ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

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!

I think the preposition issue is interesting. You (Nabisco) are presenting the loss of a marked form for the object personal relative pronoun as one of sloppiness. We all know the rule, but we don't follow it, but we do for prepositions because it's more obvious.

That may actually be right, but I'd look at it another way. To me, regularity is what makes something part of the language at large, and not just a mistake/error/slip or whatever. And, here across a wide range of language we have a very regular pattern that we mark the pronoun after prepositions, but not when in object position. The frequency of it after a preposition is VERY high, and the frequency of it in object position is VERY low. You see, that looks more like *language change in action, folks* a new rule, than it does sloppiness.

I actually spent a couple of days getting my hands dirty researching this using the Cambridge International Corpus, which includes a lot of different corpora (corpuses? wonder what the frequency of those is ...) from different universities and other publishers and so on. It's one of the biggest, if not the biggest, and although there are problems with the weighting of different forms of language, it's pretty good.

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.)

This is OTM. I think the fact that descriptivist and prescriptivist grammars are actually so similar shows you the enormous influence of the rules as taught (but also of how each individual does carry the whole language around with them, so their insights are going to be pretty good).

Descriptivist grammars, by starting from how the language is and then saying how it ought to be, rather than the other way round, are going to be a bit quicker to respond to language change, though. Which is what we're really talking about.

I mean descriptive and prescriptive grammars. Lose the "ist". (Idiot!)

Since 'definately' gets 16 million hits on Google, do you think dictionaries should list it as an alternative spelling?

Don't get me started on spelling! You'd be shocked.

But anyway, Google is not a corpus. It's all written and you can't weight for different kinds of writing etc.

Definitely gets 132,000,000 hits anyway, so I think we can make some, rough, assumptions about frequencies there.

Say that definately was used 90% of the time in a properly weighted sample, including prepared and sub-edited writing as well as spontaneous writing, then we'd have to think about it, wouldn't we?

That's where we are with whom.

Ha - me complaining about google being all writtenwhen we're discussing spelling = idiot!

Requiring 90 percent compliance is a bit steep, isn't it? After all, dictionaries have plenty of alternative spellings that are used far less than that (shewn, for example - it's in the dictionaries but when do you ever see it now?).

I guess my point is although it seems to make sense for grammar/spelling 'rules' to be descriptivist, I'm not sure they ever really are or can be. How exactly do you weigh usage, anyway? Surely that's inherently relative. Back in the old days dictionary citations were all from English literature. No doubt there's some other kind of bias that operates now. (I think it's highly likely that certain grammatical 'mistakes' might predominate in certain socio-economic or ethnic groups, without them ever finding their way into grammar handbooks as alternatives.)

That is an issue, but that is exactly what descriptive grammars such as the Longman one that I linked to above, attempt to do ie they look at different genres/registers/channels etc. and see how things work. Collecting spoken English is expensive - even for TV and radio you have to pay transcribers, and for conversational or business language you have to get volunteers to wear microphones for a few weeks or months and then transcribe that. I'm sure there are issues around who get to be the volunteers and thus the language that makes it in, and the spoken sample is always going to be smaller. The new genres of informal written English brought about by the internet should be both cheap to collect and fascinating.

Spelling works VERY differently: people develop all kinds of different speech patterns that get fairly ingrained, but there's almost total deference to the idea that there's a "right" way to spell things, even when people don't know what it is. (There's also a dictionary exercising authority on this point in nearly every home, whereas consulting a grammatical authority is rather harder.)

Jamie, I still feel like my point is somewhat getting missed, but maybe it's just not that great of a point. You say "regularity is what makes something part of the language at large," but you're talking about descriptive regularity. I'm not saying people should start using "whom" all the time -- I'm just pointing out that in relation to the Rule, our current usage is highly irregular. It's a pattern, yes, but it's not a coherent rule in the least.

I think I am missing something. How about this?

The way in which we break the Rule is so regular and so frequent that it invalidates the rule, or suggests a new one. How quick the gatekeepers of the language are to react to things like this is what we're arguing about.

Or, are you referring to the internal consistency of the grammar point?

Because on the face of it it seems a little irregular to have all your other relative pronouns not having a different object form, and the personal one having one. That said, it has a genitive form (whose) that nobody is knocking, and none of the others do. (In fact, I wish there was one for which. That would be really handy. whiches maybe?) That's the problem when you look at the internal logic. The language as desribed by the Rules is still full of quirks and inconsistencies.

Or am I still missing the point?

Argentine or Argentinian? I thought argentine was only for silvery things.

spelling = identification
grammar = communication

chew on that a bit.

[chews, isn't sure, swallows politely anyway]

Argentine or Argentinian? I thought argentine was only for silvery things

can't remember, but a good dictionary (ODWEs?) will help you out on the distinction i'm missing. i think you're right, but i might be wrong :)

My OD has neither! But I will search in others. It has no countries or country-related adjectives, in fact. And doesn't even have argentine as in silvery.

*throws 2-yr-old OD in bin*

argentine = silvery
Argentine = relating to Argentina (adjective); a citizen of Argentina (noun)
Argentinian = relating to Argentina (adjective); a citizen of Argentina (noun)
Argie (offensive) = relating to Argentina (adjective); a citizen of Argentina (noun)

I don't know if there are distinctions such as those between Arab, Arabic and Arabian.

I've always used Argentine and Argentinian interchangeably. Based on the frequency of usage within our online database here, it appears we prefer "Argentine" to refer to someone or something from Argentina.

Argentine = relating to Argentina (adjective); a citizen of Argentina (noun)
Argentinian = relating to Argentina (adjective); a citizen of Argentina (noun)

hmm. i'm sure i've always perceived a difference between the two usages -- ie "Argentine" is the adjective and "Argentinian" the noun, or the other way round -- but that could be a house-style thing.

unlikely, given the state of the existing style book in our, er, "house". but hey. if i had a copy of ODWEs to hand, i'd check. but i don't. so i can't. so hey.

xpost

I like the adjective "Argentine" just on a gut level, mostly because I feel like we have a lazy English-speaking habit of always trying to force everything to fit the "_____ian" format. (To which we've recently added a lazy habit of always trying to force things to fit the "____i" format!)

Thank you all.

(I think my habit has been to say Argentinian for a person and Argentine for a thing....no logic to that whatsoever.)

(To which we've recently added a lazy habit of always trying to force things to fit the "____i" format!)

Yeah, this is most apparent with people who've heard "Iraqi" and "Pakistani" deciding that someone from Afghanistan is an "Afghani" rather than an "Afghan."

But but but afghans are blankets, and I like the sound of Afghani better.

And such variations make it even more daft that my dictionary doesn't bother to tell me what is correct. Rubbish. Anyway.

To be fair, Webster's lists both.

Euro: capped or not?

("We expect a gradual appreciation of the US dollar vs. the euro...")

As a unit of currency, it's lowercased.

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=FSq&q=%22Which+community-oriented+goals+should+I+share%3F%22&btnG=Search&meta=

hey i was wondering if there is something wrong with the grammar of this sentence ? seems like a question that ought to be more common than that , lol

gramatically it's reasonable.

semantically, though ...

"Just minutes of exercise helps older women"

No problem, right?

Yeah, I think in that case it refers to a singular block of time. That usage is common and pluralizing the verb sounds v. awkward.

Personally, I'd add 'a few' and make it 'can help'.

Which one?

1. Vegetable oil-based inks
2. Vegetable oil based inks
3. Vegetable-oil based inks
4. Vegetable-oil-based inks

first one, definitely.

Well, I don't like doing it that way. Often you can get away with making this form less ugly by doing 4. But not here, I think. I'm for 2.

Anyway, why are you so sure? I sometimes see people write things like "red wine-based sauce", which is crazy as well as ugly.

hang on, why did you ask then? only one of those is correct and that's the first one.

deconstruct it thus: vegetable oil is a type of oil; if the inks had their basis in oil, they'd be oil-based inks; so if they're based on vegetable oil, they're vegetable oil-based inks, end of story. you need the hyphen.

xpost ugly or no, red wine-based sauce is correct also!

No it's not! "Red wine-based sauce" could easily mean a sauce made using white wine and... beetroot!

This doesn't happen with "vegetable oil based inks" because "vegetable" isn't usually an adjective, so your version can only be understood in one way -- but I dislike the ugly inconsistency nonetheless.

Hmm, I take it back actually. A sauce made with white wine and beetroot would be a "red, wine-based sauce". I'm wrong.

No it's not! "Red wine-based sauce" could easily mean a sauce made using white wine and... beetroot!

it could, but it'd take quite a dunderheaded and unnecessary leap of logic to come to that wholly non-obvious conclusion. However, the insertion of a comma ("red, wine-based sauce") would make the ambiguity of which you speak, more overt - if, say, your sauce were based on white wine and rose but is only red on account of lots of tomatoes therein, or something.

haha xpost!

yes i'm with charlieno4, although i agree it's ugly

Personally, I would go with #4, although a case could be made for #1, since there isn't likely to be much confusion.

In the case of the sauce made of red wine, though, I would argue strenuously for "red-wine-based sauce," since "red sauce that happens to be wine-based" makes a whole lot more sense (and thus is likely to be read by some as such) than ""vegetable ink that happens to be oil-based."

#2 and #3 shouldn't be used, as "-based" should always be hyphenated.

#4