"Is it the passive voice you don't like?"
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Mary Harris, "Newsflash: Coronavirus Ain’t Going Nowhere", Slate 8/9/2021:
I was a little hesitant to speak with Dr. Bernard Ashby. Ashby works in Florida, taking care of COVID patients. He is bearing witness to that state’s record-breaking surge of infections at the moment. It’s not that I didn’t think Ashby would have interesting things to say. It’s just: How many times can you repeat the exact same thing? Wear a mask indoors. Get vaccinated. Support health care workers.
But when we got on the phone, Ashby sounded just as frustrated as I am: “The transmission rate is ridiculous down here. Patients are coming in by the boatload. They’re younger, they’re sicker. And unfortunately, we weren’t really prepared for the surge that we’ve gotten” […]
On Monday’s episode of What Next, I spoke with Ashby about what it’s like inside Florida’s surge. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. […]
Ashby: This is indicative of our health care system as a whole. Vaccination rates have always been low in certain demographics prior to the pandemic. Access to care has always been an issue in certain demographics prior to the pandemic. We talk a lot about disparities, and I actually dislike those terms: disparities and inequality, all that, yada, yada.
Harris: Is it the passive voice you don't like?
What does Harris mean by "passive voice" here? Her idea seems to be that terms like disparities and inequality don't assign responsibility for the situation.
Reader A.S., who sent in the link, asked "Are we at a point now where we start acknowledging secondary meanings of the term 'passive voice'"?
In fact we're long past that point — I wrote an obituary for the grammatical term more than a dozen years ago — "'Passive Voice' — 1397-2009 — R.I.P.", 3/12/2009:
I'm afraid that the traditional sense of passive voice has died after a long illness. It has ceased to be; it's expired and gone to meet its maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It's an ex-grammatical term.
Its ghost walks in the linguistics literature and in the usage of a few exceptionally old-fashioned intellectuals. For everyone else, what passive voice now means is "construction that is vague as to agency".
A bit later, I suggested that the figurative extensions of the term are broader than that:
[T]he ordinary-language meaning, struggling to be born, remains inchoate, a sludgy mixture of dessicated grammatical residues and vaguely sexualized associative goo. Sometimes passive voice is used to mean "vague about who's at fault", which seems to be the grammatical sense gone adrift; sometimes it means "listless, energyless, lacking in vigor", which is one of the more general, non-grammatical senses of passive; sometimes it seems to mean "on the fence, not taking sides", which is a sort of transmuted combination of the two.
There are dozens of other LLOG posts discussing (various aspects of) the issue, including the idea that writers should be admonished not to use the passive voice (whatever it actually is):
"When men were men, and verbs were passive", 8/4/2006
"The direct and vigorous hyptic voice", 8/5/2006
"How to defend yourself from bad advice about writing", 11/1/2206
If you're curious about what the grammatical term actually means, check out Geoff Pullum's post "The passive in English", 1/24/2011, or the version on his website preceding the list of relevant LLOG posts, to which we can add a few more:
"Passive problem", 5/13/2015
"Another passive-hating Orwell wannabe", 7/6/2015
"The passives of PricewaterhouseCoopers", 2/27/2017
"Mid-voice crisis: Beyond active and passive", 8/5/2017
"He lapsed into the passive voice", 8/17/2017
"The Museum of the Passive Voice", 2/7/2021
J.W. Brewer said,
August 11, 2021 @ 10:45 am
FWIW Dr. Ashby has apparently been affiliated (whether as a student, medical resident, post-doctoral fellow, or professor) with quite an impressive string of high-falutin' universities, including Columbia, Cornell, Johns Hopkins and Princeton. It's perhaps worth emphasizing that mastering the traditional labels of old-fashioned 8th-grade grammar is no longer part of the expected cultural capital of even the most well-credentialed-on-paper Americans.
I do think the decline (now maybe three generations back) of Latin as a ubiquitous subject among those who would end up going to medical school etc. may be a key factor. The usual descriptivist criticism of old-fashioned approaches to school-taught English grammar is that they were trying to squeeze the somewhat different facts of English into a conceptual schema that had been developed to make sense of the facts of Latin. But the upside was that when you actually took Latin-as-such the labels and categories all made sense and you could then follow their traditional application to the facts of English in a way that made sense even if your 8th-grade English teacher had not explained it very well. (And even if Huddleston/Pullum etc thought that there were better labels and categories for the facts of English.)
Michael Watts said,
August 11, 2021 @ 11:18 am
Wellll…..
That argument seems fine in general, but I don't think it applies to the passive voice. There just isn't a difference between the concept of the passive voice as it applies to Latin and the concept of the passive voice as it applies to English. And while modern high credentials are no longer supposed to include Latin, they are supposed to include "the foreign language of your choice" — and no matter what foreign language you study, the English passive voice will need to be covered as part of that study.
I am given to understand that Spanish doesn't really have a grammatical passive voice — you can't distinguish between "the egg was eaten" and "the egg ate itself". (More relevant if we consider "he was killed" vs "he killed himself".) But — assuming that's true — the concept of promoting what would normally be the object of the verb "eat" to the grammatical role of subject is still there, and how are you going to explain the meaning of such a sentence without covering the passive voice? How are you going to explain how to translate English passives into Spanish without describing what English passives are?
Martin said,
August 11, 2021 @ 11:30 am
Spanish does have the passive voice (el huevo fue comido, literally, 'the egg was eaten'), only in certain instances it is more elegant to use the active voice with a reflexive pronoun (se comió el huevo, literally, 'itself ate the egg' or el huevo se comió, literally, 'the egg itself ate').
Daniel Barkalow said,
August 11, 2021 @ 12:01 pm
Harris's question makes a reasonable amount of sense with the non-idiomatic meanings of "passive" and "voice": "Is it because they sound like there is no activity that causes and maintains this situation?" or just "Is it the passivity in the way of speaking?" So it might be not a metaphorical extension of the idiom, but that she wanted to say approximately what those words would mean if they weren't language-specific jargon, and the familiarity of that particular phrase influenced her wording.
Cervantes said,
August 11, 2021 @ 12:18 pm
I think there is no question but that people use "passive voice" to mean "construction that does not assign agency." Of course it's entirely possible to assign agency using the passive voice: "The knuckleball was invented by Eddie Cicotte," and it's entirely appropriate when you want to emphasize the object of agency rather than the agent. A clear example is victimization: "Matilda was mugged." The story is about Matilda so that's the only way to tell it. If we know who did it, "Matilda was mugged by Theodore" is the right way to say this, unless we're telling a story about Theodore.
However, the PV makes it easy to omit the agent: "Mistakes were made," and that's what people find objectionable. I certainly find it objectionable in academic writing, especially in social sciences: "The instruments were pilot tested with 10 respondents and revised accordingly." Somebody did this. the myth of the disembodied investigator undermines the very foundations of social science.
The examples given in the post, however, are not passive voice at all, rather the subjects of the clauses are abstractions. It is possible to make the subject of a sentence a consequence of an unnamed agent, which could be considered evasive in some cases.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 11, 2021 @ 12:18 pm
I don't know how Spanish verbal constructions are typically taught in U.S. schools (or in the schools of Hispanophone countries), but my thesis is based on the fact that, unlike either English or Spanish, Latin has a *real* passive voice that is marked by inflectional endings and that you have to learn by heart in great detail when you are learning how to fully conjugate a generic Latin verb through all 200+ inflectional permutations.
Spanish, like English, uses a periphrastic construction (one essentially identical to the English construction – even German is bit more different than English) to accomplish more or less the same semantic function as Latin's inflectionally-marked explicit passive voice. Anglophones who cannot consistently apply the English label "passive voice" to the relevant periphastic construction and only that construction still nonetheless use the construction perfectly correctly, and they can presumably learn to use it correctly in Spanish while still remaining muddled on the label (or reverting to being muddled after they pass the test they needed to be temporarily unmuddled for).
My overall theory here (which of course could be wrong …) is that when categories like "voice" and "mood" and even "tense" are as explicitly marked in inflectional morphology as they are in Latin, it's easier for the technical grammatical meanings to be mastered and eventually seem intuitive, whereas in a less inflected language it is easier to never get past thinking of "voice" and "mood" less as categories and more as vague poetic metaphors that can be repurposed as needed.
I guess it would be interesting to know whether Hispanophones these days exhibit a similar phenomenon of using "voz pasiva" as a loose metaphor for deprecated phrasings that don't exhibit the specific subject+inflected-form-of-ser+participle construction and not consistently being able to apply that label correctly to instances of that construction?
David L said,
August 11, 2021 @ 12:22 pm
@JWB: at school in England, I learned French, and also took a year of Latin before switching to German. It's certainly true in these classes, grammatical concepts were taught with some care, and that helped me understand the corresponding ideas in English.
But that's a strange and indirect way of acquiring an understanding of the grammar of one's native language. The fundamental problem was that we got next to nothing in the way of instruction in English grammar, so picking it up by analogy was the best we could do. Rather than reinstating Latin (which BoJo apparently wants to do, for unrelated reasons), the solution should be to have better instruction in English grammar from the outset.
Peter Taylor said,
August 11, 2021 @ 12:28 pm
@J.W. Brewer, on the subject of agency, what's the relevance of Dr Ashby's educational affiliations? It was Mary Harris who brought up the subject of the passive voice.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 11, 2021 @ 12:52 pm
@Peter Taylor: I fear I misread the passage and incorrectly identified who was speaking when. My apologies to Dr. Ashby. Ms. Harris, FWIW, appears to be a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. I daresay she may be one of many graduates of that institution who failed to avail herself of the opportunity to take a class with Mark Liberman or any other member of the linguistics department.
@David L.: My own admittedly radical view is that no one should really need explicit in-school instruction in the grammar of their native language. Bad and half-hearted teaching of English grammar, as is ubiquitous in both the US and UK, is worse than nothing. You end up as noted above with students who remember having been told to avoid the passive voice but can't go back through something they've drafted and correctly identify which sentences this bad advice applies to.
What schools in Anglophone countries should do for LEP students and/or students whose native variety of English is significantly different from the standard/prestige variety is a different question. Although I suspect "not what they're currently doing" is part of the answer.
Jerry Packard said,
August 11, 2021 @ 2:31 pm
Mandarin has interesting corresponding cases. The particles bei4 (被), rang4 (让), jiao4 (叫) and gei3 (给) all mark the passive; all of them may be followed by the agent+verb, while bei4 and gei3 may be followed directly by the verb without assigning agency.
The most interesting contemporary usage is with the verb ‘to commit suicide’ zi4sha1 自杀 self-kill, where a person can now be said to have bei4 zi4sha1 le ‘to have committed suicide’ ("*to have been suicided"), implying an agency other than the self, with the committer of the nefarious action (agent) being left open to conjecture.
David L said,
August 11, 2021 @ 2:44 pm
no one should really need explicit in-school instruction in the grammar of their native language
That's somewhat like saying we can all learn how to drive a car without knowing how it works – it's true, but at the same time I think it's helpful to have an idea of how the machinery operates.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 11, 2021 @ 3:22 pm
@David L. When I was young I had a mechanically-detailed clear-plastic mockup of a car that showed how the steering wheel worked, how the rotation of the crankshaft in the engine made its way through the transmission/driveshaft/differential to rotate the rear wheels (front-wheel-drive wasn't really a thing in the U.S. back then) etc. The fact that my father had studied mechanical engineering may have had something to do with why we had this in our house.
Fast forward to the next generation, and my attempts to convince my oldest child at age 16 (good reading knowledge of Latin and has subsequently started on Greek) that she should understand those mechanical rudiments of how an exploding air/gasoline mixture inside the cylinders made the wheels turn as a precondition to learning to drive were met with extreme skepticism and non-cooperation. By the time my second child was old enough for me to teach her how to drive (in the middle of a pandemic while I was working from home, which actually made the paternal-instruction process logistically easier) I didn't even try.
That said, I will tell any of my children (and anyone else imprudent enough to listen) that I think part of a good general education ideally ought to include the sort of things about how language works that you would learn in a decent college-level Intro to Linguistics class. I do not think our existing inventory of junior high school English teachers are necessarily well-positioned to convey that content.
David Marjanović said,
August 11, 2021 @ 3:51 pm
When I read this, I was enlightened.
That alone, not Latin, would explain why no such phenomenon is happening in German: we just call it Passiv, not *passive Stimme or anything like that.
If by "real" you mean "synthetic", why don't you just say so? The English and Spanish passive is just as grammaticalized as the Latin one – arguably more so given the deponentia (formally passive-only verbs with active meanings) of Latin.
Admittedly it may make less sense to call the passive a "voice" in English than in Latin; I've never looked into that.
I agree, and got such instruction for my native German long before I started Latin. To a large extent it wasn't "here's how to do this correctly" (though we didn't all know the finer points of Standard German!), but rather just an introduction to what the terms mean so we could, among other things, reapply them to foreign languages later.
Do you mean "they're dead, and it was officially declared a suicide but looks very suspiciously like an extrajudicial execution"? I have seen to have been suicided for this in English (most recently about Jeffrey Epstein), along with to have been disappeared (in Argentina during the military dictatorship in particular) and… not sure if I've seen to have been resigned ("they were pressured to resign till they actually did it, but everyone denies there was any pressure") in English, but I think I have in German, and the corresponding innovative synthetic verb form in Hebrew, crossing the vowel patterns of the passive and the reflexive, is famous.
Rick Rubenstein said,
August 11, 2021 @ 4:07 pm
The shift in usage makes it sort of a purely-semantic eggcorn. If you don't know or don't recall what the hell a "voice" is linguistically, it's perfectly natural to reinterpret "passive voice" as "weak or agentless tone".
Gregory Kusnick said,
August 11, 2021 @ 5:26 pm
The way I read it, what Ashby doesn't like about "disparities" and "inequality" is not that they're passive or agentless; it's that they're euphemisms.
Antonio L. Banderas said,
August 11, 2021 @ 5:43 pm
Garner reads on SUICIDE,
A. And self-killing; self-murder; self-slaughter; felo-de-se. The five terms are generally synonymous, though self-murder/-slaughter are charged with extremely negative connotations.
Suicide and self-killing are broad terms that include every instance in which a person intentionally causes his or her own death. Suicide used to be included within the definition of homicide (which refers not to a crime but to the killing of a person, whether lawful or unlawful.)
Felo-de-se is a euphemism either for a person who commits, or for the act of, suicide. See -cide.
B. In the early 18th century, suicide took on the secondary sense of “someone who dies by his or her own hand.” Earlier synonyms, now less frequently employed, include self-destroyer, self-killer, self-murderer, self-slayer, and felo-de-se.
C. The verb has been used intransitively, reflexively and redundantly , and transitively and ridiculously . But all these verb uses sound trendy and semiliterate.
✳suicide victim, a seeming oxymoron,suggests a dogmatic stand on the issue whether suicide is ever justifiable. The less doctrinaire equivalent is suicide (n.)
The conventional verb construction is "to commit suicide". Some mental-health advocates discourage this usage as outdated and stigmatizing; suggested alternatives include "die by suicide", "suicide" (as a verb; an anthimeria), or rephrasings without the word suicide.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/suicide#Verb
Regarding -CIDE, Garner says,
It denotes either the act of slaying [fr. L. -cīdium “cutting, killing”] or someone who slays [fr. L. -cīda “cutter, killer”]. Hence fratricide is either the killing of one’s brother or someone who kills his or her brother.
Famicide (= the destroyer of someone’s reputation) was once used as a synonym for slanderer. Prolicide (= the act of killing offspring either before or soon after birth) is broad enough to subsume both feticide and infanticide.
The OED records uxoricide (= the slayer of one’s wife) but not mariticide (= the slayer of one’s husband), which can be deduced only from the adjective mariticidal. Scientists have developed algicides, fungicides, germicides, and insecticides (known also as pesticides).
maidhc said,
August 11, 2021 @ 5:46 pm
David Marjanović : not sure if I've seen to have been resigned ("they were pressured to resign till they actually did it, but everyone denies there was any pressure") in English.
I haven't heard that, but resigned (with air quotes) is not uncommon. I've heard it with RIF ("reduction in force", a mealy-mouthed term for layoffs). Like this:
Management: In order to right-size our valued employee resources, the company will implement a RIF.
Employee 1: Whatever happened to Bob? I haven't seen him around.
Employee 2: Oh, he was RIFfed.
As I recollect, to have been disappeared came into English directly from Spanish. News reports of the time frequently referred to los desaparecidos, there being no such convenient noun in English.
Bathrobe said,
August 11, 2021 @ 5:54 pm
In brief, “被自杀” refers to a fishy verdict of suicide. If someone is said to 被自杀 (have been suicided), it means “that person’s death has been put down to suicide but I don’t believe it”.
Bathrobe said,
August 11, 2021 @ 6:28 pm
Chinese 被 traditionally has an adversative sense that has been carried over even as the “European passive” (mechanically applied passive) has become more common in the modern language.
English, of course, has two recognised passives: the traditional “be passive” and the more colloquial “get passive”, the latter of which also tends to have an adversative meaning.
Michael Watts said,
August 11, 2021 @ 7:37 pm
Two points:
– The Latin passive voice is realized in an inflectional suffix on the verb when the verb has imperfective aspect. When the verb has perfective aspect, the passive voice is realized through periphrasis, much like the English be-passive. English "I was killed" corresponds to Latin necatus sum, literally "[I am] [killed]". So it's challenging to claim that Latin's passive is "more real" than English's is. There's not a difference.
– There are more deponent verbs in Latin than there are in English. But the category exists in English; the deponent Latin verb nascor is equally deponent in its English form to be born.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 11, 2021 @ 8:11 pm
Maybe I'm having a nihilistic day, but I'm a bit suspicious of the whole notion of "deponent verb" as meaning something more than "verb in a foreign language that uses a passive construction to express what would be expressed by an active construction in my own language." But why treat your own language as the baseline that the foreign language is implicitly faulted for deviating from? Do you think there is some objective semantics of the situation that the syntax of your language correctly mirrors but the foreign language gets bollixed up?
For "nascor" as "being born" (or the perhaps-more-adversative "getting born"), claiming that it's a deponent in some sort of objective semantic sense means claiming that the baby rather than the mother is the should-presumptively-be-nominative-case actor in the situation. Why would you think that is the objectively correct framing of the situation? That's not at least at first glance how childbirth actually works, in terms of which participant performs the labor, as it were. ("Born" in English is a sort of relict participle of "to bear," which is the active verb for what the mother does in childbearing.)
Now, it is true that saying (in English) "I was born in 19xx" is normal and unmarked, whereas saying "My mother bore me in 19xx" is in most contexts a bit odd. But I think that can be explained by pragmatic factors unrelated to any objective active/passive distinction.
junkmailsink@gmail.com said,
August 12, 2021 @ 3:26 am
I think there's more to the notion of a deponent verb than that. Most Latin deponent verbs don't have active forms. (As is also true of to be born.) Videor is a Latin verb that is syntactically passive and means "seem; appear". Morphologically, it is the passive of video meaning "see". And for videor, you could make a strong argument that it really is just the passive of video, and Latin happens to use a passive verb there.
But most deponent verbs aren't like that; they exist only in passive forms. And they have special grammar that goes beyond the fact that their form is passive.
The Latin participial system is defective. Future participles have both active and passive forms. Present participles have only active forms. And perfect participles have only passive forms. Deponent verbs are an exception; the perfect participle of a deponent verb such as sequor may be active (secutus, "having followed") or passive (secutus, "having been followed"). This is not possible for non-deponent verbs. On the analysis where Latin uses a passive construction to convey what in another language would use an active verb, this would not be possible — only the active sense of the participle would make any sense.
I disagree. I agree that "born" in English is a relic of a past status as the participle of "to bear". But we can state definitively that this is not true of the modern language. One thing we can note is that the participle of "bear" is still around, and it is spelled "borne". But that's not a particularly strong point. We can also note that an agent cannot be supplied to the verb, whereas if to be born were merely the passive form of a little-used active construction there would be no difficulty in saying "I was born by [my mother or whatever the agent should be]." Rather, when the mother is specified, you would say "he was born to [whoever]" or, much more archaically, "born of [whatever]". Finally, we can observe that bear is not the active verb in modern English for what the mother does in childbearing; that verb is give birth.
As to this more specifically:
I'm claiming that to be born is deponent in that (1) it is a verb; (2) it is syntactically passive; and (3) no active form of the verb exists. At the most basic level, this makes it parallel to the many verbs which have no passive form. (Most obviously, to be, but in general this is much more common.) As far as objective semantics, the most I'd claim is that for an verb that contemplates only a single semantic role (such as to be born — more than one role might be supplied, but only one is required) it is always possible for a verb to exist that describes the same situation in the active voice. Thus, if a language offers only a passive option, the language is using a passive construction where it was fundamentally not required, and this is odd enough to be worthy of note.)
There are stronger claims you could make — my semantics classes trained me that you should look at the roles involved in an event, assign "agency points", and claim that the subject of an active verb must be whatever role possesses the most agency points — but I don't actually believe in that model. Verbs are what they are, and I refuse to follow my training to its logical conclusion that it isn't possible to say "Brad was walking down the street when something occurred to him". But I am willing to say that for e.g. loquor, to speak, there is a minimum of one role, that role possesses nearly the maximum possible amount of theoretical agency points, that role possesses far more agency than any of the available optional roles, that role is the subject of other similar verbs expressing the same action such as dico and inquit, and therefore it is objectively strange that that one required role is the object of the hypothetical active verb rather than being its subject.
Michael Watts said,
August 12, 2021 @ 3:31 am
I should also note that Latin deponent verbs do have present active participles, and they have active senses. This would also be impossible under the theory that what we call "deponent verbs" are just ordinary passive verbs.
Michael Watts said,
August 12, 2021 @ 3:34 am
(That is to say, the agency assigned by the active participle loquens is identical to the agency assigned by the passive verb loquitur — the noun with which loquens agrees is the speaker, and so is the subject of loquitur, despite the fact that one of them is an active form and one is a passive form.)
Michael Watts said,
August 12, 2021 @ 3:35 am
I provided a quite lengthy response to J.W. Brewer before the two short addenda above – please restore that comment.
John Walden said,
August 12, 2021 @ 6:01 am
I was sent to an Edward VI grammar school in England where I was taught French, German, Latin, English and a little Greek. All with copious amounts of parsing. We were never told, as far as I can remember, that any avoidance of the passive was recommended when English was used. I think it must be an American English stricture more than a British one.
It's true that Orwell wasn't keen on passives, but he was concerned with weaselly political writing rather than with general style.
There is though some avoidance of the more cumbersome passive in many everyday and thus perhaps higher frequency contexts: 'My novel is selling well, a chicken is cooking, a piano is playing and my shirts iron at a low temperature'. Is that a more BrE thing? I don't know. Nor do I know what it is called: Middle, Ergative? So much for grammar school!
Julian said,
August 12, 2021 @ 7:11 am
"[in Latin] future participles have both active and passive forms."
I'm confused. Can you give examples please?
Julian said,
August 12, 2021 @ 7:15 am
If we allow that the meaning of the grammatical term 'passive' has changed, the problem is –
– no-one seems to know quite what it has changed to
– it makes the common usage advice 'avoid passives' incoherent.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 12, 2021 @ 8:23 am
I fear I have promoted the thread's drift into somewhat collateral matters. My original thesis does not depend on some of the complexities we have discussed. It is simply that:
1. The "synthetic" inflection-marked nature of the Latin passive in many but not all parts of the conjugation of a "regular" Latin verb; combined with
2. The way students in recent centuries learned Latin as a school-taught L2 with memorization of conjugation tables rather than picking it up in early childhood by osmosis as they did with their L1; combined with
3. Often poor school instruction in the grammar of their L1 with its exclusively periphrastic approach to passive constructions; meant that
4. Learning Latin made many students consciously aware of the categorical contrast between active voice and passive voice in a way they would otherwise not have been – both because of the differences between Latin and their L1 grammar and differences between how they'd learned Latin and how they'd learned their L1; and therefore
5. The decline in Latinity among educated elites is a plausible causal factor in the curious phenomenon of educated Anglophone elites using "passive voice" to mean all sorts of things other than the periphrastic passive construction available for many verbs in their L1.
This leads to two broader points which are:
6. The theoretical disadvantages of traditionally describing English grammar in Latin-based categories that did not fully account for the differences between English and Latin were often mitigated in practice to the extent Latin was part of a good general education, because an imperfect analogy to something the student knows may be less confusing than an imperfect analogy to something the student doesn't know.
7. Not much good has happened on the teaching-of-English-grammar-itself front since the decline of elite Latinity, e.g. it's not like 8th-grade teachers are now explaining the syntax of English to kids in a superior framework taken from Huddleston/Pullum or Jim McCawley or whoever.
As a side note on one of Michael Watts' points, we may have talked past each other because of different senses of "deponent." I agree it is useful to have a label for "verbs which manifest only in a passive construction without an active counterpart." I am more skeptical about using it as a label for "verbs in a passive construction that nonetheless have an 'active' meaning," MW's observation about "counting up agency points" not being a full or satisfactory account of the data of any actual language is a useful one.
Alexander Pruss said,
August 12, 2021 @ 9:00 am
The use of "passive voice" for language that hides agency from the interlocutor sounds to me as a rather evocative non-literal extension of the grammatical term. I haven't seen this usage before today, but it looks like a pretty nifty figure of speech to me.
I don't see how Ms. Harris' use of the phrase is supposed to show that she is ignorant of the grammatical term that underlies the figure of speech. That someone uses the phrase "batten down the hatches" in a non-literal way is no evidence of ignorance of the nautical usage (though I expect there is independent evidence of a low base rate of knowledge of the nautical usage, and indeed no doubt the metaphorical usage has overtaken the literal by far; similarly, there may be independent evidence of a low base rate of knowledge of the literal meaning of "passive voice").
Rodger C said,
August 12, 2021 @ 9:43 am
I haven't seen this usage before today, but it looks like a pretty nifty figure of speech to me.
If you'd seen it as often as I have, it'd be more apparent that it isn't a conscious metaphor.
Rodger C said,
August 12, 2021 @ 9:44 am
Regarding whether deponent verbs are really a thing, has anybody mentioned that they take direct objects? "Misericordia tua subsequetur me."
J.W. Brewer said,
August 12, 2021 @ 9:46 am
Now that I've gotten myself unmuddled about who said what in the interview, it may be useful to note that Dr. Ashby's answer to Ms. Harris' "passive voice" question may have been an implicit "No." He says he dislikes the rhetoric of "disparities and inequality" because "It makes it sound like it’s an abstract thing." Too abstract, i.e. treating individual suffering patients as just datapoints in a regrettable overall statistical pattern, seems a substantially different critique than "vague about agency."
It may be worth noting that many people are happy, indeed eager, to assign causal responsibility (and thus agency/blame) for disparities in health care and/or medical outcomes, but they tend to assign that agency to abstractions. My first google hits for "disparities caused by" offered up as the villains to blame "racism," "SDoH" (which stands for "social determinants of health"), "factors outside the health care delivery system," and "unhealthy cultural habits." The most specific cause on the first page of hits was "nutritional anemia." I imagine a little more googling could find sentences assigning blame for disparities to "neoliberalism" or "late capitalism."
Jerry Packard said,
August 12, 2021 @ 10:09 am
I should have noted at the outset that I was specifically taught (and so taught my own students) to use rather than avoid passives in writing scientific articles and abstracts to make them sound less subjective. So, '20 participants were tested' vs. 'We tested 20 participants.'
Cervantes said,
August 12, 2021 @ 1:50 pm
Yeah Jerry, but I disagree with that. "We" in fact did it, and we might just have been subjective in our assessment. Science is done by people and they should take responsibility. The agentless passive convention should be abolished.
Antonio L. Banderas said,
August 12, 2021 @ 2:36 pm
Short passives are criticized for a lack of frankness, "mistakes were made", but there are many ways of avoiding identifying the responsible agent, "mistakes occurred".
ktschwarz said,
August 12, 2021 @ 4:17 pm
My novel is selling well, a chicken is cooking, a piano is playing and my shirts iron at a low temperature
"My novel is selling well" and "my shirts iron at a low temperature" are indeed called middle voice; its hallmark is that it comes with an adverbial complement (like "at a low temperature") or a modal or a negation, and you can't add a "by" phrase to indicate the agent: it doesn't matter who irons your shirts, they iron at a low temperature because of the fabric.
"A chicken is cooking" and "a piano is playing" are sometimes called anticausative, which is distinguished from middle voice because it doesn't need an adverbial complement and can refer to a specific event. However, the distinction between these categories isn't always clear-cut.
I highly recommend Neal Whitman's Middle Voice Sentences. He points out that while the verb in English middle voice looks exactly like the active, in other languages it has a different form: e.g., in Spanish, "my shirts iron at a low temperature" would be expressed with a reflexive verb.
Jerry Friedman said,
August 12, 2021 @ 5:15 pm
Julian: If we allow that the meaning of the grammatical term 'passive' has changed, the problem is –
– no-one seems to know quite what it has changed to
– it makes the common usage advice 'avoid passives' incoherent.
Indeed, there seems to be no agreement on extended meanings of "passive", but everyone agrees in advising people to avoid it.
Andrew Usher said,
August 12, 2021 @ 6:14 pm
"Avoid passives" was always incoherent as usage advice, though you probably know that. Even those that understood correctly what the passive voice failed to see that they are found in all sorts of writing and usually pass unnoticed.
ktschwarz:
As I recall, the original IE middle voice had the form of the passive (as it still did in Latin) but that seems too restrictive. I think "my novel is selling" without an adverb would still be grammatical (though perhaps odd), but "my shirts iron" is not. (The progressive form is not essential to the first type of form but is normal for the usual reasons.)
J.W. Brewer:
Assigning agency to an abstraction may seem unsatisfactory, but it's often the most accurate picture. Social problems exist usually not because anyone actively desires them or willfully causes them, but because of the way the system works. Thus to solve them assigning agency (and blame) to anyone in particular would be counter-productive.
The term 'passive voice' is abused in this manner by people, and I think it's similar to 'beg the question' in that it sounds enough like a compositional construction with the usual meanings of the words that people start actually using it vaguely in that way, even though it's unquestionable the technical term was the origin (the phrase did not previously exist). It's regrettable because English does not lack for ways to say those things without misusing the technical term.
On 'to be born':
I don't think it's useful to call it a deponent, a distinct grammatical category that doesn't exist in English. Instead, using traditional grammatical terms, we can say that it is becoming an adjective, as its opposite 'unborn' certainly is. The process of participles becoming ordinary adjectives is a normal one and doesn't require the disappearance of the original participial sense. Some confusion is raised here by the homonymous 'bear' meaning carry, support, undergo, etc., whose participle is normally spelled 'borne' – that verb is not obsolete, and behaves regularly.
There is no inherent reason to regard the last word in 'I was born' as a verb rather than an adjective complement that I can see. Note that 'to be born' is used figuratively (not referring to childbirth) as in: an idea 'was born'. In that case the active verb is impossible: one can't 'bear' an idea in that sense, though one can 'give birth to' it. That compound verb has a normal participle, though, 'given birth to', which is that used in the active sense, so 'born' is not even suppletive.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo dot com
Arthur Baker said,
August 12, 2021 @ 11:47 pm
Typo: "How to defend yourself …" is dated 2206 above, should be 2006.
Michael Watts said,
August 13, 2021 @ 12:16 am
Certainly. I'll start at a low level, so forgive me if I cover material you're familiar with.
A "participle" is the term given to a verb form that in some sense takes the syntactic position of an adjective rather than a verb. Instead of using the clause's verb to state directly that an event took place, we describe a noun by reference to its role in an event.
Channeling an old high school test, I'll give examples where I see a killing "take place" between a man and some girls. (When the killing occurs will vary relative to the time at which I see something.) I will make no claim to be using 'natural' Latin word order.
Here the participle necantem is singular and accusative, agreeing with the noun it modifies (virum). It is present tense, indicating that the killing takes place contemporaneously with the seeing. And it is in the active voice, indicating that, if we were to describe this sub-event in an independent clause wherein the subject of the clause was our virum and the verb was neco, that verb would be in the active voice.
The passive-participle version of this sentence is possible in English – "I saw the man being killed by the girls" – but not possible in Latin, where there is no such thing as a present passive participle.
Here the participle still agrees with virum and therefore still describes him, but the killing took place before I saw anything (since the participle is perfect), and rather than being the subject of a hypothetical active verb, our virum is the subject of a hypothetical passive verb. He was killed by the girls.
The active-participle version of this sentence isn't really possible in English — "the man having killed the girls" can't really stand on its own as a noun phrase, even though "the man killed by the girls" can — but perfect active participles are a general part of English syntax, whereas they are only possible for deponent verbs in Latin.
Here necaturum is the future active participle, describing a man who will kill the girls shortly after I see him.
Here necandum is the future passive participle, describing a man who will be killed shortly after I see him. (This is far and away not the most common use of this form of the verb; it is usually used to express that something should be done, as in Carthago delenda est. But it is a possibility.)
The senses of the future participles present no problems in English, but I wouldn't want to make the claim that the complicated prepositional phrase "about to kill someone" is in some sense "really" a participle. I'd be more comfortable stipulating that English does not have future participles, and instead expresses the same meaning by other means. In contrast, I'm comfortable saying that "having killed" is "really" a participle despite its periphrastic nature.
John Walden said,
August 13, 2021 @ 4:15 am
@ktschwarz Thanks for that explanation.
Michael Watts said,
August 13, 2021 @ 6:08 am
But the category does exist in English, and it consists of the verb to be born.
It's a small category, to be sure, but it's not a large category in Latin either.
I agree with this.
But this is very wrong. This born cannot be interpreted as an adjective. I may have been born twenty years ago, but I am not "born" now, and there is no point in history at which I could have been described as "born". A hypothetical speaking infant in the process of emerging from the womb must say "I am being born", not "I am born".
J.W. Brewer said,
August 13, 2021 @ 8:30 am
@Andrew Usher: I don't have any general problem with assigning agency to abstractions.* I just thought that that was an interesting fact in light of Dr. Ashby's claim that talking about "inequality" and "disparities" was itself too "abstract." I suppose "avoid abstractions" is probably out there as bad (because unnuanced) usage/style advice (probably Orwell?), just like "avoid passives." "Use a more concrete term when that is more appropriate and use a more abstract term when that is more appropriate" is obviously the correct stylistic approach most of the time, but how to help the advisee develop good judgment about which is appropriate in a given context is trickier.
*Obviously the higher-level the abstraction, the less practically useful it is. Saying something is caused "by the system" is less useful than saying (if plausible) that it is caused by such-and-such specific feature of the system which might be amenable to some sort of targeted non-Utopian reform. That said it is almost certainly true (IMHO) that many disparities in, for example, health care outcomes are caused, if you go far enough back in the chain of causation, "by the inherent sinfulness of human nature." Yet I feel like that accurate (IMHO) ascription of agency may feel unsatisfactory to many readers.
Coby said,
August 13, 2021 @ 8:32 am
I don't think that the status of "be born" as the passive of "bear" has vanished. "She bore three children" is still perfectly idiomatic.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 13, 2021 @ 8:36 am
@Michael Watts: On your analysis, is "be born" the *sole* member of this interesting category? You can find via googling lists (often in an ESL-instruction context) of "phrasal verbs" with "be," such as this one https://www.learn-english-today.com/phrasal-verbs/phrasal-verbs-BE.html. I don't know that everyone agrees with that analysis but it seems plausible. But as with most phrasal verbs the other component is typically a preposition or similar particle. Any other such combinations of be with a participle that has no function outside that construction?
I guess another way in which "be born" differs from a typical "phrasal verb" is that its meaning is, well … I was going to say compositional, but if "born" exists only in this construction maybe it's hard to classify as either compositional or non-compositional? (Although note that born also has more adjectival uses in contexts like "born loser.")
J.W. Brewer said,
August 13, 2021 @ 8:55 am
@Coby: The claim, which I will admit is at least an interesting one, is that the passive equivalent of your example is "Three children were borne by her," which sounds archaic/poetic but maybe not actually ungrammatical, but that the extremely idiomatic "Three children were born to her" is a different construction than that. It may be relevant that you can speak of children being born "to" a couple or family even though only one member of the couple/family (i.e. the mother of the newborn) did the actual "bearing."
Antonio L. Banderas said,
August 13, 2021 @ 10:37 am
BORN https://oed.com/oed2/00025380
BORNE https://oed.com/oed2/00025384
matt w said,
August 13, 2021 @ 3:55 pm
The question to which Harris was responding contains the sentence "And I see so much focus on the vaccine resistant, but it sounds like you’re also seeing people who just haven’t been reached," in which "people who just haven't been reached" is literally passive voice, if I'm not mistaken.
matt w said,
August 13, 2021 @ 3:57 pm
Sorry, Ashby was responding to a question of Harris's.
matt w said,
August 13, 2021 @ 4:00 pm
I guess my previous comment didn't post! Anyway, if you look at the question Ashby was responding to, it indeed contains a passive voice construction, "people who just haven't been reached."
Andrew Usher said,
August 13, 2021 @ 6:12 pm
First, the OED links above are surely helpful, but how did you get those un-paywalled? I haven't seen that before!
Yes, both 'She bore three children' and 'Three children were born [not borne] by her' are grammatical still, but there's a sense that this verb is archaic and disappearing – while the other verb 'bear' is merely formal (and surviving in specific uses, as the US 'right to bear arms' and 'load-bearing' in engineering). 'Born to' is a different idiom, perhaps abstracted from phrases where it actually was the infinitive marker.
Michael Watts says on 'I was born':
[quote]But this is very wrong. This born cannot be interpreted as an adjective. I may have been born twenty years ago, but I am not "born" now, and there is no point in history at which I could have been described as "born".[/quote]
I'm not convinced; I think the obstacle to this extension is more semantic than grammatical. There's simply no reason for calling oneself 'born', because everyone is. One would not say 'I was born' without modification either, as it conveys nothing. But when it does matter, it can be used e.g. 'The child is born' in reply to someone that assumed it was still unborn, and as 'unborn' is an adjective without question so must 'born' be there. But since normally the only reason for using 'born' is to say something related to the event, not the state, it's unsurprising that the change to 'I am born' does not occur.
Finally any description of Latin will explain a deponent as "passive in form but active in meaning" and surely 'to be born' is not active in meaning. If it's a verb, it's passive in both form and meaning and will be even if the active verb it's derivded from becomes obsolere. I simply can't see a reason for introducing the label 'deponent' into English, even if a category with one element made sense.
Michael Watts said,
August 13, 2021 @ 9:12 pm
I'm prepared to believe that "be born" is the sole deponent verb in English, but lacking a comprehensive list of verbs in English I won't make the claim. Maybe something slipped my mind; maybe there's a rare verb I don't know about. But I'm happy to reject the idea that any of the verbs on the linked list are deponent verbs; in most cases I reject the idea that they are phrasal verbs. (I tend to agree that "be up to" is best analyzed that way, but "be in/out/away" are simple cases of be with a location, no different from e.g. he is at home or he is in the library, and I can't accept the idea that "be on" is a phrasal verb after comparing it with "turn on". By my analysis, "on" is a state, and a machine can be in that state.)
That list has generally low quality. If I say interest rates are up, I don't mean that they are increasing (as the list suggests) but that they have increased, and despite listing "be off" in the sense of "about to leave" and "be on" in the sense of "currently operating", they somehow overlooked "be off" in the sense of "not currently operating".
Interestingly, I think the notion of the meaning being compositional has some relevance, but the reason I don't think those verbs are deponent is that I think they are compositional; the be can be easily separated from its complement. But the born of to be born cannot be separated from its passive marker be.
Well, I have some thoughts about this.
First, you can say "the child is born" immediately after the birth in reference to the state transition. But I would say in that case born must be analyzed as a participle and not an adjective, because a significant part of the meaning is that it describes an event that has already happened (and thus must be a verb form with a tense), not a state that currently obtains.
But I think you have a point about "born" in contrast to "unborn". It's possible to claim that "unborn" is also a participle, but I don't think I can definitively reject the claim that it's an adjective in that use.
I will still happily reject the claim that born in "I was born" is an adjective. It isn't. When I say "I was born last year", that claim is not "true but misleading", it is false. That sentence specifies that an event happened last year; it does not claim that a state obtained last year.
This claim is easier to dispense with; you are wrong in a couple of ways. Most obviously, nascor is a deponent verb in Latin. It is (obviously) passive in form, but it shows other hallmarks of "true deponency" such as having an active participle†. (Compare the English word "nascent", still preserving the Latin meaning of "in the process of being born".) If it is passive in form but active in meaning in Latin, there is no way to claim that it is inherently passive in meaning in English.
More generally, I tend to agree with J.W. Brewer that the concepts of "semantically active" or "semantically passive" are not meaningful. If there is only one role in a situation, then it's possible for an verb to realize that role as its subject.
But note also that it's easy to conceive of "being born" as something that happens to the baby, and this phenomenon is also true of a large number of Latin deponent verbs. They often mean that the subject experiences something such as amazement, fear, or anger (miror / vereor / irascor); sometimes it's fairly easy to conceive of them in a passive way (are you following someone, or being led by him?); and patior literally refers to having something happen to you. (But of course, despite having perhaps the strongest possible case for being "semantically passive", its English equivalents suffer, bear, and endure are all active.)
† It strikes me that this might be one reason to describe a special category of Latin verbs while not bothering to do so for English verbs. It's necessary for a Latin deponent verb to put its present participle in the active voice (without flipping the meaning) because Latin has no present passive participles. In English there is also a need to be able to say e.g. "being born", but because English has present passive participles it can preserve the use of a grammatically passive form where Latin didn't have that option.
Michael Watts said,
August 13, 2021 @ 9:27 pm
On the idea that being born is an inherently passive action, it's probably also worth noting that it is expressed with an active verb in Chinese, 出生. The morphemes are 出 ("out", probably best glossed in this context as "emerge") and 生 (many senses broadly related to life, but the closest one is as the verb "give birth to").
Tangentially, this makes me think of what might be described as an "active deponent verb" — in Mandarin, you express that it is raining by saying 下雨, snowing by saying 下雪, or windy by saying 刮风. 雨 is a noun meaning "rain", 雪 is "snow", and 风 is "wind". The nouns in these expressions can be modified: 下大雨 ("big rain") "it is raining heavily".
The 下 and 刮 are verbs, 下 meaning "move downward" and 刮 meaning "blow". The strange part is that the expressions appear to place the rain, snow and wind as the objects of the verbs, omitting a subject entirely. A verb with an object and no subject looks kind of similar to a verb with a passive form but no active form.
That said, topical fronting in Mandarin means this analysis is not a slam dunk, and the rain and snow, as the things which are moving downward, really should be the subject of 下. (刮 in the sense "blow" is, as far as I know, only used in this expression — the ordinary word for blowing is 吹 — so it could arrange its arguments however it likes. But 下 sees a lot of use in other contexts.)
Jonathan Smith said,
August 14, 2021 @ 12:34 am
@Michael Watts FWIW while in textbooks sometimes related to "weather" in particular, this Mandarin pattern is massively productive… a kind of "cunxianju" 存現句 reminiscent of Eng. presentational "There came a time.." etc. thus "intransitive" V + NP in 出事 / 存在問題 / 來客人 / 長霉 / 生病 and on and on… some authors relate this to a class of Mand. "unaccusative" verbs but I don't know how useful that is…
Anyway it seems the meaning 'to give birth' for sheng1 生 (more fundamentally 'come forth') should be understood as having emerged in the context of reanalysis of a "presentational" pattern (生孩子) parallel to those above. Same can readily happen in other cases e.g. 你出主意, etc., such that chu1 'exit' almost needs to be listed with "transitive" meanings…
Michael Watts said,
August 14, 2021 @ 1:41 am
That makes sense, but it's very clearly distinct now, in that 生 takes a subject which is not the following 孩子. And I've always thought of 生病 as being similar; as a child can emerge from you, so can a disease.
As you note, this reanalysis appears to have also happened with 出事 – it takes a subject which is not the 事. (Reading straight out of a dictionary – "我的车子出事了。") 来人, though, seems to require a reading where the following 人 is the subject ("Someone come!").
Antonio L. Banderas said,
August 14, 2021 @ 4:45 am
CGEL reads,
Singulary situations "She asked me where I was / had been born", where "was" cannot be interpreted as a backshifted preterite: #"Where are you born? " In BrE the past participle "born" is restricted to short passives, "I was born in Boston and She'd borne three children", but not *"He was born by a Greek peasant" .
Fowler's reads,
"Born" is also used in figurative expressions such as "an indifference born of long familiarity". In all other meanings, the past participle of bear is "borne" ( I have borne with this too long; He was borne along by the wind ), and this form is used with reference to birth when the construction is active, or when it is passive followed by "by" (the mother).
Michael Watts said,
August 14, 2021 @ 6:10 am
I mean, it already is listed with transitive meanings. That's a very common way to use 出. ABC gives glosses of "issue; put out; post", "produce; turn out", "put forth; vent", and "pay out; expend". 现代汉语规范词典 gives 向外拿，特指往外拿出钱财，长出，出产，and 发散出；发泄, though admittedly some of those are kind of hazy as to how transitive they might be. CC-CEDICT gives "produce", and "put forth".
Even the verb for playing a card in a card game is 出牌.
Jonathan Smith said,
August 14, 2021 @ 11:17 am
^ Since Mand."presentational" sentences often take an initial NP~PP encoding a "site" of action in a general sense (外面下雨，家裡來客人，某人出事…), my thought was that certain of these ["site" + VI + argument] constructions would be amenable to reanalysis/"co-analysis" as [S + VT + O]… this seems useful re: modern sheng1 生 but yeah it's unclear how meaningfully it could be applied elsewhere..
Andrew Usher said,
August 14, 2021 @ 1:49 pm
Michael Watts:
I don't really disagree about 'I was born'. If you want to consider 'born' a participle in that case, because it refers to the event, and an adjective only when it refers to a state, that would be fine. But language as really used is not governed by logic or strict grammatical categories: "I was born [state] last year" is wrong not because of the grammatical classification of 'born', but because people don't use it that way, and the reason they don't is (as I said before) that it would express no information, so it is hardly going to displace a use that does.
Yes, that statement about Latin deponents is oversimplified, but I recall having read it repeatedly. It's really not surprising that so many have meanings that could be seen as passive, given that they must have originated as passives, just like 'to be born'. But as you have realised (and others pointed out ) they have grammatical peculariities like having an active participle, and these don't exist in English.
Last, I see that my use of [quote][/quote] didn't work – can anyone let me in on the secret? How do I get the kind of quotes everyone else uses here? – the interface provides no help.
Michael Watts said,
August 14, 2021 @ 8:57 pm
For commenting on wordpress, you enter your comment in raw HTML and hope it gets through. This is much less safe than the phpBB style of dedicated markers such as [quote] that are not meaningful in HTML, but someone somewhere once thought it was a good idea.
So we quote with <blockquote> </blockquote> . It's also useful to know how to enter HTML entities, since those still work for characters that wordpress rejects. A < can be entered with the sequence (ampersand lt semicolon) (no spaces). I will attempt here to enter the "zany face" emoji (U+1F92A) with the sequence (ampersand #x1f92a semicolon): 🤪
Andrew Usher said,
August 15, 2021 @ 7:52 pm
Alright, let's test that:
quote 1
&<;
& and ;
Andrew Usher said,
August 15, 2021 @ 7:54 pm
The less than sign didn't work as you said (assuming the obvious conversion:; what about the greater than:
&>;
>
(test posts are necessary because there's no preview function)
Andrew Usher said,
August 15, 2021 @ 7:57 pm
OK, are the parentheses necessary?
(&;)
(ampersandltsemicolon) – That last takes your instructions literally …
Andrew Usher said,
August 15, 2021 @ 7:59 pm
<, damn it, just < !
Andrew Usher said,
August 15, 2021 @ 8:02 pm
So print as written if they are not interpreted as a tag, right, and the escape sequence you propose does nothing?
Michael Watts said,
August 15, 2021 @ 9:14 pm
Sorry, I can't give an example of a character entity, because that would begin with an ampersand, and although in HTML it should be possible to escape that ampersand, wordpress will unescape a double-escaped character entity twice.
But here's the MDN page on entities: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Entity . It's quite short and gives examples; hopefully it will be helpful.
Michael Watts said,
August 15, 2021 @ 9:20 pm
Sequence of successively-more-escaped less-than entities:
< (0 levels)
< (1 level)
&lt; (2 levels)
&amp;lt; (3 levels)
&amp;amp;lt; (4 levels)
Michael Watts said,
August 15, 2021 @ 9:22 pm
Huh. That worked perfectly. I tried to double-escape a chinese character with a high unicode code point in an earlier thread and it didn't work correctly, instead rendering the character itself. I must be missing something.
Same sequence, but for the zany face:
🤪
🤪
&#x1f92a;
&amp;#x1f92a;
&amp;amp;#x1f92a;
Michael Watts said,
August 15, 2021 @ 9:30 pm
Well, I wasn't missing anything – the sequence for the zany face double-decoded the double-escaped entity. Oddly enough, it did not double-decode the triple-escaped entity. This is clearly a bug in wordpress.
Same sequence, but identifying the less-than character by hexadecimal code (#x3c) instead of alphabetic mnemonic (lt):
<
<
&#x3c;
&amp;#x3c;
&amp;amp;#x3c;
If this works correctly, it will look like the first less-than sequence; if it works incorrectly, it will probably look like the zany-face sequence, with the top two entities both rendering as < .
Andrew Usher said,
August 16, 2021 @ 9:29 pm
It did the latter. You didn't specify that 'lt' was meant tho be spelled out, and not converted into the character like 'ampersand' and 'semicolon', so I'll try again:
< quote1 &rt;
(<) quote2 (&rt;)
This is the way the page you link to has it (without the parentheses – where did that come from?). But, I don't really think I'm ever going to see a need for that character anyway, if it doesn't work.
Andrew Usher said,
August 16, 2021 @ 9:32 pm
Duh – 'gt' not 'rt' to be sure (must have been thinking left/right) and repeat:
< quote1 >
(<) quote2 (>)
and this should produce the characters (they have to be paired to really test whether escaping works).
Alex Boulton said,
August 19, 2021 @ 11:04 am
As Ashby says: "This is indicative…"