of that as in (2) — are of course silly, but it might be useful to speculate about where they come from.

I posted yesterday on my blog (though the posting was mysteriously dated 12/28 by WordPress) about what looks like a whimsical proscription from Ambrose Bierce, who in 1909 instructed his readers not to use

Because for For. “I knew it was night, because it was dark.” “He will not go, because he is ill.”

Jan Freeman pointed me to this "rule" in Write It Right. She and I have been unable to find it elsewhere (in the 19th or 20th centuries); it seems to have been an invention of Bierce's, a concocted usage rule — like the ones that Freeman discussed in an entertaining recent column entitled "Rule by whim".

Meanwhile, in a comment on Freeman's latest column (on usage advice that hasn't aged well) I came across another candidate for whimsical proscription, against complement clauses missing the complementizer that.

After I saw a Youtube clip of British comedian and quiz show host Stephen Fry pedantically insisting that none requires a singular verb, I was sincerely disappointed that this intelligent man evinced exactly the kind of "linguistic martyrdom" that Thomas Lounsbury ridiculed a century ago in The Standard of Usage in English.

My spirits lifted when I saw another Youtube clip (via the Tensor) wherein Fry and his comedic partner Hugh Laurie hilariously hold forth on language:

For my money, "Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers" trumps colorless green ideas sleeping furiously any day. And now comes more heartening evidence that Fry is a true language lover and no prescriptivist stick-in-the-mud. On his newly redesigned blog, The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry, he kicks things off with a wonderfully rambling post entitled "Don't Mind Your Language…". A choice excerpt follows below.

It is only natural that just months before the current administration packs up to leave the White House, various branches of government would be scurrying to set their favorite programs in concrete for the incoming president and his staff to have to address as best they can. The Department of Education is no different from the others. Since numerous self-inflicted setbacks have left the No Child Left Behind effort with a less than positive heritage, today the Secretary released a report that includes dire warnings of impending doom.

Louis Menand ("Thumbspeak", The New Yorker, 10/20/2008) aims a gibe at my profession:

[P]rofessional linguists, almost universally, do not believe that any naturally occurring changes in the language can be bad.

As a representative of the species, I can testify that this is false. Rather, we believe that moral and aesthetic judgments about language should be based on facts, not on ignorant and solipsistic gut reactions.

Amy Ostrander is an undergraduate student from Brandeis University who has taken the very sensible step of broadening her horizons beyond that excellent institution and is visiting Edinburgh for a year to take linguistics courses here. She just pointed out to me something very cute about prescriptivism, Latinophilia, and the so-called "split infinitive".

The familiar practice of putting modifier constituents between to and a plain form verb in the infinitive clause construction (as in to really love someone) is calling "splitting the infinitive" because it is thought that to love is a word. People apparently see the modifier as separating the two parts of what would be in Latin a single word: amare ("to love") is one word in Latin, and certainly no adverb is permitted to occur inside it. That suggests a principle saying, when something is expressed by a single word in Latin but by two in English, it is bad grammar to separate those two English words with a modifier. What Amy pointed out was this. Suppose we accepted the principle (absurd and perhaps unchampioned though it is). We would face a problem. It cannot be maintained, even by prescriptivists whose pronouncements imply that they might defend it. The reason is that (among thousands of other examples) a word like amo in Latin also translates as two words in English: I love. Everyone, prescriptivists included, agrees that it is grammatical to split them, as in I really love you. So under that principle, what makes it OK to split the two parts of amo in an English sentence (I really love) but not OK to split the two parts of amare (to really love)? Nothing. The putative prescriptivists are being inconsistent. So never mind the fact that the principle is absurd; things are worse than that, because no one can really believe it or obey it. Thanks to Amy, I now see that it is an even more utterly stupid idea than I thought it was before.

Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post published a piece of pompous, sentimental mush yesterday. It's all about a little book he learned about in college and still carries around to this day and will love till he dies (yadda yadda yadda; violins, please); and yes, you guessed it, the book is E. B. White's disgusting and hypocritical revision of William Strunk's little hodgepodge of bad grammar advice and stylistic banalities, The Elements of Style. I have discussed it many times before here on Language Log. The appearance of this slop would have made me pretty sick, except that the wonderful Jan Freeman was on it like greased lightning. Jan's piece is called Return of the living dead, and it's a delight. (It contains original scholarship, too.) I have nothing more to say, except read Jan Freeman. She is a wonderful language writer. She should be writing for Language Log. But our organization, vast and powerful though it is, doesn't have the resources to steal her from the Boston Globe.

Having just posted (again) on less/fewer with plural C (count) nouns, I was primed to catch the following in Gail Collins's op-ed piece ("Sarah Palin Speaks!") in the NYT yesterday:

How many times have you heard McCain promise to slash taxes and pay for it by eliminating unnecessary programs? And who better to help carry out that agenda than the governor of a state whose residents pay less taxes than anyplace else in the union, because of their genius in making the federal government pay the tab for virtually everything?

Collins could have written pay less tax, with a M (mass) use of the lexical item TAX, or she could have written pay fewer taxes, with the modifier fewer that some usage critics insist on with plural C nouns. All three variants are attested, but not (apparently) with equal frequencies. I found Collins's pay less taxes entirely natural, indeed to be preferable to pay fewer taxes, and I would have found pay less tax also natural.

There are two points of interest here: yet another context where less is fine with plural C nouns, plus the double classification of TAX as M and C, with the result that M tax and plural C taxes overlap significantly in their meaning (a situation also seen for E-MAIL, SPAM, and some other lexical items).

The BBC News Magazine, expanding on earlier BBC News coverage of the Tesco "10 items or less" flap (reported on here), passes on more misinformation from various sources about the usage of fewer and less. The piece ("When to use 'fewer' rather than 'less'?") begins inauspiciously:

Tesco is changing its checkout signs after coming under criticism from linguists for using "less" rather than "fewer". But it's not just huge, multinational supermarkets that get confused about this grammatical point.

The grammatical question of fewer versus less has been raising the hackles of plain English speakers for years.

"Plain English speakers" — where does that come from? From, I assume, the primary source that BBC News used for these stories, the Plain English Campaign, which was also the source for the replacement for "10 items or less": "Up to 10 items".

There's a lot to unpack here, including objections from some to "up to" as a replacement for "or less".