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About a month ago, Brad DeLong took Ross Douthat to task for his unpleasant description of a failed undergraduate hook-up ("Fear of Reese Witherspoon Look-Alikes on the Pill", 3/16/2009). DeLong made his case mainly by quoting Douthat's own words, from p. 184 of his 2005 book Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. The quoted passage was picked up and reproduced in more than a dozen other blog posts, for example in Wonkette ("Misogynist Neck-Beard Ross Douthat Shares his Sexy Stories", 3/18/2009).

It's hard to disagree with the rather negative tone of the comments on Mr. Douthat's attitude towards the young woman "who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon", and who "bored and somewhat disgusted" him by "drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks" and "pushing her tongue into my mouth". Perhaps the most temperate of these remarks was "it's clear he is no gentleman".

But I'm here to defend Douthat from the many commenters who also accused him of being an incompetent writer — e.g. Froborr at slacktivist.com who suggested that "once again we note the curious association between being a horrible person and being a bad writer".

There have been many horrible people, orders of magnitude less nice than Ross Douthat, who were excellent writers. And in this case, the bizarre solecism attributed to Douthat was actually a scribal error on the part of Brad DeLong.

Here's the passage as DeLong quotes it, with the offending sentence indicated in bold:

One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend's parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point–"Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?" she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn't sure what to say, but then I wasn't sure this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business… and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered–"You know, I'm on the pill…"

Comments on this included:

Your ability to what? Spill out of pink pajamas?
His ability to WHAT??? Get an erection?
To do what! Egads, my students write better than this.
Uh, do “most Harvard guys” write sentences like this? WTF does it mean?
His ability to spill? Vomit? Semen?

Now, we linguists, like everyone else, sometimes learn that our ideas of grammaticality  differ radically from those of some other people, a phenomenon that I've called "WTF grammar".  And verb-phrase ellipsis is one of the areas where judgments often differ.  But when I read DeLong on Douthat, I was pretty sure that in this case, the omission of the verb phrase was way outside the bounds of grammatical variation in English, and had to be a mistake rather than an idiolectal or stylistic quirk. My only question was whether the mistake was made by Brad DeLong or by Ross Douthat (and his publisher).

Yesterday afternoon, I happened to be in the library, and so I checked the relevant section of Privilege. As a result, I can reveal that Brad DeLong was the (grammatically) guilty party:  what those overflowing breasts threatened was Ross Douthat's ability to breathe.

Here's the full passage, with a bit of context at both ends:

Hooking up with people outside the Harvard bubble was always easier, or so everyone knew ("dropping the H-bomb" is the campus term for luring a girl to bed by casually telling her where you go to school). […]

My own attempts to drop the H-bomb peaked the summer after my grand freshman failure. I wasted fruitless hours at UConn frats and seedy basement parties, making desperate conversation with various young women — "Beer Slut," my friends called one; "Stumpy," they nicknamed another — the hopes of burying Rachel Polley's memory with a string of conquests.

One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend's parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point — Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want? she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn't sure what to say, but then I wasn't sure that this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to breathe. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business . . . and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered —

"You know, I'm on the pill . . ."

I'm on the pill. . . . She wasn't from Harvard, but on that night, in that dank basement bedroom, she spoke for all of us, the whole young American elite. Not I love you, not This is incredible, not Let's go all the way, but I'm on the pill. Because that, after all, was the critical information.

In general, I have a high opinion of the collective wisdom of the internet. But after many re-posts of DeLong's quote from Douthat, and dozens of comments on the "threatened my ability to" sentence, you'd think that someone in the reality-based community would have checked the text before this.

April 18, 2009 @ 6:47 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Syntax, Variation

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