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).

It’s a Word! It’s a Phrase! It’s Grammar Girl!

For a while I’d been noticing a podcast called Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Clean Up Your Writing when I browsed through the podcasts at iTunes. I never subscribed to it because first of all, I’m pretty comfortable with my grammar, and second, I figured it would be the same old things grammar and writing guides are always telling you: don’t use the passive voice; don’t use hopefully as a sentential adverb; in fact, avoid adverbs wherever possible. But I finally got curious enough to check out a few episodes, and what a surprise! The podcasts present traditional grammar rules, provide nonjudgmental observations of what’s actually happening in the language when the rules don’t reflect common usage, and give practical advice on what to do when faced with these mismatches. Even better, Grammar Girl will get into linguistic topics when doing so will help explain a grammar point. And just a couple of episodes ago, she talked about a linguistic topic apparently just because it was interesting all by itself.

Whomever Is Never Actually Right

My wife and I watched this week’s episode of The Office last night, which featured the following scene (20:55 into the online version, accessible here):

Ryan: What I really want, honestly Michael, is for you to know it, so that you can communicate it to the people here, to your clients, to whomever.
Michael: [chuckle] OK.
Ryan: What?
Michael: It’s whoever, not whomever.
Ryan: No, it’s whomever.
Michael: No, whomever is never actually right.

Harry Potter and the Grammar Police

I finished reading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets to Doug and Adam tonight. As I’ve read it for the past few nights, I’ve been paying special attention, seeing if it’s really true that, as Jan Freeman writes, “Even Harry Potter’s most loyal fans would concede that his creator, J.K. Rowling, has a weakness for adverbs.” I’ve heard this said before, but it’s never been something I really picked up on. Of course, it’s hard to know how seriously to take the criticism when, as Freeman demonstrates, some of the complainers don’t seem to know what an adverb is. In her column, Freeman quotes one ignorant reader who seems to think that adverb means “word that ends in -ly,” and who criticizes Rowling for having an adverb — deathly — right in the title of the final Harry Potter book.

Coordination and Quotative Inversion Meet Again

I’ve been reading another book by Beverly Cleary to Doug and Adam. This one is Muggie Maggie, which was published in 1990. As I read it, every now and then I notice a sentence that, although perfectly good standard English, strikes me as unusual style for Cleary. Finally, I decided I had to go through the whole book and find all these sentences. Luckily, the story is only 70 pages, so within ten minutes I had picked out:

1. “Many letters start up slowly, just like a roller coaster, and then drop down,” she said, and she traced over the first stroke of each letter with colored chalk. (14)
2. “Today we practice our signatures,” she said, and she looked at Maggie. (32)
3. “Well, it’s wrong,” she said, and she sighed so hard that Kisser looked anxious. (61)
4. I will not enjoy it, thought Maggie, and she said, “All those loops and squiggles. I don’t think I’ll do it.” (8-9)
5. “Oops,” said Mr. Schultz, and he closed his loops. (20)
6. “Good for you, Goldilocks,” said her father, and he rumpled her hair. (43)

Now, compare those sentences with these, from a post from back in June. These are from Cleary’s Henry and Ribsy, published in 1954:

1. “Boy, is he mad about something!” he exclaimed, and ran over to the driveway. (46)
   
2. “Wuf,” he said mildly, and waited patiently while Beezus frantically pried Ramona’s fingers loose from his tail. (64)
   
3. “Hi,” she answered, and entered the kitchen with her arms full of packages. (73)
   
4. “Ow,” he exclaimed, and pulled away. (7
   
5. “Wuf!” he said, and looked hungrily at the lunch box. (129)
   
6. Come on, salmon, bite, he thought, and tossed out his line.
   
7. “I won’t,” promised Henry, and got back into the car. (15-17)
   
8. “I have come to haunt you,” said Henry in his hollow voice, and let out a groan. (19)
   
9. “I just stepped into the market to buy a pint of milk to drink with my lunch,” began the officer, and went on to explain what had happened. (30)
   
10. “Wuf,” said Ribsy, and went to the refrigerator to show that what he really wanted was another piece of horse meat. (37)
    
11. “Day in and day out,” said Mrs. Huggins, and laughed. (39)
    
12. “Aw, keep quiet,” answered Henry, and grinned. (70)
    
13. “Oh, it’s nothing,” said Henry modestly, and bared his teeth. (90)
    
14. “Ribsy!” yelled Henry, and grabbed his dog by the collar. (94)
    
15. “Try and get it,” taunted Scooter, and began to laugh. (96)
    
16. “I wonder if…” began Mrs. Huggins and paused. (100)
    
17. “O.K., you old dog,” muttered Henry, and steeled himself for the meeting with Scooter and Robert. (103)
    
18. “Good old Ribsy,” said Henry, and hugged him. (111)
    
19. “Wuf,” answered Ribsy, and worried the rope. (112)
    
20. “Better not count on it,” said Mr. Grumbie, and yawned. (14
    
21. “Don’t lean out,” said Mr. Huggins sharply, and rewound the rope. (167)

See the difference? In H&R, whenever (1) Cleary uses and to indicate a sequence of two events; (2) the verbs for each event have the same subject; and (3) the first event is one of speech or thought, Cleary regularly omits the subject for the second verb. Thus for example, “Boy, is he mad about something!” he exclaimed, and ran over to the driveway, and not “Boy, is he mad about something!” he exclaimed, and he ran over to the driveway. In the whole book, you will not find a sentence like that. In MM, however, a book half the length of H&R, there are the six such sentences reported above. Moreover, there is not a single instance of Cleary omitting the subject for the second verb when the three conditions are met.

What happened between 1954 and 1990 to cause such a complete flip-flop? My guess is that a prescriptive grammarian got to her, and convinced her that the non-parallelism of “Ow,” he exclaimed, and pulled away was ungrammatical (unlike the non-parallelism of, say, John came early, and Marsha, late). All you linguists out there reading books by Beverly Cleary, check out how she handles sentences like these. With enough books for data points, we can answer important questions such as: When did the switch occur? Was it gradual? Has she alternated between styles over the years? Hey, we could make this the Beverly Cleary meme! On second thought, let’s not. If I launched a meme, then I’d feel guilty about ignoring memes I get tagged with.

Eating Shoots, and Leaving

Arnold Zwicky at Language Log recently wrote about the the kids’ version of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, but had to base his comments on examples quoted in a review on Amazon, since he hadn’t read the book. Well, now I have. My wife bought it to read to Doug and Adam, and they laughed at the funny pictures illustrating, for example, “Eat here and get gas.” However, I don’t think they’ll learn much about using commas from the book, other than that they can make a big difference in a sentence’s meaning.

More Bad Whether

At the beginning of the month, I read a column by Gwynne Dyer on the Israel-Hezbollah war. Near the end, he wrote:

[Hezbollah] may have foreseen the likelihood of a massive Israeli overreaction, and calculated that it could ride it out and win from it.

Nothing grammatically weird there. But the next paragraph began like this:

Whether that was its intention, it probably will ride it out and win.

I read Whether that was its intention, parsed it as an indirect question, and got ready to read something that called for an indirect question, such as …doesn’t matter, or …is anyone’s guess or …is something reasonable people can disagree on. Instead, of course, what I got was an entire clause with no open slot for an indirect question anywhere in it, and my parse crashed.

Darn it! I thought. The stupid copyeditors have done it again! I went back to the beginning of the sentence, and this time parsed the whether clause as an adverbial clause, mentally restoring the or not that I knew must have been there originally. I put it after intention, but it could just as easily have come right after the whether. As it happens, though, my guess was right: Check out the second to last paragraph of the plaintext version of the article on Dyer’s website.

I agree that or not is redundant in sentences such as Do you know whether or not Sam is coming? Not as egregious as free gift or pre-plan, but I’ll still grant the point. But when you’re using whether to introduce the idea that some proposition is true regardless of which of several possibilities is (or becomes) true, it doesn’t make sense if you then mention only one possibility. Why, even James J. Kilpatrick agrees on this one!

There’s never any confusion if the possibilities are different enough that they are each spelled out, as in Whether you choose to do it or someone forces you to, or Whether it rains or shines, or Whether you opt for monthly payments or one lump sum. Only when one of the possibilities is the negation of the other do copyeditors suddenly confuse adverbial-clause whether with indirect-question whether. At least, those at the Columbus Dispatch do. I’ll bet Bill Walsh doesn’t.

If It’s Not for Everyone, It’s Not for Anyone

Once again, I find myself wondering exactly what James J. Kilpatrick is thinking. He begins this week’s column with:

This was a headline in USA Today on April 28: “Mass Transit Not an Option for All Drivers.”

Did you wince? Roll your eyes? Did you groan? Then you have the soul of a grammarian, and will go to heaven when you die…. There you will lecture the seraphim on the distinction between “all” and “not all,” and you will explain to them that if mass transit is not an option for “all” drivers, it cannot be an option for even one driver.

Don’t Change a Thing. And if You Do, Don’t Change it Back.

I had trouble following the train of thought in a newspaper column I read today. The author espoused one position, then undermined it, then followed with a non-sequitur. The column was James J. Kilpatrick’s “The Writer’s Art.”

Kilpatrick starts off with a complaint about some writers’ use of fulsome, giving the examples and then stating:

It is a good guess that the writers used fulsome to mean abundant or copious or unstinting. Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate (2003) confirms that popular usage. Its editors say the primary definition of fulsome today is “generous in amount” or “full and well developed.”

Aargh! Until quite recently, fulsome had a very different primary meaning:

• American Heritage (1993): “offensively flattering or insincere; offensive to the taste or sensibilities.”

So far, so good. A typical prescriptive stance expressing frustration at change in a certain word’s meaning. But then he goes on to say:

We may be witnessing in fulsome an unusual process of linguistic reversion. When fulsome appeared early in the 13th century, it meant exactly what Merriam-Webster says its primary meaning is today–abundant, generous, lavish. There were no offensive implications of insincerity.

So what’s the problem? Why was the change from meaning A to meaning B all right, while the change from meaning B back to meaning A is to be condemned? Is it that the change from A to B was bad enough, and careless writers are only compounding the evil by changing it again? Or is it that it’s especially bad to allow a word to lose its negative connotations once it has them? Kilpatrick never says.

Instead, he shifts the topic to Bryan Garner, author of Modern American Usage:

Garner identifies two contentious schools. The first comprises language aficionados and purists who insist upon traditional use. The other comprises linguistic liberals and those who don’t concern themselves much with language. Garner adds morosely: “As time goes by, Group One dwindles; meanwhile, Group Two swells.”

OK, nevermind the question of fulsome; my complaint now is about this Garner’s complete omission of a third group–the one that contains language aficionados who are also linguistic liberals (taking linguistic liberal to mean “not a purist who insists on traditional use”). The implication is that such a group could no more exist than a group comprising language purists and people who don’t care about language very much. Oh, wait a minute–Kilpatrick says Garner identifies two contentious schools. My group must have been left out because it’s not contentious enough.

Whether Or Not, Or Not?

I was reading the paper Sunday, when my eye tripped over a sentence, and I had to read it again for it to make sense. This is just the kind of thing that writing manuals say that you don’t want your readers to do. Read aloud what you write, they say, so you can make sure there aren’t speed bumps in the text that are going to distract the reader. The offending sentence was in an article about Ohio’s Big Darby Creek, and it went like this:

Whether they live within its watershed, all taxpayers in the state have a stake in this stream.
“A tenuous balance: scenic creek in tug of war between preservation and development.” Spencer Hunt, The Columbus Dispatch, April 10, 2005, C1.

I read Whether they live in its watershed, tripped when I got to all taxpayers, and skidded through the rest of the sentence before stumbling to a stop at the period. Where was the or not? I had been expecting an or not to show me where the whether clause ended, but instead, I’d found myself skating right into the main clause with all taxpayers before I was ready. When I went back, I was prepared. When I got to watershed, I supplied my own or not, and continued smoothly to the end of the sentence, no thanks to the copyeditor.

I know what happened. The copyeditor went by the rule that whether … or not is usually redundant (as in, “I don’t know whether I passed (or not)”), and therefore eliminated the or not. But this whether was introducing an adverbial subordinate clause, making the or not crucial. A quick and dirty test is to substitute if for whether. If the substitution is grammatical and doesn’t change the meaning, you can omit the or not. (Or, I’d say, leave it in anyway, just for emphasis.) Otherwise, it needs to stay. Using that test, we have If they live within its watershed, all taxpayers in the state have a stake in this stream–definitely a different meaning from the original.

I judge this to be another case of someone overruling their language instincts in favor of a rule that didn’t really apply to the situation at hand. And in so doing, they disregarded the overarching rule of making the writing clear.