Prof. Geoffrey Pullum (Language Log) has a post that strikes me as so apt that it’s worth quoting at length, though with some extra emphasis on my part (see the original for the links, reader comments, and some more text):
See Plethoric Pundigrions for screen shots showing a version of Microsoft Word (I don’t know which one) that for levelheaded suggests correcting it to level-headed and for level-headed suggests correcting it to levelheaded. That should give rise to a frustrating morning of trying to finalize the draft, shouldn’t it?You will probably want to know what The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language says about what the right answer is; and those who yearn not just for authority but for actual authoritarianism will be disappointed that it reports, “It is an area where we find a great deal of variation” (p. 1760, in the section on lexical hyphens).
If you think that nonetheless an answer should be stipulated, then go ahead and make up a stipulation. What The Cambridge Grammar is telling you is that you won’t have any basis for it. You might just as well have stipulated the opposite. Educated usage will not always match your stipulation (thus showing it to be a good one), and it won’t always fail to match.
There are two general tendencies, though. (1) The longer a compound has been in use, the more likely it is to have started being written without a hyphen. (2) American English is a bit less likely to favor hyphenating than British English is. Apart from those two rules of thumb, you are out there working with no net, trying to follow the shifting tendencies in the usage of other people. I think I would recommend simply finding a recent use of the term in the writing of an author whose work you really like to read, and following that. If Stephen King describes someone as levelheaded, and you like reading Stephen King, then write levelheaded. Nothing much will hang on it. Not everyone will agree with you (and Word may even disagree with itself), but hey, it’s a free country.
Does that make me sound like an anarchist? I hope not. I believe there are thousands of quite strict constraints on Standard English, constraints such that if you would be ill-advised to violate because you will look like a gormless illiterate. All I’m saying is that whether or not to hyphenate a compound like level(-)headed is not one of the areas of English in which a strict and widely respected constraint holds.
This strikes me as sound advice on this issue, but I particularly like two broader points:
1. Descriptivism stems in large part — it certainly does for me — not from some ideology about freedom or populism, but in the insistence that proposed rules have some actual foundation in something. I’m happy to be strict about the rules in math, or in physics, or for that matter in law, because there’s some basis for the rules. In law, that’s the judgment of some authoritative body (whether a court, a legislature, a constitutional convention, or the people voting for a law or a constitutional provision). In physics, that basis lies in the real world. In math, that basis comes in a combination of the real world and some conventions that are demonstrably more convenient for important mathematical principles, and that are therefore widely adopted by the great bulk of mathematicians.
But in the English language, the only such basis that I can see is the consistent pattern of usage (perhaps focusing on edited usage, just to set aside mistyping and similar things that even the user would on a moment’s reflection recognize as an error). If the great bulk of English speakers and writers say or write something, I simply see no basis for saying that it’s “against the rules.” You can say that it’s inelegant (an aesthetic judgment), or you can say that it’s potentially confusing, or you can say that it will alienate some readers, and you might well be right. But I just can’t see a basis for saying that it’s “incorrect.” (For a response to the argument that a common usage can be soundly labeled incorrect because it’s “illogical,” see here.)
2. Yet this hardly means that descriptivists don’t believe that there are any rules. There are lots of rules. Here’s one: Following “I am,” one says words like “eating” and not “eat.” No native adult speaker violates this rule; I’ve never heard even nonnative speakers violate it, nor have I heard uneducated speakers violate it.
Even my 4-year-old and my 6-year-old, who have trouble with other rules, have not to my recollection ever said “I am eat,” at least since they started speaking in complete sentences. This might make the rule sound trivial, because we don’t need to apply it while editing. But it actually means that the rule is extraordinarily strong, precisely because people almost never violate it.
Likewise, there are rules about the meanings of words — for every controversy about what a word “means,” which usually reflects the reality that the word has multiple meanings in common English usage, there are hundreds of entirely uncontroversial definitions. Each such definition is a rule. The same is true for rules about spelling, pronunciation, and so on.
So we descriptivists care a great deal about rules, and think it’s important that people follow them. We just insist that those who assert the validity of a rule have some evidence for that assertion. And the only evidence that makes sense to us (or at least to me) is Horace’s “will of custom, in whose power is the decision and right and standard of language.”
Richard S says:
“In law, that’s the judgment of some authoritative body.” That’s only in modern times. The common law, at least as John Adams learned it from Coke was rather more like your account of what is authoritative in language. He wrote, “Judicial decisions are the principle and most authoritative evidence, that can be given, of the existence of such a custom as shall form part of the common law. . . The law, and the opinion of the judge are not always convertible terms, though it is a general rule that the decisions of courts of justice are the evidence of what is common law.”
Law needn’t be the command of some authority.
March 3, 2010, 1:31 pmPubliusFL says:
Interesting post. Looking at the quote from Prof. Pullum, I wonder what the difference is between “ill-advised” and “level(-)headed.” They’re fairly similar in form and phonologically, but “levelheaded” and “level-headed” are both in common use, while I’ve only seen “ill-advised” (never *”illadvised”).
March 3, 2010, 1:35 pmAnonsters says:
And this is categorized under “American Constitution Society” because…. [Whoops, must have accidentally clicked the wrong box -- thanks for the heads-up! -EV]
March 3, 2010, 1:35 pmys says:
Possibly because someone may think it’s “illad-vised”
March 3, 2010, 1:39 pmNelson Lund says:
I believe that Eugene’s oft-articulated general position on descriptivism is irrefutable. But two qualifications may be worth considering. First, Eugene and others sometimes cite early usages to refute a prescriptivist’s claim than the usage is incorrect; this move seems to me inconsistent with descriptivism, or at least inadequate taken alone, since outmoded customs are no longer customs. Second, prescriptivists might be performing a useful social function by discouraging the spread of usages that make the language less useful (such as the loss of the distinction between imply and infer).
March 3, 2010, 2:47 pmStephen Lathrop says:
Custom can overcome anything, rules, logic, meaning, you name it. Long usage will dull your knife. Does that make your dull knife a better one to use than the sharp knife you once had?
Worse, some of what now becomes customary does so not because people prefer it, but because users can’t prevent the software robots they employ from distorting their intentions. A prime example is the apostrophe to indicate omission, such as ” ’09″ for “2009.” Type “ain’t” and you get an apostrophe; use the same key to type ” ’09″ and your idiot word processing program will often try to turn it around the wrong way. The software presumes the preceding space indicates an opening quotation—although I notice the text editor for this site is sophisticated enough to get it right. Kudos. By the way, you can usually fix the problem with a manual override if you know how. But with giant renditions of the incorrect usage flooding every kind of graphic presentation on TV and elsewhere, why should you bother. It only matters when it creates ambiguity, or if you hate ugly.
Here’s a great example—a wonderful, extremely useful, correct usage so long forgotten you can win bar bets with it. In the AM/PM system of time notation, what is the correct way to denote noon? Is it 12:00 AM or 12:00 PM? Neither. The correct notation for noon is “M” meaning Meridian. 12:00 M is noon. Makes perfect sense, and unambiguously distinguishes noon from midnight. It was customary about 150 years ago. Don’t you wish you could use it? You can’t. People will assume you made an error and pester you to try to figure out what you intended.
Interesting you mentioned hyphens. There are actually 3 dashes employed in typography, and it can improve communication to reserve them for their correct usages. Most literate people understand two of them, at least somewhat, the hyphen (-) and the long dash known as an M-dash (—). The intermediate dash, known as the N-dash (apparently can’t show it here), is a tool mostly for copy editors and typographers (note the sense of the musty past those two terms invoke), and a good thing too, because who knows how to make an N-dash on word processing software. But the N-dash is useful. It is needed to distinguish conjoined terms where one term modifies the other, from other situations where the two terms stand as equals. “Level-headed accountant” is a different kind of construction than “labor-management relations.” The second case gets the N-dash. Mostly, this distinction is just a bit of gratuitous help for the reader. Every so often a case comes up where a paragraph can be rendered completely incomprehensible by using the wrong dash.
Another distinctive use of the N-dash is to signify a range of values: “3-4 weeks duration”; “April 7-9.” But wait, surely we get the meaning, and this text as displayed has hyphens, you’re just being punctilious. Try to build a table showing ranges of values in a case where some of the values in the ranges are negative numbers. You’ll be screaming for something besides hyphens, and using M-dashes would compound the confusion.
Descriptivists are the Schumpeters of language, applauding creative destruction wherever they find it. I just wish, in both cases, that the Schumpeters had some way to distinguish creative destruction from the other kind.
March 3, 2010, 2:54 pmTNeloms says:
I agree with the descriptivist approach advocated in these posts, but one point that is often ignored is that some usages are actually better in the sense that they make the language richer and more expressive. You can make the argument it has become correct for “beg the question” to mean “lead to the question,” but that’s really too bad because now it’s much harder to convey the original meaning of “beg the question,” which a useful concept to express.
March 3, 2010, 3:06 pmBrian says:
Professor Volokh, I am disappoint.
March 3, 2010, 3:53 pmKevin R says:
I accidentally the whole present participle inflection.
March 3, 2010, 3:59 pmJohn Burgess says:
Or, for the real Grammar Nazis…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8fbrUjjivw (NSFW language)
March 3, 2010, 4:40 pmDuffy Pratt says:
What’s wrong with writing “level headed”?
Some of the early hyphenates are so old that most people don’t even recognize them as hyphenates at all anymore. “Atone” and “behave” come to mind.
I don’t think anyone denies that grammatical rules should arise, at least at some point, from actual usage. The question comes is whether the rules ever get set in stone. When I was growing up, I knew people who were sticklers about the appropriate use of “whom,” a word that is pretty much obselete these days. Yet the same people didn’t seem to care at all about the proper usage of “thee” and “thou.” In some areas of the country, however, I think those words still get some common usage, while as far as I know “whom” is pretty much dead.
March 3, 2010, 5:04 pmGuest14 says:
By what mechanism would they get set in stone? This goes to the question of what one thinks a grammatical rule is, and I don’t know the prescriptivist answer to this question.
March 3, 2010, 5:35 pmHyphenation, Descriptivism, and Rules | Liberal Whoppers says:
[...] more here: Hyphenation, Descriptivism, and Rules [...]
March 3, 2010, 5:37 pmJoe Photon says:
The phrase “whether or not” sets my teeth on edge. Please don’t do that again.
March 3, 2010, 5:48 pmerp says:
I’m passionately against hyphenating Americans. I actually despise it, but other than that, I’m pretty cool about hyphenation. Hyphenate or not at will, just as long as it’s not to further separate us into little islands of race or ethnicity.
March 3, 2010, 6:00 pmmatth says:
Stephen, I’m afraid your ode to the n-dash/hyphen distinction may have had the opposite effect from what you intended. Speaking for myself, I’m relieved that such a pointless, persnickety convention is no longer a recognized usage rule.
Context will usually make it clear whether a particular hyphen is meant to create a modifier/modified relationship or just to link to concepts. It’s just as well, because, in ordinary prose, it’s usually difficult to distinguish between an n-dash and a hyphen. Dropping this convention made the language easier to use without reducing its expressive power at all. That seems like a clear win to me.
(As a tax lawyer, I actually use the n-dash in citations all the time, and even have a shortcut key set up for it. In this as in most things, though, the healthier choice is to avoid emulating tax lawyers.)
March 3, 2010, 6:04 pmCrunchy Frog says:
At the risk of looking like a gormless illiterate – what’s a gorm, and why would I not want to be seen without one?
March 3, 2010, 6:33 pmarch1 says:
Eugene,
I must be missing something, because I know that you consider clear communication to be very important: Doesn’t the utility of a putative language rule carry any weight for you, above and beyond the question of what is customary?
If not, is this because you think (casting about here..) that customary usage is generally such an excellent proxy for utility that it’s a waste of time to fuss about utility in its own right?
March 3, 2010, 8:45 pmEugene Volokh Is Trying to Make My Head Explode. | Little Miss Attila says:
[...] almost enough to make one question the meaning of life as a proscriptive grammarian. [...]
March 4, 2010, 2:58 amauh2o says:
As I wrote in an earlier iteration of this dispute: This controversy between prescription and description in language is ancient. The zealous prescriptionists fail to recognize the ineluctable evolution of language. The promiscuous descriptionists abhor authority and accept any atrocity employed by a sufficient number. Recognizing that language evolves and that language requires some sense of governing logic to permit teaching, learning, and the reliable conveyance of a distinct message, I insist that a learned and thoughtful person can distinguish between a change that enriches a language and a change that adulterates a language and between a discipline that enriches and preserves, on the one hand, and discipline that oppresses, on the other. The governing question is never whether language is elastic and capable of growth; happily, it is. The question is never whether language is capable of adulteration; alas, it is. The question is how to insist on the one and exclude the other.
March 4, 2010, 7:39 amSnaphappy says:
I haz a sad.
March 4, 2010, 10:07 amSnaphappy says:
My above usage, when typed into google with quotation marks, has 722,000 hits.
“I simply see no basis for saying that it’s ‘against the rules.’ You can say that it’s inelegant (an aesthetic judgment), or you can say that it’s potentially confusing, or you can say that it will alienate some readers, and you might well be right. But I just can’t see a basis for saying that it’s ‘incorrect.’”
March 4, 2010, 10:09 amSnaphappy says:
See also “I can has” (10.8 million hits)
March 4, 2010, 10:11 amliamascorcaigh says:
“So we descriptivists care a great deal about rules, and think it’s important that people follow them.”
Of course you do. As long as they’re rules you agree with. Anyone who adds to your happy moiety is an authoritarian prescriptivist. Anyone who subtracts therefrom, a “gormless illiterate”. What this in effect means is that the age-old conflict between P-tives and D-tives can be reduced to an argument about what constitutes illiteracy, avec ou sans gorm. The Ps are more fastidious, the Ds more tolerant. Of course, like Swift’s “pointed end” and “round end” egg eaters, they heartily loathe each other to the bemusement of the less engaged.
Let both groups have at it over the text of Finnegans Wake. That would surely cool all ardor.
March 4, 2010, 1:41 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
How about “weather or not”? Or even “rather or not”? (inexplicable to me, b/c “weather” is at least almost a homonym.) (You think I’m joking? See here.) Or the mushmouthed southern pronunciation, “whethernot”? That last is like the southern pronunciation “Missippi” – we mean to say the extra syllable, and if asked we would say we do, but somehow it doesn’t materialize.
March 4, 2010, 9:54 pm