Obviating the need for usage anxiety

"I used the phrase obviate the need to," e-mailed Jacques W., and "my anal friends said that the phrase was redundant. I said that if a significant number of literate people use a construction, that makes it acceptable. And what say you?"

 Ordinarily I would endorse Jacques' reasoning, but in the case of obviate, there's no need to rely on the brute fact that usage makes the rule, not the other way around. The ban on "obviate the need" was wrongheaded and shortlived, usage history reveals.

The OED online defines the verb as "To meet and dispose of; to circumvent, do away with, remove (a difficulty, need, etc.); to prevent or avoid by anticipatory measures." The grammarian Alexander Bain used the disputed phrase in "A Higher English Grammar" (1891): "Certain pronouns also, as will presently be seen, obviate the necessity of repeating the great substitutes of the Noun in composition."
 
But in the 1950s and '60s, says MWDEU, usage gurus Theodore Bernstein and Wilson Follett "seem to have invented the notion that obviate can mean only 'make unnecessary,' not 'anticipate and prevent.' They may have arrived at this conclusion by focusing too narrowly on the second part of the definition in Webster's Second [Unabridged Dictionary]."

I haven't (yet) found these authors specifically banning "obviate the need"; the accusation of redundancy must have been made explicit by later, lesser authorities. As recently as 2001, it is explained (and dismissed) in a usage note in Microsoft's Encarta College Dictionary:

Because one of the meanings of obviate is "to make unnecessary," it is sometimes argued that obviate the need (or necessity) for is redundant. An older but still current meaning, however, is "to avoid an anticipated difficulty." In a sentence like Addressing these issues early can obviate any need for a joint resolution, the need can be perceived as a difficulty -- or early consideration can make the resolution unnecessary, in which case any need for is indeed redundant. There is little reason to prefer either interpretation to the other.

And Garner's Modern American Usage (2009) demolishes the objection: "In the sense 'to make unnecessary,' obviate often appears correctly in the phrase obviate the necessity of or need for. These phrases are not redundancies, for the true sense of obviate the necessity is 'to prevent the necessity (from arising),' hence to make unnecessary."

One more peeve you can cross off your list, assuming you've ever had the misfortune to encounter it. 

Pavlovian peeving

While researching my next Word column, I ran across a two-year-old Language Log posting by Arnold Zwicky on the assertion (made by a Canadian newspaper)  that we cannot correctly say "standards of living increased," but only "standards of living rose." 

Not true, of course, but a surprising number of commenters were willing to defend the idea, or at least to chew over the ways it might be defended. This response inspired a comment from Language Hat that said what I too have thought (but ne'er so well expressed). I didn't have room to quote it in the column, so here it is: 

I don't know why this has never occurred to me before, but this discussion has made me realize that a mischievous person could pick any construction at random and denounce it just for the fun of watching the opprobrium spread across the prescriptivist world, or take two perfectly good English sentences and state authoritatively that one was correct and the other not and watch people fall all over themselves to provide justifications for the judgment. If you say one person or idea is better than another most people will form their own judgment and either argue or agree with you, but when it comes to grammar (or "grammar"), it seems there's a vast public eager to appropriate any proscription that comes within their ken, whether it makes sense or not. To err is human, to want to feel superior to other people's supposed errors is even more so.

Of course, if you take "mischievous" in its not-funny sense, you could argue that Dryden did just this when he disparaged the stranded preposition. It's hard to imagine him doing it out of pure cussedness, but considering how much needless trouble he caused, he might just as well have.

Word: Flat-trap

Some Tea Party spam recently came my way, bringing with it a curious neologism. "You really believe that?" scoffed the author. "Oh Ya, and Obama is a conservative! Hahahaha! What flat-trap nonsense!"

I guessed that flat-trap might be an eggcorn for claptrap,though I couldn't immediately come up with another relevant citation for flat-trap. (Google offered up a Melbourne band, some glue traps for mice, and several physics papers with titles like "Superfluidity of two-dimensional excitons in flat and harmonic traps.") But you could get from claptrap to flap-trap quite easily, I thought, if you took "clap one's trap" to be a variant of "flap one's trap (or one's gums)," meaning "talk nonsense."

But was that in fact the root sense of claptrap? Not even close. Claptrap, says the OED, is a theater term from the early 1700s, meaning "a trick or device to catch applause; an expression designed to elicit applause." ­ The first citation is a dictionary definition dated 1727-31: "A Clap Trap … a trap to catch a clap by way of applause from the spectators at a play."

That rather literal meaning fits nicely into the latter part of the English theatrical era that gave us characters named Marplot, Aimwell, and Lady Wishfort. But the evolution of claptrap into its modern meaning is also pretty seamless: by the early 19th century it means "language designed to catch applause; cheap showy sentiment" (OED), and that sense generalizes easily over time to "nonsense, rubbish."

Meanwhile, shut one's trap had been used since the 1770s; flapping one's mouth came along in the early 20th century, giving rise to flapping one's trap or gums. So flap-trap, though coined by a different method from claptrap, is just as plausible. But flat-trap? I still can't figure out a way to make that "flat" fit the idiom.

This little piggy went to market

I'm glad Arnold Zwicky decided to post about the "Figures in Speech" sculptures by Marsha Tosk, because I've been watching them for months (several have been advertised in the NYT Magazine) and wondering if I had anything to say about them. Not really, I decided -- the literal renderings of phrases like "Pig in a Blanket" and "Hot Dog" (the dog is in front of a fan) are kind of cute, but basically they're fourth-grade wit; I couldn't imagine spending $1,000 (plus or minus, depending on the item) for a permanent embodiment of a fairly obvious witticism. (My imagination is clearly deficient; apparently plenty of customers believe the joke will never get old.)

Zwicky, however, was more appreciative than I, and in fact he has launched a solstice orgy of visual puns, with follow-up postings here and here. As I savored this bounty (the "chillin' wif ma peeps" cartoon is priceless), it dawned on me that my very own home boasts a pun-art installation, an assemblage my husband created from (once) easily available materials for a total of less than $20.

What's his homemade sculptural pun? It starts with this lineup:

These are "talking" mugs with the likeness and voice of Bill Goldberg, erstwhile pro wrestling champ. Push a button on the cup, and Goldberg emits one of his signature battle cries. So when the Goldbergs are properly primed,* you can push their buttons in succession and hear three different bellows: "THIS IS GOLDBERG," a threatening "BAHHH ...," and Goldberg's victory roar, "WHO'S NEXT?" These are, of course -- ta da! -- the Goldberg Variations.

True, Paul's little showpiece is harder to dust than a plastic pig, and it does require AAA batteries. But then, the Scottish wool blanket on the high-priced porker is surely not maintenance-free either. I'd been hoping we might get rid of the Goldbergs, but what did I know? Turns out they're not tacky souvenirs at all, they're witty pop art.  

*As I wrote this, I realized that in fact, any one of the Goldbergs can run through the entire repertoire of Goldberg Variations; the three make a formidable array, but they're not strictly necessary to the joke artwork. So if a Goldberg (variations included) would make your life complete, do make an offer; I'll be sure to pass it on.