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Here’s a question that I didn’t know the answer to for quite a while. Definitely not until after I graduated from college. (This is the sort of revelation that sets off a chorus of tut-tutting from the grammar police about the miserable state of our modern schooling.) When do I use flout and when do I use flaunt? Well, that I could answer. But I couldn’t answer the question of when I ought to use flout over flaunt.
The answer’s simple. To flout something is to express contempt for it, spit in the face of it, mock it and such; to flaunt something is to show it off, to display it ostentatiously or obtrusively (the OED’s words). So you flaunt something you like and flout something you don’t:
(1) The starlet flaunted her wealth by purchasing two diamond diadems for her puppy
(2) The starlet flouted the law by driving to the diadem store while intoxicated
What’s interesting is that this confusion suddenly sprang into existence after years of no one confusing them. Google Books returns 53 instances of someone saying “flaunt the law” between 1900 and 1940 (compared to 290 uses of “flout the law” in that time period), but not a single result for “flaunt the law” before 1900 (and 52 instances of “flout the law” before then). By a chi-square test, this has a 99% probability of indicating an increased confusion of flaunt for flout. The OED’s first attestation of flaunt to mean flout is in 1923, so apparently once the error appeared, it took off like gangbusters. That’s weird, because the similarity between flaunt and flout is phonetic. They sound the same and the former is much commoner than the latter, so people use the former when they mean the latter. Usually this sort of confusion carries a long pedigree and/or starts out slowly and only gradually becomes more common. In this case, though, it appears that no one really got confused until around 1920, and then suddenly everyone got confused. I don’t know why that would happen myself, but it’s really neat. Everyone confuses these two words now, and only 100 years ago no one seems to have. Must have been that post-WWI laissez-faire education our grandparents got.
Summary: You flaunt something you’re proud of and flout something you despise.
Prescriptivists are sometimes like kids. The thing about kids is that they’ll sometimes come up with a really clever argument for why something is the way it is, but they won’t think about its consequences. A kid might, for instance, claim that milk must be good for you because very fit people advertise for it. But then they won’t think of all the other things that are advertised by very fit people but that are unquestionably bad for you (e.g., fast food, pop, beer). Prescriptivists will often do the same thing: they’ll come up with a seemingly reasonable argument to back up the position they hold, but for the argument to be valid, you’d have to ignore some obvious counter-examples.
On that point, let’s look at the issue of gerundive subjects (which sounds much more exotic than it is). Remember that a gerund is a present participle of a verb (the -ing form) that is being treated like a noun:
(1) Swimming is one of my favorite activities
(2) I enjoy eating cakes
The issue of gerundive subjects comes up in a sentence like (3), where the question becomes whether me or my is the better choice:
(3) My roommates are rather concerned about me/my dancing
The representative I’ve chosen for the prescriptivist opinion on this is Patricia O’Conner, from her book Woe is I. (Other prescriptivists, such as James Kilpatrick, agree with her opinion, but she’s the one who’s at least given some justification for her stance.) O’Conner describes gerundive subjects as the “Gordian knot of possessive puzzles”, by which I figured she meant that the solution is to cut the sentences in half with a sword. But no! That’s not at all what she was getting at. O’Conner has a nice neat and tidy solution to this issue — not unlike Alexander the Great’s solution to the original Gordian knot. And, like Alexander’s solution, O’Conner’s solution ignores the essential subtleties of the problem.
O’Conner’s solution is to say that my (the genitive form) is always right, and me (the accusative form) is always wrong. She claims that while a gerund has certain trappings of a verb, it is actually a noun. This is based on the distributional properties: a gerund in a position like this can be easily replaced by things that are unambiguously nouns:
(4) My roommates are rather concerned about *me/my dance.
If the gerund is a noun, then it must take a genitive possessor, because that’s how nouns work. You can’t say me dance, so you can’t say me dancing. As I mentioned earlier, O’Conner’s not the only one to hold this opinion. James Kilpatrick, in his laundry list of complaints, agrees that gerunds are “nouns in drag” and thus require a genitive subject.
Boy, this would be a great, simple solution to a knotty problem, if only it ended up working. But of course it doesn’t, or else I wouldn’t be taking such a smug, self-satisfied tone in this post. So let’s look at the evidence that gerunds aren’t just plain nouns:
(5) My roommates are rather concerned about me dancing spastically.
Huh? What the devil is spastically doing there? That’s an adverb, it’s modifying dancing, and everyone knows that adverbs can’t modify nouns! You can’t replace dancing with dance in this sentence. (You might note that this sentence could be re-written with my spastic dancing, where dancing does behave like a noun, but all we’re trying to show here is that the gerund sometimes conducts itself in a manner unbecoming a noun.)
(6a) I enjoy eating/consumption.
(6b) I enjoy eating/*consumption cakes.
(6b) is another example where a noun can’t replace a gerund, even though it could in (6a). The problem here is that the verbiness of the gerund means it can take arguments (i.e., the direct object cakes), which a noun definitely can’t. Okay, so maybe it’s not that we users of English have been duped into thinking gerunds are verbs – maybe they really are verbs (or at least they have some characteristics of a verb). That’s one of the central points in Rob Malouf’s thesis/book (which I think I mentioned earlier): gerunds aren’t verbs or nouns, they’re both. Malouf describes gerunds as mixed-category items, items that simultaneously display verbal and nominal properties, as in (7):
(7) His repeatedly visiting Mike angered me
The gerund here is modified by an adverb (one point in the verb column) and has a direct object (another point for verbdom), but is the subject of the sentence (one point in the noun column). So it’s painting with an overly broad brush to claim that the gerund is just a noun and that one must therefore use the genitive form (my dancing). And in fact there’s a number of situations where you oughtn’t to use the genitive form, such as:
(8) #My roommates are rather concerned about my dancing at their party tomorrow
Something about this sentence just seems wrong. Using my dancing seems to imply that the act of dancing has already occurred, since you’re referring to it as a noun, but the act has not yet happened, so that’s bad. Using me dancing instead makes it okay if this act of dancing has not yet occurred.
Okay, let’s review. Gerunds aren’t just nouns, they’re a mix of verbal and nominal properties; you can’t always replace a gerund with a non-gerundive noun; and sometimes you can’t use a genitive subject for a gerund. It looks like the prescriptivist position that only possessive subjects are allowed is a vast oversimplification of the state of the world.
Now we’re back at square one, with seemingly no insight about which form is correct, accusative [as in (5)] or genitive [as in (7)]. Except we have gotten one insight out of this – and it’s a big one. The answer is that both should be considered correct in most cases. To me, and I think to most people I’ve run this by, the difference in the two forms is that the genitive form (9a) seems to address the singing as a thing, while the accusative form (9b) addresses it as an event and focuses more on the person doing the singing. In most situations, this is a minor difference, so it’s okay to use either form. In some situations, like those in (8) or (9b), one form is a bit better than the other (at least to me), but these are surprisingly few and far between.
(9a) I object to his singing; he’s horribly off-key!
(9b) I object to him singing; this is my concert!
So my solution is as follows: use the genitive version (his singing) when you want to focus on what’s being done, and the accusative version (him singing) when you want to focus on the person doing it. If the focus doesn’t matter to you, then just pick whichever sounds better to you. If anyone objects, teach ‘em a little bit about mixed categories for me.
[Full disclosure: in O'Conner's defense, her prescription (always use the genitive) is followed by a sidebar in which she says "another complication is the kind of sentence that can go either way" (i.e., where the accusative form is also okay). However, she doesn't specify how to tell these sentences apart from the earlier sentences, which people think can go either way, but can't (in O'Conner's opinion). So that's not a terribly useful hedge.]
I’m not the sort of person who expects people to always listen to what I have to say. But here I go admonishing that Omit Needless Words is not a rule of grammar, and I’m immediately reminded of why I had to do so. Let’s look at an example of misusing Omit Needless Words in support of a proposed grammar rule; in fact let’s go a step further and look at an example of misinterpreting ONW in support of said rule: James Kilpatrick’s newest column. He’s got a bee in his bonnet about the double genitive, the common construction used in sentences like
(1) He is a friend of Celine Dion’s.
(2) I’m familiar with that enticing look of his.
Now, as Language Log has pointed out, there’s nothing wrong with those sentences — the double genitive was a favorite of Shakespeare’s, among others. But here’s what’s weird about Kilpatrick’s argument: he claims that the double genitive is wasteful. For Kilpatrick, the friend of… part of the phrase establishes possession, and thus the ’s possessive is redundant. As Kilpatrick puts it, “Words are precious! Waste them not!”, which is an instantiation of the Omit Needless Words idea. (It looks to me that Kilpatrick has made a mantra of Omitting Needless Words; he wastes none on segues between the various peeves he catalogs in his column.)
Now, it’s bad enough that Kilpatrick has gone astray by claiming that Omit Needless Words justifies his grammar rule, but to add salt to the wound, he’s gone further astray by confusing what qualifies as a word. Properly, ’s is a clitic (a syntactically independent but phonologically dependent lexical item — something you can’t say unless it’s attached to another word), not a true word. Strunk never said anything about Omitting Needless Clitics. If you’re going to buttress your opinion by exhorting people not to waste something, make sure you’re exhorting them not to waste the right thing. And seriously, who on earth sits about fretting over wasting clitics? It’s not as though the clitic mines are running short, or we’ve passed “peak clitic”.
Anyway, as I mentioned before, the Omit Needless Words/Word-Like Elements argument won’t pass muster here, because the double genitive really is a grammatical construction in English. Just try to rephrase sentence (2) so as to not use the double genitive, without changing the meaning of the sentence. What can you say? Certainly not that enticing look of him, nor that enticing look of he. You could try his enticing look, but it loses the specificity of the look that that enticing look affords. So not only is the double genitive not bad, it’s also good. Further supporting this, consider sentence (3a) and some possible restatements (each accompanied by delightful symbols):
(3a) This complaint of Kilpatrick’s is unfounded
(3b) *?This complaint of Kilpatrick is unfounded
(3c) #Kilpatrick’s complaint is unfounded
(3d) ?This one of Kilpatrick’s complaints is unfounded
(3a) sounds right to me, but (3b) sounds nearly ungrammatical. (3c) is perfectly grammatical, but isn’t the right thing to say if Kilpatrick has more than one complaint and we need to distinguish that this particular is unfounded. (I’m positive he’s had some well-founded arguments in his life.) And (3d) sounds a bit off to me, though not too bad. But, if we were going to rule out (3a) by Omitting Needless Words, then we’d really have to rule out (3d) a little harder because it’s got one more word (and one more suffix) than (3a) had. So here it looks like the double genitive is the best option.
Summary: Please, don’t get overzealous in applying Omit Needless Words. Strunk made no suggestion to Omit Needless Clitics. If you’re going to complain about niggling points of grammar, please use the right terminology. Also, the double genitive is not ungrammatical.
Prescriptivists love William Strunk, Jr., author of The Elements of Style. This is a bit odd, because Strunk and most prescriptivists differ in their stated goals. The introduction to Strunk’s original 1918 version of the book clearly lays out what his book is about. It is about “the principal requirements of plain English style”, “the field of English style”, “the rules of rhetoric”, “plain English adequate for everyday uses”, “the secrets of style”, “principles of composition”. No mention of grammar whatsoever. The closest he comes is to mention that his book discusses the “rules of usage”, but you’ll notice that issues of style/composition/rhetoric are far more important in his introduction.
And in fact, his book is laid out to reflect this. Section II is titled “Elementary Rules of Usage”, and that’s the part with issues of grammar. Section III is titled “Elementary Principles of Composition”, and that’s the part with advice about how to write better. That means that stuff in Section III is NOT GRAMMAR. It is advice. This is why Strunk called them “Principles”, not “Rules”.
That means, dear prescriptivists, that the following are not matters of grammar to St. Strunk:
As such, prescriptivists, I would thank you kindly not to cite these as inherent rules of English Grammar, but rather as one writer’s opinion of what makes good writing. Of course, even if Strunk had claimed that these were rules of grammar, that wouldn’t make it so. But at least it’d be less galling when you parrot them as inalienable truths about the language.
Readers: do not be taken in by the claim that these principles of style justify any so-called rules of grammar! Stay on your guard!
[Sorry... the images in this post are all fouled up. I would put forth a lot of effort to fix it, but I've got a lot on my plate this week. Speaking of which, come to the Berkeley Linguistics Society meeting this weekend and you'll hear an exciting talk on environment prototypicality from me, live and in the flesh!]
This post carries with it an important disclaimer. I do not like Yanni’s music. Not a bit. Nor would I want to read his book. However, I am in the habit of going to thrift stores and rummaging through their books, and that’s where our story begins. The other night at the thrift store, my apartmentmate found a copy of Yanni in Words and showed me the back cover, which Amazon has been so kind as to digitize. What it says is:
“What are the chances that a poor kid from the seaside town of Kalamata, Greece, who doesn’t read music but taught himself to play piano at eight, who doesn’t dance, doesn’t sing, doesn’t write lyrics, doesn’t conform to any particular musical style, is fiercely independent, and doesn’t want to play the show business ‘game’ — what are the chances that this kid will ever succeed, much less become a composer and performer revered in every corner of the globe?”
This is an oddly phrased question for a couple of reasons. The first is the odd lack of parallelism. Everyone from schoolchildren to undergraduates to businessfolk are exhorted to maintain parallelism in writing and speech:
(1) I gave gifts to Pikachu, to Diglett, and to Ponyta.
(2) I gave gifts to Pikachu, Diglett, and Ponyta.
(3) (*) I gave gifts to Pikachu, to Diglett, and Ponyta.
(1) & (2) are both considered fine, but (3) is considered bad. Linguistically, (3) uses the conjunction and to join two prepositional phrases and a noun phrase, and that’s just not the way and works. It’s supposed to join like elements. Also, the omission of to in (3) makes it sound like one of the thoughts you’re making this sentence out of is I gave gifts Ponyta. I wouldn’t go so far as to say (3) is ungrammatical, but I definitely prefer (1) & (2) to (3).
In the Yanni sentence, you’ve got two different non-parallelisms. The first is that who is used for the first two relative clauses, but not for subsequent ones:
… who doesn’t read music but taught himself to play piano at eight, who doesn’t dance, doesn’t sing, doesn’t write lyrics …
This gives the sentence a structure like:
There’s not anything inherently wrong with this; each new description (for instance, that Yanni doesn’t sing) can be added either as a new relative clause (with its own who) or as a new conjunct within the current relative clause (without its own who). So to get this structure, you just make who doesn’t dance a new relative clause, conjoined to the relative clause who doesn’t read music…, and all subsequent descriptors are conjoined to the verb phrase doesn’t dance within the second relative clause — not the relative clause itself. But this ends up leading to a new problem; there is no conjunction to join the two relative clauses:
There is a single and in this question, and it is within the second relative clause, so this is an ill-formed sentence. So that’s the first bit of non-parallel weirdness to this sentence.
The second bit is that the negations are not parallel. The relative clauses are all negated but one. You’re going along: doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, is, doesn’t … whoa! Again, this does not make the sentence ungrammatical, but it does make it harder to comprehend (at least for me — I actually had to stop and think for a second when I got the non-negative verb phrase). It’s something that makes a sentence less acceptable, although not necessarily less grammatical.
The last weird thing about this sentence that I want to discuss is its use of resumption. (This is also why my apartmentmate brought it to my attention in the first place.) The question has a huge(!) noun phrase in it, almost 50 words long (a poor kid … business ‘game’). This NP is longer than most sentences — I think it’s longer than any I am using in this post — and that means it is entirely possible for the reader to forget what the beginning of the sentence was by the time they get to the end of the NP. Try it yourself. Can you remember the structure of the beginning of the question was by the time you reach the end of the NP? I had only a foggy memory of it in my head. So to help the reader out, Yanni actually restarts the question with an anaphor replacing the giant noun phrase. The 49 words used at first are reduced to two (this kid), so that the opening structure can be retained in the reader’s mind. It’s something you do when you talk, but it’s just not allowed in written English.
Which I think is a shame.
This is that this is how people actually speak, and resumption is used judiciously in other languages to help the reader out. French, for example, uses resumptive pronouns when you have some long subject that might confound the reader [please, please excuse how dusty my French is]:
Cet homme avec les chapeaux, avec les yeux bleus, avec les chats et les chiens, il est tres gros.
(with which I intend to mean: That man with the hats, with the blue eyes, with the cats and dogs, he is very fat.)
The long noun phrase is introduced at the beginning, recalled with il, and the sentence uses this resumptive il as the subject. That’s just not how it’s done in English. You only get to say the subject once, so you can’t go on and on and then try to simplify it to a pronoun. You’d say “That man with the hats and all that jazz is very fat.” Or rather, you’d write that. But in saying it to myself as I wrote it, I snuck in a he and said “That man blah blah blah, he’s very fat.” It’s especially common in my head when you’re pointing someone out: “That man over there, he’s very fat” or “That man over there, isn’t he fat?” In speech you assume that the listener can’t go back and look at what you said, so to be safe, you’d better repeat it to make sure the idea will come out right, even if that means stepping on the toes of a few grammatical rules. In writing, though, you assume that you should generally stick to grammatical norms and that the reader can always go back if their memory gets hazy.
This is why Yanni’s question is odd. It sounds relatively fine to me, because each grammatical norm it violates is a sort of justifiable. The first one, that he’s got one too few ands or one too many whos, is commonplace in speech, where you can’t go back and check what you’ve been conjoining your phrases to and you don’t necessarily know at the outset how many conjuncts you’ll end up having. It’s just weird to see in writing, because you do have the chance to go back and check the sentence over and instill some parallelism to it. The second problem, the non-parallel negation, is also not so bad because it’s hard to make a negative phrase that means the same as is independent. And the third problem, the resumption, is alright by me because it makes the question easier to comprehend.
That said, the question is still quite awkward to me — but I think that’s the point. It uses the grammar of speech instead of the grammar of writing, probably to subtly establish that this book is intended to read like a conversation or narration, not as a dusty old biography. But it also goes to show that speech and writing really have different grammars, and what sounds fine in speech can send up some red flags when written down.
Summary: The grammar of speech and the grammar of writing are markedly different. What would sound fine spoken can look pretty odd written. A lot of that’s because speech and writing have different constraints; you can go back and re-read writing, but you can’t re-hear speech. As such, the two modalities care about different things: speech cares about clarity, and writing cares about formalism. When you sacrifice clarity in speech or formalism in writing, things seem a little odd. Maybe they shouldn’t.
I had just finished playing some trashcan basketball in the lab today (I won 4-3 with a tremendous 3-game run at the end) when I decided to give myself a quick post-game pep talk before resuming work. What I wanted to say was something along the lines of “All right brain, time to re-apply yourself to the work the work at hand”, but who’s going to be inspired by such bland talk? It’s the down-home idioms and dialectical speech that coaches use that inspire their teams. Everyone knows that.
So I attempted to rephrase the pep talk with an idiom involving knuckling, but I couldn’t figure out whether it was time to knuckle down to some work or to knuckle under to some work. This is not a preposition to take lightly, as it turns out: knuckling down is focusing and applying oneself (akin to buckling down) whereas knuckling under is to give in or submit. And I am not the sort to supplicate myself to my work.
What’s weird about it, though, is that the OED claims that knuckle down can have either of these two dissimilar meanings. The basis for knuckle down as “submit” appears to be based on a single attestation in the Times (I presume London’s) in 1888, where knuckle down was (mistakenly?) used instead of knuckle under.
This stands at the periphery of one of the questions that I think about a lot, since I’m big on the idea that linguistic theory and grammar ought to based on actual usage rather than pie-in-the-sky beliefs about “proper” usage. How can we tell whether this usage of knuckle down was a mistake, an intentional usage that is peculiar to this writer/editor, or an intentional usage that reflects a general acceptance of knuckle down to mean ’submit’? Regrettably, I don’t think we can tell in this situation, because there’s just not enough data for this idiom at that time.
But suppose for a second that we could tell. If it’s a mistake, it seems pretty clear to me that it shouldn’t be considered a real meaning for knuckle down; at the very least, it ought not to be codified in the august OED. If it’s an instance of a generally accepted meaning at that time period, then obviously it ought be considered a real meaning for knuckle down. But what if it represents a meaning used only by a small group of speakers? If one person can use knuckle down to mean “submit”, does our grammar need to be equipped to handle that? Should we say something like “knuckle down can mean submit, only it doesn’t to most people”? Basically, this is the case that presents itself with slang: some people agree that the slang term has some meaning, but not everybody. Should we treat these minority meanings as valid but of limited familiarity, or should they be brushed aside in favor of the standard meanings, and only admitted to the fold when they become too popular to ignore?
You probably know my answer by now: generally the former, occasionally the latter. I have somewhere on the order of thirteen distinct definitions of cheese in my vocabulary (cheese it!, cheesed off, etc.), each of which I consider a quite valid, if not universally recognized, English word. On the other hand, I will likely never accept bootylicious as a valid word of English. The way I look at it is that, frankly, a lot of the currently “valid” words of English are understood by fewer people than most slang. Take, for instance, the word senary. The OED says it’s a valid word, meaning “pertaining to the number six”. But I’ll bet fewer people know what senary means than know what cheesed off means.
I’ve wandered off-topic, so let me wrap things up. The point of this post was simple; I wanted to prevent other people from confusing knuckle down (“focus”) and knuckle under (“submit”) like I almost did. But as it turns out, maybe the OED’s right and you can’t actually confuse them because they’re already the same.
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