Lavengro

Comparative and superlative inconsistencies and peeving

Ann Curzan's latest Lingua Franca post describes ten common peeves. They have been conveniently summarised as follows by Barrie England, who has blogged extensively on the subject of the negative canon:

1. 'I could care less'
2. Apostrophe used for plurals
3. Hyperbolic use of 'literally'
4. Confusion of 'loose' and 'lose'
5. Confusion of 'your' and 'you're'
6. Confusion of 'their', 'there' and 'they're'
7. Misunderstanding of 'nonplus'
8. Confusion of 'affect' and 'effect'
9. Confusion of it's' and 'its'
10. Claim that 'irregardless' is not a word

There is one other that is worth mentioning: the use of a superlative adjective for two items is often held to be a solecism. Nevertheless, Jane Austen wrote in Emma:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father, and had, in consequence of her sister's marriage, been mistress of his house from a very early period. Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses, and her place had been supplied by an excellent woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection.

Less common surely is the reverse, the use of the comparative with more than two items. Nevertheless , in the Sherlock Holmes story of The Five Orange Pips Watson recalls some cases that are not described in full.

The year '87 furnished us with a long series of cases of greater or less interest, of which I retain the records. Among my headings under this one twelve months I find an account of the adventure of the Paradol Chamber, of the Amateur Mendicant Society, who held a luxurious club in the lower vault of a furniture warehouse, of the facts connected with the loss of the British bark Sophy Anderson, of the singular adventures of the Grice Patersons in the island of Uffa*, and finally of the Camberwell poisoning case. In the latter, as may be remembered, Sherlock Holmes was able, by winding up the dead man's watch, to prove that it had been wound up two hours before, and that therefore the deceased had gone to bed within that time -- a deduction which was of the greatest importance in clearing up the case

Watson, or rather Doyle of course, uses latter to describe the last of five items.

*The Adventures of the Grice Patersons in the Island of Uffa by Sandor Jay Sonnen is available in Kindle format from Amazon.

Grammar poll

Tom Freeman at the Stroppy Editor quotes a YouGov poll that showed 1000 Americans some sentences and asked them to pick which one of each pair or group was grammatically correct.

These were the results:

1. My oak tree loses it’s leaves in autumn. – 31%
   My oak tree loses its leaves in autumn. – 67%
2. The dogs are happily chewing on they’re bones. – 4%
   The dogs are happily chewing on their bones. – 89%
   The dogs are happily chewing on there bones. – 4%
3. I think you’re very smart. – 91%
   I think your very smart. – 6%
4. I consulted an attorney whom I met in New York. – 61%
   I consulted an attorney who I met in New York. – 32%
5. I don’t trust fruits and vegetables which aren’t organic. – 24%
   I don’t trust fruits and vegetables that aren’t organic. – 68%
6. The beneficial affects of exercise are well documented. – 17%
   The beneficial effects of exercise are well documented. – 77%

His comments on these figures are just what I would have written myself but he got there first so please follow the above link to see them.

The Guardian whinges

The Guardian has an article entitled

Good grammar saves lives – and rescues friendships

Despite the uproar it caused, local councils are still banishing apostrophes from street signs. But a single apostrophe can save utter humiliation

It is written by Gary Nunn, a journalist in Australia with no apparent linguistic qualifications. Well,

1) Does it need saying again? Apostrophes have nothing to do with grammar. They are punctuation marks or even, some say, the 27^th letter of the alphabet.

2) The pronoun it in the subhead has no noun referent. The sentence should read: Despite the uproar caused by their decision … That is a grammatical mistake.

After relating an anecdote about how his neighbour knew that a text message wasn’t genuine because it contained your for you’re, the author concludes rather grandiosely:

A single apostrophe can prevent you from being ostracised in your own neighbourhood.

We then have

Good grammar saves lives, too. “Let’s eat, Grandma” and “Let’s eat Grandma” have two very different meanings: one an invitation, the other homicidal.

An old chestnut that has nothing to do with grammar. And nothing to do with apostrophes.

But if we are going to be picky about commas, there is an extraneous comma in this sentence:

Oh how sick is [sic], the three-lettered bitchy Latin put-down that succinctly and snootily says “Don’t for one second think that was my error.”

The comma after [sic] apparently marks a pause in speech but the [sic] is a parenthesis, already marked at beginning and end by square brackets to indicate a pause. The base sentence is

Oh how sick is the three-lettered bitchy Latin put-down …

(NOTE: On rereading this post I see that the comma might be intended to mark an apposition. If so, it is correct. However, the presentation is clumsy. The brackets, which suggest an editorial insertion, should surely be replaced by inverted commas to indicate a quotation.)

There then follows a spectacular whinge about apostrophes with special reference to street name signs.

Birmingham, Mid Devon, Cambridge, East Staffordshire, East Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire – all took the decision to remove apostrophes from street signs. You can imagine them, sat [sic] around like the parish council in the Vicar of Dibley, eating Marmite cheesecake and discussing the things that really matter to locals – such as spending money creating new, apostrophe-less signs.

Our grammar angel contacted all the local authorities that have abolished apostrophes and was told by Huntingdonshire that the decision ‘was made to aid clarity when using address names in search engines and sat navs’. That sounds fair enough to me but ‘Birmingham city council – Europe’s largest local authority – didn’t respond before the deadline.’

How rude of them! Or can one imagine them not sitting around eating Marmite cheesecake but in fact doing the things that really matter to locals and not spending taxpayers’ money on a petty query from a solipsistic journalist?

And shouldn’t our author refer to ‘the parish council in The Vicar of Dibley’ rather than ‘the parish council in the Vicar of Dibley’? Sometimes a capital letter can make the difference between the name of a sitcom and group sex.

(The Vicar of Dibley was a BBC sitcom featuring a woman Church of England vicar, Wikipedia.)

Less and fewer

Can anyone honestly say that this is a reasonable use of English? This is hypercorrection because less is used with quantities (click to enlarge):

As I say in A Guide to English Language Usage:

Few(er) is used with countable nouns and little/less is used with uncountable nouns. However, native speakers often use less with countable nouns: less books, people, years. When this refers to a quantity rather than to a number, it is perfectly acceptable in forms such as (No) less than fifteen minutes, 200 miles, £3000.

Gwynne, suicide and language

We know that Nevile Gwynne lives in a world of his own where grammar is as he thinks he was taught at school. The problem is that he tries to make that world ours. Tom Freeman, the Stroppy Editor, reports hearing Gwynne say ‘When I was young there was no such thing as suicide,’ and that the modern explosion of suicide was due to people ‘not thinking coherently’ – a tragic result of their using ‘hopefully’ as a sentence adverb and saying ‘different to’ and such other brain-destroying, life-ruining horrors.

In a detailed post that is well worth reading Tom has the figures to show that Gwynne is utterly mistaken on suicide rates. I can only second his conclusion:

My objection to Gwynne is not that he is conservative or uncompromising or authoritarian. My objection is that he is ignorant, incompetent and lazy. He literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

I have dealt with Gwynne myself here, here and here.

ABC y la lengua de Shakespeare / A Spanish newspaper gets it wrong

English version below.

La falta de precisión en las traducciones en España no es nada nuevo. He descrito varios ejemplos en este mismo blog aquí y aquí. Pero hay otro aspecto. Hace poco expliqué aquí como el famoso relaxing cup of café con leche in Plaza Mayor de Ana Botella (enlace en inglés) no era tan mal del punto de vista lingüístico como muchos decían. Ahora ABC hace lo mismo con la carta que Artur Mas ha enviado a los líderes de la UE. No me interesa aquí la política del tema pero Ramón Pérez Maura se equivoca de forma espectacular en su artículo.

Dice textualmente:

Mas empieza tuteando a la canciller Merkel. En inglés no existe el tuteo propiamente dicho. Esa distancia se guarda dirigiéndose a ella como «Señora Canciller» y en ningún caso como «Querida», algo que en inglés se reserva para los amigos.

Es cierto que en inglés no se hace la diferencia entre tú y Usted, como también es cierto que en castellano se escribiría Señora Canciller. Pero es igualmente cierto que en inglés en todas las cartas (exceptuando las más íntimas) se escribe Dear sin implicar ninguna relación de intimidad. Por supuesto el equivalente español Apreciado no hace creer al destinatario en la aprecio que el autor tenga por él. Igualmente, Yours faithfully no expresa una fidelidad personal, como Atentamente no es necesariamente una señal de atención por parte del autor

En inglés (y en muchos otros idiomas y según la mayoría de los criterios de urbanidad) jamás debe empezarse una carta con un «Yo...».

Al contrario Sr. Pérez. Es de lo más normal que una carta escrita en la lengua de Shakespeare, que Usted defiende con tanto empeño, empieza precisamente con las palabras que leemos aquí. Es una forma de introducir el tema de la carta en las primeras palabras y, como es una regla de hierro en inglés que el sujeto se encuentra delante del verbo, como también que no se omiten nunca los pronombres, empezar con las palabras I am writing to let you know no es nada extraño. De hecho esta frase tiene 2,250,000 resultados en Google.

Traduce acontecimientos por developments, que en inglés es más bien desarrollos urbanísticos (el subconsciente...), en lugar de emplear la palabra events.

Bueno, en la traducción normal acontecimientos son events y desarrollo es development. Pero los que saben más de esta lengua que Sr. Pérez Maura, saben que los ingleses hablan de developments para describir acontecimientos que desarrollan y cambian. La carta de Mas es correcta y ABC comete otro error garrafal.

Y para colmo

Pone el día del mes delante del mes en lugar de detrás como se hace en inglés

Para mañana esperamos leer en ABC como la BBC tampoco domina la lengua inglesa. De hecho las dos formas son igualmente correctas para escribir la fecha. Unos eligen 12 December (the twelfth of December) y otros prefieren December 12 (December the twelfth).

Queda clarísimo que tanto ABC como Sr. Pérez Maura se equivocan estrepitosamente. Hasta qué punto será por ignorancia o por ceguera política es un tema que no nos interesa aquí, pero el daño hecho a la marca España por tantas chapuzas es evidente.

*****

It is common in Spain for translations to be found wanting in accuracy. I have mentioned several examples myself (here and here). But there is another aspect to the matter. A few months ago I pointed out how the fuss about a speech made by the Mayor of Madrid was not as disastrous in purely linguistic terms as was being made out. Now the Spanish newspaper ABC has done something similar in a description by Ramón Pérez Maura of a letter written in English by Artur Mas, the President of the Catalan Government.

The background is that Mas wishes to make Catalonia independent of Spain and wishes to recruit support among the leaders of the other EU countries and others. The politics of the matter are of no interest to this blog but it is worth noting that ABC is a conservative newspaper that strongly opposes Mas. That may have some bearing on the extraordinary article that it has published. While other papers have criticised Mas’s letter for its content, tone, style or even existence, ABC focuses on the use of the English language in the letter – and thereby offers spectacular proof of Muphry’s (sic) Law, which states that “If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written”.

Pérez starts by saying that Mas has used the familiar tú form in his letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He admits that English has no familiar form as such but he bases this criticism on the opening salutation Dear Chancellor and the ending Yours faithfully, which he translates literally as Fielmente tuyo. But both of these are perfectly correct in English. All letters (except the most intimate ones) begin with Dear; this is a convention that no more implies intimacy than the Spanish equivalent Apreciado implies respect. Letters that begin with Dear Sir, Madam or other title conventionally end with Yours faithfully, this being no more than a formula lacking in meaning. Letters that begin with Dear Mr, Mrs, Ms etc. and surname conventionally end with Yours sincerely.

Next, he criticises the fact that the letter begins with the pronoun I, attributing this to egotism. But Mas’s letter begins I am writing to let you know and that is an absolutely standard way of introducing the topic of a letter written in English. It gets 2,250,000 ghits

Then Pérez goes on to complain about the word developments. It is true that desarrollo is the normal Spanish equivalent of development, in the urban or economic sense for example, and that acontecemientos, which is normally translated as events, would be the right word in Spanish; but in English developments is a perfectly good word for this context.

The last point is that the letter has 12 December instead of December 12. Dates are complicated in English but both forms are used. The BBC places the numeral before the month.

It is clear that ABC has got this completely wrong. To what extent it is plain ignorance and how much is political intent is hard to say but the image of Spain is hardly benefited by this.

Women and men, pedantry and punctuation

Once again the internet produces a supposed example of the importance of the correct use of punctuation, and once again it fails to stand up to minimal scrutiny.

In this sentence:

A woman without her man is nothing

all that is needed is the final point. The sentence is clear and unambiguous.

The first variation:

A woman, without her man, is nothing.

introduces an unnecessary parenthesis without changing the meaning in the slightest.

The second variation:

A woman: without her, man is nothing.

is just a complicated way of saying:

Without a woman man is nothing.

This declarative form is defensible as a piece of rather overblown rhetoric but is hardly an example of normal usage.

In short, we see forced examples being used yet again to make a non-existent point. Nothing in these variations helps communication. (See my discussion of the internet’s hardline views on the Oxford comma.)

Better than I or me?

In a sentence transformation exercise a student was presented with this:

I can’t play the guitar as well as Jane does.

Jane plays ______________________________

He put:

Jane plays the guitar better than me.

I accepted it as correct without comment, even though some people would insist that it must be better than I.

The only slight doubt in my mind is whether the does (which is redundant though correct) in the original sentence implies that better than I do is required as the answer. However, this is not for Proficiency; it is an exercise that I found on the internet and use for diagnostic purposes with new students so I see no need at all to be pernickety. While the prescriptive logic that demands than I is clear, practical use is clearly in favour of than me. It may be that than is perceived as a preposition and the oblique form of the pronoun is used naturally.

The Google Ngram for British English (below) shows that than me has always been more popular than than I with a great change in its favour starting in the 1970s. Than I will include instances of than I am/do/have etc. Graphs for American English and all English are similar but show greater closeness, with near parity in about 1940.

I have mentioned this question before in connection with between you and I (here).

Literally Spanish

The non-literal use of literally to strengthen an expression is a recurrent theme of English language comment. The usage is also found in Spanish as we see in El País (my emphasis):

Pero la situación había llegado a un punto en el que Obama se veía, literalmente, con las manos atadas, no ya para sacar adelante las reformas prometidas, sino para garantizar el funcionamiento básico de las instituciones judiciales fundamentales.

But the situation had reached the point where Obama literally found his hands tied, not just to go ahead with the promised reforms but to ensure the basic working of the fundamental legal institutions.

The Spanish Royal Academy’s Dictionary does accept this meaning:

Que debe entenderse en la plenitud de su sentido la palabra a la cual acompaña. Estoy literalmente extenuado.

The word that it accompanies to be understood in its full meaning. I am literally exhausted.

Comprising and caution

In this week’s World Wide Words newsletter Michael Quinion looks at the problems surrounding comprise. He follows the common usage as described in the COED:

– USAGE According to traditional usage, comprise means ‘consist of’ and should not be used to mean ‘constitute or make up (a whole)’. However, a passive use of comprise is fast becoming part of standard English: this use (as in the country is comprised of twenty states) is more or less synonymous with the traditional active sense (as in the country comprises twenty states).

While recognising the undoubted existence of is comprised of he feels obliged to issue a warning:

it would be wise for a serious writer who values their reputation to be careful of the is comprised of form. It will still attract criticism.

This is the same point that I have made about split infinitives. Descriptivism is fine for theoretical purposes; by nature I am a descriptivist myself. But for practical purposes those who make a living by teaching or by writing for the public cannot afford to row against the mainstream of accepted norms.