A few days ago on Twitter, John McIntyre wrote, “A reporter has used ‘comprises’ correctly. I feel giddy.” And a couple of weeks ago, Nancy Friedman tweeted, “Just read ‘is comprised of’ in a university’s annual report. I give up.” I’ve heard editors confess that they can never remember how to use comprise correctly and always have to look it up. And recently I spotted a really bizarre use in Wired, complete with a subject-verb agreement problem: “It is in fact a Meson (which comprise of a quark and an anti-quark). “So what’s wrong with this word that makes it so hard to get right?

I did a project on “comprised of” for my class last semester on historical changes in American English, and even though I knew it was becoming increasingly common even in edited writing, I was still surprised to see the numbers. For those unfamiliar with the rule, it’s actually pretty simple: the whole comprises the parts, and the parts compose the whole. This makes the two words reciprocal antonyms, meaning that they describe opposite sides of a relationship, like buy/sell or teach/learn. Another way to look at it is that comprise essentially means “to be composed of,” while “compose” means “to be comprised in” (note: in, not of). But increasingly, comprise is being used not as an antonym for compose, but as a synonym.

It’s not hard to see why it’s happened. They’ve extremely similar in sound, and each is equivalent to the passive form of the other. When “comprises” means the same thing as “is composed of,” it’s almost inevitable that some people are going to conflate the two and produce “is comprised of.” According to the rule, any instance of “comprised of” is an error that should probably be replaced with “composed of.” Regardless of the rule, this usage has risen sharply in recent decades, though it’s still dwarfed by “composed of.” (Though “composed of” appears to be in serious decline. I have no idea why). The following chart shows its frequency in COHA and the Google Books Corpus.

Though it still looks pretty small on the chart, “comprised of” now occurs anywhere from 21 percent as often as “composed of” (in magazines) to a whopping 63 percent as often (in speech) according to COCA. (It’s worth noting, of course, that the speech genre in COCA is composed of a lot of news and radio show transcripts, so even though it’s unscripted, it’s not exactly reflective of typical speech.)

What I find most striking about this graph is the frequency of “comprised of” in academic writing. It is often held that standard English is the variety of English used by the educated elite, especially in writing. In this case, though, academics are leading the charge in the spread of a nonstandard usage. Like it or not, it’s becoming increasingly more common, and the prestige lent to it by its academic feel is certainly a factor.

But it’s not just “comprised of” that’s the problem; remember that the whole comprises the parts, which means that comprise should be used with singular subjects and plural objects (or multiple subjects with multiple respective objects, as in The fifty states comprise some 3,143 counties; each individual state comprises many counties). So according to the rule, not only is The United States is comprised of fifty states an error, but so is The fifty states comprise the United States.

It can start to get fuzzy, though, when either the subject or the object is a mass or collective noun, as in “youngsters comprise 17% of the continent’s workforce,” to take an example from Mark Davies’ COCA. This kind of error may be harder to catch, because the relationship between parts and whole is a little more abstract.

And with all the data above, it’s important to remember that we’re seeing things that have made it into print. As I said above, many editors have to look up the rule every time they encounter a form of “comprise” in print, meaning that they’re more liable to make mistakes. It’s possible that many more editors don’t even know that there is a rule, and so they read past it without a second thought.

Personally, I gave up on the rule a few years ago when one day it struck me that I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen it used correctly in my editing. It’s never truly ambiguous (though if you can find an ambiguous example that doesn’t require willful misreading, please share), and it’s safe to assume that if nearly all of our authors who use comprise do so incorrectly, then most of our readers probably won’t notice, because they think that’s the correct usage.

And who’s to say it isn’t correct now? When it’s used so frequently, especially by highly literate and highly educated writers and speakers, I think you have to recognize that the rule has changed. To insist that it’s always an error, no matter how many people use it, is to deny the facts of usage. Good usage has to have some basis in reality; it can’t be grounded only in the ipse dixits of self-styled usage authorities.

And of course, it’s worth noting that the “traditional” meaning of comprise is really just one in a long series of loosely related meanings the word has had since it was first borrowed into English from French in the 1400s, including “to seize,” “to perceive or comprehend,” “to bring together,” and “to hold.” Perhaps the new meaning of “compose” (which in reality is over two hundred years old at this point) is just another step in the evolution of the word.

As I said in my last post, I don’t think the distribution of that and which is adequately explained by the restrictive/nonrestrictive distinction. It’s true that nearly all thats are restrictive (with a few rare exceptions), but it’s not true that all restrictive relative pronouns are thats and that all whiches are nonrestrictive, even when you follow the traditional rule. In some cases that is strictly forbidden, and in other cases it is disfavored to varying degrees. Something that linguistics has taught me is that when your rule is riddled with exceptions and wrinkles, it’s usually sign that you’ve missed something important in your analysis.

In researching the topic for this post, I’ve learned a couple of things: (1) I don’t know syntax as well as I should, and (2) the behavior of relatives in English, particularly that, is far more complex than most editors or pop grammarians realize. First of all, there’s apparently been a century-long argument over whether that is even a relative pronoun or actually some sort of relativizing conjunction or particle. (Some linguists seem to prefer the latter, but I won’t wade too deep into that debate.) Previous studies have looked as multiple factors to explain the variation in relativizers, including the animacy of the referent, the distance between the pronoun and its referent, the semantic role of the relative clause, and the syntactic role of the referent.

It’s often noted that that can’t follow a preposition and that it doesn’t have a genitive form of its own (it must use either whose or of which), but no usage guide I’ve seen ever makes mention of the fact that this pattern follows the accessibility hierarchy. That is, in a cross-linguistic analysis, linguists have found an order to the way in which relative clauses are formed. Some languages can only relativize subjects, others can do subjects and verbal objects, yet others can do subjects, verbal objects, and oblique objects (like the objects of prepositions), and so on. For any allowable position on the hierarchy, all positions to the left are also allowable. The hierarchy goes something like this:

subject ≥ direct object ≥ indirect object ≥ object of stranded preposition ≥ object of fronted preposition ≥ possessor noun phrase ≥ object of comparative particle

What is interesting is that that and the wh- relatives, who and which, occupy overlapping but different portions of the hierarchy. Who and which can relativize anything from subjects to possessors and possibly objects of comparative particles, though whose as the genitive form of which seems a little odd to some, and both sound odd if not outright ungrammatical with comparatives, as in The man than who I’m taller. But that can’t relativize objects of fronted prepositions or anything further down the scale.

Strangely, though, there are things that that can do that who and which can’t. That can sometimes function as a sort of relative adverb, equivalent to the relative adverbs why, where, or when or to which with a preposition. That is, you can say The day that we met, The day when we met, or The day on which we met, but not The day which we met. And which can relativize whole clauses (though some sticklers consider this ungrammatical), while that cannot, as in This author uses restrictive “which,” which bothers me a lot.

So what explains the differences between that and which or who? Well, as I mentioned above, some linguists consider that not a pronoun but a complementizer or conjunction (perhaps a highly pronominal one), making it more akin to the complementizer that, as in He said that relativizers were confusing. And some linguists have also proposed different syntactic structures for restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, which could account for the limitation of that to restrictive clauses. If that is not a true pronoun but a complementizer, then that could account for its strange distribution. It can’t appear in nonrestrictive clauses, because they require a full pronoun like which or who, and it can’t appear after prepositions, because those constructions similarly require a pronoun. But it can function as a relative adverb, which a regular relative pronoun can’t do.

As I argued in my previous post, it seems that which and that do not occupy separate parts of a single paradigm but are part of two different paradigms that overlap. The differences between them can be characterized in a few different ways, but for some reason, grammarians have seized on the restrictive/nonrestrictive distinction and have written off the rest as idiosyncratic exceptions to the rule or as common errors (when they’ve addressed those points at all).

The proposal to disallow which in restrictive relative clauses, except in the cases where that is ungrammatical—sometimes called Fowler’s rule, though that’s not entirely accurate—is based on the rather trivial observation that all thats are restrictive and that all nonrestrictives are which. It then assumes that the converse is true (or should be) and tries to force all restrictives to be that and all whiches to be nonrestrictive (except for all those pesky exceptions, of course).

Garner calls Fowler’s rule “nothing short of brilliant,”^[1] but I must disagree. It’s based on a rather facile analysis followed by some terrible logical leaps. And insisting on following a rule based on bad linguistic analysis is not only not helpful to the reader, it’s a waste of editors’ time. As my last post shows, editors have obviously worked very hard to put the rule into practice, but this is not evidence of its utility, let alone its brilliance. But a linguistic analysis that could account for all of the various differences between the two systems of relativization in English? Now that just might be brilliant.

Sources

Herbert F. W. Stahlke, “Which That,” Language 52, no. 3 (Sept. 1976): 584–610
Johan Van Der Auwera, “Relative That: A Centennial Dispute,” Journal of Lingusitics 21, no. 1 (March 1985): 149–79
Gregory R. Guy and Robert Bayley, “On the Choice of Relative Pronouns in English,” American Speech 70, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 148–62
Nigel Fabb, “The Difference between English Restrictive and Nonrestrictive Relative Clauses,” Journal of Linguistics 26, no. 1 (March 1990): 57–77
Robert D. Borsley, “More on the Difference between English Restrictive and Nonrestrictive Relative Clauses,” Journal of Linguistics 28, no. 1 (March 1992), 139–48

1. ^[1] Garner’s Modern American Usage, 3rd ed., s.v. “that. A. And which.” ↩

I meant to blog about this several weeks ago, when the topic came up in my corpus linguistics class from Mark Davies, but I didn’t have time then. And I know the that/which distinction has been done to death, but I thought this was an interesting look at the issue that I hadn’t seen before.

For one of our projects in the corpus class, we were instructed to choose a prescriptive rule and then examine it using corpus data, determining whether the rule was followed in actual usage and whether it varied over time, among genres, or between the American and British dialects. One of my classmates (and former coworkers) chose the that/which rule for her project, and I found the results enlightening.

She searched for the sequences “[noun] that [verb]” and “[noun] which [verb],” which aren’t perfect—they obviously won’t find every relative clause, and they’ll pull in a few non-relatives—but the results serve as a rough measurement of their relative frequencies. What she found is that before about the 1920s, the two were used with nearly equal frequency. That is, the distinction did not exist. After that, though, which takes a dive and that surges. The following chart shows the trends according to Mark Davies’ Corpus of Historical American English and his Google Books N-grams interface.

It’s interesting that although the two corpora show the same trend, Google Books lags a few decades behind. I think this is a result of the different style guides used in different genres. Perhaps style guides in certain genres picked up the rule first, from whence it disseminated to other style guides. And when we break out the genres in COHA, we see that newspapers and magazines lead the plunge, with fiction and nonfiction books following a few decades later, though use of which is apparently in a general decline the entire time. (NB: The data from the first decade or two in COHA often seems wonky; I think the word counts are low enough in those years that strange things can skew the numbers.)

The strange thing about this rule is that so many people not only take it so seriously but slander those who disagree, as I mentioned in this post. Bryan Garner, for instance, solemnly declares—without any evidence at all—that those who don’t follow the rule “probably don’t write very well,” while those who follow it “just might.”^[1] (This elicited an enormous eye roll from me.) But Garner later tacitly acknowledges that the rule is an invention—not by the Fowler brothers, as some claim, but by earlier grammarians. If the rule did not exist two hundred years ago and was not consistently enforced until the 1920s or later, how did anyone before that time ever manage to write well?

I do say enforced, because most writers do not consistently follow it. In my research for my thesis, I’ve found that changing “which” to “that” is the single most frequent usage change that copy editors make. If so many writers either don’t know the rule or can’t apply it consistently, it stands to reason that most readers don’t know it either and thus won’t notice the difference. Some editors and grammarians might take this as a challenge to better educate the populace on the alleged usefulness of the rule, but I take it as evidence that it’s just not useful. And anyway, as Stan Carey already noted, it’s the commas that do the real work here, not the relative pronouns. (If you’ve already read his post, you might want to go and check it out again. He’s added some updates and new links to the end.)

And as I noted in my previous post on relatives, we don’t observe a restrictive/nonrestrictive distinction with who(m) or, for that matter, with relative adverbs like where or when, so at the least we can say it’s not a very robust distinction in the language and certainly not necessary for comprehension. As with so many other useful distinctions, its usefulness is taken to be self-evident, but the evidence of its usefulness is less than compelling. It seems more likely that it’s one of those random things that sometimes gets grammaticalized, like gender or evidentiality. (Though it’s not fully grammaticalized, because it’s not obligatory and is not a part of the natural grammar of the language, but is a rule that has to be learned later.)

Even if we just look at that and which, we find a lot of exceptions to the rule. You can’t use that as the object of a preposition, even when it’s restrictive. You can’t use it after a demonstrative that, as in “Is there a clear distinction between that which comes naturally and that which is forced, even when what’s forced looks like the real thing?” (I saw this example in COCA and couldn’t resist.) And Garner even notes “the exceptional which“, which is often used restrictively when the relative clause is somewhat removed from its noun.^[2] And furthermore, restrictive which is frequently used in conjoined relative clauses, such as “Eisner still has a huge chunk of stock options—about 8.7 million shares’ worth—that he can’t exercise yet and which still presumably increase in value over the next decade,” to borrow an example from Garner.^[3]

Something that linguistics has taught me is that when your rule is riddled with exceptions and wrinkles, it’s usually sign that you’ve missed something important in its formulation. I’ll explain what I think is going on with that and which in a later post.

1. ^[1] Garner’s Modern American Usage, 3rd ed., s.v. “that. A. And which.” ↩
2. ^[2] S.v. “Remote Relatives. B. The Exceptional which.” ↩
3. ^[3] S.v. “which. D. And which; but which..” ↩

In a recent New York Times video interview, Steven Pinker touched on the topic of language change, saying, “I think that we do sometimes lose distinctions that it would be nice to preserve—disinterested to mean ‘impartial’ as opposed to ‘bored’, for example.”

He goes on to make the point that language does not degenerate, because it constantly replenishes itself—a point which I agree with—but that line caught the attention of Merriam-Webster’s Peter Sokolowski, who said, “It’s a useful distinction, but why pick a problematic example?” I responded, “I find it ironic that such a useful distinction is so rarely used. And its instability undermines the claims of usefulness.”

What Mr. Sokolowski was alluding to was the fact that the history of disinterested is more complicated than the simple laments over its loss would indicate. If you’re unfamiliar with the usage controversy, it goes something like this: disinterested originally meant ‘impartial’ or ‘unbiased’, and uninterested originally meant ‘bored’, but now people have used disinterested to mean ‘bored’ so much that you can’t use it anymore, because too many people will misunderstand you. It’s an appealing story that encapsulates prescriptivists’ struggle to maintain important aspects of the language in the face of encroaching decay. Too bad it’s not really true.

I won’t dive too deeply into the history of the two words—the always-excellent Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage spends over two pages on the topic, revealing a surprisingly complex history—but suffice it to say that disinterested is, as Peter Sokolowski mildly put it, “a problematic example”. The first definition the OED gives for disinterested is “Without interest or concern; not interested, unconcerned. (Often regarded as a loose use.)” The first citation dates to about 1631. The second definition (the correct one, according to traditionalists) is “Not influenced by interest; impartial, unbiased, unprejudiced; now always, Unbiased by personal interest; free from self-seeking. (Of persons, or their dispositions, actions, etc.)” Its first citation, however, is from 1659. And uninterested was originally used in the “impartial” or “unbiased” senses now attributed to disinterested, though those uses are obsolete.

It’s clear from the OED’s citations that both meanings have existed side-by-side from the 1600s. So there’s not so much a present confusion of the two words as a continuing, three-and-a-half-century-long confusion. And for good reason, too. The positive form interested is the opposite of both disinterested and uninterested, and yet nobody complains that we can’t use it because readers won’t be sure whether we mean “having the attention engaged” or “being affected or involved”, to borrow the Merriam-Webster definitions. If we can use interested to mean two different things, why do we need two different words to refer to the opposite of those things?

And as my advisor, Don Chapman, has written, “When gauging the usefulness of a distinction, we need to keep track of two questions: 1) is it really a distinction, or how easy is the distinction to grasp; 2) is it actually useful, or how often do speakers really use the distinction.”^[1] Chapman adds that “often the claim that a distinction is useful seems to rest on little more than this: if the prescriber can state a clear distinction, the distinction is considered to be desirable ipso facto.” He then asks, “But how easy is the distinction to maintain in actual usage?” (151).

From the OED citations, it’s clear that speakers have never been able to fully distinguish between the two words. Chapman also pointed out to me that the two prefixes in question, dis- and un-, do not clearly indicate one meaning or the other. The meanings of the two words comes from different meanings of the root interested, not the prefixes, so the assignment of meaning to form is arbitrary and must simply be memorized, which makes the distinction difficult for many people to learn and maintain. And even those who do learn the distinction do not employ it very frequently. I know this is anecdotal, but it seems to me that disinterested is far more often mentioned than it is used. I can’t remember the last time I spotted a genuine use of disinterested in the wild.

I think it’s time we dispel the myth that disinterested and uninterested epitomize a lost battle to preserve useful distinctions. The current controversy over its use is not indicative of current laxness or confusion, because there was never a time when people managed to fully distinguish between the two words. If anything, disinterested epitomizes the prescriptivist tendency to elegize the usage wars. The typical discussion of disinterested is often light on historical facts and heavy on wistful sighs over how we can no longer use a word that was perhaps never as useful as we would like to think it was.

1. ^[1] Don Chapman, “Bad Ideas in the History of English Usage,” in Studies in the History of the English Language 5, Variation and Change in English Grammar and Lexicon: Contemporary Approaches, ed. Robert A. Cloutier, Anne Marie Hamilton-Brehm, William A. Kretzschmar Jr. (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 151 ↩

The other day on Twitter, Bryan A. Garner posted, “May I ask a favor? Would all who read this please use the prep. ‘till’ in a tweet? Not till then will we start getting people used to it.” I didn’t help out, partly because I hate pleas of the “Repost this if you agree!” variety and partly because I knew it would be merely a symbolic gesture. Even if all of Garner’s followers and all of their followers used “till” in a tweet, it wouldn’t even be a blip on the radar of usage.

But it did get me thinking about the word till and the fact that a lot of people seem to regard it as incorrect and forms like 'til as correct. The assumption for many people seems to be that it’s a shortened form of until, so it requires an apostrophe to signal the omission. Traditionalists, however, know that although the two words are related, till actually came first, appearing in the language about four hundred years before until.

Both words came into English via Old Norse, where the preposition til had replaced the preposition to. (As I understand it, modern-day North Germanic languages like Swedish and Danish still use it this way.) Despite their similar appearances, to and till are not related; till comes from a different root meaning ‘end’ or ‘goal’ (compare modern German Ziel ‘goal’). Norse settlers brought the word til with them when they started raiding and colonizing northeastern Britain in the 800s.

There was also a compound form, until, from und + til. Und was another Old Norse preposition deriving from the noun und, which is cognate with the English word end. Till and until have been more or less synonymous throughout their history in English, despite their slightly different forms. And as a result of the haphazard process of spelling standardization in English, we ended up with two ls on till but only one on until. The apostrophized form 'til is an occasional variant that shows up far more in unedited than edited writing. Interestingly, the OED’s first citation for 'til comes from P. G. Perrin’s An Index to English in 1939: “Till, until, (’til), these three words are not distinguishable in meaning. Since ’til in speech sounds the same as till and looks slightly odd on paper, it may well be abandoned.”

Mark Davies’ Corpus of Historical American English, however, tells a slightly different story. It shows a slight increase in 'til since the mid-twentieth century, though it has been declining again slightly in the last thirty years. And keep in mind that these numbers come from a corpus of edited writing drawn from books, magazines, and newspapers. It may well be increasing much faster in unedited writing, with only the efforts of copy editors keeping it (mostly) out of print. This chart shows the relative proportions of the three forms—that is, the proportion of each compared to the total of all three.

As Garner laments, till is becoming less and less common in writing and may all but disappear within the next century, though predicting the future of usage is always a guessing game, even with clear trends like this. Sometimes they spontaneously reverse, and it’s often not clear why. But why is till in decline? I honestly don’t know for sure, but I suspect it stems from either the idea that longer words are more formal or the perception that it’s a shortened form of until. Contractions and clipped forms are generally avoided in formal writing, so this could be driving till out of use.

Note that we don’t have this problem with to and unto, probably because to is one of the most common words in the language, occurring about 9,000 times per million words in the last decade in COHA. By comparison, unto occurs just under 70 times per million words. There’s no uncertainty or confusion about the use of spelling of to. We tend to be less sure of the meanings and spellings of less frequent words, and this uncertainty can lead to avoidance. If you don’t know which form is right, it’s easy to just not use it.

At any rate, many people are definitely unfamiliar with till and may well think that the correct form is 'til, as Gabe Doyle of Motivated Grammar did in this post four years ago, though he checked his facts and found that his original hunch was wrong.

He’s far from the only person who thought that 'til was correct. When my then-fiancee and I got our wedding announcements printed over eight years ago, the printer asked us if we really wanted “till” instead of “'til” (“from six till eight that evening”). I told him that yes, it was right, and he kind of shrugged and dropped the point, though I got the feeling he still thought I was wrong. He probably didn’t want to annoy a paying customer, though.

And though this is anecdotal and possibly falls prey to the recency illusion, it seems that 'til is on the rise in signage (frequently as ‘til, with a single opening quotation mark rather than an apostrophe), and I even spotted a til' the other day. (I wish I’d thought to get a picture of it.)

I think the evidence is pretty clear that, barring some amazing turnaround, till is dying. It’s showing up less in print, where it’s mostly been replaced by until, and the traditionally incorrect 'til may be hastening its death as people become unsure of which form is correct or even become convinced that till is wrong and 'til is right. I’ll keep using till myself, but I’m not holding out hope for a revival. Sorry, Garner.

In my last post I touched on the fact that whose as a relative possessive adjective referring to inanimate objects feels a little strange to some people. In a submission for the topic suggestion contest, Jake asked about the use of that with animate referents (“The woman that was in the car”) and then said, “On the flip side, consider ‘the couch, whose cushion is blue.’ ‘Who’ is usually used for animate subjects. Why don’t we have the word ‘whichs’ for inanimate ones?”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (one of my favorite books on language; if you don’t already own it, you should buy it now—seriously.) says that it has been in use from the fourteenth century to the present but that it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that grammarians like Bishop Lowth (surprise, surprise) started to cast aspersions on its use.

MWDEU concludes that “the notion that whose may not properly be used of anything except persons is a superstition; it has been used by innumerable standard authors from Wycliffe to Updike, and is entirely standard as an alternative to of which the in all varieties of discourse.” Bryan A. Garner, in his Garner’s Modern American Usage, says somewhat more equivocally, “Whose may usefully refer to things ⟨an idea whose time has come⟩. This use of whose, formerly decried by some 19th-century grammarians and their predecessors, is often an inescapable way of avoiding clumsiness.” He ranks it a 5—“universally adopted except for a few eccentrics”—but his tone leaves one feeling as if he thinks it the lesser of two evils.

But how did we end up in this situation in the first place? Why don’t we have a whiches or thats or something equivalent? MWDEU notes that “English is not blessed with a genitive form for that or which“, but to understand why, you have to go back to Old English and the loss of the case system in Early Middle English.

First of all, Old English did not use interrogative pronouns (who, which, or what) as relative pronouns. It either used demonstrative pronouns—whence our modern that is descended—or the invariable complementizer þe, which we’ll ignore for now. The demonstrative pronouns declined for gender, number, and case, just like the demonstrative and relative pronouns of modern German. The important point is that in Old English, the relative pronouns looked like this:

(Taken from Wikipedia.org. The þ is a thorn, which represents a “th” sound.)

As the Old English case system disappeared, this all reduced to the familiar that, which you can see comes from the neuter nominative/accusative form. The genitive, or possessive, form was lost. And in Middle English, speakers began to use interrogative pronouns as relatives, probably under the influence of French. Here’s what the Old English interrogative pronouns looked like:

On the masculine/feminine side, we get the ancestors of our modern who/whom/whose (hwā/hwǣm/hwæs), and on the neuter side, we get the ancestor of what (hwæt). Notice that the genitive forms for the two are the same—that is, although we think of whose being the possessive form of who, it’s historically also the possessive form of what.

But we don’t use what as a relative pronoun (well, some dialects do, but Standard English doesn’t); we use which instead. Which also had the full paradigm of case endings just like who/what that. But rather than bore you with more tables full of weird-looking characters, I’ll cut to the chase: which originally had a genitive form, but it too was lost when the Old English case system disappeared.

So of all the demonstrative and interrogative pronouns in English, only one survived with its own genitive form, who. (I don’t know why who hung on to its case forms while the others lost theirs; maybe that’s a topic for another day.) Speakers quite naturally used whose to fill that gap—and keep in mind that it was originally the genitive form of both the animate and inanimate forms of the interrogative pronoun, so English speakers originally didn’t have any qualms about employing it with inanimate relative pronouns, either.

But what does that mean for us today? Well, on the one hand, you can argue that whose as an inanimate relative possessive adjective has a long, well-established history. It’s been used by the best writers for centuries, so there’s no question that it’s standard. But on the other hand, this ignores the fact that some people think there’s something not quite right about it. After all, we don’t use whose as a possessive form of which or that in their interrogative or demonstrative functions. And although it has a long pedigree, another inanimate possessive with a long pedigree fell out of use and was replaced.

His was originally the possessive form of both he and it, but neuter his started to fall out of use and be replaced by a new form its in the sixteenth century. After English lost grammatical gender, people began to use he and she only for people and other animate things and it only for inanimate things. They started to feel a little uncomfortable using the original possessive form of it, his, with inanimate things, so they fashioned a new possessive, its, to replace it.

In other words, there’s precedence for disfavoring inanimate whose and using another word or construction instead. Unfortunately, now thats or whiches will never get off the ground, because they’ll be so heavily stigmatized as nonstandard forms. There are two different impulses fighting one another here: the impulse to have a full and symmetrical paradigm and the impulse to avoid using animate pronouns for inanimate things. Only time will tell which one wins out. For now, I’d say it’s good to remember that inanimate whose is frequently used by good writers and that there’s nothing wrong with it per se. In your own writing, just trust your ear.

The other day I was thinking about relative pronouns and how they get so much attention from usage commentators, and I decided I should write a post about them. I was beaten to the punch by Stan Carey, but that’s okay, because I think I’m going to take it in a somewhat different direction. (And anyway, great minds think alike, right? But maybe you should read his post first, along with my previous post on who and that, if you haven’t already.)

I’m not just talking about that and which but also who, whom, and whose, which is technically a relative possessive adjective. Judging by how often relative pronouns are talked about, you’d assume that most English speakers can’t get them right, even though they’re among the most common words in the language. In fact, in my own research for my thesis, I’ve found that they’re among the most frequent corrections made by copy editors.

So what gives? Why are they so hard for English speakers to get right? The distinctions are pretty clear-cut and can be found in a great many usage and writing handbooks. Some commentators even judgementally declare, “There’s a useful distinction here, and it’s lazy or perverse to pretend otherwise.” But is it really useful, and is it really lazy and perverse to disagree? Or is is perverse to try to inflict a bunch of arbitrary distinctions on speakers and writers?

And arbitrary they are. Many commentators act as if the proposed distinctions between all these words would make things tidier and more regular, but in fact it makes the whole system much more complicated. On the one hand, we have the restrictive/nonrestrictive distinction between that and which. On the other hand, we have the animate/inanimate (or human/nonhuman, if you want to be really strict) distinction between who and that/which. And on the other other hand, there’s the subject/object distinction between who and whom. But there’s no subject/object distinction with that or which, except when it’s the object of a preposition—then you have to use which, unless the preposition is stranded, in which case you can use that. And on the final hand, some people have proscribed whose as an inanimate or nonhuman relative possessive adjective, recommending constructions with of which instead, though this rule isn’t as popular, or at least not as frequently talked about, as the others. (How many hands is that? I’ve lost count.)

Simple, right? To make it all a little clear, I’ve even put it into a nice little table.

This is, in a nutshell, a very lopsided and unusual system. In a comment on my who/that post, Elaine Chaika says, “No natural grammar rule would work that way. Ever.” I’m not entirely convinced of that, because languages can be surprising in the unusual distinctions they make, but I agree that it is at the least typologically unusual.

“But we have to have rules!” you say. “If we don’t, we’ll have confusion!” But we do have rules—just not the ones that are proposed and promoted. The system we really have, in absence of the prescriptions, is basically a distinction between animate who and inanimate which with that overlaying the two. Which doesn’t make distinctions by case, but who(m) does, though this distinction is moribund and has probably only been kept alive by the efforts of schoolteachers and editors.

Whom is still pretty much required when it immediately follows a preposition, but not when the preposition is stranded. Since preposition stranding is extremely common in speech and increasingly common in writing, we’re seeing less and less of whom in this position. Whose is still a little iffy with inanimate referents, as in The house whose roof blew off, but many people say this is alright. Others prefer of which, though this can be awkward: The house the roof of which blew off.

That is either animate or inanimate—only who/which make that distinction—and can be either subject or object but cannot follow a preposition or function as a possessive adjective or nonrestrictively. If the preposition is stranded, as in The man that I gave the apple to, then it’s still allowed. But there’s no possessive thats, so you have to use whose of of which. Again, it’s clearer in table form:

The linguist Jonathan Hope wrote that several distinguishing features of Standard English give it “a typologically unusual structure, while non-standard English dialects follow the path of linguistic naturalness.” He then muses on the reason for this:

One explanation for this might be that as speakers make the choices that will result in standardisation, they unconsciously tend towards more complex structures, because of their sense of the prestige and difference of formal written language. Standard English would then become a ‘deliberately’ difficult language, constructed, albeit unconsciously, from elements that go against linguistic naturalness, and which would not survive in a ‘natural’ linguistic environment.^[1]

It’s always tricky territory when you speculate on people’s unconscious motivations, but I think he’s on to something. Note that while the prescriptions make for a very asymmetrical system, the system that people naturally use is moving towards a very tidy and symmetrical distribution, though there are still a couple of wrinkles that are being worked out.

But the important point is that people already follow rules—just not the ones that some prescriptivists think they should.

1. ^[1] “Rats, Bats, Sparrows and Dogs: Biology, Linguistics and the Nature of Standard English,” in The Development of Standard English, 1300–1800, ed. Laura Wright (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2000), 53. ↩

A few weeks ago, as a submission for my topic contest, Bob Scopatz suggested I tackle the issue of gender-neutral pronouns in English. In his comment he said, “I dislike alternating between ‘he’ and ‘she’. I despise all variants of ‘he/she’, ‘s/he’, etc. I know that I should not use ‘they’, but it feels closest to what I really want. Could you maybe give us the latest on this topic and tell me if there is any hope for a consensus usage in my lifetime?” It must be a timely topic, because I’ve read three different articles and watched a video on it in the past week.

The first was Allan Metcalf’s article at Lingua Franca on failed attempts to fill gaps in the language. He says that the need for a gender-neutral pronoun is a gap that has existed for centuries, defying attempts to fill it with neologisms. But he notes almost in passing that they is another option, but “filling a singular gap with a plural doesn’t satisfy” every one.

The next was June Casagrande’s article in the Burbank Leader. She gives the subject a little more attention, discussing the awkwardness of using “he or she” or “him or her” every time and the rising acceptance of the so-called singular they. But then, in similar fashion to the it’s-not-wrong-but-you-still-shouldn’t-do-it approach, she says that she won’t judge others who use singular they, but she’s going to hold off on it herself (presumably because she doesn’t want to be judged negatively for it). She also overlooks some historical facts, namely that they has been used this way since Chaucer’s day and that it wasn’t until the end of the eighteenth century when it was declared ungrammatical by Lindley Murray.

That leads to the next article, an interview with Professor Anne Curzan at Visual Thesaurus. She discusses the “almost hypocritical position” of having to grade students’ papers for grammar and usage issues that she doesn’t believe in, like singular they. She tackles the allegation that it’s incorrect because they is plural, saying that in a sentence like “I was talking to a friend of mine, and they said it was a terrible movie”, “they is clearly singular, because it’s referring to a friend.” This probably won’t carry much weight with some people who believe that it’s innately plural and that you can’t just declare it to be singular when it suits you. Ah, but here’s the rub: English speakers did the same thing with plural you in centuries past.

Originally, English had two second-person pronouns, singular thou and plural you. But speakers began to use you as a formal singular pronoun (think French vous, Spanish usted, or German Sie). Then it began to be used in more and more situations, until thou was only used when talking down to someone and then disappeared from the language altogether. Now we have a pronoun that agrees with verbs like a plural but clearly refers to singular entities all the time. If you can do it, why can’t they?

Further, Steven Pinker argues that “everyone and they are not an ‘antecedent’ and a ‘pronoun’ referring to the same person”, but rather that “they are a ‘quantifier’ and a ‘bound variable,’ a different logical relationship.” He says that “Everyone returned to their seats means “For all X, X returned to X’s seat.” In other words, there are logical objections to the logical objections to singular they.

Then there came Emily Brewster’s Ask the Editor video at Merriam-Webster Online. She notes that for the eighteenth-century grammarians who proscribed singular they and prescribed generic he, “inaccuracy of gender was less troublesome than inaccuracy of number.” She then concludes that “all this effort to avoid a usage that’s centuries old strikes some of us as strange” and makes the recommendation, “Perhaps everyone should just do their best in the situations they find themselves in, even if their best involves they as a singular pronoun.”

Rather than join the ranks of grammarians who walk through all the arguments in favor of singular they but then throw their hands up in defeat and tell you to avoid it because it’s not accepted yet, I’m taking a different track and recommending its use. The problem with not using it until it becomes accepted is that it won’t become accepted until enough people—especially people with some authority in the field of usage—use it and say it’s okay to use it. If we sit around waiting for the day when it’s declared to be acceptable, we’ll be waiting a long time. But while there are still people who will decry it as an error, as I’ve said before, you can’t please everyone. And as Bob said in his original comment, they is what many people already use or want to use. I think it’s the best solution for a common problem, and it’s time to stop wringing our hands over it and embrace it.

So, to answer Bob’s question if there will ever be consensus on the issue in our lifetime, I’d say that while there might not be consensus at the moment, I’m hopeful that it will come. I think the tide has already begun to turn as more and more linguists, lexicographers, editors, and writers recommend it as the best solution to a common problem.

A couple of weeks ago, in my post “The Value of Prescriptivism,” I mentioned some strange reasoning that I wanted to talk about later—the idea that there are many usages that are not technically wrong, but you should still avoid them because other people think they’re wrong. I used the example of a Grammar Girl post on hopefully wherein she lays out the arguments in favor of disjunct hopefully and debunks some of the arguments against it—and then advises, “I still have to say, don’t do it.” She then adds, however, “I am hopeful that starting a sentence with hopefully will become more acceptable in the future.”

On the face of it, this seems like a pretty reasonable approach. Sometimes the considerations of the reader have to take precedence over the facts of usage. If the majority of your readers will object to your word choice, then it may be wise to pick a different word. But there’s a different way to look at this, which is that the misinformed opinions of a very small but very vocal subset of readers take precedence over the facts and the opinions of others. Arnold Zwicky wrote about this phenomenon a few years ago in a Language Log post titled “Crazies win”.

Addressing split infinitives and the equivocal advice to avoid them unless it’s better not to, Zwicky says that “in practice, [split infinitive as last resort] is scarcely an improvement over [no split infinitives] and in fact works to preserve the belief that split infinitives are tainted in some way.” He then adds that the “only intellectually justifiable advice” is to “say flatly that there’s nothing wrong with split infinitives and you should use them whenever they suit you”. I agree wholeheartedly, and I’ll explain why.

The problem with the it’s-not-wrong-but-don’t-do-it philosophy is that, while it feels like a moderate, open-minded, and more descriptivist approach in theory, it is virtually indistinguishable from the it’s-wrong-so-don’t-do-it philosophy in practice. You can cite all the linguistic evidence you want, but it’s still trumped by the fact that you’d rather avoid annoying that small subset of readers. It pays lip service to the idea of descriptivism informing your prescriptions, but the prescription is effectively the same. All you’ve changed is the justification for avoiding the usage.

Even more neutral and descriptive pieces like this New York Times “On Language” article on singular they ends with a wistful, “It’s a shame that grammarians ever took umbrage at the singular they,” adding, “Like it or not, the universal they isn’t universally accepted — yet. Its fate is now in the hands of the jury, the people who speak the language.” Even though the authors seem to be avoiding giving out advice, it’s still implicit in the conclusion. It’s great to inform readers about the history of usage debates, but what they’ll most likely come away with is the conclusion that it’s wrong—or at least tainted—so they shouldn’t use it.

The worst thing about this waffly kind of advice, I think, is that it lets usage commentators duck responsibility for influencing usage. They tell you all the reasons why it should be alright to use hopefully or split infinitives or singular they, but then they sigh and put them away in the linguistic hope chest, telling you that you can’t use them yet, but maybe someday. Well, when? If all the usage commentators are saying, “It’s not acceptable yet,” at what point are they going to decide that it suddenly is acceptable? If you always defer to the peevers and crazies, it will never be acceptable (unless they all happen to die off without transmitting their ideas to the next generation).

And furthermore, I’m not sure it’s a worthwhile endeavor to try to avoid offending or annoying anyone in your writing. It reminds me of Aesop’s fable of the man, the boy, and the donkey: people will always find something to criticize, so it’s impossible to behave (or write) in such a way as to always avoid criticism. As the old man at the end says, “Please all, and you will please none.” You can’t please everyone, so you have to make a choice: will you please the small but vocal peevers, or the more numerous reasonable people? If you believe there’s nothing technically wrong with hopefully or singular they, maybe you should stand by those beliefs instead of caving to the critics. And perhaps through your reasonable but firm advice and your own exemplary writing, you’ll help a few of those crazies come around.

I just came across the sentence “George A. Smith became the namesake for St. George, Utah” while editing. A previous editor had changed it to “In 1861 St. George, Utah, became the namesake of George A. Smith.” Slightly awkward wording aside, I preferred the unedited form. Apparently, though, this is an issue of divided usage, with some saying that a namesake is named after someone else, some saying that a namesake is someone after whom someone else is named, some saying that both are correct, and some saying that namesakes simply share the same name without one being named after the other.

But I’d like to get a better idea of which definitions are most common, so I’m putting up this nice little poll. Let me know your feelings on the matter, and feel free to explain your vote in the comments below.