Foolish hobgoblins
In response to my recent
posting
on spelling rage, in which differences between American and
Canadian spelling figured prominently, Stephen Jones writes to propose
that we should "accept both the British and American forms
indiscriminately". I think this is an excellent idea, but it's
unlikely to gain wide support, since it's going to look to a lot of
people like advocating
INCONSISTENCY, and consistency
is widely believed to be a good thing in itself.
As a linguist, I have to point out that inconsistency is just another
name for variability, and variability is not some pesky defect of
languages, but a central feature of them (along with, at least,
opposition, compositionality, redundancy, ambiguity,
synonymy/paraphrase, and hierarchical structure -- plus, of course,
shared norms). Language (both spoken and written) varies from
person to person, from social group to social group, from occasion to
occasion, and even for a single person on a single occasion, from
moment to moment. And this is a very good thing. It would
be insane to try to enforce a single choice between variants, on all
occasions, for everyone.
So the question is: when is regulation (in favor of consistency)
appropriate, and when should variability flourish? This is far
too big a question for me to answer here, but I will talk about some
cases -- mostly from the mechanics of written English -- where it seems
to me a case can be made for letting people do whatever they feel like
doing at the moment. You could always choose one variant, or
always choose another (in either case recognizing that other people
make different choices, and that's ok), or choose between them in some
systematic way, or choose between them at your whim (in which case
there might be a system in some of your choices, but not one that
you're aware of -- and some of your choices will be made at random).
This last possibility -- true free variation within an individual --
certainly occurs. The production of segments in speech shows a
good bit of variation, even for a single speaker, even within a single
word. My /o/ (as in
rose
and
coat and
no) ranges over a considerable
territory phonetically. Some of this variation is in fact
conditioned by the phonetic context, and some of it has to do with
factors like speed of speech, emphasis, accommodation to (or distancing
from) other people's speech, and so on. But there remains a good
bit of variation that has no apparent conditioning.
Similarly in writing. I write the capital letter
A sometimes in its cursive form,
sometimes in its printed form. Both variants can occur within a
single sentence, and I don't even write my first name the same way
every time (though I stick to the cursive form for official
signatures). Mostly I have no idea why I've chosen one of these
variants. So far as I know, no one has ever had a problem with
this; in fact, so far as I know, no one has even noticed the
variation. I have no plans to reform my handwriting practice so
as to be consistent in my
As.
Now, back to British and American spelling. Jones is proudly
defiant:
When I set work for my Saudi students,
or even when I write an internal memo to staff, I deliberately mix the
spellings; I'll write 'color' one minute and 'colour' the next. A
plague on both your purities!
He's opted here for true free variation. The options he's
rejected include three versions of the injunction to Be Consistent:
Strict Global Consistency: always
choose one particular variant. That means everybody.
Strict Local Consistency:
By Group: Everyone in some group must
use just one variant,
consistently, but different groups (say, Canadians and Americans) are
allowed different choices.
By Individual: Each person must use just one variant, consistently, but
different people are allowed different choices.
By Context: choose variants systematically, by context; but be
consistent in your choices. (Say, use British or American
spellings exclusively, according to the practice of the person you're
writing to; use quot-punc order, with periods and commas inside
quotation marks only if they were in the quoted material, if you're
writing for Language, but
punc-quot order if you're writing for Oxford University Press.)
Consistency by Context can, of course, be recommended for everyone, for
groups, or for individuals.
Consistency with Variances: always choose X unless you can defend Y in
specific circumstances. (Often recommended by the usage
manuals. For instance: Avoid Passive in general, unless you can
argue that there's a good reason for it in this specific case; always
use restrictive relative
that,
unless you can defend the choice of
which
in particular circumstances.)
I go into such detail here mostly to highlight Strict Local Consistency
by Individual, a recommendation I find baffling. Here's an
instance reported by Jones in his e-mail to me:
About thirty years ago the London
examination board, responsible for O and A level exams, announced that
students could use American spelling but would have to use it
consistently. This is idiotic.
No American student will be taking a British examination unless he has
spent part of his time in the British education system and thus got his
spelling mixed up between the two varieties.
What's important here is that these students deal on a regular basis
with two slightly different sets of practices and are likely to have
trouble differentiating them; in reading, they are likely to treat the
variants as equivalent (a point I'll return to below), and that view
might well carry over into their writing. I can understand, up to
a point, that British examiners might want to insist that people in the
U.K. do as the British do -- Strict Local Consistency by Group and
Context -- though I don't fully understand why they should care so much
about minutiae of spelling that are known to vary in the
English-speaking world, to the point of treating non-local variants as
errors to count against exam-takers. But requiring Strict Local
Consistency by Individual -- do graders actually search through essays
to check consistency? -- strikes me as a foolish insistence on
consistency for its own sake.
I replied with a story of my own:
I've had dealings with an editor at a
major academic press who will, if pressed very hard, allow an author to
use restrictive relative which
-- but only if they use it CONSISTENTLY, and never use
restrictive that. This
is lunacy.
Or, in other terms, a foolish consistency. Of course, what people
who object to Fowler's Rule are asking for is not the right to use
which as
THE
restrictive relativizer -- that would be silly, because there are
syntactic contexts in which
which
is decidedly inferior to
that,
to the point of being sometimes unacceptable -- but the right to have
BOTH
which and
that available to them. (I'm
even prepared to argue that the two relativizers are subtly different
in meaning, a difference related to the fact that relativizer
that is a complementizer and
relativizer
which a (definite
and anaphoric) pronoun.)
On to further cases in the mechanics of written English. The
treatment of the two parts of compound words, for instance: written
solid, hyphenated, or separated by a space? Many are fixed, but
others show variation, and I can't see why people should insist that
only one version be allowed. I myself sometimes write
diningroom table, sometimes
dining-room table, sometimes
dining room table (although it's
always, I think,
dining room
on its own), and I can't see the point in fixing on one of these
versions to the exclusion of the others.
I use
OK as, I think,
the only spelling of this word, but I don't care whether other people
spell it
ok or
O.K. or
o.k. or
okay or sometimes one of these and
sometimes another. (Oh dear, I now discover that I in fact use
ok sometimes -- not really a
surprise in someone who's generally sparing with upper case. See above.) Why
should anyone care?
Now, a few words on apostrophes. Mark Liberman has already
explored this territory, in
a
posting that takes up Jonathan Starble's
considering (in the
Legal Times)
the deep divide that exists among the
nation's intellectual elite regarding one of society's most troubling
issues -- namely, whether the possessive form of a singular noun ending
with the letter s requires an additional s after the apostrophe.
and goes on to examine the practice of Justice Antonin Scalia in this
regard, which is variable (
Kansas's,
Ramos's,
witness's; but
Stevens',
Adams',
Tibbs'), and his own, concluding,
puckishly:
On this question, I agree with
Associate Justice Scalia. At least, I'm rarely certain what the
spelling should be in such cases, and so I add s or not, as the spirit
moves me. If this is the thin edge of the moral-relativist wedge, so be
it -- Antonin and I stand together, behind the right to follow the
dictates of conscience in each individual s+possessive circumstance.
I'm astonished that Mark was not besieged by people screaming THERE
OUGHT TO BE A RULE. Mark is, after all, advocating punctuation by
whim: "as the spirit moves me". He even throws out a mischievous
reference to "the thin edge of the moral-relativist wedge", alluding to
the many people who believe that making linguistic choices is a moral
issue, so that tolerating (or, worse, advocating) variability is moral
relativism of the most deplorable sort.
This is one of many cases where each of the variants has something
going for it: the s variant represents (most people's)
pronunciation clearly; but the zero variant is shorter and more
pleasing to the eye (or at least to the eyes of people who find
s's ugly), and conforms to the
punctuation of possessive plurals (where, however, no possessive s is
pronounced). Either practice makes sense. Either is
defensible. As a result, some people do it one way, and some
people do it the other way, and even if there weren't people like Mark,
who vary from occasion to occasion, everybody (no matter what they do
in practice) will be acquainted with both versions. So we all
cope with both variants, and consequently treat them as
equivalent. If there weren't authorities claiming that one system
or the other is God's Truth, probably no one would notice the variation
or care about it.
It turns out that the
Chicago Manual
of Style (15th ed., pp. 283-4) does supply a rule. Well,
it supplies two: one for the s variant, with a number of subclauses;
and one for the zero variant, concluding:
Those uncomfortable with the rules,
exceptions, and options outlined above [for the s variant] may prefer
the system, formerly more common, of simply omitting the possessive s on all words ending in s...
Though easy to apply, that usage disregards pronunciation and thus
seems unnatural to many.
No doubt this flexibility in the
CMS
offends the grammatical moralists (though it isn't grammar that's at
issue here). I would be cheering it, except for the fact that
CMS is not recommending Do As You
Will, it's telling you to choose one system or the other and stick to
it. It's advocating Strict Consistency by Individual, presumably
because the authors believe in consistency for its own sake.
A few more cases. Not long ago I
touched
on another burning issue in punctuation, whether or not to use the
serial comma in coordination:
Patty,
Maxine, and LaVerne or
Patty,
Maxine and LaVerne. Again, each variant has something
(small) going for it -- the serial variant is clearer in some contexts,
the non-serial variant saves a character -- but everybody is used to
seeing both variants, and probably only people who have been made
sensitive to the issue notice the variation, so it seems pointless to
invest a lot of energy in enforcing one variant over the other.
Yet editors and publishers insist on Strict Consistency by Context: you
write for one publication, you must always use the serial comma; you
write for another, you must never use it.
Then there's quot-punc vs. punc-quot order, mentioned above.
Again, each variant has something (small) going for it -- quot-punc
makes more sense (things inside quotation marks should belong to the
quoted material), but punc-quot has a long tradition (having to do with
typesetters' preferences, I believe) in its favor -- but everybody is
used to seeing both variants, etc. (as above). Yet once again
editors and publishers insist on Strict Consistency by Context.
In fact, in many quarters quot-punc is viewed as a vulgar error, an
especially egregious mistake. Joanne Feierman's
Action Grammar: Fast, No-Hassle Answers on
Everday Usage and Punctuation (1995) features a list of ten
"mistakes your boss minds most", five from speech and five from writing
(the ones she says were most often mentioned in her interviews with
executives). Sally Thomason, who's posted here about
useful
prescriptivism,
will probably find this list disheartening: emphatic
myself ("It was done by Carol,
Barbara, and myself") is on the list twice, once in speech and once in
writing, while singular
they
("Everyone has their own idea about this") isn't on the Ten Worst list,
though it eventually gets an honorable mention in the section on nouns
and pronouns (on pp. 145-7). But quot-punc order is there, at #6,
the top of the sublist of errors in writing.
Feierman notes that not everyone adheres to punc-quot order, but
insists on consistency (Strict Local Consistency by Group and Context),
even in the face of logic. Rules are rules:
In the United States, periods and
commas always go inside quotation marks. That's our rule, and it
is followed scrupulously by all professional writers. (p. 17)
Do I hear an objection? Did you say our rule makes no sense?...
Well, I agree with you, but that is not the rule. (p. 18)
This is the American system. The
rest of the English-speaking world uses the more logical system, as do
publications of international bodies such as the United Nations.
The only Americans who do not follow the American style in this matter
are lawyers. [What is the Linguistic Society of
America? Chopped liver?] (p. 18)
Just to remind you: this is supposed to be a mistake that bosses really
care about -- presumably one that could torpedo your chances of getting
hired. I truly hope not. (Though I've had a businessman
tell me -- when he discovered I was a linguist, in fact one
specializing in English syntax -- that he would never hire someone who,
as he put it, used
which for
that. So maybe nothing should
surprise me any more in the world of popular attitudes about grammar
and usage.)
One more case, involving an even more minute point of punctuation (if
that is possible). Back in November, Barbara Wallraff fielded the
following query in her "Word Court" column in the
Atlantic Monthly (p. 152):
Adam Gordon, of Los Gatos, Calif.,
writes, "At the advertising and marketing agency where I work, we have
an ongoing debate about the number of spaces between a terminating
period and the first letter of a new sentence. We writers were
all taught to use two; my artists insist than one is the current
rule. Would you be so kind as to adjudicate?"
Wallraff allows free variation in many contexts, but maintains a
One-Space Rule, requiring consistency, for publications:
Do anything you like in letters,
e-mail, business memos, and other writing that's an end in itself, but
put one space between sentences in writing that's going to be
published, whether in print or on the Web. It's standard.
And indeed, the Microsoft Word grammar-checker on my Mac marks every
use of two spaces as an error in grammar. This is enormously
annoying to me, because, like Adam Gordon, I was taught (back when
dinosaurs roamed the earth and people used typewriters) that I
MUST
use two spaces between sentences in typewritten work; using only one
was a mistake, one that cost you some (small) fraction of a
grade. Now I've come to view that extra space as attractive and
the use of only one space as squinchy -- but that's just a personal
aesthetic judgment, based entirely on my experience.
Wallraff explains that the One-Space Rule wasn't always in force: "You
can find extra space between sentences in books from as late as the
1960s." (Hell, you can find them right now, in my Language Log
postings.) She suspects that the extra space came from the days
of typesetting -- a letter by John Bowers, of Bend, Ore., in the
March 2007 issue (p. 19), disputes this, maintaining that
"conscientious printers" used only one space and that the extra space
"arose with stenography" -- but was, in any case, eliminated some time
ago. Both Wallraff and Bowers find a single space more
aesthetically appealing than two (almost surely a case of liking what
you're most familiar with). And of course the One-Space Rule
saves a character. Omit Needless Characters.
But I can't for the life of me see why people should be regulating the
number of spaces between sentences. Why should consistency be
required here?
Just to remind you: I'm not recommending Do As You Will in general;
there are plenty of usages that are non-standard, regional,
conversational, informal, hyperformal, etc. and so aren't appropriate
in all contexts. But there's also a huge territory of variability
where, it seems to me, no regulation is necessary, and where efforts at
enforcing consistency merely waste a lot of people's time and draw
attention away from more important matters. Certainly, the idea
that Whatever Can Be Regulated Should Be -- Why regulate? Because
we can! -- is a spectacularly bad idea, at least on rational grounds.
Somewhat gloomily, I note that many writers have claimed that a major
force in the spread of public schooling in modern times was the need
for tractable and obedient workers, people who would conform to
arbitrary rules and would perform tasks and follow procedures that
didn't necessarily make sense to them. The official rhetoric of
public schooling has focused instead on the spread of learning for its
own sake and the teaching of useful skills, for the advancement of
individuals -- for "getting ahead" in life -- but I think it would be
hard to deny the interests of industry and business in the
enterprise. Regulating grammar and usage and the mechanics of
writing and insisting on consistency on even minute and arbitrary
points fit right into this program. And then the ideas of
regulation and consistency become part of the folk understanding of the
world and how it works.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at March 4, 2007 04:07 PM