It’s National Grammar Day 2013, which has really snuck up on me. If you’ve been here in previous years, you know that I like to do three things on March 4th: have a rambling speculative discussion about the nature of grammar and/or linguistics, link to some people’s posts I’ve liked, and link to some of my posts. Unfortunately, I’ve been so busy with dissertation work lately that I’m a bit worn out on discussion and haven’t been adequately keeping up with everyone’s blogs. So I hope you’ll forgive my breach of etiquette in making this year’s NGD post all Motivated Grammar posts.
Well, not entirely. Everyone in our little community gets in on National Grammar Day, so let me mention a few good posts I’ve seen so far. Kory Stamper discusses her mixed feelings on the day, as well as on correcting people’s language in general. Dennis Baron looks at the abandoned, paranoid, wartime predecessor of NGD, “Better American Speech Week”. And from last year, but only better from the aging process, Jonathon Owen and goofy had posts asking what counts as evidence for grammatical correctness or incorrectness, and why we’re so often content to repeat grammar myths.
Below you’ll find this year’s collection of debunked myths. As usual, the statements below are the reality, not the myth, and you can click through for the original post and the rest of the story.
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The reason is because and the reason is that are both acceptable. The reason is because is a standard English phrase, one coming from the pen of good writers (Bacon, Frost, Wodehouse) for 400 years. There’s nothing ungrammatical about it, and its supposedly condemnable redundancy is at worst mild.
Gender-neutral language isn’t new. Some people get up in arms about gender-neutral language (e.g., firefighter for fireman), claiming that everyone was fine with gendered language up until the touchy-feely ’60s or ’70s. But that’s not the case, and this post discusses gender-neutral language well before our time, over 200 years ago.
Off of is perhaps informal, but not wrong. There is nothing linguistically or grammatically incorrect about off of. It’s nonstandard in some dialects and informal in most, so you should probably avoid it if you’re concerned about your writing seeming formal. But when formality isn’t a concern, use it as you see fit.
Can I do something? oughtn’t to be an objectionable question. Permission-seeking can has been in use for over a century (including by Lord Tennyson), and common use for half a century. It is time for us all to accept it.
Since for because is fine. In fact, almost no usage guides complain about this, though it’s a persistent myth among self-appointed language guardians. A surprising number of style guides (such as that of the APA) are against it, but historically and contemporaneously, English has been and remains fine with it.
Formal language isn’t the ideal; informal language isn’t defective. Informal language has its own set of rules, separate from formal language. It’s the “normal” form of the language, the one we’re all familiar with and use most. At different times, formal or informal language is more appropriate, so we shouldn’t think of formal language as the best form.
Someone can know more than me. Than is fine as a conjunction or a preposition, which means that than me/him/her/us is acceptable, as it has been for hundreds of years. The belief it isn’t is just the result of trying to import Latin rules to a distinctly non-Latinate language.
Comma splices aren’t inherently wrong. Comma splices, where two (usually short) sentences are joined by nothing more than a comma, became less prominent as English’s punctuation rules codified. But historically speaking, they’ve been fine, and to the present day they’re most accurately viewed as informal, but hardly incorrect. That said, one has to be careful with them so that they don’t just sound like run-ons.
It doesn’t make sense to say that a standard usage is erroneous. There are rules in language, but if the language itself breaks them, then it’s a shortcoming of the rule, not of the language.
Disinterested and uninterested are separating, not blurring. Though many people believe that these two words ought to mean different things, they haven’t historically. In fact, the overlap in meaning between the two isn’t indicative of a distinction being lost, but rather a distinction appearing.
Psst. Hey, down here. You want more debunked myths? We’ve got four more years of ’em for ya. Check out 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009. 40 more myths for your pleasure. Check out singular “they”, “anyway(s)”, “hopefully”, and more.
Motivated Grammar 
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March 4, 2013 at 11:19 am
Tom S. Fox
“The belief it isn’t is just the result of trying to import Latin rules to a distinctly non-Latinate language.”
Actually, whether or not it is a Latinate language doesn’t enter into it.
In German, for example, you would say, “Er ist größer als ich” (“He is taller than I”), but in Italian you say, “Lui è più alto di me” (“He is taller than me”).
March 4, 2013 at 11:34 am
ProsWrite
Reblogged this on Pros Write and commented:
I can’t believe I just remembered it’s National Grammar Day!
March 4, 2013 at 1:12 pm
limr
Reblogged this on As a Linguist… and commented:
I’m working on some new content to go up (hopefully) this week. In the meantime, however, did y’all really think I’d ignore National Grammar Day? Please enjoy this blog post from Motivated Grammar about grammar myths that should just go away.
Except the one about comma splices. That’s according to me, though. Sorry, couldn’t help myself. (Clearly, I’m okay with sentence fragments, though.)
March 4, 2013 at 1:52 pm
Craig Morris (@PPchef)
I confirm what Tom says: Dutch (Germanic): “Hij is groter dan ik,” (.. bigger than I) and French “Il est plus grand que moi” (… bigger than me.) Probably, English lost the Germanic strong cases through the influence of French, though I don’t believe that’s been proven. But generally, grammarians focusing on Latin are a problem when we are not talking about Latin ;-)
March 4, 2013 at 2:01 pm
Lane
Here’s a little thought exercise. I’m OK with almost all of these, but there are a couple I would never write. I’d be curious if you would, in prose you know a thoughtful general educated reader (not a peever, not a professional linguist) would read; just a colleague from the English department, say.
I’d say that “since” for “because” is simply utterly 100% unobjectionable — *everyone* does it and there is no reason to complain at all. By contrast, I would *never* combine two clauses with just a comma, and I keep “disinterested” and “uninterested” distinct.
Here’s the thing: I bet you do, too. Do you combine clauses with a comma only? I find it jarring, I never do it. Do you say “I was totally disinterested in that play?” I’ll bet you’re neither uninterested nor disinterested in the distinction when writing professionally…
So in the spirit of debate, I’d say that while we can cite evidence that your’e right on all 10 counts, I bet some of these are more grammatical for you than others. Am I wrong? I don’t mean to be annoying. I’m honestly curious. The reason I bring it up is because (ha) the lay reader *does* like advice, and if asked, I’d say “use causal ‘since’ and never regret, but avoid the split infinitive.”
March 4, 2013 at 3:26 pm
Happy National Grammar Day | Writing Is Hard Work
[…] National Grammar Day 2013: Ten More Grammar Myths, Debunked (motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com) […]
March 4, 2013 at 5:51 pm
March 4, National Grammar Day 2013 | Millard Fillmore's Bathtub
[…] Probably the best place to start would be Motivated Grammar: […]
March 4, 2013 at 7:19 pm
Carolyn
” Do you combine clauses with a comma only? I find it jarring, I never do it.” Nice!
March 5, 2013 at 7:45 am
Good Grammar Should Be Everyone's Business - Rabid Office Monkey Marketing : Rabid Office Monkey Marketing
[…] National Grammar Day 2013: Ten More Grammar Myths, Debunked […]
March 5, 2013 at 1:04 pm
Chandra
@Lane: “Do you combine clauses with a comma only? I find it jarring, I never do it.”
This has left me utterly bewildered as to where your comment stands on the irony-sincerity spectrum.
March 7, 2013 at 1:37 am
Randay
The site Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub linked you and commented favorably, but added: “Yeah, yeah. He said “snuck.” You and I know he should have said “sneaked,” but he’s probably go the new dictionaries that caved on the issue.” I defended you thus:
“I see nothing wrong with “snuck”. For example, “He snuck a few jokes into his speech.” To my mind it sounds better than “sneaked”. I am 60 now and have used it since childhood. As a former teacher, I have used the Oxford Advance Learner’s Dictionary which hesitantly accepts it. My old Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary(1993)accepts it.
In both Millard’s comments and mine there is the problem of using a quotation within a quotation. Should we have changed the inside quote with single quotation marks or kept the double marks as in the original?
What else bothers me is the prejudice against the word “ain’t”, which was acceptable a couple of hundred years ago. “I am right, aren’t I?” or “I am right, am I not?” The latter makes sense, but it is the former is absurd but usually used.”
To Craig, I would say that using the French example is slippery because besides “moi”, “me” is also used for “me”. For example, “Il me donne des conseils.”(He gives me advice), and “moi” has different meanings: “C’est à moi.”(It’s mine)
March 7, 2013 at 4:24 pm
Motivated Grammar’s Grammar Myths Debunked. | greg walklin
[…] celebration of National Grammar Day, one of my favorite language blogs, Motivated Grammar, posted Ten Grammar Myths, Debunked. The most interesting (i.e., new to […]
March 7, 2013 at 8:42 pm
David L. Gold
“Since” in the sense of ‘because’ in unobjectionable except if using the word creates an ambiguous sentence: “Since my helper left, I have been unable to finish proofreading the book.” Does that mean ‘from the time the helper left’ or ‘because the helper left’? Cotext, context, or both may disambiguate that sentence, but in edited prose one will want to be on the safe side by avoiding all possibility of misunderstanding.
March 7, 2013 at 9:04 pm
David L. Gold
What could possibly be wrong with “snuck,” the form which comes naturally to my lips and pen? (I was born in New York City in 1945.) Presumably, the fact that the form arose (or appears to have arisen) in American English has led certain (solely American?) prescriptivists to recommend “sneaked” instead. American English should have its own norms.
March 8, 2013 at 2:19 am
Randay
We agree David. If I looked, I would probably find that 19th century American writers, maybe Mark Twain among them, used “snuck”.
Another point, today I read an article where the author used the expression “even more impossible”. Is there a grammar word which describes using degrees of an absolute?
March 10, 2013 at 12:03 pm
blog.rightreading.com » Friday roundup : Links for 9 March
[…] Ten grammar myths “debunked“ : If simply saying they’re wrong is the same as debunking. Sorry, I still don’t like “The reason is because” […]
March 12, 2013 at 5:41 am
Virginia
I can’t imagine that disinterested and uninterested would mean the same thing. Does not “disinterested” mean that one has had some interest but lost it and uninterested that one has never been interested at all?
March 12, 2013 at 5:42 am
Virginia
To me, the reason because is a typical tautology and I will never use nor recommend it!
March 12, 2013 at 2:39 pm
David L. Gold
This is a clarification of my comment on “sneaked.” I should have written: Presumably, the fact that certain prescriptivists could not attest that form in British English led them to condemn it, but since British English should not be the touchstone for American English, the absence of a usage in the former should not be grounds for rejecting it in the latter.
March 12, 2013 at 2:50 pm
David L. Gold
This is a response to Randay: Since the earliest quotation for “sneaked” in OEDS (I do not have access to any later edition of OED) is dated 1887 and the word there is not glossed or put in quotation marks, we may assume that the writer took it to be a widespread American usage and one that readers would understand readily rather than a new or little-known one. If so, “sneaked” must be appreciably older than 1887.
March 12, 2013 at 3:11 pm
David L. Gold
This is in response to Virginia: So far as I can tell, “disinterested” in the sense of ‘who has lost interest’ is unrecorded. The English prefix “dis-” does not always imply a loss, a reversal, and so on. Rather, it can simply negate, as in “We dislike going there” and “We are dissatisfied with their behavior,” which do not imply that once we liked going there and were satisfied with their behavior. English “dis-” as a simple negative goes back (sometimes directly and sometimes via French) to Latin (for instance, one of the meanings of Classical Latin “displicere” is ‘displease’ — which reminds me that “displease” is a third English example).
March 12, 2013 at 3:27 pm
David L. Gold
This too is in response to Virginia: Did you intend to write “reason because” rather than “the reason is because”? In my opinion, both usages are redundant and the first one, if it exists, sounds less acceptable in edited prose than the first one. Should redundancy be grounds for rejecting a usage in edited prose? Or instead of answering yes or no to that question, should we proceed case by case? What about “the reason why” and “a time when”?
March 12, 2013 at 3:36 pm
David L. Gold
The paragraph headed “Comma splices aren’t inherently wrong” contains the phrase “English’s punctuation rules.” I find the possessive form of glottonyms unacceptable (I have seen, but not heard, “French’s,” “Portuguese’s,” and “Spanish’s” too). “The rules of English punctuation” is good English.
March 13, 2013 at 4:04 pm
David L. Gold
In connection with my comment on the possessive form of glottonyms, I should clarify that my discomfort with “French’s,” “Portuguese’s,” “Spanish’s,” and so on has nothing to do with phonotactics — “Judy Dench’s acting,” “Peter De Vries’s novels,” and “Larry Parrish’s batting averages” are impeccable — but with the fact that glottonyms are inanimate nouns. Granted that the possessive form of certain English inanimate nouns is irreproachable (“the ship’s bow,” “the Earth’s surface,” “season’s greetings,” and others), but for some reason I find it hard to accept “French’s” and the like, just as in this sentence the “of”-construction would have sounded better: “The atomic era, for instance, has left traces of radiation in soils around the globe, while deeper down in the rock strata, agriculture’s signature in Europe can be detected as far back as A.D. 900” (Joseph Stromberg, “The Era of Our Ways,” Smithsonian, vol. 43, no. 9, January 2013, p. 17).
March 14, 2013 at 12:14 am
Randay
David, “sneaked” is surely the earliest and my Oxford Dictionary places it back to the 16th century. “snuck” is from 19th century American English, but in this case precedence doesn’t matter; In my research at several language sites, “snuck” is now more widely used in the U.S. Even in Britain, The Times and the Guardian have used it. This site in particular drew my attention: http://stancarey.wordpress.com/2010/06/18/snuck-sneaked-in/
As to “French’s”, if one is referring to the country, it would be better to use the adjective as in, “The French policy is…” or use the possessive with the country, “France’s policy is…”. If it is referring to the people, “The French voted to…” “French’s” is for referring to a family name, “Are you going to the party at the French’s?”
March 14, 2013 at 8:33 am
David L. Gold
In response to Randay’s comment of 14 March: Earliest quotations provide us with earliest known uses, which in most cases are not earliest uses, which usually cannot be determined (one would have to be omniscient in order to know, for example, when “sneaked” and “snuck” were each used for the first time). Consequently, all earliest quotations are subject to revision (putting “rua.ua.es/dspace/handle/…/browse?type…Gold%2C+David+L.” in Google’s search engine — this will not work with Yahoo’s or any other, which are inferior to Google’s — will bring you to a website of the University of Alicante that offers freely downloadable digitalized versions of several articles of English linguistic interest, the second of which is “An aspect of lexicography still not fully professionalized: the search for antedatings and postdatings (with examples mostly from English and some from other languages),” which deals with the matter of earliest known uses). Given, therefore, the tentativeness of the dates of earliest known use and the general problem in the study of language of incomplete records (a form may have been used for many years in speech before it came to be used in writing; even if it came to be used in writing, the written evidence for it may have disappeared; even if the written evidence is extant, it may not yet have been discovered; even if it has been discovered, nobody may have yet studied it), we should be reluctant to say that such and such a form dates to such and such a year on the basis of the date of its earliest known use (see too my second comment of 12 March on what the absence of quotation marks or a gloss tells us about the age of “snuck”). In the case of American English, the problem of dating the age of this or that form is compounded by the fact that for a long time many Americans took British English as their model (Noah Webster was a notable exception) and, as a result, forms common in spoken American English were often avoided in written American English if they were not used in British English too. Thus, in light of the evidence now on hand, all we may say with certainty is that the earliest known evidence for “snuck” is dated 1887 and the evidence is American. By the way, Wiktionary says that “The irregular form snuck originated by analogy of struck for the past of strike,” but that does not seem to be right because “sneak” and “strike” do not have the same vowel. In fact, I can think of no English verb the infinitive of which has stressed /i/ and the past tense and past participle of which have stressed /ʌ/.
.
March 19, 2013 at 11:59 am
David L. Gold
This is in response to the second part of Randay’s comment of 14 March 2013, which reacts to my fifth comment of 12 March 2013, which deals with the noun phrase “English’s punctuation rules,” which appears in the section headed “Comma Splices Aren’t Necessarily Wrong” in “National Grammar Day 2013: Ten More Grammar Myths, Debunked.” I of course agree with Randay, but I had in mind something different from what (s?)he mentions: names of languages, names of varieties of languages, names of language families, and so on, that is, the nouns and noun phrases generically known as . In my opinion, glottonyms should not be used with a possessive ending. I would have therefore written “the rules of English punctuation.”
In connection with my preference for “rules of punctuation” rather than “punctuation rules” (a matter unrelated to glottonyms), see Steven T. Byington’s “The Attributive Noun Becomes Cancerous” (, vol. 2, no. 1, October 1926, pp. 34-38).
March 20, 2013 at 4:25 am
Randay
In response to punctuation, I sometimes consult various sources, the easiest being the rather concise “Merriam-Webster’s Concise Handbook for Writers”, but also “A Manual of Style” by the government printing office.
Is it wrong to say “The Finno-Ugric’s language is very different than the Indo-European’s.
I was surprised that I didn’t know what “glottonym” meant until I looked around and found out it is a synonym for “glossonym”, which I knew.
March 20, 2013 at 5:04 am
David L. Gold
English has both glosso- and glotto-, both thalasso- and thalatto-, and maybe more such pairs, the second member of which reflects Attic pronunciation.
March 20, 2013 at 5:22 am
David L. Gold
If in the sentence “The Finno-Ugric’s language is very different than the Indo-European’s” the two capitalized words are ethnonyms (thus meaning ‘speaker of Finno-Ugric’ and ‘speaker of Indo-European’), the possessive form is grammatically right, but the sentence is ambiguous: does it refer to any Finno-Ugric language and any Indo-European language or does it refer to Proto-Finno-Ugric and Proto-Indo-European? And nothing justifies mention of speakers. Therefore, the sentence should be rewritten either as “Any Finno-Ugric language is very different than any Indo-European language” or as “Proto-Finno-Ugric is very different than Proto-Indo-European.” More in a moment.
March 20, 2013 at 5:55 am
David L. Gold
“Any Finno-Ugric language is very different than any Indo-European language” and “Proto-Finno-Ugric is very different than Proto-Indo-European” are still not perfect. The adjective “different” has been followed by “against,” “from,” “than,” “to,” and “with.” “Against” and “with” now appear to be obsolete. “To,” resulting from the influence of “similar to,” now seems to be British but not American. “Than” results from a feeling that “different” is a comparative adjective. In my opinion, only “from” is recommendable.
Finally, on the content of the sentences. At least Henry Sweet (The History of Language, 1900, pp. 112-132) and Holger Pedersen (“Zur Frage nach der Urverwandschaft des Indoeuropäischen mit dem Ugrofinnischen,” Mémoires de la Société finno-ougrienne, vol. 67, 1933, pp. 308-325) believed that Proto-Finno-Ugric and Proto-Indo-European derived from a common proto-language, though so far as I know, latter-day Nostraticists do not think so.
March 21, 2013 at 4:36 am
Randay
I was just trying to find examples. I would use “Finno-Ugric” and “Indo-European” as adjectives or nouns. I always use “different than”. I learned it early in school, or maybe even earlier from my parents(my mother was an elementary school teacher), and other versions sound strange to me. I don’t know the statistics, especially about written use, but my American friends all say it.
March 30, 2013 at 8:54 am
jrlookingbill
Usage determines what is erroneous or currently acceptable. Agreed. Cheers.
March 30, 2013 at 7:40 pm
David L. Gold
A response to “jrlookingbill”: Since ‘erroneous’, ‘currently acceptable’, ‘good usage’, and similar concepts are by nature ill-defined (in contrast to, say, a clearly delineated one such as as ‘oxygen’), opinions may vary and therefore no definition acceptable to everyone should be sought, any more than one should be attempted for ‘good art’ or ‘good music’.
Rather, all one can do is describe a corpus as objectively and in as much detail as possible and, if the corpus exhibits variation (say, “sneaked” ~ “snuck”) and one is of a prescriptivist bent, go on to recommend the use of this or that variant in particular circumstances. For instance, in theory, “I ain’t got no time for them there things” is just as good a way of expressing a certain thought as “I have no time for those things” is, but in practice, they differ: you would of course want to use only the second one if applying for a job in, say, the editorial department of The New York Times.
If you disagree with the foregoing remarks, could you please give a few examples of “usage [that] determines what is erroneous or currently acceptable”?
May 6, 2013 at 3:08 pm
Marco
Tom S. Fox, maybe that’s the exception to the rule (and a very logical one)
Lui è più alto di me vs Lui è più alto di io.
The second one doesn’t sound right (phonetically speaking) although both mean the same. In Spanish is: Él es más alto que yo, the same as it is in English and German.
Strange since Italian and Spanish are both romance languages.
This reminded me of aren’t I vs amn’t I.
May 23, 2013 at 5:31 am
Ken Westmoreland
I use different from because it’s neutral between British and American usage. It follows Romance languages, hence différent de in French, while different than is similar to Dutch anders dan, while ‘different to’ is similar to German im Unterschied zu.
The only time I’ve hear people use ‘different with’ in the sense of ‘different from’ is when they’re from Indonesia or East Timor; Indonesian uses berbedaan dengan (‘different with’) and Tetum uses la hanesan ho (‘not same with’).
May 23, 2013 at 9:48 am
David L. Gold
I use “different from” rather than “different to” or “different with” for several reasons:
1. So far as I can recall, I grew up with “different from” (New York City, from 1945).
2. I associate “than” with comparative adjectives and adverbs and “different” is not a comparative form.
3. I associate “to” with similarity of some kind: “akin to,” “similar to,” and maybe other words also (“connected with”? “related to”?).
4. Many American prescriptivists recommend “different from.” If a prescriptivist’s recommendation does not run counter to my sprachgefuehl, I follow it. “Different from” sounds appropriate to me both in speech and in writing, both informally and formally, and never sounds stilted.
May 23, 2013 at 6:30 am
Tom S. Fox
@Ken: In German it’s “anders als,” which corresponds to “different than.”
May 23, 2013 at 10:05 am
David L. Gold
@Ken. “Im Untertschied zu…” ‘in contrast to…, unlike…’ being a prepositional phrase, I believe that Tom is right that it would not be relevant to a discussion of “different.”
In general, looking at other languages is appropriate if one is trying to etymologize a usage (in a lect of any size — from an idiolect to a family of languages) or making comparative studies (when preparing material, say, for students of second languages or for translators), but we would not want to make the mistake of many prescriptivists, especially frequent in earlier times, of taking usage in another language as a standard of correctness (“Because Latin has…, English should have…”).
May 23, 2013 at 2:40 pm
Ken Westmoreland
@Tom Thanks for reminding me – in Dutch als is used to mean ‘than’, (as is as in Afrikaans) although dan is far more widely used in writing. http://taaladvies.net/taal/advies/vraag/1327
I suspected that different to was a calque on a Germanic language.
@David – it was not my intention to say “Because Latin has…, English should have…” but to illustrate how these variations have come about – this is just an example of English expressions which use Latin words but are calqued on Germanic languages, hence different than and different to.
The fact that different from follows Romance languages is not the reason I use it – Dutch verschillend van and Danish forskellig fra may be calqued on different from, so they too could be considered ‘wrong’ in those languages although they also use anders dan and anderledes end ie: ‘different than’.
Dutch
Anders dan anders.
Different than others.
Meertaligheid – content verschillend van land tot land.
Multilingualism – content different from country to country.
Danish
X Factor-Thomas er anderledes end andre vindere
X Factor’s Thomas is different than other winners.
Hvordan kategorisynlighed er forskellig fra andre Salesforce -modeller.
How category visibility is different from other Salesforce models.
Afrikaans also uses anders as and verskillend van, but I’ve never noted a strong preference for one or the other in South African English, which it influences. Australian and New Zealand English have a preference for ‘different to’, as in Britain.
Basically, if it sounds okay to people on both sides of the Atlantic, I’ll generally use it.
May 23, 2013 at 2:43 pm
Ken Westmoreland
Aagh, didn’t close the HTML tag – now that’s a prescriptive language!
May 23, 2013 at 7:21 pm
David L. Gold
@ Ken. I see now that the intention of the line I skipped in my post of May 31, 2013, at 5:31 am was not clear and I apologize to you for the resulting ambiguity (grant me that the hour was too early for fully lucid thinking). What I meant was this: the first part of the post does refer to you, but not the second, which is a general afterthought that occurred to me about the three possible purposes of comparing lects.
May 24, 2013 at 2:39 pm
Ken Westmoreland
No worries, David!
May 26, 2013 at 9:08 pm
Ken Westmoreland
Another possible origin of ‘different to’ is Irish éagsúla chun, which entered Hibernian English, and hence other forms of English.
May 26, 2013 at 9:21 pm
Ken Westmoreland
Disregard that comment – éagsúla chun means ‘different [insert plural noun here] for’
July 10, 2013 at 5:21 pm
Cabbage
“She is taller than me” is okay? *jaw drop* Well, I am thoroughly embarrassed.