Johnson’s Economist column A new language textbook in Mexico has caused a brouhaha (Apr 12, 2023; archived) is delightfully sensible:
One letter does not normally cause controversy, yet a single squiggle has set the Spanish-speaking chattering classes to nattering. A new textbook issued in Mexico seemed to bless a non-standard ending on second-person singular verbs in the past tense: dijistes (you said), with an extra “s”, rather than the standard dijiste, and so on with other verbs. The squabble is instructive, and well beyond the Hispanophone world.
For critics, the sin was twofold. First, the textbook “approved” a usage that, though widespread, is not the official form, which is to say approved by the Royal Spanish Academy and observed by most Spanish-speakers (especially in writing). The second misdeed was that Mexico’s education authorities, by acting alone, threatened the unity of the Spanish-speaking world.
Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, reacted with his own hauteur, saying that critics were trying to tell ordinary people to “speak physics” rather than in their natural way. He even played, as is his wont, an indigenous-versus-European card, saying that the Spanish spoken in Mexico “has to do with the roots of ancient cultures”.
This linguistic quirk has nothing to do with the country’s indigenous heritage, however. The ending in question, which is also heard outside Mexico, is a mere overgeneralisation. In Spanish nearly every other second-person singular verb form ends in an -s, so many people add it incorrectly to verbs in the past tense. This kind of extending of rules to places they don’t belong is common, akin to English-speakers erroneously saying “I shrunk” because they rightly say “I swung” or “I strung”.
Overgeneralisation may be common, but that does not make it correct. That said, there is a sensible middle ground. It lies in not confusing “standard” with “intelligent” or “virtuous”. A standard is just that, like European countries agreeing to share 220-volt electricity. It means that people can carry their gadgets or languages across borders and know they will work. That doesn’t make it perfect from some platonic point of view. America, Canada and much of Latin America use 110-volt electricity and that works out, too.
Non-standard forms can be right, preferable even, depending on circumstance. An American saying y’all has filled a gap (here the second-person plural) in the English pronoun system, instead of using the standard plural you. Y’all may not be appropriate for an acceptance speech for a Nobel prize, but it is perfectly fine for the diner counter and especially among family and friends. It signifies warmth and a belonging to the South. Southerners are almost inordinately proud of it, as they have every right to be.
Languages feature variation like this all around the world and are more than able to handle it. Variations on “you” in different languages could fill a textbook. […] And turning to Spanish’s own “you”, many Latin Americans use vos instead of today’s European standard tú. Different parts of Latin America conjugate verbs with vos differently. No chaos has ensued. […]
Students can be taught to appreciate that, for serious work, it is best to know and use the standard form, even if they joke and bond with the non-standard one. The standard form is also helpful if they are not sure of the background of their listeners.
Too complicated, say some: children need clear rules dinned into their heads. This underestimates them. Youngsters learn early that there are words that are appropriate for some occasions and not others. (If unsure, try asking the little angels of your acquaintance if they know any naughty words not to use around grown-ups.) Opening up a conversation about grammar, style, appropriateness and identity could be a valuable lesson for children learning about language. Not a bad day’s work for one little squiggle.
Thanks, mapache!
Sensible, but not quite sensible enough. I like
better than
And I have serious doubts about this:
It could also be the recipe for nervous cluelessness.
Not impressed with the article. What is delightfully sensible about it?
It carries its own very establishment assumptions within it.
For instance, splitting the Spanish-speaking world, haha! But it’s precisely the existence of a Spanish educated standard, enforced across the Spanish-speaking world, that allows people to enjoy the benefits of a standardised language. To scoff at this because it’s so stolid, so nit-picky, so unenlightened is like the heir to a fortune scoffing at the very idea of not wasting money. You can only be so irresponsible if you’re already well off through no effort of your own.
We have seen time and time again how easy it is for languages to be split apart by politically imposed separate standards. I am not by any means a supporter of rigid standards, but you have to remember the benefits, as well as the drawbacks of standardised official languages.
For the issue in question, yes, perhaps it would be a good idea if several Hispanophone countries got together and implemented this change together. It would hasten the transition to a modification of the current standard more effectively than just one country going it alone. (Incidentally, it would have been nice if the writer had mentioned exactly how prevalent this usage is across the Spanish-speaking world. Extremely common? Well let it rip. Only common in certain quarters? Then maybe circumspection would have been advisable.) At any rate, the writer’s arguments sound one sided and superficial to me. Laughing at objections simply because he doesn’t agree with them. The dismissal of the letter “s” as a mere squiggle is symptomatic of his attitude.
There are of course multiple spelling standards within the pluricentric Anglophone world and we manage without a transnational Academy to resolve their differences, although I don’t know that the most common patterns of systematic orthographic variation (e.g. those illustrated by color v. colour or center v. centre or civilized v. civilised) are quite akin to a variant Spanish spelling that seems to actually propose saying an extra phoneme aloud at the end of the word. Is it more like dove v. dived?
“Students can be taught to appreciate that, for serious work, it is best to know and use…”
Aha, let’s do not confuse it with “virtuous”.
Let’s do not confuse it with “intelligent”.
It is simply the best.
“Opening up a conversation about grammar, style, appropriateness and identity could be a valuable lesson for children learning about language”
Prescriptive or descriptive conversation? The tone of the article is different from what I see in publications of sociolinguists (and what children would actually appreciate)
The comparison with “I shrunk” is interesting. That’s a form that seems to be increasingly common (I have also seen “I swum across the river” and so on) but I don’t think any textbook for people learning English would mark it as correct, although they might well warn the reader not to be too surprised to see it here and there.
I don’t know Spanish of any variety, so it may be that the usage described here is in fact more common and more acceptable in Mexico than “I shrunk” is in English. So perhaps it’s not that apt a comparison.
I’m not good at making comments on a mobile phone, which is how I posted my above comment.
Let me be clear: I was not criticising what the Mexicans have done. It’s their language and their education system, and I don’t know enough about Spanish to comment either way. What I was deploring was the sloppiness and one-sidedness of the article. As I said, dismissing the letter “s” as a mere squiggle is a poor way to argue the issue.
Tell it to the sixth Baron, middle-class Economist-wallah!
I say “shrunk.” What do you mean, “erroneous”? Pah!
David L, “I shrunk” is pretty common in American English, as is “I spit” for “I spat.” I suspect they’re more common in colloquial speech than the “correct” forms.
@David Eddyshaw: Practically everybody says “shrunk,” since that’s a standard past participle. The alternative form shrunken is “is now rarely employed in conjugation with the verb ‘to [sic.] have,'” per the OED. The verb shrink, like virtually all strong verbs, lost its present tense stem vowel changes in proto-Anglo-Frisian. However, it was one of a modest number of verbs that retained vowel inflections for number in the simple past tense for a long time: Middle English, “I shrank,” but also, “We shrunk.” This is apparently the origin of the use of the shrunk form for the simple past, since Modern English verbs (except for a very small number of auxiliaries) have all their simple past forms identical. The same mechanism led to the use of sung as a simple past tense (and presumably sprung and some others as well); this was relatively common through the eighteenth century, but it may have been going out of style by the time Lord Byron was writing. All such forms would be considered nonstandard today, and except for past tense shrunk, I cannot think of any others that have persisted in demotic use (although there may well be dialects in which they are still common that I’m not familiar with). Today, class 3 strong verbs in i–a–u constitute the strongest remaining strong verb paradigm in English, and we know it’s not uncommon for new, nonstandard conjugations of this type to be innovated (especially for verbs that are already irregular, as with bring–brang–brung).
Interesting. I thought it was all because of “Honey, I shrunk the kids!”
Also interesting that “Officer, I’m afraid we shrunk the kids!” would’ve been correct.
In High Ecclesiastical English that would still be wrong: you’d need “Officer, I’m afraid we’ve shrunk the kids.”
When I say “I say ‘shrunk'”, I do in fact mean that I use it as the simple past, not just the past participle. To me, “I shrank the kids” sounds too affected to be actually speakable.
After profound introspection (never a safe guide), I’ve come to the conclusion that I actually conjugate “shrink” differently in the construction “shrink from“, viz the minimal pair
“I shrank from telling my wife about it” (“I was reluctant to tell my wife about it.”)
“I shrunk from telling my wife about it” (“Having told my wife, I am no longer the man I was.”)
I attribute this to the hifalutin register of “shrink from.”
Incidentally, it is by no means the case that all such verbs have a simple past in -ang, even in the most literary style: *”I flang the book aside in disgust.”
I think some commenters are talking past each other. “I shrank” is standard; “I have shrunk” is standard. “I shrunk” is non-standard but not uncommon. I don’t have quantitative data, but impressionistically I would offer Brett “I rung” (especially “rung up” for “called on the telephone”) rather than standard “rang” as a parallel non-standard usage that has endured into present times among those who avoided prescriptivist socialization during their schooling. See this more scholarly treatment: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-language-and-linguistics/article/norm-vs-variation-in-british-english-irregular-verbs-the-case-of-past-tense-sang-vs-sung/ABF7E689167B5D158E813686A9890EBC
Interesting paper, JWB. Thanks.
(I am also delighted to be able to claim on the back of this that my own usage is simply the result of bravely resisting misguided nineteenth-century prescriptivism. Go me!)
imdb shows no movies with dijistes in the title. On the other hand, it has Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and its many sequels and takeoffs, and from the same year (1989), Who Shrunk Saturday Morning?, with Bob Bagdasarian Jr. (of Chipmunks fame) and Elizabeth Berkley (of Showgirls infamy).
In normal conversation would probably avoid saying either “shrank” (too formal) or “shrunk” (seems wrong) for the past tense. I’d talk around it. In more formal writing I’d use “shrank”, and that’s the only context I’d use “shrink from” in anyway, so I don’t really have DE’s distinction. I mean, yes, “shrank” might be affected, but not as affected as the phrase “shrink from” is itself.
@ Keith Ivey
So you never have occasion to talk about clothes shrinking? That’s the first context I would think of, and I’m not sure I could think of a word that could replace “shrunk” / “shrank”.
Bathrobe, you’re right. It’s not as rephrasable as I thought. I’m pretty sure I would say “It shrank in the wash.” And maybe I wouldn’t even notice any oddness.
Y, IMDB does have a music video called “Siempre Fuistes Para Mi” (no accent).
Not impressed with the article. What is delightfully sensible about it?
You’ve been spending too much time at LH. You need to go out and expose yourself to the usual run of online and journalistic discourse about language. Trust me, by comparison this (like all of Johnson’s columns) is delightfully sensible.
You’ve been spending too much time at LH.
Touché!
For some reason, my not-very-native intuition is happy with intransitive shrank as the simple past (All my clothes shrank while hanging in the closet) and with shrunk as the (causative) transitive (Honey, I shrunk the kids!). But I’m sure that has no historical basis, since causatives are usually weak.
(I don’t think English preserves this distinction very often, but there is hung vs. hanged).
Gibbon’s decline and fall has sunk instead of sank.
Maybe this is an area where 19c prescriptivists tried to turn “more/less common variant” into “standard/ common-but-nonstandard” but it’s slowly turned back.
to my comment above: I reacted at the word “appropriatedness”.
elementary school, grade 2.
“hello, childen, let’s talk about appropriatedness“.
*approaches the chalkboard: a-p-p-r-o-p-r-i-a-t-e-d-n-e-s-s*
brr.
The idea not to mix up conventions with virtue and intelligence is sensible. But the proposed solution is that following conventions is still virtuous in certain social contexts and domains. Of course an Arabic teacher may describe a student who does not know ʾiʿrab as neither virtuous nor intelligent – and she may formulate it in pure vernacular.
@mollymooly:
The paper JWB linked to actually goes into this matter in detail. The prescriptivists consciously selected simple past forms that differed from past participles and condemned perfectly valid Byronesque/Gibbonic alternatives on the grounds that Latin perfects differ from past participles.
The cling/clung/clung pattern is nevertheless significantly commoner than the sing/sang/sung pattern, and is the pattern that has attracted most other historically weak verbs into the strong category.
It does, but… I don’t know about the length & breadth of Mexico, but there are Spanish-speaking places where -s becomes [h] or a lengthening of the following consonant or other things you’re not likely to even hear if you aren’t used to them. That could have led to genuine uncertainty over whether it’s there, followed by the inference that it’s there like in any other 2sg.
One reason that sing-sung-sung survives, aside from tradition and analogy, is that in some forms of English–certainly Southern American–sing and sang are pronounced identically, as those phonemes are everywhere–a nasalized diphthong.
Is it more like dove v. dived?
A better (and almost parallel) example in English would be “I says” as in “So I says to him…” which is considered very non-standard but colloquial in certain registers and regions (or was? not sure if anyone really talks like that in the 21st century).
By “those phonemes” I of course meant “that sequence.”
@David Eddyshaw: Sorry, I was moving the sentences around a lot in my comment, and I bungled it. What I meant to say was this: Of the class 3 strong verbs whose conventional standard principal parts now have i–a–u, I don’t know of any of the variant simple past forms with u (except for simple past shrunk) that are considered standard alternatives in English varieties with divergent written standards. (There could easily be alternative dialect standards unknown to me that use more of them though.) Of course, plenty of the class 3 string verbs did fix their standard forms with the vowels i–u–u following their Middle English plural inflections in the simple past. However, by my count there are still fewer verbs of the cling–clung–clung type than of the begin–began–begun type, although there is also another paradigm in which the past and past participle are identical but have a diphthong, for example bind–bound–bound. (A lot of those also have the “-nd” ending. suggesting there may be phonological reasons for the diphthong.)
I was actually just parroting the numbers in the paper that JWB linked to. (It is interesting.) I haven’t bestirred myself to look for myself.
A lot of those also have the “-nd” ending. suggesting there may be phonological reasons for the diphthong.
The lengthened vowel is an Anglo-Frisian isogloss (West Germanic -VnC- -> AF -V:nC-, cf. Sater Frisian huund, Engl. hound vs. German Hund, Dutch hond); [i:] and [u:] were later diphthongised as part of the Great Vowel Shift.
I haven’t bestirred myself to look for myself.
I feel you, brother.
There is an important class of enzymes called kinases, including a smaller but still important group of hexokinases, which both my wife and I worked on (before we were married, and to a small extent afterwards). In the great majority of Spanish speaking countries these are called quinasas, but in a small minority of countries (mainly Mexico, but to some degree Costa Rica) they call them cinasas, pronounced differently as well as spelt differently. My wife wrote a review on them for the magazine of the Spanish Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, in which she consistently wrote quinasas, as one would expect. However, the man responsible for the publishing details changed it throughout to cinasas, without consulting anyone, or indeed telling anyone. To add insult to injury he is a Catalan speaker who only speaks Castilian when he has no other possibility. To put it very mildly my wife was furious about this and it nearly brought about a permanent rift with our Catalan friends.
Oh, is it? I thought it was an innovation in late Old English, so it must have happened separately in Frisian.
Anyway, binden–band–gebunden in German, also winden–wand–gewunden and finden–fand–gefunden.
Spanish from inner mainland Spain, born in and raised in the purportedly most “pure” Spanish (expression I abhor, but nevertheless you hear it from time to time). There, in my childhood, you could hear from time to time a dijistes, which invariably elicited a correction from any bystander, other children included.
The reason? Why correcting this ending while, as children do, constantly changing words and grammar, and creating semi-secret lingos just for the fun of it? Because mistakes like dijistes were not a show not of ignorance or lack of learning but of sheer incompetence in the use of your very language.
I suspect that the elevation of incompetence -not a variant usage, not the consequence of contact with a venerable aboriginal language- to a new standard is what infuriates critics of the mentioned textbook. You may accept innovation, and surely evolution in languages, things connatural to language, but chastise incompetence.
N.B.: my children laugh at my faulty use of some pronouns. So much for purity and adherence to standards.
David E: it is by no means the case that all such verbs have a simple past in -ang, even in the most literary style: *”I flang the book aside in disgust.”
Not anymore, but all of them used to, at least sometimes. For example, these are some of the OED’s literary examples of simple past flang:
That’s entirely due to analogy with the sing class (i-a-u), since fling was borrowed into Middle English from a Scandinavian verb that was weak. But the attraction of the i-u-u class was even stronger, and by the 19th century it was all flung, except for “one dissenting voice” out of 70+ grammar books checked by the linked paper (Anderwald 2011).
The simple past span remains as a fossil in “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?” And the OED’s entry from 1914 still includes span as a standard option for the simple past of spin. But the OED was behind the curve there: Merriam-Webster’s International (1890) had already labeled span as “archaic”, and the Century Dictionary (1895) labeled it “formerly”.
You can find the American quasi-proverb* “leave [or let] it lay where Jesus flang it” in such improbably high-register contexts as a 21st-century academic book chapter titled “Diagnostic Taxa as Open Concepts: Metatheoretical and Statistical Questions about Reliability and Construct Validity in the Grand Strategy of Nosological Revision.” Admittedly it’s placed in quotes and attributed to an unidentified (and probably himself “proverbial”) “Baptist preacher” to flag that it may be a deviation from the rest of the chapter registerwise. But still.
*Maybe it’s a maxim? Are maxims different from proverbs?
Abbas’s comment is the most perceptive yet. It’s not just about approving a usage that is not the official form, nor about splitting the Spanish-speaking world. It’s about a shibboleth that betrays “sheer incompetence” on the part of the speaker.
“Sheer incompetence”? That seems a tad overstated.
In my youth, we frequently used ‘come’ as the simple past tense of ‘come.’ Has the postman been yet? Yeah, he come this morning.
We were tutted for doing this this but the world stayed on its axis.
Yeah, “sheer incompetence” just means “a change I disapprove of.”
Whoops, I spoke too soon: it seems the OED wasn’t wrong about spin–span for British English. In fact I spin today, I span yesterday, I have spun is *still* considered correct by at least some BrE speakers: see discussions at Language Log and WordReference.
I think “sheer incompetence” means “a change that has been noticed by society at large and arbitrarily blinked out as mockworthy”.
I think “sheer incompetence” means “a change that has been noticed by society at large and arbitrarily blinked out as mockworthy”.
Exactly. That’s why I used the word “shibboleth”. I meant to suggest that it was not merely non-standard; it was actively singled out and stigmatised in the community.
I don’t understand why Mexicans, including but not limited to those in charge of their school system, should give a hoot about the linguistic shibboleths of actual Spaniards. Spain has a smaller GDP than Mexico.* Spain has less than half the population of Mexico, plus a collapsed fertility rate tending to mean even fewer Spaniards in the future (without even netting out those who insist on speaking Catalan or Euskara or what have you instead of Castillian if given the chance).
Spanish is only important as a “world language” because it is spoken by a heck of a lot more non-Spaniards (a plurality of them Mexican) than Spaniards. Without that, it would have approximately the same prominence on the world language stage as Romanian and its internal prescriptivist controversies of no wider interest. Indeed, it strikes me that the vast majority of living or recently-living Spanish-language authors who are read in translation (at least by Anglophones) are non-Spaniards. Has there been an actual-Spaniard author whom well-read Anglophone intelligentsia types are expected to have read or at least read enough about that they can bluff a little since the death of Ortega y Gasset, which the internet informs me was in 1955? Bolaño admittedly ended up living and working in Spain for most of his somewhat short adult life, but AFAIK never self-identified as a Spaniard versus a Chilean or at least “Latin American” at large.
*Caveat: definitely smaller GDP in PPP terms. Which of the two has a larger nominal GDP apparently depends on which source you consult since they are not all in accord.
Javier Marías might fit the description; of course he has nothing like the cultural reach of Ortega y Gasset, but who does any more?
I will confess to not being very familiar with Marias’ works, but on perusing his bio I have the separate thought that it must be a great embarrassment for Spanish letters and literary culture for its allegedly best-writer-of-his-generation to have spent so much time living abroad in Anglophone nations and to have such good English that he could make a living translating English literature into Spanish. That’s the sort of thing that would be understandable if you were the best-living-writer in a small-scale literary culture like Estonian or Slovenian, but …
My (Argentina-born) grandfather attempted to dissuade my mother from learning Spanish, on the grounds that there was no literature worth reading in Spanish* (he suggested Italian as a much preferable option.) While I do actually see (more or less) what he was driving at, the attitude does strike me as a tad extreme.
* Or perhaps, no literature worth learning Spanish for in order to be able to read it in the original (a slightly less inflammatory position, though still one that I would be – hesitant – in sharing with my hispanophone relatives …)
There is room for “sheer incompetence”: inconsistent speech errors, which even the speaker themself might recognize as unintentional. I don’t think the speech mannerisms of the Rev. Spooner or Mistress Quickly would count as distinct dialects or registers.
I can’t tell whether Abbas’s experience of Iberian dijistes refers to an error of speech through leveling, as young children make while learning a language (like English “wented”), or whether they are an instance of an established but despised register.
@DE: I am trying the arguably-less-extreme exercise of distinguishing between a) literature written in Spanish; and b) literature written in Spanish by Spaniards, as opposed to having been written by Colombians or Peruvians or Equatoguineans etc. The first set is certainly a larger universe of texts than the second, although your grandfather might well harrumph and say that quantity was no substitute for quality etc.
In the U.S. of course virtually no one purports to take Spanish so that they can read Ortega y Gasset (or Cervantes, or Lorca, or for that matter Comrade Gonzalo) in the original. You take it because it’s easy* or because it’s “useful,” which in practice seems to work out in more affluent circles as “you can talk to the cleaning lady.”
*Leaving aside the question of the extent to which Spanish is “objectively” one of the easier tongues for Anglophones to learn in terms of not involving grossly dissimilar lexicon, phonology, grammar, orthography, etc., the issue in the U.S. is that since it is in recent generations by far the most popular foreign language studied in K-12 schools, it ends up being the one studied by default, meaning the one typically studied by students who are not particularly academically ambitious or motivated (including or especially in parts of the country where the demographics are such that there is not a very high percentage of students with Spanish-speaking parents). Which means that Spanish classes end up in practice being easier because those teaching classes in French or Latin or German or even perhaps Italian can with some degree of accuracy think that the students are self-selected for interest in the subject and can thus be challenged to work reasonably hard at it, whereas that assumption about likely student effort and engagement simply does not hold for those teaching Spanish classes. This is, I think, unfortunate for all concerned, not least those who really would like to learn Spanish in an intense and rigorous way.
J.W. Brewer wrote:
There are of course multiple spelling standards within the pluricentric Anglophone world …
This use of multiple for many or several interests me. Exiguous in its occurrences before about 1960, it now seems almost de rigueur – in academic English at least. I find myself striking it out in favour of a more traditional and less potentially confusing alternative, sometimes with a comment to the client. Like this: “What exactly is a ‘multiple spelling standard’? How many are there, do you think?”
“I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,” as Hat himself has said multiple times in this very place.
@Noetica. I was born after 1960, so my sense of pre-1960 usage is spotty and formed by extensive but perhaps not-well-balanced reading. But wiktionary gives the simple and straightforward “More than one” as its first sense of “multiple” as an adjective. So I genuinely don’t understand what you’re on about. Are you claiming that pragmatically you shouldn’t use “multiple” when there are only in practice two or three variations and you need more like five or seven for it to be a cromulent word?
In the specific application, part of the issue is that while there seem to be but two polar-extreme orthographic standards, which we might call maximally-American and maximally non-American, my understanding is that there are plenty of publication stylebooks in places like Canada or Australia or wherever that sort of mix and match rather than adopt either pure extreme. So they might go with (non-American) “foetus” but not (non-American) “civilise,” or perhaps vice versa.
JWB:
Are you claiming that pragmatically you shouldn’t use “multiple” when there are only in practice two or three variations and you need more like five or seven for it to be a cromulent word?
No, I’m saying that as a matter of description this use of multiple as a reinforcing mark of plurality has become common only recently. In the last three decades, we might think (see my ngrams). And its use is steadily rising.
Also as a matter of description, the singular multiple standard has been in use since about 1880 (see my ngram for that, above). So multiple spelling standards is ambiguous, while the alternatives I offer are not: several spelling standards or many spelling standards, depending on what is meant.
I would argue that something is lost, and nothing is gained, by preferring multiple spelling standards. We could also think that several multiple spelling standards ought to have an intelligible meaning. Right?
… and, no surprise, that Log post about span-spun was followed up at Language Hat: SPAN OFF THE ROAD. D’oh, never forget to search site:languagehat.com!
@Noetica. So I am using the word consistently with a generic someone of my age writing in the present year? Sorry, will have to try harder with my reactionary affections. (Post something about bandit-occupied mainland China, so I can use my old-school pre-Communist spellings of the toponyms.)
No offence intended, JWB. I’m only reporting on a matter of linguistic interest – as a professional editor who follows these things avidly. You will write as you will. So will I. And I will advise my clients the best way I can.
As another American born after 1960 (though not terribly long after), I’m also confused by Noetica’s peeving. Using “multiple” to contrast with “single” seems absolutely normal to me, and singular “multiple standard” or “several multiple standards” is puzzling. If I’d encountered those phrases during my life as an editor I might well have suggested rewriting them, unless they represent established terminology in a field.
Keith Ivey:
Peeving? A needlessly pejorative expression, of the sort I have avoided in dialogue with JWB.
Please explain what you find confusing in my evidence and statements, and I’ll try to make things clearer. You write:
Using “multiple” to contrast with “single” seems absolutely normal to me, and singular “multiple standard” or “several multiple standards” is puzzling.
But your use of multiple here is ambiguous. You could mean “more than one” (as in “multiple individuals have asked the same question”), or you could mean “having an internal multiplicity” (as in “yesterday there was another multiple escape, involving a concerted effort by twenty prisoners”).
Note these uses of multiple with a singular noun, in print:
And for several multiple Xs:
Are these confusing to you also? If so, what is unclear and how might you edit them?
I (b. 1956) am with Noetica on disliking ‘multiple’ as a synonym for ‘many.’ Example: a house has many owners; it has multiple ownership. The ownership (singular) has many components. It is multiple in nature.
But this is old school, I know.
I think “sheer incompetence” means “a change that has been noticed by society at large and arbitrarily blinked out as mockworthy”.
Sometimes. Sometimes it’s incompetence. Certainly grammatical and lexical errors are often evidence of social incompetence, and since one of the primary functions of language appears to be signaling social status and which tribe one belongs to it isn’t surprising that certain errors are stigmatized.
@Noetica I find myself striking it out in favour of a more traditional and less potentially confusing alternative, sometimes with a comment to the client. Like this: “What exactly is a ‘multiple spelling standard’? How many are there, do you think?”
Then from me you’d get a waspish rebuke that you’re out of touch with modern English, and no I don’t want you as editor to ‘correct’ that thank you. (BTW I appear to be older than many who’ve volunteered their d.o.b.)
the singular multiple standard has been in use
No it hasn’t. The quotes you link to both say “_a_ multiple standard” (my emphasis). Completely different, if you want to compete in peevery. So that’s ‘multiple’ as adjective, not as quantifier — because the ‘a’ has already taken the quantifier/specifier slot in the NP.
(At a guess) ‘_a_ multiple spelling standard’ would be a standard that tolerated variations in spelling. Which in fact UK spelling does tolerate, but we don’t have an Academie Française to lay down a standard — as @JWB was pointing out. Ait/Eyot/Eyet/Eight, for example, all tolerated within UK English.
JWB was contrasting chiefly UK vs US spellings. (That’s two — i.e. multiple — standards.) If I were wanting to express that there are many/several standards for English spelling, and that specifically some of those tolerate multiple spellings within each, I’d say ‘standards for multiple spellings’ — with explicitly two plurals. “multiple spelling standards” would not convey that sense; neither would I expect my audience to take that sense even if my editor swore blind that’s what it means..
We could also think that several multiple spelling standards ought to have an intelligible meaning. Right?
No, that’s gibberish. Prefer ‘several standards for multiple spellings’ — with two plurals.
‘several spelling standards’ or ‘many spelling standards’: either mean much the same as ‘multiple spelling standards’ to me. (IF there’s a difference: ‘several’ connotes there’s only a few; ‘many’ connotes plenty more; ‘multiple’ connotes more than one possibly up to many, the author hasn’t carried out a rigorous survey/it’s not their point to quantify exactly.) I think @JWB’s phrasing was just right.
Maybe this is particular to me, but I consider multiple as an adjective to connote several/many BRANCHING alternatives starting from a single (real or notional) starting point. In this view, multiple standards are diverging from an original uniform or uniformly imposed standard, which probably did not exist as such for 16C English, so that the common starting point for various (proposed) standards was multivalent in places, and the standard authors made selections that accorded with popular usage or their own taste.
@PP connote several/many BRANCHING alternatives
Yeah, but what is it that’s branching?
With Ait/Eyot/Eyet/Eight, we have one pronunciation (or at least we conjecture there was one pronunciation at the time those spellings appeared — I deliberately chose a dialect word with a small regional extent, and which to this day tolerates a variety of spellings), but various ways to represent the pronunciation. (There’s no evidence there was a single spelling that diverged.) Shakespeare was not unusual for his day in using different spellings for the same pronunciation even within a single script/letter. So that’s _not_ branching in the sense you want to connote? What term would you use?
Or is it branching at a national level? UK vs US spelling? Which has become regularised (at least by the publishing industry) such that the places where ‘colour’ is acceptable are disjoint from where ‘color’ is acceptable [**]. And there’s a whole slew of spelling variants with the same distribution.
[**] We’ve noted above some differences in coverage of UK/US spelling in Australia vs NZ. In Singapore — which picks up quite a bit of English language publishing — different books from the same publisher carry different spelling systems, presumably from the original author/publisher.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED13148/track?counter=1&search_id=23515060
“eighte card. num. Also eghte, aghte, aughte. Etymology OE eahta, æhta.”
The dipthong and guttural are already present in OE. But the final (optional, e.g., pronounced before some or all following consonants) vowel is not in your four spellings. Neither is the guttural. So I would say the four spellings you provide are branching from *eit, a notional spelling of (a later reflex of) the M.E. form eighte pronounced without the guttural or the final vowel.
Me: The lengthened vowel is an Anglo-Frisian isogloss
DM: Oh, is it? I thought it was an innovation in late Old English, so it must have happened separately in Frisian.
You’re right, I checked now and the change is dated to the 9th century in Old English, so it must be a parallel development.
@PP Not that *eit, but this eit: WM eit from Merc. *ēgoþ, corresp. to WS īegoþ, īgeþ, īget; cp. OE ēg, īeg, īg island (Pgmc. *agwjō-). MnE dial. ait island in a river. And that gives me an extra variant of the spelling.
Used specifically of the long skinny islands in the Thames formed from sedimentation. There’s one at Runnymede upon which the Magna Carta was signed (goes one legend).
wrt ‘branching’, you’ve now shifted the goalposts: I see no evidence there was exactly one widely-agreed spelling (for either word)/you seem to be talking about spellings branching from a pronunciation. I’m pretty sure “*eit” is intended as a conjectured pronunciation (for modern spelling “eight”), _not_ a spelling. ‘Quotations: Show all’ for eit gives me various spellings in C11th, 12th, 13th none representing a gutteral.
(Good to see it’s cognate with Norwegian Bokmål øy. [wiktionary] I’ve an aunt lives near ‘Bygdøy’ (big island), Oslofjord.)
Paddy:
Maybe this is particular to me, but I consider multiple as an adjective to connote several/many BRANCHING alternatives starting from a single (real or notional) starting point.
An interesting take. Appeal to such hydra-like pluralities might amount to an alternative justification for the usage I have drawn attention to, beyond the supposed prescission from specificity that would have us not wanting to use either several or many (or a few, and so on).
By the way, if there are exactly two Xs (neither being a multiple X!) are there multiple Xs?
Sometimes. Sometimes it’s incompetence.
Of course there is such a thing as incompetence, but that’s not what tends to get complained about, because it’s generally due to non-native-speaker status — it’s churlish to complain if a foreigner says “I am not owning a house,” and most people don’t do it. In my experience, such complaints are almost always about widespread (i.e., not “incompetent”) forms that the complainer doesn’t like.
I’m also confused by Noetica’s peeving.
Noetica is not a peever, he’s a guy with a strong sense of how English works (based not only on intuition, as with the Peeververein, but on close examination of modern grammars like Huddleston/Pullum). I often disagree with him, but I have deep respect for his analyses.
@antC
Sorry for my mixup of the eventually homophonic etyma, but a victory for Plato that you found the ur-eit! I perhaps expressed myself poorly, but by “notional” starting point, I meant something that could serve as a base from which the different standards could be regarded as variations, due either to actual divergence or selection of one of the alternatives provided at the start.
@Noetica
Due to the fractal nature of reality, your question can only provide temporary puzzlement. One thought that, apart from medical curiosities, there were only two human genders, but now we see there are multiple genders (I leave speculation on the starting point to those who have the requisite theological and anatomical expertise).
I’m confused by the manner in which Noetica is trying to make his point, because he repeatedly refers to “multiple standards” while the quote he’s criticizing is “a multiple x standard”, so at face value it doesn’t seem to suffer from the ambiguity he highlights. I’m not even clear whether Noetica is opposed to “a multiple x standard”
My phrase which originally attracted Noetica’s critique was the plural “multiple spelling standards.” (I suppose “multiple spellings standard” might be a cromulent way to describe a particular standard that tolerates internal orthographic variation, but that’s not what I was referring to.)
One advantage of “multiple” here, I realize in hindsight, is that it covers the semantic range of both “several” and “many,” so I didn’t have to think through exactly how many different standards are out there in the Anglophone world (arguably a difficult classification issue, as noted above) and which side of the fuzzy line between “several” and “many” that number fell on.
Incompetence applies not just to L2 learners but also to L1 learners. There are perhaps still dialects where the simple past of “I go” is “I goed” rather than “I went”, but even so I reckon that most instances of “goed” result from incompetence rather than dialect variation. There are [a] divergences that could only ever be incompetence, and [b] others that could only ever be dialect driven; and [c] those like goed that could be either. I would more easily forgive the linguistically naive for mistaking dialect for incompetence in the case of [c] than [b]
Incompetence is the main driver of linguistic change. Yesterday’s incompetence is tomorrow’s competence. (Sometimes.)
Incompetence is the main driver of linguistic change. Yesterday’s incompetence is tomorrow’s competence. (Sometimes.)
It sounds reasonable on the face of it, but I am skeptical of random mutations as the main cause of language change. Children make mistakes as they learn a language, but they get better.
Ryan:
“My phrase which originally attracted Noetica’s critique was the plural ‘multiple spelling standards’,” writes RWB in response to your confusion. In my discussion I addressed (and adduced with links) expressions of the forms “[a][the] multiple X[s]”. I had to, so I could discuss the issue at all.
Read carefully, to see that I am primarily interested in the rising use of “multiple Xs” (as in “multiple occasions”, in which example there is no such thing as a singular “multiple occasion”). See ngrams in my very first link, above; and see again RWB’s “multiple spelling standards” (in which instance the reader could think that more than one “multiple spelling standard” is in play). Similarly, there might be more than one “multiple escape” (of several prisoners, each time) when a report speaks of “multiple escapes”. See my examples from print sources.
To make my point that “multiple” had a common singular application long before it was a common reinforcer of plurality, I of course had to speak of instances in which it does not reinforce plurality in the way that several and many do.
I can only simplify so much, and it takes many words to do so. The rest is up to the reader.
JWB:
One advantage of “multiple” here, I realize in hindsight, is that it covers the semantic range of both “several” and “many,” so I didn’t have to think through exactly how many different standards are out there in the Anglophone world.
Two of us have already mentioned this as a motivation.
Hat:
Thanks.
Incompetence is the main driver of linguistic change.
To put it another way: competence is the mainstay of resistence to linguisitic change.
The weak may not inherit the earth, but it’s not for lack of trying. “Down, sir! How dare you, sir!” [Mulligan, addressing the leader shoots of ferns or grasses]
“Come up, you fearful Jesuit.”
[Mulligan, addressing his displeased and sleepy roommate]
Sorry, Noetica, I’m only familiar with the newfangled usage “multiple standards”, as in “more than one standard”. “Multiple standard” (in the singular) is new to me. That only goes to show my own narrowness and lack of knowledge by the way, not that it is strange or wrong.
Sorry Noetica. Part of my confusion came from reading the thread in a scrolling-backwards-to-find-where-I-left-off order and so entangling what you said with how you were quoted. Which is a failure to pay close attention to what you’d actually written.
“Multiple choice test” seems to have skyrocketed in popularity around the end of the first world war. I wonder if this was transitional, a common phrase perhaps coined to reflect the multiplicity of options internal to the act of making a choice, or but interpreted as describing the multiple options (choices) available.
Multiple itself was virtually unused (in n-gram searchable works) in 1850, and has recently been about ten times more common than in 1900, perhaps partly driven by the rise of multiple choice tests introducing the term to every high school student.
For common words or constructions, yes, but for sufficiently rare ones that doesn’t always happen.
For common words or constructions, yes, but for sufficiently rare ones that doesn’t always happen.
Sure, I can see how that might be true, but are there actual supporting data?
Stu and Hat:
Want to manure the whole place over, scabby soil. A coat of liver of sulphur.
Bathrobe:
I’m only familiar with the newfangled usage “multiple standards”, as in “more than one standard”.
That’s fine, but you must be familiar with a multiple birth, and be able to make good sense of several multiple births. Familiar or not, a multiple standard and several multiple standards are manifestly like that. Like multiple escape (see earlier, with examples from print sources) and several multiple escapes also. Yes?
And if we are given to using multiple to reinforce plurality, there is a serious risk of ambiguity when we issue sentences like these:
SOED, on multiple as an adjective:
While the plural-reinforcing usage dates from M17 (like the other adjectival usage), the two examples are from late 20C; and my ngram evidence shows its rarity for general purposes before then. That said, ngram evidence for the likes of multiple cuts,multiple cut,multiple layers,multiple layer and a multiple layer * is interesting too.
Ryan:
Sorry Noetica.
De nada. A many-fibrilled thread, hard to untangle. There are accounts above of what I wrote – and of what I think and what I am competent or incompetent at – that are wildly inaccurate. Even simple failure to perceive careful use of italics to mark the bounds of an expression under discussion. Not worth the effort to refute.
Yes, “multiple[-]choice test” is interesting. Google ngrams for multiple-choice * show “multiple-choice question[s]” as even more prominent. (You get similar results without the hyphen.)
I wonder if this was transitional, a common phrase perhaps coined to reflect the multiplicity of options internal to the act of making a choice, or but interpreted as describing the multiple options (choices) available.
Hmm.
Choice is itself interesting, in this and similar contexts. If we confronted a bifurcation in the road but one of them was blocked we might say either “We have no choice about how to proceed” or “We have only one choice about how to proceed”. But if there were nine possible ways forward, we would not say “We have eight choices about how to proceed”.
there is a serious risk of ambiguity when we issue sentences like these
There is serious risk of ambiguity for almost any sentence (in any language, but especially English), if you issue it without sufficient context. Then DON’T DO THAT. Shearing off context is exactly what Chomskyites do with their preposterous judgments about sentence grammaticality. It’s just worthless research. And in one of the examples your first post linked to, you’d sheared off part of the sentence (the determiner ‘a’) so that actually contradicted your argument.
And that ‘ambiguity’ mode of argument is exactly what peevers do. (I cite my English teacher at school — who very nearly stifled all my love for Language.) I accept @Hat’s assurances you (Noetica) are not a peever [**], but frankly the mode and register [***] of your comments provides strong evidence the other way.
There are easy ways to disambiguate the sentences you allege to ambiguous. And are they only ambiguous because you’ve wrenched them out of context? Even
* There were multiple multiple births in the maternity wing yesterday. vs
* There was one multiple birth, and multiple other births in …
Where we understand the ‘other births’ to be contrastive, so non-multiple.
are from late 20C; and my ngram evidence shows its rarity for general purposes before then.
We are now well into 21C. So (not for the first time) I wonder why you’re bringing evidence from a generation ago? Language changes, even in the register of academic publishing, ‘innit?
Yes, I think @Ryan is on to an explanation through “multiple-choice test” (with or without the hyphen).
‘choice’ there is acting as a classifer. Classifiers use the singular, even if the phrase connotes a test whose questions offer multiple choices for answers.
[**] I expect we would in general agree pretty closely on what constitutes well-written academic English. But of course what we discuss here is the corner cases and examples that one participant finds marginal but another finds acceptable.
[**] Who except a pedant would use a hundred-dollar word like ‘prescission’ on an informal blog? Prefer “avoiding specificity”. Or perhaps “evading” — depending on what attitude you’re attributing to the speaker.
… and the caravan moves on.
@Noetica By the way, if there are exactly two Xs (neither being a multiple X!) are there multiple Xs?
Good question! (But really beside the point of whether to use plurals.) My two-penny worth:
If you know there are exactly two, saying ‘multiple’ would be misrepresentation/exaggeration.
Contrariwise, if you know there are many, saying ‘multiple’ would be misrepresenting/underplaying.
If you know of two (or of several, or of a few), and suspect there are more, ‘multiple’ is just the word.
The linguistic is only one among multip-, um, many varieties of annoying peevers.
@Stu competence is the mainstay of resistence to linguisitic change.
Yeah. Discuss wrt the status of Classical (written) Chinese, or Sanskrit.
When literacy was not widespread, the Scholastic classes could preserve their expertise. As literacy spread, the Scholastic classes had to retreat into more recondite defences: split infinitives are bad because Latin.
Now that literacy and music publishing embraces regional and non-formal registers, the Scholastic classes can either embrace the new registers and study Rap as an art form, or retreat into defending moribund forms on grounds they preserve some valuable distinction. As if speakers are unable to find ways to make such distinctions when they need to. (And as if cleaving to these moribund forms somehow inoculates against loose meanings.)
@Noetica, upon probing into your analysis, I find it weak:
Note these uses of ‘multiple’ with a singular noun, in print:
…
And for several multiple Xs:
…
All of your examples take the form ‘<Det> multiple X(s)’. Where <Det> is either ‘a’ — in which case the head noun is singular; or ‘several’ — in which case the head noun is plural form. The appearance of ‘multiple’ has no influence on the form of the head noun, because ‘multiple’ is not appearing as Determiner/Quantifier introducing the NP.
So to answer your appended question: no, those are not unclear to me, because there is a <Det> as well as ‘multiple’.
Examples of the form ‘<Det> multiple[-]choice X(s)’ follow the same rule: the plural marking on the head noun is driven from <Det>; ‘choice’ is not marked plural, because it appears as a classifier.
Now it’s a reasonable question what would the plural of ‘a multiple escape’ etc look like? If it were important to distinguish multiple multiple[-]escapes vs multiple single-prisoner escapes, the language already has plenty of resources to make clear. So I suspect speakers would avoid the ambiguity of ‘multiple escapes’ simpliciter. OTOH, if using ‘multiple’ is deliberately to avoid specificity as to overall number or cardinality of each escape, ‘multiple escapes’ would be just the ticket.
After that analysis, to circle back to your several multiple spelling standards, I plain think that phrasing is so hazardous to parse, I wouldn’t use it/I’d advise an author to rephrase/if my editor suggested it, I’d ignore them. ‘several standards for multiple spellings’ seems within easy reach, and the two plurals make abundantly clear what’s denoted.
“Having told my wife, I am no longer the man I was.”
A (male) friend of mine habitually sings “Yesterday” with the words “I’m not half the man I used to be” in falsetto.
I’m not sure I could think of a word that could replace “shrunk” / “shrank”.
“The clothes ensmallened themselves in the dryer.”
The cling/clung/clung pattern is nevertheless significantly commoner than the sing/sang/sung pattern
I don’t know how significant it is: CGEL and WP list 9 Class IIIa strong verbs with distinct predicates and past participles are nine (drink, shrink, sink, stink, ring, sing, spring, begin, swim) and 16 with merged preterites and participles (dig, win, spin, cling, fling, sting, string, swing, wring, slink, stick and bind, find, grind, wind). That’s not a lot either way. Run is also Class IIIa, but with merged plain form and participle; rin survives in Scots.
For the record, the other strong verb classes (neglecting those that are weak in some varieties and strong in others) are:
Class I: bide, bite, chide, drive, hide[*], ride, rise, rive, shine, shrive, slide, smite, stride, strike, strive[**], thrive[**], write.
Class II: choose, cleave, fly, freeze, shoot (each irregular in its own way).
Class IIIb: fight, burst/bust.
Class IV: bear, break, come, get[***], shear, speak[***], steal, swear[****], tear, tread[***], wake[****], weave[***].
Class V: eat, give, lie, see, sit, also be in the predicate.
Class VI: drag, draw, forsake, lade, shake, shape, shave, slay, stand, take.
Class VII: beat, blow, fall, grow, hang, hold, know, throw, let.
[*] Ex-weak verb
[**] Loanword
[***] Formerly Class V
[****] Formerly Class VI
Does multiple standard ever mean something different from bimetallic standard in the Real World, as opposed to the various imaginary worlds of economists?
the change is dated to the 9th century in Old English
I was looking at Bremmer (2009) An Introduction to Old Frisian. The lengthening of short vowels before certain consonant clumsters seems to be assigned to late Old Frisian there too, although the details are scattered about in Bremmer’s account—not discussed as a group but as subheadings under the description of the development of each different vowel in Old Frisian.
Bremmer, p. 44, on original the various origins of OFr. [eː]:
p. 44, on original the various origins of OFr. [ɔː]:
p. 115, on the various characteristics of Old West Frisian:
He gives no examples for Frisian mb and ng that I could find.
I was also curious about the evidence used to date the change in OE. I found this from Charles Jones (1989) A History of English Phonology, p. 29ff (apologies for any uncaught OCR errors):
I wonder if there are examples of similar lengthening process before homorganic clusters from outside this linguistic area. It’s an odd convergence in evolution between two closely related languages, even if the details of the environments differ between OE and OFris. I wonder if there was some predisposition in the phonetic realization of these clusters. I have no hound in any Germanic diachronic phonological fight, though.
John Cowan:
Does multiple standard ever mean something different from bimetallic standard in the Real World, as opposed to the various imaginary worlds of economists?
Yes. Some excerpts that you too could google (but I prescind from giving links, because an excess would send all this into moderation):
It’s an odd convergence in evolution between two closely related languages, even if the details of the environments differ between OE and OFris. I wonder if there was some predisposition in the phonetic realization of these clusters
The phenomenon of parallel development is not unknown – examples would be the diphthongisation of /i:/ and /u:/ and the developments /e:/ -> /i:/ and /o:/ -> /u:/ that happened in Standard English, Dutch, and High German, but at different times and with different results and intermediary steps, or the falling and strengthening of yers in the Slavic languages – we know that it happened only in the individual languages, but the rules for which yers fell and which became vowels are almost identical between languages (with the exception of Novgorodian, IIRC) and the main difference is in the vowel quality of the strengthened yers.
It seems to have happened a lot in Oti-Volta, though there the matter is complicated by a lack of data as to how much actual contact has occurred between distinct Oti-Volta languages in the past.
If the change in question is “natural” (a characterisation which admittedly seems liable to beg the question) such parallel developments don’t seem too surprising; an Oti-Volta one is that proto-Oti-Volta */Vɰ/ has become /V:/ in all branches except for two which are not particularly close to one another.
Otherwise you could hypothesise that there was some subphonemic phonetic detail about the system in the protolanguage which made it unstable and predisposed to a particular kind of change. People have suggested such things with the consonant “mutations” in the Insular Celtic languages, which all seem to be somehow the same kind of thing, but can’t be reconstructed to the protolanguage.
“by the rise of multiple choice tests introducing the term to every high school student.” – For me it is still a “Western” thing, though since 90s they are common in Russia too.
@John Cowan:
A suitably ambiguous question! I read it differently from Noetica above: as a question restricted to monetary standards.
I’m an economist but not a historian, either of economic thought or of monetary systems. With this caveat, I can say with reasonable confidence that the normal (if not universal) meaning of multiple standard excludes the bimetallic standard as an instance thereof.
The bimetallic standard once belonged to the sensible world. It used to be the monetary system of coining two metals (gold and silver in all cases I know) at a legally fixed relative valuation.
The multiple standard belongs to the intelligible realm. It is the idea of a monetary system in which representative money is backed by a predefined basket of commodities, whose relative valuations are not legally fixed.
I expect fellow Hattics will enjoy Edwin W. Kemmerer’s peeving (in his 1935 Money, Ch. 7) that this not what multiple standard ought to mean. However, his alternative definition still acknowledges that the bimetallic standard is not a multiple standard. Moreover, his conclusion should be noted, but perhaps not so much appreciated, by Noetica.
Not far behind Kemmerer’s complaints I sense the shadow of the idea that the bimetallic standard of gold and silver coins circulating simultaneously at a fixed rate should be called a “double standard” as opposed to the “dual standard” of gold and silver coins (or dollars and pesos, or what have you) circulating simultaneously at a floating exchange rate.
Needless to say, I am unqualified to determine if the fleeting sensible world of commodity money or the enduring intelligible realm of monetary ideas is more properly considered the real world, let alone the Real World.
I had googled up the 21st century instance of “multiple standard” that Noetica annotates with “[Go figure!]” and concluded from context that it was an excellent example of “sheer incompetence.” Either a typo not caught by proofreading or a failure of idiomaticity caused by the fact that much academic writing these days is in ESL.
A review of the google n-gram viewer, by the way, will show that “multiple standards” has been consistently more common (in the google books corpus) since 1948. The claim that the minority variant is The Proper Way to Do It while the majority variant is somehow confusing or illogical* is strong, if perhaps not always conclusive, evidence that one is dealing with a peever. Moreover, the n-gram results substantially overstate the relative prevalence of the minority variant because they capture a lot of false-positive hits where “multiple standard” is just a sequence of adjectives in a longer NP like “multiple standard curves” or “multiple standard addition methods.”
“Multiple standard” peaks (with probably more of its hits being real positives for the NP) in the late 19th century when controversies over bimetallism and related points of monetary theory were of wide popular and polemical interest rather than being a niche topic discussed only by specialists.
*It is always possible to demonstrate that some hypothesized alternative to ordinary idiomatic speech would be more precise and less susceptible of ambiguity, which is why specialized genres of writing (mathematical proofs, medical lab reports, etc.) are often written in a distinct style/register and often use specialized jargon. The takeaway from this is that maximizing theoretical precision and minimizing the theoretical risk of ambiguity are simply not the overriding desiderata in most ordinary idiomatic use of language, so critiques and reform proposals that act as if they should be are misapprehending how human beings actually use natural language under typical circumstances.
maximizing theoretical precision and minimizing the theoretical risk of ambiguity are simply not the overriding desiderata in most ordinary idiomatic use of language
Exactly.
Separately, google finds three instances of my specific phrase “multiple spelling standards,” two of which were written by people who aren’t me and weren’t AFAIK quoting me, compared to zero for “multiple spelling standard.” From which I conclude that my usage is the dominant one by infinity percent.
“Exactly”
Usually there is no ambiguity. Everyone knows what everyone means when she says “epicenter”.
Having lived for a long while in earthquake country, I will never give up peeving about “epicenter”.
JWB:
The claim that the minority variant is The Proper Way to Do It while the majority variant is somehow confusing or illogical is strong, if perhaps not always conclusive, evidence that one is dealing with a peever.
An interesting pronouncement. If “peevers” constituted a natural kind (like witches) it might be a useful rule of thumb for identifying and branding them, so the world could be made safe for right-thinking thelemites. But matters are more complex.
No one is saying that using multiple as a popular reinforcer of plurality is “wrong”. It is not “illogical”, and it is not always confusing. There are very many cases and contexts, however, in which it is. Surprised? It is often better replaced by something equally common that is likely to be more precise (but we note points about specificity and its sometimes-justified avoidance, above).
I see such cases often enough, in my editing. In some instances with a plural noun it is genuinely unclear how the adjective multiple is intended. Some writers use it quite unthinkingly, peppering a text with it and shunning plain unambiguous words like many. (Similarly, the word so is often completely absent, avoided as perhaps too natural and easy on the reader.)
Part of my role as an editor is to be alert to such mannerisms, and to advise about them. Senior academics pay good money for me to do that, and are immensely grateful when they receive the revised text they have commissioned. They are then perfectly free to restore or further modify as they choose. That’s their business.
I reported my observations on multiple, saying it was a matter of interest to me. Your use of the word was just a prompt for that, JWB. Harmless enough, but not somehow exempt from notice and comment – any more than my frankly deliberate talk of “prescission” was exempt (and it drew harsh censure above; “peeving” censure?). I’m sorry if you took it as against you in particular, and I have already declared that no offence was intended.
The world of thinkers concerning language use is not dichotomously divided into prescriptivists and descriptivists, as one might think from much that is written here and at the Log. Let’s be alert to the metapeevery that spreads such myths.
As a quondam editor, I subscribe to Noetica’s explanation.
That’s fine, but you must be familiar with a multiple birth, and be able to make good sense of several multiple births.
I stand corrected.
@Y, I’m not confident that without peevers I would have known the original/professional meaning of “epicenter”. Etymological/semantic peevers are informative.
But some preach a theory that the whole process of appropriation of such words by the irresponsible mob is pure evil, that it disrupts communication between irresponsible people and even between responsible people.
I have doubts.
@drasvi, yes. I have strong personal tastes in some matters of language (and food, and other things), but just because I find something repulsive doesn’t mean I need to make a religion out of it and smite the infidels. Much as I’m tempted to.
@Noetica I see such cases often enough, in my editing. In some instances with a plural noun it is genuinely unclear how the adjective multiple is intended.
I don’t think JWB’s original deployment of ‘multiple’ falls into that category. There was vagueness as to exactly how many standards might be involved — and that made ‘multiple’ (more than one, but probably fewer than ‘many’) entirely appropriate — and reinforced by ‘pluricentric’ appearing later in the sentence.
@Hat As a quondam editor, I subscribe to Noetica’s explanation.
Editors (quondam or otherwise) I expect to be sensitive to a publication’s context and register/intended audience. The Hattery is an informal blog. I don’t, frankly, think I’ve read anything published in the past 50 years following the guidelines Noetica seems to be pushing. (And I’ve been reading a lot of medical papers over the past few years.)
What attracts me to the Hattery is the expertise of the participants, but equally that it covers topics in an unstuffy way. And I would sharply contrast that with one particular English teacher I suffered over 6 years. Noetica echoes exactly the polemic recourses of that teacher. And in a style 50 years out of date.
In particular, _still_ banging on It is often better replaced by something equally common that is likely to be more precise shows Noetica continues to arrogantly presume being ‘precise’ is the sole measure for posts here; and _still_ banging on about “prescission” (and indeed maliciously — like a cheeky schoolboy — using ‘prescind’ entirely unnecessarily after I’d noted the inappropriateness) means you are not listening/learning.
Noetica’s style and presumptions/presumptuousness are plain not appropriate for this blog imo. Please try harder to distinguish your language/modes of argument from that of peevers. I can volunteer to review your posts before you deliver them, to moderate that ‘ex cathedra’ tone.
For example, it would have been fine to start with wording to the effect of: JWB used ‘multiple’ appropriately, drawing on the contemporary sense of ‘vague as to number’; but there’s other possible vagaries of spelling conventions, I wonder if that’s at play … ? Then an interesting sidelight might be that 50 years ago you could have used ‘multiple’ to connote that sense of vagueness/licentiousness-within-one-convention.
Hey, don’t knock infidel-smiting until you’ve tried it, Y! It keeps you alert and physically fit. These things matter as one ages. Smite those Amalekites! (Possibly superfluous, as they seem pretty thoroughly pre-smitten these days.)
It’s either that or take up gardening.
Noetica’s style and presumptions/presumptuousness are plain not appropriate for this blog imo.
Your style and presumptions/presumptuousness are not appropriate imo. Please try harder to treat other people decently and not descend into vicious-attack mode at the slightest whiff of opportunity. Noetica may be a bit stuffy but he does not insult people, and I wish you would imitate his behavior in that respect. I have said this before.
As the person who introduced the word “peeving” to these comments, I’d like to clarify that I did not intend it as an insult and have been known to apply to the word to some of my own expressions of opinion on matters of usage.
Noetica, I believe that, like Tertan with Prof. Howe, AntC is calling you an instrument of prescission.
DE, does killing plants by under-watering them count as smiting? Because if it is, gardening for me isn’t much of a step up.
(And I’ve been reading a lot of medical papers over the past few years.)
For comparison, I took more-or-less at random a recent paper and examined its usages of ‘multiple’. Here’s the preprint. It’s a handy case-study because the peer-reviewed version is now online (link at that link); so we can see the effect of peers’ feedback.
There’s two appearances in the preprint of ‘multiple’, in what I take to be usage Noetica is concerned about (more than one, fewer than many — though in neither case would ‘many’ be a suitable substitute: that would be _too_ many whereas ‘a few’ would be too few; neither case needs to be specific as to number). Quick! without looking at the peer-review, which of those appearances offend against the concerns? One of them has disappeared in the later version. I think not because of the usage of ‘multiple’ — but as an accident of a more thorough-going restructuring.
If anything, the usage brought forward, is _more_ liable to the lack of ‘precision’ Noetica alleges; and indeed the slight revision has increased the risk of alleged misapprehension. But I really have to read the versions with a deliberately contrarian frame of mind to even see it.
does killing plants by under-watering them count as smiting?
How about by letting the plants stand out in the rain? NZ seems to have suffered an enormous amount of rain-induced smiting this past few months — the meteorologists talk of a ‘river of tropical moisture’.
The plants in question are rather rooted to the spot. Should I be arranging awnings? (Speaking as a confirmed non-smiter.)
an instrument of prescission
Haha. The verb ‘prescind’ has two almost opposite senses. (intransitive with from vs transitive). Switching to the abstract nominal has left your comment open to both interpretations.
Hat:
I find no evidence above that AntC understoods my take on multiple and ample evidence to the contrary, despite my conscientious work of explaining. In a couple of earlier threads, engaging with AntC proved futile whenever the topic required forbearance and focus. I prescind from it here; but I want to say, without going into detail, that my ideas continue to be misrepresented. Other Hatters have understood, and I’m happy with that. Thanks – and best wishes to all!
Only a modest number of usages of multiple of the type that Noetica apparently prefers have been cited above, and they do not, to me, seem to represent a particularly productive paradigm. I recognize and understand multiple escape, but that seems to be a term of art (as are a lot of these). Note that “a multiple escape” is also “multiple escapes,” with a slightly different* meaning of escape. The relationship between multiple birth (which is definitely a term of art) and multiple births seems to be precisely the same.
Moreover, even for the rather limited class of usages that have been quoted here, some of them are still opaque to me. I now have a very clear understanding of what multiple standard denotes. However, I still don’t know what multiple attack means. (In parallel to some of the other examples, it sounds like it may refer to situations such as the one in the joke from circa fall 1967 in which the punchline is: “‘No, Achmed! It’s a trap! There are two Israelis!'”)
It also now occurs to me that Noetica’s preferred usage has multiple as a different type of adjective than what it is in its more usual (today) role. In elementary school English, we learned that adjectives typically came in one of three (or four, if the articles were being considered an additional kind of adjective) types. Good teachers would point out that these categories were not always clear-cut** (and, as with multiple, an adjective might be of different types in different contexts); however, for third graders learning to understand sentence structure and parts of speech, it was useful to identify adjectives as modifying nouns (or sometimes pronouns), usually by specifying “what kind,” “how many,” or “which ones.” In “multiple escapes,” multiple is describing “how many,” but in “multiple escape,” it’s about “what kind.” (“Was the prison camp escape single or multiple?”)
* Whenever I mention something “with a slightly different” something else, I am reminded of a quote from Baby Rudin.*** In the supplemental section on Dedekind cuts, one of the exercises is to show why the condition that the cuts (as Rudin defines them****) never contain maximal elements (making them, in a more sophisticated, topologically-based framework, open above). You can show that if this condition is dropped, there are still additive inverses, although “with a slightly different identity element(!),” but multiplicative inverses are lost.
** A favorite example of an adjective of unclear type is legion, although that was definitely not one of the edge cases brought up in class by Mr. Fenske.
*** Should the nickname of a book, when the nickname is used more commonly than the book’s official title, be italicized?
**** You have to be careful with Rudin’s slightly idiosyncratic definition of the Dedekind cuts that form a model of the reals. For the reals, his version is perfectly fine, but in the extended real number system, naive application of Rudin’s definitions makes the indeterminate form ∞ − ∞ always equal to − ∞.
Brett:
Only a modest number of usages of multiple of the type that Noetica apparently prefers have been cited above, and they do not, to me, seem to represent a particularly productive paradigm.
…
Moreover, even for the rather limited class of usages that have been quoted here, some of them are still opaque to me. I now have a very clear understanding of what multiple standard denotes. However, I still don’t know what multiple attack means.
[For convenience I will call the word as it is used in a multiple birth (and in several multiple births) multiple1, and as it is used in multiple people multiple2.]
First, for what it’s worth let’s be clear that multiple1 is the original sense etymologically and historically. My first ngrams above (these ones) illustrate the recency of multiple2.
Second, as suggested in examples given below the productivity of multiple1 is undiminished. These were easy to find, and for most the meaning is discoverable enough. Even for multiple attack, which in some cases is rather transparent and in others could be got by a little further reading. From 21C, verifiable by googling:
Even if the precise meaning can’t be discovered, the general structure is apparent. And common.
does killing plants by under-watering them count as smiting?
Certainly. Smiting is a broad church. We smiters of today pride ourselves on our inclusiveness.
I presume that these were infidel plants?
@DE
I feel your answer to be potentially misleading in its brevity. Whilst the Lord has smitten plants, e.g., by sending a plague of locusts, the objective of the smiting is not the punishment of floral sins, however grievous these may be. Such smiting is directed at certain human plant consumers, who are being singled out for punishment on the basis of superior sinfulness, because they are in the way of the Lord’s plans, or for some other reason. In the case of the “burning bush”, it seems clear that the subject plant was not consumed, but unharmed, and no doubt lived to tell the story to its grand-seedlings.
Brett:
I meant to add cases like this, which show the sturdy productivity of multiple1:
“I am trying to create a multiple blog, but I don’t seem to get a simple detail that will make it work properly.”
Multiple blog is common enough, and it must be only recent because blog is recent.
‘Multiple blog’ is common enough, …
The example you quote has article ‘a’, so the ‘multiple’ is classifier not Determiner. And that’s a different usage compared to JWB’s that sparked the discussion.
So of the common enough appearances of multiple blog, and not counting multiple blogs because the plural is problematic/ambiguous, how many have a Determiner/quantifier?
(It would seem ‘multiple blog’ might be a software/blogland term of art/fixed phrase: most of the ghits are to blogging technology.)
@Noetica: Your examples definitely show that, for some speakers, multiple¹ is in vibrant use, and for those people, noun phrases containing multiple¹ can be straightforwardly compositional constructions, not just fixed terms of art. However, this use of multiple¹ is equally clearly not a figure of my own idiolect, nor apparently that of some other highly educated native speakers. In spite of what I have learned from this discussion, if I encountered “several multiple standard” in something I was reading, I would still almost certainly find it confusing and opaque.
That appearances of multiple¹ could be ordinary compositional constructions was made clear from the variety of quotes with “multiple attack.” That noun phrase is evidently used to refer to joint attacks by plural attackers (as in the quote about lions, probably as well as some of the earlier quotes); but also sequential attacks by the same attacker (as in the quote about enzymatic catalysis); or a spectrum different possible attacks, only one of which can actually be carried out (the one about volleyball). Moreover, while alternative locutions with “multiple attacks” would probably sound better to me in all of those examples, I realized that I actually had encountered and understood “multiple attack” in chemistry context before. Yet my idiolect considers that a basically noncompositional technical term, and my having encountered it before was no help in understanding other appearances of “multiple attack,” in which the multiplicities were of different characters.
compositional: – when someone coins a term like “tail recursion” the meaning is not immediately obvious from “tail” and “recursion”. The person who coined it may add a definition. With “multiple X” the same coinage can happen without an explicit definition, if the context makes the intended meaning obvious.
Brett:
I cannot deal with the full and vast range of ideolects. No observer or analyst can do that. Multiple2 figures very little in my own ideolect, but of course I acknowledge its rising general prevalence. If multiple1 (a feature of English for centuries, and still going strong) figures little in yours, that is just one data point among many. Most of us raise no eyebrow at multiple1 in “three multiple collisions in icy conditions”, “a multiple orgasm”, “participants in trial B reported several multiple orgasms”, etc. “I wanted to set up another multiple blog, but forgot how to” is readily comprehensible though it involves a recent coinage, as are nonce uses of multiple1: “the multiple cooling chamber in this new model is a great innovation”.
@Noetica, re AntC: check. You articulate my experience better than I have. It’s all too bad.
I remember a news video of some Chicago workers who said they worked for the Sewers Department. I thought this sounded ridiculous and wrong. (More charitably, it’s correct in a working class sociolect.) If I had worked there, I’d say I worked in Sewers, but “in the Sewer Department”. The same was true when I worked in an election office — I could say I worked in Elections, but it’s the Election Department.
That’s the context in which a multiple freezer chamber is recognizable for me. I couldn’t say “a multiple freezer.” For that matter, I’d say “a 3-freezer chamber”, but “a 3-freezers chamber” sounds silly.
Likewise I could talk about a multiple orgasm sexual experience, but if orgasm is the noun, I could only say multiple orgasms, not a multiple orgasm. “Several multiple orgasms” might be understandable if I pause to think why anyone would say such a thing, but typically, I’d hear it as redundant, someone stumbling for the right word — “several, er, um, multiple orgasms.”
Most of the other usages you cite sound like abbreviated references to me. I could use “a multiple attack” of lions, potentially. But it would only issue from my mouth after I’d described the situation, which included multiple lions, and multiple would be a nominalized adjective for the number of lions, without saying anything else about “attack” I could see a volleyball coach, having spoken to her players regularly about providing multiple options for the setter in an attack, start to abbreviate with “multiple attack,” without adopting your sense of what multiple means. And there is no “multiple collision” for me, only a “multiple-car collision.”
I’m not asserting these phrases work this way for you or their authors. But I do wonder about the non-tech/scientific cites, whether they work the way I mention. Or worked that way first and then through repetitive usage, they hardened.
Ryan:
First, note that I edited my own wording to “the multiple cooling chamber”, avoiding somewhat distracting issues with “the multiple freezer chamber”. Sorry about that.
Second, the semantic details in those and many other deployments of multiple1 are complex and unsettled. I agree that there are several single collisions whenever there is a so-called multiple collision, and the individuation of orgasms is an inquiry from which I prescind. None of that takes away from the historical primacy and current persistence of multiple1. A salient fact for me is that multiple collisions are so called, and no difficulty arises from such expressions for most users of the language. We can make good enough provisional sense of such expressions as a multiple cooling chamber even if the structural or ontological details are unknown or troublesome. Similarly with multiple sclerosis.
Googling “Elections Department” yields many hits, and it sounds perfectly fine to me, as does “Sewers Department.” They’re responsible, after all, for more than one election and sewer respectively.
Sales Division …
… and “What a savings!” in some US usage. Different, but fascinating too. Made famous in Galaxy Quest. Also “It’s in my savings account”, more in line with the present examples.
@Noetica: I agree that you have demonstrated that multiple¹ is am idiomatic feature of many English speakers’ idiolects. However, “Most of us raise no eyebrow…,” is a quantitative claim, and, I’m afraid, not one that I believe. Based on my life experience, as well as many people’s comments here, my suspicion is that multiple¹ is not a productive part of most Americans’ vocabularies.
It is certainly a consequence of my relatively privileged circumstances that my native idiolect is very close to Standard American English,* and it’s an even more a privilege that I can afford to treat my idiolect as being perfectly standard even if and when it is not. Nonetheless, I do not think, based on this discussion, that it is likely that multiple¹ is a vibrant feature in most speakers’ usage. I could be wrong, of course, but nothing that I have read so far would incline me believe that this is anything but an archaism, preserved mostly in fixed terms of art and idiosyncratic personal idiolects.
* American English has multiple pronunciation standards, but the written standard is much more monolithic.
@drasvi: “Tail recursion” is not compositional. However, if that phrase originated as a clipping of “tail call recursion” (which it probably did), the bracketing “[tail call] recursion” is fully compositional, although the it contains another compound, “tail call,” which is not itself compositional, for the same reason that “tail recursion” is not, on its own.
>A salient fact for me is that multiple collisions are so called, and no difficulty arises from such expressions for most users of the language.
I had taken for granted that this might be true because you claimed it, believing I just hadn’t heard it. But I don’t find any evidence for it.
Googling, even with quotes to avoid hazy matches, the top hit is for wiki’s article Multiple-vehicle collision. (I absolutely hate that google and bing do this – returning answers that are non-responsive to your use of quotes to avoid exactly the links they return. But here it proves useful.)
Interestingly, wiki offers no less than 4 synonyms — “colloquially known as a pile-up, multi-car collision, multi-vehicle collision,[1] or simply a multi.” They don’t mention “multiple collision.”
Scrolling down, the only non-adjectival hits I find are a couple in a particle physics context and one that seems to be an English-language headline on a Tagalog news video in YouTube, and a news article headline from Indonesia. I don’t believe “multiple collision” as a noun phrase is a term most L1 speakers have ever heard or would easily recognize.
Searching Twitter for “multiple birth” (since the top google returns are medical pages), I find that the top hits are mostly about using multiple birth control pills, suffering multiple birth defects or having multiple birth certificates, ie, the mainstream plural-emphasis usage. There are several usages that do mean “giving birth to twins, triplets…” However, of those I pursued, 100% were from Australia, except one for an international association using English as lingua franca, related to a conference in Budapest.
You would think there would be at least one vernacular usage from the US, Canada or UK, but I didn’t find any.
This may be a clue. Perhaps multiple1 is still current in Australia but not elsewhere? Perhaps this is relevant to the prominent Filipino and Indonesian instances of multiple collision, as a spillover into local languages from something that would seem to be rare even in Australian English. (else “multiple collision” would have returned at least one Australian hit before the two from non-L1 Oceania.)
At any rate, I’m with Brett in believing multiple1 is not a mainstream usage through most of the English-speaking world, and would stop most L1 users in their tracks, at least long enough to consider the context in order to figure out what was meant.
Interesting on “elections department”, and I do stand corrected. I find it interesting that the first 20-30 google hits are nearly all from western states, with only Miami-Dade and a single Connecticut municipality.
There are a lot of false positives – Board of Elections, Department of State, rendering comparative stats with “election department” less meaningful.
I would note that there are 500,000 google hits for “sewer department” and only 7,000 for “sewers department”, and of the latter, some turn out to be in the form “Plan for Sewers, Department of Public Works.”
I believe that the rule I asserted remains true for most mid- and high-register L1, that nouns used as adjectives generally revert to the singular. Ticket offices do not sell only 1 ticket each, and I’ve never heard of a tickets office.
Brett:
Nonetheless, I do not think, based on this discussion, that it is likely that multiple¹ is a vibrant feature in most speakers’ usage.
Multiple1 may not be as common as it used to be, and it may well be progressively nudged aside by the rise of multiple2. But see evidence below of its use in US news reporting and in a couple of revealing finds from Australia. I can assure you that multiple1 is very much alive in Australian English (and New Zealand English), despite the rise here of multiple2: probably led by the constant wash of US English in our media. And let’s always remember, of course, to distinguish passive and active presence of multiple1 in people’s practices.
Ryan:
Perhaps multiple1 is still current in Australia but not elsewhere? […] At any rate, I’m with Brett in believing multiple1 is not a mainstream usage through most of the English-speaking world, and would stop most L1 users in their tracks, at least long enough to consider the context in order to figure out what was meant.
I’m not convinced. A lot depends, may I say, on the accuracy of the searching technique. I got these hits with searches of this exact style (and results may vary by the searcher’s location):
New York Times
• The race was halted on the lap of the accident and Al Duffy of Brooklyn, the first driver to reach the finish line after the multiple collision, …
[1944]
• Ten persons were hurt in the multiple collision, which occurred shortly after 2 AM.
[1973]
• 21 Hurt in Multiple Collision Near Grass Fire in Texas
[1974]
• TRIESTE, Italy, July 18 (Reuters)—Fourteen persons were killed and 34 injured today in a multiple collision involving a bus and several …
[1977]
• Their dissimilar frequencies (along with all their overtones) tend to interact within the amplifier in a sort of multiple collision.
[1989]
• It was a multiple collision of forces. Feminists had for years worked to encourage the creation of the pill, but not long after it appeared, …
[1990]
• And its main feature, an 800-foot-long subterranean concourse, is designed as if to represent a multiple collision among these disciplines.
[1996]
• I could go on piling up superlatives like cars in a multiple collision, but take my word: there’s going to be a whole lot of rubbernecking …
[2004]
• The mother’s character, Babou, is a sporty race car heading for a multiple collision. When Esmeralda rebukes her for her extravagance, …
[2010]
New York Post
• Niki Lauda (left) and James Hunt after both were involved in a multiple collision and forced to retire at the start of the Belgian Grand Prix, …
[2019]
Chicago Tribune
• Snow leads to massive pileup on the Kennedy Expressway
Apr 15, 2020 at 7:41 am
About 50 vehicles are at the scene of a crash on the Kennedy Expressway near North Avenue early Wednesday and 14 people have been transported to hospitals, according to the Chicago Fire Department. In addition to the 14 people who were taken to hospitals, 32 others were evaluated at the scene but will not be transported, according to CFD. Low traction on the expressway caused multiple collisions, according to fire officials. Illinois State Police’s Chicago district warns that roads are covered in sheets of ice, which have caused multiple vehicle crashes throughout the city.
[My bold, especially to highlight uncertainties in the meaning of multiple collisions. Given that the topic is a “massive pileup”, which could be called a “multiple collision” (see examples in US news sources above), were the other reported incidents also “multiple”? There is no guarantee these days that multiple-vehicle crashes (with a hyphen) would be used to indicate collisions that are multiple1.]
Sydney Morning Herald
• Multiple collisions on Canberra roads causes [sic] morning traffic chaos
Updated April 12, 2017 — 8.27am, first published at 8.15am
Two collisions on Canberra’s roads caused traffic chaos on Wednesday morning.
Tow trucks were called to a three vehicle crash on Braybrooke Street, near Ginninderra Drive and Masterman Street.
Police recommended avoiding the area.
A small truck rollover on the Federal Highway near Anthill Street had also caused delays, with police repeating warnings to avoid the area.
No injuries were reported.
[That’s the complete story. In this Australian news report it’s again indeterminate whether both incidents involved a “multiple collision” (it seems there were only two); but if the second one did not, it would be misleading to head the story “Multiple collisions on Canberra roads …”. Poor writing anyway, with that lack of number accord. Note also the absence of a helpful hyphen in “a three vehicle crash”. “A small truck rollover” is also interesting!]
• ‘This is too scary’: More than 200 vehicles involved in pile up on bridge in central China
Bernard Orr
December 28, 2022 – 6.13pm
…
Visibility in multiple areas, including Zhengzhou, was less than 500 meters, and 200 metres in some areas this morning, according to the local meteorological service.
…
Multiple collisions occurred on the north-to-south and south-to-north directions near the middle line of the Zhengxin Huanghe Bridge, CCTV reported.
[More confusion because of the nearby use of multiple2 (“multiple areas”); but the accompanying image leaves little doubt that these multiple collisions were multiple1. This sort of confusion is exactly my reason for counselling my clients to avoid multiple2!]
I can assure you that multiple1 is very much alive in Australian English (and New Zealand English), …
I don’t follow Australian press, but that claim is a surprise to me in NZ. From _today’s_ headline:
KiwiRail intent on finding out why multiple errors made before Wellington train disruption
That’s multiple2 as in more-than-one error. (They’ve compounded — indeed the whole episode has been a clown-fest over the past few weeks.) It’s not multiple as in EMU/DMU Electric/Diesel Multiple Unit, a multiple unit train. (An acronym, so a fixed phrase.)
And the multiple hits I got on Radio NZ’s website for the past few weeks are all in the more-than-one sense — typically ‘multiple sources’/’multiple reports’ have confirmed … There’s ‘multiple blows’ causing ‘multiple injuries’ in one article, and it doesn’t mean one multiple-fracture. There’s a dealer selling to ‘multiple clients’, and it doesn’t mean merely multiple sales to one client.
Indeed I can’t find any usages in any other sense.
I find that example unconvincing. Two collisions (one of them involving multiple vehicles) is the multiple2 sense, to my mind. As to the ‘[sic]’, perhaps there was an earlier version of the headline saying “A multiple-vehicle collision … causes …”; that was amended (inexpertly) when news of the “small truck rollover” arrived?
wrt reporting of road crashes on NZ websites, the mode juste seems to be “multi-vehicle crash/accident” — and that’s in the body of the article, not just to save space in the headline.
Two dead and five others critically injured after multiple Anzac Day crashes. “Two people died and multiple people were seriously injured in crashes throughout the country.” “… a series of Anzac Day crashes …” Of which one was ” a two-car crash”.
So to summarize all citations in 50 years of two New York papers, we have
– 2 usages written in Europe by unnamed wire service stringers
– 1 usage by a man who grew up in Vienna
– 1 by an American who’d been living in France for 50 years when she wrote it
And a grand total of 2 by an L1 English speaker living in an English-speaking milieu. But even that overstates its L1 penetration, because both were written by the same guy, an architecture critic.
I think even your evidence proves just how marginal multiple1 is outside Oceania.
You’ll never guess what Herbert Muschamp, the architecture critic, reviewed a few months before one of his citations. That’s right, the Sydney Opera House. But hey coincidences happen all the time.
Ryan:
I think even your evidence proves just how marginal multiple1 is outside Oceania.
It proves nothing of the sort! We’d have a long way to go before reaching any such proof. What I have shown is that multiple1 does occur in generic news US sources, syndicated or not. And I put it to you that all those NY Times excerpts are readily understood by US L1 English speakers. Right? If they were not, it’s unlikely that US major-newspaper subeditors would allow them into print. They routinely alter punctuation and spelling; vocabulary often enough, also.
Confining ourselves to collision[s] may skew things. Look at the results of this search on “a multiple crash” -site:nz -site:au, which excludes most hits from Australian and New Zealand sites. Here I get 89 hits. Do you? Click on this, if you see it at the bottom: “repeat the search with the omitted results included”. You get zillions more hits, not originating from Oceania.
For “multiple crash” in NY Times alone search just their site, using “muliple crash” (with the quote marks of course). The hits are all rather old, except the 2006 hit for a report from Carlotta Gall, who is a correspondent for that newspaper. Wikipedia: “Carlotta Gall is a British journalist and author. She covered Afghanistan and Pakistan for The New York Times for twelve years. She is currently the Istanbul bureau chief for The New York Times covering Turkey.” No US subeditor altered her text to remove multiple crash: “Five civilians were killed and more injured in the multiple crash, a statement from Karzai’s office said.” May I assume, then, that US L1 English speakers living in this century would have not the slightest difficulty with her wording? All that said, it appears that NY Times prefers multiple collision to multiple crash.
To get non-junk evidence from New Zealand Herald, by the way, we could use this Google search (“multiple crash” | “multiple collision”) restricted to their site (https://www.nzherald.co.nz). About 17 hits, after clicking at the bottom to see them all. And a similar site-restricted search for https://www.odt.co.nz yielded 11 hits (in total) from the Otago Daily Times.
Google searching can be quirky, and the algorithms continue to be notoriously opaque. But the method I use does a lot to guard against traps for the unwary.
[Ryan, my comment in response had too many links, so it went to moderation. I suppose it will appear here before long.]
how marginal multiple1 is outside Oceania.
Hmm. I’d say “outside (possibly) Australia”. And “possibly” because I haven’t looked yet.
Samoa follows U.S. style, not surprisingly: photo caption ‘Multiple people were injured when the Tepatasi bus, travelling from Apia to Falelatai, was smashed in half.’ (2018, syndicated on a NZ news site)
You can search fijitimes.com. Most of those hits are with ‘multiple’ modifying a plural noun. An apparent exception: Fiji Police probe multiple murder case in Rakiraki. (‘multiple’ is modifying ‘murder’, but then ‘murder’ is modifying ‘case’; so would be singular, so dubious as a counter-example.) Headline ‘A multiple award-winning family fun park on the Coral Coast’ has Determiner ‘A’, so ‘multiple’ is there as classifier. ‘Tiger Woods suffers ‘multiple leg injuries’ in single car crash in Los Angeles’ presumably is not alleging Woods has (or suffers) multiple legs.
You’da thought this might be covered in a style guide. Radio NZ policy documents talk of one, but they’re coy about revealing it. NZ Law has one, but it’s mostly about gender-neutral and respectful language. There’s two appearances, both multiple2:
* The name of a High Court judge … or, in the case of multiple judges, “Parker and Ouseley JJ”.
* Use the abbreviation “cls” to refer to multiple clauses. [of a contract]
(Presumably a single-clause contract is so unlikely as to not distinguish from a multiple-clause contract.)
(Most NZ newspapers/media are now subscription-only, which is why I’m focusing on dear old RNZ. Other NZ news sites’ very limited search facilities are uniformly coming up with multiple2 examples only. But their ownership is dominated by Aus companies (Fairfax) and/or they outsource copy-editting to Aus — which is why I’m surprised at claims Aus style/usage is different.)
“outside (possibly) Australia”. And “possibly” because I haven’t looked yet.
You can search for yourself smh.com.au (Sydney Morning Herald), theage.com.au (Melbourne), canberratimes.com.au. There’s been heavy consolidation of Aus media (b****y Murdoch), so that’s hardly a broad survey, more like buying three copies of the same newspaper expecting them to have different content.
Results very much like I reported for NZ.
One exception in a subhed Russia has launched its deadliest attack on Ukraine in months, with multiple missile strikes killing 25 people, including children. — but that’s overseas news so might not follow house style. Multiple strikes each with multiple missiles? Or multiple strikes each with one missile? Or multiple strikes, each with multiple missiles, each with multiple warheads? This seems to me an excellent example of using ‘multiple’ deliberately to be vague as to number: what does it matter? It’s the fog of war.
Then just the same as JWB’s usage of ‘the vague’ ‘multiple’ — back to where we started.
You’da thought this might be covered in a style guide.
The Guardian’s/Observer’s says nothing specifically about ‘multiple’, but says:
* multicultural, multimedia, multimillion, multinational, multiparty but multi-ethnic
Which suggests to me (and I see the pattern elsewhere) that sense multiple1 is getting absorbed into a compound, possibly hyphenated, often abbreviated to multi-. ‘Multi-vehicle pileup’, ‘multi-car crash’.
Univ of Oxford Style Guide also no specific entry, but plenty of appearances of ‘multiple’, all sense more-than-one quantifier of a head noun in the plural AFAICT:
* ‘Use a comma between multiple qualitative adjectives …’ is not ruling on adjectives describing multiple qualities
* ‘Do not use a comma between multiple classifying adjectives …’ is not proscribing wrt adjectives describing multiple classifications.
So the pattern I’m observing:
* If the NP begins with ‘multiple’ and has a head noun in the plural, that’s the sense 2 more-than-one/vague as to number — i.e. quantifier.
* If the NP begins with some other quantifier/determiner, the plural-marking of the head noun follows that. ‘multiple’ 1 appears within the NP as qualifier of the noun to its right: ‘A multiple award-winning family fun park …’ — and that example is forced to use a hyphen to show ‘multiple’ attaches to the winning of awards. Different would be ‘A multiple award-winning-family fun park …’.
* If the NP begins with ‘multiple’ but the head noun is singular form and there’s an intervening adjective/classifier, probably the ‘multiple’ attaches to the intervener. This pattern is unreliable/be cautious. ‘multiple murder case’ — that was in a headline, the body says ‘… investigating a multiple murder case’ ?for the hed prefer ‘multiple-murder case’ .
* A pile-up of nouns with ‘multiple’ somewhere in the middle is beyond rescue: get out the blue pencil; shuffle stuff around; stick in some prepositions. Unless (as I discovered while being coached for an audit report) your aim is deliberate vagueness/plausible deniability. Go on! abstractly-nominalise your verbs, not even gerunds, so we’re clueless as to which of the other nominals are subject/object/agent. (I threw a serious wobbly: turning my carefully-crafted prose into mush, indeed!)
So the pattern is clear for ‘a multiple car crash’. Suppose there’s more than one of those? ‘multiple car crashes’ is irretrievably vague; ‘multiple-car crashes’ is a little better; ‘multiple multi-car crashes’ seems admirably clear to me, but editors would hate it. What if there’s more than one crash, of which some but not all are multi-car? Then back to ‘multiple car crashes’: exhibits just the non-specificity we need. And I’d say that’s the only reliable interpretation.
JWB’s ‘multiple spelling standards’ is perfect. ‘Multiple standards for multiple spellings’ would mean something less protean, and was not the intended sense — as it turned out upon follow-up questioning.
(That’s it, I’m outta here. Life’s too short.)
You and me both, Noe. fiat silentium et pereat mundus
To me, “multiple collision” sounds fine, since it is a term of art—filling a useful lexical niche in a manner exactly parallel to “multiple escape” or “multiple birth.” However, “multiple crash” absolutely raises an eyebrow.
I’m out but I am wondering whether Noetica’s final sally will make it through moderation.
@Ryan: It’s already up there.
(Still away and wishing to avoid any more waste of time and effort; but I do need to correct my own misspelling above. Idiolect, not ideolect. Of course.)
Good decision, Noe and Stu. Life is short, some arguments are fruitless.
“a single squiggle has set the Spanish-speaking chattering classes to nattering”
And English-speaking classes.
or maybe it was already covered by “The squabble is instructive, and well beyond the Hispanophone world.“
Thank you @Noetica for that further evidence. Your post that had been in moderation appeared for me only after I’d despatched my lengthy analyses last night (my time).
I venture to suggest we are seeing the same phenomena. multiple1 (as we’re calling it) is alive and kicking (although not as much as multiple2). All shall have prizes. (I’m not seeing much difference in prevalence in Aus/Oceania compared to RestOfWorld.)
We need to be careful, though, how we characterise it. Notoriously, newspaper headlines drop ‘noise’ words like articles, determiners, even plural-marking. I suggest they’re couched in a language (conventionally called ‘Headlinese’), not English. They’re merely a hook to get you to read the article. So I read the articles. Here’s just a few examples:
* Hed ‘Multiple crash in South Dunedin’; body ‘… the multiple car crash …’ [ODT]
* Hed ‘Multiple crash in Invercargill, no injuries’; body ‘A multiple car crash …’ [ODT]
* Hed ‘Van flees multiple crash scene’; body ‘A van has fled a crash scene after hitting three vehicles …’ [Herald]
* Hed ‘Close call for crash drivers’; body ‘[the driver] “a bit shaken up” by the multiple collision.’ [Herald]
* Hed ‘Multiple vehicles roll in separate crashes near Ngongotahā’; body ‘One vehicle crashed and rolled on Dansey Rd, …’; ‘Meanwhile, a van has also rolled on Oturoa Rd. … the single-vehicle crash, …’ [Herald]
(In examples 3 and 5, ‘multiple’ doesn’t appear in the body — which itself gives a hint.)
So the bodies appear to follow the pattern I outlined in my last lengthy post: for sense multiple1, the NP should start with a Determiner, so that ‘multiple’ can appear within the NP as a classifier (“internal multiplicity”). The head noun carries singular/plural agreement with the Det.
NPs with front ‘multiple’ and plural noun (example 5, and as was JWB’s usage that started us) are the more-than-one vague-as-to number senses — whose vagueness (‘multiple vehicles’) doesn’t specify whether all vehicles were involved in a single crash vs more-than-one crash. (Example 5 goes so far as ‘separate crashes’ in the hed; must’ve been a light news day.)
In ‘multiple crash scene’, the singular head noun tells it’s a single scene (perhaps an icy road), the lack of plural agreement with ‘multiple’ tells that must qualify ‘crash’, but is vague as to whether that’s more-than-one crash. (But in a hed, that’s an unreliable inference.)
I’d feel a lot more comfortable characterising these as different _constructions_, rather than throwing all the weight on the single word ‘multiple’. Headlinese omits parts of the construction, leaving the innocent ‘multiple’ to carry the can/seem ambiguous.
Then we readily explain these examples from Noetica as multiple1, because there’s a Det preceding ‘multiple’. “a multiple birth”, “several multiple births”, “multiple multiple births” all perfectly cromulent. (In the last, the middle ‘multiple’ must be multiple1 because the quantifier slot is already taken.)
(Just on a technical Languagehat point, I want to see if this link ultimately yielding 300+ Google hits depending on exact Google settings is the sort of thing that throws some comments into moderation, because the string is quite long and therefore suspect. So I’ll know to avoid them in future. Already Google made me prove – or pretend, I should perhaps say – that I am human. If there’s ever a thread with heading A multiple squiggle I’ll avoid that with extreme prejudice also.)
Congratulations, you avoided moderation!
> A multiple squiggle
LOL
(Thanks Hat. Bear with me: perhaps its multiple linking that brings a comment to moderation. Earlier I wanted to show that multiple1 was in rude health and currency across the anglophone world, but I was put off by the spectre of moderation. Let’s try now, with these six links (with optimised Google settings) in which multiple1 shows up at almost every hit: New York Times (300+ hits) Daily Mail (UK; 400+) Toronto Star (220+) Sydney Morning Herald (200+) New Zealand Herald (190+). How did that go?)
I agree that there are several single collisions whenever there is a so-called multiple collision
I have been attempting to stay out of this collision of prescriptions, but the above is surely not a matter of fact. If car A hits car B, causing it to hit car C, this is a multiple collision (so-called or otherwise) comprising several single collisions, and this is surely the most probable case. But if three people at a pool table aim their cues so that the balls thus set in motion all collide, then there is no necessity for there to be any single collision (that is, one consisting of exactly two objects) at all. Similarly, a quadruple star normally consists of two binary stars where each star orbits the common center of gravity of its pair and each pair orbits the common center of gravity of the pairs. But four stars in a Klemperer rosette (known to Larry Niven as a “Kemplerer rosette”) orbit their c.c.g. without any two stars orbiting their c.c.g.
(Because I’m now happily out of this thread, John Cowan, I’ll leave it to someone else to articulate the obvious refutation. No collision of prescriptions here by the way. Praescriptiones non fingo, except to those who solicit them – and of those there are multiple, as I have heard people put it.)
No collision of prescriptions here …
I concur with m’learned colleague.
A Multiple star system consists merely of three or more stars gravitationally bound, with no preference as to the arrangements of their c.c.g. (wikip says they might not be bound at all, but merely appear close when looking from earth. That seems unhelpful.)
Beware with ‘multiple’ that it might be appearing in a term of art/fixed phrase. So its meaning opaque. Would it be wrong to write that hyphenated as ‘multiple-star system’?
I don’t think we need so many as three pool players. One player aiming the cue ball into the cluster can readily cause two-ball, three-ball, more-ball collisions. With a bit of luck, at least one ball will end up in a pocket; there could easily be multiple balls potted — a multiple sinking(?) Handily, ‘multiple’ is vague as to number.
As a wee aside, I came across this vague-as-to-number news report [~1870’s AFAICT]
Hed: multiple dairymen milk price shock ?
What is the correct “herd” term for numerous cowkeepers and dairymen? A “swearing”? A “handclasp”? A “drove”?
… and more urgently, what’s the collective noun for numerous herds of multiple cows — numerous multiple cow herds ? — wandering around the town because their keepers are pontificating on the price of mulk?
And what authorities are appropriate to deal with cowkeeper-less cows?
And does a cow on the public highway after dark with a horn but not a light count as a bicycle?
(Aha, so it is indeed multiple linking that sends some comments to moderation. See sixth comment above this one, now rescued, with its several links to show multiple1 alive and vigorous across Anglophonia.)
Given my German background I’m sorely tempted to hyphenate all occurrences of multiple1. They’re all compounds and stressed accordingly, like a blackbird as opposed to a black bird, right? Or is there some Christmas Day weirdness going on?
I’m sorely tempted to hyphenate all occurrences of multiple1.
That seems admirably sensibly — um — German.
And this example from one of Noetica’s searches seems to be following your advice — even to excess.
” an author and multiple-homicide expert”, also “eight answering-machine messages “, “A cable-television installer”, “a record-store clerk”. But ” like a teen-ager with a crush” seems taking it too far. Who except NYTimes would hyphenate ‘teenager’?
All of those are unambiguous without the hyphen — going by the patterns I described: each NP begins with a Determiner/quantifier and/or the head noun is in the singular.
New Zealand Herald (190+). How did that go?
Yes I got 17 screensfull. By no means are all of them multiple1. Or if the intent is multiple1, I recommend DM’s hyphenating practice.
Might be ambiguous as to whether ‘multiple2 modes for shooting’ or ‘modes for multiple1-shooting’, except the previous paragraphs had
At a guess ‘multiple1-shooting’ might mean taking many rapid-fire exposures with one press of a button — as for example to capture progress of a horse race. But I can’t see any suggestion like that in the article.
Also from reviewing other examples (thank you), it seems the best journalese is careful to surround the multiple1 sense with strong lexical context. To my reading, it’s multiple2 that’s the default/more prevalent sense, unless contextually marked otherwise.
The cable television installer is certainly unambiguous, and so is the record store clerk in practice: they’re strings of nouns, so they can only be compound nouns. Such things are hardly ever hyphenated in English.
A multiple homicide expert would, however, leave me wondering for a second or two what a multiple expert in homicides could be; and “eight answering machine messages” without any context could just as well mean “eight of them were answering messages from/by/through machines”.
With the teen-ager, the NYT goes in the other direction: more separation, not less. That’s about as antiquated as to-day.
(I’ve heard of people, though, who sarcastically reinterpreted Teenager in German as Tee-Nager “tea gnawer(s)”.)
A multiple homicide expert would, however, leave me wondering for a second or two what a multiple expert in homicides could be;
I don’t see any ambiguity in this example. “a multiple expert” doesn’t strike me as a thing that exists in quotidian English. Certainly would not come to my mind. Otoh, “multiple homicide experts” would be confusing without context.
“eight answering machine messages” without any context could just as well mean “eight of them were answering messages from/by/through machines”.
Yes, it could certainly mean that, but only as a weird sentence fragment, so not “just as well”. Even a headline writer wouldn’t write something that ambiguous if they were talking about eight people answering messages created by machines. You would probably throw a comma in after “eight”. Stripped of context the default assumption has to be “eight messages from an answering-machine”.
Agreed, mostly. My kids wouldn’t know what an answering machine is. But they wouldn’t see machine messages as a noun either (nor would I), so it would be a particularly random crash blossom.
Déformation professionnelle – I read so many scientific papers, many by good but nonnative speakers, that I always expect the unexpected…
(Quite so, David M. Native and non-native, and across registers, examples like these are retrievable in simple Google searches:
Are we equipped for a discussion of multiple2 versus multiple1, persistently misunderstood above though SOED definitions I adduced make the distinction pellucidly obvious? I seek to make meta-comments only, because participation proved to be a wretched time sink. Should I desist altogether? I’ll think about it …)
*pretends being able to lift one eyebrow*
Fascinating.
(*Ditto with contralateral eyebrow.* Yes. Fascinating to us half-human half-Vulcan descriptivists from afar.)
How I wish I could wiggle my ears ! That would be the height of polite putdown, though just below the raising of an eyebrow – which I can’t bring off either.
When I was fiveral I inferred that “several” meant “approximately seven”.
I can, even one at a time – but it’s not very noticeable.
Folks, none of these examples are ambiguous as to sense of ‘multiple’ if you take the whole sentence into account. (No eyebrow-wiggling needed.) And ‘multiple2’ is a ‘function word’/quantifier which — by most descriptions of language — lack any inherent meaning except when seen in context. (Hence why dictionaries tie themselves in tangles trying to give single-word meanings for prepositions, ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘this’, …)
So in most of Noetica’s latest batch of examples, there’s a quantifier/determiner (‘many’, ‘a’) preceding ‘multiple’: that must be multiple1.
* The ‘Graphic Design’ is some sort of job title. It’s akin to Headlinese, not English/not a sentence. (And “Multiple” there is entirely superfluous/adds nothing except high-blown language. I would remove it. I suggest “Marketing” instead of “Marketer”, for consistency.)
* “Multiple Expert: …” also is not appearing in a sentence. I spot following the colon, a cumbersome/clunky Noun Phrase with pile-ups of nominalisations. The sort of deliberately vague managementspeak I was forced to write for decades. In particular, what is “that success necessitates” supposed to attach to? This is just bad writing. Again, ‘Multiple’ is there for its hype value.
* The Multidisciplinary example has scare quotes, so that’s not a usage of ‘multiple’, it’s a _mention_ — If I put on my Analytic Philosopher’s Hat. It’s also awkward in the second occurrence of squeezing the plural -s inside the quote: I would put ‘ “multiple expert”s ‘. And the example is reported of a conversation, so we don’t know how the speaker might have punctuated it.
Are we equipped for a discussion of multiple2 versus multiple1,
Yes, provided we always survey the context of appearance, and don’t over-focus on it being ambiguity of a single word. English has gazillions of multi-meaning words (not just ‘function words’) for which their context of use disambiguates.
Anyone who can wiggle an ear, raise an eyebrow, and flare a nostril, all at the same time, is excluded from diplomatic service. They could inadvertently start a war.
I knew someone who could bend any finger at the top (distal) joint, at 90 degrees, while keeping the rest of the finger straight. And he could do it independently for any fingers. He didn’t play any musical instrument, incidentally.
(David M, I would be remiss not to affirm that each of those eight examples with “multiple expert[s]” shows multiple1 in unambiguous use. Dismissals you see above are wrong – wrong even beyond the perimeters of expectation. But counter-argument falls mute, faced with argument of so little weight, rigour, or relevance. The discussion of multiple will very soon die away; my lingering regret is that this meta-comment, while seeming to be called for, prolongs it a little.)
@Noetica
In my family we had/[have not quite outgrown] a game called “Happy Memories”, in which Player A tries to recreate in detail a scene in which Player B felt acute negative emotions such as embarassment, anger, etc. In order to win, Player B must refuse to engage or give any sign that he is reliving the experience and/or the accompanying emotions, e.g., by pointing out something (perhaps deliberately) wrong in A’s account. Otherwise A wins.
A polymath by nature, David is a multiple expert who is passionate about all things in his remit; be they startup management, cinematography or ecologically sensitive garden design.
These Davids, polymaths all! There were two Davids on the Gale Cowan Memorial Event Committee, otherwise known as the Gang of Seven, who certainly fit the stereotype. The Event was, by the way, a smashing success, though nothing was actually smashed (nor were there any howls to be heard).