In my note on verb agreement with disjunctive subjects, I googled up some examples with “either he or she are” (and some with “either of them are”; and you can also find some examples with “neither he nor she are”). It occurred to me that either might be a crucial ingredient in these examples, so I tried searching on {“he or she are” -either}, expecting to find fewer examples. Instead, I found more, but mostly of one type — with he or she used for generic reference. (more…)
Archive for April, 2009
he or she are
April 6, 2009More variation than expected
April 5, 2009I suppose I should never say that some position is “utterly uncontroversial” and that I’m unaware of variation on the point in question. But I did say this, on Language Log recently, about this handbook advice on agreement with disjunctive subjects:
When all parts of a subject joined by or or nor are singular, the verb is singular; when all parts are plural, the verb is plural
Now Ran Ari-Gur writes to tell me:
There is some variation on this; I know at least one speaker who seems to prefer the plural for all conjoined subjects, even if they’re conjoined with a logical disjunction. (This came up during proofreading, so it wasn’t just a typo or speech production error or the like.)
And Google produces a (very) few relevant examples, for instance:
A teacher who poses nude has the reasonable expectation to believe that either he or she are not abiding by a school’s code of conduct. (link)
There is no question that either he or she are qualified to lead. (link)
Of course, examples with singular agreement hugely outnumber examples with plural agreement, but there are some plurals. And not just in coordination:
Is schizophrenia genetic? Is bipolar disorder genetic? If either of them are, are there tests that can show if it was passed to a child or not? (link)
Personally, I don’t think either of them are responsible enough to work as doctors. (link)
So there might be something worth looking at here.
Foamers and stories
April 4, 2009For some reason, foamers (intense railfans) have been in the news recently. I came across the term in Details magazine, and then found that Nancy Friedman had written on her blog citing a NYT story on it. Details to follow.
The usual story about the word foamer is that it comes from the verb foam, as in “foam at the mouth”, used here to describe intense enthusiasm. But Friedman quoted someone who offered a much more complex story, which to my nose stinks of invention (whether deliberate and playful or else innocent but gullible). The fact is, people like stories, very particular ones, and find appeals to general tendencies (to metonymy, metaphor, semantic generalization or restriction, whatever) unsatisfying — even that’s what scholars of word and phrase origins mostly have to offer.
A celebration of American English
April 3, 2009Political consultant, pollster, and sloganeer Frank Luntz, in Words That Work (2007), pp. xiv-xv:
IN DEFENSE OF LANGUAGE
For the record, I love the English language. I have built a career attending to matters of rhetoric, to the painstaking and deliberate choice of words. I love the soft twang of Southern belles and the gum-popping slang of Southern California valley girls, the gentle lyricism of the upper Midwest and the in-your-face bluntness of Brooklyn cabbies. I’m enthralled by the bass rumble of James Earl Jones, the velvet smoothness of Steve Wynn, the upper-crust sophistication of Orson Welles and Richard Burton, and the sexy intonations of Lauren Bacall, Sally Kellerman, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. When spoken well, the language of America is a language of hope, of everyday heroes, of faith in the goodness of people.
At its best, American English is also the practical language of commerce. The most effective communication is the unadorned, unpretentious language of farmers, mom-and-pop shopkeepers, and the thousands of businesses located on the hundreds of Main Street USAs, as well as the no-nonsense, matter-of-fact, bottom-line language of men and women who built the greatest companies the world has ever seen.
This is meant to be celebratory and to sound heartfelt, but it strikes me as patronizing and overwrought. But then it’s Luntz.
(Richard Burton, by the way, was a child of the Welsh working class.)
Black historian
April 2, 2009In my piece on the late John Hope Franklin, I didn’t use the descriptor black historian, though it would have been appropriate — in both senses, ‘historian who is black’ and ‘scholar of black history’, that is of the history of black people. (Here I’m putting aside the further question of how we interpret black in in these expressions and the question of choosing between black and African American — while noting that African American historian presents the same ambiguity as black historian.)
Class sniping at the NYT
April 1, 2009Letter in the 29 March New York Times Book Review:
Knitted Brows
To the Editor:
In his back-page essay about George Steiner (“Our Steiner Problem — and Mine,” March 15), Lee Siegel calls The New Yorker “middlebrow” and The Times Literary Supplement “bourgeois.” Thank heavens the Book Review is neither of these terrible things.
JIM HOLT
Manhattan
The actors in this little play:
Lee Siegel is a writer and cultural critic who has been published in, among other places, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.
Jim Holt is a writer and cultural critic who has been published in, among other places, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The London Review of Books. He is the author of the recent Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes.
John Hope Franklin
April 1, 2009(I post on this blog occasionally on matters that are not really about language, as in this case. If that’s not to your taste, pass on.)
The American historian John Hope Franklin, of Duke University, died on 25 March at the age of 94. There are obits and remembrances all over the place.
Some people are like the gingko tree: you think they’ve been around for an immense amount of time and will go on into the indefinite future. But of course they’re just people, not a species of tree, and their time comes to an end.
Franklin was a pioneer black presence in the elite American academy, perhaps best known for his book From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, first published in 1944. He combined a courtly manner — he was a truly charming man — with a steely resolve.
I met him when he was on the board of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, an institution for which I have great affection. Its current director is Claude Steele, who is, in fact, African American (which is, these days, both utterly inconsequential and also still enormously significant).