Not dead, but…

A postcard from Chris Ambidge, with a lovely quotation from a May 31, 1811 letter of Jane Austen’s:

Letting her correspondent down gently: rather than asserting baldly that the mulberry trees are not alive (or even more baldy, that they are dead), Austen merely appears to be reporting her mental state about the matter, her fears. Nevertheless, afraid with a complement clause is often used to convey the content of the complement clause; the hedging with afraid in such cases is a matter of politeness, rather than truth value. Which understanding is intended is something you have to work out from the context.

Spouse vocabulary

The AP Stylebook, which I often mock for its attention to entirely inconsequential details and its belief that it could legislate these details for writers all over the US, sometimes takes on somewhat weightier matters. Today, a revision:

husband, wife: Regardless of sexual orientation, husband or wife is acceptable in all references to individuals in any legally recognized marriage. Spouse or partner may be used if requested.

This is nicely nuanced in one way: it says that husband and wife are acceptable, but doesn’t require those usages, offering alternatives. On the other hand, it assumes (without mentioning it) that husband and wife will be used with appropriate sex reference (husband for a man, wife for a woman), rather than by role reference (husband for the more dominant partner, wife for the more submissive partner, leaving a lot of room for deciding on what constitutes dominance/submission).

Phony rules

In the February issue of Smithsonian Magazine, a brief piece by Patricia T. O’Conner & Stewart Kellerman on phony rules of grammar:

Most of What You Think You Know About Grammar is Wrong

And ending sentences with a preposition is nothing worth worrying about

Think of the piece as a maximally condensed version of their 2009 book Origins of  the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language.

The scandal of English grammar

The main title of a talk that Geoff Pullum gave tonight (in competition with the State of the Union address), at the University of Washington (in Seattle). Subtitle: “Ignorance of grammar, damage to writing skills, and what we can do about it.”

It’s a topic that Geoff and Mark Liberman and I and others have railed about for years and years.

Another invented “rule”

From a correspondent in Germany, an e-mail query about there vs. over there in English. My correspondent reports that when he was in vocational college (in Germany) he had a teacher from Great Britain who explained to the class that the difference between the two expressions was that there was used for relatively short distances, over there for significantly longer distances.

She said you can ask someone over the phone, who lives in China “How’s the weather over there?”. But asking “How’s the weather there?” is, according to her, grammatically incorrect.

Oh lord, another invented “rule”, of a sort that linguabloggers (notably on Language Log) have been wrestling with for years. Teachers and amateur usageists are especially prone to come up with misguided advice — for reasons that are pretty clear.

Possessive controller for SPAR

From NPR’s Morning Edition on the 17th, in the story “Farmers Cautious of Drought-Resistant Seeds”:

Z4.72. Like many Iowa farmers, [Gary] Plunkett’s corn harvest numbers have gyrated …

Some usage critics (like Philip B. Corbett, the NYT‘s associate managing editor for standards, in charge of the paper’s style manual) would reject the initial like-phrase out of hand as a “dangling modifier” — see below — but people not under the sway of an explicit rule about these things tend not to see anything at all notable in examples like this one, which are very common, even in careful writing.

Avoiding a split infinitive

From the 12/3/11 Economist, p. 43, in “Marijuana in California and Colorado: Highs and laws”:

In October, California’s four federal prosecutors threw the state (and drug-lovers everywhere in the country) into confusion when they announced their intention aggressively to go after landlords who rent their buildings to dispensaries of medical marijuana, and even after newspapers, radio and television stations who accept advertising from sellers of the weed.

The placement of the adverb aggressively (which modifies the VP in go after… that follows) before the infinitive marker to struck me as awkward, suggesting (momentarily) that the intention was aggressive, that is, that the prosecutors intended something aggressively. This brief potential ambiguity in the scope of aggressively isn’t problematic in itself, but if the writer had alternatives that are better stylistically, they’d have done better to go with one of them.

And there is a clearly better placement for aggressively: snuggled right up to the head V, go, of the VP it modifies (go after landlords …): the intention to aggressively go after landlords … Why not go for it?

Presumably because that involves the configuration misleadingly known as a “split infinitive”, against which some people bear an irrational prejudice. More on this in a moment. First, a note on why I’m resurrecting a quote from last year.

The hedonistic monks of Mount Syntax

Today’s Dinosaur Comics:

A lot of stuff thrown in there. Soon T-Rex will have been being vindicated (in the future perfect continuous — a k a progressive — passive), bitches. Meanwhile, he claims precedence over Strunk & White.

 

Writing advice

From Henry Mensch on Facebook, this advice on the lifehacker (“Tips and downloads for getting things done”) site (by Adam Pash):

Email Writing Values: Concision, Concision, Concision (by Adam Pash)

Before we get started, I should preempt this post with a concise summary of the helpful suggestions below, in case you don’t want to wade through all that pesky text:

In your email, be brief and to the point.
Cut it down to subject only if you can with EOM.
For most email, try to keep it under five sentences.

What I noticed first was preempt, which is certainly the wrong word. Then the wordiness of the advice, going exactly against content of the advice. And, finally, the choice of concision rather than conciseness. Three very different considerations.

From the reflexives files

From Steven Weinberg‘s article “Why the Higgs?”, New York Review of Books 8/16/12, p. 78, two conjoined objects with a personal pronoun as 2nd conjunct. First, in par. 5, with the first 1sg pronoun in the piece:

This is what happens in the theory of weak and electromagnetic forces proposed in 1967–1968 by Abdus Salam and myself.

and then, in par. 8, after an occurrence of Salam and I as subject:

One of the consequences of theories in which symmetries are broken by scalar fields, including the models considered by Goldstone and the 1964 papers and the electroweak theory of Salam and me, is that …

That is, Weinberg introduces himself into the text with a reflexive pronoun, myself. A nominative  form I follows, in When Salam and I used ...; after it, an accusative me (and then another nominative I, in Salam and I found …). Those exhaust the 1sg pronouns in the text.

What’s notable about this is the myself, an “untriggered” reflexive, neither anaphoric (with an antecedent in its clause) nor emphatic (doubling another NP, as in He himself did it). The usage literature is pretty much dead set against untriggered myself, which means that this literature doesn’t even consider what writers like Weinberg are doing with it.