Language Log

Anita Krishnakumar posts at Concurring Opinions on November 2 about a Supreme Court judgment by Justice Anthony Kennedy that turned quite crucially on the distinction between active and passive voice in the language of criminal statutes, only (you're ahead of me already aren't you, Language Log readers?) Justice Kennedy doesn't know his passive from a hole in the ground, so the claims made are nonsense. I see no way to read what he says that does not involve assuming that he thinks if serious bodily injury results and if death injury results are passive clauses. And the point is a general one, crucially tied to grammar: Kennedy thinks that in general "criminal statutes use the active voice to define prohibited conduct" and use the passive voice to specify mere sentencing factors associated therewith, and courts should pay attention to that distinction. Only there isn't a distinction in the statute he cites. I won't go on about it, since a couple of sensible commenters do my work for me right after the post, citing Language Log, where so many posts have been devoted to this topic (I aggregate them for reference here). But heavens above: You can get to be a Supreme Court justice, and write about actives and passives, without having any clue how that distinction is normally defined by grammarians, and without giving any alternative definition? Could we perhaps organize a few lunches at which linguistics department chairs meet with law school deans or something?

This morning's comics page featured at least two strips focusing on Twitter as a literary genre. There was Doonesbury, in which Larry King demonstrates his command of the form:

And Pearls Before Swine, in which Rat edits Pig's copy of Leaves of Grass:

Now for another piece of evidence (I gave one here) that even if you have no clue about grammar you can write grammar textbooks or reference handbooks and make good money by doing so. Here is an exercise set in Pupil Book 4 in the Nelson Grammar series (published by Thomas Nelson, now Nelson Thornes Ltd in the UK; ISBN 0-17-424706-0):

Three of the examples below are adjective phrases and three are sentences. Find the three adjective phrases. Add a verb and any other words you need to make each one into a sentence. Find the three sentences and write them with their correct punctuation.

1. thank you said Jim
2. Janet ran home
3. the poor injured duck
4. a shivering and frightened
5. give me that
6. with a heavy bag

Can you do this homework, Language Log readers? It appears to be aimed at children in elementary school, not older than 8 or 9. You will need the definition of "phrase", which is given on the previous page: "A phrase is a group of words that does not contain a verb" [sic; I swear I am not making this up]. I will now leave you to do the exercise (comments are open). Later I will come back to this and discuss it.

The comments on Geoff Pullum's recent "grammar gravy train" posting have wandered into the confused territory where the grammatical terms pronoun, possessive (or genitive), and determiner live. (The first two have a long history, going back to the grammatical traditions for Latin and Greek. The third is much more recent; OED2 takes it back only to Bloomfield's Language in 1933.) We've been over this territory on Language Log several times, from several different angles. But here's one more attempt at clearing things up.

More on the language of footwear, from this morning's Cathy:

On the base station for the wireless telephone system at my apartment there is a red light. I looked up in the manual to see what the semantics was. The relevant diagram was clear and explicit. The line pointing to that light on the picture of the base station unit said: "TAM LED". Neither "TAM" nor "LED" had been previously glossed anywhere in the manual (the diagram was fairly near the beginning, on page 10). That is a classic example of the sort of thing I refer to as nerdview.

Looking for a job? How about one where you set your own hours, you don't have a boss, you have nothing to do but write at your own pace, you end up receiving fat royalty checks, and you don't have to know anything at all about the topic that you write about? The job is to write non-fiction (textbooks and handbooks), only it's OK if you don't have a clue about the subject matter.

One word about your new career (and it's not "Plastics"): grammar! The field where nobody much cares about anything that's been discovered since the 18th century, and you don't even need to get the 18th-century stuff right!

I'll give you some examples over the next few days or weeks — it depends how much time I get (unfortunately I have a real job where I have to attend meetings, teach things that are true, respond to questions, write sensible exam questions, and so on). Here's just one example for today.

What language is this?

Here's a bit more context:

Just in case you haven't seen this: