Sauce for the Gander

Mike Clark, the N&R columnist on language, writes today about how "language sticklers" like him tend to drive friends and family nuts with their linguistic policing. Mike also drives me a bit nuts, because I believe that such policing has little to do with a love of language and much to do with a desire to control others.

Besides, the notions of "correctness" that get used in these exercises are quite arbitrary, and are often just a matter of imposing past conventions -- real or imagined -- on present speech. I find that policers of language impose their standards inconsistently, or, worse, are guilty of the same crimes that they accuse others of.*

(*No, it is not incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition, and if you don't like it, it's just something you have to put up with.)

In fact, Clark's column today is full of the kinds of little errors that he likes to find in others.

For example, he writes,

However, at home it seems to go differently.

Passing over the vague reference of "it," which doesn't refer clearly to anything in the preceding context, I'll ask why Clark doesn't know that "however" should be postpositive. According to Strunk's Elements of Style, "In the meaning nevertheless, ["however" is] not to come first in its sentence or clause ... When however comes first, it means in whatever way or to whatever extent."

Clark also writes,

Evidently, there was an infinitesimal catch in my voice. A teeny tone thing that gave me away.

In proper usage, "infinitesimal" means "an infinitely small amount, too small to be measured or reckoned." How could something so small be evident? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Clark's usage, meaning "very small," is only found in "loose or hyperbolic" speech. Tsk.

Furthermore, "tone thing" is redundant. A tone is of necessity a thing; the word "thing" adds no meaning to the phrase. Why not just say "a teeny tone"? Even worse, "A teeny tone thing that gave me away" is not a complete sentence; it's a mere fragment.

Clark continues,

Then I explained that when you write a check, you want to hyphenate numbers with "ty" in the first part ...

Hmmm. "You want"? I think he means, "you ought." "Want" as a modal verb showing obligation or necessity is not listed at all in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Clark goes on,

We know that our desire for correct punctuation, spelling and usage is based on the fact that language is the building block of thought, of communication.

"[T]he building block"? Really? How can you build something with just one block? That's a failed metaphor, and it's factually incorrect to boot. We have many non-linguistic thoughts, for example when we compose, play, or listen to music. And we communicate with gesture, posture, and facial expressions as well as with language.

Later in the column he writes,

They're more than willing to say, "What's the rule for commas and quotation marks?"

If Clark meant to be precise, he would have written, "What are the rules ..." unless he meant to say that there is a single rule for the use of both commas and quotation marks. Or is he talking about some rule concerning the proper relationship between commas and quotation marks? At any rate, he hasn't made himself very clear.

Still further down, he writes,

Catherine, I am happy to report that "alright" is still considered nonstandard, even though it has become increasingly commonplace since it first appeared (in the 19th century).

Clark should have avoided the passive voice in "is still considered" (see Strunk again), but the passive is convenient for him, because it allows him to avoid saying just who, exactly, considers "alright" to be nonstandard. Furthermore, there is no reason put parentheses around "in the 19th century."

And Clark probably doesn't really mean that "alright" has become more commonplace ("devoid of originality or novelty" -- OED); he just means that it has become more common.

Had enough? Me too. I hope you found this post completely irritating. Because there really isn't much wrong with the style, grammar, or punctuation of Clark's column. My point was to show, by example, the pointlessness of being a language policeman.

Lingua Latina in Temporibus

The New York Times says, Hooray for Latin:

As much as opening the concertina enlarges your imagination, squeezing it shut — translating English into Latin — sharpens your prose.

Years of reading and writing Latin have had some effect on the way I write, I'm sure -- though whether for good or ill, I can't say. I also liked this bit:

With a little Roman history and Latin under your belt, you end up seeing more everywhere, not only in literature and language, but in the classical roots of Federal architecture; the spread of Christianity throughout Western Europe and, in turn, America; and in the American system of senatorial government.

I've heard classicists quote Cole Sear on this point: "I see dead people." American culture is suffused with classical culture, but few see it.

Learning Latin and Ancient Greek is hard, but I rarely hear anyone who put in the effort to do it well say that it wasn't worth it. For most, it's a source of satisfaction and a path to interesting insights throughout their lives.

Update: Somebody could use a little classical eduction. Sheesh!

Teenaged Girls Talk Like That, Like, For A Reason

Mike Clark, the N&R's language columnist, today takes on two features of teenaged girl talk that seem to bug adults the most: the profligate use of like, and rising intonation at the end of declarative sentences. He transcribes a girl's cellphone conversation which he overheard at the Smithsonian:

"Waitwaitwait listen. Like my cousin? Rachel? Like she was here last year? And, like, she got so bored? That they, like, had to practically put her in an institution?"

[Mike continues] ... My wife insists that all generations after ours will speak with the question inflection ... the problem seems to be spreading.

He's right that "the problem" of rising intonation is widespread. Two scholars published a study in 2005 of the rising intonation in teenaged girls in Finland. It's also an established feature of many dialects in the UK, including Australia and New Zealand, and its prevalence in some speech patterns in Canada and the upper midwest in the US have led some to believe it's an artifact of Norwegian influence.

Most studies indicate it's commonest among adolescent girls and has been since the 1980s. Since I don't notice many adult women in their 30's talking that way, I'm guessing it's a speech pattern most of them outgrow.

And the rising intonation (which, by the way, is not the same as "question" intonation, which usually has a rise-and-fall unless it's a yes-or-no question) has a discourse function.

Most researchers seem to agree that the rising intonation is used (1) to provide the listener with an opportunity to give indications that she's still listening ("uh huh"), and (2) to signal that the speaker isn't done yet, that there's still more to come.

That may be why the girl on the cellphone used the rising inflection so often. When people don't have access to visual cues that their listener is still listening, it seems natural that they would use vocal ones more often.

As to the use of "like," that's another interesting phenomenon that has been studied pretty intensively among US and UK speakers. Far from being just a verbal tic or a filler, it's been shown to have a number of specific functions, such as marking a new, focused informational element in the utterance, as opposed to an established topic. One recent study shows,

In the vast majority of the children’s data like focuses on constituents which occur to the right of it including not only phrasal constituents, but also whole clauses and, arguably, entire discourse topics. --Stephen Levey, "He's like ‘Do it now!’ and I'm like ‘No!’" English Today (2003), 19: 24-32.

The irritating girl on the cellphone was telling her listener every time she said like, "this is new and important information that hasn't been previously established in our mutual discourse and that isn't a part of our set of shared assumptions." Her repeated use of "like" isn't meaningless; it just tells us that, like a lot of teenaged girls, she tends to place too much importance on trivial things. She's irritating because she repeatedly communicates that her every phrase is important.

Like actually does a lot more than that, however, and the literature on it is fascinating. It can be found without a great deal of effort, both in libraries and even on the internet. The same is true of studies of rising intonation.

I'll bet readers of a language column in a newspaper would like to know some of that stuff.