The pot calling the kettle illogical

I picked up an old paperback version of Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage at a used bookstore some time ago. It was $3, and I was pretty sure someone I held in some esteem had recommended it to me. Now I believe only the first part of that sentence; I don’t suspect anyone would have recommended it. I’d thought the book was going to be somewhere between the good-if-somewhat-too-conservative Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage and the wonderfully accurate Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (MWDEU). Instead, it’s largely a series of unsupported statements from Partridge that this or that is unacceptable and dismissals of certain usages out of hand.

That’s par for the course with prescriptivists. Sometimes Partridge goes one step further and tries to cite evidence, although this often devolves into a contradiction. Case in point: alright. My take on alright is that, well, it’s perfectly all right. (MWDEU feels the same.) The word has been around for 100 years now, it has a different meaning and intonation pattern than all right for many (most?) people, and it follows by analogy from altogether, although, already, and almost. Partridge does not agree. His entry on alright starts off with

“alright is an incorrect spelling of all right and an illogical form thereof.”

Now, Partridge was writing in the 1940s, and at that point the form alright had less of a pedigree, so it’s not fair to judge him through 21st-century eyes. Thus, I’m not going to argue the claim that, at that point, alright was an incorrect variant spelling of all right, although I do believe he is wrong about that. Instead, let’s look at his claim of that alright is “illogical”. Six of the seven paragraphs of Partridge’s entry on alright are from a 1938 letter to The Observer, which Partridge quotes without stating what it is intended to show. The letter is informative in a way that Partridge’s opinions are not, discussing the process of single words being formed from multiple words, and actually bothering to justify (some of) its positions. Let me reproduce just the concluding paragraph of the letter; the rest of the letter gives the evidence for the opinion the writer holds:

“I have personally no doubt that there is a single word alright, with a somewhat fluid meaning, but distinct from that of all right. This word, however, is a colloquialism, very convenient in everyday intercourse but of no importance whatever in literary composition. I find that I use it regularly in ordinary conversation, but never have occasion to write it except in familiar correspondence. When I do write it, I spell it as two words!”

Of course, I’d dispute the claim that alright is of no literary importance, and I don’t understand why the author would write it as two words, given the lengths he goes to in the letter to establish that it is a single word, but those are just quibbles. The key point here is that Partridge asserts that alright is illogical, then quotes, without comment, a six-paragraph letter establishing that, actually, alright is a perfectly logical word. There’s even a point in the letter in which the author says “Obviously, if alright represents a compound word which actually exists, it has a certain justification.” (That justification having been given just before.) Partridge could as well have said “The Sun revolves around the Earth” and then cited Copernicus. Sure, Partridge might have an argument somewhere up his sleeve that alright really is illogical, but he omits that argument and instead delivers its exact antithesis. That, I believe, is an example of an illogical formulation. Alright is not.

It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if prescriptivists believe that illogical is a generic adjective meaning “bad for some unspecifiable reason”, much in the same way that they complain about us kids using cool or nice as a generic adjective for something pleasant. Given the prescriptivist penchant for insisting that words must have very clearly defined meanings and their obsession with precision in language, it just seems weird how cavalierly they toss illogical about.

Apparently “the” was in short supply during the Depression

Language Log (in the guise of Arnold Zwicky) alerted me this morning that Wordnik is now up and running. Succinctly, and stealing from their front page, Wordnik is an “ongoing project devoted to discovering all the words and everything about them”. Seems a laudable aim to me.

I went and checked out the site, and not feeling particularly imaginative today, looked up some rather quotidian words: whether, capital, and the. (I had principled reasons for this, I assure you, having to do with worries of data sparsity in a new search engine.  Those reasons oughtn’t to detract from the lamentable fact that when presented with a choice to stick in the everyday or to press on into terra infirma, I slipped off my boots and sidled back to the known. I intend the use of “quotidian” here instead of “mundane” or “commonplace” to function as some minor penance.) All in all, it’s a pleasant experience they have over at Wordnik, and I suspect I’ll end up wasting more than a few moments of my life finding out what their algorithm considers the most representative Flickr pictures for various abstract words — everyday, for instance.

But, as I am the sort who has never managed to fully slip the surly bonds of mathematics, it was the statistics that really snagged me. There’s a graph for each word showing its frequency change over the last 200 years. I don’t get what exactly it means for a word to be “unusual” in a year, but check out the statistics for the:

For some reason, from the 1920s to 1950, the was much more unusual than in the rest of the past 200 years (ignoring that outlier around 1980). This is almost certainly an artifact of the data, rather than an actual increase in the unusualness of the. I’m betting it has to do with different corpora being used at different points in the historical statistics. My guess would be that up to the 1920s, the data is dominated by prose writing that has entered into public domain (books in Project Gutenberg, etc.) and that when the public domain prose dried up, the corpora were dominated by work from some other genre that uses fewer articles. This hypothesis is backed up by a similar pattern on the indefinite articles a and an. I don’t know what genre would lead to a decrease in the number of articles — an increased proportion of dictionaries or telegrams? — or why there is the return to normalcy at 1950 — perhaps digitized news archives take over the corpus at that point? (If you have any ideas, please post a comment.) I assume it’s not really the case that articles became unusual at those points in time, but this points out an important failing of relying too heavily on automatically mined historical data; you can get really funky results due to changing corpus demographics, data sparsity, and the like.  If you think you’ve found an interesting result, you should always check it against some sort of baseline.

Let this be a lesson to all you word explorers out there. For all that can be found in the exotic parts of the dictionary (the most recently searched Wordnik words at the moment include palimpsest, irrendentist, epaulette, and interrobang), the greatest mysteries sometimes lurk in the everyday.

[P.S.: I've been gone awhile, but I should be back to posting and commenting and responding to email semi-regularly next week.  The school year has finally ended, I'm back in the U.S. from a machine learning conference, and now I have nothing to do but blog. Oh, and all the work I pushed off to the summer and the two summer jobs I've ended up with. Crumbs.]

Won’t someone please think of the adverbs?

Saturday morning in our apartment was marked, as all of them ought to be, by Saturday morning cartoons. It may be more accurate to say “cartoon”, singular — only one cartoon was shown, on repeat, because my roommate’s visiting friends had fallen asleep watching it the night before. It was “The Old Man and the Lisa“, the episode of The Simpsons where Mr. Burns loses all his money and is forced to make a living by recycling. Sent to a retirement home, Mr. Burns looks for something to do, such a newspaper to read, only to be met with Grampa Simpson’s explanation of why none are available: “We’re not allowed to read newspapers. They angry up the blood.”

The same restriction ought to be placed on me as well, except I shouldn’t be allowed to read grammar blogs. For you see, as I was busy working on my big yearly paper, I needed to read something to clear my head from all the Dirichlet distributions dancing in my head. Having already hit all of the sites I normally hit for distracting stories and finding nothing new, I foolishly sought out what other grammar bloggers had to say for themselves. Three minutes later, my blood had been so angried that I actually left a corrective comment on one blog — something that I virtually never do. I felt soothed and returned to my paper with a renewed vigor.

The next day I noticed that there was no comment on that post. Odd, I thought, but then again, I’d been up late writing the night before. It was entirely possible that I’d thought better of posting the comment. So I tried another comment, shorter and less confrontational. It too disappeared.  And so I have to go to all the bother of debunking this grammar gremlin here instead of settling it there.

The post in question is just the same junk everyone says on the internet to show their linguistic superiority — complaining that the so-called “educated” amongst us are actually uneducated, blaming the ills of modern language usage on “the drone of mass media”, all that jazz. The whole point of the post is that the rabble is destroying the language by replacing adverbs with adjectives.  The post drips with disdain for those dips whose slovenly usage is slowly leaching our precious adverbs from our precious language.

Look, I don’t have a lot of patience for this garbage. I’m not going to assert that adverbs definitely aren’t disappearing, but let me point out that the first three examples given to support the claim that our language is falling apart are completely specious.  This is the opening paragraph of the post:

My theory—though I cannot call it my own, original theory—is that within the next hundred years or so, all adverbs will cease to exist. I see them slowly disappearing throughout the various levels of education: the un-tenured freshman recalling that her O-Chem professor “talks too fast” (forgetting, for a moment, the equivocation of the verbs talk and speak); the corporate guru pitching his product as “built tough;” all the way up to the double-doctorate responding “I’m good, thanks” when confronted by the everyday salutation “how are you?”

So we have three examples of adverbs being displaced: talks too fast, built tough, and I’m good.  There’s just one problem.  Adverbs aren’t being displaced in any of these.

Let’s start with “talks too fast”. I’m supposing that the author presumes it’s an error because fast is an adjective and not an adverb.  Since fast is modifying the verb talks, an adjective would indeed be inappropriate.  But here’s the thing: fast is both an adjective and an adverb. It’s been an adverb since around 1200, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In fact, the OED notes that the adjectival form of fast came from the adverbial form!  I don’t even know what the intended correction of talks too fast would be supposed to be.  Talks too fastly?  Nope.

Now on to that damnable Ford advertising slogan: “built tough”. Okay, that complaint at least gets the part of speech right; tough is indeed an adjective, and there is no adverbial usage of tough that would be consistent with the intended meaning. But as it turns out, the adjectival form is totally fine there. It’s called a predicative adjective. Compare it to

(1a) I painted the door white.
(1b) The door was painted white.

(2a) The company built the truck tough.
(2b) The truck was built tough.

And note that an adverb doesn’t actually work here.  You can’t say the door was painted whitely, and while I think you could say the truck was built toughly, it doesn’t have the right meaning.  Toughly in that phrase describes the manner by which the truck was built, while tough in (2) is modifying the truck itself.  And since the truck is a noun phrase, it gets modified by an adjective, not an adverb.

I’ll admit that the predicative adjective sounds a little odd — I don’t often use it myself — but it’s been standard English for quite some time. While you may have many objections to the Ford Motor Company, this one just isn’t justified.

The last complaint is saying “I’m good.”  On occasion back at college, I caught some guff for this.  In my family, we just don’t say well. We’re not well, we’re good. There is a substantial difference to me — well implies mere healthiness, while good implies an overall contentedness.  One can be well without being good, and vice versa.  But I digress. What’s more important than a brief overview of my family’s social interactions is that well in this situation isn’t an adverb, either. It’s an adjective.

You have to use an adjective in this sentence because there’s only a linking verb.  You couldn’t say I’m indignantly; you’d say I’m indignant.  The modifier is modifying the subject of the sentence, so it’s got to be an adjective.  When you say I’m well, you’re not using adverbial well, because there wouldn’t be anything for the adverb to modify. You’re using adjectival well, which just means “healthy”.  It’s a separate question whether you think well is a better adjective than good in this sentence, but the choice has to be between adjectives.  Adverbs are strictly ruled out.  Strike three.

Okay, so someone on the internet is wrong.  Why was I so riled up? Honestly, I wouldn’t have cared about this junk if it weren’t for the last paragraph of the post:

I blame the drone of the mass media, producing poorly thought-out mind-tranquilizers without regard for elevating the comprehension of the masses. But then, I generally hate the entertainment industry and am always quick to point out its culpability in the denigration of our society whenever possible. Meanwhile, if at some point you catch me twitching while listening to you, there’s a good chance you’ve forgotten two very important things: first and foremost, you’ve forgotten your third grade grammar lessons; and second, you’ve forgotten that you’re talking to a grammar snob.

See, that’s why people don’t like self-appointed “grammar snobs”. Not only are they often completely wrong, but they’re insufferably condescending about it. If you’re going to go around telling everyone that they’re idiots, you should probably do a little research to make sure they really are.

“noob” can’t be the millionth word

Ben Zimmer has once again written a cutting post about Global Language Monitor, its absurd claim that the English language is about to get its millionth word, and the news sources that blindly regurgitate GLM’s warmed-over press releases about that.   I know it’s become cliche, upon reading an article that one disagrees with, to ask “So this is what passes for journalism these days?”   But articles like the BBC’s really demand that question. Here’s another, from the Telegraph, touting an obviously false claim: “One millionth English word could be ‘defriend’ or ‘noob’.”

First off, to the reporter’s credit, he manages to answer one question about GLM’s methodology; a word is a word by their count once it has been attested 25,000 times “by media outlets, on social networking websites and in other sources.” This information is not available on GLM’s website — I searched for 25,000, 25000, “twenty-five thousand”, “twenty five thousand”, “twentyfive thousand”, and “25 thousand” on the GLM website and didn’t get a single hit.  So kudos to the reporter for getting this nugget out!

But then the whole enterprise falls apart. The article notes that among the words GLM is “currently monitoring which could take English to the one million threshold” is noob. If that’s the case, then GLM’s monitors are incompetent.  I popped over to MySpace, which surely would be included in any reasonable list of social networking sites, and lo! 145,000 hits. It’s already a word by GLM’s arbitrary standard!  Who is GLM using to monitor the social sites? Clearly they ought to be fired. If noob, which has been in wide use by computer folks since the turn of the millennium, managed to slip under their nose, think of how many other unnoticed words there are! For all we know, English might have already passed this made-up milestone a month ago!  To call this possibility a tragedy is an unacceptable understatement.  And the claim that noob hadn’t been yet used 25,000 times on the Internet — where it was born all those years ago! — didn’t set off any alarms at the Telegraph?

How credulous can one be? Here’s the lead paragraph of the Telegraph article:

“The milestone will be passed at 10.22am on June 10 according to the Global Language Monitor, an association of academics that tracks the use of new words.”

And the last paragraph:

“The organisation first predicted that the millionth English word was imminent in 2006, and has repeatedly pushed back the expected date. Other linguist[s] have expressed scepticism about its methods, claiming that there is no agreement about how to classify a word.”

Of course if the first guess was only off by three years, it’s totally reasonable to assume the current guess is off by less than a minute.

Also, “other linguists” implies that Paul Payack is a linguist. He is not. I’m not even convinced he or his merry monitors can be called academics. They are entrepreneurs at best, and they are peddling nothing worth acknowledging.

What an unnatural stress pattern you have, Ms. Sotomayor!

Mark Krikorian of the National Review Online is upset that he’s supposed to pronounce Sonia Sotomayor’s last name with the stress on the final syllable:

“Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English [...] and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to.”

Now, Krikorian is right that final stress is rare in multisyllabic English words.  But it is certainly not unheard of, and it’s certainly not “unnatural”.  Consider these common English words, all of which have final-syllable stress:

1. personnel
2. Japanese
3. volunteer

In fact, according to a study of the subset of English in the Hoosier Mental Lexicon (Clopper 2002), 11% of the multisyllabic words had their primary stress on the final syllable.  By comparison, Wikipedia notes that about 2-6% of the U.S. population has red hair, and around 10% is left-handed.  So if final-syllable stress is unnatural, so’s red hair and left-handedness.

Furthermore, I’m willing to bet that Krikorian isn’t always so obstinate.  I’ll bet he doesn’t go into Victoria’s Secret and ask to buy “lingery” because the pseudo-French pronuciation is too unnatural.  I’d be surprised to hear he refers to a sauté pan as a “soat” pan to avoid that unnatural final stress.  And I’d be shocked if he can’t go to a Starbucks because it’s a café.

What Krikorian is complaining about is having to use a stress pattern that occurs in a full 10% of multisyllabic English words.  He’s looking for an excuse to be lazy, and does a terrible job justifying it with his foray into armchair phonology.

Oh, and Krikorian also whines about “the whole Latina/Latino thing — English dropped gender in nouns, what, 1,000 years ago?”  He’s spot-on there.  That’s why you can say that Brad Pitt is a hunky actress and that Joan of Arc was burnt for being a warlock.  Or that Sonia Sotomayor is an intelligent man and Mark Krikorian is a confused woman.  Right?

Robert Hartwell Fiske strikes me as a prig and a bully

On occasion, I look up at the tagline of this blog (”Prescriptivism Must Die”) and wonder if perhaps I’m being too harsh.  But then I read something like Robert Hartwell Fiske’s Dictionary of Disagreeable English, and realize that the tagline is, if anything, understating the case.

Fiske seems to believe he is in some sort of competition for the title of King Prescriptivist, and his book seems to be his equivalent of the Eveningwear Competition.  His book flaunts everything that is wrong with prescriptivism: ad hominem attacks, unresearched prescriptions, illogic, wild invective against those who disagree with him.  You might remember his quote that the to no end idiom, which many of you well-educated readers use, is a “bastardization born of mishearing”, when — of course — he presented no evidence for this claim.

In his books, Fiske is a bully who asserts that disagreeing with him or making a simple usage error is evidence of poor mental faculties.  As it is with anyone who argues by bluster and bluff, proving Fiske wrong is an exercise in futility.  It’s like nailing jelly to the wall; you can do it, sure, but he’s just going to ignore the nail of evidence and continue his descent to the floor of absurdity.  It is a complete and utter waste of time.  That said, I haven’t much of a stomach for bullies, and have some time to waste.

Let’s start with an example of a bald assertion made without any effort made to back it up.  Check out this weaselly use of the passive: “Though both words are in common use, normality is considered preferable to normalcy.”  Who considers normality preferable, exactly? Certainly not The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (which, by the way, is being sold through Fiske’s website), in which it is written that “Normalcy and normality stand side by side in AmE [American English] as legitimate alternatives.”  This sort of unsourced claim is exactly why everyone’s always up in arms about the passive voice.  This is “mistakes were made” territory.

Most of the book consists of these unjustified ipse dixit proclamations. I can see why; when Fiske does offer justifications, he often contradicts himself. Here’s a line from page 284: “Preventive is preferable to preventative because it has one fewer syllable.” Hey, look, I’m fine with that. Speaking as a light dyslexic, I am all too willing to accept shorter words; there’s less for me to transpose. But a mere 12 pages earlier in the book, Fiske talks about perquisite, which he sneers is “commonly called a perk by the ever-monosyllabic, ever-hasty everyman”. So is conciseness the sign of an efficient mind or a hasty mind?  We are left to wonder.

And then he does the same thing again when talking about one of the only: “Only does not mean two or more; it means one, sole, alone. One of the only then is altogether nonsensical—and further evidence that people scarcely know what their words mean.” This is quite incorrect, and there are so many ways to show it — in fact, I did so in a previous post. One could cite the 20-odd pre-1800 usages of the phrase “one of the only” in Google Books, or perhaps the 634 pre-1800 usages of the phrase “the only two“, which surely would be ruled out if only could not possibly refer to two or more objects. One could even go back a bit farther and point out the Oxford English Dictionary’s citation of a plural usage of only in Pecock’s Repressor, printed around 1450. Yes, yes, all of these would be well and good, and would serve to illustrate that there is no historical injunction against only modifying a plural noun. But the particular usages I choose to cite in defense of one of the only are a bit more modern:

(1) “We have words aplenty that mean to annoy; the only other words that mean to aggravate are worsen and exacerbate.”
(2) “[...] the only people inclined to use & in place of and [...]” [Italics author's, boldface mine.]

These usages are from pages 30 and 43 of The Dictionary of Disagreeable English, by Robert Hartwell Fiske. Clearly, Fiske himself scarcely knows what only means, since his stated definition doesn’t match his observed usage of plural only.  So if (1) and (2) are fine, why would Fiske object to saying that “worsen is one of the only words that mean to aggravate,” or that “the new copywriter is one of the only people inclined to use &”? It’s beyond me.

All right, enough of that. So Fiske occasionally contradicts himself. Who doesn’t?  So Fiske sometimes doesn’t support his beliefs. Is it fair to excoriate someone for that? In most cases I’d say no. But Fiske is a bully, one who launches vicious ad hominem attacks against the intelligence of other writers. For instance, when Burt Sugar, a boxing writer for the Los Angeles Times decided to get a bit cute, writing of an out-of-shape boxer that he “has gone north–as in north of 250 pounds,” Fiske responded that “Mr. Sugar, like some of the boxers he writes about, has apparently had his ear deformed, his brains addled.” After all, he’s used north of, which Fiske describes as “[i]diotic for more than.” Never mind that I found this usage to actually be rather clever, with its implication that the boxer had metaphorically gone on vacation. Fiske clearly did not, and that makes Sugar an idiot.

Another example: Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, is apparently a fool. After all, he used the wrong tense in this sentence: “If I would have been a publishing house, I would’ve eagerly taken David’s book.” Yeah, it’s not right, but it doesn’t reveal any glaring intellectual deficit, right? Wrong! Fiske writes “Mr. Lowry’s use of would have exposes an inability to reason well—as does his imagining he might conceivably have been a publishing house.” Yep, I’m sure that Lowry was really imagining that.

So if I may be excused for the well-worn phrase, Fiske is really a pot calling a kettle black.  If these writers have addled brains and an inability to reason, then one can scarcely imagine what Fiske has.

One last point, and perhaps the most frustrating one, is that on rare occasions Fiske shows admirable lucidity. For instance, he admonishes one questioner that “[p]erhaps you have trouble understanding why fixing to is improper because—dislike it though you may—it is not improper; it is, as you say, Southern.” Oh, if only that reasonable Robert Hartwell Fiske could sit down and talk to the Fiske who spazzes over Sugar’s north of, or the one who baldly asserts that normalcy is to be avoided.  Maybe then we would have been spared Fiske’s disagreeable complaints.  But instead, we are treated to the vitriol of a crank who views any error, whether large or small, as incontrovertible evidence of the end of English.

Book Review: Things That Make Us [Sic] makes me slightly ill

Apparently this blog has become sufficiently well-known that I have begun to receive gifts as a result of my writing. I don’t know why anyone would do such a thing, but I greatly appreciate it, because I love nothing more than free things.  (It’s an unfortunate family trait.) Over the past few months, I’ve received a number of grammar books, and slowly it dawned on me that these weren’t truly free gifts; presumably, it would be proper for me to review the books I’ve received. And so I’m starting up a series of book reviews.  If you have a book that you’d like to see reviewed, let me know (motivatedgrammar gmail com).  If you have any thoughts about what you’d like to see in these reviews, also let me know.

The first book I’m going to review is the first one I received: Martha Brockenbrough’s Things That Make Us [Sic]. Looking at the dust jacket when it arrived, I figured the book was just going to be like the Apostrophe Protection Society’s web page, a series of pictures of grammar errors with condescending finger-wagging. I was pleased to find that it was not a picture-book, but that was about the high point for me.

Brockenbrough, as you may know, is the founder of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar. We don’t see eye-to-eye on grammar, so I was expecting to find that I’d mark up the book with red pen, gnashing my teeth all the while.  That expectation was slightly off; while there were points I disagreed with, on the whole her advice was relatively uncontroversial, and she did include the now-obligatory section of debunked grammar myths. There were two points I strongly disagreed with:

• staunch should not be used as a verb [debunked here]
• People that I know should always be people who I know [debunked here and here]

Pretty minor disagreements, really.  But then there was the part where for five pages Brockenbrough fantasizes that Justin Timberlake is checked into grammar rehab.  At the climax of the fantasy, Timberlake reports to his grammar therapist that he has found an error in Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone: “When you got nothing, you got nothing left to lose,” notes Timberlake, ought to be “when you‘ve got nothing, you‘ve got nothing left to lose.”

The reader is stunned!  Justin Timberlake, grammatical imbecile, has now been converted into the pedant we’d always hoped he’d be!  His therapist responds, teary-eyed, “That’s where the artistry of the song comes in. [...] Dylan is increasing the folsky feel of his song by playing a bit with the verb tenses.”  I have absolutely no objection to that argument.  That’s the point of poetic license, and I think the song would be slightly worse with the change.  But to lionize Dylan for using a grammatical error to relate to his audience after excoriating Timberlake for his grammatical errors strikes me as a bit unfair — especially seeing what happens to Timberlake’s song after Brockenbrough corrects it!  The original lyrics are:

“When you cheated, girl / My heart bleeded, girl.”

You wouldn’t mistake this couplet for Alexander Pope’s work, but it has a nice three-syllable end-rhyme.  That long end-rhyme makes up for the repetition of girl; I think it’s cheap to rhyme two lines by repeating a word, but not if it’s as part of a long rhyme.  I really don’t mind this, and in fact, the use of bleeded strikes me as charming.  But putting my poetic sensibilities aside, here’s Brockenbrough’s preferred form:

“When you cheated, girl / My heart did bleed, girl.”

Oof.  If ungrammaticality is the price we must pay to avoid lines like this, I accept the trade.

The book continues on like this, swapping between basic grammar lessons and these weird excursuses, many of which take the form of letters written by Brockenbrough to those who have incurred the wrath of SPOGG.  As I mentioned above, the points in the grammar lessons were mostly valid.  A few times Brockenbrough overreached in arguing that her usage preferences could be justified by improving clarity, and there was the occasional appearance of the recency illusion (i.e., claiming that some “error” is only recently attested when it’s actually been commonplace for years).  Otherwise, I mostly agreed with her advice — or at least didn’t strongly oppose it — and, again, I did appreciate the mentioning of grammar myths at the end. I would have liked to see more convincing arguments against the myths, of course, but this book wasn’t written with me in mind.  So, in terms of content, the book was alright.  If you’re someone who makes a lot of common grammatical errors, the information is pretty good.  People with pretty decent grammar, though, won’t get much out of it.

But, alas, I’m not here to tell you the book is alright, and that’s because I had two stylistic problems with the book.  I wish these points hadn’t skewed my opinion so much, but these were huge distractions, and are the things that still stick in my craw after putting the book down.  First, the whole book has that creepy but-of-course-I’m-only-joking vibe that makes me extremely uncomfortable.  Some of the jokes were funny, like the proposal that Dekalb, Illinois be renamed “Deka#”. (Pound symbol, “lb”, get it?)  But the self-righteous-haha-it’s-meta! tone of the letters and other excursuses quickly grows tiresome.  For instance, immediately following the discussion that staunch can be a verb, but shouldn’t, there is a letter to Rep. Jay Inslee, condescendingly reprimanding him for using staunch as a verb — even though the previous page said it’s technically acceptable!  The letters aren’t really funny — they’re nagging, they’re awkward, and they usually harp on obvious points, like correcting obvious spelling errors in text messages.  And, outside the letters, there’s this one paragraph where Brockenbrough goes moderately insane, launching ad hominem attacks against people who don’t fawn over apostrophes.  Sure, I get that it’s all probably supposed to be an over-the-top joke, but after two hundred pages of it, it’s hard to believe there’s no truth underlying the jest.

I’d perhaps have been able to overlook this joking-or-am-I? tone of the book if it weren’t for the fact that the whole book is written in first-person plural, or as Brockenbrough calls it when writing to the Queen of England, “the royal we”.  It starts off on page 2, when Brockenbrough writes “As we write, Billboard’s list of top-selling albums contains two serious spelling errors.” (One of the errors, by the way, is kingz, which I would be reluctant to call serious.) Perhaps there is a ghostwriter to this book, but otherwise, this usage is just weird.  It continues throughout the book; I didn’t notice a single instance of I or me or myself or my in the book, except in quotes or example sentences.  This is also standard practice on the SPOGG website and blog, although not in Brockenbrough’s Encarta column.  I get the idea; Brockenbrough is claiming to speak for the SPOGG as a whole.  Maybe that’s standard practice for people who found organizations and write books — I’ve done neither, so I wouldn’t know.  But when you’re talking about grammar, which is so idiosyncratic, I doubt one can speak for the membership as a whole.  The use of this royal we throughout really grated on me, especially as it felt like a crutch.  It was as though Brockenbrough wasn’t confident enough in her grammatical opinions, and had to constantly imply that other people felt the same way she did.

So, on the whole, the book has some good points: it’s not overly prescriptivist, it argues against some common grammar myths, and it has some decent jokes.  It’s a quick and easy read as well, and does a pretty good job of explaining some less intuitive aspects of grammar.   But those are needles of goodness lost in a haystack of poorly justified condescension, royal wes, only-half-joking tones, and discomfitting fantasies.  It’s like Eats, Shoots and Leaves if Lynne Truss weren’t quite so mean.

Stanching staunch prescriptivism

Suppose, dear reader, that you’ve end up on the receiving end of a rather severe paper cut.  At first, there’s nothing but a line on your skin to explain the searing pain, but then slowly the line darkens and a tiny bit of blood seeps out.  Fearing that more will follow that, you rush off to the medicine cabinet to obtain a bandage.  If someone were to obstruct your path, would you yell (1a) or (1b)?

(1a) Out of my way! I have to staunch the flow of blood!
(1b) Out of my way! I have to stanch the flow of blood!

(Please ignore the fact that no normal person would say either in this situation.)  Up through a few days ago, I operated under the assumption that (1b) was the more proper form, but that many people would say (1a) because of the rarity of stanch.  As you might have guessed from the qualifying statement “up through a few days ago”, it turns out that that assumption was wrong.

I found this out by reading through Martha Brockenbrough’s Things That Make Us [Sic], which I’ll be reviewing in the near future.  In it, Brockenbrough writes:

“Although ’staunch’ can be used to stem the flow as well, the Society believes words are more powerful when their meanings are narrow. [...] The word ‘nice,’ for example, has been used to mean ignorant, foolish, dainty, timid, slutty, or strange. [...] It would be… nice to stanch this tide before we lose another fine word.”

Now, you may be wondering why someone telling me not to do something I already preferred not to do would make me realize that it was alright to do it.  The answer, of course, is that the reason not to do it is stupid.  Brockenbrough is worried that by using one word (staunch) as both a verb and an adjective, we’ll no longer be able to tell what we mean in a given situation.  I am going to make a hyperbolic statement here and guess that there is no sentence in which staunch is ambiguous between verb and adjective.  The problem with nice is that every one of its potential meanings is adjectival, so if you say Timothy is a nice young man, you have very little information about which meaning of nice is intended*. (The smart money’s on “slutty”, of course.)  Compare that to the following sentences containing staunch:

(2a) After staunch resistance, NAT may come to IPv6 after all.
(2b) Stimulus Aims to Staunch Industry Job Losses
(2c) Calgary Meals on Wheels could not function without the more than 46,000 hours of donated time given each year by our staunch and loyal corps of some 650 volunteers.
(2d) [...] some brandy was applied to staunch the bleeding of his cheeks [...]

I doubt you had any trouble with any of them.  What’s more, it’s not verbal usage that’s depriving staunch of a single narrow meaning — the OED lists six definitions for adjectival staunch, each attested since at least 1650.  And, lest you still cling to the idea that clarity will somehow be affected down the road, I’d like to point out that Brockenbrough herself has used one of these verb-or-adjective words in her argument against verbal staunch.  She used mean, which can function either as a verb meaning “denote” or as an adjective meaning “ill-tempered”. I bet you could immediately tell which meaning was intended when you read the quote.  The lesson here is that multiple meanings are fine, so long as context can be used to disambiguate them.

But all that shows is that the argument against verbal staunch for the sake of clarity is specious. We need to take it one step further and show that verbal staunch (and adjectival stanch) are okay.  I’ll defer here to others: MWDEU, the American Heritage Book of English Usage, and the Columbia Guide to Standard American English. All of them say the same thing, that stanch is the more common verbal spelling and that staunch is the more common adjectival spelling, but that the two are interchangeable. Whether you use them or not, there’s no prohibition against staunching the flow of blood, nor against assembling a collection of stanch friends.  Personally, I’m going to continue differentiating them in my usage, but I wouldn’t hold anyone else to that.

Summary: Although staunch is the most common spelling of the adjective meaning “firm” and stanch is the most common spelling of the verb meaning “stop (the flow)”, both spellings are acceptable for both meanings.

—

*Assuming that you buy into all those meanings of nice, of course.  In my lexicon, though, nice almost invariably means “pleasant” or “good”, and certainly doesn’t mean any of those things Brockenbrough listed. As a result, Timothy is a nice young man is pretty unambiguous, if a little vague.

Why I aspire to be Geoffrey Pullum when I grow up

Should be apparent from his stunning takedown of the “uninformed bossiness” of Strunk and White in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Are they trying to misunderstand what people say?

The prescriptivists are on my last nerve.  Some of them really believe that there is something wrong with this sentence:

(1) One of the only things I liked about living in Ottawa was the strong film community.

Reasonable readers, can you find the error in (1)?  The construction that “doesn’t convey any information”, the one that Richard Lederer calls a “strange and illogical expression”, the one Robert Hartwell Fiske cites as “further evidence that people scarcely know what their words mean”? Give up? It’s one of the only!

Oh, you didn’t find that to be illogical?  You thought you got some information out of those words?  Well then, congratulations; you’re a normal speaker of English.  Honestly, I couldn’t see what could the problem with one of the only possibly be.  Well, let’s look at Lederer’s argument against it:

“This strange and illogical expression began showing up a few years ago, and English took a step backward when it did.  The expression has been defended on the basis that it is no worse than only two, because only means ‘one’ and only two is oxymoronic. A specious argument! It’s like saying that robbing a bank is okay because it’s no worse than robbing a jewelry store.  Moreover, only in the sense of ‘only two’ does not mean ‘one’; it means ‘no more than.’  There is no meaning of only that fits with one of the only.“

Well, that’s a kick in the gut of the facts — three kicks, in fact.  Kick the first is the claim that one of the only started showing up a few years ago.  Google Books reports it in two books around 1770, in The Dramatic Censor and The Sale of Authors, and reports hundreds of uses throughout the nineteenth century.  It’s more than a few years old, that’s for sure.

Kick the second is the idea that any reasonable person defends one of the only by noting that only two is oxymoronic.  I sure don’t, and I don’t understand who would.  There is nothing oxymoronic, nothing contradictory about the construction.  Only two is completely clear, comprehensible, standard, and logical — hundreds of pre-1800 usages of only two in Google Books attest to this.

Kick the third is Lederer’s definition of only.  Only two does not mean “no more than two” in standard usage.  If it meant “no more than two”, then (2) would be a totally acceptable sentence.

(2) *The cyclops has only two eyes.

With Lederer’s definition (2) is fine, because a cyclops has only one eye, and one is no more than two.  But a quick poll of the only two people in the apartment at the moment revealed that (2) is utterly unacceptable; clearly Lederer’s definition is insufficient.  The real definition of only in only two is something along the lines of “exactly”, but with the crucial additional implicature that this is a smaller number than expected.  Violating this implicature makes a sentence sound weird, as with (3b):

(3a) I was sad when only two people showed up at my cats’ wedding.
(3b) #I was sad when only one thousand people showed up at my cats’ wedding.

Now, the fact that one gets this implicature, that only two sounds so much better than only one thousand, ought to suggest that there is logic underlying the construction. This, coupled with Lederer’s crummy definition of only, should lead a reader to be skeptical of his claim that no meaning of only can fit in one of the only. I am curious as to what Lederer thinks the definitions of only are.

So what does one of the only mean?  What happens if we follow one critic’s request to “parse it if you will, and see what you get”?  Let’s look at the example in (1).  The only things I liked about living in Ottawa is a noun phrase, identifying the set of things the speaker liked about living in Ottawa, noting that this set is the complete set, and implying that it’s an awfully small set.  That’s what the quantifier only means, that’s what it’s meant for hundreds of years.  One of modifies a noun phrase, selecting one member of that set.  The two combined, as they are in (1), pick out a single member of the set of all things the speaker liked about living in Ottawa. So what exactly were we supposed to see when we parsed this?  That it works?  I’m fine with that.

There’re a lot more arguments that one of the only makes sense, and Jan Freeman has a wonderful column with a few of them.  Notably, Freeman points out that one of the only is attested cross-linguistically, further destroying the notion that one of the only is somehow illogical.  So in the end, I have to ask this of the prescriptivists: Do you really have nothing better to do in your lives than to ignore the well-known meanings of words so that you get to call other people stupid?  Are you really unable to think of a better pastime than claiming that a reasonable, well-worn construction is illogical and incomprehensible?  Are you really so committed to those goals that you’re unwilling to comprehend an easily comprehensible construction?

Or as I screamed into my computer after reading this junk: Why are you spending more effort trying to misunderstand someone than trying to understand them?

Summary: Prescriptivists insistently grouse that people don’t think enough when they write, but prescriptivists seem just as likely not to think when writing.  Case in point: the arguments against one of the only are positively absurd, based off of a wanton misinterpretation of what only means, and completely independent of historical usage in English and other languages.  Of course one of the only is fine, a fact that has been known since 1770.