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Learning grammar from Billy Bob Thornton
I just discovered the rather hilarious site? blog? Celebrity English, which critiques the speech of the likes of Billy Bob, Angelina, and Jessica. It's much funnier for being absolutely deadpan:
Billy Bob has made an error in parallelism. His second sentence contains a list of items that are not all the same grammatical structure.
Dead-on, too, in its analyses of the celebrities' grammar. Even so, I would have preferred "are not all" in the sentence I just quoted to read "don't all have." (Since when are "items" "structure"?)
The truth is, everyone needs an editor!
I would like to explain ...
Comments on my previous entry expressed doubt about the correctness of the grammar of "I would like to thank ..." when it means "I am now thanking." Don't worry -- it's fine. By way of explanation, I've hunted up highlights from an e-mail exchange I had in 2006 with Joe Pickett, the editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, in which I asked for his thoughts on a closely related point. Me:
Here's
a question I'm trying to answer:
Harold
Shaw, of Penobscot, Maine, writes: "Tell them to stop it! When
someone says, 'I want to thank all the little people who voted for me,' why don't
they just go ahead and do it? Say 'I thank all the little' etc., and get it
done with?"
Of course, "I want
to thank ...," meaning "I am now thanking," is perfectly
standard. (Similarly, "I want to tell you a story. Once upon a time ...")
But I don't find a relevant definition in the AHD or any other dictionary.
Doesn't seem to me that the ordinary "desire" meaning ("Used to express desire or
intent: She said she would meet us at the corner") quite
fits, because someone who says "I want to thank ..." is gratifying
the desire. The "be in need of" meaning doesn't fit either. The idea
is more nearly expressing an intention to ..., no? What am I missing?
I think this is related
to polite requests using would and like and want, rendering what are really
commands:
"Would you like to
go to the store and get me some aspirin?" "Want to go to the store
and get me some aspirin?"
I think it ostensibly
fits the "desire" meaning but is used pragmatically to mean
"please."
But let me look around a
bit.
I looked in A
Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, by Randolph Quirk, Sidney
Greenbaum, et al., and they confirm what I noted before.
As for would (I am
simplifying):
p. 233 section 4.63
discusses "tentativeness or politeness: could,
might, and would";
"Tentative Volition
(in polite requests)" e.g. in "Would you
lend me a dollar" would is more
polite than will.
As for like (again
simplifying):
p. 235 notes this:
Hypothetical would when followed by a verb such as like,
love, or prefer is used
to indicate a tentative desire in polite requests, offers, or
invitations: Would you like some tea? Thanks but I'd prefer
coffee.
While this doesn't
exactly address your reader's concern (the expression of thanks in public), the
situations seem close enough. The expression of gratitude naturally calls for
politeness and self-effacement, and so would like is
the natural choice.
While we might not be
taken aback if someone said "I thank all the people who made this movie
possible," it's just not as polite as "I would like to thank . .
."
So there you have it: would like to adds an extra tinge of politeness to what it precedes. Politeness may not be ipso facto grammatical, but it comes close.
"I would like to thank ..."
That thoroughly ordinary staple of awards ceremonies demonstrates something curious about English -- and probably many other languages too. Namely:
If you'd like to thank someone, why don't you?
Um, I just did.
In "I would like to thank...," "would like to" means "I'm doing it even as I speak." But you won't find that meaning of in dictionaries -- at least, not anywhere you can find it, in any recognizable form. I believe this is called an "implicit performative utterance" -- "performative" because the statement actually does what it refers to, and "implicit" because it doesn't do it literally and directly, the way, for instance, "I hereby thank ..." would.
Apostrophes, part 2
In my " Apostrophe News" entry of a week ago, I said that I hadn't seen anyone point out that the city council of Birmingham, England, was following in the footsteps of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names when it banished apostrophes from street signs. That's because I didn't read Michael Quinion's discussion of the flap as carefully as it deserved.
Quinion concludes:
My impression is that fashion, the real difficulties that exist in some cases, and -- particularly -- the absence of firm teaching of grammar and punctuation in school, are all leading to an accelerating decline in the correct use of the mark.
I couldn't agree more. If everybody understood the rules governing apostrophes, there would be less temptation to break them. If we didn't see the rules broken all the time, we'd find it easier to understand what the rules are, and apostrophes would be better able to do their job.
The Elements of Comics Style
Writing is awash in conventions: Start a sentence with a capital letter. End a sentence with a period, question mark, or exclamation point. Don't hyphenate after an adverb that ends in "-ly." And on and on.
All that stuff is my stock-in-trade. So I was delighted to discover (by way of reader Joel Blum, of Paris -- thanks, Joel!) that comic-book letterers have their conventions too: Point the balloon tail at the character's mouth. Use burst balloons only for screaming. Use hollow sound effects when you need impact but have serious space constraints.
If I hadn't read all the way to the end of Nate Piekos's "Comics Grammar and Tradition" page, I would have missed wonderful information like "Old-school telepathy balloons look like a thought balloon except they have breath marks on opposing corners" and "Traditionally, whispered dialogue is indicated by a balloon with a dashed stroke. More recently accepted options are ..."
An irresistible time-waster.
Peeved about "slay"
Huh. I have as many peeves as the next grammarian, but "slay" doesn't particularly bother me. It's no farther off-kilter than "pix" in the beloved 1935 Variety headline "Sticks Nix Hick Pix" (translation: Small-town and rural viewers aren't responding positively to movies set in rural milieux).
Headlines are often highly condensed -- I've put in my time as a newspaper editor deleting unnecessary syllables to get the danged thing to fit on one line. And "Slaying" is at risk of being read as a participle rather than a noun-adjective -- as in "Slaying Suspect Amanda Knox, Mystery Killer Vanishes."
In any case, I probably don't need to worry that "slay suspect" will turn up in The Atlantic anytime soon.
"With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?"
Am I paranoid to wonder whether AT&T's "customer-service" representative was punishing Stanley Fish for correcting her grammar? Or, more precisely, for ranting?
He kind of asked for it. I mean, she was instructed to say "With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?" He complained. No doubt she has also been instructed to say "I'm sorry you feel that way" in response to any complaint she can't resolve. So when that remark elicited another complaint from Fish, there wasn't much she could do to get him off the phone (and surely she has also been instructed to get callers off the phone ASAP) except to fob him off on someone else. So she invented a problem with his Social Security number and shipped him off to limbo.
Real human communication has been driven far underground in our dealings with corporate representatives. Paradoxically, corporate goals of courtesy and efficiency are what drove it there. Of course, the result is neither courteous nor efficient -- it's just mechanized. The only partial solution I know is to stay really, really nice, even when I'm really, really annoyed. Does anyone else have another strategy that's more satisfying?
No, it's not a "visitor's" center!
My extremely cool colleague Jim Fallows has written about the dopey mistakes the Chinese make when they translate things into English -- most recently here. He wonders why they don't ask a native English speaker to look translations over before making them public.
I, however, worry about the dopey mistakes that native English speakers make. I wonder why people don't run things by someone who's known to be good with spelling and punctuation and so forth.
Here's a case in point. That's Harvard in the background. (Apologies if the photo looks as peculiar on your screen as it does on mine!) I'm beginning to think the battle against misplaced apostrophes is over, and my side lost.
Myriad ways to say it
I'm feeling a wee bit trivial as everybody else argues about the election or the economy and I slog along minding our language. All I can say in my defense is that readers continue to show an interest. For example, this just in, from a reader named Wanda Lee:
YES! I have a language question! Mine is something that grates like chalk on a blackboard when I read it--but if editors at publishing companies don't correct it I figure I must be the one in the wrong. Please straighten this out for me.
"Myriad" or "a myriad of"? I've always considered "myriad" itself to mean the same as "a lot of," but now it seems either usage is OK with publishers. "A myriad of" reads to me the same as "a a lot of of" or "a many of of." To tell you the truth, I hope I'm wrong so I can get over it annoying me so because I think it's here to stay!
Thank you for a service that is so helpful--to some of us. Wanda, just as you hoped ... The "myriad" you like is a perfectly good adjective, as in this snippet from the Iowa City Press-Citizen: Brian Flaherty, chairman of the Johnson County Democratic Party, ... added that myriad issues from health care to the war in Iraq to the nation's standing in the world have inspired people to volunteer. But the word is also a perfectly good noun, as in this recent AP story: A sampling of presidential campaign-oriented direct mail from some of the battlegrounds reveals a myriad of messages. Or this from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: It's difficult to tell how large the Obama or McCain campaigns' online networks are -- or how many e-mail addresses either have gathered.
But for Washington voters, that combined with a competitive gubernatorial race and a myriad of other hotly contested races and ballot measures could mean a lot of extra lunchtime reading -- or a lot of deleting.
(Well, yes, those bits are from political news -- language is relevant to everything!) In fact, the noun came first, appearing in texts from the mid 1500s, whereas the adjective wasn't invented until almost 200 years later. And -- get this -- originally it meant 10,000 of anything, especially soldiers. So if an enemy force decimated a myriad ... Who wants to do the math? Wanda, may I suggest you start thinking of "myriad" as roughly synonymous with both "numerous" and "a number of" or "plentiful" and "plenty of"?
Collocations vs. cliches
Written yesterday:
I'm on the plane to London,
reading a review copy of a book with the - I have to say - unappealing title A
Damp Squid. (Thereby hangs a tale, of
course, which you can read when the book is published, in December.) It
contains a lot of thought-provoking stuff about how dictionaries - in
particular, the OED - are now
made and what else we can learn from the tools that lexicographers use to make
them.
Case in point: "collocates," words
that go together naturally and relatively commonly, and "collocations," combinations
of such words - for instance, "eccentric behavior" but "quirky perspective."
Today's lexicographers can generate statistics about how often a given word
appears before, after, and in the vicinity of other particular words. This
helps them zero in on precise definitions, but the idea is interesting to me
for other reasons.
It brings to mind clichés and the
puzzle of how these differ from good
collocations. Writers are constantly being told and telling themselves to use
"fresh" language. If instead of "case in point," above, I'd written "case at
issue," would that be fresh language, or would it just be weird? (I'd say the
latter.) Is "fresh language" itself a cliché, or is it a desirable collocation?
(In between.)
I'd love to be turned loose on the
"corpora" - vast collections of text and speech - from which lexicographers
generate those statistics. It would be fun to find out whether "fresh language"
is stale and "eccentric perspective" quirky. My suspicion is that I'd just be
quantifying what's known as an ear for language, and the project would be about
as useful as, and useful in a similar way to, figuring out the differences in
molecular composition between good and mediocre food. But let's see if I get a
chance to ask the Oxonians about collocations. Information often contains
surprises.
PS: My computer's power ran out
before I got to the end of the book. The material toward the end is on subjects
I know well, like "style wars" and "usages people hate." It furthered my
suspicion that quantification has its limits.
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