The Avenging Linguist

All of the following, William Safire notwithstanding, appeared in the New York Times:

[Farrah Fawcett’s] hair is still long, blond and tussled ...

[I]ts plush tone, so ideally suited to smooth and sleek Classical works or rich and effulgent Romantic ones, can lack a needed sarcasm, bite, harshness or angularity.

“The Koran is stronger than America,� shouted the tall, thin, bearded sheik, his voice rising to fevered pitch.

And what was the role of John Silber, the chancellor and former president who has run Boston University with a tight hand for more than three decades ... ?

The Board named as interim president Dr. Aram V. Chobanian, the widely regarded dean of the medical school ...

The captain refused to give him ship stationary, but Hurd managed to write a spellbinding account, partly on toilet paper, of the Titanic’s final moments.

Gibbs certainly did more than two other Redskins coaches in the Hall of Fame — George Allen and his Over the Hill Gang of three decades ago, and Ray Flaherty, who won the 1937 and 1942 titles with the renown passer Sammy Baugh.

The Scottish turns of phrase abound, sometimes a might impenetrably.

Lynn Harrell also seemed uneasy; his playing was forceful and gruff.

In June, 1941, the two set out on a perilous trip to the United States with samples of their penicillin mold.

[I]t gathered pace in dark and deadly silence until ... it smashed into a group of repair workers ...

At Atocha station, one couple waited for aid as paramedics administered to others.

[I]t is peculiar that I should think such an antic would wash over successfully.

I felt a twang in my gut ...

[T]his consciencious Catholic’s position pleased neither the Democratic interest groups nor the Roman Catholic hierarchy ...

However we humans shimmered onto the scene, it seems important to our self-image that the appearance of Homo sapiens was somehow cosmically decreed ...

That mass display of indifference seemed ... to illuminate the central paradox of the broad dysfunction between European citizens and the European political institutions from which they generally feel estranged ...

The movie ... portrays the president as over his head and out of touch ...

He received a patent covering several approaches that rely on the same principal ...

Campaign Money Flows Amok (headline)

These examples are all drawn from a large collection that I began a few years ago as I was gearing up, in the course of my duties as a faculty member at the University of Minnesota, to teach one of the complement of courses dubbed writing-intensive. The prevalence of lapses like the ones just cited in most prestigious daily newspaper in the country made it clear to me that there’s some very basic stuff about written English that isn’t getting across to our students — even the ones who end up as professional writers and editors. Nor do the problems end with misrenderings and malapropisms like the ones in the quotes above. In the spirit of public service I assembled, for use by my own students, a compendium which I call The Avenging Linguist’s Boners List. In it I tried to do two things: point to common confusions (like the one made by an NYT reporter in an article about the growing importance of what was referred to throughout the piece as discreet mathematics) but also to give constructive advice about matters like punctuation, preposition choice, when compound expressions are written as two words or as a single word, and so on.

As time went by I found myself being seized by a missionary impulse, or perhaps with megalomania. Why stop with my own students? Why not make the fruits of my efforts available to a broader public? It’s a sign of my age that as I thought about how to do this, starting a blog didn’t so much as cross my mind until very late in the game. But once the thought occurred to me, I got quite excited. The result of that excitement is now before you on your computer screen.

Let me use this inaugural posting to address a question I suspect will be in some readers’ minds, having to do with a seeming inconsistency. What is a linguist, of all people, doing going around pointing out other people’s supposed mistakes? Aren’t we, after all, the preachers of the descriptive-not-prescriptive gospel, the ones who made implacable enemies of the humanistic Old Guard with our admonition to leave your language alone?

I hope at a later time to get into this and related issues in more detail — the whole matter is actually rather complicated, not to mention subtle — but let me say at least this much now. The antiprescriptivism of linguists does not amount to the proposition that anything goes. What it does amount to is the belief (which I share) that the structural differences between standard and nonstandard varieties of a language like English are on a par with the differences between different languages. Everybody who uses language follows rules, but not everybody follows the same ones: that some English speakers say things one way and others say them another is no different, scientifically speaking, from the fact that English and French speakers differ in their linguistic practices and the conventions which underlie them. Certain things follow from this precept and others don’t (even though there are those, including some linguists, who are mistaken on this point).

One of the things which does follow is that there can be enlightenment about how language works to be gained from investigating the structure of nonstandard varieties (and yes, nonstandard linguistic varieties are as structured as standard ones). Another is that the persistence of some people in continuing to speak in nonstandard fashion despite all the efforts of educators and others to get them to do otherwise cannot be ascribed to laziness, ignorance or genetic defect.

A claim which doesn’t follow is that there’s no such thing as a linguistic mistake. Indeed, there is considerable interest among linguists in what in the biz we call performance errors — things like spoonerisms and, on the receptive side, misconstruals of syntactic structure. Linguists know as well as anybody that language use, like any other form of purposive behavior, is error-prone — indeed, perhaps one of the most error-prone of all. This is especially true in the case of writing, at least if you’re dealing with a language like English and its murderously vicissitude-filled spelling system. Confusing discreet and discrete in writing or reading is no less a mistake than mixing up, say, lag and rag (as many non-native English learners do) in speaking or listening. Part of what mastery of the written language involves is the avoidance of such confusions. Unfortunately, as my monitoring of the New York Times reveals, the knowledge and skills required are not being imparted — which is why, no doubt, many readers of the Newspaper of Record are left wondering why some mathematicians are forced to communicate with each other only in hushed tones behind closed doors.

Michael Kac
a.k.a. The Avenging Linguist