The comment is here, under a post of mine entitled “Scriptivists”. I believe the comment is supposed to be a rebuttal of that post, but I’m a little confused by the attempt. The commenter apparently accuses me of burning straw men, but ironically, he sets up a massive straw man of his own.

His first point seems to make fun of linguists for using technical terminology, but I’m not sure what that really proves. After all, technical terminology allows you to be very specific about abstract or complicated issues, so how is that really a criticism? I suppose it keeps a lot of laypeople from understanding what you’re saying, but if that’s the worst criticism you’ve got, then I guess I’ve got to shrug my shoulders and say, “Guilty as charged.”

The second point just makes me scratch my head. Using usage evidence from the greatest writers is a bad thing now? Honestly, how do you determine what usage features are good and worthy of emulation if not by looking to the most respected writers in the language?

The last point is just stupid. How often do you see Geoffrey Pullum or Languagehat or any of the other linguistics bloggers whipping out the fact that they have graduate degrees?

And I must disagree with Mr. Kevin S. that the “Mrs. Grundys” of the world don’t actually exist. I’ve heard too many stupid usage superstitions being perpetuated today and seen too much Strunk & White worship to believe that that sort of prescriptivist is extinct. Take, for example, Mrs. Sotomayor, who says that split infinities make her “blister”. Or takeone of my sister-in-law’s professors, who insisted that her students could not use the following features in their writing:

• The first person
• The passive voice
• Phrases like “this paper will show . . .” or “the data suggest . . .” because, according to her, papers are not capable of showing and data is not capable of suggesting.

How, exactly, are you supposed to write an academic paper without resorting to one of those devices—none of which, by the way, are actually wrong—at one time or another? These proscriptions were absolutely nonsensical, supported by neither logic nor usage nor common sense.

There’s still an awful lot of absolute bloody nonsense coming from the prescriptivists of the world. (Of course, this is not to say that all or even most prescriptivists are like this; take, for example, the inimitable John McIntyre, who is one of the most sensible and well-informed prescriptivists I’ve ever encountered.) And sorry to say, I don’t see the same sort of stubborn and ill-informed arguments coming from the descriptivists’ camp. And I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a descriptivist who resembled the straw man that Kevin S. constructed.

First off, I should say for those who don’t know me that I work as a copy editor. I clearly understand the value of using Standard American English when it is called for, and I know its rules and conventions quite well. I’m also a student of linguistics, and I find language fascinating. I understand the desire to celebrate language and to promote its good use, but unfortunately it appears that National Grammar Day does neither.

If you go to National Grammar Day’s web site and click on “About SPOGG” at the top of the page, you find this:

The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar is for pen-toters appalled by wanton displays of Bad English. . . . SPOGG is for people who crave good, clean English — sentences cast well and punctuated correctly. It’s about clarity.

I can get behind those last two sentences (noting, of course, this description seems to exclude spoken English), but the first obviously flies in the face of the society’s name—is it trying to promote “good” (read “standard”) grammar, or simply ridicule what it deems to be displays of bad English? Well, if you read the SPOGG Blog, it appears to be the latter. None of the posts on the front page seem to deal with clarity; in each case it seems quite clear what the author intended, so obviously SPOGG is not about clarity after all.

In fact, what I gather from this post in particular is that SPOGG is more about the social value of using Standard English than it is about anything else. The message here is quite clear: using nonstandard English is like having spinach in your teeth. It’s like wearing a speedo on the bus. SPOGG isn’t about good, clean English or about clarity. It’s only about mocking those who violate a set of taboos. By following the rules, you signal to others that you belong to a certain group, one whose members care about linguistic manners in the same way that some people care about not putting their elbows on the table while they eat.

And that’s perfectly fine with me. If you delight in fussy little rules about spelling and punctuation, that’s your choice. But I think it’s important to distinguish between the rules that are truly important and the guidelines and conventions that are more flexible and optional. John McIntyre made this point quite well in his post today on his blog, You Don’t Say.

Unfortunately, I find that SPOGG’s founder, Martha Brockenbrough, quite frequently fails to make this distinction. She also shows an appalling lack of knowledge on issues like how language changes, what linguists do, and, to top it all off, what grammar actually is. Of course, she falls back on the “Geez, can’t you take a joke?” defense, which doesn’t really seem to fly, as Arnold Zwicky and others have already noted.

As I said at the start, I can appreciate the desire to celebrate grammar. I just wish National Grammar Day actually did that.

At the top it explained that they were requesting permission to use the information provided in my return to inform me of other stuff that I might be interested in purchasing from them. Then there was a paragraph saying something like “I, Jonathon, hereby consent to blah blah blah.” Next to this paragraph there was a check box. I took this to mean that by checking the box, I was allowing them to use my information. By leaving it unchecked, I was not. Pretty clear and straightforward so far.

Below this paragraph were two buttons, labelled “I Disagree” and “I Agree”, respectively. And here I paused for a little while, trying to figure out what exactly I was potentially agreeing or disagreeing with. Was I agreeing or disagreeing with the entire process of giving or not giving my consent? But the whole process was essentially an implicit question—can we use your information to try to sell you stuff?—and you can’t agree or disagree with a question, because it has no truth value to either confirm or deny. And anyway, if you could disagree with it, you’d just be agreeing to answer the question in the negative by refusing to answer it in the affirmative. I thought that perhaps I was reading it a little too literally, but I asked my wife what she thought about it, and she was similarly perplexed.

I finally figured out what they were really after when I moused over each button to see what appeared in my browser’s status bar. The disagree button had something about withholding consent or whatnot, so I decided that that was the option I wanted. In other words, it appears that the check box was entirely superfluous (though maybe it wasn’t—I don’t actually know what would have happened if I’d checked it and clicked “I Disagree” or left it unchecked and clicked “I Agree”), and the buttons were providing the wrong answers to the implicit question being asked. Of course, “I Agree” could have worked if it had not been answering an implicit question but rather a proposed course of action: “I agree to give my consent.” However, this does not work in the negative, producing the ungrammatical *I disagree to give my consent.

This problem wasn’t quite as troublesome as Geoffrey Pullum’s latest run-in with bad interfaces, but the basic problem is the same: the buttons don’t make a lick of sense by themselves because of fundamental breakdowns in semantics, and the user is left with no recourse but to take a stab at it and hope they got it right.

The explicit rule is this: use fewer for count nouns (things that can be numbered), and use less for mass nouns (things that are typically measured). So you’d say fewer eggs but less milk, fewer books but less information. Units of time, money, distance, and so on are usually treated as mass nouns (so you’d say less than ten years old, not fewer than ten years old. One handy (but overly simplistic) way to tell mass nouns and count nouns apart (save for the exception I just noted) is this: if you can make it plural and use a numeral in front of it (five eggs), then it’s a count noun and it takes fewer.

The only problem with this rule is that it was invented by Robert Baker in 1770, and it contradicts historical and present-day usage. In actual practice, fewer has always been restricted to count nouns, but less is often used with count nouns, too, especially in certain constructions like twenty-five words or less, no less than one hundred people, and one less problem to worry about. It used to be that people used less when it sounded natural and nobody worried about it, but then some guy in the eighteenth century got the bright idea that we should always use one word for count nouns and one word for mass nouns, and people have been freaking out about it ever since.

Baker’s rule is appealing because it’s simple and (in my opinion) because it allows people to judge others who don’t know grammar. It makes a certain kind of sense to use one word for one thing and another word for another thing, but the fact is that language is seldom so neat and tidy. Real language is full of complexities and exceptions to rules, and the amazing thing is that we learn all of these rules naturally just by listening to and talking with other people. Breaking Baker’s rule is not a sign of lazy thinking or sloppy grammar or anything else negative—it’s just a sign that you’re a native speaker.

The fact that not everybody follows the simple, explicit rule, nearly 240 years after it was created, shows you just how hard it is to get people to change their linguistic habits. Is there any advantage to following the made-up rule? Probably not, aside from avoiding stigma from people who like to look down their noses at those who they deem to have poor grammar. So if you want to please the fussy grammarian types, be sure to use follow Baker’s made-up rule. If you don’t care about those types, use whatever comes naturally to you.

A lot of people hate the verb impact because they say that it should only be a noun or a participial adjective (impacted). The verb seems to be a fairly recent innovation, and it’s often stigmatized because it’s strongly associated with business-speak. (Though it’s worth pointing out that the verb contact is also a relatively recent business-speak derivation from a noun, and nobody gets up in arms about that one.)

I’m not a big fan of impact meaning “affect,” but as far as crimes against the language go, I think it’s pretty inconsequential. I think it waters down the original sense of “impinge upon” or “strike,” but such is the way language goes—words change, and there’s not a whole lot we can do to stop it.

But the participial adjective impacted is something different, at least in my mind. I don’t think it has really gained the “affected” sense that the verb impact has. It seems to me that impacted is only ever used to refer to two things: wisdom teeth and feces lodged in someone’s colon.

These are, to say the least, not exactly the associations one wants to evoke when referring to computer systems. Now, I just want to point out that this association in no way hindered my understanding of the e-mail from my bank; I knew exactly what they meant and did not have to spend any extra time figuring it out. I did, however, do a mental double-take when I read it, and that’s presumably not the reaction they were hoping for.

This is the point where a die-hard prescriptivist would rail against the abomination that is impacted meaning “affected,” but I’m not going to do that. My only point is this: feel free to use whatever words you think are best, but be aware of how they will impact your readers.

Keep in mind that the shirt colors there are just examples—you can choose your own. And, as always, if you have any feedback or requests, feel free to let me know.

Also, I promise that I’m working on a real, substantive post. It should be done any day now . . .

The speech was pretty formal and serious, so I’m not sure if I want to assume that it was a jocular or ironic usage. However, a Google search for “newest fangled” returns a mere 363 hits, and citations in the OED for fangle or fangled are pretty rare and don’t appear much after 1700, so it doesn’t appear that this is an example of dialectal usage. Idiolectal, perhaps, but it’s hard to say since I’ve only got one example and I’m not familiar with Clark’s other works.

At any rate, I got a kick out of it, and I thought I’d share.

Now, Bill Walsh has already covered this topic on his site, the Slot, but it’s worth covering again. I’ve seen a couple different websites that pointed out that WALL-E is either spelled with or “promoted with” an interpunct, and I got involved in a forum discussion where people were wondering whether the dot should be rendered as a hyphen or an asterisk (once again, someone explained that it’s an interpunct).

Something about this strikes me as silly. Did I miss the memo when it was announced that graphic designers are the arbiters of proper orthography? And why is it that some people kowtow to certain logos and not others? After all, as Bill Walsh points out, nobody insists that the proper spelling of Macy’s is actually macy*s so why do we worry about whether it’s WALL-E or WALL*E or WALL·E? (Then again, I see Wal*Mart plenty often. Perhaps there’s some research grant money to be had in studying the sociolinguistics of brand name orthography.)

A while back, I thought this issue mostly cropped up with tech companies (particularly internet companies, like Yahoo and eBay), but then I started seeing the aforementioned Wal*Mart as well as car names like SATURN (remind me again what that stands for) and Mazda6 (now we have to match the italics too? What next, colors and fonts?) I don’t know if this is just an example of the recency illusion, but it does seem like a lot of people nowadays don’t really know how to properly represent brand names.

And anyway, getting back to WALL-E, how do we even know that that’s an interpunct? The Wikipedia article doesn’t cite a source for this fact, and it’s not easy to tell from the logo whether it’s an interpunct, a bullet point, or just a dot. When a novelty font uses a decorative punctuation mark, it might be impossible to say what character that mark is supposed to correspond to. It might not correspond to anything at all, as with the stars in Macy’s and Wal-Mart. As Walsh notes, the five-sided star used in those logos is not the same thing as an asterisk.

I really see no good reason to forsake good judgement and slavishly copy the styling of logos, especially since it’s not always possible to do so. After all, the purpose of a logo is to be eye-catching and recognizable, not to conform to the principles of good spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. I say let logos be logos and text be text. It’s the job of editors to use common sense and good judgement in helping text to conform to reasonable standards. It’s not our job to mindlessly reproduce what we see.

Now, I’ve tried to mellow over the last few years and take a more descriptivist stance on a lot of things, but I’m still pretty prescriptivist when it comes to spelling and style. Hyphens have a few different purposes, one of which is to join compound modifiers, and that purpose was not being served here.

Unfortunately, this is one of those things that most people aren’t really taught in school anymore, and even a lot of editors struggle with hyphens. It seems that some people see hyphens between numerals and whatever words follow them and generalize this to mean that there should always be hyphens after numerals.

But this isn’t the case, because as I said before, hyphens serve a purpose. The stress patterns and intonation of “10 digit(s)” are different in “You have to dial 10 digits” and “You have to dial 10-digit numbers,” because one is a compound and the other is not. The hyphen helps indicate this in writing, and if there’s a hyphen when there doesn’t need to be one, the reader may be primed to expect another word, thinking that “10-digits” is a compound that modifies something, only to find that that’s the end of the phrase.

Of course, one may argue that in compounds like this, the noun is always singular (”10-digit dialing,” not “10-digits dialing”), thus preventing any ambiguity or misreading. While technically true, some readers—like me—may still experience a slight mental hiccup when they realize that it’s not a compound but simply a numeral modifying a noun.

The solution is to learn when hyphens are actually needed. Of course, not all style guides agree on all points, but any decent style guide will at least cover the basics. And if all else fails, trust your ear—if you’re saying it like a compound, use a hyphen. If you’re saying it like two separate words, don’t use one. And if you’re writing or editing anything for publication, you really should know this already.

But for now, you’ll have to be satisfied with something else entirely: t-shirts. I’ve moved my store from Cafepress for various reasons and have expanded my product line a little bit. I’ve got some other designs completed or in the works, but apparently Spreadshirt only lets me have three vector graphic designs at a time until I sell at least 10 shirts.

Until then, if you have any requests for different types of shirts or different designs, like maybe this better living through phonetics one, just let me know and I’ll be glad to accommodate.