Monthly Archives: December 2011

December 19, 2011, 7:37 pm

More on ‘So’

So. That’s no way to start a sentence, much less answer a question. Or is it? “So,” as Ben Yagoda wrote on this blog last month, is a word in transition, taking on newly expanded, assertively vague meanings. Its use as a sentence opener (“So, I just went to Mexico”) instead of a conjunction (“We were hungry, so we ate”) is on the rise, though no one agrees on where it originates or exactly what it means. Jonathan Lethem described his character Perkus Tooth’s use of it in his 2009 novel, Chronic City, after Tooth starts a conversation by saying, “So, I’ll lend you my own copy of Echolalia, even though I never lend anything. Because I think you ought to see it.”

“This ‘so’ of Perkus’s—his habit of introducing any subject as if in resumption of earlier talk,” Lethem’s narrator explains, “wasn’t in any way coercive. Rather, it was as if Perkus…

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December 18, 2011, 7:53 pm

It’s Tebow Time . . . Maybe

By Allan Metcalf

@Tebowing Nation/Facebook

To use a football metaphor, it’s the fourth quarter of 2011 and the clock is ticking. Less than two weeks left, and no timeouts. In other words, it’s Tebow time.

Thanks to the astonishing fourth-quarter exploits of Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow (right), his name has become a word—not only a noun, but also a verb.

And that could lead to a last-minute come-from-behind victory for Tebow when the American Dialect Society chooses its Word of the Year 2011 in Portland, Ore., on January 6.

The noun, in the combination Tebow time, means the moment when a heretofore indifferent performer amazingly snatches victory from the jaws of defeat. The verb, to Tebow, means to perform that feat. We find that verb, for example, in these recent fan comments on the Broncos’ Web site:…

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December 16, 2011, 12:01 am

Pronoun Agreement Out the Window?

By Geoffrey Pullum

I exchanged a few e-mails about grammar with a woman I have never met, who I will call Mary, since that is not her name. In one of my messages I happened to make this passing reference to someone:

[1]	She would never be acerbic to anybody until they stepped over the line and really deserved it.

To my amazement, Mary’s reply quoted this back and added a comment:

I avoid having pronouns not agreeing with antecedents. I guess this rule is out the window in Scotland too. No way shall I ever be convinced to change this in my writing or listening.

And I thought, wow. (Or words to that effect; I’m not sure you can actually think a wow.) We professors don’t have a corner on arrogance, do we?

Consider Mary’s implied claim. Here’s me, a native speaker with a Ph.D. in syntax, co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, head of a large department of…

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December 15, 2011, 12:01 am

Kindness of Strangers

By Ben Yagoda

When I was working on a book on the history of The New Yorker magazine, I approached dozens of people for interviews. Almost everybody said yes, including a soberingly long lost of notables who have since passed on, including Emily Hahn, William Steig, William Maxwell, Joseph Mitchell, Brendan Gill, Pauline Kael, and Whitney Balliett. A few people didn’t respond (pocket vetoing the request, as it were), but only one explicitly said, in the manner of Bartleby the Scrivener, that he would prefer not to.

That was John Updike. He wrote me a postcard (one of his favorite means of communication, I later learned) saying that he had no objection in principle to interviews, in general or for my project in particular, but when he agreed to them, he invariably found that when the appointed day arrived, there was something else he would rather do. He softened the blow by adding that if I cared to…

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December 14, 2011, 12:01 am

Include Needful Words

By Lucy Ferriss

A close friend told me a few months ago that her 14-year-old son was reading Infinite Jest for fun. “He comes into the kitchen and says, ‘Listen to this, Mom!’ and then he quotes a passage from page 546 or something.” She sighed. “I never made it past page 200.”

We think of ourselves as living in the age of the excerpt. When pressed, most professors I know admit that they assign fewer pages of reading now than they did, say, 20 years ago. We share these statistics and sigh. Pressed further, we admit to skimming more ourselves, to reading short online articles rather than the lengthier printed versions, to choosing our leisure reading based in part on the lean word count of the book.

The odd paradox of this impression of the dumbed-down reading world is that young people seem to be gravitating toward doorstoppers. And reading them. The New York Times best-seller list for…

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December 13, 2011, 12:01 am

Quoting Well, Part 3: Dot Dot Dot

By Carol Saller

Today, in the last of a series of posts about quoting, I tackle ellipsis—that is, the omission of words, phrases, or longer passages from quotations. The best scholarly writers take care when using ellipsis. First, they use it with restraint and honesty; second, they render it clearly by means of punctuation.

While the first concern is more important, readers here are not likely to need my advice on how not to join two unrelated quotations to manufacture a connection the author didn’t intend. Or how not to, say, quote a presidential candidate verbatim while omitting the context that would make it clear that he was quoting someone else at the time, in disagreement. Most writers know how to be honest; it’s merely a matter of choosing to do it.

When it comes to punctuating, however, even writers who choose to follow convention may be flummoxed by how to integrate ellipsis dots (…

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December 12, 2011, 4:12 am

From Newt to Tweet: 2 Decades of Words of the Years

By Allan Metcalf

As I mentioned in my last post, on January 5, 2012, in Portland, Ore., the American Dialect Society will choose the Word of the Year for 2011. Various others will already have chosen their own Words of the Year, but the American Dialect Society’s is the last word in more ways than one—and also the first, having begun the practice in 1990.

The chosen words don’t necessarily have lasting significance. Rather, they provide snapshots of the preoccupations of the years.

Nowadays everyone, it seems, has an “X of the Year,” but Time magazine was first with its Person (formerly Man) of the Year, and ADS was first with its Word of the Year. The decision makers for each “OTY” are completely different, but their choices over the past two decades have sometimes run curiously close.

The Bush family has been prominent in those connections. In 1990, when Time chose George H.W….

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December 9, 2011, 4:00 am

Fisher Monarchs

By Lucy Ferriss

We’ve come a long way, baby, and then we’ve gotten stuck. In academe particularly, gender-neutral language is the norm: “chair” not “chairman,” “first-year” not “freshman,” “female student” not “co-ed,” “ombudsperson,” and so on. Sure, cultural stereotypes can override these conscious language decisions. My two sons, for instance, used to insist that a mail carrier (pronounced “cawiwehw” when they couldn’t do r’s) had to be male, though a police officer could be a woman. (Go figure.) And when I tried substituting “she” for “he” to designate some of those anthropomorphic characters in their picture books, they stopped me to ask “Why’s it a girl?”—the rule apparently being that elephants or kangaroos could be female only if they were mothers or causing trouble.

And sure, certain pockets of language resist gender neutrality. Pronoun…

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December 8, 2011, 4:09 am

Words of the Years

By Allan Metcalf

If you want to know about American English, look no further than the American Dialect Society. Since 1889, it has been the leading (well, the only) association of experts who study the English language in North America—not just dialects but everything else.

Most ADS members are academics, but anyone with an interest in American English dialects, history, usage, and vocabulary is welcome to join. Here’s a link to the Society’s Web page, with information about membership, meetings, publications—and the Word of the Year.

Right after the end of each year, ADS holds its annual meeting in association with the much larger meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. That’s the professional society for professional linguists.

So it’s experts on American English and on language who will be gathered in Portland, Ore., this coming January 5-8 for the ADS and LSA annual meetings….

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December 7, 2011, 4:00 am

Quoting Well, Part 2: When It’s OK, and Not OK, to Meddle

By Carol Saller

Part 1 of my advice on quoting covered practices widely accepted in scholarly writing. Also well accepted, but perhaps not so well understood, is that it is permissible to make certain changes in quoted text.

The suggestion of tinkering with the original text may strike writers as confusing and dangerous, since the first rule of quoting is to quote verbatim. Altering the original, we are taught, is for the lazy, devious, or even criminal. All true.

Nonetheless, there are some alterations writers and editors routinely and safely make to quotations because they serve the reader without violating the original text.

—Footnote or endnote numbers. Normal practice is to drop note callouts from quoted text without comment. If it’s essential to include the note text as well, introduce it as a separate quotation.

—Capitalization. Quoters normally change the initial casing of the …