Coverville is a regular podcast by Brian Ibbott (also available on KYCY in San Francisco, 1550 AM) that features cover versions of songs, usually in a thematic set. Program 576, back in May, was “Grammarville”, with songs whose titles seemed to Ibbott to offend the rules of English grammar.
Archive for the ‘Usage’ Category
Grammarville
June 19, 2009Quibbling
June 14, 2009Commenter Jim G on Mark Liberman’s recent Language Log posting about Charles Krauthammer and passive/active voice:
The Language Loggers have twice found my quibble-button today.
You could have gone all day without using ‘reference’ as a verb, and I’d have been happier as a result.
And Prof. Pullum had earlier upset my pepsia by writing [here] that he was going to ruminate over lunch, although he was probably going to ruminate the lunch itself while he was thinking.
My main purpose in this posting is to ask what the point of this quibbling is. But there are some other matters to clear up before that.
The decimators
June 3, 2009An Emily Flake cartoon from the New Yorker:
A long time ago I started a posting on decimate, which seemed not to have been discussed in any detail on Language Log. It began:
The Peevy
It’s time to institute an award for Great Language Peeves — peeves that are widespread, of long standing, and passionately advocated, in the face of solid long-time contrary practice by educated speakers and writers, not to mention a thoroughly specious rationale for the peeve. It’s a crowded field, but I think that for English, one item stands above all others: the verb decimate used to mean ‘destroy or eliminate a large part of’. Even more than speaker-oriented hopefully, even more than stranded prepositions and split infinitives, it deserves a Peevy for Lifetime Achievement.
X can’t mean Y
May 27, 2009Back on 23 May on ADS-L, I noted an occurrence (in speech) of “The military can do so much”, clearly intended to mean, in the context, ‘the military can do only so much’ (i.e., not everything, or not a lot, while “the military can do so much” otherwise conveys ‘the military can do a lot’). Not long after, a poster wrote:
If “can do so much” can actually mean “can do only so much”, then perhaps Churchill really meant “Never have only so few owed only so much to only so many”? I don’t think so. The sentence really needs “only” in there to make sense.
This is one version of the “X can’t mean Y” (sometimes “X doesn’t mean Y”) reaction to reports that some people sometimes use X to mean Y: flat rejection of the pairing of form X with meaning Y, usually on the basis that the objector wouldn’t use X that way (grammatical egocentrism). Note that the objection is framed as statement of fact (about the language in general, not just about the objector’s variety of the language), though actually it serves as a normative judgment (that X shouldn’t be used to mean Y).
Singular they comes to Iowa
April 24, 2009… along with same-sex marriage. From the new “Application to Marry in Iowa” found on the Des Moines Register’s site, in the “Affidavit of competent and disinterested person”:
“I, ______________ affirm that I am acquainted with _______________, and they are ____ years of age; and that I am acquainted with_______________, and they are ____ years of age.”
This gets around the awkwardness of he or she or he/she or (s)he. Of course, this person (with is) would also have been possible.
(Hat tip to Steven Messamer.)
Ask AZ: many in affirmative statements
April 10, 2009Frédéric Dichtel asks, in a comment on a totally unrelated posting of mine (and also on Facebook):
Could you possibly devote one on the use of the unmodified quantifier many in affirmative statements?
The traditional rule states that this use belongs to formal style. But what about the following sentences extracted from the COCA American Corpus? Aren’t they neutral in style?
Cryptochromes were discovered in plants many years ago.
In many ways, my family’s story is universal.
There are many risks for any outside company.Could it be that the formality of many differs according to whether it is subject, object etc.?
Many readers will be unfamiliar with the “traditional rule” Dichtel refers to. It comes from usage advice in the ESL literature (so it’s significant that Dichtel is not a native speaker of English). In this literature, writers are told to use many (or much) when it’s modified by a degree adverbial (very, so, that, how, etc.); this is in effect a grammatical requirement, since the alternative a lot isn’t available in this context. Writers are advised to use many (and much) in questions and under negation (in preference to a lot) —
Were there many people at the party?
There weren’t many people at the party.
but otherwise (that is, in affirmative statements) writers are told that many and much are formal in style, while a lot is neutral.
The advice literature meant for native speakers tells a somewhat different story. This literature generally misses the connection with “negative polarity” contexts (questions and negation) — not surprisingly, because much of this literature maintains that a lot is informal in style, too informal for use in formal writing (a claim that might have been true at the turn of the 20th century, but is not true now).
The case of much vs. a lot is treated at some length (with links to Language Log postings and other literature) here; much of this carries over to many, though there are some differences. In particular, the “formality effect” seems stronger for much than for many, though for both there are contexts in which they can occur unmodified in affirmative statements without conveying formality of style, as in Dichtel’s examples from COCA. (I have speculated that there are indeed differences according to syntactic function (subject vs. object, in particular), and differences according to the verb in the sentence, but these speculations aren’t easy to investigate.)
More 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.
Act of show
March 26, 2009From the Palo Alto Daily News of 21 March 2009, “Palo Alto shooting suspect still at large”, by Diana Samuels, p. 3:
Police said Gil-Fernandez claimed affiliation with the Norteno street gang, though that claim may have been mostly an act of show in Palo Alto, where the Norteno gang doesn’t have much of a presence.
This is the mass noun show ‘display’, also seen in “That was all show (and no substance)”, “That was nothing but show”, and “That was just show” (notice the subtle contrast with “That was just a show”, with its greater sense of pretense). But “act of show” was new to me.
Linking i
March 22, 2009Geoff Pullum’s Language Log posting “Retching schedule” elicited comments on each of the pronunciations that drove the Guardian‘s Tim Footman to displays of anger and disgust: mischievious, schedule with [sk-], somethink. I had something to say on the first of these, which I’ll expand on here.
X-men
March 19, 2009Robbo comments on my “first female congresswoman” posting:
This one drives me up the wall because I’m in the military.
Why are these are OK: ‘airmen’, ’seamen’, and ‘midshipmen’; but yet we have ’servicemen and women’ — which is too cumbersome, so we just use ‘troops’. Can we not get the idea that a ‘chairman’ can be a woman? Or a congressman? What about yeoman or alderman? Truly we can are enlightened enough to accept a historical title to be filled by either gender?
[The last sentence has a nice error — “we can are enlightened enough” — that’s probably a cutnpaste error, the result of shifting from an original formulation, probably with “we are enlightened enough”, to a somewhat more hedged formulation with “can”, but without fixing the “are”.]
This is a separate issue from the one I talked about in my posting, which was about the error “first female congresswoman” for the intended “first black congresswoman”, in a caption.