Prescriptive - Descriptive (Language)

I'd sooner ask Rush Limbaugh for instructions on open-mindedness!

More prescriptive poppycock, Frank. It even describes you in it.

"You can't talk people out of their positions on this; they do not want to be confused with facts."

I bet you memorized this nonsense right quick.

Why do you figure, Frank, a guy, who [consciously] knows virtually nothing about the rules of English grammar, keeps standing up and shouting, "Look at me, the grammar dunce is over here"?

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Preaching the incontrovertible to the unconvertible
December 6, 2012 @ 8:06 pm · Filed by Geoffrey K. Pullum under Prescriptivist poppycock, Syntax, Usage advice, relative clauses

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I guess that if doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, it is insane for me to imagine that I could do any good by telling the readers of The Chronicle of Higher Education that the rule banning which from restrictive relative clauses is "a time-wasting early-20th-century fetish, a bogeyman rule undeserving of the attention of intelligent grownups." But that's what I do in the post published at one minute past midnight on the 71st anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. "A Rule Which Will Live in Infamy," I called it. I blame Stan Carey for infecting me with my false optimism about changing people's minds: on his blog "Sentence first" last year he actually reported getting some traction: according to a Twitter message he saw, he actually converted an editor.

I probably won't convert any American academics. The most likely outcome of my rehearsing the familiar descriptivist arguments (look at the evidence, for heaven's sake), and recounting the history (how the rule emerged out of the late 19th century as a recommended reform but was mistaken by American editors and teachers as a statement of approved legislation), will be commenters insisting that they plan to ignore me and continue enforcing the rule because it is worth taking time and trouble to "be clear" (yawn). You can't talk people out of their positions on this; they do not want to be confused with facts.

And to be honest, I have to admit that some of them are between a rock and a hard place: if you want the stupid TA to give you an A on your paper, and said stupid TA insists on no passives and no which-relatives, what options do you have? If you want to publish your paper in a high-impact psychology journal, and its brain-dead editor insists on no split infinitives and no which relatives and no uses of since in its inferential meaning, what can you do? Some people live under savage and unyielding oppression of this sort. But I thought it was worth speaking out anyway. The way one does about Syria or North Korea. The tyrants are not listening to me, but I just want to have said it: I do not approve of tyranny.

Nor do I approve of ignoring evidence. When the brothers Fowler were writing The King's English (published 1906), Bram Stoker's fine novel Dracula was in the bookstores (as it still is today, never having been out of print). Let me give an approximation to an analysis of Stoker's usage by searching the text of that book very quickly for four sequences likely to be the beginnings of restrictive relative clauses: "a xxxx which", "the xxxx which", "a xxxx that", and "the xxxx that", where "xxxx" is any lower-case word. In most of these the which or that is likely to be introducing a restrictive relative clause modifying the noun xxxx, as in examples from the novel like the glimpse which I got of it, the peasant that you tell me of, a country which was full of beauty, or the coach that brought me here. I didn't read all the examples, but I did correct the results by removing the cases with "the fact that", which is not a relative clause construction (it's a noun-plus-complement construction). Here are the figures:

a(n) xxxx which 34
the xxxx which 65

a(n) xxxx that 47
the xxxx that 90
In 42% of these phrases Stoker used which, and in 58% he used that. Very roughly a 2 to 3 mix of the two types of relative, in other words. To say that in Bram Stoker's language all the 42% of cases that used which were sporadic grammar errors is patently ridiculous. The phrases in question were incontrovertibly grammatical and entirely acceptable in style terms; and they still are.

December 6, 2012 @ 8:06 pm · Filed by Geoffrey K. Pullum under Prescriptivist poppycock, Syntax, Usage advice, relative clauses


http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4357#more-4357

Do you feel better now, JTT?

Once the urgency is gone...you should calm down.

Did you like the part where you were described, Frank?

"You can't talk people out of their positions on this; they do not want to be confused with facts."

What I'd like to see is some of that top of the class grammar wizardry that you were bragging about.

You are seeing it in every post.

Jeez!

Being disingenuous is just another example of your dishonest nature, Frank.

You mean like this, Frank?

I have two legs upon which to stand...or if you must, I got legs two stand on to.

No, what I really meant, Frank, was to have you explain some grammar points. Do you believe in the prescriptive rule regarding restrictive versus nonrestrictive relative pronouns?

Could you take us through that "rule" and explain how it works?

No...I wanna play my game...not your game.

Another prime example of your dishonesty.

No dishonesty at all. I do want to play my game...and not yours.

I didn't really expect you to understand, Frank. You've never really shown any inclination in that regard.

You seem to have trouble with the language, JTT-- trouble expressing yourself. You seem often to say thing that are ambiguous...and then when someone responds to what you said, you explain what you meant.

You ought really to get over that.

The trouble isn't mine, Frank, it's yours. It's your dishonesty, it's your lack of attentiveness, it's your ignorance wrt the English language. It's your [stated] intentions to not address any issue in an honest fashion. This is, for you, not at all a new thing.

JTT...still here...as expected.



Nope, the trouble is yours. You have to think of new ways to make insults. Must be a problem for you.



I am not dishonest. I've asked you to cite a specific lie I have told...and you have never been able to do so.



I do attempt to be attentive (and courteous) to you...and to stifle my yawns even though you cannot see them. But you do tend to drag on...and I guess I do get inattentive at times.



"wrt???"

I write and speak clearly. Sorry that is not enough for you.



I defy you to quote my "stated intentions to not address any issue in an honest fashion."

You really must respond to this request...or to acknowledge that it is hyperbole.



It is not only not a new thing...it is not even a real thing.

If you look here, JT--

http://archive.org/stream/essaysbymatthew00arnogoog/essaysbymatthew00arnogoog_djvu.txt

You will find Matthew Arnold's Essays in Ctiticism. The second essay, Influence of Literary Academies, explores this matter in some depth.

On the same Google page there is an essay by Henry James on the book.

I think you might find both essays useful if only in ameliorating your extremely simple, indeed common, approach to the subject. They might also improve your manners although I can't say I have much hope of that.

Your propensity for the assertion is probably incurable because you have nothing to say without resort to the vulgar gambit.

Fowler is, as you've already been told, terribly out of date.

The problem in reading Fowler is that one never knows which way he is going to vote. Is he going to allow a usage because it is widespread, or is he going to condemn it for the same reason? … The impression the entries give is that Fowler considers to be idiomatic what he himself uses. Usages he does not like are given such labels as 'ugly' (e.g. at historicity) or even 'evil' (e.g. at respectively).

Considering just how out to lunch you are on language issues, Spendi, I'm not about to go through all your fluff.

Pick out the sections you think are pertinent, S, and I'll take a look.

That is more than enough, Frank, as I've stated many times. This illustrates your dishonesty, your deceptive nature. You are woefully ignorant of the workings of language. You are terrible at analyzing how language works.

You've likely got a fair memory, which pulled you thru in school but as you've been repeatedly shown, those rules you memorized were language falsehoods.

You avoid discussing them, again your dishonest nature, because you know they are falsehoods but you'll probably [85%] correct some more folks down the line, again, your dishonest nature.