Book Review: I love “Origins of the Specious”

I am unabashedly in love with “Origins of the Specious”. It’s got a clever title, alluding to that controversially correct tome of Darwin’s, an homage to a field of study with even more ill-informed cranks than grammar. More importantly, it’s a wonderful book, one that I would despise for its attempt to render me superfluous, were it not for its friendly approachable style, and how very spot-on it is.

The book is written by Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman, who argue the same sorts of points as I do, but who came to their opinions through a much different path. They are not the rebellious sort — a point that they establish right in the book’s introduction — but unlike most popular grammarians, who upon seeing a singular they or other such “mistake” shove their fingers into their ears like a petulant child and scream “NA NA NA! I can’t understand you! You’re stupid!”, O’Conner and Kellerman are sensible. If choosing a grammarian were like selecting a president, they’d win — hands down — because they’re the ones you could sit down and have a meal with. They’re reasonable, and more importantly, they’re right.  They are proponents of a simple principle, that language usage is a democracy:

“People often ask me who decides what’s right. The answer is we all do. Everybody has a vote. The ‘rules’ are simply what educated speakers generally accept as right or wrong at a given time. [...] You may kick and scream too, when you find out that many of your most cherished beliefs about English are as phony as a three-dollar bill. Hey, I know the feeling! [...] Keep an open mind and expect the unexpected. Feel free to grumble too. Democracy can be exasperating when you’re on the losing side. But English is a work in progress, and always will be [...]” (pg. xvii)

“Origins” is a list of lexical, grammatical, and etymological myths, expertly debunked. It’s a massacre of the misinformed beliefs of most prescriptivists: common edicts against none are (p. 26), drive friendly (p.29), and data is (p. 177), among others, all fall under their sword. The best part is that these sword-wielders are not young Turks, who prescriptivists would readily write off, but rather the trusted old guard. O’Conner and Kellerman aren’t writing because they believe that what they write is the way language should be, but rather because what they write is what language is. Tired of the knowing winks and hardy slaps on the back that misinformed prescriptivists give them, they fight back, showing everyone where they’re wrong. In the introduction, they even note that they occasionally regret their findings, yet they present them nevertheless. This is science, done right, and it alone would justify the book.

“Origins” is split up into chapters, each covering a separate area of the language. The first considers the claim that Americans are destroying the proper English of the Brits. I hope it’s not giving away too much to reveal that O’Conner and Kellerman conclude that we aren’t. In fact, on many points American English is more conservative than British English. The next chapter does what I do, debunking spurious grammar edicts, and this was the part of the book that appealed most to me. It was top-notch. Others might prefer the chapters on mangled words and idioms, or on the etymology of popular words and phrases, or on fractured French borrowings (the gallingly non-Gallic pronunciation of lingerie, for instance). There’s something for everyone who likes words and is interested in their real backstories.

But best of all, the book is well-written, easy to read, and unremittingly pleasant (unlike many grammar books). I read it in a week, despite the deadlines I had looming. Those days I longed for the bus ride, when I’d set aside time to set aside my other work and devote myself to the book. I took the long way home on occasion to squeeze a few more pages in. I read in bed with the lights off, a small desk lamp illuminating the pages so everyone would think I was asleep and not bother me.

All in all, it’s a great book, assuming you’re into this kind of thing — which, if you’re reading this blog, you almost certainly are.

The real difference between “between” and “among”

I apologize for not posting much recently, but I’ve been bogged down with being a grad student — submitting a paper, setting up a self-paced reading study, and moving apartments. But in the course of compiling that paper, I skimmed through an article with the following title:

(1) Establishing relationships among patterns in stock market data

(Emphasis mine.) That set off my “weird usage” alarms and — BAM! — the grammatical fire was back! (1) isn’t exactly ungrammatical, but it is an incorrection, a usage dictated by a misguided rule. The rule, of course, is that between can only be used with two entities and no more; if three or more items are being discussed, among is said to be the only acceptable choice. This, I assume, is the reason that the authors shied away from the title that I (and probably many of you) would have used:

(1′) Establishing relationships between patterns in stock market data

Now, why would I use between over among here? It’s not just to be contrary, but rather because among is, in actual English usage, used to express a weaker, vaguer, more nebulous connection between items than between. The Oxford English Dictionary summarizes the distinction crisply:

“[between] is still the only word available to express the relation of a thing to many surrounding things severally and individually, among expressing a relation to them collectively and vaguely”.

So return to the above title (1), the whole point of the paper is that there are distinctive specific relationships between stocks that a good machine learning algorithm can pick up on, rather than some general tendency or imprecise relationships across them. Thus between is more natural (to me). Further evidence of the vague/specific distinction comes from examples like these, where I distinctly prefer one over the other, depending on the collectivity and nebulousness of the relationship:

(2a) The “Duck Hunt” dog had hidden among (?between) the reeds.
(2b) Luxembourg is located between (?among) France, Belgium, and Germany.
(2c) The gangster divided the loot equally between (?among) his cronies.
(2d) His cronies then distributed it among (?between) themselves.

So how did that junk rule about between being restricted to two entities come about? I usually see it justified by an appeal to etymology. The OED notes that between comes from Old English bi saem twéonum, which literally meant “by seas twain”. This “by twain” began to be used in other constructions where bi and twéonum were placed together, and over time the two words coalesced into one. Since etymology is destiny, and right there in its original form 1000 years ago is twain, prescriptivists argue that between is illogical when more than two things are being discussed. For instance, check out this bit from James Brown’s Third Book of the Rational System of English Grammar (1856):

“In this use of between, there is a perfect disregard to the dual import which this preposition derives from its parent word, twain. If we can say between twenty men, what is the difference between among, and between?”

Of course this is bunk. First, despite what Wittgenstein said, etymology is not destiny*. The fact that as recently as 1870, awful could be used to mean “impressive, awesome” does not mean that it must retain that meaning in contemporary English.

Second, if the rule really were justified by etymology, wouldn’t we expect that there was a point in the past where people really did just use between when two things were talked about? Well, the OED points out that “In all senses, between has been, from its earliest appearance, extended to more than two.” And by “from its earliest appearance”, the OED is talking about 971. For more than a millennium, between has been being used with more than two items. If the word’s etymology didn’t bother people back when the word was fresh, why should we start to be bothered by it now?

Third, the very prescriptivists who insist between is wrong with more than two entities use between with more than two entities. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage gives examples of this for Samuel Johnson (he of the first dictionary) and Frank Vizetelly.

But lastly, and really the only argument that needs to be made against it, is that the only-two rule requires you to say things that are obviously not standard English. The OED gives a few examples of this, including:

(3a) *the space lying among the three points
(3b) *to insert a needle among the closed petals of a flower

I’ve taken the liberty of marking these as ungrammatical. (3a) is the clincher for me; I did math as an undergrad, and if I’d defined the interior of the triangle ABC as the area among the three line segments AB, BC, and CA, people would have wondered if perhaps my mind had gone a trifle John-Nash-in-A-Beautiful-Mind on me. But the area between those three line segments is well-defined; it’s the way sane ol’ Colin MacLaurin would have said it. Here we see the specific/vague tendency come into play; it’s hard to have a more specific relationship than “mathematically enclosing” in (3a) or a more concrete relationship than “physically abutting, sticking through” in (3b). Among just doesn’t have the fortitude to fit with such strict individual relationships, even though there’re more than two items in play.

Summary: The rule that between can only be used with two items, and among for more than two, is specious. The real tendency of English is for between when the connections are conceptualized as being between individuals, and among when the connections are more vague and collective.

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*: The aphorism is true in its weak sense; words have no inherent meaning, so of course the meaning of a word is whatever is history has led to it being recognized as denoting. For instance, dog would never mean dog if it hadn’t been for people agreeing to use it as such at some point in the past and for its continued usage with this meaning. The trouble is that this point is used far more often in the strong (incorrect) sense than the weak (correct) one.

**: If you want to read more on this issue, I’d advise checking out the tremendous entry at the MWDEU on between and among.

Whoever v. Whomever! Cases collide! Match of the Century!

Sometimes I worry that I’m not properly using this blog as a chance to get the word out about linguistics, so to rest my troubled mind, let’s talk a little about a component of syntactic theory: case. (Please stop clicking on the nearest link in an attempt to escape.) If you’ve never heard of case, here’s a quick overview. Syntactic theory dictates that all noun phrases must be assigned a case in order to be grammatical. This requirement is called the Case Filter. The Case Filter explains why (1a) is grammatical but (1b) is not; an inflected verb like ate can supply case to its subject (the man), but the uninflected infinitive to eat can’t supply case to its subject.  As a result, the man is not assigned case in (1b), breaking the Case Filter and resulting in an ill-formed sentence.  We can remedy this situation, as in (1c), where told supplies case for the man, satisfying the Case Filter and fixing the sentence.

(1a) The man ate seven sour cream donuts.
(1b) *The man to eat seven sour cream donuts.
(1c) I told the man to eat seven sour cream donuts.

In an attempt to build suspense, I’ve so far avoided saying what exactly this “case” thing is that’s being assigned. Roughly, case is a marker on a noun phrase (NP) that indicates what the NP’s role is in the sentence. English only has three morphological cases: the nominative (or subjective), accusative (or objective), and genitive (or possessive) cases. I’m going to overlook possessive case in this post, because it’s not relevant to the final point and is rather different from the other two cases. Nominative case is used to mark a subject, while accusative marks an object. These two cases are only apparent in pronouns. The nominative forms of the personal pronouns are I, you, he, she, it, we, they, while the accusative forms are me, you, him, her, it, us, them. (2a) is correct because the subject is in the nominative case and the object is in the accusative. (2b) is incorrect because the cases are swapped.

(2a) I saw him.
(2b) *Me saw he.

(2c) The octopus ate the cuttlefish.
(2d) The cuttlefish ate the octopus.

Note that (2c) & (2d) are both correct because non-pronominal NPs are “zero-marked” in English. That means that they don’t exhibit any outward marking of their cases; a nominative non-pronominal NP looks the same as the accusative non-pronominal NP. Zero-marking appears in some other places in English: the plural of sheep is sheep, and the conjugated verb eat in I eat fish is indistinguishable from the uninflected infinitival form in I want to eat fish.

Because only the pronouns have apparent case markings, English is often said to have an “impoverished” case system. Compared to a Finno-Ugric language like Estonian or Hungarian, which has tons of cases with exotic names like the inessive, superessive, ablative, translative, and exessive, English seems as poor as a pauper on payday. And what’s worse is that English has been steadily reducing its case markings. Back in Old English, not only were all nouns marked for nominative and accusative cases, but also dative and instrumental cases.

Why has English shed so much of its case system? Well, quite simply, it got outsourced. Prepositional phrases took over the roles of morphological case marking for most of the oblique cases, like dative and instrumental. That’s why we now say that Vikings lived by the sword instead of lifde sweorde — the instrumental changed from an -e suffix on the noun to the prepositions with and by. The English equivalents of those exotic Finno-Ugric cases are mostly recreated through humble prepositions. As for the structural cases (nominative and accusative), the modern (relatively) fixed word order has rendered them obsolete. Outside of poetic writing and certain syntactic alternations like topicalization, the word order of Modern English is Subject-Verb-Object. As a result, the structural cases are redundant and their markings have just fallen out of the language.

But not entirely! Pronouns have zealously retained their case markings through hell and high water. Except, of course, for whom, which has been losing its grip on that accusative -m for some time. And this, at long last, brings us to the whole point of this post.  Reading through a column about hypercorrection by Paul Mulshine, I was struck by one supposed example of hypercorrection, the use of whomever for whoever:

(3) Whomever the Republicans nominate should assume he must replace Iowa’s seven electoral votes …

(3) comes from the pen of George Will, who Mulshine claims has engaged in a spot of hypercorrection; according to Mulshine, whomever ought to be whoever. Mulshine asserts that “‘Whomever’ may sound more impressive to the unlettered, but it cannot serve as the subject of a sentence.” But whomever isn’t the subject of (3). The subject is the whole phrase whomever the Republicans nominate. And this is where case assignment gets really tricky, because we start to get a conflict.

Obviously, subjects get assigned nominative case; that’s why I love you is sweet and Me love you is stupid. But the subject in this sentence is actually a whole clause — a “sentential subject”, as it’s known in the biz. Semantically, who(m)ever is the head of the sentential subject, so you might well expect the nominative case to manifest itself on who(m)ever, yielding an m-less whoever. I imagine this is Mulshine’s train of thought here.  But within the sentential subject, who(m)ever is the object!  It has moved from the object position to the front of the clause, but if the embedded question were answered, we’d have “The Republicans nominate McCain”, with McCain, the object, replacing who(m)ever.*   Therefore, who(m)ever ought to get accusative case, yielding whomever. And so it seems that who(m)ever in (3) needs a Schrodinger’s m, an m that simultaneously exists to satisfy the accusative case and does not exist to satisfy the nominative case.

This dilemma ends up being resolved by arguing that the nominative case on the sentential subject doesn’t ever have to visibly manifest itself on an NP; it is an abstract case assigned to the whole sentential subject. That means that the nominative case never gets assigned to who(m)ever, and the problem clears right up, with George Will being technically correct to write whomever. But note that it took substantial analysis to realize that — certainly more than us case-deprived English speakers are prepared to do in fluent speech. Furthermore, note that this is such a weird situation that even native English speakers such as Mulshine will make mistakes on it. But more than anything else, note that it doesn’t matter. There is no ambiguity in the meaning of the sentence, no effect of omitting or including the m. That’s why case is falling out of the language; it just doesn’t do anything for us, and it can get really difficult to apply accurately. In my own speech and writing, I have an alternation between who and whom for the accusative case. I use whom in situations where it pleases my ears and I am confident in the accusative case assignment, and everywhere else I go with who. There are probably a lot of children who are being taught that who is the standard accusative form. I say good for them, and good for the language. It’s moving on.

—

*: If you’re having trouble with this part of the argument, think of the sentential subject as a question on its own: Whom did the Republicans nominate? Clearly in this question the Republicans is the subject and Whom is the object.

You and myself

Once again, I’ve got a question for you dear readers.  As I so regularly do in my spare time instead of cultivating rewarding interpersonal relationships, I was reading a piece on grammatical/punctuation errors, by Toni Bowers.  Of course, being quarrelsome, I disagreed with half of her six points.  I could agree with three points in the article: don’t confuse me and I, don’t confuse its and it’s, don’t confuse their, they’re, and there.  But there’s nothing wrong with an apostrophe after an acronym/initialism, so CD’s is fine.  Furthermore, periods are fine within quotation marks if you’re British or prefer the British style — and if you really care about which goes inside the other and you’re not editing a text that has to conform with a specific style guide, you need to re-analyze your priorities.  And the last point the great debate of standard accusative pronouns (me, you, them) versus reflexive pronouns (myself, yourself, themselves). I wouldn’t necessarily say I disagree with her point, but that’s because I am not sure how I feel about her example sentence.  So I figured I’d ask the smartest (and least susceptible to flattery) folks on the internet: how do the following two sentences compare for you?

(1a) I have enough salsa for you and myself.
(1b) I have enough salsa for you and me.

Are both acceptable?  Neither?  Only one?  And how do they compare to these two sentences?

(2a) I have enough salsa for myself.
(2b) I have enough salsa for me.

And lastly, how do they compare to these four sentences?

(3a) Troy has enough salsa for you and himself.
(3b) Troy has enough salsa for you and him. (Assuming him refers to Troy)

Please leave a comment if you have any opinions on the matter.  If you can, give a ranking of these sentences as well.  Next week we’ll look at your thoughts and compare them to the expectations of prescriptivists and syntacticians.  Oooh, I’m giddy with excitement!

So it’s National Punctuation Day again

The orbit of the Earth being what it is, September 24th has come around again.  September 24th, for those of you who don’t have a copy of Chase’s Calendar of Events lying around, is National Punctuation Day.  But can I be honest with you?  I just can’t bring myself to care.

Don’t get me wrong, punctuation is great.  I use it all the time, I think it’s a great invention.  Like rechargeable batteries.  But, like rechargeable batteries, I just can’t get too excited about punctuation.  I’ve tried to, I really have.  I had a copy of Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West shipped down to UCSD via Inter-Library Loan, which was supposed to be the definitive academic history of punctuation in English and related languages. I hoped it would reveal to me the history of punctuation, the evolution of its different forms and purposes. It very well might have, if it weren’t so incredibly dense and disorganized. I tried to read it in bed one night. I fell asleep around page 3. So I took it on vacation, the only book I’d packed in my carry-on at the airport.  I ended up sitting at the gate for an hour and a half, staring out the window at a unchanging hillside for an hour, because after reading a chapter of the book on my lap, I just couldn’t take anymore.  I put together one quarter-page of notes on the book by the time that the library asked for it back. I obliged them immediately.

I did get one point out of the book, though: punctuation arose as a means of marking where an orator would pause in delivering a speech.  Different marks could be used to indicate differing pause lengths, which generally corresponded to differing logical divisions.  Short pauses, like those indicated by the modern comma, usually divided segments that were still closely related to a core idea.  Longer pauses, like those of the modern semi-colon, indicated somewhat more independent segments, and still longer pauses, now periods, indicated still more independent segments.

This is the trouble with punctuation: it started out as an indicator of pauses, but due to the correlation with syntax, it has become common for punctuation to mark syntactic divisions instead.  Now we have hybrid punctuation that can either mark timing or serve as syntactic separators, and this has created a somewhat imprecise punctuation system in English.  Furthermore, punctuation is mostly silent.  Is there a difference in pronunciation between high definition and high-definition?  If there is, it’s very slight.  So too with you’re and your. or even

(1a) It seems we’ve failed, all is lost.
(1b) It seems we’ve failed; all is lost.

Yes, there are certainly rules about punctuation, but they’re mostly boring and uncontroversial.  “Put a comma after an interjection.” Okay, fine.   The ones that are controversial, like whether to put periods inside or outside of quotation marks, or the Oxford comma, aren’t interestingly controversial.  One person says “I put the period inside the quotes.”  Another says, “Oh, I put it outside”.  The former is more standard American style, the latter more standard British.  What is there to argue?  I like to wear shorts, and my friend likes to wear long pants.  Who’s wrong?

All the interesting punctuation debates I have are internal, as I debate whether or not a comma is necessary in a given spot, or whether two clauses are sufficiently related to be separated by a mere semi-colon.  Punctuating your writing is, I think, intensely personal, and you have to practice it to get your voice down.  Whenever I edit a friend’s work, I always find instances where I’d change their punctuation (usually by adding a comma), but then it wouldn’t sound like them anymore.  I always found this especially difficult when I’d look at my mom’s writing; she writes more directly than I do, and is much more frugal with her commas than I am, so my inner editor would be distracted noticing all the perfect nesting spots for commas in her sentences.  Arguing about how to best punctuate is often like trying to convince someone that liking chocolate milkshakes is bad because strawberry milkshakes are good.  The trick lies in realizing that there’s more than one good way to do it.

So to return to my original point, the 600-odd words above notwithstanding, a day for punctuation just doesn’t excite me much.  As Vampire Weekend so deftly put it, “Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?”

[By the way, goofy over at bradshaw of the future always brings out his A-game for National Punctuation Day, and this year is no exception.  Go read it.  Now.]

It(‘)s nothing new

Lest anyone think that it’s only since the invention of texting or the Internet that people confuse it’s and its, I just wanted to offer some evidence that it’s not. It comes in the form of an old TV idiom, the spinning newspaper:

This mistake graces the first few seconds of the music video for John Mellencamp’s “Authority Song”, which I hadn’t heard before last week but now have become completely infatuated with. The spinning newspaper editor, no doubt a bit addled from typesetting on a rotating headline, put in an apostrophe that doesn’t belong, using it’s when its is called for! (It’s also arguable that there ought to be an apostrophe after the s in workers, but I don’t find that strictly necessary because Mine Workers Strike could be a complex compound noun in the context of a headline.)

Here we’ve got an example of the its-it’s mistake from 1984, when the Internet was still ARPANET, and texting and instant messaging were unheard of, so it seems unfair to blame the modern state of it(‘)s confusion simply on the profusion of quick electronic communication. But, you might argue, weren’t there beepers and pagers around then? Couldn’t they, as stepping-stones toward full-blown texting, have laid the seeds of apostrophal destruction that are now bearing fruit? I don’t know, because Wikipedia didn’t make it obvious to me when the first pager became available in the commercial market, and information that’s not in Wikipedia isn’t really worth knowing. Maybe John Mellencamp’s 1984 newspaper gaffe was already due to the insidious influence of digital communication. But turns out that it actually goes even farther back, to the very inception of possessive its in the sixteenth century.

Of course, no one should be surprised that its-it’s confusion should predate modern speedy communication.  As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, it(‘)s first appeared in the sixteenth century as the combination of it and the genitive case marker ’s, and it was “at first commonly written it’s“.  According to the OED, this spelling died out in the early nineteenth century, although Google Books reveals that attestations of possessive it’s continue from that point through to the modern day, albeit less commonly than in its heady early days.  Somewhere along the line, possessive it’s began to be regarded as the dispreferred form, and then later the grammatically incorrect form.

[Drifting off-topic, I loved the old archetypes that the kid adopts in the video: the miner with the head-mounted lamp, the butcher with the traditional apron/bowtie combo, the farmer dressed in flannel and overalls. They reminded me of the noble images of the workingman that I was raised with, the images I had as a child of millhunks and Rosie the Riveters, who worked in mines and mills and factories and returned home grimy and greasy and scarred. I couldn't help but wonder if I'm part of the last generation for whom these images aren't terribly outdated. Or perhaps they're out of date even within my generation; when I mentioned this idea to my girlfriend, she was surprised to learn that there were still operating mines in the U.S. Has a new modern image of the little guy displaced these old archetypes? Or have we lost a part of our collective soul with nothing to fill its void? And if I'm this nostalgic now, what will happen when I actually reach an age when nostalgia is justifiable?]

Summary: Don’t be too surprised that people use it’s when they ought to use its.  it’s used to be the correct form, and it never completely died out, even after its became the grammatically correct choice for possession.

Singular “they” and the many reasons why it’s correct

Suppose you were reading and came to the following line:

“She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes.”

Would you …
(a) continue reading, because that’s a perfectly acceptable sentence, or
(b) throw a tantrum and insist that the author is an imbecile speeding the wholesale destruction of the English language?

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’re probably answering (a). If you’re answering (b), I regret to inform you that you hate the writing of C. S. Lewis.

And if you’re the sort to answer (b), the sort of person who rages at the alleged grammatical buffoonery of your fellows, I’m sure it’s because you think you’re doing us all a favor, and that your condescending tone is justified because: first, you’re being helpful regardless of the tone you’re using; second, people only learn through negative conditioning, and so it is your duty, however unpleasant, to rub their noses in it to keep them from going on doing it; third, only a truly illiterate mouth-breather would be so moronic as to make such a mistake, and such imbeciles are below contempt and probably don’t even realize that you’re condescending to them anyway; and fourth, given the Heruclean effort you’ve put into learning the English language as impeccably as you did, it’s really only fair that you get to be a little self-satisfied and perhaps even gloat a smidge.

The only problem with this view is that all you’ve managed to learn about English is how to get your brain to release some satisfying endorphins every time you blindly regurgitate some authority figure’s unjustified assertion. You’re not helping; you’re just getting someone to pretend to agree with you long enough to shut you up. Or worse, you’re scaring people into submission to a point where they feel compelled to preface their speech with apologies for any unknown violence their words are committing against the presumed propriety of the language. Never forget, though, that language is the people’s. Your witless superstition will, by-and-large, be ignored by the speakers of the language, and the alleged impropriety will almost certainly win out in the end. Don’t mistake yourself for a brave defender of our language against the barbarians at the gates when, in truth, you’re nothing but a millennialist shouting about the end-times of the English language. Meanwhile, the world spins on, and the language flourishes, hale and hearty.

One great example of this situation is the shouting down of those who use singular they.  I’ve wanted for some time to have one place to send everyone who complains about singular they, a single page that can debunk whatever junk they’re peddling against it. There’s been lots of great stuff written about why singular they is acceptable, but every time I want to smash the arguments against it, I have to waste time jumping through old Language Log posts and books and whatnot, so I figured I’d finally go about summarizing it all. Without further ado, here’s the evidence for singular they, and why you ought to stop “correcting” it.

Historical usage: Geoffrey Chaucer is widely credited as the father of English literature. He was one of the first well-known authors to write in Middle English instead of the prevailing literary tongue, Latin, bringing legitimacy to the language. And, what’s this? Why, it’s a line from The Canterbury Tales, ca. 1400:

“And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame,
They wol come up [...]“

It’s a little hard to tell in the Middle English, but whoso is a quantified expression, like whoever, that is syntactically singular, but then is paired to the syntactically plural they. So, since at least the beginnings of literary Middle English, 600 years ago, it’s been all right to use singular they. It’s been consistently attested since then; Henry Churchyard reports examples from the Oxford English Dictionary in 1434, 1535, 1643, 1749, 1848, and a wide variety of years in between. There has literally been no point since 1400 when singular they went unattested in contemporary English.

Usage by good writers: Lest one counter the historical point by claiming that it was a mistake or an illiterate usage, it should be noted that singular they has been employed by revered writers throughout its history. A list of examples from some such authors (including Chaucer’s and C. S. Lewis’s quotes above) is available on Churchyard’s site. Among the luminaries: Lewis Carroll, Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Shakespeare, William Thackeray, Jane Austen, and Oscar Wilde.   The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage has still more examples for those who prefer their empirical data to be overwhelming.  And, if you subscribe to Mark Liberman’s one-liner “God said it, I believe it, that settles it,” you’ll be interested to see that the King James Version, along with the Tyndale, Bishop’s, and Geneva Bibles, along a range of other versions of the Christian Bible all employ singular theys.  (I’m not sure of the stance of non-Christian religious texts. I imagine no religion has a commandment disavowing singular they, but I have not studied comparative religion.)

Acceptance by authorities: So it’s historically attested, with usage by great writers. “But great writers are fallible!”, cries the grammaticaster*, ignoring the implication in this that the grammaticaster is substantially more aware of the rules of our language than its best writers. “Grammatical authorities agree that singular they is a barbarism!”

This appeal to imagined authority wouldn’t be convincing regardless, but it rings especially hollow when you realize it’s patently false. Certainly many prescriptivists assert that singular they is an affront to the language. Some even put it in books. Eric Partridge, for instance, says it’s so in Usage and Abusage, supplying exactly no argumentation for his opinion.

But The New Fowler’s, 3rd Edition, which carries on its front cover the subtitle “The acknowledged authority on English usage”, takes a neutral-to-positive stance on singular they, calling the issue “unresolved” but noting that it “is being left unaltered by copy editors” and that aside from pedants, “such constructions are hardly noticed any more or are not widely felt to lie in a prohibited zone.” [p. 776] (This is an especially interesting stance because it goes against Fowler’s own original position from 1926.) Grammar Girl also comes down unambiguously in favor it, if she’s your cup of tea.

Some old style guides even saw the light a century ago. An English Grammar by Baskervill & Sewell, originally published in 1896, states that while he is preferred to singular they in general, they is “frequently found when the antecedent includes or implies both genders. The masculine does not really represent a feminine antecedent [...]” (Italics in original.) Further, as an exercise, they give examples of singular they, and tell the reader, “In the above sentences, unless both genders are implied, change the pronoun to agree with its antecedent.” (Again, italics in original.)

There was even an article in Robert Hartwell Fiske’s fervently prescriptivist Vocabula Review arguing for singular they. The money quote: “We have seen that history is not on the side of those who would ban singular they from written texts; neither is logic; nor is majority rule.” If you needed an authority figure to tell you that singular they was all right, well, I hope you might find it harder to find one against singular they.

Singular/plural syntactic disagreement: Then, of course, there’re the self-styled logicians who say that they can’t be used with an indefinite pronoun like everybody because they have different numbers.  After all, you say they are but everybody is, and so that proves it.  A moment’s reflection shows that this argument is fallacious, especially if in that moment’s reflection you think of a sentence like

(1) My family stops by regularly, and they always bring pizzas.

My family is syntactically singular in American English, as seen in the conjugation of stops.  They is syntactically plural, as seen in the conjugation of bring.  And yet, (1) is a well-formed sentence, and the other option (“My family stops by regularly and it always brings pizzas”) sounds absurd.  The key point here is that it’s not the syntactic number, but rather the semantic number that matters.  And everybody is semantically plural, just like they.  Don’t believe me?  Consider this trio from Geoff Pullum:

(2a) Everybody knows each other.
(2b) They know each other.
(2c) *He knows each other.

Each other is a reciprocal pronoun that requires a plural antecedent, or in non-linguistic terms, whoever each other refers to has to be plural.  So it works in (2b), where it can refer to the semantically plural they, and it doesn’t work in (2c) with the semantically singular he.  Since (2a) is a grammatical sentence, we know that everybody can be semantically plural.  Since everybody can be semantically plural, we know that there’s nothing wrong with using they with it.  And, as we’ll see in the next section, this agreement only matters if you insist that everybody and they have a pronoun-antecedent relationship, which probably isn’t the right way of looking at it.

It’s not really a pronoun relationship anyway: The above argument supposes that they is a pronoun referring to a syntactically plural but syntactically singular quantified expression like everybody.  But what if you’ve got a semantically singular one like anybody? Is it essential that they and the quantified expression agree in number at all?  Steven Pinker argues that it isn’t:

“The logical point that everyone but the language mavens intuitively grasps is that everyone and they are not an antecedent and a pronoun referring to the same person in the world, which would force them to agree in number. They are a “quantifier” and a “bound variable,” a different logical relationship. Everyone returned to their seats means “For all X, X returned to X’s seat.” The “X” is simply a placeholder that keeps track of the roles that players play across different relationships: the X that comes back to a seat is the same X that owns the seat that X comes back to. The their there does not, in fact, have plural number, because it refers neither to one thing nor to many things; it does not refer at all.”

And that’s the weird thing.  Here’re these pedants crying about how English has to adhere rigidly to logic, and they don’t notice the one time the language actually behaves like a system of formal logic.  The point is that singular they can behave non-referentially; it’s an entirely different word from the standard referential pronouns he or plural they in these cases.  In fact, Pinker notes that some other languages have different words for the two meanings.  Since this they doesn’t pick out any specific entity or entities, it functions like the variable x in the mathematical expression 2(x + 7).  Can he be used in the same way as they, as a bound variable?  Sure, but that leads to the next point.

he isn’t gender-neutral: Some claim that singular they is unnecessary because he is gender-neutral, and that this whole kerfuffle about singular they being in any way good or useful only came about when “arrogant ideologues began recasting English into heavy artillery to defend the borders of the New Feminist state.” That’s from an article in The Weekly Standard by David Gelernter, a computer science professor at Yale. See,

“Ideologues can lie themselves blue in the face without changing the fact that, to those who know modern English as it existed until the cultural revolution and still does exist in many quarters, the neutral he ‘has lost all suggestion of maleness.’”

Yep, back before the evil, scary cultural revolution of the 1970s, no one ever saw anything odd about gender-neutral he.  And we see this by the fact that back in 1896, when women couldn’t vote in the U.S., Baskervill and Sewell thought that he sounded weird with mixed company. And we see evidence in the fact that singular they has been used since Chaucer’s time.  No, wait, that’s the opposite of his claim!  Nuts!

If you really think that he is gender-neutral, you ought to find nothing wrong with the following sentences:

(3a) At the funeral, everyone was dressed to the nines, each wearing his swankest tie or nicest dress.
(3b) Is it your brother or your sister who can hold his breath for four minutes?

Geoff Pullum came up with (3b), and I think it’s the clincher. I just can’t picture any competent speaker of English saying it and thinking it correct.  Sometimes it might be the case that he is approximately gender-neutral, but it’s not so in the general case.  There are many such examples where he sounds bad compared to a truly gender-neutral pronoun.

Equal ambiguity: Some others, often members of the “Don’t start a sentence with since!” set, complain that another problem with using they with a quantified or generic expression is that it introduces ambiguity. For instance, who does they refer to in

(4) Everyone meeting the royal family said that they were gracious?

Yes, that’s ambiguous as to whether the visitors or the royal family were gracious. Yes, replacing they with he removes the ambiguity. But what about

(5) Everyone meeting the new principal said that he was gracious?

What’s this? He has led to an ambiguity?  Inconceivable!  Note that (5) wouldn’t be ambiguous with a singular they.  Like the Oxford comma, sometimes singular they introduces an ambiguity, but just as often it avoids an ambiguity. Ambiguity is par for the course with pronouns with multiple referents, anyway:

(6a) Bob asked Jim if he was fat.
(6b) The Romans befriended the Gauls, but they slew them.

These sorts of ambiguities are common, even in edited writing, because the surrounding sentences give context to the ambiguous sentence.  Pilgrim’s Progress, for instance, one of the most prominent books in English literature, has almost 40 examples of “they * them” (e.g., they overtook them, they seek to stifle them).  That’s a lot more examples than one would expect if this sort of ambiguity were so crippling.  So ambiguity in singular they isn’t a deal-breaker either.

Summary: You don’t have to use singular they yourself.  You can go ahead and re-work your sentences to avoid it. You can employ he or she, or s/he, or some stupid made-up gender-neutral pronoun of your own devising like xe.  You can even just stubbornly plow on, using he as a gender-neutral pronoun until you grow tired of people pointing out that it isn’t really.  I don’t care, and you’re not grammatically wrong.  But you’re just making a fool of yourself when you go around telling users of singular they that they’re wrong, because they’re not.

—

*: Grammaticaster, by the way, is one of my new favorite words, learned from the book Dimboxes, Epopts, and Other Quidams. It refers to a “petty, self-styled export on grammar, usually a niggling, precise type who can stab a bony finger at a dangling participle or split infinitive but lacks a true appreciation of writing in all its riches and varied styles. The rule-conscious pedant who sees writing not as good or bad but as right or wrong.” Or as the OED more briefly puts it, “A petty or inferior grammarian. (Used in contempt.)”

**:The information above was compiled from a number of sources, most of which are mentioned in the post, but here’s a few others that I found useful and may or may not have linked to above:
Grammar Girl: Generic Singular Pronouns
Language Log: Shakespeare used they with singular antecedents so there
Language Log: Singular they with known sex
Language Log: “Singular they”: God said it, I believe it, that settles it.
Language Log: Lying feminist ideologues wreck English, says Yale prof
The Lousy Linguist: Singular ‘they’ is old, logical, and grammatical
Wikipedia: Donkey pronoun

“Irregardless” has a posse

With the passion of a thousand suns do grammarians hate irregardless. Grammar forums are rife with rage at its continued existence. It’s called an “evil word“, “a corruption, an abomination“. Richard Lederer wrote, “Of all the misuses that slither through the English language, irregardless will get you into the hottest of water.” You can even buy a T-shirt advertising your low opinion of irregardless.

The question isn’t whether or not irregardless is a word, because that’s such an ill-defined question. Of course it’s a word, as it’s a string of letters with a fairly well-agreed-upon intended meaning, a string that is standardly separated from other words in a sentence by spaces. But asking if it’s a word isn’t the question anyone’s interested in; when people ask if irregardless is a word, they really mean to ask if irregardless is a valid and well-accepted component of Standard English. And on that front, as with many words that I use, such as jaggerbush or slippy, the answer is no, it’s definitely non-standard. The reason why is obvious; it’s got a morphological double negative, with the negative prefix ir- and the negative suffix -less. As a result, it doesn’t fit the (singularly negative) meaning it’s intended to convey.

Irregardless appears to have arisen as a blend of the two standard words irrespective and regardless, and it’s not new. The American Dialect Dictionary antedates it to 1912. Thanks to Google Books, I can even offer a few unconfirmed earlier occurrences for irregardless:

(1) “[...] B. Gosse Esq., of London, who gave indiscriminately to every object irregardless of worthiness, and disliked to destroy anything.”
[Nature's Revelations of Character, by Joseph Simms, MD, 1873]

(2) “Individually, at least, I am in favor of the education of whole country, irregardless of race, color, or previous condition.”
[Transcript of the Congressional Testimony of William H. Hill, December 28, 1876]

(3) “[...] an agreement amongst everybody who handles coal in the New England cities to protect themselves irregardless of the situation and irregardless of the demands of the people [...]“
[Court Proceedings from 1906]

Honestly, these early attestations surprised me. I’d figured, as I assume most people do, that irregardless was a fairly new phenomenon. I was wrong; not only is irregardless over a century old, but it’s even appeared in older formal writing, such as the official text of the U.K. Contagious Disease Act (Horned Cattle) of 1880. As I found out while trawling the Oxford English Dictionary, I oughtn’t to have been so surprised by the long pedigree. In fact, irregardless would have fit in just fine in the 16th and 17th centuries:

“[un-] is sometimes redundantly prefixed to adjectives ending in -less. [...] The type, however, chiefly belongs to the later 16th and 17th centuries; among the instance from that period are unboundless, uncomfortless, undauntless [...]“

Note that for these double negative words, like with irregardless, the intended meaning is negative. It might sound crazy that this could ever have been a common and productive pattern, but here’s an example from a 1570 poem:

“Who seeking Christ to kill, the King of everlasting life,
Destroyed the infants young, a beast unmerciless,”

How about that? I suppose it’s not overly surprising that this is the case; the 16th and 17th centuries were a time when double negatives were still being used to indicate negation. Shakespeare, who wrote in this period, used them as negatives. And unmerciless and irregardless are just instances of double negatives within a word.

Even knowing all that, it’s still kind of surprising to me that irregardless is isn’t so much an ill-formed word as it is a latecomer who missed its chance by a few centuries. That doesn’t mean I’d advise using irregardless; far too much has changed in the language since 1570 for irregardless to be valid in Modern English. It’s just neat that something that’s now so anathema used to be acceptable.

Metapost: On Health Care Reform

Warning: there is nothing in this post about grammar. Nothing at all. It is just my current opinion on health care reform, which I have felt rather strongly about for quite a while. As with my previously posted opinions on Proposition 8, I don’t expect this piece will change your opinion drastically. Don’t bother reading it if you think it will skew your opinion of me or prevent you from enjoying the site in the future. If you’re interested, my thoughts are below the fold.

Slow down a second

Have you ever had to confront a dirty truth about one of your childhood heroes?  I have.  I used to worship Woodrow Wilson.  My elementary and high school history books treated him like a brainiac whose sole problem was his aloofness.  He’d have a great idea, like the League of Nations, or the Fourteen Points, or a less-punitive Treaty of Versailles, but then the lunkheads in Congress — I’m looking at you, Henry Cabot Lodge — would vote him down, seemingly because they were jealous of how smart and great he was.

I graduated from high school and went on to college at Wilson’s alma mater, excited about all the stuff on campus named for him or otherwise honoring him.  And then, during my junior year, I started reading about how Wilson was actually a pretty heavy-duty racist, even for his time. (This came from reading Lies My Teacher Told Me, one of the inspirations for this blog.)  It was a crushing blow, and revealed to me that, even though I thought I had matured beyond hero worship, hero worship isn’t something you ever really outgrow.

“Weird Al” Yankovic is another of my boyhood heroes.  My best friend in elementary school and I listened to Weird Al’s Bad Hair Day album incessantly throughout much of 1996 and 1997. I still get the song “Mr. Popeil” stuck in my head from time to time, and the lyrics to “Amish Paradise” are etched into my brain.   Thus it is with a profound sense of sadness and tarnished dreams that I inform you that even Weird Al can be wrong — though not nearly so badly so as Wilson.  Weird Al posted a video on Twitter in which he stops a car because he sees a road sign reading

You might be able to predict what happens next: Weird Al gets out of the car, walks over to the sign, and attaches a Post-It with “LY” written on it.  Turning to the camera, he says “Grammar, people! C’mon!”

This may have contributed to the appearance of “g-r-a-m-m-a-r” as one of the top trending topics on Twitter. (It appeared with the dashes between the letters on Twitter; I’m not spelling it out or anything.)  Twitter discussions of grammar, with or without dashes, are probably something best avoided, so I’m a little dismayed at what Weird Al has wrought.  But more than anything else, I am sorry to say that Weird Al is incorrect.  There is nothing wrong with the phrase drive slow.

Whoa, there!  Perhaps you’re wondering if I’ve gone round the bend.  There’s nothing wrong with drive slow?  Yes, you read that right.  Slow is what’s known as a flat adverb, one that lacks an -ly suffix and therefore looks the same as an adjective.  Another flat adverb is right, which I used in the phrase read that right a few sentences ago.  But I think my favorite example of a flat adverb is fast, because it’s uncontroversially an adverb, and it has no -ly version:

(1a) Varla insists on driving fast.
(1b) *Varla insists on driving fastly.

(2a) Linda prefers to drive slow.
(2b) Linda prefers to drive slowly.

(The * means the sentence is ungrammatical.) According to the Oxford English Dictionary, adverbial slow appeared around 1500 and has stuck around the language ever since. Adverbial fast and right are even older, dating back to 1205 and 950 respectively, so it’s clear that flat adverbs like slow have a long pedigree.

Not only that, but the pedigree is distinguished as well. Thackeray includes the line “[...] we drove very slow for the last two stages on the road [...]” in his 1848 classic Vanity Fair. Even Shakespeare himself would smile upon the road sign; he used adverbial slow in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “[...] but O, methinks, how slow / This old moon wanes!”

And, if you’re the sort who only accepts grammar if some authority tells you it’s the case, you’ll be interested to hear that The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Usage and Abusage, and The Penguin Dictionary of American English Usage and Style all accept adverbial slow in the context of a road sign. (Fowler’s does so begrudgingly, the others openly.)

So, no, idol-of-my-youth and all your re-tweeters, the sign didn’t need corrected. Your ire is misplaced. The same is true for Dr. Pepper’s slogan “drink it slow”. (It is worth noting, though, that adverbial slow can only follow the verb; it usually can’t be an adverb if it precedes the verb. I slow drove down the street, for instance, is wrong.)

Summary: It’s fine to use slow as an adverb; it is part of a class of words that can be either adjectives or adverbs, and has been for 500 years. Shakespeare, Milton, and Thackeray all used adverbial slow, so it’s even fine with the literary set and style manuals