Language Log

John McIntyre notes on his blog You Don't Say that a man named Rod Gelatt, a retired professor of journalism who taught at the Missouri School of Journalism, writes in a letter to the Columbia Missourian newspaper (responding to an article calling for more attention to correcting grammar errors in online content):

in the announcement of the invitation for us to become grammar police, I found two errors: "….who wants to generously point out…" (splitting an infinitive) and "Spell check won't help you when you have the wrong word to start with" (ending sentence with preposition).

I ignore the first point (split infinitives have always been grammatically correct in English; see for example this page). And as for the second, stranded prepositions have also always been grammatical in general, of course; but with respect to Mr Gelatt's example, I wonder what he thought the "correction" would be? The common phrases to start with and to begin with are among the (numerous) cases where stranding the preposition at the end of the phrase is not just permitted in Standard English, it's obligatory.

In a comment on Ben Zimmer's post about two linguists being among this year's MacArthur "genius" grant winners (one of those going to my UC San Diego colleague Carol Padden), a reader identifying themselves as "Pflaumbaum" writes:

Off topic, but I wonder if any of the profs will comment on Emma Thompson's prescriptivist rant:

http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20100928/906/ten-emma-thompson-says-youngsters-poor-l.html

Apparently "ain't", "like" and "innit" make you sound stupid, and we need to reinvest in the idea of, um, as it were, articulacy, as a form of human freedom and power.

Well, at least Pflaumbaum warned us that it was off topic. Anyway, go ahead and follow the link to read the story about Emma Thompson. It's very, very short. I'll be here waiting, below the fold.

The misnamed "split infinitive" construction, where a modifier is placed immediately before the verb of an infinitival complement, has never been ungrammatical at any stage in the history of English, and no confident writer of English prose has any problems with it at all. (As the grammarian George O. Curme pointed out in 1930, it's actually the minor writers and nervous nellies, the easily intimidated, who seem to worry about it.) Quite often, placing a modifier just after to and just before the verb is exactly the right thing to do with a modifier in an infinitival complement clause (see the discussion on this page). However, that is not the same thing as saying it is always the right thing to do. Sometimes it's an absolute disaster. My colleague Bob Ladd was preparing to fly back to Edinburgh (EDI) from Munich in Germany when his airline, easyJet, sent him the following email (bafflingly, they sent it after he was in the departure lounge):

Dear DWIGHT ROBERT LADD

We are really sorry to inform you that your easyJet flight, 6914 to EDI on 24/09/2010 has been cancelled. We understand that cancelling your flight will cause you inconvenience and we are very sorry when things don't run as scheduled.

We always aim to provide the best possible experience when flying with easyJet, however from time to time situations arise which are out of our control. On this occasion we've been forced to take the decision to regrettably cancel your flight.

You can see that this is by an inexperienced writer just from penultimate sentence, with its the dangling participle (who is flying?) and classic "comma-splice" run-on sentence and mispunctuated connective adjunct however. But the placement of the adverb regrettably is a much worse mistake. It is a horrible, disastrous writing choice, genuinely leading to syntactic ill-formedness. But why, exactly?

I can understand why Margalit Fox would want to give such prominence to Edwin Newman's two books on usage in her New York Times obituary for for the journalist, who died recently at 91. Newman retired from NBC more than 25 years ago, and people who remember him are likely to be hazier on his journalism than on his 1970's bestsellers Strictly Speaking and A Civil Tongue, which are still in print (though only in large type and audio editions appropriate to a public of advancing diopter). But I wish they had left me out of it.

Geoff Pullum's musings on Simon Heffer's aprioristic prescriptivism ("English Grammar: Not for debate") were based on a report by the BBC, which is a reliably unreliable witness.  So I  wondered whether Mr. Heffer's usage advice was equally empty when taken straight from the source. The first sample that I found was "Strictly English: Part one", The Telegraph, 8/20/2010, which is "The first of four exclusive extracts from ‘Strictly English: the Correct Way to Write… and Why It Matters’". And it starts like this:

Even when armed with fine intentions, one can still fall into traps: for many words do not mean what one thinks they mean. In the interests of accuracy and precision, what follows is a reminder of the true meaning of some commonly misused words.

One occasionally reads in newspapers about people who have died or been injured in a car that has collided with a tree. This is remarkable, because a collision requires both parties to it to be in motion. The Latin verb collidere means to strike or clash together, and the etymology is strict. So two moving vehicles may collide, as may a car and a cyclist or even a car and a pedestrian, but not a car and a tree. Like so much of our language this is a question of logic based on the etymology; there is no perversity about it.

Various Language Log readers have been sending me to this BBC report about a British columnist called Simon Heffer, who has a book about the decline of proper language use coming out, and in order to promote it recently visited a school and talked to the children about his prescriptive notions. The BBC used this sentence as a hook, claiming that it is ungrammatical and Mr Heffer can tell you exactly why:

[1]   The Prime Minister has warned that spending cuts are necessary.

Now, set on one side the issue of whether this truly exemplifies a grammatical mistake: of course it doesn't. What interests me here is the psychological question of what could possibly, even in principle, convince someone like Simon Heffer that he was wrong.

Some Language Log readers have long suspected me of secret prescriptivist sympathies, and I'm about to add fuel to the fire by standing up for John Dryden. Sort of.

It all starts with today's SMBC. A student asks "Can I end my sentence with a preposition?", and the teacher responds "Good question! Let's see what a group of Latin-obsessed 17th century introverts decided!"  The introverts' cartooned answer:

An anonymous informant deep within corporate America ("I work at a large financial institution", he says guardedly) has seen the corporation's style guide for communications with customers, and its advice includes (guess what) this gem of cluelessness:

Use active voice rather than passive voice. Active voice is easier to read. Instead of "we have decided," write "we decided." Instead of "we will be implementing a program," write "we are implementing."

They think these are passives! And people disagree with me when I point out such things (over and over again, like a CD that has gotten stuc- stuc- stuc- stuc- stuc- stuc- stuc- stuc- stuck), and ask rhetorically where on God's green earth knowledge of elementary English grammar terminology disappeared to in the late 20th century. People — writing advisers, in fact — are scoring zero on identifying a grammatical construction they feel a need to warn other people not to use. I know I have already pointed this out a time or two, but really, this is an utterly insane situation.

A (not particularly amusing) cartoon in the July 5 New Yorker has a doctor giving a bedridden patient some food on a tray and saying: "That which doesn't kill you might give you stomach trouble."

The only reason I mention it here is that its oddly stilted wording (why not say "What doesn't kill you"?) provides an example of a case where the much-fetishized but illegitimate rule about never using which to begin an integrated relative clause is obligatorily broken: not even a New Yorker copy editor would "correct" that which doesn't kill you *that that doesn't kill you.

Here is Sandy Brindley, of Rape Crisis Scotland, quoted (in the Metro newspaper, 29 June 2010), talking about an advertisement her organization has published:

The advert has been designed to shake out ingrained prejudices many Scots have towards women who have been raped. Even though people believe they wouldn't judge a rape victim by what they wear, how drunk they were, or if they had been flirting, they often do.

Now, you're a Language Log reader; you've probably read about singular they and the prescriptivist prejudice against it. What do we want to say about the use of pronouns in the second sentence in this quotation?

I've promoted this from its origin as an update to Sunday's post "Spelling is hard". KF wrote:

My dear husband always corrects my grammar…. Spelling is difficult; walls are hard.
Many people fail to use the word hard correctly….

But KF's husband can be added to the list of those who are ignorant about hard. The OED's entry has:

5. a. Difficult to do or accomplish; not easy; full of obstacles; laborious, fatiguing, troublesome.

a1340 HAMPOLE Psalter vi. 4 Ful hard it is to be turnyd enterly til þe bryghthed and þe pees of godis lyght. c1440 Promp. Parv. 227/1 Harde yn knowynge, or warkynge, difficilis. 1559 W. CUNINGHAM Cosmogr. Glasse 97 It is as harde, and laborus, to get the Longitude. 1611 BIBLE Transl. Pref. 2 So hard a thing it is to please all. 1653 WALTON Angler ii. 60, I see now it is a harder matter to catch a Trout then a Chub. 1711 STEELE Spect. No. 36 {page}8 How hard a thing it is for those to keep Silence who have the Use of Speech. 1876 MOZLEY Univ. Serm. iv. 90 Often..what we must do as simply right..is just the hardest thing to do.

I've simply had it with all the people who keep telling me that they revere The Elements of Style because it's such a nice little book and helped them so much with their writing when they were in college that they carry it everywhere they go and give it to all their students or hand a copy to each new employee that they hire for their company yadda yadda yadda… I have decided that my campaign against Strunk and White's toxic little compendium of unfollowable dumb advice, bungled grammar claims, and outright mendacity must be taken directly to America's colleges, starting with the great universities of the East Coast. For the opening event I have chosen Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. I will speak on the Brown campus at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday night next week, April 13, in the Metcalf Chemistry Building Auditorium at 190-194 Thayer Street. Admission is free, and Language Log readers get a 30% discount off that. Be there.

I recently used the word disprefer in an email, and my spellchecker objected. That led me to a web search that convinced me that disprefer is (1) widely used in linguistics, (2) not listed in the OED, American Heritage, or Merriam-Webster online dictionaries, and (3) abhorred by some prescriptivists.  This post is about to turn into another of those Language Log rants about some prescriptivist's blunders.  My excuse for adding to this already copious genre?  In this case the self-appointed critic aims his barbs directly at "linguists and their lackeys," (Yeah, really) who he describes as "idiotic" and "disaffected… from sense and thoughtfulness."  When a guy calls you names like that and then gets three out of four of his examples wrong, it's hard to keep a civil tongue, but I'll try.