Incorrection

Hanged vs. hung came up today on ADS-L, so I quoted from MWDEU‘s nice entry on the subject, with this admirable (and somewhat testy) conclusion:

The distinction between hanged and hung is not an especially useful one (although a few commentators claim otherwise). It is, however, a simple one and certainly easy to remember. Therein lies its popularity. If you make a point of observing the distinction in your writing, you will not thereby become a better writer, but you will spare yourself the annoyance of being corrected for having done something that is not wrong.

That is, the annoyance of being incorrected, a k a miscorrrected.

MLC in the news

A side-product of abortion in the news: many many cites like these two:

[coordination with and] Mr. Romney has said that abortion should be allowed only in cases of rape, incest and when it would save the mother’s life. (Jim Rutenberg, “The Lowest Common Denominator and the 2012 Race for President”, NYT 8/17/12, p. A15)

[coordination with or] Generally, federal law prohibits federal funding for abortions except in the cases of rape, incest or when the mother’s life is in danger. (Louise Radnofsky, “Remarks Put Spotlight on Definition of Rape”, WSJ online, 8/22/12, here)

These are routine examples of a construction type that has been disparaged as unacceptable — because of a failure of parallelism — by usage critics for at least a century; thanks to the work of Neal Whitman, it’s now known as multiple-level coordination (MLC).

Zomlingbies

A piece of prime silliness, from the ZombieLaw site (“ZombieLaw blogs about zombies in law, politics and current events”): Zwicky’s Zombie Rules of Grammar (here). References to linguablog discussions, illustrated with these images of me, John McIntyre, and Geoff Pullum:

We lurch on, pursued by Abraham Lincoln and others.

 

When English teachers snap

Passed on on Facebook by Bert Vaux, from Trust me, I’m a “Linguist”, ultimately from Funny Times, this cartoon by Kathryn LeMieux:

It’s not unknown for posses to form to “correct” signs in public places, but this almost always involves spelling and punctuation (and not actual grammar, as in this case), and so far as I know, English teachers don’t join these posses, despite the stereotype of them as peevers about vernacular English, and (especially) non-standardisms, a stereotype that’s exploited in cartoons on the theme of the rampaging English teacher.

On the garmmra watch: The Oatmeal

From Alon Lischinsky on Google+ this morning:

The Oameal has a series of “Grammar” posters berating, sometimes quite aggressively, some typical mistakes. Unsurprisingly, none of them are really grammatical; rather, they concern spelling, punctuation, or disputed word usage (i.e., “irony”). One more for Arnold Zwicky’s garmmra watch.

The hopefully files

An inventory of some postings on the adverb hopefully, divided into the pre-AP Stylebook period and the post-AP Stylebook period.

like you and I

Caught this morning on public radio station KALW, during its beg-a-thon:

… because listeners like you and I agree that …

It’s the nominative case of I that’s the issue, and the example illustrates two different points of usage:

(a) pronoun case in combinations with like (and as, beside(s), including, and than); and

(b) pronoun case in coordination.

Collecting examples of people like you and I – there’s a huge number of them — then led me to blogger Melanie Spiller, puzzling over such examples in 2006 and concluding (via tortured grammatical reasoning) that I was the correct pronoun form.

Damn you, Dryden!

John McIntyre has just posted a piece on his Baltimore Sun blog that ends with with a footnote:

A friend on Facebook apologized today for a sentence ending in a preposition. Damn you, John Dryden, I can forgive almost anything for the author of “Mac Flecknoe” and those lovely translations of Virgil’s Georgics, but I wish to God you had kept your mouth shut about stranded prepositions in English.

Amen to that. Dryden is the sad source of years of utterly unnecessary grammatical unhappiness.

live close?

Back on April 13th, mail (lightly edited below) from someone who had just found Language Log and my “Open and closed” posting of 3/28/08:

I just discovered this site tonight & I swear I see an error.

No offense. I am no linguist, but you said “Since there’s no adjective close /kloz/ in English, the stative adjective closed gets to fill its slot in the pattern”.

I’d like to differ in opinion. Close, as in proximity of objects to others or near, drives me nuts.

There are signs in Minneapolis that read “live close” in advertisement of college-time housing.

When I first drove by the signs I only noticed the word live having double meaning. I hadn’t thought of close initially but there were multiple signs along that road so I always saw the phrase more than once at a time.

Two points here: one about spellings and pronunciations, and one about judgments of usage.

Anniversaries

Chris Ambidge wrote to report a mailing from the San Francisco LGBT Community Center, celebrating its ten-year anniversary; on-line story here. Chris would have said tenth anniversary, and found ten-year anniversary redundant (like PIN number, he said), because ‘year’ is already contained in anniversary. This is one of two complaints about the usage of anniversary: the perceived pleonasm of n-year anniversary. The other complaint is about the perceived contradiction in n-span anniversary for spans other than year, especially month (one-month anniversary, six-month anniversary, six-week anniversary) — again, because ‘year’ is contained in anniversary. The second complaint seems to be the older one; it’s the only one reported in MWDEU (in 1989).

The second innovation presumably arose from a weakening appreciation of the etymology of anniversary, so that the word can be extended to recurring spans of time other than a year (though the default span of time was still a year). Then people began supplying year, for clarity, giving us things like ten-year anniversary, as distinct from ten-month anniversary and ten-week anniversary.

And the complaints piled up.