The bell tolls for “whom”

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Richard Bowker

Here is a nice essay about the inevitable decline and fall of “whom,” a word that continues to exist only to trip people up and make them feel stupid. The Google Ngram Viewer for “whom” shows a decline of about 75% from its peak in 1820 or so to today. But why?

One explanation is that the word has outlived its ability to fulfill the most important function of language: to clarify and specify. Another is that its subject/object distinction can be confusing to the point of frustrating. The most immediate reason, though, is that whom simply costs language users more than it benefits them. Correctness is significantly less appealing when its price is the appearance of being—as an editor at The Guardian wrote—a “pompous twerp.”

The writer quotes William Safire about what a writer should do about the word: “The best rule for dealing with who vs. whom is this: Whenever whom is required, recast the sentence.”

It’s annoying that “whom” continues to bedevil us when there are so many words that we need but that don’t yet exist. Here are just a few:

A gender-neutral singular word for “they” and “them” instead of the atrocious “s/he” and the wordy “him or her”
A word like “either” that applies to more than two choices
A word for someone you are living with who is more than your girlfriend or boyfriend and less than your fiancée or spouse or (ugh) life partner

These words would make a writer’s life a whole lot better. Whom can I talk to about coming up with them?

Listening to Joe Biden give a speech literally makes my head explode

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I liked Biden’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. But he should leave the ad-libbing to Bill Clinton. His prepared text, which you can read here, is fine. But his ad libs showed a strange, almost obsessive penchant for the word literally. As a blogger for the Washington Post put it:

At the beginning of the speech, which went on only slightly less long than it seemed to go on, Joe spoke about his love for his wife. But as the speech went on it became clear where his true affections lay: nestled around the word “literally.”

Here is the text as delivered. I count ten occurrences of literally. Sometimes he used it correctly; sometimes he used it incorrectly. It didn’t seem to matter to Joe. It served as an all-purpose intensifier with which to punch up the speech. At one point the text says:

My fellow Americans, we now find ourselves at the hinge of history. And the direction we turn is in your hands.

But here Joe doubled down on his favorite word and said: “And the direction we turn is not figuratively, is literally in your hands.” Yikes. (By the way, double down has become a trendy political term. Here is an article on Romney doubling down on his initial response to the latest trouble in the Middle East. At least it doesn’t say that Romney was literally doubling down.)

Of course, complaining about the misuse of literally is just pedantry, as well as a lost cause. Here is xkcd, as usual making the point perfectly:

Parsing “factual shortcuts”

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Richard Bowker

“Factual shortcuts” was the phrase of the day after Paul Ryan’s speech at the Republican convention last week. It was how AP characterized statements he made about the Medicare cuts, the closing of a GM plants, etc. Many other outlets reprinted the story and the characterization, so it received huge play in the media.

It’s an interesting phrase. Clearly someone at AP had to think hard to come up with something that was softer than “lies” but stronger than “misstatement” or “inaccuracy” or “questionable claims”. It drove Andrew Sullivan nuts:

“Factual shortcuts” are newspeak for lies. Zack Beauchamp goes nuts at the media euphemisms for lies. I think they should call them “enhanced campaigning techniques.”

Daily Kos snarked:

What is a “factual shortcut”? Does that mean that you were on your way towards a fact, but then decided to hop a fence and cut through Cow Patty Fields?

It really does seem to be a neologism. Google only gives hits related to the AP usage. Google Ngram Viewer doesn’t show any occurrences through 2008. So somebody just added an idiom to the language!

But why bother? We already have a perfectly good phrase that says pretty much the same thing. You could say “Ryan’s speech played fast and loose with the facts” and people would understand you perfectly. And Kos is right–the phrase doesn’t really make any sense. It seems to rely on an implied negative connotation to the word “shortcut”, as in “there are no shortcuts to success” or similar phrases. But where is the shortcut in factual shortcuts? Where are you heading when you take a factual shortcut? It sounds like a quick and perhaps morally dubious way of reaching a fact. But of course its meaning is exactly the opposite — it’s a way of avoiding a fact.

I suppose the phrase was formed by analogy with “ethical shortcut,” which is a morally dubious way of resolving an ethical challenge. So, a “factual shortcut” is a morally dubious way of dealing with a fact–by twisting it in some way so that it means something different from what ordinary people would recognize as the truth. In this interpretation, Ryan didn’t say anything that you could directly point to as a lie, but if people had all the facts, instead of the ones he twisted, a different reality would emerge.

OK, that’s the best I can do. Ultimately an idiom doesn’t have to make sense. I don’t really know what the literal meaning of “play fast and loose” is, but I understand it well enough.

Still, it would be helpful if the mainstream media could bring itself to utter the word lies.

The power of this blog cannot be underestimated

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Richard Bowker

On my endless commute I’ve been listening to a course on modern French history. The professor knows his stuff, but he is not the most articulate lecturer I’ve ever heard. Here’s an approximation of a sentence he uttered: “The importance of Charles de Gaulle, um, in post-war France, um, cannot, er, um, be underestimated.” I swear that I knew this sentence was going to go awry even before he finished it.

Presumably the point he was trying to make was that de Gaulle was so important it would be impossible to overestimate that importance. No matter how high you made your estimate, you

This post isn’t about Charles de Gaulle

would always fall short of his real importance. You could, I suppose, make the case that what he was trying to say that de Gaulle’s importance must not be underestimated–that is, his point was that you might be inclined to give a low estimate of his importance, but that would be a foolish mistake on your part. In either case, the professor wasn’t saying what he wanted to say.

Here are some (of many) recent Google hits with the same problem:

“The complexity of bank reform cannot be underestimated”
“Iranian cyberthreat cannot be underestimated”
“The power of the English language cannot be underestimated” (hmm)

The great blog Language Log has more than one post about this construction (and similar ones). In this post, the author comes up with four potential explanations:

Our poor monkey brains just can’t deal with complex combinations of certain logical operators;

The connection between English and modal logic may involve some unexpected ambiguities;

Negative concord is alive and well in English (or in UG);

Odd things become idioms or at least verbal habits (“could care less”; “fail to miss”; “still unpacked”).

The author prefers the “poor monkey brains” explanation–as do I–but he feels obliged to work through the logical issues involved in explanation 2. Here’s a taste:

Now, it’s a theorem of deontic logic that if it’s not permissible that A, then it’s obligatory that not A; or in symbols

¬PA → O¬A

This follows straightforwardly from the fact that PA (“A is permissible”) is defined as ¬O¬A (“not obligatory that not A”), and ¬¬O¬A becomes O¬A by cancellation of the double negative.

And since “cannot” can mean “not be permitted to”, while “must not” or “should not” can mean “be obliged not to”, it somewhat confusingly follows that “cannot” sometimes means the same thing as “must not” or “should not”.

If you say so. Again, I think the likely explanation is that people can’t quite get the logic right when there are negatives involved, so they end up saying something that, if you work it through, means the opposite of what they intended. But as time goes by, the poor monkey brains explanation tends to give way to explanation 4–the phrase simply becomes an idiom that people don’t even try to understand. Here’s the phrase’s Google Ngram, which shows that its use is very much a modern phenomenon:

Are we getting stupider? Or is this just one of those things that happens in language? I dunno, and I suppose I could care less.

In which Joe Biden tests the limits of my support

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Here is a report of Joe Biden speaking down in Provincetown:

Biden honed in on the LGBT issues during his campaign speech at the Pilgrim Monument and Museum, which is located in a prominent gay community in Cape Cod. “If I had to use one adjective to describe this community it’d be courage,” Biden said. “You have summoned the courage to speak out, to come out. We owe you.”

(First, note the Politico reporter testing the limits of my support by using the phrase “hone in on,” which I’ve considered previously. Also, who says “in Cape Cod”? Any native would say “on Cape Cod.” But I digress.)

I’m pretty sure that Biden knows that courage is not an adjective. And his sentiments are admirable! But geez, every vote counts; let’s think harder about what we’re saying and avoid making the pedants grumpy.

Here is Biden speaking:

image Jamie Citron twitter

Like most vice presidents, Biden is the target of a lot of ridicule; it comes with the territory. He actually has a compelling biography, especially the heartbreaking story of what happened to his family after he was first elected to the Senate:

On December 18, 1972, a few weeks after the election, Biden’s wife and one-year-old daughter were killed in an automobile accident while Christmas shopping in Hockessin, Delaware. Neilia Biden’s station wagon was hit by a tractor-trailer as she pulled out from an intersection; the truck driver was cleared of any wrongdoing.Biden’s two sons, Beau and Hunter, were critically injured in the accident, but both eventually made full recoveries.Biden considered resigning to care for them; he was persuaded not to by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and others and was sworn into office from one of their bedsides.The accident left Biden filled with both anger and religious doubt: “I liked to [walk around seedy neighborhoods] at night when I thought there was a better chance of finding a fight … I had not known I was capable of such rage … I felt God had played a horrible trick on me.”

On the other hand, we’ve been blogging about plagiarism lately, and Biden has more than one plagiarism story in his bio. Here is a nuanced (and lengthy) discussion of the topic.

In regards to the language wars

Posted on June 30, 2012 by Richard Bowker

So a woman is applying for a writing job, and we ask her for additional samples. She sends an email that begins:

In regards to your request . . .

I wanted to pound my head against my monitor. She’s a graduate of an Ivy League university, with years of experience in the writing biz. But she never got the memo that in regards to is nonstandard. Of course, plenty of other people haven’t gotten the memo. The usage started taking off around 1990; it’s still in the statistical noise compared to in regard to, but maybe that’s in the process of changing.

Language changes. People who get too far out in front of the changes may sound illiterate; people who don’t keep up with the changes may sound like pedants. At work we have our own style guide, where we have to make judgments about this sort of thing. We certainly wouldn’t allow in regards to, but we’d probably deprecate in regard to as sounding too stuffy and prolix; why not just say concerning or about? Every company I’ve worked for has preferred data is to data are, in spite of the grammarians’ insistence that data is the plural of datum. Data are still wins the Ngram Viewer war, but the trend is clearly in favor of data is.

Anyway, what are we to make of The Language Wars, which is clearly on the descriptivist side of the prescriptivist/descriptivist divide? The New Yorker writer slams the book, but I have a hard time following her argument. At times, she seems to have read a different book from the one I read. She says, for example, that Hitchings deplores Modern English Usage, but he does nothing of the sort. Here is his nuanced judgment:

But while some parts of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage possess an air of both Oxonian grandeur and sub-molecular pedantry, others manifest a striking reasonableness. He is much more flexible in his thinking than many of his admirers have seemed to imagine…. Many would demur, but Fowler enjoyable comments that ‘good writing is surely difficult enough without the forbidding of things that historical grammar, & present intelligibility, & obvious convenience on their side, & lack only–starch.’

He also quotes at length from Fowler’s wonderful discussion of split infinitives. His judgment of Strunk & White seems equally apt.

My judgment of Hitchings: his book gives a useful historical perspective on usage debates, and his opinions seem reasonable (although see my strongly worded dissent here). My problem with the book is that it was often too detailed for my taste, or talked about stuff I already knew; so I ended up skimming a lot.

Hitchings is a descriptivist, in the reductive sense that he is describing something. But theNew Yorkerwriter accuses him of some kind of hypocrisy because he knows and uses the rules he describes:

Having written chapter after chapter attacking the rules, he decides, at the end, that maybe he doesn’t mind them after all: “There are rules, which are really mental mechanisms that carry out operations to combine words into meaningful arrangements.” We should learn them. He has. He thinks that the “who”/“whom” distinction may be on its way out. Funny, how we never see any confusion over these pronouns in his book, which is written in largely impeccable English.

Why is this “funny”? The rules of English usage are historically contingent; many of them will disappear over time, and new rules will take their place. But that hardly means that a professional writer can ignore the current state of play.

Due to inclement weather, graduation will be held indoors

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Richard Bowker

The use of “due to” in this sentence is wrong, wrong, wrong. So it won’t surprise you that I misused it in one of those excerpts from my novels I posted the other day.

This brings me to an interesting essay by Steven Pinker in Slate about the latest prescriptivist/descriptivist controversy. I’m a big Pinker fan, and I think he gets it right:

The thoughtful, nondichotomous position on language depends on a simple insight: Rules of proper usage are tacit conventions. Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things—not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice. Standardized weights and measures, electrical voltages and cables, computer file formats, the Gregorian calendar, and paper currency are familiar examples.

And:

Once you understand that prescriptive rules are conventions, most of the iptivist controversies evaporate. One such controversy springs from the commonplace among linguists that most nonstandard forms are in no way lazy, illogical, or inferior. The choice of isn’t over ain’t, dragged over drug, and can’t get any over can’t get no did not emerge from a weighing of their inherent merits, but from the historical accident that the first member of each pair was used in the dialect spoken around London when the written language became standardized. If history had unfolded differently, today’s correct forms could have been incorrect and vice-versa.

But the valid observation that there is nothing inherently wrong with ain’t should not be confused with the invalid inference that ain’t is one of the conventions of standard English. Dichotomizers have difficulty grasping this point, so I’ll repeat it with an analogy. In the United Kingdom, everyone drives on the left, and there is nothing sinister, gauche, or socialist about their choice. Nonetheless there is an excellent reason to encourage a person in the United States to drive on the right: That’s the way it’s done around here.

(My cold-eyed editors would probably remove that hyphen from vice-versa, but we’ll let that pass.)

There is a bit of historical illogic in using “due to” as a prepositional phrase instead of an adjectival phrase, but it’s completely comprehensible to any reader of English. So why should we care if it’s used as a preposition, equivalent to “because of”? In general, we shouldn’t. But if you’re a writer, maybe you should, because there will be a part of your audience who will think the less of you if you use “due to” in this way. And you’re probably not good enough a writer to not care about annoying those people.

Bryan Garner, the author of Modern American Usage, has coined the term die-hard snoots to refer to the pedantic folks who care about these lost causes. Here the Columbia Journalism Review talks about the die-hard snootiness of opposition to the prepositional “due to.”

At work recently we discussed whether we should prohibit the prepositional “due to.” We decided that we should. Ordinary schlubs won’t care if we use “because of” instead of “due to,” but die-hard snoots will. And we want die-hard snoots to like us as much as ordinary schlubs; so why not make them happy?

I’ve started reading a book called The Language Wars that Pinker mentions in his essay. I’ll let you know who wins.

In which I end up with a pit in my stomach

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Richard Bowker

An article in today’s Boston Globe (available online only to subscribers) quotes a New Hampshire state rep as saying “I had a pit in my stomach” when he saw an inaccurate résumé from a colleague. Ouch! I would have expected something like “I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach,” but I guess I haven’t been paying attention. Here’s an interesting article giving all kinds of similar usages from the Times. Language Log recently ran a followup, noticing that Thomas Friedman continues to have a pit in his stomach. The original article connects these two versions of the cliché with the competition between “hone in on” and “home in on,” which I certainly have noticed.

Here’s the Google ngram for “pit in my stomach,” which shows that the usage has been taking off starting around 1990 (although it’s still relatively rare compared to the much older “pit of my stomach”).

As the article in Language Log says, the newer usage is not obviously less plausible than the older usage — we’re just more familiar with “pit of my stomach”. So who am I to complain? Still, “pit in my stomach” gives me a bad feeling . . . somewhere or other.

You’ve got to be carefully taut

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Richard Bowker

Last night’s writeup of the hard-fought Celtics-Sixers playoff contest in the online Boston Globe called it a “taught game throughout.” Yikes!

That reminded me of an email I got from someone telling me we needed to “reign in” something or other. How are all these extra g’s sneaking into words?

Dunno about “taught” for “taut”. And I’ll excuse almost anything in email; I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve used the wrong its or there or your in a hastily written email. The guilty party in this case is an excellent writer and would be deeply embarrassed if I were to point out the error to him. But of course “rein in” is the kind of dead metaphor that will get progressively easier to screw up as history moves us ever further away from the era the time when the metaphor actually had some meaning in every day life. “Reign in”, “rein in”, what’s the difference?

Here is a grumpy guy complaining about “reign in” and other annoying mistakes like “vocal chord.”

Both the Globe error and the email error are, I assume, the result of fast writing unmediated by editing or even self-review. Your spellchecker certainly isn’t going to complain about the error. Google, however, shows that “reign in” is gaining traction, with over half a million hits. Here are some novelists discussing what you should do when your characters “go rogue”: should you “reign them in”? Here is CNN talking about reigning in the influence of Super PACs on elections.

Looks to me like “rein them in” is a cliché on its way out.

In which I am again distracted by a mangled cliché

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Richard Bowker

I suppose I should have something interesting to say about Lisa Randall’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door, which I have finally finished. But instead I find myself pondering these two sentences from her section on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC):

Nothing substitutes for solid experimental results. But we physicists haven’t just been sitting on our thumbs for the last quarter century waiting for the LHC to turn on and produce meaningful data.

“Sitting on our thumbs?” Doesn’t she mean “sitting on our hands”? Or “sitting around twiddling our thumbs”? “Sitting on our thumbs” evokes an anatomical image that I find a little distressing. Did I miss the memo that made this an acceptable cliché?

I decided to ask Mr. Google Ngram Viewer Person, who has helped me in the past. But he just throws up his hands — or maybe his thumbs.

“Sitting on our hands” showed up around the beginning of the twentieth century and took off in the nineties. “Sitting on our thumbs” doesn’t even register.

But regular ol’ Mr. Google tells me that “sitting on our hands” currently has 269,000 hits, and “sitting on our thumbs” has a whopping 74,000 hits. So it looks like something’s been happening to the language lately — at least in the unedited wasteland that is the Internet. (The first hit for “sitting on our thumbs” is from Ann Coulter in 2011. Good job, Ann!) In every case that I looked at of “sitting on our thumbs”, “sitting on our hands” would have worked just as well, so a lot people just seem to have lost the feel for the older metaphor.

Clichés and dead metaphors are what they are — few people think deeply about them, and “sitting on our thumbs” seems to be completely comprehensible. So who am I to complain? Time for me to stop being distracted and to return to contemplating the search for the Higgs boson.