The Volokh Conspiracy

Okay, now I can’t get my brain around it.  In my post below, I wondered about converse versus obverse.  Can someone do two things for me, in the language usage category.  First, give me a clear definition of the distinction between the two.

Second, and harder, I believe but maybe am wrong … give me examples of how, in prose in which one is using them as linguistic metaphors rather than as technical terms in math or something genuinely physical, one would use each correctly.  Meaning by correctly, showing me the difference in when and how you would use one, and then the other.  The converse of a proposition is … and the obsverse of a proposition is … and the difference between the is …  but then give me some examples from a more realistic setting, not just speaking abstractly of “propositions.”

I wonder if I have been abusing these terms all my life.

An ABC News headline reads, “Rep. Maxine Waters Refutes Ethics Charges”; the opening sentence of the story uses the same word — “Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., today adamantly refuted charges brought against her by the House Ethics Committee.”

But is this quite right? As I understand, Rep. Waters denied the charges; one might also say she rejected them, or responded to them. But my sense is that “refute” tends to convey the message that some allegation is actually being disproved, not just denied or responded to. The Random House Dictionary takes this view; and while the Oxford English Dictionary and the World English Dictionary give both definitions (“disprove” and “deny” or “reject”), this means that at best the headline is ambiguous. More likely, if the Random House definition is considered, the dominant connotation of “refute” is indeed to “disprove,” which means that most people’s first reaction on reading the headline would be that Rep. Waters either disproved the charges or at least introduced powerful evidence that (in the newspaper’s judgment) comes close to disproving them — something that the body of the article does not, in my view, support.

Of course, if over time the commonly accepted meaning of “refute” changes to mean “deny,” that will be the new meaning; I am certainly not abandoning my descriptivist position on this. Likewise, if “refute” loses any dominant connotation of disproof, and comes to mean “either disprove or deny,” with no view being dominant, then such a headline would at worst be misleading. But my sense is that neither of these has happened, and “refute” still first raises in most people’s minds the sense of “to prove to be false or erroneous” (to quote the Random House). If I’m right on this, then it seems to me the headline can properly be faulted for being likely misleading, and at the very least ambiguous.

A random walk through yesterday’s NY Times pulled up the following:

In a story about the Fox v. FCC decision from the Second Circuit, page B1:
“The decision, which many constitutional scholars expect to be appealed to the Supreme Court, stems from a challenge by Fox, CBS and other broadcasters to the FCC’s decision in 2004 . . .”

From Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed column, p A27
“Some mix of fear, love, hopelessness and shattered self-esteem keep her from trying to run away. . . . ”

From a story in Sports on the All-Star Game, page B14:
“The National League’s motivation might have stemmed from . . . . the folksy, funny and almost fiery pep talk that [Charlie] Manuel gave before the game . . .”

I’ve been noticing, the last year or so, the absence of that serial comma — the one that should precede the final item within the list — with increasing frequency, and it’s pretty clear that the Times Style Guide must consider it optional. It is becoming harder and harder to insist upon its use, given that it is so frequently omitted (even in “good writing”).

That’s unfortunate. I know the arguments for and against the Rule, but I consider one of them dispositive in its favor: use of the serial comma expands the possibilities for communicating nuance of meaning, and is therefore an unmitigated Good Thing. The classic illustration is this:

(a) “The woods are lovely, dark and deep”
versus
(b) “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep”

In the first edition of Frost’s Collected Poems, that line (from “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”) was printed as in (a), but it was corrected in subsequent editions. The point is that the two lines have different meanings — in the first, the woods are lovely; “dark and deep” then becomes a descriptor or illustration of that loveliness. In the second, the woods have three separate characteristics: they’re lovely, they’re dark, and they’re deep. (Was Charlie Manuel’s pep talk folksy, as illustrated by its funniness and fiery-ness? Or was it funny, folksy, and fiery?) If we lose the serial comma rule, we won’t be able to distinguish between the two meanings when we encounter lines with (or without) the comma; it’ll just be random, a matter of whim and fancy, on the order of whether you form the possessive for “James” as James’ or James’s, or whether you do or don’t capitalize prepositions that appear in the middle of titles, incapable of carrying any semantic weight. A shame, if that happens.

Running around the track tonight, I found myself musing over the famous ironic expression by Voltaire in Candide: “pour encourager les autres.”  The more I thought about it, the less convinced I was that I understood it, in the sense of being able to come up with cleverly parallel situations in which the irony of the expression is preserved.  I would be interested to know how one would explain the ironic function in the phrase as used in Candide.

The phrase is found in the famous (and actually historical) scene of the execution of a British admiral, John Byng, on the deck of his own ship, for allegedly failing to engage the enemy in the Battle of Minorca.  Voltaire adds of this:

“Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.” (“In this country, it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time so to encourage the others.”)

The un-ironic meaning could be preserved by simply saying “incentivize” or “motivate” the others.  Similarly “threaten” or even “discourage” the others from failure.  The irony is given by deliberately using “encourage.”  Explain this, however, and give me some parallels in modern life where that precise irony is preserved.  At least when I was operating on 20% oxygen going around the track, I found it harder to think up exactly ironic parallels than I would have thought.  (And if the Language Log wanted to weigh in, so much the better!)

And like me, did you “learn” the meaning from the Vulcan mind-meld?  (Continuing a discussion with Michelle from comments to an earlier post.)  I have to say, I did “learn” the word by hearing its repeated use on Star Trek.  To meld, so far as I’ve ever been concerned, means … whatever it is that Spock did with his mind.  Feel free, Oh Ye Prescriptivists, to correct me in the comments.

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.”

A while back, a prominent law review asked me to review a book on a topic of interest to me.  I readily agreed, on condition that the review be relatively short.  When it came time to sit down and read the book, however, I found it extremely difficult to understand; the book was loaded with unnecessary jargon, long, run-on sentences, and big, obscure words where short, simple ones would do fine.  I found myself sometimes reading a sentence five times to try to figure out what the author was trying to say.

After several hours of this, I gave up.  I sent an email to the law review editors to the effect that while I was loath to go back on my commitment to review the book, I’d rather be boiled in hot oil than spend my time giving this book the attention it needed to be ready to start writing a review.

I won’t claim to be the best writer in the world, but I do try hard to make all of my academic writing readable, even by non-academics.  I’m not sure that this is always a career benefit–some student law review editors, the basic scholarly gatekeepers of our profession, likely confuse turgid, elliptical, and jargon-filled prose with erudition.  But, as my anecdote hopefully shows, going the opposite route also has its costs.

UPDATE: All this bring to mind the following from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience:

If you’re anxious for to shine, in the high aesthetic line as a man of culture rare,

You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant them everywhere.

You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind,

The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.

And everyone will say, As you walk your mystic way,

If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,

Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be.

Seems to me that the answer is “both,” because both fit standard well-established patterns of English speech. On top of that, both are clear in context.

The One Right Way theory leads some people to insist that it must be just one, usually by analogy to other usage. Some, for instance, argue that it must be “twenty ten” by analogy to “nineteen sixty-eight.” But why not “two thousand ten,” by analogy to “two thousand”? (Never mind the common “two thousand nine” locution, since some of the “twenty ten”-only advocates claim that too is somehow wrong.)

These sorts of analogies work only to the extent that they help one remember or recognize actual usage patterns. Here, as best I can tell, both “twenty ten” and “two thousand ten” are in common use. You can choose whichever you wish for yourself, but there is no reason to treat one as right and the other as wrong. Prof. Arnold Zwicky has more on this.

Incidentally, this is the way things appear to be in English; common usage in other languages may be different. For instance, the way I learned Russian — and I should acknowledge that I doubtless wasn’t exposed to the wide range of Russian usage, especially current Russian usage — one might say the Russian equivalent of “one thousand nine hundred seventy fifth,” or “seventy fifth” (the word “year” is implied, though it could also be explicitly included) but never “nineteen seventy fifth” or “nineteen hundred seventy fifth.” Saying “Twenty tenth” would thus be incorrect in Russian, simply because it would be a departure from all of the standard usages. (Likewise, saying “ten hundred” would be incorrect in English, though my six-year-old keeps using it, since it’s perfectly logical and analogous to nine hundred, fifteen hundred, and the like. It is a departure from all of the standard adult usages, except when one is trying to emphasize some mathematical fact or analogy, for instance when teaching a child that ten hundred equals a thousand.)

Yet all this further illustrates that the sensible test of correctness is usage, which varies from language to language, and not universal logic. Nor can the test be some hoped-for consistency within the language, as anyone who knows the Russian word for 40 (“sorok,” completely inconsistent with the pattern for other multiples of ten) or the English words for 11 and 12 (completely inconsistent with the pattern for 13 to 19) can tell you. A language consists of what its speakers say, not of what would-be logicians prefer.

Michael Skapinker has a great column in today’s Financial Times, “Give diligencing its due in the lexicon of 2010,” on words newly included in the New Oxford American Dictionary.  (Behind the subscriber wall, alas.)  He quotes Steven Pinker estimating that “a fifth of English verbs started as nouns, including ‘to progress’, to contact’, and to host’.”  Moreover, even “unfriend,” as in Facebook, actually has a long history (as indeed, I would add, “un” words do in English, “unhand” or “unsex”) … in 1659, says Skapinker, Thomas Fuller wrote, “I hope, Sir, that we are not Unfriended by this Difference which hath happened betwixt us.”  As for the movement from due diligence to “diligencing,” I would note that it is being marked sternly in red as I type this as misspelled.  As is “unfriend.”

(PS.  I agree with the commenters that “defriend” is much more the common FB expression, not “unfriend.”)

In the City Journal, Heather Mac Donald has an interesting article showing how California’s 1998 ban on bilingual education (a referendum initiative that passed despite the opposition of most of the political and education establishment) has improved English Language acquisition by immigrant Hispanic students. Unsurprisingly, young children learn new languages better by immersion. Mac Donald also claims that this result ran counter to the predictions of various experts in education and psychology:

Unless Hispanic children were taught in Spanish, the bilingual advocates moaned, they would be unable to learn English or to succeed in other academic subjects….

The 1960s Chicano rights movement (“Chicano” refers to Mexican-Americans) asserted that the American tradition of assimilation was destroying not just Mexican-American identity but also Mexican-American students’ capacity to learn. Teaching these students in English rather than in Spanish hurt their self-esteem and pride in their culture, Chicano activists alleged: hence the high drop-out rates, poor academic performance, and gang involvement that characterized so many Mexican-American students in the Southwest. Manuel Ramirez III, currently a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, argued that bilingual education was necessary to ensure “the academic survival of Chicano children and the political and economic strength of the Chicano community…”

Novel linguistic theories arose to buttress this political platform. Children could not learn a second language well unless they were already fully literate in their native tongue, the newly minted bilingual-ed proponents argued. To teach English to a five-year-old who spoke Spanish at home, you had to instruct him in Spanish for several more years, until he had mastered Spanish grammar and spelling. “Young children are not language sponges,” asserts McGill University psychology professor Fred Genesee, defying centuries of parental observation.

Such claims are difficult to take seriously. Centuries of immigrant experience show that immersion enables young children to quickly pick up new languages, whether they are literate in their original language or not. When I arrived in the US at the age of six, I didn’t speak a word of English and I couldn’t read and write in Russian at all, never mind being “fully literate” in it. Nonetheless, as a result of immersion, I was fluent in English within a year and literate within two – long before I belatedly achieved literacy in Russian at the age of ten. Since we spoke Russian at home, my progress with English was almost entirely the result of immersion in school.

It would be wrong to generalize from personal experience alone. But I have seen numerous other immigrant children with similar stories, both in the Russian community and elsewhere. For example, when I was in college, I was a volunteer tutor for Cambodian refugee school children. Most of the parents were poor, ill-educated, and had limited or no English proficiency. Nonetheless, their kids who had arrived in the US at elementary school ages all spoke fluent English because of immersion (public schools in the area probably lacked the personnel to teach these students in Cambodian, even if they had wanted to). Those who came to the US at high school ages had a much tougher time, but were still making progress. I can understand claims that bilingual education is needed for students who arrive in the US at high school age or later. But for elementary school students, immersion is by far the best way to go. Moreover, as Mac Donald points out, immersion is a standard, highly effective technique used by leading programs that teach students foreign languages (e.g. – Middlebury College’s Language Schools). Even adult students benefit from it, though admittedly not as much or as quickly as children.

I would add that in most immigrant communities, the usual concern about immersion is not that it prevents kids from learning English, but that it leads them to lose competency in their native languages. I’ve often heard immigrant parents lament this, though few want to put their kids in bilingual ed programs to prevent it (because they realize that failure to learn English quickly is likely to hurt their children’s future prospects). Loss of native language competency is a genuine problem; speaking a second language has great value in today’s globalized economy. But this issue should be addressed by means that don’t slow students’ progress in English.

A reader asks:

I’m trying to finalize a “stylebook” for briefs our office files and am stuck on one thing and am asking around for views of people who might have an opinion to share. Given your interesting takes on language and usage, I’d love to get your thoughts. The issue is whether to use the American or British rule on the placement of added punctuation inside or outside a close quotation mark. (American rule = periods and commas inside the quotes, even if you are adding them to the quoted material; British rule: only quoted material goes inside the quote marks.)

I personally think the British rule is more sensible and may be especially appropriate for use in briefs where accuracy is especially important, but had been preparing to use the American rule for our briefs because I thought that was the universally-accepted practice here. But then I ran into Judge Easterbrook’s opinion in the McDonald case, and noticed he seems to use the British rule. I checked a few of his other opinions and it seems to be his practice. This suggests the time might be right to switch to the more logical rule, but I’m still tempted to go with the majority. (I am pretty sure the Supreme Court and DOJ use the American rule, and haven’t seen any other courts or judges do otherwise. Interestingly, however, in our office, a sizeable minority of draft briefs I see use the British rule until I force them to change.)

So, I put it to you: if you were setting a rule for [a large government] office, which rule would you use?

Here’s what I said in response: I see the value of the British rule, both because of the elegance of its logic, and because it may be more precise in some situations (if people know that one is indeed consistently following the British rule). But my sense is that the American rule remains vastly more common in America, and is also more aesthetically pleasing, partly because it reduces what strikes me as ugly white space, but partly because it is indeed what people are used to.

I would draw a firm line against moving other punctuation, such as colons or semicolons, to before the closing quotation mark (except, of course, when it’s part of what’s being quoted, such as “He asked, ‘What did you say?’”). There, usage is more mixed, and I see no reason to move the punctuation — plus I am personally annoyed when it is moved, though that might just be me.

Note, of course, that this is a question of what is better stylistically, aesthetically, and functionally, not what is “correct.” Certainly the American rule, much as it offends some people’s sense of linguistic logic, is correct in American usage, because it is usage and not logic that defines linguistic correctness.

I just read a Language Log post on the recurring debates about whether the “Xer” comparative form of various adjectives is correct, or whether one has to say “more X.” The post is in general quite worth reading, but here’s a particular passage that I was quite amused by:

Back in August 2005, Jon Lighter reported on ADS-L about Fox News anchor E. D. Hill, who maintained vehemently, on camera, that cleverer was not a word. Later she stated on air that a colleague had found it in a dictionary, so it was after all a word. But then (as Lighter wrote),

… in a surprising twist that left linguists in the viewing audience reeling, minutes before the show ended, Hill laughed as she said, “We’ve received an email from a viewer [name unintelligible] who has a doctorate, and she writes as follows : ” ‘Cleverer’ is not a word. It is not a verb and cannot be declined or inflected.’ ” Hill concluded, “So I was right all along ! It’s not a word ! “

It is to weep.

By the way, Google Books makes it easier than ever before to get a sense of whether particular words — such as “cleverer” — were in fact used commonly (and not just occasionally) by great past authors, which is probably a pretty good proxy for whether they were commonly used in educated writing more broadly.

“Obviously.” In my view, the word “obviously” should only be used in arguments when the point asserted is generally beyond debate. Consider an example. When discussing judicial nominations, you could say, “Obviously, Obama has the constitutional authority to nominate anyone he wants.” The word signifies that the point is a shared view that isn’t genuinely controversial. It helps the reader by announcing that you’re just establishing common ground.

“Obviously” tend to be an unpersuasive word because it is rarely used this way. Especially on the Internet. Most of the time, the word is used when the author has strong feelings. A view passionately held becomes so central to the speaker that it seems obvious to him. For example, “Obama is bad for America” becomes “Obama is obviously bad for America.” This usage usually backfires because it suggests the author doesn’t know or care about the views of anyone else. That is, the speaker is so wrapped up in his own perspective that he confuses the intensity of his own belief with its persuasiveness to others. Folks who are closed to the views of others don’t make very good advocates: The come off as cranks. So use “obviously” with caution.

UPDATE: Several commenters bring up the use of “obviously” in legal arguments specifically, especially in briefs. It’s much the same problem, with a slight twist: Some lawyers use words like “obviously” and “clearly” in briefs out of a sense that perhaps their apparent personal conviction and spirit will itself persuade the court. If a lawyer feels so strongly, the thinking goes, perhaps the court will assume that there must be truth behind the claim. But this always backfires: Judges more than anyone know that lawyers are advocates. As the saying goes, “When you have the facts on your side, pound on the facts. When you have the law on your side, pound on the law. When you have neither on your side, pound on the table.” Using words like “obviously” and “clearly” is just the written version of pounding on the table.

The recent “everybody” threads reminded me of one of my favorite songs:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Note that I quote it just because I like it, not because I think that it by itself is evidence that’s as strong as what I’ve pointed to earlier.

Earlier today, I posted quotes from prominent authors who use “them” with formally singular terms such as “everyone.” A commenter had earlier complained that “Already constructions like these are ubiquitous among high-school age writers, and sanctioned by their teachers.” I pointed out that they were apparently sanctioned by leading writers as well.

A commenter suggested that perhaps the quotes given above were just isolated errors on the authors’ part: “Even great writers commit infelicities on occasion. If you are telling me that Jane [A.] did this all the time, that would be meaningful.” Feeling the desperate need to procrastinate this morning, I decided to put that theory to the test, by doing some Google Books searches through the works of the notorious language-mangler Jane A., whom I mentioned above.

I won’t bore you with all the details and citations, which you yourself can uncover by searching for “everybody” with author Jane A. (despite her obvious inability to grasp the inexorable logic of the English tongue, she’s pretty famous, so you can probably deduce her last name). But suffice it to say that I found not one “everybody” matched with a singular pronoun — maybe there were some, but in that case I missed them — and several matched with “them.” “Everybody had a right to be equally positive in their opinion.” “Everybody had their due importance.” “If everybody was to drink their bottle a day.” “Their new dining-room prepared everybody for their keeping dinner-company.” “Everybody said, they never saw so fat a haunch.” “Everybody has their taste in noises as well as in other matters.” And there are more.

Incidentally, Jane A. consistently uses everybody with the singular forms of verbs, e.g., “everybody is.” Yet she apparently sees nothing wrong with at the same time using the pronoun “they,” including in the line, “But everybody is to judge for themselves.” That’s precisely the sort of “jarring (I hope!) juxtaposition of the singular verb with the plural pronoun” that my original correspondent complained about. Maybe it’s jarring to that commenter, but many readers of P. and P. seem to have enjoyed the novel quite well despite it.

If you think that Jane A. was an outlier in consistently using “them” with “everybody,” and the other examples I gave were (unlike with Jane A.) themselves outliers in those authors’ bodies of work, then by all means provide some evidence of it. But I like to think that what I’ve posted so far at least shifts the burden of proof to those who want to argue that this phenomenon is somehow the special province of modern high-school age writers and their decadent loosey-goosey modern teachers.

UPDATE: Someone — whose need to procrastinate was apparently even greater than mine — actually has a much longer list of examples, all from Jane A.’s work. The page also discusses the quotations vs. narration question, and more broadly goes into this in a great deal of detail; the detail, I think, amply supports the assertions I make above.

A commenter writes:

Well it could be worse. I hazard that in 50 years the sex sensitivities of the colloquial speaker will have caused the formal replacement of the generic singular pronoun (he) with the plural pronoun (they), which is safely without gender. Already constructions like these are ubiquitous among high-school age writers, and sanctioned by their teachers:

Everyone must choose their own path.

Each student selects their thesis topic.

Note in the second example the jarring (I hope!) juxtaposition of the singular verb with the plural pronoun. This is the future.

Buddy, you don’t know the half of it! Not only are high-school age writers being taught this by teachers, they are even taught this by some other writers (who must obviously be misguided hacks, given how badly they’re abusing the English language). Some examples from some of these awful people — to avoid unduly embarrassing them, we’ll call them William S., Jane A., W.H. A., Jonathan S., William Makepeace T.,

And every one to rest themselves betake

I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly

… it is too hideous for anyone in their senses to buy

Who makes you their confidant?

… every fool can do as they’re bid

A person can’t help their birth

There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend

(All sources are from the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, where the full names of these miscreants are revealed.) [UPDATE: A more comprehensive survey of Jane A.'s works is in the Spurious Grammatic “Rules” of Every Sort Are My Abhorrence post.]

So, commenters, is it that all these writers (whose work ranges from the late 1500s to the 1900s) and many more were wrong, and you’re right, when you say that “their” can’t be used in these contexts? Is it that you have the Logic of the Language on your side — the same logic that tolerates the singular “you are,” “aren’t I?,” “ice cream,” and much more, but that as a matter of the laws of logic balks at a singular “they”? Or is it just that you’re discussing what you find aesthetically pleasing (or even pedagogically optimal, for instance with an eye towards teaching students usage that will satisfy self-described “purists” and will thus serve them well socially)? If it’s the latter, I’ll happily end the debate. But my sense is that many people who denounce the singular “they” (including where the singular relates to nouns with a collective meaning, such as “everyone”) and similar matters are making an assertion about correctness, and not just about their own tastes or about the most useful teaching approaches.

This is coming more than a little late, as the book has been out for a few months, but I wanted belatedly to congratulate my Washington College of Law colleague, Robert Tsai, on his book Eloquence and Reason: Creating a First Amendment Culture.  I have it on my shelf for night reading, but unfortunately even my “free reading” time has been swept up in other things.  However, I note that it just received an enthusiastic review from Kevin Kosar in the Weekly Standard, October 26, 2009 (maybe sub reqd.).  Kosar’s review notes (along with some criticisms of the book):

Tsai, a professor at the American University law school, depicts how the Court has transformed the nature of the First Amendment by pouring new meanings into its words. In a mere century, the Court has made stunning alterations to the freedoms of speech, assembly, and religious exercise, and transmogrified the Amendment’s prohibition against making a law ‘respecting an establishment of religion’.

Tsai argues that the Court has been able to pull off this feat by employing stirring rhetoric and powerful metaphors. Thus, over the past century, it has likened the act of speaking in a public place (in Justice Holmes’s words) to falsely shouting Fire! in a crowded theater, to lawful assembly in the grand tradition of democracy, and to the peddling of wares in a ‘marketplace of ideas’. When one metaphor ceases to provide the desired results, the Court crafts a new one….

Inevitably, as Tsai shows, metaphors fail. Speech may be like fire, but it is not fire; it is speech. When people have wised up to this, the Court has concocted a new metaphor and eased an old one from the scene. And as it has repeated this rhetorical switcheroo, the Court’s decisions have grown increasingly estranged from the plain language of the First Amendment and the Constitution generally. The word ‘speech’ no longer means talking; it now includes actions, such as burning the American flag and peddling pornography via the Internet. Taking all this in, the average American might well wonder if the justices are making things up as they go.

Tsai has written a fine book, but I cannot help but think that the late Justice Stanley Reed got it right in his dissent inMcCollum v. Board of Education (1948): “A rule of law should not be drawn from a figure of speech.”

In the Writing Guidelines I distribute to students, I use the following example to illustrate the principle that “everything you put on the page matters”:

Everything – every word, every bit of punctuation, every decision to begin a paragraph with one sentence rather than another, every decision whether to use “shall” or “should” or “may” or “might,” or whether to use “since” or “because” or “thus” or “moreover” – matters. That may or not be true in other fields, but it is true in ours. This is less an objective fact than an attitude, an attitude that may or may not come naturally to you but which I urge you to start cultivating. Care about the words you put down on the page. Give a damn about them. They reflect who you are as a lawyer, and they are often the only reflection of who you are as a lawyer that your professional colleagues will get to see.

When Robert Frost’s Collected Poems was originally published, it contained these familiar lines (in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”):

“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep.”

In fact, what Frost had written was:

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep.”

In a recent conversation with some colleagues about this point, Mark Lemley pointed me to a wonderful legal example of this principle. In Stark v. Advanced Magnetics, 119 F.3d 1551 (CAFC 1997) the court had to construe section 256 of the Patent Act, which reads:

§256 Correction of named inventor
“Whenever through error a person is named in an issued patent as the inventor, or through error an inventor is not named in an issued patent and such error arose without any deceptive intention on his part, the Commissioner [of patents] may . . . issue[] a certificate correcting such error.”

The court – correctly, in my view – reads this to mean that there are two kinds of inventorship “errors” that the Commissioner may correct: misjoinder, i.e., naming a person incorrectly as the inventor, and (b) nonjoinder i.e., failing to name a person as an inventor. Misjoinder can be corrected whether the error arose through deception or not; nonjoinder, though, can only be corrected where the error arose “without any deceptive intention” on the inventor’s part.

So far, so good. But what elevates the case into true sublimity is this: there is another section of the same statute, sec. 116, that is identical to sec. 256 except it adds a single comma, and the court construes it to mean something entirely different. Sec. 116 deals with correction of inventorship during the process of patent prosecution (as opposed to after the patent has issued), and it reads:

“Whenever through error a person is named in an issued patent as the inventor, or through error an inventor is not named in an issued patent, and such error arose without any deceptive intention on his part, the Commissioner [of patents] may permit the application to be amended . . .

Note the comma after the words “issued patent.” The court – again, correctly in my view – reads this as forbidding correction whenever an error of either kind (misjoinder or nonjoinder) arose with deceptive intention. So the two provisions taken together: after a patent issues, a misjoinder error that arose through “deceptive intention” can be corrected (256); before the patent issues, it cannot (116).

It makes no policy sense whatsoever, and was probably inadvertent on Congress’ part. But the court’s gotta do what the court’s gotta do, and the comma really does change the meaning of that sentence, and they have to give effect to it.