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May 2, 2011 @ 3:47 am
· Filed under Language and the media, Lost in translation, passives, Semantics, Syntax
Tom Scocca, in Slate magazine, is full of scorn for the language of the New York Times. It is not always easy to discern his meaning (he uses a metaphor of lard in pie crusts, which I didn't quite follow), but he seems to think the Times is desperately concerned to "preserve its sacred function […]
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February 22, 2011 @ 2:15 pm
· Filed under passives, Usage advice
"The BBC is a remarkable place", says Nigel Paine, the Head of People Development at the BBC, in his prefatory note to The BBC News Styleguide (2003); "Much of the accumulated knowledge and expertise locked in people’s heads stays that way: occasionally we share, and the result is a bit of a revelation." Paine is […]
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January 24, 2011 @ 7:00 am
· Filed under passives, Prescriptivist poppycock, Syntax, Usage advice
Numerous Language Log posts by me, Mark Liberman, and Arnold Zwicky among others have been devoted to mocking people who denigrate the passive without being able to identify it (see this comprehensive list of Language Log posts about the passive). It is clear that some people think The bus blew up is in the passive; […]
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August 12, 2010 @ 4:25 am
· Filed under passives, Prescriptivist poppycock
An anonymous informant deep within corporate America ("I work at a large financial institution", he says guardedly) has seen the corporation's style guide for communications with customers, and its advice includes (guess what) this gem of cluelessness: Use active voice rather than passive voice. Active voice is easier to read. Instead of "we have decided," […]
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August 5, 2010 @ 5:58 am
· Filed under Language and politics, passives, Syntax
A commenter named bloix here on Language Log recently pointed out yet another case of passive allegations: First Read, a reliable purveyor of Beltway conventional wisdom, tries out the passive voice: "As for the media, we've allowed this story over race [to] bury one of the more consequential weeks of Obama's presidency thus far (the […]
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July 21, 2010 @ 7:44 am
· Filed under passives, Syntax
A stunning case of public grammatical incompetence from blogger Brad DeLong (pointed out to Language Log by Paul Postal). DeLong quotes a passage by Wolfgang Mommsen (about whether Max Weber was prepared for the start of World War I), in English translation, and comments: It is never clear to me to what extent the fact […]
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July 2, 2010 @ 5:50 pm
· Filed under Language and politics
Following up on my post "Rhetorical testosterone and analytical hallucinations" (7/1/2010), Linda Seebach sent a link to a column in which Mark Steyn complained about president Obama's "passivity" ("Obama's lazy tribute to Daniel Pearl", 5/21/2010): Like a lot of guys who've been told they're brilliant one time too often, President Obama gets a little lazy, […]
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March 24, 2010 @ 2:15 pm
· Filed under Language and politics
Language is changing at a torrid pace in China, and it's not just a massive infusion of English words that is to blame. Nor can we simply ascribe the dramatic changes in language usage to rampant, wild punning for the purpose of confusing the ubiquitous censors. Creative manipulation of lexical and grammatical constructions is another […]
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February 17, 2010 @ 9:09 am
· Filed under Linguistics in the comics
Yesterday's Dinosaur Comics explores the far reaches of verbal morphosyntax in English: (As usual, click on the image for a larger version.)
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November 4, 2009 @ 9:57 am
· Filed under Language and the law, passives, Syntax
Anita Krishnakumar posts at Concurring Opinions on November 2 about a Supreme Court judgment by Justice Anthony Kennedy that turned quite crucially on the distinction between active and passive voice in the language of criminal statutes, only (you're ahead of me already aren't you, Language Log readers?) Justice Kennedy doesn't know his passive from a […]
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August 3, 2009 @ 10:24 am
· Filed under Language and culture
Jonathan Coulton, "Soft Rocked By Me", 11/21/2008: (The relevant part of the song starts about 1:00 in, or use this link, since time offsets don't work in YouTube embedding. But Coulton's pre-song explanation is also part of the package: "… ladies like a sensitive man — a little bit — but you don't want to […]
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June 30, 2009 @ 2:21 pm
· Filed under passives, Syntax
Every so often I come across a passive sentence that puzzles me: why did someone write this? Last month I posted about one such case on my blog, but there you could imagine how the sentence arose. My most recent find just looks perverse, and it has an awkward adverb placement as well. This is […]
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June 25, 2009 @ 12:16 pm
· Filed under Language and politics, passives
OK, I give up. I admit that I was wrong. I thought that the grammatical term passive had developed a spectrum of everyday meanings like "vague about agency", "listless writing, lacking in vigor", and "failure to take sides in a conflict". But I've now reluctantly concluded that for some members of the chattering classes, it […]
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