Fancy a pint?

Instead of posting on journalism and other ills of the Republic, I am heading out to the Hamilton Tavern with my son for a pint. You come too, as Mr. Frost used to suggest. What is the benefit of unemployment if you wind up spending all day at a computer keyboard?

The president's grammar

After the administration of President George W. Bush, whose syntax frequently looped around is own feet and tripped itself, it hadn’t occurred to me expect fault-finding about President Barack Obama’s discourse. But today I have this inquiry from a retired classics professor:

Our president is a talented orator, but he makes lots of grammatical mistakes. Do you know if anyone has made a collection of his solecisms and written about them?

Well, writing in City Journal in February, Benjamin Plotinsky expanded a disagreement with Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman over the acceptability of using I as a subject — as in Mr. Obama’s “a very personal decision for Michelle and I” — into a sour complaint about the press’s “adulation” of the president.

The blurring of subject and object in pronouns is quite common in speech, and it often displays a class component. I once talked regularly with a janitor whose account of what he and his wife had done invariably began Her and I. The construction between he and I is often a misguided hypercorrection among education people who fear that the objective pronouns sound a little too downmarket.

Ms. O’Conner and Mr. Kellerman are quite knowledgeable about grammar and the history of usage, and I would not be quick to dismiss their findings. Besides, the “for Michelle and I” solecism — a minor one at most — should be more excusable in speech than in formal writing. I give this one a nol-pros.

V.R. Narayanaswami addressed some of Mr. Obama’s supposed lapses in an article at Livemint.com in February, discovering more of the shopworn shibboleths that have come to characterize an unthinking prescriptivism.

One example was Mr. Obama’s description of Sen. Joe Biden as “one of the finest public servants that has served this country.” The ill-advised complaint was that that must be reserved for inanimate objects or nonhuman beings, and that who must always be used for persons. And yet, earlier today at divine service, I heard Bishop Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer language — a fetish for many language purists — repeated thus: “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord [emphasis added].”

There have also been complaints that Mr. Obama’s use of first-person pronouns has been excessive. Mark Liberman looked into this at Language Log, discovering by making an actual count of pronouns in specimen texts, that Mr. Obama has used first-person pronouns less frequently than either George W. Bush or Bill Clinton on comparable occasions. His follow-ups do not fill one with confidence that writers of columns and op-ed pieces take much trouble to confirm their assertions.

One the plus side, The Grammar Vandal diagrams one of the president’s extended sentences and finds it sound.

I am not an apologist for Mr. Obama. We have had presidents who could speak intelligibly, such as John F. Kennedy, and write exemplary English prose, such as Ulysses S. Grant. And we have had presidents who could not, such as the egregious Warren G. Harding. It seems to me that it would be better for the Republic if we focused our attention a little more on how presidents govern than on how they speak.

Today in history

Early in the morning on this date in 1984, I began making telephone calls to get the word out about the arrival on the scene of two persons subsequently christened Alice Elizabeth Marian McIntyre and John Paul Lucien McIntyre.*

Today, a quarter-century later, Alice teaches Latin at the Garrison Forest School, and J.P., an aspiring food writer, publishes the blog Eat Drink Man Weblog.**

No man has been more fortunate in his children.

And I, dear reader, will be neglecting you today as I mark this momentous date with my family. You’re welcome to look in at Craig Silverman’s Regret the Error site, where he has published a short article of mine on how publications make corrections. It is the first of a series of contributions to that Web site.



*My colleagues at The Cincinnati Enquirer, learning that Kathleen was expecting twins, helpfully put together a list of a hundred or so paired names, among them Minneapolis and St. Paul.

**I commend to you his excellent pot roast and kale.

Ease up on the academic

The doctor is IN.

An inquiry from a reader who wonders about criticism that his writing may be excessively academic.

[F]or the past year I have been working part-time as an editor and researcher on book manuscripts for a media personality. My duties often include re-writing some parts of a manuscript and adding whole new sections and chapters. My employer seems to like the work I have done, but other folks who have read the finished manuscripts have remarked that they tend to be "too academic."

My background is in academia, but I am puzzled by the criticism. Does it refer to content (too much focus on minutiae), style (too dry and abstract), form (given too much like a lecture and not like a story), or something else?

I suspect that it's some combination of all of the above, which would mean I either need to learn to write differently, and soon, or find another way to supplement my income.

From your blog, I respect your opinion a lot. Do you or your other readers have any practical advice on how an academic writer can create more accessible prose? My first thought is to imagine my six-year-old daughter as my audience, which would help me keep things simple and maybe a little colorful.

It might not hurt to start out by asking these readers what they mean by “too academic,” but I would not be optimistic about it. Readers can say what they like or don’t like, but few of them are equipped to explain their reactions analytically. So let’s look into the possibilities.

Vocabulary: Being fond of Big Words myself, I enjoy parading them.* When a reader of this blog thanks me for the gift of a previously unknown word, I break into one of my unaccustomed smiles. But some people find it painful to have their vocabularies stretched, and you should therefore make sure that your diction is not too abstract or elevated. I’m not sure that your six-year-old daughter would be the best source of advice on vocabulary, but if you know a twelve-year-old to consult, you would fall into the range of most adults. (Don’t, for God’s sake, imitate me.)

Syntax and paragraphs: I’m not saying that you should break everything down to a series of simple declarative sentences in the manner of the Hemingway parodists (among whom the first and greatest was Ernest Hemingway). But many of my undergraduate students at Loyola will identify any sentence longer than a dozen words as a “run-on,” especially if it has two or more clauses. Academic writing tends to boast longer, clause-clustered sentences, and you might want to stick to more abbreviated versions. Similarly, academic paragraphs tend to be longer. One-sentence paragraphs are fine, and three or four sentences are probably as many as you want to pack into a single paragraph. Look at a daily newspaper or popular magazine for models. Or Web sites.

Content: Not having seen any examples of the work you do, I can’t comment knowledgeably about it. In general terms, journalistic writing tends to look for and showcase the significant detail rather than flatten the text with a barrage of details. It focuses more on people than on objects or procedures, and it tends to explain objects or procedures through the relationship of identifiable people to them — thus the “anecdotal lead,” which presents a person whose situation is representative before describing the forces and events that created the situation.

Style: Written American English has been growing increasingly informal, even colloquial, over the past century. Newspaper journalism from the 1930s and 1940s, for example, looks much more formal, even stodgy, than what is currently published. What the contemporary reader looks for is the sense of the writer speaking directly to him or her. Read aloud what you have written. Anything that sounds false or strained when you read it aloud is probably something you ought to revise to make more conversational.

The writer: To an editor (well, to some editors), the writer is an annoying inconvenience that nevertheless makes editing possible — the chicken that must be plucked, cleaned, and butchered before it can be turned into a delightful coq au vin. But you do have some obligation to make the text resemble the work of the author, perhaps dusted off and perfumed a little, but still recognizably the author more than you. The text should be not what you would have written, but what the author would have written had he been a better writer.

More?: You out there reading this, are you going to help this guy or not?



*You may know Dr. Johnson’s remark about learning among the Scots, “like bread in a besieged town, to every man a mouthful, to no man a bellyful.” Learning was a lot like that in the part of eastern Kentucky where I grew up, and I formed the habit early on of letting it be known when I had had a decent meal.

Voices from the choir

A serendipitous discovery and a boon to time-wasters goofing off at work across the land:

The King’s Singers’ famous weather report for the British Isles performed in Anglican chant is available on Youtube:

http://stmonica.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/anglican-chant-weather-forecast/

Heavenly.

Addendum: Please note the corrected attribution in the comment below that this recording is by a group called the Mastersingers, not the estimable King's Sinmgers.

I'll write what I like, said he

Responding to the post “This is not a passive construction,” Bruce Holtgren posed these questions on my Facebook page:*

Regarding this topic, I'd appreciate you weighing in on this example:

1. "Let's go to the movies," John said.
2. "Let's go to the movies," said John.

Is the latter passive? If so, does it matter enough to fix it? (I once had an editor who insisted that the answers were yes and yes.)

The latter example is not a passive sonstruction but a simple inversion of normal word order. There are many journalists who get peevish about the Inverted Said. Perhaps they find it too literary.

Generally speaking, in ordinary journalism, the normal word order is preferable; the reader glides over it without distraction. But making a fetish of this point, as many writers and editors appear to do, leads to the occasional maladroit construction. Here’s an example:

“That will not do,” McIntyre, the language blogger and currently unemployed three-decade veteran of daily newspaper copy desk, said.**

That long, suspensive appositive (which, incidentally, I would also deplore) suggests that the reader is moving through a periodic sentence, with an emphasis coming down at the end. Arriving at the homely said creates a minor anticlimax.

If the attribution following direct quotation includes an appositive, the inverted veb/subject construction is both apt and natural.



*I feel a little uncomfortable about these comments on Facebook, which exclude from the discussion readers of this blog who are not members. Would you like for me to start copying Facebook comments to this site?

**In my seventh week of joblessness, it occurs to me to be grateful at my liberation from journalists (some of them, alas, copy editors) who dress up their idiosyncratic and uninformed preferences with ill-understood technical terms (split infinitive, split verb, passive voice) or mere buzzwords (flow, voice).

You get one vote

Language is perhaps the ultimate expression of democracy.

In her Boston Globe column on language last Sunday, Jan Freeman wrote about the shift in meaning of chauvinism in American English from mindless nationalism to male sexism:

People who object to such language changes sometimes say, “Just because everyone does it, that doesn't make it right.” But what's true about speeding or tax fiddling does not apply to language change; if everyone does it, that does, eventually, make it right.

To shift to the obverse, from the many to the one, keep in mind what Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman point out in Origin of the Specious:

As the language changes, no one has more than one vote.

It is true that, as in a democracy, someone occasionally has disproportionate influence. But even that is limited. Noah Webster’s A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language in 1806 changed colour and honour to color and honor in American spelling. But tung for tongue and soop for soup didn’t take. Generations of English teachers have flailed away at ain’t, achieving no better than a draw; the word remains lodged in the language, though discouraged in formal usage.

Language becomes what its users collectively make of it. That is how Anglo-Saxon was transformed into English, mainly by a rabble of illiterate peasants, and no one should be sorry about that.

But this is a hard truth for the class of people whom the linguists at Language Log call peevologists — the teachers and editors and columnists and bloggers who trumpet their disdain for this word or that usage. (People who insist on flaunting their “pet peeves” might keep in mind that peevish — querulously fretful, like old Mr. Woodhouse in Emma worrying whether the carriage will get him home through a light fall of snow — is not an adjective to inspire admiration.)

The linguist Arnold Zwicky has remarked in his personal blog on his reaction to people who think that their individual tastes and preferences should have the force of law:

People send me e-mail saying that they dislike some usage in my writing, and people insert comments in other people’s blogs objecting to the bloggers’ usages. That is, they say, I don’t like this.

At which point, I ask: why are these people telling me what they don’t like, and doing that in my e-mail and blogs? Perhaps they just want to demonstrate their superiority, but the message I get is: Don’t offend me; stop doing this. And I resent this imposition, bridle at it. Where do you get off, telling me to write and talk the way you’d like?

I, like you, have one vote in English, and the reason I write this blog is not to attempt the bootless task of legislating for the language. Instead, if you merely wish to write a little more clearly, more precisely, and even, God save the mark, more elegantly, I will give you my best advice, along with the reasoning behind that advice. Take it or leave it. It’s your language as much as mine.

There, there

When editors and writers and teachers who don’t know what they are talking about inveigh against “passive voice,” one of the things they commonly misidentify as passive is the there is/there are construction.

There in this context is what Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage calls a “dummy subject.” The actual subject of the verb is found in the noun or nouns following the verb. Some writers use are to make the verb agree with a compound subject, and some don’t, and that’s just the way it is. (It is also a dummy subject in such constructions as It’s raining.)

Though there is/there are is not technically a passive construction, it is frequently identified by teachers of composition as a weak construction to be shunned. Merriam-Webster’s is instructive on this point:

In an article appearing in Written Communication for July 1988, Thomas N. Huckin and Linda Hutz Pesante investigate the use of there as dummy subject, calling it “existential there.” They decided to test the common handbook warning not to begin sentences with there against a 100,000-word sample of good writing by what they call “expert” writers. Their survey found the construction very common; the expert writers obviously paid no attention to the handbook prohibition. They found there sentences used for four chief purposes: to assert existence, to present new information, to introduce topics, and to summarize. Clearly, then, there sentences are often highly useful, and they seem to occur with the same frequency at all levels of discourse.

To give an example of the utility of the there is construction in a statement of assertion, what sane writer would want to change There is a balm in Gilead to A balm exists in Gilead?

The only sensible advice about there is/there are constructions is not to rely on them too heavily and risk monotony in the prose.

Want to buy a used newspaper?

A few days ago, Baltimore Brew posted a short article on the possibility that a federal bankruptcy court might take management of the Tribune Company away from Sam Zell, concluding with an assertion, presented without evidence, that anyone but Zell would be an improvement.

This exercise in speculation also talked about the possibility of a return of The Baltimore Sun to local ownership.

Few of the discussions in Baltimore in recent years about a breakup of Tribune that would lead to transfer of The Sun to local ownership have gone into detail about the realities. While I have no specialized knowledge about the inner financial workings of Tribune or The Sun, and would sooner attempt to manage a professional baseball team than undertake ownership of a daily newspaper, I have questions about the feasibility of such a change. Have you looked under the hood?

The Tribune Company, like the other media conglomerates, has pursued cost savings through economies of scale, such as negotiation for lower newsprint prices than an individual paper could get. It has also consolidated a number of operations, such as payroll, human resources, and information technology, sharply reducing the number of employees at the constituent newspapers. Would a new owner find it necessary to hire additional staff to conduct these operations, or contract them out at some expense?

Moreover, the individual Tribune papers’ computer systems are linked to centralized servers. Would a new owner have the capital to invest in computer equipment? For that matter, would a new owner have the capital to invest in any technological improvements?

A new owner would have to buy the name, the physical property, and the goodwill, probably with borrowed money, paying off the debt through revenues. But the sickening drop in revenues is the main reason for the substantial reductions of staff, in the newsroom and elsewhere. Would the revenues be enough to pay off the debt, or would a new owner have to make ever further cost-cutting reductions in product and staff?

It is hard for me to shed the apprehension that any group of banks taking over the Tribune Company from Mr. Zell, or any local owner buying The Sun from a dismembered Tribune Company, could well wind up presiding over an even more drastic diminution of the operation.

The problem is not a lack of readers but a lack of revenue. The panelists and audience attending the Abell Symposium earlier this month on the survival of local news had lots of ideas about what newspapers could and should do.

But nobody could suggest where any substantial amount of money would come from.

This is not a passive construction

Once more, with feeling.

My arm has not wearied from hacking away at the weedy growth of bad advice on grammar, whether it is the superstition about split infinitives, the nonsense about not splitting verb forms (Do you hear me, Associated Press Stylebook? It’s. Not. Over), or misguided attempts to avoid passive constructions.

What has become depressingly clear is that bad advice has been coming from people who are unable to identify what a split infinitive is or even what the passive voice in English is. And before you start rending your garments and covering your head with ashes because of the deplorable ignorance of the young, I have to tell you that this level of ignorance obtains among senior newspaper columnists, teachers of composition, graduate teaching assistants, and others whose certainty of opinions can be matched only by the shakiness of their information.

If you are of the stamp-out-the-passive-voice camp, pull your hand back before you strike all the forms of to be in a sentence. Some of them are merely copulatives (Easy there, big fella, that doesn’t mean what you think it does) linking a subject with a predicate complement. A sentence beginning There is may not be exciting, but it is not a passive construction. And it is possible to have a passive construction that lacks any form of to be.

The tireless Arnold Zwicky has put together a succinct summary of issues involving the passive voices and the mistakes people make about it, accompanied by links to postings at Language Log. If you have any serious intention about being informed before you start marking up those student papers or criticizing your subordinates’ memos, you owe it to yourself to have a look.