Snobs at Restaurants

Out at a restaurant? Want to feel falsely superior to your fellow diners? Ask leading questions about the owners of restaurants until you goad someone into saying restauranteur. Don’t worry; if you’re persistent enough someone’s bound to say it. Then — and this is where you get to indulge your inner blowhard — show the fool who said restauranteur up by pointing out that it’s properly restaurateur.

The backstory to this is pretty cute. Restaurant is derived from the substantive use of the Latin present participle restaurer, which means “to restore”. So restaurant originally came from something like “place of restoration”, and the purveyor of this restoration was a “restorer” (restaurateur), not a “restaurant-er”.  It’s sort of like how you have messenger and message, but not *messenge.

This was news to me when I read about it yesterday, but it seems that it’s actually fairly well-known. Google shows 3 million hits for restaurateur and only 250,000 for restauranteur, and if you search for the latter it suggests that you might really mean the former. In American English at least, restauranteur, restaurateur, and restauranter all seem pretty acceptable.  But if you want to be properly safe, I’d advise you use the proper, older term restaurateur.

[Note: Please, please don't do this.  If you think a good thing to do in a social situation is to correct people's grammar, I assure you that you are mistaken.]

Preposterous Apostrophes I: Possessives

Let’s start the joy of apostrophication by forming the possessives of singular nouns! (Of course, the exclamation point is spurious — there is nothing exciting about forming possessives.) First off, there’re three cases that are uncontroversial:

singular nouns not ending in an /s/- or /z/-sound: add ’s
one fish’s lair – the box’s contents – everybody else’s indignation

plural nouns ending in an /s/- or /z/-sound: add ‘
The Smiths’ misery – the proposals’ results – some boxes’ lids

plural nouns not ending in an /s/- or /z/- sound: add ’s
laymen’s opinions – geese’s eggs – two fish’s habitats

Snorefest! Let’s get our hands dirty with some controversial possessives! Is it the princess’s diadem or the princess’ diadem? Is Oliver Twist Dickens’s character or Dickens’ character? Was President McKinley Leon Czolgosz’s victim or Leon Czolgosz’ victim? And, lastly, are the Israelites Moses’s or Moses’ people? Let’s check in with some grammarians:

(1) princess’ – Dickens’ – Czolgosz’ – Moses’: a commonly-held belief
(2) princess’s – Dickens’ – Czolgosz’ – Moses’: On the Mark Writing
(3) princess’s – Dickens’s – Czolgosz’ – Moses’: Harold Kolb, James Cochrane, et al
(4) princess’s – Dickens’s – Czolgosz’s – Moses’: Strunk (& White)
(5) princess’s – Dickens’s – Czolgosz’s – Moses’s: Patricia O’Conner

These choices can be translated into the following possible rules for singular possessives:

(1) use ’s except for nouns ending in s/z
(2) use ’s except for names ending in s/z
(3) use ’s except for names where “adding ’s would make pronunciation difficult” [Brief English Handbook, 292]
(4) use ’s except for ancient names ending in s/z
(5) use ’s for all singular nouns

To me, all of these rules are relatively reasonable, though I lean toward (3) and (5) as the best choices. (1) is weird because one pronounces the possessive of princess with the extra -iz sound, so why not write it? (2) is weird for a similar reason; you say Dickens-iz, not just Dickens. (4) requires one to include the time-period of a name, which seems sort of a silly criterion (so you’d have Jesus’ miracles but Jesús’s car), and this probably wouldn’t accurately reflect the phonology of the word. As a result, I think you’re best served to choose between (3) and (5). (3) has the difficulty of being subject to a subjective condition, but generally reflects pronunciation. (5) has the advantage of combining two rules into one. I learned rule (5) when I was a kid, and it’s the one I personally use. However, if you’re worried about how your writing will be perceived by grammar snobs, go with (3). Most of the grammar books I read through pick it. But don’t, unless you pride yourself on being unreasonable, correct someone who handles possessives of singular nouns ending in -s differently from you.

Next up on the apostrophe parade: Possessives for abbreviations!

Summary: The possessive of singular nouns ending in -s is contested. I advise adding ’s to all of them or at least to those where the suffix doesn’t make it too hard to pronounce. But importantly, there’s some prescriptivist who’ll back up almost any choice of ’s or ‘, so don’t complain too much about other people’s choices.

***

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)

Preposterous Apostrophes (a series)

Apostrophes are notorious for arousing the ire of grammar fundamentalists. Lynne Truss of Eats, Shoots & Leaves fame was driven so mad by the advertisements for Two Weeks Notice that she posted her own apostrophes on posters to make it Two Weeks’ Notice. (I personally disagree that an apostrophe is necessary there, but I’ll address that later once I have a chance to research it.) While no one knows exactly where prescriptivists such fervent rage from, nor how they manage to contain so much rage without the anger ripping their bodies to shreds, they do have some excuse for being so uppity about apostrophes. The apostrophe is misused extensively; more so, perhaps, than any other punctuation mark. For example, there’s the “greengrocer’s apostrophe”, where one uses ’s to pluralize a noun (e.g., cucumber’s are on sale). Another common mistake is forming possessives of plural nouns that don’t end in s by adding s’ (e.g., the mens’ room is on the left). And of course there’s all the confusion about your/you’re and their/there/they’re. Such problems are railed upon at length on the Internet, spawning photo galleries heaped upon photo galleries of awful apostrophal miscues, and all of these mistakes are truly mistakes.

Unfortunately, not everything about apostrophe usage is so cut-and-dried. Take, for instance, the case of dreamy Prince William. He is the son of Prince Charles. But does that make him Prince Charles’ son or Prince Charles’s son? Now let’s say that at some point Prince William pulls an Edward VIII and leaves behind the royal life for the woman he loves. Piecing together a living in this hardscrabble world, he learns to fix appliances and opens a TV repair store. What does his banner read? TVs fixed while you wait? Or TV’s fixed while you wait? Or T.V.’s? Or T.V.s? Regrettably, poor Prince William will be criticized regardless of his choice, as various sources claim that each of these possibilities is the one, true, and correct choice.

So over the next few days, I’m going to look at various situations where an apostrophe is called for and try to explain what I think is the best course of action in each case, and why. Some of it will be prescriptive (with justifications) and some of it will be a defense against other people’s (not peoples’) misguided prescriptions. Hopefully it’ll help. In the meantime, let me know if there’s any point of apostrophe usage you’d like to know about (or if there’s anything you think you know that might not be so).

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)

On the educated

James Cochrane is a really angry person. See, the world is full of these people that take his language and do things with it that he doesn’t like. This riled him so much that he went out and wrote a book (Between You and I, 2003) listing all the ways common mushmouths hurt his language, in alphabetical order, and then pointing out how you are an imbecile if you do these things. I’ve only been able to put up with so much of him excoriating me for saying things like “It feels like I’m falling in love”, so, in fairness, it’s possible he lightens up after the Cs. But here’s a quick rundown of some of his feelings about users of English, from the A through C sections:

“To say something like ‘as far as United’s chances’ … is lazy and uneducated.” (17)
“It is hard to find a reason for its not being used … other than sheer stupidity.” (21)
“It is not at all good English to be bored of something.” (22)
“Educated readers will not need to be told that could of represents an illiterate mishearing…” (31)

Sadly, Cochrane’s book does not address the distressing tendency among pigheaded authors to misuse the word educated. (I skipped ahead to the E section just to make sure.) Educated, as defined by the OED, means “That has received education, mental or physical; instructed, trained, etc.”. The meaning intended by Cochrane in his quote about could of is in fact that of the word well-educated or perhaps the phrase properly educated; he is attempting to distinguish between those (like him) who learned how to be a pedant and those (like the rest of us) who learned how not to be a jerk.

The more I think about this, the angrier I get. I am aware that using educated to mean well-educated is well-established by common usage by the hoity-toity set. But these same people are the ones who rail against how common usage is making as and like interchangeable, or about how common usage permits disinterested both as indifferent and impartial. The difference is that it’s poor, under-educated people who make the latter mistakes. But, Mr. Cochrane, I submit to you that you are no better than the masses whose educations you derisively dismiss as inconsequential. And I just want to suggest that, in your own words, “It is hard to find a reason for [well-educated] not being used … other than sheer stupidity.”

Cochrane has some other overly harsh opinions that I hope to comment upon in the near future. However, I just can’t take his martyrdom seriously right now, and I feel this way about all the others who anoint themselves educated and anoint the rest of us fools. It is a very fine line between language change and language crime, and unfortunately, some ill-informed judges hold the court.

Here’s why I’m writing this blog

Grammar is like etiquette.  They’re both codes that weigh upon social interactions.  They both are supposed to indicate good breeding.  And both are full of outmoded rules that no one but a chosen few know.  For instance, my copy of Amy Vanderbilt’s 1954 Complete Book of Etiquette includes a diagram listing no fewer than 24 distinct glasses that can be used in a meal, each with its own prescribed beverages.  It is unlikely that even in 1954 this mattered much, but doubtlessly there were those who would cluck their tongues should an ill-informed maid bring out a Loire wine in a Rhine wineglass or fill a brandy snifter half-way instead of a quarter of the way.

Even now, etiquette is roundly considered too hard and too unmotivated for most ill-bred folks like me to learn.  I can remember a couple of the rules I’ve learned from Amy Vanderbilt, Emily Post, and the like, but frankly, every time I tried to learn the rules I was overwhelmed by the mass of nitpicky, unintuitive things they expected me to remember, and the awkward ways I was supposed to use the utensils that I had spent the previous twenty years mastering.  It was just too many rules and too little justification.  So I gave up, because I don’t really need formal etiquette anyway.

I think many people feel the same way about grammar as I do about etiquette: there’s too much to remember, and it’s too hard to figure out what’s grammatically correct if you haven’t got a rule memorized.  The difference is that formal etiquette is a lot more expendable than formal grammar.  It’s not so bad if you eat your salad with the wrong fork.  It is bad if you use the wrong there/their/they’re.

So my goal in this blog to explain what rules you have to know, which you have to be aware of, and which you can reasonably ignore.  Its secondary goal to give counter-arguments for when some nitpicky grammar snob tell you that some made-up grammar rule matters.  Maybe eventually grammar rules will be whittled down to only those that matter and those that determine how formal you’re being, and all those other ones, like “different than is a crime against nature”, can be sent off to pasture.

Quotes from Compatriots

Lest you think that the anti-prescriptivist movement is composed of a bunch of ill-educated know-nothings who oppose the very idea of grammar, I want to supply a few quotes from well-educated, similar-minded fellows who write a hell of a lot more clearly than I do. I’ll update this intermittently.

“Lexicographer, n. – A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be considered ‘as one having authority,’ whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statue.” – Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary

“Everyone just assumes that whenever a stern grey-haired male professional says somebody’s grammar is wrong, the charge must automatically be correct and the accused guilty, and no facts need to be checked. Well, it’s not so.” -Geoffrey Pullum on Language Log

[By the way, some would claim that quote is strictly a verb, never a noun, and so the title of this post ought properly to be "Quotations from Compatriots".  Among the proponents of the quote-is-a-verb-only philosophy are Grammar Girl and SparkNotes. However, Paul Brians uses quote as a noun in his list of errors, and Mark Liberman on Language Log quite nicely establishes that quote has been in dictionaries as a noun since at least 1891, and shows an instance of its usage in a poem from 1600.  So I think we safely that 400 years of common usage ought to justify taking quote to be a noun.]

On uniqueness (against arguments 1 and 2)

So here’s a common refrain:

“Very unique is an example of perversion not uncommon to every-day usage.” – The Worth of Words, Ralcy Husted Bell, 1902.
“A thing is unique (the only one of its kind) or it is not. Something may be almost unique (there are very few like it), but nothing is ‘very unique.’” – Paul Brians

If we agree with the grammarians, very unique is an abomination, for unique means one-of-a-kind, and how can something be more or less one-of-a-kind? You’ll note that this is a instance of argument #2: that logic dictates that some bit of usage is impossible. (And here I want to point out that if “very unique” is really logically rubbish, then why do so many otherwise logical people understand what it means?) However, the idea that uniqueness can be graded and different things can be more or less unique is actually logically reasonable.

For starters, everything is truly one-of-a-kind. Just as there are no two identical snowflakes, there are no two identical objects anywhere in the world (excluding, perhaps, microscopic particles). Identical twins are different from each other. So are two boxes of cereal on the shelf at the supermarket (one will certainly have more bits of cereal than the other). So if everything is unique, why not just say it’s a meaningless word and do away with it altogether? Because, within our minds, some things are sufficiently similar to be lumped together in our minds as identical for certain purposes. This leads to an argument that X is unique if and only if there is no other thing of the same kind as X that can be considered identical to X.

The problem with this definition is that different things can be considered identical in different contexts. Take the case of Harry Potter. There’s two swords of Godric Gryffindor. One is made by goblins and is therefore imbued with special powers, and the other is a clever replica that looks almost the same, cuts the same, but lacks the magical powers. To the uninitiated (e.g., Bellatrix Lestrange), the two swords look and behave identically, but to a wise goblin (e.g., Griphook), they are noticeably different. Thus, to Bellatrix, the swords are not unique, but to Griphook they are. I am amazed I managed to make a grammatical point using Harry Potter. So if a single item can be viewed as unique or not by different proportions of the population, does it not make sense to say that things that are unique to more or less of the population can be referred to as more or less unique?

Secondly, something can be one-of-a-kind, with the “kind” having a variety of different sizes. To say that a person is unique is to say that he or she is one amongst six billion. To say that a mole on my skin is unique is to say it is one amongst a hundred (the number of moles I have). To say that a particular insect is unique is to say it is one amongst 300 quintillion (an estimated number of insects in the world). So it sure seems that intuitively a “unique” insect is more unique than a “unique” mole. So that insect, in my opinion, is very unique.

In a similar vein, one unique thing can be different from similar objects in more or fewer ways. In math-speak, it could be unique on different numbers of dimensions. A sculpture, for instance, could be unique in size, shape, material, placement, inspiration, sculptor, price, location, color, time-period, or intention. Suppose sculpture X is unique as the only tin sculpture of the Renaissance, but sculpture Y is unique only as the only black marble sculpture weighing more than a thousand pounds done by Georg Cantor in 1897 to protest Prussian treatment of the French. Sculpture X is then one of more kinds than sculpture Y is one of, and furthermore, sculpture X is one of a kind in a much more general kind than sculpture Y. So it again is logically possible to argue that sculpture X is more unique than sculpture Y.

My point is that very unique is not logically reasonable only to someone who interprets the definition of unique in a downright contrarian way. There are many possible ways for two things to be more or less one-of-a-kind. So it cannot be claimed that logic precludes the use of very unique.

Furthermore, this whole argument is precarious anyway, as it assumes that the sole definition of unique is “one-of-a-kind”. The Oxford English Dictionary does give this as a definition for unique, but it also notes a second definition that has been in use since the 18th century and has been “very common” since the middle of the 19th century: “standing alone in comparison with others, freq. by reason of superior excellence; unequalled, unparalleled, unrivalled”. This is attested in writing as early as 1809, by R. K. Porter: “As it was thoroughly unique…”, and further examples from the 19th century occur in force in a full text search of Google Books for “very unique”. This undermines argument #1: even authors of the good old days succumbed to the reasonable temptation to modify unique.

Summary: Unique can be modified without complaint; better writers than me have done so for almost 200 years and there is no reasonable logical argument against it. However, unique is, in my opinion, overused, in part because everything is unique in some sense. As such, I would recommend avoiding unique (modified or not) when you can say it another way.

i.e. vs. e.g.

Lest anyone think that this blog is some sort of new-age feel-goodery where everyone’s free to say whatever they want, I’m making sure that my first real grammar post is going to tell you what you should do. This is a mistake that I used to make all the time and only recently did I find out what the real deal was. What’s the difference between i.e. and e.g.? Or, more violently, who’d win the battle of i.e. v. e.g.?  Well, it depends on whose home court you’re on.

i.e. comes from the Latin id est, which means it is. In English, its use is basically limited to situations where you would say “that is” or “in other words” or “namely”. It is used when there is only one thing (or set of things) to which you could be referring. e.g. comes from the Latin exempli gratis, which means for the sake of an example (or so I’ve read – I personally don’t think that the Latin case system would allow so many words in English to compress down to two Latin words, but I don’t know any Latin short of “Et tu, Brute?”, and I think of that as French). Anyway, its use is limited to cases where you’d want to say for example, including, or such as.

In a sense, e.g. is like combining i.e. with etc. for super Latin fun time. i.e. says “I’m going to tell you exactly what I’m referring to (with nothing omitted)”, while e.g. says “I’m going to list some of the things I’m referring to (but there are others, too)”. Using i.e. means there is nothing else that fits your description, while using e.g. implies you’ve left some stuff off and have only stated representative items from the set. Another way to think of it is that if you use “i.e.”, you should be able to replace what precedes i.e. with what follows it: I haven’t figured out the toughest problem, i.e., how to make her love me is approximately the same as I haven’t figured out how to make her love me.

If you’re the sort of person who likes mnemonics, you can think of i.e. as it’s everything, since you didn’t leave anything out, and e.g. as examples go on. Or you can use other mnemonics such as in essence v. examples given.

Some quick additional thoughts: In written American English, it seems to be standard (i.e., I don’t remember ever seeing it another way) to set i.e. or e.g. off from the rest of the sentence with commas. Apparently in the olden days these abbreviations were italicized, but that’s no longer the case. I don’t really use these abbreviations in speech (in part because “e.g.” is really awkward to say), but that’s a matter of personal style.

Some usage examples with prissy marginal notes:

• Perhaps you are thinking of a landlocked South American country, i.e., Paraguay or Bolivia.
• Or maybe a landlocked European country, e.g. Austria, Switzerland, or Moldova.
  [There are only two landlocked South American countries, namely the two in sentence 1. Hence "i.e.", it's everything. But there's a lot of landlocked European countries not mentioned in sentence 2, like Andorra or San Marino. Hence "e.g.", examples go on.]

• We all want the same thing, i.e., a tuna-salad sandwich with relatively little mayonnaise.
• We all want the same things, e.g., comfort, care, and power beyond our wildest beliefs.
  [Note that in the first sentence there is a single thing that is desired (the sandwich), while in the second there are other things besides comfort, care, and power that we all desire (an obvious untruth).

Summary: enjoy using these abbreviations correctly (i.e., as per this discussion) and you’ll impress the socks off of many Latin-lovers (e.g., Classicists, playwrights, judges, the Pope).

Some Opening Thoughts

Hi there. Let me jump right in here. If you are one of those people who correct people’s grammar in casual conversation, I probably don’t like you. I’m sure you’re a fine person and all. I’ll bet you give more to charity than I do (not hard), and were a small child to fall down a well, you’d probably be much more willing than me to dive right in after them (also not hard – I don’t particularly care for small children). But at the same time, whereas I had no problem with the previous sentence, you had at least one, if not two problems with it:

1. “more willing than me” – some (e.g., Cecil Adams) would claim that “than” is not a preposition but rather a conjunction, and as such this is intended to be the elliptical construction more willing than I [would be]. Admittedly *more willing than me [would be] is atrocious. But “than” does function as a preposition quite often, as in the sentence Quentin likes his friends more than me. More compelling is the fact that Lord Byron wrote in a letter Lord Delawarr is considerably younger than me. (cited in the “than me” entry) If it’s good enough for Lord Byron, it’s good enough for a schmo like me.

2. “them” to refer to a single person of indeterminate gender. This has been discussed at length by people smarter than me over at Language Log. So go fight them.

Anyway. This is just filler to start the blog. Real stuff is forthcoming.