Funny language error in this Slate piece on "natural language analysis" of our president's unnatural language: "[T]hink about that corrugated green line under a sentence in Microsoft Word reminding you to avoid passive tense...." (My emphasis.)
So nearly true (you should avoid 'passive tense').
Wow. I'd hate to have the majority construe this TSA notice:
"We encourage everyone to pack gel-filled bras in their checked baggage."
(HT to Jason Stanley.)
I'm no stickler about grammar. But you know, the term 'thus' is already an adverb. So what's up with the 'thusly'?
I was going to provide a list of the top ten most obscure words. But that would be a little self-defeating, wouldn't it?
My dad yesterday recounted a story involving a friend (of my dad's generation) who professed both unfamiliarity with the word 'cannabis' and an inability to find that word in a dictionary -- two odd bits of cognitive incapacitation that rather ironically suggest a robust familiarity with the substance in issue, if not its designation.
Anyway, this got me thinking about basic dictionary-using competence. Seems like if you weren't good at using a dictionary, you'd have a need for a reference work, say, "Dictionaries for Dummies." But then given the very incapacity in issue, you'd need another reference work for that, ostensibly "'Dictionaries for Dummies' for Dummies." And so on. This obviously leads to a pedagogically vicious regress. Turns out, then, dictionary illiteracy is irremediable.
As a corollary, it is impossible that you are comprehending this post at all.
John Derbyshire argues that the movement to expunge "politically incorrect" terms from our language is misbegotten. I pretty much agree: PC activists, in trying to mount the horse of civic virtue, have extended their activism into a synthetic programme of linguistic cleansing; it's a leap too far, and they've landed clear on the other side of the horse. Derbyshire has plenty of decent examples of this sort of thing, and they're entertaining to read.
But you get the sense that Derbyshire laments more than that the movement has loosed all these unmotivated and disorderly intrusions into reasonable (morally unobjectionable) linguistic practice; he seems to think that the changes wrought constitute an authentic loss to Language. You can see Derbyshire casting about for principled reasons to prefer the Old Linguistic Ways when he declares, for instance, that
[i]n this essay, I shall use only generic “he” on the principle declared by Winston Churchill: “The male embraces the female.”
Granted, the practice of using the generic 'he' is perfectly acceptable, and there are many reasons why this is so (e.g., it's an established practice with no compelling, unconfusing, less ambiguous alternative). But Churchill's fatuous dictum surely isn't one of them: That "the male embraces the female" is pure cant.
And given Derbyshire's lobbying in this way on behalf of linguistic tradition's contingent repository of to-be-preferred modes de l'emploi, it's particularly odd that he approvingly quotes Samuel Johnson's argument:
My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, ‘Sir, I am your most humble servant.’ You are not his most humble servant. You may say, ‘These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times.’ You don’t mind the times. You tell a man, ‘I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet.’ You don’t care six-pence whether he is wet or dry. You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society: but don’t think foolishly.
True, but obviously too true for Derbyshire's argument to go through. For if language is merely the "dress of thought," what can it matter that contemporary mores of usage prefer, for instance, 'humanmade' to 'manmade' (a preference that Derbyshire specifically decries)? Not much -- Johnson's argument renders 'humanmade' but a bit of innocuous cant, after all. (Besides which, it's hardly as if 'manmade' were of the two terms any more "in accordance with the truth of things.")
Language and "modes of talking" within it develop and change capriciously. And Derbyshire's right that the PC prescriptivists mostly just need to get over it. But he might follow his own advice.
(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)
In case you were wondering why Michelle Malkin hasn't jumped onboard the "Barack Hussein Obama" wagon, perhaps a clue resides here.
From Cognitive Daily: "[I]n an analysis of a set of 891 sentences ranging in length from 1 to 25 words, a team led by Kathryn Baker found an average of 27 possible ways to parse each sentence."
I would've said how interesting that was, but for the fact that I now realize it's possible I'm totally misreading it.
I was going to submit this entry to Mark Kleiman for his nascent Winglish-English Dictionary, but then realized it's closer to plain English:
malarchy/ n./* A state ruled or headed by Republicans. (Cf. malarkey.)
I've always found it irritating when language mavens hasten to point out some formal linguistic or orthographical error that has no substantive or communicative significance. David Crystal's got my back.
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