Chris Ambidge wrote me a little while back about having come across a photo in the Washington Post (which I can no longer find) of the unveiling of a photo of Shirley Chisholm, described as “marking the 40th anniversary of her swearing in as the first female congresswoman”. Apparently they meant “first black congresswoman” — that is, first Representative (or congressperson) to have been both female and black.
The redundant “first female congresswoman” has some currency in the media, however.
The warning on the site — a notice of possible “adult” content — goes:
(1) This blog is not suitable for viewing by anyone.
Ouch. The reading I got immediately was that anyone was a “negative polarity” any-expression, so that (1) is (truth-functionally) equivalent to
(2.1) This blog is suitable for viewing by no one.
or
(2.2) There is no one for whom this blog is suitable for viewing.
or possibly
(2.3) Pick someone, anyone; this blog is not suitable for viewing by that person.
But that would be a silly thing for a blogger to say; it warns everyone away.
So the intended interpretation had anyone as a universal any-expression, with (1) truth-functionally equivalent to
(3.1) This blog is not suitable for viewing by everyone.
or possibly
(3.2) This blog is not suitable for viewing by just anyone.
(1) is in fact potentially ambiguous between the ‘everyone is excluded’ reading and the ‘some people are excluded’ reading, but, unfortunately (and for reasons I don’t fully understand) many readers are likely to get the wrong — not the intended — reading.
We’ve been in this neighborhood before.
What I noticed first about the language in this television ad for the Prayer Cross (from Montebello Collections) — viewable here — was the reference to the cross as a “spiritual accessory”. Then I noticed a modifier in the ad:
When held up to the light, the entire Lord’s Prayer becomes instantly and almost miraculously visible.
That is, when the cross is held up to the light, the entire Lord’s Prayer etc. etc. The cross is mentioned in the previous context, of course, and it’s obviously topical in the context. So though the subjectless predicative adjunct would be labeled a “dangling modifier” by many people (because it doesn’t pick up the referent for the missing subject in the default way, from the subject of the main clause), it’s likely to escape most people’s notice (as it did mine for some time), because it’s so easily interpretable.
Gene Buckley writes to grouse about this message from the Linguistic Society of America:
XXX has applied for a 2009 LSA Institute Fellowship and has provided your name as a recommender. For your convenience, we are only accepting applications online.
How is this limitation on the means of response for our convenience? I suppose that the person who wrote this felt that a straightforward “we are only accepting applications online” would have been too blunt, so that something needed to be added for the sake of politeness. There are several options — “we are able to accept only online applications”, for instance — but the writer fell back on a formula that is widely used to preface announcements that might be unwelcome to the recipient.
It’s first cousin to “courtesy call” used of telemarketers’ sales calls.
On the 14th, Ron Butters posted to ADS-L with a complaint about his AOL spell- and grammar-checker. He typed
I will have to convince the writer to give us a quick revision of her article.
and the grammar-checker spit (or perhaps spat) back that this use of convince had an “inappropriate preposition”, and suggested persuade instead.
Butters said he vaguely remembered
that some old-time prescriptivists condemn the use of “convince” as a verb meaning “persuade,” but this seems bizarrely old-fashioned–and “preposition” has nothing to do with it.
The proscription against convince with an infinitival VP complement is in fact a “zombie rule” (like the ones discussed here), a proscription that has died in practice but continues to lumber about in odd corners of usage advice.
Jan Freeman’s Boston Globe column on usage advice that hasn’t aged well includes several items that are simply astounding to modern speakers and readers (sleuth can only mean ‘track, footprint’, according to some people), but there are some others that have trudged on, zombie-like, to recent times. (And then there’s have got / ‘ve got vs. have, where there are complex dialectal differences in usage.) Three in particular: blame on, love for like, and graduate from.
From Jan Freeman’s compendium of usage advice that hasn’t aged well:
Very pleased. “Don’t say ‘I am very pleased to see you.’ Say ‘I am very much pleased to see you, or I am pleased to see you.’ Note. – Very cannot directly modify a verb, and, hence, not its past participle. ‘I am very delighted,’ ‘I am very disappointed,’ etc., are incorrect expressions.” (Josephine Turck Baker, “Correct English, How to Use It,” 1907)
This was a new one for me. But it’s an interesting example of a proscription with a “logical” basis, one that arises by reasoning from “first principles”.
On p. 1 of the 7 January 2009 NYT, the first sentence of “Purple Heart Is Ruled Out for Traumatic Stress” by Lizette Alvarez and Erik Eckholm:
The Pentagon has decided that it will not award the Purple Heart, the hallowed medal given to those wounded or killed by enemy action, to war veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder because it is not a physical wound.
I had a moment of reading “because it is not a physical wound” as modifying “who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder”, which was a bizarre thought. Problem with modifier attachment! “Because it is not a physical wound” is supposed to modify the whole “it will not award the Purple Heart … to war veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder”. I read it as having “low attachment”, but the writers intended “high attachment” — an intention that could have been made clearer by a comma setting off “because it is not a physical wound”.