Hyphenating Dilemmas (and Nothing about Baseball)

A front office change over at Fangraphs: Meg Rowley has taken over as managing editor and podcast host at the popular baseball site. Carson Cistulli, who was managing editor and podcast host for years, is moving on to work for the Toronto Blue Jays.

I'm interested in the podcast because I like baseball, but what I've always appreciated is Cistulli's approach to the project. The podcast has never been only about baseball; there has been a fair amount of French philosophy and pop culture in the mix, for example (and trash culture, too, as you could count on professional wrestling to come up now and then).

In the handoff episode, where outgoing host Cistulli played guest to incoming host Rowley, they talked a bit about their disagreements on hyphenation:

I've written about hyphenating previously, but that was an unusual circumstance. Rowley and Cistulli are talking about a traditional rule of hyphenation, one that says you need to insert a hyphen into a compound adjective when placed before a noun, so you're good to go with "grass-fed cows" and "cows that are grass fed."

The case of "front-office decision" vs. "front office decision" is trickier, if you are open to the idea that the matter is open to interpretation. The Chicago Manual of Style has, in recent editions, backed off from their stance that the hyphen rule applies across the board. They now promote leaving out a hyphen if the reader will not be confused. This introduces ambiguity, to be sure, but dropping the hyphen can reduce clutter.

Cistulli makes his case that hyphens can clarify things (is it an office decision that has a front, back and sides, perhaps?), while Rawley believes dropping the hyphen would not cause confusion, so this is a case where it could be dropped.

It's subtle, and most often you just have to go with the traditional rule. Where do I stand on "front-office decision" vs. "front office decision"? Please refer to the first sentence of this post to see.

___________

You will find a good summary of basic hyphenation rules in the Common Errors in English Usage book and on the Web site. You will find interesting discussion on bending and even breaking rules responsibly in Far from the Madding Gerund. Both books are on sale this month—$15 with free shipping.

                

All you ever needed to know about the passive voice you learned in kindergarten, assuming Geoffrey Pullum was your kindergarten teacher*

* and you were precocious and paying attention. This post is for the rest of you.

Let's start with the very practical advice Paul Brians provides in Common Errors in English Usage:

There are legitimate uses for the passive voice: “this absurd regulation was of course written by a committee.” But it’s true that you can make your prose more lively and readable by using the active voice much more often. “The victim was attacked by three men in ski masks” isn’t nearly as striking as “three men in ski masks attacked the victim.” The passive voice is often used to avoid taking responsibility for an action: “my term paper was accidentally deleted” avoids stating the truth: “I accidentally deleted my term paper.” Over-use of passive constructions is irritating, though not necessarily erroneous. But it does lead to real clumsiness when passive constructions get piled on top of each other: “no exception in the no-pets rule was sought to be created so that angora rabbits could be raised in the apartment” can be made clearer by shifting to the active voice: “the landlord refused to make an exception to the no-pets rule to allow Eliza to raise angora rabbits in the apartment.” 

Good advice all the way around, stated succinctly and directly. The bad example sentences are improved by switching to active construction, and the passive verbs are correctly identified ("was written," "was attacked," "was deleted," "was sought," "could be raised").

This seems fairly simple: The passive voice is almost always formed by using a form of "to be" with the past participle form of the main verb. In the previous sentence I did it with "is" and "formed."

And as a usage point, note that Paul does not say it is always wrong or bad style to use the passive—it is the writer's prerogative to judge whether the writing would be improved by changing to active voice. Would my sentence in the previous paragraph be improved by changing it to "One forms the passive by using [. . . ]" or "You form the passive by using [. . . ]"? I decided it would not.
The key is to be well aware of what you are doing as you move along in your writing. Blindly prohibiting the passive voice will not improve your writing, but being aware of this construction and its possible overuse could help.

But is that all there is to know about the passive? Well, hardly. Over at Language Log, Geoff Pullum has been tracking this case for years, and he has thought about the passive voice far more than you or I.

What has Geoff found in all this tracking and thinking? I'll give you some highlights, but keep in mind that I'm burying the lede, which will come at the end. If you wish to skip to the end right this minute, you have to promise me you'll read that document thoroughly. If you plan on clicking the link and skimming for a minute or two, I'm sorry—that will not do. You have to at least get through the salient points:

1. First, there is a shocking amount of misunderstanding about what the passive voice is. You may say, "Well, that's because it's a grammar term and who can be expected to know those?" But Geoff has found one instance after another of "authorities" handing out usage advice without being able to identify a passive. Quick: Name three popular style guides that every writer is familiar with. Chances are you thought of Strunk and White's Elements of Style among those three, but lest you think they know what they're talking about, keep in mind that in that book's discussion of the passive, four example "bad" sentences are provided; but only one of those four is actually a passive. In another instance, Sherry Roberts advises:
   
   "A sentence written in passive voice is the shifty desperado who tries to win the gunfight by shooting the sheriff in the back, stealing his horse, and sneaking out of town."
   
   But Pullum, the grammarian, quickly points out that she herself brazenly uses a passive in composing that sentence (the bare passive adjunct "written in passive voice"). Many other examples of this transgression have been catalogued on Language Log over the years.
   
   
2. Remember that earlier in the post I claimed that the passive is almost always formed by using "to be" with the past participle form of the main verb. True enough, but there are several other passive voice constructions out there: Geoff gives us "I had the suit made by my tailor in Rome," "He got hooked on skeet shooting," and "This rug badly needs washing," along with Sherry Roberts' "A sentence written [. . . ]," as examples of other kinds of passives.
   
   
3. If someone tells you "My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me" is a passive to be avoided, and that "I will always remember my first visit to Boston" is active and much better, you are entirely within your rights to remind that person that no speaker or writer of English would consider uttering or writing anything so inane as "My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me." Geoff calls this the "general information-structure constraint," meaning that in a naturally formed passive, there needs to be new information on both sides of the verb, so the phrase "will always be remembered by me" is completely unnatural because the "by me" information adds nothing to the meaning of the sentence. "I will remember" is the natural choice, and trying to twist this sentence around to create a bad example sentence is disingenuous, but indeed, that is what William Strunk did when composing a passive voice example in an early edition of Elements of Style. Yes, you heard me right: "My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me" was written by Strunk; it is not a real sentence, naturally formed and then later collected for discussion/examination.
   
   
4. What I'm really getting at is that Strunk and White are shifty desperadoes who try to win the gunfight by shooting the sheriff in the back, stealing his horse, and sneaking out of town.
   
   
5. What is labeled as "passive voice" is often just any old phrase or sentence that some critic decides is weak, an utterance that seems designed to shift responsibility and that often but not always contains a form of "to be." Thus "The election results saddened me" and "There was sadness in the room when we heard the election results" have the patina of passive voice, and so a critic ignorant of grammar may deem either of those passive. But they are not. The first sentence is just a verb with a direct object that happens to be "me"; the second sentence uses "There was"—a phrase that often can be revised for the better, but labeling it "passive" is a mistake. Other times sentences are labeled as "passive" for reasons that cannot be discerned or even guessed at. Geoff points out that the Canadian Press Stylebook labels this sentence as passive:
   
   "The economy experienced a quick revival."
   
   It is impossible, for me anyway, to see how anyone could imagine that sentence uses passive voice. Another example from a site called Grammarist calls this a passive:
   
   "I urge him to stay in cable, where he belongs."
   
   I have no idea what "stay in cable" means in this directive (perhaps this is advice to not acquire a satellite dish, or to avoid taking a job at a CBS?) or why "in cable" would be where someone could possibly belong, but I do know that that sentence in no way employs the passive voice.
   
   
6. The passive voice is absolutely required at times; for that reason alone you cannot blindly go about trying to eliminate it. Here's one example from Geoff:
   
   "The picture you’ve been admiring wasn’t painted by Picasso at all; it was painted by me!"
   
   Here the one-to-one symmetry of "by Picasso" and "by me" would be lost entirely were the sentence changed to the active "Picasso didn't paint the picture you've been admiring; I did!" Note the lack of rhetorical punch; note how much worse the active is than the passive in this case. How about the ungrammatical-but-effective exclamation "We was robbed!"? The critique, if there is one, is that the verb does not agree in number with the subject—no one in their right mind would try to "improve" the phrase to "The refs robbed us" or "The judge robbed us." It's important to keep that balance of "we" and "robbed" to emphasize the injustice of the situation.
   
   
7. Regardless of advice you may hear to avoid the passive voice, there is no writer, from the towering literary giant to the casual seller on eBay, who never uses the passive voice (an average of 13–17 percent of the time, in fact). A usage "expert" may advise you to avoid it, but doing so would only make your writing less sophisticated than that expert's.

But enough of the highlights. You really ought to go read Geoff Pullum's "Fear and Loathing of the English Passive." You will learn about several other situations that guide the use of passive voice, and you will be deeply horrified and saddened by the incompetence of many would-be usage guides. Yes, the paper is written for an academic journal, but don't let that discourage you—you won't find a more readable paper on an English usage point, and my summary barely scratches the surface—there are many more juicy parts to discover in the original.

Author appearance: Geoff Pullum at the University of Washington

Here is a rare opportunity to see the globe-trotting Geoff Pullum deliver a lecture in the Great Northwest. Next Tuesday, February 12 at 6:30. The title of the lecture,

The scandal of English grammar teaching: Ignorance of grammar, damage to writing skills, and what we can do about it

has prompted Geoff to post a clarification at Language Log:

[ . . . ] although the summary published on the registration page is entirely accurate, I would still conjecture that as many as half the people planning to attend will think that the scandal is people who write bad. They will assume that I will be dinging ordinary folks for writing (and speaking) ungrammatically. Little will they know what lies in store: that my target is the grammarians. It is the rule-givers and knuckle-rappers and nitpickers that I will be castigating for their ignorance of the content of the principles of English syntax.

But those of us who know Geoff already knew that.

The Artist

I just realized that over there on Facebook, Language Log is using an image I created a few years ago as their profile cover. Geoff Pullum had thought a visual representation of Language Log might work as something to be incorporated into the cover for Far from the Madding Gerund, whose type is incorporated into that Facebook profile cover also.

I'm very happy to have something I did featured like this, and hey—it looks pretty good to me. How would I know, though? I'm not an artist. I have some friends and acquaintances who are very serious and talented and successful, but I am only very lightly any of those three things. Required. To be an Artist.

That does not keep me from doing stuff, though. I came into book editing at exactly the time that computers started making layout work doable by the masses (I was, and still am, a mass), and so part of my duties in book production for a small publisher has always been design work, often creating book covers and ad pieces. Some of this work has been passable, including that cover for the Language Log book, Far from the Madding Gerund. Some of it has been hasty and quite uninspired, like a cover I generated in one 30-minute stint before going away on vacation:

I left instructions to use this type as a possible basis for creating something else that could actually be the actual cover. When I returned from vacation the book had been shipped to press with the cover more or less exactly how I had created it, including using color swatches entirely from the readymade palette that ships with Adobe Illustrator. The book went on to sell more copies than any other book we have ever done. Art, you see, doesn't matter much when it comes to selling books about computing.

For another Windows book, I created something I liked pretty well but never used or even showed to anyone:

I think it looked too fun, though. I once was told to make sure the cover never looks more fun than the book really is, and that's probably good advice.

I've created dozens of book covers over the years, and part of the reason I know I'm not an artist is that it is never torturous for me. I always enjoy it, even when it is clearly not going well at all.

Back to Language Log—I had a few other visualizations for what Language Log Plaza might look like:

 

I gave a full report on creating that cover in another post.

All of this is true—I am not a serious artist and only consider myself a designer when it is professionally expedient to do so (I'm a book editor, that's my self-definition)—but what is really, really true is that I have no skill as a photographer, and yet (another Language Log tie-in), I am very proud that my photograph of Mark Liberman is the one that shows up on the side when you Google Mark's name: 

Which has the background knocked out. The original photo, taken at pod in Philadelphia, looks like the one you see on the left side of the row of Mark Liberman images:

The only occasionally nefarious dictionary editor

Ben Zimmer, a guest author featured in Far from the Madding Gerund, writes a piece in today's New York Times that reminds us dictionary making is slow, methodical, scholarly work, and not produced by "cloak-and-dagger cabals full of deep, dark secrets." Ben tells us:

As an informal (and unpaid) consultant for the O.E.D. for the past several years, I had to chuckle at the breathless reporting. The O.E.D. has long kept filing cabinets full of citation slips for words under consideration, though nowadays the work is mostly done online. There is nothing surreptitious about it — it’s all part of the mundane work that lexicographers do to keep track of how words and phrases develop over time, in order to shape and revise their entries. If you saw how dictionary editors actually went about their day, you’d quickly understand why Samuel Johnson famously defined “lexicographer” as “a harmless drudge.” 

Ben's piece is great (as usual for him), but something I originally learned from Nathan Bierma is actually pretty scandalous: There is a tradition of making up entries while producing encyclopedias and dictionaries. The reason for it is to trap would-be copyright thieves; that is, you know someone stole from you if the information they are passing off as their own has only one single (false) source, and that source is your encyclopedia or your dictionary. You can learn all about it by searching on the word esquivalience. The New Yorker wrote up one famous example of the fountain designer Lillian Virginia Mountweazel.

Sign of the Times: Mark Liberman cited by Paul Krugman today

Here's something that would never have happened 15 years ago: A New York Times columnist citing a blogger. I'm referring to Paul Krugman today, paragraph II:

Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a list of words that most commonly follow the adverb “severely”; the top five, in frequency of use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured. [Link added]

Yes, there was a time not so long ago that blogs were looked at as pretty uniformly unreliable or, worse, merely a forum for opinion unencumbered by the restrictions of factual information. In fact, that opinion still holds in some places, not always without reason. Nevertheless, these days it is commonplace for writers in mainstream publications to quote one of the (many) good, reliable blogs out there. Language Log is certainly in that category. I identified that years ago when I went about collecting their posts for Far from the Madding Gerund.

Far from the Madding Eggcorn—can Webster's be far behind?

Years ago I pulled out an old sheet of newsprint, placed an acorn on it, and shot some photos with the digital camera. The day before that I had been in downtown Portland pointing the lens skyward to capture images of clouds.

The family thought it a little perverse, yes, but I had a vision; I was getting ready to build the cover of Far from the Madding Gerund, the collection of Language Log posts we were preparing for publication.

An acorn? For that? True, Geoff Pullum had imagined a large office building labeled with "Language Log," as if the blog itself had a physical location, with professional linguists in their offices all day long cranking out blog posts, running down the hallway to the copy room, ordering take-out together for a lunchtime meeting. A very romantic take on things, not unlike the announcement you hear on Car Talk when they give the address as "Car Talk Plaza." I messed around with it a little, like this:

and this:

also this:

this, too:

and even this:

But I kept going back to the acorn as the one true visual symbol of Language Log. It was the acorn, after all, that had inspired the word "eggcorn," which Mark Liberman in 2003 described on Language Log this way:

Chris Potts has told me about a case in which a woman wrote "egg corns" for "acorns." This might be taken to be a folk etymology, like "Jerusalem" for "girasole" in "Jerusalem artichoke" (a kind of sunflower). But it might also be treated as something like a mondegreen (also here and here), the kind of "slip of the ear" that is especially common in learning songs and poems. Finally, it's also something like a malapropism, where a word is mistakenly substituted for one of similar sound shape.

Although the example is somewhat like each of these three named categories of errors, it's not exactly any of them. Can anyone suggest a better term?

To which Language Log contributor Geoff Pullum responded that this kind of error should be called an "eggcorn," and thus "eggcorn" became common coin over at Language Log, where it has since been well understood by readers of the site. Too many posts have been written discussing eggcorns to link to, and a spin-off site, The Eggcorn Database, was launched in 2005. (Geoff, by the way, always told me the image on the cover has to be called an eggcorn, not an acorn, which sort of makes my head spin if I think that over too much.)

All these years later, Ben Zimmer tells us that, after the OED family of dictionaries added "eggcorn" last year, the American Heritage Dictionary now has "eggcorn" among its newly added terms of 2011. I like to think that this means my cover is now a word. That said, this is the final version of that cover—an acorn floating on the clouds with the smiling word "Gerund" telling you this is not all dead serious grammar talk inside, plus a joyous blurb by the great Jan Freeman resting like a crown atop the whole thing ("exuberant, tart, and totally addictive"). It may be my all-time favorite cover I've designed:

And, if you have not had enough of the "eggcorn" media blitz (it's just everywhere—it even made this blog!), you may go listen to Steve Kleinedler, executive editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, discussing "eggcorn" and other new entries with Robin Young at Here and Now.

The birthday of Ms.—110 years young

Those of us who started life on this planet in the 1960s may think that the popularizing of Ms. as an abbreviation—partly due to Gloria Steinem's magazine—in the late sixties/early seventies was very close to the first appearance of that title, but Ben Zimmer has uncovered a piece published on this date in 1901 that shows otherwise. That's an eye-opener for me; by the time I was born, "Ms." was sixty years old!

Just another example of great research by Zimmer, whose excellent work on Winston Churchill appears in our very own Far from the Madding Gerund.

Misspell "vise" and win a free book!

I was reading Paul Brians' account of the history of vise and vice, as told by the OED, and I could not help but remember, for better or worse, an unusual encounter I had with the vise/vice spellings when I was editing the collection of Language Log entries, Far from the Madding Gerund . . .

The final piece of that book was the Introduction written primarily by Geoffrey Pullum, the co-author of the book (in fact, though Mark Liberman is the founder of Language Log and was listed as the first author of the book, it was Geoff who worked most attentively on the book version). I remember struggling with this sentence:

It concentrates primarily on topics having to do with grammar and correctness in Standard English—how people use the language, evidence that a lot of usage criticism is flat wrong, speculations on why incorrectly framed or completely mythical rules have such a vice-like grip on the minds of educated Americans, and so on. [emphasis added]

You, no doubt, will focus on that "vice-like"—shouldn't that be "vise-like"? I thought so, too, until I consulted the Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Unabridged) at the office here. It told me that "vice" was a spelling of "vise," so (I thought to myself) don't automatically make that change. Best to query the author. Here is photo evidence (note the straightforward manner of the entry: "vice"="vise" with no "esp. British" restrictions on it, and yes, this is an American publication):

Trouble is (or, I guess . . . trouble was), the author was away in Spain, and not Madrid or Barcelona or some other reasonable location. Far away in Spain, out in the Spanish Boonies. Far, far away. "Incommunicado," I think is how they put it. I, under tight deadline, had to make an Editorial Decision.

"No problemo," as they [don't actually] say. I'll just go into the mind of Geoff Pullum, whom I had worked with enough to know things such as he would say that only fools fret over "who" and "whom" in sentences such as this one. He is not just an authoritative English grammarian, he is also a sophisticated and witty prose stylist. He excels at the self-referential sentence that is not too subtle. He enjoys bringing you in on a joke, and so I reasoned something like this:

Here is Geoff using a variant spelling of "vise" in a sentence that discusses the folly of would-be usage police. He is daring anyone to challenge the spelling, daring the reader to consult the dictionary and see that, in fact, even a dictionary editor would agree that "vice" is actually an acceptable spelling for "vise." 

Pretty clever, I thought, and let it go at that. Let's leave the spelling as is. So far, so good.

But then . . . within a few months of the book's publication, I received this note from a reader:

Good morning!

Yesterday a birthday box arrived from my firstborn son and fellow linguaphile. In it I found a copy of Far from the Madding Gerund and a box of Godiva chocolates. What bliss! I dipped into both with gusto, beginning with a chocolate cream and the Preface. In the second paragraph I chewed happily while scratching my head in puzzlement. Was I in the "vice-like grip" of a pun or a slip of the homonym. Hmmm. Yum. If you'll reply, I'll send you a chocolate with a G on top! (I'm enjoying the book enormously.)

Hopefully, (and I hope I'm using that word properly),

DEVOTED READER

OK--the name of the reader was not "Devoted Reader." There was a real name involved, but I am respecting the privacy of the reader correspondent.

Naturally, I wrote back with the explanation I outlined above: "vice" is an acceptable replacement for "vise." I was strident, but my reply was not entirely without wit, and I invited the reader to contact Geoff Pullum, who had long since returned to civilization from the far reaches of rural Spain, directly for confirmation on this.

The reader dutifully did follow up with Geoff. Came the reply:

"Vise" is one of the Americanisms of spelling that I have not internalized, despite having been an American since 1987.  I do fine with "color" and "center" and "Americanize" and "aluminum", and even vary the spellings according to my audience ("colour" and "centre" and "Americanise" and "aluminium" for British correspondents); but "vise", and above all the single "l" in words like "labeling", tend to slip by me.

MADDING GERUND is strictly supposed to be in American spelling, so you were right to pick on it.  I'd like to blame our editor, Tom Sumner, if that's all right?

Best wishes,
GKP

So ouch. Mea culpa. But what about that Random House dictionary? What was going on there? Indeed, I went home that night and consulted the Webster's I used in college. Right there in front of me was the distinction "Chiefly Brit." next to the "vice" spelling when "vise" is standard in American spelling. My heart sank. I had been let down by the hefty Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Unabridged).

There was a very happy ending for me, however. The Devoted Reader found the exchange so interesting that she sent me a copy of a really delightful children's book that had been written by her mother-in-law. 

There is a lesson here for copy editors everywhere. When you start trying to outthink the room, you'd better start with at least two dictionaries in hand. If you're really lucky, one of them will be the OED, for reasons Paul Brians explained in his recent post here.

Far from the madding gerund: the "we knew Ben Zimmer when" edition

Time to meet William Safire’s replacement for the "On Language" column over at The New York Times.

But if you read Language Log, you already know him. Ben Zimmer has been posting there regularly since 2005. Before that, LL readers knew him as a frequent commenter whose remarks were frequently mentioned by Mark Liberman and Geoff Pullum in their own posts.

And if you’ve really been paying attention (like me), you’ll know that two of his comments were so good that Pullum insisted they appear in our book collection of Language Log posts, Far from the Madding Gerund, in 2006. I think Geoff put it to me like this: “You are a fine editor, Tom [Geoff is always so gracious when the knife is still held behind his back], but if Zimmer’s posts on Churchill are not included in the book, there will be no book. I hope that’s clear. Maybe you’d like that, though; it would free you up to go back to measuring your woodpile, or whatever it is you do up there in Oregon.”

OK--maybe not his exact words, but I can’t locate the exact words in my flawed email filing system, so I’m forced to resort to making things up (which I just hate to do, by the way--apologies to Geoff if I’ve misquoted, but I think I have not).

And then, if you’ve really, really been paying attention (like me), you will also know that it was a series of Ben Zimmer posts (covering a topic which will by necessity not be covered in his NY Times column--you have to get the book to know what I mean by that) that was selected to represent Language Log in Sarah Boxer’s Ultimate Blogs (2008).

And if you’ve pay any attention at all to the language usage biz (like me), you’ll also know that Ben has been one of the rotating columnists the Times has employed to write the “On Language” column during William Safire’s absence due to illness and since his passing.

Somewhere along the line, Zimmer became editor of Visual Thesaurus, which is perhaps the best-produced language usage site for the general reader on the web, due in no small part to his acumen.

Being asked to write the “On Language” column must be the language-columnist equivalent of being asked to host The Tonight Show. William Safire set the standard for the position just as surely as Jack Paar did so for the late-night talk show. This is big--really, really big. The only thing bigger than this is the congratulations and best wishes we send to Ben Zimmer. Ben Zimmer, “On Language” columnist for The New York Times just sounds great, doesn’t it? This is going to be good.

William Safire Remembered, but Best Remembranced Elsewhere

Ben Zimmer, contributor to Language Log and to Far from the Madding Gerund (and occasional sub at the NYT "On Language" desk), writes two remembrances of William Safire and points to a column where the late, great gray eminence references the work of Language Log in defining the phenomenon known as "snowclones," a term actually coined by Glen Whitman rather than a staffer at Language Log.

Look everywhere else for remembrances of Safire (I'll ignore much of his political opinion except as it relates to civil liberties and media conglomeration), and also look around for discussions of what a snowclone is. As far as I know, Safire never plugged that other phenomenon noted and popularized at Language Log, the eggcorn.

As far as I know, Safire never gave mention to Paul Brians' Common Errors in English Usage, which would have seemed a natural for him, but once upon a time he did give mention to Brad Hansen's Dictionary of Computing and Digital Media, published by our own selves. To him the book was "catnip for netties."

More on Obama's inaugural address

Listening to Mark Liberman's discussion on The World, I was struck by his declaration that Obama's "Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America," saying that it may become a historical moment of speechifying if, indeed, America does pick itself up, dust itself off, and begin the work of remaking itself.

Geoff Nunberg at Language Log singles out this phrase as a source of inspiration and an allusion to Jerome Kern's great tune, sung by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Swingtime. You can click on the link to his post to see Fred and Ginger do it in the movie. That version remains the standard, naturally, but here's another good one by Diana Krall:



But what are we picking ourselves up from? If Obama continues to hark back to classic Americana in his speeches, perhaps we can start to forget moments like these from the president who preceded him:



Maybe there is hope after all.

Mark Liberman saves The World!

Well, he didn't actually save it--it was a pretty good show anyway, but there was Mark Liberman on The World discussing Barack Obama's inauguration speech. Everyone knows Mark Liberman is co-author of our own Far from the Madding Gerund and co-founder of Language Log, but did you know Barack Obama is the current president of the United States? It's true.

You'll be hearing more about Barack Obama in the months and years to come, now that he's the president and all. For now you can listen to Mark Liberman on BBC's The World here. And those on the go can download it here.

Colorless green ideas do not sleep furiously—or do they?

Noam Chomsky’s most famous sentence is also one of the strangest ever constructed: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” His point, in contrasting the syntax of this sentence with a variation, “Furiously sleep ideas green colorless,” was that while the former is grammatical and the latter is not, the latter is no less probable to appear in English language than the former.

Because he asserted his point so audaciously—claiming that no statistical model for grammaticalness would show otherwise—he left himself open to Fernando Pereira’s 2000 report on his own analysis. It turned out that a simple statistical model showed the grammatical version to be 200,000 times more likely to appear than the ungrammatical version.

All of this was described by Mark Liberman in a Language Log post which was reprinted in Far from the Madding Gerund.

So it seems Mr. Chomsky was wrong in that particular assertion, but then along came Mikael Parkvall to seal the deal, showing us once and for all that colorless green ideas do, in fact, sleep furiously. His illustration serves as the punch line for this post:

This illustration appeared on the back cover of the original UK edition of Limits of Language, but for some reason was dropped for the US edition. Since I was involved in the decision, I ought to be able to explain, but for some reason I cannot. Take another look at that beautiful rendition and tell me I’m not crazy.

Hey there, Georgy Boy

I agree with Mark Liberman and Bill Poser: I don't understand the success of Bushisms as a cottage industry, given the mundane nature of seeking out slips of the tongue—many of which any of us could make—compared to the fascinating and important task of calling out truly nefarious deeds. In fact, in putting together Untidy, I made a point of dismissing a similar criticism of Rumsfeld early on in the collection (using Geoff Pullum's perfectly stated "No foot in mouth").

But that was until I discovered the George W Bush Singers. Part Seekers, Young Caucasians, or Lawrence Welk Singers, these guys bring it all home, I think, with a post-modern twist to a pretty tired gag: what they do works just as well as a parody of a bygone era of popular music as it does as a knock on Bush's challenged syntax. Their forte is juxtaposing layered harmonies with amazingly bizarre lyrics, all composed by George W Bush himself. It's the most surreal call-and-response you'll see. Here is their hit "4000 Hours":




Now, what would happen if you worked in the opposite direction, taking something formally structured like academic study and placing it in an free-wheeling atmosphere such as a blog? Perhaps you would end up with something also pretty hilarious, such as Far from the Madding Gerund.

I have, by the way, certainly logged in at least 4000 hours between working on that book and otherwise reading Language Log. I think the country is better for it, so I'll go ahead and count that as the "service to my country" GWB was referring to.

New book by Liberman

In celebration of being cited by the journal Science for its article Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men?, Mark Liberman, co-author of Far from the Madding Gerund, rounds up all the relevant posts he has written debunking much of Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain, plus Leonard Sax's Why Gender Matters, and Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens' The Minds of Boys.

And yes, there is enough material here to fill a book. One complaint to Mark: If, as he says, "[t]his is more on the subject than any sane person wants to read," then why do the books he debunks do so well?

And we should never diminish the efforts that have been awarded a Becky.

Anyway, I hope that reading and re-reading the marvelous material on Language Log is never "more on the subject than any sane person wants to read." Let's just call it enlightened self-interest.

Here's the full list, as it appears on Language Log:

Posts on Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain:

"Neuroscience in the service of sexual stereotypes" (8/6/2006)
"Sex-linked lexical budgets" (8/6/2006)
"Sex and speaking rate" (8/7/2006)
"Yet another sex-n-wordcount sighting" (8/14/2006)
"The main job of the girl brain" (9/2/2006)
"The superior cunning of women" (9/2/2006)
"The laconic rapist in the womb" (9/4/2006)
"Open-access sex stereotypes" (9/10/2006)
"David Brooks, Neuroendocrinologist" (9/17/2006)
"Gabby guys: the effect size" (9/25/2006)
""Every 52 seconds": wrong by 23,736 percent?" (10/13/2006)
"Guys are a bit gabbier in Dutch, too" (10/16/2006)
"Two new reviews of Brizendine" (10/30/2006)
" Word counts" (11/28/2006)
"Sex differences in "communication events" per day?" (12/11/2006)

More on the spread of these ideas in the media:

Regression to the mean in British journalism(11/28/2006)
Censorship at the Daily Mail(11/29/2006)
Contagious misinformation(12/1/2006)
Femail again(12/2/2006)
Bible Science stories(12/2/2006)
Fabricated but true?(12/3/2006)
The spread of bogus numbers in the meme pool (12/16/2006)
Busy tongues (12/31/2006)
The silence of the men (12/29/2006)
Cerebro de El Pais (1/28/2007)
The Female Brain is out in Britain(4/4/2007)

And on Leonard Sax's Why Gender Matters, and Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens' The Minds of Boys:

"David Brooks, cognitive neuroscientist" (6/12/2006)
"Are men emotional children?" (6/24/2005)
"Of rats and (wo)men" (8/19/2006)
"Leonard Sax on hearing" (8/22/2006)
"More on rats and men and women" (8/22/2006)
"The emerging science of gendered yelling" (9/5/2006)
"The vast arctic tundra of the male brain" (9/6/2006)
"Girls and boys and classroom noise" (9/9/2006)

See also:

"He bold as a hawk, she soft as the dawn" (9/14/2006)
"Stereotypes and facts" (9/24/2006)
"Gender myths: letting science mislead" (9/30/2006)
"Political correctness, biology and culture" (10/31/2006)
"When stereotypes hang out" (11/16/2006)
"Dueling stereotypes" (11/18/2006)
" The neuroendocrinologist formerly known as Prince", 11/28/2006
" Guess what?", 2/20/2007
" Women and men again, you know?", 5/13/2007

Diversions? There are Eight

According to the Southwest Airlines in-flight magazine Spirit, there are just eight diversions of note, but one of them is Language Log.

They had the good taste to include Geoff Pullum's post on Ray Charles among the recommended readings at the site. It is, to my mind, one of the best things originally published on the web. The structure of the post emulates the blues it describes--commencing on one theme, segueing to a pitch-perfect improvised solo in the middle, returning to the main theme with a big finish at the end.

Geoff's own version of the blues sets the scene in an idealized California--Ray Charles, not long before his passing, appearing at a summertime blues festival in the park. From there, Geoff's solo takes us into an analysis of Ray's word selection in "America the Beautiful," and with such flare we almost don't notice we've strayed from an unabashed Ray Charles appreciation to complete grammar-geek mode. Pullum gets out of this potentially dead-end riffing by slyly reminding us that he himself has had just two real professions: blues musician and linguist. He thus circles back to praise--more forceful and meaningful this time--for Ray Charles’ musicianship. The piece concludes with the four magic words for any American: Happy Fourth of July. It’s what we in the biz call bringing it home.

But if you’re like me, you tire of trying to read so much great material onscreen. For you, there’s Far from the Madding Gerund, complete with Geoff’s masterpiece of blogging on Ray Charles and 139 other classics from the annals of Language Log.

When you pick up the book, please do not miss Mark Liberman’s “The SAT fails a grammar test.” I know there are but eight great diversions remaining in this weary world, but surely this must be one of them, too.

Janet Maslin’s Teaching Moment

I used to teach writing. Don’t talk to me about sentences that are not sentences; I’ve seen sentences that are not sentences. These days, since switching from being a teacher to a book editor, I see fewer than I used to.
 

But they’re still there, and for once I think I can alert readers to an instance of a major media writer correctly calling out some real live sentence errors--errors that no self-respecting copy editor would let pass unnoticed. These are errors that should cause any reader to stop and say, “Wait a minute. This isn’t just some fake error like using singular ‘they.’ This error stops me dead in my tracks and makes me wonder what the author is trying to say.”

The book is Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8th. The authors are Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen. The asleep-at-the-switch publisher is St. Martin’s Press. Janet Maslin, erstwhile best movie reviewer at the New York Times turned best book reviewer at the New York Times, is the scold who gets it right about this sentence:

One would have to be dead, very stupid Fuchida thought, not to realize they were sallying forth to war.

Janet helpfully explains that the authors do not intend to impugn Fuchida’s intelligence; it’s just a matter of a dropped comma or a missed opportunity for a couple of em dashes. Do not be confused.

Elsewhere Ms. Maslin cites some more egregious sentences--very stupid sentences--that bring back many memories for me, memories of poring over student papers till late in the evening, wondering what those students are actually trying to say:

James nodded his thanks, opened the wax paper and looked a bit suspiciously at the offering, it looked to be a day or two old and suddenly he had a real longing for the faculty dining room on campus, always a good selection of Western and Asian food to choose from, darn good conversations to be found, and here he now sat with a disheveled captain who, with the added realization, due to the direction of the wind, was in serious need of a good shower.

Had enough?

I thought not:

The boys had money in their pockets to burn and fresh in from the West Coast the obligatory photos with hula girls, sentimental silk pillows for moms and girlfriends, and ridiculous-printed shirts had sold like crazy.

Janet also cites these zingers: the authors confuse “incredulous” with “incredible” and substitute “wretching” for “retching” (note to Newt: Just because the New Yorker can’t get it right doesn’t mean you can’t, either).

When you’re done having a laugh at Newt and William’s expense, you may proceed.

Now, let’s back up for a moment and consider the kind of thing that passes for grammatical analysis in the popular press: we’re told not to confuse that and which, to be precise in our word selection, never to leave modifiers out there hanging loosely (in truth, you may not be in trouble if you make any number of commonly cited errors). Some of this type of advice can be put to use selectively, I suppose, but what ever do we do when we come across the truly inept, uncategorizable errors in communication such as we find in the prose of Messrs. Gingrich & Forstchen? Hint: Don’t look to Strunk & White.

No, I’m afraid Newt, like fellow Republican, Rudy Giuliani, might be in serious need of a reading list. I offer two William, James & Co. titles, plus one well-known-to-writing-teachers classic:

1. Common Errors in English Usage, by Paul Brians. Because no two grown men plus a copy editor should ever confuse retch with wretch, incredulous with incredible.
2. Far from the Madding Gerund and other dispatches from Language Log, by Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum. Newt, William--just read this book. My advice: Don’t do it like Dan.
3. “The Syntax of Error,” by Valerie Krishna [essay]. There is not, as far as I know, a better explanation of how to revise and correct sentences for meaning. You may have to work to find a copy of this one; it’s 32 years old and was first published in the Journal of Basic Writing. Here’s a start for you, Newt, since I know you’re in DC at least some of the time: Head over to the American University Library and check out one of their copies of Rhetoric and Composition by Richard L. Graves. Or you could just order to have it delivered by post. Krishna’s essay is on pages 128-132. It’s short, yes, but it’s packed with useful strategies for revising remedial writing. Right up your alley.

So congratulations to Janet Maslin for alerting us so accurately to the problems we may find in the first book of Newt and William’s planned trilogy. And good luck to Newt, William, and the unknown St. Martin’s Press copy editor as they make it through their assigned reading list in time to get their prose all cleaned up for the second book. I think I speak for everyone when I say we cannot wait to see their improvement.

Signals offers Madding Gerund and Common Errors

For some time now, customers of the Signals catalog (gifts that inform, enlighten and entertain) have been ordering our book Common Errors in English Usage by Paul Brians. Far from the Madding Gerund is also now available from Signals, beginning with the newest (Summer 2007) issue.

The print catalog has long been popular with public radio listeners. (Get a free copy by clicking here.) Now the same catalog is easily accessible online as well. Some customer favorite items include wooden watches, "National Sarcasm Society" sweatshirts, duck bottoms coat rack, kids' astronaut suits and candle-by-the-hour.

Geoff Pullum at The Make Out Room in San Francisco

Renowned linguist and wit Geoffrey Pullum (Far from the Madding Gerund) will be featured in Writers with Drinks at The Make Out Room on Saturday, May 12, 7:30 to 9:30 PM. Doors open at 7:00p.m. Address is 3225 22nd Street, between Mission and Valencia, in San Francisco.

from the website
Variety is more that just the name of Prince's favorite girl-singer sidekick. It's more than just having sex dressed as Alien Greenspan every once in a while. It's also a Literary Imperative! Which is why Writers With Drinks combines erotica with literature, stand-up comedy with science fiction and poetry with essays. Plus mystery, romance, memoir, rants and 'other.'

Others on the schedule for the evening include
Jami Attenberg (Instant Love)
Stephanie Paul (The Comedy Store)
Liz Maverick (Wired, Shards of Crimson)
Jaime Cortez (Sexile/Sexilo)
Blair (Black Rennaissance Noir, Burying The Evidence)

Cost of entry is $3 to $5 on a sliding scale. All proceeds go to Other magazine.






SF Weekly named Writers With Drinks events in Best of San Francisco 2006:

BEST LITERARY DRINKING. Charlie Anders' "Writers With Drinks" continues on, five years strong. What's her secret? Variety! ... You're bound to stay interested if you find yourself listening to revered children's author Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) one moment and local comedian W. Kamau Bell the next. Throw in a few cartoonists, sex workers, radio hosts and big-shot authors like Andrew Sean Greer, Vendela Vida and Michelle Tea -- as well as the hostess ... and you've got a seriously (and not so seriously) good time.