Motivated Grammar

If there’s one thing prescriptivists hate, it’s children. I mean, it’s bad enough the way that babies trample the rules of English with their run-on babbling, or how toddlers perversely insist on using their neologism goed as the past tense of go when went has been standard for centuries. But I suppose you can partially dismiss those as products of insufficient education; there’s still hope for them. What really gets the prescriptivists’ goat is older children — those needlessly rebellious teenagers. Here they are, just about as educated as they’ll get, and they’re abusing the language left and right.

See, in the prescriptivists’ day, teens understood the meaning of words and respected the sanctity of their parents’ language. Far be it from them to make up new words when old ones would suffice; everyone knows that slang is a worthless invention of the pop-swilling, face-stuffing youth of today. These rotten kids today muck it all up, wantonly using words for purposes directly counter to their God-given meanings. Exhibit A for the prosecution: the use of literally in situations where figuratively is meant.

I intend to do a longer post later about why, despite the ire of prescriptivists, this use of literally isn’t so bad; in fact, it actually makes some sense. But for now, to soften people up to this seemingly indefensible claim, I’d like to quote to you from Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette (1958 edition), which I found myself reading the other morning:

“And he literally dances attention on the girl he has brought to the party…”

This is not meant at all literally. What would it even mean to literally “dance attention” on someone? It frankly sounds quite painful. (By the way, I looked on Google to see if “dances attention” was used anywhere else, in case it was a weird 1950s idiom, but it doesn’t seem to have been.)

It is odd that Amy Vanderbilt would use literally non-literally, given the highfalutin’ tone of the book. This is an etiquette book, not a grammar book, and there are a lot of other dreadfully pressing matters of etiquette to deal with (such as what to do if you are given an audience with the Pope), so it doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about proper language use. What it does have, though, is oddly specific and distinctly cranky. For instance, it derides Is she expecting? as a “particularly vulgar” way of asking if someone’s pregnant, and says that there is “something very low class” about girlfriend, which she claims “in all cases it is better to substitute ‘girl, who is a friend of mine’.” So someone who wouldn’t deign to use girlfriend has no problem with a non-literal use of literally? Wow. That’s a surprise.

I don’t know if this reflects a general willingness to use non-literal literally in the 1950s or if it is peculiar to Amy Vanderbilt, but I was honestly shocked to see it used by someone who fusses over minor grammatical points. So is Amy Vanderbilt wrong or are the kids today right? I’ll try to give my opinion before the month is out, but in the meantime, what’s your take?

In my capacity as the administrator of a data mining contest (I’ve included a link to said contest, even though I assume that very few people are interested both in rambling diatribes about grammar and in the issue of classifying data based on only a positively-labelled training set), I ended up having to look up information about how to properly call the language of Slovenia (Slovene and Slovenian are apparently both acceptable). For reasons I’ve since forgotten, this made me interested in the early history of the Cyrillic alphabet, so where else should I turn but Wikipedia, which has a tremendous table detailing the letters of the early Cyrillic alphabet? If you follow that link and scroll down a bit, you’ll see a letter that is called an “ornate omega”, which apparently “would seem to be used in interjections, especially before vocatives.” It looks like this: . To be honest, I figured this had to be a joke — a symbol that looks exactly like a face yelling something being used in vocatives (an expression identifying the addressee)? It would be like if English adopted “:D” as a variant of capital D in excited sentences and :( as a variant of capital C in sad sentences.

(1) I can’t believe we get to go to :Disneyland today!
(2) I didn’t get to go to the :(ow Palace when I was in San Francisco.

(I just might start doing this.) Anyway, I was unsure if I should believe in this “ornate omega” stuff, but then I found a similar omega variant in a version of the Slavonic alphabet: So maybe those 10th century monks were on to something. It’s unclear whether this was an early version of emoticons or an early version of a theme font. Either way, I’d like to buy those monks a beer, except for the fact that they probably wouldn’t be allowed to drink a beer, and they’re probably dead by now. So it goes.

You may have noticed that I’ve made something of a habit of flouting prescription and unapologetically using they as a non-specific third person singular pronoun — along the lines of “he or she”. As any good, rage-filled prescriptivist will gladly inform you, this is WRONG WRONG WRONG.

But it’s not, as Geoff Pullum insightfully argues.  In summary: singular they is historically attested (by good writers, even), is hardly semantically or syntactically illogical, and is clearly useful.  There is no conceivable harm that comes from using singular they.  But I suggest reading his post, because it’s an excuse to bask in the glow that is Geoff Pullum’s writing style.

In the earlier post I wrote on the email/e-mail debate, I claimed that, were I backed into a corner, I would favor the unhyphenated version. However, today I was writing my comps paper (on speaker choice in the needs doing alternation), and found myself typing the word “e-mail” into the paper. It just felt right in that situation. And that’s why I don’t want to be tied down to just one form or the other; sometimes the dispreferred form is just better for a given task.

I’m bringing this up not to bore you with the details of my personal life, nor to toss in a plug for my upcoming paper, (although these are both unintended benefits) but because I wanted an excuse to revisit the hyphenation question and give a few arguments against a few arguments that the hyphen is necessary. Commenter mike — who, by the way, has a nice blog and a great outlook on grammar — suggested that this website had some “not-unreasonable” arguments for the hyphen. The arguments didn’t seem unreasonable, but also the author took pains to condescend to people like me and Mike and Donald Knuth, who use email unselfconsciously. And so I was forced to take pains to point out some flaws in these arguments for e-mail.

First off, the author claims that “Established publications edited by grown-ups” use e-mail. We’re so predictable, those of us engaged in this prescriptivist/descriptivist war, huh? The prescriptivists call the descriptivists ill-educated, or child-like, or focused on the lowest common denominator, or claim that we’re opening the gates to language barbarians. The descriptivists call the prescriptivists bloody-minded pedants, cantankerous old cads, or angry old coots. And so on. (Some muckrakers might even go so far as to attempt to claim that I have at times in the past engaged in such sophomoric name-calling, but I’m nearly positive that they’re mistaken.)

Anyway, the author had best hope that the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Reuters News Service, and the Guardian don’t catch wind of this slight. I think they all like to think of themselves as established and edited by adults — well-educated and grammatically precise adults, no less. Ditto the Oxford English Dictionary, which lists email as the preferred spelling of the noun and as an acceptable spelling of the verb. And it first attests email in 1982.

Okay, so respectable grown-up publications use email. Next point: e-mail is not a compound word, but rather a word headed by a single letter abbrevation for electronic. Thus the hyphen should be retained because “no initial-letter-based abbreviation in the history of the English language has ever morphed into a solid word”. At first, I couldn’t think of any example of this either. The author cites A-frame as one example, but in this case, the A isn’t short for anything, so we’re not looking at quite the same situation. Better examples would be A-bomb and H-bomb, short for atomic and hydrogen bombs. However, even this isn’t quite the same situation, because A and H aren’t productive prefixes in English, at least as far as I’m aware. It’s not like I can say A-clock and have people figure out I mean atomic clock. It seems to me that the e- prefix is relatively unprecedented, so you can’t dismiss hyphen removal out of respect for the past. Both e and i have established themselves as productive prefixes without hyphens: iGoogle, iPod, iMac; eHarmony, ecard, eBay.  I’m inclined to say these prefixes are proving themselves able to operate without a hyphen, regardless of what previous initial-letter-prefixes did.

And, finally, about the pronunciation of the unhyphenated version. No one but a contrarian would read the word email with the wrong pronunciation*; it’s common enough that people have memorized how it’s pronounced, and no reasonable mispronunciation of email sounds like another word. It is entirely possible for a word-initial e to be read as a long e [i: in IPA]; witness evil. And compounding/prefixing/suffixing words has always led to pronunciations that aren’t what you’d expect: cooccur, baseball, modeled. We are readers of English — complaining that a word doesn’t sound like it’s spelled is like complaining that a part of the ocean is too wet.

Summary: Look, there are arguments that e-mail is better with a hyphen, and there’re arguments that it’s better without one. None of them is compelling. Use the form you want.

[*An old (but not necessarily contrarian) potter could also confuse it with the word email, as in a type of ink used on porcelain, derived from the French word for "enamel". This word is pronounced with an "eh" sound at the beginning. However, I can't find this word attested on the internet, so I think the possibility of confusion is minor at the most.]

p.s.: I’m probably going to post quite sparingly for the next three to four weeks because I have to pound out my comps paper if I want to remain a graduate student. And I do, because it’s a pretty sweet lifestyle.

I didn’t vote in the California primary this year, predominantly out of protest over the absurdity of our flawed primary system, partially out of solidarity for those shut out of the process in Florida and Michigan, and partially because I wasn’t strongly for or against any of the candidates at the time. However, on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary, I am reminded of the fact that one should always vote, even if only to negate people like this reader of The Lehigh Valley Morning Call:

“So far, Hillary has my vote because she says she will ‘try to’ do something. I’ve heard most of the other candidates from both parties say they will ‘try and’ do something. I don’t know where this ‘try and’ thing ever came from, but it’s becoming so common that almost everyone uses it. It’s ugly, awkward and incorrect. I hope this terrible misuse of the language can be stopped.”

This is not how to make a political decision. First off, (completely ignoring the likely satirical stance of the reader) proper grammar has nothing to do with the necessary qualities of a president. That would be like voting for a president on the basis of hairstyle or fashion sense. Good hair and fashion sense might well be indicative of an attention to detail that is useful as a president. So too might exceedingly proper grammar. But it also might reflect an underlying belief in style over substance, or an inability to relate to the common man. (It’s interesting to note that Obama, who’s now under fire for his “elitism”, was accused by this complainant of being a member of the grammatical unwashed.)

As far as I’m concerned (and I say this as someone who often misspeaks), the propriety of a president’s grammar has no bearing on their ability to lead the nation. I’m not against Bush for his frequent grammar missteps any more than I am against Dan Quayle for misspelling ‘potato’. Speaking is hard, and if you’re in the public spotlight, you’re going to mess up from time to time. All I’m saying is, no one’s perfect, calm the heck down. Even if you think that try and is a grievous grammatical error (which it’s not, as we’ll see), let he who is without questionable usage cast the first stone.

But more to the point of this blog, I’ve got some leads for the complainant on where — and when — this try and thing came from, and the answer is, as usual, from extension of an existing acceptable construction somewhere around the 1700s. I’m assuming you’re all familiar with the phrases come and and go and, as in:

(1) I’ll go and see what episode of Antiques Roadshow is on.
(2) Would you come and tell me whether the appraiser I like is on?

I don’t think anyone is going to say (1) or (2) are bad grammar. They’re definitely fine by me, and they’re attested well into the past at the OED (see and, B. 10). Anyway, the same basic construction, where the action of the first verb (come, go) occurs before the action of the second verb of the second one (see, tell), got applied with a few other first verbs, such as try. This yielded sentences like:

(3) Vic’s going to try and fit twenty-seven grapes in his mouth tonight.

This extension makes some sense: first Vic will try to fit the grapes in his mouth, and then he will fit the grapes in his mouth, just as in (1), I will go and then see. (It’s a little weird with try because it’s difficult to clearly say whether the final outcome should count as part of the act of trying. If I’m trying to hit a home run, and I do hit a home run, at what point did I stop trying and start doing it? It’s a sticky metaphysical situation.)

Independent of its sensibility, though, the try and extension has some history behind it. The first attestation in the OED is in 1878, in an economics primer. Google Books has examples dating back to — saints be praised! — 1603, 1657, and 1662. It’s not a new phenomenon and it used to be used in formal writings. In fact, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage hypothesizes that try and predates try to. Nowadays, though, try and is somewhat more colloquial; to me, at least, it looks out of place in formal writing. That’s not to say it does not appear in writing; in fact, the construction is commonplace in modern books, but seems more common in ones with a slightly informal tone.

But there’s nothing wrong with saying try and; it’s old, it’s well-attested, and it’s got a reasonable lineage. So please don’t base your vote on whether or not a candidate says it. Unless, of course, you’re voting in favor of a candidate who uses try and, who’s willing to stand by history and ignores the ill-informed objections of armies of pedants. That would show character.

Summary: try and is a venerable old construction with 400 years of usage backing it. For whatever reason, it’s no longer considered sufficiently formal for formal/business writing, but it’s still fine in most writing styles and certainly in speech. As Fowler said: “It is an idiom that should be not discountenanced, but used when it comes natural.”

There’s a big debate amongst prescriptivists as to whether one should write the term for electronic mail with or without a hyphen — i.e., e-mail or email. That’s a really dumb debate. Why on earth should it matter? I would even go so far as to say that if it matters to you, you’re probably reading the wrong blog. Strike that. You’re reading the right blog, because hopefully I’ll eventually convince you that stupid little niggling points like this don’t matter. Maybe you’ll even come to believe that holding staunch opinions about insignificant points like whether there’s a hyphen in e-mail serves only to convince people that grammar is just a bunch of stupid rules determined more or less arbitrarily by angry old people, and that most of these rules can be safely ignored by reasonable people. (Returning readers may have noticed this is a common theme in my posts.)

Grammar is not that, or rather it oughtn’t to be that. Grammar (from this linguist’s perspective) is really a series of conventions that ease communication and improve the overall likelihood of an intended message being transmitted correctly and efficiently. Does including or excluding the hyphen in e(-)mail affect information transmission or make anything less clear? (Hint: No.)

Is there anyone out there who can give a good reason why this needs standardized? Is it going to hurt you or distract you to read a story where it’s sometimes written e-mail and other times email? Such variation is commonplace. Think about when you’re talking. If you’re like me, sometimes you say either with an “I” sound at the beginning, and other times you say it with an “E” sound at the beginning. There’s no difference in meaning between the two; it’s just two ways of saying the same thing. Sometimes one just seems to sound better, but most of the time, the decision seems to come down to random variation. Why not let hyphenation in e-mail be the same way? Sometimes it looks better with a hyphen, sometimes without, and sometimes it looks about the same. My rule about hyphenating email is to do what feels right to you. Include the hyphen, omit the hyphen. Hyphenate it sometimes, don’t hyphenate it others. Whatever. The world doesn’t care. Or at least the world shouldn’t care. Hopefully at some point it won’t.

Look, if you just can’t stand not having a prescribed form for email, ditch the hyphen. Ray Tomlinson, the first person to send an inter-computer email, says the word shouldn’t have a hyphen. I’m of the opinion that the inventor of something should usually have final say on its name, unless they want to call it something absurd like “The Infinitgatiatorewenerwjrti73426736yyyryteyryreyery”. That’s a name I’d oppose.

Summary: It’s oughtn’t to make a difference whether it’s email or e-mail, and I say both are perfectly acceptable. If you need to come down on a side, I’d go for the non-hyphenated version.

[Updated 4/24/08: I've posted some counter-arguments to claims that e-mail must be hyphenated, in case you happen upon somebody who can't be dissuaded from the position that this does matter.]

Pop quiz, hot shot! Which of these are acceptable?

(1a) I lent him my favorite toaster oven on Maundy Thursday.
(1b) I loaned him my favorite toaster oven on Maundy Thursday.

Hopefully my phrasing of the question tipped you off that this was a trick. Both are acceptable! (Hence the are in the question.) I see your furrowed brow there. No, wait, that’s my furrowed brow in the reflection of my monitor. What am I doing, saying loaned is acceptable? Everyone knows that loan is the noun and lend is the verb. And I mean everyone. Heck, even books say it’s so. You just can’t loan somebody something. That would be as perfectly absurd as saying you borrowed somebody something.

Well, despite my furrowed brow and the beliefs of all those people I cited above, it turns out that loan is a verb, at least in American English, and has been for a while. In fact, according to the OED, loan has been used as a verb since about 1200 AD. Hmm. That’s funny, because the authors who tell you that loan is not a verb say things like “Although loan is creeping into use as a verb, we like the old rule [lend=verb,loan=noun]” (Nitty-Gritty Grammar), when in fact it’s the opposite — loan is creeping out of use as a verb. Lend has pretty much taken over for verbal loan in British English, so it’s only Americans who regularly use loan as a verb anymore, and even we’re drifting inexorably toward lend.

But returning to this so-called “old rule”, is anyone else as appalled by this quote as I am? Here’s a book making a claim that is not only incorrect, but really obviously incorrect. As in, it took me one minute to look this up in the Oxford English Dictionary to realize it was wrong. I understand that this book was published in 1998, before the Internet made it quite so easy to consult the OED, but really, are you telling me that no one at this publishing house even bothered to look at what’s considered to be the most definitive dictionary of the language when editing a book about grammar? And no one bothered to look at other contemporary grammar books, such as the Columbia Guide to Standard American English [1993], The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage [1996], or Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage [1989], either? As Gob Bluth would say, c’mon! I’m a stupid blogger, and I did more research in writing this stupid blogpost that makes me no money than the editors did for a book that they’re selling!

Do you see why I am so angry all the time? When I set out to do this post, I thought it was going to be short and sweet; I’d mention that loan is not a verb and then go home. I was convinced this was the case thanks to the lies the prescriptivists fed me in my younger years. And here I am, almost a quarter-century into my usage of the English language, and only now do I find out that the prescriptivists were blowing smoke. I feel betrayed. This is why I do this blog: I’m sick and tired of being fed whole-cloth lies, and it’s time to fight back.

Rhetoric aside, loan is and has for a while been an acceptable verb, just like lend. However, it should be noted, as the Columbia Guide to Standard American English points out, that there is a difference between verb loan and verb lend. Namely, loan can’t be used in figurative contexts:

(2) *Friends, Romans, countrymen: loan me your ears!
(3) *The small potted fern loans a nice organic touch to the soulless factory.

Otherwise, go ahead and use loan as a verb. Tell anyone who wants to complain that they’ll need to file a complaint 800 years in the past. I’m sure Chaucer will be receptive.

Summary: Loan is a fine verb. It’s been around as a verb since the 1200s; it’s not some new word creeping into the language that should be stopped. The only difference between the verbs loan and lend is that loan can’t be used in figurative senses. So go use loan as a verb, and when someone complains, hit them with the facts.

[p.s.: I am not the only one to have noticed this. In addition to the books I cited above, both Paul Brians's and John Lynch's websites debunk the anti-loan claims. So consider this a reminder of how good their advice is.]

I had joked with some friends when I first embarked on the brave new world of being a TA that surely some student would send me an email asking a question written like a text message. It was intended as a joke. An exaggeration. A situation that surely would not happen. And then I got an email last quarter asking about a question on the homework. “What do u mean…” began the student’s email. I had assumed it was a little joke to poke fun at my oldster sensibilities, so I ignored the curious spelling. Then a few days later I received another email from the same student. Same thing; you was once again replaced by u.

At first I was going to make this post just a diatribe in which I ranted at length about how academic emails call for a certain formality, how you look foolish when you don’t you an appropriate level of formality, how you need to turn off text-speak when you’re not composing a text message, and how text messaging is a bane to our preciously and precociously absurd spelling system (yes, it’s hard to learn, but it looks so cool sometimes). In short, I was going to be old and tell all the youngsters out there about how dumb they look when they don’t obey the little formalisms that all us oldsters consider so terribly important.

But then I thought better of it. After all, it’s already been said many other times, and to judge from my cousin’s insistent use of such contractions, these complaints don’t seem to sink in. And perhaps I’m jumping to conclusions by assuming that u is a result of laziness. There are a wide range of reasons why one might desire to type out you but find oneself only able to type u. For instance, perhaps the student’s parents had been killed by a runaway y-o combination and she can’t bring herself to type such a combination again. It could be that her keyboard lacks those keys. Or perhaps she is a militant simplified-spelling activist, fresh off of a hunger strike at Merriam-Webster HQ, and adamant in her belief that the silent y-o should be omitted.

And the more I think about it, really, what’s it matter anyway? Is English’s archaic spelling essential in some way to the language? Though I do love its idiosyncrasies, it would probably be better if English had spelling that better reflected its pronunciation.  And using u instead of you is shifting us closer to that.

All that having been said, my current opinion is that academic emails do call for a certain level of formality, even to an egalitarian descriptivist like me. Please, please, readers: don’t use text-speak when you email your TAs and professors. Add in those extra couple letters. We’re trying to teach you to at least look intelligent. (This is something I’ve mastered; I assume that being intelligent will follow.) Try not to remind us how often we fail.

In a previous post about apostrophication, I asked why the contraction won’t for will not isn’t wo’n't, with apostrophes in each position where letters have been elided. In so doing, I skirted the obvious and much harder question of where the devil that o comes from. Why is it won’t and not win’t or willn’t? I had hoped to avoid this, but I have been called out by a commenter on that previous post, who slags the usage patterns of English spellers:

Surely if won’t is derived from will not it should be Willn’t not Won’t. Won’t should be a word of its own in my oppinion even if it’s not at lease spell the thing correctly. The english language has become very lazy with apostrophes and spellings. It really bugs me.

Now, as the grammatical apologist I am, I have to disagree that English has become lazy with apostrophes and spellings. If anything, English spelling is getting more complicated as word pronunciations continue to slide away from what they were when our orthography got fixed back in the day. I think that we all deserve pats on the back for retaining the spelling knight after losing the silent velar fricative that once started the word, and for successfully mastering learning the various sound sequences that that master of disguise ough can hide (bough, trough, plough, through, tough, etc.). And anyway, it’s not the language that has gotten sloppy; it’s its practitioners. There remain well-established rules about apostrophes to distinguish singular and plural possessives, for instance, and for most contractions it’s pretty well set in stone where the apostrophes go — it’s just that people don’t always check their usages.

That said, let’s address the primary issue in this comment: why write won’t as a contraction of will not? Is it just that modern people are lazy? Or some consequence of the O and I keys abutting on a QWERTY keyboard? Nope. In fact, we’re not even asking the right question. The fact is that the question is wrong. Won’t is not a contraction of will not. It’s a contraction of woll not or wol not or wonnot.

Yes, back in the day it wasn’t yet set how to pronounce or write the modal verb that eventually came to us as will. The Oxford English Dictionary cites 33 different spellings just for the 1st/3rd person singular form, running the gamut from will to welle to ool to wol. Some of these usages were more scattered than others, and it seems like the big division eventually came down to will-type usages versus woll-type usages, which lasted into the mid-1800s before will cornered the modal market.

But while the correct form for will was still open for debate, people still had to be able to express the concept of negated futures (i.e., will not). Unsurprisingly, there were some pretty inventive ways of saying it, such as nill — from which the term willy-nilly (literally meaning “will he, won’t he” in Middle English) is derived. Generally, though, speakers just added not after whatever form of will/woll/welle/ool they were using. This type of negation, used with the woll variant, led to the amalgam wonnot and eventually got further reduced orthographically to forms like wo’not or won’t.

So that gives us won’t as a contraction meaning the same as will not (and, you’ll note, the apostrophe is correctly placed to indicate omission of no from wonnot). Now why is it that won’t outlived woll and rose to prominence over the equally reasonable willn’t? I’d speculate that it’s because willn’t is a hard word to pronounce. Why would you strain yourself to pronounce a word ending with three consonants when you could pronounce a word that ends with only two? Willn’t does get attested; Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens liked it, and you’re welcome to too. But I would strongly advise against using it in situations where you don’t want people to think that you are a Victorian writer lost in the wrong century.

Summary: won’t doesn’t come from will not but rather from woll not, an alternate form that existed into the mid-1800s. Will muscled out woll, but won’t muscled out willn’t. Just another weird bit fact about English.

***

The Preposterous Apostrophes series as it stands:

• I: Possessives (08/29/2007)
• II: Pluralization (09/03/2007)
• III: The Kings of England’s (09/07/2007)
• IV: History Lesson (09/10/2007)
• V: Contractions (09/11/2007)
• VI: A Wrinkle (09/27/2007)
• VII: Why Won’t Willn’t Work? (04/03/2008)

I had just finished walking around the University of North Carolina for the last time last weekend (having been there for a psycholinguistics conference), and my camera had just run out of battery power, when I came to this intersection between the campus and my hotel.  I skipped part of the last poster session at the conference just so I could go replace my batteries and get this picture.  Of course, that wasn’t strictly necessary; the ubiquitous Google Street View also has a picture of the sign, albeit significantly blurrier.

The sign filled me with nostalgia, as during my sophomore year at Princeton, there was roadwork going on on the road between my dorm and the rest of campus, and the start of this roadwork was demarcated by a gigantic light-up sign that screamed something about being prepared to yeild.  Somehow, despite the fact that this sign was up for months, I never bothered to get a picture of it.  And here the Universe interceded to give me another chance.

Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit I usually misspell “yield” the first time I write it.