Language Log

From the annals of incorrection: cases where, because of some structural similarity between constructions C1 and C2, some people see C1 (incorrectly) as an instance of C2, where C2 is believed (incorrectly) to be non-standard (or defective in some other way), so that these people avoid C2 and replace it by something else. The proscription against C2 has then CONTAMINATED the innocent C1. On to cases.

I mentioned recently here on Language Log that the people who live in terror of splitting infinitives appear never to have looked inside the handbooks that they claim to be respecting. I came upon a remarkable instance of this the other day while looking for something else.

Punctuality Rules! is advertised as "A blog devoted to writing, grammar, good manners, and basically trying to save Civilization, one punctuation mark at a time." In this post last year the proprietor, who identifies herself as "Deb", wrote about her beloved copy of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style (of which she actually provides a photo):

Now, Strunk and White (as it's commonly called) is quite strict about some of its rules: don't end sentences with a preposition, never start one with a conjuction [sic], don't split an infinitive. All rules which common usage mostly lets slip these days. (How many non-writers do you know who even know what an infinitive is?) Its reputation is almost stodgy. A long list of rules and commands by two old, old men, you might think . . . and then you open it and start to read.

She loves her copy of S&W's third edition, of course, and she says that she reads it: "the quality of the writing is superb", and it is "possibly the very best place you can learn the rules", she thinks. I think the exact opposite is true. But never mind that. My point here is that as far as I can see, Deb hasn't actually paid attention to what The Elements of Style says.

The recent gift of a staggering $100,000,000 by a single person to Harvard University — the largest gift from an alumnus in Harvard's history — has just been announced, in prose that suggests no matter how much money they may raise, the development and public relations staff at Harvard are afflicted by ancient irrational terrors:

David Rockefeller, a member of the Harvard College Class of 1936 and longtime University benefactor, has pledged $100 million to increase dramatically learning opportunities for Harvard undergraduates through international experiences and participation in the arts.

What are "dramatically learning opportunities", you might ask? We'd normally expect an adjectival rather than adverbial modifier on "learning opportunities"; is it a typo for "dramatic learning opportunities"?

No. The writer of this newsletter item (see this link) was in the grip of unreasoning fear, too petrified to consider using a normal and fully grammatical construction of Standard English that is acknowledged as grammatical in even the most conservative reference works, and never was ungrammatical at any time in the entire history of the language. Rather than use this much-dreaded construction, the writer blundered into something that actually is ungrammatical, and put an adverb in a position that actually is syntactically blocked. It truly makes me wonder whether intellectual progress is possible for a tribe as prone to panic and primitive superstition as modern educated Americans.

"Everyone knows each other", said someone on BBC Radio 4 this morning, speaking about some tight-knit community. And instantly I saw that this was the key to a definitive argument against the logic of the opponents of singular they. I wonder if I can make you see how awesomely beautiful the insight is.

The -s suffix on the present-tense verb knows tells us that the subject is morphosyntactically singular. That is, it counts as singular for purposes of subject-verb agreement. But each other, famously, requires a semantically plural subject. That is why They know each other is grammatical and *He knows each other is not. From this and nothing else it follows that semantic plurality and morphosyntactic singularity are compatible in English. No prescriptivist has suggested that there is something grammatically wrong with Everyone knows each other. But because of that, the logical objection to singular they just collapses. Everyone knows themselves has no grammatically relevant property that isn't already instantiated by Everyone knows each other.

A couple of days ago, Andrew Mueller at the Guardian tossed some bleeding gobbets into the crowd of ravening peevologists ("Linguistic pedants of the world unite", 4/14/2008). His point of departure:

For centuries, travellers have crossed America to explore it, conquer it, settle it, exploit it and study it. Now, a small but righteous crew are traversing America in order to edit it. Jeff Deck, and his friends at the Typo Eradication Advancement League (Teal), are spending three months driving from San Francisco, California, to Somerville, Massachusetts, on a mission to correct every misspelled, poorly punctuated, sloppily phrased item of signage they encounter en route. Equipped with marker pens, stickers and white-out, they are seeking to scourge America's landscape of floating apostrophes, logic-defying syntax and other manifestations of laziness and/or illiteracy.

Expressions like ^!real comfortable, with a modifier of adjective form preceding the head of an adjective phrase, adverb phrase, or determinative phrase, are characteristic of non-standard dialects. I take that to be simply a factual claim, not a value judgment. In written Standard English prose on serious subjects, outside of dialog, you do not find ^!real comfortable, ^!real friendly, etc. (the exclamation mark prefix is the notational device used in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language to mark cited examples that are grammatical in some non-standard dialects but not grammatical in any variety of the Standard English dialect).

Some writers of a prescriptivist bent tend to suggest that the speakers who use such phrases are simply too lazy and ignorant to distinguish an adjective from an adverb: ^!real comfortable is wrong, they say, because adjectives like real do not modify adjectives, so the phrase should be corrected to really comfortable. It's simply a matter of slovenliness and inattention. These people should shape up, and learn the difference between an adjective and an adverb.

However, the other day, I heard someone on BBC Radio 4 say There are precious few, and I realized that it thoroughly undercuts the laziness-and-ignorance diagnosis. Precious few is clearly and definitely grammatical in Standard English. And crucially, preciously few is not.

Whee! I think I'm the first to post using the swanky new system, which has a wisywig interface and everything! First!

Nodding to the giant posts of yesteryear, I return to the Language Log classic of finding howlers in that horrid little book.

I hadn't looked at the thing since freshman composition, remembering it vaguely only through the scientific and unbiased reminders provided by Language Log posts. But a talk I attended last Friday referred to a S&W rule, purportedly about avoiding ambiguity: "Keep related words together".

I was curious about how Strunk and White would formulate the notion of 'related words', so I went to check it out. And, I kid you not, this is the formulation of the rule:

"The subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning."

I was afraid someone was playing a joke on me. But no, that's really it!