"Offhand impressions and grumpy peeves"

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Steven Pinker, "On my radar", The Guardian 8/23/2015:

4|Website: Language Log.

Do you notice grammar gaffes, wonder about the speech styles of celebrities, find yourself curious about the origin of new words and constructions? Language Log is the place to go for commentary by people who actually know their stuff – linguists and other language scientists – as opposed to the pundits and scribblers who think that their standing as writers entitles them to present their offhand impressions and grumpy peeves as proven fact.

Geoff Pullum's comment (by email):

From your mouth to God's ear, Steve!  I cannot understand why people go to pundits and scribblers who think that their standing as writers entitles them to present their offhand impressions and grumpy peeves as proven fact. They need to come to ME. My offhand impressions and grumpy peeves are much closer to proven fact…

 

 



13 Comments

  1. Guy said,

    August 24, 2015 @ 12:24 pm

    I'm reminded of a comment I read on a different blog discussing Pullum's criticism of Strunk & White that said something to the effect of "isn't Pullum being hypocritical by being just as pedantic as they are?" Comments on that blog required a pay account, so I wasn't able to point out that Pullum wasn't criticizing them for being overly pedantic, he was criticizing them for being wrong on actual assertions of fact about grammar.

  2. Geoffrey K. Pullum said,

    August 24, 2015 @ 2:27 pm

    Yes, Guy, it's true that I do have a scholarly development of empirical arguments to offer (here and here) that say Strunk and White's claims about grammatical correctness are demonstrably head-up-the-ass wrong. Thank you for pointing that out.

    But never forget, I also HATE them. So it's not all analytical detachment. I have emotions too. I actually wish Strunk and White were still alive so I could hunt them down and kill them. I hope that's clear.

  3. Chris C. said,

    August 24, 2015 @ 5:50 pm

    Being pedantic and right is insufferable. Being pedantic and wrong is a capital offense.

  4. Pflaumbaum said,

    August 24, 2015 @ 6:45 pm

    I understand, and share, the rage. But has there been much work on whether peeving is actually a significant mechanism in language change?

    For instance, CGEL notes that traditional case-marking 'errors' like 'between you and I' and 'those whom he thought were guilty' are so common that they should not be classified as ungrammatical or hypercorrections – they get the % treatment.

    But it seems a plausible hypothesis that these usages at least originated in hypercorrections. And that the hypercorrections arise to some extent from prescriptivist peeving pressure (PPP) on the part of parents, teachers, and even know-nothing pundits.

  5. Viseguy said,

    August 24, 2015 @ 7:20 pm

    GKP> But never forget, I also HATE them. So it's not all analytical
    GKP> detachment. I have emotions too. I actually wish Strunk and
    GKP> White were still alive so I could hunt them down and kill them.
    GKP> I hope that's clear.

    LOL, literally. People spend years on the couch, and many thousands of dollars, to acquire that sort of clarity. (Or used to, until the insurance companies threw cold water all over it — the couch, that is.)

  6. Guy said,

    August 24, 2015 @ 8:05 pm

    @Pflaumbaum

    There's also this. I think it would be fascinating if it could be shown that explicit instruction is the only reason "I" is used in coordinates even when the coordination is in subject position, as the data could be read to suggest.

  7. Pflaumbaum said,

    August 24, 2015 @ 9:06 pm

    @ Guy

    Indeed. I'd still love to know the answer to the question I asked in the comments to that post, re CGEL's analysis of subject-position X and me.

    It's interesting listening to my daughter and her friends (3-4 year olds) – they seem to have only me/her/him and X in subject position. I guess no-one's started trying to eradicate it yet. On the other hand, the kids haven't had much exposure to the non-instructional formal language either – although I've noticed children's TV, especially the BBC, is quite fastidious about using nominatives.

  8. Laura said,

    August 26, 2015 @ 7:11 am

    @Guy and @Pflaumbaum

    I have a vague recollection of Jack Chambers giving a talk where he went through several stigmatised non-standard things (double negation, pronoun case, etc) and he argued something along the lines of these things being more 'natural' somehow – the prescriptive versions are indeed later, taught, and marked. I can't quite recall the line of argument now but it was convincing at the time. Sorry not to have a better reference for you though. Looking at his publications, this one seems likely: "Global features of English vernaculars." Areal Features of the Anglophone World, ed. Raymond Hickey. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 261-76.

  9. djw said,

    August 26, 2015 @ 12:14 pm

    Viseguy, I don't always agree with G Pullam, but I do often find him drop-dead funny. I'm just sad he quit giving us reasons for closing the comments here; always took the sting out of not being able to read others' perceptions of his piece!

    His comment here cracked me up!

  10. DWalker said,

    August 27, 2015 @ 10:28 am

    Speaking of "me", I HATE it when popular movies have titles like "Marley and Me" or "Mac and Me" or "The Prince and Me" or "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl" or "Me and Orson Welles" or "Roger & Me" or the upcoming "Max & Me". Yuck!

    I don't know how, or if, the title to "Despicable Me" could (or should) be fixed, but somehow it doesn't sound as bad as the others.

    I actually never saw "Me and Orson Welles" just because of its title. Otherwise, I probably would have.

    Can't anyone do something about this? :-)

  11. DWalker said,

    August 27, 2015 @ 10:57 am

    Followup: I will be embarrassed if someone tells me that all of those titles are correct. However, I can't see the titles as the "object" of a thought or a sentence; they seem like the subject. (It occurs to me that Despicable Me is probably "not incorrect" because it's just a title, and doesn't fit as any part of a sentence.)

  12. Bloix said,

    August 27, 2015 @ 11:42 am

    Today: "I actually wish Strunk and White were still alive so I could hunt them down and kill them. I hope that's clear."

    Five years ago: "White was a fine craftsman."

    http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2235

    Hmm.

    BTW, I commend to all the long comment thread in that old post. I find my contributions as fresh, amusing and insightful today as they were then. ;-)

  13. Colin Fine said,

    August 29, 2015 @ 2:16 am

    DWalker: I'm not going to tell you those are 'correct',because 'correct' is a judgment of fashion, not linguistics, and I'm not interested.
    What I am going to tell you is that they are English, in a sense that Emonds argues the forms with I are not.
    Emonds argued in "Grammatically Deviant Prestige Constructions" (1985 -posted with permission on my website) that there was not enough surviving use of cases in English to allow native learners to extract the rule that prescriptivists would have us use, and naive learners substitute a different rule which is not about case

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