2018-02-23 18:58:03 +00:00
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---
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created_at: '2017-06-12T18:12:43.000Z'
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title: 'Grammar Puss: The fallacies of the language mavens (1994)'
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url: https://newrepublic.com/article/77732/grammar-puss-steven-pinker-language-william-safire
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author: Tomte
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points: 51
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story_text:
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comment_text:
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num_comments: 31
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story_id:
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story_title:
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story_url:
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parent_id:
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created_at_i: 1497291163
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_tags:
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- story
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- author_Tomte
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- story_14539492
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objectID: '14539492'
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2018-06-08 12:05:27 +00:00
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year: 1994
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2018-02-23 18:58:03 +00:00
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---
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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Of course, forcing modern speakers of English to not—whoops, not
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to—split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as
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much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and
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togas. Julius Caesar could not have split an infinitive if he had wanted
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to. In Latin the infinitive is a single word such as "facere," a
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syntactic atom. But in English, which prefers to build sentences around
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many simple words instead of a few complicated ones, the infinitive is
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composed of two words.Words, by definition, are rearrangeable units, and
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there is no conceivable reason why an adverb should not come between
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them:
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2018-02-23 18:19:40 +00:00
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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Space—the final frontier.... These are the voyages of the starship
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Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to
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seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has
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gone before.
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2018-02-23 18:19:40 +00:00
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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To "go boldly" where no man has gone before? Beam me up, Scotty; there's
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no intelligent life down here. As for outlawing sentences that end with
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a preposition (impossible in Latin for reasons irrelevant to English)—as
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Winston Churchill said, "It is a rule up with which we should not put."
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2018-02-23 18:19:40 +00:00
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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But once introduced, a prescriptive rule is very hard to eradicate, no
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matter how ridiculous. Inside the writing establishment, the rules
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survive by the same dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations
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and college fraternity hazing. Anyone daring to overturn a rule by
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example must always worry that readers will think he or she is ignorant
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of the rule, rather than challenging it. Perhaps most importantly, since
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prescriptive rules are so psychologically unnatural that only those with
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access to the right schooling can abide by them, they serve as
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shibboleths, differentiating the elite from the rabble.Throughout the
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country people have spoken a dialect of English, some of whose features
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date to the Early Modern English period, that H.L. Mencken called The
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American Language. It had the misfortune of not becoming the standard of
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government and education, and large parts of the "grammar" curriculum in
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U.S. schools have been dedicated to stigmatizing it as sloppy speech.
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Frequently the language mavens claim that nonstandard American English
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is not just different, but less sophisticated and logical. The case,
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they would have to admit, is hard to make for nonstandard irregular
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verbs such as "drag/drug" (and even more so for conversions to
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regularity such as "feeled" and "growed"). After all, in "correct"
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English, Richard Lederer noted, "Today we speak, but first we spoke;
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some faucets leak, but never loke. Today we write, but first we wrote;
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we bite our tongues, but never bote." At first glance, the mavens would
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seem to have a better argument when it comes to the loss of
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conjugational distinctions in "He don't" and "We was." But then, this
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has been the trend in standard English for centuries. No one gets upset
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that we no longer distinguish the second person singular form of verbs,
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as in "thou sayest." And by this criterion it is the nonstandard
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dialects that are superior, because they provide their speakers with
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second person plural pronouns like "y'all" and "youse."
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At this point, defenders of the standard are likely to pull out the
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notorious double negative, as in "I can't get no satisfaction."
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Logically speaking, they teach, the two negatives cancel out each other;
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Mr. Jagger is actually saying that he is satisfied. The song should be
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titled "I Can't Get Any Satisfaction." But this reasoning is not
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satisfactory. Hundreds of languages require their speakers to use a
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negative element in the context of a negated verb. The so-called "double
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negative," far from being a corruption, was the norm in Chaucer's Middle
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English, and negation in standard French, as in "Je ne sais pas" where
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"ne" and "pas" are both negative, is a familiar contemporary
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example. Come to think of it, standard English is really no
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different. What do "any," "even" and "at all" mean in the following
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sentences?
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I didn't buy any lottery tickets. I didn't eat even a single french
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fry. I didn't eat junk food at all today.
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Clearly, not much: you can't use them alone, as the following strange
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sentences show:
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I bought any lottery tickets. I ate even a single french fry. I ate junk
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food at all today.
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What these words are doing is exactly what "no" is doing in nonstandard
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English, such as in the equivalent "I didn't buy no lottery
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tickets"—agreeing with the negated verb. The slim difference is that
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nonstandard English co-opted the word "no" as the agreement element,
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whereas standard English co-opted the word "any."
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A tin ear for stress and melody along with an obliviousness to the
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principles of discourse and rhetoric are important tools of the trade
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for the language maven. Consider an alleged atrocity committed by
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today's youth: the expression "I could care less." The teenagers are
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trying to express disdain, the adults note, in which case they should be
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saying "I couldn't care less." If they could care less than they do,
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that means that they really do care, the opposite of what they are
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trying to say. But the argument is bogus. Listen to how the two versions
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are pronounced:
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> COULDN'T care I
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> LE CARE
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> i ESS LE
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> could ESS
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The melodies and stresses are completely different, and for a good
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reason. The second version is not illogical, it's sarcastic. The point
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of sarcasm is that by making an assertion that is manifestly false or
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accompanied by ostentatiously mannered intonation, one deliberately
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implies its opposite. A good paraphrase is, "Oh yeah, as if there were
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something in the world that I care less about."
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Through the ages, language mavens have deplored the way English speakers
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convert nouns into verbs. The following verbs have all been denounced in
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this century: to caveat, to input, to host, to nuance, to access, to
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chair, to dialogue, to showcase, to progress, to parent, to intrigue, to
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contact, to impact.
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As you can see, they range from varying degrees of awkwardness to the
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completely unexceptionable.In fact, easy conversion of nouns to verbs
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has been part of English grammar for centuries. I have estimated that
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about a fifth of all English verbs were originally nouns. Consider the
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human body: you can "head" a committee, "scalp" the missionary, "eye" a
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babe, "stomach" someone's complaints and so on—virtually every body part
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can be "verbed" (including several that cannot be printed in a family
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journal of opinion).
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What's the problem? The concern seems to be that fuzzy-minded speakers
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are eroding the distinction between nouns and verbs. But once again, the
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person on the street is not getting any respect. A simple quirk of
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everyday usage shows why the accusation is untrue. Take the baseball
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term "to fly out," a verb that comes from the noun "pop fly." The past
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form is "flied," not "flew" and "flown"; no mere mortal has ever flown
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out to center field. Similarly, in using the verb-from-noun "to ring the
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city" (form a ring around), people say "ringed," not "rang." Speakers'
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preference for the regular form with "-ed" shows that they tacitly keep
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track of the fact that the verbs came from nouns. They avoid irregular
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forms like "flew out" because they sense that the baseball verb "to fly"
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is different from the ordinary verb "to fly" (what birds do): the first
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is a verb based on a noun root, the second, a verb with a verb root.
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The most remarkable aspect of the special status of verbs-from-nouns is
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that everyone feels it. I have tried out examples on hundreds of
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people—college students, people without college educations, children
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as young as 4. They all behave like good intuitive grammarians: they
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inflect verbs that come from nouns differently than plain old verbs. So
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is there anyone, anywhere, who does not grasp the principle? Yes—the
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language mavens. Uniformly, the style manuals bungle their explanations
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of "flied out" and similar lawful examples.
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I am obliged to discuss one more example: the much vilified "hopefully."
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A sentence such as "Hopefully, the treaty will pass" is said to be a
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grave error. The adverb "hopefully" comes from the adjective "hopeful,"
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meaning "in a manner full of hope." Therefore, the mavens say, it should
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be used only when the sentence refers to a person who is doing something
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in a hopeful manner. If it is the writer or reader who is hopeful, one
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should say, "It is hoped that the treaty will pass," or "If hopes are
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realized, the treaty will pass," or "I hope the treaty will pass."
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Now consider the following:
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(1) It is simply not true that an English adverb must indicate the
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manner in which the actor performs the action. Adverbs come in two
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kinds: "verb phrase" adverbs such as "carefully," which do refer to the
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actor, and "sentence" adverbs such as "frankly," which indicate the
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attitude of the speaker toward the content of the sentence. Other
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examples of sentence adverbs are "accordingly," "basically,"
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"confidentially," "happily," "mercifully," "roughly," "supposedly" and
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"understandably." Many (such as "happily") come from verb phrase
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adverbs, and they are virtually never ambiguous in context.The use of
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"hopefully" as a sentence adverb, which has been around for at least
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sixty years, is a perfectly sensible example.
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(2) The suggested alternatives, "It is hoped that" and "If hopes are
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realized," display four sins of bad writing: passive voice, needless
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words, vagueness, pomposity.
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(3) The suggested alternatives do not mean the same thing as
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"hopefully," so the ban would leave certain thoughts
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unexpressible. "Hopefully" makes a hopeful prediction, whereas "I hope
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that" and "It is hoped that" merely describe certain people's mental
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states. Thus you can say, "I hope the treaty will pass, but it isn't
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likely," but it would be odd to say, "Hopefully, the treaty will pass,
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but it isn't likely."
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(4) We are supposed to use "hopefully" only as a verb phrase adverb, as
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in the following:
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Hopefully, Larry hurled the ball toward the basket with one second left
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in the game. Hopefully, Melvin turned the record over and sat back down
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on the couch eleven centimeters closer to Ellen.
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Call me uncouth, call me ignorant, but these sentences do not belong to
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any language that I speak.
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I have taken these examples from generic schoolmarms, copy editors and
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writers of irate letters to newspaper ombudsmen. The more famous
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language mavens come in two temperaments: Jeremiahs and Sages.
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The Jeremiahs express their bitter laments and righteous prophesies of
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doom. The best-known is the film and theater critic John Simon. Here is
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a representative opening to one of his language columns:
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"The English language is being treated nowadays exactly as slave traders
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once handled the merchandise in their slave ships, or as the inmates of
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concentration camps were dealt with by their Nazi jailers."
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What grammatical horror could have inspired this tasteless comparison,
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you might ask? It was Tip O'Neill's redundantly referring to his "fellow
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colleagues."
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Speaking of the American Black English dialect, Simon says:
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Why should we consider some, usually poorly educated, subculture's
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notion of the relationship between sound and meaning? And how could a
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grammar—any grammar—possibly describe that relationship?... As for "I
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be," "you be," "he be," etc., which should give us all the
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heebie-jeebies, these may indeed be comprehensible, but they go against
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all accepted classical and modern grammars and are the product not of a
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language with roots in history but of ignorance of how language works.
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This, of course, is nonsense from beginning to end (Black English is
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uncontroversially a language with its own systematic grammar), but there
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is no point in refuting this malicious know-nothing, for he is not
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participating in any sincere discussion. Simon has simply discovered the
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trick used with great effectiveness by certain comedians, talk show
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hosts and punk rock musicians: people of modest talent can attract
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attention, at least for a while, by being unrelentingly offensive.
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The Sages, on the other hand, typified by the late Theodore Bernstein
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and by William Safire himself, take a moderate, commonsense approach to
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matters of usage, and they tease their victims with wit rather than
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savaging them with invective. I enjoy reading the Sages, and have
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nothing but awe for a pen like Safire's that can summarize the content
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of an anti-pornography statute as, "It isn't the teat, it's the
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tumidity." But the sad fact is that even Safire, the closest thing we
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have to an enlightened language pundit, misjudges the linguistic
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sophistication of the common speaker and as a result misses the target
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in most of his commentaries and advice. To prove this charge, I will
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walk you through parts of one of his columns, from the October 4, 1992,
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New York Times Magazine.
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The first story was a nonpartisan analysis of supposed pronoun case
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errors made by the two candidates in the 1992 presidential
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election. George Bush had recently adopted the slogan "Who do you
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trust?," alienating schoolteachers across the nation who noted that
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"who" is a subject pronoun and the question is asking about the object
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of "trust." One would say "You do trust him," not "You do trust he," and
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so the question word should be "whom," not "who."
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In reply, one might point out that the "who/whom" distinction is a relic
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of the English case system, abandoned by nouns centuries ago and found
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today only among pronouns in distinctions such as "he/him." Even among
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pronouns, the old distinction between subject "ye" and object "you" has
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vanished, leaving "you" to play both roles and "ye" as sounding
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archaic. Though "whom" has outlived "ye," it is clearly moribund, and
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already sounds pretentious in most spoken contexts. No one demands of
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Bush that he say, "Whom do ye trust?" If the language can bear the loss
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of "ye," why insist on clinging to "whom"?
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Safire, with his reasonable attitude toward usage, recognizes the
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problem, and proposes:
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Safire's Law of Who/Whom, which forever solves the problem troubling
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writers and speakers caught between the pedantic and the
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incorrect: "When whom is correct, recast the sentence." Thus, instead
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of changing his slogan to "Whom do you trust?"—making him sound like a
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hypereducated Yalie stiff—Mr. Bush would win back the purist vote with
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"Which candidate do you trust?"
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Telling people to avoid a problematic construction sounds like common
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sense, but in the case of object questions with "who," it demands an
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intolerable sacrifice. People ask questions about the objects of verbs
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and prepositions a lot. Consider the kinds of questions one might ask a
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child in ordinary conversation: "Who did we see on the way home?," "Who
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did you play with outside tonight?," "Who did you sound like?"
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Safire's advice is to change such questions to "Which person...?" or
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"Which child...?" But the advice would have people violate the most
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important maxim of good prose: omit needless words. It also subverts the
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supposed goal of rules of usage, which is to allow people to express
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their thoughts as clearly and precisely as possible. A question such as
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"Who did we see on the way home?" can embrace one person, many people or
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any combination or number of adults, babies and familiar dogs.Any
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specific substitution such as "Which person?" forecloses some of these
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possibilities. Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Safire should
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have taken his observation about "whom" to its logical conclusion and
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advised the president that there is no reason to change the slogan, at
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least no grammatical reason.
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Turning to the Democrats, Safire gets on Bill Clinton's case, as he puts
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it, for asking voters to "give Al Gore and I a chance to bring America
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back." No one would say "give I a break," because the indirect object of
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"give" must have objective case. So it should be "give Al Gore and me a
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chance."
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Probably no "grammatical error" has received as much scorn as the
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"misuse" of pronoun case inside conjunctions (phrases with two parts
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joined by "and" or "or"). What teenager has not been corrected for
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saying "Me and Jennifer are going to the mall"? The standard story is
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that the object pronoun "me" does not belong in the subject position—no
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one would say "Me is going to the mall"—so it should be "Jennifer and
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I." People tend to misremember the advice as, "When in doubt, say
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\`so-and-so and I,' not \`so-and-so and me,'" so they unthinkingly
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overapply it, resulting in hyper-corrected solecisms like "give Al Gore
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and I a chance" and the even more despised "between you and I."
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But if the person on the street is so good at avoiding "Me is going" and
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"Give I a break," and even former Rhodes Scholars and Ivy League
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professors can't seem to avoid "Me and Jennifer are going" and "Give Al
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and I a chance," might it be the mavens that misunderstand English
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grammar, not the speakers? The mavens' case about case rests on one
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assumption: if a conjunction phrase has a grammatical feature like
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subject case, every word inside that phrase has to have that grammatical
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feature, too. But that is just false.
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"Jennifer" is singular; you say "Jennifer is," not "Jennifer are." The
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pronoun "she" is singular; you say "She is," not "She are." But the
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conjunction "She and Jennifer" is not singular, it's plural; you say
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"She and Jennifer are," not "She and Jennifer is." So a conjunction can
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have a different grammatical number from the pronouns inside it. Why,
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then, must it have the same grammatical case as the pronouns inside
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it? The answer is that it need not. A conjunction is not grammatically
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equivalent to any of its parts. If John and Marsha met, it does not mean
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that John met and that Marsha met. If voters give Clinton and Gore a
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chance, they are not giving Gore his own chance, added on to the chance
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they are giving Clinton; they are giving the entire ticket a chance. So
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just because "Al Gore and I" is an object that requires object case, it
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does not mean that "I" is an object that requires object case. By the
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logic of grammar, the pronoun is free to have any case it wants.
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In his third story Safire deconstructs a breathless quote from Barbra
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Streisand, describing tennis star Andre Agassi: "He's very, very
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intelligent; very, very, sensitive, very evolved;... He plays like a Zen
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master. It's very in the moment."
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Safire speculates on Streisand's use of the word "evolved": "its change
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from the active to passive voice—from \`he evolved from the Missing
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Link' to \`He is evolved'—was probably influenced by the adoption of
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involved as a compliment."
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These kinds of derivations have been studied intensively in linguistics,
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but Safire shows here that he does not appreciate how they work. He
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seems to think that people change words by being reminded of rhyming
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ones—"evolved" from "involved," a kind of malapropism. But in fact
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people are not that literal-minded. New usages (such as "to fly out")
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are based not on rhymes, but on systematic rules that change the
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hundreds of words' grammatical behavior of dozens of words in the same
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precise ways.
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Thus Safire's suggestion that "very evolved" is based on "involved" does
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not work at all. For one thing, if you're involved, it means that
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something involves you (you're the object), whereas if you're evolved,
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it means that you have been doing some evolving (you're the
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subject). The problem is that the conversion of "evolved from" to "very
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evolved" is not a switch from the active voice of a verb to the passive
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voice, as in "Andre beat Boris" to "Boris was beaten by Andre." To
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passivize a verb you convert the direct object into a subject, so "is
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evolved" could only have been passivized from "Something evolved
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Andre"—which does not exist in contemporary English. Safire's
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explanation is like saying you can take "Bill bicycled from Lexington"
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and change it to "Bill is bicycled" and then to "Bill is very bicycled."
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This breakdown is a good illustration of one of the main scandals of the
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language mavens: they show lapses in elementary problems of grammatical
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analysis, like figuring out the part-of-speech category of a word. In
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analyzing "very evolved," Safire refers to the active and passive voice,
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two forms of a verb.But the preceding adverb "very" is an unmistakable
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tipoff that "evolved" is not being used as a verb at all, but as an
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adjective. Safire was misled because adjectives can look like verbs in
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the passive voice, and are clearly related to them, but they are not the
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same thing. This is the ambiguity behind the joke in the Bob Dylan
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lyric, "They'll stone you when you're riding in your car; They'll stone
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you when you're playing your guitar.... Everybody must get stoned."
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This discovery steers us toward the real source of "evolved." There is a
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lively rule in English that takes the participle of certain intransitive
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verbs and creates a corresponding adjective:
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a leaf that has fallen —\> a fallen leaf
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snow that has drifted —\> the drifted snow
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a man who has traveled widely —\> a widely traveled man
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Take this rule and apply it to "a tennis player that has evolved," and
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you get "an evolved tennis player." This solution also allows us to make
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sense of Streisand's meaning. When a verb is converted from the active
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to the passive voice, the verb's meaning is conserved: "Dog bites man"
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to "Man is bitten by dog." But when a verb is converted to an adjective,
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the adjective can acquire idiosyncratic nuances. Not every woman who has
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fallen is a fallen woman, and if someone stones you you are not
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necessarily stoned. We all evolved from a missing link, but not all of
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us are evolved in the sense of being more spiritually sophisticated than
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our contemporaries.
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Safire then goes on to rebuke Streisand for "very in the moment":
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This very calls attention to the use of a preposition or a noun as a
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modifier, as in "It's very in," or "It's very New York," or the ultimate
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fashion compliment, "It's very you." To be very in the moment (perhaps a
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variation of the moment or up to the minute) appears to be a loose
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translation of the French au courant, variously translated as "up to
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date, fashionable, with-it" ...
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Once again, by patronizing Streisand's language, Safire has misanalyzed
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its form and its meaning. He has not noticed that:
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The word "very" is not connected to the preposition "in"; it's connected
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to the entire prepositional phrase "in the moment."
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Streisand is not using the intransitive "in," with its special sense of
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"fashionable"; she is using the conventional transitive "in," with a
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noun phrase object "the moment."
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Her use of a prepositional phrase as if it were an adjective to describe
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some mental or emotional state follows a common pattern in
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English: "under the weather," "out of character," "off the wall," "in
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the dumps," "out to lunch," "on the ball" and "out of his mind."
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It's unlikely that Streisand was trying to say that Agassi is au
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courant, or fashionable; that would be a put-down implying shallowness,
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not a compliment. Her reference to Zen makes her meaning clear:that
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Agassi is good at shutting out distractions and concentrating on the
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game or person he is involved with at that moment.
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The foibles of the language mavens, then, can be blamed on two blind
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spots: a gross underestimation of the linguistic wherewithal of the
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common person, and an ignorance of the science of language—not just
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technical linguistics, but basic knowledge of the constructions and
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idioms of English, and how people use them.
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Unlike some academics in the '60s, I am not saying that concern for
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grammar and composition are tools to perpetuate an oppressive status quo
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and that The People should be liberated to write however they
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please. Some aspects of how people express themselves in some settings
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are worth trying to change. What I am calling for is a more thoughtful
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discussion of language and how people use it, replacing bubbe-maises
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(old wives' tales) with the best scientific knowledge available. It is
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ironic that the Jeremiahs' wailing about how sloppy language leads to
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sloppy thought are themselves hairballs of loosely associated factoids
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and tangled non sequiturs. All the examples of verbal behavior that the
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complainer takes exception to for any reason are packed together and
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coughed up as proof of The Decline of the Language: teenage slang,
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sophistry, regional variations in pronunciation and vocabulary,
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bureaucratic bafflegab, poor spelling and punctuation, pseudo-errors
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like "hopefully," government euphemism, nonstandard grammar like
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"ain't," misleading advertising and so on (not to mention occasional
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witticisms that go over the complainer's head).
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I hope to have convinced you of two things. Many prescriptive rules are
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just plain dumb and should be deleted from the handbooks. And most of
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standard English is just that, standard, in the sense of standard units
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of currency or household voltages. It is just common sense that people
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should be encouraged to learn the dialect that has become the standard
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in their society. But there is no need to use terms like "bad grammar,"
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"fractured syntax" and "incorrect usage" when referring to rural, black
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and other nonstandard dialects (even if you dislike "politically
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correct" euphemism): the terms are not only insulting, but
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scientifically inaccurate.
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The aspect of language use that is most worth changing is the clarity
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and style of written prose. The human language faculty was not designed
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for putting esoteric thoughts on paper for the benefit of strangers, and
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this makes writing a difficult craft that must be mastered through
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practice, feedback and intensive exposure to good examples. There are
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excellent manuals of composition that discuss these skills with great
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wisdom—but note how their advice concentrates on important practical
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tips like "omit needless words" and "revise extensively," not on the
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trivia of split infinitives and slang.
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As for slang, I'm all for it\! I don't know how I ever did without "to
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flame," "to dis" and "to blow off," and there are thousands of now
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unexceptionable English words such as "clever," "fun," "sham," "banter"
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and "stingy" that began life as slang. It is especially hypocritical to
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oppose linguistic innovations reflexively and at the same time to decry
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the loss of distinctions like "lie" versus "lay" on the pretext of
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preserving expressive power. Vehicles for expressing thought are being
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created far more quickly than they are being abandoned.
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Indeed, appreciating the linguistic genius of your ordinary Joe is the
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cure for the deepest fear of the mavens: that English is steadily
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|
deteriorating. Every component of every language changes over time, and
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|
at any moment a language is enduring many losses. But the richness of a
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language is always being replenished, because the one aspect of language
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that does not change is the very thing that creates it: the human mind.
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Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard and the
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|
author of The Stuff of Thought.
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**For more TNR, become a fan
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on [Facebook ](http://www.facebook.com/thenewrepublic)and follow us
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on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/tnr).**
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