Guerrilla Prescriptivism

The prescriptivists have apparently taken to guerrilla campaigning to rouse support for their proscriptions. I went to a talk in the Psychology Department last week, and on my way down the stairs to return to my office, I found this graffito (the singular form of graffiti if you feel like being true to its Italian roots). Needless to say, it brightened my day. UCSD is known for its stairwell graffiti — or at least it was until the administration decided that its ongoing War on Being Interesting required most stairwells to be expunged of graffiti, lest anyone think that the campus is full of radicals, hooligans, or college students. Hopefully, this prescription will be sufficiently authoritarian that it will be left alone, keeping alive grammatical debate amongst the hordes of brow-beaten undergrads roaming the stairwells.

And, by the way, I do not share the graffitist’s qualms about starting a sentence with a conjunction. Or at least, I often don’t, although sometimes sentences starting with a conjunction sound unduly colloquial.

[Sorry I’ve resorted to another picture post, but I’m way busy right now. The defense of ‘literally’ I’ve promised to supply is forthcoming.]

over = more than

Did I miss the memo? Suddenly all the grammar snobs on the snobosphere are debating whether over is an improper substitute for more than. This is idiocy. Of course over means more than! Over has been used in this metaphorical sense for a millennium [Attestations from Old English and dated attestations from 1175 are available in the OED, definition III.13]. I even feel uncomfortable calling it a “metaphorical” sense, that’s how long it’s been in use and how pervasive it is in English. The connection between height and amount is central to our conception of the two. Not only can over mean “more than”, under can also mean “less than”, high can mean “a large amount” (high voltage, high-risk), low can mean “a small amount” (low wages, low intelligence). Carrying it further in the height=amount idea, we get elevated, heightened, escalated, and raised all meaning “increased” — and their verb forms mean “to increase”. And the same is true in the other direction for depressed and lowered.

Furthermore, other languages share this same idea. I just walked by a sign that said High Voltage Alto Voltaje. So Spanish is okay with the height=amount idea too.

I guess the argument against over is that it’s somehow ambiguous, but that’s literally almost never the case. Claims for the intolerable ambiguity of over are often backed up with an apocryphal story about Civil War enlistment. To serve in the military during the Civil War, the law said you had to be at least 18 years old. Apparently this was tested by the soldier stating under oath that he was “over 18”. Kids under 18, being as they are adept at circumventing the spirit of the law without circumventing the letter of the law, supposedly would go down to the local recruitment center with the number “18” drawn on the sole of their shoes. Then would be “over 18” when they made the oath. Then they’d march off to die on the killing fields. See, that’s why we can’t use metaphorical language: using over KILLS CHILDREN!

But the problem here isn’t that “over 18” is ambiguous and “more than 18” isn’t. They’re both ambiguous: more than 18 what? Inches? Months old? Lovers? Level 18 in D&D? The ambiguity instantly disappears if you say “over 18 years old” — you can’t draw the concept “18 years old” on your shoe. More than hardly buys you anything that over doesn’t.

If you really buy into this idea that over induces a legal ambiguity, I invite you to drive 95 on the highway, and then when you get pulled over, motion to the giant “55” you’ve painted on your car’s roof and gently explain to the officer that, actually, you were driving under 55, so the ticket’s null and void. I think this will be a learning experience for you.

The madness that over is not an acceptable substitute for more than was started by William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post, in 1877, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. Bryant GAVE NO EXPLANATION FOR THIS EDICT. (surprise!)

And, look, if you’re still unwilling to yield to reason and want to insist that proper grammar snobs make the distinction, well, you’re even wrong there. I was perusing a 1920 grammar book written by the Managing Editor of Funk & Wagnall’s New Standard Dictionary, and it says that over as a comparative is “defensible” and has the support of literary usage. This coming from a man who called out of sight an “intense vulgarism”, and who said that saying Had I have known better… stamps one as “grossly ignorant.” So if even an intense prescriptivist like him is saying this is all right, please, please listen.

[By the way, let me give a shoutout to goofy over at bradshaw of the future, who commented on a few of these anti-over posts to explain they were wrong. Also, this post might get followed up by another that delves deeper into the issue of the claimed ambiguity from using over, if there is mutual interest in such a post.]

[Update 07/28/08: As pointed out on Laurie Blandford’s blog, it turns out that the AP Stylebook also repeats this “over is for spatial relationships” claim.  Why doesn’t anyone ever check to see if their grammar rules are made up before they make them affect a sizable proportion of English-language reporters?]

Summary: 1000 years of usage, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Columbia Journalism Review, and even most prescriptivists agree: over and more than are interchangeable.”

How should you teach grammar?

Arnold Zwicky (whose class last summer was the inspiration for this blog, by the way) has a killer post on Language Log right now. His key point is twofold, complete with two catchy mottos: “Crazies win” and “Don’t let crazies win”. Crazies, in this particular context, are people who demand that you do grammar their way. People who thumb their noses at those who split infinitives. People who call those who interchangeably use that and which ill-educated morons. You get the idea. Many crazies are unabashed about it, wrapping themselves in stoles of “grammar snobbery”, which is for some reason considered a good thing to them. And, because of how obnoxiously they impose their unfounded grammatical beliefs, they win — other people start believing that infinitives can’t be split and “over” and “more than” mean different things. (Hence the “crazies win”.)

The key question Zwicky raises and struggles with is “what should grammar advice be, in light of the crazies?” Should you tell students not to split infinitives because there are ill-informed ignorami out there who would fault them for it? I think he’s right when he details the position he’s come to:

“After many years of wrestling with this question — I’d tell students that there were many people who viewed split infinitives as just wrong, and some who were lunatic on the matter, so they might want to take that into consideration — I’ve decided that the best advice is just to go ahead and do what seems natural to you. There are much more important things to worry about in this life, and if you think you can satisfy the tastes of everyone who reads what you write or hears what you say, you’re doomed”

I’ll drink to that. (Jealously, of course, as he’s put it better than I’d’ve put it.) Grammar prescriptions should be about the big things, not the minutiae, and they should be well-justified. Unless you have a darn good reason for claiming that something is “bad grammar”, let it go. Those who actually study language understand this, but are too often content to just ignore the crazies. That’s how the crazies win. We need to take the crazies to task as much as they take the rest of us to task. Drown their sound and fury in a deluge of reason and historical usage. Don’t just let them win. (Hence the “don’t let crazies win”.)

Back when ‘literally’ was good etiquette

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?

[Update: Commenter Emily and Jan Freeman over at the Boston Globe figured out that the source of this construction is ‘dancing attendance’, which apparently actually was in common use. I still don’t think I’ve ever heard it, and I still don’t quite understand it, but at least Amy Vanderbilt didn’t spin it out of whole cloth. All the same, the key point remains: one cannot literally dance attention on anything.]