Collateral damage
The usual complaint about the expression
for free is that it's
pleonastic. Lose the
for.
Omit needless words. Not
You
can get it for free, but
You
can get it free.
Richard Lederer and Richard Dowis (
Sleeping
Dogs Don't Lay: Practical Advice for the Grammatically Challenged,
St. Martin's Griffin, 1999) go beyond this pedestrian complaint to
maintain that the expression is syntactically ill-formed. On page
40:
for
free (never)
Free is an adjective, not the
object of a preposition. We're not charging you extra for that
information. We're giving it to you for nothing; we're giving it to you
free. Free works best when it is free of
adornment.
GENERALIZING a proscription against a particular
expression -- and especially providing an
EXPLANATION
for the proscription -- is a potentially dangerous step. There
can easily be collateral damage, extending to all sorts of expressions
the proscriber didn't have in mind. So it is in this case, as in
many others. Innocent bystanders will be wounded.
According to
MWDEU, the
campaign against
for free
began in 1943 (
OED2 has cites
for the expression from 1887, "chiefly U.S."), probably in reaction to
a fashion for it. "Wordy slang" is a typical slam. The
alternatives are (at least)
free,
gratis,
without charge, and
for nothing, and
MWDEU notes that these are often
unsatisfactory.
Gratis
and
without charge are stiff
and formal (in addition,
without
charge really works only in a selling context, not in a buying
one;
I got it without charge
is possible, but odd);
for nothing
has a potential for ambiguity (
I
shoveled the neighbors' snow for nothing could mean 'to no
purpose, with no good result'); and plain
free is sometimes (to my ears)
barely acceptable at all (??
I
shoveled the neighbors' snow free -- vs.
I shoveled the neighbors' snow for free).
In addition,
for free is
(like
for nothing) parallel
in structure to
for X, where
X is an amount of money (
I got it
for twenty dollars), which is a point in its favor.
Lederer & Dowis hint at the pleonasm criticism ("works best when it
is free of adornment"), but focus on a perceived syntactic flaw in the
expression: "
Free is an
adjective, not the object of a preposition." Let's pass over the
odd juxtaposition of syntactic category ("adjective") and syntactic
function ("object of a preposition" -- why not "noun"?) and get right
to the core of the objection, which is that
for free is a combination of a
preposition and an adjective, and that's just not the way English
syntax works.
This is deeply silly.
For free
is an
IDIOM, and idioms fairly often show bizarre
syntax.
By and large is
a textbook example, and others are easily listed.
But it's worse. As Tommy Grano (who came across the Lederer &
Dowis bit while browsing in advice books for something completely
different) pointed out to me, there's
in
vain, also apparently P + Adj. We then immediately came up
with
for real and possibly
for good (it's not clear whether
good is an adjective or a noun
here), and since then I've thought of
for
sure/certain,
in short/brief,
and
at first/last.
Probably there are more. Another seven (or eight) will do.
[Yes, there are more:
at large and
in full, for example. You can stop sending me more cases. Please.] The point is that if
for free
is bad because it's P + Adj, so are all the others. This is
fairly severe collateral damage from the proscription against
for free.
Once proscriptions against particular expressions are generalized (and,
often, provided with some sort of grounding explanation in grammar),
they very often take in a host of other expressions the proscriber
never had in mind. The red pencil turns into a prediction.
This is usually not a good thing.
Another case:
Garner's Dictionary of
Modern American Usage (Oxford, 2003) warns against relative
pronouns with possessive antecedents. Simplifying Garner's
example from real life: "There may have been inimical voices raised
among the committee, such as Nikolaus Esterhazy's, who just then had
had an unpleasant brush with the composer." I am as unhappy with
such examples as Garner is. (The history is complex: relative
clauses with possessive heads are a survival from much earlier English,
and are occasionally to be found in recent times, but now strike most
readers as at best awkward. Things are even worse when the
possessive has an overt head: "Nikolaus Esterhazy's voice, who just
then had had an unpleasant brush with the composer, was especially
strong." Still worse: "Nikolaus Esterhazy's, who just then had
had an unpleasant brush with the composer, voice was especially
strong.")
Ok so far. Such relative clauses are fairly often deprecated in
the advice literature. But Garner doesn't stop there; he goes on
to say that the proscription is necessary, citing a more general
proscription, with an explanation for it:
The relative pronoun who stands for a noun; it shouldn't
follow a possessive because the possessive (being an adjective, not a
noun) can't properly be its antecedent.
Eek. Now Garner has invoked the
Possessive
Antecedent Proscription (which he does not otherwise seem to
espouse) in its full power, and he's set himself against innocent
bystanders like
Mary's father adores
her. The problem is that if possessives are bad
antecedents for relative pronouns because they are adjectives -- they
aren't, of course, but Garner thinks they are -- then they're also bad
antecedents for personal pronouns like
her and
she. That's
SERIOUS
collateral damage.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at February 20, 2006 09:02 PM