Language Log

David Russinoff suggests to me that I should think again about the following two sentences, which featured in this recent post of mine on an apparent writing error by Megan McArdle:

1. Oddly enough, the New York Times health blog has an entry on performance reviews, which suggests that they're probably a bad idea.
2. Oddly enough, the New York Times health blog has an entry on performance reviews that suggests that they're probably a bad idea.

Russinoff draws attention to the initial adjunct oddly enough, which I had been ignoring. He remarks:

You say that the second is correct and the first is not; I say you're wrong on both counts. Don't you see? It's the "oddly enough" that does you in. The intention of the first sentence is first to report that a health blog has an entry on performance reviews, a circumstance that the reporter thinks odd. The content of the entry is then included as additional information. It's true that the sentence is ambiguous, i.e., it can be interpreted as intended or otherwise (only bacause we can't agree that a relative pronoun should have an antecedent), but that doesn't make it ungrammatical. The second sentence is unambigous but incorrect insofar as it can't possibly be interpreted as intended, unless you really want to insist that it is not merely the appearance of an entry on this subject on a health blog that is considered odd, but rather the position taken in that entry.

And you know, oddly enough, having ruminated on the data again, I've decided he is right.

Jonathan Falk did a double-take, and quite rightly, when he saw this opening sentence in a recent article by Megan McArdle in the Business section of The Atlantic:

Oddly enough, the New York Times health blog has an item on performance reviews, which suggests that they're probably a bad idea.

Unh? They're saying that the mere fact of the New York Times health blog having an item on performance reviews makes performance reviews ipso facto a bad idea? Could they possibly think that?

Finally the penny dropped, and he realized he was supposed to take the relative clause as restrictive. Under the intended sense, what suggests performance reviews are a bad idea is not the fact of the New York Times health blog having published the item; it is the content of the item.

What has gone wrong with McArdle's writing here? Could the initial misunderstanding be some kind of vindication of the purported that/which rule so beloved of the Fowler brothers?

In case anyone fails to notice what W. Kiernan has pointed out in the comments following this post, we now know that Jan Dawson was wrong about the intended meaning of the phrase practitioner of diversity in the quote from law professor Pamela Harris, and I was wrong (and others including Barbara Partee were wrong) to agree with her interpretation. Briefly, the people who read of diversity as a complement of the noun practitioner were right, and the people like Jan and me who interpreted it as a modifier were wrong — not about the grammatical possibilities, but about the writer's intent in this particular case.

In a meeting the other day I heard a colleague say something that was either the first of these or the second:

A good test of whether a course is coherent in its content is whether we can give it an aim.
A good test of whether a course is coherent in its content is whether we can give it a name.

When I give lectures on why you should not listen to prescriptivists' dimwitted prattle about the wrongness of constructions that are fully grammatical and always were, people sometimes ask me what I would regard as bad grammar, as if such cases were going to be hard to find. So occasionally I note down striking cases of failure to get English syntax right (especially written English, naturally enough), and discuss them here.

A friend (don't make me say who) with a middle-rank managerial position in a large bureaucratic organization (don't make me say which) recently received a memo informing him about which of his recommendations for staff promotions and pay increases had been successful, and part of it said:

…it is strongly recommended that you meet with staff, whom have been unsuccessful, in order to provide support after their receiving the disappointing news.

That's a rather astonishing ungrammatical case of whom, used without a shred of justification as subject of a tensed verb to which it is immediately adjacent; but also a crashingly salient case of punctuating a restrictive relative incorrectly. And the email version of the memo, amazingly, was even worse.

Dan Bilefsky, "Hungarian Right, Center and Far, Make Gains", New York Times 4/11/2010:

Hungary’s center-right opposition party won first-round parliamentary elections here on Sunday, while a far-right party, whose black-clad paramilitary extremists evoke the Nazi era, made significant gains.

Gene Buckley quoted this sentence from James R. Glenn, "The Sound Recordings of John P. Harrington: A Report on Their Disposition and State of Preservation", Anthropological Linguistics 33(4): 357-366, 1991:

[NAA] also anticipates that, once data editing is complete, information about both the Harrington sound recordings and photographs will be available on INTERNET, to which the Smithsonian recently subscribed.

Edward Wyatt ("Creators of ‘Lost’ Say the GPS Unit Is Plugged In", NYT 1/28/2010) quotes Damon Lindelof, an executive producer of Lost, exploring the use of they as an indefinite singular pronoun in free variation with he:

“There’s an inherent process when you’re ending something to sort of be thinking about the beginning,” Mr. Lindelof said. “One of the things that I think we are trying to do — all of us, the actors and the writers as well, in the sixth season — is to show the audience the before,” as well as the after.

Therefore episodes in the final season will continue to provide plenty of back story. That way viewers “have some sense of, ‘Oh, this is what he used to be and who they are now,’ ” Mr. Lindelof added. “So you really get a sense of how far that person’s come.”

Carl Voss wrote to me about this sentence in a recent humor piece by Woody Allen in The New Yorker called "Udder Madness (I had already noticed the same sentence when reading the piece):

That's why when included in last week's A-list was a writer-director in cinema with a long list of credits although I was unfamiliar with the titles I anticipated a particularly scintillating Labor Day.

It is a remarkable piece of sentence construction. Here's what's going on.

Over on ADS-L, Larry Horn read his NYT carefully:

One additional highlight of the Virginia Heffernan guido/guidette piece in today's N. Y. Times Magazine section is a nice example of a plural pronoun with singular sex-known but indefinite antecedent, a phenomenon we've discussed in the past. Here's Sammi Sweetheart, describing the role she plays in the MTV Reality show, "Jersey Shore", as quoted by Heffernan

"A Guidette takes really good care of themselves, has pretty hair, cakes on makeup, has tan skin, wears the hottest heels."

Via Wonkette and The Raw Story comes this shocking political headline from the Reuters newswire:

One can only imagine what Stephen Colbert will have to say about this.

Crash blossom of the week: Andrew Morse, "Google fans phone expectations by scheduling Android event", Total Telecom 1/4/2010.

Andrew Dowd sends me a genuine, attested case of the kind of sentence that I have elsewhere called plausible angloid gibberish. It is a particular kind of mangled comparative that somehow seems English when it isn't. It has absolutely no right to be called grammatical, and nothing can explain why it is that we (falsely) believe that it has a meaning that could be accounted for in the regular way — it doesn't and it couldn't. No syntacticians that I know of can say why it sort of slips by, in comprehension and sometimes (as here) even in production. The sentence came from http://www.backspace.com/notes/2004/06/, citing AdAge, and it reads thus:

In Michigan and Minnesota, more people found Mr Bush's ads negative than they did Mr Kerry's.

Complete and utter syntactic nonsense. And yet when you read it you see what they meant long before you realize that they couldn't have meant it.