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#arrant pedantry
prokopetz · 1 year
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A thing that bothers me about wizard schools in popular media – outside of the magic-grade-school stuff, anyway – is that they're typically depicted as being basically magic universities, but their actual curricula and pedagogical approaches look much more like those of a technical institution. Like, buddy, that's not a wizard university, that's a wizard trade school. You can't just slap university student culture on top of trade school pedagogy. It doesn't work like that – the one emerges from the other!
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boxboxlewis · 11 months
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14 and 19 please!
14. that one thing you see in fics all the time this is a personal stylistic preference, rather than a inviolable rule laid down by god, but if i open a fic and see "the Monégasque" or "the taller man" or w/e i am probably closing that tab, it just grates at my brain.
i will also take this opportunity to note that the adjective form of the adverb "gingerly" is in fact "gingerly":)) "He laid a ginger hand--" no he didn't, not unless he'd just been cooking
19. you're mad/ashamed/horrified you actually kind of like... answered here!
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duckprintspress · 25 days
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Round Table Discussion: Grammar Pet Peeves
Today, March 4th, is National Grammar Day! Last year, we celebrated with six of our favorite grammar quirks. This year, we’re going to the other end of the spectrum: we had a conversation with our editors and blog contributors about grammar things we hate. They may be technically correct, but that doesn’t mean they don’t make us crazy. Eighteen people, many anonymous, contributed to this discussion.
Dangling Modifiers
boneturtle: Dangling modifiers, hands down. Even when I can decipher what the writer meant based on context, it viscerally hurts me every time. When I am editing I have to stand up and take a lap around my apartment when I hit a dangling modifier. Remind myself that I am here to help. Learn more about dangling modifiers.
Commas
anonymous: Commas are not difficult! Commas end phrases. Full stop. That’s all they do. Is a phrase necessary to the grammatical coherence of the sentence? if the answer is yes, no commas because that phrase hasn’t ended. If the answer is no, commas! comma hug that bish if it’s the middle of a sentence. The difference between grammatical and informational is whether or not the sentence makes sense without the phrase. 
Examples: 
The man who ordered the six double anchovy pizzas claims to have a dolphin in his pool. 
You need “who ordered the six double anchovy pizzas” because you need to identify which man you’re talking about. The world is full of many men. 
The ancient Buick, which Madeleine purchased via Craigslist, belched black smoke whenever she pressed the accelerator. 
We don’t need to know how Madeleine purchased the car for the sentence to make sense. You don’t even meed “Madeleine” for the grammar to make sense. Therefore, hug that phrase! 
(a comma on each side of the phrase) or give it a dramatic send off with a comma and an end punctuation. (i could go into conjunctions, too, but those are a little more complex, and if you were taught them properly, i understand not getting the comma use 😂 ) 
Prepositions at the End of Sentences
Tris Lawrence: There was a dictionary (Merriam-Webster? Oxford? idek) that posted recently on social media about how the rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition came from English scholars trying to make English line up with Latin, and that it’s totally okay to do it… and I’m just wanting to point to it to yell THIS because uhhh trying to rework sentences to not end in a preposition often creates clunky awkward things (my opinion, I recognize this).
D. V. Morse: Ending sentences/clauses with a preposition. Well, not doing that is supposed to be the rule, but depending on the sentence, it can be a convoluted mess to try and avoid it. Winston Churchill famously told someone off after they “caught” him breaking that rule, saying, “This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.” (Yes, I had to look that up.)
Pronoun Confusion
anonymous: I hate playing the pronoun game when reading. I hate it in life when someone comes up to me and tells me a story involving 2 people of the same pronouns and stops using names halfway through, and I hate it while reading too. Nothing makes me fall out of scene more if I don’t know who just did/said what. Use names. That’s why we have them.
Nina Waters: epithets. If I know the characters name…why? Also, when people use “you” in third person writing. There are times I’ll allow it as an editor/times when I do think it’s at least acceptable but not gonna lie, I absolutely hate it.
anonymous: My pet peeve … I read hundreds of essays in a given month for work, plus a whole lot of fanfic for fun. A rising issue that I have noticed in both places is incomplete sentences (lacking subjects, typically). I think it’s because people rely on Google’s grammar checker to tell them if something is wrong and…Google doesn’t check for that apparently. I’m increasingly convinced that my high schoolers simply weren’t taught sentence structure, because when I ask them to fix it they almost universally say some variant of “I don’t understand what you’re asking me to do.” Therefore, it might be punching down a little to complain about it. I’m not sure. It does drive me nuts though. Lol
“Would Of”
Neo Scarlett: Not quite sure if that falls under grammar, but I hate hate hate when people use “should of” instead of should’ve. Or “would of.” It just makes my toe nails curl up because it may sound right, but it looks wrong and is wrong.
Semi-Colons
Shea Sullivan: I saw a list punctuated by semicolons recently and that made me froth at the mouth a bit.
anonymous: I think any editor who’s worked with me knows that I have a pet peeve about using colons or semi-colons in dialogue. Or really, any punctuation mark that I don’t think people can actually pronounce. Semicolons can live anywhere that I don’t have to imagine a character actually pronouncing them.
English isn’t Dumb!
theirprofoundbond: As a former linguistics student, it bugs me a lot when people say that English is a dumb or stupid language because it has borrowed from so many languages. What people mean when they say this is, “English can be really difficult (even for native speakers).” But I wish people would say that, instead of “it’s dumb/stupid.” Languages are living things. Like other living things, they adapt and evolve. English is basically a beautiful, delightful platypus. Let it be a platypus.
Dei Walker: I remember seeing somewhere that English has four types of rules (I’m trying to find the citation today) and everyone conflates them. And I guess my pet peeve is that everyone treats them equally when they’re NOT. There are rules but not all of them are the same – there’s a difference between “adjectives precede nouns” (big truck, not *truck big) and “don’t split infinitives” (which is arbitrary).
And, because we couldn’t resist, here are some of our favorite things, because when we asked for pet peeves…some people still shared things they loved instead of things they hated.
Oxford Comma
Terra P. Waters: I really really love the Oxford comma.
boneturtle: me: [in kindergarten, using oxford comma]
teacher: no, we don’t add a comma between the last two objects in a list.
me: that’s illogical and incorrect.
anonymous: I will forever appreciate my second grade teacher’s explanation of Oxford comma use: Some sentences are harder to understand if you don’t use it, but no sentence will ever be harder to understand because you do use it. Preach, Mrs. D
anonymous: I am definitely Team Oxford Comma. I even have a bumper sticker which says so
Other Favorites
Shea Sullivan: I adore the emdash, to every editor’s chagrin.
Shadaras: zeugmas! I think they’re super cool!
Shea Sullivan and Hermit: I use sentence fragments a lot. Fragments my beloved.
English Grammar vs. Grammar in Other Languages
anonymous: so in English my favourite thing is the parallel Latin and Saxon registers because of how that affects grammar, but in Japanese my favourite grammatical thing is the use of an actual sound at the end of the sentence to denote a question, as opposed to how in English we use intonation? Also how in Japanese the sentence structure requires reasoning first and action second in terms of clauses. So rather than go “let’s go to the cinema because it’s raining and I’m cold,” you’d go “because it’s raining and I’m cold, let’s go to the cinema.” (My least favourite thing is the lack of spaces between words in the written form but that’s purely because I find that level of continuous letters intimidating to translate.)
I also love how Japanglish in the foreign communities in Japan starts to develop its own grammatical structure as a way of situating yourself in this space between the two languages. It’s used as a call-sign of belonging to that specific community, because in order to make some of the jokes and consciously break the rules of English or Japanese grammar and/or choose to obey one or the other, you’re basically displaying your control over both/knowledge of them. Like, the foreign community in Japan is often a disparate group of people with multiple different native languages who are relying on their knowledge of at least one non-native language but often two to signify their status in the group as Also An Outsider and I think that’s really interesting.
Nina Waters: Chinese and Japanese both drop subjects, and Chinese doesn’t have like… a/the… Japanese doesn’t have a future tense… Chinese kinda sorta doesn’t have tenses at all… (these are not pet peeves, btw, I love how learning a language with such different ways of approaching these things reshapes my brain). Chinese also doesn’t really have yes or no.
There’s a joke somewhere on Tumblr about that, though I actually think it’s about using “a” versus “the,” like, someone was giving a Russian speaker a hard time after they said “get in car” and they were like “only you English speakers are dumb enough to feel this is essential why would I be talking about getting into any random car of course I mean our car wtf.”
anonymous: on the subject of other languages, epithets are also something that happen differently in other languages. In French repeating a word (names included, and sometimes even pronouns) is considered bad writing. As in, way more than in English. Going by how grating the English translation of the Witcher books was to me when the French one was fine, I’d say it’s the same with Polish, at least. It’s also very interesting how brains adapt to writing styles in other languages.
What are some of your favorite and least favorite grammar quirks, in English or in the language of your choice?
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penwiper26 · 3 years
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PSA
- FLAUNT (v.) : Transitive sense, "flourish (something), show off, make an ostentatious or brazen display of" is from 1827. 
 - FLOUT (v.) : "treat with disdain or contempt" (transitive), 1550s, intransitive sense "mock, jeer, scoff" is from 1570s.
So, if somebody is "flaunting" masks, their masks prob have sequins or some fancy shit. 
If they're "flouting" masks, they're not wearing one or bitching about having to. 
This has been today's message from your friendly neighborhood pedant.
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allthingslinguistic · 5 years
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You may have seen articles like this one that list 10 or 15 words whose pronunciations have changed over time. But I can do one better. Here are 100,000 words that illustrate how words change. 1. a: Before the Great Vowel Shift, the name of the first letter of the alphabet was pronounced /aː/, much like when the doctor asks you to open your mouth and say “ah” to look down your throat. In Old English, it was /ɑː/, which is pronounced slightly further back in the mouth. [...] Hopefully by now you see where I’m going with this. It’s interesting to talk about how words have changed over the years, but listicles like “10 Words Whose Pronunciations Have Changed” can be misleading, because they imply that changes in pronunciation are both random and rare. [...] Sound changes aren’t something that just happen from time to time, like the Great Vowel Shift. They’re happening continuously, and they have been happening since the beginning of language.
Arrant Pedantry: 100,000 Words Whose Pronunciations Have Changed
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superlinguo · 4 years
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Superlinguo Seasonal Gift Guide 2019
One of the obviously differences between early years of the Superlinguo gift guide and later editions is that I decided to start making the kinds if linguistics-themed items that I wanted to see in the world. Thanks to the rise of print-on-demand product services like RedBubble, CafePress and Zazzle there are so many more linguistics-themed products than there used to be!
Whether you’re shopping for the Christmas season or the conference season, here are some of my favourite recommendations! If you’re trying to avoid buying things, then I’ve got some clutter-free suggestions as well (podcast subscriptions! Audio books!).
Lingthusiasm swag
It’s not a surprise I’m going to recommend checking out the Lingthusiasm store - one of the best things about running your own merch store is that you get to fill it with things you really like! We use RedBubble to print on demand (except the ties which are done through Zazzle), so check out their shipping deadlines (and keep an eye out for their regular sales!).
The latest Lingthusiasm merch includes:
Lingthustiastic socks! (International Phonetic Alphabet, tree diagrams, and esoteric symbols in a variety of colours
New word art design: LINGUISTIC "CORRECTNESS" IS JUST A LIE FROM BIG GRAMMAR TO SELL MORE GRAMMARS, which is available on shirts, totes, mugs, and zippered pouches,
 A few new items with IPA-themed puns, so you can have glottals on your bottles or liquids around your liquids!
greeting cards with "thanks" or "congrats" on them in the International Phonetic Alphabet
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You can also still get our three prints (IPA, trees, symbols) in various colours on scarves, notebooks, mugs and ties, and a variety of other lingthusiastic gifts.
Other RedBubble linguists
You can bundle purchases on RedBubble to make the most of a sale, or save on shipping.
The Vocal Fries podcast has some themed merch (I particularly love the ‘they go low, we go lower’ mug.)
jazzmoth has fun and colour (Party Chomsky! and other hand-drawn linguistics designs)
shapkaa (OT ☞ manicule series and colourful clipart aesthetic)
gillianembers (black and white text aesthetic)
Other linguistics merch online
Arrant Pedantry has a spreadshirt store with linguistics and editing merch.
If you want wugs head to Jean Berko Gleason’s official Wug Store over on Cafe Press.
Books! Print and Audio!
Below are the books I’ve been excited about this year. I can confirm that the audiobooks for both Because Internet and Shadowscent are excellent.
Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch (Same snazzy cover, but different subtitles in the US and UK.
Shadowscent, P.M. Freestone (AKA as The Darkest Bloom in the UK) - I created a conlang for this fast-paced big-hearted YA fantasy adventure
Language Unlimited: The Science Behind Our Most Creative Power, David Adger
The Dictionary of Difficult Words, Jane Solomon & Louise Lockhart
You can also get a subscription to The Big Issue and have By Lingo delivered to your door every fortnight!
Support your favourite linguistics podcast and creators
There are lots of great language and linguistics podcasts, and many of them have Patreon pages where you can support your favourite show, get an inside view of the show, and sometimes even get bonus content.
Lingthusiasm (at the $15 level you get you own IPA character and a place on our supporter wall)
History of English
Vocal Fries
Talk the Talk
You can also be a patron of Etymonline, support an amazing free resource and and get behind-the-scenes look at how an etymological dictionary is created.
Previous Superlinguo gift guides:
Superlinguo Seasonal Gift Guide (2018)
Superlinguo Seasonal Gift Guide (2017)
Gifts for the Wordnerd in your life (2016)
Seasonal Gift Guide for Word Nerds and Language Lovers (2015)
Gift Guide for the Language Lover in Your Life (2013)
(note that some links in these posts may no longer be active)
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auressea · 5 years
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As part of my on-going work at de-colonizing my use of language... I’m acknowledging my tendency to police grammar and spelling. This was forcibly drummed into me as a child- and it’s taking a LOT of effort to shift.
I recognize the classist, elitist and exclusionary tactics that are baked into language policing. I won’t apologize for my tendency toward pedantry- because I’m Autistic and wired this way.
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paintingarta · 4 years
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All You Need To Know About Winston Churchill Up With Which | Winston Churchill Up With Which
All You Need To Know About Winston Churchill Up With Which | Winston Churchill Up With Which – Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill (30 November 1874 – twenty-four January 1965) was a British politician, army official, and writer. He has been Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, when this individual led Britain to victory inside the Second World Conflict, and again from 51 to 1955. Churchill represented five constituencies during his / her career as a Associate of Parliament (MP). Ideologically a fiscal liberal and imperialist, for the majority of of his profession having been a member associated with the Conservative Party, which often he led from 1940 to 1955, but through 1904 to 1924 has been a member of typically the Liberal Party.
Of combined English and American parentage, Churchill was born within Oxfordshire to a wealthy, noble family. He joined the British Army in 1895, and saw action inside British India, the Anglo-Sudan War, and the Second Boer War, gaining fame since a war correspondent plus writing books about their campaigns. Elected an MEGA-PIXEL in 1900, initially since a Conservative, he defected to the Liberals within 1904. In H. H. Asquith’s Liberal government, Churchill served as President regarding the Board of Business, Home Secretary, and Very first Lord from the Admiralty, promoting prison reform and workers’ social security. During typically the First World War, he oversaw the Gallipoli Marketing campaign; after it proved a new disaster, he resigned coming from government and served in the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front. In 1917, he returned to authorities under David Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions, then as Secretary of State for War and Air, and finally with regard to the Colonies, overseeing the particular Anglo-Irish Treaty and Britain’s Middle East policy. Following two years out of Legislative house, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative authorities, returning the pound sterling in 1925 to typically the gold standard at the pre-war parity, a shift widely seen as creating inflationary pressure and depressing typically the UK economy.
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Three Writing Rules to Disregard
New Post has been published on https://writingguideto.com/trending/three-writing-rules-to-disregard/
Three Writing Rules to Disregard
I have nothing against rules. They’re indispensable when playing Monopoly or gin rummy, and their observance can go a long way toward improving a ride on the subway. The rule of law? Big fan.
The English language, though, is not so easily ruled and regulated. It developed without codification, sucking up new constructions and vocabulary every time some foreigner set foot on the British Isles—­to say nothing of the mischief we Americans have wreaked on it these last few centuries—­and continues to evolve anarchically. It has, to my great dismay, no enforceable laws, much less someone to enforce the laws it doesn’t have.
Certain prose rules are essentially inarguable—­that a sentence’s subject and its verb should agree in number, for instance. Or that in a “not only x but y” construction, the x and the y must be parallel elements. Why? I suppose because they’re firmly entrenched, because no one cares to argue with them, and because they aid us in using our words to their preeminent purpose: to communicate clearly with our readers. Let’s call these reasons the Four C’s, shall we? Convention. Consensus. Clarity. Comprehension.
Also simply because, I swear to you, a well-­constructed sentence sounds better. Literally sounds better. One of the best ways to determine whether your prose is well ­constructed is to read it aloud. A sentence that can’t be readily voiced is a sentence that likely needs to be rewritten.
A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection. (If you want to puzzle your reader, that’s your own business.)
As much as I like a good rule, I’m an enthusiastic subscriber to the notion of “rules are meant to be broken”—­once you’ve learned them, I hasten to add.
But let’s, right now, attend to a few of what I think of as the Great Nonrules of the English Language. You’ve encountered all of these; likely you were taught them in school. I’d like you to free yourself of them. They’re not helping you; all they’re doing is clogging your brain and inciting you to look self-­consciously over your own shoulder as you write, which is as psychically painful as it is physically impossible. And once you’ve done that, once you’ve gotten rid of them, hopefully you can put your attention on vastly more important things. 
Why are they nonrules? So far as I’m concerned, because they’re largely unhelpful, pointlessly constricting, feckless, and useless. Also because they’re generally of dubious origin: devised out of thin air, then passed on till they’ve gained respectable solidity and, ultimately, have ossified. Language experts far more expert than I have, over the years, done their best to debunk them, yet these made-­up strictures refuse to go away and have proven more durable than Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. Put together. Part of the problem, I must add, is that some of them were made up by ostensible and presumably well-­meaning language experts in the first place, so getting rid of them can be a bit like trying to get a dog to stop chasing its own tail.
I’ll dispatch these reasonably succinctly, with the hope that you’ll trust that I’ve done my homework and will be happy to see them go. I’m mindful of Gertrude Stein’s characterization of Ezra Pound as “a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not,” and no one wants to be that guy. Also, if you persist in insisting that these nonrules are real and valid and to be hewed to, all the expert citations in the world won’t, I know through experience, change your mind one tiny little bit.
An admission: Quite a lot of what I do as a copy editor is to help writers avoid being carped at, fairly or—­and this is the part that hurts—­unfairly, by People Who Think They Know Better and Write Aggrieved Emails to Publishing Houses. Thus I tend to be a bit conservative about flouting rules that may be a bit dubious in their origin but, observed, ain’t hurting nobody. And though the nonrules below are particularly arrant nonsense, I warn you that, in breaking them, you’ll have a certain percentage of the reading and online-­commenting populace up your fundament to tell you you’re subliterate. Go ahead and break them anyway. It’s fun, and I’ll back you up.
1. Never Begin a Sentence with “And” or “But.”
No, do begin a sentence with “And” or “But,” if it strikes your fancy to do so. Great writers do it all the time. As do even not necessarily great writers, like the person who has, so far in this essay, done it a few times and intends to do it a lot more.
But soft, as they used to say, here comes a caveat:
An “And” or a “But” (or a “For” or an “Or” or a “However” or a “Because,” to cite four other sentence starters one is often warned against) is not always the strongest beginning for a sentence, and making a relentless habit of using any of them palls quickly. You may find that you don’t need that “And” at all. You may find that your “And” or “But” sentence might easily attach to its predecessor sentence with either a comma or a semicolon. Take a good look, and give it a good think.
Let’s test an example or two.
Francie, of course, became an outsider shunned by all because of her stench. But she had become accustomed to being lonely.
Francie, of course, became an outsider shunned by all because of her stench, but she had become accustomed to being lonely.
Which do you think Betty Smith, the author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, chose? The former, as it happens. Had I been Smith’s copy editor, I might well have suggested the second, to make one coherent, connected thought out of two unnecessarily separated ones. Perhaps she’d have agreed, or perhaps she’d have preferred the text as she’d written it, hearing it in her head as a solemn knell. Authors do often prefer their text the way they’ve written it.
Here’s another, in two flavors:
In the hospital he should be safe, for Major Callendar would protect him, but the Major had not come, and now things were worse than ever.
In the hospital he should be safe, for Major Callendar would protect him. But the Major had not come, and now things were worse than ever.
This is E. M. Forster, in A Passage to India, and I suspect you’ll not be surprised to learn that version 2 is his. For one thing, version 1’s a bit long. More important, version 2, with that definitive period, more effectively conveys, I’d say, the sense of dashed expectations, the reversal of fortune.
These are the choices that writers make, and that copy editors observe, and this is how you build a book.
One thing to add: Writers who are not so adept at linking their sentences habitually toss in a “But” or a “However” to create the illusion that a second thought contradicts a first thought when it doesn’t do any such thing. It doesn’t work, and I’m on to you.
2. Never Split an Infinitive.
To cite the most famous split infinitive of our era—­and everyone cites this bit from the original Star Trek TV series, so zero points to me for originality—­“To boldly go where no man has gone before.”
There’s much more—­much more—­one could say on the subject, but I don’t want to write about the nineteenth-­century textual critic Henry Alford any more than you want to read about the nineteenth-­century textual critic Henry Alford, so let’s leave it at this: A split infinitive, as we generally understand the term, is a “to [verb]” construction with an adverb stuck in the middle of it. In the Star Trek example, then, an unsplit infinitive version would be “Boldly to go where no man has gone before” or “To go boldly where no man has gone before.” If either of those sounds better to you, be my guest. To me they sound as if they were translated from the Vulcan.
Otherwise, let’s skip right to Raymond Chandler. Again, as with the Star Trek phrase, everyone loves to cite Chandler on this subject, but it’s for a God damn [sic] good reason. Chandler sent this note to the editor of The Atlantic Monthly in response to the copyediting of an article he’d written:
By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-­down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.
Over and out.
3. Never End a Sentence with a Preposition.
This is the rule that invariably (and wearily) leads to a rehash of the celebrated remark by Winston Churchill that Winston Churchill, in reality, neither said nor wrote:
“This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.”
Let me say this about this: Ending a sentence with a preposition (as, at, by, for, from, of, etc.) isn’t always such a hot idea, mostly because a sentence should, when it can, aim for a powerful finale and not simply dribble off like an old man’s unhappy micturition. A sentence that meanders its way to a prepositional finish is often, I find, weaker than it ought to or could be.
What did you do that for?
Why did you do that?
has some snap to it.
But to tie a sentence into a strangling knot to avoid a prepositional conclusion is unhelpful and unnatural, and it’s something no good writer should attempt and no eager reader should have to contend with.
If you follow me.
Benjamin Dreyer is vice president, executive managing editor, and copy chief of Random House. He began his publishing career as a freelance proofreader and copyeditor. In 1993, he became a production editor at Random House, overseeing books by writers including Michael Chabon, Edmund Morris, Suzan-Lori Parks, Michael Pollan, Peter Straub, and Calvin Trillin. He has copyedited books by authors including E. L. Doctorow, David Ebershoff, Frank Rich, and Elizabeth Strout, as well as Let Me Tell You, a volume of previously uncollected work by Shirley Jackson. A graduate of Northwestern University, he lives in New York City.
Excerpted with permission from the new book Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, by Benjamin Dreyer. Published by Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Copyright © 2019 by Benjamin Dreyer. All rights reserved.
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Three Writing Rules to Disregard
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austenmarriage · 7 years
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New Post has been published on Austen Marriage
New Post has been published on http://austenmarriage.com/rules-road-regency-language/
Rules of the Road for Regency Language
Recently, some writers online were discussing language, particularly the use of language for an historical period such as the Regency age. I was traveling and unable to jump into the discussion, but the comments set me to reflect about my approach—which I had considered for quite a while as I began my historical fiction based on Jane Austen’s life.
As for general language, I take the actor’s approach when preparing to play an historical character: don’t imitate the person, inhabit the person. Learn all you can, absorb the way the individual thinks, feels, and acts, then speak naturally. The voice will come to you. Afterward, with a period piece, check for anachronisms. It’s not unusual for me to check five or six words a page. Trouble is, some old English words sound new, and some new English words sound old. “Ignition,” for example, sounds like a modern word: We relate it to car ignitions, “ignition, liftoff,” and so on. However, this word has been firing up our vocabulary since at least 1612.
The discussion covered a variety of bugaboos, mostly prohibitions that grammarians in the 19th Century tried to force on English to make it more like Latin, to rein in English’s sprawling structure to become more “proper.”
Among these rules, there’s no law against beginning a sentence with “And” or “But” or other conjunctions; however, that usage was not typical of traditional English and it does sound modern. Austen, though, uses an opening conjunction once in a while. Here’s an early example from “Mansfield Park,” when Fanny is trying to settle in: “And sitting down by her, he was at great pains to overcome her shame in being so surprised, and persuade her to speak openly.”
When I begin a sentence with a conjunction, it is usually to express a character’s thoughts, to distinguish a character who speaks abruptly, or to mark the less formal aspect of speech. Austen does the last in the same section in “Mansfield”: “And remember that, if you are ever so forward and clever yourselves, you should always be modest; for, much as you know already, there is a great deal more for you to learn.”
Austen commonly uses the “semicolon-and”; perhaps fifty for every “period-and.” Why should the former be seen as stately English, connecting two balanced phrases, and the latter as improper?
Split infinitives are another bogus issue. English is an accented language, and sometimes sentences split an infinitive for the rhythm: “To boldly go where no one has gone before” is a “Star Trek” phrase in almost perfect iambic. “To go boldly” or “Boldly to go” strike the English ear as wrong.
The phrase originated in a 1958 White House pamphlet on space travel; it was amended to “where no man has gone before” for the first “Star Trek” television series, then returned to “where no one has gone before” for the revival, “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” The phrase is also brought out in the split-infinitive debate. I’ve always wondered why the phrase wasn’t “to boldly go where none has gone before,” because that is perfect iambic pentameter. Perhaps the author thought it sounded too lyrical. Or perhaps “none” might have been contradicted by alien species, of which there are aplenty boldly going somewhere in the “Star Trek” saga.
There are other sentences in which the only correct sense requires the infinitive to be split. How else could you construct the following: “Prices are expected to more than double by next year.” The words that split the infinitive are nothing more than modifiers of the main verb; i.e., adverbs.
Split prepositions are also fine. Both Austen and Shakespeare used them. When challenged on his use of sentence-ending prepositions, Winston Churchill is reputed to have responded: “This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put!” Though there is no definitive source of the remark that traces directly to the British Prime Minister, it sounds like the English bulldog—though he might have thrown in a “bloody” or two. Ending a sentence with a preposition is fine if it gives the sentence a punch. The same is true of keeping the preposition with its object where it technically belongs.
Among the other language issues that arose in the earlier lively discussion, I admit that it bugs me when people don’t know the difference between “farther” and “further,” but Jane Austen didn’t. Neither did Thomas Hardy, who wrote nearly a hundred years later. They both used “further” to mean distance. “Further” has always had the broader sense, but it’s a relatively recent development to separate the two so that “farther” means only “distance” and “further” means everything else. A nice distinction, but new.
Having been a copy editor, I learned and enforced all the rules. I was part of the priesthood. Over many years since, I have become more flexible. I do not believe technicalities should overcome the sense the writer is trying to convey. Some technically correct solutions are so cumbersome they break the spell by taking the reader out of the story. Usually, the best solution is to rewrite the sentence entirely, but that sometimes creates other problems.
I have a good friend and fellow writer who was never very good with spelling and punctuation. He asked me one time if the technical stuff really mattered, since the writer must focus on content. I replied that the rules were part of our box of tools and after twenty or thirty years we should be able to use them. I noticed decided technical improvements in his work after that. These changes, in turn, led to crisper writing. Sharpening his tools paid off.
There are many good style guides, from the plain and simple “AP Style Book” to the dense and complex “Chicago Manual of Style.” Even when the rules seem unintelligible, you can usually find an example that matches the phrase you’re concerned about. E.B. White’s “Elements of Style” is another classic, more about elegant writing than technical style.
One of the problems for American writers with an English audience is the difference between English spelling and punctuation and American spelling and punctuation. Some of the differences, mostly in spelling, evolved over time (“colour” = “color”, “encyclopaedia” = “encyclopedia”). A few developed independently (automobile “boot” = automobile “trunk”).
The main differences, however, happened abruptly and deliberately. Have you ever wondered why American punctuation is the inverse of English? American usage begins with a double quotation mark, and any interior quote is a single quotation mark: “Jones said angrily, ‘I hate quotes within quotes!’ ” English usage is the opposite: ‘Jones said angrily, “I hate quotes within quotes!” ’ Another difference is that in English usage, a noun that has a plural sense takes a plural referent: “The government/they.” In American usage, the same word has a singular sense: “The government/it.”
The reason is purely arbitrary. After the Revolutionary War, American printers wanted protection from the more established and cost-efficient British publishers. In a patriotic and protectionist fervor, Americans established a style just different enough to keep British printers from winning U.S. print contracts. It was the literary equivalent of driving on the other side of the road.
(Originally, most nations used the left side of the road in order to have the (right-handed) sword hand in a protective position against people coming the other way. The U.S. switch to the right side related to Napoleon’s preference for the right, which shifted the continent in that direction, and to the larger freight wagons over here in the U.S., which favored a rider on the left rear horse. This person would have a whip in his right hand for the horses and would want to see oncoming traffic on his left, putting his wagon on the right.)
Back to language. In some cases, the arbitrariness of the grammatical rule frustrates sense.
Consider a mixed group of men and women asked a question, and no one knows the answer. Which should it be:
“Everyone shook his head in confusion.” grammatically correct but leaves out women
“Everyone shook her head in confusion.” grammatically correct but leaves out men
“Everyone shook their heads in confusion.” grammatically incorrect but correctly inclusive
Most “singular/he” constructions can be avoided by changing the noun to plural, something like “people/they.” This is one example of trying to write around the problem. Most grammarians say it is fine to use the “everyone/they” construction in informal usage, but not in formal usage. I would normally use “everyone/he” or “everyone/she” in nonfiction, depending on sense. Nonfiction wants to be rigorous. In the above example, I would use “everyone/they” in fiction. Why? Because in fiction, there’s a different kind of rigor, which is maintaining the spell of the scene. There is no good substitute for the word “everyone” in English. Try recasting the above sentence to “people” and you’ll see what I mean: “People shook their heads in confusion.” What people? Everyone!
Also, rewriting the section might create more awkwardness than it solves; and being the way most of us speak, “everyone/they” is far less intrusive to a reader who, you hope, is caught up in your story. If the only one who objects is a grammar freak, I’m OK with that. I know I would have tried every workaround beforehand.
There’s only one unbreakable grammatical rule: You can’t break a rule unless you fully understand it, know why it exists, and have a good reason to break it.
As an American, I use U.S. spelling and punctuation. I know the obvious differences between U.S. and UK style, but a UK publisher will be far more capable than I of properly dealing with the nuances. English and American readers buy the opposite editions all the time, and neither has any trouble reading the other’s punctuation and spelling style. The best thing is to be proper and consistent with whichever you use.
When writing from an English point of view, however, I avoid Americanisms. In writing about Austen, I have readers versed in both the Regency period and UK English review my work before I publish. I have been corrected in the American use of “fall” for “autumn,” “creek” for “brook,” and a few other such provincialisms. I was embarrassed to learn from an English friend that I used the American “momma” instead of the English “mama” near the end of Volume II of “The Marriage of Miss Jane Austen,” my novel on Austen’s life, after having used the correct form earlier. This was a late addition and suffered from the lack of vetting.
A few times, my intrepid early readers caught a few words they thought were anachronisms but were not. One flagged “administratrix” as modern technical, but it goes back to circa 1561. I follow a rule similar to that of Regina Jeffers, another Austen blogger, who will use a word if its documented use comes within ten or twenty years of the time she writes about. The rationale is that a word must have been circulating in speech for a while before it became part of the written lexicon. In my Austen trilogy, the character Ashton Dennis uses the word “stomp” in late 1802. The first known written use of the word was 1803. I decided that Ashton must have been the one to coin it.
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prokopetz · 27 days
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Hey proko, with the fairy vs walrus debate going on, did you forget extremely portable baby walruses exist? That seems kind of an oversight for the tax law loophole guy of tumblr.
If you're allowed to go "what if the walrus is a baby", I'm allowed to go "what if the fairy is just a guy with no obviously supernatural attributes", and we're right back where we started. This is one of those scenarios where sophistry perfectly cancels itself out unless you arbitrarily stipulate that only one side is allowed to engage in it.
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jondrowe · 13 years
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Why You Shouldn't Talk About 'Mutual Friends'
I know, I know. Blame it all on Charles Dickens. But saying 'our mutual friend' is just wrong.
Mutual means A is to B as B is to A. So mutual support means I support you, and you in turn support me. Mutual defense means I've got your back, and you've got mine.
When you say 'mutual friend', what you mean to say is that Tom is a friend to Dick, and also a friend to Harry. But that doesn't make Tom their mutual friend, he's a common friend.
Interesting that we have no trouble talking about a common enemy, but default to the word 'mutual' when talking about friends.
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prokopetz · 4 months
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I understand that this is a profoundly pedantic bit of crankery, but it bugs the hell out of me when a robot has jiggly boobs, but then later their chest gets opened up for someone to mess around with their internal gadgetry and you can clearly see that the interior wall of the thoracic compartment follows the exterior contour of the breasts. Like, are these tiddies rigid, or are they not? Pick one or the other!
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prokopetz · 11 months
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Fantasy worldbuilding tip #137: most of the time, the word you're looking for is "wild", not "feral". Though the term may be used in other ways when referring to individual animals, when referring to a whole species, "feral" specifically means a group of creatures which are born wild, but are descended from domesticated stock. Thus, if you call a fantasy species that you invented "feral", you're necessarily implying that there exists a domesticated version of whatever it is.
This may in fact be what you intend, but best be explicit if you do!
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prokopetz · 1 month
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What the whole "walrus vs. fairy" thing really illustrates is the importance of defining your terms. What some folks are clearly taking "a fairy" to mean – including, based on their subsequent remarks, the original poster – is "you open the door and see something which by its very existence utterly refutes the validity of human reason as a means of gaining knowledge about the world, and you are instantly, intuitively and irresistibly aware of this fact", but what the overwhelming majority of people interpreted it to mean is "you open the door and see Tinkerbell", and those are two very different propositions!
(Well, unless you're the sort of person for whom seeing Tinkerbell would instantly provoke a full on H-P-Lovecraft-finding-out-he's-part-Welsh existential crisis, in which case they are in fact the same proposition, but this does not seem to be the majority opinion.)
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prokopetz · 4 months
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The reason nobody can agree where the boundary between "visual novel" and "adventure game" lies is because the term "adventure game" originated in the American gaming industry and was later loaned into Japanese, while the term "visual novel" originated in the Japanese gaming industry and was later loaned into English, but the meanings shifted in both cases, so the American gaming industry uses "visual novel" to mean something different from what it means in Japan and the Japanese gaming industry uses "adventure game" to mean something different from what it means in America, and now we've got two terms with (at least) four separate definitions between them, but nerds on the Internet who don't understand how loan-words work keep trying to directly compare them without taking into account that there are multiple only partially compatible cultural idioms in play.
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