Sometimes prescriptivists render me dumb. I mean dumb in both its senses: speechless and stupid. I’ll just stare at the comment and my brain sputters, trying to object but just bumping up against the enormity of the proscription’s idiocy. For instance, today I chanced upon the prescription that (1a) is wrong and (1b) is right:
(1a) The letter pleased him to no end.
(1b) The letter pleased him no end.
Really? I don’t ever remember having heard anyone say a sentence like (1b), but I know I’ve heard a lot of people use to no end as in (1a). Whatever, I muttered, let it go. But curiosity got the better of me, and I looked around for others who held this view. And, in the book I’m currently skimming through and will be railing against in a forthcoming post (The Dictionary of Disagreeable English by Robert Hartwell Fiske), what did I find but an injunction against to no end! Fiske writes:
“The phrases you complain of [including to no end] are bastardizations born of mishearing and nurtured by imitation.”
What on Earth is Fiske talking about? All of language is nurtured by imitation. It’s how we acquire language, how we use it. And idioms, including (to) no end, exist only due to imitation; they can’t be explained with the compositional syntax and semantics that the rest of language follows. For instance, there is no grammar rule in English that explains why the bigger, the better means what we all perceive it to mean. It makes no sense to deride imitation in language, since it’s the central force in language’s continued existence.
Furthermore, what language does Fiske think he is examining? Because in (American) English, it seems that to no end is perfectly acceptable, somewhat more common than the to-less variant, and emerged contemporaneously with the variant a little over a century ago. With regards to the current usage, “pleased me to no end” has 6600 Google hits, while “pleased me no end” has 700. I’d hoped to establish the claim of contemporaneous emergence using Google Books, but the problem is that it’s really hard to find good old examples of this idiom, in either of its forms. When you do, there’s the further matter that the idiom can have different meanings, especially when someone says something like:
(2) [...] don’t lave me here near this villain that’s afther cursing me to no end
Does to no end here mean “ceaselessly” or “for no purpose”? Context, in the form of the two pages before and after, do not help. I still can’t tell you which meaning is intended in (2), and I’ve been thinking about it off and on for a day. Let me tell you what I do have. I can’t find a single example of no end meaning “ceaselessly” or “incessantly”, or “strongly” in Google Books before 1844. (I searched for “me no end“, “him no end“, and “her no end“.) After 1844, the number of hits becomes too cumbersome to sort through. I haven’t got the time to go to all that bother just to find out if prescriptivists are morons, as we already know the answer to that one from previous investigations. But I did find a usage of to no end from 1874:
(3) Only when he saw a rich fellow, he would make up to him, and cringe, and fall down and worship him to no end.
Now, if to no end is the bastardization, then no end would have to have been the received usage before to no end showed up; if the two forms appeared at the same time, then there’s no reason why one should be considered the proper version. I can find no evidence that no end preceded to no end. So I thrust the burden of proof upon the prescriptivists. Show us that to no end is wrong! Show us that it is a bastardization, and show us that this is a problem! (After all, it’d be a 135-year-old bastardization, and who really cares about lineage that far back?) Until then, the 1.3 million webpages containing “to no end” and I will be here waiting, the prescriptivists’ incessant and ill-informed blathering perplexing us to no end.
And, by the way, let’s do an informal poll. Do you use either or both of these idioms? What is standard in your idiolect? Does one of these idioms set your teeth on edge? Is my to-requirement another piece of evidence establishing that despite my aspirations and affectations I remain inescapably prole? Thanks for your help!
Summary: Some people actually argue that “to no end” is an improper bastardization of “no end”, and more oddly, that this matters to our lives. There is no evidence that one is a bastardization of the other, and they’ve both been attested for more than a century. Complaints about such trifling matters serve only to turn people off from the beauty of language and reveal the niggling nature of many prescriptivists.
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February 5, 2009 at 1:13 am
mike
It’s always a skewed test when you find yourself saying “Well, I *think* I would say …” :-) That said, I think I favor “no end,” missing “to”:
Today’s meeting pleased me no end.*
I wonder if it’s by some sort of mental analogy to “no end of”:
At this meeting there was no end of suggestions for how to proceed.
Is there another usage for “to no end” to mean “to no purpose”? Now I’m confused.
* An obviously fictional statement.
February 5, 2009 at 3:16 am
Bob Hale
In my part of the UK (the Midlands) those two forms would both be fairly common but they would have different meanings. Here the “to no end” form is only used to mean “without purpose” and the “no end” form to mean “to a great extent”. I don’t recall ever hearing them used the other way round.
The version with “to”, in the example given (The letter pleased him to no end), would be very unlikely to be heard. It simply wouldn’t make sense as it would sound as if the letter itself had no ulterior motive.
Actually, now that I think about it, our “to no end” is just as likely to mean the, subtly different, “with no result” than “with no reason” but that may be just a local quirk of usage.
February 5, 2009 at 7:29 am
Daniel
For me, it’s definitely “to no end”. In fact, I don’t recall having ever encountered “no end” before. “The letter pleased him no end” definitely sounds odd to my ear.
Also, FTR, for me the primary meaning of “to no end” would be “endlessly”, not “pointlessly”.
February 5, 2009 at 8:20 am
Bob Hale
Where are you from Daniel? It would be very interesting to get some regional data on the variations in usage of these expressions.
February 5, 2009 at 8:36 am
Ryan
I’m from the Pacific Northwest, and to see the idiom without the “to” was a surprise. I’m also primarily familiar with the “endlessly” meaning.
February 5, 2009 at 8:38 am
edkupfer
Like Daniel, I have never heard a to-less “to no end”. I’m Canadian, but I can’t recall having heard it in any of the USAian media I’ve devoured over the years either.
February 5, 2009 at 10:15 am
goofy
I’m Canadian and would use “pleased me no end” I think. But “pleased me to no end” sounds fine too. But it is potentially ambiguous, altho I don’t think that makes it wrong.
Good luck with Fiske’s book… he’s the guy who said “Descriptivists and laxicographers have really had their day. I really want to upset them. I want them to know that their purpose in life is really questionable.”
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/vip/001227.html
February 5, 2009 at 11:16 am
arnoldzwicky
A guess at what would lead Fiske to proscribe “to no end” ‘immensely’…
First, One Right Way tells us that only one variant can be acceptable.
Next, Omit Needless Words tells us to opt for the shorter variant “no end”.
Next, this variant is easily relatable to “no end of”; there is no “to no end of”.
Finally, Avoid Ambiguity also tells us to opt for “no end”, because it lacks the ambiguity of “to no end” (‘immensely’ or ‘to no purpose’ or ‘endlessly’).
Now, as for regional distribution: I suspect that “no end” ‘immensely’ is more common in the UK, “to no end” in the US. (For what it’s worth, the OED and NOAD2 have only the former, in the relevant sense, and AHD4 has neither in this sense.)
February 5, 2009 at 12:03 pm
RH Fiske
Here is the complete text:
Step foot in sets my teeth on edge — should be set foot in — but I hear it all the time. Ditto for to no end in phrases such as “He bothered me to no end” — where to my ear (or mind) the to simply does not belong. Do the phrases that bother me qualify as variant usages, or are they simply mistakes?
◘ The correct, well-established idioms are, as you know, set foot in (meaning “go into”) and no end (meaning “very much; to a great degree”). The phrases you complain of are bastardizations born of mishearing and nurtured by imitation. Those who embrace a descriptive approach toward language will certainly maintain that — since these expressions are indeed found in our speech and, even, writing — they are acceptable usages. These are the same people who are disinclined to reject for all intensive purposes, beckon call, and other equally monstrous expressions.
February 5, 2009 at 1:48 pm
mike
“bastardizations”? “monstrous”?
It’s one thing to have a discussion about usage and whether phrases are logically correct or sensible, about how people mishear and reproduce misheard phrases, and even about how some of these mishearings can have amusing results (“for all intensive purposes”).
Where the fun (and objectivity) stops is when the discussion becomes judgmental, suggesting that some language is inherently superior, and that deviations from a standard usage (always the speaker’s, not by coincidence) are morally suspect, as are the speakers who produce these deviations. Language is neutral; we can give it moral and ethical value, but we should not confuse the values we assign to it with the language itself.
In any event, the descriptivist POV is that the entirety of the language has resulted from monstrous bastardizations, and that this process continues all around us. No amount of condemnation and outrage — which goes back as far as people have been writing about English — has had any demonstrable effect on stopping this change. It has, however, raised hackles and, satisfyingly, made the condemnation and outrage from past generations of would-be purifiers of English look silly in retrospect.
February 5, 2009 at 9:03 pm
kaflooey
Perhaps it’s due to a regional preference (I live in Australia), but I think the to-less version sounds wrong and awkward, and I don’t believe I had encountered it prior to today.
February 6, 2009 at 7:49 am
Daniel
Bob,
I grew up and live in the eastern US in the area near the fuzzy border between “Midatlantic” and “Southeast” (for any Americans reading this who are interested, I grew up in Maryland near DC and currently live in Raleigh NC).
I should also probably clarify that when I said that for me the primary meaning of “to no end” would be “endlessly”, not “pointlessly”, I was using “endlessly” in a metaphoric sense. To be more accurate, I should have said “immensely”. The phrase probably does get at least occasional use from me to mean “endlessly” in the literal sense, however.
February 7, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Richard Hershberger
RH Fiske: “The correct, well-established idioms are, as you know…”
…followed by unsupported assertions. Classic!
February 7, 2009 at 10:29 pm
The Ridger
Grew up in Tennessee but read extensively, have lived in California, Germany, and Maryland. “To no end” sounds odd, but I’d parse it as meaning “to no point” or “pointlessly”. “No end” is what I say.
February 8, 2009 at 8:04 am
Jen
I grew up in Alaska, went to college at Stanford, now law school at Harvard. “No end” without “to” sounds foreign and is barely parsable. “To no end” meaning “endlessly” I understand just fine. Now that I think about it I agree that “to no end” could also be used to mean “pointlessly,” but that never occurred to me before now.
February 9, 2009 at 9:37 am
Gabe
Wow, thanks for all the usage data and great discussion, everyone! I hope to compile all this discussion into a short summary post later this week. I have to admit I am surprised at the prevalence of “no end”, seeing as I still don’t remember having heard it before last week — the fun of language, eh?
And how about a hand for Arnold Zwicky for his excellent proposed explanation of the “to no end” prohibition and for Mike’s stirring condemnation of judgemental language snobbery? You guys are great.
February 18, 2009 at 12:26 pm
emmaeck
Just to add one more data point – I am from Mid-Atlantic US (NJ-PA) and recognize exactly the same distinction between the 2 terms as Bob Hale does. However, this may be due entirely to having read a lot of Brit literature – I can give no realistic estimate of whether either/both phrases are widely used around here, by me or anyone else. Self-reporting in these matters is hard, but I am pretty sure “no end” can only mean “extensively” to me, while “to no end” *could* be used to express either “extensively” or “purposelessly” though I believe I favor the latter.
I do think it’s telling Fiske didn’t address this issue (among others) – for at least some English speakers, the 2 phrases are neither variations of each other nor mistakes for one another, are they?
February 19, 2009 at 11:41 am
Gabe
I posted the summary of people’s thoughts on these idioms today: http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/following-up-on-to-no-end/
Thanks again for all the comments!
March 5, 2009 at 11:28 am
Nikita
hello everyone! i’m from South Asia .. and i here almost everyone says without the “to”.
Infact, “to” seems somehow jarring to the ears..i dunno why! it just doent feel right.
in all effect, i would prefer “The letter pleased him no end” to “The letter pleased him to no end”
May 27, 2009 at 6:33 am
Kevin C
Ok, I know I’m extremely late to the conversation but I had to put my two cents in. I have always heard and used the expression “to no end” to mean “without end” or “incessantly”. I have never heard or used the expression without the “to” until I read this article. Honestly, I probably would have had to control my INTP nature to correct someone if I had heard them say it that way. It just looks and sounds wrong. FTR, I am the son of Yankees, raised in the South and have lived in several parts of the U.S.
March 5, 2010 at 10:52 am
Steve Nelson
OK, a search of your site shows this is the only post with the word “enormity” and you use it as I usually see it prescribed: a measure of wickedness.
Mostly, these days, it’s also used to mean how big something is. The enormity of Hoover Dam. Not that it’s an evil dam, but it’s big.
So in the spirit of Prescriptivism Must Die!, enormity really does have as much to do with size as badness, right?
March 7, 2010 at 11:08 am
Gabe
Steve: I’m working on putting together a post on this, but I have no idea when it will be done. I actually intended “enormity” in this post to evoke primarily a sense of size and then to also take advantage of the secondary meaning to suggest that the proscription is bad; it’s easier to replace the word with “immensity” than with “wickedness” in my sentence.
As far as I know at the moment, “enormity” started out as a non-wicked word, was given the wicked meaning (in the Victorian era?), and then has returned to its non-wicked usage. I like to use it in a situation when some amount of wickedness is in play, but I don’t consider that necessary for good usage.
April 5, 2010 at 11:07 am
Tom S. Fox
Isn’t ”the … the …“ a common construction in English? As in ”The more I know, the less I need?“ How can you say there were no grammar rule explaining it?
April 5, 2010 at 11:57 am
Gabe
Tom: It’s a common (and perfectly grammatical) construction, and most any native speaker of English will know what it means.
But there’s no general grammatical rule that explains how to get the idiomatic meaning out of the construction. You can infer the meaning using your pragmatic knowledge, but it doesn’t fall directly out of compositional semantics, as a “logical” construction would. (Especially in the massively elided form “the more, the merrier”.) Again, that doesn’t mean that it’s in any way ungrammatical, but rather that grammar rules are generally the wrong way of analyzing idioms.
June 1, 2010 at 3:53 pm
timmah
Oh stfu and learn the language you shower of ignorant bastaards. Its “NO END”. The first link even explains why “to no end” is grammatically and semantically wrong. This is the same crowd of spellchecker-wielding malignancies that have butchered the words “loose” and “lose”. If you can’t figure out the difference, don’t try to use it.
December 1, 2010 at 10:01 am
Peter Stelling
I just had a novel published, and friends are now reading it. One friend mentioned to me that he had finished the book and made some very favorable comments on it. When I asked him if he found any typos or errors, he cited only one: the use of the idiomatic expression “no end” without the preceding word “to” in the upper third of page 74. I guess he anticipated my question, and I appreciate his thoroughness and his good memory!
This puzzled me, because I have heard that expression “no end” used without the preceding “to” most of my life. My parents were from New York and western Pennsylvania and spent their formative teenaged years in central Florida. I was particularly intrigued to see the post defending my position from a fellow named Bob Hale, who lives in the British Midlands.
Who knows how these quirky little varieties of usage evolve in the same direction is such disparate locations?
By the way, the book is entitled A PLACE TO CALL HOME and will be available on amazon soon! :>)
May 1, 2011 at 12:59 am
David Richfield
I’m from South Africa and to me, ‘no end’ and ‘to no end’ have clearly distinct meanings (endlessly and pointlessly, respectively). If you say ‘to what end did he do it?’ then ‘to no end’ makes perfect sense.
December 16, 2011 at 12:54 am
Some Chinese Dude
I think the point is… prescriptivists are dumb. I’m not trying to be a troll or anything, but come on, “bastardization”? Language is dynamic, it always has been, always will be. “Proper Grammar” was pretty much unheard of before the 1700s, and before that, people just spoke and spelled however way the wanted as long as it was understandable. I agree to a certain extent that standardization helps effective communication, but when people start talking about how a phrase many people are using already shouldn’t be used because it’s “grammatically incorrect” and a “bastardization”, it’s a bit too far. I mean, would you say “you” is a bastardization of “thou”? If bastardization is the case, let’s all speak Shakespearean English! Actually no, since English is a mixture of a number of Gaelic and Germanic languages, we should stop speaking English because it bastardizes these languages. If we keep going back like this, we’ll end up having to grunt like cavemen. Actually, that might be quite fun.
Whatever is popular becomes standard. Two things can be standard at the same time, sometimes, the latter takes over the former. For me, that’s all there is to it. I’ll even go as far as saying there is no such thing as “proper English”. American English, British English, Australian English, Chinese English, Indian English… all forms of world Englishes are equally as legitimate as the next.