Language Log

… is needed, to figure out what happened here, in John Lahr's review of "John Guare's rollicking play 'A Free Man of Color'" (the New Yorker 11/29/2010 p. 88):

For the price of fifteen million dollars – more than two hundred million in today's money – the newly United States unexpectedly found itself with an additional eight hundred and twenty-eight thousand square miles of uncharted territory, which would eventually be divided among fourteen states.

Perhaps the most illiterate phishing spam yet: ignoring the incompetence of having Velez Restrepo as the sender, jg_van88 (at a Chinese address) as the reply-to, and Mr(.) John Galvan as the alleged sender, with the X-Accept-Language set to Spanish, this message has at least 20 linguistic errors in the text, which is roughly one for each four words.

From gvelez@une.net.co
Wed Dec 15 11:11:57 2010
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 03:11:43 -0800
From: velez restrepo guillermo <gvelez@une.net.co>
Subject: Comprehend This Proposal
Bcc:
Reply-to: jg_van88@w.cn
X-Mailer: Sun Java(tm) System Messenger Express 7.3-11.01 64bit (built Sep 1 2009)
X-Accept-Language: es
Priority: normal

Good day,

I am Mr John Galvan a staff of a private offshore AIG Private bank united kingdom.

I have a great proposal that we interest and benefit you, this proposal of mine is worth of £15,500,000.00 Million Pounds.I intend to give Four thy Percent of the total funds as compensation for your assistance. I will notify you on the full transaction on receipt of your response if interested, and I shall send you the details.

Kind Regards,
Mr. John Galvan

In his short but cutting review of Simon Heffer's Strictly English, Steven Poole remarks that the book "condemns hanging participles yet perpetrates a monster (on p165, too tedious to quote here)." What was this tedious monster, I feel sure you Language Log readers are asking? The sentence in question is the second one in this quotation (from the beginning of a section; I underline the relevant phrase):

Partridge has a long entry in Usage and Abusage on the word got – he could as easily have made the entry about the word get – but, if anything, this unusually strict grammarian lets the promiscuous and often thoughtless use of this term off lightly.³ Without detracting from Fowler's point that the Anglo-Saxon is to be preferred to the Romance at all times, the use of the verb to get in an increasing number of contexts is not merely "slovenly" (Partridge's word): it is downright confusing.

---

3. Usage and Abusage, p136.

Is that really a mistake?

Everybody acquainted with colloquial English knows that Yes has alternations in pronunciation: it may lose its final [s] and add a centralizing offglide to become Yeah, and it may pick up an alternative final consonant, an unreleased [p] (simulating the sudden closure of the lips at the end of the utterance), to make Yep. No also gets a final unreleased [p] sometimes, hence the spelling Nope (notice that in each case there is a conventional spelling of the [p]-final pronunciation for use when direct reporting speech, e.g. in novels). But my colleague Heinz Giegerich just pointed out to me a surprising constraint on the final-[p] pronunciations: for a long time those pronunciations have been current only as single word utterances.

In particular, he noted (on receiving an email from a Chinese student who agreed to a meeting by writing "Oh, yep", and noticing that it seemed odd) that the [p]-final pronunciations don't seem to occur when preceded by the interjection oh.

Lady Bracknell, in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, is one of the most terrifyingly pedantic and correctly spoken characters in all of English theater ("a monster," Jack Worthing says of her, "without being a myth, which is rather unfair"). And I have mentioned her usage in lectures on numerous occasions to point out, when talking about preposition stranding, that she does strand prepositions. But as I watched Mark Thomson's wonderful production of the play at Edinburgh's Lyceum Theatre last Friday night (get tickets now, readers in eastern Scotland), I suddenly noticed something new about what she says when Jack Worthing gives his age:

LADY BRACKNELL: … How old are you?
JACK: Twenty-nine.
LADY BRACKNELL: A very good age to be married at.

A preposition phrase (PP) like at the age of 29 is very clearly an temporal adjunct, not a complement. So Lady Bracknell is prepared to strand a preposition even in a temporal adjunct PP!

I'm not quite sure what went wrong with this sentence (Metro [Scottish edition] Wed 6 Oct 2010, page 19; can't find it anywhere online), which is a quote from Erin Arvedlund, the author of Madoff:

‘Madoff was just the human face of this lie that Wall Street told us and that we told one another — that the endless rise in everything we owned was too good to be true.’

It seems to be a kind of undernegation. But I can't quite see what to do to put it right.

Take a look at the use of the underlined verb in this recent story about an incident of boorish locker-room behavior toward a female reporter:

In the locker room, she was subjected to whistles and catcalls, eventually tweeting that she was avoiding eye contact with players.

Tweet is an invented verb, so it provides an interesting little experiment in syntactic change. It takes content clauses with the subordinator that, as the above example shows. Can it take a direct object plus content clause, like tell in She told him that she was leaving? Apparently so: if you Google for tweeted him that she, you get about 3,400 Google hits.

Every time a post or comment on Language Log mentions, in any context, the prescriptive disapproval of preposition stranding (where a preposition is separated from its logically associated complement, as in What are you looking at?), e.g. in this post, we get commenters (who, incidentally, seem never to have read the site before) tussling with each other to be the first to inscribe two routinized types of comment.

One type says "I think a preposition is a fine thing to end a sentence with!", or words very much to that effect (unaware that instances of this lame "look-I'm-violating-the-rule" joke have been going on since at least the 1700s). The other type says, "This is nonsense up with which I shall not put!" (invariably thinking that they are quoting Sir Winston Churchill, though Ben Zimmer definitively refuted that misattribution years ago in a post that Mark and I subsequently included in our book, and it is enormously annoying to us that still no one is aware of Ben's discovery).

Unable to bear any longer the tedious work of seeking out all the instances of these two comment types so I can delete them, I have decided that from now on I will hunt down the relevant commenters and kill them.

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.

John McIntyre writes a column in the Baltimore Sun's online content pages called "Leave it lay" in which he discusses the perennial difficulty of getting students to distinguish the verbs lie and lay in their writing. (See my post Lie or lay? Some disastrously unhelpful guidance for the details of the two horribly intertwined paradigms.) He recommends giving the topic a rest, since teaching it is such a dead loss as regards imparting really valuable information. And a commenter named Tom (the second commenter on the post) immediately pipes up to say this:

The point you make is indeed true, however the example of lie and lay is a curious one. In Australia, the word lie not only survives, but has not become confused with lay in the slightest. The two retain their distinct meanings more or less unabated, forming a sharp contrast to the developments in the US. I would imagine the same would be true of most other English-speaking countries and those learning English as a second language outside the US.

When will people learn that nowadays everyone can fact-check linguistic claims of this sort?

David Walchak is a senior at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois. He has a proposal for a tiny change in spelling conventions that will enhance semantic clarity in certain situations. He writes:

I was trying to take notes for European History the other day and ran into a clarity issue that I had trouble resolving. I was trying to describe the legal situation of peasants in the middle ages. I wrote this sentence in my notes:

The peasants of the middle ages were under their lords' legal jurisdiction. That sentence is not quite clear. It is unclear how many lords each peasant had (one). So I rephrased: The peasants of the middle ages were under their lord's legal jurisdiction. This is more clearly wrong the previous attempt, it implies that there is only one lord for all the peasants. This conundrum led me to a grammar invention–the paired apostrophe. The paired apostrophe is used to imply singular possession of many people. Here is how rewrote the sentence: The peasants of the middle ages were under their lord's' legal jurisdiction. I think this works, though it basically functions as a replacement for the use of respective. Here's a final example: All the kids told stole their parent's' car. It could be rewritten, All the kids stole their respective parents' cars and be totally understandable. I guess I at least cause a net-gain in word economy.

Coby Lubliner wrote to ask:

This morning, on NPR's Morning Edition, Elizabeth Blair discussed Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" sequel and said (seemingly reading from a prepared text) that the new Gordon Gekko "rents instead of owns". What do you think of this phrasing, compared with (what I think of as) the standard "instead of owning" (or maybe "rather than owns")? Are there precedents for a finite verb as the object of a preposition?

Well, I ain't no syntactician, as Cow Cow Davenport didn't say, and my copy of CGEL is on the other side of the world, but I guess that I can discuss Elizabeth Blair's wording until a member of the Syntacticians Union shows up.

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?