Anglicans, taking one with another, are a broad-minded and tolerant sort — a colleague once congratulated me on our magnanimity in not resenting the pope and his followers for having broken away from the Church of England. But I cringed this morning on my way to church as I heard a news reader on NPR refer to reaction to a previous story about conservative “Episcopals.”
Please, dear people at NPR and journalists elsewhere, keep always in mind that if you report on religion you must master the lingo. And each branch you encounter will have its own distinctive nomenclature, fatally easy to get wrong.
For purposes of the U.S. Episcopal Church, one branch of the Anglican Communion:
Episcopal (adj.)
Episcopalian (n.)
Episcopalians are members of Episcopal congregations, NOT Episcopals are members of Episcopalian congregations. The Episcopal Church — not the Episcopalian Church — is an episcopal polity (with authority given to bishops).
Do say it over to yourselves two or three times.
Then go and sin no more.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Information without knowledge
I’ve just started reading a very promising book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, by Charles P. Pierce.
From page 8: “The rise of Idiot America today reflects—for profit, mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know best what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert."
In my own parochial way, I said something similar earlier this year in a post, “Crisis of authority.” But Mr. Pierce makes the point more forcibly and more entertainingly: America “is drowning in information and thirsty for knowledge” and suffering from “lazy, pulpy tolerance for risible ideas.”
If you are curious about these risible ideas, his introduction describes a visit to the Creation Museum in Hebron, Kentucky, where visitors can marvel at a model of a dinosaur wearing an English saddle — since, of course, human beings and dinosaurs were contemporaneous when the world began in 4004 B.C.
Expect a fuller report once I finish the book.
From page 8: “The rise of Idiot America today reflects—for profit, mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know best what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert."
In my own parochial way, I said something similar earlier this year in a post, “Crisis of authority.” But Mr. Pierce makes the point more forcibly and more entertainingly: America “is drowning in information and thirsty for knowledge” and suffering from “lazy, pulpy tolerance for risible ideas.”
If you are curious about these risible ideas, his introduction describes a visit to the Creation Museum in Hebron, Kentucky, where visitors can marvel at a model of a dinosaur wearing an English saddle — since, of course, human beings and dinosaurs were contemporaneous when the world began in 4004 B.C.
Expect a fuller report once I finish the book.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
The man who never listened to Michael Jackson
Tell the Charlotte Observer that I’m ready for my interview.
The reason: A mention at Headsup (thanks, fev) of an article in that paper on the late Michael Jackson that included this passage:
Homer had the “Iliad,” Francis Ford Coppola had “The Godfather,” and Michael Jackson had “Thriller” – which is arguably the most influential album of all time and easily the most popular one in history.
It's nearly impossible to find someone over age 35 who didn't own the album at one time [emphasis added]. Since it was released Nov. 30, 1982, more than 50 million copies of “Thriller” have been sold worldwide.
Here I am, well past 35, without ever having owned a single Michael Jackson, song, album, or poster. I suppose I may have inadvertently heard something from Thriller over the years, but I was not conscious of it. I had no interest in his music when he was a cute little kid, and even less when he became a creepy adult. So for the past couple of days I have had to tune out the gush on Facebook, the newspaper, and the television.*
All right, journalists, here is your assignment and your challenge.
A famous person dies, a performer who has, for whatever reason, legions of devoted fans for whom this passing is a moment of intense emotion. You have to write about both the artist’s career and the impact on the fans, giving justice to each.
Your challenge is to do so without sounding like a fan. Skip references to the Iliad, unless you have some substantial reason to think that people will be listening to Thriller three thousand years hence. Turn away from superlatives and improbable assertions. Wildly improbable assertions. Get a grip.
The trick for a professional is to smuggle in the excess by direct quotation of fans’ emotional excess; then you are simply reporting, not endorsing.
*I don’t remember where I was when John Lennon died, either.
The reason: A mention at Headsup (thanks, fev) of an article in that paper on the late Michael Jackson that included this passage:
Homer had the “Iliad,” Francis Ford Coppola had “The Godfather,” and Michael Jackson had “Thriller” – which is arguably the most influential album of all time and easily the most popular one in history.
It's nearly impossible to find someone over age 35 who didn't own the album at one time [emphasis added]. Since it was released Nov. 30, 1982, more than 50 million copies of “Thriller” have been sold worldwide.
Here I am, well past 35, without ever having owned a single Michael Jackson, song, album, or poster. I suppose I may have inadvertently heard something from Thriller over the years, but I was not conscious of it. I had no interest in his music when he was a cute little kid, and even less when he became a creepy adult. So for the past couple of days I have had to tune out the gush on Facebook, the newspaper, and the television.*
All right, journalists, here is your assignment and your challenge.
A famous person dies, a performer who has, for whatever reason, legions of devoted fans for whom this passing is a moment of intense emotion. You have to write about both the artist’s career and the impact on the fans, giving justice to each.
Your challenge is to do so without sounding like a fan. Skip references to the Iliad, unless you have some substantial reason to think that people will be listening to Thriller three thousand years hence. Turn away from superlatives and improbable assertions. Wildly improbable assertions. Get a grip.
The trick for a professional is to smuggle in the excess by direct quotation of fans’ emotional excess; then you are simply reporting, not endorsing.
*I don’t remember where I was when John Lennon died, either.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Those damn copy editors again
You may have read that a former writer at the student newspaper at the University of Hawaii-Manoa has been accused of fabrication: An examination of his work identified twenty-nine people quoted in fourteen articles whose existence could not be confirmed.
Now, according to an article in the Honolulu Advertiser, the student, Kris DeRego, has come up with a novel explanation: It’s the copy editors’ fault. His articles, he says, were “adulterated” on the copy desk.
The faculty adviser to the paper, Jay Hartwell, found it odd that no other reporters for the paper had complained about such bungling on the copy desk, and he found it additionally odd that other names in the articles, such as faculty members, were correct.
Mark Brislin, the editor of the student paper, Ka Leo O Hawaii, said that DeRego, asked to supply names, telephone numbers, and e-mail addresses for the twenty-nine questionable sources, submitted five. Only one of the five responded.
It would be idle to pretend that copy editors do not make mistakes, even inserting errors into texts — I bear the scars of many such lapses myself. But I have also seen over the years how tempting it is for some reporters to condemn the copy desk before determining the facts. The human reflex to shift blame elsewhere, especially on a target group, is quite strong. Any number of times I have reported to work to take up the day’s fresh complaints, discovering frequently on examination that the reporter actually made the error, or the originating editor made the error, or even, on some occasions, that there was actually no error.
I’m not privy to Mr. DeRego’s work or the work of the Ka Leo copy desk, but the reported information casts a shadow over his explanation, as well as over his work.
Now, according to an article in the Honolulu Advertiser, the student, Kris DeRego, has come up with a novel explanation: It’s the copy editors’ fault. His articles, he says, were “adulterated” on the copy desk.
The faculty adviser to the paper, Jay Hartwell, found it odd that no other reporters for the paper had complained about such bungling on the copy desk, and he found it additionally odd that other names in the articles, such as faculty members, were correct.
Mark Brislin, the editor of the student paper, Ka Leo O Hawaii, said that DeRego, asked to supply names, telephone numbers, and e-mail addresses for the twenty-nine questionable sources, submitted five. Only one of the five responded.
It would be idle to pretend that copy editors do not make mistakes, even inserting errors into texts — I bear the scars of many such lapses myself. But I have also seen over the years how tempting it is for some reporters to condemn the copy desk before determining the facts. The human reflex to shift blame elsewhere, especially on a target group, is quite strong. Any number of times I have reported to work to take up the day’s fresh complaints, discovering frequently on examination that the reporter actually made the error, or the originating editor made the error, or even, on some occasions, that there was actually no error.
I’m not privy to Mr. DeRego’s work or the work of the Ka Leo copy desk, but the reported information casts a shadow over his explanation, as well as over his work.
English is not in danger
A few days back, Language Log published a sneer at a panel discussion on English-only measures at the “Building the New Majority” conference sponsored by The American Cause, Pat Buchanan’s organization. I am afraid that Mark Liberman, whose headline for the post was “Conferenece of dunces,” may be insufficiently respectful of Mr. Buchanan and his endeavors.*
For my part, I have been bewildered for years at the recurring propositions that (a) the English language is in some kind of danger and (b) some kind of governmental action can protect it.
I once wrote an op-ed piece for The Baltimore Sun on proposition (a). It is no longer available in a public archive, but I can summarize its points. English has become a world language, more widespread than Latin at its high-water mark. It’s hardly like Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, whose dwindling population of speakers gets annual attention in wire service feature stories. People around the world are keen to learn English, and you can make a modest living by teaching it to them.
I suppose that the perceived threat to English is the number of people in the United States whose primary language is Spanish or Chinese or something else that sounds like an outlandish tongue to middle-aged white American monoglots. But I live in a city that as recently as a century ago had public schools in which instruction was conducted in German, and yet somehow the Kaiser did not prevail here.
As to proposition (b), the failure of the French Academy to preserve the purity of French from inroads by English and other languages should be instructive.
If that is not a sufficient example, consider this passage from H.L. Mencken’s The American Language:
[S]o early as February 15, 1838, the Legislature of Indiana, in an act establishing the State university at Bloomington, provided that it should instruct the youth of the new Commonwealth (which had been admitted to the Union in 1816) “in the American, learned and foreign languages ... and literature.” Nearly a century later, in 1923, there was a violent upsurging of the same patriotic spirit, and bills making the American language official (but never clearly defining it) were introduced in the Legislatures of Illinois, North Dakota, Minnesota and other States.
Further, Mr. Mencken writes, Jay McCormick, a Republican of Montana, introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives proposing “That the national and official language of the Government and people of the United States of America, including Territories and dependencies thereof, is hereby defined as and declared to be the American language.” Mr. McCormick’s bill died quietly and unmourned.
You may be aware, from what you say and hear and read and write every day, that American English, as distinct from the British and other varieties, has done all right for itself, without having to be propped up by the regulatory and military might of the federal government or the constituent sovereign states.
The polar ice caps are melting, hundreds of thousands of people (including your most humble & ob’t. servant) are out of work, and the National Threat Level is an ugly orange. Worry about those things and leave English alone. It has done quite nicely on its own for the past six centuries and more. It does not require assistance.
*When a measure was introduced to make English the official language of Taneytown, Maryland, I had a little innocent fun with the subject myself.
For my part, I have been bewildered for years at the recurring propositions that (a) the English language is in some kind of danger and (b) some kind of governmental action can protect it.
I once wrote an op-ed piece for The Baltimore Sun on proposition (a). It is no longer available in a public archive, but I can summarize its points. English has become a world language, more widespread than Latin at its high-water mark. It’s hardly like Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, whose dwindling population of speakers gets annual attention in wire service feature stories. People around the world are keen to learn English, and you can make a modest living by teaching it to them.
I suppose that the perceived threat to English is the number of people in the United States whose primary language is Spanish or Chinese or something else that sounds like an outlandish tongue to middle-aged white American monoglots. But I live in a city that as recently as a century ago had public schools in which instruction was conducted in German, and yet somehow the Kaiser did not prevail here.
As to proposition (b), the failure of the French Academy to preserve the purity of French from inroads by English and other languages should be instructive.
If that is not a sufficient example, consider this passage from H.L. Mencken’s The American Language:
[S]o early as February 15, 1838, the Legislature of Indiana, in an act establishing the State university at Bloomington, provided that it should instruct the youth of the new Commonwealth (which had been admitted to the Union in 1816) “in the American, learned and foreign languages ... and literature.” Nearly a century later, in 1923, there was a violent upsurging of the same patriotic spirit, and bills making the American language official (but never clearly defining it) were introduced in the Legislatures of Illinois, North Dakota, Minnesota and other States.
Further, Mr. Mencken writes, Jay McCormick, a Republican of Montana, introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives proposing “That the national and official language of the Government and people of the United States of America, including Territories and dependencies thereof, is hereby defined as and declared to be the American language.” Mr. McCormick’s bill died quietly and unmourned.
You may be aware, from what you say and hear and read and write every day, that American English, as distinct from the British and other varieties, has done all right for itself, without having to be propped up by the regulatory and military might of the federal government or the constituent sovereign states.
The polar ice caps are melting, hundreds of thousands of people (including your most humble & ob’t. servant) are out of work, and the National Threat Level is an ugly orange. Worry about those things and leave English alone. It has done quite nicely on its own for the past six centuries and more. It does not require assistance.
*When a measure was introduced to make English the official language of Taneytown, Maryland, I had a little innocent fun with the subject myself.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Got prestige?
A sentence in The New Yorker’s profile of Angelo Mozilo refers to the head of Countrywide Financial as having delivered “the prestigious Dunlop Lecture for Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies in Washington, D.C.”
Like dramatic, prestigious is one of those adjectives you should probably shy away from. If circumstances are inherently dramatic, giving the details suffices. If an award or a lecture carries genuine prestige, you shouldn’t have to say so; writing about “the prestigious Nobel Prize” would make you look like an idiot.
“The prestigious Dunlop Lecture for Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies in Washington, D.C.,” tells the reader that this lecture, which he has probably never heard of (which is why the writer needs to add “for Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies in Washington, D.C.”), is important for a limited audience of which the reader is not a member.
It would have been better for the writer, rather than resort to the prestigious shortcut, to explain what the audience is and why the lecture is important to it.
I possess a certain small stock of prestige among copy editors, as the comments on my farewell post at Baltimoresun.com attest.* It is an exceedingly dim flicker of glory among a very small populace, and attaching the term prestige to anything I have ever been or done would strike most readers as, at best, peculiar — hell, would look ludicrous even to copy editors.
Writers who are tempted to pump up the importance of a subject by adjectival shortcuts — dramatic, prestigious, prominent, significant, premier, momentous, outstanding, renowned, storied — would be better advised to heed the venerable show-don’t-tell maxim.
*I don’t expect that I will ever be able to express my full appreciation for those comments and the regard of those readers.
Like dramatic, prestigious is one of those adjectives you should probably shy away from. If circumstances are inherently dramatic, giving the details suffices. If an award or a lecture carries genuine prestige, you shouldn’t have to say so; writing about “the prestigious Nobel Prize” would make you look like an idiot.
“The prestigious Dunlop Lecture for Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies in Washington, D.C.,” tells the reader that this lecture, which he has probably never heard of (which is why the writer needs to add “for Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies in Washington, D.C.”), is important for a limited audience of which the reader is not a member.
It would have been better for the writer, rather than resort to the prestigious shortcut, to explain what the audience is and why the lecture is important to it.
I possess a certain small stock of prestige among copy editors, as the comments on my farewell post at Baltimoresun.com attest.* It is an exceedingly dim flicker of glory among a very small populace, and attaching the term prestige to anything I have ever been or done would strike most readers as, at best, peculiar — hell, would look ludicrous even to copy editors.
Writers who are tempted to pump up the importance of a subject by adjectival shortcuts — dramatic, prestigious, prominent, significant, premier, momentous, outstanding, renowned, storied — would be better advised to heed the venerable show-don’t-tell maxim.
*I don’t expect that I will ever be able to express my full appreciation for those comments and the regard of those readers.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
C'mon, AP Stylebook, fix it
That nagging little Jiminy Cricket voice of conscience in my head was asking the other day, “John, why can’t you help the AP instead of bashing the AP? Do you always have to be so critical?”
All right, all right. The current edition of the stylebook retains the asinine “no split verbs” bogus rule, but that need not be perpetual. To save the editors trouble, I’ve drafted some language they can consider for next year’s edition:
verbs The abbreviation v. is used in this book to identify the spelling of verb forms of words frequently misspelled.
SPLIT FORMS: The belief that it is an error to “split” infinitive forms of a verb (to leave, to help, etc.) or compound forms (had left, are found out, etc.) is unfounded and contrary to idiomatic English syntax. The Star Trek formula to boldly go is perfectly acceptable English. Do not resort to awkward constructions to avoid this imagined error.
Awkward: The candidate always has released the names of contributors.
Preferred: The candidate has always released the names of contributors.
And, for good measure, they can have this one:
none It means either “not one” or “not any.” In the former sense, it takes a singular verb, in the latter sense a plural. Both of these sentences are acceptable: Of the dozen entries, none was rejected by the judges. None of the entries were rejected by the judges.
If you cannot determine which nuance of meaning the writer intended, let the writer’s words stand.
Now for your part, dear readers:
The editors of the stylebook are Darrell Christian, Sally Jacobsen, and David Minthorn. You can write to them to suggest that they adopt these sensible revisions:
The Associated Press
450 W. 33rd Street
New York, NY 10001
And if you have subscribed electronically to the stylebook, you can go to “Ask the Editor” and inquire why they have retained the bogus “split-verb” rule and when they plan to abandon it. (We old-fashioned book-buying types aren’t privileged to ask snotty questions of the editors online.)
If you have been giddy with excitement about receiving the 2009 edition, as some have proclaimed themselves to be on Twitter,* imagine your feverish ecstasy when these changes appear in the 2010 edition.
*I am not making this up.
All right, all right. The current edition of the stylebook retains the asinine “no split verbs” bogus rule, but that need not be perpetual. To save the editors trouble, I’ve drafted some language they can consider for next year’s edition:
verbs The abbreviation v. is used in this book to identify the spelling of verb forms of words frequently misspelled.
SPLIT FORMS: The belief that it is an error to “split” infinitive forms of a verb (to leave, to help, etc.) or compound forms (had left, are found out, etc.) is unfounded and contrary to idiomatic English syntax. The Star Trek formula to boldly go is perfectly acceptable English. Do not resort to awkward constructions to avoid this imagined error.
Awkward: The candidate always has released the names of contributors.
Preferred: The candidate has always released the names of contributors.
And, for good measure, they can have this one:
none It means either “not one” or “not any.” In the former sense, it takes a singular verb, in the latter sense a plural. Both of these sentences are acceptable: Of the dozen entries, none was rejected by the judges. None of the entries were rejected by the judges.
If you cannot determine which nuance of meaning the writer intended, let the writer’s words stand.
Now for your part, dear readers:
The editors of the stylebook are Darrell Christian, Sally Jacobsen, and David Minthorn. You can write to them to suggest that they adopt these sensible revisions:
The Associated Press
450 W. 33rd Street
New York, NY 10001
And if you have subscribed electronically to the stylebook, you can go to “Ask the Editor” and inquire why they have retained the bogus “split-verb” rule and when they plan to abandon it. (We old-fashioned book-buying types aren’t privileged to ask snotty questions of the editors online.)
If you have been giddy with excitement about receiving the 2009 edition, as some have proclaimed themselves to be on Twitter,* imagine your feverish ecstasy when these changes appear in the 2010 edition.
*I am not making this up.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
The pipes, the pipes are callin'
Barbara Phillips Long forwards this morsel from The Wrap in which Ray Richmond considers the effect of the News Fuse application for the iPhone on newspapers:
Would I pay 20 bucks a month for News Fuse? Maybe. Would anybody else? I doubt it. We are, after all, now living in the simultaneously having-and-eating our cake world of entitlement where we expect everything to happen instantly, flawlessly and without cost – the Magic Media! But logic naturally tells us there will invariably be a pauper to pay.
Ms. Long comments: “I guess the pauper that may have to be paid is a journalist, but some people might prefer to pay the piper.”
Would I pay 20 bucks a month for News Fuse? Maybe. Would anybody else? I doubt it. We are, after all, now living in the simultaneously having-and-eating our cake world of entitlement where we expect everything to happen instantly, flawlessly and without cost – the Magic Media! But logic naturally tells us there will invariably be a pauper to pay.
Ms. Long comments: “I guess the pauper that may have to be paid is a journalist, but some people might prefer to pay the piper.”
O my people
Mark Liberman, writing with his usual clarity at Language Log, examines examples of what people appear to think that “passive voice” means.
Some of us learned long ago that it is a syntactical construction in which the subject of the sentence is not the agent of the action, as in the classic “Mistakes were made.” But people, including professional writers and editors and teachers, are identifying “passive voice” as simply not identifying the agent of action, or not taking sides, or merely being dull.
There is nothing unusual, Professor Liberman points out, for a technical term to take on a broader, popular sense. But he finds it distinctly odd that people who pretend to expertise in language and criticize the work of other writers cannot get the technical terms right. But he says it better:
It is common that “one of a word's senses is a term of art in some well-established field whose scope overlaps in everyday life with the word's ordinary-language uses. This applies to many legal terms and to some physical, chemical, and biomedical ones. But in the case of grammatical terms, something additional and unusual has happened: a large class of professionals, who act like maintainers of a body of technical knowledge, have actually lost the thread.
“It's as if nurses, as a class, had never learned that fever is a technical term for abnormally high measurements of body temperature, and instead used it variously to mean "A state of intense nervous excitement" or "Contagious but transient social enthusiasm", while still acting as if these were well-defined medical conditions, subject to exact measurement and treatment.”
The fault here lies increasingly with my fellow prescriptivists, bloggers and columnists and language commentators and viewers-with-alarm and — yes, to my sorrow — even copy editors. It is depressing to see how many writers professing to uphold the purity of the language simply get things wrong.* Or, as a recent post at Arrant Pedantry, “Linguists and Straw Men,” says, “There’s still an awful lot of absolute bloody nonsense coming from the prescriptivists of the world.
Some of that bloody nonsense can be attributed to mumpsimus,** the stubborn human persistence in a long-held error. Many wrong-headed prescriptivist pronouncements can be traced back to bad advice from an English teacher or journalism professor or managing editor. Arnold Zwicky has traced the means by which bad advice becomes embedded, and the main factor appears to be sheer laziness: “[T]he bad advice has the advantage of simplicity and clarity (never do X; do Y or Z instead), while the good advice allows for alternatives and requires people to make judgments about what they want to say or write in particular contexts.”
I’m frankly at a loss. I give my students and colleagues my best advice. I exhort. I explain. I point to reputable authorities whose work is available in books and on the Internet. I link to linguists and to fellow reasonable prescriptivists, like Bill Walsh and Jan Freeman, all of whom have manned these ramparts longer than I have. And the problem is not barbarians at the gates — kids texting in their peculiar argot or adults succumbing to Twitter. The language is not degenerating. English is not going down the tubes. The enemy is at our side, fighting the wrong battles with the wrong weapons.
*I’m going to spare you citations of previous posts on the superstitions about the split infinitive, the split verb, none as a plural, and the like. You should know what I think by now.
**Unlike nearly everyone else who ever uses this word, I’m not going to detail its etymology. You can look it up yourself.
Some of us learned long ago that it is a syntactical construction in which the subject of the sentence is not the agent of the action, as in the classic “Mistakes were made.” But people, including professional writers and editors and teachers, are identifying “passive voice” as simply not identifying the agent of action, or not taking sides, or merely being dull.
There is nothing unusual, Professor Liberman points out, for a technical term to take on a broader, popular sense. But he finds it distinctly odd that people who pretend to expertise in language and criticize the work of other writers cannot get the technical terms right. But he says it better:
It is common that “one of a word's senses is a term of art in some well-established field whose scope overlaps in everyday life with the word's ordinary-language uses. This applies to many legal terms and to some physical, chemical, and biomedical ones. But in the case of grammatical terms, something additional and unusual has happened: a large class of professionals, who act like maintainers of a body of technical knowledge, have actually lost the thread.
“It's as if nurses, as a class, had never learned that fever is a technical term for abnormally high measurements of body temperature, and instead used it variously to mean "A state of intense nervous excitement" or "Contagious but transient social enthusiasm", while still acting as if these were well-defined medical conditions, subject to exact measurement and treatment.”
The fault here lies increasingly with my fellow prescriptivists, bloggers and columnists and language commentators and viewers-with-alarm and — yes, to my sorrow — even copy editors. It is depressing to see how many writers professing to uphold the purity of the language simply get things wrong.* Or, as a recent post at Arrant Pedantry, “Linguists and Straw Men,” says, “There’s still an awful lot of absolute bloody nonsense coming from the prescriptivists of the world.
Some of that bloody nonsense can be attributed to mumpsimus,** the stubborn human persistence in a long-held error. Many wrong-headed prescriptivist pronouncements can be traced back to bad advice from an English teacher or journalism professor or managing editor. Arnold Zwicky has traced the means by which bad advice becomes embedded, and the main factor appears to be sheer laziness: “[T]he bad advice has the advantage of simplicity and clarity (never do X; do Y or Z instead), while the good advice allows for alternatives and requires people to make judgments about what they want to say or write in particular contexts.”
I’m frankly at a loss. I give my students and colleagues my best advice. I exhort. I explain. I point to reputable authorities whose work is available in books and on the Internet. I link to linguists and to fellow reasonable prescriptivists, like Bill Walsh and Jan Freeman, all of whom have manned these ramparts longer than I have. And the problem is not barbarians at the gates — kids texting in their peculiar argot or adults succumbing to Twitter. The language is not degenerating. English is not going down the tubes. The enemy is at our side, fighting the wrong battles with the wrong weapons.
*I’m going to spare you citations of previous posts on the superstitions about the split infinitive, the split verb, none as a plural, and the like. You should know what I think by now.
**Unlike nearly everyone else who ever uses this word, I’m not going to detail its etymology. You can look it up yourself.
Monday, June 22, 2009
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?
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