How we talk now

If you are old enough, you were probably taught the "due to" crotchet.  

For the youngsters in the gallery, due was only ever supposed to be an adjective, typically following a linking verb and followed by a prepositional phrase: "An error is due to carelessness." What was utterly forbidden was to treat due to as a preposition: "Due to carelessness, an error was made." 

This is how due to is described in Follett's Modern American Usage (1966):"Can someone complain that due to worry he sleeps badly? The answer of everyone who cares about workmanship is a flat no. But to give that answer in the United States today is to commit oneself to fighting a rear-guard action. For the doctrine that any locution in wide use is right by virtue of its mere existence has validated the unanchored due to." Further, "the loose and lawless due to is still rare in writers other than those who take advantage of every latitude."

Wilson Follett's guide was edited and completed by Jacques Barzun. Collaborators included Carlos Baker, Frederick W. Dupree, Dudley Fitts, James D. Hart, Phyllis McGinley, and Lionel Trilling. Follett's Modern American Usage displays how we talked then about language and usage: Eminent authorities spoke ex cathedra about what was right, protecting the language in a desperate rear-guard action from the loose and lawless misuses of ill-educated barbarians who think anything goes in English. 

Here is what Bryan Garner says today about due to. The traditional restriction to adjectival uses following to be is something that a stylist may wish to avoid, since one authority calls it a "graceless phrase, even when used correctly." And today due to "is commonly used as a preposition or conjunctive adverb meaning because of, owing to, caused by, or on grounds of." In Garner's language-change index, due to used for because of or owing to is at Stage 4, "Ubiquitous but ..." rather than Stage 5, "Fully accepted." 

Garner's Modern American Usage (fifth edition, 2022) is representative of the way an authority talks about usage today. He doesn't sneer at people who speak and write the language. He makes use of corpus data to determine how widely and where particular usages occur. He pays attention to the findings of linguists and lexicographers. (Follett--or perhaps Barzun--grouses that those slippery lexicographers admitted prepositional due to into the sacred precincts of Webster's Second.) Neither his own tastes in usage, nor the tastes eight selected worthies, constitute an authority that is allowed to ignore evidence. 

Sneering does continue, though no longer with the elevated style favored by the late John Simon. It is more likely to manifest in online snark parroting some long-deceased English teacher. But we working editors do not go in for it. We understand that there are many Englishes, and that even the dialect of formal written English is not a monolith. We continue to consult dictionaries. We continue to consult authorities. We consult our own wide reading. And we strive to make balanced, informed judgments about what is most effective for the writers we edit, and for their readers. 

Two ways about it

 I used to teach my editing students at Loyola Maryland a nice little word, dilemma. It's ultimately from the Greek, di, "two," and lēmma, "assumption." In its strict sense, it means a choice between two equally disagreeable alternatives. Odysseus has to choose between Scylla and Charybdis; you have the devil and the deep blue sea, and neither is very nice. 

You notice I said the strict sense. That sense has been rubbed smooth for a long time, and today the increasingly prevalent loose sense of dilemma is "difficult choice," "disagreeable choice," or even "problem." This kind of drift happens a lot in language. Terrific has moved from "inspiring awe and fear" to "awful" or "frightful" to "astounding" or "tremendous" to just "swell."

Now the strict sense of dilemma is still there in the language, and you are free to use it. You can even try to insist on it, inveighing against anyone who has the temerity to use it in the loose sense. If you inveigh thus, people will call you a fussbudget, and you will be fine about that, because fussbudgets are proud of being fussbudgets. 

But if you are an ordinary person, or some byte-stained wretch editing for ordinary readers, you will have to develop your own sense of how strict or loose to be in any given situation, sensitive to both the language at large and to your specific context. Manuals like Garner's and Fowler's can inform you about distinctions as they exist, but they cannot advise you what to do in a specific instance. You have to develop judgment, case by case. 

So if you are confronted by a text that uses dilemma, you may yourself face a dilemma, a minor but difficult choice. 

Porch sitting

 The porch at our front door is small, holding a round table, a small side table, and four chairs. That's the capacity. When I worked, this is where my wife and I shared a bottle of Prosecco and a snack or light supper on my days off. In retirement, this is where I spend much of my time. 

This porch is where I discovered that the late afternoon light in the summer turns the oak leaves silver. This porch is where I exchange greetings with neighbors out for a walk or out being walked by their dogs. This porch is where I can spend hours enjoying a book and a drink (whiskey with Faulkner, gin with John le Carre, coffee with Robert Caro, tea with Barbara Pym). 

When I smoked a pipe, the porch was where I could indulge the vice without defiling the interior. The porch is where I can sit on a still summer day as the wind picks up suddenly, then watch as a storm rolls in. The porch is where I can savor the calm of the evening twilight until the mosquitoes chase me inside. 

Loafing comes naturally to me, perhaps hereditarily. My grandfather, Lucien Lundy Early, a lifelong inveterate loafer, used to spend time with other elderly loafers on the front bench of the general store in Elizaville, Kentucky. Growing up in Kentucky, I was enough of a Southerner to understand that the way to deal with the oppressive heat is to sit there and not move. A propensity for loafing (and reading) made sitting still an easy skill to acquire. 

It is a pity that so many houses have been built without front porches, or that people who have houses with porches do not take advantage of them. Yes, I know that many houses have decks, but decks are in the back, for family, for privacy. When you sit on your front porch, you are identifying yourself as a resident; you are making yourself visible and known; you are helping to people the neighborhood. 

So if you should be minded to come by sometime to sit on the porch with me, I am not averse to genial conversation. That is one of the things it is for. 

It's not over

This week someone on Twitter quoted a tweet from a fellow journalist: "Not to be dramatic, but the day @APStylebook made it okay to say 'over' when it should be 'more than' was humanity's worst day." 

Not to be dramatic, but, hearing the alarm, I reached for my musket to head for Lexington Common. 

We know where this comes from. An entry in the "Don't List" of James Gordon Bennett at The New York Herald reads: "Don't use 'over' in in the sense of 'more than.'" No explanation, just a fiat. A distinction with no foundation in English (we'll get to that) invented in nineteenth-century American journalism made its way eventually into the Associated Press Stylebook, to be taught as an article of faith in journalism schools and newsrooms. 

The usage note to "over" in The American Heritage Dictionary attributes the distinction to William Cullen Bryant, another nineteenth-century editor, and concurs that the distinction has been championed by American editors who offer no explanation. "Over" for "more than," American Heritage says, has been in English since the 1300s and is fully standard.

Now, mind you, there's a place in my heart for pedantry. All my sympathies are with anyone who deplores that "beg the question" has come to mean "prompt the question" rather than "you've made a dumbass fallacious argument." The traditional sense, as Bryan Garner reminds us, is to make a circular argument--"that is, to base a conclusion on an assumption that is as much in need of proof or demonstration as the conclusion itself." If I see "beg the question" in someplace like The New York Review of Books, I see that someone is holding on to the traditional sense, and it would be nice to maintain it, but that train has left the station.   

But "over/more than," that "over" can only be used to indicate spatial relationships, has no such traditional footing. It's merely an arbitrary distinction arbitrarily maintained in newspaper journalism for decades. It is, in Arnold Zwicky's felicitous term, a "zombie rule." It has no life, it has been repeatedly debunked, and yet it walks among us. 

Jeremy Butterfield, in Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, refers to the "strong tradition in American newspapers and some American usage guides of absolute, unconditional, almost maniacal hostility to the use of over with a following numeral to mean 'in excess of, more than.'" He advises, "It is useful for editors and writers of other varieties of English to be aware that the anxiety continues (and, to judge by some editorial forums, can almost induce nausea or hyperventilation)." 

Oh, Jeremy would be on my side at Lexington Common.   

That meaningless distinction is one of a number of bogus rules that I campaigned against for years, until finally, at the national conference of the American Copy Editors Society in 2014, the editors of the AP Stylebook announced that the "over/more than" distinction was being dropped. There was a chorus of groans in the room, and, as we see on Twitter, the pissing and moaning about it has not died away. 

That ACES conference in Las Vegas in 2014 drew lexicographers from Merriam-Webster's and American Heritage, who told me they were amazed to learn that American editors had been championing a distinction that they had never seen in English. And if you trouble to look into dictionaries, you will find that they uniformly register "over" as a synonym of "more than." 

Yes, I woke up this morning and decided to swat a gnat with a ball peen hammer. But let me suggest that in all discussions like this there is an unspoken but important question lurking beneath the surface: Just what is the source of your expertise in these matters?