Archive for the ‘Usage advice’ Category

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The perils of advice

March 23, 2012

Blogger Brian Risk puzzled on 11/23/09 about pronoun case with including:

When you determine if you are to use “me” or “I” isn’t it the rule that you are supposed to ignore the words relating to other people? For example “John and me went swimming” is wrong because “me went swimming” isn’t how ya say it.

Here I am now really confused when it comes to sentences that have “everyone including”. To illustrate: “Everyone including me went to the show” is the way I’ve been saying it my whole life, but it just dawned on me how asinine it would be to say just “me went to the show.” However, “everyone including I went to the show” sounds equally asinine, but can this be right?

Risk has dimly remembered some (rather confused) advice about the case of conjoined pronouns and then extended that to examples with the preposition including (instead of the conjunction and); since it’s I went to the show and not me went to the show, he concludes that it should be everyone including I went to the show, despite the fact that this runs counter to his intuitions and his actual practice. Garbled theory trumps facts.

It appears that many others have gone down this path to everyone including I.

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Posted in Pronoun case, Usage advice | 8 Comments »

A double-barreled summative

March 20, 2012

From the lead story in the NYT on the 16th, “Karzai Insisting on U.S. Pullback to Bases by 2013”:

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai insisted Thursday that the United States confine its troops to major bases in Afghanistan by next year as the Taliban announced that they were suspending peace talks with the Americans, both of which served to complicate the Obama administration’s plans for an orderly exit from the country.

The grammatical point here has to do with the non-restrictive relative clause beginning with both of which (boldfaced above). The intended reference is to two situations, Karzai’s insistence and the Taliban’s announcement, the combination of which complicates the Obama administration’s plans. Neither of these situations is expressed in the sentence by a NP; instead, reference to the situations is via the VPs insisted … and announced … For many usage authorities, this sort of summative reference is unacceptable, because the pronoun which has no NP antecedent and is therefore declared to be unacceptably vague.

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Posted in Modification, Usage advice | 1 Comment »

Edward I as Oliver Cromwell

March 18, 2012

From Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words #778 of 3/17/12:

Miles Irving found this in an article on Dalhousie Castle in the Scotsman on 14 March: “The castle was visited by England’s King Edward I, also known as Longshanks, the Hammer of the Scots, and Oliver Cromwell.”

Three contributions to the problem: (a) the combination of a parenthetical or appositive construction with coordination, both of which use commas, but in two different ways; (b) the possible use of asyndetic coordination (lacking an explicit coordinator) in Longshanks, the Hammer of the Scots — it helps to know that these are two epithets for Edward I — though perhaps the writer’s intention was that the Hammer of the Scots is to be understood as in apposition to Longshanks, inside the parenthetical introduced by also known as (one parenthetical inside another is a potentially confusing configuration); and (c) the choice between using the serial, or Oxford, comma or avoiding it. The result is that even if you know that Oliver Cromwell is not an epithet of Edward I, but the name of an entirely different person, you are likely to get hung up on that absurd interpretation.

Some comments on this particular example, then an inventory of LLog and AZBlog postings on the Oxford / serial comma.

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Posted in Conditions in conflict, Links, Punctuation, Usage advice | 9 Comments »

Grammar shit

February 21, 2012

Something that’s been making the rounds recently, in various forms:

Two annoyed comments, and one admiring one.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Compounds, Spelling, Usage advice | 9 Comments »

bedbug / bed bug

February 17, 2012

In the midst of the NYC Bedbug Panic of 2010 — see Tara Parker-Pope, “The Curious World of Bedbug Research” in the Health section of the NYT blog 8/30/10 and the full story, “They Crawl, They Bite, They Baffle Scientists”, by Donald G. McNeil Jr. in  Science Times — came two comments in the blog on spelling:

[comment #19] I understand that entymologists refer to them as bed bugs (2 words) not bedbugs, as the author of this article uses. Apparently if the animal is an actual bug, it should be 2 words. Dragonfly is an example of an insect that is not really a fly, so they merge it into one word.

FROM TPP — Yes we have heard about this from a few readers. The Webster’s New World College Dictionary, which is our definitive source when something’s not specifically addressed by the NYT stylebook, spells it as one word. So for now, it’s bedbugs in the New York Times. But I agree the argument for bedbugs as two words is compelling. [AMZ: there is no argument here, only assertion.]

(Larry Horn on ADS-L waggishly suggested that entymologists constituted an instance of folk entomology. Certainly, some confusion between entomology and etymology is common, common enough to merit an entry in Brians. The orthographic combo entymology is also reasonably common, as you can see from a Google search — apparently as an error for entomology.)

[comment #74] Bed bugs is TWO words – not one. The general rule for writing out common names of insects is as follows. If the insect name is a misnomer (e.g., the dragonfly is NOT a fly and neither is a damselfly), then the whole name is written as one word. If it is not a misnomer, then it is written as two words (e.g., house fly, which is a real fly). The bed bug is a “true” bug and therefore is two words.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Ordinary vs. technical lg, Punctuation, Spelling, Usage advice | 5 Comments »

Punctuating relatives

November 23, 2011

The beginning of the Wikipedia entry on hair:

(1) Hair is a filamentous biomaterial, that grows from follicles found in the dermis.

At first this looks like that as a non-restrictive relativizer, but in fact which is not really an improvement:

(2) Hair is a filamentous biomaterial, which grows from follicles found in the dermis.

The intended reading is surely restrictive — corresponding to either of the alternatives:

(3a) Hair is a filamentous biomaterial that grows from follicles found in the dermis.

(3b) Hair is a filamentous biomaterial which grows from follicles found in the dermis.

Instead, (1) has the that from (3a) together with the punctuation of (2). How could that happen?

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Posted in Relativization, Syntax, Usage advice | 3 Comments »

that which won’t die

October 19, 2011

On his blog yesterday (in “That which is restrictive”), Stan Carey reported that on Monday

The Guardian’s Mind your language blog firmly advocated the that/which pseudo-rule.

(that is, use the relativizer that for restrictive relatives, which for non-restrictives). Carey attacked the pseudo-rule on the Guardian’s blog and expanded his critique in yesterday’s (excellent) posting on his own blog. His wry postscript:

My comments at The Guardian helped convert at least one editor. This morning, I received confirmation of a second. One more, and I’ll call it a trend.

We can hope. Though some days it seems like a hopeless battle. Especially while the pseudo-rule propagates itself through the schools.

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Posted in Relativization, Usage advice | 11 Comments »

More notional-subject NomConjObs

August 18, 2011

Recently collected instances of NomConjObjs (nominative conjoined objects — see the brief summary of the topic, bibliography, and list of blog postings here):

(1) Seer: Don’t be naive. I told you of my vision. Of you and I doing great things together. [episode of the tv show Charmed] (link)

(2) “I think it raises, at a very bottom line, real serious questions about government interfering with the ability of you and I to talk to each other,” Policinski [Gene Policinski, executive director of the First Amendment Center] says. “How far does that go? How far will the courts permit it?” [about Twitter blocking on BART in San Francisco] (link)

Add to these:

(3) You’re getting everything that you’ve heard Norm and I talk about…  (Greg Sherwood, in KQED begathon, 5/22/06)

(4) Michele Obama: “I think it was important for Jill and I to come now because we’re at the point where the relief efforts are underway but the attention of the world starts to wane a bit. And as we enter the rainy season and the hurricane season, you know, the issues are just going to become more compounded. And I think it was important for us to come and shed a light.” (link) [e-mail from Ben Zimmer 4/14/10 under header “FLOTUS NomConjObj”)

(5) “My poor friend,” she [Sonia Sotomayor] recalled years later in a speech honoring Mr. Cabranes, “he spent all that time listening to José and I dissect the Puerto Rican colonial spirit.” [David D. Kirkpatrick, “Judge’s Mentor: Part Guide, Part Foil”, NYT 6/22/09, p. 1]

All of these involve (coordinate) objects functioning as the notional subject of a following VP — a likely context for nominative case, since the cooordinate NP “feels” subject-like to many speakers, even more likely in a coordinate object, where nominative case is now widespread. (See brief discussion in connection with (5) here.)

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Posted in Coordination, Pronoun case, Usage advice | 7 Comments »

Thesaurisizing

July 4, 2011

Over on Language Log, Mark Liberman looks at a recent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon (also passed on to me by Paul Armstrong), in which a high school teacher, faced by thesaurisizing students, puckishly creates a fake thesaurus, only to have the students pick up her fancy-sounding inventions.

And a while back, Bruce Webster passed on to me a query about a recent book, The Well-Spoken Thesaurus, full of (generally bad) “Don’t say that, Instead say this” advice.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Usage, Usage advice | 10 Comments »

Prices continue to rise

April 20, 2011

This morning I puzzled over a report of a “rule” saying that the (intransitive) verb rise can occur only with animate subjects, so that Speed limits rise is incorrect (also Prices rise and The standard of living has risen). I appealed to readers for some insight into this nutty non-rule, adding that I recalled some past discussion of Prices rise, but couldn’t pin it down.

Jan Freeman came to the rescue, exclaiming:

This is the LL post I thought you must mean, but it’s yours! (On “rise” v. “increase”)

Oh my, the pitfalls of memory!

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Posted in Lexical semantics, Memory, Usage advice | 2 Comments »

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