Dictionary.com with some good advice

I don’t know what’s going on over at Dictionary.com, but I like it. They’ve been stepping up their blogging game recently. Gone are the days of word hating (I hope)! Instead, they recently published a post about the problematic nature of some words that get casually thrown around. If you don’t know why it might be harmful to use words like Sherpa, Nazi, and hysterical, you might want to check this one out.

“Stop Using These Phrases in 2020 (Use These Synonyms Instead)” on Dictionary.com

Good job, Dictionary.com. Keep it up!

1 Idea You Are Literally Beating to Death

Look! Up in the sky! It’s bird shit… It’s acid rain… It’s another garbage article about Words You Shouldn’t Use™!

Ugh.

Ok, so this one’s from way back in 2013. Excuses? Maybe. But it was linked to by an article from 2019, so maybe it’s still relevant? I don’t know. Thick as thieves, these bad linguistics posts, I guess.

Anywho…

The article is called “9 Words You’re Literally Beating to Death” and so you already know it’s going to be the worst. It’s by renowned linguist esteemed language scholar revered language expert some dude named Rob Ashgar. Let’s have a little look see at Rob’s linguistic brain farts, shall we? (Scroll down for why all this is important)

Right off the bat, we’re deep in La La Land:

A few people can shift from a chatty and casual tone to a formal and professional one. But most of us can’t. We import our worst habits from everyday chattage to a formal job interview, a sales presentation or a eulogy.

“A few people”? What, like 3? Maybe four or five? You got any evidence to back this up, Robbo? Remember there are over 500 million L1 English speakers. If only a few of them can shift from a chatty and casual tone to a formal and professional one, why don’t you tell us their names? Oh right, because you’re making this up.

Book review: Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer

Dreyer’s English is not a style guide like the MLA or Chicago Manual. It’s more in the vein of the Elements of Style and Gwynne’s Grammar. Unlike those books, however, Dreyer’s English is fun to read and (for the most part) correct in its language proclamations. One of the reasons this book is good is because Dreyer knows what a style guide is and what it should be. He explains in this quote:

This book, then, is the next conversation. It’s my chance to share with you, for your own use, some of what I do, from the nuts-and-bolts stuff that even skilled writers stumble over to some of the fancy little tricks I’ve come across or devised that can make even skilled writing better.

Or perhaps you’re simply interested in what one more person has to say about the series comma.

Let’s get started.

No. Wait. Before we get started:

The reason this book is not called The Last Style Manual You’ll Ever Need, or something equally ghastly, is because it’s not. No single stylebook can ever tell you everything you want to know about writing – no two stylebooks, I might add, can ever agree on everything you want to know about writing […] (p. xvii)

Sounds good to me. This passage also gives you an idea of Dreyer’s writing style, the conversational nature of it. I’ve broken this review up into the Good, the Bad and the Other. This may seem like there are three equal parts, but really there’s much more good in this book than anything else.

Good Writers Use “Thought” Verbs and So Can You

In a post about Words You Should Avoid™, the website ProWritingAid gives some advice about which words you shouldn’t use in your creative writing. The words that they single out are think, know, understand, realize, believe, want, remember, imagine, and desire. They quote Chuck Palahniuk as evidence of a successful writer who also thinks you shouldn’t use these words:

Thinking is abstract. Knowing and believing are intangible. Your story will always be stronger if you just show the physical actions and details of your characters and allow your reader to do the thinking and knowing. And loving and hating.

The idea is that these words are used to describe what is going on in a character’s mind, but good writers instead describe their characters thoughts in other ways… or something. Chuck Palahniuk says “Instead of characters knowing anything, you must now present the details that allow the reader to know them.  Instead of a character wanting something, you must now describe the thing so that the reader wants it.”

But does Chuck really avoid using these words? And how common are they really? Let’s have a look.

Tom Freeman on Lionel Shriver on semantic drift

Over on the Stroppy Editor blog, Tom Freeman has written a response to Lionel Shriver’s article in Harper’s complaining about semantic drift. You should go check Freeman’s article out here.

I want to point out two especially great part’s in Freeman’s post. First, Freeman starts his post by boiling down what these language complaints are really about:

The remarkable thing about language change is that it only started happening when I started noticing it. For centuries, English was constant and true, but as soon as I was old enough to have an appreciation of good standards of usage, people around me started falling short. Since then, there has been an alarming, unprecedented surge in rule-breaking.

Neither I nor anyone else really believes any such thing, of course, but some of us sometimes talk as if we do. One such person is Lionel Shriver.

I tell my students something similar. The people who complain about language change are often the same people who are no longer in their 30s with their lives ahead of them. They’re in their 50s or 60s now and they’re recognizing that they are being replaced whether they like it or not. Life in your 20s and 30s seems great – you don’t have as many responsibilities, you still have your youth – of course the world and everything in it should stay the same, including the language rules that you learned. But it doesn’t. You get older. The world changes. And language changes. How dare they?

Freeman also gives the idea that dictionaries should be thought of as guidebooks, not gospels:

For Shriver, a dictionary should be a rulebook of almost scriptural immutability. She wants usage to adhere to the rules that she spent time and effort internalising; any deviation, whether by the ignorant masses, by trendy literati or by dictionaries themselves, is to be fought.

The better way to view a dictionary is as a guidebook. It describes the features of the language as you’re likely to encounter it, and it thereby helps you find your way around. To do this, a dictionary needs to record differences in usage and it needs to be able to change.

That’s a very good point. Go read the rest of Freeman’s article here: https://stroppyeditor.wordpress.com/2019/07/31/how-do-you-cope-when-everyones-usage-is-wrong/

Book review: 25 Rules of Grammar by Joseph Piercy

I sort of remember enjoying this book, but now that I write my review, it seems that I didn’t like it so much. I guess it’s good for the most part, but it looks like there are many problematic claims. This review is more-or-less in list format, but so is Piercy’s book so…

Book Review: The Great Typo-Hunt by Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson

Short review: tl;dr

Jeff Deck, an Ivy-league-educated middle-class white man, goes around the country to correct typos in everything from store signs to t-shirts to whatever else he comes across. He enlists friends (including his Ivy-league-educated co-author Benjamin D. Herson) who do not check him on his privilege, but rather enable him on his path to be as petty as possible. Deck and his friends learn little to nothing about language before, during or after their excursion. What could be a profound journey of discovery turns out to be nothing more than an aimless adventure of assholery. File this one under “Language books not worth reading”. Hunter S. Thompson would be pissed to know that these asshats stole the title of one of his books.

The vowels haven’t gone anywhere

There’s another brainfart article on language in the New York Times. The author, John Williams, shows right away that he’s thinking out loud from somewhere deep inside his armchair with this one. Basically, Williams is having some vague instance of a Recency Illusion as he ties James Joyce and MGMT to Tumblr, Flickr, and other modern companies which opt out of using vowels in their names. His idea is that – apparently all of a sudden – no one is using vowels anymore. lol.

A couple of things. First, as a Twitter friend pointed out, orthography and speech do not correspond. That means that our writing system and our spelling system only have a passing resemblance to each other. Writing is not speech on paper – it’s so much less than that. You think we need vowels in writing to distinguish between words, but we really don’t. This is Linguistics 101. Williams totally whiffs on it.

Second, Williams claims that people are only now routinely removing vowels from their writing by signing their correspondence with “Yrs” (his example). He makes a reference to “Finnegans Wake” and says “Time was that you had to be an experimental weirdo to ditch vowels.” That’s a nice dig at ya boy Joyce, but ol’ Jimmy J was just stealing this style from other writers. John Adams didn’t use vowels when he signed his letters. Neither did Jane Austen. Time was when no one wrote vowels because ink and paper were precious commodities yo.

Third, I kinda have to give Williams some credit for actually reaching out to a linguist, but unfortunately it doesn’t make the article any better. Williams contacted John McWhorter to see what is going on with people dropping vowels. I don’t know how much he talked to him – I only have the quotes included in the article – but it seems like McWhorter was really phoning this one in.

Now, full disclosure: I like John McWhorter when he talks about linguistics. He’s made some highly questionable political debates and articles recently, but his linguistics stuff has always been sound. In this article, however, McWhorter says “There is a fashion in American language culture right now to be playful in a way that is often childlike. This business of leaving out the vowels and leaving you to wonder how to pronounce something, it channels this kid-ness in a way — like saying ‘because science,’ or the way we’re using -y, when we say something like, ‘well, it got a little yell-y.’”

I don’t know what McWhorter is on about here. No one wonders how to pronounce Tumblr, Flickr, MNDFL or Mdrn (except maybe NYT writers working on a deadline?). And saying “because NOUN” is not channeling “kid-ness” (what is kid-ness anyway, linguistically speaking?). And and, adding a y-sound onto the end of words is really not child-like. That’s just language-like. They’re called diminutives. Go talk to the Aussies about them. Or any other English speakers.

So yeah, stay away from the NYT Style Section’s hot takes on language.

Casting the first ice pick

This tweet by Prof. Daniel Drezner of the Fletcher School came across my feed last night.

I'm grading grad student papers and one of them keeps using "it's" when "its" is appropriate and I'm not saying I'm a harsh grader but I'm torn between giving the paper a failing grade or stabbing the author with an ice pick.

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) November 21, 2018

Teachers, don’t make fun of your students. It’s not funny. It’s shitty.

Besides that, the distinction between its and it’s is so insignificant that only people who don’t know much about language would cling to it like it’s some ancient secret. Arguing about its/it’s (or picking on your students over it) is like arguing over who the best Robin was, Dick Grayson or Tim Drake*.

As it turns out, Ammon Shea (the author of Reading the OED, which you should totally read) did some digging and found out that Prof. Danny mistakenly used it’s for its in his dissertation. Because of course he did.

@dandrezner Does this look familiar? It's from your dissertation. "it's concern" comes on p. 207 pic.twitter.com/pd615gadtC

— ammonshea (@ammonshea) November 24, 2018

I wonder how he’d feel if his supervisor joked on twitter dot com about stabbing him with an icepick.

* If you didn’t get this reference, don’t worry. It doesn’t matter. Just like misusing its/it’s doesn’t matter. If you did get this reference, then you know the answer is Tim Drake**.

** Fight me.

Word Fails Me #9: Neither do me

Ok, we don’t need to get into subject and object prepositions, but it’s bananas that Word is suggesting I write “Neither do me” over “Neither do I”. Come on, Word! Not even the laissez-fairest of linguists (such as me) would say that “Neither do me” is good (enough) English.

This is an entry in a series of posts I’m calling Word Fails Me, in which I highlight the strange ideas that Microsoft Word has about English grammar. Each post will be a screenshot with a short comment. The intention of this series is to amuse you and make you wonder where Word is getting its ideas. I’m not trying to be condescending to Word’s grammar checker or the people behind it. Word is a fascinating program and the grammar checker can be a lifesaver, even if it leans prescriptivist sometimes. If I come across interesting research into MS Word’s grammar checker, I’ll share it here. You can find all of the entries under the Word Fails Me tag. Enjoy!