The Volokh Conspiracy

Prof. Mark Liberman (Language Log) has all about this “exchange” — in this instance, a literal fistfight rather than a figurative one — all about whether to “elevate the status of Russian to a second language, equal to Ukrainian, in about half the regions of the country, including Kiev.” You have to see the picture, or at least the video (which I’m deliberately withholding so that more people can visit and maybe see what a great site Language Log is).

Prof. Julie Sedivy (Language Log) has a very interesting post about a British film ratings controversy involving a Ken Loach movie that uses the word “cunt.” The film rating people are distinguishing “aggressive” uses of the word from “non-aggressive” uses; a British commentator faults this for being a double standard, and a class-based one at that; Prof. Sedivy responds, I think quite soundly. A very interesting discussion. (What the proper rule of film ratings agencies should be, when it comes to either legally binding or non-legally-binding but nonetheless practically coercive ratings aimed at shielding minors from certain images or words, is a different story.)

An interesting project, covered in this New York Times ArtsBeat item. An excerpt:

To demonstrate the validity of Twitter-based research, Mr. Russ searched through some 400,000 Twitter posts coming from identifiable locations and zeroed in on three different linguistic variables, starting with the regional distribution of “soda” vs. “pop” or “Coke,” something that has been well-studied by scholars and amateurs alike. Next, he tracked the use of “hella,” an intensifier (as in “hella boring”) that is associated with Northern California but whose regional distribution has only been examined anecdotally. Finally, he looked at the well-documented syntactic construction “needs X-ed” (as in “the car needs washed”), which is common in the Midwest and especially around Pittsburgh.

Mr. Russ’s results for carbonated beverages, plotted onto a Google map, track closely with previous research, with “pop” predominant from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest, “Coke” predominant in the South and “soda” ruling the Northeast and Southwest while also cropping up elsewhere. But his map for “hella” shows the word leap-frogging up the West Coast to Seattle (and, more puzzlingly, popping up in St. Louis and Kansas City).

Thanks to Donna Colin for the pointer.

In addition to the scores of specific words and phrases dissected in Lawtalk: The Unknown Stories Behind Familiar Legal Expressions, we also discuss more generally what may be the most ridiculed characteristic of legal language — its predilection for redundancy: “aid and abet,” “over and above,” “goods and chattels,” “ordered, adjudged, and decreed,” and so on and so forth. In law school it was explained to me that this was the result of combining words from Old English (like goods) with substantially synonymous words of French origin (like chattels) to assure comprehension in an age in which both languages were used in England, particularly in legal contexts.

But this common explanation doesn’t hold water. Aid and abet, for example, are both from French; over and above are both native English. In Lawtalk we point out a number of considerations that fostered — and in many cases still foster — the use of such phrases, such as the fear that omitting some customary word would open the door to an argument that some shade of meaning is not covered. A factor now mostly forgotten is that for centuries court clerks, and even some lawyers, were paid by the page — an approach unaccountably neglected in the search for alternatives to billing by the hour, about which Beth Thornburg wrote in this space two days ago. And we emphasize an even more overlooked factor: that the use of redundant expressions is not specifically a lawyerly habit, but a common stylistic feature of general English, sometimes adding gravity (e.g. wrack and ruin) and sometimes whimsy (jot and tittle).

An e-mail the other day from Eugene Volokh, however, raises the interesting question of how redundant such phrases really are. He noted that abet historically referred to verbal encouragement rather than physical assistance, so that aiding and abetting actually covered two different types of participation in a crime.

The point is a good one. It is undoubtedly the case with any number of fixed phrases of this sort that the words have, or originally had, different meanings or different nuances, but the distinction blurs to the point of nonexistence when they are used together. For example, at least originally, a nook was an interior corner, and a cranny was a small hole or fissure in a wall. Possibly in some early uses the phrase nooks and crannies was a deliberate conjunction of two distinctly different types of small partially enclosed space, but it is doubtful that many people today are conscious of the distinction.

So it is with aid and abet. It is quite true that the original meaning of abet was to “urge on, incite.” The word is actually distantly related to bait as in bear-baiting, in which dogs were incited to attack a chained bear. It thus was distinguishable from aid in the narrow sense of providing concrete assistance. So it is no doubt true that the phrase aid and abet in the common law was chosen to cover the gamut of participatory conduct by a secondary actor in a crime.

But the concepts could never be entirely distinguished. Physical assistance encourages one to proceed with a task, and verbal encouragement helps one to accomplish it. That’s why football teams have cheerleaders.

Moreover, in law it seldom matters anyway whether one directly aids or only solicits or encourages the commission of a crime. Blackstone’s definition of “principal in the second degree” in 1769 (Commentaries, vol. 4, p. 34) was “he who is present, aiding, and abetting the fact to be done.” (Blackstone then immediately explained that “presence” may be constructive rather than actual.) And modern law likewise lumps the two together: the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code, § 2.06, defines an “accomplice” as including anyone who “(i) solicits . . . or (ii) aids or agrees or attempts to aid” the commission of the crime. The confederate of a second-story man would get nowhere by arguing that she merely requested the thief to steal certain jewelry but did not help him, or merely held the ladder but did not encourage him. The law doesn’t care. (On personification of “the law,” see our entry on “the law is a ass.”)

The impossibility and pointlessness of distinguishing “assistance” from “encouragement” led to a loss of the distinction, so that now the Oxford English Dictionary defines abet as “To encourage or assist (a person) to do something,” and gives examples as early as 1840 of aid and abet — and 1883 of abet alone — used in everyday nonlegal contexts in which only physical assistance is referred to.

Why, then, do we continue to use both words when just “abet” would do? The answer is that such redundancies — and we cite lots of examples in the book — are characteristic not just of legal writing but of English generally. Why else would Abraham Lincoln, in a public address celebrated as a model of concision, say that it was not just fitting but “altogether fitting and proper” to dedicate a portion of the Gettysburg battlefield as a cemetery for the fallen soldiers — and then go right on to use three virtually synonymous words to say that “in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground”?

And why the particular words “aid and abet,” and not, say, “help and encourage” or “assist and exhort”? Because if there’s one thing English likes even better than redundancy, it’s alliterative redundancy, like hale and hearty, safe and sound, and even, as in my opening sentence above, so on and so forth.

To borrow a legal expression: for the rest, residue, and remainder of what we have to say on this subject, see the book!

Thanks so much to Eugene Volokh for the invitation to guest blog about Lawtalk:  Unknown Stories Behind Familiar Legal Expressions this week.  Working on the book was tons of fun (and a dramatic lesson in the amount of historical material now available online), and my co-authors and I are enjoying the opportunity to share what we’ve learned with those who are interested.  Today’s topic is time, both in the sense of the provenance of legal expressions and as a measuring stick for legal fees.

In many cases, we discovered that law-related expressions are much older than people generally believe, and older than the earliest cites in the Oxford English Dictionary.  For example, I initially bought into the myth that Los Angeles police chief William H. Parker coined the phrase thin blue line in the 1950s (thanks, Wikipedia).  Not true:  in its laudatory metaphorical form (referring to the police as a line protecting the citizenry from crime), we traced this play on “thin red line” (referring to red-coated British soldiers in the Crimean War) back to a speech given by the Bishop of Coventry to the annual meeting of supporters of the Birmingham Police Institute in 1900–and as a literal reference to lines of policemen, all the way back to 1855.

A different kind of surprise, though, was how comparatively new the expression billable hour is.  In fact, billable in this sense is even now absent from the OED; it has the word only as a legal term meaning “liable to be served with a bill; indictable,” and its only cite is from 1579. Billable as an accounting term meaning ‘something one can bill for’ seems well established by the turn of the twentieth century, although LexisNexis shows the earliest case law use of this version of billable in a 1929 case, and the earliest billable hour (actually “non-billable hours”) in 1947 – and neither instance is about lawyers.

Lawyers didn’t always bill by the hour (and some still do not). Early twentieth century lawyers used various methods for billing clients. Some matters were billed at a flat rate, some on a percentage basis, and many used a method called value billing. Bills were sent only sporadically and were not itemized, noting only “for services rendered.”

By the 1920s, state and local bar associations began to publish minimum fee schedules, listing the appropriate charge for various kinds of legal matters.   For example, the schedule would “suggest” one fee for handling a real estate closing, another for drafting a will, and yet another for a contested divorce.  Lawyers ignored these schedules at their peril, as habitual under-charging could be treated as professional misconduct.

A mid-century movement toward “legal economics” marked a shift to charging for time rather than tasks.  In 1940, Reginald Heber Smith wrote four articles for the American Bar Association Journal advocating a more organized approach to law firm management. Among other things, he recommended monitoring and documenting lawyer productivity through “Daily Time Sheet” forms.

Then in 1957 the ABA created the Committee on Economics of Law Practice, and in 1958 went on a crusade to promote hourly billing with its pamphlet, The 1958 Lawyer and His 1938 Dollar.  This tract pointed out that lawyers who kept track of their time and billed clients accordingly made more money than those who did not. (It also noted that lawyers’ earnings had failed to keep up with those of doctors and dentists). The problem, said the ABA, was that by concentrating on “devotion to public interest,” lawyers were failing as businessmen, and that they should start recording and charging for their time, their “sole expendable asset.”  State bar associations responded, as when a committee of the Wisconsin State Bar calculated in 1959 that an average billing rate of $18 per hour was necessary to sustain a net return of $14,500 per year.

The ABA’s efforts continued into the 1960s.  The Committee published a series of pamphlets covering many phases of law practice management, culminating in the 1962 Lawyer’s Handbook.  In 1966 the President of the ABA noted that 35,000 lawyers had copies of the handbook, but he still worried that too many lawyers failed to use efficient practice methods to assure an “adequate economic return.”  It was during this period that billing by the hour gradually caught on, spreading from large firms to small ones, and by the late 1970s hourly billing became the norm.

The term billable hour seems to have crept into legal vocabulary only as its adoption as a billing method became established. A 1968 case is the first to use “billable hour” with respect to lawyers, and it uses quotation marks and defines the term. It seems likely, though, that bar association meetings and publications were the earliest adopters of this lingo, and those sources (including a law student letter to the editor) routinely used billable hour without explanation by the early 1970s.  As late as 1975, however, the author of an article in the journal Legal Economics still felt the need to explain “the ‘billable hour’ concept.”

Today the billable hour is very much in the news.  Just last week the online ABA Journal reported that a law firm associate claimed he was fired for refusing to fraudulently bill 3,000 hours a year, and its weekly survey question asked “How many hours will you bill in 2011?”

But has there really been much change?  A 2007 survey showed a slight increase in alternative billing methods, and the protracted economic recession that began in December of that year encouraged further rethinking of billing practices, with the result that some large law firms report using flat rate billing or other methods more often nowadays.  But the billable hour remained firmly entrenched. As one industry observer was quoted as saying in 2007, “alternative fees are like teenage sex. There are more people talking about it than doing it, and those that are doing it don’t know what they’re doing.”

A few thoughts — perhaps helpful to law review editors and authors — about what’s customary in American legal publications. [Added: My sense is that this is also customary in most other books and journals, but I can speak with the most confidence about the custom in legal publications.]

1. Place commas and periods inside quotation marks, e.g.,

The Court’s answer to this was “no.”

2. Place all other punctuation marks outside quotation marks, unless they are logically parts of the quotation. I have seen some departures from this where semicolons or question marks are involved, but my sense is that those departures remain rather rare exceptions in modern legal publications.

The Court’s answer to this was “no”; but two years later, the Court changed its mind.
Was the Court’s answer “yes” or “no”?
The Court’s response was, in essence, “Says who?” [The question mark is logically part of the quotation.]

3. Place footnote calls after all punctuation marks (other than em dashes), except if the footnote relates solely to a parenthetical, in which case place the call within the parentheses. I have likewise seen some departures from this, but again my sense is that they remain rare exceptions.

The Court disagreed.¹
The Court disagreed in the first case,² but then changed its mind.
The Court disagreed in the first case;³ but in the later case . . . .
The Court reversed (except as to the jurisdiction issue⁴), holding . . . .

See, for example, this Harvard Law Review article, including footnote calls 73 (p. 24) and 141 (p. 40).

The reasons for these practices are obviously not solely logic; they are chiefly aesthetics and custom (which are related, because once a custom is established many people will find adherence to the custom to be more aesthetically pleasing). Nonetheless, unless I’m mistaken, the practices are pretty well-settled, and editors risk annoying readers — and being inconsistent even within their own publications — if they depart from this custom.

I should note, by the way, that many people are quite opposed to the custom of placing periods and commas in quotation marks, even when the periods and commas don’t logically fall within the quoted material; as I understand it, the modern British style is indeed to place periods and commas within quotation marks only when they are themselves being quoted. But I don’t want to get into this debate here (see this Slate article for one view of the debate), or enter into a similar logical debate as to footnote calls. Rather, I’m just trying to report what the custom actually is, for those who feel they ought to follow the custom.

I should also note that it’s possible that I have misunderstood or incompletely described the custom, or missed a major and broadly accepted competing view. (Among other things, it’s not easy for me to use Westlaw or Lexis to quickly confirm my sense of the dominant view here; it would be much easier if the question had to do with rival spellings or phrase constructions, which are more readily searchable.) Please let me know if I have indeed erred in this respect.

Earlier this month, I blogged about assertionism — my label for usage claims that sound like prescriptivism, but are actually bare assertions: They don’t rely on any claims about what the (supposed) Linguistic Authorities say, on any detailed logical arguments, or on claims about allegedly superior clarity or precision; they just consist of a person’s bare assertions. And when one asks for evidence supporting the claim, all one gets is more bare assertions. Prescriptivists ought to dislike assertionism as much as descriptivists do, partly because assertionism often comes across as unintentional parody of prescriptivism.

Here’s an interesting example, which started on the wilful vs. willful thread. I started my post with, “A student saw ‘wilful’ used in an opinion, and asked whether it was a typo.” A commenter then responded that the sentence

does not conform to proper English usage. The “whether” indicates that what follows is speculative, requiring that the verb be rendered in the subjunctive mood. “Was” is always indicative.

And the commenter then gave several assertedly “proper renderings of the sentence,” the first of which was:

A student saw “wilful” used in an opinion, and asked whether it were a typo.

The trouble is that “whether it were” is nearly never used in modern American English, and while it was once a bit more common, it was never the dominant usage (either in American English or British English). Consider this Google Ngrams graph of the usage of “wondered whether it was” (blue) vs. “wondered whether it were” (red) — I used “wondered” just to better test the commenter’s assertion, which is limited to “speculative” uses:

The one problem with Google Ngrams is that it doesn’t show raw numbers, so when one of the terms is very rare compared to the other, it’s hard to find the ratio. I therefore did a Westlaw search through the USNEWS database (which contains many U.S. newspapers). The search for “wonder! #whether it was” yields 4812 results. The search for “wonder! #whether it were” yielded 8 results. That’s right: “whether it was” in this context is 600 times more common than the assertedly more “proper” “whether it were.”

Continue reading ‘If Only There Were No Assertionism’ »

Our readers likely know that I have many disagreements with prescriptivists when it comes to English usage. But while I have philosophical disagreements with prescriptivists in general, my main practical disagreements are with people who might best be labeled “assertionists” — people who don’t just say that prescriptions set forth by some supposed authorities define what is “right” in English, but who simply assert a prescription even in the face of what those supposed authorities say. Usage X is wrong, they say. Why? Because it violates this rule. What’s your authority for the proposition that this is a rule? Well, it violates the rule.

The recent exchange about starting sentences with “and,” “but,” or “or” offers an excellent example. I pointed out that this is common usage — including among prominent authors, in leading newspapers such as the New York Times, and in leading legal sources such as the opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court. I also noted that the supposed usage authorities that I checked do not in fact condemn it.

Yet some people still argued that such a usage is wrong, at least in “formal” writing (though you’d think that Supreme Court opinions would be classified as pretty formal). When I inquired why this might be so, I got three basic replies:

1. “I learned basic grammar long ago. A conjunction joins two related thoughts in a sentence.” But this is mere assertion. One can equally say that conjunctions (or at least the kind we’re discussing) “link units of equal status”; indeed, this is precisely what the Oxford English Grammar (1996) says. This could mean two words in a sentence, two clauses in a sentence, two sentences in a paragraph, or two paragraphs in a work; and indeed the Oxford English Grammar gives an example of a sentence that starts with “But,” without any objection.

Now one could try to dismiss such an authority (and I’ve heard many assertionists do that in other contexts) by saying that the authority is merely descriptivist, and that therefore we shouldn’t trust its claims. I don’t buy that argument, because I’m a descriptivist; but let’s accept it for a moment. Even if one dismisses the Oxford English Grammar as an authority for the proposition that conjunctions “link units of equal status” as opposed to just “two related thoughts in a sentence,” one still needs an authority for the contrary proposition. What is that authority?

2. One commenter did try to point to such an authority, writing,

I have a Ph.D. in linguistics and I taught grammar at a university for 20 years – for what it is worth. It is indeed a rule in formal English that you cannot begin a sentence with a conjunction. See grammar texts by Azar.

Formal English = written English in a formal context = English that is meant to be read in a formal context, e.g. academic research.

In conversation, however, you can start a sentence with a conjunction. Blogging is often intended to be conversational, so we see conjunctions at the beginning of sentences a lot. I do it in my own blog.

To be formal, use ‘also’ for ‘and’; use ‘however’, for ‘so’. Make sure you use commas.

Please note: Language changes. This is one of those areas of English that we see changing before our eyes. My children will know how to use ‘however’ and ‘thus’, and know how to punctuate them, but I don’t expect that their public schooled peers will.

So I got a text by Azar (Betty Schrampfer Azar). As best I can tell, Azar generally writes schoolbooks, so I got Fundamentals of English Grammar, a “developmental skills text for lower-intermediate and intermediate students of English as a second or foreign language.” And, sure enough, Azar does say that “Except in very formal writing, a conjunction can also come at the beginning of a sentence,” though without (as best I can tell) explaining what writing qualifies as “very formal.”

But Azar doesn’t explain the basis for her assertion, so it’s basically her word against the Oxford English Grammar’s, Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage, the Supreme Court, and others (at least unless “very formal writing” is such a vanishingly small category that none of the sources thought of noting the exception, and that Supreme Court opinions do not fit within it). Again, then, we have argument by assertion, with no explanation for why we should follow Azar rather than the others.

3. Finally, one of the commenters also argued, “My impression is that, in casual English, sentences beginning with conjunctions are usually incomplete sentences. However, they may contain complete thoughts with the missing words implied.” Now I think that functional arguments are often sound arguments for why we should avoid some usage (though not that the usage is “wrong”). But again this seems to me argument by assertion. The commenter thinks that sentences beginning with conjunctions (such as “but”) are usually incomplete sentences, but I don’t know of any evidence for that proposition. (Why would such sentences be incomplete more often than sentences that start with, say, “However” or “Moreover”?) Nor does the commenter offer argument in support of the more relevant proposition that we should avoid complete sentences beginning with “but” just because many such sentences are incomplete.

I’ve discussed this before, here, here, and here. But I thought it was worth noting, and worth breaking assertionism out as a separate category, and to call on people who make prescriptivist arguments to at least identify the supporting evidence or argument for their prescriptions — and to explain why this evidence or argument trumps the evidence or argument on the other side — rather than just relying on bare assertion.

Some people categorically criticize the passive voice, a criticism that Prof. Geoffrey Pullum (of Language Log) has long and colorfully condemned; his latest salvo is an excellent post in the Chronicle of Legal Education‘s Lingua Franca blog on the subject. (For my thoughts on the subject, see here.)

Some editors, for some reason, tend to try to change each though I use into an although. I don’t get it — both are fully standard, both are commonplace in edited legal prose, and have been for centuries. A quick Lexis NEWS;US database search reveals that “although” and “though” are roughly equally common today; and “though” is no newcomer, at least according to Google Ngrams, which reports that “though” was actually even more common in English-language books in the past.

Why change an author’s “though” into “although”? The only explanation that I can see is that some people think “though” is some sort of new and not-fully-standard shortening of “although.” But if that’s their belief, it’s an incorrect one: Both words have been used since the time of Middle English, and, as I’ve noted, “though” is used routinely in standard published prose. And while I agree that legal writing shouldn’t be informal to the point of being unprofessional (you won’t find any OMGs or ROTFLs in my articles), “though” is hardly slang or otherwise unusually casual.

In response to my post defending sentences that start with “and” and “but,” commenter ptt writes, “Or they’re called conjunctions for a reason. EV should create a new tag: Rules of English I Don’t Like.”

Actually, my claim in the post was that there is no rule of English against starting sentences with conjunctions. Educated writers at the highest levels routinely start sentences with conjunctions (I gave some examples in the post, but we can find many more). And even if one looks at Rules that are set by ostensible Authorities (I don’t, but of course prescriptivists do), I’m unaware of any consensus of authority in favor of a rule prohibiting conjunctions at the start of sentences. The commenter certainly doesn’t point to one.

The commenter does seem to appeal to logic, by apparently suggesting, in his first sentence, that conjunctions must connect together two parts of a sentence. But like many appeals to supposed logic when it comes to language, this appeal assumes the conclusion. The term “conjunction” does suggest that a word is connecting two things, but it doesn’t tell us that those two things must be parts of the same sentence. Why can’t a conjunction serve as a transition that logically connects two consecutive sentences?

So if you want to argue that some usage is wrong because you’re a prescriptivist and it violates some authoritative prescription, that’s fine: You won’t persuade descriptivists (except insofar as the prescription accurately captures common usage), but you might persuade other prescriptivists. But you still need to actually point to credible authorities that issue such a prescription, rather than just asserting that some usage is a violation of the “Rules of English” as you personally believe those rules to be.

I occasionally run across people — including law review editors — who seem to take the view that there’s something wrong with starting a sentence with “and,” “but,” or “or.” I don’t see any basis for that view. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage notes, this doesn’t violate any established usage or grammar practices. It’s commonplace in edited writing, including in legal writing; for instance, a Lexis search for caps(but) and date(> 1/1/2000) in the Supreme Court database found over 900 results since 2000, and a Lexis search for caps(but) and date(> 9/16/2011) in the New York Times database found over 1100 results in just the last week. Nor is this just something new; the Constitution contains sentences that begin with “and” and “but,” as do the works of Dickens and many others.

Moreover, starting a sentence this way is useful: An initial “and,” “but,” or “or” is a good transition that shows the relationship of this sentence to the previous one, with as little formality and complexity as possible. The usual alternatives, such as “however” or “moreover” strike me as stuffier, though sometimes “moreover” adds an emphasis that “and” doesn’t.

Now if you just find these locutions aesthetically displeasing, and want to avoid them in your own writing, there’s not much I can say about that. But I see no basis for faulting others’ use of them, or for editors’ trying to edit them out.

I’m losing my battle to keep the initial capital “I” in “the Internet.” I’m starting see references to “the internet” everywhere; the latest to fall seems to be The Economist (see headline from July 30: “An internet with Chinese characteristics” – I’m quite certain that it was “the Internet” up until quite recently).

It actually matters. I had a footnote in the first chapter of my “Jefferson’s Moose” book about why I was keeping it as “the Internet,” and the more I think about it, the more I think it matters — for our understanding of the Internet and its role in the world, which is surely something we need to understand.

Suppose we live someplace that only has one bookstore. You write to me: “I’m going to the bookstore; let’s meet there.” I understand what you mean — after all, there’s only one bookstore.

Now, suppose we live in a place with lots of bookstores. Now if you write “I’m going to the bookstore; let’s meet there,” I have no idea what you mean.

Finally, suppose we live in a place with lots of bookstores, but — it being a college town — it has one that is often referred to as “the Bookstore.” You know, the Bookstore. If you write “I’m going to the Bookstore,” I know where to meet you — it’s a way of designating one bookstore out of many.

There are a hundred million internets — or 82 million, or 461 million, or who knows how many. Ranging from little teeny-tiny ones (like the one that connects my home network to my service provider’s network) to big ones (the LAN in my law school building to the University network), to one really, really gigantic one. It would be nice to have a proper noun for that one, because we need to talk about it separately from all the others; it has many, many characteristics that distinguish it from all the others. The Bookstore.

[Update: A bunch of commenters suggest that because the smaller networks (e.g. home network, Univ. network, etc.) are known as "intranets," the problem I'm describing goes away.

So I'll repeat what I said. We have hundreds of millions of internets. There's one that's of particular interest. What we call it is a proper noun, whether that's "the Internet" or "Ellen" or what have you.]

Or suppose, with all the millions and millions of trees in the world, there was one that was 411 miles tall. Wow! Referring to that one as “the tree” doesn’t work — it won’t help us talk about how the Tree got to be so damned tall, and why the Tree is different from the other trees, and whether some virus might be attacking the Tree, and whether one of the other trees might supplant the Tree in height, and . . .

Back in 2002, I asked: “Why is ‘tasty’ good but ‘smelly’ bad?” Now there’s a linguistic attempt to answer this, in a book chapter titled — I kid you not — A Note on an Asymmetry in the Hedonic Implicatures of Olfactory and Gustatory Terms. The author’s main explanation seems to be,

[T]he things that we taste and the things that we smell differ systematically in how pleasant and unpleasant they are. The reason is that we have generally more control over what we put into our mouth than what enters our nose. If one guiding principle of our behavior is the maximization of pleasure, and if there are roughly equally many pleasant and unpleasant smells and tastes available, then we should draw more pleasure out of the sense that we can control, than out of the sense that we cannot control as easily. Consequently, what we taste will be more likely pleasant than what we smell.

Thanks to Prof. Kai von Fintel (Language Log) for the pointer.

I’m generally not an early adopter of such products, but this sounds interesting. For the original report, see here.

My Beloved and I saw an excellent production today of the “Comedy of Errors” at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC.  Late in the play, however, I noticed the usage of a word I had not heard before, and which, had I not been sitting Amidst the Words of the Bard, I would have taken for an ugly neologism.  Albeit an ugly neologism I might well have used; forsooth, such is the corrupting Influence of the Conspiracy upon me so to use Words of Mine Own Invention: O Fie, & Alackaday, &tc., &tc.

The word is “defeatured.” I note that WordPress spellcheck rejects it resolutely. It appears at Act 2, Scene 1:

By him not ruin’d? Then is he not the ground of my defeatures?  My decayed fair.  A sunny look of his would soon repair …

“Defeatures” here, as in marred or decayed features, eg an aged face.  Interesting.  I rather like it.  I’ll be on the lookout for a place to work it into a post.  And conversation!

Yes, that was apparently the view among some grammarians in the late 1800s; see here for some examples. I did not know that! Here’s an example of such a condemnation:

This modern form ["is being ..."] is very seldom used among writers of the highest class…. “The house is being built” does not express what is intended; being built denotes existence in the state experssed by built; as, “Our house being built, we have now a home.” It would be better for those who are not satisfied with the well-established classical form ["The house is building"] to say, “The house is becoming built” — coming into the state expressed by built.

Thanks to Prof. Mark Liberman (Language Log) for pointing this out. (He reports that “the progressive passive [e.g., 'is being built' -EV] first appeared in the English language in the second half of the 18th century, replacing what historians of English grammar call the passival [e.g., 'is building' -EV].”

Today, of course, “the house is building” (or, to give another example offered as proper in the late 1800s, “While these arrangements were making”) is so rarely used that it is likely nonstandard, or at least highly unidiomatic, and “the house is being built” is fully standard. And we say “the house is being built” because we wisely adhere to Horace’s advice: Follow “the will of custom, in whose power is the decision and right and standard of language.”

[UPDATE: So far, the first eight commenters have all read the statement that I'm describing differently from how I read it. This suggests that my and my correspondent's reading of the term "ingenuity" might well have been idiosyncratic, and that my misunderstanding may have been entirely my fault and not the fault of the author of the statement. Sorry for the confusion if that is indeed what happened. FURTHER UPDATE: Later commenters agree, which persuades me that I indeed just misread the statement; my apologies to our readers and to the author of the statement.]

As I’ve argued before, we law professors ought to teach our students about effective usage — and that includes avoiding usages that are technically “correct.” My advice: “[T]ell your students what’s effective writing, rather than limiting yourself to what’s correct and incorrect. By teaching them that even usages that are approved by the dictionary can still be distracting, alienating, clumsy, or otherwise ineffective, you can help your students think more broadly about how they can improve their work.”

I was reminded of this by an item that Prof. Samuel Levine passed along to me, from the statement that Attorney General Eric Holder issued today (emphasis added):

As of today — what is known as “Cyber Monday” and billed as the busiest online shopping day of the year — anyone attempting to access one of these websites using its domain name will no longer be able to make a purchase. Instead, these online shoppers will find a banner notifying them that the website’s domain name has been seized by federal authorities.

With today’s seizures, we are disrupting the sale of thousands of counterfeit items. We are cutting off funds to those looking to profit from the sale of illegal goods and exploit the ingenuity of others. And, as the holiday shopping season gets underway, we are also reminding consumers to exercise caution when looking for deals and discounts online. To put it simply: If a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.

It seems quite unlikely that Attorney General Holder was faulting the counterfeiters for exploiting people’s cleverness, inventiveness, or creativity. (Selling products that contain counterfeit trademarks doesn’t require such great creativity. [UPDATE: A commenter suggests that the Attorney General was referring to people's trying to free-ride on creators' ingenuity, but that struck me as not very likely as to many of the items at issue, such as "shoes, handbags, athletic apparel, [and] sunglasses.” But if that was the point, then it seems to me that “exploit the ingenuity of others” remains confusing, though for reasons other than those I describe below — unless my reaction is highly idiosyncratic, and, who knows, perhaps it might be.] Rather, I take it that he meant that the site operators were exploiting the public’s trust or naivete — their ingenuousness.

Now as it happens, “ingenuity” was indeed once a synonym (more or less) for “ingenuousness.” But though the American Heritage and the Random House label that meaning obsolete, the real problem is not the term’s obsolescence as such: Rather, even if “ingenuity” still maintained “ingenuousness” as a current but rare meaning, why use a rare and potentially ambiguous term? Sure, anyone who reads or hears the quote would likely be able to figure out the meaning from context — but why put people to the trouble?

Even “ingenuousness” would not be perfect here, I think. It’s a pretty rare term — a LEXIS NEWS;MAJPAP (major newspapers) search finds only 17 references in 2010 — and “trust” would be a simpler and more universally accessible substitute. (“Naivete” might also be an option, but perhaps the Attorney General might find that too pejorative to the consumers.) On top of that, “ingenuousness” is itself subtly ambiguous; it could mean either sincerity or naivete, and it might take a bit of effort on the reader’s part to figure out which is meant in context.

And more broadly, I suspect that using fancy words generally tends to increase the risk of writer or editor error. As Prof. Levine speculated in an e-mail to me,

As far as why he would have used “ingenuousness,” my guess is that these kinds of announcements go through multiple drafts, and multiple authors/editors. I would speculate that one of these authors/editors wanted to emphasize the innocence of the victims, and … found a word that reflects this point. A later editor … was not familiar with the word or thought it sounded odd, and replaced it was a more familiar but similar word, thinking it had the same meaning.

This is much less likely with a simple, familiar word such as “trust.”

So one could label the statement “incorrect,” because it is a departure from modern standard English. But that’s not the core mistake here, it seems to me — the core mistake is that the statement is not as effective as it could be, because it’s potentially confusing (which in turn stems, I suspect, from its trying too hard to be fancy). And that’s a problem that “fixing” the statement to say “ingenuousness” wouldn’t entirely resolve.

A commenter writes,

Of course language evolves. It is so ironic that the apologists for standardless vulgarization should parade this undeniable reality as though it were a justification or motivation for rushing headlond to a modern Tower of Babel.

Language must serve as a medium for exchange of information, a store of data, and a structure for thought. If it is so spare of vocabulary and bereft of precision that it fails of these functions, its bearers are at a competitive disadvantage, and the language, like any other living thing, adapts or goes under.

Of course we see this happening about us, in the real world, almost as we speak, as surpassed languages go under, one after another. When the guardians of language, the learned professions default in our duty to act as a brake on simplistic vulgarization, we do our neighbors no favor. Orwell alerted us to this process, and I recommend his afterword to the fictional 1984 as a grave warning of its consequences

A blog comment is not the place for a complete exposition of these points: a hefty volume would hardly be adequate. Let it suffice if we point out that one whose mind has but a single form of the verb “to be” is less well equipped to grasp being and to communicate that concept than one whose vocabulary encompasses every variation of meaning.

A few thoughts:

1. Many surpassed languages have gone under, in the sense of not being used at all. But to my knowledge not a single one has fallen prey to “standardless vulgarization.” Rather, they were the languages of indigenous ethnic groups whose cultures had been in various ways defeated by a dominant culture. These defeats have stemmed from military, cultural, economic, and epidemiological reasons; but I don’t know of any in which the supposed “standardless vulgarization” of the rejected language has played a role.

2. Some languages have been surpassed in the sense of no longer being dominant languages for international discourse. French and Latin are examples. They have been surpassed by English, a language that has probably been subject to more “vulgarization” — and that has been less within the guardianship of some prescriptivist elite — than either French or Latin.

3. Let’s look at the example that the commenter thinks should suffice to demonstrate his point. First, my first language, Russian, uses no present-tense form of “to be” at all, at least in normal usage. You wouldn’t say “the dog is big”; you’d say, more or less, “dog big.” (“Est’” is the closest to “to be,” but it is not used the same way “to be” is in English.) I’m pretty sure this did not leave me ill-equipped to grasp being and to communicate that concept, nor did learning English equip me better along those lines.

4. Standard English is not actually losing its present-tense forms of “to be.” Some dialects use locutions such as “you is” instead of “you are,” but I don’t think this change has made its way into the standard dialect, nor do I think it’s likely. But if it does happen, and somehow (for instance) “are” is entirely replaced by “is” — again, not something I suspect will happen — I can’t see how this would make us less well-equipped to grasp or communicate being.

5. If English lost the past tense of “to be,” so people said “he is” to mean either “he is” or “he was,” that would make the language more ambiguous (though I doubt it would really make it harder for English speakers to grasp or communicate being; they’d just need more words to make themselves clear). But to my knowledge there is no trend at all along these lines. Nothing like this is “happening about us, in the real world.”

Without doubt, we can hypothesize some linguistic change that would be bad — how about replacing all words with grunts? Wouldn’t that be a shame? But it turns out that such a change isn’t happening, and neither is the loss of useful forms of “to be.” Is this just a fortunate coincidence? Or a sign that what some call “standardless vulgarization” actually generally does not interfere with people’s ability to grasp or communicate being or other fundamental concepts?

6. I’m pretty sure that Orwell’s 1984 isn’t terribly instructive on this point (though it is on others). But if you really want to use that an analogy, recall that Orwell’s Newspeak was a prescriptivist attempt by the self-appointed guardians of language to mold the language to be more useful for their purposes. The evolving English that I defend is the very opposite. And, unsurprisingly, its actual simplifications generally do not yield the result that Orwell was describing.

The Recency Illusion thread produced this comment:

First, Volokh would have us believe that against all usage, usage is all that matters.

Now, we hear that it is improper to lament the contemporary decline in the order of the language because, in times before that order was fully established, the order did not exist. Imagine if he praised modern errors in spelling by pointing to ages with unorganized systems of orthography. Volokh’s citations to Shakespeare et al. here are no more interesting for understanding the significance of contemporary changes in langauge than they would be in justifying a spelling error that happened to conform to Shakespeare’s usage.

What Volokh really despises is an order that sustains civilization and limts the ability of technocrats to demonstrate their cleverness with statistics. The parallels between his attack on decent speech and the attacks his spiritual cousins would have brought on morals is most interesting. We have long heard from those who loath the good that it is impossible to lament declines in public morals because such laments were also lodged long ago in ancient Rome as if there has been only one moral community in history. The lesson of past decline is not to repeat it. But men like Volokh would turn the lessons of history into excuses for irresponsibility. The fact, of course, is that morals and languages are broken down and restored again and again … broken by men like Volokh, restored painfully by others with a knowledge and respect for order and authority.

The commenter’s position on this seems rather extreme, but I’ve seen milder versions of it before, in which people have generally tried to draw an analogy between descriptivism-as-linguistic-relativism and “moral relativism.” This set of “parallels” strikes me as fundamentally flawed, and I thought I’d briefly explain why.

1. To begin with, note how all of us are linguistic relativists at least across languages. The extreme form of moral relativism is to say that there’s no sound external basis for judging a culture’s morals. If some culture wants to kill Jews, or stone women who commit adultery, or execute heretics or apostates, who are we to judge? I certainly don’t subscribe to any such view, and I suspect most of our readers don’t. We think that many basic moral principles must, as a moral matter, remain constant among cultures.

But I suspect that virtually no-one seeks to demand compliance with universal standards across languages. Americans say “dog”; Russians call the same animal “sobaka.” Neither is wrong — they’re just different. In English, the double negative in “there’s no nothing here” makes the phrase non-standard; in Russian, the literal translation (“tut n’et nichevo”) is fully standard, because double negatives are quite proper (in fact, often required) in Russian. Neither approach is wrong in the abstract; they’re just different rules for different languages. In Russian, nouns have many different cases (“dog,” for instance, takes different endings depending on whether you’re saying “to the dog,” “near the dog,” “with the dog,” and so on); in English, they do not (unless you count the possessive as a separate case, in which case they have only two cases). In Russian, nouns have genders, and the adjectives corresponding to the nouns have different endings depending on the gender — a big female dog is “bol’shaya sobaka” but a big male dog is “bol’shoy p’os.” Not so in English. None of these approaches is wrong; they’re just different.

To be sure, there are some regularities even across languages, especially within the Indo-European family but even across families. But those are interesting facts studied by linguists; they do not have moral significance. And though there are very many differences, people who would be rightly outraged by substantially different approaches to murder, rape, and the like in Russia and in America don’t see any problem with substantially different linguistic structures in Russian and English.

2. The critics of supposed relativism in usage generally speak of supposed decline within a language. But once we recognize that today’s English need not be judged by the standards of today’s Russian (and vice versa), and that today’s English need not be judged by the standards of Middle English, why should today’s English be judged by the standards of the English of 1700 or 1800 or 1900? Again, changed usages need not be wrong — they can just be different. At some point there might be practical costs to changed usage, for instance if people have a hard time understanding documents written in the 1700s because the words have changed too much; but very few controversial language changes actually relate to this practical concern.

Of course, there’s a separate problem (one of factual inaccuracy) when people claim that there’s a “contemporary decline in the order of the language” if there is no decline. Sometimes supposed innovations in the language are not new at all, but have been around for centuries. That, for instance, is why my Recency Illusion post gave examples from Shakespeare, Swift, Defoe, and Austen. I don’t understand what the commenter means by saying “Volokh’s citations to Shakespeare et al. here are no more interesting for understanding the significance of contemporary changes in langauge than they would be in justifying a spelling error that happened to conform to Shakespeare’s usage.” Is the claim, for instance, that though “since” in the sense of “because” was common from 1600 to the early 1800s, it somehow became improper at some point after, and we have since “decline[d]” from that hypothetical point? If so, then (1) it’s hard to see why we should conclude that the proper baseline is this hypothetical 1900 consensus rather than the 1600-to-early-1800s consensus, and (2) I could equally find other examples from great writers using the same locution around 1900; I just didn’t because I was responding to a claim that somehow the “since”-as-”because” usage was a modern innovation.

But even if there has been a change in the language — as sometimes there is — why should we see it as a “decline” rather than as a change? “Thou” has become archaic; is that a “decline” that we should condemn as tantamount to a “br[eak]down” in morals? “Doth” is now written “does”; is that a “decline”? “Pleaded” is now often written “pled” in legal English; why should we conclude that this is a “decline”?

3. To be sure, there are sometimes functional arguments to support the claim that some changed usage is a “decline” — claims that the usage is ambiguous, or even more likely to enable moral errors. But the commenter makes no such specific arguments, and often such arguments just can’t work with regard to a usage at all. Whatever one’s objection to the use of “pled guilty” instead of “pleaded guilty,” for instance, it can’t be that “pled” is ambiguous.

And beyond this, the claim that some term is potentially ambiguous simply means that it is one of the thousands of well-established English terms that are potentially ambiguous. That is a reason to be careful in using the term; it may be even a reason to avoid the term altogether; but it is not a reason for labeling the term non-standard or otherwise incorrect, any more than the term “sanction” (just to give one example) is incorrect simply because it is potentially ambiguous.

4. Finally, the language that sustains our corner of our civilization is indeed an order, but it is a grown order, the result of a constant process of evolution through the actions of millions of speakers and writers. Its evolution continues, and ought not be faulted or labeled “decline” simply because it is change. And its evolution progresses in ways quite different from the evolution (for better or worse) of our society’s moral practices.

Three comments in recent threads reminded me of what Arnold Zwicky (Language Log) calls the recency illusion, “the belief that things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent. This is a selective attention effect. Your impressions are simply not to be trusted; you have to check the facts. Again and again — retro not, double is, speaker-oriented hopefully, split infinitives, etc. — the phenomena turn out to have been around, with some frequency, for very much longer than you think. It’s not just Kids These Days.”

1. Consider this comment, from the “Internal Structures of Logic or Order” thread:

All I can [say] is that very little grates on me more than people who use “proved” for the perfect. I understand that it widely accepted and has gained wide use among academic types, but it sounds absolutely awful and, in the end, those aesthetics are among the most important underlying forces in any language.

I do recognize that this is the general trend in English — reducing verbs forms. We had already done away with almost all verb conjugations, with only “to be” left with the full complement of forms (though “to be” is a structural verb that we use instead of most verb conjugations that other languages utilize), and if people want to reduce “to prove” to the Basic Three forms (prove,proves,proved) as so many other verbs have come to, then that makes sense. But it still hurts my ear.

I can’t say much about the commenter’s aesthetic reaction; but one seeming assumption behind that reaction — that “have proven” is the traditional model, and “have proved” is some neologism — is not historically correct. (I infer that this is the assumption from the “has gained wide use among academic types,” “this is the general trend,” “We had already done away,” and “people want to reduce ‘to prove.’”) According to the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, “proven” has been on the rise in recent decades; “proved” used to be more dominant. A search through Shakespeare yields several uses of the perfect “proved,” but no “proven.” You can find the same with Jonathan Swift and Jane Austen. Not that “have proven” is wrong today; it’s just that the trend has been towards greater use of the irregular “have proven,” not away from it.

2. Likewise, several commenters in the “pled” / “pleaded” thread assumed that “pled” was the traditional term, and that “pleaded” is the innovation. (E.g., “As a layman in his 60s, I recall reading and hearing ‘pled’ in the legal context most of my life, and the use of ‘pleaded’ as a neologism that clunks to the ear rather than rings true. Could just be a regional thing.”) Actually, “pled” was very rare in legal opinions before 1900, and was outnumbered nearly 5-to-1 by “pleaded” as recently as 1970. Only in the last few decades has it reached rough parity with “pleaded,” which had earlier been the dominant form.

3. Finally, consider this comment from the “When People Commit Errors of ‘Internal Structure of Logic or Order’” thread: “At the end of the day, it all comes down to style. How many of you use ‘since’ and ‘because’ interchangeably in formal writing? One defines a temporal scope, the other establishes causation. Somewhere along the line, the two became synonyms, but not to me.”

That somewhere along the line turns out to have been 1450 or so; the OED gives quotes from 1450 and 1489 for “since” meaning “because” (plus more from later years). We see it in William Shakespeare: “But, since I am a dog, beware my fangs.” Jonathan Swift: “[S]ince it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or hath no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage.” Daniel Defoe: “[S]ince human affairs are all subject to changes and disasters, I would have you give orders but for one hundred pounds sterling, which, you say, is half your stock, and let the hazard be run for the first.” Jane Austen: “They were certainly no friends to his acquaintance with me, which I cannot wonder at, since he might have chosen so much more advantageously in many respects.”

Again, if you don’t want to use “since” in its “because” sense, you should certainly feel free to do that; and if you want to make aesthetic arguments about what’s better style — or functional arguments about what is supposedly more or less confusing — you should feel free to. But if you want to make a claim about the supposed recency of some developments, keep in mind that your own observation and recollection of such matters might have been quite limited. It doesn’t hurt to check one’s assumptions here, especially since search tools that can let one do that (such as Google Books) are nowadays so easily available.

A commenter on the “Internal Structure of Logic or Order” thread writes,

Education is fundamentally elitist, and it ought to be. When people commit errors of “internal structure of logic or order” it’s perfectly okay for those who know better to define those as mistakes, and, within the bounds of social propriety, correct them. Social propriety ought, at a minimum, extend to endorsing adults helping children and teachers helping students. Those helped are empowered to think more clearly as a result. Why anyone would criticize that is mysterious to me.

The notion of “rival structures” legitimizing error is one that ought to be resisted. For example, it is commonplace for observers of criminal verdicts to say the defendant has been “found innocent.” That rival structure was popularized by publishers, who noted a liability risk in writing “not guilty.” An editing error which omitted the “not” could lead to a libel suit. Generations of journalism students were trained to use “found innocent” instead, and as a result the rival structure has taken over and confused millions. That’s a real loss, and there is no reason to approve of it just because it’s what most people do.

I actually agree that teachers ought to teach their students more effective usage. But, as I argued here, we teachers ought to do this without ourselves making errors — including by erroneously faulting something as grammatically or linguistically “incorrect” when the objection is something else.

Let’s consider “found innocent” and “found not guilty.” Recall that one well-established definition of “innocent” is “not guilty.” (See the OED, “Free from specific wrong or guilt; that has not committed the particular offence charged or in question; not deserving of the punishment or suffering inflicted; not guilty, guiltless, unoffending.”)

Of course, the phrase “found innocent,” if taken literally, may inaccurately convey the message that the jury actually concluded that the person didn’t commit the crime. But “found not guilty,” if taken literally, may inaccurately convey the same message that the jury actually concluded that the person was not guilty.

Continue reading ‘“When People Commit Errors of ‘Internal Structure of Logic or Order’”’ »

A commenter wrote, apropos my “pleaded” / “pled” post,

Can Volokh possibly be truthful when he says that he can see no basis for calling a use “incorrect” other than statistical usage? Can he really believe that [l]anguage has no other internal structure of logic or order except for usage? This is a silly view.

Others made similar arguments in the past, so I thought I’d blog about this.

English, probably like all human languages, is full of internal structures of logic and order (which I’ll call “regularities” — observations that “conform[] to a trend [or] pattern”). It’s critical for people to understand these regularities in order to learn the language (which is to say to learn actual usage). They also help shape how the language changes: New terms and changes to old terms almost always fit some aspect of those regularities. The regularities are thus helpful predictors of usage, for instance when you’re not familiar enough with the term to know the usage, and can’t easily look it up (if you’ve never heard the verb suborn before, you can still make a good guess that its past tense is suborned), or when the term is too new for there to be a large pool of usage to consult.

The trouble is that those regularities often conflict with each other, or have one-off exceptions that are fully standard, notwithstanding their departure from the regularity. Regularities can’t tell you which of two rival regularities to turn to, nor can tell you when an exception to the regularities should be used. How do we resolve these conflicts? Precisely by looking at standard usage.

For instance, there’s a very helpful regularity in English: c followed by e or is almost always pronounced s (see, e.g., accept). But there are a few exceptions, for instance in soccer. If you follow the internal structures of logic or order, and say sokser, you will not be speaking standard English. To determine what is standard English here, you have to look to usage, however illogical and chaotic, not by the internal structures of logic and order.

Likewise, consider the item that prompted the comment to which I’m responding — pleaded vs. pled. There is an important and commonly followed regularity in English: Most verbs form the past tense by adding -ed. But pled didn’t develop just because someone invented a completely unusual irregularity; language rarely changes that way.

Rather, there is also a rival regularity: The other verbs that end with the -leed sound, when produced by the letters -lead and -leed — lead, mislead, and bleed — form the past tense by changing the -eed sound to an -ed sound. And some (but not all) other verbs that end with the -eed sound, when produced by -ead and -eed, operate similarly: read, breed, feed, and speed (but not bead, knead, deed, heed, need, or seed). I assume that plead acquired the pled form by analogy to lead, bleed, and the like — by following one regularity rather than another, and not just by entirely departing from “internal structures of logic or order.”

So which regularity to follow? The only answer is usage. Usage gives us one answer for lead and read. It gives us another for bead and need. For plead, modern legal usage (as reflected in court opinions) reports that both pleaded and pled are standard.

I don’t think there’s any external vantage from which you can fault established usage as “incorrect” (as opposed to, say, ambiguous or confusing, which is a different criticism). Correctness is, in my view, defined by usage. But in any event, unless you are prepared to radically redesign the English language — and somehow get hundreds of millions of speakers to go along with you — you can’t define correctness by adherence to “internal structure of logic or order,” because in our actual current English language there are many rival structures, as well as exceptions to structures.

Let me explore this a bit more using one of my favorite examples — the personal pronouns, coupled with the verb to be. These seven-plus-one simple words, and their forms, help illustrate both how many regularities there are in the language, and how often there are exceptions from those regularities, and rival regularities that compete with the primary regularities. Here’s what is doubtless just a partial list:

Continue reading ‘“Internal Structures of Logic or Order”’ »

I have no idea how many people attended the DC rally today; could be 10 or 1,000,000 for all I know.  I’m sitting outside my law school in the sunshine.  I know that there is much commentary on comparisons to the Beck rally in terms of size.  But I am unsure how to interpret the following sentence opening the Washington Post story today on the rally.  The headline says “‘One Nation’ Rally Draws Thousands.”  But the opening sentence says:

A rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial kicked off Saturday with tens of thousands of progressive activists hoping to energize supporters worried about the conservative tea party movement and the possibility that Democrats could lose control of Congress.

So does that mean that it kicked off with “tens of thousands of progressive activists” actually in attendance on the Mall?  Or does it mean that there were, somewhere, someplace, on the Mall or in Los Angeles or Mumbai, “tens of thousands of progressive activists hoping to energize supporters”?  With, drawing on the headline, only thousands of actual activists on the Mall?  I don’t know and the rest of the story doesn’t say, at least when I read it; it seems to be one of those online stories from a newspaper updating as it goes, but without indicating where or how the updates are made.

Just as a linguistic construction, this seems to me a good illustration of the possibilities and limits of “strategic ambiguity.”  I regard this sentence – as someone curious as to the actual turnout at the Mall – as flawed.  But it is possible that the writers or editors thought it a clever way of avoiding committing themselves.  Is the ambiguity a bug or a feature?  What is the most editorially space-efficient way to clarify this sentence, one direction or the other?

Added:  By the way, my general position is that in reading or writing or, really, any rhetorical exercise outside of deliberate polemic, a primary ethical requirement is fidelity and charity.  I don’t think it is possible, or particularly useful – often quite the opposite – to try and write so as to eliminate all possibility of ambiguity.  There is also an obligation on the part of readers to read with a charitable eye to the intended argument or meaning.  Here, however, the ambiguity lies in exactly the question that, for many readers, is the point of the piece, the one matter on which the article ought to be crystal clear, even if only to say, we haven’t a clue how many people were there.

A commenter writes,

Actually, anyone with a brain disrespects all of rap and anyone in it. In mitigation, those of us who can actually speak and write English have accepted the black verb “disrespect,” which itself would be laughed out of existence but for the constant threat of black rioting. No justice, no peace.

The commenter might well have more problems than just a casual assumption that her prejudices about English are shared by other English speakers. But let me focus on that assumption here.

Just a quick Google Books search, for instance for books containing the word “disrespecting” and published before 1900 gives a good sense of how long the verb “disrespect” has been fully standard in ordinary English. Or, if you prefer, search for “disrespected” in books published before 1800. (Some of those entries are for “disrespected” as an adjective, but the adjective likely stems from the verb.) Or you could search just for “disrespecting” in books published before 1900 that have “Dictionary” in the title. The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1614 as the first attestation for the verb, but I realize that not everyone has an OED subscription; that’s why I pointed to Google Books instead.

There’s thus nothing inherently “black” about the word. I suppose it’s conceivable that it’s more commonly used today among blacks than among whites, but it is certainly not just Black English dialect. Nor is there reason to think that anyone would laugh the word out of existence, given its non-laughed-at acceptance for centuries.

More broadly, each of us has only a limited mental image of the English language. We listen to only a fairly limited set of speakers, and read a fairly limited range of publications; and we don’t always remember well all the details of what we hear and read. It may appear to us that a particular word was recently invented, or is entirely a product of a particular dialect or jargon. But it doesn’t mean that our perception is correct.

So before you make assertions about English usage — or for that matter, about other easily verified things — why not look it up? Google Books is only a few keystrokes away.