(1) Now that they’ve graduated high school they can set their goals on college.

Those of an older bent will be more familiar with an intransitive usage where the graduated institution appears in an ablative* prepositional phrase:

(2) Yesterday the heir to the Notorious B.I.G. throne, young Tyanna graduated from high school at an undisclosed location.

And, you may be thinking, darn right! It’s graduated from, and it’s always been, and the kids are screwing up the language again. And it’s true that the transitive form in (1) is newer and seems to be gaining in popularity.** But it turns out that graduate from isn’t the original form, either. It used to be graduated at, as in this 1871 example:

(3) He graduated at Williams College in 1810, and studied theology with the Rev. Samuel Austin, DD, of Worcester, Mass.

So already, just going back 140 years, we’ve seen transitions from graduated at to graduated from to the plain graduated. But there’s an even more substantial change in the history of graduate. Graduating used to be something a school did to its students, not something the students did to the school. One was graduated at some school — witness this 1827 list of folks that Harvard graduated, such as:

(4) Jabez Chickering, Esq., son of Rev. Jabez Chickering, was graduated at Harvard University, in 1804; and settled in the profession of law in this town.

I’ve put together a Google Books N-grams graph illustrating the changes over time:

Interestingly, it looks like the forms in (3) and (4) were both in use throughout 19th century American English. That’s a bit surprising because the two forms assign different roles to their subjects, but it just goes to show that grammatical ambiguity is tolerable when there’s no chance of confusing the roles. (It’s always clear that the person is getting the degree, and the university issuing it.) We see was graduated at start dropping off in the second half of the 19th century, graduated at remaining strong until the early 20th century, and graduated from taking off from there.

So while I graduated high school may not yet be standard, it will be, and there’s nothing wrong with it. It just isn’t what people used to say. For whatever reason, the younger generation likes to change how graduation works. There’s no reason to fret over it; it’ll change, and life will go on, and our kids will be just as grumpy as us when their kids re-reinvent the word’s usage.

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*: Ablative is one of a set of words describing the cases that can be marked in a language. Ablative in particular indicates motion away from something; Wikipedia has a list of these, including such fun ones as illative and inessive. (Valid only for certain definitions of “fun”.)

**: I’m a little surprised, but I don’t see any clear evidence in Google Books N-grams or the Corpus of Historical English of the transitive usage growing faster than the ablative intransitive. I suspect this is due to a strong avoidance of the transitive usage in writing, which both of these corpora are based on.

I’ve always felt sort of uncomfortable with the Plain English Campaign and other related groups that push for more straightforward writing. These groups, if you’re not familiar with them, look over various writing and call people out for unclear language, excessive wordiness, muddled explanations, and biased euphemisms. All in all, a good thing for someone to do, right? I’ve always felt like it was, especially on legal forms and important things like that. Yet at the same time, I’ve always felt a twinge of discomfort with it, and I never quite figured out why. I finally decided that it must be because of the latent prescriptivism in it, and the fact that I sometimes disagreed with the changes that the groups wanted to make.

But that’s an irrational stand. Surely, I’m not against prescriptions when they are focused and clearly improve the comprehensibility of writing, right? That would be insane. So, I had to wonder, what’s eating me about it?

Judging from his post, Stan has similar misgivings about Plain English, but he’s figured his out a bit better. Pointing out overnight tonight and temperatures really struggling as two examples the PEC has flagged as “weatherese”, Stan calls them inoffensive. Stan grants that overnight tonight is redundant, but that redundancy is mild and potentially useful.* I agree; mild redundancy is something that I believe is useful rather than harmful, as an error-correcting code in language.

But it’s temperatures really struggling that gets to the heart of my misgivings. Stan allows that this is “a bit vague and anthropomorphic”, and it is. It’s confusing if you have no other context, and you need to know this bit of our collective unconscious in which we think of the weather as trying to get warm rather than trying to get cold. (I imagine this directionality is not universal, but variable from culture to culture.**) As a result, if there is no other context, or you’re talking to someone who doesn’t share the same cultural knowledge, you probably should avoid temperatures really struggling.

But avoiding such usages has its own downsides. Language is interesting because it is both a tool and an art. Yes, we could use always just say things the same way every time we talk, in whatever way is the most straightforward and least ambiguous. Or we could be a little laxer and permit variation, but ban metaphorical language, and it would probably be easier to get what people are saying. We could disavow sarcasm, because that’s hard to catch, particularly around people you don’t already know, or people like me who fail to have sufficient differentiation between their regular and sarcastic voices.

But we don’t want to, and I don’t think we should. Language is a fun thing, a way to make art every day, every minute. We read fiction because it’s not the newspaper. We have such a fetish for artistry in language that we store quotations, making whole books of words that someone else put together in the right way. Sometimes these quotations are stored because they’re so clear, but more often it’s because they’re not so clear. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be: For loan oft loses both itself and friend,” from Hamlet, is a great line, one that has become an idiom as a result. But it could have been said much more clearly as “Do not make a loan or take a loan, because loans ruin friendships.”

A reasonable contrarian may be saying something like, “Well, that’s Shakespeare, not the weather report,” and I don’t disagree. But these aren’t categorical differences; we don’t want to say that artistry is limited to plays and creative writing and whatnot. All writing is creative. The question is the balance between artistry and clarity.

I’m realizing this right now because I am occasionally babysitting my two-year-old nephew (actually first cousin once removed, but never mind). That means that I have to re-phrase things a lot, because I do tend to speak like I write, which to be charitable to myself, I’ll call flowery. When I say something with a lot of rare or long words, he just sort of stares at me, and I have to rephrase them in words that a two-year-old might know. But when I’m back to talking to other adults, that sort of obsessive clarity isn’t necessary, and would make me unpleasant to talk to.

Clarity, contrary to what many writing guides say, is not paramount. One should be as clear as necessary, but not always more. If a bit of anthropomorphism makes the writing more interesting and engaging, it may be worth the potential loss of clarity. The same if a spot of ambiguity enlivens the sentence, or a slight omission makes it flow better. The key is to know how clear your audience needs you to be. If they’re non-native speakers or still in diapers, clarity is king. If they’re academics, heave clarity overboard.***

So in the end, perhaps the source of my discomfort with the Plain English idea is nothing more than being wary of making clarity the major consideration instead of a major consideration. Clarity has its place, but there are other factors, and those may be more important depending on the purpose of your writing.

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*: In my idiolect, it’s not redundant at all, because tonight can refer to any block of time between the next sunset and sunrise (most importantly, either to the time before or after I go to bed or both) and overnight could refer to any late night, not necessarily the next one.

**: One example of this sort of expectedly non-universal directionality is time. In most every culture, the past is thought of as being behind you, and the future in front of you. However, for the Aymara, the past is in front of someone and the future behind them.

***: This is not entirely facetious. I once wrote a paper that my co-author worried was too clear; because it was easy to understand the algorithm we were presenting, it didn’t feel like it was a deep insight.

(1a) The written warning is primarily the verbal warning put in writing [...]
(1b) [...] general verbal skills, such as verbal fluency, ability to understand and use verbal reasoning, and verbal knowledge.

Some people insist that verbal can’t be used as in (1a). Verbal is derived from the Latin verbum, meaning “word”, and that means that it only distinguishes things involving words from things not involving words. This is the usage in (1b), where verbal reasoning is implicitly differentiated from mathematical reasoning, or spatial reasoning, or any other form of reasoning that is not based in words. Clearly this is a valid usage of verbal.

And, while we’re at it, we can quickly agree that oral would be inappropriate for the usage in (1b). “Oral knowledge”, for instance, is specifically knowledge that is spoken aloud, and I really can’t see that being the intended meaning. I think we can also all agree that oral is definitely appropriate for the usage in (1a). So what we have a is 2×2 chart, with three of the values filled in:

The only remaining question is whether verbal is allowable in that last cell, with the meaning “spoken”. And the answer is yes, and it has been almost since verbal‘s first appearance in English. The Oxford English Dictionary first attests verbal in 1483, but at that point it modifies people. William Caxton writes:

“We be verbal, or ful of wordes, and desyre more the wordes than the thynges.”

The first attestation of verbal meaning “composed of words” comes between 50 and 100 years later, in either 1530 or 1589.* And the first attestation of verbal meaning “conveyed by speech” comes in 1617:

“The Chamber of the Pallace where verball appeales are decided [...]“

This meaning has persisted. I looked at the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) for the most common nouns to follow verbal over the past 200 years. The two most common collocates were communication and expression, each with 43 hits. Unfortunately, looking at the contexts in which these were used, it’s hard for me to tell which meaning was intended. But the third most common collocate, message, appears 40 times, spread out over the past two centuries. And these are pretty unambiguously examples of the “spoken” meaning, because it’s rare that you’d need to distinguish message delivered in words from those that aren’t. For instance:

“His reply was this verbal message: ‘Wait — and trust in God!’” [1875]
“The verbal message is the key to the written one.” [1909]

I don’t have numbers on the relative usage of the two meanings of verbal, so I’m not going to try to say that one is more common than the other. But it is pretty clear that the “conveyed by speech” meaning is valid.

Does this acceptability mean that you should unquestioningly use it in this way? Not necessarily; there is a potentially significant ambiguity here, so it’s not the best choice in all situations. On occasion, it will matter whether verbal means “conveyed by speech” or “involving words”. If I write to a tutor and ask them to improve my verbal skills, it may be ambiguous as to whether I’m looking for instruction in public speaking or vocabulary building. That’s a trivial example, but in legal contexts, it’s probably better to refer to oral contracts, warnings, etc. than verbal ones, just to avoid the ambiguity.

In most cases, where this ambiguity is small or unimportant, you can and should use whichever feels better to you. You can freely swap between the two meanings in different contexts, as I do. A lot of the time, the context (especially what noun verbal is modifying) will clarify things. So in the end, our chart becomes:

Summary: Verbal can refer either to anything delivered in words or something that is specifically spoken. This latter usage is sometimes condemned as modern sloppiness, but it’s been persistently attested for 400 years. The ambiguity is generally not sufficient to be problematic, so it’s only in cases where precision is paramount that the latter usage should be avoided.

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*: The 1530 attestation is listed under this definition, but its usage seems to me identical to Caxton’s usage, modifying people. The 1589 attestation is unambiguously referring to language, referring to “verbale sermons”.

So what’s wrong with hashtagging? It’s not that Biddle’s against categorizing tweets; he’s against a recent semantic expansion of hashtagging. Many people have taken to what I’m going to refer to as meta-hashtagging, where hashes are used not as category labels but rather as paralinguistic markers. Biddle doesn’t care for it, largely because he thinks that “the hashtag is conceptually out of bounds, being used by computer conformists without rules, sense, or intelligence”.

But is that the case? The use of the meta-hashtag is certainly noisy; some people use it incompetently, and others idiosyncratically. But if we look at the general usage patterns, I think there’s actually substantial structure to it. The primary usage of the meta-hashtag is to make meta-commentary — that is, commentary on what you’re saying, often from a slightly different point of view. This is not something new; Susan Orlean discussed it on the New Yorker‘s site in June 2010.

For instance, @ourboldhero is the guy that I really learned the meta-hashtag from, when he posted things like:

Scare quotes on Wikipedia may be my new favorite thing: Smelting involves more than just “melting the metal out of its ore” #ohwikipedia

Morning Dan knew that if he threw out the last of the toothpaste I’d have to go shopping at some point tonight, and buy him milk #wellplayed

In both of these cases, if I were reading them aloud, I’d say the hashtagged material in a different voice from the rest of it, complete with hand gestures and overwrought facial expressions. These hashtagged phrases can function like a narrator or, as @EllieTr neatly put it, a chorus in a Greek play. They can offer the author’s opinion on someone else’s writing, as in the first tweet, or a just change the point-of-view from the tweeter to a more neutral, narrator-like view, as in the second. (Also, note that these hashtags double as reasonable category labels.)

There are many different applications of the meta-hashtag. I can’t put together an entire ontology of meta-hashtagging, but let me talk about two additional prominent uses that show there is more going on than just a confederacy of dunces misusing the pound sign because they think it makes them cool. (This is going to overlap a bit with Language Log’s post on hashtags.)

One use is to indicate a general sense of the preceding material. Biddle does this in his opening paragraph: “Unfortunately, the hashtag is ruining talking. #NotGonnaLie”. This type of usage was probably the spawn of the meta-hashtag — it’s category-like in that it classifies the tweet, but it’s also adding information about the tweet itself.

Another common use I’ve seen is to indicate irony, as discussed at some length by Ben Zimmer. Biddle’s article targets #winning, the meme that took off as everyone chuckled as Charlie Sheen’s mental health flew apart in front of our eyes. Biddle objects:

“#Winning. It took off as the lowbrow badge of choice across Twitterdom, signifying success without showing it. You could say the saddest heap of shit, add #winning, and that seven letter thumbs up would make it OK.”

But the truth is that it isn’t serious. #Winning has never been the same as winning. No one thought Charlie Sheen was really winning when he said he was; he was falling apart. When people tweet that they’re #winning, it generally doesn’t seem to be for something honestly great. It’s used ironically, for something falling somewhere on the spectrum between mildly good and actually embarrassing:

Just bought 75 glow sticks for $5 #winning. New Years is gonna be awesome. It’s the #simple things in life that make me happy.
my dad is cooking ribs tonight!! #winning.
My longest trip for the past week has been from my bed to my couch #winning

There are a variety of other uses I’ve seen, from adding emphasis to suggesting a pause between sentences. As a result, I disagree with Biddle’s classification of the meta-hashtag as “without rules, sense, or intelligence”. There is a pattern to it, and one that is, I suspect, increasing its clarity rather than decreasing it.

Biddle is right that meta-hashtagging is often used incompetently — but the same could be said of humor, of rhetorical devices, of all of language. Do we ban analogies because many writers offer bad ones? No, we grit through the bad and wait for the good.

Meta-hashtagging has been and will continue to be used infelicitously. No question there. But it’s also used cleverly, and I find that the good uses outweigh the bad. Even if you don’t share my opinion that the meta-hashtag is an interesting addition to language, surely you can agree that it’s a serious underestimation of the strength of language to suppose it could be ruined by something so insignificant as the pound sign.

And on that point, I have to ask why Biddle thinks that the meta-hashtag is going ruin English. Here are the five reasons I found in his article:

1. It’s used without an obvious pattern
2. People could just use regular words
3. It’s an inside joke amongst Twitter users
4. It’s a “lazy reach for substance”
5. Noam Chomsky doesn’t use it

I don’t agree with these points, especially the first. But suppose we take them at face value. How do these five points lead to the conclusion that meta-hashtagging is ruining English? They’re limited little things that can’t do anything to the rest of the language. In fact, I suspect that Biddle knows this and that he’s just going in for a bit of cheap hyperbole — the exact same sort of cheap hyperbole that he’s accusing the users of #winning of doing. As Biddle himself might have said,

“You could complain about the tiniest bit of English, add ‘it’s ruining the English language’, and that five word thumbs down would make it unacceptable.”

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*: For readers who aren’t familiar with hashtagging, it’s when someone writes a word prefaced by a pound sign (e.g., #eating). Hashtags arose on Twitter as a way of classifying tweets. Suppose you want to see what everyone’s saying about something really cool, like, let’s say, grammar. If you just search for “grammar”, you’ll get false positives from “grammar school” and junk like that. But if someone put #grammar in the tweet, they’re saying “this tweet is about grammar”, so searching for #grammar drops the false positives substantially. Hashtags function as categories within Twitter, but it’s a very ephemeral category structure, since the tags are generated by users. If you haven’t before, try searching for something in its hashtagged and nonhashtagged forms before continuing.

Yes, Virginia, there is no Newt (on the ballot)‎

Apologies, Mr. McIntyre.  I couldn’t agree with you more. This headline is terrible.

And yet, like the movies on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, there’s a certain beauty in it.  Whereas most Yes Virginias spawn from a lack of creativity, in this one the writer was instead too creative. Not many could have managed to make such an abomination, such a square-peg-round-hole sort of a sentence; this takes a real sense of purpose, a desire to keep going when all those around you say it can’t be done. This is the headline of a man on a mission, someone who said “Virginia and Christmas, there’s a joke in there” and wouldn’t give up without finding one.

It is, in some ways a minor work of art.  The whiplash-inducing swap from positive to negative polarity is redolent of the 1922 song Yes! We Have No Bananas. The parenthetical phrase at the end suggests that the allusion so obscures what the article is talking about that the true topic must be specifically pointed out to the reader. Add it all up, and I’ve got my choice for the worst “Yes, Virginia” headline of 2011.

By comparison to the winner, the honorable mentions may seem like the “Yes, Virginia” headlines of “Yes, Virginia” headlines: insipid little sentences borne from eh-good-enough thinking.  But I think there are some gems in there, especially as the connections to the original newspaper column and jolly fat man stretch toward the breaking point.

The at-least-it’s-a-person continuations:

• Yes, Virginia, there is a Tim Tebow
• Yes, Virginia, there is a Garry Marshall‎
• Mitt was Right! or, Yes, Virginia, There is Corporate Personhood

The at-least-it’s-Christmas continuations:

• Yes, Virginia, there is a Christ in Christmas‎
• Yes, Virginia, there is a Rancho Hallmark store
• Yes, Virginia, There Is a Pooping Log, and Other World Christmas Traditions

And then the wheels fall off:

• Yes, Virginia, There Is Pepper Spray
• Yes, Virginia, there is a Science of Generosity Award
• Yes, Virginia, There Is An Indemnity Clause‎
• Yes, Virginia, there is a moustache-shaped baking mold
• Yes, Virginia, there really is a squirrel season
• Yes, Virginia, there is a Democrat-media complex
• Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as great 3D!
• Yes, Virginia, there is ‘climate change’ the earth is cooling off!
• Yes, Virginia, There Is a Redneck World Magazine‎
• Yes, Virginia, there is renewable energy in Israel

Found a worse one? Add it in the comments! Merry Happy, all!

One of these is “Me and Mia” by Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, and every time I listen to it, I’m struck by the way Leo pronounces the word forgotten in the line “call your friends ’cause we’ve forgotten / what it’s like to eat what’s rotten”. Here’s the album version of the line [at the 0:42 & 1:30 marks]

I love the way he says it, like he’s swallowing the end of the word and just barely spitting back out. And he seems to be fairly consistent in how he pronounces forgotten in this song: here’s a live version with the same pronunciation (around the 1:25 mark). Since I’ve found it such a striking pronunciation and since I’m a linguist, I figured that I could figure out what makes it distinctive.

Let’s start off by talking about the canonical American English pronunciation of forgotten, which is probably going to be something like [fɚgɑtən]. If you, like me, aren’t at home with the International Phonetic Alphabet, the basic gist is as follows. The first syllable is an f sound followed by an er sound (ɚ). That weird symbol is a rhotic schwa; the er sound is not actually two distinct sounds, but rather a single vowel whose third formant is lowered, which we perceive as a combination of a vowel and an r. This syllable doesn’t really impact the end of the word, so let’s move on.

The second syllable sets up Leo’s distinctive pronunciation of the third. The two phonemes in this syllable, [g] and [ɑ], are both located in the back of one’s mouth. For [g], you push the back of your tongue up against your soft palate, back behind your teeth. Then, to make [ɑ], you pretty much push your tongue as far down and back in your mouth as you do for any English sound. If you try overexaggeratedly saying “got”, you’ll hopefully feel what I’m talking about here. If you don’t, just trust me that your tongue is further back in your mouth than normal as you finish up this syllable.

If it helps, here's a vowel chart for California English. The vowels' positions are loosely correlated with the where your tongue in your mouth. The left is the front of your mouth, the top the roof of your mouth. Notice ɑ is in the bottom right.

And now the third syllable. Let’s start with the canonical form of it, [tən]. After jamming your tongue way back in your mouth last syllable, now you push your tongue up against the back of your teeth to make a [t], relax it a bit to make a lax vowel of some sort (possibly a schwa, but this will vary), and then push your tongue up against your teeth again to make an [n]. Or, at least, that’s what you would do if you were overenunciating.

In real-life American English, you’re going to replace that [t] with what phoneticians call a “flap” (ɾ), a quick tap of your tongue against your gumline that’s sort of a midpoint between t, d, and r.* In addition, you might not make a separate vowel+n pair, but instead, you’ll do a syllabic n, taking advantage of the ability to sustain a nasal stop like n. And that gets you what I’m going to call the “relaxed” pronunciation of forgotten.

With that as a base form, what’s Leo doing? Well, at the end of the second syllable, his tongue is way in the back of his mouth. Instead of moving his tongue all the way forward to make the t or flap sound, he uses another allophonic variant, the glottal stop. If you’re not familiar with the term, think of either a Cockney pronunciation of bottle, or the word uh-oh. There’s a weird gap in the middle of these words; the two syllables are clearly connected by something, but it’s more of a silence than a sound. If anything, it might sound like a weird gasp. That is the glottal stop, where one’s vocal folds close up and then release a brief burst of air as a little creaky pop.

The glottal stop doesn’t require the tongue to move from its back-of-the-mouth position, so when it comes time to make the [n], Leo’s tongue is further back than if he’d made a proper t or flap. When he goes to make the n sound, he doesn’t move his tongue all the way forward, creating a “retracted” n that’s located further back in his mouth than a normal n.

That’s a lot of words about something that might seem rather uninteresting — I started by saying “oh, it’s neat how Ted Leo sort of swallows the end of his word” and concluded by saying “oh, the reason why it sounds like he’s swallowing the syllable is because the syllable is further back in his mouth”. But there’re two things I found interesting in that analysis. One is that it’s kind of neat that we do have this phonetic intuition telling us that sounds produced further back than usual sound like they’re being swallowed, even if we don’t consciously notice where our tongues are when we’re making such noises. The second is that it’s a good illustration of how sounds are affected by the phonetic environment; if it weren’t forgotten, but rather the made-up word fortetten, swallowing that last syllable wouldn’t have been natural.

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*: Wikipedia has a concise but somewhat confusing overview of the way flaps work in different forms of English, if you’re interested.

Unfortunately, it’s always difficult to get good statistics on the prevalence of different meanings of a word, so I’m basing what I say here what the Oxford English Dictionary, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, and (to the least extent possible) my brain have to say on the matter. I’ve added corpus statistics where possible.

Next to: beside. The most literal meaning is also the primary meaning of beside in modern English. If you’re talking about physical positioning, you definitely want beside; the last attestation of physical-position besides in the OED is from 1440.

(1a) The purple couch beside the road
(1b) I am slightly concerned about the hungry tiger standing beside me.

Idiomatic nearness: beside the point. The “next to” meaning of beside is not limited to physical proximity; there are also idiomatic usages, the most prominent of which is beside the point. The alternative, besides the point, is rarely attested both historically and recently:

Adverb: besides. The OED reports that beside was once a standard adverb, but now it’s become obsolete in most of its adverbial usages and archaic in the rest. So use besides in sentences like:

(2a) Men? Sure, I’ve known lots of them. But I never found one I liked well enough to marry. Besides, I’ve always been busy with my work.
(2b) … lost her social position, job, and husband, and was broke besides. [MWDEU]

If you’re using it as sentence modifier, as in (2a), or as a clear adverb (i.e., without a noun following it (2b)), you probably want besides.

In addition to: besides. Now let’s return to prepositional usages. In modern English, the “in addition to” meaning almost always uses besides:

(3) There was no need to install additional software besides the game itself.

Beside used to be common in this usage, but it seems to have become rare in modern English (although I feel like it may be a common local variant in some places). I’ve found it only rarely in modern American writing, such as “Did Glenn mention anything beside the names I dropped?”, from COCA in 2002.

Other than: besides. A similar usage to the last one, again with besides as the primary modern form. Here I’m talking about using the word to mean something like “except”, as in:

(4a) Having been lost in the forest for days, I began to forget whether I’d ever eaten anything besides acorns.
(4b) Will Los Angeles ever be something besides a “suburban metropolis”?

Summary & caveat

So, in general, beside is used for literal and figurative nearness, and besides takes pretty much everything else (especially all other metaphorical usages).

That said, there is an important point here: each of the suggestions I’ve made above is still a bit fluid, since the distinct usages often didn’t start ossifying until the 19th century. Different usages and different people will vary on how much one form is preferred over the other. Adding an s in (1b) is straight out for me, but dropping the s in (3b) just sounds dialectical. And the further you go back in English, the more the usages will blend together.

Lastly, the promised caveat: it’s very hard to get clear data on the usage patterns of different senses of a word, so while I’m confident that these rules of thumb are accurate for my own idiolect, and fairly confident that they apply to standard American English, I’m not sure how well they reflect non-American Englishes. Use them at your peril.

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The S-Series so far:
S-Series I: Anyway(s) [02/03/11]
S-Series II: Backward(s) [06/14/11]
S-Series III: Toward(s) [08/29/11]
S-Series IV: Beside(s) [12/07/11]

But dang, they do have a good logo.

By way of introduction, I’ll offer up a few of the complaints from their “Booberies” section, along with my thoughts on them. Let’s start with their condemnation of “inappropriate” commas in this caption on a New York Times article:

“Tyler, the Creator, of Odd Future, at the Coachella music festival in Indio, Calif., last month. His new album, “Goblin,” will be released this coming Tuesday.”

Not one of those commas is incorrect. Tyler, the Creator is the stage name of Tyler Okonma, and the name contains the comma. of Odd Future is a non-restrictive prepositional phrase, so it should be offset from the rest of the sentence by commas. Cities and states are separated by commas, and states are followed by commas in most newspaper styles I know. “Goblin” is another non-restrictive modifier, so that needs its surrounding commas as well. Sure, the caption might look nicer if it were reworked to require fewer commas, but as it stands, I wouldn’t remove a single one.

Let’s move on to this complaint against a whole ‘nother:

“Some people speak a whole ‘nother language! ‘Whole’ is not an infix.”

An infix is an affix that is inserted into a word stem instead of being attached to the beginning (i.e., prefixes) or end (i.e., suffixes). An example is the Tagalog infix -um-, which is inserted after the initial consonant or consonant cluster. Thus the word sulat becomes sumulat.*

Formal English has no infixes, but colloquial Englishes do have some things that are either infixes or like infixes. A prime example of it comes in the Australian poem “Tumba Bloody Rumba”, which takes its name from the town of Tumbarumba. The full poem is available here as a video, or here as text, and in both cases the word bloody is inserted into words such as kangaroos, meself, and enough. American English has this as well, with such uses as the non-profane Ned Flanders’ diddly or the quite profane abso-fucking-lutely. Or, as one with any familiarity with homey American English would surely be aware, a whole nother.

"Buenos-ding-dong-diddly-días, señor."

Whole does not appear to be a productive infix like Tagalog’s -um-, by which I mean that whole doesn’t get infixed to words other than another. As such, it may be better described as an instance of tmesis, a literary device wherein one word is inserted into another, rather than a true infix. Nevertheless, the idiom a whole nother has existed for at least a century. It’s a casual usage, sure, but it’s not noteworthy, and certainly not cringeworthy.**

The rest of my objections can be lumped together under the heading of “treating their opinions in debatable matters as gospel truth”, much the same thing we all had a laugh at the Queen’s English Society for doing. They admonish Oprah Winfrey for not using the serial comma. They refuse to accept apostrophe-s for plurals of acronyms/initialisms/individual letters. And boy, do they ever have a thing against comma splices, even when used judiciously.

All in all, it’s a site that alternates between suggesting people are boobs for making minor errors and suggesting people are boobs for having made different choices than the SAGB did. Pretty much the same boring griping schtick as always, with the only distinguishing characteristic being their obsession with the word boob, an eccentricity that gets tiresome pretty quickly.

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*: More on this infixation as an open issue in Optimality Theory is available in this article [PDF, $] if you want to go further down the phonological rabbit-hole.

**: Or, as the SAGB puts it, “booberific”.

The sign was brought up as part of a brief discussion of the construction the reason why, and whether it ought to be replaced with the reason that. When the building the sign was on passed to new owners, they appeared to answer this question by modifying the sign:

But was it right to remove the why?* What’s the beef with the reason why, and ought it to be the reason that?

You probably already know the argument against the reason why, because it’s the same hoary argument trotted out for so many grammatical constructions that have, for whatever reason, earned the irritated attention of prescriptivists. I’m speaking, of course, of the great grammatical bogeyman of redundancy. A quick pair of examples:

“Both the reason is because and the reason why have something very basic in common: they’re entries for the category of the redundancy category.”

“if you say ‘The reason why…’ it’s like saying the word ‘reason’ twice.” [Tarzan and Jane's Guide to Grammar, 2005]

But so what? Why is redundancy bad? Well, you might say that it’s inefficient. But communication is a noisy system, whether you’re talking in a windy area, or reading an email through a smudged screen, or talking to a somewhat distracted interlocutor. In addition to these external sources of noise, the language itself adds some noise, in the form of lexical and structural ambiguities (e.g., the possible meanings of Time flies like an arrow). Adding redundant information is the rational thing to do if you expect the noise levels to be high enough that some information will be lost, and in almost every linguistic situation, that’s the case.

For many non-linguistic problems, redundancy is already regarded as a logical solution. Suppose you give me the first 15 digits of your credit card number (please do). Then I can tell you what the final digit is going to be, because the last digit is completely determined by applying an algorithm to the first 15 digits. Why not just use 15 digits, then? Well, because writing down a sequence of numbers is an easy task to screw up. By including the check digit in the 16th spot, most minor transcription errors can be caught before the transaction is started. Yeah, it’s redundant, but it’s rational redundancy.

Language has similar reasons to use rational redundancy. In an example relevant to my daily life, UCSD’s campus is positioned under the flight path of planes landing at the local Marine base. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence the engine noise becomes too loud for someone I’m talking to to hear what I’ve said. It would be absurd to refuse to repeat myself because the second time is redundant.

Now a second example: explaining a complicated concept. In academic papers, you’ll often see someone state a point, and then immediately follow it up with “That is to say”, followed by a re-statement of the argument. If you got the argument the first time, the second explanation might be unnecessary, but because some people might not have gotten it, it’s worth re-iterating.

That is to say, redundancy is not inherently bad in language.** Every agreement marker in a language is in some sense redundant. For instance, if I want to compliment some bears in Spanish for their strength, I might say:

(1) Ustedes son osos fuertes (“You-plural are bears strongs“)

Each of the four words in that sentence are marked as plural. Shouldn’t it be sufficient to only label one word as plural? This is a little bit of a special case, because the redundancy is required by the grammar. But the truth is that redundancy is common even in places where the grammar doesn’t demand it. An obvious example:

(2) The person who left their wet swimsuit on my books is going to pay.

This sentence would be fine as the person that, and would be less redundant (we already know it’s a human being that the relative clause is modifying), but no one complains here. In fact, this is the preferred version according to many prescriptivists.

Now, all of this goes to show that some redundancy is okay, but it doesn’t directly address whether this particular redundancy is okay. We can surely agree that there are unacceptable redundancies, like the old department of redundancy department. But unacceptable redundancies have something else wrong with them. It’s not that they’re merely redundant; it’s that they’re redundant and longer, or redundant and confusing, or redundant and awkward.

The reason why (and similarly, the person who) is only redundant. It’s actually shorter than the alternative the reason that, and it’s neither confusing nor awkward. At absolute worst, it’s stylistically unpleasant, and even that’s in the eye of the beholder.

One last thing, and something that should tell you that the redundancy point is off the mark, is that the reason why is both common and venerable. Both Google Books N-grams and the Corpus of Historical American English have the reason why being consistently more common than the reason that for the last 200 years. And the first example of the reason why in the Oxford English Dictionary dates back to 1533:

“He couth fynd na resson quhy he aucht nocht to helpe þe romane pepill to recovir þe land.”

Summary: Are people telling you that the reason why is redundant and therefore unacceptable? They’re wrong; there’s nothing inherently unacceptable about redundancy, and the reason why has been standard for centuries.

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*: The story of the sign is revealed here.

**: Nor in other areas; architectural structural redundancy prevented significant damage to the Empire State Building when a plane crashed into it in the 40s.

Of course, prescriptivists and other anti-descriptivists denounce this position as folly. But so do (almost) all descriptivists. The position is intellectually bankrupt. There are many reasons for an utterance not to be assumed to be grammatical. For instance, young speakers of the language speak pretty terribly (“I goed to the store”), so they clearly need to be exempted from the set of speakers establishing the grammar of the language. You will not find a linguist listening to a three-year-old and dutifully transcribing their speech as grammatical forms of the language.

But that one’s pretty obvious. In a more problematic case, we also know that people make grammatical errors that they subsequently recognize as errors. I know this especially well because every third post or so I get a comment or email asking if I didn’t make a grammatical error in a sentence, and often it’s because I did. I’m not talking about sentences that merely deviate from stylebook norms (YOUR PERIODS FOLLOW THE QUOTES YOU IDIOT!), but undeniably ungrammatical utterances like These is a big problem or worse. If it were really anything goes, you’d see linguists rushing to the defense of these ill-formed sentences even as I said “no, no, they’re not right!”

So let me try to state the maximally descriptivist position that I think a reasonable person could take. It’s that the set of grammatical utterances of a language is the set of utterances that can be made by speakers who have sufficient linguistic ability (i.e., adults who are fluent in the language) such that the speaker making that utterance does not find a problem with it after careful examination. More briefly, it’s the set of sentences that a qualified speaker would accept. But this is hardly “anything goes” — it’s more like “anything meeting certain standards goes”, and that’s a major philosophical shift. In fact, the difference between this theoretical “certain standards” descriptivist and a moderate prescriptivist is little more than a difference of what the standards are.*

And if we’re treating this as the descriptivist baseline, I have to confess that I am a bit less accepting than that. For me, the set of grammatical utterances is community-based; a sentence is grammatical in a linguistic community if and only if it is considered acceptable by a substantial portion of the linguistic community. Note that this is equivalent to the position I sketched above when the “community” is the individual; the difference is that my position does not extend the individual’s grammaticality judgments any further unless the rest of the community agrees.**

Now, the descriptivist philosophy I’ve outlined doesn’t rule out an additional prescriptive preference in stylistic matters, nor does it say that one can’t have a preference between two grammatical sentences. It is only defining the set of grammatical sentences. Most every descriptivist I know has these sorts of stylistic preferences. I, for instance, don’t like hyperbolic usages like figurative literally. Do I think they’re ungrammatical? No, not usually. But would I advise people to avoid them? Yes. And would people be right to ignore my advice? Sure, if they didn’t care what I think (and why should they?).

Lastly — and this is a point that Jonathon at Arrant Pedantry has made better in two of his posts, but it’s important enough to repeat — this means that descriptivism and prescriptivism aren’t necessarily at odds. You can be a descriptivist who acknowledges that something is an acceptable usage even as you avoid it yourself. And in fact, I know many self-described prescriptivist editors who hold this (I think eminently reasonable) position.

What’re your thoughts on the matter? If you’re a descriptivist, do you hold one of the philosophies I’ve sketched above, or something else? If you’re a prescriptivist, do you feel that your philosophy meshes with this sort of descriptivism, or do descriptivists still seem like whateverist hippies dancing in the ruins of English?

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*: That little more, though, contains the philosophical difference I tweeted the other day: if usage and rules conflict, the descriptivist will base grammaticality on usage, the prescriptivist on rules.

**: To clarify, I think the maximal-descriptivist position is valid for describing idiolects, one’s personal form of the language. But for the purposes of delineating a dialect or language, it doesn’t matter if one person thinks a certain usage is good if all the rest of the world disagrees.