Poor Grammar
I've been reading one of the best books on poor grammar which is like all dictionaries should read. Okay, can you spot the three common grammar mistakes in that sentence (and in the title of the post itself)? Of all things, one would think that a book about working and writing for one of the largest dictionary publishers* would be about as exciting as watching ice melt; but author Kory Stamper turns her recent book, Word By Word, into such a challenging read that you are pulled into the world of what constitutes proper English grammar (although according to the author, grammar actually has little to do with lexicography or the world of words...what??) Irregardless** (an entire chapter is devoted to this nagging double-negative of a word that continues to be used and proves to be the bain of many an English major...but now appears in most dictionaries), the world of linguistics is so full of twists and turns that you begin to wonder if we've been educated in the correct manner, regardless of your country of origin (and I can only speak for the English language for I would be almost helpless if trying to correct the grammar rules of the Welsh or Ahka languages or the majority of languages other than English, for that matter). Still, it's been fascinating to explore for much of what we learn turns out to be unconsciously taught...say what??
Take this example, the world of unergative and unaccusatory verbs, something which is practiced in most languages but no so much in English (much as with the grammatical world of male and female conjugations, such as the French "la" and "le"). Unergative verbs signify something that you have control over, such as something you choose to do; thus in French, a statement such as "you ran" would use the avoir verb and become "vous avez couru." But lose that control and the verb will switch to the unaccusatory; so a statement such as "I fell" (which is something you couldn't control) uses the être verb and becomes "vous êtes tombé." Sound logical? Turns out that words are also grouped into count and mass words, such as corn and beans (to picture this, reverse the plurality of the words to corns and bean and you can sense how awkward this sounds). Much of that comes from the captivating lectures taught by Professor John McWhorter from his Great Courses series, a whirlwind tour of languages and pronunciations you've rarely or never heard, and many of them now so ancient that they are rarely used but somehow were instrumental in how our world's languages evolved.***
So here's a quick --really quick-- summary of some of the vagaries of English grammar, all nicely summed up by the famous children's writer, Nancy Lamb (and paraphrased from her book, Crafting Stories for Children): all right (never alright); less refers to quality, few refers to quantity (less frost could mean fewer pumpkins); lend is a verb, loan is a noun (I'm happy to lend you money to pay off your loan); among deals with more than two objects, between with only two (when having to choose among so many colors, it's difficult to just choose between red and blue); farther is distance, further is time or quantity (I can throw the ball farther than you so I don't think we should go further in this contest). We could dive into the deeper end...lie vs. lay (do I lie on the bed or lay on the bed?), me vs. I (he and me went to the beach or he and I went to the beach?, and what about him and me or him and I?), and on and on. In short, the grammar becomes a bit of a tangle the more involved one becomes (for those of you wishing to explore further, a fun but serious reference of sorts is Bill Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words). So why bother with this at all, much less why bother to work on dictionaries (or read a book on doing such since the author writes that the most recent unabridged dictionary her company released took "almost 100 editors and 202 outside consultants twelve years to write")? So let's quickly burst a few bubbles...
From Kory Stamper's book: After I got my job at Merriam-Webster, friends would ask me what my day-to-day work looked like. It makes sense: the idea that anyone spends eight hours a day doing anything with dictionaries beyond shelving them or using them as doorstops is absurd...So what does absurd do? I assured my friends that the work was utterly dreamy for a nerd like me: I spend most of my day reading. Heads would tilt; drinks would float back down to the tabletop. Sly incredulity would slide over their faces. Reading. Really. Not finding new words, not culling old ones. Just reading. I'd smile broadly. Oh, yes. Yes, yes...Folks assume that I spend my day in a locked, smoky conference room, chomping on cigars and guzzling scotch, where other lexicographers and I bark out the latest, greatest additions to the language like caricature admen. Dartboards and blindfolds are sometimes invoked; extensive bribery setups are hinted at -- how else did "Xerox" and "Kleenex" get into the dictionary? After such a buildup, it is perhaps disappointing to find that dictionary work really is so mundane. At that point, she probes deeper...how quickly does one add words such as AIDS and SARS to a dictionary while infotainment and muggles get put on hold for possible later inclusion? Is it strictly based on popular usage, and if so, usage where? On the internet, in medical journals, in back neighborhoods, in automobile magazines (don't laugh, they have to read all of those or how else would you know that the term horses could also have a meaning of horsepower in describing an engine?).
And if you're puzzled at all these seemingly random conjugations and grammar rules, what's even more puzzling is how English came about at all since most of England's monarchy spoke French (and indeed were of French origin)...not until Henry VII did a bit of broken English begin to arrive on the land, necessitating the arrival of books of translation...dictionaries. Italian to English, Latin to English, French to English (since the structure of the English language is more closely tied to Germanic roots rather than Latin roots); and from there, it was off to the races (up until the middle of the 15th century, author Stamper writes, most documents were still recorded in Latin). She adds: To linguists and lexicographers, the word "grammar" has generally referred to the way that words interact with each other in a sentence or the systematic rules that govern the way those words interact. Grammar, to the lexicographer, tells us why we say "He and I went to the store" and not "Him and I went to the store," or why we stick the verb between the subject and the object (usually) and not at the end like German does (as in, "why we the verb between the subject and object stick," which is perfectly grammatical and normal in German)...Many people --and many people who think they'd be good at this lexicography gig-- believe that the dictionary is some great guardian of the English language, that it's job is to set the boundaries of decorum around this profligate language like a great linguistic housemother setting curfew. Words that have made it into the dictionary are Official with a capital O, sanctioned, part of Real and Proper English. The corollary is that if certain words are bad, uncouth, unlovely, or distasteful, then folks think that the dictionary will make sure they are never entered its hallowed pages, and thus such words banished from Real, Official, Proper English...This is commonly called "prescriptivism," and it is unfortunately not how dictionaries work at all (on a side note, the words c**t and f**k first appeared in Nathaniel Bailey's published dictionary...in 1721).
There are all sorts of dictionaries, from those that pick up slang words in the Urban Dictionary to those attempting to find the words used on the streets but not making it to print such as Wordnik. And now the grammatical and linguistic landscape is changing even more as robotic programs begin writing quick bleeps for respected papers such as the Heliograph program at The Washington Post or the Wibbitz program at USA Today (the programs actually free up reporters for other jobs by tracking changes and sending out notifications almost instantly...think Twitter but updated in milliseconds). Last year, Facebook fired all of it human editors from its Trending module (it is now 100% robotically produced), all captured in a lengthy piece on the decline of printed journalism in Wired. Might dictionaries be next?
As with life (and mathematical equations) we seem to not give much thought to dictionaries, a word is a word is a word. And while we are occasionally forced to look up something such as onymous or portmanteau, the occasions are rare. But perhaps it is in those moments of digging --much as with the roots of a language or family-- that we begin to discover. Perhaps such a field of study is not for everyone, and such discoveries about language may or may not hold our interest...but as this quick peek shows --some of the scholars seemingly just sitting there with open doors and inviting you in-- there's a world of building blocks to tell us how we got here. Now, pidgin (which is what I grew up with in my childhood), dat be one whole udda ting...
*Merriam-Webster's dictionary is considered the second largest selling book after the Bible (the Merriam brothers bought out Noah Webster's dictionary business back in 1844 but lost the rights to exclusively use the Webster name after an appeals court ruled that the name had entered the world of common usage and could no longer be trademarked).
**As she defines it, the prefix "ir" --which connotes a negative meaning-- cannot stand on its own and thus has little business being there and adds nothing to the word "regardless," a word already meant to signify the negative meaning of the previous sentence.
***You can watch McWhorter's TED Talk on how the rapid rise of texting is also changing our world of language...and for the better. Linguists have actually shown that when we're speaking casually in an unmonitored way, we tend to speak in word packets of maybe seven to 10 words. You'll notice this if you ever have occasion to record yourself or a group of people talking. That's what speech is like. Speech is much looser. It's much more telegraphic. It's much less reflective — very different from writing. So we naturally tend to think, because we see language written so often, that that's what language is, but actually what language is, is speech.
****Ah-ha, so some of you were actually paying attention and reading all the way through to the bottom. You see, I actually feel that much information gets bypassed in footnotes and endnotes, those places where writers feel that the information is crucial, but not so crucial that it should be added to the initial text; think of it like frosting on a cake -- not essential but adding it brings that special element to the whole. So let me once again begin with apologies to all of you who may be English majors or at least recognized experts in the field of grammar or language; I am none of these and do not pretend to be such so any errors made are mine alone and done with total innocence and lack of knowing better. To those of you sticklers, yes, the multiple use of asterisks (horrors!) are fine and recognized by most grammarians as exemplified by this from the United Nations Editorial Manual: In documents and publications, asterisks and other symbols are used as footnote indicators when it is necessary to depart from the normal system of numbering or lettering. Sequence of symbols. When a series of such footnotes is required, the following sequence of symbols should be used: * , ** , *** , **** , † , ‡ , §. When more than seven footnotes are needed, numbers are used instead of symbols. Phew! Then there are books such as the maze-like read of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski where the seemingly endless sets of footnotes and endnotes don't really add to the story but become entirely new stories altogether. Skip the footnotes there and you'll missed a big chunk of the book itself. And for those of you left wondering about those mistakes in the opening sentence --and bearing in mind that much of this will seem to be nit-picking and old school (which it very well may be) and that times and rules change quickly-- take all of the following corrections with chagrin. Here again is the sentence: I've been reading one of the best books on poor grammar which is like all dictionaries should read....best is singular, always, so "the best book I've read this year" is correct, "one of the year's ten best movies" is not; the word poor is slowly gaining acceptance but grammatically most editors still prefer the word bad to describe (ironically) something of poor quality; ditto with the word like which is generally replaced with as (this was always a rant of my English teachers when the popular cigarette jingle Winston Tastes Good Like A Cigarette Should would cause them endless hours of grief...but then came James Brown with his I Feel Good song which, well, pushed many of my teachers over the edge; it's not grammatically correct either).
Take this example, the world of unergative and unaccusatory verbs, something which is practiced in most languages but no so much in English (much as with the grammatical world of male and female conjugations, such as the French "la" and "le"). Unergative verbs signify something that you have control over, such as something you choose to do; thus in French, a statement such as "you ran" would use the avoir verb and become "vous avez couru." But lose that control and the verb will switch to the unaccusatory; so a statement such as "I fell" (which is something you couldn't control) uses the être verb and becomes "vous êtes tombé." Sound logical? Turns out that words are also grouped into count and mass words, such as corn and beans (to picture this, reverse the plurality of the words to corns and bean and you can sense how awkward this sounds). Much of that comes from the captivating lectures taught by Professor John McWhorter from his Great Courses series, a whirlwind tour of languages and pronunciations you've rarely or never heard, and many of them now so ancient that they are rarely used but somehow were instrumental in how our world's languages evolved.***
So here's a quick --really quick-- summary of some of the vagaries of English grammar, all nicely summed up by the famous children's writer, Nancy Lamb (and paraphrased from her book, Crafting Stories for Children): all right (never alright); less refers to quality, few refers to quantity (less frost could mean fewer pumpkins); lend is a verb, loan is a noun (I'm happy to lend you money to pay off your loan); among deals with more than two objects, between with only two (when having to choose among so many colors, it's difficult to just choose between red and blue); farther is distance, further is time or quantity (I can throw the ball farther than you so I don't think we should go further in this contest). We could dive into the deeper end...lie vs. lay (do I lie on the bed or lay on the bed?), me vs. I (he and me went to the beach or he and I went to the beach?, and what about him and me or him and I?), and on and on. In short, the grammar becomes a bit of a tangle the more involved one becomes (for those of you wishing to explore further, a fun but serious reference of sorts is Bill Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words). So why bother with this at all, much less why bother to work on dictionaries (or read a book on doing such since the author writes that the most recent unabridged dictionary her company released took "almost 100 editors and 202 outside consultants twelve years to write")? So let's quickly burst a few bubbles...
From Kory Stamper's book: After I got my job at Merriam-Webster, friends would ask me what my day-to-day work looked like. It makes sense: the idea that anyone spends eight hours a day doing anything with dictionaries beyond shelving them or using them as doorstops is absurd...So what does absurd do? I assured my friends that the work was utterly dreamy for a nerd like me: I spend most of my day reading. Heads would tilt; drinks would float back down to the tabletop. Sly incredulity would slide over their faces. Reading. Really. Not finding new words, not culling old ones. Just reading. I'd smile broadly. Oh, yes. Yes, yes...Folks assume that I spend my day in a locked, smoky conference room, chomping on cigars and guzzling scotch, where other lexicographers and I bark out the latest, greatest additions to the language like caricature admen. Dartboards and blindfolds are sometimes invoked; extensive bribery setups are hinted at -- how else did "Xerox" and "Kleenex" get into the dictionary? After such a buildup, it is perhaps disappointing to find that dictionary work really is so mundane. At that point, she probes deeper...how quickly does one add words such as AIDS and SARS to a dictionary while infotainment and muggles get put on hold for possible later inclusion? Is it strictly based on popular usage, and if so, usage where? On the internet, in medical journals, in back neighborhoods, in automobile magazines (don't laugh, they have to read all of those or how else would you know that the term horses could also have a meaning of horsepower in describing an engine?).
And if you're puzzled at all these seemingly random conjugations and grammar rules, what's even more puzzling is how English came about at all since most of England's monarchy spoke French (and indeed were of French origin)...not until Henry VII did a bit of broken English begin to arrive on the land, necessitating the arrival of books of translation...dictionaries. Italian to English, Latin to English, French to English (since the structure of the English language is more closely tied to Germanic roots rather than Latin roots); and from there, it was off to the races (up until the middle of the 15th century, author Stamper writes, most documents were still recorded in Latin). She adds: To linguists and lexicographers, the word "grammar" has generally referred to the way that words interact with each other in a sentence or the systematic rules that govern the way those words interact. Grammar, to the lexicographer, tells us why we say "He and I went to the store" and not "Him and I went to the store," or why we stick the verb between the subject and the object (usually) and not at the end like German does (as in, "why we the verb between the subject and object stick," which is perfectly grammatical and normal in German)...Many people --and many people who think they'd be good at this lexicography gig-- believe that the dictionary is some great guardian of the English language, that it's job is to set the boundaries of decorum around this profligate language like a great linguistic housemother setting curfew. Words that have made it into the dictionary are Official with a capital O, sanctioned, part of Real and Proper English. The corollary is that if certain words are bad, uncouth, unlovely, or distasteful, then folks think that the dictionary will make sure they are never entered its hallowed pages, and thus such words banished from Real, Official, Proper English...This is commonly called "prescriptivism," and it is unfortunately not how dictionaries work at all (on a side note, the words c**t and f**k first appeared in Nathaniel Bailey's published dictionary...in 1721).
There are all sorts of dictionaries, from those that pick up slang words in the Urban Dictionary to those attempting to find the words used on the streets but not making it to print such as Wordnik. And now the grammatical and linguistic landscape is changing even more as robotic programs begin writing quick bleeps for respected papers such as the Heliograph program at The Washington Post or the Wibbitz program at USA Today (the programs actually free up reporters for other jobs by tracking changes and sending out notifications almost instantly...think Twitter but updated in milliseconds). Last year, Facebook fired all of it human editors from its Trending module (it is now 100% robotically produced), all captured in a lengthy piece on the decline of printed journalism in Wired. Might dictionaries be next?
As with life (and mathematical equations) we seem to not give much thought to dictionaries, a word is a word is a word. And while we are occasionally forced to look up something such as onymous or portmanteau, the occasions are rare. But perhaps it is in those moments of digging --much as with the roots of a language or family-- that we begin to discover. Perhaps such a field of study is not for everyone, and such discoveries about language may or may not hold our interest...but as this quick peek shows --some of the scholars seemingly just sitting there with open doors and inviting you in-- there's a world of building blocks to tell us how we got here. Now, pidgin (which is what I grew up with in my childhood), dat be one whole udda ting...
*Merriam-Webster's dictionary is considered the second largest selling book after the Bible (the Merriam brothers bought out Noah Webster's dictionary business back in 1844 but lost the rights to exclusively use the Webster name after an appeals court ruled that the name had entered the world of common usage and could no longer be trademarked).
**As she defines it, the prefix "ir" --which connotes a negative meaning-- cannot stand on its own and thus has little business being there and adds nothing to the word "regardless," a word already meant to signify the negative meaning of the previous sentence.
***You can watch McWhorter's TED Talk on how the rapid rise of texting is also changing our world of language...and for the better. Linguists have actually shown that when we're speaking casually in an unmonitored way, we tend to speak in word packets of maybe seven to 10 words. You'll notice this if you ever have occasion to record yourself or a group of people talking. That's what speech is like. Speech is much looser. It's much more telegraphic. It's much less reflective — very different from writing. So we naturally tend to think, because we see language written so often, that that's what language is, but actually what language is, is speech.
****Ah-ha, so some of you were actually paying attention and reading all the way through to the bottom. You see, I actually feel that much information gets bypassed in footnotes and endnotes, those places where writers feel that the information is crucial, but not so crucial that it should be added to the initial text; think of it like frosting on a cake -- not essential but adding it brings that special element to the whole. So let me once again begin with apologies to all of you who may be English majors or at least recognized experts in the field of grammar or language; I am none of these and do not pretend to be such so any errors made are mine alone and done with total innocence and lack of knowing better. To those of you sticklers, yes, the multiple use of asterisks (horrors!) are fine and recognized by most grammarians as exemplified by this from the United Nations Editorial Manual: In documents and publications, asterisks and other symbols are used as footnote indicators when it is necessary to depart from the normal system of numbering or lettering. Sequence of symbols. When a series of such footnotes is required, the following sequence of symbols should be used: * , ** , *** , **** , † , ‡ , §. When more than seven footnotes are needed, numbers are used instead of symbols. Phew! Then there are books such as the maze-like read of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski where the seemingly endless sets of footnotes and endnotes don't really add to the story but become entirely new stories altogether. Skip the footnotes there and you'll missed a big chunk of the book itself. And for those of you left wondering about those mistakes in the opening sentence --and bearing in mind that much of this will seem to be nit-picking and old school (which it very well may be) and that times and rules change quickly-- take all of the following corrections with chagrin. Here again is the sentence: I've been reading one of the best books on poor grammar which is like all dictionaries should read....best is singular, always, so "the best book I've read this year" is correct, "one of the year's ten best movies" is not; the word poor is slowly gaining acceptance but grammatically most editors still prefer the word bad to describe (ironically) something of poor quality; ditto with the word like which is generally replaced with as (this was always a rant of my English teachers when the popular cigarette jingle Winston Tastes Good Like A Cigarette Should would cause them endless hours of grief...but then came James Brown with his I Feel Good song which, well, pushed many of my teachers over the edge; it's not grammatically correct either).
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