Rules ignoring people

In a Facebook discussion just now, I took my usual "descriptivist" position in a discussion with "prescriptivists" (quotation marks since I don't particularly like the word "descriptivist" and my conversation partners might not like "prescriptivists" either). As part of the discussion, I contrasted some examples of what I called "real" rules with the "rules of grammar" that get so much attention:

Here's an example of a rule in English: the order of modifiers before a noun is fixed. We say "an attractive pink swimsuit" but not "a pink attractive swimsuit." Or another: what types of construction can follow a particular verb? "Risk" takes a gerund phrase ("you risked going too far") but not an infinitive (*"risked to go too far") or a noun clause (*"risked that you went too far"). These are real rules of English grammar. Pretty much all the rules that get argued about in public are not "rules" like this. "They" cannot be singular: demonstrably false. The "who/whom" distinction is a matter of subject/object uses: demonstrably false. "That" is for integrated relatives, "which" for supplementary relatives: demonstrably false.

One of the others involved in the discussion is an excellent poet and sharp thinker who I have great respect for (and who would definitely prefer I had said "whom I have great respect for" – I'm not sure what her position on the stranded preposition there might be). She responded aphoristically:

Andrew, the only difference I can see between the rules you cite as real and the rules you cite as demonstrably false is that the former aren't ignored quite as often as the latter.

To which I could only respond that she had hit the nail on the head:

Exactly. The "rules that are often ignored" are not real rules, but pretend rules. In fact, that helps me with a nice chiasmus to state my position: with such rules, it's not that people are ignoring rules. Rather, it's that rules are ignoring people.

And that's the purpose of this post: to make a permanent record of my nice chiasmus. 

Such as and/or such X as?

In a review of the 2011 film of Jane Eyre, a student wrote the following:

... they were joined by an equally great supporting cast, featuring actors such as Judi Dench and Jamie Bell.

I'm curious about that use of "such as". To me, it implies that Judi Dench and Jamie Bell are not only in the film but also the type of actors who are in the film. That is, from the name "Judi Dench", I should be able to make some pretty good guesses about who the other members of the supporting cast might be. That is, I read it as similar to this example (stolen from the COCA corpus):

It could be damage that happened as the result of an acute injury, such as spinal cord damage.

Here, "spinal cord damage" is an example of "an acute injury," and I can make some pretty guesses as to other members of that category. And I can't really do that with "actors such as Judi Dench and Jamie Bell."

However, I could do it with "featuring great actors, such as JD and JB." So it seems that the problem derives from two things: "actors" by itself seems odd with "such as" (as "an injury" by itself would in the above sentence?), and the absence of a comma before "such as" (though I'm not sure why that absence should be important here).

I actually prefer a different solution: "featuring such actors as JD and JB." To my ear, this implies that the named actors share some characteristic (probably "greatness"?) that is then also shared by the other members of the supporting cast. Even here, though, it would be a bit better to have that characteristic named, wouldn't it? "... featuring such great actors as JD and JB."

Why write all this up? First of all, to ask others what they think about the uses of "such as". And secondly, because I'm worried that I might be just peeving about something that is not as precise in other people's usage as I somehow expect it to be. If I'm just peeving about my own personal taste, then I know that I should just keep quiet about it. Along the lines recently suggested by Geoffrey Pullum: "The idea is that I will concentrate on my own usage rather than other people's."

Grammatical norms and social discipline

My nephew Alex wrote me a note on Facebook:

I found this sentence in the French philosopher Georges Canguilhem that I thought you might appreciate (context: a short history of social normalization and standardization): "On commence par les normes grammaticales, pour finir par les normes morphologiques des hommes et des chevaux aux fins de défense nationale, en passant par les normes industrielles et hygiéniques."

To which I responded:

And the grammatical norms that are established in contemporary English as the beginning of this disciplinary process necessarily have nothing to do with how people actually speak the language. Necessarily, because it's not about helping people to speak correctly but about establishing arbitrary authority that people must obey without thinking through the grounds of that authority for themselves. The grammatical rules that are part of public discourse can thus become shibboleths people use to celebrate their own conformity with arbitrary power and to discipline those who do not conform to such power.

Hey, I can still talk the talk!

(Why post this here? Because if I leave it on Facebook, it will disappear down my timeline. If I post it here, it will disappear down my blog, but I will always be able to find it again.)

Speak Softly ... no, Whisper

I was planning to write a rather scathing takedown of this article by Constance Hale from the NYT Opinionator blog: "Make-or-break verbs." But Geoffrey Pullum beat me to it: "Not Rage So Much, But a Modicum of Fear." As I wanted to, Pullum went after Hale's complete misuse of the terms "active" and "passive." But he did leave me some points to make.

Hale writes: "Picking pointed verbs also allows us to forgo adverbs. Many of these modifiers merely prop up a limp verb anyway. Strike speaks softly and insert whispers." If Teddy Roosevelt had followed that advice, he would have made himself ridiculous: "Whisper and carry a big stick." Beyond that, "speaking softly" is something quite different than "whispering" anyway. And finally, there's absolutely nothing wrong with adverbs anyway!

Further, Hale also has trouble with grammatical categories that Pullum does not take her down for. She uses the opening of a short story by Jo Ann Beard to talk about "static verbs": "Here is a scene. Two sisters are fishing together in a flat-bottomed boat on an olive green lake ..." Apparently, Hale sees "is" in the first sentence and "are" in the second as "static" verbs that should be used carefully so as not to make one's writing too static. But the "are" in the second sentence is part of the phrase "are fishing", and "to fish" is surely not one of her "static" verbs.

So all in all, if you want good writing advice, avoid Constance Hale. On the evidence of this article, she does not know what she is talking about.

But go slowly if the old dog wakes up

In A Student's Introduction to English Grammar, Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum pose the following problem:

Leaving aside interjections, the eight parts of speech (as defined by H and P) are nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, determinatives, coordinators, and subordinators. Is it possible to construct a sentence that contains one and only one of each of the following parts of speech?

As many of my students figured out, the key problem is the "subordinator" (traditionally, a "subordinating conjunction"): a sentence with a subordinator will necessarily have two verbs (one in the main clause, one in the subordinate clause).

I have come up with a sentence that contains two verbs and one of each of the other parts of speech:

But go slowly if the old dog wakes up.

Some people might argue that the coordinator "but" should not be at the start of a sentence like this, and the presence of a coordinator in a sentence does raise difficulties for the problem stated above, precisely because coordinators mostly coordinate two things with the same form (noun and noun, verb and verb, etc.). But a sentence-initial coordinator overcomes this difficulty, and, as Huddleston and Pullum argue in their book, there is no descriptive justification for the "rule" that says you cannot begin a sentence with a coordinator.

In class, though, I discussed a different problem: which parts of speech can appear in one-word sentences? I assumed that the answer is that only verbs can stand by themselves as sentences, and then only in the imperative form: Stop! But students made two other proposals that intrigued me:

Fire!

So?

This is not the verb "fire" but the noun: it's what you shout when there's a fire in a crowded theater (or what you don't shout when there isn't one).

At first, I wanted to say that "a sentence has to be a main clause with a finite verb in it, or it's not a sentence." But I was immediately suspicious of this: that's a conventional definition, but perhaps there's a more interesting definition that takes the two possibilities above into account.

I had hoped that Huddleston and Pullum's Cambridge Grammar of the English Language might help me on this score, but they make short shrift of the concept of "sentence" and instead focus their attention on the concept of "clause" (as is always the case with their unconventional moments, the discussion of the point is lively and fascinating).

So I turned where we all turn these days, to Wikipedia. The page is called Sentence (linguistics). The first definition there focuses on something that had crossed my mind: a sentence is a grammatical unit of one or more words that bears minimal syntactic relation to what comes before and after it. To me, that implies that "Fire!" in the above sense can be considered a sentence, because it can stand on its own without any other context, and it will still be understood. In contrast, "So?" might not be a sentence, as it cannot really be fully understood unless you know what it calls into question (that is, what preceded it). — But that argument is not very satisfying.

The second idea of the sentence provided on the Wikipedia page is that a sentence is anything that begins with a capital letter and ends with a period/full stop. This pretty much wipes out the whole issue of which parts of speech can be one-word sentences, because now anything can:

Me.

Stop!

Definitely!

Green.

Up.

So?

This.
If.

Home in on and hone in on

It begins with this status update from someone on Facebook:

Do people now accept "to hone in on" as in sharpen one's attention on something — as opposed to "to home in on"?

After a dozen or so comments that all denounced "hone in on," I entered the fray by referring the crowd to the Eggcorn Database and the page on the issue there:

eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/48/hone/

There's a link there to a lengthy discussion of the issue by Mark Liberman, from Language Log:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000378.html

I noted the following about Liberman's discussion:

It's fascinating to note that "home in on" is definitely only a few years older than "hone in on," and that George HW Bush's use of "hone in on" suggests that the "hone" form might have arisen almost simultaneously with "home in on" (as he was a pilot in WW2).

 After a few more comments by others, along came this comment:

Sorry to be so harsh, but only a dribbling cretin would believe the former to be correct. 'Hone' - as many others have pointed out - has *always* denoted the act of polishing/refining.

This led me to write:

"Only a dribbling cretin": give me a break! Read the Mark Liberman link I posted; like a good linguist, he treats all users of a language as worthy of respect, and he ends up with a much deeper understanding of how language is used than those who insult people for making "mistakes."

Which eventually led the poster of the "dribbling cretin" comment to this remark:

 Thank you for the link, Andrew: extremely interesting - but anyone who possesses what you characterise as "a much deeper understanding of how language is used" would be forced to the inevitable conclusion that Liberman - albeit perhaps a little too subtly for some - is simply monitoring, with exemplary fair-mindedness, the continued use of a malapropism that unfortunately appears to have taken root among dribbling cretins everywhere.

As for "treating all users of a language as worthy of respect": do you accord the same respect to people who deploy (as two examples we see on Fakebbook every day) "your" rather than "you're" and "it's" rather than "its"? If not, then perhaps you'd care to explain *why* not?

So here is my response to this last comment.

On the eggcorn in question:

First of all, I would not call the use of "hone in on" instead of "home in on" a malapropism. In a malapropism, the misused word does not make any sense at all in the context it is used in. In an eggcorn, the new phrase is "different from the original, but plausible in the context" (to quote the Wikipedia page on "eggcorn," which begins by contrasting the two terms). Recall that Mrs. Malaprop misuses words because she wants to show off. Users of eggcorns are not showing off; there are good reasons for the construction of an eggcorn.

This particular case exemplifies those reasons (as Liberman argues quite cogently): there is a phonetic justification for the usage (home/hone is a minimal pair, and the distinguishing phonemes are often misconstrued). Further (and again, following Liberman), the metaphorical extension of "hone" in this context is semantically feasible. 

To me, though, Liberman's most interesting point is that "hone in on" appears relatively soon after "home in on." We are not talking about one expression ("home in on") that has existed for centuries and a new expression ("hone in on") that recently began to replace it. Instead, "home in on" appears, and shortly thereafter, "hone in on" appears. So this is an example of a new expression that immediately generates an alternative that is phonetically and semantically not without justification. (A related case is "could (not) care less," where the "incorrect" form follows very quickly after the "correct" form. There are Language Log discussions of this, too, such as the one here, again by Liberman, which provides links to many further posts on the topic.)

In addition, once people begin hearing the "alternative" expression, they will begin to use it, especially if everybody around them does. A different expression is both a good example here and a funny story in its own right: I once used the spoonerism "one swell foop" when talking to my friend Heather. This is just a form that I like to use sometimes because it's funny. Heather laughed and told me that her mother had always used the spoonerism for its comic effect, but that meant that Heather thought that the real expression was "one swell foop." Eventually, Heather heard "one fell swoop" and thought that that expression was a funny spoonerism. This did not make either Heather or her mother a "dribbling cretin"; the whole process was and is completely understandable. If you hear something all the time, you will pick it up and use it, because that's what you hear.

On treating language users with respect (and "your/you're" and "it's/its"):

The short answer is that I do respect users who mix these forms up, because I understand why they get mixed up. One source of the problem is touch-typing: I learned how to touch type almost 35 years ago (thanks, Mom, for insisting that I take the typing class!), and one thing I noticed pretty much immediately was that when I got faster, my fingers stopped typing individual letters, as it were, and typed whole words as units. My name, for example, is so programmed into my touch-typing fingers that if I try to type my wife's name (Andrea), I always end up typing my name first (Andrew), and then I have to go back and correct it. The same thing happens with the problem pairs with apostrophes (for me, it's usually not the two mentioned above but "their/there/they're" that cause trouble because of typing reflexes—and even as I typed them now, my finger reflexes got in the way again!).

Secondly, in the case of "it's/its," many people are probably posting on Facebook with their iPhones, and the iPhone autocorrect will turn "its" into "it's" almost every time! (I'm puzzled why it sometimes does not do so.) Similarly, the commenter in question uses hyphens for dashes, and that would be annoying in a printed context. But on Facebook, it doesn't matter at all, and it's completely understandable—after all, it's easier to type a hyphen than a dash on a computer, and it's much easier to do so on an iPhone.

Thirdly, I mostly come across those problems in unedited contexts (such as Facebook), and I simply write it off as an honest slip; I've certainly posted things before editing them often enough, only to discover a silly mistake after doing so. It's related to rapid production (I had to stop for a moment to check my "it's" there to make sure it was correct, and it slowed down my production for a moment!). Even in the comment above, such a "rapid production" mistake appears: the commenter writes "Fakebbook." I like the playful "Fakebook" for "Facebook" (that's what I assume it is), and the double "bb" is just a typo. The mistake caused by rapid production does not make him a cretin.

Finally, even in highly edited contexts, the mistake slips through. When I come across "it's" for "its" in poetry collections, I take note of them. I've come across a half-a-dozen instances in the past two or three years. And in every case, the mistake only appears once or twice, and "it's" is otherwise correctly used in the book. The same is true of novels. 

In the final analysis, these are not problems of grammar. They are problems of typography. People make such errors even if they largely write correctly otherwise. And to come back to the commenter's question: yes, even people who make such mistakes deserve to be treated with respect as far as their language use is concerned.

Spelling Rage

I just saw a Facebook page called "Learning How To Fucking Spell Properly":

1. When I first read it, I put the fourth word after the fifth word, which changed the meaning.

2. Then I wondered why such a page would be necessary anyway: I rarely see anyone misspell "properly."

3. Then it struck me as odd that someone with spelling rage would split an infinitive. Not that split infinitives are incorrect, but that most people with spelling-rage issues also have grammar-rage issues.

There was / were a huge number

I was preparing a grammar exercise from a book, and I came across the sentence "there were a huge number of mosquitoes." The sentence was not actually testing the number of the verb, but I stumbled over it, as I would spontaneously say "there was a huge number of mosquitoes." But I also noticed that I would say "a huge number of mosquitoes were there."

So I spent a few minutes digging around in grammar books and found several confirmations of the latter point ("number of" + plural verb) but no discussion of the number of the verb in such a construction with "there." So there's always a nice Google test:

"there were a huge number of" = 381k hits
"there was a huge number of" = 15.5m hits

You can't always count on Google to do your linguistic research for you, but this one seems pretty clear! Over 40:1 in favor of the singular "was" here, even though the reverse is true without "there" (though only just under 9:1):

"a huge number of people were" = 1.36m hits
"a huge number of people was" = 156k hits

Take out "huge" and the ratio is over 100:1 in favor "there was a number of", but about 20:1 in favor of "a number of people were."

So the descriptive conclusion is that in contemporary English, "number of" usually takes a plural verb, but "there X a number of" usually has a singular verb.

(Just trying my hand at a little linguistics.)

More Sarah Maguire

What do I remember? — a litany of whiskies:

Lagavulin, Laphroaig, Talisker, Aberlour,
The Macallan ...

"Uisge Beatha" (from Spilt Milk)

I've drunk all of those except Aberlour. :-)

*

Maguire's poem "Perfect Timing" (also from Spilt Milk) starts like this:

The night I fell in love with you I lost my watch:

What a splendid opening! I was quite excited to read it, but my excitement deflated immediately:

stripping off at the sea's edge, it fell into the dark

Is it just my déformation professionelle (I'm an English teacher at the University of Basel) that I notice the dangling participle? — "It" refers to "the watch", but the watch did not "strip off at the sea's edge". The poem was ruined for me.

But to be fair, I should post the whole poem, which is otherwise quite memorable (I even found it on a web page, so someone remembered it well enough to type it in):

PERFECT TIMING

The night I fell in love with you I lost my watch:
stripping off at the sea's edge, it fell into the dark
as I swam out into a night thick with stars,
with fisherman calling from one lit boat to another
of their catches and harbours, leaving for the dawn.
Imagine it now, plunged deep in cool sand, still hidden
years later, grains ticking over it one by one—
as your hands slide into me and I move to their pulse.