Fashions, manners, and language mavens

Back in May, when we were all marveling at The New Yorker’s cluelessness about “prescriptivism,” a commenter at Language Log argued that prescriptivism is not a counterpart of descriptivism but a matter of manners. It’s “a branch of etiquette columnry -- prescriptivists advise us of what the more embarrassing solecisms are.”

 Now John McWhorter, writing at the NYT’s Opinionator blog, makes a similar point, this time calling the usage rules a matter of fashion. 

The well-spoken person, [William] Cobbett instructed [in 1818], swimmed yesterday and builded a house last year ... Builded only started falling out of disuse* around 1920. Not for any reason; no one discovered that builded was somehow elementally deficient. Fashion changed.

Call it fashion or etiquette -- there’s plenty of overlap -- but the fact that usage customs change over time is easy for anyone to see, with the works of the great peevologists all online at Google Books. So even if “etiquette columnry” was meant to sound dismissive, we don't have to take it that way. As I said in a comment at John McIntyre’s blog, teaching "the rules" as mutable, adaptable customs is a useful strategy:  

It takes them down from the Eternal Verities pedestal and puts them in the realm of everyday choice; we remove our shoes at home, our friends don't. Bridesmaids must never wear black; until they do, and look tres chic (to everyone but their swooning mothers). Geoff Pullum argued persuasively (at Language Log) that dangling modifiers were not mortal sins, but existed on an etiquette continuum, from offensively baffling to barely noticeable. 

If we keep reminding everyone that "good English" varies according to the circumstances, and that any usage is subject to change (yes, over our dead bodies), maybe we'll eventually reduce the amount of self-righteous dudgeon and ritual complaint about language decline. 

And we might even improve our prose. In a follow-up post on editing and etiquette, McIntyre shows how useful the analogy can be. A perfectly grammatical published sentence, he notes, can amount to “a breach of manners, because etiquette requires consideration of the other party, and this sentence shows no such consideration to the reader.”  That’s a criterion that will always be relevant, however fashions in usage may change.  

*Update: Commenter Vance Maverick points out that McWhorter means "falling out of use," not disuse.

Will you rate your transaction at Amazon.com?

No. No, Amazon, I will not. I would like to give your sellers full credit -- and generally, the shipping/billing process goes exactly as it ought to -- but you are asking too much.

In your e-mail requesting feedback, you tell me I can click on five stars, meaning "Excellent -- Item delivered on time, was as described, great customer service (if contacted)" and so on. Or I can click on "My experience was different" and enumerate my complaints. But you won't let me just click on "excellent" and leave it at that. No, you demand that I enter a comment, or at least a couple of typed characters, into a text box. I can't just bestow an A+ -- no, I have to add some inane attempt at amplification.

I thought you had seen the error of your ways, Amazon. Last fall, I reported that you had abandoned this silly practice, but apparently I was wrong. I don't get it: How can it be good for sellers if you annoy the most satisfied buyers by telling them they can only award five stars if they consent to waste their time adding superfluous  compliments?

For a smart organization, this is a very stupid policy. Customers should be able to give good sellers the best rating -- "Excellent -- five stars" -- without being forced to put a cherry on top.

Painful contractions

When I started this post, weeks ago, I thought I knew where it was going. I wanted to point out a couple of English constructions that sound weird -- close to unacceptable -- to me, and (with luck) to find out what they're called and why they don't work. But it turns out there may be no there there -- just my idiolect insisting (as an idiolect will) that its way is the right and reasonable one.

The first example comes in the caption of the comic "Cornered," where the mom is saying to the kid(?): "Kindergarten is supposed to be fun. You mustn't be doing it right." I would have said* "You must not be doing it right"; I hear "you mustn't" as meaning "you are forbidden to," not "you probably are." (I wondered if the "mustn't" form might be OK in British English, but I thought Americans would be on my side here.)

The tagline in a Slim-Fast ad bugged me in a slightly different way. "Your swimsuit is ready. You'll be too" trips me up; I'd prefer either "You'll be ready too" or "You will be too."

I hoped these contractions would prove to be forbidden forms of auxiliary reduction, but just coming up with that term stretched my expertise to its limits. So I asked Arnold Zwicky, who knows all the linguistic labels and is a wizard at coining new ones when they're called for. And he poured cold water all over my quest.

Are these contractions off limits, or even suboptimal? He didn't think so. "For me, the Cornered example is perfectly fine," he wrote.

 "Mustn't" (like "must not") is in principle capable of either a root interpretation -- subject is obliged not to V -- or an epistemic interpretation -- it must not / mustn't be the case that subject Vs. Compare: You mustn't touch the hot stove (or you'll get burned). You mustn't like ice cream (if you make a face like that). 

As for my theory that the "epistemic mustn't" is a British thing, well, that's just an example of the "foreigners are weird" default assumption. Americans, Brits, and Australians all use it, said Zwicky. It's true that "some speakers judge such examples to be unacceptable, but what they say about them is all over the map. In particular, some find the examples to be unacceptably American, some find them to be way formal and British-sounding."

The swimsuit issue was also not a question of auxiliary reduction, he thought. 

I think that the problem here is that the example is somewhat zeugmatic: in "Your swimsuit is ready", the subject of "be ready" is interpreted as the object of the understood verb "wear", but in "You'll be ready", the subject of "be ready" is interpreted as the subject of "wear". These are non-parallel interpretations. (Things are fine in "I'll be ready, and you'll be too.") 

Well, maybe. But I don't interpret the elliptical sentence as "Your swimsuit is ready  [to wear], and you'll be [ready to wear it] too."  My (mental) expansion was "Your swimsuit is ready [for summer, for the beach], and you'll be [ready for summer] too" -- which is grammatically parallel. It's the truncation itself that doesn't work: For me, things are not fine in "I'll be ready, and you'll be too," any more than they're fine in "I'm happy, and you're too." (You're too what?)

That's as far as I can go without professional help. And if you want to avoid this whole mess, I understand. But if you've been patient enough to read this far, please let me know how these constructions strike your ear -- intolerable, unremarkable, or somewhere in between?

*At least I think I would -- we're all unreliable witnesses to our own linguistic behavior.

In defense of sudden death

At You Don't Say, John McIntyre notes the death of the Queen's English Society, "suddenly, in Britain, of attenuated interest." Commenter James Callahan objects to his language: "When I was a cubbie, I was chewed on pretty good by an editor for using the word 'suddenly' with 'died' in an obituary. I've been waiting 38 years to return the favor."

I've always thought it was a dumb idea, this ban on "died suddenly," and looking back at the archives, I see that I said so in a short item four years ago. I could say more, but I don't think I need to.

SUDDEN SILLINESS (From the Boston Globe, Feb. 2, 2008):
I was talking with a former journalist about Stupid Newsroom Rules the other day, and he reminded me of one I hadn't heard in years: the ban on "he died suddenly."

In their 1999 book "The Trust," Susan Tifft and Alex Jones recount how Arthur O. Sulzberger, former publisher of The New York Times, learned from an editor at the Milwaukee Journal that suddenly was (supposedly) redundant: "'Everyone dies suddenly,' he said. 'One minute you're here, the next you're dead.' Years later ... Punch said the main lesson he took away was that 'in Milwaukee, you died unexpectedly."'

But this "rule" is totally bogus. Suddenly has always meant both "without preparation, all at once" and "unexpectedly," according to the OED. Trying to limit its sense to "instantaneously" is sheer crankiness.

Suddenly might have once been problematic, back when it was a journalistic euphemism. In the old days, "No one ever committed suicide," observes John McIntyre on his Baltimore Sun blog, but "people sometimes 'died suddenly."'

That usage, however, is no longer current, judging by the paid death notices in newspapers. Journalists may ration their references to dying "suddenly," but bereaved families use it routinely -- surely not as a euphemism for suicide.

Sometimes, it's true, the adverb is superfluous. In a report of death from an accidental overdose, a car crash, or a bomb, suddenly should go without saying.

Otherwise, it's perfectly appropriate to say someone "died suddenly." The adverb was never meant to imply scientific precision; it has always been about perception, not biology.