Language Log

Don't miss another excellent takedown of the Da Vinci Code by a renowned linguist: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.html

#0 is correct. I'll recommend this piece on S&W [1] and specifically on point #5 [2]. These style guides, especially points #1 through #6, came about from bureaucrats who were essentially filibustering or otherwise obfuscating in their writing. The root problem there was not the long-winded writing, it was their intent to hide bad things. If you can make sure you're not carrying water for corrupt officials, you best strategy is to try to write natural prose. Yes, do look for wordy phrases or cliches, but don't obsess over adverbs or the passive voice. [1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=15509 [2] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003366.html

David Rock cites a very very similar fact in "Your Brain at Work." I only have the audiobook currently or else I'd quote directly, but the gist is that distractions from overcommunication temporarily drop IQs an average of 10 points: 5 for women, 15 for men, supposedly. The study originally revolved around email, and presumably text/sms/chat in the 13 years since the study). Interestingly, following up on the quote he gave led me to this blog with an exchange [1] between the blog author and the original study author. [1] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002493.html

> because Linux has a history of being different for the sake of being different. Heh. I get the same feeling about git when I'm working with hg, the Canada[1] of git. For svn, darcs, bzr, and Mercurial, "revert" means to change the working directory to the repo state. Why did git use it to mean creating a new commit that undoes an old commit? There's no use rallying against the majority software when it doesn't follow the standard. When you're the majority, you just get to make your own standards because you are the standard. BSD being the Canada of Linux, it's a little funny to hear them complaining about things that Linux does. -- [1] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005497.html

Do you have any linguists consulting / on staff? Bryan Garner might be a careful compiler but doesn't seem to be a linguist and seems to be a traditionalist who makes simple errors. e.g. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001869.html "His chapter is unfortunately full of repetitions of stupidities of the past tradition in English grammar — more of them than you could shake a stick at." http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5630 "So why did Bryan Garner, a highly intelligent and insightful person, make this elementary error?" http://www.arrantpedantry.com/2007/01/02/editing-chicago/ "A good editor should know that Bryan Garner’s take on the subject is misleading and incorrect. It’s become apparent to me that many of the self-appointed guardians of the language don’t even know what it is they’re guarding." etc.etc.

For every "literally" there's a "really." http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2005/11/the_word_we_l… http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002611.html

Both this and the article remind me of a strange Google Translate problem where the translation of "Austria" varied, depending on how many exclamation marks it was followed by: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005485.html

http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/09/agreement-over-collective-n… > In British English it’s absolutely fine to treat most collective nouns as either singular or plural – you can say my husband’s family is very religious or my husband’s family are very religious. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001874.html etc. With something like collective nouns it's probably wrong to make blanket statements about correct and incorrect, even if you're a prescriptivist not descriptivist. EDIT: And while I love (but am hopeless with) English usage this is the least interesting bit of the submitted article.

Thou comest at the king, as it is said, and thou had best not miss: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.html

I present to you my favorite blog post of all-time, The Dan Brown Code: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.html

Choices is countable, so thats "fewer choices" not "less choices". Actually, that's a widespread misconception. See here, for example: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.html (edit: tl;dr: "less has been used of countables since the time of King Alfred the Great", i.e. since before English existed) That's a linguist's take on it - you can find many more by googling [fewer less languagelog] or similar.

As great as Adam and Joe are, the term pre-dates their podcasts. I always thought it was coined on the language log, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000018.html

You’re in good company. The rising tone at the end of a sentence used in a non-interrogative context is called uptalk or a high rising terminal [1]. Its increased use has been a far-reaching dialect shift that has been ongoing for a couple of decades now. The New York Times published an article on it in 1993 [2] and just recently another [3] with a good overview of how its use has mostly spread into every corner of the American populace. Perhaps my favorite discussion of uptalk is an analysis of some of George W. Bush’s speeches in which he extensively employs it [4]. ### [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal [2] http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/15/magazine/on-language-like-uptalk.htm… [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-trendsette… [4] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002708.html

No. Your formulation is not incorrect, but pg's is correct as it stands. The word "less" has been used in a range of English dialects for both countable and measurable things, for more than a thousand years. See e.g. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.html for some excellent discussion on this issue, and actual corpus data to back it up.

Speaking of comparatives, a fellow grad student here at the University of Maryland is working on a phenomena called the comparative illusion, which involve sentences like the following: More people have been to Russia than I have. Think about that one for a bit. LL did a post on it, btw: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000860.html

I was going to quote one of my favorite lines by Churchill: This is the sort of English up with which I will not put. But I figured why not check the Google first, just in case. First thing I see is an old post from the inestimable Language Log arguing that the quote isn't Churchill's at all: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001715.html Basically, if you're famous, all the best jokes get attributed to you.

I follow a similar approach but maybe more extreme : whenever possible, I use "YESTERDAY'S TECHNOLOGY TOMORROW" It's nicely presented on http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000606.html > I want yesterday's technology tomorrow. I want old things that have stood the test of time and are designed to last so that I will still be able to use them tomorrow. I don't want tomorrow's untested and bug-ridden ideas for fancy new junk made available today because although they're not ready for prime time the company has to hustle them out because it's been six months since the last big new product announcement. Call me old-fashioned, but I want stuff that works. The same thing is true with free software: I prefer to use the terminal. In the terminal, I prefer to run bash and vim, not zsh and neovim. When I write code, I've found C (and perl!) to be preferable, because "You can freeze it for a year and then pick it back up right where you left off." There are rare exceptions, when what's new is so much better than the previous solution (ex: Wayland) that it makes sense to move. However, that should be rare, and you should be very sure. If you think you made the wrong choice, you can always move back to your previous choice: after playing with ZFS for a few years, I'm moving some volumes back to NTFS. Someone mentions how the author choice (python2) is getting harder to install. Cold blooded software works best when done with multiplatform standards, so I'd suggest…

Thanks. While I've heard people say those things I don't recall being taught them or having read them anywhere authoritative, though I think Strunk & White recommended something in particular for less/fewer. > Split infinitives: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/grammar/splitinf.html From the citation: There is no clear support for the people who insist that a ‘split infinitive’ is a grammatical error. Even quite conservative grammar and usage books agree that it is not ... > Less vs fewer: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.h... The cite recommends a usage manual, Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage, and says that book rejects the common advice/rules on about less & fewer. --------- Those two cites, at least, seem to be examples of the opposite of your claim; they say these aren't rules but misunderstandings (or possibly the second cite says that one is obsolete) and that authorities reject them. Even if they are rules, that doesn't make them arbitrary. For example, some could be obsolete, useful in a time and place. Some may be useful for mass publication, when a wide range of readers means you need to deal with edge cases that ordinary communication can ignore (sort of like the difference between code you write for yourself and code you write for millions of users). > Can you give me four equivalent examples of rules that have to be taught in school but arose naturally? I appreciate that you appear to have done some…

Have you read any of the criticism of the book? Its Wikipedia entry quotes Pullum: > The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules ... It's sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write however or than me or was or which, but can't tell you why. (See also "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice" at, eg, https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-file-manager/file/5bd88992… . Language Log recommends https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Strunk+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fi… as a way to find further criticism from them.) For "Omit needless words", a problem is identifying what "needless" means. Quoting http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004552.html: > Whenever you see an appeal to ONW, you should wonder what people are doing with those "needless" words. Most of the time, those extra words are serving some function that conflicts with brevity; they're doing some work. There are also examples how that phrase (likely) caused people to believe that if a word can be omitted…

Perhaps. Grammar pedants (prescriptivists), seem to be made up mostly of people who've come to the conclusion that the particular mode of the language they're most comfortable with is the "correct" one that everybody should be communicating in. It seems to come from some deep-down inflexibility to tolerate or comprehend that other people communicate in different modes. The pedant seems to wish that all the world should structure their communication to be most convenient for them rather than trying to work on increasing the scope of the modes they can work with. They believe there is one kind of audience and their preferred mode is the magical key that ensures correct and precise communication with that audience -- regardless if this is actually true. It makes a kind of sense that this might stem from some deep seated introversion -- people for whom the principal interaction between audience and speaker is themselves. But on the other hand, wouldn't you likely be able to understand any mode of communication within your own mind? What's most often fascinating to me is how deeply wrong and ignorant of grammar most grammar pedants are beyond some superficially memorized rules they've attached themselves to. When pushed for the "why" behind their rules they frequently don't know, or will point to some style manual (usually also full of grammar errors) they believe has taken on an almost holy quality. One of my favorite tactics is the "that's not a word" argument, with fingers…

Other than a few synthetic languages, that true of every other language, so I don't understand why you are singling out English. Well, I guess there are a few language academies which try to define a language, but those are post hoc. If you accept that, then I can declare myself the explicit definer of English language, no? I can say that the past tense of "to God" is "to Gods", but English has a general rule that the "d"/"ed" form usually forms the past, while "s" is used for third person singular present tense. (There are exceptions, of course.) I could say that in Swedish "att Gud" is conjugated in the present as "att Gudo", but Swedish has a pretty strong rule that present tense verbs ends with an -r. The exception being the modals and archaic forms like "äro" in the song "Vi äro, musikanter". Tossing the 'explicitly defined grammar' aside, which is the realm of the prescriptivists, we're still left with the meaning of rule used by the descriptivists. What are those rules? In terms you use, what are the rules which describe what "other people will naturally agree with." In case you couldn't tell, I'm a descriptivist, in the Language-Log-fanboi sort of way. Quoting from http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3985 : > Bloom finishes with some more invective against "these do-as-you-please linguists" who pretend that "utopia is at hand, that everyone is a revolutionary, that linguistic anarchy will set you free." I would love to meet one of these anarcho-linguists,…

Some good commentary (from syntacticians) is here: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3809 http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001192.html The first link is by one of the authors of CGOTEL, and comes out strongly against calling that were-form subjunctive; the second link is by another syntactician, and is a little more ambivalent. What follows is a mixture of (a) my understanding of some terminology and facts, and (b) my interpretation of the arguments: "Subjunctive" is a label for a type of sentence mood, where "mood" has to do with the relationship between the sentence and reality. Subjunctive mood is usually, like indicative and imperative moods, marked on the verb. (In my mind, interrogative is also a mood, but it is usually marked on the sentence, not on the verb.) Indicative and imperative moods have fairly narrow commonly-agreed semantics, but subjunctive is more of a catchall (my second link above will warn of the danger of confusing syntactic terminology with semantics, but while they don't correspond perfectly, they are related). We can quickly note that "if I were a rich man", a counterfactual clause, easily fits into area that can be covered by a "subjunctive" mood in various languages. It's widely agreed that the following construction in English should be called "subjunctive": I ask that you be polite to him. The subjunctive form of "be" is so distinct from any other finite form that it makes for good examples. Any time a finite…

Not-entirely-OT grammar nerd reply: > I use male singular pronouns for people whose sex I'm not aware of because English male singular pronouns are actually also its neuter singular pronouns (I believe this is true for several other major languages, as well). Hence, for a noun that has gender, but whose gender is unknown, the correct pronoun is "he", rather than some silly construction such as "he/she" or the at worst flagrantly incorrect, at best vastly confusing singular "they". (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Universa...) I have a few bones to pick with this. It's not the case that "he" is "the correct pronoun". First of all, any competent grammar nerd recognizes that correctness in language is defined by the consensus of fluent users (yes, that's a circular definition, get over it), and there's an open debate in English about what is a correct pronoun for unknown-gender individuals. Also, "they" is not "flagrantly incorrect", and it's often perfectly clear. (It's certainly not always clear, but neither is "he".) It has a 500-year history, and I think the general rule is "Good enough for Shakespeare, good enough for me." If you're happy with WP as a source, I give you the very next section in the same article you linked: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Singular_.22they.2… Or http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.html

Because it's not all that great. It's the C Programming Language of linguistic style guides—well-respected and historically relevant, but not necessarily the best resource. For example, The Elements of Style tells you to avoid the passive voice, on the grounds that sentences like "The sandwich was eaten by me," are much more awkward than "I ate the sandwich." It gives three sentences in support of this: "There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground," "It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had," and "The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired." None of these sentences actually contain a passive: the first is an existential sentence, the second is a simple copula, and the third uses the copula with an adjective, not a participle.[1] All of which is to say—Strunk and White did not know what a passive was. The actual advice they meant to give is something along the lines of, "Don't be vague about agency," but that is a different proscription. There are places where you should avoid the passive, and there are also places where you should employ the passive, because it is clearer than the alternative. For example, if your documentation says, "Our software product is used to [blah]", you should not change it to, "People use our software product to [blah]," because those people do not matter. By avoiding the passive, you have made your writing less clear by introducing unnecessary information. Strunk and…

I only wish I could up-vote this more. See also this earlier Language Log essay (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003366.html), in which Pullum points out that passives occur in "Politics and the English Language" at a considerably higher rate than was typical in contemporary periodicals - Orwell couldn't follow his own advice, even as he was dispensing it. The same goes for Strunk and White, who in the very passage instructing writers to abjure the passive, say: "Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can _be made_ lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as /there is/ or /could be heard/." Still, at least the guide linked in the OP has picked actual examples of the passive voice as illustrations, and concedes that there are times when it can be reasonably used (sorry, "writers can reasonably use it"). This makes it something of a rarity, even if the advice is still poor.

Probably http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003366.html, giving specific statistics on Orwell and on Strunk & White, linked from https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922.

A fun fact I learned just recently is that even Shakespeare used singular "they": http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.html (and even singular "themselves"!) which puts to rest approximately every argument I've ever seen against it.

Fun to see the Aubrey-Maturin series mentioned here; that was indeed the first thing I thought of. Killick's use of "which" always struck me as odd. I'm not entirely sure if it's the same grammatic construct as the one in the article. Here [1] is a discussion about it. The top answer argues it's just a meaningless discourse marker. It was also covered in Mark Liberman's Language Log [2]. Apparently the conjunctive "which" is increasing in usage as a discourse marker [3]. [1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/245363/what-is-the-name-of… [2] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000118.html [3] http://colinmorris.github.io/blog/which-discourse-marker

> Referring to "Leonardo da Vinci" as "da Vinci" is like listing Lawrence of Arabia in the phone book as "Of Arabia, Mr. L," or > The mistake of referring to Leonardo as "da Vinci" is so entrenched, I'm afraid it's uncorrectable. I have had to fight with editors about this: You say "Leonardo," and they want to say "da Vinci," thinking it's his last name — thinking it's the same as saying "Reynolds." They think that, when you say "Leonardo," you're saying the equivalent of "Joshua." Actually, to say "da Vinci" is to say "of Orange," instead of "William." (Both from Cutting in line: What would 'Of Nazareth' do? at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003151.html a post about plagiarism including of these examples.) I, for one, welcome any deviation from the assumption that everyone's name is of the form "Given-name Surname".

This sounds like "edenics" (as in garden of Eden), which posits that there was original language (probably Hebrew) from which all languages descend. Other popular "original" languages are Tamil, Sanskrit, Basque, or whatever language some nationalist crackpot decides they want to promote. It's totally disconnected from reality. Here's a Language Log post on it: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005278.html