Annals of peevology: the double negative

 "Some optimists may be disposed to ask, what is the good of this hair-splitting, and to say that English may safely be left to itself. But, if we examine the history of the language, we perceive, that, since the date of the authorized translation of the Bible, -- the finest example of English, -- the alterations that have taken place have been, generally, for the worse. The double negative has been abandoned, to the great injury of strength of expression ...

 "The nineteenth century has witnessed the introduction of abundant Gallicisms, Germanisms, Americanisms, colonialisms, and provincialisms; nearly all needless, or easily to be supplied by more correct words or phrases. There is no nation, except our own easy-going one, that would tolerate such words as a propos or naive, the one a foreign phrase, the other the feminine of an adjective, applied indiscriminately to nouns of both genders; the Carlyleian before-unheard-of, phrase-binding-together, Aristophanes-wise; such vile compounds as starvation, a Saxon root with a Latin termination, in a misapplied sense; and the many provincial slang words, as to run down and put up with, both provincialisms."

-- From The London Review, 1864, quoted by Fitzedward Hall in "Modern English," 1873

Twelfth Night (or, What You Will)

Way back in November, John McIntyre reminded us all that the "Twelve Days of Christmas" don't end with the big day, but only start there. John had a number of other Christmas crotchets, some of which I don't share -- you can use "'Tis the season" every day from Halloween to New Year's Day for all I care, as long as the apostrophe points the right way -- and some of which I do: What's with all these celebratory "poems" that don't even pretend to scan? There's good doggerel and bad doggerel, and too many writers (and editors) don't know the difference.

But never mind -- that's a year-round peeve, not a seasonal one. What I want to complain about today (as yesterday's "Cul de Sac" comic reminded me) is a journalistic cliche John somehow left off* his list: The annual calculation of the cost of those damn 12 days of gifts. Could anything be less meaningful to a consumer than the cost of a partridge, adjusted for inflation? (Well, yes -- the cost of six geese a-laying or 10 lords a-leaping.) 

This is a conceit you only need to hear played out once in a lifetime; repetition does not improve it. But this year, I was threatened with the annual partridge-in-pear-tree report three different times, on three separate radio shows, all on local NPR stations. Enough already: Put your heads together, producers, and agree to rotate this particular chestnut so it only gets one airing per season. I'd rather eat fruitcake with those green candied blobs than ever hear it again.

[*Correction: In a comment below, John McIntyre points out that he did address the 12-days economics story in a separate seasonal caution, and as usual, he handily out-ranted me. Sorry I missed it -- I'm surprised anyone dared even propose the story after that.]

Build a building, house a housing?

In today's "Pickles," by Brian Crane, Nelson wonders why a building isn't called a "build."

But Nelson is many centuries too late with his peeve. The OED has the noun building dated to the 13th century:

1297 R. GLOUC. 271 And (th)er nas of olde house in (th)e lond non, (th)at he ne amendede mid som lond, o(th)er mid byldynge.
c1430 Syr Gener. 244 This belding we made here Is for you.  
1553 EDEN Treat. New Ind. (Arb.) 14 It ... hath in it very fayre byldinges.  
1611 BIBLE Eccles. x. 18 By much slouthfulnesse the building decayeth.

The dictionary also has two 14th-century cites for build meaning "building" (now obsolete), and of course it lists build meaning "form" ("he has a powerful build"), though it hasn't yet caught up with build = version of software.

Already in Old English, the OED says, words ending in -ing had moved on from being "nouns of action" to expressing "a completed action, a process, habit, or art," as in blessing, learning, wedding.

From this stage, some -ing nouns came to denote

a material thing in which the action or its result is concreted or embodied; as 'a writing was affixed to the wall'; so a covering, holding, landing, shaving, winding (of a river), etc. A peculiar instance is a being, one wherein the attribute of being or existence is exemplified, now usually a living being.

But this is only one of eight groups into which the OED sorts verbal nouns according to their sense. There are also nouns of "continuous action or existence" (crying), of "practice, habit, or art" (fencing, smoking),  of collective designation (clothing, carpeting), and so on. Poor Nelson wants a simple answer, but he hasn't asked a simple question.

Off with the old, on with the new ( blog)

It's not quite that neat; this is actually a continuation of/successor to The Word blog, the woefully neglected offspring of my Word column in the Boston Globe. And I've cross-posted some entries so as not to spring into existence here as naked as the New Year's baby.

Naturally, I've resolved to be more diligent in the coming year. (And now that my book is finished -- click on it to order -- and Erin McKean is sharing the burden of weekly columnizing, I have fewer excuses for negligence. But procrastination springs eternal.) A happy, hopeful 2010 to all!

Crash blossoms: Christmas edition

Over at Headsup: The Blog a few days ago, fev found a headline from the Columbus Dispatch confusing:

Children's major player in tumor war

Having lived around Boston for decades, I had no trouble interpreting it; I'm sure there have been plenty of Globe headlines that referred to our Children's Hospital the same way. But it reminded me of a headline that did mystify me, several years ago, in one of the suburban weeklies:

Fate of Infant Jesus unclear

Wait, what? Isn't the fate of Infant Jesus one thing Christians of all stripes have pretty much agreed on, at least in its broad strokes?

But reading on, I found that Brookline had a Catholic church called Infant Jesus-St. Lawrence, one of the churches the archdiocese put on the list for closing in 2004, and one whose parishioners were putting up a fuss. If the church had been St. Paul's or St. Mary's, there wouldn't have been even a whisper of ambiguity. As it was, the paper produced one of my all-time favorite crash blossoms.

Moderating the (sometimes) immoderate

I liked Grant Barrett and Mark Leibovich's Buzzwords report in yesterday's Times -- especially the fact that they included the useful crash blossom on the list, and that they didn't suggest that salahi has any future as a verb meaning "crash a party." (A slippery word like salahied ousting the satisfyingly concrete and crunchy gatecrashed? Not gonna happen. And no, crash blossom is not an epithet for Mrs. Salahi.)

Even better, though, was Grant's online talkback to some of the commenters on the piece, who'd been invited to contribute buzzwords (but often chose peeves instead). One of them offered a complaint I'd also heard from readers, about "the word 'so' to begin a sentence."  He got a swift (but polite) reality check:

Sentence-initial "so" has had a long run as a discourse marker in English. I’ve had a number of people swear to me that it’s more common than it used to be, but the data show it isn’t. I think some folks are just paying more attention as they grow older and wiser, so it only seems like they’re hearing it more.

If only all comment threads could have monitors on duty to correct misconceptions and reel in the rogue theorizers. But there's a limit to what one author can do. At the end, Grant tried to point the gloomsters toward the sunny side:

If you took this as an opportunity to peeve about language rather than find something joyful and exciting in it, then, I fear, you have fallen out of love with the best tool you ever had.

Amen to that. But hostility is the default option in so many comment threads that people may now think a peeve (like a shower gift) is the expected contribution. And since any comment represents a reader (or at least a drive-by scanner), newspapers have no incentive to turn off the spigot; bilious readers, in these desperate days, are better than none.

Wish we knew 'may' from 'might'

A caption* on the Globe's front page last month read, "The median on Blue Hill Avenue where the Silver Line [transit route] may have been placed."

A couple of readers were puzzled by that "may have been." "I hadn't realized that the Silver Line was missing," e-mailed David Devore of Newton. William F. Bell of Lenox, Mass., agreed: "The meaning is unclear unless you realize that what is meant is 'might have been placed."

I'm with them. For me, the verb there can only be might, the past of may. ("May have been" means there's a chance the line was once placed there; we know that isn't true.)

But the distinction seems to be evaporating. Just two days earlier, I had spotted the construction on the New York Times op-ed page: "If dentists would just decide to withdraw the flossing directive, we may have enough additional spare time to learn Spanish." I could go with either "If dentists decide, we may," or "If dentists decided/would decide, we might," but as written it sounds wrong. This may/might choice is not about levels of likelihood, just about sequence of tenses; normal English uses "She said she was happy," not "she said she is happy" (unless, some say, you intend to emphasize the latter verb).

And today the Globe's op-ed page has, "I fought off the temptation to shoo the animal with a firm 'no!' or 'go to your bed!'’ -- commands that may have gotten results. " [But it never happened. So: "might have gotten results."]

Officially, the Times is on my side, as Philip Corbett explained in a recent After Deadline post:

A verb that is present tense in a direct quotation shifts to past tense in an indirect quotation after a past-tense verb: I am going to the store becomes He said he was going to the store, not He said he is going to the store. In such constructions, the future-tense “will” becomes “would” after a past-tense verb. In these cases, “would” is not acting as a conditional (He would go to the store if he needed something) but simply as the past-tense form of “will.”

Corbett calls this the "formal rule," but I don't think I learned it it as a formal usage; it's just the way everyone said it. So why the shift? It's another of those language mysteries. As I mentioned in a September Word column, Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage can't explain it, and doesn’t approve: 'We advise you to use might in all contexts where the past tense is appropriate or where a hypothetical or highly unlikely situation is being referred to.'"

But a more recent discussion at Language Log quotes the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language on the futility of resistance: "Conservative usage manuals tend to disapprove of [this] usage, but it is becoming increasingly common, and should probably be recognised as a variant within Standard English."


*It turned out the caption was wrong; the rapid bus service it referred to was not officially part of the Silver Line. But that doesn't affect the grammar question.