A brief history of speaking about graduation

Hiding from my dissertation in a little alcove under the stairs on the bottom floor of the library, I was scanning through a book of grammar gripes. One of them was the common objection to transitive usage of the verb graduate. For instance, people will sometimes say:

(1) Now that they’ve graduated high school they can set their goals on college.

Those of an older bent will be more familiar with an intransitive usage where the graduated institution appears in an ablative* prepositional phrase:

(2) Yesterday the heir to the Notorious B.I.G. throne, young Tyanna graduated from high school at an undisclosed location.

And, you may be thinking, darn right! It’s graduated from, and it’s always been, and the kids are screwing up the language again. And it’s true that the transitive form in (1) is newer and seems to be gaining in popularity.** But it turns out that graduate from isn’t the original form, either. It used to be graduated at, as in this 1871 example:

(3) He graduated at Williams College in 1810, and studied theology with the Rev. Samuel Austin, DD, of Worcester, Mass.

So already, just going back 140 years, we’ve seen transitions from graduated at to graduated from to the plain graduated. But there’s an even more substantial change in the history of graduate. Graduating used to be something a school did to its students, not something the students did to the school. One was graduated at some school — witness this 1827 list of folks that Harvard graduated, such as:

(4) Jabez Chickering, Esq., son of Rev. Jabez Chickering, was graduated at Harvard University, in 1804; and settled in the profession of law in this town.

I’ve put together a Google Books N-grams graph illustrating the changes over time:

Interestingly, it looks like the forms in (3) and (4) were both in use throughout 19th century American English. That’s a bit surprising because the two forms assign different roles to their subjects, but it just goes to show that grammatical ambiguity is tolerable when there’s no chance of confusing the roles. (It’s always clear that the person is getting the degree, and the university issuing it.) We see was graduated at start dropping off in the second half of the 19th century, graduated at remaining strong until the early 20th century, and graduated from taking off from there.

So while I graduated high school may not yet be standard, it will be, and there’s nothing wrong with it. It just isn’t what people used to say. For whatever reason, the younger generation likes to change how graduation works. There’s no reason to fret over it; it’ll change, and life will go on, and our kids will be just as grumpy as us when their kids re-reinvent the word’s usage.

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*: Ablative is one of a set of words describing the cases that can be marked in a language. Ablative in particular indicates motion away from something; Wikipedia has a list of these, including such fun ones as illative and inessive. (Valid only for certain definitions of “fun”.)

**: I’m a little surprised, but I don’t see any clear evidence in Google Books N-grams or the Corpus of Historical English of the transitive usage growing faster than the ablative intransitive. I suspect this is due to a strong avoidance of the transitive usage in writing, which both of these corpora are based on.

Plain English and the balance between clarity and aesthetics

I was reading through Stan Carey’s recent Macmillan Dictionary post on the 2011 Plain English Campaign awards, and he put together some disparate bits of thoughts that had been floating around my head for years now.

I’ve always felt sort of uncomfortable with the Plain English Campaign and other related groups that push for more straightforward writing. These groups, if you’re not familiar with them, look over various writing and call people out for unclear language, excessive wordiness, muddled explanations, and biased euphemisms. All in all, a good thing for someone to do, right? I’ve always felt like it was, especially on legal forms and important things like that. Yet at the same time, I’ve always felt a twinge of discomfort with it, and I never quite figured out why. I finally decided that it must be because of the latent prescriptivism in it, and the fact that I sometimes disagreed with the changes that the groups wanted to make.

But that’s an irrational stand. Surely, I’m not against prescriptions when they are focused and clearly improve the comprehensibility of writing, right? That would be insane. So, I had to wonder, what’s eating me about it?

Judging from his post, Stan has similar misgivings about Plain English, but he’s figured his out a bit better. Pointing out overnight tonight and temperatures really struggling as two examples the PEC has flagged as “weatherese”, Stan calls them inoffensive. Stan grants that overnight tonight is redundant, but that redundancy is mild and potentially useful.* I agree; mild redundancy is something that I believe is useful rather than harmful, as an error-correcting code in language.

But it’s temperatures really struggling that gets to the heart of my misgivings. Stan allows that this is “a bit vague and anthropomorphic”, and it is. It’s confusing if you have no other context, and you need to know this bit of our collective unconscious in which we think of the weather as trying to get warm rather than trying to get cold. (I imagine this directionality is not universal, but variable from culture to culture.**) As a result, if there is no other context, or you’re talking to someone who doesn’t share the same cultural knowledge, you probably should avoid temperatures really struggling.

But avoiding such usages has its own downsides. Language is interesting because it is both a tool and an art. Yes, we could use always just say things the same way every time we talk, in whatever way is the most straightforward and least ambiguous. Or we could be a little laxer and permit variation, but ban metaphorical language, and it would probably be easier to get what people are saying. We could disavow sarcasm, because that’s hard to catch, particularly around people you don’t already know, or people like me who fail to have sufficient differentiation between their regular and sarcastic voices.

But we don’t want to, and I don’t think we should. Language is a fun thing, a way to make art every day, every minute. We read fiction because it’s not the newspaper. We have such a fetish for artistry in language that we store quotations, making whole books of words that someone else put together in the right way. Sometimes these quotations are stored because they’re so clear, but more often it’s because they’re not so clear. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be: For loan oft loses both itself and friend,” from Hamlet, is a great line, one that has become an idiom as a result. But it could have been said much more clearly as “Do not make a loan or take a loan, because loans ruin friendships.”

A reasonable contrarian may be saying something like, “Well, that’s Shakespeare, not the weather report,” and I don’t disagree. But these aren’t categorical differences; we don’t want to say that artistry is limited to plays and creative writing and whatnot. All writing is creative. The question is the balance between artistry and clarity.

I’m realizing this right now because I am occasionally babysitting my two-year-old nephew (actually first cousin once removed, but never mind). That means that I have to re-phrase things a lot, because I do tend to speak like I write, which to be charitable to myself, I’ll call flowery. When I say something with a lot of rare or long words, he just sort of stares at me, and I have to rephrase them in words that a two-year-old might know. But when I’m back to talking to other adults, that sort of obsessive clarity isn’t necessary, and would make me unpleasant to talk to.

Clarity, contrary to what many writing guides say, is not paramount. One should be as clear as necessary, but not always more. If a bit of anthropomorphism makes the writing more interesting and engaging, it may be worth the potential loss of clarity. The same if a spot of ambiguity enlivens the sentence, or a slight omission makes it flow better. The key is to know how clear your audience needs you to be. If they’re non-native speakers or still in diapers, clarity is king. If they’re academics, heave clarity overboard.***

So in the end, perhaps the source of my discomfort with the Plain English idea is nothing more than being wary of making clarity the major consideration instead of a major consideration. Clarity has its place, but there are other factors, and those may be more important depending on the purpose of your writing.

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*: In my idiolect, it’s not redundant at all, because tonight can refer to any block of time between the next sunset and sunrise (most importantly, either to the time before or after I go to bed or both) and overnight could refer to any late night, not necessarily the next one.

**: One example of this sort of expectedly non-universal directionality is time. In most every culture, the past is thought of as being behind you, and the future in front of you. However, for the Aymara, the past is in front of someone and the future behind them.

***: This is not entirely facetious. I once wrote a paper that my co-author worried was too clear; because it was easy to understand the algorithm we were presenting, it didn’t feel like it was a deep insight.

Is there a difference between “verbal” and “oral”?

To a linguist, there is an obvious difference between verbal and oral: only the first word can be used to mean “pertaining to a verb”. But for people who don’t talk about parts of speech so often, the more relevant question is whether verbal can refer to spoken language (as opposed to written language), or if it can only refer to the more general sense of all language:

(1a) The written warning is primarily the verbal warning put in writing [...]
(1b) [...] general verbal skills, such as verbal fluency, ability to understand and use verbal reasoning, and verbal knowledge.

Some people insist that verbal can’t be used as in (1a). Verbal is derived from the Latin verbum, meaning “word”, and that means that it only distinguishes things involving words from things not involving words. This is the usage in (1b), where verbal reasoning is implicitly differentiated from mathematical reasoning, or spatial reasoning, or any other form of reasoning that is not based in words. Clearly this is a valid usage of verbal.

And, while we’re at it, we can quickly agree that oral would be inappropriate for the usage in (1b). “Oral knowledge”, for instance, is specifically knowledge that is spoken aloud, and I really can’t see that being the intended meaning. I think we can also all agree that oral is definitely appropriate for the usage in (1a). So what we have a is 2×2 chart, with three of the values filled in:

	using words	spoken
verbal	YES (1b)	? (1a)
oral	NO (1b)	YES (1a)

The only remaining question is whether verbal is allowable in that last cell, with the meaning “spoken”. And the answer is yes, and it has been almost since verbal‘s first appearance in English. The Oxford English Dictionary first attests verbal in 1483, but at that point it modifies people. William Caxton writes:

“We be verbal, or ful of wordes, and desyre more the wordes than the thynges.”

The first attestation of verbal meaning “composed of words” comes between 50 and 100 years later, in either 1530 or 1589.* And the first attestation of verbal meaning “conveyed by speech” comes in 1617:

“The Chamber of the Pallace where verball appeales are decided [...]“

This meaning has persisted. I looked at the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) for the most common nouns to follow verbal over the past 200 years. The two most common collocates were communication and expression, each with 43 hits. Unfortunately, looking at the contexts in which these were used, it’s hard for me to tell which meaning was intended. But the third most common collocate, message, appears 40 times, spread out over the past two centuries. And these are pretty unambiguously examples of the “spoken” meaning, because it’s rare that you’d need to distinguish message delivered in words from those that aren’t. For instance:

“His reply was this verbal message: ‘Wait — and trust in God!’” [1875]
“The verbal message is the key to the written one.” [1909]

I don’t have numbers on the relative usage of the two meanings of verbal, so I’m not going to try to say that one is more common than the other. But it is pretty clear that the “conveyed by speech” meaning is valid.

Does this acceptability mean that you should unquestioningly use it in this way? Not necessarily; there is a potentially significant ambiguity here, so it’s not the best choice in all situations. On occasion, it will matter whether verbal means “conveyed by speech” or “involving words”. If I write to a tutor and ask them to improve my verbal skills, it may be ambiguous as to whether I’m looking for instruction in public speaking or vocabulary building. That’s a trivial example, but in legal contexts, it’s probably better to refer to oral contracts, warnings, etc. than verbal ones, just to avoid the ambiguity.

In most cases, where this ambiguity is small or unimportant, you can and should use whichever feels better to you. You can freely swap between the two meanings in different contexts, as I do. A lot of the time, the context (especially what noun verbal is modifying) will clarify things. So in the end, our chart becomes:

	using words	spoken
verbal	YES	YES
oral	NO	YES

Summary: Verbal can refer either to anything delivered in words or something that is specifically spoken. This latter usage is sometimes condemned as modern sloppiness, but it’s been persistently attested for 400 years. The ambiguity is generally not sufficient to be problematic, so it’s only in cases where precision is paramount that the latter usage should be avoided.

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*: The 1530 attestation is listed under this definition, but its usage seems to me identical to Caxton’s usage, modifying people. The 1589 attestation is unambiguously referring to language, referring to “verbale sermons”.

The hashtag’s not ruining anything.

Gizmodo ran an article last week by Sam Biddle, titled “How the Hashtag is Ruining the English Language”. And, as I’ve begun to realize articles titled “How X is doing Y” tend to do, it forgets to explain how exactly the hashtag* is ruining English; at best, it presents a mildly convincing case that the hashtag has become an overused catchphrase.

So what’s wrong with hashtagging? It’s not that Biddle’s against categorizing tweets; he’s against a recent semantic expansion of hashtagging. Many people have taken to what I’m going to refer to as meta-hashtagging, where hashes are used not as category labels but rather as paralinguistic markers. Biddle doesn’t care for it, largely because he thinks that “the hashtag is conceptually out of bounds, being used by computer conformists without rules, sense, or intelligence”.

But is that the case? The use of the meta-hashtag is certainly noisy; some people use it incompetently, and others idiosyncratically. But if we look at the general usage patterns, I think there’s actually substantial structure to it. The primary usage of the meta-hashtag is to make meta-commentary — that is, commentary on what you’re saying, often from a slightly different point of view. This is not something new; Susan Orlean discussed it on the New Yorker‘s site in June 2010.

For instance, @ourboldhero is the guy that I really learned the meta-hashtag from, when he posted things like:

Scare quotes on Wikipedia may be my new favorite thing: Smelting involves more than just “melting the metal out of its ore” #ohwikipedia

Morning Dan knew that if he threw out the last of the toothpaste I’d have to go shopping at some point tonight, and buy him milk #wellplayed

In both of these cases, if I were reading them aloud, I’d say the hashtagged material in a different voice from the rest of it, complete with hand gestures and overwrought facial expressions. These hashtagged phrases can function like a narrator or, as @EllieTr neatly put it, a chorus in a Greek play. They can offer the author’s opinion on someone else’s writing, as in the first tweet, or a just change the point-of-view from the tweeter to a more neutral, narrator-like view, as in the second. (Also, note that these hashtags double as reasonable category labels.)

There are many different applications of the meta-hashtag. I can’t put together an entire ontology of meta-hashtagging, but let me talk about two additional prominent uses that show there is more going on than just a confederacy of dunces misusing the pound sign because they think it makes them cool. (This is going to overlap a bit with Language Log’s post on hashtags.)

One use is to indicate a general sense of the preceding material. Biddle does this in his opening paragraph: “Unfortunately, the hashtag is ruining talking. #NotGonnaLie”. This type of usage was probably the spawn of the meta-hashtag — it’s category-like in that it classifies the tweet, but it’s also adding information about the tweet itself.

Another common use I’ve seen is to indicate irony, as discussed at some length by Ben Zimmer. Biddle’s article targets #winning, the meme that took off as everyone chuckled as Charlie Sheen’s mental health flew apart in front of our eyes. Biddle objects:

“#Winning. It took off as the lowbrow badge of choice across Twitterdom, signifying success without showing it. You could say the saddest heap of shit, add #winning, and that seven letter thumbs up would make it OK.”

But the truth is that it isn’t serious. #Winning has never been the same as winning. No one thought Charlie Sheen was really winning when he said he was; he was falling apart. When people tweet that they’re #winning, it generally doesn’t seem to be for something honestly great. It’s used ironically, for something falling somewhere on the spectrum between mildly good and actually embarrassing:

Just bought 75 glow sticks for $5 #winning. New Years is gonna be awesome. It’s the #simple things in life that make me happy.
my dad is cooking ribs tonight!! #winning.
My longest trip for the past week has been from my bed to my couch #winning

There are a variety of other uses I’ve seen, from adding emphasis to suggesting a pause between sentences. As a result, I disagree with Biddle’s classification of the meta-hashtag as “without rules, sense, or intelligence”. There is a pattern to it, and one that is, I suspect, increasing its clarity rather than decreasing it.

Biddle is right that meta-hashtagging is often used incompetently — but the same could be said of humor, of rhetorical devices, of all of language. Do we ban analogies because many writers offer bad ones? No, we grit through the bad and wait for the good.

Meta-hashtagging has been and will continue to be used infelicitously. No question there. But it’s also used cleverly, and I find that the good uses outweigh the bad. Even if you don’t share my opinion that the meta-hashtag is an interesting addition to language, surely you can agree that it’s a serious underestimation of the strength of language to suppose it could be ruined by something so insignificant as the pound sign.

And on that point, I have to ask why Biddle thinks that the meta-hashtag is going ruin English. Here are the five reasons I found in his article:

1. It’s used without an obvious pattern
2. People could just use regular words
3. It’s an inside joke amongst Twitter users
4. It’s a “lazy reach for substance”
5. Noam Chomsky doesn’t use it

I don’t agree with these points, especially the first. But suppose we take them at face value. How do these five points lead to the conclusion that meta-hashtagging is ruining English? They’re limited little things that can’t do anything to the rest of the language. In fact, I suspect that Biddle knows this and that he’s just going in for a bit of cheap hyperbole — the exact same sort of cheap hyperbole that he’s accusing the users of #winning of doing. As Biddle himself might have said,

“You could complain about the tiniest bit of English, add ‘it’s ruining the English language’, and that five word thumbs down would make it unacceptable.”

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*: For readers who aren’t familiar with hashtagging, it’s when someone writes a word prefaced by a pound sign (e.g., #eating). Hashtags arose on Twitter as a way of classifying tweets. Suppose you want to see what everyone’s saying about something really cool, like, let’s say, grammar. If you just search for “grammar”, you’ll get false positives from “grammar school” and junk like that. But if someone put #grammar in the tweet, they’re saying “this tweet is about grammar”, so searching for #grammar drops the false positives substantially. Hashtags function as categories within Twitter, but it’s a very ephemeral category structure, since the tags are generated by users. If you haven’t before, try searching for something in its hashtagged and nonhashtagged forms before continuing.