Saturday, December 10, 2022

Length, 1,200+ pages; weight, about nine pounds

 Another damned, thick, square book. Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Garner? 

A copy of the fifth edition of the newly published Garner's Modern English Usage arrived yesterday, and it is even a more impressive work than the previous four editions.  

One mark of its impressiveness is the increasing use Mr. Garner has made of online corpora to determine how people are actually using the language in formal speech and writing, which informs and updates his Language Change Index, with its gradations of acceptability. Another mark is the firepower of the people he has consulted, among them the distinguished linguist Geoffrey Pullum, who examined hundreds of entries, and John Simpson, the former chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.* 

To illustrate, the entry on they, which occupies two and a half double-columned pages, begins by saying that the pronoun "has been under great pressure to take on singular sense--and has been doing so since the late 20th century," which he accounts for by a combination of "natural linguistic evolution and a few social-engineering campaigns." 

The natural linguistic evolution is that, given the lack of a common-gender, third-person singular pronoun in the language, English speakers have blithely been making use of they for centuries, despite the strictures of grammarians. The campaigns to accept they as a singular were an aspect of the gender politics of the previous and current century; what was formerly identified as incorrect has come to be seen as nondiscriminatory toward women. Mr. Garner says that roughly in the space of a generation, they answering for indefinite pronouns such as anybody and everyone became fully accepted.  

The next stage of evolution, in a citation from Mr. Pullum, was "a radical reform proposal ... [in which] they refers to a single specific individual who purports not to be locatable in within the familiar male/female/neuter ontology."

"Traditionalists won't have it. Progressives champion it," Mr. Garner writes, and he projects that "the progressives will prevail," though the new uses won't be fully accepted in Standard English "until a whole generation dies off."

Obviously, the they entry is far more detailed and sophisticated than this three-paragraph truncation, and it merits your examination as you review your own choices in usage. 

That level of examination and reflection is precisely what this book makes possible, and desirable. Standard English, or Standard Written English, however you choose to call it, is a learned dialect. Whatever you may think of the social and cultural values of the people who use it, it is how much of the work of the world is conducted. To participate effectively in that work means mastering its conventions. 

I say conventions, not rules. Bryan Garner is no ill-informed stickler; his book explodes any number of superstitions and shibboleths. He recognizes the need to identify natural linguistic evolutions and identify which conventions work most effectively.

So should you. 


* Mr. Garner also consulted me on a handful of points, so you can see that he casts a wide net. 

5 comments:

  1. I bought the first edition when it came out. It struck me as largely standard material, with the innovation of a pseudo-scientific rating system and mostly, though not entirely, eschewing the petty insults typical of the genre.

    He has discovered the internet exists: Good for him? The internet has been mainstream for a quarter of a century. Being impressed that he has noticed seems damning with faint praise.

    The discussion of singular "they" is, noting that you gave an abbreviated version so this may not be true of the original, incomplete. There was an intermediate step between its use with an indefinite pronoun antecedent and its general application. This was its use with an antecedent of a non-specific person or, less frequently, a specific person of unknown sex: "My boss hired a new worker. I will be training them." This usage slides right by me, while I am old enough to be faintly startled by "My boss hired Bob. I will be training them." My teenager kids use this unconsciously.

    "He recognizes the need to identify natural linguistic evolutions and identify which conventions work most effectively."

    Good luck with that last bit. The language doesn't give a damn what usage manual writers think works most effectively. He seems to have given up the fights of a half century ago, but not because these fights are pointless, but instead to pick new ones.

    The new edition I want to see is Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. That is far and away the most useful of the genre, because it is interested in reporting the facts, not picking fights.

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  2. Unfortunately, I gather that Merriam-Webster has no plan to update MWDEU.

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  3. Also, cut him some slack. The initial tangles with descriptivists have given way to his consulting with Pullum.

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  4. God knows I've abandoned any number or prescriptivist strictures that I upheld thirty years ago.

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  5. I have the third edition of Garner's book, when it was titled 'Garner's Modern American Usage'. One reason the third edition is so big – and I'm guessing that Garner has kept the style for the even larger fifth edition – is the ponderous detail for his example quotations and their citations.
    If he suggests that a certain spelling is a simple error, we usually don't need more than one example to prove that the error can be found out there. For many quotations, we often don't need the full sentence to get the flavour of a usage or a misspelling. For nearly all quotations, we rarely need (or can digest) the detailed bibliographic citation he supplies. And his lawyer's style of 'at 25', at the end of a citation to mean 'at page 25' could be simplified to 'p25' or '25', or be deleted entirely.
    'Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage' is far more economical and sensible with examples. It provides only the key parts of a quotation and its citation, which makes reading easier too.
    If Garner followed MWDEU's style, I estimate that his book would be 5 to 10% shorter. And if Garner really wants to keep the tedious detail, for the very rare times that someone might want to check an example or two, then he should put the detailed quotations and citations on a free website.

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