ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

Nice.

Descriptivism and prescriptivism are on a ... continuum. When I am feeling more descriptivist than usual, I get to go home early.

I infer from the above that I must be a hardcore descriptivist

When I'm at my most descriptivist the other sub editors feed me biscuits until it goes away

I mean geez, what's we're talking about here has nothing to do with prescriptivism or descriptivism -- it just has to do with how rigorous or indulgent your editing is, and how formal or conversational the tone of your publication is. Editing is, by definition, an act of prescription. Changing stuff to sound like common speech because "whom" sounds "too poncey" is every bit as prescriptive as the other way around, except at least the other way around you can't be a huge hypocrite and act like you're striking some grand blow against language snobs.

Re the well/good situation, I found this on the internets.

It says stuff like:

'Realize that when you respond "I'm good" to the question "How are you?" you are telling the person that you are beneficial, kind, favorable or perhaps virtuous (depending on how the listener interprets your answer).'

But, yuh, I'm not necessarily agreeing with it....

...but it does back up my drunken argument.

Changing stuff to sound like common speech because "whom" sounds "too poncey" is every bit as prescriptive as the other way around, except at least the other way around you can't be a huge hypocrite and act like you're striking some grand blow against language snobs.

Nobody was saying you should do that, anyway. I said that you could use 'who' or 'that' as relative pronouns in certain cases (see waaaaaay upthread now) and somebody claimed that 'who' was wrong and needed to be changed to 'whom' because that was TEH RULE. The whole debate was about the fact that this 'rule' is wrong, and both 'who' and 'whom' are acceptable, but that you would only expect to encounter the latter in formal, written language. Nobody was suggesting that you should change formal documents to sound like common speech, we were fighting against the idea that you should change common speech to sound like formal documents because some house style guide says it's the rule.

I think maybe some of the misunderstanding results from the fact that this thread is entitled "ATTN: Copyeditors," and the vast majority of what it's about is written English.

Ok.

This is making my brain hurt:

bored of
bored with
bored by

I've always used all three of these interchangeably. Am I wrong in doing this? Someone's just told me "bored of" is not correct English.

Argh. I need a decent reason for any assertion!

"bored with" is the one preferred by the purists. the other two are ok in informal writing.

ok, i've now done some of my own homework and discovered this:

"The normal constructions for bored are bored by and bored with. More recently, bored of has emerged (probably by analogy with other words, such as tired of), but this construction, though common in informal English, is not yet considered acceptable in standard English." (Oxford dictionary of English 2003)

So it seems bored of, although technically incorrect, is becoming acceptable purely through frequency of usage. Woo...

So it seems bored of, although technically incorrect, is becoming acceptable purely through frequency of usage. Woo...

How else would it become acceptable?

well, some constructions never become "officially" acceptable despite widespread usage: "I could of done it", for example, or "I'm going to try and come later". But I've never seen "bored of" in any light other than an acceptable one. Maybe that's just me.

On a similar note, 'obsessed with' or 'obsessed by'?
I hate 'obsessed by' but don't know why as I can't see any particular reason for it to be wrong.

Oh, also can you say 'this is the reason why....' or should it be 'reason for (something happening)' or 'reason that (something happened)'?
Again I don't like 'this is the reason why...' but not sure why...

i'm so, so glad i was too busy to be reading ILX while that whole debate above was going on. especially as, on friday night, i nearly started a pub fight about the use of "whom". no, really.

When I'm at my most descriptivist the other sub editors feed me biscuits until it goes away

see if we do end up facing each other across some kind of merged desk? that sentence will be re-cast, and "feed me biscuits" will be replaced by (or is it "with"?) "hit me with bats".

the Guardian style guide says it's "All mouth and trousers", not "all mouth and no trousers". Surely not??

I've noticed the Guardian does that but I don't know the answer.

blimey... there's a whole blog devoted to keeping the "all mouth and trousers" expression. Apparently it's a Northern expression that's been corrupted by bungling Southerners into "all mouth and no trousers". Well I'll be!

It's "all mouth and trousers" i.e. all front - it's what's in yer trousers that counts. I think people started to conflate that phrase with things like "all bark and no bite" hence the corruption but it just turns it into a nonsense phrase IMO.

(oops the slowest typing ever made an x-poster outta me)

I feel like wading back into the who/whom debate, but I'm rather busy, so I'll just post this, from the Guardian style guide:

Use of "whom" has all but disappeared from spoken English, and seems to be going the same way in most forms of written English too. If you are not sure, it is much better to use "who" when "whom" would traditionally have been required than to use "whom" incorrectly for "who", which will make you look not just wrong but wrong and pompous.

My argument is not that "whom" should never be used in any context, but that it is not "wrong" in any meaningful sense to use "who" instead. It's just a marker of formality and we should recognise it as such. "Could of", in contrast, is actually wrong, as CharlieNo4 says above.

And say that all prescriptivists are actually deluded descriptivists, since they make their pronouncements based on a version of the language as it is spoken/written. It's just that descriptivists actually spend vast amounts of time, money, computer analysis and so on to find out statistically what is actually said or written in a variety of contexts, whereas prescriptivists make it up. Laters ; )

It's "all mouth and trousers" i.e. all front - it's what's in yer trousers that counts. I think people started to conflate that phrase with things like "all bark and no bite" hence the corruption but it just turns it into a nonsense phrase IMO.

(oops the slowest typing ever made an x-poster outta me)

-- NickB, Wednesday, 27 June 2007 14:40 (39 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

Depends whether you think of the "trousers" bit to connote embarassment or denote that the subject has no balls.

The monstrosity below illustrates why “whom” may come in handy on occasion:

A beaut: Game shows, the story said, are “popular only with older viewers, who advertisers are least interested in reaching.” Which is to say, least interested in reaching they.

http://cjrarchives.org/tools/lc/who.asp

No, it doesn't. It's only a "monstrosity" if you regard 'whom' as the only possible form of 'who' when it's the object of a verb, but (as this thread has gone into great detail) hardly anyone nowadays thinks you have to use 'who' instead of 'whom' in informal speech and lots of people consider both 'who' and 'whom' to be acceptable in writing, with the only difference being the level of formality that it signifies.

It would only "come in handy" if the sentence that you've quoted was either impossible to understand (which it isn't) or hideously inelegant (which is a matter of opinion, but to my eyes "...whom advertisers are..." looks far odder).

but to my eyes "...whom advertisers are..." looks far odder

whoa really? I think that this is one of the few cases in which the use of "who" actually offends my eyes/ears. Not so much because of its grammatical function, but because of how it sounds to have the "who" preceding a vowel without the "m" stepping in between, like an a/an situation. I know this is completely not how who/whom works, but "who advertisers are.." really hurt my brain unexpectedly, and I think that's the irrational reasoning behind it.

to who it may concern

I'm becoming more and more convinced that this is just a difference between British and American English. (xpost)

Nabisco - I think everyone agreed that after a preposition you would have to use 'whom', but that most of the time you can easily avoid that word order (one of the exceptions being fixed expressions like that).

oh well if there's a PREPOSITION then of course

Seriously, though, I doubt I've ever corrected anyone's who/whom in my life, but this kind of approach seems kinda incoherent -- you're basically saying the rule is bunk EXCEPT in cases where the rule happens to be obvious, which is like saying "stop lights are meaningless and archaic! unless there's a cop behind you, then stop."

Whereas of course the truth is that the words make a consistent distinction that most people just aren't very interested in, and we only bother to correct it in cases where it's so egregious that a substantial portion of readers would actually catch or be bothered by it.

aka pick-your-battles prescription

No, I'm not saying that. The whole argument has been against people saying it's wrong to use 'who' as a relative pronoun when it's the object of the verb. Some of us are on one side saying this is perfectly acceptable (and is perfectly normal for the vast majority in spoken English) and that the choice between 'who' or 'whom' is just one of register. Some are on the other side saying "Noooooo! It's the rule!"

I've never said it was impossible to use 'whom' in that position, just that it was a marker of formality, and in many cases would look excessively formal. Judging from the responses, this is not the case in American English, and its use is probably more widespread and less marked in the USA.

I've agreed that 'who' is not used after prepositions, but only from a descriptivist point of view. In other words it's 'wrong' because no one does it. At the same time I've said that in many situations you wouldn't put the preposition before the relative pronoun as this is also considered (perhaps only in Britain) as a marker of considerable formality (e.g. the vast majority of people would say or write "the school which I went to" instead of "the school to which I went"). So while the use of 'whom' is 'correct' after the preposition, this is only because the location of the preposition signifies formality in exactly the same way as the choice of the word 'whom'. The fixed expression "to whom it may concern" is only used in very formal writing and is used without variation (nobody says "to who it may concern"), so this is one rare occasion where you there is no alternative.

(ignore rogue 'you' in final sentence)

the vast majority of people would say or write "the school which I went to"

Or, preferably, "the school that I went to."

Yeah, fine, but that doesn't really answer what I'm saying, which is more of a meta issue here.

The who/whom thing isn't just a directive that you use one or the other in particular situations -- it's a general, consistent rule that one is an object and the other is, like, not.

When you say it's acceptable to not use "whom" in certain situations (based on people's usage), but it should be used after a preposition, you're just acknowledging that people only follow this rule when it's REALLY obvious (because the preposition is making it very clearly an object). So ... the general rule remains somewhat intact, but only in those instances where the average person might actually notice. No judgment is being made either way on the rule as a whole; we're just electing to not care about applying it except in the extreme.

So I used the term "pick-your-battles prescription" to denote that however descriptively you might want to frame this, the truth is that it's quite possible to acknowledge both that (a) there is an extant rule that "whom" is an object, and that (b) it is completely normal and acceptable to most people to ignore/break that rule in speech and all but fairly formal writing, enough so that it's not really worth fighting people over doing it correctly.

The main meta issue I'm having is acting as if there's a vast complex of individual who/whom rules applying to individual sentences, whereas there's actual one fairly simple overarching one. Your version of how we apply that irregularly is descriptively accurate. But it's just silly for you to say that "this 'rule' is wrong," as you did upthread, because you're not talking about the rule. You're just accepting that nobody applies the rule except in very obvious cases (and in those obvious cases the old, general rule stands just as much as it ever did).

(Anyway a rule can't be "wrong" -- it can be good or bad, useful or pointless, followed or not-followed, but not incorrect.)

...or that the rule described the language as it was once used, but is increasingly irrelevant today (but not completely irrelevant yet). So the use of 'whom' as the object form of 'who' has disappeared from everyday speech, but persisted in more conservative use. Even in more conservative use, i.e. written speech, it is slowly disappearing. It may be that in fifty years time nobody uses 'whom' except where it has become fossilized in fixed expressions (such as 'to whom it may concern') and that in a further fifty years it has disappeared even from them, or that those expressions are no longer used.
(xpost)

Dude, rules do not DESCRIBE, they are RULES!

And again, yes, precisely, that is what I am saying: you are just riding the wave of diminishing use, so you shouldn't pretend to have some kind of call on the RULE -- if you had an opinion on the rule either way, you would either ask for it to be used or consistently not-used, not just casually describe its current irregular status.

Actually I shouldn't even be referring to this as a rule-use issue: it's more a matter of having two distinct words for someone we've decided could be covered by just using one all the time.

Dude, rules do not DESCRIBE, they are RULES!

We're not really going to agree on this one, are we? ;-)

ARGH that statement has nothing to do with your descriptive jones, which I think is making you miss my point entirely -- hell, a good descriptivist should be the first to understand "rules" as meaning consistent strict guidelines, rather than likely observances. But whatever, nevermind.

how can you say "to who" is unacceptable? I have noticed increased acceptable usage of phrases like "to who" by such OTM people as nabisco

Hey wait possibly the sand in my vadge is just the idea of champions of endless description even using terms like "wrong," "rule," "acceptable," and "unacceptable!"

(Well that and not acknowleding that prescription is as much a part of natural human language development as anything else, down to the routine prescriptions of second grade -- cf the lack of similar stances and developments with regard to spelling, where there's a much more free-flowing level of interpersonal prescription and total respect for arbiters & authorities like, umm, the dictionary.)

If nabisco is not otm, who else should we turn to? It boggles.

WHOM YA GONNA CALL?

Aw crap. That was me, not JimD.

(Anyway a rule can't be "wrong" -- it can be good or bad, useful or pointless, followed or not-followed, but not incorrect.)

Nabisco otm. To place rules in slightly different frame of reference, a rule is always prescriptive, but never self-enforcing, and therefore is not necessarily descriptive of anything occuring in nature. It need only meet the internal necessity of being prescriptive to become a rule.

I may, for example, formulate a rule that white shoes may not be worn prior to Easter, or that when one spills salt a pinch of it must be thrown over one's left shoulder using one's right hand. These are legitimate rules. At one time they were both widely followed, now they are not. This says nothing about their inherent "ruleness". Rules they remain and forever shall be, even when they are forgotten by those who walk the earth.

Technically he could be using "rule" the way it's used in "as a rule" or "the exception that proves the rule" -- i.e., a descriptive kind of rule -- but obviously that'd be an interesting choice here, and like I say, it ignores the way prescription plays a massive role in even grass-roots, all-natural language. (The same way prescriptive rules about what you should wear play a huge part in what everyday people actually do wear.)

Wading back in to the debate ...

I prefer "patterns", not "rules", when it comes to grammar. It seems to make a whole lot more sense.

And something is "wrong" when it doesn't fit the pattern of the language as it is actually used, which of course varies according to context, register, channel, audience etc. As I said above, this is in essence what yer 19th Century grammarians were doing anyway, but rather than actually doing the research, which would anyway have been impossible without computer technology, they just used their insight and their own ideolect and got down to it. I find it surprising that people find this difficult. After all, that is pretty much how dictionaries have always worked. You do your research, collect your citations etc. They are now all written using corpus research. Why shouldn't we take the same approach to grammar?

So, we are saying that who/whom is a matter of pragmatics in addition to one of morphology, yougetme?

Also, in Jeb's link, the editor of the New York Times, no less, was campaigning for this distinction to be dropped. He ceased to be editor in 1950, so this was seen as archaic and pompous at least 57 years ago, probably more! Enough is enough.

http://www.amazon.com/Hardcover-Longman-Grammar-Written-English/dp/0582237254

This is great, by the way!