One of those people that care(s)
The second hour of KQED's "Forum" radio program this morning had as its
guest Kitty Burns Florey, author of
Sister
Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of
Diagramming Sentences (Melville House, 2006), a charming and
decidedly non-technical account of
Reed-Kellogg sentence diagramming
and those who have loved it. She kept reminding her listeners
that she was neither a linguist nor an English teacher, she carefully
made no claims about the pedagogical values of sentence diagramming,
and she was realistic about change in language (while struggling to
recognize what was "technically" or "traditionally" correct). But
of course most of the phone calls were from people retailing
their pet peeves about English grammar and usage, complaints that will
be familiar to readers of Language Log.
Early on in the calls came one beginning firmly:
I'm one of those people that cares...
that care.
(meaning that the caller cared about prescriptive correctness).
The caller laughed and then went on with her complaints, and nobody
remarked on either of the usage points in her first sentence.
[Correction: now that I can access the recording of the show, I see that I got my transcription backwards: "Susan from Berkeley" says: "I was going to say that uh I'm one of those people that care [laugh]... that cares." This is a bit more delicious than what I thought I heard the first time, as we'll see below. (Thanks to Jonathan Lundell.)]
It's been five whole months since we
wrote
about the choice of singular or plural verb in a restrictive
relative clause following
one of
+ plural NP: singular to go with
one,
or plural to go with the plural NP? (The plural variant is
considerably older, but the singular has been around at least since
Shakespeare and people have been complaining about it since around
1770, after it began appearing with some frequency in the works of
respected writers;
MWDEU suggests that there's a
subtle difference in meaning or discourse function between the
alternatives, so that both should be accepted as standard.) The
caller went for the singular first and then altered it to the plural,
possibly recognizing the "correction" with her laugh. Maybe she
cares too much. [Addendum: now we see that she started with the prescriptive standard (plural) and revised it to the sometimes-proscribed version (singular).]
People who maintain that they
CARE about grammar very
often care about
that as a
restrictive relativizer with human-denoting heads, maintaining that
only
who is acceptable in
formal writing (or even acceptable, period).
MWDEU tells the convoluted story of
relativizer
that with
reference to human beings: it came first, then fell out of favor, but
was revived in the 18th century, though with a bad taste left over from
its years in exile among the common people; John Simon and William
Safire have deplored it.
In searching the Language Log archives for the link to my earlier
posting "One of those who", I pulled up the postings in which this
expression and some of its variants were used (rather than mentioned)
by the bloggers. Our usage on the singular/plural issue is
divided: two to two for "one of those who" (singular in Mark Liberman's
postings #2459 and #2466, plural in Geoff Pullum's #937 and Mark's
#1347), an edge for the singular for "one of those people who" (Mark's
#1209, #2381, and #3044, versus plural in Geoff Pullum's #1461 and
someone I quoted in #3555). In any case, we are not unhappy with
the singular.
On the
that/
who issue, we seem not to have used
that at all for reference to
human beings in the contexts "one of those people..." or "one of
those..." So we're inclined to be
who users. But we wouldn't
deride the "Forum" caller for her choice of
that.
That's ok with us.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at November 21, 2006 09:27 AM