Tom Torriglia is going to have a best-seller

At the turn of the new year, I wrote post about Tom Torriglia, who’d managed to get a front-page article in the San Francisco Chronicle stating his opposition to pronouncing the year 2010 as “two thousand ten”. Torriglia, as it turns out, is the head of a group he calls NAGG (National Association for Good Grammar). He is also in the process of writing a book about all the various companies that NAGG has complained to about the grammar of their advertisements, and how (strangely) no one at the companies ever really listened. A draft of the book is available online. So I looked through it, and I can see why the companies never listened to his complaints: they’re mostly rubbish. A few examples:

Ordinal dates for cardinal dates – Torriglia complains about a Fox Sports Net ad for the MLB All-Star Game that had a date written as “March 5th”. Torriglia claims that the cardinal “March 5″ is the only acceptable form in writing, and that the ordinal “March 5th” is speech improperly transcribed. If this were an error, it would be one with a long history: here is an example from the front-page of a 1740 sermon, here is an example in a 1773 from Colonel Burgess Ball, and here is a series of examples in an 1832 letter from Charles Darwin. It sure seems acceptable.

Me replacing I – The next complaint is about a children’s show called Buster and Me. Torriglia claims that this ought to be Buster and I. His rationale is a quote from grammarbook.com: “Subject pronouns are used when the pronoun is the subject of the sentence”, but this point is completely irrelevant because Buster and Me/I is not a sentence. The default case for English pronouns outside of sentences is the accusative (or object) case (me, him, her, etc.). If someone asks “Who wants ice cream?”, you can either reply with a full sentence “I do!” or the single word “Me!” Note that you cannot reply with the single word “I”, because it is not in the default case. In the absence of a full sentence* to assign a case to the noun phrase Buster and Me — as in the title — accusative me will be preferred over nominative I.

dead body is redundant – His rationale: “[T]he Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines body as a corpse.” If that is the only definition for body in the RHUD, then it’s not a very good dictionary; the online Oxford English Dictionary lists more that 30 definitions of the word, only one of which is “Short (or euphemistic) for ‘dead body’, corpse.” Yes, body can mean “corpse”, but it doesn’t have to. Here’s just one example of a live body:

(2) “whilst all the rest of my body is sore with cold.”

Strangely, Torriglia follows up his claim that dead body is redundant by noting that a body can, in fact, be alive. Perhaps the dictionary he’s using, in addition to defining body as “corpse”, defines redundant as “clarificatory”.

Slow is not an adverb – It is. See an earlier post on this matter if you don’t believe me.

Torriglia’s book is riddled with errors and absurd claims, so why am I confident that the book will be a best-seller? Simple: a successful popular grammar book is required to contain as many erroneous and unsubtantiated claims as possible. Plus, Torriglia’s got the style down just right. He starts by noting that “This book is a [sic] light-hearted in approach but serious in intent”, and adds the disclaimer “No advertising copywriters were harmed during the writing of this book although I really hope I get to strangle each and every one of them someday!”, as well as noting, in response to a poorly-written email, that “The grammar police had to snuff that guy.” Lynne Truss, you’ve got a competitor in anger!

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*: Technically, it’s not a full sentence that assigns the case, but rather a case governor like an inflectional phrase (IP).

Some words whose meanings have changed without controversy

A few posts ago, I was talking about the sentential-modifier meaning of hopefully, or in non-linguist speak, hopefully in the sentence:

(1) Hopefully I’ll be able to escape from the dungeon this afternoon.

This is not the original meaning of hopefully, which originally meant “in a hopeful manner”. Although it seems that the original meaning has lost prominence in recent years (and has almost completely fallen out of at least my lexicon), it’s still in use:

(2) “‘A whip isn’t a weapon,’ he replied hopefully.”

But as soon as you have the perception that a new meaning is edging the old one out, prescriptivists see it as a battleground for the language, and lift their skinny fists like antennas to heaven, crying out for someone to aid them in their quest to return the word to its original, unsullied state. And you know what? On its face, that might seem like a reasonable stance; after all, we don’t want to open the floodgates and allow any word to mean anything, right? At that point it seems it’s a slippery slope to the Humpty Dumpty position on language, named for the following exchange in “Through the Looking-Glass”:

`I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”‘ Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”‘
`But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument,”‘ Alice objected.
`When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

But this slope is not nearly as slippery as prescriptivists would have you believe. There is a world of difference between Humpty’s singular declaration that glory means “a nice knock-down argument” and the acknowledgment that a meaning that has been in common usage for almost 80 years (sentential hopefully) is a proper meaning of the word at this point. Maybe you don’t believe me, or still don’t feel entirely comfortable with new meanings. I wouldn’t blame you; this is a commonly-held belief known as the etymological fallacy.

So let’s look at some examples of words whose common and well-accepted meanings were really quite different from their original meanings. None of these, as far as I’m aware, are controversial meanings. They all represent substantial changes from their original meanings. And the English language has not fallen into whateverism as a result. Keep these in mind the next time you’re about to object to a newer usage just because it’s new, whether it be hopefully, anxious, nauseous, or something else entirely. All the definitions are based on the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, online version (http://www.oed.com). And many thanks to the commenters on the earlier post, who offered suggestions for some of the best words below.

Show some evidence!

Back in high school, I used to read etiquette guides. In fact, I read them and took extensive notes, because I was going to be somebody, and somehow I got the idea in my head that impeccable etiquette was a crucial part of that.  It was a simple error I’d made, mistaking a need for “good manners” as a need for “good etiquette”.  I worked on this for probably two or three years, and now I can’t tell you a single rule I read out of an etiquette book.  Why?  Because there was absolutely no discernable method or pattern to the rules of etiquette.  In search of a pattern, I even studied the history of etiquette guides in college, spending Saturday afternoons up on the third floor of the University Library pulling out books that hadn’t been borrowed since 1943, containing advice on the use of calling cards and what use good etiquette had in a world with horseless carriages. I certainly enjoyed it, but I’d be reluctant to say I really learned anything.

I was reminded of this period of my life when, at the used bookstore, I chanced upon a copy of Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior.  I opened up to a random page in the middle, and was happy to find out that it was about eating, something I happen to know a little bit about.  Luckily, this portion of the book is available online, so you can follow along! The question posed to Miss Manners is a simple one:

“How do you eat spaghetti with a [fork and] spoon?”

To which Miss Manners icily replies that eating spaghetti with a fork and spoon was “outrageous”, because

“A fork is the only utensil that may be used to eat spaghetti while anyone is looking.”

Miss Manners delves slightly into the details of how to eat spaghetti using only the fork — plant the fork on the plate, twirl, present to mouth — and closes with a tart reprimand that allowing the ends of the spaghetti to fall back onto the plate after a bite would be unthinkable, and that the only acceptable solution is to slurp the remnants into your mouth.  (Of course, she doesn’t use the proletarian term slurp, but rather dances around it by suggesting that the eater inhale.)

To this, an agitated reader responds:

“[Your proposed method is] Proper, perhaps, for a Roto-Rooter man. The correct way to eat spaghetti is with a fork and a soup spoon. [...] One cannot eat spaghetti properly without a soup spoon.  Shame on you.”

(Why, by the way, a soup spoon?  Why is there no such restriction on the fork?)  And, of course, Miss Manners replies with this convincing counter-argument:

“In the civilized world, which includes the United States and Italy, it is incorrect to eat spaghetti with a spoon.  The definition of ‘civilized’ is a society that does not consider it correct to eat spaghetti with a spoon.”

"I say, Eustace! That man eats spaghetti, yet he uses a spoon!"
"Edward, you have espied a true scoundrel!"

So, to recap, the entire debate consists of three points: 1) Miss Manners asserts that using a spoon is unacceptable; 2) A reader asserts that not using a soup spoon is unacceptable; 3) Miss Manners counters that using a spoon (any sort) is uncivilized.

It is a fruitless argument where both sides insist that the boundary of acceptability is what they say it is — without a single piece of evidence in favor of their points — each implying that it is self-evidently obvious that their claim is true, heedless of the fact that their opponent considers it self-evidently false.  No evidence is given, no argumentation advanced, nothing.  And then, just in case you couldn’t pick up on the subtle connection I’m trying to make between etiquette mavens and language mavens, Miss Manners underscores the point by changing the very definition of a word (civilized) to pretend that it supports her claim. (Much as grammaticasters misuse educated as meaning “agreeing with me”.)

I think you can see why I stopped analyzing etiquette advice in my free time. But, why, again, did I replace it with analyzing arguments over grammar?  The evidence presented here suggests it is because I am stupid.

I come to praise potential ambiguity, not to bury it

Many grammarians go about their days maligning ambiguity. Don’t use while when you mean although, they say, because it’s ambiguous. Don’t use since in place of because either, they say. And so on. If they were right, then everyone would be confused by these two sentences:

(1a) Since I eat the right foods in the right combinations, I’m not focused on calorie restriction.
(1b) The Oscar-winning director tells the story of Venezuela’s “peaceful revolution” since Chavez came to power in 1998 [...]

But people aren’t confused, because the clauses readily disambiguate since. (1a) uses the present habitual I eat, which prevents the “ever since” meaning from making sense. (1b) uses the past perfect, which would allow for either meaning, but there’s nothing in the sentence that a “because” clause could attach to, so the “ever since” meaning is the relevant one.

In general, these concerns about ambiguity are actually concerns about potential ambiguity, where someone intentionally misreading the sentence or not paying a lot of attention to it could misread it.* These situations usually don’t result in actual ambiguity for reasonable readers. That’s not to say there are never ambiguities, but only that these ambiguities are usually much less of a problem than prescriptivists claim.

(2) In a second term, Carter might have moved the course of government toward the left, but since Reagan won the election the nation’s political movement has been toward the right instead.

When it is important that the reader gets exactly the meaning you desire, it is important to remove ambiguity, and at those times you’d want to, for instance, replace since in (2) with because or ever since. When the distinction is either obvious or unimportant, there’s no reason to change it. And the problem is that trying to make language completely unambiguous often comes at the cost of readability and comprehension:

(3) Upon such default, and at any time thereafter, Secured Party may declare the entire balance of the indebtedness secured hereby, plus any other sums owed hereunder, immediately due and payable without demand or notice, less any refund due.

That’s legalese; an officiously precise form of the English language that is borderline incomprehensible to those not trained in its tortuous wendings. Although there is little ambiguity in (3), it’s very difficult to extract the meaning, and the sentence seems bloated. But just try shortening or clarifying the above sentence without re-introducing an ambiguity, and you’ll see the difficulty: languages are not built for precision. And, in fact, ambiguity in language is not a bug, but a feature. This is a point nicely summarized by Frederick Newmeyer in a paper that I otherwise disagree with heartily, Grammar is grammar and usage is usage (PDF):

“The transmission rate of human speech is painfully slow [...] less than 100 bits per second—compared to the thousands that the personal computer on one’s desk can manage. A consequence is that speakers have to pack as much as they can into as short a time as they can, leading to most utterances being full of grammatical ambiguity [...] For that reason, humans have developed complex systems of inference and implicature, conveyed meanings, and so on. [...] Stephen Levinson phrased it beautifully: ‘[I]nference is cheap, articulation expensive, and thus the design requirements are for a system that maximizes inference’ (Levinson 2000:29).”

[Emphasis mine.] Ambiguity is useful, as ambiguous sentences can convey the necessary information just like unambiguous sentences, but in fewer words. The reader, listener, or whoever you’re directing your language to is then able to use their knowledge of context and implicatures to determine the appropriate interpretation (this is the “inference” process). A great example of this (again from the Newmeyer paper, but originally from Martin, Church, & Patel 1987) is (4), which has 455 possible parses, many of which yield different meanings.

(4) List the sales of products produced in 1973 with the products produced in 1972.

And yet, given a bit of context, and some knowledge of what one is trying to do in the situation in which this sentence is uttered/written, you are able to pretty quickly figure out which potential meaning is the best. Trying to make the sentence perfectly unambiguous would only drown the reader in words.

Summary: Pick your battles against ambiguity. Where ambiguity is truly detrimental, put forth the effort to clarify, to root out plausible ambiguities and remove them. Where ambiguity is tolerable, it can be better to leave it in to keep from exhausting yourself and your audience.

[If you're interested in more on potential vs. effective ambiguity, Arnold Zwicky had a post on Language Log from 2008 discussing this topic. Now that I look at his post again, I've realized that most of what I said here, he already said there, plus more.]

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*: I know some of you in the audience are editors, and I’ve had a few editors explain to me that their job consists in part of idiot-proofing writing. This requires you to try to make it as easy on the reader as possible, and to assume that the reader will fall into whatever garden paths and other meaning pitfalls are possible. Removing the potentially ambiguous situations might be seen as a step in this task. That’s a fair counter-point, but it does not compel a change, and the change must be weighed against the considerations. Avoiding ambiguity that requires the reader to wantonly misinterpret is less crucial than avoiding easy-to-fall-into ambiguities.

In a moment, for a moment

What does momentarily mean?  It’s a bone of contention for many prescriptivists, who insist that it must mean “for a moment”, not “in a moment”.  It’s a common enough debate to have appeared in an episode of Sports Night, when Dana (the show’s executive producer) begins discussing this point in the midst of preparing for that night’s show. (Video of the exchange here, if the embedded bit below doesn’t work.)

DANA: Momentarily does not mean “in a moment.”
DAVE: Here’s 2 dissolving to 3.
DANA: Thank you. It means “for a moment.”
JEREMY: Yes.
DANA: That makes me crazy.
JEREMY: We’ve been wondering what the source was.
DANA: Let’s see a graphic for Seattle.
CHRIS: Coming.
DANA: It means “for a moment,” not “in a moment.”
CHRIS: Seattle’s up.
DANA: On the plane when they say “We’ll be landing momentarily,” I call over a flight attendant, and I tell them, “if we land momentarily, it won’t give the passengers enough time to get off the plane.”
JEREMY: And once safely inside the airport, how long do they usually detain you for questioning?
DANA: Well, they know me by now.

But is Dana correct?  If Sports Night had been set in the 1830s, then she may have been.  But in our modern world, she is not.

Let’s go through a quick history of momentarily, from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage.  Momentarily is first attested in 1654, with the “for a moment” meaning.  Two other meanings, “instantly” and “at every moment”, popped up in the 18th century.  The newest meaning, “in a moment”, is first attested by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1869.  Interestingly, the MWDEU notes that momentarily — with any of these meanings — was used only rarely until the 20th century.  Then, in the early 20th century, momentarily usage picked up.  It was the “for a moment” sense that became popular first, and the “in a moment” sense followed shortly thereafter.  (The other two meanings never hit the big time.)

This popularity lag is probably the source of the modern concern that “for a moment” is the more original, more pure sense, and “in a moment” the interloper.  It doesn’t help that the “in a moment” meaning is “chiefly North American” (according to the OED), which prescriptivists generally interpret as meaning “a boorish American misusage”.  But the truth is that both meanings are more than 140 years old.  If you’re concerned about ambiguity, take heart in the fact that it’s unlikely that the two meanings will be confused:

(1a) You will be sent to the new Environmantal [sic] Laboratory site momentarily or you may click here.
(1b) [...] the Pacific breezes momentarily gave way to a brisker wind.

That’s not to say that they could never be confused, because they can if you leave out the context:

(2a) I will visit your house momentarily, (as I’m only a few blocks away.)
(2b) I will visit your house momentarily, (since I have to hurry to another engagement.)

But context usually offers the necessarily disambiguation. And if you were really that concerned about ambiguity, there’d be a lot of words more common than momentarily that you’d have to avoid. (For instance, did my use of common in the last sentence mean “not rare” or “undistinguished”? I don’t know myself.)

Lastly, both usages are accepted as standard by the MWDEU and the Columbia Guide to Standard American English. That said, “in a moment” isn’t without its detractors; the American Heritage Dictionary’s usage panel is a holdout, with only 41% of the panel accepting it. But all that means is that 59% of the panel is uninformed.

Summary: Momentarily can mean either “for a moment” or “in a moment”.  Both meanings are over 140 years old, and both date back to before the word momentarily was common.  Allowing for both meanings doesn’t introduce much ambiguity.

Pronouncing 2010

This article from the San Francisco Chronicle made my head spin. It’s about an accordionist, Tom Torriglia, who thinks that saying the current year, 2010, as “two thousand (and) ten” is bad grammar, and insists that everyone ought to say “twenty ten” instead. The story, amazingly, ran on the front page. And there are four things I want to say about it.

1) When Torriglia claims that no one would say “I was born in one thousand nine hundred and fifty-three,” he may be right. But people would write it, as for instance in the New Jersey State Constitution:

“[...] ten seats shall be filled by election in the year one thousand nine hundred and fifty-three [...]“

2) Furthermore, sometimes people say “nineteen hundred (and) fifty-three”. That’s more similar to “two thousand (and) ten” than “one thousand nine hundred and fifty-three” is, phonologically speaking, so it’s the more relevant comparison. Here’re snippets from an (oral) interview* of Dr. Walter Cooper at the Rochester Black Freedom Struggle Online Project:

“My parents came north in nineteen hundred and twenty-one. [...] And I had interviewed in May nineteen hundred forty-six, so the—I met with the director of admissions, I remember his name, I won’t call it now. [...] We married in January of nineteen hundred and fifty-three, and well, being married, I then confronted the housing segregation in Rochester.”

3) Torriglia is so convinced that two thousand ten is bad grammar and illogical (he claims to cringe at it) that he even insists that two thousand nine is bad grammar and that it ought to have been twenty aught nine.

4) Torriglia is 56. He is no longer young enough to be this foolish. Neither, for that matter, is the 145-year-old Chronicle.

The truth is that it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing wrong with either pronunciation. Twenty ten will probably be the more common one since it’s shorter, but two thousand ten won’t disappear. Nor should it, Tom Torriglia’s opinion notwithstanding.

[Update, 01/04/10: One additional thought here. How did Torriglia pronounce the year 2000, if "two thousand" wasn't acceptable? "Twenty aught aught"? If so, he's completely absurd.]

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*: The silver lining to having read the Chronicle article is that it led me to this interview. If you’ve got some time on your hands, I recommend reading it; it starts off with a fascinating first-hand look at the way that even northern companies and colleges exhibited fairly open racism against even highly intelligent blacks in the forties and fifties, and it pushes further on from there.

What’s wrong with “hopefully”?

Hopefully. Good gravy, why are there so many misguided souls up in arms over this innocent little word? I received a comment about it recently:

You may be correct about the word “loan” Gabe, but your credibility is damaged by your incorrect use of the word “hopefully”.

The “incorrect” usage he mentions?

(1) Hopefully my phrasing of the question tipped you off that this was a trick.

Now, this commenter was obviously quite polite about it, but I’ve seen others who are quite different. They see a usage like (1), of hopefully as a sentential adverb meaning something between “I hope” and “With luck”, and then they start a tirade about how that’s not what hopefully means, about the sad state of grammar in our modern world, and on and on. This argument, as far as I can tell, runs as follows: hopefully started its life as an adverb meaning “in a hopeful manner”, and that’s how it was used up until the early 20th century, as in (2):

(2) [...] in the late revival a number of persons were hopefully converted in Scituate [...]

But then hopefully gained a related usage as the sentential adverb.  The OED first notes this usage in 1932, in a pretty high place: the New York Times Book Review. And, interestingly enough, this newer meaning has pretty well replaced the original meaning, so much so that many people my age (myself included) do not have the original meaning available in our lexicons. Which is why it struck me as a little strange when someone first insisted to me that hopefully couldn’t be used in the only way I naturally used it. I dismissed that claim as an eccentricity. But then another person said it, and another. I started to think that maybe there was something wrong with hopefully. Then still more people complained about it, in really stupid posts about hopefully, and I realized that there couldn’t be anything wrong with it.

I’ve only ever seen two coherent arguments against hopefully as a sentential adverb.  One is that hopefully is an adverb, and as we learned in elementary school, adverbs can modify verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs.  A sentential adverb is asked to modify a sentence — instead of modifying the verb, it modifies the entire proposition — and that, we’re told, just isn’t done.  Except, of course, that it is.  Often, and uncontroversially:

(3a) Happily..they intended Neptune, or I know not what Devill. [1614, Purchas, cited in OED]
(3b) Luckily..our speculations are supported by facts. [1762, Kames, cited in OED]
(3c) Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. [1939, Gone with the Wind]

Now let’s say that you want to be completely absurd and try to argue that these adverbs somehow are modifying the verbs intended, supported, and give.  (They’re not; don’t bother.)  Or maybe you’re going to claim that you don’t like those sentential adverbs either.  Whatever.  There are still lots more sentential adverbs that are absolutely unambiguous in what they modify and absolutely beyond reproach:

(4) Perhaps it was not me who broke the lamp.

That perhaps is an adverb is confirmed by the Oxford English Dictionary, and it’s clear that perhaps in (4) modifies the whole proposition. (What would it even mean for perhaps to modify only the verb?)  So it’s not that sentential adverbs don’t exist, nor is it that they are considered uniformly bad in any variety of English I have ever encountered.  Clearly, (note the sentential adverb) this is not a valid argument against sentential adverb hopefully.

On to the second argument, then, which is that the original meaning of hopefully was “in a manner full of hope”, the meaning intended in (2).  But this is just as simple-minded an argument as the first.  Yes, from its first discovered usage around 1639, all the way up to sometime around 1900, this was the only meaning of hopefully.  And then it gained a new meaning.  I know, prescriptivists; that’s just another example of the fallacy of common usage.  So what if everyone uses hopefully wrong; if everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?

But look, if you’re not willing to use a non-original meaning of a word, you’re going to have to excise a substantial portion of your vocabulary.  How much?  Well, glass, snack, and naturally for starters; they all started their lives with different meanings from those they are now uncontroversially allowed to have. A discussion of some words like these, and how their meanings have shifted — to show that hopefully isn’t the only one — will be the next post. Hopefully.

[Update 01/28: The follow-up post is now posted; check out how glass, of course, snack, naturally, enthusiasm, and quarantine have all changed their meanings over time.]

New Year(‘)s(‘) Day(s)

I had so much fun doing a Christmas-themed post last week that I found myself compelled to follow it up with another holiday-themed post. This time it’s Nochevieja y el Día de Año Nuevo, or as people who aren’t still giddy from managing to pass the first quarter of undergraduate Spanish might call them, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.* The obvious question, as with so many holidays, is whether there’s an apostrophe, and if so where it goes. New Year’s is pretty easy; unlike other holidays, there’s only one new year revelant on that day, so neither New Years Day nor New Years’ Day work, because they suggest more than one new year is starting. (This issue of multiple new years was the subject of a brilliant satirical post last year.) The correct version being New Year’s Day is confirmed in Title 5, Section 6103 of the U.S. Code, and the Banking and Financial Dealings Act of 1971 in the U.K.

So maybe New Year’s Day is a bit boring. Where the real fun comes is when you try to pluralize New Year’s Day. Suddenly you have multiple new years, so New Years Days and New Years’ Days become reasonable possibilities again. Since all three are fairly reasonable, the matter would seem to be one of personal taste. If you’re the sort of person who likes to pluralize early in the construction of complex noun phrases, the sort to say things like passers-by or Attorneys General, then go ahead as pluralize the year before possessivizing, netting New Years’ Days. You’ll be in the company of G. E. Sargent and the Charles-Dickens-edited weekly Household Words. If you’re the sort to treat set phrases as a single word, preferring passer-bys and Attorney Generals, leave it as New Year’s Days. It’s been seen in the weeklies Every Saturday (1873) and the Charles-Dickens-Jr.-edited All the Year Round (1894). If you’re indecisive, omit the apostrophe to avoid having to go one way or the other. That’s done by David Jennings (1730) and others, but this approach seems much rarer than either of the apostrophized versions.

Which version’s “right”, though? I think you all know me well enough to know that I’ll defer on that point.

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*: It’s sort of sad that I consider this a substantial accomplishment, what with being in my fourth year in a linguistics doctoral program, and given the fact that a moderately intelligent four-year-old could do the same thing if raised in a Spanish-speaking home.

Putting the X back in Christmas

I spent the day today walking around the suburbs of Pittsburgh, soaking up the cold and the snow as best I could, storing it away mentally to be recalled throughout the long bright winter in San Diego. And with the all the lights, signs, and half-inflated Santas, well, in the air there’s a feeling of Christmas.

Or might one say Xmas?

One might of course, but in so doing one runs the risk of offending a few people. For instance, these folks, who view the use of Xmas as a way for the secular to omit Christ from Christmas. This is a widely held belief, and one that people often feel strongly about; a search for “Christmas not Xmas” on Facebook netted 200 groups and 34 pages pushing for use of the word Christmas instead of Xmas. It’s even led to poetry:

We surely would not write “X-ian”
For the Christians here on earth,
Then why do many write “X-mas”
For the day of the Savior’s birth?

But, as so often happens, the poem is mistaken. There is nothing devious or censorious about Xmas, or even Xian for that matter; X is an old abbreviation for Christ. And when I say old, I mean old: 900 years old in English, and 1700 in Latin/Greek.

In fact, it all goes back to the Roman Emperor Constantine I, best known for his giant marble head, his founding of Constantinople, and his much-publicized acceptance of Christianity on the eve of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 AD. After the battle, Constantine adopted the labarum — ☧, a juxtaposition of the Greek letters chi (X) and rho (P) as a symbol for Christ — as his monogram. Although the symbol ☧ itself and the abbreviation XP pre-dated Constantine, it was his use of them that really launched them to prominence.

So why use “Chi-Rho” anyway? Well, it’s an abbreviation for “Christ”, which in Greek is “Χριστός”. Note those first two letters, chi and rho. That means people have been abbreviating Christ with an X (or an XP) for 1700 years. In fact, these sorts of abbreviations and word games were something of a calling card of the early Christian church. The “Jesus fish” so prevalent on on the back-ends of cars has “ΙΧΘΥΣ” inside of it, an acrostic for the ancient Greek “Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ ͑Υιός, Σωτήρ”, which means “Jesus Christ, Son of God, savior”. Before it became a foot soldier in the bumper sticker wars, this acrostic was used as a marker in the early Christian underground. Other common abbreviations — also known as Christograms — include the INRI (from the Latin for “Jesus Nazarene, King of the Jews”) on crucifixes, the IHS (from the first three letters in “Jesus” in Greek) on tombstones, or the contracted nomina sacra in early Greek scriptures. These abbreviations are throwbacks to the exciting early years of Christianity, not some modern plot to snuff out Jesus.

That’s all well and good, but what about the X in English? Was it just a Roman-era Christian symbol that’s only now being resurrected by heathens to cover up the Christ in Christmas? Nope. In the Old English Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, written sometime before 1123, we see the chi-rho abbreviation in Christ’s mass, the progenitor of the word Christmas:

Her on isum eare to Xes. mæssan heold se cyng Heanri his hired on Westmynstre.

The OED lists further examples of such X abbreviations from then until now — not just in Xmas, but also in Xtian (for Christian). Aldous Huxley used it in 1915 (The ethics are identical with Xtian ethics), Ezra Pound in 1940 (They drove the Xtians out of Japan), and D. Jones in 1960 (what the present notion of Xtianity boils down to). So the poet I quoted above is completely mistaken; we surely might write X-tian for the Christians here on Earth. It’s not a common abbreviation anymore, but Xmas still is. Here’s even a neat example from Wikipedia, with Xmas used in a postcard in the good ol’ days around 1910:

So fear not, traditionalists! You can use Xmas without fear of offending God! The only concern with Xmas is that as an abbreviation, it’s a bit informal. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it on your letterhead, but if someone suggests you’re impious for using Xmas, let ‘em know how traditional you are. 1700 years traditional, baby!

Led astray by the no-split-infinitives fetish

There is nothing wrong in English with splitting an infinitive. There never was anything wrong with it, either. You probably all knew that already. Unfortunately, the loudest grammar snobs are the ones who’ve put the least research into their opinions, and so, for every ten people quietly aware that infinitives can and sometimes should be split, there’s one vocal grammaticaster shouting over them that split infinitives are an abomination in the eyes of Pope. That means that there’re still a substantial number of people out there either objecting to or grinding their teeth over Star Trek’s to boldly go.

These people are mistaken. But the fact that they are mistaken will not stop them from complaining and possibly thinking less of you. And you may very well be in a position where the opinion of the misinformed matters to you; you might be an author, editor, or even a job applicant whose cover letter will be read by a lunkhead whose personal grammatical prejudices may blind him to your outstanding qualities. This leads a large number of people aware that there is no linguistic reason to avoid split infinitives (or singular they, or sentential hopefully, etc.) to still avoid using them for fear that someone of some importance will judge them harshly. It’s an unfortunate state of affairs, best summarized by Ann Daingerfield & Arnold Zwicky’s line: “Crazies win“.

Now, in many cases, it’s not so bad. It’s unfortunate that reasonable people have to bow to the whims of the mad, but that’s life, innit? After all, would you really notice if someone changed (1a) to (1b)?

(1a) I’m going to angrily split infinitives.
(1b) I’m going to split infinitives angrily.

And sometimes it even sounds better to not split an infinitive:

(2a) Alfonso Ribeiro taught me to gracefully dance.
(2b) Alfonso Ribeiro taught me to dance gracefully.

But these bad-to-split situations are not as pervasive as some people seem to think. That’s because prescriptivists have a bad habit of not actually looking at the language that they’re claiming domain over.  For example, the normally reasonable folks at AskOxford write that “Split infinitives are frequently poor style, but they are not strictly bad grammar,” and illustrate this claim with exactly zero examples. In so doing, they completely ignore the fact that sometimes the split infinitive is the only right way of doing it. For example, consider

(3a) She decided to gradually get rid of the teddy bears she had collected.
(3b) She decided gradually to get rid of the teddy bears she had collected.
(3c) She decided to get rid of the teddy bears she had collected gradually.
(3d) She decided to get gradually rid of the teddy bears she had collected.
(3e) She decided to get rid gradually of the teddy bears she had collected.
(3f) She decided to get rid of gradually the teddy bears she had collected.

This is an example from R. L. Trask. (3b) and (3c) unsplit the infinitive, but make it unclear where gradually is attached; is she gradually getting rid of the bears, gradually deciding to get rid of them, or getting rid of bears collected gradually? And (3d), (3e), and (3f) are just plain awkward, so if someone thinks a split infinitive is poor style, surely they’d think these ones still worse. A reasonable person might avoid split infinitives in other situations, so as not to incur the wrath of idiots, but in cases like this, no one would intentionally ruin their sentence in order to placate the misinformed.

Or so I’d figured. But then Amy McDaniel posted a worksheet from a class taught by David Foster Wallace, who very well may have been a talented writer, but also held some severely backward prescriptivist views, as discussed/destroyed at Language Hat. The worksheet is a list of sentences, each of which Wallace claims contains an error. One of the sentences is:

8. She didn’t seem to ever stop talking.

Now, in light of all this discussion about split infinitives, it’s clear that Wallace’s objection will be to the phrase to ever stop. But how do you fix it? The answer, given by McDaniel in the comments on the post, may surprise you:

the easy, unawkward fix, according to Wallace, is “She didn’t seem ever to stop talking.”

I don’t often use interrobangs, but: WHAT?! I could see “She didn’t ever seem to stop talking.” I could see “She didn’t seem to stop talking, ever.” Heck, I think I might even prefer one of those to the original.  If you’re willing to change the words, you could also use: “She never seemed to stop talking.”; “It seemed she never stopped talking.”; “She seemingly never stopped talking.”  Any of those would be reasonable, unawkward replacements.

But “She didn’t seem ever to stop talking”? Does anyone find to be that a good sentence, or even an “unawkward” one? It sounds awful to me, but then, being from Pittsburgh, I’m not entirely standard in my usage of negative polarity items like ever or anymore. If you like this sentence, please say so.

This is the weird thing with this worksheet: Wallace was a well-renowned writer, as well as a native speaker of English.  How can someone so close to the language be so blind to what does and doesn’t sound like English?  Because his re-phrased sentence most certainly does not.

Please, dear reader, I beg of you. Don’t let fear of what other people will say about your writing cause you to write something obviously awkward. And if you should disregard my plea, at least don’t pull a David Foster Wallace and convince people who respect you to fly in the face of all that sounds right in English.

[Hat tip to bradshaw of the future for pushing me to finish this post.]

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Wallace’s other sentence revisions have already been intelligently discussed (attacked) in many other blogs, among them Arnold Zwicky’s discussion of each other and one another, Chris Potts’s succinct dismissal at Language Log, the truly stunning point-by-point gutting of the test delivered at Mackerel Economics, and another equally stunning point-by-point evisceration from Starlingford Chronicles. I highly recommend you check these out.