Language Log

Some corrections to and clarifications of my posting on by the hundreds / by hundreds / by the hundred.

On ADS-L, Fred Shapiro (following up on a lead from Barry Popik) has posted the following antedating of Father's Day, which the OED currently has from 1943:

1908 Boston Globe 19 May 10 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers)  Why doesn't somebody suggest the idea of having a "Father's day," when everybody in the country shall wear a modest violet in honor of poor Father?

I don't know why the writer suggested a "modest violet", but the idea seems never to have caught on. Instead, as the holiday was commercialized, the celebration came to center on giving "poor Father" characteristically "masculine" gifts: tools, gadgets, golf equipment, grilling equipment, supplies for hunting, fishing, and camping, items associated with sports (especially football), stock car racing, and beer drinking, and so on.

But this is Language Log, not Culture Log. So the main point of interest is the shall in the 1908 quote. First, however, some background on the holiday.

You readers are not going to like this, because you've heard too much on the topic already, and you are begging for relief; but I am going to report it anyway. My job is not to be merciful; my job is to get stuff out there, on the record. Charles Krauthammer, whom the Financial Times in 2006 described as the most influential commentator in America, is yet one more major figure who doesn't know his passive from a hole in the ground. His June 12 column in the Washington Post, "Obama Hovers From On High", says:

"On religious tolerance, he gently referenced the Christians of Lebanon and Egypt, then lamented that the 'divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence' (note the use of the passive voice)."

No, Mr Krauthammer, we do not note the use of the passive voice: clauses of the form X has/have/had led to Y are in the active voice. Now, your defenders, I know, are going to say that all you meant was that Obama did not specify the agents of the tragic violence. But tragic violence is simply a noun phrase, like mythic affluence or comic indolence. The passive has nothing to do with it. If you are noting a reluctance to come out and say who commits violence, then say that. Don't lurk behind a putative linguistic observation because you think it will sound more like someone who went to college. Did you want Obama to make the agent fully explicit? Did you want him to stand there in Cairo and say, "divisions between Sunni and Shia have led you dogma-crazed towelheads to unloose brutal violence and large-scale war on each other, killing millions of your own people, you insane bastards"? Then just say so. (And recommend a comparable-sized bit that he could have cut: this version is about 20 words longer.) Because I am getting really tired of these mealy-mouthed, misinformed, pseudo-syntactic grumblings about the passive voice. And Language Log readers, I know, are getting really sick of me saying so.

Over on the American Dialect Society mailing list, we've returned to a topic last aired there in 2007: the alternation between and and zero in numerical expressions like "two hundred (and) six" (in speech and in writing), in particular when they are used as determiners, as in "two hundred (and) six elephants". These discussions quickly range over a variety of types of numerical expressions, uses of them, and contexts for these uses. Plus a lot of back-and-forth about the acceptability of the variants.

Several sorts of numerical expressions recur in these discussions, among them those expressing a whole number plus a fraction, and those in the related case of a dollar amount plus a cent amount. Until this morning, I'd attributed the appearance of these cases (which seemed to me to be irrelevant to case above) to simple thread drift, one phenomenon reminding people of phenomena that are similar to it in some respect. But then Russ McClay posted a collection of net discussions that suggested to me that something much more interesting — something familiar to me from discussions of other alternations — is going on.

(Mark Liberman and I posted on this topic at nearly the same time. Consider this to be an amplification of Mark's posting.)

Yesterday was Strunk & White day — the actual 50th anniversary of the publication of The Elements Of Style — which National Public Radio celebrated twice. Morning Edition had "Strunk And White's Venerable Writing Guide Is 50", in which Renee Montagne interviewed Barbara Wallraff, and then in the afternoon Talk of the Nation had "A Half-Century Of 'Stupid Grammar Advice'", in which our very own Geoff Pullum fielded questions from host Neal Conan and from listeners who called or e-mailed in. You can listen to both programs here. And read some related material, like this remarkable item:

This telegram [of August 20, 1959] from California Book Co. (supplier to the Berkeley college bookstore) is an indicator of the book's early success. Placing an order for more copies, it ends with the words "Whole campus gone wild."

Plus photographs of Strunk and White.

Rhymes With Orange plays with less/fewer:

This is a familiar topic here on Language Log. Some previous postings:

ML, 11/15/06: If it was good enough for King Alfred the Great… (link)

AZ, 8/10/08: 10 English majors or less (link)

AZ, 8/31/08: More on less (link)

AZ, 9/4/08: Still more on less (link)

Following up on had did (here) and have saw (here): a note on Richard Meade Bache; an I've saw sighting from the 20's (from John V. Burke); and (from Breffni O'Rourke) an observation about different verbs DO.

Back in 2005, Mark Liberman and I (here and here and here) both took a look at certain issues relating to placement of clause adjuncts, and we touched on William Strunk's prejudice against sentence-initial however as an adjunct, as set forth in The Elements of Style. I suggested in "Fossilized prejudices about however" that Strunk had some basis for his prejudices, since novels of the time really did seem to prefer however in second position. This was a modest defense of Strunk, whose horrid little book I regard as almost entirely mistaken in the grammatical advice it purveys. Michael Stillwell has now discovered that my defense evidence was flagrantly mistaken.

A little while back, it was had did, and other uses of did, rather than done, as the PSP (past participle) of the verb DO. Non-standard PSP did is a (partial) regularization of the system of verb forms in English; all regular verbs, and a great many irregular ones as well, have identical PST (past) and PSP: jump ~ jumped ~ jumped, buy ~ bought ~ bought. PSP did improves the fully irregular pattern do ~ did ~ done to the somewhat more regular do ~ did ~ did. As I pointed out in the earlier posting, the most common non-standard partial regularization for DO is using done for the PST: do ~ done ~ done (similarly, see ~ seen ~ seen).

What I didn't say in that posting — because I've mentioned it several times in the past — is that the regularization to PSP did is in fact in the usual direction of verb regularization, which gives non-standard I have took / went / rode / wrote etc. John Cowan has now reminded me of this, and also reminds me that H. L. Mencken, in The American Language, refers to this regularization as a feature of "The Common Speech" — widespread, non-regional, non-standard American English. It now seems that the geographical and social distribution is more complex than that, that PSP did has some association with Southern varieties and with AAVE (as several correspondents have suggested to me). And that I have saw is out there too.

Looking into these things brought me to Richard Meade Bache's Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech (which I've seen on-line in the 2nd edition (1869)), with its note on I have saw.

Yesterday I got this note from a reader:

I seem to remember a Language Log post about the construction "I appreciate you coming over to help me" as opposed to the prescriptively approved "I appreciate your coming over to help me." I am in a discussion with a prescriptivist about the validity of the former but I can't find the relevant post on LL. Can you help?

There have been a couple of relevant posts over the years, but what this reader really needed was a reminder to check his copy of the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (or the concise edition of the same work).