I was scanning through Paul Yeager’s book, Literally, the Best Language Book Ever, and, as with most all books of peeves, I found myself at times slightly at odds with the author. It wasn’t that I thought his preferred usages were wrong, or even that they weren’t my preferred usage (they often were), but that I felt like he never bothered to explain what was wrong with his dispreferred usage.
And then I read one claim that made me understand his linguistic philosophy, revealing that the incompleteness of his arguments was intentional, and indicative of a deeper misunderstanding of language. The claim was in a discussion of how one should make the past tense of forecast, and in arguing that only forecast (not forecasted) is correct, he reveals a crucial (and misguided) assumption in his argument:
Language doesn’t work like the local supermarket; there are no buy-one-get-one-free deals: one word, one past tense.
I immediately thought of an exchange from Arrested Development, when Lindsay Bluth, rich philanthropist, tries to convince Johnny Bark, a nature activist, to stop protecting a tree from her family’s bulldozers:
Lindsay: Look, I’m an activist, too, and I appreciate what you’re doing for the environment. But we’re not the only ones who destroy trees. What about beavers? You call yourself an environmentalist. Why don’t you go out and club some beavers?
Johnny Bark: You don’t really get nature, do you?
This is the problem with many peeveologists; they don’t really get language. In Yeager’s case, he adheres to the axiom of One Right Way: there is a single correct form of each word, a single correct way of saying any given thing. Once you determine that one usage is right, all the others must be wrong by extension. But any linguist can explain to you that is one wrong way of looking at language. Just to hammer home the point, let me offer some examples of Multiple Right Ways:
Pronunciation. People will pronounce some words differently depending on context. For instance, I vary my pronunciation of either and neither and route and homage and caramel, because sometimes one way sounds better than the other in a given situation. Most people, I would wager, have a set of words with similarly variable pronunciation. I’ll bet you do.
Numbers. This is really a subpoint under pronunciation, but how do you say 1387? “One thousand three hundred and eighty-seven”, “thirteen hundred and eighty-seven”, “thirteen eighty-seven”, and “one three eight seven” are all standard in some contexts.
Word choice. There are tons of these. One example: kid and child are two words for the same thing, differing primarily in tone. Or damp and moist, or bother, annoy, and irritate.
Morphology. When I was a math major, I had to write a lot of either formulas or formulae, and my choice of plural varied with the context. People and persons are each acceptable in different contexts as well. Looking specifically at past tenses, I wrote a few months ago about variation in the past tense of shine, and similar variation appears in dreamed/dreamt, dived/dove, and lighted/lit, among others.
Syntactic structure. Syntactic alternations give you multiple ways to say the same thing. The dative alternation lets one say either I gave him the gift or I gave the gift to him; the genitive alternation offers the friend of the president and the president’s friend; the needs doing alternation yields the house needs to be cleaned and the house needs cleaning. Because in some cases one sounds better than the other (e.g., I gave John the gift he always wanted vs. I gave the gift John always wanted to him), this sort of alternation is really useful.
It’s essential to note that in these alternations, the alternate forms are not identical in meaning or use. The point is instead that in many situations, one form is no more right than the other(s). In other situations, one form might be more right than another, but the other(s) still might not be wrong.
Sure, there’s something to be said for consistency, for using specific words in consistently prescribed ways. And sometimes you can do that, but not always. The trouble is that the world rarely submits to sharp definitions. The world rarely has one right way to do something, and so neither does language. That’s a fact that every language commentator needs to understand. Unfortunately, few of them do.
Motivated Grammar 
12 comments
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January 6, 2011 at 8:04 am
Chrissy
“the house needs to be cleaned” and “the house needs cleaning”
Let’s not forget “the house needs cleaned” ;-)
I love messing around with syntactic alternations. Now I even know what they’re called.
Nice post, thanks.
January 6, 2011 at 9:12 am
Desi
Thanks for this post on Multiple Right Ways. Also, isn’t that the beauty and fun of language? There are Multiple Right Ways to say something, and we get to choose which way we wish to say it, and that choice can reveal a slightly different meaning or tone. That’s why I love linguistics, anyhow.
January 6, 2011 at 9:59 am
Emily Michelle
Desi, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re so right. That’s a vital part of writing and what makes up someone’s writing style. An author’s ideas are obviously essential, but the way they choose to use language to express those ideas can completely change their book for better or worse. Actually, when I write for fun (which is almost never), the part I really enjoy is finding just the right word or phrase to express something. If there were only one right way to say things, we’d lose that.
January 6, 2011 at 12:34 pm
Trey Jones
Another important aspect that peevologists (note the alternate spelling) don’t get is that language changes. And no amount of screaming or whining will make it not so. I like to recite the first sentence of Beowulf at people who don’t get the point:
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
That was English about 1000 years ago, and it is utterly incomprehensible. No one cared about the peevologists’ desire for English to remain unchanged then, and 1000 years from now, when whatever language(s) English has become are spoken, no one will care then either. Why should I care now?
The first few lines of the Canterbury Tales are also useful to demonstrate ~600-year old English:
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
The meanings of enormity, hopefully, and “beg the question” have changed or are changing. Impact is now a verb. It hurts, but it’s true. You can avoid words you wish people would use like they used to, but if you insist on using outdated meanings you won’t get your message across.
January 6, 2011 at 9:05 pm
The Ridger
Wow. So when he discusses baseball, for him a batter “flew out to second”?
January 7, 2011 at 1:23 am
Stan
It’s childish to expect the world (linguistic and otherwise) to conform to one’s preconceptions of it, to believe that it should, and to proselytise accordingly. Ideals of uniformity seem to exert a weird gravitational pull on peevologists.
Diversity is, as Desi suggested, the beauty and fun of language – and of nature more generally. I like how Wishydig put it: “put down the rocks and enjoy the colours”.
January 7, 2011 at 10:31 am
Warsaw Will
A couple of months ago I saw this on his blog – languageandgrammar.com
‘We have often noted that often repeated language and grammar errors seem to become “correct” usage. Wouldn’t it be weird if math used that philosophy? When enough people said 2+2=5, it would! It would still equal 4, of course, but it would also equal 5.’
And I wrote on my blog:
Quite extraordinary! And I’m not referring to the frequency of the word often. Nor to the quotation marks around ‘correct’ and the corresponding lack of them round ‘errors’. But to the fact that somebody would want to compare language to maths.
And then I listed all the changes since my youth – may to can, whom to who, slow death of the subjunctive etc – but I think he would like us to still speak like that. Which in the UK at least would make you something of a circus freak.
So I think that your title really sums it up nicely.
January 7, 2011 at 2:02 pm
Tom S. Fox
@Warsaw Will:
If you think those are changes that happened during your lifetime, you couldn’t be more wrong.
1. The reason your teacher told you to use “may” for permission is that he was one of those people who think the rules of grammar are carved in stone. The fact is that “can” was already being used for permission as early as 1858, as a line from Anthony Trollope’s “Doctor Thorne” shows:
“Can I come in, Frank?”
2. Even Shakespeare used “who” instead of “whom.” Did he live during your lifetime?
3. The use of indicative “was” instead of subjunctive “were” can be traced back to the end of the 16th century.
4. A strict distinction between “fewer” and “less” never even really existed! “Less” has been used of countables for just about as long as there has been a written English language. The rule that you should use “fewer” for countable nouns and “less” for uncountable nouns was made up out of whole cloth by some guy called Robert Baker in 1770.
Language does change, but not at the insane speed you think it does.
January 8, 2011 at 6:24 am
Joseph Pendleton
People who have a pretty good handle on Standard Written English too often go around making hard and fast “rules” out of style choices or dialect differences. These people are the peeves. They are lonely and have found a way to place themselves above the people in with which they cannot fit.
The reality for the English language is that there are not many clearly definable differences between what we would like to call the “rules” of Standard Written English and the stylistic choices we make in our speech and writing.
Some rules are clear and useful, such as the need for subject and verb agreement. Some rules are pretty darn clear and quite useful but might be broken, such as the use of “however” as a conjunctive adverb within an independent clause rather than as a conjunction between two independent clauses. Some rules can be useful and are frequently cited by peeves but are dubious, such as the use of “fewer” rather than “less” when citing things that can be counted or measured. And then some “rules” are just plain wrong, such the mistaken notion that you should place a comma before a pause. (I, for example, took a pause and poured myself a cup of coffee in the middle of writing the last sentence, so I guess some folks think I should have another comma somewhere after the word “mistaken”).
We should keep in mind that Paul Yeager’s book is probably filled with useful advice for learning how to write in Standard Written English in the way he uses it. And I am confident he uses it well. Not knowing this dialect is a significant problem for many people today since it is the language of educated and well-connected people who speak and write English. That is not going to change.
But Gabe’s point about Yeagar’s mistaken notion that there is one way to use a word is correct, and people commenting on language or teaching it in schools and colleges would do well to keep this in mind. If teachers and other language experts could move away from notions of right and wrong and move towards showing people the different word, phrase and clause choices that might be made at any given moment, we might be able to have people see how interesting using this language can be.
January 12, 2011 at 1:15 am
Fonetástico
Thank you for your post! I yhink that the assumption about correctness in language is very common. That is what we learn in school. Anyhow, I think it’s a shame- Firstly because many people think that their own variant of their language is not as good as other variants. Secondly, it’s a shame because believing that there is only one correct way of saying or spelling lot of poetry in language is lost. We forget that we ourselves create the language.
January 13, 2011 at 4:33 am
aleekwrites
Fantastic post, fantastic critique of the ‘peeveologist’.
Language is meant to be enjoyed. Absolutely. Couldn’t like this post more.
January 18, 2011 at 3:17 pm
slipsofthetongue
As I was mulling over your post while out and about yesterday, I tuned into our local news, and passed by a McDonald’s. Both events reminded me of semantic alterations that infuriated me. While I am all for breadth of language and synonym power, I become upset when neologisms are created as a way to seemingly “dumb down” an already existent word.
McDonald’s, to introduce their salads a few years back, was including as a promo a “step-o-meter”. I may or may not have shrieked at the TV: “It’s called a pedometer! The root ‘ped’ means ‘foot’! The word already exists!!”
Our local news affiliates try to be clever and copyright the names of their Doppler and forecasting systems, so listeners can develop loyalties, or some nonsense. Again, watching a meterologist refer to his “futurecast” or “Future Tracker”, I may be heard mumbling, “‘Fore’ means ‘future’. The word ‘forecast’ already exists.”
Language changes, words change, new words enter our language, meanings become less literal (e.g., excruciating, decimated), or shift, but I really hate it (peevologist here) when language is artificially dumbed down and a new word is simply translated out of the Latin to serve some marketing purpose.
End of soap box. Gabe, what do you think of the artifically introduced defin-nyms? (ooh, coined a new word!)