ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

I'm sure we all actually agree with each other, and it's just a question of definitions and such like, but I suppose where I'm coming from is that "the authorities" have to both follow AND lead. If they aren't based on actual usage (As researched using high-falutin computer tools) they are intellectually meaningless, but if they don't carry some authority or weight to tell people what is "right", they are functionally useless.

But people seem pretty relaxed with this when it comes to dictionaries and changing patterns of word-use. You don't have people up in arms when the new edition of the OED comes out and has some new definitions in it, but they freak out when you try to apply the same evidence-based approach to syntax and morphology. INNIT.

Indeed, and as you say, I'm sure we could all come to an general view, over a soothing pint and some healing tobacco smoke, that we are probably more in agreement with each other than disagreement. As long as we could have a section of the evening where we all shouted FUCK! at each other in loud, angry voices.

That sounds good!

FUCK!

No...

FUCK!

Actually this is quite good. It's toning up me up for my journey home.

Fewer peas, less cheese

I'm a sub (freelance, so across a few magazines) and basically a descriptivist. Day job, I'm cutting and correcting to a set of clear rules: it's all pragmatic - to me, you're telling the community you're addressing that this publication speaks clearly, accurately and consistently in its voice and can be trusted.
Generally, though, that's not really what's interesting about language, to me at least. The tool analogy seems flawed: it's more like language is a set of tools, and 'standard' English is just one of them. I like it, but to believe it's the only one is limiting - I'd rather look at the crazy flexibility and inventiveness of English, and how it can be pushed and bent in my spare time than get hung up on disinterested/uninterested collapsing.
Meaning sorts itself out in language communities from what I can can see. There's enough of a shared centre and shared context to make things work.
FUCK, btw.

After all dictionaries could have markers for erroneous as they do for vulgar or archaic speech

This is a good point, and brings me neatly to this:

If they aren't based on actual usage (As researched using high-falutin computer tools) they are intellectually meaningless, but if they don't carry some authority or weight to tell people what is "right", they are functionally useless

If I look up "knob" in a dictionary, it's almost certainly going to have "vulg a penis" in there somewhere (those vulgar penises get in all sorts of places). That's become a widely accepted use. But what if I look up "gay"? Lighthearted and carefree; check. Homosexual; check. But where's something synonymous with lame or rubbish? By the "actual usage" approach, that should be up there too -- and maybe in some larger, newer dictionaries it is. But in the majority, it won't. Why? Because that usage, despite being increasingly widespread, is ... well, wrong. And (I'd hope) unlikely ever to be accepted.

I reckon most people consult dictionaries in order to find out what is "right": ie, for the majority, they're a prescriptive tool. (Just like me.)

they freak out when you try to apply the same evidence-based approach to syntax and morphology

Of course they do! Neologisms are a) fun and b) a necessity. "Shit, look, we've invented a ... a thing! What are we gonna call it?" Whereas syntactical variations are fluid and dependent on all sorts of confounding factors: age, "class" (for want of a better catch-all term), location, dialect ... you name it.

New lexical items can become accepted quite quickly; new syntax takes generations (as evinced, surely, by the toward/forward discussions, and many others, above). Also: neologisms, or additional meanings (eg gay-as-homosexual) rarely have the effect of displacing existing lexical items; new forms of syntax (ie John Wells's probably precient thoughts on the apostrophe) tend to replace what's gone before.

I'm sure we could all come to an general view, over a soothing pint and some healing tobacco smoke, that we are probably more in agreement with each other than disagreement. As long as we could have a section of the evening where we all shouted FUCK! at each other in loud, angry voices

This really is an absolute spunker of an idea (that's a good thing, BTW) and I think we should bloody well make it happen. GrammarFAP! FUCK!

Now, back to my lab report. Tits.

To borrow from Causistry in another thread: this is like flirting, in my neighborhood.

(WoofWoofWoof: sorry, I xposted across you there ... and now I've done it with Laurel, too. Suffice it to say: yes, I see where you're coming from -- and I suppose that, as someone working with a variety of different house styles, you'd have to be at the very least a promiscuous prescriptivist! I guess that at base, yes, I agree with Jamie; it's just that I think the majority of people, when consulting dictionaries/textbooks/the occasional wisdom of this thread, are looking -- as I said, tongue-in-cheek, above -- for QUICK ANSWERS. Some descriptions, perhaps, are more descriptive than others.)

Woof - Hmm, well I suppose that all seems in order (even if I did just slam my pint down on the table and shout FUCK!). I like the shared centre and shared context thing - how annoyingly pragmatic you are woof - no arguments that start out as disinterested attempts to get to some sort of workable truth but that end up as weepy shouting matches where your points are just barely concealed attempts to abuse and wound your opponent with you.

Of course (<---does evil emperor chuckle) the possibilities for invention are wondrous and liberating.

But if you want me to stop letting whole days being ruined by my creed of tight-fisted pedantry then you've got another thing coming. It's far too enjoyable and makes my heart beat dangerously fast.

I can be inventive and peevishly resentful at the same time.

See anyone come try and share my centre.

weepy shouting matches where your points are just barely concealed attempts to abuse and wound your opponent with you

Hahahah, oh my. That *is* the production desk I worked on a few years ago.

things can be right or wrong even within a framework of change. My trousers either fit or they don't, even now I'm a tubster, and old trousers that were once right are no longer.

..··¨ rush ~°~ push ~°~ ca$h ¨··.. (a passing spacecadet)

EVERYBODYYYYYYYYYY
FREE SOMEBODYYYYYYYYY

Thanks to The Resistable Force for getting in getting in there with what I was about to put re less/fewer being a countable/uncountable rather than singular/plural distinction.

Regardless of whether a sentence wants to emphasise countability or not by using percentage, percentage should be dealt with as any other uncountable noun. "Fewer than 1% of..." is part of a sentence that cannot exist, as with "Fewer than 1lb of apples...", whereas "Less than 1% of..." and "Less than 1lb of apples..."

Sorry - no wish to be prosecuted for dealing in imperial measurements, make that "Less than 0.45359237kg..." (at least according to google!).

If I look up "knob" in a dictionary, it's almost certainly going to have "vulg a penis" in there somewhere (those vulgar penises get in all sorts of places). That's become a widely accepted use. But what if I look up "gay"? Lighthearted and carefree; check. Homosexual; check. But where's something synonymous with lame or rubbish? By the "actual usage" approach, that should be up there too -- and maybe in some larger, newer dictionaries it is. But in the majority, it won't. Why? Because that usage, despite being increasingly widespread, is ... well, wrong. And (I'd hope) unlikely ever to be accepted.

Because that usage is 'wrong'? Or because those dictionaries are smaller and older? It might be a usage that offends you, but it isn't 'wrong', is it?

And yet what is wrong?

Seriously, though, youth-slang connotative spins on existing words rightfully don't get in dictionaries because they tend to circulate within groups that already understand them (so there's little call to codify them) and because they have a very high probability of evaporating within a decade or so; no sane dictionary board is going to waste its effort keeping up with these short-termers until they turn out to have, umm, legs and width.

If someone uses a word that doesn't mean what they think it means, that's wrong (e.g. I had a friend who thought 'akimbo' meant 'all over the place' and who consequently made some very strange remarks about 'dogs akimbo' and 'umbrellas akimbo'). But if hundreds and then thousands and then millions of people all consistently made the same mistake with 'akimbo' then it would have taken on that meaning and it would no longer be wrong. (xpost)

^^ the 2 millionth person makes it right

Usually it's that chick Janet from the Staples by the highway

Damn her

She's no more damnable than #1,999,999, that dude Jeff with the thing with his lip

i like janet

peeve of the day: people who use "can't be underestimated" when they mean either "shouldn't be underestimated" or "can't be overestimated." i see this occasionally, including in print in publications that should know better -- and including today, in a quote that can't be corrected because it's a quote -- and it is annoying because it's exactly the opposite of what they mean. grr.

As an existing phrase it's the opposite, but in their (slight) defense, "can't be underestimated" does kinda function as a very strong imperative statement of what they mean.

in the sense that "i forbid you to underestimate it," i guess. but it's basically just a misusage.

Or a "we cannot afford to underestimate it," yeah, which is surely the source of the slippage. But yes, I'm with you.

I mean, syntactically it's identical to "this cannot be countenanced" or "this cannot be allowed to stand" or whatever

the 2 millionth person makes it right

Ha, beautifully put.

There's no formula for these things; ultimately, the team at Oxford/Chambers/wherever are the ones who'll eventually, wearily, maybe make the call that, OK, "gay" has a third meaning (for example) and include it in a dictionary.

So, here's a question to which I really don't know the answer: is a usage correct if it doesn't appear in a dictionary? (And no, I don't count Urban Dictionary. Or Roger's Profanisaurus.)

That really comes down to what "correct" means. Let's look in a dictionary!

Hello subs and pedants. The other half likes to tell me off for saying "play guitar", which he says is nasty US-speak for "play THE guitar". But on the ILM TOTP thread, what do I find? Why, it's the Times -- oh, sorry, The Times, but it's our very own Britisher Times -- with

Last month Noel Gallagher, of Oasis, advocated a revival of the chart programme, a show on which he once switched roles with his brother Liam - miming the singer's words to Roll With It while Liam pretended to play guitar.

Should heads roll at the Times? Does this entitle me to claim victory in a recurring petty squabble? Does anybody else care? And what do the Americans have to do with it anyway?

Last night I played a little air guitar after I loaded dishwasher.

Busy evening. I hope you didn't eat soup or play chess as well.

(Yeah, I'm not sure these are exact parallels either, but there's clearly some kind of older precedent at work which may or may not be relevant. I don't mind if I'm wrong, but claims like "nobody ever said that before AMERICANS started to", even though they may well be right, make my knee jerk towards the internet in the hope of British pre-war citations)

I didn't eat soup but I shot dove.

Sadly, my gun backfired and I was taken to the hospital.

After Deadline examines questions of grammar, usage and style encountered by writers and editors of The Times.

It is adapted from a weekly newsroom critique overseen by Philip B. Corbett, the deputy news editor who is also in charge of The Times’s style manual. The goal is not to chastise, but to point out recurring problems and suggest solutions.

Since most writers are likely to encounter similar troubles, we think these observations might interest general readers, too.

This isn't quite a pet peeve so much as something I've been noticing a lot lately, something I find abandoned even by the more careful writers I admire: the loss of the conditional tense (though I find this explained as "the subjunctive mood" online):

"If I were a rich man" should not be "if I was a rich man."
"If he were going to do that" should not be "if he was going to do that"

This is one of those grammar truths that seems self-evident to me, and I don't mind the lapse in slang or conversation, but do mind it in otherwise formal writing.

There's no such thing as the conditional tense; what you're talking about is, and always has been, the subjunctive mood. But yeh, I agree wholeheartedly.

Bizarrely, I was just talking about the subjunctive on the 44 bus home. As you do. (And no, not to myself, in a ranting style.)

Track listing
All songs written by John Mellencamp, except where noted.

"Crumblin' Down" (George Green, Mellencamp) – 3:33
"Pink Houses" – 4:43
"Authority Song" – 3:49
"Warmer Place to Sleep" (Green, Mellencamp) – 3:48
"Jackie O" (Mellencamp, John Prine) – 3:04
"Play Guitar" (Larry Crane, Mellencamp, Dan Ross) – 3:25
"Serious Business" – 3:25
"Lovin' Mother fo Ya" (Will Cary, Mellencamp) – 3:06
"Golden Gates" – 4:04
"Pink Houses" (acoustic version, 2005 re-issue bonus track) – 3:47

Lovin' Mother fo Ya

An apostrophe after Lovin' but not fo'? Fo' shame.

This is one of those grammar truths that seems self-evident to me, and I don't mind the lapse in slang or conversation, but do mind it in otherwise formal writing.

In what way is it self-evident? Without wanting to sound too much like a stuck record, the use of 'was' in the second conditional is gradually taking over from the use of 'were'. It's not a 'lapse', just another example of slowly changing language. There was probably a thread on here about 400 years ago bemoaning the use of 'you' when the correct word was 'thou'.

Had no idea John Prine co-wrote Jackie O. Such a great record.

I think "play guitar" is a more conceptual act than actually playing an instrument. You can play guitar on a tennis racket.

"There's no such thing as the conditional tense"

in English

"just another example of slowly changing language"

But couldn't you say that about every common error? I'm not saying you're wrong, just that that's no argument. To my eyes, the grammar here serves clarity, and the error is really jarring to me. And I'm only 39, and not exactly speaking the king's English.

Or wedded to it in everyday life, I mean, though when other teachers ask me how I'm doing, I do say "well" rather than "good."

But sometimes I say, "I'm good." Anyway, not all changes in the language are a.) instantly universal and b.) good.