Five years ago I posted about “National Grammar Day,” and I’m doing it again for the same reason: because this silly “official day” inspired a good response, a plea for sanity by lexicographer Kory Stamper:
I have a friend–well, a “friend”–who, every March 4th, marches forth into a variety of local stores with a black marker and corrects the signage in the name of “good grammar.” Grocer’s apostrophes are scribbled out, misspellings fixed, and good Lord the corybantic orgy of less/fewer corrections. This friend also printed up a bunch of stickers one year that read, “FIXED THAT FOR YOU. HAPPY NATIONAL GRAMMAR DAY.”
When he was finished telling me about how he observes National Grammar Day, he waited for me to break into a big smile and congratulate him. So when I didn’t–when, instead, my face compressed itself ever so slightly into a look of utter distaste–he was very confused. “Seriously,” he said, “don’t tell me that’s not awesome.”
Reader: that is not awesome.
Go on, read the whole thing; I call your attention in particular to her use of John E. McIntyre’s brilliant coinage “peeververein.”
And yet, and yet. Bet you taught your children standard grammar, Hat.
Nobody’s knocking standard grammar.
You don’t catch me teaching my kids standard grammar. Humans are designed to learn language and my kids have a peer group skewed enough toward native speakers of the standard/prestige variety of AmEng (plus they read books, both the old-fashioned kind and the kind they download onto the Kindle that I paid for but do not know how to operate) that they’re picking it up perfectly well w/o my intervention. If anything, I found the various mistakes they made as they grew into language so downright fascinating to observe that I didn’t want to intervene and stamp them out, and of course they grew out of them on their own despite my irresponsible laissez-faire attitude. Alternatively, they’re apparently being taught “standard grammar” by the school district employees paid out of my exorbitant property taxes, although there if anything I’m worried they’ll be taught some sort of pernicious prescriptivist nonsense and I’ll have to decide whether to affirmatively unteach them. (My older daughter did have one teacher who was at least nuanced enough to say that while Oxford commas were mandatory for assignments in her class and you’d lose points for omitting them, not every consumer of their subsequent writing would necessarily have the same attitude on that issue.)
“I’ll have to decide whether to affirmatively unteach them.”
Proscribing prescriptivism is just neoprescriptivism, surely?
J.W. Brewer: “…my kids have a peer group skewed enough toward native speakers of the standard/prestige variety of AmEng (plus they read books …) that they’re picking it up perfectly well w/o my intervention.”
So you like the fact that your children are learning “standard/prestige …AmEng”, informally and also formally at school. There must then be a benefit for children not exposed to such a peer group being taught standard/prestige AmEng.
Especially by a teacher who is wise enough to say that once they learn the standard way they will know when and where it can be set aside. But at least they do know it.
LH: “Nobody’s knocking standard grammar.” Does the prescriptivist/descriptivist divide then become a question of what “standard grammar” actually is? Are the less/fewer or more/over, etc, distinctions of prescriptivists (apparently) based on a different standard grammar ?
Or if they are the same, then what is wrong with some people encouraging the use of the standard grammar which you apparently endorse ?
And having now read the piece you linked to: Of course I don’t endorse bullying, defacing signs, etc. But that doesn’t mean one can’t, if appropriate, gently point out the error or in general terms urge “corrrect” usage.
March 4th? Isn’t that Exelauno Day?
Could you explain “peeververein”, I’m a bit slow today.
Gassalasca: “Peever’s Union”, perhaps with implications of stereotypical German pedantry.
Verein: “A union, association, or society; – used in names of German organizations.” The German Wikipedia article lists Traditionsvereine, Sportvereine, Hobbyvereine, Musische Vereine, Kulturvereine, Weltanschauungsvereine, Umwelt- und Naturschutzvereine, Selbsthilfevereine, karitative und humanitäre (Fremdhilfe-)Vereine, and Förder- und Trägervereine. I suspect the nineteenth-century Zollverein (German Customs Union) introduced it to the English-speaking world.
:slaps forehead:
My highschool German teacher would be so ashamed of me.
“Alternatively, they’re apparently being taught “standard grammar” by the school district employees paid out of my exorbitant property taxes, although there if anything I’m worried they’ll be taught some sort of pernicious prescriptivist nonsense and I’ll have to decide whether to affirmatively unteach them.”
Perfect.
“But that doesn’t mean one can’t, if appropriate, gently point out the error or in general terms urge “corrrect” usage.”
Yes it does. If radio waves from a Russian meteorite obliterated the prescriptivist urge in the brain of every grammar prescriptivist on the planet tomorrow, the world would be a much more pleasant place and language would be much, much more diverse and interesting.
Contra other-Paul, I actually don’t have any sort of considered view or emotion as to whether I “like” that my daughters are growing up naturally/natively acquiring the standard/prestige variety of AmEng which is also my own native variety. It’s like asking me if I like being tall – I’m used to it, I don’t mind it, and I’m not plagued with guilt over whatever social or economic advantages it may incidentally confer, but I can’t say how much time I’d spend bemoaning my lot or trying to change things if I were short. I certainly don’t oppose certain sorts of efforts to help children who natively speak certain sorts of non-prestige varieties to also master the standard prestige variety and be able to code-switch when appropriate (although even there I think there are distinctions to be made – I don’t think kids from South Carolina ought as a general matter to be taught to mimic Connecticut pronunciation). I don’t think the sort of jerky behavior described in the linked piece has anything to do with that, and I don’t think trying to make people feel ashamed of their native language variety is a particularly productive way to promote the sort of code-switching facility that may in turn promote social mobility.
If radio waves from a Russian meteorite obliterated the prescriptivist urge in the brain of every grammar prescriptivist on the planet tomorrow, the world would be a much more pleasant place and language would be much, much more diverse and interesting.
Well said!
“…and language would be much, much more diverse and interesting.”
Are you bored with the language then ? I find it very diverse and interesting now, and regularly discover new vocabulary.
JW: Re teaching southerners Connecticut speech, whichwould of course be curious, I think there may be a trans-atlantic distinction here. Is there actually a generally recognised RP in the US, as there is in UK ?
What J.W. Brewer’s daughter’s teacher said was a good point. Usually when you write for publication, you have to follow a style guide. It’s not whether something is correct or not correct, it’s whether you can consistently follow a set of rules. When writing for yourself, you can make your own decisions about whether to use an Oxford comma or whatever, but first you need to recognize that there are a set of decisions to make, and second you need to apply your own rules in a consistent way. For example, in fiction, if a character speaks in a particular dialect, that dialect should be represented in a consistent manner all the way through.
Similarly, teaching someone to do, for example, APA referencing, is not saying that this is the only possible style, it’s just teaching how to follow a particular set of rules. Once you’ve learned how to follow one set of rules, it should be much easier to follow a different set of rules, as opposed to having no rules at all.
Hat, I suspect it was the various societies that Germans set up in the U.S. that introduced -verein to American English at least.
Pop: There is nothing even somewhat like RP in American English: cultivated Bostonians don’t aspire to talk like cultivated Houstonians, nor vice versa. Indeed, the only recent President who didn’t have a well-marked regional accent was Reagan, and he was an actor (Obama is also a special case). It is pretty much only actors, newscasters, and suchlike professional public speakers who learn a specific accent, and they do so to minimize individual accent features rather than to acquire a specific set.
Hat, I suspect it was the various societies that Germans set up in the U.S. that introduced -verein to American English at least.
Hmm, very likely… but that line would presumably have died out around WWI, when such societies would have vanished. Would it have persisted in nooks and crannies since then, or is awareness of the term in the minds of people today (like McIntyre) due rather to learning about things like the Zollverein in history classes or general reading? A nice question.
I myself learned the word in German class, not in history class. I bet it’s not widely known in the US. If we want to know where McIntyre got it, we could ask him. I do think peeververein is brilliant.
I think I first encountered the word “Verein” in a german-american society a relative was involved in, that either survived the world wars or (more likely) was formed later. At any rate, I don’t remember learning about the Zollverein (the fault of my memory and attention span, not my teachers), but I already knew the word when it came up in German class.
contra maidhc, I don’t think oxford commas are the sort of thing that I even bother to be internally consistent about myself within a given piece of writing, nor do I think they are the sort of issue a style sheet should address. It is, I suppose, useful for public schools to get children used to the practical need in adult life to occasionally conform to pointless and arbitrary rules mindlessly enforced by bureaucrats/martinets, but I think public schools already inculcate that lesson in a sufficient number of ways that it need not be added to English instruction.
I think I had probably read about the Zollverein as a historical thing before I first took German in 9th grade, but I don’t know if I would have been able to spot the morpheme in McIntyre’s coinage without having done the latter.
nor do I think they are the sort of issue a style sheet should address.
Then apparently you don’t think there should be such a thing as a style sheet, because that’s pretty much the paradigmatic example of what a style sheet is supposed to address.
I agree with Hat here. At school, children are taught how to use commas. I was taught to leave out the last comma (I believe it’s known as the Cambridge comma). I didn’t realise until university that there was even another way of doing it. You might consider it a pointless and arbitrary rule, but whether you like it or not, children are being taught such rules.
MacIntyre’s in Baltimore, though, and Germanness survived better there than elsewhere, as shown in the works of that famous Baltimorean, Heinrich Ludwig Mencken. Googling, I note the current existence of the Progressive Radoher Verein and Riga Kurlander Verein cemeteries, the Har Sinai Verein synagogue, and even the Verein Deutscher Trachten von Baltimore Tanzkreis, which was founded so recently as 1979 (to use a good Menckenisch phrase). In a proper American spirit, the officers of this last Verein are named Klaus-Skowronek, Stephen, Skowronek, Graziano, and Rothstein.
In any case, I have posted to his personal blog asking him about it, though my comment is waiting for his moderation.
Okay, we have the answer! Quoth John MacIntyre:
Huh, weird. One copy with links, one without. Please zap the first copy without links, O Hat of the Hats.
Thanks very much for eliciting that extremely satisfying answer! I too discovered and loved Archy and Mehitabel at that age.
O Hat of the Hats
Shouldn’t that be O Hat of Hats?
By the way, “Worms Turnverein” is stupendously brilliant. Don Marquis should be better known.
Amen about “Worms Turnverein”. I heard of Archy and Mehitabel in high school, but never got turned on to it. I guess it’s not too late.
If that’s really what style sheets are for (as opposed to, for example, making a particular newspaper’s stories all come out the same way on “Myanmar” v. “Burma”), consign them to the flames. The publishing and newspaper industries are headed for bankruptcy anyway. Let them go, and let their style-sheet enforcers beg bread in the streets unless they have the skills necessary to get hired as baristas.
Excuse me? Would you like it if people said that about your profession?
That was a counterfactual (as signalled by the introductory “if”) because I am in fact hoping to be advised that uniform-comma-policy enforcement is a peripheral/regrettable aspect of the editing enterprise rather than its paradigm core (where I am fully open to the possibility that in some institutional settings a uniform “house style” on certain recurrent issues is in fact of potential value), and was rather surprised to see a suggestion to the contrary. On the other hand, I didn’t see it listed in John McIntyre’s triage you linked to in a different post about zombie rules versus still-alive-and-dangerous rules, and I don’t know what inference to draw from that silence.
In my own profession, I try not to impose my idiosyncratic stylistic preferences on other people’s written work (unless it’s something drafted for my signature) and push back, when not politically imprudent to do so, when they try to impose their preferences on mine.
The word is brilliant.
*facepalm*. It’s spelled *facepalm*. </prescriptivism
(It’s so widespread now that I’ve heard it spoken, in Poland, by someone who speaks better French than English – and pronounced it with [al] instead of [ɑ]… or [ɒ] as it is in the southeastern US.)
Bathrobe: “Hat of Hats” if derived from “King of Kings”, surely. But I had something else in mind, just what, I can’t recall at the moment, perhaps “a Scot of the Scots” or something of the sort.
I too read Archie & Mehitabel as a teenager. I’ve always pronounced Don Marquis’s name like the British “marquess”, but I now see I could be wrong about that: does he in fact sound like a garden wedding tent?
Over here we call a garden wedding tent a “tent”. We use “marquis” for another kind of rooflet: something that sticks out over the door on a theater, or possibly a store/shop of some kind. And we pronounce it like (an approximation to) the French word for a kind of nobleman.
I’d guess that I’m not the only American who once believed that “marquess” was the feminine counterpart of “marquis”. Of course now I know better: a marquess is male, and the feminine counterpart is a marionette.
A marchioness is the wife of a marshmallow.
Is porte cochère just a name used by architects, or do others in the US use it too? I must say I’ve never heard it in England, but England didn’t have the 19C. tradition of sending architectural students to the École des Beaux-arts that the US had.
I always said MAR-kwis, and Wikipedia agrees.
Is porte cochère just a name used by architects, or do others in the US use it too?
I have never heard anyone in the US use it, and would be very surprised to do so. Frankly, I would have thought it was an archaic term from the days when people drove up to your home in coaches.
Ah, marquise with non-silent [z]. Used in German (spelled with k), still feminine.
Architects use it all the time, it’s porte-cochère this and porte-cochère that, ok, well, not very often but occasionally they do. I said I’d never heard it in England, but I now remember the awning at the Savoy hotel in London recently being described as a porte cochère. And here’s a Miami one. Maybe it’s a hotel word as well as an architect word. A British real-estate word I’ve recently heard, and it’s used by the general public too, is an “en-suite” (the British emphasis is on the “en”). It means of course a bedroom with an adjoining toilet or, if you’re lucky, a proper bathroom. People say things like “Our house has three en-suites”. The other British expression that’s new to me is “a build” to mean some construction. A “newbuild” (one word) is a new piece of construction, especially a house. Weird.
I’m reeling a little–anyway, having to adjust my ideas.
First, right, the thing over the door (“mar-KEE”) is spelled “marquee” not “marquis”, isn’t it? Is it the same with the British wedding tent?
Second, it runs out that the name of the creator of Archy and Mehitabel is pronounced as Hat says. My high school English teacher was wrong! (Well, that’s not as big a shock as it could be. In second grade a teacher told us that that “bulb” was spelled “bolb”, and our sixth grade teacher told us that there are no second chances in life.)
French terms:
une marquise: 1. the wife of a marquis [silent s] (a middling noble rank: “marquess”); the word often connotes elegance but also artificiality and “putting on airs”; 2. a decorative glass awning over a door, usually supported by a wrought iron framework.
une porte cochère (no hyphen): a large door, in two vertical parts, through which “coaches” (horse-drawn carriages) could enter an inner courtyard. Usually this door fits into a Roman-type archway (rounded at the top). The top of this door can be a separate piece, or each half-door can fit its half of the arch. There are still many examples in France in old buildings, admitting cars to a courtyard used as a private parking area. Often this type of door was so large (especially in width) that a regular size door was built into one of the sides in order to admit pedestrians without going to the trouble of opening the whole door (this was also a security measure to repel intruders).
The door in the Sorbonne picture (in the French Wiki article) looks rather narrow for a porte cochère, but that must be because of its height.
On the other hand, the Savoy picture for English “porte-cochère” does not qualify for the French term since it is not a door but a roof extending from the entrance, a kind of extra-large “marquise”.
Ø, yes, the wedding tent & thing over the theatre entrance is a marquee. I’m sorry for causing the confusion. Is “it runs out that” a reference to something or just a phrase I don’t know?
m-l, I don’t think porte cochère is normally hyphenated in English, it was just me adding it to “this” & “that”. French uses hyphens differently, though, doesn’t it? That’s a great description of the French term. I didn’t realise it differed so much from the English usage, i.e. a big canopy you can drive under, sometimes even one that’s freestanding (a small pavilion).
Christ, what an asshole.
AJP, I meant to type “it turns out”.
My high school English teacher was wrong!
My younger brother’s high school English teacher thought George Eliot was a man. My brother took great pleasure in correcting him. (He took it well, fortunately.)
My sister’s junior-high English teacher spelled and pronounced the word “compound” as “countpound”.
AJP, thank you. I took the hyphenated spelling porte-cochère from the English Wiki article.
I used the English word “coaches” in my description but the French word for this type of horse-drawn vehicle is un coche, and the driver is un cocher. (A female driver – hypothetical I think – would have been une cochère).
All derived from the Hungarian village of Kocs, pronounced almost exactly like English “coach”, where the horse-drawn cart with spring suspension was invented sometime in the 15th century. Thurn und Taxis, the Imperial postal service (we await Silent Tristero’s empire!) was the first to put them into regular service. However, kocsi in modern Hungarian means ‘automobile’.
Wow, that’s interesting. I think we still talk about “coachwork” on cars, don’t we? Maybe only Rolls Royces.
AJP, similarly, in some varieties of Spanish there is un coche (in two syllables, not as in French) which now means ‘automobile’. The extension of the word from a horse-drawn to an automobile vehicle is not at all unexpected since the two kinds of vehicle have the same function of family transportation. In French une voiture had the same semantic evolution (at least in France).
In England a coach is the word used for a long-distance bus (though I think it may be on the way out), and another word for a train carriage, the equivalent of the US ‘car’, perhaps.
My sister’s junior-high English teacher spelled and pronounced the word “compound” as “countpound”.
I’ve seen “compound” – as in a group of buildings – given a derivation from Malay “Kampung”- is this complete nonsense?
No, that’s correct. There are two different English words compound, from two different sources.
Wow.
Just ran across this (in a family-written death notice that seems to have gone viral): “He despised […] Southerners who used the words ‘veranda’ and ‘porte cochere‘ to put on airs…” So apparently it’s a Southern thing, in some circles at least.
It deserves to have gone viral.
In that obit, what’s up with the “they” in “He married his main squeeze Ann Moore, a home economics teacher, almost 50 years ago, with whom they had two girls Amanda Lewis of Dallas, and Alison of Starkville”?
JWB: Definitely an anacoluthon: the sentence probably began as “They had” and was intended to be changed to “with whom he had”, but the change was only half-consummated.
JC: Anacoluthon: I am delighted to run into the English equivalent of the French anacoluthe, one of the favourite insults of Tintin’s friend le capitaine Haddock, from whom I learned the word but not its meaning. Somehow it looks to me like it should have something to do with snails, but I know it is about grammar and stylistics.
Compound, godown, amok… All quite anglicised (especially if you spell the last one ‘amuck’).
Coolie, too.
Actually, ‘coolie’ isn’t from Malay. My mistake.
A fine and lovely Cambridge comma from the LRB: “[The Eameses’] many visitors included at various times Billy Wilder, a party of fifty nuns and Tony Benn, whose thank-you letter in the form of a limerick appears in the exhibition.”
One wonders what Tony Benn was doing with all the nuns, and how 51 persons can write a limerick together (I think two persons would be straining it). Of course for real ambiguity another guest would have to be mentioned, but it garden-pathed this Oxford-comma-expecting Yank pretty good just the same.
‘coolie’ isn’t from Malay
Has the etymology of coolie been decided on? I remember having an argument with a Chinese friend on whether it was Tamil or Chinese, quite heated despite the fact that both of us barely knew what we were talking about.
quite heated despite the fact that both of us barely knew what we were talking about.
Those are some of the most enjoyable arguments!
Fortunately, the OED3 has now reached this word. Coolie has several sources, but none of them Chinese: the use by Europeans in China was a transference from India. The ultimate origin is apparently the Koli people of Gujarat (G. Koḷí), whom the British didn’t think much of, calling them a “criminal tribe”. One of the OED’s quotations from 1825 puts it very plainly: “A Kholee, the name of a degenerate race of Rajpoots in Guzerât, who, from the low occupations in which they are generally employed, have (under the corrupt name of Coolee) given a name […] to bearers of burthens all over India.”
By 1581 the word was in Portuguese as qule, cule, probably reinforced by the unrelated Tamil kūli ‘payment for casual labor’. The merged form surfaces in Urdu as qulī, where it mixes with Ottoman Turkish kul ‘slave’. Finally the English get a hold of it and spell it coolie, from which it passes back into the North Indian languages as Hindi kūlī and likewise in Tamil and Telugu, where it coexists with the original Tamil word (note the difference in vowel length). It also spreads to colonial Dutch (including Afrikaans) as koelie.
Thanks for the update!
Burthens? Like Shakespeare’s murtherere? As late as 1825? I think I’ve learned something.
Burthens? Like Shakespeare’s murtherere? As late as 1825?
And well into the 20th century thanks to Jerome Kern.
Enter Murtherers, burthened with lanthorns.
And climbing on lathers (i.e. ladders).
The word “Hindi” is a relic from an earlier edit state, and doesn’t belong there.
Burden and burthen coexisted from the 12C to at least the end of the 19C. The OED2 treats them together, and says “The English forms with d, which began to appear early in 12th cent., may be compared with murder for murther, and dialect farden, furder, for farthing, further. [In the song “Oranges and Lemons”, the rhyme for “St. Martin’s” is “five farthings”.] The prevalent form is now burden, but burthen is still often retained for ‘capacity of a ship’, and also as a poet. or rhetorical archaism in other senses.” Burden was also reinforced by 14C bourdon, burdoun ‘bass drone note’, which is now one of its meanings.
the rhyme for “St. Martin’s” is “five farthings”
Is the t in St. Martin’s voiced? Even most Americans don’t rhyme Martin and harden.
@Kieth Ivey: Maybe they rhyme in newspeak.
Actually, my twelve-year-old daughter was just talking about “Oranges and Lemons” yesterday afternoon. She thought it was quite charming, except for the
Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!
at the end. I pointed out that, while it is one of the most famous nursery rhymes in Britain, its fundamentally English character makes it rather little known here in America. I associate it specifically with its appearance in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the violent ending (which Winston Smith cannot remember) provides some dramatic irony for British readers.
Even most Americans don’t rhyme Martin and harden.
More and more do, though — Kids These Days are (logically enough) expanding the t-flapping environment to include “before syllabic /n/”, as in ki[ɾ]en, mi[ɾ]en, bu[ɾ]on.
@TR: I haven’t experienced this as a generational phenomenon; I’ve heard of it as a feature of regional varieties and miscellaneous idiolects. I myself am a member of the “younger generation,” as my grandmother would say, and I don’t flap /t/ before syllabic /n/. I think I use something more like a glottal stop in this position, and I doubt this would easily develop to [ɾ].
In some Irish English dialects, “fodder” and “father” are homophonous, causing a miscue when a farmer fodders his cattle.
@Eli: Interesting. Here in California I associate it with college kids and younger, but I could be wrong. (I also have the glottal stop pronunciation, which I think of as standard.)
An’ yit she gin her cheer a jerk
Ez though she wished him furder,
An’ on her apples kep’ to work,
Parin’ away like murder.
–James Russell Lowell
@TR: Yeah, as a 20-something I haven’t noticed that either – it’s [ˈkʰɪʔn̩] for me. In fact, the only relevant complaints that I can recall hearing have actually been about the use of glottal stops. Which seems nonsensical at first glance (as you note, the glottal stop is standard), but I think what’s meant is the use of a glottal stop followed by an audible vowel, e.g. [ˈkʰɪʔən] or [ˈkʰɪʔɪn] – which does strike me as something of a teen girl pronunciation.
I think that if an American uses an actual schwa rather than a syllabic consonant in these words, then the /t/ will be flapped, as it is then intervocalic.
I’ve definitely heard the [ʔɪn] form.