Language Log

Omit needless

My adventures in the Practical Survival Skills area of the advice literature on English -- material that gives you some small number of crucial mistakes to avoid in business or other professional writing, or just in writing in general -- have taken me to some curious places.  Occasionally I discover "mistakes" I hadn't noticed before.  For instance, in a website on "10 Grammar Mistakes That Make You Look Stupid" (version of 5/23/05), there are the ten mistakes -- almost all of them common spelling errors that a spellchecker won't find (like loose for lose, they're/their/there, and then for than) -- plus two peevish extras: hit and miss for hit or miss, and this one, appended to the then/than entry:


Omit needless then!


(A very big hat tip to Doug Kenter, who pointed me to the "Make You Look Stupid" site.)

First, a few words on hit and miss.  "Make You Look Stupid" attacks it on the basis of logic:


(By the way, appeals to "logic" in usage matters are almost always flags indicating gaps in reasoning, suppressed premises, and the like.)

A user of hit and miss can counter that this version of the idiom makes more sense than the version with or: if something is hit and miss, sometimes it hits AND sometimes it misses.   In fact, two recent dictionaries distinguish two different idioms:


Whoops!  Essentially the same meaning distinction, but with the meanings assigned in opposite ways.  My guess is that we're looking at a lot of variation between speakers here, with some preferring one version (in both meanings), some preferring the other version (in both meanings), some differentiating the meanings one way, and some differentiating the meanings the other way.  As for Google, the raw webhits are pretty much a dead heat, with the two versions each a bit over a million hits.

In any case, we're dealing with idioms here, and idioms by definition aren't entirely "logical", that is, semantically compositional.  Not something you'd want to develop a "burning pet peeve" (in the blogger's words) over.

I've looked at a sampling of the advice literature for opinions on hit and/or miss, without finding anything.

A similar search for advice on conditional then is slightly, but only slightly, more successful.  Nothing in MWDEU, Garner's MAU, Bernstein's Careful Writer, the AHD Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style, Follett, Follett/Wensberg, any of the editions of Fowler (old original Fowler, Gowers's Fowler, Burchfield's Fowler), Morris & Morris, etc.  Not even in the 1918 advice of Prof. Omit Needless himself, Will Strunk.

Evans & Evans, Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, has the mildest of warnings:


But Mark Davidson's Right, Wrong, and Risky (2006:309) just says no -- well, almost always no:

Actually, what Wilson's Columbia Guide (1993:234) says is:


so Wilson doesn't say it's permitted in these cases -- which would implicate that it's not permitted elsewhere -- but that it's required only in these cases -- which entails that it's permitted elsewhere.

Finally, Fiske's Dictionary of Disagreeable English (2006:189) is as forthright as Davidson in labeling conditional then as an error, though he softens the punch:


That's my current crop of opinions on conditional then.  "Make You Look Stupid", Davidson, and Fiske object to it, explicitly or implicitly, as needless, and Evans & Evans and Fiske express reservations on aesthetic grounds. 

Davidson also finds a potential ambiguity in conditional then, but my experience is that if you want to object to a usage, you can almost always find a potential ambiguity to complain about -- because potential ambiguities are everywhere, in almost every part of almost every sentence.

Turning now to Omit Needless Words (ONW).  Part of its popular appeal comes from the assumption -- a piece of language ideology, resting on the so-called Conduit Metaphor -- that what language is for, all that language is for, is to convey messages from one person to another.  Material that doesn't serve this purpose is then just so much dead weight; it "contributes nothing to your message" (Davidson), it's "superfluous" ("Make You Look Stupid"), so it should be excised.

Whenever you see an appeal to ONW, you should wonder what people are doing with those "needless" words.  Most of the time, those extra words are serving some function that conflicts with brevity; they're doing some work.  Conditional then marks the consequent clause of a conditional sentence in parallel to the way that if marks the antecedent clause, so what it does is to clearly indicate sentence and discourse organization -- and this can be a distinct service to the reader or hearer.

That's not to say that you should ALWAYS use conditional then.  That would be silly advice, just as silly as requiring that the complementizer that should ALWAYS be used (rather than omitted) in sentences like I know that I can't fly (vs. I know I can't fly).  The point is to have alternatives, which can do different things on different occasions.

I suspect that I'm not a very heavy user of conditional then.  Often I'm happy to do without.  I might even find it inelegant on occasion.  But there are times when it's a good thing.  Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences, p. 226, gives a particularly "apt use" (her words) of if ... then conditionals in a passage from Ralph Cohen's "Do Postmodern Genres Exist?", which begins:


The parallelism thus established, Cohen continues without conditional then:


Artful indeed.

zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu

Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 30, 2007 02:00 AM