Associated Press style book finally caves on "hopefully"

I can take this one, but if irregardless ever makes it into a dictionary or style book, my linguistic snooty pants will be set on fire.

Yeah, this really exposes the stupidity of prescriptivist stubbornness. Hopefully they've learned their lesson.

omg u guyz r so uptite. lolz.

i agree that prescriptivist grammar is ridiculous, especially with antiquated rules like pronoun and number correctness (using he instead of they, blah). But somethings were changed where the meaning just doesn't make any sense -- like the word irregardless. I will never accept.

Also when people qualify absolutes like unique (like most unique) that drives me nuts.

Prescriptivism is bad, except for the things I prescribe! :P

I don't think unique is used as an absolute most of the time, with or without modifying adverbs.

True story: the first time I ever "met" the former babble moderator audra (original and best), was on her "other" discussion board/blog, where she castigated me for using "irregardless." I think that's the only time I ever used the word. It was definitely the last (except to relay this anecdote, obv).

I have used irregardless before too -- back in the day :) -- and then saw that sketch on SNL with jimmy fallon and ben affleck where they parodied Boston ummm, highschool kids and felt like a huge idiot.

I agree with your notes on prescriptivism, I disagree with it, unless I agree with it. Most of the grammar stuff is too old timey, and descriptivist (spelling, my bad) grammar and a better commentary on how communities and cultures use language, except when words are integrated because of misuse and misunderstanding!

Also the word only if frequently used wrong (in terms of meaning in a sentence) and it too drives me nuts.

I think I took on a lot of my linguistic professors annoyances with words and grammar.

Also when people spell a lot as one word.

Sven, you should take that quote to the United Nations and get everyone speaking (the Queen's) English! Then we'd get the best "communicability" ever!

We've been over this before, of course, but 'perfect communication', frequently cited or at least appealed to by prescriptivists, is a myth. It doesn't exist. It's never existed, and it never will. That's not to say normalization forces don't or shouldn't exist, however--but to believe that the operate around a single, dominant locus is not only false, it's impossible.

Heh. For a (in his heart of hearts a prescriptivist) take on Garner, see this (much, much longer) essay by lexiphile/savant David Foster Wallace: Tense Present. Also available in DFW's breathtaking Consider the Lobster. I guarantee you it is worth the read.

Quote:

The most salient and timely feature of Garner's book is that it's both lexicographical and rhetorical. Its main strategy involves what is known in classical rhetoric as the Ethical Appeal. Here the adjective, derived from the Greek ethos, doesn't mean quite what we usually mean by ethical. But there are affinities. What the Ethical Appeal amounts to is a complex and sophisticated "Trust me." It's the boldest, most ambitious, and also most distinctively American of rhetorical Appeals, because it requires the rhetor to convince us not just of his intellectual acuity or technical competence but of his basic decency and fairness and sensitivity to the audience's own hopes and fears.

These are not qualities one associates with the traditional SNOOT usage-authority, a figure who pretty much instantiates snobbishness and bow-tied anality, and one whose modern image is not improved by stuff like American Heritage Dictionary Distinguished Usage Panelist Morris Bishop's "The arrant solecisms of the ignoramus are here often omitted entirely, `irregardless' of how he may feel about this neglect" or critic John Simon's "The English language is being treated nowadays exactly as slave traders once handled their merchandise...." Compare those lines' authorial personas with Garner's in, e.g., "English usage is so challenging that even experienced writers need guidance now and then."

The thrust here is going to be that A Dictionary of Modern American Usage earns Garner pretty much all the trust his Ethical Appeal asks us for. The book's "feel-good" spirit (in the very best sense of "feel-good") marries rigor and humility in such a way as to allow Garner to be extremely prescriptive without any appearance of evangelism or elitist putdown. This is an extraordinary accomplishment. Understanding why it's basically a rhetorical accomplishment, and why this is both historically significant and (in this reviewer's opinion) politically redemptive, requires a more detailed look at the Usage Wars.

I could give what I consider a strong rebuttal of Garner and DFW if you like, but I've met with far too many grammarians to be too interested in goin through that. As a literary critic, I'm well aware of the grammarian programming that gets installed deep within our intellects from a very early age; so I'm not terribly inclined to going through the horrible process of trying to remove it, or at the very least, point out that it's there.

For myself, I'd liked "passed away while continuing to struggle with reality".

CF, the DFW piece was, indeed, well worth reading.  

He offers many interesting observations which I'd like to think about for a while...and that's exactly what I'm going to do next. 

Get out and read The Pale King! DFW and taxes! Fun!

Since this is our most recent grammar thread, I'll post this by Steven Pinker (Boo! Hiss!) here:

Quote:

Nature or nurture. Love it or leave it. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.

If you didn’t already know that euphonious dichotomies are usually phony dichotomies, you need only check out the latest round in the supposed clash between “prescriptivist” and “descriptivist” theories of language. This pseudo-controversy, a staple of literary magazines for decades, was ginned up again this month by The New Yorker, which has something of a history with the bogus battle. Fifty years ago, the literary critic Dwight Macdonald lambasted the Third Edition ofWebster’s New International Dictionary for aiming to be “a recording instrument rather than … an authority” and insufficiently censuring such usages as “deprecate” for depreciate, “bored” fordisinterested, and “imply” for infer. And in a recent issue, Joan Acocella, the magazine’s dance critic,fired a volley of grapeshot at the Fifth Edition of theAmerican Heritage Dictionary and at a new history of the controversy by the journalist Henry Hitchings, The Language Wars. Acocella’s points were then reiterated this week in a post by Ryan Bloom on the magazine’s Page-Turner blog. The linguistic blogosphere, for its part, has been incredulous that The New Yorker published these “deeply confused” pieces. As Language Log put it, “Either the topic was not felt to be important enough to merit elementary editorial supervision, or there is no one at the magazine with any competence in the area involved.”