Dancing with Myself

In the evenings, my wife and I will sit watching TV, which is when I see episodes of various shows I’ve mentioned here. Often I’ll be working on the computer, and when I’m really trying to focus on something, I won’t want to watch something that will distract me. Those are the nights when my wife turns on the stuff I don’t care about, like Burn Notice or Glee. Or Dancing with the Stars. I should be more interested in that show, since ballroom dancing was a good portion of my social life in college—and is even how my wife and I met. But the competitive dancing on that show is not much like the social dancing I learned in college.

Ah, yes, ballroom dancing in college. And that one time when correcting someone’s grammar caused me a lot of embarrassment. Not just retrospective embarrassment, as I look back on it; embarrassment right then. I remember it like it was about 20 years ago, because it was about 20 years ago… [cue wavy screen]

Harry Potter and the Attributive Adverbs

“I’m mad, Dad,” Doug said. He has been wanting to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, preferably with some of his friends, but I’ve been dragging my feet about putting any kind of outing like that together. Unlike when the other HP movies came out, this time Adam is old enough to appreciate it, and I’d like him to be along to see it, too. He hasn’t wanted to see the other ones until recently, but now that he’s been watching them on video with us, I don’t want to leave him out of a family outing to see this one in the theatre. And I don’t want to go as a family when one or two of us has already seen it, either. I’m not going to boycott what sounds like a great movie if some of Doug’s friends invite him to see it with them first, but I’m not going to make a special effort to make that happen.

In that case, why haven’t we gone ahead and seen HP6 as a family? Well, before we do that, to maximize Adam’s enjoyment of it, I want him to have read — or more accurately, heard read aloud — at least the first five Harry Potter books. We listened to Goblet of Fire last summer, but did we then go right on to Order of the Phoenix? No, we did not. I put it off and put it off, and now we find ourselves listening to it in the car, the longest of the seven books in the series, while Doug waits for his chance to see Half-Blood Prince in the theatres. Oh, well. There are plenty of kids who will have to wait for the video, or won’t even be able to see it at all, so I don’t feel too bad about making Doug wait.

Anyway, as I listen to Jim Dale read the book aloud, I stand in awe of his talent. I’ve read articles here and there (usually when a new Harry Potter book was published) about all the voices he’s created for the hundreds of characters, and hearing them for myself, I am amazed at the job he’s done. I don’t think he’s created hundreds of distinct voices, but it’s certainly in the dozens, and even the voices that sound similar he uses consistently. When I read to Doug and Adam, I use my regular voice for the protagonist; then I bring out my Bert voice, my Marvin the Martian voice, my Howard Sprague voice, my gravelly creaky voice, my Cruel Shoes voice, my Simpsons teenager-with-acne voice, very occasionally my Grover/Yoda voice or Mr. Creosote voice, and a few other voices I don’t have names for, by choosing them on the spot when we meet a new character. But if the character disappears for a few chapters and reappears later, I rarely remember what voice I used for them. From now on, I’m going to take my reading aloud up a notch by recording a sample sentence on my iPod for each character to reference later, a technique I read about in one of those articles on Jim Dale.

However, hearing Jim Dale read the books aloud has raised my awareness of a complaint I’ve heard about J. K. Rowling: that she uses too many adverbs. I wrote before that I’d never noticed this, but I am finding it disconcerting as I listen to Jim Dale read the book — sometimes. It sticks out most when she uses them with verbs of attribution, as she does here:

“Keep muttering and I will be a murderer!” said Sirius irritably, and he slammed the door shut on the elf. (p. 110)

I didn’t find it awkward when I read the book myself, but I do now. Is it because I’m now familiar with the complaint about Rowling and her adverbs? Maybe, but here’s what I think is really going on. When I read the book to myself, an adverb like irritably after said is informative. Sure, fiction writers may say, if an author does their job well enough, then it should be obvious how a character says something, and the adverb will be superfluous. But sometimes, a single adverb does the job more quickly than a sentence or two of “show, don’t tell”. However, when Rowling says someone says something sarcastically or loudly or doubtfully, Jim Dale actually says it that way, and you can hear it, and the adverb really is superfluous. By contrast, when he reads that someone performed some non-speech action distractedly or slowly or however else, it still sounds just fine to my ears.

I’ve noticed a couple of other interesting things while listening to the audiobook. Still on the subject of adverbs, Rowling uses a couple of them often enough for me to have noted Jim Dale’s unusual pronunciation of them: dully and shrilly. These adverbs, of course, are formed by suffixing the adjectives dull and shrill with the suffix -ly. Because of a rule of English orthography, we don’t write dullly or shrillly, with three L’s in a row, but that’s how I think of them, and I pronounce them (I think) with an /l/ at the end of the first syllable and an /l/ in the onset of the second one. In phonetic terms, I have a geminate /l/. Dale, however, degeminates the double /l/, pronouncing dully to rhyme with Tully, Sully, and hully gully; and shrilly to rhyme with frilly, silly, and Milli Vanilli. You can see the difference on a spectrogram as well as hear it. I recorded myself and used Praat to find out that my dull-ly and shrill-ly took about 0.6 seconds to pronounce, while dully and shrilly took 2/3 to 3/4 of that time.

Now that I think about it, though, why shouldn’t we get degemination here? It happened with fully and really long ago. Another adverb that Rowling used often enough for me to notice Dale’s pronunciation is coolly, and that one Dale seems to pronounce sometimes with a geminate /l/, and sometimes without. (I wonder how he’d pronounce Pooland.)

As for the other interesting thing I noticed, look at these other sentences with quotations:

“Department of Mysteries,” said the cool female voice, and left it at that. (p. 135)

“I’m going to get started on some homework,” said Ron angrily, and stomped off to the staircase to the boys’ dormitories and vanished from sight. (p. 294)

Did you catch that? No, not the angrily; I’m talking about the unusual (for J. K. Rowling) construction she used in these passages. Follow the last link and this one to see what I’m talking about.

UPDATE, 11 Aug. 2009:

“Now!” said Mrs. Weasley, and withdrew. (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, p. 95)

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They Swim As Good As They Look

While I was out and about today, I saw a girl wearing a T-shirt promoting her high school swim team. On the front, it said:

If only we swam as good as we look!

Time to Get Even

I have some advice to share today with all the people who have asked me for tips on how to improve their writing. There’s a lot of advice out there, but personally, I have found that nothing will do more to sharpen your writing than learning the proper placement of even. For that reason, I am happy to present my first annual blog post on even.

(A side note: If you’re writing about a special event that is the first of its kind, let’s say the Veeblefester Family Reunion, and you think there’s even a chance of its becoming an annual occurrence, the best practice is to call it the first annual event of its kind. You don’t want to be in the ridiculous position, a year later, of announcing the Second Annual Veeblefester Family Reunion when there hasn’t been a first one. You could retroactively call the previous year’s reunion the First Annual VFR, but that tactic is sloppy, and best reserved for events that one doesn’t envision recurring, such as the Great War/World War I.)

Learning where to place even is quite simple, really. You just need to place it as close as possible to the word it modifies. Let’s take an example. Suppose there’s a fight in the schoolyard. The teacher on duty investigates, and finds that Stewart hit Phil on the nose. In fact, she learns that:

Even Stewart hit Phil on the nose.

Only the Manly

“You’d never catch me sticking my bare hand down a hole like that!” Laura said, as she ran the clippers over the back of my neck. Jim and Stan, two of the other barbers, were sitting in the waiting chairs talking about an outdoor activity that I’d never heard of called noodling. Noodling, I learned, was the sport of catching catfish with just your hand, usually by sticking it into a likely-looking hole in a creek and, if you were lucky enough for a catfish to bite it, pulling out the catfish by its jaw. Part of the thrill was not knowing what might be in one of these holes. Instead of a catfish, it might be nothing at all, or a muskrat, or a snapping turtle. In fact, Stan said, the guy who’d introduced him to noodling was missing a finger — because of an incident involving a gun that he’d picked up by putting his hand over the muzzle.

Then talk turned to the snowstorm we had last week, the one that canceled two days of school for Doug and Adam. That got me to thinking about how many of the allotted “calamity days” for the school year had been used, and while I was doing that, I missed what Jim said next. Laura laughed and I came back to the present.

“Did you hear what they said?” she asked. “Jim and Stan and Harry all came to work that day, but Len was snowed in. So Jim said that only the manly men came in.”

“Ha!” I laughed, and then thought. Hmmm…

Only the manly men came in.

Laura seemed to be speaking from firsthand knowledge when she told me that Jim and Stan and Harry had come in. It sounded like she’d been able to make it to work that day, too. So if my intuition was right, it was not true that only the manly men came in: Only the manly men and Laura had come in!

More on Coordination, Quotative Inversion, and Beverly Cleary

“So how was school today?” I asked Doug as we walked from the bus stop.

“Good,” he said. Then he remembered something: “I checked out Strider at the library today!”

“For me?” I asked. “Wow, that was really thoughtful of you, Doug! They let you check out two books?”

“No, but I had this one book, and while we were standing in line to check out, I noticed Strider on the shelf, and I rushed out of the line to ask if I could switch books –”

“You sacrificed your own library book so I could get my hands on Strider!” I said. “That was really nice of you, Doug.”

“No, not really,” he said. “I didn’t really want the other book anyway.”

Eventually, Doug will learn the finer points of situations like this, and get the hang of saying, “Aw, that’s OK,” and “I didn’t mind,” to maximize the favored party’s indebtedness. Too late this time, though!

So why did I want to find a copy of this book Strider, anyway? It started about a week earlier, during our read-aloud time. I’m remembering it now …

Kilpatrick’s Rule Works Only Sometimes

It’s January, and you know what happens in January, right?

Yes, yes, of course there’s the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. That goes without saying. And of course, the concurrent meeting of the American Dialect Society, with its annual, headline-grabbing Word of the Year selection. I meant the other thing that happens in January: the publication of James J. Kilpatrick’s annual column on only! Here’s how it begins this year:

Every January for 20 years I’ve written an “only” column. The theme’s the same: No little dog trick of the writer’s art will sharpen your style quite so effectively as the proper placement of “only.” And its mastery is no trick at all.

The annual illustration remains the same. Several schoolboys get into a fistfight. They are hauled off to the principal’s office. There we learn that (1) only John hit Peter in the nose, (2) John hit Peter only in the nose, (3) John only hit Peter in the nose, and (4) John hit only Peter in the nose. The elements of the offense are now clear. Punishment may be fairly administered. Justice has been served.

The trick is to snuggle the limiting “only” as closely as possible to the noun [sic] it modifies. It works every time.

Kilpatrick’s example is clever, and does illustrate the difference that the placement of only can make. And when he says to put only as close as possible to the noun it modifies, I’m sure he meant word, since Kilpatrick certainly knows that hit is a verb, and in a preposition. The trouble is that Kilpatrick’s rule doesn’t work every time. (And when I say it doesn’t work every time, I mean that it is not the case that it works every time, not that it never works.) He is assuming, and leading his readers to believe, that the only things that only can modify are words. In fact, it can modify whole phrases. Allow me to repeat some of what I said in my review of Grammar Girl’s book. (If Kilpatrick can recycle chunks of his material, so can I. And I don’t even get paid for it!)

[I]n the entry on misplaced modifiers, Fogarty gives these two sentences:

Squiggly ate only chocolate.
Squiggly only ate chocolate.

Both sentences are grammatically correct, but they don’t mean the same thing. Fogarty argues that the second sentence means “all Squiggly did with chocolate was eat it. He didn’t buy, melt, or sell it. He only ate it.” Indeed, it can mean this—if you say it with the emphasis on ate. However, it can also mean that all Squiggly ever did was eat chocolate; he never played baseball, wore sweaters, or drank cappuccino in Italian restaurants with Oriental women. How will you know the difference? By intonation and context. And this where Fogarty falls into the same trap that ordinary grammar mavens fall into: In spoken English, intonation is part of the grammar that tells you what only is restricting. In only ate chocolate, the word only can apply to just the verb ate (Fogarty’s reading); to the entire verb phrase ate chocolate (my alternative reading); and indeed, to just the direct object chocolate (the supposedly incorrect reading that means the same as Squiggly ate only chocolate). Certainly, if you can reduce ambiguity in your writing by judicious placement of only, you should do so, but there are cases where ambiguity persists regardless of how carefully you position the only. Fogarty’s failure to recognize this could confuse readers who wonder why Squiggly only ate chocolate can’t mean that all he ever did was eat chocolate, and leave them less confident than before on how to handle only.

Similar comments apply to only hit Peter in the nose.

Aside from the ambiguity that can’t be eliminated by careful placement of only, there’s another ambiguity in Kilpatrick’s example that can be eliminated this way. In his sentence (4), only is not modifying just the preposition in — unless we allow that it needs to be established that John hit Peter in the nose, not above it, below it, or around it. But of course, that’s unrealistic, you say. When would a situation ever arise where we had to make a distinction like that? I agree, not often; but Kilpatrick is all about precision in getting exactly the meaning you want when you use only. If he wants only to narrow down just what parts of Peter’s body John hit, he should follow his own advice and put only as close as possible to the noun it modifies, and write John hit Peter in only the nose. Now Kilpatrick could respond: “Only is limiting general regions of the body: in the nose as opposed to in the stomach, on the ears, or about the head and neck.” That’s fine. In that case, only is modifying neither the preposition nor the noun, but the entire prepositional phrase. And if you recognize (once again) that only can modify an entire phrase, then you have to admit that it’s syntactically ambiguous whether this particular only is modifying just the in that it’s next to, or the entire in the nose that it’s next to.

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Stupid Me Again

In Jeffrey Seglin’s “The Right Thing” ethics column/blog post from a couple of months back, a reader had written in about her poor judgment regarding an ex-boyfriend:

Stupid me made his house payments, paid the bills, supported his drinking habit, bought new tires for his truck.

Stupid me has come up before in this blog, in another newspaper column from another woman berating herself for poor judgment regarding boyfriends. In fact, this seems to be a pattern: I looked for “stupid me” in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and found only one attestation with me used as the subject:

First you wanted to graduate from college. That was fine. No problem. I thought that was appropriate. Then you thought you should just get through the first two years of medical school. Even that was okay with me since I could get most of my Ph.D. coursework out of the way. But then you thought it best to put things off until you got yourself all the way through medical school. Are you detecting a pattern here or is it just me? Then the issue became getting the first year of residency behind you. Stupid me even accepted that, but now it’s the whole residency business. What about the fellowship deal you talked about last month? And then after that you might even think it best to wait while you set up your practice.
(Robin Cook, Shock, 2001)

There were also some attestations in which Stupid me was used as an appositive to the subject, along the lines of: Stupid me, I thought…. But apparently, to make a very hasty generalization, if someone uses “Stupid me” directly as the subject of a verb, it’ll be a woman berating herself for her naivete regarding men.

However, that wasn’t the main thing I wanted to talk about. Here’s where I was originally going: One of the rules that traditional grammar books are pretty good at teaching is to use the nominative form of a personal pronoun (I, he, she, we, they, and trivially, the nominative forms that look just like the accusatives: you, it) when it’s being used as the subject of a sentence. But rarely do they say what to do when you want to do anything more elaborate to that subject. About the most I’ve seen them do is to talk about coordinated pronouns, such as he and she, and give the rule about using whatever forms you’d use if you were using just one of the pronouns. But what do you do when you want to modify your pronoun with an adjective? The grammars I’ve seen leave their students high and dry on that one. The grammar book from my freshman-year English class in high school never talked about it. The ESL books I taught from never talked about it. Garner doesn’t talk about it. Even the descriptive MWDEU and CGEL don’t address this as far as I’ve been able to see.

What the grammar and usage guides ought to do, of course, is say to use the objective form when a pronoun is modified by an adjective, since phrases like *stupid I are clearly ridiculous. But I bet the first grammar book that notices adjectives modifying pronouns will go for the rule that’s easy to state but impossible to take seriously: Use whatever form you’d use if the adjective weren’t there.

Of course, I haven’t looked at every grammar book, and for all I know, one or more of them has, in fact, covered this topic. If you’ve seen it covered, who did it and what did they say?

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Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Book

Back in February, I wrote about the podcast Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing. As I noted at the time, Grammar Girl (aka Mignon Fogarty) forgoes the ranting tone often taken by writers on grammar and usage (think James J. Kilpatrick) or punctuation (Lynne Truss), and instead provides friendly and humorous tips and mnemonics to improve your writing. Although Fogarty admits to having grammar peeves, and is sympathetic to the peeves of her listeners, she also says, “I often have to tell people their pet peeves aren’t actually hard-and-fast grammar rules,” and points out that the most fertile ground for grammar peeves is those areas where the rules aren’t so clear-cut.

The podcast has led to the publication of a book by the same name. If you like the podcast, you’ll probably like the book: It consists mostly of material taken from the podcast scripts, though with some material that seems to be new. Better yet, the entries are organized into chapters covering broad topics, which makes it easier to find all the entries on, say, word usage than it is on the website. If you’re unfamiliar with the podcast, you should know that despite her chosen nickname, Fogarty does not restrict her tips to just grammar. In addition to word choice and issues of syntax and word forms, the book covers punctuation, capitalization, online writing, and even how to generate ideas and overcome writer’s block. If it will in some way improve your writing, it’s fair game for Grammar Girl. Nevertheless, this book is not intended for people who make their living as professional writers, and who presumably already have other, more thorough references on their desktops. This is a guide for “everyday writers” who would like to write clearer memos, emails, blog posts, and the like.

More on Whomever

If you found this post on whoever vs. whomever interesting, you can find further discussion of whomever in this post from Arnold Zwicky at the new and improved Language Log site. He identifies the origin of the confusion over whomever as “an unexamined theoretical assumption about syntax” that is still taught in schools (at least, in those that actually teach grammar).