Language Log

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.)

The text for the day comes from Paul Brians's Common Errors in English Usage, in the entry Artic/Arctic:

Although some brand names have incorporated this popular error, remember that the Arctic Circle is an arc. By the way, Ralph Vaughan Williams called his suite drawn from the score of the film Scott of the Antarctic, the Sinfonia Antartica, but that’s Italian, not English.

Brians's advice is specifically about spelling, but the spelling Artic is simply a reproduction of a very common pronunciation of the word, and it's the pronunciation that's the root issue.

My interest in this case comes from my interest in fashions in prescriptions: certain usages are widely proscribed, often with extravagant condemnation, while other, similar, usages escape attention. In the case at hand (and another I hope to post about soon), it's "simplified" pronunciation that is at issue. For Arctic/Artic, there's also a complex history (one that Brians might have misunderstood).

A little while back, there was a small media flap about the marking of the UK's GCSE (General Certification of Secondary Education) English exam back in 2006. The issue was an obscenity given as a response to one question, which nevertheless received a couple of marks. Controversy ensued. 

The news stories had to cope with reporting the obscenity, and that's of interest to us here at Language Log Plaza. In addition, the examiner compared the inappropriateness of the obscenity to the inappropriateness of using to preposition to with the adjective different — and such judgments on usage are another perennial topic here on Language Log.

Dipping randomly into another one of Roy Peter Clark's Glamour of Grammar essays ("What the Big Bopper Taught Me About Grammar", 5/8/2008), I found this curious piece of revisionist intellectual history:

In our common culture, grammar has taken on at least three sets of meanings and associations. It still refers to the etiquette of writing and reading, the conventions that allow us to create a standard written English, the technical term for which, according to critic John Simon, is "grapholect."

This view of grammar is sometimes called "prescriptive," which is how I came to understand in 1959 (at the age of 11) that, when the Big Bopper sang "… but baby I ain't go no money, honey," he was using language in a way that would have gotten his ass kicked by Sister Catherine William. […]

Then, of course, along came "descriptive grammar," a movement that had the unmitigated gall (why is gall always unmitigated?) to sneak "ain't" in the dictionary, a discipline of language that could take into account the Big Bopper's nonstandard usage, including that surely double negative.

Underpinning this rebellion against Emily Post conformity was something called "transformational" or "generative" grammar, described by scholars such as Noam Chomsky, before he became a political critic and darling of the left.

This explanation evokes another common collocate for unmitigated, namely nonsense.

Yesterday, a correspondent I'll identify as "Kevin S" sent me a left-handed compliment:

Someone recommended your posts on Language Log as an instance where I might encounter a rational form of Descriptivism. I must admit, you do generally write well, and your "mask of sanity" appears firm. It doesn't take long, however, before the mask fails.

Kevin uncovered my true nature by inspection of a Language Log post from 10/28/2006, "Evil". I'll spare you the body of his evaluation ("disingenuous … smug … misrepresentations …"), but his peroration is worth thinking about:

I doubt that you've read this far (or read this e-mail, at all), but in case you have, I suppose that I should fully disclose my colors before I close.

At the end of the day, Descriptivism appears merely to be another form of Nietzsche's concept of slave morality, which is the dominant morality of our day. Emily Bender's remarks, as quoted in your post of 10/28/06, offer a typically tedious, humorless, and self-righteous example of this type of morality. Descriptivism, like most such ideologies, merely reflects the values and tendencies of the society it serves. In this case, those tendencies are a frantic race to the intellectual bottom, where language and the Humanities are concerned; a perversion of the concept of democracy; a mutation of the virus neophilia; and a telling instance of that great logical fallacy of modern times: Post hoc, ergo hoc melius.

This morning, Arnold Zwicky took a look at the general question of whether language mavens' advice to "Avoid Potential Ambiguity" is actually helpful in avoiding ambiguity. He focused on the particular case of sentence-adverbial hopefully, and part of his argument was that if you're fluent in English,

you have to know that lots of people use hopefully as a sentence adverbial; it's all over the place. (I haven't run the numbers, but I'm sure that these days sentence-adverbial hopefully vastly dwarfs nominal-modifying hopefully in both colloquial and more elevated English.)

Well, here at Language Log, we aim to leave no number unrun. So I went to Mark Davies' lovely "Corpus of American English" search page at BYU, and checked a sample of 100 instances of hopefully from each of the five genres that he offers: spoken, fiction, magazines, newspapers, and academic. I assigned each example to one of the two categories "speaker-oriented" (i.e. sentence adverb meaning "it is to be hoped") and "subject-oriented" (i.e. verbal adverb of manner, meaning "in a hopeful manner").

The results, expressed as percentage of subject-oriented examples… the envelope please…

The usage manuals are full of condemnations of forms and constructions on the grounds that they could lead to ambiguity, and many of the disputed usages in English that I post on here bring me e-mail (usually with awful examples) about how they should be banned because they could lead to ambiguity. Almost without exception, these protestations are without merit; the usages in question are innocuous, and the awful examples are deeply decontextualized — with no linguistic context, and usually with cues to the social and cultural context removed, so that readers or hearers have to understand things "entirely by the words" (which tends to convert potential ambiguity into effective ambiguity).

Eventually, I saw that there was a pattern here. The first piece of the pattern is that the accusations of pernicious ambiguity are directed at DISPUTED USAGES (usages that at least some people dispute). That's what this posting is about. I'm intending to post more, because I think there's a deeper reason for the pattern, but this is a beginning.

I was surprised to find Jay Livingston, an intelligent and sensible person, subscribing to the prejudice that words like which and this, when understood as referring to some situation or proposition alluded to in the preceding discourse, should be shunned as "non-reference pronouns".

On the contrary, it seems clear that (what Arnold Zwicky calls) "summative" expressions normally do have referents, that summative reference helps makes discourse coherent, and that summative use of which and this is generally no harder to understand than the alternative ways of accomplishing the same goal.

In my post this morning, I gave a few examples of well-regarded writers using summative which. I started with Shakespeare, and most of the other examples were from poetry as well; but some people (like Jay's high-school English teacher, Miss Elliott) discount such examples as poetic license, so I thought I'd add some evidence from expository writing.

But first, let's consider the argument that such evidence is intended to support.

I'm used to the which-hunters' ill-informed prejudice against the traditional role of which in integrated relative clauses (discussed here, here, here, here, here, and in many other LL posts over the years). But I now learn that some extremists have targeted which even in its grammatical ghetto of supplementary relative clauses, ("Why are some summatives labeled 'vague'?", 5/21/2008; "More theory trumping practice", 5/22/2008.)

The endangered examples of supplementary which are those that have a "summative" function, "understood as referring to some situation or proposition alluded to in the preceding discourse". A simple example: "Neptune opposes Apollo, which implies that things moist and dry are in continual discord."

In my last posting, I noted that reference work after reference work condemns summative uses of pronouns (He snores, which bothers me. He snores, and that bothers me.) on theoretical grounds: a pronoun must have a noun or pronoun as an antecedent (this is a theoretical assumption), but these summative pronouns lack such antecedents – they refer to a situation or proposition alluded to in the preceding discourse context – and so they are unacceptably vague and should be avoided, though summative non-pronominal NPs (He snores, a fact that bothers me. He snores, and that fact bothers me.) are judged to be acceptable in the same contexts.

Examining the practice of good writers would show that they don’t avoid summative pronouns in general (though of course in many contexts alternative constructions would be preferable). But the advice above has theory trumping practice. Then in looking through the sections of Laurie Rozakis’s Complete Idiot’s Guide to Grammar and Style (2nd ed.) that deal with pronouns, I came across an old acquaintance, the Possessive Antecedent Proscription (the PAP), and, by golly, Rozakis (p. 94) advocates it, and gives an entirely theoretical justification for it.

I've long reflected on the accusation that certain types of expressions are (unacceptably) "vague". There is, of course, a certain amount of troublesome vagueness and unclarity out there — what WERE they trying to say? — but some of the standard targets of this charge are, it seems to me, entirely innocent.

But there's a story about why they get targeted. Well, several stories, different for different cases.

Here's one story. The crux is unexamined grammatical dogma that's been transformed into folk linguistics (and bad advice).

From the blog "Stuff White People Like", a 12 May posting on "Grammar" that begins:

White people love rules. It explains why so they get upset when people cut in line, why they tip so religiously and why they become lawyers. But without a doubt, the rule system that white people love the most is grammar. It is in their blood not only to use perfect grammar but also to spend significant portions of time pointing out the errors of others.

Geoff Pullum's most recent posting on split infinitives noted that handbooks on grammar and usage do not prohibit them, but most say they should be avoided, unless splitting the infinitive would improve clarity. When you think about it, this is decidedly odd advice.

There's some history here, which is well covered in MWDEU, and has now been briefly treated by John McIntyre in his blog You Don't Say. The short version: the split infinitive as a bugaboo lodged itself in "the popular press and folk belief" (MWDEU) in the 19th century, so that the handbooks now say (and have been saying for a century or so), in effect, that there's nothing grammatically wrong with split infinitives, but some people are offended by them, so you should avoid them as much as possible, to avoid giving offense. In McIntyre's words: "the only reason to avoid splitting infinitives is to escape the uninformed censure of people who think that it is a violation of grammar and usage."

In other words, crazies win.