Language Log

Further linguistic adventures at grocery store check-out counters: last time it was a New Yorker cartoon in which "10 items or less" was altered to "10 items or fewer", mimicking real-life episodes like the one in which (under grumbling from customers) the Marks & Spencer chain replaced its "6 items or less" signs with "6 items or fewer", reported on here.

And now, also from the U.K., comes the news that the giant supermarket chain Tesco is also replacing its checkout signs. This time "10 items or less" will bow to "Up to 10 items".

As Mark notes in Innovation or error?, a commenter on my post The Languages of the Caucasus questioned my use of entitled with the meaning "having the title", citing a guide to common errors at CMU according to which the correct usage is titled. This may well be the historical usage, but in my judgment, not only is entitled correct, but titled is wrong. To me it sounds awful. Since this does not concern some specialized area in which I am not expert, in which case I would defer to experts, I take my usage to be correct.

I look at it this way: I am a native speaker of English. I grew up in Northern New England. I went to Harvard. I know a bunch of languages. I have a Ph.D. Therefore my usage is standard. Your mileage may vary.

My post on "The split verbs mystery", which was stimulated by a comment from Alan Gunn, in turn stimulated a couple of informative reactions from copy editors.

As a result of an exchange (1, 2 ,3 ,4, 5) with Alan Gunn in the comments yesterday, I was reminded that for many years, legal scholars throughout the U.S. were subjected to a peculiar form of stylistic tyranny, imposed by a curious work known as The Texas Manual on Style. According to James Lindgren ("Fear of Writing", California Law Review 78(6):1677-1702, 1990):

Unquestionably, the most dangerous advice in the old fifth edition of the Texas Manual was its disapproval of split verbs: "Avoid splitting verb phrases with adverbs. . . ." In other words, don't place an adverb between the parts of a compound verb. Yet Fowler and Follett (both praised in the Foreword to the Texas Manual) argued that the normal place for an adverb is in the midst of a multiple word verb. Thus the fifth edition of the Texas Manual seemed to have gotten the rule backwards. It prohibited what the experts recommend.

Specifically, this means that choices like "has always been" are to be suppressed, in favor of "always has been" or "has been always".

This is not the only bad advice in the book — Lindgren makes a strong case on other grounds for his view that "The Texas Manual on Style is one of the most pernicious collections of superstitions that has ever been taken seriously by educated people". But "avoid split verbs" is certainly the most eccentric piece of voodoo syntax since the prohibition of clause-final prepositions.

This is a brief follow-up to what Mark just said to "Robert", one of our commenters who thinks there is "massive literary authority" for the avoidance of split infinitives. Robert is going to be really disappointed by this. The eminent (and fairly conservative) early 20th-century American grammarian George O. Curme made a detailed study of the literary history of the split infinitive, and amassed a collection of hundreds and hundreds of examples. Some of his findings (and many though not all of his examples) are set forth in his book Syntax (1931), which forms Part III of his 3-volume work A Grammar of the English Language. Look at what he says on page 461:

[The split infinitive] has long been used in literary and colloquial language. In general, it is more characteristic of our more prominent authors than of the minor writers, who avoid it as they fear criticism.

Poor Robert. And poor Deb at Punctuality Rules, and poor Karen Elizabeth Gordon (see the book pictured there). They have all been suckered by a piece of fake-rule invention out of the late 19th century, and have joined the ranks of the "minor writers, who avoid [the split infinitive] as they fear criticism." While "prominent authors" have the courage and judgment to place their adjuncts just where those adjuncts work best syntactically and semantically, whether just after infinitival to or elsewhere in the clause, the timid little minor writers daren't follow them. Isn't that sad? A nation's minor writers in thrall to a rule that doesn't have any justification or factual basis and never did have any. Break out, minor writers! Revolt! You have nothing to lose, and an extra possibility of stylistically appropriate adjunct positioning to gain!

This morning, "Robert" added a comment to a Language Log post from April 30, "Books more loved than looked in". He began:

Just found your website, after hearing one of you discuss it on BBC Radio 4. I'm very glad to have discovered it, because it looks like good fun.

I tend to avoid split infinitives in formal prose, because most, if not all, of my models from the last 200 years avoid them. It's a stylistic preference, based on good authority; but I was happy to find on your site confirmation of my suspicion that there wasn't an actual *rule* against the split infinitive.

We're glad to be of service. Perhaps I can help even more, by raising some doubts in your mind about the quality of the "authority" behind your stylistic preference.

In a comment about yesterday's post "Geoff and the Language Guardians", Stephen Jones listed some of "the usual collection of nutters" who were featured on BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth program, including "one who pretends there's a difference between 'disinterested' and 'uninterested'". Some other commenters politely expressed surprise and concern, including the suggestion that "the difference is still observed by many people who are not 'nutters'".

Outeast observed that this is yet another a case, like imply and infer, where the segregation of meanings between the two words is emergent and incomplete, rather than traditional and under siege. This is an interesting and curious feature of the ecology of peevology. In most areas, what is fashionable is seen as new, and out-groups are censured for being behind the times. But there are some things, English usage among them, where disdain must by convention be directed at innovators. This convention is so strong that it overrides mere fact. When a word's meaning is becoming more specialized, with an older sense being abandoned, those who hold to the old ways must be castigated for failing to maintain a traditional distinction.

Caught on-screen in an episode (set in Namibia, a re-run from some years ago) of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, a travel-and-food television show:

This program contains indigenous nudity. Parental discretion is advised.

It's a warning that there were to be (female) breasts and (male) penises on display, though surely only fleetingly or out of the main focus of the camera, combined with the reassurance that the people whose bodies are (however negligently) on display are indigenous peoples — "primitives" and not "full people" like you and me, the viewers (or like Janet Jackson). That's the social point, which has been commented on on the net by a fair number of people, and about which there's a gigantic literature having to do with the attitudes and stances of people in dominant, urban, colonializing, modern, Western, literate, largely white, and/or "civilized" cultures towards the Other, the Exotic.

Then there's a linguistic point, about the nominal expression indigenous nudity, which is clearly an adjective modifier plus a noun head, but isn't understood as predicating some property (indigenousness, in this case) of some entity (nudity, in this case), but is understood as relating two entities (nudity and indigenous peoples, in this case). That is, the expression is Adj + N, but it functions semantically (and to some extent syntactically) like N + N, like a noun-noun compound.

Yesterday I posted about the history of the English word infer, including the fact that an often-deprecated usage — "evidence E infers conclusion C" — is one of the original meanings, has been used by elite writers since the 16th century, and is hallowed by inclusion in authoritative dictionaries like Webster's 2nd.

Rob Gunningham's comment was: "I'll bet you're not going to start using … infer instead of 'imply' yourself, are you?"

I hadn't thought about it, but on reflection, Rob is right. More broadly, I can't recall ever having changed my speaking or writing habits on the basis of a grammatical analysis or a historical investigation. This isn't a matter of principle for me, but it's a fact; and on reflection, I think that it's a fact worth thinking about.

Week after week the language-and-literacy pontificators fulminate in newspapers and magazines, nearly always revealing how little they know about language. The worst case I've seen in the past week is a column by Howard Jacobson in The Independent about how old teaching methods worked and new ones don't (muted thanks to Steve Jones for pointing it out to me). In the column he foams at the mouth over a contestant on a reality show who did not understand the meaning of the idiomatic phrase at your peril. Peril means "danger", of course but is somewhat archaic. Proceed at your peril means "If you proceed you will be in danger", but crucially, this is not compositional: the meaning does not follow from the regular principles for the rest of English phrase semantics. For example, you can't say ^??Proceed at your trouble to mean "If you proceed you will be in trouble"; you can't say ^??Proceed at your error to mean "If you proceed you will be in error". At your peril is a fixed phrase you have to learn as a whole. It is insane to whinge about the whole educational system going to the dogs just because one young person didn't know this single idiom. Everyone is ignorant of at least some of the abundantly many idiomatic phrases in English. And apart from that one phrase, Jacobson's complaints about education rest entirely on two things: a teacher named Phil Beadle used the transitive verb lay to mean "lie" ("be recumbent") in a TV program (see my disastrously unhelpful guidance on Language Log about this supposed shibboleth), and practice (rather than practise) was used as a verb in the program's closing credits (there's nothing wrong with it: dictionaries list it as a variant spelling, but Jacobson is too stupid or too over-confident to look at dictionaries). What a pathetic basis for apocalyptic claims about modern education. Read this linguistically ignorant blithering windbag at your peril.

From the New Yorker of 28 July, a cartoon by J.C. Duffy (p. 60), showing a man, working a cash register at a grocery store, who is addressing a shopper staring at the sign at his counter. The sign has "10 items or less" on it, with the "less" crossed out and "fewer" written in. Says the man:

“What can I say? I was an English major.”

Two things here: the usage of less and fewer in this context, which Mark Liberman took up here some time ago; and the stereotype of English majors as sticklers for "correct" grammar.

Language Log reader Jukka Kohonen has written to me about the Recency Illusion, the (often inaccurate) belief that a usage you have recently noticed is in fact a recent development in the language. Kohonen wondered whether anyone had studied its causes (and effects) systematically, and he had a specific instance in mind. I had to admit to a profound ignorance on the subject, and to considerable worries about how the topic could be studied systematically.

Ben Zimmer, posting on Monday on Visual Thesaurus ("Of Showdowns, Throwdowns, and Hoedowns"):

Last week we featured a debate over contemporary usage of whom, with Baltimore Sun copy editor John McIntyre squaring off against Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky. To be honest, the exchange was a bit too civil and reasonable to live up to its billing as a "usage showdown" — at least based on the Visual Thesaurus definition of showdown as "a hostile disagreement face-to-face." I was amused to see that on his copy-editing blog, "You Don't Say," John McIntyre facetiously referred to the debate with an even more inappropriate term: smackdown, which most people (in the U.S. at least) would associate with professional wrestling.

(Ben then went on to discuss a few other -down words: beatdown, throwdown, and hoedown.)