(Almost) Zero Tolerance, and linearly separable blogrolls

You know how prescriptivists are always on about how kids these days lade their speech with hedges like like or kinda or sorta?  (Of course, adults do the same thing, but that’s neither here nor there.) I wrote about this a while back and, like a moth to a flame, a prescriptivist flew through and commented on the travesty that is kids’ speech today.  Why don’t these dang kids just come out and say things categorically and unequivocally?

Well, if kids will permit me to take up their mantle for a moment, I’ve got to say, the kids are right to do what they do. Prescriptivists don’t hedge nearly enough. Witness Josh Abraham’s open letter to Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation:

[...] you recommend punctuating as follows:

4   Though it is less rigorously applied than it used to be, there is a rule that when a noun phrase such as “stainless steel” is used to qualify another noun, it is hyphenated, as “stainless-steel kitchen”. Thus you have corrugated iron, but a corrugated-iron roof. The match has a second half, but lots of second-half excitement. Tom Jones was written in the 18^th century, but is an 18^th-century novel. The train leaves at seven o’clock; it is the seven-o’clock train.

*Ahem.*

Therefore, crazy lady who does not practice what she preaches, one has zero tolerance, but a zero-freakin’-hyphen-tolerance approach. Where the bloody blazes is the dang hyphen betwixt “Zero” and “Tolerance” in your stupid title, you daffy bird?!?

This isn’t out of the ordinary for prescriptivists; hardly a month goes by without the Language Loggers pillorying some foolishly certain prescriptivist for breaking the very rule the prescriptivist was trying to impose.  For goodness’ sake, guys, learn how to hedge!  We descriptivists appreciate you making it easy for us to show that your advice is poorly-thought-out, but c’mon — we do like a challenge every now and then.  Offering up such obvious hypocrisy makes it like shooting fish in a barrel.

[hat tip for the Abraham letter to Justin Moss]

***

Also, a dispatch from the “I majored in math and therefore find patterns in everything” portion of my brain: If you’ll be so kind as to direct your attention to the Blogroll to your left, you’ll note that I finally (only, what eight months after the fact?) got around to re-naming “Notes from the Copy Editor” to “Language is the People’s“.  This means that the blogroll now has an unintentional linear separator.  All of the Language Blogs come before “lively” in the dictionary, while all of the Not Language Blogs come after. Unfortunately, this means that it will be very difficult for me to add a new blog to the blogroll if it does not fit this scheme.  I wish I could say I was joking.  Please adjust your blog names accordingly.

English First, English Second, English Third, and so on

Nashville, Tennessee, is home to Vanderbilt University, the Grand Ole Opry, and apparently a ton of different languages.  So many, in fact, that they’re bleeding the city dry, according to Councilman Eric Crafton.  He was the driving force behind a special election for an English-only measure in Nashville that got voted on Thursday.

It failed.

I’m not here to talk about why I think such legislation is a bad idea, because this is just a grammar blog, not a linguistics or politics blog.  I’ll just mention what happened in Miami when they tried the same thing: everyone hated it, and it got repealed.  I’ll also mention that I happen to know a lot of smart people who are contributing to the economy, whose first language is not English, and who are able to converse in English, but aren’t great at understanding written English legalese.  I’ll also mention that there’s something known as the critical period in language learning, which prevents most adults from ever becoming fluent in a language they didn’t learn in childhood.  So these lazy immigrants don’t learn English not because they’re lazy, but because the task is almost insurmountably hard.  All right, I guess I was here to talk about why I think this is a bad idea.

But the thing I wanted to point out — and this at least borders on grammar — is that proponents of the measure called it an “English First” measure, as opposed to the more common appellation “English Only”.  Here is the text of the measure as it is listed on Nashville’s Election Commission’s website, and I’ve taken the liberty of bolding a few words in it:

“English is the official language of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee. Official actions which bind or commit the government shall be taken only in the English language, and all official government communications and publications shall be in English. No person shall have a right to government services in any other language. All meetings of the Metro Council, Boards, and Commissions of the Metropolitan Government shall be conducted in English. The Metro Council may make specific exceptions to protect public health and safety.”

For not being an “English Only” rule, there sure are a lot of universal quantifiers (all, only, any other) in the measure’s text.  Saying something puts “English First” implies that something else comes second.  You don’t often say, “For breakfast, I shall first eat one quail’s egg.  I shall then be done.”  Nor do you often say, “My plans for tonight are to first watch television, and second, watch television.”  (Maybe facetiously.) I fail to see what comes second in the “English First” measure.  Possibly more English?  Or perhaps silence?  I guess the idea is that the Council may, at its discretion, choose to permit other languages for health and safety purposes, so that qualifies as “Other Languages Second”.  But, given that no person would have had a right to receive anything in another language, I don’t imagine the Metro Council would have often voluntarily exercised the “Other Languages Second” clause.

On a similar point, some of the English-only folks apparently find “anti-English-Only” to be too unwieldy, too hyphenated, too reasonable, so they just say “anti-English”. I guess I’m anti-English, then. Who’d've thunk it? (Besides prescriptivists, that is.)

Faithful executions

Barack Obama was sworn in as president on Monday, in a ceremony that I completely missed because, due to the three hour time difference between San Diego and Washington, it started at 7 in the morning — or, as I prefer to call it, “why on earth did I set an alarm this early?”   However, I did eventually catch one part of the ceremony: the oath of office.  And of all the parts I could have caught, you might think that’s about the least exciting, and in general I would agree with you.

But Monday’s was no ordinary oath, because of a floating faithfully.  The only constitutionally mandated part of the inauguration ceremony is that the President must recite the following oath:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

(And yes, Ability is capitalized in the original text. An insidious German influence, perhaps?) Presidents have better things to fill their brains with than the exact form of a sentence that a bunch of white-hairs came up with 220 years ago, so the Chief Justice feeds the President the sentence a few words at a time and the President repeats what the Chief Justice says.  And that generally works pretty well, except that even Chief Justices aren’t perfect. And so, with the eyes of the world upon him, John Roberts choked:

ROBERTS: I, Barack Hussein Obama…
OBAMA: I, Barack…
ROBERTS: … do solemnly swear…
OBAMA: I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear…
ROBERTS: … that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully…
OBAMA: … that I will execute…
ROBERTS: … faithfully the office of president of the United States…
OBAMA: … the office of president of the United States faithfully…
ROBERTS: … and will to the best of my ability…
OBAMA: … and will to the best of my ability…

Now, Ben Zimmer has already commented on this at Language Log, as has Neal Whitman at Literal-Minded. Not to mention that Obama and Roberts did a do-over to make sure that no one was giving the Constitution short shrift. (After all, if all the Constitution demands of the President is that he say one little sentence, it’s only polite to make sure you get it right.)  But Liz asked me to comment, and by gum, I’m not about to let down a friend. I’ve got precious little to add, but I will make three small points.

First off, it doesn’t actually make a difference which position faithfully is in.  In all three forms (will faithfully execute, will execute faithfully, and will execute the Office … faithfully), faithfully has to modify the verb execute.  I suppose that you could argue that if faithfully occurs at the very end of the clause, it could modify swear, but no native speaker of English would interpret it as such.  Also, a couple of ill-informed prescriptivists have attempted to claim that Roberts was rectifying a grammatical error in the Constitution by avoiding a split infinitive.  That’s an imbecilic rationale, not only because there is no reason to be against split infinitives in English, but because there is no infinitive in any of these versions of the oath.  So it wasn’t for semantic reasons that Obama had to retake the oath.

Secondly, there was one person who didn’t botch the oath.  Sure, the captioner was probably working from a script and all, but still, kudos are due.  At least if you were deaf you weren’t confused.

There’s one final point I’d like to make here, one that may seem to have no connection whatsoever to the inauguration of a president.  My dear Pittsburgh Steelers made it back to the Super Bowl with a resounding walloping of the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday.  How is this relevant?  Well, at least one attendee of the inauguration was a Steelers fan. (That’s a screenshot of the Terrible Towel, in case it’s not immediately obvious.)

Actually, make that two attendees:

And cheese could be improved by making it a stapler!

I happened upon something on NewsOK.com, the online version of the newspaper The Oklahoman.  I say “something” because it was certainly not an article, I don’t think it was a column, and it was so scattered that I daren’t call it an opinion piece.  I suppose that this may be the sort of writing that contributed to the newspaper being named The Worst Newspaper in America by the Columbia Journalism Review in 1999. The headline (what lured me in) was “Rules of grammar are not set in stone”, but the text did not seem to hold any significant relationship to its headline. As far as I could tell, it was basically a statement that perhaps ain’t is a word, but then again, of course it’s not, but maybe it is, and by the way, I think you can split infinitives.

My brain is still a bit sore from the whole ordeal, but there’s one bit of insanity that stood out heads and shoulders above the rest:

“Grammarians still wrangle over whether the wild and wooly English language should be saddled with civilized Latin grammar.”

No, we don’t. You might as well say “biologists still wonder whether a penguin wouldn’t be better off as a lion”, or “chefs still debate whether peanut butter could be improved by making it gazpacho”.  Penguins have an ecological niche just like lions do, and peanut butter has as much its own taste as gazpacho does. Similarly, English has as much a grammar as Latin did.

There is about as much debate about this point as there is about whether Barack Obama really qualifies as a “natural-born citizen” according to the Constitution.  Yes, there are people who fervently claim that Obama’s birth certificate is a fake, or he was born in Hawaii before it was a state, or whatever.  But these people are wrong.  So too with Latin-loving prescriptivists; they exist, but they’re wrong. Very wrong. They don’t understand languages at all.

Point of fact, English isn’t so wild anyway.  For instance, there is a very specific word order to English, which is not true of free-word-order languages like Russian, Warlpiri, or (guess what!) Latin.  The only reason that Latin seems orderly is because it’s a dead language, so there’s hardly anyone around to use it — and therefore, hardly any data that could disprove the grammatical rules that people think Latin obeys.  It’s static in a way that no living language will ever be.  Which leads to one final point: if Latin’s grammar was so wonderful, why did the language die out?  The answer, of course, is that it didn’t — instead, it morphed into the various extant Romance languages, which, you’ll notice, people rarely suggest English should adopt the grammar of.

None is, none are: Grammar according to Clarkson

I know Black Friday was a while ago now, and you’re probably not too interested in my exact location a month and half ago.  However, I will brazenly pretend that you are and tell you that I was up in the Bay Area that day — which also happened to be my birthday.  (It is not pleasant to have people refer to your birthday with the same name as the days that saw the Fisk-Gould market-cornering scheme, the slaughter of Iranian protesters, and the invasion of the Falkland Islands.  Then again, my birthdays have a tendency to involve some unpleasantness, such as the year my friends stole my bed as part of an elaborate birthday prank, the year my friends threw eggs at me as part of a less elaborate birthday prank, or the year that my friend threw a single egg at me as an allusion to the previous year’s egg-throwing.  So I suppose if someone’s birthday has to be called Black Friday, I can take one for the team.)

In honor of my ability to remain alive for a quarter-century, my dear friends fed me the Old Bay ice cream they had made and took me to the best place for Black Friday shopping: a used bookstore.  There, in the extreme bargain section at the front of the store, I saw The World According to Clarkson, a book written by Jeremy Clarkson, the overbearing but hilarious co-host of Top Gear.  And this is what, at long last, leads to the grammar portion of the post.

I finally got around to reading the book, and found this sentence in it:

(1) None of the people who run it is getting any sleep.

If you are in the newspaper biz, you probably thought nothing of that sentence, aside from some minor curiosity about what it refers to. (It’s the European Union, if you were concerned.)   But to me, the sentence was a fingernail caressed gently along a chalkboard: I could stand it, but I wanted badly to read the sentence with are replacing is.  I didn’t dare; Clarkson’s authoritative voice rumbled through my mind, dissuading me from disagreeing with his usage. Yet well after I finished reading the sentence, the question still smoldered in my head. Is Clarkson right? Is none singular, as he and many others make it, or plural, as I’d prefer to?

As is nearly always the case here at Motivated Grammar, the answer is that both are fine and have been for a long time. (“Home of the friendly grammarians!” could be the blog slogan just as easily as “Prescriptivism Must Die!”)  We can start our analysis by quickly checking in with other grammarians — and, stunningly, they are fairly quiet about the issue.  In fact, pretty much everyone agrees on three basic facts:

• when none quantifies a singular or mass noun, only singular agreement is acceptable
• when none quantifies a plural noun, both singular and plural agreements are acceptable.
• when none doesn’t quantify anything, both agreements are acceptable.

To check how this jibes with real English usage, I ran some quick Google searches (drawing the numbers from page 10 of the results to improve accuracy):

	is	are
None of the food	14200	3
None of the projects	2730	2870
None	2350000	2990000

Hooray!  We’ve got a match! And what’s more, the singular and plural usages are basically equally common.  Sure looks like the facts are right.

But not everyone agrees with this; some claim that none must always be singular. The source of this belief is the canard that none is a contraction of not one, which must be singular.  Now, supposing that were the case, it is argued that (2a) being unacceptable would imply (2b) is unacceptable as well:

(2a) ?? Not one of the readers are interested in this.
(2b) None of the readers are interested in this.

But that’s just wrong, at every step of the way. First off, the fact that two words are semantically equivalent does not mean that they have the same grammar.  This is a common misconception, which I addressed in a previous post on different than.  The key point is that there are many semantically equivalent constructions in English that do not employ the same grammar. Therefore, even if not one and none were semantically equivalent, it wouldn’t mean they were both syntactically singular. And as it turns out, not one and none aren’t quite the same semantically anyway:

(3a) *Not one of the blind mice can see each other.
(3b) None of the blind mice can see each other.

If you’ll excuse a bit of linguistic terminology, (3b) shows that none can take the reciprocal anaphor each other. An anaphor is a pronoun that refers to some other entity in the discourse, and a reciprocal anaphor is one that refers to each of the members of that entity.  There are two reciprocals in English: each other or one another.  So when you say Bill and Linda like each other, you’re saying that Bill likes Linda and that Linda likes Bill.  You can’t use a reciprocal anaphor unless its referent can be thought of as a plural set.  This is why you can’t say *I like each other. (You’d use myself, a reflexive anaphor, instead.)  None can be thought as a plural set, but not one apparently can’t.  They’re not quite the same.

The fact that you can’t use a reciprocal with not one but can with none is compelling evidence that none isn’t just a contraction of not one.  Yes, not one and none have the same source; according to MWDEU, Old English nan ‘none’ formed from of ne an ‘not one’.  But shared history does not make none and not one the same any more than shared ancestors make two species the same.

Anyway, putting that canard behind us, MWDEU cites plural usage all the way back to King Alfred the Great in 888.  In fact, none can always be plural, except in a situation like (4):

(4) None of the food has/*have gone bad.

Otherwise, you’re free to choose between singular and plural.  I think I almost always use the plural, but it’s up to you to decide how you want to treat it.

Summary: None can be singular or plural, unless it quantifies a singular or mass noun. Don’t believe anyone who says none has to be singular because it’s a contraction of not one.  Both none of the meals is and none of the meals are are okay, and both none is and none are are okay.  *None of the stuff are is ungrammatical, though.

Heathens assaulting the apostrophe!

This is funny. Who would have thought that a little apostrophe would mean the difference between proper Christianity and secular heathenry? Well, James McGrath would. He argues (satirically, of course) that using New Years Day (or, I presume, New Years’ Day) instead of New Year’s Day is a plot by pro-diversity punks to lend credence to non-Gregorian calendars. My favorite part is the line “Truly committed Christians should be listening carefully for the lack of apostrophe” — that’s brilliant.  Now I can’t wait until people realize that Mothers Day is a ploy by lesbians to convince people that having two mommies is okay.

[Hat tip to Pharyngula.]

Jan Freeman hits nails on their heads

Jan Freeman, blogger and columnist for the Boston Globe, is one of those people that I aspire to become. She addresses more or less the same issues as I do in this blog: pointing out when overzealous prescriptivists have overstepped the bounds of English grammar in their attempts to convert English into their own personal Byzantine wonderland. In fact, the main difference between us, I think, is that she does this with the conciseness, precision, and effectiveness that I can only dream of eventually mastering.

I was reminded of this because I had had two ideas bouncing around in my head for months, unable to figure out how to put them together into a coherent post.  The first: it is bad to be obsessed with Omitting Needless Words. The second: prescriptivists make things up seemingly out of thin air. Thankfully, Jan took both of those ideas, wrote them up in the newspaper, and scored two direct hits against the prescriptivist ramparts.  I highly recommend reading both columns and freeing yourself from the shackles of prescriptivism.  (Well, really I recommend reading all of her columns, but I assume you have other things that need done today.)

And if you doubt the power Jan has in this world, it was her column, and not my post, about the “Some prescriptivists argue not should not conclude a sentence” claim that led to its being removed from Wikipedia. That’s right — she can get people to erase information from a website. Imagine what she could do to you if you were foolish enough to oppose her.