The unfab four
A
little while ago, after a discussion of the evil passive voice (as
characterized by Sherry Roberts in
her little handbook
on business writing), I set Language Log readers a take-home question:
Take-home.
Section 9 of
the Roberts booklet begins:
Watch
out for these four commonly misused words.
Some words in the English language take a constant beating in business
correspondence. Be one of those writers who use them properly and
pleasantly surprise your readers. Your conscientiousness may sell your
next idea or product.
So, what do you think these four words are, and what's the problem with
them?
The envelope, please! And the losers are:
That
vs. which. Which often
follows a comma and
introduces a phrase that provides additional information not essential
to the meaning of the sentence. That
introduces a phrase that is essential to the meaning of the sentence.
The report, which is twenty pages
long, is mandatory reading. (Which
introduces additional, but unnecessary, information.)
The report that is twenty pages long
is mandatory reading. (That
points out a characteristic of the report and distinguishes it from a
ten-page report.)
Hopefully. This doesn't mean I
hope. Hopefully, I'll finish the
report by noon. Do you mean you'll finish the report in a
hopeful frame of mind by noon? Or do you mean you hope you'll finish
the report by noon? Say what you mean: I hope to finish the report by noon.
Very. Avoid this lukewarm,
unspecific adverb. I'm very happy
that you elected me chairman of the Society for People with Super
Sensitive Feet. Is very happy happier than just happy?
[Note rhetorical question, conveying that very happy is not in fact
happier than happy.] Why not overjoyed
or: I'm tickled to be the new
chairman of the
Society for People with Super Sensitive Feet.
How disheartening: Fowler's Rule (which counts as two misused
words), speaker-oriented sentence adverbial
hopefully, and the intensifier
very.
We've written a lot about Fowler's Rule here on Language Log and I
don't see any point in rehashing the topic, though I will note that
Fowler (who was not the originator of the principle, but did serve as
the major vector of its spread in the 20th century) merely said that it
might be better if the functions of restrictive and non-restrictive
relativization were cleanly split between
that and
which, respectively -- while
admitting that writers in English generally did not do this.
Speaker-oriented (or "stance") adverbial
hopefully has been taking abuse
pretty steadily for 30 or more years (see
MWDEU). Linguists are mostly
just baffled by this disparagement; see the discussion in the
American Heritage Book of English Usage,
where it's noted that "
hopefully
seems to have taken on a life of its own as a shibboleth." But
the word fits right into long-standing patterns of the language
-- cf.
frankly in "Frankly,
this soup stinks" and
surprisingly
in "Surprisingly, this soup is delicious" -- and it provides a way of
expressing the speaker's attitude towards a proposition which is both
(a) brief and (b) subordinate: "I hope that S", "I have a hope that S",
"It is to be hoped that S", and the like are wordier, and have the
hoping expressed in a main clause (as the apparent main assertion),
while what writers want is to assert the proposition provisionally,
adding a modifier expressing their attitude towards it. So
speaker-oriented
hopefully is
a
GOOD thing, and it's no surprise that it's spread so
fast.
As for
very, I intend to post
on this eventually -- I've had a piece in draft for some time --
because it's a venerable proscription (going back to Strunk (1918) and
before), and one that has its puzzling aspects. For the moment,
the crucial thing is that for many people who use
very,
very happy is indeed happier than
happy, while replacements like
extremely happy and
overjoyed are often too far up on
the happiness scale. (
Tickled
is just an elaborate joke, and somewhat out of place in a manual of
business writing.)
[Added 5/15/07: On ADS-L, Doug Harris pointed how how effective repetition of the
very can be, citing a story from the Oneonta (NY)
Daily Star, in which a local farmer who'd been struck by lightning was said to be "very, very, very sore". I then reported having found ca. 69,800 Google webhits for {"be very very afraid"}, some of the form "Be afraid. Be very(,) very afraid." and others with just the second part. Jesse Sheidlower then supplied the source of the formula: "Be afraid. Be very afraid." (from the 1986 horror film "The Fly") -- an effective use of
very as an intensifier, it seems to me. Bill Mullins suggests that the use of "Be afraid. Be very afraid." by Wednesday in "Addams Family Values" (1993) was probably a bigger vector for its spread.]
Some general remarks... Note that Roberts simply asserts Fowler's
Rule and similarly just asserts what the meaning of
hopefully is; these are just
inarguable
FACTS about English, deriving presumably
from some higher authority. And she just asserts that
very is lukewarm (a judgment of
taste) and unspecific (a judgment of meaning), brooking no objection
from those whose judgments are not the ones she reports.
We are, indeed, in shibboleth territory. Roberts is merely
repeating three very fashionable proscriptions on grammar, style, and
usage. Neither reason nor actual practice have anything to do
with it.
Propagating such shibboleths has a variety of unfortunate
consequences. Some people become "blinded by the rules", as I've
put it: they can't help noticing the proscribed items and may find that
these items slow down their comprehension. In extreme cases,
these sadly afflicted folks suffer from a willful failure to understand
-- reporting that they can't understand things like "Hopefully, it's
not going to rain today" (because "it" cannot be hopeful) and
maintaining that people who say "I didn't do nothing" are saying that
they did something -- and so exhibit stunningly uncooperative behavior:
in ordinary language use, we're trying to gauge others' intentions from
their words, not to enforce what we believe to be language
norms.
For a final flourish, let's return to the evil passive voice.
After Jon Lighter quoted from Roberts's handbook on ADS-L, Larry Horn
(5/2/07) came up with this even wilder critique of the passive, from
the 5/7/07
New Yorker, p. 87:
Constructing passive sentences is a way
of concealing your own testicles, lest someone cut them off.
(psychoanalyst Ernesto Morales, played by Ian Holm in the new film "The
Treatment")
Horn commented wryly, "I'm not sure whether according to this theory
women can construct passive sentences with impunity."
[Added 5/15/07: Language Hat writes to say that the Morales quote is not in the Daniel Menaker book on which the movie is based, though in the book Morales does have something of a preoccupation with genitals and castration. Further commentary: "The screenwriter is Daniel Saul Housman, and this seems to be his first movie, so we can't investigate his corpus for other evidence of Strunkism; we can only speculate about what he may have been exposed to at Columbia while getting his MFA."]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 14, 2007 02:27 PM