Language Log

Ben Smith and Glenn Thrush, Osama bin Laden's death brings celebration, unity – and questions", Politico 5/2/11 (emphasis added):

Two years ago, Obama tasked CIA Director Leon Panetta to prioritize the hunt for the 9/11 mastermind, a response to the perception that the Bush administration had allowed the hunt for bin Laden to back-burner.

The bold-face usage struck me as unexpected.

Tom Scocca, in Slate magazine, is full of scorn for the language of the New York Times. It is not always easy to discern his meaning (he uses a metaphor of lard in pie crusts, which I didn't quite follow), but he seems to think the Times is desperately concerned to "preserve its sacred function (or the appearance of its sacred function) of neutrally and modestly recording events, not judging them" — it struggles so hard to be neutral that it becomes vapid. He is incensed that the phrase "showed just how broadly" in the print edition was replaced in a later online edition by "raised new questions about how broadly", in this passage about the reported deaths of Gaddafi's son and grandsons in Tripoli:

And while the deaths could not be independently verified, the campaign against Libya’s most densely populated areas raised new questions about how broadly NATO is interpreting its United Nations mandate to protect civilians.

Scocca's bitterly scornful remark about the language involved is this:

There: in the disembodied implied passive, questions were raised. About the interpretation of the mandate. And just like that, we have bounced gently away from the bomb crater to a discussion about the understanding of a policy.

The disembodied implied passive? What is this, exactly?

Bob Bechtel was reading James Warren's article "The Potentially Revolutionary Political Role of Fried Chicken" (in The Atlantic) when he stumbled on this sentence:

Reaching for a New Deal is supported by the Russell Sage foundation, a bastion of research in the social sciences and due out in August.

The Russell Sage foundation is due out…? What has gone wrong here? Was he looking at a sentence with a missed comma (perhaps from a typo)? Or an overapplication of the rule saying there should be no comma before a final and?

On The New Yorker's Book Bench blog, Eileen Reynolds writes about a site called "Unsuck It" that translates corporatese: "You type in a particularly odious word or phrase—'incentivize,' say—and 'Unsuck It' spits out the plain-English equivalent, along with a sentence for context." Reynolds uses the occasion to vent about how words can change their parts of speech when they work their way into corporate jargon:

Once words enter the workplace they’re allowed to bounce about between different parts-of-speech with freewheeling fluidity. Nouns become verbs. Verbs become nouns. Sam Lipsyte’s miserably funny “The Ask” is, among other things, a brilliant riff on this alarming phenomenon.

We've grappled with such issues of anthimeria from time to time on Language Log (on the nouning of ask, for instance, see Arnold Zwicky's 2008 post). But I'm more interested in the morphology of "Unsuck It" itself.

Rodney Huddleston points out to me a remarkable development in English that seems to both of us fairly new (though of course we may be in the grip of the Recency Illusion). English adjectives generally don't take noun phrase (NP) complements. (A complement is a phrase that accompanies a word to make up a phrase having that word as head — for example, something appropriate to a particular adjective that you can add after it to make up an adjective phrase.) The number of exceptions is extraordinarily small: one example is worth (notice how we say worth my time, not *worth of my time). Such exceptional adjectives have long been noted; Fowler comments on worth in his Modern English Usage (1926), and points out that it could be called a transitive adjective. But such adjectives are extremely rare in the dictionary. And yet some new ones appear to have been creeping into the language.

"The BBC is a remarkable place", says Nigel Paine, the Head of People Development at the BBC, in his prefatory note to The BBC News Styleguide (2003); "Much of the accumulated knowledge and expertise locked in people’s heads stays that way: occasionally we share, and the result is a bit of a revelation." Paine is praising a little book which he says "represents some of John Allen's extraordinary wisdom surrounding the use of English in written and spoken communications." If you know style handbooks, it will not surprise you that Mr. Allen's extraordinary wisdom includes his views on the time-honored topic of the passive construction and why it is evil. And if you read Language Log (see this list of posts about the passive, and my recent attempt to lay out what the facts are in "The passive in English"), it will not surprise you to find that he is just as clueless about it as so many critics and usage pundits have been before him. He repeats tired old nonsense, he makes false claims about prominence and agency, and (as Language Log reader Jeremy Wheeler pointed out to me) he cannot tell actives from passives anyway.

From a Livescience.com article (about a police chief who recommends keystroke-logging your kids to obtain their passwords so you can find out where they go online) comes this disastrous tangle of a sentence, which will take hours of police time to clear up:

"When it comes down to safety and welfare of your child, I don’t think any parent would sacrifice anything to make sure nothing happens to their children," said Batelli, the father of a teenage daughter.

Neil MacFarquhar, "Unrest Spreads, Some Violently, in Middle East", NYT 2/17/2011:

From northern Africa to the Persian Gulf, governments appeared to flounder over just how to outrun mostly peaceful movements, spreading erratically like lava erupting from a volcano, with no predictable end.

The protests convulsed countries across the Middle East on Thursday , with riot police launching a sudden crackdown on thousands of people challenging the monarchy in Bahrain, firing shot guns, tear gas and concussion grenades into a tent camp to send demonstrators fleeing under clouds of stinging fumes. At least five people were reported killed.

Daniel Mahaffy points out an interesting phrase in President Obama's pre-Super Bowl interview with Bill O'Reilly:

At about 7:21, the president says:

That's saying to Americans, we're gonna each of us be responsible for our own health care.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

"In no uncertain terms" is an idiom in which the "no" and the "un-" cancel, so that the result means something like "in very specific and direct language", "very clearly", "in a strong and direct way", or perhaps "emphatically". In other words, "in no uncertain terms" means "in certain terms", construing "certain" as in certainty. The earliest example that I've been able to find is this sentence from the Chicago Tribune, July 20 1863:

Our dispatches contain another circular from the Provost Marshal General's office, and accompanying, the voice of the Government, couched in no uncertain terms, that the draft will be enforced in every loyal State, without fear or favor.

And "in no uncertain terms" is still being used that way, as in this example from today's New York Times:

After last week, the question now is: Why am I writing a post this week instead of sleeping?

When more than 200 people tell you, in no uncertain terms, that the first step to dealing with the exhaustion incurred when a child does not sleep is to find ways and moments for you, yourself, to sleep, that’s a fair question.

But recently, through the miracle of misnegation, this elderly cliché has found a new role in life.

Numerous Language Log posts by me, Mark Liberman, and Arnold Zwicky among others have been devoted to mocking people who denigrate the passive without being able to identify it (see this comprehensive list of Language Log posts about the passive). It is clear that some people think The bus blew up is in the passive; that The case took on racial overtones is in the passive; that Dr. Reuben deeply regrets that this happened is in the passive; and so on.

Our grumbling about how these people don't know their passive from a hole in the ground has inspired many people to send us email asking for a clear and simple explanation of what a passive clause is. In this post I respond to those many requests. I'll make it as clear and simple as I can, but it will be a 2500-word essay; I can't make things simpler than they are. There is no hope of figuring out the meaning of grammatical terms from common sense, or by looking in a dictionary. Passive (like its opposite, active) is a technical term. Its use in syntax has nothing to do with lacking energy or initiative, or assuming a receptive and non-directive role. And the dictionary definitions are often utterly inadequate (Webster's, for example, is simply hopeless on the grammatical sense of the word). I will try to explain things accurately, and also simply (though this is not for kids; I am writing this for grownups). If I fail, then of course the whole of your money will be refunded.

Sometimes two fairly ordinary things combine to create something bizarre. Karen Davis writes:

It seems to me that there is something deeply strange in this quote, from a 1922 novel by Joseph S. Fletcher called The Middle of Things:

"Robbery wasn't the motive. Murder was the thing in view! And why? It may have been revenge. It may have been that Ashton had to be got out of the way. And I shouldn't wonder a bit if that wasn't at the bottom of it, which is at the top and bottom of pretty nearly everything!"

"And that, ma'am?" asked Mr. Pawle, who evidently admired Miss Penkridge's shrewd observations, "that is what, now?"

"Money!"

I'm on my way to Pittsburgh for the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. And while I'm waiting for my plane, I think I have just about enough time for a question, even if I fluff it out a bit by giving you the train of thought that led up to it.