May 25, 2012, 12:01 am
By Lucy Ferriss
Following up on my colleague Ben Yagoda’s post on the latest battle in the –iptivist language wars, I’d like to play a game, or take a survey—call it what you will. Below is a fairly random selection of sentences from The New York Times, a publication chosen mostly because I read it every day. (Not out of elitism, but because I live not far from New York, and because it contains some of the best newspaper writing in the country.) Because these sentences were published in one of the “registers” to which Ben referred, I suspect they rub some folks the wrong way. But maybe not. Here they are, with various options for your response:
1 = This sentence commits an egregious grammatical, vocabulary, or syntactical blunder, and the copy editor should be chastised if not fired.
2 = This sentence contains a grammatical, vocabulary, or syntactical error that is a symptom of our…
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May 24, 2012, 12:01 am
By Geoffrey Pullum
Language use in early human societies, tens of thousands of years ago, was very different from what we have today. Essentially all linguistic communication was face-to-face, symmetrical, and personal, conducted within a hunter-gatherer band or tribe or clan of at most a few hundred mutually acquainted people. Humans typically talked only to other members of their group. They used unamplified voice, eye contact, and perhaps hand signs. No writing, no mass communication.
Have things ever changed. For a year or two I have been receiving continuous, unsolicited, unwanted, asymmetrical linguistic communications from a stranger on another continent whom I have never met. A robot in the service of someone named Scott Reed has been hounding me with e-mails telling me that Scott has invited me to join his professional network on LinkedIn and wants me to accept the invitation and sign up.
I …
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May 23, 2012, 12:01 am
By Carol Saller
My walk to work takes me down a charming 1890s street that is under constant renewal, and over the years I’ve enjoyed watching the restoration of several frame cottages and a couple of large Victorian beauties. Yesterday I stopped to watch some workers tear off a roof, and I wondered why it was being done several months into the rehab instead of at the beginning. Does that mean water was leaking all this time into the new interior? Maybe someone can enlighten me.
In any case, it reminded me of a question I get from nearly every writer early in the process of publishing a book, sometimes before the manuscript is even edited: When will I see the book cover?
The answer is always disappointing: “Much later.”
There are reasons why a book’s cover design comes late in the publication schedule. First, designers know from experience that a book cover’s central visual…
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May 22, 2012, 12:01 am
By Ben Yagoda
The sign that got a kid suspended last year. HMU="Hit me up," i.e., "Get back to me, if you would, through your favorite means of electronic communication."
I was all ears when this story came on public radio’s Marketplace on Friday (and not just because the correspondent has killer vocal fry). Rather, the piece confirmed to me that, when it comes to formal high-school dances in the spring, the definite article is definitely not the bomb.
Back when Archie Andrews was in the first blush of youth and starting to roam the halls of Riverdale High School, his thought was always to escort Veronica to the prom. But over the years, the the has been jettisoned. That was certainly the case with my kids, when this odd institution came on their radar about 10 years ago.
At this point, among the actual…
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May 21, 2012, 12:01 am
By Allan Metcalf
Adam Naming the Creatures, 1847 Currier & Ives print
It has been vulgarly claimed that prostitution is the oldest profession. Wrong! It’s lexicography.
Here’s proof:
As we have learned, perhaps in elementary school, a word isn’t a word unless it’s in the dictionary.
If it’s not a word, you can’t use it.
Therefore, you need the dictionary before you can utter a word. So dictionary making has to be among the oldest of professions, if not the oldest.
This logic, incidentally, solves the question of the origin of human language, a question that has vexed linguists ever since Darwin proposed his theory of evolution.
Linguists know that languages change drastically over the course of a few thousand years, so drastically that there’s no telling what the original human language was…
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May 18, 2012, 12:01 am
By Ben Yagoda
The opening of Thomas Carlyle's 1836 novel (in English "The Tailor Re-Tailored"). Language and clothing are more alike than they may at first appear to be.
I have a friend who holds a named professorship at a prestigious liberal-arts college. He owns a sharp-looking black suit, with thin lapels, that he often wears to conferences. My friend enjoys good beer. One day, in search of a six-pack, he journeyed to a nearby working-class tavern that sells a wide variety of beer. As he was paying for his purchase, another customer looked him over and said, “Are you an undertaker?” My friend said, “Excuse me?” The man repeated, “Are you an undertaker?” Recounting the incident to me, my friend had no idea if his interlocutor was being funny or serious.
I was reminded of this story by Joan Acocella’s New Yorker review of Henry…
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May 17, 2012, 12:01 am
By Allan Metcalf
Alas!
No, that’s not the four-letter word in decline. It’s “ain’t.”
Unlike other proscribed four-letter words, “ain’t” isn’t obscene, blasphemous, or insulting. And yet in its heyday, not too long ago, in some circles it could provoke a reaction even stronger than the f-word.
What reaction? Well, according to one version of the jump-rope rhyme:
Don’t say ain’t or your mother will faint,
your father will fall in a bucket of paint,
your sister will cry, your brother will die,
your dog will call the FBI.
Why? Well, according to another version of the rhyme,
Don’t say ain’t, your mother will faint,
your father will step in a bucket of paint,
because there ain’t no word such as ain’t.
So proscribed was “ain’t” that like other four-letter words having to do with certain intimate activities, supposedly it wasn’t in the dictionary….
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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 …
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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 …
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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-…
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