Oh, the blogger is probably male. But from eir perspective, so was I: I blogged about “refining the art of human rationality” and ey could have been ever-so-responsibly screening off priors and making eir best guess and ey was wrong and I am pissed off. So, I decline to do the same thing.
Meanwhile I find ‘ey’ just irritating so my approach is to sometimes just avoid pronouns while other times I randomly generate pronouns based on my prediction, biased towards 0.5. I don’t recall being dramatically mistaken thus far and seem to have a reasonably good track record for guessing right based on writing style. At least, that is, in cases where I get later confirmation.
I think the singular they is not appropriate in this case, where the referent is a specific person of unknown (to the writer) gender, namely Alicorn, instead of an indeterminate person. From Wikipedia:
Some grammar and usage guides have accepted singular uses of they, in cases limited to references to an indeterminate person.[48] For example, A person might find themself in a fix is considered standard English, but not Dr. Brown might find themself in a fix.
Like some others here, I also find ‘ey’ annoying and distracting, so the fix I would prefer in this case is ‘he or she’. Does anyone consider that annoying or ungrammatical?
I’m sorry you find “ey” irritating; I promise not to refer to you a la Spivak. And I’m glad you’re good at detecting gender from writing style. And someday you may piss someone off very badly.
It doesn’t appear to have occurred to you that some people find Spivak pronouns very annoying. They annoy me immensely because it feels like someone is deliberately obstructing my reading in an uncomfortable way to make some kind of political point almost entirely unrelated to the context of the post itself. I usually just stop reading and go elsewhere to calm down.
It’s not me being referred to with them that bothers me, it is them being used at all. I find it difficult and uncomfortable to read, like trying to read 1337 5p34k, and it breaks my reading flow in an unpleasant way. It’s like bad grammar or spelling but with the additional knowledge that someone is doing it deliberately for reasons that I consider political.
I think it may have been a few decades ago, when the pronouns were invented, but at this point Spivak is generally used for courtesy purposes, as Alicorn said.
Breaking the flow I’ll agree is a valid objection, however. I have opted to avoid neologistic pronouns for that reason, save in cases where such are requested. If someone wants to be a “xe”, that’s their business, I say.
Thanks for the detailed description of why you find invented pronouns annoying.
I’m pretty flexible about new words, so I react to invented pronouns as a minor novelty.
I don’t know what people who use invented pronouns have in mind—they could be intending to tweak people, or they could be more like me and generalizing from one example.
I trained myself to use Spivak pronouns in less than a month. As far as lingual/grammatical conventions go, they flow very naturally. Singular “they” does not, because a plural verb does not belong with a singular subject. I find that much more annoying.
There is a difference between those situations. “You” is the only modern second person singular pronoun, whereas the third person singular has “he” and “she” in addition to the oft-used “they,” the latter obviously being the one which doesn’t fit.
Personally, I do feel it would be better to have some separation among the singular and plural second person pronouns, to avoid awkward constructions like “you all” and similar things. However, “thou” doesn’t seem to be a very viable option, given its current formal, Biblical connotations.
Also, the English language is missing a possessive form of the pronoun “which” (compare “who” and “whose”), if anyone wants to work on that problem.
One really clumsy thing in English is that there is no interrogative pronoun to which the answer would be an ordinal number (i.e. N-th in some sequential order). There isn’t even a convenient way to ask that question.
That is the suggested remedy, but it’s a bit of a kludge. “Who” is intended to be used as a pronoun for people, so the possessive form “whose” should be used in the same way.
That is the suggested remedy, but it’s a bit of a kludge
I’m a bit confused that you call it just a “suggested remedy”; my point is not that anyone advises this, it’s that this is what English speakers actually do.
“Who” is intended to be used as a pronoun for people, so the possessive form “whose” should be used in the same way.
Intended by who? Should why? It’s not even clear offhand that we should regard “whose” as exclusively a possessive form of “who”, given the above.
Off the top of my head I can’t think of any situation where the antecedent of “whose” would be unclear due to its ability to also refer to inanimate objects.
But doing so reduces the clarity of the language, by conflating two different meanings.
I have to disagree with this. I’m also someone who’s bothered when words with multiple distinct meanings get merged, but I don’t think this can be described as a case of that. (I suppose the most obvious objection is that this does not reduce the quality of the language because there is nothing to compare to. If English ever had these other words you suggest, it can’t have been for hundreds of years at least.)
In any case, these words are just function words, they’re just relative pronouns. Merging different relative pronouns doesn’t add extra meanings—most of them could be pretty well expressed with “what”—it just forces you to include the information even if it’s not relevant (maybe we don’t care if what did this is animate or not), while allowing some things to become slightly shorter by being implicit (we can say “he who did this” rather than “What person did this”. This wouldn’t work as well with “whatever”, but that’s a quirk of how the word is formed in English rather than any general feature of relative pronouns.)
Basically you’re just introducing another unavoidable; it doesn’t “add meaning” any more than does English’s insistence that all finite verbs have tense.
You’re not the only person I know to make this claim, but I will admit to never having understood it.
That is, I can understand objecting to “If my neighbor visits I’ll give them a cookie” because it violates the English grammatical convention that the subject and object must match in quantity—singular “neighbor” doesn’t go with plural “them.” I don’t have a problem with that, myself, but I accept that some people do.
And I can understand endorsing “If my neighbor visits I’ll give em a cookie” despite it violating the English grammatical convention that “em” isn’t a pronoun. I don’t have a problem with that either.
But doing both at once seems unmotivated. If I’m willing to ignore English grammatical conventions enough to make up new pronouns altogether, I don’t see on what grounds I can object to someone else ignoring subject/object matching rules.
Mostly, when people say this sort of thing I understand it to be an aesthetic judgment, on a par with not liking the color blue. Which is fine, as long as they aren’t too obnoxious about trying to impose their aesthetic judgments on me.
That is, I can understand objecting to “If my neighbor visits I’ll give them a cookie” because it violates the English grammatical convention that the subject and object must match in quantity
Presumably you mean pronoun and antecedent. Clearly, subject and object need not agree in number (what you call “quantity”); such a requirement would in fact be logically impossible.
Yup, you’re right. I have absolutely no idea what my brain thought it was doing there.
Entirely incidentally: requiring that the subject and object match in number would admittedly be a strange sort of grammatical requirement to have, as it would preclude expressing all manner of useful thoughts (e.g., “Give me two slices of pizza”), and I’d be incredulous if an actual language claimed to have such a requirement, but I’m not sure it’s logically impossible.
You’re right, of course. In fact, one could conceive of a language where the grammatical number of the object would have to agree with the subject, and it would therefore not give any information about the actual number of things denoted by the object, which would have to be stated explicitly if it’s necessary to avoid ambiguity, like in languages that lack grammatical number altogether. For all I know, there might even be an actual human language somewhere that features something like this.
But doing both at once seems unmotivated. If I’m willing to ignore English grammatical conventions enough to make up new pronouns altogether, I don’t see on what grounds I can object to someone else ignoring subject/object matching rules.
I don’t consider the creation of words to fall under the auspices of grammar. That happens in English and other languages all the time, because new or different concepts frequently need to be expressed in ways that are unavailable in the current state of the language. Using new words promotes clarity, in the long term, but misusing current words does the opposite.
“The pronoun form ‘they’ is anaphorically linked in the discourse to ‘this person’. Such use of forms of they with singular antecedents is attested in English over hundreds of years, in writers as significant as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, and Wilde. The people (like the perennially clueless Strunk and White) who assert that such usage is “wrong” simply haven’t done their literary homework and don’t deserve our attention.” (Language Log)
Language Log apparently thinks there are official rules determined by history.
This could hardly be farther form the truth. Language Log thinks that some completely made up rules that even the authors that propagate them often don’t follow in the very books they are doing the propagating in (I’m not sure if this applies in the specific case of Strunk and White and singular they, but it applies in many cases of what’s labeled prescriptivist poppycock there) are made even more absurd by history and the usage of high status people praised for their style.
This could hardly be farther form the truth. Language Log thinks that some completely made up rules that even the authors that propagate them often don’t follow in the very books they are doing the propagating in
Exactly so. My favorite example is Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” in which he rails against (among other things) the passive voice, but the very opening sentence of the essay contains the phrase “it is generally assumed.” Mistakes were made, I guess...
This is unfair to Orwell. Orwell’s advice is not to never use the passive voice. To begin, Orwell gives examples of bad writing and says:
I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged: … the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active …
His obvious complaint is that the passive voice is overused and inappropriately used, not that it is used at all. Note the phrase “wherever possible”. That suggests that the problem he is identifying is one of excess. In obvious reaction to this, he suggests a rule which exactly flips the above description, specifically:
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
This however does not say “never use the passive, ever”. And it should furthermore be obvious that Orwell does not mean, “never use the passive where you can find some convoluted and unreadable way to use the active.” I should think that you could always find some convoluted way to use the active. Rather, I think it should be obvious that he means, “never use the passive where you can use the active well.” What it amounts to is a reminder to the writer to re-examine his passives to see whether an active would not be better.
Well, yes, he also says, “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” But his opening sentence sounds to me precisely like the sort of passive that he’s warning against. It conjures the image of vague nameless opponents instead of naming concrete people, or at least concrete sorts of people, where we could examine if he really represents their views fairly. For a careful reader, this should be a warning that he might be setting up a strawman.
Can you even think of a concrete phrase that exemplifies a more shamelessly weasely use of passive than “it is generally assumed that...”?
Your position seems to be, then, that Orwell’s advice is sound, and it was his failure to follow his own advice which was unsound. I had taken you to mean approximately the opposite—that Orwell, a good writer, failed to take his own advice, and thereby illustrated the unsoundness of his advice. Or did you have something else entirely in mind?
Actually, both, to some extent. There is good and bad writing in terms of aesthetic style, and also in terms of logical soundness and factual accuracy. Any given piece of writing can be good or bad along these dimensions almost independently. Clearly, texts that combine great style with bad logic and inaccurate facts are especially misleading and difficult to assess correctly, and a lot of Orwell’s writing is in this category.
Now, in this essay, the great stylist Orwell breaks his own advice all over the place and thereby demonstrates that it’s complete rubbish when it comes to achieving good writing style. Good style in fact requires breaking these rules so often that it’s meaningless to espouse them as general guidelines. What’s significant is that Orwell is such a good stylist that his style dazzles you into not realizing this even as the contradictions are dancing in front of your nose. At the same time, the rules do have some limited applicability when it comes to logic and facts: some particular sorts of passives, bad metaphors, etc. are commonly used as weasely rhetorical tricks—and Orwell’s weasely essay does in fact employ them, hidden in plain sight by his great style.
So, to sum it up, Orwell has taken some observations about writing of non-zero but limited usefulness and applicability and written an unsound essay espousing them as supposedly general (if not absolute) rules. In the process he has contradicted himself by demonstrating that to achieve good style one must break these rules liberally, and also by breaking them in those situations where they do have some applicability (such as the awful “it is generally assumed that...”).
Debates on proper language style and grammar are always entertaining due to the impossibility fundamentally inherent in them of ever coming to a rational resolution. It’s a fun distraction to hone the creative mind for when real debate comes along.
It’s a fun distraction to hone the creative mind for when real debate comes along.
Or a temptation to reinforce bad habits of rhetoric so that when there is actually a rational conclusion to be reached everyone can merrily ignore it and follow their ego unfettered.
To expand on this point—Strunk & White and Language Log are both playing the “does this look right nowadays” game; the difference is that LL is basing their conclusions on what people actually do nowadays, whereas S&W are simply stating what they think would work better with no actual testing. That they failed to actually follow it suggests that in actual usage they did not find it to work better.
The reference to historical authors (rather than the current ones that would be more relevant) is just a bit of Dark Arts by LL, because the people espousing such arbitrary rules often claim they are based on history.
If that’s actually what’s being argued, no. And indeed prescriptivists often do argue this. But nobody seems to have actually been claiming that in this case.
They may be wrong on this particular matter, but it hardly follows that they “don’t deserve our attention”. White (of Strunk and White) is the author of Charlotte’s Web, still popular after six decades, so, not quite a literary failure.
Sure. Also, if they are driving a car into an intersection I’m crossing, I definitely endorse attending to them. But I suspect the poster Morendil is quoting meant “don’t deserve our attention [as authorities on grammatical usage].”
The pervasive wrongness of Strunk and White, in particular, is a recurring theme on LanguageLog.
If we’re to be treating people as deserving of our attention on the basis of their literary success, as the author of the quote did (see the appeal to Chaucer et al.), then it becomes relevant that E. B. White wrote Charlotte’s web. If we are going to ignore what E. B. White says on matters of usage because it doesn’t matter what he did as a writer, then in order to be fully consistent we should ignore Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the rest. This, however, undermines the Language Log quote, because it relies entirely on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the others to make its point.
I don’t think it’s straightforwardly literary success. Chaucer and Shakespeare may be the two most influential writers in English. Their work represents the form of English that ‘won’ in the 14th century and turn of 1600 respectively. The only other texts that leap to mind as historical sources of similar importance would be the King James Bible and the first Dictionary.
Shakespeare and Chaucer aren’t being appealed to as authoritative commentators. Their writing is referred to of evidence of English as it did and does exist.
It is not clear to me what you are saying. On the one hand you are saying that their work is representative of English as it existed. On the other hand you are saying that they are highly influential. Well, which is it?
But either way, E. B. White meets the criteria to at least some extent. First, he is indeed a representative of English as it existed in the mid-20th century. And as such, he is arguably more relevant to us now than Shakespeare and Chaucer are, since his English is closer to ours. Chaucer’s work, after all, is sufficiently hard for us to read that there now exist translations into current English of his work, and even Shakespeare cannot be read without a glossary.
As for influential, well, after all, White is one of the authors of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, which is influential. In fact, it is precisely because of the influence of Strunk and White that Language Log is bothering to talk about it.
Both representative and influential. Why would that be a contradiction? Newton and Einstein are both referred to as showing how scientists work AND as influencing scientists after them.
Writers and ‘experts’ are being mixed up here. White’s involvement here is as a commentator and critic, not in his own writing. Shakespeare and Chaucer aren’t commentators offering arguments, they’re the sort of thing that experts have to be expert in. You can argue whether another commentator’s analysis is right or wrong, but it’s more difficult to reject the evidence of cases in the field itself. The example of Einstein is a different sort of evidence about science, and a different sort of appeal, than the arguments of Kuhn or Popper.
Both representative and influential. Why would that be a contradiction?
I didn’t say it was a contradiction. I was asking you to clarify what you were saying. In any case I answered for both possibilities.
Writers and ‘experts’ are being mixed up here. White’s involvement here is as a commentator and critic, not in his own writing.
As I argued elsewhere, I don’t think this distinction is decisive.
You can argue whether another commentator’s analysis is right or wrong, but it’s more difficult to reject the evidence of cases in the field itself.
But now you are simply not answering what I wrote, but are beating up a straw man. My original statement was:
They may be wrong on this particular matter, but it hardly follows that they “don’t deserve our attention”.
In other words, I am admitting that they are wrong (I say “may” but my intent is that I am persuaded by the evidence from the OED), so if we treat them as prosecution lawyers I would say as the jury that they have lost the case and the defense has won, but I am saying that Language Log goes too far in saying that they “don’t deserve our attention”—i.e. that they should not have been permitted into the courtroom in the first place. That takes it one step too far, and I pointed that out.
Sorry, I took ‘which is it’ as meaning it must be one or the other. I think that the distinction is, while not perfect, well worth making. If we’re being philosophers of science, we listen to what Feynman says about physics, but our response can be to disagree. If it’s understood that some hold Feynman’s position, the simple fact he says it doesn’t itself constitute direct evidence. Whereas if we’re being philosophers of science and someone points out that our theory about what science can do clashes with what one of Feynman’s theories actually did, we have to engage with that in a different way.
On refusing them from the courtroom, LangagueLog obviously thinks they are simply bad commentators. It refers to ‘the perennially clueless Strunk and White’. I don’t know the area well enough to know if that’s fair.
But your counter-argument was that we should listen to White because he was a literary success, and that argument was founded on the comparison to appeals to Chaucer and Shakespeare. The fact is that White was being referred to as a bad commentator, which is very consistent with being a good author. And Chaucer and Shakespeare were being referred to as influential and representative authors, not simply succesful ones.
I disagree, because I think that being a bad commentator on writing is not “very consistent” with being a good writer. That is not a comfortable fit. It is technically consistent (i.e. possible), but not very consistent (i.e. probable). Similarly, Feynman being a good physicist would be technically consistent with making outrageously false statements about what science is in his popular essays, but it would not be a comfortable fit. We do not expect someone who has no clue about what science is to actually be a good scientist, and we are right not to expect that. This is why, having seen that Feynman is a good scientist, we expect him to have a very good grasp of what science is and so we expect his popular essays about science to be insightful and largely true.
This is why I find the distinction being made here between writer and commentator on writing to be a bit thin.
I think we’re coming from different ideas about this: in my experience, practicioners in any area often make absolutely horrible theorists about it. And at my university there was a physics professor who actively discouraged students from taking history and philosophy of science. Not because he thought it was worthless but because he felt it would blunt their scientific focus and abilities. This is all relative to those of similar intelligence/ability who haven’t specialised: on average, those doing well at almost any intellectual/educated pursuit will correlate with doing well at others to a degree.
There are honourable exceptions, of course.
In any case, even if there is a close association, there’s still a difference between someone’s work as a practitioner and their work as a commentator.
I think we’re coming from different ideas about this: in my experience, practicioners in any area often make absolutely horrible theorists about it
I sense this veering onto a whole other topic, but it may still be worth pointing out that the Elements of Style is not, and is not intended as, a work of theory. It is intended as a manual of instruction. And as far as I know, by far the majority of instructors in one craft or another are themselves practitioners rather than philosophers or sociologists who study the field from an outside vantage point. You want to learn physics from a physicist, not from a philosopher of physics. You want to learn writing from a writer. You want to learn architecture from an architect. And so forth. And before we had schools of art, we had the system of apprenticeship, in which people who are learning a trade study under those who are already making a living in the trade.
This is a good point; however, it rests on the assumption that Strunk and White managed to accurately describe what they are doing. But actually they failed at this.
This is a good point; however, it rests on the assumption that Strunk and White managed to accurately describe what they are doing. But actually they failed at this.
You are stating this as a binary fact (either they did, or they did not, accurately describe what they are doing). But surely what is more relevant is not a binary fact, but rather a matter of degree. Two questions are important:
1) What portion of their own advice did they not follow?
Suppose you find ten things that Strunk and White didn’t do that they said you should do. That amounts to a page of errata, which many books have (and which maybe all books should have). If we threw out every book that had (or deserved) a page of errata, then we would probably empty the libraries.
2) To what extent did they not follow it?
Question number (2) is interesting because it’s not always a question that can easily be answered by looking at their writing. Here’s what I mean. Suppose that I write an essay that is 100% passive constructions. Then I remember the advice to avoid passive constructions if possible. So I go through my essay, find a lot of passives that would be strengthened by making then active, and bring my essay down to 80% passive constructions.
Now, somebody looking at my essay will see that it is 80% passives and he might be tempted to conclude that I didn’t follow the advice to avoid passives. And he would be wrong.
That you do not find it very consistent is not relevant, because it happened. Even if you do not resolve it in the same direction as the people at Language Log, the contradiction between their writing and their advice on writing remains.
You seem to be failing to draw the distinction between looking at what they said and looking at what they did. And indeed, Strunk and White did not, in fact, actually follow their own advice.
I simply don’t think that this distinction is decisive. After all, on the topic of what physics is, we pay attention to Richard Feynman not only as an example of a physicist. We also pay attention to what he says about what physics is. And we take his statements about physics as having some authority on the strength of his being a physicist.
Fundamentally it seems to come down the expert-at-vs.-expert-on distinction. Being an expert at writing is some evidence for being an expert on it, but if what one says in one’s persona is an expert on writing doesn’t actually match what you do in your persona as an expert at writing, we have to ask which one is actually accurate. These are people who were initially known as experts at writing, so if there’s a contradiction it’s quite possibly because they were able to parlay their reputation as one into reputation as the other, without necessarily actually being the other. And if someone is primarily an expert at writing, then looking at what they actually wrote is more important. We do listen to what Feynman says about what physics is, but we expect philosophers of science to have a somewhat better idea.
But all this is hardly relevant. The fact remains that these days we have better experts on writing, whose expertise is actually empirically based. Should the debate become so unclear as to come down to authority rather than arguments, who has the better track record is pretty clear.
We do listen to what Feynman says about what physics is, but we expect philosophers of science to have a somewhat better idea.
Not on principle, but because I have read Feynman, and I have read philosophy of science (plenty of it, in my view), I do not expect philosophers of science to have a better idea—but in my case it’s not expectation. It’s memory.
Of course, you don’t have to pay any attention to what I just wrote. But I think that if you read enough philosophy one thing you will find philosophers agreeing on often is that other philosophers are wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, could not be more wrong, disastrously wrong.
We do listen to what Feynman says about what physics is, but we expect philosophers of science to have a somewhat better idea.
I don’t. I’ve read work by prominent philosophers of science and noticed parts that were not even internally coherent. As far as I can see they are off in their own little world divorced from anything useful.
Fair enough—I only mentioned it because I happened to have a period where I avoided singular-they because I thought it was forbidden. I’ll trust your judgement on style.
Oh, the blogger is probably male. But from eir perspective, so was I: I blogged about “refining the art of human rationality” and ey could have been ever-so-responsibly screening off priors and making eir best guess and ey was wrong and I am pissed off. So, I decline to do the same thing.
Meanwhile I find ‘ey’ just irritating so my approach is to sometimes just avoid pronouns while other times I randomly generate pronouns based on my prediction, biased towards 0.5. I don’t recall being dramatically mistaken thus far and seem to have a reasonably good track record for guessing right based on writing style. At least, that is, in cases where I get later confirmation.
The singular they has a long and illustrious history. I know I’ve said it four or five times in the recent comments, but that’s what I’d recommend.
Really? I use ‘they’ quire frequenly but feel bad every time. I’ll stop feeling bad now. Thanks. ;)
Glad to be of service!
I think the singular they is not appropriate in this case, where the referent is a specific person of unknown (to the writer) gender, namely Alicorn, instead of an indeterminate person. From Wikipedia:
Like some others here, I also find ‘ey’ annoying and distracting, so the fix I would prefer in this case is ‘he or she’. Does anyone consider that annoying or ungrammatical?
I’m sorry you find “ey” irritating; I promise not to refer to you a la Spivak. And I’m glad you’re good at detecting gender from writing style. And someday you may piss someone off very badly.
It doesn’t appear to have occurred to you that some people find Spivak pronouns very annoying. They annoy me immensely because it feels like someone is deliberately obstructing my reading in an uncomfortable way to make some kind of political point almost entirely unrelated to the context of the post itself. I usually just stop reading and go elsewhere to calm down.
I promise not to refer to you with Spivak pronouns either.
“I don’t know what gender the person I’m talking about is and wouldn’t care to get it wrong” is not a political point, though.
It’s not me being referred to with them that bothers me, it is them being used at all. I find it difficult and uncomfortable to read, like trying to read 1337 5p34k, and it breaks my reading flow in an unpleasant way. It’s like bad grammar or spelling but with the additional knowledge that someone is doing it deliberately for reasons that I consider political.
“Political”?
I think it may have been a few decades ago, when the pronouns were invented, but at this point Spivak is generally used for courtesy purposes, as Alicorn said.
Breaking the flow I’ll agree is a valid objection, however. I have opted to avoid neologistic pronouns for that reason, save in cases where such are requested. If someone wants to be a “xe”, that’s their business, I say.
Thanks for the detailed description of why you find invented pronouns annoying.
I’m pretty flexible about new words, so I react to invented pronouns as a minor novelty.
I don’t know what people who use invented pronouns have in mind—they could be intending to tweak people, or they could be more like me and generalizing from one example.
I trained myself to use Spivak pronouns in less than a month. As far as lingual/grammatical conventions go, they flow very naturally. Singular “they” does not, because a plural verb does not belong with a singular subject. I find that much more annoying.
Dost thou also find the use of “singular you” annoying?
There is a difference between those situations. “You” is the only modern second person singular pronoun, whereas the third person singular has “he” and “she” in addition to the oft-used “they,” the latter obviously being the one which doesn’t fit.
Personally, I do feel it would be better to have some separation among the singular and plural second person pronouns, to avoid awkward constructions like “you all” and similar things. However, “thou” doesn’t seem to be a very viable option, given its current formal, Biblical connotations.
Also, the English language is missing a possessive form of the pronoun “which” (compare “who” and “whose”), if anyone wants to work on that problem.
One really clumsy thing in English is that there is no interrogative pronoun to which the answer would be an ordinal number (i.e. N-th in some sequential order). There isn’t even a convenient way to ask that question.
Don’t we use “whose” for that purpose?
That is the suggested remedy, but it’s a bit of a kludge. “Who” is intended to be used as a pronoun for people, so the possessive form “whose” should be used in the same way.
I’m a bit confused that you call it just a “suggested remedy”; my point is not that anyone advises this, it’s that this is what English speakers actually do.
Intended by who? Should why? It’s not even clear offhand that we should regard “whose” as exclusively a possessive form of “who”, given the above.
There’s a difference between what people actually do and what they should do.
Exactly my point. “Who” is for people, i.e. those beings that can have intentions.
But doing so reduces the clarity of the language, by conflating two different meanings.
Off the top of my head I can’t think of any situation where the antecedent of “whose” would be unclear due to its ability to also refer to inanimate objects.
I have to disagree with this. I’m also someone who’s bothered when words with multiple distinct meanings get merged, but I don’t think this can be described as a case of that. (I suppose the most obvious objection is that this does not reduce the quality of the language because there is nothing to compare to. If English ever had these other words you suggest, it can’t have been for hundreds of years at least.)
In any case, these words are just function words, they’re just relative pronouns. Merging different relative pronouns doesn’t add extra meanings—most of them could be pretty well expressed with “what”—it just forces you to include the information even if it’s not relevant (maybe we don’t care if what did this is animate or not), while allowing some things to become slightly shorter by being implicit (we can say “he who did this” rather than “What person did this”. This wouldn’t work as well with “whatever”, but that’s a quirk of how the word is formed in English rather than any general feature of relative pronouns.)
Basically you’re just introducing another unavoidable; it doesn’t “add meaning” any more than does English’s insistence that all finite verbs have tense.
You’re not the only person I know to make this claim, but I will admit to never having understood it.
That is, I can understand objecting to “If my neighbor visits I’ll give them a cookie” because it violates the English grammatical convention that the subject and object must match in quantity—singular “neighbor” doesn’t go with plural “them.” I don’t have a problem with that, myself, but I accept that some people do.
And I can understand endorsing “If my neighbor visits I’ll give em a cookie” despite it violating the English grammatical convention that “em” isn’t a pronoun. I don’t have a problem with that either.
But doing both at once seems unmotivated. If I’m willing to ignore English grammatical conventions enough to make up new pronouns altogether, I don’t see on what grounds I can object to someone else ignoring subject/object matching rules.
Mostly, when people say this sort of thing I understand it to be an aesthetic judgment, on a par with not liking the color blue. Which is fine, as long as they aren’t too obnoxious about trying to impose their aesthetic judgments on me.
Presumably you mean pronoun and antecedent. Clearly, subject and object need not agree in number (what you call “quantity”); such a requirement would in fact be logically impossible.
Yup, you’re right. I have absolutely no idea what my brain thought it was doing there.
Entirely incidentally: requiring that the subject and object match in number would admittedly be a strange sort of grammatical requirement to have, as it would preclude expressing all manner of useful thoughts (e.g., “Give me two slices of pizza”), and I’d be incredulous if an actual language claimed to have such a requirement, but I’m not sure it’s logically impossible.
You’re right, of course. In fact, one could conceive of a language where the grammatical number of the object would have to agree with the subject, and it would therefore not give any information about the actual number of things denoted by the object, which would have to be stated explicitly if it’s necessary to avoid ambiguity, like in languages that lack grammatical number altogether. For all I know, there might even be an actual human language somewhere that features something like this.
I don’t consider the creation of words to fall under the auspices of grammar. That happens in English and other languages all the time, because new or different concepts frequently need to be expressed in ways that are unavailable in the current state of the language. Using new words promotes clarity, in the long term, but misusing current words does the opposite.
“The pronoun form ‘they’ is anaphorically linked in the discourse to ‘this person’. Such use of forms of they with singular antecedents is attested in English over hundreds of years, in writers as significant as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, and Wilde. The people (like the perennially clueless Strunk and White) who assert that such usage is “wrong” simply haven’t done their literary homework and don’t deserve our attention.” (Language Log)
(Examples)
Language Log and Strunk and White are not playing the same game.
Strunk and White are playing “Does this look right nowadays?”
Language Log apparently thinks there are official rules determined by history.
I, of course, think the singular “they” looks just fine, nowadays.
This could hardly be farther form the truth. Language Log thinks that some completely made up rules that even the authors that propagate them often don’t follow in the very books they are doing the propagating in (I’m not sure if this applies in the specific case of Strunk and White and singular they, but it applies in many cases of what’s labeled prescriptivist poppycock there) are made even more absurd by history and the usage of high status people praised for their style.
Exactly so. My favorite example is Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” in which he rails against (among other things) the passive voice, but the very opening sentence of the essay contains the phrase “it is generally assumed.” Mistakes were made, I guess...
This is unfair to Orwell. Orwell’s advice is not to never use the passive voice. To begin, Orwell gives examples of bad writing and says:
His obvious complaint is that the passive voice is overused and inappropriately used, not that it is used at all. Note the phrase “wherever possible”. That suggests that the problem he is identifying is one of excess. In obvious reaction to this, he suggests a rule which exactly flips the above description, specifically:
This however does not say “never use the passive, ever”. And it should furthermore be obvious that Orwell does not mean, “never use the passive where you can find some convoluted and unreadable way to use the active.” I should think that you could always find some convoluted way to use the active. Rather, I think it should be obvious that he means, “never use the passive where you can use the active well.” What it amounts to is a reminder to the writer to re-examine his passives to see whether an active would not be better.
Well, yes, he also says, “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” But his opening sentence sounds to me precisely like the sort of passive that he’s warning against. It conjures the image of vague nameless opponents instead of naming concrete people, or at least concrete sorts of people, where we could examine if he really represents their views fairly. For a careful reader, this should be a warning that he might be setting up a strawman.
Can you even think of a concrete phrase that exemplifies a more shamelessly weasely use of passive than “it is generally assumed that...”?
Your position seems to be, then, that Orwell’s advice is sound, and it was his failure to follow his own advice which was unsound. I had taken you to mean approximately the opposite—that Orwell, a good writer, failed to take his own advice, and thereby illustrated the unsoundness of his advice. Or did you have something else entirely in mind?
Actually, both, to some extent. There is good and bad writing in terms of aesthetic style, and also in terms of logical soundness and factual accuracy. Any given piece of writing can be good or bad along these dimensions almost independently. Clearly, texts that combine great style with bad logic and inaccurate facts are especially misleading and difficult to assess correctly, and a lot of Orwell’s writing is in this category.
Now, in this essay, the great stylist Orwell breaks his own advice all over the place and thereby demonstrates that it’s complete rubbish when it comes to achieving good writing style. Good style in fact requires breaking these rules so often that it’s meaningless to espouse them as general guidelines. What’s significant is that Orwell is such a good stylist that his style dazzles you into not realizing this even as the contradictions are dancing in front of your nose. At the same time, the rules do have some limited applicability when it comes to logic and facts: some particular sorts of passives, bad metaphors, etc. are commonly used as weasely rhetorical tricks—and Orwell’s weasely essay does in fact employ them, hidden in plain sight by his great style.
So, to sum it up, Orwell has taken some observations about writing of non-zero but limited usefulness and applicability and written an unsound essay espousing them as supposedly general (if not absolute) rules. In the process he has contradicted himself by demonstrating that to achieve good style one must break these rules liberally, and also by breaking them in those situations where they do have some applicability (such as the awful “it is generally assumed that...”).
Debates on proper language style and grammar are always entertaining due to the impossibility fundamentally inherent in them of ever coming to a rational resolution. It’s a fun distraction to hone the creative mind for when real debate comes along.
Or a temptation to reinforce bad habits of rhetoric so that when there is actually a rational conclusion to be reached everyone can merrily ignore it and follow their ego unfettered.
To expand on this point—Strunk & White and Language Log are both playing the “does this look right nowadays” game; the difference is that LL is basing their conclusions on what people actually do nowadays, whereas S&W are simply stating what they think would work better with no actual testing. That they failed to actually follow it suggests that in actual usage they did not find it to work better.
The reference to historical authors (rather than the current ones that would be more relevant) is just a bit of Dark Arts by LL, because the people espousing such arbitrary rules often claim they are based on history.
Is it Dark Arts to head off at the pass the feeling that a grammatical rule is upholding ‘proper, traditional’ English against ‘slipping standards’?
If that’s actually what’s being argued, no. And indeed prescriptivists often do argue this. But nobody seems to have actually been claiming that in this case.
If it had been explicitly claimed it wouldn’t be ‘heading it off at the pass’!
:-)
They may be wrong on this particular matter, but it hardly follows that they “don’t deserve our attention”. White (of Strunk and White) is the author of Charlotte’s Web, still popular after six decades, so, not quite a literary failure.
Sure. Also, if they are driving a car into an intersection I’m crossing, I definitely endorse attending to them. But I suspect the poster Morendil is quoting meant “don’t deserve our attention [as authorities on grammatical usage].”
The pervasive wrongness of Strunk and White, in particular, is a recurring theme on LanguageLog.
If we’re to be treating people as deserving of our attention on the basis of their literary success, as the author of the quote did (see the appeal to Chaucer et al.), then it becomes relevant that E. B. White wrote Charlotte’s web. If we are going to ignore what E. B. White says on matters of usage because it doesn’t matter what he did as a writer, then in order to be fully consistent we should ignore Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the rest. This, however, undermines the Language Log quote, because it relies entirely on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the others to make its point.
I don’t think it’s straightforwardly literary success. Chaucer and Shakespeare may be the two most influential writers in English. Their work represents the form of English that ‘won’ in the 14th century and turn of 1600 respectively. The only other texts that leap to mind as historical sources of similar importance would be the King James Bible and the first Dictionary.
Shakespeare and Chaucer aren’t being appealed to as authoritative commentators. Their writing is referred to of evidence of English as it did and does exist.
It is not clear to me what you are saying. On the one hand you are saying that their work is representative of English as it existed. On the other hand you are saying that they are highly influential. Well, which is it?
But either way, E. B. White meets the criteria to at least some extent. First, he is indeed a representative of English as it existed in the mid-20th century. And as such, he is arguably more relevant to us now than Shakespeare and Chaucer are, since his English is closer to ours. Chaucer’s work, after all, is sufficiently hard for us to read that there now exist translations into current English of his work, and even Shakespeare cannot be read without a glossary.
As for influential, well, after all, White is one of the authors of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, which is influential. In fact, it is precisely because of the influence of Strunk and White that Language Log is bothering to talk about it.
Both representative and influential. Why would that be a contradiction? Newton and Einstein are both referred to as showing how scientists work AND as influencing scientists after them.
Writers and ‘experts’ are being mixed up here. White’s involvement here is as a commentator and critic, not in his own writing. Shakespeare and Chaucer aren’t commentators offering arguments, they’re the sort of thing that experts have to be expert in. You can argue whether another commentator’s analysis is right or wrong, but it’s more difficult to reject the evidence of cases in the field itself. The example of Einstein is a different sort of evidence about science, and a different sort of appeal, than the arguments of Kuhn or Popper.
I didn’t say it was a contradiction. I was asking you to clarify what you were saying. In any case I answered for both possibilities.
As I argued elsewhere, I don’t think this distinction is decisive.
But now you are simply not answering what I wrote, but are beating up a straw man. My original statement was:
In other words, I am admitting that they are wrong (I say “may” but my intent is that I am persuaded by the evidence from the OED), so if we treat them as prosecution lawyers I would say as the jury that they have lost the case and the defense has won, but I am saying that Language Log goes too far in saying that they “don’t deserve our attention”—i.e. that they should not have been permitted into the courtroom in the first place. That takes it one step too far, and I pointed that out.
Sorry, I took ‘which is it’ as meaning it must be one or the other. I think that the distinction is, while not perfect, well worth making. If we’re being philosophers of science, we listen to what Feynman says about physics, but our response can be to disagree. If it’s understood that some hold Feynman’s position, the simple fact he says it doesn’t itself constitute direct evidence. Whereas if we’re being philosophers of science and someone points out that our theory about what science can do clashes with what one of Feynman’s theories actually did, we have to engage with that in a different way.
On refusing them from the courtroom, LangagueLog obviously thinks they are simply bad commentators. It refers to ‘the perennially clueless Strunk and White’. I don’t know the area well enough to know if that’s fair.
But your counter-argument was that we should listen to White because he was a literary success, and that argument was founded on the comparison to appeals to Chaucer and Shakespeare. The fact is that White was being referred to as a bad commentator, which is very consistent with being a good author. And Chaucer and Shakespeare were being referred to as influential and representative authors, not simply succesful ones.
I disagree, because I think that being a bad commentator on writing is not “very consistent” with being a good writer. That is not a comfortable fit. It is technically consistent (i.e. possible), but not very consistent (i.e. probable). Similarly, Feynman being a good physicist would be technically consistent with making outrageously false statements about what science is in his popular essays, but it would not be a comfortable fit. We do not expect someone who has no clue about what science is to actually be a good scientist, and we are right not to expect that. This is why, having seen that Feynman is a good scientist, we expect him to have a very good grasp of what science is and so we expect his popular essays about science to be insightful and largely true.
This is why I find the distinction being made here between writer and commentator on writing to be a bit thin.
I think we’re coming from different ideas about this: in my experience, practicioners in any area often make absolutely horrible theorists about it. And at my university there was a physics professor who actively discouraged students from taking history and philosophy of science. Not because he thought it was worthless but because he felt it would blunt their scientific focus and abilities. This is all relative to those of similar intelligence/ability who haven’t specialised: on average, those doing well at almost any intellectual/educated pursuit will correlate with doing well at others to a degree.
There are honourable exceptions, of course.
In any case, even if there is a close association, there’s still a difference between someone’s work as a practitioner and their work as a commentator.
I sense this veering onto a whole other topic, but it may still be worth pointing out that the Elements of Style is not, and is not intended as, a work of theory. It is intended as a manual of instruction. And as far as I know, by far the majority of instructors in one craft or another are themselves practitioners rather than philosophers or sociologists who study the field from an outside vantage point. You want to learn physics from a physicist, not from a philosopher of physics. You want to learn writing from a writer. You want to learn architecture from an architect. And so forth. And before we had schools of art, we had the system of apprenticeship, in which people who are learning a trade study under those who are already making a living in the trade.
This is a good point; however, it rests on the assumption that Strunk and White managed to accurately describe what they are doing. But actually they failed at this.
Examples (because these are what actually determines it but have been lacking from the discussion so far—yes, these are drawn from Language Log, it’s an easy source):
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001905.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001906.html
The note about “which” here
The note about “needless words” here
Point 10 here
You are stating this as a binary fact (either they did, or they did not, accurately describe what they are doing). But surely what is more relevant is not a binary fact, but rather a matter of degree. Two questions are important:
1) What portion of their own advice did they not follow?
Suppose you find ten things that Strunk and White didn’t do that they said you should do. That amounts to a page of errata, which many books have (and which maybe all books should have). If we threw out every book that had (or deserved) a page of errata, then we would probably empty the libraries.
2) To what extent did they not follow it?
Question number (2) is interesting because it’s not always a question that can easily be answered by looking at their writing. Here’s what I mean. Suppose that I write an essay that is 100% passive constructions. Then I remember the advice to avoid passive constructions if possible. So I go through my essay, find a lot of passives that would be strengthened by making then active, and bring my essay down to 80% passive constructions.
Now, somebody looking at my essay will see that it is 80% passives and he might be tempted to conclude that I didn’t follow the advice to avoid passives. And he would be wrong.
That you do not find it very consistent is not relevant, because it happened. Even if you do not resolve it in the same direction as the people at Language Log, the contradiction between their writing and their advice on writing remains.
You seem to be failing to draw the distinction between looking at what they said and looking at what they did. And indeed, Strunk and White did not, in fact, actually follow their own advice.
I simply don’t think that this distinction is decisive. After all, on the topic of what physics is, we pay attention to Richard Feynman not only as an example of a physicist. We also pay attention to what he says about what physics is. And we take his statements about physics as having some authority on the strength of his being a physicist.
Fundamentally it seems to come down the expert-at-vs.-expert-on distinction. Being an expert at writing is some evidence for being an expert on it, but if what one says in one’s persona is an expert on writing doesn’t actually match what you do in your persona as an expert at writing, we have to ask which one is actually accurate. These are people who were initially known as experts at writing, so if there’s a contradiction it’s quite possibly because they were able to parlay their reputation as one into reputation as the other, without necessarily actually being the other. And if someone is primarily an expert at writing, then looking at what they actually wrote is more important. We do listen to what Feynman says about what physics is, but we expect philosophers of science to have a somewhat better idea.
But all this is hardly relevant. The fact remains that these days we have better experts on writing, whose expertise is actually empirically based. Should the debate become so unclear as to come down to authority rather than arguments, who has the better track record is pretty clear.
Not on principle, but because I have read Feynman, and I have read philosophy of science (plenty of it, in my view), I do not expect philosophers of science to have a better idea—but in my case it’s not expectation. It’s memory.
Of course, you don’t have to pay any attention to what I just wrote. But I think that if you read enough philosophy one thing you will find philosophers agreeing on often is that other philosophers are wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, could not be more wrong, disastrously wrong.
I don’t. I’ve read work by prominent philosophers of science and noticed parts that were not even internally coherent. As far as I can see they are off in their own little world divorced from anything useful.
OK, I guess that part was just wrong.
Singular they may be less distracting than Spivak, much as I like the latter.
I use singular “they” sometimes, although I find it makes many sentences awkward, especially if I’m also talking about some plural items or persons.
Fair enough—I only mentioned it because I happened to have a period where I avoided singular-they because I thought it was forbidden. I’ll trust your judgement on style.