You can't bring it with you (or maybe you can)

Like any enforcer of an institutional style, the New York Times’s Philip Corbett has to defend certain distinctions well into their obsolescence. One of his probably-lost causes came up in a December After Deadline blog post:

A Met official took the stage to say Ms. White had suffered a short fall and was brought to the hospital.*

Here’s what the stylebook says:

bring, take. Use bring to mean movement toward the speaker or writer; take means movement away from the speaker or writer (in fact, any movement that is not toward the speaker or writer). So the Canadian prime minister cannot be bringing a group of industrialists to a conference in Detroit, except in an article written from Detroit.

I grew up following this rule -- or, rather, not knowing there was any other way to use bring and take;  you bring something with you when you come, and take it when you go. And when I asked Boston Globe readers about their usage, in a 1998 column ($ except for subscribers), 73 percent said they did it my way.

But over the years I've gotten used to hearing bring where I would say take -- "I'll bring this to New York," for instance, spoken by a husband sitting next to me in Boston. And even when I was still suspicious of that bring, it was clear that bring and take often hovered on an imaginary threshold, with only the speaker knowing which point of view was assumed: "Shall we bring/take an umbrella?" (See Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage for a thorough and sympathetic analysis.)

I don't think I'm alone in my growing tolerance for that minority use of bring, because I keep seeing it in respectable publications. I haven't gone looking for examples, but the usage is still odd enough to my ear that I (sometimes) notice it; here are a few cites I've clipped in the past year or so.

This week, I tested three computer mice that laptop users will actually want to bring along with them. (Katherine Boehret, Wall Streeet Journal, January 2011)

Burch wraps up a slice of cake and two cupcakes for me to bring home to my daughter. (Daphne Merkin, NYT T Magazine, December 2011)

So Wayne and Judy took over their son’s care, bringing him [from Memphis] first to a premier brain-injury center in Atlanta  ... and then to a clinic in Destin, Fla. (Jeneen Interlandi, NYT Magazine, December 2011)

[If the world were going to end in December 2012] I’d love to bring my family to the Serengeti to see migrating herds of zebra and gazelles. (Scott Simon, WSJ, January 2012)

And here's one that uses both verbs alternately:

Bring This Checklist with You Next Time You’re Apartment Hunting
Just print it out and take it with you when you're at an apartment showing ... You may also want to bring your camera along so you can take a few photos.
(Adam Dachis, Lifehacker.com, January 2012)

I haven't seen an example yet in the New Yorker, but it sure looks as if certain NYT and WSJ editors think bring sounds normal in these contexts. I'm not there yet myself, but since I'm no longer a working editor, I don't plan to lose any sleep over the question.

* I'd make it "had suffered a short fall and was (had) been brought to the hospital," but Corbett didn't comment on the lack of parallelism.

The writer didn't blue it after all

A British veteran of colonial Burma and WWII wrote of another former "forest man," his colleague in the teak harvesting trade:

Nor can I ever explain what possessed him to blue all his savings he had accumulated towards the enjoyment of one leave, on the invention and patenting of a form of head protection which should supersede the solar topee in the dry season and the umbrella during the monsoons.

The author is J.H. “Elephant Bill” Williams, and my friend Vicki Croke, who’s working on a book about Williams, sent me the puzzling quote. How, we wondered, could a native speaker of English come up with the blue in that sentence? And how could the editor of the 1953 book in which it appears have missed it?

If Williams had used the past tense, writing “he blue his savings” would look like just a slip, an accidental substitution of blue for blew. But neither spelling makes sense in the infinitive form: “to blue all his savings” and “to blew all his savings” are equally unacceptable.

Our speculation, it turned out, was a waste of time and brainpower; the answer was at my fingertips, in Jonathon Green’s imposing new Green's Dictionary of Slang.* This blue, says Green, is just a variant of the slang blow, “to squander, to waste.” His earliest example is from the periodical Wild Boys of London (1866): “Sich an hawful lot of coin I’ve blued, too.” (Blue, unlike blow, is conjugated as a regular verb: I blue it, I blued it, I have blued it.)

The OED lists the slang blue too, with citations from 1846 to as recently as 1959, when the Observer used it in what sounds like another description of British colonial life: “Men in cotton shirts and corduroys met there to ‘blue’ their cheques on supplies and on fiery colonial rum.” Google Books also has several examples; the latest I could find came from Anthony Burgess's 1963 novel, "Inside Mr. Enderby":

'An' I blued it all on booze in town. I think I'd better come up there,' he added, bold. 'I could sleep on the couch or something.'

Maybe this blue was chiefly British usage, and maybe, despite its century-long career, it was never truly widespread. But if Burgess could use it in 1963, there's no reason to think Williams's editor, 10 years earlier, would have balked at it -- however odd "he blued it" looks today. 

*FTC disclosure: Oxford University Press sent me a review copy of Green's Dictionary of Slang.

NPR on the garden path

Just heard this momentarily misleading report on "All Things Considered":

A Pennsylvania hospital says it was spreading lung cancer …

Wait, spreading it how? It’s not contagious, is it? Well, no:

… it was spreading lung cancer that killed Joe Paterno.

Amazing how far your mind can race down the wrong fork of a garden-path sentence before the truth catches up with it.

Too much of a good thing?

Earlier today, Robert Lane Greene at Johnson checked in from the road to ask readers what topics The Economist’s language blog should focus on. The replies so far are unusually varied (not just the same old peeves) and sometimes strange, but the strangest of all, I thought, came from Great Uncle Clive. His recommendation:

Not so many posts, Johnson . . . a max of two a week

Allow your bloggers* ... Us ... to respond to each other and develop ideas, before you change the topic

Thanx

A commenter who wants you to post less frequently: With fans like that, who needs critics? RLG is a pro, so I’m sure his response to Uncle Clive won’t be “If you want to develop your own %$@! ideas, write your own %$#@! blog!” But I wouldn’t be surprised if he was thinking it.
*I'm assuming (perhaps too charitably) that Uncle Clive's "blogger" for "commenter" here was a slip.