Ten Reminders

 When you are on social media, remember that your classmates who were dim then are probably not appreciably brighter today. 

Your project will require three times the anticipated effort to achieve one-third of the desired result. 

In six months you will discover that you need the book you just donated to clear your shelves. 

If you did not put at least some vermouth into it, you cannot call it a martini. 

Any article or memo you write can be cut by at least 10%, and should be. 

When someone introduces themself as a member of Mensa, remember that they are the people who believe that IQ tests actually measure intelligence. 

That person rattling on about Judaeo-Christian values almost certainly knows little about Judaism, and may well know less about Christianity. 

They will tell you that it has become perfectly acceptable to wear brown shoes with a blue suit. They are wrong. 

You should stop adding all those commas before you turn into Henry James. 

You should make more productive use of your time than to read Ten Things posts. 

Take a breath. The wells of English are not defiled.

 Someone raised a question today at an online grammar site, "Why is correct grammar a lost art?" and damme, I am heading down a well-worn path. 

It is a bad question for two main reasons. First, grammar is not a lost art. Grammatical writing can be found at The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and even in many blogs (including [cough] this one). 

Second, it is misguided to speak of "correct" English as if standard English, the form used in schools, government, and the professions were the only one, true English. Standard English is a dialect of English, one very useful if you aspire to academia, government, or the professions, but all the other English dialects possess distinct and genuine vocabularies and syntax. African American and Appalachian English are just as much Englishes as the standard version. (So stop belittling the people who use them, and stop moaning that what Dr. Johnson called "the wells of English undefiled" have been polluted.)

Usually people who bemoan what they imagine to be the passing of grammatical English are harboring an  assumption that there was a golden age when all the children dutifully learned their English and wrote it properly. There was no golden age. I was there. In the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, 1961-1965, I learned standard English from two formidable teachers, Mrs. Jessie Perkins and Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, who kept at us relentlessly. I learned it, and several of my classmates did, but many did not. 

The blunt fact is that most people are not good at writing, and most people never have been. Speech is natural and learned naturally, but writing is a skill that requires extensive instruction and practice. It is not easy to get good at it, so most people don't. Before the internet we could entertain the belief that the skill was widely applied, because most of what we read was edited prose in newspapers, magazines, and books. But the internet, allowing anyone who has an online connection to publish their writing, has exposed how unskilled at writing most people are. Hell, I was a newspaper copy editor, and my daily work for more than forty years was to correct basic errors in grammar and usage in the work of college-educated professional journalists. 

Some in the golden-age crowd like to argue that linguists and permissive teachers dropped instruction in grammar in the 1960s and thereafter, leading to a collapse of literacy. But one reason to move away from the traditional schoolroom grammar instruction is, as I just told you, that it was not particularly effective. Another is that it was full of bogus rules and bad advice. Theodore M. Bernstein's Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins, published in 1971, has 250 pages itemizing bad instruction in English. 

Online discussions of this sort inevitably degenerate into peevery, with some preening themselves on their expertise in punctuation and others on their I-fall-upon-the-thorns-of-life-I-bleed sensitivity to particular words or expressions they dislike. None of this edifies. 

English, people, still ticking along at 700-plus years, is in no imminent danger. Nice of you to offer to help it, but it can take care of itself.  

You are entitled to ignore bogus usage distinctions

 Earlier today a colleague posted on Facebook about the entitled/titled distinction, that entitled must only be used in the sense of "having a right to," never in the sense of "bearing the title." I remarked that that was not reliable advice and was asked, quite reasonably, why. 

Bryan Garner, in Garner's Modern English Usage, is succinct: "The word entitle has two meanings (1) 'to provide with a right or title to something' ... and 'to give a title to.' ... But sense 2 actually predates sense 1, and both senses are well established."

Merriam-Webster's, Webster's New World, and the Concise Oxford give both senses of entitle, as does American Heritage, which, significantly, presents no usage note on this supposed distinction. There is no mention of a title/entitle distinction in four editions of Fowler's (I looked). 

Why, civilians ask, is this even an issue? It is because the Associated Press Stylebook, which has scraped many barnacles off its hull--but there were so many--advises in the entitled entry, "Use it to mean a right to do or have something. Do not use it to mean titled." This advice I followed for many years, until I didn't. 

The title/entitle distinction was also upheld by the late John Bremner, who as the admired (and occasionally feared) Oscar S. Stauffer Distinguished Professor of Journalism at the University of Kansas and the author of Words on Words, had considerable influence on U.S. journalism. 

The origin of "rules" like this one lies in editors' relentless pursuit of precision in language, which tempts them to invent distinctions. The Blessed Henry Watson Fowler, in a notable example, expressed a suggestion that English would be tidier if that were only used to introduce restrictive dependent clauses, which only to introduce nonrestrictive dependent clauses. The British have persisted in ignoring this pious wish for the past century, but among U.S. editors it has become a Rule with a status on par with Newton's Four Laws of Motion. 

My recommendation is that you should have better things to spend time on than title/entitle, but if you must dither over whether a sentence should read "Mark Twain wrote a book titled Huckleberry Finn" or "Mark Twain wrote a book entitled Huckleberry Finn," just make it "Mark Twain wrote a book, Huckleberry Finn." The italics (or quotation marks, if you're still in thrall to the AP Stylebook) will do the job for you.