Are they trying to misunderstand what people say?

The prescriptivists are on my last nerve.  Some of them really believe that there is something wrong with this sentence:

(1) One of the only things I liked about living in Ottawa was the strong film community.

Reasonable readers, can you find the error in (1)?  The construction that “doesn’t convey any information”, the one that Richard Lederer calls a “strange and illogical expression”, the one Robert Hartwell Fiske cites as “further evidence that people scarcely know what their words mean”? Give up? It’s one of the only!

Oh, you didn’t find that to be illogical?  You thought you got some information out of those words?  Well then, congratulations; you’re a normal speaker of English.  Honestly, I couldn’t see what could the problem with one of the only possibly be.  Well, let’s look at Lederer’s argument against it:

“This strange and illogical expression began showing up a few years ago, and English took a step backward when it did.  The expression has been defended on the basis that it is no worse than only two, because only means ‘one’ and only two is oxymoronic. A specious argument! It’s like saying that robbing a bank is okay because it’s no worse than robbing a jewelry store.  Moreover, only in the sense of ‘only two’ does not mean ‘one’; it means ‘no more than.’  There is no meaning of only that fits with one of the only.“

Well, that’s a kick in the gut of the facts — three kicks, in fact.  Kick the first is the claim that one of the only started showing up a few years ago.  Google Books reports it in two books around 1770, in The Dramatic Censor and The Sale of Authors, and reports hundreds of uses throughout the nineteenth century.  It’s more than a few years old, that’s for sure.

Kick the second is the idea that any reasonable person defends one of the only by noting that only two is oxymoronic.  I sure don’t, and I don’t understand who would.  There is nothing oxymoronic, nothing contradictory about the construction.  Only two is completely clear, comprehensible, standard, and logical — hundreds of pre-1800 usages of only two in Google Books attest to this.

Kick the third is Lederer’s definition of only.  Only two does not mean “no more than two” in standard usage.  If it meant “no more than two”, then (2) would be a totally acceptable sentence.

(2) *The cyclops has only two eyes.

With Lederer’s definition (2) is fine, because a cyclops has only one eye, and one is no more than two.  But a quick poll of the only two people in the apartment at the moment revealed that (2) is utterly unacceptable; clearly Lederer’s definition is insufficient.  The real definition of only in only two is something along the lines of “exactly”, but with the crucial additional implicature that this is a smaller number than expected.  Violating this implicature makes a sentence sound weird, as with (3b):

(3a) I was sad when only two people showed up at my cats’ wedding.
(3b) #I was sad when only one thousand people showed up at my cats’ wedding.

Now, the fact that one gets this implicature, that only two sounds so much better than only one thousand, ought to suggest that there is logic underlying the construction. This, coupled with Lederer’s crummy definition of only, should lead a reader to be skeptical of his claim that no meaning of only can fit in one of the only. I am curious as to what Lederer thinks the definitions of only are.

So what does one of the only mean?  What happens if we follow one critic’s request to “parse it if you will, and see what you get”?  Let’s look at the example in (1).  The only things I liked about living in Ottawa is a noun phrase, identifying the set of things the speaker liked about living in Ottawa, noting that this set is the complete set, and implying that it’s an awfully small set.  That’s what the quantifier only means, that’s what it’s meant for hundreds of years.  One of modifies a noun phrase, selecting one member of that set.  The two combined, as they are in (1), pick out a single member of the set of all things the speaker liked about living in Ottawa. So what exactly were we supposed to see when we parsed this?  That it works?  I’m fine with that.

There’re a lot more arguments that one of the only makes sense, and Jan Freeman has a wonderful column with a few of them.  Notably, Freeman points out that one of the only is attested cross-linguistically, further destroying the notion that one of the only is somehow illogical.  So in the end, I have to ask this of the prescriptivists: Do you really have nothing better to do in your lives than to ignore the well-known meanings of words so that you get to call other people stupid?  Are you really unable to think of a better pastime than claiming that a reasonable, well-worn construction is illogical and incomprehensible?  Are you really so committed to those goals that you’re unwilling to comprehend an easily comprehensible construction?

Or as I screamed into my computer after reading this junk: Why are you spending more effort trying to misunderstand someone than trying to understand them?

Summary: Prescriptivists insistently grouse that people don’t think enough when they write, but prescriptivists seem just as likely not to think when writing.  Case in point: the arguments against one of the only are positively absurd, based off of a wanton misinterpretation of what only means, and completely independent of historical usage in English and other languages.  Of course one of the only is fine, a fact that has been known since 1770.

Going to the kids with singular “they”

Over break, I’ve had the chance to take advantage of my girlfriend’s cable TV, which means that I’ve had the chance to be utterly underwhelmed with the mediocrity of mid-day programming. On the plus side, though, I’ve been able to catch a few re-runs of shows I’ve often thought I ought to watch. One of these is WordGirl, a PBS show designed to convince kids that words are fun and cool and hip and so on. It’s full of the self-awareness and meta-jokes that my generation respects, not the sing-song dreck that made Barney and Teletubbies so horrendously popular amongst the younger generations. I still remember, upon first catching it, thinking that Power Puff Girls was the best kids’ show in history because of the way it played with the conventions of the genre — and I have to say that WordGirl manages to hit the same chord. Sure, I share Mark Liberman’s concern from 2007, when the show premiered, that WordGirl can be condescending when she corrects people’s word usages and that no doubt this will influence some viewers to become the judgmental prescriptivists that I so hate. But the show is surprisingly reasonable in its grammar.

In the episode I caught yesterday, the writers offered us linguists a conciliatory gesture. After being convicted of robbing a hair salon, the criminal mastermind Granny May was sentenced to house arrest.  This house arrest was to be served at the house of one of Granny May’s relatives, but Granny May was not told in advance whose house it was.  The house, which for some reason Granny did not recognize, was her mother’s, and the police were evidently being quite careful not to spoil the big reveal by giving away any details about the relative.  In fact, when they got to the front door of the house, the policewoman accompanying Granny May remarked that “we’re taking you to a relative’s house so they can watch you”. The policewoman was completely aware that Granny May’s mother was the only resident of the house, and that her mother was a woman, but to avoid revealing prematurely whose house they had taken her to, the policewoman chose to use the neuter pronoun they. (Note that, no matter what anyone tells you about he/him/her being gender-neutral, “so he can watch you” would not have worked in this situation.)

Good for WordGirl’s writers. I’m glad to see them taking their case directly to language learners. If the kids agree that singular they is illogical and unacceptable, and stop watching the show, then I suppose the prescriptivists will be proven right. But I’ll bet dollars to donuts (both of which I am quite fond of) that kids will be fine with this eminently useful, historically well-attested, and entirely reasonable construction. Maybe at last we’ll be able to outgrow these stupid grammar myths.

Metapost: Four quick links

I haven’t posted anything in a while because it was the end of the quarter and, even without any classwork to speak of, I had to get a few components of my research together before spring break. And now I’m on break, so I’m having trouble putting together the energy to concoct a proper post. However, there are four other posts that I found semi-recently that I was so very fond of that I had to share them with you all.

The first is Mark Liberman’s Language Log post “Teaching Zombie Rules“, which offers a potential answer to the problem I find myself in quite a lot: how should one deal with grammar rules that aren’t really rules?  Sure, it’s an easy question once you’re a professor or even a grad student.  I use the grammar that I believe to be best justified, and if anyone tells me I’m wrong, I present the facts that back up my usage.  If a pedant insists I’m wrong, it doesn’t matter, because they don’t hold any power over me.  But what if you’re a student preparing for a grammar test that includes zombie rules (the SAT, for instance)?  Even worse, what if you’re a tutor preparing someone else for a grammar test?  How do you teach a rule you know to be wrong?  Liberman’s answer is great, in part because it recasts the problem in terms of audience design.

The second is this year’s Grammar Day post from John at Bradshaw of the Future.  John points out that all these grammar points that we all care so much about are just insignificant pieces of the whole.  The core of English (or any other language’s) grammar is essentially the same across all its users.  A few people saying “between you and I” isn’t going to change the fact that English is an Subject-Verb-Object language or that it has singular and plural morphology, but not dual morphology (as in American Sign Language).  This is why you shouldn’t get up in arms about the horrendous English these kids today speak — virtually everything they say is grammatically correct anyway.  (John has a history of good Grammar Day posts; last year’s was a gem as well.)

The last is a two-pack: Arnold Zwicky’s Grammar Day post from last year on Language Log, and this year’s version on his own blog.  There’re a lot of good points in these posts, but I’m just going to mention the minor one that prescriptivists have this infuriating tendency to constantly couch their opinions in light absurdity so that when someone complains that their beliefs are ill-founded, they can point to the absurd part and saying “Can’t you tell I’m joking?!?!?”  It’s like when you’re talking to someone about their spouse and they growl, “Sometimes I just want to wring his/her neck,” and then after they stare into the middle distance for a second, they sort of chuckle.  Sure, they’re probably chuckling about the absurdity of the statement, but then again, you have to wonder if they were if they were really chuckling at the mental image.  So too with prescriptivists; I think they think they’re joking, but having dealt with them and occasionally incurred their wrath, I’m not so sure they are.

I hope you enjoy those links as much as I did.

The (Burger) King’s English

My roommate, his girlfriend, and I trudged over to the mall food court last night for something resembling a dinner.   Being secret monarchists, they headed to the decadent Burger King, while I, ever-conscious of my health, went over to the Mongolian Grill instead, which might very well be regarded as a healthy alternative if you only disregard the fatty meat I laded my bowl with and the near-gallon of soy sauce and oil it was cooked in.  But this is not a post about the shabby meals we eat; rather it is a post about the shabby English attending our meals.  Had Henry Watson Fowler, author of The King’s English, accompanied us, he would have fallen over when he saw my roommate’s food.  Not merely because Fowler has been dead for the better part of a century (after all, dead people can be made to stand; I’ve watched both Weekends at Bernie’s), but because of the coupon my roommate got with his meal.  I might not have this exactly right, but if memory serves, it read:

(1) “Try one Free New BK Burger Shots, Saturday 3/14 [...]“

That’s pretty awkward, what with the disagreement in number between one and Burger Shots.  I think we all get the idea that supposed to be coming across here: Burger Shots are bonsai burgers, small little mini-burgers that are not sold separately.  So one can’t order a Burger Shot, but rather must order two or six Burger Shots.  The problem is that talking about two Burger Shots is ambiguous.  Do you mean one order of a two-pack of Burger Shots or two separate orders of Burger Shots (i.e., four or twelve burgers)?  This is a common problem that I encounter when ordering at fast food restaurants, especially through the voice destroyers known as drive-thru intercoms.  If the coupon were to offer “two free Burger Shots”, customers might argue that they were led to believe they were getting two orders for free.  Standardly, the way of getting around this problem is to use a grouping term, like “order of” or “X-packs“, where X is some number.  And, in fact, we do see this in an online Burger Shots coupon, which reads:

(2) “Click on the coupon below to receive a free 2-pack BK BURGER SHOTS [...]“

But even here the Burger King’s English is not quite right; the standard usage would be 2-pack of.  No one goes around talking about the six-pack Heinz ketchup they bought to honor the greatest team in professional football.  (I’m not being hyperbolic here; Google did not return a single hit for the phrase “six-pack heinz ketchup”.)  I’ve got to say, these usages strike me as quite odd.  I think almost everyone will agree that both (1) and (2) are obviously ungrammatical.  (2) might just be a typo, where the copywriter thought they’d put in an of, and the error was too small to be noticed.  This typo explanation is especially likely since it’s a web coupon.  It’s hard to see where the writer was going with (1), though, and given that there are two separate weird usages, I’m beginning to wonder if Burger King is consciously trying to re-write the grammar of Burger Shots.

National Grammar Day 2009: Ten Common Grammar Myths, Debunked

And so it has come to be National Grammar Day again, one of those made-up holidays like National Soup Month or World Hello Day. I can’t help but feel cynical about the day, in the same way that Matt Lane at Math Goes Pop! felt cynical about yesterday’s “Square Root Day”. The problem is that Square Root Day doesn’t get anyone excited about real math, but rather about simple arithmetic coincidences. Likewise, to the dismay of us linguists, National Grammar Day will mostly just result in prescriptivist dilettantes coming out in full force, tossing around ignorant grammatical proclamations with gusto, like so many dimes at a dime toss. It’s not going to get anyone excited about psycholinguistics or syntactic theory or any of the really awesome parts of language.

As such, I might as well do what I can with National Grammar Day and debunk a few of the grammar myths you might encounter today. That also gives me an excuse to go through and call up a few interesting posts that I’d forgotten about, both my own and others’. So here are 10 facts about the English language that go against the unjustified beliefs peddled by prescriptivists. I’m putting summaries of the posts here, with links to the original posts so that you can see why the prescriptivists’ claims should be regarded as myths, no matter how loudly they are proclaimed. To prevent misinterpretation, I am not going to state the myths here, only the corresponding truths:

You can use that in relative clauses with people. (Part I, Part II) Whether you’re speaking historically or restricting yourself to present usage, you’re mistaken if you think that is strictly for things. Phrases like the people that I know are actually more common in contemporary English than the people who(m) I know.

10 items or less lines are perfectly fine, grammatically speaking. The idea that less can’t be used with count nouns isn’t well supported; it’s a rule that hasn’t ever been strictly followed, especially for count nouns that can be perceived as masses. Groceries lend themselves to perception as a mass, so it’s no surprise that “10 items or less” is favored now, just as it has been historically. Please stop complaining about this.

Different than is perfectly acceptable. There are three major arguments claiming from is the only preposition that can be used with different. They’re all invalid. Not only that, but historical usage justifies the continued usage of different than.

Alright is all right. Alright is a common, 100-year-old alternate spelling of all right, presumably created on analogy to already and although. I think to many people (including myself), the two spellings have slightly different meanings and could reasonably be considered two separate and equally valid words.

Over can mean “more than”. The idea that over can’t mean “more than” is such rubbish that I wouldn’t have believed anyone believed it, were I not constantly dealing with prescriptivist idiocy. Truth is, over has been used to mean “more than” for 1000 years.

Nauseous can mean “sickened”. nauseous has had two meanings for the past 150 years, both “sickened” and “sickening”. Anyone concerned that having two meanings will lead to terrible confusion are either naive or shedding crocodile tears. If you can’t figure out what “I feel nauseous” is supposed to mean, you’re actively trying to misinterpret it.

From Language Log:

You can end a sentence with a preposition, Dryden be damned! I wrote about this in the context of the question “Where are you at?”, but it’s a more general problem than that, and is one of the best-known grammatical bugaboos. No serious scholar of the English language holds this view.

They can be singular in certain situations. To quote an idol of mine, Geoff Pullum: “Avoid singular they if you want to; nobody is making you use it. But don’t ever think that it is new (it goes back to early English centuries ago), or that it is illogical (there is no logical conflict between being syntactically singular and semantically plural), or that it is ungrammatical (it is used by the finest writers who ever used English, writers who uncontroversially knew what they were doing).”

Often a passive sentence is better than its active counterpart. In my younger years, I was repeatedly admonished for using the passive voice in my writing. The admonishers were mistaken, though. Many famous detractors of the passive voice (the passive is opposed by many) consistently use the passive voice in appropriate circumstances. Don’t be scared away from it. Honestly, it’s very useful.

And one from the Volokh Conspiracy:

Split infinitives when you feel like it. Honestly, if you think that it’s improper to split an infinitive in English, you need help. This has never been a rational or justifiable rule of English, and just looking at competent English writing should be enough to disabuse you of this notion. Split infinitives are commonly quite beautiful, especially when compared to the often-barbarous sound of an unsplit infinitive.

The meaning of “careening”

I think this is a good sentence:

(1) “The right side of the plane was badly burned in a fire after the plane careened through a field [...] like a four-wheeling Jeep.”

To hear a prescriptivist tell it, though, this is an awful sentence, symptomatic of an American carelessness for the meaning of words.  In fact, let’s let a prescriptivist tell it. I quote here from James Cochrane’s vituperative volume Between You and I, page 23:

“Users of this expression may be surprised to discover that the original meaning of to careen is to turn a vessel over on its side [...] What they presumably mean to convey is the idea of something rushing headlong down a street on a dangerously erratic course. [...] In American English, careen is certainly a Lost Cause, since its use in this erroneous sense is recognised in dictionaries, but for British English it may not be too late to rescue it.”

Cochrane is right, though unbearably pretentious, in his claim that the first meaning of careen was to turn a ship onto its side, usually in order to clean off the barnacles and other sea-junk. This sense is attested all the way back to 1600 in the Oxford English Dictionary, and it continues to be used to the present day, albeit sparingly and primarily by seafarers.

But Cochrane stops short of the whole story.  Careen has a second meaning that is just as uncontroversial as its original meaning: to lean, heel over, list, or tilt.  Thus we get the following usages:

(2a) In Worcester a charming reminiscence hangs about the sloping heights of Asnebumskit, whose great hill-sides, which the Senator has bequeathed in trust to his two grandchildren, careen toward the city. [1909]
(2b) The ship staggered, careened, and reeled, as wave after wave came thundering on her. [1863, cited in the OED]

It’s still occasionally used with this meaning today, at least in nautically-themed historical romance novels.  But Cochrane makes no mention of it, and therefore, to use a nautical idiom, he’s selling us a bill of goods.  He’s smugly saying that we are — as he puts it in the Preface to the 2nd Edition of the book — “half-educatedly” using careen, and yet he is only half-educatedly explaining the history of careen.  You can almost see why he’d be irritated by people taking such a huge semantic leap with a word, moving straight from “turning on a side to clean” to “rushing unsteadily”, if that were the case. But it wasn’t. There were two reasonable semantic jumps, first from “turning on one side” to “tilting from side to side” (2b), and only from there to “moving quickly and unsteadily/uncontrolledly”.

But tons of words no longer mean what they once meant. (I wrote a few months ago about the curious history of awful and awesome, for instance.)  So why does careen draw prescriptivists’ ire in a way that most other words whose meanings have changed do not?  The answer is a single word: career.  Prescriptivists are convinced that when we say careen, we really mean career.  After all, the OED tells us that career means “to gallop, run, or move at full speed”.  And that is very close to what we intend with careen.  Very close indeed… and yet, not close enough.

The verb career apparently comes from a Latin root related to racing.  The early uses of the word in the OED are about just this: the careerers are horses hurtling down the track fast as they can.  Now, I am not an equestrian myself, but I generally think of horses as graceful creatures.  For instance, I have watched two consecutive runnings of the Kentucky Derby, and the horses ran beautifully, steadily, and speedily both times.  In neither case would I be willing to say that the horses careened down the track.  On the other hand, I have also had a few opportunities to watch toddlers race.  They most assuredly careen.  They do not career.  Perhaps this is strictly my own usage, but I think of careering as “moving swiftly and effectively”, and careening as “moving fast and uncontrolledly”.  For me, the two have very closely related, but distinct, meanings.  And this is why I continue to use careen.

I feel that this is the appropriate time to point out a line from Between You and I’s Preface, where Cochrane is spelling out the purpose of his book:

“It is not written from any inclination to be purist in the sense of proposing that change is to be resisted at all costs; on the contrary, not only is change inevitable but the constant renewal and enlargement of our wonderful language is generally to be welcomed rather than not.”

You are welcome to draw your own conclusions about whether Cochrane had recently read his book when he wrote that preface.

Summary: Prescriptivists claim it’s wrong to use careening to mean “moving quickly and unsteadily”, because careening actually means “turning a boat on its side” and the intended meaning can be gotten from the obscure verb career.  However, career does not mean the same as careen, and a series of simple semantic extensions can explain why careen has taken on its unsteady-motion meaning.