Language Log

Language Log readers who have not seen The Very Model of an Amateur Grammarian on "The Stroppy Editor" should check it out. Sing it (or imagine it sung), fairly fast, to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "I am the very model of a modern major-general" from The Pirates of Penzance — the same tune that Tom Lehrer used for his astonishing accomplishment in performing to music the entire list of elements in the periodic table of the elements.

In a comment yesterday, Jonathon Owen pointed us to a fascinating post at Arrant Pedantry on Which Hunting (12/23/2011). You should read the whole thing, but as a teaser, here's the key graph:

Jeff Tomczek has an article in the Huffington Post on the things people didn't tell him about getting cancer and undergoing the treatment. It's very good (those who have been through it or are very close to people who did will find much that resonates). But his title is a botch that I think must be due to the myth that English has a "past subjunctive" (which it does not). Here is the title under which his article was published:

The Things I Wish I Were Told When I Was Diagnosed With Cancer

That isn't well-formed English as I understand it. And I have used this language for quite a few years; I'm kind of used to it. I realize that your mileage may differ, but I would judge the above to be actually disallowed by the grammar.

The Queen's English Society (QES), mentioned only a couple of times here on Language Log over the past few years, is no more. It has ceased to be. On the last day of this month they will ring down the curtain and it will join the choir invisible. It will be an ex-society. Said Rhea Williams, chairman of QES, in a letter to the membership of which I have seen a facsimile copy:

At yesterday's SGM there were 22 people present, including the 10 members of your committee. Three members had sent their apologies. Not a very good showing out of a membership of 560 plus!

Time was spent discussing what to do about QES given the forthcoming resignations of so many committee members. Despite the sending out of a request for nominations for chairman, vice-chairman, administrator, web master, and membership secretary no one came forward to fill any role. So I have to inform you that QES will no longer exist. There will be one more Quest then all activity will cease and the society will be wound up. The effective date will be 30th June 2012

(Quest is the society's magazine.) Is this a sad day for defenders of English? Not in my view. I don't think it was a serious enterprise at all. I don't think the members cared about what they said they cared about. And I will present linguistic evidence for this thesis.

Readers of The New Yorker might be getting the impression that the magazine has it in for a nefarious group of people known as "descriptivists." They're a terrible bunch, as far as I can tell. First came Joan Acocella's "The English Wars" in the May 14 issue (see Mark Liberman's posts, "Rules and 'rules'," "A half century of usage denialism"). And now the vendetta continues online with Ryan Bloom's post on the magazine's Page-Turner blog, "Inescapably, You're Judged By Language," which promises to unmask the dastardly descriptivists and their "dirty little secret."

Clyde Haberman, "Is This the End of Proper Grammar? Hopefully Not", NYT, 4/19/2012.

Unsurprisingly, The Associated Press won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting early this week, for articles about the New York Police Department’s surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods and organizations in the wake of 9/11. Also unsurprising was fresh controversy that the award stirred, given the sensitive subject.

Curiously, that clamor proved to be but a warmup for more hullabaloo over the A.P., on an issue that is dearer to some people’s hearts than police spying. This is about language. Language, of course, is the soul of a culture.

He's talking about the AP Style Guide's decision to allow the use of hopefully as an evaluative adverb, announced on Twitter at 6:22 a.m. on 17 April 2012:

Hopefully, you will appreciate this style update, announced at ‪#aces2012‬. We now support the modern usage of hopefully: it's hoped, we hope.

I didn't notice, frankly;  the "hullabaloo" was a muted one, compared to (say) the Ruckus in the Rada. The Boston Globe copy desk sniffed "Hopefully, we'll see it rarely". Andrew Beaujon at poynter.org sighed "Hopefully, this is the last we’ll write about ‘hopefully’", and pointed out that

Cleverly, Clyde Haberman uses a sentence adverb to begin every paragraph of his story about the change, demonstrating that the prohibition was bunk in the first place, even if pouncing on such “errors” kept many fine copy editors employed (and, by extension, manufacturers of cardigans in business).

Noreen Malone ("Grading Obama’s ‘Classic Undergraduate-ese'", New York Magazine 5/2/2012) turned to Matthew Hart to grade a letter that Barack Obama wrote to a girlfriend when he was an undergraduate at Columbia University. Prof. Hart, who "specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone culture, with an emphasis on modernist poetry, contemporary British fiction, political theory, and the visual arts", was not impressed:

Considered as homework, I'd give the future President a B-minus. The reference to "an ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats" (besides confusing that and which) sounds impressive, but it's more than a little opaque.

Noam Chomsky in the Guardian uses 'anticipate' to mean 'expect'. I thought language was his thing.

— Daniel Hannan (@DanHannanMEP) May 1, 2012

Daniel Hannan is both a writer for The Telegraph and also Conservative MEP for South East England; and what he's complaining about is this passage (from "What next for Occupy?", The Guardian 4/30/2012):

But a lot of [the response], again, is just, "Why don't they go away and leave us alone?" That's to be anticipated.

I want to share something with you Language Log readers. But for heaven's sake don't mention it to anyone at The Chronicle of Higher Education or its Lingua Franca blog. This is just between us. There is no telling what would happen over at the Chronicle if they read this, so just keep it dark, OK?

I applaud Mark for taking on the question of left- and right-wing linguistic moralism. It encourages me to add some snippets from the disorganized drawer of Thoughts I have on this topic, some of them from stuff I wrote but never published. I leave the insertion of transitions as an exercise for the reader.

In the first place, doesn't make sense to think of this question other than historically. The distinction between "prescriptivism" and "descriptivism" is a twentieth-century invention, and an unfortunate one, I think, since it implies that this is a coherent philosophical controversy with antique roots. In fact both terms are so vague and internally inconsistent that we'd be better off discarding them, and to impose those categories on the eighteenth-century grammarians, say, is gross presentism. So let me talk about "language criticism," both because it's closer to the mark, and because what linguists describe as "prescriptivism" in most of the Western languages is by-and-large just a stream of the critical tradition. (Language criticism, it has struck me, is the dream-work of culture.) And the politics of both have always been in flux.

It is asserted that the following passage contains an elementary grammatical error:

When I called to see her in June, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the woods, as was her wont (I am not sure whether it was a male or female, and so use the more common pronoun), but her mistress told me that she came into the neighborhood a little more than a year before, in April, and was finally taken into their house; that she was of a dark brownish-gray color, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick and flatted out along her sides, forming stripes ten or twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring these appendages dropped off. [Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854.]

Yesterday, P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula posted some thoughts on education under the title "A goal to strive for". A zombie commenter promptly reached up through the soil of his gravesite to ask

is this where we snarkily mock PZ for ending the title of this post on education with a preposition?

I got a message from a former teacher who said her friend had sent her my article about Strunk and White and it had stimulated her to ask me the following question:

For 31 years, this is the rule I taught to all of my elementary school students: do not put a comma before "because." Since I noticed that you did so at least twice in your article, I am wondering if I taught the students incorrectly (I hope not) or rather if Scots follow another rule (I hope so). I'd really like to know.

Oh, dear. The problem was not how to answer the question; the problem was how to do so kindly and gently. I did not do well enough