Language Log

A little more than a week ago, our mass media warned us about a serious peril. "Scientists warn of Twitter dangers", said CNN on 4/14/2009:

Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering, scientists say.

New findings show that the streams of information provided by social networking sites are too fast for the brain's "moral compass" to process and could harm young people's emotional development.

MSNBC asked "Is Twitter Evil?". The Telegraph explained that "Twitter and Facebook could harm moral values, scientists warn". Other headlines from 4/14/2009 include "Twittering, rapid media may confuse morals", "Does texting make U mean?", "Hooked to facebook? Beware", "TV News More Damaging to Empathy Than Twitter", "The social networking, anti-social paradox","Study: Twitter erodes morals", "Twitter makes users immoral, research claims", "Twitter's moral dangers outlined", "Facebook hurting moral values, says study", "Twitter, Facebook Turn Users Into Immoral People", "Twitter could make us immoral", "Twitter can make you immoral, claim scientists", "Facebook and Twitter 'make us bad people'", "Digital Media Confuse the Moral Compass",  …

As usual when stuff that people like is shown to be bad for them, the public apparently discounted these dire warnings. According to a poll reported at the Marketing Shift blog, when asked "Do social networks and rapid updates desensitize you to sad news?", 74% said "no", 13% said "maybe", and only 13% said "yes".

In this case, the public skepticism was a good thing, because the news reports were a load of hooey.

Poor Sam Roberts. He begins his New York Times article "'The Elements of Style' turns 50" (April 21) thus:

How does a professional writer discuss "The Elements of Style" without nervously looking over his shoulder and seeing Will Strunk and E. B. White (or thousands of readers of their book) second-guessing him? (Is "second-guessing" hyphenated or not? Is posing a question the same as using the passive voice?)

Is posing a question the same as using the passive voice? Great Caesar's ghost, it is just as bad as I thought out there, or worse.

I happened to be browsing through my copy of Bury's History of the Later Roman Empire and came upon a passage I had forgotten about. The Emperor Justinian is known, if at all, for his legal code. The Justinian code was indeed a great success as a codification. It settled numerous disputed points of law and relieved judges and lawyers of the need to consult a huge range of often contradictory legal sources dating back to the Laws of the Twelve Tables, and in some areas, it was progressive. In areas relating to religion and to sex, however, it was just plain awful, in some ways worse than Shari'a Law.

Anyone who looked at the front page of the New York Times today probably noticed the article by Sharon LaFraniere entitled "Your Name's Not on Our List?  Change It, Beijing Officials Say." Featured in the article is a young woman named Ma Cheng, whose surname Ma is written with the character for "horse" and whose given name Cheng is written with a very rare character composed of three horses lined up closely in a row:  馬馬馬 (the latter character is exceedingly difficult to write in a small square exactly the same size as the space allotted to one horse [and to all other characters, even if they have as many as 64 strokes]!).  The article states that this character pronounced Cheng is not to be found among the 32,252 characters in the Chinese government's computer systems, so Ms. Ma has been told peremptorily that she must change her name.

In the world of linguistic peevery, there are several levels of hell. On the lowest reside expressions that incite some people to rage, the symptoms of which are frothing at the mouth, extreme physical revulsion, and an inclination towards violence (up to homicide) against the perpetrator. You hope that all of this is merely verbally hyperbolic, but it's nevertheless disturbing. (We've posted on Language Log a number of times about word rage.)

One circle up are the cringe expressions, which merely make some people shrink back, but not puke or attack with weaponry. (Again, we've posted a number of times on Language Log about cringe words.)

And then we have the circle of prejudices, expressions that some people merely disapprove of.

(Some of these dislikes are widely shared, disseminating from one person to another or through advice givers of one sort or another. Others are more idiosyncratic, apparently arising from individual experiences with the expressions in question, which gave rise to unpleasant associations — a topic I hope to blog about eventually. There are people, for example, who dislike frankly as a sentence adverbial.)

A little while back, Jan Freeman posted on her Boston Globe column "The Word" on prejudice against foreground as a verb.

Over at Ask Metafilter, someone recently asked for an explanation of David Foster Wallace's characteristically frequent use of which N constructions, as in

Now I'm writing this sort of squatting with my bottom braced up against the hangar's west wall, which wall is white-painted cinder blocks, like a budget motel's wall, and also oddly clammy.

One of the MeFites began a response this way:

You know how "whom" exists to clarify that you aren't asking "who?", but telling?

The charitable thing is to take this absurd question as a joke, parodying the ambiguity-avoidance arguments for stylistic choices that Arnold Zwicky has often dissected. Unfortunately, it's not very funny. But it has the virtue of reminding me of a genuinely funny parody of whom-related usage advice, from James Thurber's Ladies' and Gentlemen's Guide to Modern English Usage. In case some of you haven't seen this small masterpiece, I reproduce it below.

We are painfully aware of the fondness of NBA players for sporting Chinese tattoos that they don't understand. The misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture has long been diligently documented at Hanzi Smatter.

But it wasn't until I read an article in my local newspaper and Benjamin Zimmer called a similar article in the Telegraph to my attention that I realized a similar phenomenon has been occurring in China recently.

Incidentally, Hellenophiles will be delighted to see in the Telegraph article that at least one person has some elegant Greek lettering on his / her derriere.

According to the Telegraph, Zhang Aiping, a tattooist at Tattoo 108 in Shanghai, said: "Around 30 per cent to 40 per cent of our customers are choosing tattoos in English letters now. This has happened really suddenly, since the beginning of this year."

Two things from recent days: first, I posted on my blog about, among other things, the innovated verb bigger 'make bigger, enlarge', noting that zero-verbing of adjectives is not very frequent in English; and then, yesterday's New York Times Magazine was an issue about "The Green Mind", which reminded me of the now-ubiquitous use of green (roughly, 'environmentally responsible') as a verb meaning 'make green(er) [in this sense]': another zero-verbed adjective.

I was then reminded of a discussion a while back on the American Dialect Society mailing list on the innovated verb extinct 'make extinct, drive to extinction'.

This morning, email from Yu Guo drew my attention to yet another example where the combination of a negation, a modal, and a scalar predicate leaves writers and readers in a state of confusion. In this case, however, the result is not a phrase that means the opposite of what its author intended, but rather an expression that seems to have no coherent literal meaning at all.

The phrase is "The reality could not be further from the truth", and this intrinsically nonsensical expression is used, surprisingly often, as if it meant something like "the reality is otherwise". We find examples even in published work by competent writers. Thus on p. 10 of Toby Miller, Television: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, we read

In the best of all worlds for neoclassical theory, the government might act as an objective guarantor of contracts, and would intervene only when absolutely necessary to correct extreme imperfection in markets, or to provide the essential public goods like national defense. It seems that the reality could not be further from the truth.

My appearance on NPR nearly caused a car crash. Sarah Ferrell wrote in the NPR comments area: "I was in the car and rushed in to comment–I am gobsmacked." I can just see that Volvo careening around the corners on the way back from the supermarket and screeching to a halt in the driveway, and Sarah leaping out of it screaming, running to the house and dashing up the stairs to the computer…

But a willingness to drive dangerously in one's lust to get home and write comments doesn't always go along with a willingness to think or write carefully. Her comment goes on:

Pullam's explanation of why "none" should NOT be followed by the singular "is," but rather "are" or "were" is ABSURD!! One of the basic tenets of English grammar is to achieve subject verb agreement--just because his favorite authors used "were" and "are," does NOT mean that WE should. I for ONE have no problemm with the concept that verbs should match their subjects!! English is a very complex, fluid language and I assert that this rule STILL STANDS. It has been the cutsom for some time now.

All this discussion of Strunk and White (among other places, here and here) reminds me that in the Spring 2009 issue of The American Scholar, William Zinsser reflected on his book On Writing Well (first published in 1976, now in its 6th edition, with sales approaching 1.5 million copies, a figure dwarfed by S&W but still astonishing to Zinsser).

There's a direct connection to S&W and, for me, an indirect connection.

Craig Russell, one of the commenters on my post "What sounds like a clearing of the throat", asked a question that deserves an answer:

Even though the consonantal *sound* in the middle is singular, is it really a sin (or even a mistake) to use the word "consonant" to refer to certain letters of the alphabet?

Craig went on to suggest that by implying people should use the term "consonant" for a sound type rather than a letter type I was just being a prescriptive pedant of the type I normally condemn.

Well, the short answer to his question is yes, it's a real mistake. But I'll give a longer one.

The following poster is circulating among students from Shanghai, both inside and outside of China:

For a complete translation, go to the next page.