May 16, 2012, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
I discovered this intriguing comment in the readers’ responses to my colleague Geoffrey Pullum’s brief note in Language Log, responding in its own way to the news from Slate that a significant number of Swedes have been attempting to get the neologism hen accepted as an alternative for han and hon, or he and she.
The debate on this subject seems endless and traverses gender references in languages as diverse as French and Mandarin. As I am neither a linguist nor versed in non-European languages, I won’t attempt a summary of the discussion. Suffice to say that not only since the advent of 20th century feminism, but also since medieval times, usage of gender-neutral pronoun alternatives have been both advanced and, in some cases, put into relatively widespread use.
The fuss over hen has to do, not with its acceptance as an “in-between” pronoun, similar to the oft-discussed …
Read More
May 15, 2012, 12:01 am
By Geoffrey Pullum
People are surprisingly free with barefaced lies when the topic is language. A commenter in The Washington Post, purportedly commenting on an article about hopefully (though flagrantly off-thread) asserted:
If usage determines correctness, then the split infinitive is now correct. I have not seen a “whole” infinitive in years, particularly from “journalists.”
Not a single unsplit infinitive, in years? I browsed a few other articles from that day’s Post, and found that journalists in news stories didn’t seem to split infinitives at all. In hundreds of infinitival clauses I read not a single one with an adverb after the to.
Google searches for plausible word sequences revealed that split infinitives do occur on the washingtonpost.com site (as one would expect: Placing adverbs between to and the verb has always been grammatical, and remains so, as all serious usage manuals agree—the …
Read More
May 14, 2012, 12:01 am
By Carol Saller
Photo by Hans Gerhard Meier
If after reading Parts 1 and 2 of this series you’ve decided that a computer isn’t competent to index your book and that hiring a professional isn’t an option, and if you’ve never written an index before, you might appreciate some advice. Here are some answers to questions I frequently hear from writers contemplating the DIY solution.
Q. How elaborate an index should I make?
A. Browse through the book and put yourself in the place of a reader or teacher or student and imagine what kinds of things you might want to locate. Consider on a sliding scale where the book falls between a one-time read and a reference book, and provide less or more detail accordingly.
Q. I have never done an index before. I am becoming worried about how difficult, complicated, and time-…
Read More
May 11, 2012, 12:01 am
By Geoffrey Pullum
U.S.S.R. postage stamp of extraterrestrial satellite; grammar understanding and textbooks are similarly last century.
The vast number of books, pamphlets, articles, columns, blogs, and other study aids on English grammar are virtually all afflicted with a single problem. Using loose, mushy, meaning-related notions, they make statements that are (i) stated in essentially identical terms everywhere (it resembles mass plagiarism), and (ii) almost universally accepted, especially by educated people, yet (iii) patently false, as even a minute of reflection reveals.
The minority belief that intelligent aliens visit our planet is nowhere near as strange. (i) No real consensus emerges from the reports about aliens given by those few who claim to have encountered them; (ii) the minority of Americans who…
Read More
May 9, 2012, 8:28 pm
By Carol Saller
Photo by Philip Dean
Last week when I listed various reasons why you should not allow a computer to write the index for your monograph, I failed to mention one: That is, you might want to do it yourself because it’s potentially a lot of fun.
I say “potentially” because it is also potentially infuriating, but never mind that for now. Today we’re all about fun.
Many readers are unaware of the mischief book indexers get up to, because few of us read through indexes from beginning to end. Rather, we dip in, skim to what we want, and wing back to the text. So the odds of landing on a prank entry are not high to begin with, and often rogue entries are cleverly placed where you aren’t likely to look. Would you look under “stupid pet tricks” in a book about artificial intelligence?*
In 2009…
Read More
May 9, 2012, 12:01 am
By Ben Yagoda
Long before Naomi Schaefer Riley’s recent Brainstorm post for The Chronicle attacking the discipline of black studies (the controversy over which seemed to reach some closure yesterday), I’d been thinking about racists. The word, that is, not the people. Certainly, the word was heavily represented in the reaction to Riley. A contributor over at the Innovations blog, Marybeth Gasman, called Riley’s post “uninformed, dismissive, and downright racist.” And Brainstorm’s Laurie Essig wondered, “Is Brainstorm racist for publishing racist attacks?”
But the word was on my radar before all this. Specifically, I was picking up on how frequently and in what manner it’s being used by the mainstream press. Consider these recent headlines:
FANS LET LOOSE WITH RACIST COMMENTS AFTER LOSS—Associated Press online, April 26, 2012
‘NATIONAL REVIEW’ FIRES JOHN DERBYSHIRE: Move comes after he…
Read More
May 8, 2012, 12:01 am
By Allan Metcalf
Unless you have several hundred dollars to spare, and a foot of shelf space for five 8¾-by-11¼-inch volumes of a close to a thousand pages each, you aren’t likely to own a copy of the Dictionary of American Regional English. But you might find it worth your while to visit your local public or university library to take a look at the 60,000 rare and unusual words inside.
DARE reached a milestone this spring: publication of Volume V, completing the alphabet A through Z of words used differently in different parts of the country.
Last week, in celebration of that milestone—nearly 50 years after work on the dictionary began, more than 25 years after publication of the first volume—the dictionary staff at the University of Wisconsin staged a “symposium” (learned academic gabfest) and a “shindy”: a party or gathering, especially a noisy one with dancing. You will grasp…
Read More
May 7, 2012, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
Spending a couple of weeks in Pakistan, especially in areas near to the tribal belt and the Khyber Pass toward Afghanistan, is bound to be enlightening at this moment in history. I was in Lahore and Peshawar for two weeks in April, researching background material for a novel, and learned more about disparities in culture than years of reading books had taught me. Only a handful of these insights bear directly on language, but I’ll take advantage of this post to note them in brief.
•Linguae Francae. The national language of Pakistan is Urdu, a mish-mash of Hindi and local dialects, and nearly everyone speaks it. In Lahore, they also speak Punjabi, which is related to Urdu but not the same, and they’ll often switch between one and the other. Educated classes also read and write English, but the driver who took me to all my appointments in Lahore spoke and wrote solely Urdu. Yet…
Read More
May 4, 2012, 12:01 am
By Allan Metcalf
Illustration by Nan Lawson
Many words belong to all speakers of a language. But some are differentiated by region, ethnic group, social class, gender, age group, occupation—or by generation.
In their book Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069, published more than 20 years ago but still largely on target with its observations, William Strauss and Neil Howe proposed that each generation has distinctive attitudes, different from the generations before and after. Here are Strauss and Howe’s names and dates of recent generations:
Lost Generation, born between 1883 and 1900
GI Generation, born 1901-24
Silent Generation, born 1925-42
Boom Generation, born 1943-60
Thirteenth Generation, born 1961-81
Millennial Generation, born 1982-2004
Homeland Generation, born 2005-
In 500 …
Read More
May 3, 2012, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
A new parlor game has emerged thanks to Ben Greenman and his colleagues at The New Yorker, who recently initiated a Twitter-based game called “Questioningly.” They began by asking people to suggest a word that might be eliminated from the English language, on the theory that we have (at least) one word too many. The results of their contest were hilarious, not only because of the variety of reasons for nixing a word—triteness, political correctness, ugly sound, superfluity, misuse, sledgehammer use, arrogance, and so on—but because readers were so vehement about the need to execute a word. One proposed “God,” “because he doesn’t exist”; another “he,” to “realize how women have felt these past 20,000 years.” Through a link to Ben Zimmer’s post on a similar topic, I learned that there’s a Facebook group called “I HATE the word MOIST!” where you can go to…
Read More
Follow Lingua Franca through your favorite RSS reader: SUBSCRIBE