Language Log

Among the 39 comments on David Beaver's post "Orwell's Liar",  comments that were often impassioned and mostly long, the best one was calm and short: Joseph Williams makes related points in his influential article, "The Phenomenology of Error," published in College Composition and Communication in 1981. That essay has an unforgettable surprise ending. You can […]

Orwell's Politics and the English Language is a beautifully written language crime, though it pretends to lay down the law. Furthermore I just noticed that its final law is rather curious. We'll get to that shortly. Orwell begins with the unjustified premise that language is in decline – unjustified because while he viciously attacks contemporary cases […]

I posted yesterday about (among other things) the idea that that should never be omitted as the mark of a complement to a verb, as in the putatively offending (1) I know he is a good man. versus the prescribed (2) I know that he is a good man. Now Geoff Pullum reminds me that […]

Over the years we've written many times about the disparagement of adjectives and adverbs by writers and usage advisers, most prominently in Strunk and White's "Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs" (The Elements of Style, p. 71). Now Jef Mallett has taken the matter up in his comic strip Frazz: (Hat tip […]

While filing some examples of summative constructions, I came across the discussion of summative modifiers in Joseph Williams's Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace (I have the 3rd ed., of 2008), which made me wonder whether we had said good things about Williams's books on style here on Language Log. The answer is yes, […]

Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post published a piece of pompous, sentimental mush yesterday. It's all about a little book he learned about in college and still carries around to this day and will love till he dies (yadda yadda yadda; violins, please); and yes, you guessed it, the book is E. B. White's disgusting […]

Ben Zimmer, posting on Monday on Visual Thesaurus ("Of Showdowns, Throwdowns, and Hoedowns"): Last week we featured a debate over contemporary usage of whom, with Baltimore Sun copy editor John McIntyre squaring off against Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky. To be honest, the exchange was a bit too civil and reasonable to live up to its billing as a "usage […]

This morning, from the airport in Brussels, I want to following up on our discussion of discourse anaphora ("Why are some summatives labeled 'vague'?", 5/21/2008; "More theory trumping practice", 5/22/2008; "Poor pitiful which", 5/23/2008; "Clarity, choice, and evidence", 5/23/2008), in the spirit of Friday's post about "Prescriptivist science".

William Safire has taken up (in his column in the NYT Magazine of 11 May) the knotty question of whether political candidates should say they approve some message or approve of it. This caught my eye because I've been thinking recently about "diathesis alternations" in general (see here and here), and in particular about alternations […]

Geoff Pullum's most recent posting on split infinitives noted that handbooks on grammar and usage do not prohibit them, but most say they should be avoided, unless splitting the infinitive would improve clarity. When you think about it, this is decidedly odd advice. There's some history here, which is well covered in MWDEU, and has […]

Stephen Smith writes: There's a New Yorker article about a Moldovan woman working for an organization that tries to track down victims of sex trafficking and bring them home, but it includes this weird bit: "She talks on the phone and knocks out memos and documents and e-mails in four languages and three alphabets—Russian, Romanian, […]

I mentioned recently here on Language Log that the people who live in terror of splitting infinitives appear never to have looked inside the handbooks that they claim to be respecting. I came upon a remarkable instance of this the other day while looking for something else. Punctuality Rules! is advertised as "A blog devoted […]

Having commented in an idle moment on what and/or means and why we have it, I started to receive email from people solemnly informing me that they were native speakers but in their variety of English or had only the exclusive meaning, where the disjuncts can't both be true. In other words, these are people […]