I hate when someone starts a monologue by needlessly invoking a dictionary definition for some word. Few openings can ruin a graduation speech faster than “Webster’s defines ‘scholarship’ as …”. (Even the Yahoo! Answers community knows this.) For most common words, the dictionary definition is just a simplified, neutered form of the rich definition that native speakers have in their heads. There’s no need to tell me less about a word than I already know.
Unfortunately, I simply can’t come up with another way to start today’s post. I recently ran across this analysis of can’t help but, an idiom that (if you can believe it) the author finds illogical:
“Try to avoid the can’t help but construction. While it has been around for a while, most grammarians agree that it’s not the most logical construction. It’s considered to be a confused mix of the expressions can but and can’t help.”
Before we try to “logically” analyze idioms, let’s reflect for a moment what an idiom is. Here it comes — The Oxford English Dictionary defines an idiom (in its third noun sense) as:
“A form of expression, grammatical construction, phrase, etc., used in a distinctive way in a particular language, dialect, or language variety; spec. a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from the meanings of the individual words.”
I’ve bolded that last bit because that’s the key point: an idiom is an idiom when its meaning is well-known among users of the language but does not come from strict interpretations of the words themselves. If you say someone has idiomatically kicked the bucket, there’s no bucket, there’s no kicking motion, and it actually means they died. Logical analysis of kick the bucket won’t get you anywhere near the actual meaning.
With that in mind, let’s look at can’t help but. Surely, most fluent English speakers — including those who disparage it as “illogical” — know what it means. If that meaning can be deduced from the words and syntax of the construction, then hooray, it’s fine, because it’s grammatical. If that meaning cannot be deduced from the words and syntax of the construction, then hooray, it’s still fine, because it fits exactly the definition of an idiom. It doesn’t matter if the meaning is deducible or “logical”, whatever that means. (For some thoughts on why I put “logical” in quotation marks when talking of grammatical logic, see Emily Morgan’s post on the logic of language.)
You might think that I’ve done some rhetorical sleight-of-hand in the last paragraph by saying that can’t help but either makes sense or is an idiom. What if it isn’t an idiom, but just an illogical corruption of can help but? I’ve got two thoughts on that.
The first is a simple matter of history. The OED records the use of can’t help but starting in 1894, but I’m finding it in Google Books further back than that. Here are examples from 1852 [Uncle Tom's Cabin], 1834, and 1823. Similar investigation antedates can help but around the same time, 1842 and 1834. There’s no clear evidence that one form predates the other, so there’s no evidence that cannot help but is a corruption of the correct form.
The second point is that the supposedly logical alternatives can help but and can’t help make no more sense than cannot help but. I don’t understand the above claim that can’t help but is “not the most logical construction”. Maybe it isn’t; I’ll grant that it’s not as immediately interpretable as “I am walking” or something. But if can’t help but isn’t logical, why are the alternatives can help but and can’t help logical? What meaning is there for help that makes can’t help eating the cake mean “can’t stop myself from eating”? Whatever it is, it’s strictly idiomatic; you couldn’t, for example, write “I am helping eat the cake” with the meaning “I’m stopping myself from eating the cake”. In fact, it means exactly the opposite!*
For confirmation, I checked in the OED, and this meaning occurs only in these idioms. So can help but and can’t help aren’t “logical” either; they’re the result of people applying idiomatic knowledge to the interpretation of the construction. As soon as you expect help to mean something other than its standard aid-related usages, you’re going idiomatic, and logic pretty much goes out the window.
This is a long way of arguing that can help but and can’t help but are both grammatically reasonable. Shouldn’t we decide on one form over the other? Well, no. I know that prescriptivists love doing that, but it’s not the way language really works. The fact of the matter is that both are common, and in the opinion of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, both are standard.
But if that still won’t placate you, if you simply must be told which one is better, the perhaps surprising answer is that it’s the “illogical” can’t help but. The Corpus of Historical American English has 243 examples of can not help but to a mere 6 of can help but, and Google N-grams shows cannot help but dominating since 1840. (And personally, can help but doesn’t exist in my idiolect.) If you want to write the more common form, go with can’t help but. If can help but seems better to you, go with that.
Summary: Can’t help but is a perfectly standard idiom, meaning “can’t stop myself from”. It’s also the more common choice, historically and contemporarily, over can help but, even though both options are grammatical and standard in English. (Can’t help Xing is fine too, of course.)
—
*: Furthermore, doesn’t can’t help Xing have the potential to be even more confusing than can’t help but? If I say “I can’t help putting together your bike today”, am I saying that I can’t do it or I can’t stop myself from doing it?
27 comments
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April 20, 2011 at 2:32 pm
mike
The issue of logic comes up a lot in the discussion of “couldn’t care less/could care less,” as you know. Only the former is logical, but the latter is well attested, hence has to be treated as an idiomatic expression, yes?
April 21, 2011 at 6:03 am
Brian
Compared with a relatively vivid idiom like “kicked the bucket,” the phrase “can’t help but” seems even more difficult to grasp because it’s less metaphorical. It brings to mind “needs must”/”must needs,” which is composed of two perfectly accessible words that have combined to form something inscrutable. When I first came across “needs must” as a teenager, I kept feeling certain that I was on the brink of dissecting it in a way that would make it seem logical. Alas.
April 21, 2011 at 10:43 am
The Ridger
I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard “I can help but do it”. “Can’t help but” is very common.
There are a small number of expressions in English, generally featuring modals but not always, which mean the same thing whether negated or not. They include “could(n’t) care less, teach you (not) to, (don’t) know jack about, could(n’t) give a damn”. As often seems to be the case (c.f. “hopefully”), one example has been singled out for opprobrium while the others are left alone…
April 21, 2011 at 10:45 am
Emily Michelle
It’s never in my life occurred to me that this phrase might be considered ungrammatical. The things you learn on the Internet, I tell you.
The first part of the post entertained me because I have definitely been guilty of starting speeches with a definition, though I try to avoid it these days. I’ve found it to be especially prevalent at my church, which says a lot about the general public’s faith in the dictionary. “I’d like to refer to our two greatest sources of truth: scripture and Webster.”
April 21, 2011 at 11:29 am
Gabe
mike: Yes, and I’m glad that you connected these idioms. I’ve felt for some time now that the “could care less” debate was useless hoopla, but hadn’t really put my finger on why until now. It’s an idiom, it’s in widespread use, and thus it doesn’t need to be interpretable.
Brian: I’m not familiar with “needs must”! Where’s it from and what’s it mean?
The Ridger: Nice examples, and a great tie-in to “hopefully”! I also had never heard “can help but”, but apparently it’s somewhat common. Any readers use it?
Emily Michelle: That’s how I felt when I saw someone object to “aren’t I” for the first time.
April 21, 2011 at 12:36 pm
The Ridger
“Needs must” can be expanded to “needs must when the devil drives” – I’ve sometimes heard it as “need must”. It means “when you gotta, you gotta” or “if there is need then a way must be found”.
April 21, 2011 at 12:41 pm
Warsaw Will
Like the Ridger I’d never heard of ‘can help but’, so I’ve just ngrammed it together with ‘can’t help but’, and the former doesn’t even get off the bottom line. The story is the same for both AmE and BrE, with a whopping sixfold rise in in its usage since the 1960s.
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=can+%27+t+help+but%2Ccan+help+but&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
April 21, 2011 at 12:43 pm
Warsaw Will
Sorry, the ‘whopping rise’ is of course for ‘can’t help but’.
April 21, 2011 at 4:09 pm
Gabe
The Ridger: Well, I’ve learned something today. I don’t think I’d ever heard it before, but now I’m going to keep an ear out for it.
Warsaw Will: There was a typo in your link, and it looked at the frequency of “can help nbut” instead. (I fixed it, hope you don’t mind.) “Can help but” doesn’t get much off the zero line either, although it does stay in competition with “can’t help but” until around 1900.
April 21, 2011 at 8:25 pm
Dan M.
I’m another speaker who does not have “can help but” in my ideolect, and It flummoxes me to learn of it, because “cannot help but” seems to be non-idiomatic in that its meaning seems obviously compositional from its parts, taking those parts in a particular way.
If you take “help” to mean “take action to produce a result” and “but” to mean “anything except for this one thing”, then “cannot help but X” composes to “it is not possible to take action to produce any result, except if that result is X”.
Obviously, “can help but X” must mean the opposite in some way, but that seems to fit poorly for the not-really-the-case connotation of “but” and the trying-but-maybe-not-succeeding connotation of “help”. Moreover, the first example that MWDEU’s first example for this version is
Even in this case, there is a negation going in, bringing back the same interpretation of “but X”.
April 21, 2011 at 8:31 pm
Dan M.
Arg! Sorry to conflate things, but the example I just sited lacks the word “help” and so doesn’t directly address however one should use “can help but”.
On the other hand, the two examples Gabe directly cites for that both begin with “Who can help but X?”. Again, there is a form of negation insofar as “who” here semantically is taken to denote no one at all.
April 21, 2011 at 8:54 pm
Dan M.
Actually, reading those six instances of “can help but” in COHA all have either explicit negation or question words that are implied to apply to no one.
Can anyone cite even one actual use of “can help but”?
April 23, 2011 at 2:01 pm
Rilian
I’m not sure what “can but” means. Is it “can do nothing but”?
April 26, 2011 at 9:43 am
ambermartingale
Interesting post, as always!
April 26, 2011 at 10:32 pm
Tom S. Fox
Gabe, what ever happened to your s-series?
April 29, 2011 at 3:35 am
Stan
I don’t hear “needs must” very often, but I see it quite regularly in print, usually in books that are at least a few decades old. There’s also the inverted form “must needs”, which is explained here — needs acts as an adverb.
April 29, 2011 at 3:37 am
Stan
Sorry. Coding fail. Here’s the link.
May 4, 2011 at 12:14 pm
ambermartingale
@Stan: Sometimes things fail.
May 5, 2011 at 10:39 am
Gabe
Dan M.: You wrote that “Obviously, ‘can help but X’ must mean the opposite [of can't help but] in some way”, and it sure does seem obvious, right? But that’s putting a little bit too much faith in the logic of idioms. Just yesterday I ended up at an old Language Log post looking at constructions that mean the same thing whether or not they’re negated — for instance, like “I (don’t) know squat about history”. As for a good purely non-negative or questioning example of “can help but”, I’m at a loss.
Tom S. Fox: I put it on the back-burner (or back-burnered it, as LL has seen it used) because I wrote a couple of entries in it that all blurred together into one and I was getting frustrated trying to untangle them. I ought to have the next one out soon, for some inspecific sense of “soon”. :)
Stan: Wow, thanks! That’s a very nice explanation of it.
May 5, 2011 at 10:45 am
The Ridger
Actually, the Loggers were looking at, not “backburned it” (which is, I think, common and unremarkable) but “let it backburner” (which is neither).
May 5, 2011 at 10:49 am
Gabe
You’re right; I misremembered the post topic because “back-burner” was a new verb to me.
May 5, 2011 at 10:00 pm
Dan M.
Thanks for the reply, Gabe.
I’m afraid my meaning of “obvious” didn’t survive becoming text rather than speech. I only meant that if one expression can be analyzed non-idiomatically, then adding a “not” but invert some element in the analysis. That fact has no bearing on an expression that isn’t analyzed. I meant to indicate that my analysis was obviously uninformative in the latter case.
While there’s certainly necessary for some expressions to be considered an uninterpretable literally (such as “could care less” meaning unable to care less), that seems like giving up too easily for some expressions whose meanings are maintained under negation. For instance, “X knows squat” and “X doesn’t know squat” can be nearly identical in meaning because “X knows (in total) squat [very little]” is very little different from “X doesn’t know (even) squat [very little]“.
I was wondering if there was some analysis of “can help but X” where the scope of the “but” differs such that the overall meaning is retained, as with “squat”. But that goal is obviated unless there are some actual constructions that use a positive “can help but”.
May 13, 2011 at 4:32 pm
emily
so just because that mean girl from the last post made a big deal on her blog about how you don’t respond to your commentators doesn’t mean you have to comment more often…just sayin’
btw, i kinda feel like making a voodoo doll of her complete with running shoes and beer in hand. then when her shoes laces become mysteriously tied together while she’s drunk off her ass and she trips and breaks her nose, it will be just as good as if i did it myself.
yeah, i’m not as mature as you.
well done as always gabe :)
ps how’s your dissertation coming along?
March 22, 2012 at 7:20 am
jon
it is not an idiom it is just an idiotic way of saying i cant help thinking you all are just dumb…
August 18, 2012 at 4:02 pm
fractalmania
I have spent the last week scratching out the “help” in all the “can’t help buts” in novels and stories I am reading by one author. That phrase, and its cousin, “couldn’t help but,” drive me nuts. Not logical and not needed. Instead of “I couldn’t help noticing” or any of its variants, why not simply “I noticed” (or if some kind of urgency need be indicated, “I noticed immediately”?). This author frequently says “I couldn’t help but think” and he doesn’t need that, or “couldn’t but” or “couldn’t help thinking…” when what he really means is “It was hard not to think about … ” or “I found myself thinking about …” or simply “I thought”! Jeez. His addictive wording is furniture cluttering the reader’s path to the gist. I have been an editor since Moby Dick was a guppy, and I wouldn’t let these repetitions go by; yet this author has National Book Award nominations and is on “best of lists” right and left. His compulsive use of that so-called idiom is glaring.
September 15, 2012 at 11:41 am
albert rugoso
I don’t have any comment but I’d wanna know if can’t help is not used itself without but,am trying to learn english grammar .thanks and hope u’ll really help me by giving the deference between can’t help less but and can’t help plus but.
September 18, 2012 at 5:24 pm
The Ridger
Albert, “I can’t help doing that” is used very often, much more so than “I can’t help but do that”. The syntax is slightly different (doing vs do) but otherwise the meaning is probably exactly the same. You could probably find people who think there is some slight difference, since there are two forms, but I don’t think there really is.