A while ago, I was scanning through recent entries on a stolidly prescriptivist grammar blog. It’s a blog that I occasionally mine for grammar myths to debunk, and while there I noticed that they had switched off comments on all the posts.
If I may get on a soap-box for a paragraph, I can’t stand when an ostensibly informative blog doesn’t have comments. There’s no reason to think that a given blogger knows anything about the subject they’ve chosen to blog about. Leaving on comments is a sort of check-and-balance system, where readers can point out flaws in an argument, introduce new information, and debate controversial points. Sure, commenters at large blogs and news sites are often rambling imbeciles promoting porn sites or superficial political philosophies (see, among others, CNN’s commenters), but at small blogs — exactly where you need something to prove that the blogger knows what they’re talking about — commenters are usually informative, helpful, and insightful members of a small community (see, among others, this blog’s commenters). I just don’t trust bloggers who close comments, because they aren’t interested in learning the facts. They want you to hear what they have to say and accept it unquestioningly. That’s just not the way I think blogs should work, so I get a little cheesed when people turn off comments.
Anyway, back to that blog. It kept on parroting obvious prescriptivist canards that I couldn’t correct because I couldn’t comment. I’m an academic, so someone being wrong about something I know about really sticks in my craw. Luckily, there was one post — the “pet peeves” post — that still allowed comments, where I hoped I could explain the error of their prescriptivist ways. However, the comments for that post were moderated to exclude comments that, among other things, contain “overly negative language, or are not directly related to a pet peeve.” Drat!
I needed a back door, and conveniently someone had left a comment complaining about sentence-modifying hopefully:
“Hopefully… It is an adverb, not a verb. It is not a substitute for ‘I hope’. It means ‘in a hopeful manner’ or ‘full of hope’.”
Exactly the sort of prescriptivism I’d like to correct. Hopefully doesn’t get used as a verb. No one thinks it does, except for the author of this awful post, who made the absurd claim that hopefully is “most commonly used” as a verb. Figuring that the commenter was just repeating the complaint from that post, I set the plan in motion by replying innocently:
“Who thinks ‘hopefully’ is a verb? I have never seen anyone use it as such.”
And the original commenter justified the claim with a reference to that post, just as I’d hoped.
I replied again, pointing out that the referenced post was nonsensical and linking to the post here explaining why there is nothing wrong with the sentential usage of hopefully. Sadly, the comment never got through! But in getting it rejected, I got the best thing I could have hoped for, the whole reason I was trolling in the first place. Check out this comment from the owner of the blog:
“The pet peeves page is intended to be a list of pet peeves–a list of things that annoy people–not a discussion about whether we agree, disagree, whether they’re valid, not valid, etc.”
What a marvelous statement of the prescriptivist position, right? It doesn’t matter if your gripe’s valid or if it makes any sense; what matters is that you’ve decided to be annoyed by something, and you want other people to change because of it. This is insane. It’s so insane, in fact, that I can’t even think of an analogy for it. But that’s the way prescriptivism works: you choose what’s going to make you angry, and everyone else is expected to play along.
I posted one last comment, which I am certain adhered to the restrictions. It didn’t get through the moderation, so let me go ahead and say it here: The thing that annoys me is when someone hangs on to an obviously incorrect and easily disproven belief about language, and forces it upon others. You could call it my pet peeve.
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June 24, 2010 at 3:05 am
Stan
How little faith they must have in their ideas. I don’t know if I’d have the stomach to linger in such an echo chamber of ill-informed peeving.
June 24, 2010 at 1:29 pm
Faldone
Could you respond that your pet peeve is people making obviously false statements about what is and what isn’t proper English grammar?
June 24, 2010 at 4:26 pm
Ray Girvan
Tw*ts. But choking off open discussion/critique is a common practice of any number of authoritarian soapboxes on the Web. However, it’s particularly closed-minded to do it in a field like language, where discussion citing references is classically how discourse procedes. Can you imagine Fowler refusing to discuss his views on usage? Even the famously prescriptive William Safire, as mentioned in the brief Language Log death notice (here) was open to discussion, and amiably so, with descriptivists.
June 25, 2010 at 7:27 am
KellyK
To throw in an opposing viewpoint (because you seem to be in favor of that), defending your views over and over can get awfully tiresome, especially to people who have already made up their minds, and dealing with people who show up just to stir things up (the definition of trolling) can ruin discussion.
Most blogs I’ve seen with interesting and productive discussion in the comments have moderators keeping things on topic and chucking comments or closing threads where people are rude or veer way off-topic. They also have pretty strict comments policies delineating what is and is not appropriate. (Although CNN and the like are comment cesspools, the same kind of thing goes on at smaller blogs as well.)
A lot of people view their blogs as their virtual living room, and yes, if someone sits on my couch telling me that my political views are stupid, I’m not entitled to my pet peeves, and oh by the way, the shirt I’m wearing looks awful, I’m going to show them the door, without being real concerned about whether it hits them on their way out.
Posting something controversial and then turning off comments, sure, it may be close-minded. But I don’t think it’s reasonable to complain about comment-less blogs as though you have an inherent right to go into their space and argue with them. If you have the deep, driving need to prove someone wrong, you have your own blog for that, and the trackbacks will show them that their ideas are being discussed other places.
Sure, critique can be good, and discussion can be healthy. But no one is obligated to defend their point of view every time someone else demands it, or to have whatever comments someone else wants appear on their blog, even if they’re rude or derailing.
June 25, 2010 at 7:34 am
KellyK
Now that I’ve disagreed with you all over the place, I should also point out that I think “hopefully” is perfectly valid as a sentence modifier, that anyone who thinks it’s misused as a verb seems to have a fuzzy definition of what a “verb” is, and that I totally sympathize with your irritation there. Hopefully, there are no hard feelings. :)
June 26, 2010 at 8:19 am
Ray Girvan
KellyK: it’s not about any inherent right to public dispute; it’s that they chose to use a weblog format, where there’s an established custom of public interaction, and then bottled out of that interaction to avoid engaging with rational criticism.
June 26, 2010 at 10:45 am
Tom S. Fox
They also claim that ”the reason why“ is redundant. I once wrote a comment saying that if ”the reason why“ is redundant, then so are ”the place where“ and ”the time when,“ but it never got through.
June 30, 2010 at 3:06 pm
Joseph Pendleton
I’ll try to defend the indefensible. The prescriptivist folks are wrong about the nature of language, but they do a pretty good job of getting people to pay attention to the clarity of their writing. I do not agree with the idea of nit-picking people’s words, but a little elitism does little harm if it is kept in perspective.
August 19, 2010 at 12:37 am
Tom S. Fox
I just noticed that somebody called Matt Worsham added a post:
[quote]I read the article and ‘hopefully’ someone will kindly remind the author that she’s confused about the difference between a verb and an adjective. NOBODY uses hopefully as a verb…it’s impossible! I can’t ‘hopefully’ anybody nor can anyone ‘hopefully’ ME, or at least it’s to be hoped!
I think forgetting the exact names and functions of the ‘parts of speech’ when writing about a contentious language issue is a far greater faux pas than misusing the word hopefully![/quote]
August 28, 2010 at 10:29 am
Tom S. Fox
Okay, this is hilarious. As a joke, I wrote in:
My pet peeve is when people say, “I worked hard.” “Hard” is an adjective and cannot modify a verb! The correct way to say it is: “I hardly worked.”
Somebody correctly pointed out that “hard” can be an adverb and that there is a difference in meaning between “I hardly worked” and “I worked hard.” I wrote back:
Impossible! What are you going to tell me next? That “drive slow” is also correct?
My question remained unanswered and unpublished (they moderate comments) for a few days until it was finally deleted along with the post telling me that I was wrong. Seems like I convinced them that saying “I worked hard” actually is wrong.