John McIntyre, a favorite here at LH (see this post), posts about an important distinction that should be more widely understood:
I see this opening sentence in an article published by CNN: “GOP Rep. Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska, who was recently indicted for concealing information and lying to the FBI regarding an investigation into illegal campaign contributions, has officially resigned from his committee assignments.”
Anyone care to guess what in that sentence has triggered my boundless scorn?
For.
In the Former Times, when journalism organizations employed copy editors, we were all schooled that that preposition for suggests certainty, established fact. And because people accused of criminal acts receive a presumption of innocence in our legal system, we never allowed indicted for to get into print, substituting indicted on a charge of.
Curious whether standards have shifted during my senescence, I plucked my Associated Press Stylebook from its place of repose and found: “To avoid any suggestion that someone is being judged before a trial, do not use phrases such as indicted for killing or indicted for bribery. Instead use indicted on a charge of killing or indicted on a charge of bribery.”
It may be a little thing, but following that guideline observes the fundamental principle that journalists are not to put their fingers on the scales.
He compares it to “the guideline of not using murder as a synonym for homicide or killing until after a verdict,” and quite rightly, too. (Sadly, the first comment on his post is an unrelated bit of peevery, and I expect more will follow.) So I’m helping to spread the word.
“Diagnosed with” (for the Only Correct Form “diagnosed as having”) has always annoyed me, on grounds which I now retroactively declare to be similar.
In my humble o, it’s OK. It is good to maintain an open mind, but sticking “allegedly” in front of every unproven charge or, like British papers do, putting quotation marks around random words as a blame-shifting device just looks silly, not non-judgmental, open-minded, or equal-handed. It might have been a distincion with a difference, if people believed newspaper reports and official pronouncements, but everyone is already sufficiently skeptical and there is no need for lengthy formulaic expressions. Add to that that the word “indicted” already gives all the relevant information and there is no real problem remaining here at all. On the other hand, we can all enjoy sentences like “Al Capone was indicted for murder and racketeering on a charge of tax evasion”.
By the way, suppose someone was convicted “on a charge of” a crime X and then the conviction was overturned. Is it still not good to write that that someone was “convicted for X”? What if exoneration was on a technicality?
It might have been a distincion with a difference, if people believed newspaper reports and official pronouncements, but everyone is already sufficiently skeptical and there is no need for lengthy formulaic expressions.
I strongly disapprove of this attitude, which is a sign of the End Times and exactly what leads people to write in the way McIntyre is complaining about. Why not go all the way and just announce people are guilty as soon as they’re arrested?
The UK press are pretty scrupulous about this. (Possibly because in the UK you can get into serious trouble if you’re not scrupulous about it.)
Depends on who does the announcements. Neutral sources, like AP, should try not to push their opinions or false information, but “indicted for X” doesn’t do it, it’s just a shorter form “on the charge of”. In the American system, it is an ordinary occurrence for prosecutors to overcharge in a hope of shaking down the indicted person on a plea or sometimes conversely, to charge a lesser crime (sex with a minor instead of a rape, for example) which is easier to prove. No ammount of linguistic equilibristics can help with that.
Would you have to be tested on a charge of rabies?
“indicted for X” doesn’t do it, it’s just a shorter form “on the charge of”.
So you say, but the AP in general and John McIntyre in particular disagree with you; on what grounds do you consider your opinion more firmly based than theirs?
Here’s this bulwark of journalistic standards, Daily Mirror, “The Attorney General has sent indictments to the Chief Justice to constitute a Trial-at-Bar to hear the cases against 25 suspects indicted for conspiracy over the Easter Sunday attacks.”
And then look at this: Chilling footage ‘shows killer mum walking with body of son, 7, in duffel bag’. If you think that the quotation marks really preserve someone’s reputation and should make a difference in any lawsuit, you can cast a stone at me (but I warn you, the likely effect is that you will ruin your computer).
on what grounds do you consider your opinion more firmly based than theirs?
Google searches.
“Charged with X” is shorter than “indicted on a charge of X.” It is reasonably easy to find published judicial opinions in which judges write “indicted for X” without any apparent concern that their readers will interpret the phrase as conveying or presupposing actual guilt of X. I guess it could be an open question whether judges are overestimating the sophistication of their readers or journalists underestimating the sophistication of theirs?
But does “arrested for X” give rise to the same peeve? Whence cometh the assertion that the “preposition for suggests certainty, established fact”? Because that totally feels like typical prescriptivist BS not grounded in the facts of actual usage, which might, I suspect, tend to show that the meaning of “for” in phrases of the form “VERBED for X” may vary somewhat from verb to verb. For example, a phrase like “took him for a fool” comes with some implicature that the taking may prove to have been mistaken.
I’m foreign, but I still have the strongly held opinion that stacking cautious wording upon cautious words adds nothing at best. When “indicted for” is used to mean “indicted, not judged”, readers understand that, Those who want to see guilt where none is proven do, and those who don’t don’t. But without the extra precautions, the naive reader will understand the simple wording better and maybe gain some understanding of due process.
I’m a linguist hangaround. I gotta trust language. What I don’t trust is formulas. Official formulas twisted and bent.
Here’s a document from the Congressional Research Service relevant to Congressman Fortenberry’s current situation which shows in its title that the CRS does not care what the AP thinks or what John Mcintyre thinks Miss Thistlebottom taught him in eighth grade. https://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/crs-report-oct-2007.pdf
Like J.W. Brewer, in light of the recent indictment of Nebraska Republican Rep. Jeff Fortenberry and his consequent resignation of his committee assignments, I was curious about how the House rules were worded:
https://www.gop.gov/conference-rules-of-the-117th-congress/
https://www.dems.gov/imo/media/doc/DEM_CAUCUS_RULES_117TH_April_2021.pdf
Similarly, for the Senate, from the CRS:
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/RL34716.pdf
Here’s this bulwark of journalistic standards, Daily Mirror
I won’t even click on the link. If you want to pay attention to the Daily Mirror, be my guest.
Google searches.
If you want to determine your view of reality by Google searches, be my guest. That’s how people wind up convinced that aliens abducted Elvis and 9/11 was an inside job.
what John Mcintyre thinks Miss Thistlebottom taught him in eighth grade
If you think John McIntyre (or for that matter Languagehat) has any truck with Miss Thistlebottom, think again.
Anyone is, as always, free to disagree; if you want to pretend that distinctions don’t matter, or that issues of guilt and innocence are as trivial as “shot to death” (the topic of that first comment), go right ahead. I stand with John and the presumption of innocence.
I am now reminded by free association of the amusing fact I may have mentioned before that, since I am what’s called a “representative payee” (i.e. I have Social Security benefits payable to another member of my family deposited directly into my bank account for administrative convenience on the understanding I will use the funds for that other person’s benefit rather than my own), I have to fill out each year a compliance form that among things asks whether in the time since I completed the previous year’s form I have been “convicted of a crime considered to be a felony.” It always makes me want to ask “well, considered by whom?” Whoever thought this would be clearer than the terser “convicted of a felony” may not have thought hard enough.
Yes, I have to agree that that’s a very silly choice of wording.
What is the empirical descriptivist-linguistics evidence backing up the claim that “indicted for X” conveys a meaning that is inconsistent with the presumption of innocence in a way that e.g. “charged with X” does not? I’ve been practicing law for coming on 30 years and I really can’t recall ever hearing a working lawyer or judge (people who are generally clearer than the average layperson on the importance of the conceptual distinction between accusation and proof in general, and indictment and conviction in particular …) express this concern. So my default assumption is that it’s a made-up prescriptivist peeve of the sort that newspaper stylebooks are full of. But I am certainly open to contrary evidence. Do you have some?
I won’t even click on the link.
No need. The quoted phrase is clear enough. It just shows that across the pond they do the same thing. Do you want me to find something similar in Times or Guardian? In Economist? Here’s Morning Star : Her lawyer Renaud Agbodjo said that she was indicted for “financing terrorism,” although no date has been set for a trial. From reading the article, it is abandontly clear that the author thinks the charge is bogus.
If you want to determine your view of reality by Google searches, be my guest.
Linguistic reality, yes.
It just shows that across the pond they do the same thing.
Of course they do, I never doubted it for a second.
Linguistic reality, yes.
But I’m not talking about “linguistic reality,” for heaven’s sake — I would have thought that was clear. I’m talking about the implications, however subtle, of one wording as against another. This is the kind of thing editors have to be concerned with.
This is farther afield, but out of curiosity I looked up the current version of Form 4473 (the one you will be asked to fill out if you want to buy a gun from a licensed federal firearms dealer in the U.S.) to see how they phrased the “any felony convictions” question. But they also ask a separate indictment question, which is phrased in pertinent part as “Are you under indictment or information in any court for a felony, or any other crime for which the judge could imprison you for more than one year.”* So the “for” construction, but used slightly differently. I don’t know if the AP stylebook would tolerate “under indictment for X” or view it as just a variant of the same sin.
The bonus question is a few items down, and is perfectly clear, yet amusing. Item 21.d: “Are you a fugitive from justice?” (You have to check either the “yes” box or the “no” box.)
*The rule as I understand it is that if you are under indictment what the presumption of innocence does for you in this context is that it’s not illegal for you to remain in possession of whatever guns you may already own (although a judge might impose some bail condition requiring you to temporarily turn them over to someone else for safekeeping) but you can’t buy any more until the system decides whether you’re guilty or not.
And here’s a press release from the ACLU using the “indicted for X” construction in connection with their own client who had not yet been convicted of the charges at the time the press release was issued. Are we to think they’re softer on the presumption of their client’s innocence than the Associated Press?
https://www.aclu.org/other/al-marri-v-gates-al-marri-v-spagone
As a former (occasional) journalist and admirer of Mr McIntyre, I find myself disagreeing with him here. The notion that ‘indicted for’ is substantially different from ‘indicted on a charge of’ seems to be a bit of fussiness that has no real basis in how language is used or understood. Rather, it’s a way for journalists to give themselves plausible deniability on any accusation that they are prejudging the issue. That may have some merit in its own right, but I don’t think it stands up to any linguistic analysis.
And as to the over-use of ‘alleged’ — I remember years ago, in reporting on the Rodney King case, the WaPo was scrupulous about referring to the ‘alleged beating of Mr. King,’ even when everyone had seen the pictures and videos of the coppers laying into King with their boots. The distinction, I guess, was that even though they were undeniably kicking him, it hadn’t been established that they were kicking him in a legally objectionable way. But if that’s what referring to ‘alleged beating’ was meant to convey, it’s a distinction that will fly over the head of the average reader.
The notion that ‘indicted for’ is substantially different from ‘indicted on a charge of’ seems to be a bit of fussiness that has no real basis in how language is used or understood. Rather, it’s a way for journalists to give themselves plausible deniability on any accusation that they are prejudging the issue. That may have some merit in its own right, but I don’t think it stands up to any linguistic analysis.
Fair enough, but devoted as I am to linguistic analysis, I’m even more devoted to the rights of the accused, which are everywhere and always under threat (I’m sure plenty of Americans envy the 99%+ conviction rates in countries less devoted to them). Even if the “for” construction has a minuscule effect, I don’t like it. But that’s just me (and JM).
@David L.: Your example is just an instance of sloppy journalism. Something like “allegedly unjustified beating” would have worked just fine. That would have correctly conveyed that it was common ground between the prosecution and the defense both that the defendant officers had indeed repeatedly struck Mr. King and that sometimes the police are allowed to do that sort of thing, with the disputed question being whether these particular officers had or had not under the circumstances gone outside the boundaries of what was allowed in terms of use of physical force.
If I were a native speaker or an experienced reader of law reporting, I might well cringe at indicted for, and might well edit it all to charged with if so empowered – but the very fact that indicted was used instead of convicted makes abundantly clear that nothing is as of yet proven.
Credibly accused, on the other hand, conveys “we think they’re totally guilty, and here’s some lip service to the presumption of innocence” rather forcefully.
Wow. Pounds to doughnuts they’re not quoting anyone.
No, those are merely apotropaic quote marks. Traditionally, they are distributed at random in the sentence in question; pedants and sticklers feel that they should at least be paired, however.
Something like “allegedly unjustified beating” would have worked just fine.
Except that such an awkward turn of phrase would leave many readers scratching their heads. Imagine the photocaption: “In this still from from a bystander’s video, Rodney King is receiving an allegedly unjustified beating from police officers.”
It’s obviously difficult to describe events in plain language without at the same time offending legal sensibilities, and journalists often resort to standard phrasings that have become common journalistic practice, whether or not they really do the job in a self-evident way.
Mother charged with murdering son found dead in river
Who was in the river?
I don’t think that there are justified beatings by poilice officers in US law. So I suppose you could argue that “unjustified” is mere editorialising; on the other hand, if an actual beating by the police took place at all, that would be illegal, so using the word “beating” unadorned implies lawbreaking, which actually is an issue to be settled in court.
“Alleged”, though bizarre in context, presumably is meant to leave to the judgement of the court (as is proper) the question as to whether all the evidence was faked by a giant left-wing conspiracy or not; the beating might not have taken place at all, or might represent a misunderstanding of perfectly non-beating behaviour on the part of the police. Or people who were pretending to be the police. You know how devious these Socialists are.
There’s the legal term ‘justifiable’, but it doesn’t go with the non-legalese ‘beating’. “Justifiable assault” is a thing.
‘”I think you’d better put in your report as self inflicted wounds while resisting arrest,” said Vimes.’
I used to practice law and I’ve never seen this complaint about “indicted for” before. I concur with those seeing it as a prescriptivist peeve.
The complaints about “allegedly” are well placed, however. Though everything needs to be proven for conviction, I find it misleading to use “allegedly” for facts not likely to be contested at the trial.
I agree that the lexeme “beating” is colloquial, non-technical, and a bit pejorative, although I’m not sure I go along with David E.’s notion that it necessarily implies per se illegality. I’m sure Official Police Spokespeople would use a different word to describe “perfectly non-beating behaviour” that might be regrettably misconstrued as beating by the casual observer. But their preferred word might well be a euphemism or at a minimum bureaucratic bomfog. This is not a uniquely American thing. British bobbies have been issued truncheons (I think that’s the most British-sounding out of the various names for the item in question?) since the 19th century, and they are trained to use them as offensive weapons in appropriate circumstances. What non-euphemistic verb would David E. use for the action of a British bobby deliberately striking someone with his truncheon in order to inflict pain (not gratuitously, but as a means toward some other goal) under circumstances where that is a lawful thing (or at least an arguably lawful thing) for the bobby to be doing?
I’d say that the officer “struck” the Member of the Public with his truncheon: that would leave open the possibility that the policeman was defending himself or otherwise pursuing his legal duty.
If I said that he* “beat” the M of the P with his truncheon I certainly would be implying behaviour above and beyond the call of duty, to a degree where even Cressida Dick might feel that it was out of order.
Apart from the fact that “beat” is skunked by collocation, in “wife-beater” and the like, I also feel that it’s what is called a “plural verb”: a single action can’t be a “beating” (In Kusaal, such verbs are derived with the suffix -s. I thought you’d like to know.) It could be a “striking.”
If the facts were as in the Rodney King case, the most neutral way I could put it would be “repeatedly struck.” That gets round the plural-verb angle, and avoids the assocations of “beat”, which, for me, really do inescapeably imply behaviour unbefitting a police officer.
* Or she. In principle. In practice, examples of female constables beating people seem to be few …
But you need a noun or gerund or something. The “allegedly unjustified repeated-striking”? I remembered the story from a few years ago that featured the fellow who, lacking a proper truncheon, used a narwhal tusk to confront the “knifeman” (a Briticism) who ran amok in Fishmongers Hall before exiting onto London Bridge. But I couldn’t find in the first story or two anyone using an interestingly apt verb for legally-justified narwhal-tusk-wielding. And then when the cops arrived they didn’t bother with truncheons but just immediately escalated to deadly force via firearms.
You can always be vague and say “allegedly unjustified use of force”. But that presupposes, for me, that there is a legitimate purpose to the use of force, even if it was used excessively. I am at a miss of trying to express the idea that a police officer entered into an altercation with a civilian which might or might not have had a legitimate purpose and during the attack they might or might not have exceeded legally allowed level of force or used a form of force which might have been either legal or illegal under the circumstances irrespective of the ammount of the said force.
“An alleged man, whose names are alleged to be “Rodney” and “King”, allegedly in that order, was allegedly alleged to have been allegedly beaten by alleged officers of the alleged police department of what is allegedly a city allegedly named “Los Angeles” [but its real name is “Porciuncula”] …”
`the alleged Savior…’
[IIRC from one of the journalism episodes of The Wire?]
we were all schooled that that preposition for suggests certainty, established fact.
Sorry, but this seems like complete nonsense to me. This is an arbitrary peever rule that some authority made up to seem smart at some point in the past and that journalistic organizations adopted and taught as a shibboleth. Since this rule has no relation to the way people actually understand spoken American English, it is hardly surprising that it has lost adherents.
Yes, this business about ‘for’ is what I still feel I’m not getting. You can be tested for AIDS and not have it, be asked for spare change and not have any, beg for mercy and not get it. The test and the request and the begging are facts, but so is the indictment.
(‘Indicted’ is a bit foreign to me anyway, but presumably hat feels the same way about ‘arrested for’)
“we were all schooled that that preposition for suggests certainty, established fact”
I’ve also never heard this before. As many have already said, the word “indicted” makes things perfectly clear. All due respect to John McIntyre, but the AP Stylebook is full of prescriptivist guidelines such as “toward” but not “towards,”* “entitled” must not be used to mean “titled” (for a book or other work), “farther” and “further” must be strictly distinguished, and uses of “that” and “which” in what they call essential and nonessential clauses. I’ve given up my online subscription and the latest print version I have is 2009, so some of these examples may be out of date. They do update things, to their credit.
*Informal research indicates that the rule against “towards” was invented by American editors in the late 19th century. I first heard it from a British nun, and it came as quite a shock, as I’d said and written “towards” all my life before that, and I’m American.
I share Mr. Hat’s devotion to even handed journalism and the presumption of innocence. That said, I would never have taken ‘indicted for’ as an attack on either. To my ear, indicted for is legalese for ‘accused of’ and soon to be tried in a court of law. The trumpenproletariat and others who equate arrest or indictment with guilt will not be swayed by a preposition. Those who demand convincing evidence and a conviction will not be railroaded to a presumption of guilt by one.
Mr. McIntyre wrote, “ And because people accused of criminal acts receive a presumption of innocence in our legal system, we never allowed indicted for to get into print, substituting indicted on a charge of.”
If I were in nitpicking mode, I might find fault with “indicted on a charge of”. Why?
It’s redundant. As McIntyre says, an indictment is an accusation. A charge, according to legal dictionaries, is an accusation.
Hypotheses:
(a) For many values of V1, structure “V1 personX FOR V2ing” implies that personX does/did in fact V2; whereas not so for e.g. “V1 personX OF V2ing” or other preposition.
(b) “indict” is an exception to (a) in legal usage.
(c) Readers ignorant of law may be influenced by (a) and unaware of (b)
I can’t say whether the hypotheses are true, but they each seem plausible to me.
mollymooly has it. This is not a matter of either grammar or legal niceties, it’s a matter of avoiding even a hint of prejudicial influence on the reader. If you think “indicted for” isn’t prejudicial, great! Most people doubtless don’t! But if even a few people might be swayed towards a presumption of guilt, it’s worth using the wordier construction.
@Jen in Edinburgh: I’m not a native speaker, but I think that the crucial difference is that in your examples ‘for’ is final, not causal. You get a test *in order to* find out whether you have AIDS, or ask for mercy *in order to* receive it; but you get indicted *because* you are supposed to have commited murder. ‘Per’ in Italian is similarly ambiguous.
Imagine my delight at being dismissed as a peeving prescriptivist. Those who have followed my tussles with the AP Stylebook editors over the years know that I had a hand in their dropping the bogus “over/more than” distinction, the spurious rule that “collide” must involve two objects in motion, and the idiotic “split verb” rule, among others. (Happily, the AP Stylebook is not all bad; it does not include the hoary quibble on the use of “diagnose.”)
As to the preposition “for,” if you were to encounter a sentence saying that “McIntyre was cited for denouncing ill-judged AP style rules at conferences,” you would assume that amounted to fact, not assertion, right?
There still appear to be no actual examples of actual people who actually construe* “indicted for” in the way the AP stylebook worries about, except perhaps for people whose perception of reality has apparently been distorted by excessive contact with the AP stylebook. Note, by the way, that while it’s not ungrammatical to say “convicted for murder,” the google n-gram viewer indicates that’s much less common than “convicted of murder,” which tends to confirm my intuition that focus on prepositions as if they have stable meaning from verb to verb may be a mistake. Rather, I tend to think that there’s a lot of random variation (maybe there are historical reasons, but those will be opaque in terms of how most native speakers understand the resultant semantics) in what preposition is used to form complements of which verb. So if you correctly understand the semantics of the verb, the preposition that happens to be customary won’t necessarily change that — unless the particular verb is standardly used with several different propositions which indicate different shades of meaning in terms of how the verb relates to the complement.
*There are no doubt plenty of actual people with the attitude “most people who are indicted are ultimately found guilty so the fact of indictment is itself a good statistical basis to assume probable guilt in this individual case,” but I see no evidence that the exact syntax used to report the fact of indictment is more or less likely to induce that attitude.
“I want scientific proof, with examples, that this construction might be beneficial before I will even consider giving it a stamp of approval!”
Fortunately, no one here is in the business of writing news stories, so it’s all theoretical.
Mr. Brewer, despite your concern that my mind has been corrupted by the Associated Press Stylebook, I thought the same thing about the preposition “for,” from my experience with the language, when I was in graduate school before I became a journalist.
If Mr. McIntyre is correct about his “Mcintyre was cited for” example, that’s a fact about the semantics of “cite,” not the semantics of “for.” And in fact “cite” has multiple meanings, which are not all the same when it comes to whether the truth of the complement is presupposed. Consider the alternative sentence (googled up at random from a news story) “A Roseburg man was cited for second degree criminal trespass by Roseburg Police on Wednesday morning.” That’s sense 3 of the verb “cite” per https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cite, whereas I take Mr. Mcintyre’s example to be sense 2.
Presumed Innocent
suspected of
accused of
charged with / in connection with
arrested for/ in connection with
indicted for / on a charge of
put on trial for
Presumed Guilty
found guilty of
convicted of / for
imprisoned / executed (US) for
JM
Do you think all the fors in the first group are attracted to “Presumed Guilt” by the two fors in the second group? If so, what would you prefer for (Oops) arrested for and put on trial for? What about the ofs? Or are the ofs neutralised because of (Oops) e.g., found innocent of?
Like Mr. McIntyre, I thought the same thing about this use of “for,” from my experience with the language, before I ever heard of the Associated Press Stylebook.
It may, of course, be a generational thing. Kids Today with their crazy prepositions!
“Indicted on charges of trespassing for entering the mansion the night of a party. The arrestee claims he was the guest of a woman invited to the party.”
I think this is why “for” seems to leave a reader not paying close attention with the idea it’s a statement of fact. It suggests that there is a fact, which may be somewhat separate from the legalistic question of guilt for the crime, but it still introduces it as fact.
It’s certainly true that if you stop the reader, make them consider what conclusions they should draw from a sentence, they will generally recognize the difference. But that’s not really the question, is it?
A “for” clause introduces reasons, and unless the writer challenges those reasons, they are implying that the reasons are sufficient.
It’s not “for” itself: the question is whether “indicted for” implies that the charge is valid. I wouldn’t feel myself that there was any such implication in “arrested for”, for example.
My own Sprachgefühl is worthless in this particular case, as we don’t really do indictments over here.
Ryan’s example may not clarify the situation, because it sounds like it’s describing a situation in which the arrestee is not disputing that he, in fact, entered the mansion on the night in question but only disputes whether doing so was a crime, which may turn on the resolution of disputed facts other than the fact of entry. OTOH, we only infer that the issue of entry is undisputed from the following sentence, but once we’ve seen that sentence it’s harder to think how we would parse the first sentence in isolation. If the fact of entry were disputed an “allegedly” after the “for” would not be amiss. There is variation from situation to situation as to whether the defendant’s position is “I never did physical act X” or “sure I did physical act X but under the circumstances that did not amount to crime Y” and at the point an indictment is issued it will not always be clear which tack the defendant may take.
For David E.: The best I can do to substitute for his absent Sprachgefühl is to refer to the ACLU news release I linked way upthread in which the ACLU used “indicted for” with reference to its own client who had not yet gone to trial, and suggest to him that the ACLU is even less likely than Messrs. Mcintyre and hat to use wording that they think would lead a reader to presuppose the validity of the charge.
@ryan
I would say that arrested for and charged with have an emotive force that say, held for questioning about or suspected of do not. I do not get that with indicted for (and think of it more in connection with contempt of court or failing to appear before a court, tribunal or public board). But i do not feel that a person who is charged with or arrested for X has done X, only that the police are proceeding with a case to the point of an arrest and may want to go further.
Separately, I think my default attitude that prepositions are words with low semantic content, whose meaning in constructions like these tends to be determined by the semantic content of the verb with which they are semi-arbitrarily paired with for whatever contingent historical reasons, dates back to the age of 14. At which age I began formal instruction in German and was struck by the total lack of anything approximating one-to-one mapping of prepositions despite the fact that English and German are rather closely related. If a German idiom used a different preposition than the “literal” translation of the English one, that was just an arbitrary thing you had to learn, and vice-versa for German-speakers learning English. Maybe in both cases you could construct a just-so story for why the preposition the other language used was a reasonable choice assuming some core semantics of that preposition and metaphorical extensions therefrom (I did this for a while myself), but as is often the case there would be multiple candidate prepositions that each had plausible semantic just-so stories, and which one was the right one could not be resolved on that basis.
So let’s use google translate (since my own lexical competence in German is very rusty) to see what German does here, especially in light of Jen’s various other VERBED for X examples:
1. Both “indicted for X” and “charged with X” come out as “wegen X angeklagt.”
2. “Tested for X” comes out as “auf X getestet.”
3. “Asked for X” (at least for the suggested X) comes out as “nach X gefragt.”
4. “Begged for X” comes out as “um X gebeten.”
Four different verbs all using the same preposition in English. Four different prepositions in German. I imagine one could construct an example going the other way where four German verbs that all take the same preposition for their complements in German take four different prepositions when translated into English.
“McIntyre was cited for denouncing ill-judged AP style rules at conferences”
That sentence on its own is insufficient. Who is doing the citing, and why? You might have “In awarding its lifetime achievement medal, the committee cited McIntyre for denouncing ill-judged AP style rules at conferences.” In that case, the reader assumes that the denouncement was genuine. But if the police announce that someone was cited for driving 60 mph in a 40 mph zone, it’s an accusation, not an established fact.
FWIW, I am approximately the same age as Mr McIntyre and our host, and I have on occasion written news stories, one or two of which have been given a legal look-over. I have no real objection to “indicted on a charge of,” and I agree that some readers might take “indicted for” as a degree or two closer to an assertion of the truth of the allegations.
But at the same time, I think the use of such workarounds can be seen as excessively finicky. They can make journalists seem to be trying too hard to be neutral, which of course inclines some readers to think they are pussy-footing around and shying away from the plain truth. You can’t make everyone happy.
Just yesterday I was reading in the NYT about the latest attempts in Texas to manufacture reasons for a ‘forensic audit’ of the presidential election results. The story said that the Orange Ogre had written a letter to Texas Gov Greg Abbott, and that Abbott, “apparently responding to the letter,” then called for an audit. This struck me as a very bad way of reporting the events — as if the writer wants the reader to think that Abbott’s action was a response to Trump’s letter while putting on the fig leaf of ‘apparently’ to say, oh my goodness no, we’re not really making any such accusation. It would have been better, IMO, to say that Trump wrote a letter to Abbott and that, two days later, Abbott called for a new audit. Just the facts, ma’am, and readers will infer what they will. Although I suppose then some readers would say the story is offering innuendo between the lines. You can’t win.
FWIW, I am approximately the same age as Mr McIntyre and our host, and I have on occasion written news stories, one or two of which have been given a legal look-over. I have no real objection to “indicted on a charge of,” and I agree that some readers might take “indicted for” as a degree or two closer to an assertion of the truth of the allegations.
But at the same time, I think the use of such workarounds can be seen as excessively finicky. They can make journalists seem to be trying too hard to be neutral, which of course inclines some readers to think they are pussy-footing around and shying away from the plain truth. You can’t make everyone happy.
That’s a very fair summary from an informed source. And of course it is a truth universally acknowledged that you can’t make everyone happy.
It seems that booked for is much rarer than booked on charges of.
COCA returns over 700 occurrences of “indicted for” and a mere 13 occurrences of “indicted on a charge.”
If this is indeed a problem, isn’t it primarily a problem with the legalese word indicted itself, when something like (officially) charged with or (formally) accused of would be clearer? Incidentally, both of those occur roughly 17,000 times in COCA.
The suggestion that someone would think indicted for means found guilty but indicted on a charge of suddenly makes them think it means accused of seems a bit implausible.
PS In the Collins COBUILD usage-based dictionary, it says: “If someone is indicted for a crime, they are officially charged with it. [mainly AM, legal]”
“McIntyre was cited for denouncing ill-judged AP style rules at conferences”
I am with David L here. This sentence attests to the fact that Mr. McIntyre was cited, whether the denouncing actually took place might be under dispute. And if there is a dispute the journalist has to provide this information explicitly, not rely on reader’s ability to infer it from the prepositions.
languagehat says
October 22, 2021 at 9:36 am
Fortunately, no one here is in the business of writing news stories, so it’s all theoretical.
At least one of us here is in the full-time business of writing and editing news stories. Insofar as McIntyre is reminding journalists and editors to follow their style guides, he can’t be faulted.
It’s bizarre to see the AP style guide, or any other style guide for that matter, described as “prescriptivist” as if it’s a slur. Of course it’s prescriptivist. What the hell else would a style guide be, and what would be the point of it if it weren’t?
Well said!
>McIntyre was cited for…
A bigger problem with that sentence is that “cited” has become (was always?) a uselessly multivalent word, along with it’s sister citation. You get a citation for creating an excellent diorama in 5th grade science or failing to signal your left turn.
I’m not clear whether McIntyre is the subject of opprobrium or approval.
åpprobrivulam I guess is the correct word.
Walter, I have never had a text-editing job, but we all know what denunciation as “prescriptivist” means. It means creating rules which are not followed by the majority of competent writers, when they are free to write without a style guide yoke.
You clearly don’t understand what house style, and therefore style guides, are for. Which is fine, most people don’t, but it’s like pontificating about physics without knowing about elementary particles.
You clearly don’t understand…
This statement is indisputably correct. If you tell me that house and style guides exist to constrain competent writers with arbitrary rules in order to achieve a higher purpose, I will believe you without any doubt. I will try not to pontificate, but cannot guarantee the result.
Insofar as I become aware of the effects of style guides at all, it’s when they are not concerned with matters which are strictly linguistic, but more to do with politics. The Grauniad, for example, evidently has a house rule that actresses are always to be called “actors” (one I continually notice because it’s so sharply at variance with my own usage, enlightened though I be.)
This “for” business is perhaps analogous: it’s not really to do with natural usage as such, but more part of a set of conventions to do with not just being neutral but (as it were) performing neutrality. (This is not snarking: there’s a valid place for this kind of thing.)
As D.O. said, it’s not the prescriptivism, it’s the poppycock. It’s the claim that a syntax variation is not just inconsistent with house style, a matter of 4:00 a.m. vs. 4 AM, but equated with understanding the presumption of innocence or not, a diagnostic that the writer does or doesn’t care.
I don’t have David L’s and JWB’s experience, but let’s see what professional writers and editors outside the AP find acceptable:
aclu.org: “indicted for” about 98, “indicted on” about 70
newyorker.com (1970-2010): “indicted for” 33, “indicted on charges/counts” 23
thenation.com (1970-2010): “indicted for” 8, “indicted on” 5
theintercept.com (2014-present): “indicted for” 84, “indicted on” 37
Are those bad sources? If so, what would be better ones?
Bryan Garner hasn’t noticed this issue, nor has Chicago, unless I’ve missed something.
Corpus of Historical American English, 1950s-present: both “indicted for” and “indicted on” have been around in roughly similar numbers, no clear trend one way or the other.
So, why not be strict anyway, because you think it might make a tiny difference to some people? And why not avoid split infinitives and singular “they” and “either side of the street” etc., etc., which *do* distract some readers and diminish their trust (and we know this for sure, because they complain)? Because every second you spend enforcing One Right Way is a second you didn’t spend checking for misnegations, attachment ambiguities, misspelled names, factual errors. And, it goes without saying, which facts are included or withheld is orders of magnitude more effective at slanting a story than one preposition.
And more importantly to me as a reader here, because angry denunciations of a syntax variation as an indicator of character and values, with sarcasm and dismissal that “fortunately” the opinions of non-professionals about how something reads don’t matter, are very upsetting to me. Or is it only a house style, without deeper meaning? I’d like to be able to ask whether enforcing it makes any difference *to the reader*, without being told I’m so dumb I’ll believe anything on the web.
When McIntyre puts that much emotional weight on one preposition and doesn’t have a word to say about choice of details etc., it feels to me like he cares about reporters performing neutrality to other AP reporters (as DE said), first and foremost.
If it’s a matter of moral stands, I’ll stand with the ACLU.
It’s one thing to think that “house style” is important such that out of a variety of different phrasings different fluent writers might use if left to their own devices a particular one will be consistently used in a particular publication, in order to create a unified approach regardless of byline. This seems to me a more legitimate concern with “straight news” reporting, should such a thing still exist, then with opinion pieces or feature writing where a distinctive authorial voice rather than consistent institutional voice is more likely to be the desideratum. But if what the style guide mandates is a comparatively rare variant or an eccentric innovation rather than one common variant within the range normally used by writers left to their own devices, then it seems reasonable to ask for justification for the novelty. Deciding to put an umlaut over cooperate a la the New Yorker, for example, can be easily taken to signal “ooh, look at me, aren’t I precious”?
Just saying “oh, but they have a style book and it’s in their style book” is not an adequate response, any more than “well, that’s just our corporate policy” is when the policy in question is stupid. (NB in the latter case and possibly the former that may nonetheless be a reason not to take out your ire at the stupidity on the low-level employee you may be dealing with who is not responsible for the stupidity,)
House styles are there to avoid inconsistency, which a tiny minority of readers find very distracting. I’m one of them, so I say fine. At the same time I envy people who can really let loose with their spelling, and who mix p.m., P.M., and pm with gay abandon.
(Some style rules are actually good ways to achieve clarity, like rules for the judicious use of commas, but that’s another matter.)
ktschwarz’s post made me pick up my copy of MWDEU (1989 edition). It lacks an entry for “indict” but does have one for “alleged,” making fun of Ambrose Bierce’s 1909 peeving, but noting that in practice “alleged” does have a tendency to be inserted in sentences in sloppy and misleading ways that judicious editing ought to clean up.
MWDEU also has an entry on “accuse,” noting that while “accuse of” is now standard it was not always treated as the only option, and back in the day that noted busybody and scold Bishop Lowth was criticizing those well-regarded stylists Dryden and Swift for using “for” instead.
Dryden: “Ovid, whom you accuse for luxuriancy of verse”
Swift: “Accused the ministers for betraying the Dutch”
Everything said above about German is accurate. There are also a few cases where the preferred prepositions vary regionally within Standard German.
Most scientific journals seem to have style guides. Most of them keep most of the guide secret, so if you’ve submitted to that journal (or publisher) for the first time, you won’t find out most of the rules exist until you get the page proofs. On a few occasions I’ve asked for exceptions from such a secret rule in the interest of not making my text positively misleading, or asked why the rule exists. Every time, the low-level contact persons I get to talk to seem wholly unable to understand the question – they just restate the rule! They never forward the question to their superiors either.
> There still appear to be no actual examples of actual people who actually construe* “indicted for” in the way the AP stylebook worries about, except perhaps for people whose perception of reality has apparently been distorted by excessive contact with the AP stylebook.
I’m an actual example, I think.
I’ve never read the AP stylebook, but “was indicted for X-ing” does sound to me like it means “was indicted because (s)he had X-ed” rather than merely “was charged with X-ing”. More generally, “for X-ing” sounds to me like the X-ing is being asserted by the speaker/writer, rather than by some third party to be understood from context. (I note that we say “tested for rabies”, not *”tested for having rabies”.)
Teasing this apart a bit . . . something like “He was yelled at for swearing in front of the kids” sounds to me like “He swore in front of the kids, and was yelled at for it”; but something like “He was yelled at for swearing in front of the kids, even though he hadn’t” sounds fine to me. So I guess that for me “for X-ing” suggests that there was X-ing, but that suggestion can be canceled by the context?
So, assuming I’m not just an outlier here, I wonder if the reason that judges/lawyers/legislators/etc. are OK with “was indicted for X-ing” might be that for them, the word “indicted” is already enough to cancel the suggestion that the person actually X-ed? (Like, maybe they read “was indicted for X-ing” as implicitly equivalent to “was indicted for X-ing, even though maybe (s)he hadn’t”?) That would tally with mollymooly’s hypotheses above, as well as with comments by D.O. and others about the word “indicted” itself (e.g. D.O.’s statement that “the word ‘indicted’ already gives all the relevant information”).
Thanks, it’s nice to get confirmation of my own take on it.
@Ran You’ve left it very implicit whether you think indicted on a charge of changes much of anything there.
“Bob was indicted for credit card fraud” suggests to the casual reader that Joe did in fact commit credit card fraud. As Ran points out, the implicature is weak and highly dependent on context. (This is why the ACLU examples aren’t as pertinent as they might initially seem: the context of the sentence appearing in an ACLU statement overwhelms the weak implicature, so they don’t need to think about the implicatures in the same way as a journalist writing about the case.)
“Bob was indicted on a charge of credit card fraud” is slightly weaker in its implicature: the circumlocution subtly reminds the reader that the validity of the charge remains unproven. But it isn’t sufficient on its own to ensure that readers remain neutral in their assessment of Joe’s guilt or innocence. If you are concerned about neutrality, there are probably other parts of the article you should be focusing on.
The only situation where I can imagine the choice of phrasing making a difference to the reader’s understanding is when extreme concision is needed because the person indicted is not the main subject of the article and the indictment is only mentioned in passing — e.g. “Alice was seen on Tuesday having lunch with Bob, who was indicted last month on a charge of credit card fraud.” (The article is about Alice’s presidential campaign, the paragraph is discussing her questionable choice of associates, and this is the only mention of Bob.)
I agree that there is an implicature here. But the strength of any implicature depends on the beliefs and feelings of the reader, which a journalist cannot possibly know. There are plenty of people for whom arrest is equivalent to conviction (“the police know what they are doing, don’t they?”) and others who, if they hear from Alice that Bob said Carol said David saw Edward committing mopery, are quite prepared to hang him even if they have no idea what mopery might be: no amount of hearsay cancels out the perlocutionary force on them of the word commit. Compared to that, the difference between indicted for and indicted on a charge of is tiny. In any case one might do better to write “The grand jury handed down an indictment for / on a charge of murder against X; he will now be tried to determine if he is guilty.”
In any case, I have found the complained-of locution in sacred scripture, s.v. Orthography:
A spelling reformer indicted
For fudge was before the court cicted.
The judge said: “Enough —
His candle we’ll snough,
And his sepulchre shall not be whicted.”
Compared to that, the difference between indicted for and indicted on a charge of is tiny.
So what? Even a tiny difference is worth making. It’s not like it costs anything.
I am puzzled by the assertion that habitually using a five-word phrase instead of a two-word phrase is costless. At least in the old days where you were setting type to fit in a necessarily finite hole measured in column-inches, every incremental character you wanted to add to a given story had a real cost. Accordingly, brevity is traditionally a stronger desideratum in newspaper stories than in many other prose genres. Once you accept that there is even a tiny cost, it’s no longer so clear that a tiny conjectured benefit is cost-justified.
An alternative solution would be to just stick with “charged with” and never use the I-word, on the grounds that the technical differences between an indictment and some other mode of a criminal charge being formally brought are typically not understood by the Common Reader* and are thus of limited salience in a news story that doesn’t have space for a substantive digression explaining the differences. You could say “charged by a/the grand jury with” once in the body of the story if you wanted to.
*Even to a professional reader, that the prosecution proceeded by indictment rather than some other process is likely to be substantively irrelevant in the vast majority of situations.
In my various jobs at weekly magazines, I spent many hours trying to lose a word or three from a story to avoid an ugly line break or get rid of a widow or simply make the story fit into the space available. Of course, we always tried to do that without breaking the meaning, but sometimes you had to bend it a little…
to avoid an ugly line break or get rid of a widow
They’re pesky, and can be dangerous. See the bible parable about the widow’s bite. Best thing is to engage a copyeditor.
I’m having trouble understanding the people who think this is meaningless. It’s unarguable that “for” often does express causality. If I say “my daughter was given detention for skipping school,” very few people would think “of course, she might not have skipped school.” Most of the objection to the need for better language here seems basically “I’m always skeptical of what’s being said by law enforcement” rather than any real argument that “indicted for X” where X is a phrase or clause stating that the indictee did something doesn’t imply he did that something.
Indicted for murder is different in my ears from indicted for stabbing his business partner, killing him. The former is a legal usage, using a different meaning of “for”, and is more likely to be internalized that way by the reader. The latter is not. It does leave the reader with the understanding that he stabbed his partner. More skeptical readers may infer that conviction will depend on other issues than whether he stabbed his partner, killing him. Or they may doubt the accuracy of the writing. But the writing says he stabbed his partner.
>Of course, we always tried to do that without breaking the meaning, but sometimes you had to bend it a little…
Yes. But you typically had a “hole” for the article. You weren’t cutting and cutting till you had the maximally terse version. You just needed to hit a line count. The value of shaving a given word always had to be weighed against shaving some other word.
Also, the article cited in the original post shows anything but an aversion to verbosity.
Original article:
>indicted for concealing information and lying to the FBI regarding an investigation into illegal campaign contributions,
Good editor:
>Indicted for perjury for what he told FBI agents investigating contributions to his campaign.
You weren’t cutting and cutting till you had the maximally terse version.
You’d be surprised, or maybe not, at the number of experienced writers who, when asked to deliver a 650-word story, send in 800 words along with a protestation that they can’t see how it can possibly be any shorter. What they really meant was that they couldn’t bear to take the machete to their own work so wanted to make me do it instead. Which I would.
It’s safer to let someone else amputate you than to do it yourself. Under anesthetic you shouldn’t be messing around with a scalpel.
Dr. Leonid Rogozov
>asked to send in a 650-word story…
When I briefly worked for a daily in the 80s, the computer calculated the column inches. My memory is that you weren’t allowed to turn in anything long. A decade ago, doing freelance for a weekly and a magazine, I tried to stay pretty close to word counts, but I can imagine many writers don’t. A writer for a prominent political magazine, whose highly regarded book I’d read and enjoyed, once handed me a draft of an op ed he was hoping to publish, to see what I thought. What I thought was “You must have great editors.” There were insights, but his writing was very hard to follow. Couldn’t believe it was the same author.
Brett, that’s quite a story. I assume Rogozov was right-handed. I wonder whether some doctors would prefer to direct someone else doing the cutting, particularly if they were left-handed. Wiki closes saying that the Russians made “extensive health checks” mandatory after that. How early can appendicitis be detected?
If Ryan is now perceiving a difference between “indicted for fatally stabbing so-and-so” and “indicted for murder” in terms of how much implicature there is that what follows the “for” is an accurate statement about the world, that would seem to highlight that “for” really is a word of comparatively little fixed meaning. How about “indicted for the murder of so-and-so”? Where does that fall on the spectrum? Is “charged with fatally stabbing so-and-so” significantly better for Ryan? If so is that because it seems to presuppose that so-and-so was in fact stabbed to death but suggests that whether the person charged is actually the person who did it remains to be determined? (It is comparatively rare for homicide defendants to argue that homicide *by someone* was not in fact the cause of death versus just arguing “it wasn’t me it must have been someone else,” but it does happen.)
Oh. That could be misunderstood as a statement of fact that the campaign contributions were illegal – at least as easily as “indicted for”.
I do agree newspaper articles should use “indicted on a charge of” (or perhaps “charged with” as suggested by a commenter) instead of “indicted for”. The latter can be read as indicating that what follows “for” is something he did, according to the author, as opposed to just indicating those are the charges. “Indicted on a charge of” is nicely unambiguous.
I do feel like many of the people commenting don’t understand the possibility of ambiguity. Yes, “indicted for” can mean “indicted on a charge of”. But there’s no guarantee the reader will take it that way.
A follow up to my comment just above. Here’s a personal example (with a ticket, not an indictment) of “for” vs “on the charges of” (or similar):
Once upon a time, I got a ticket for parking on the wrong side of the road, with a charge of parking with my right wheels more than 10 inches from the right curb. (Two way street in the U.S., with parking on the right side of the road, with respect to the direction the vehicle is facing.)
What comes right after “for” is what I did, but not what I was charge with.
JW
Can you see any difference between these sentences?:
Your example:
>Is “charged with fatally stabbing so-and-so”
Another possibility:
Is “charged because he fatally stabbed so-and-so”
I do in fact see a huge difference. I don’t see how your position leaves you able to explain the difference.
“Indicted for fatally stabbing so-and-so” is potentially synonymous with either of these two sentences.
It’s too ambiguous to determine which meaning “for” carries.
Exactly.
Perhaps “indicted for allegedly Xing” would be a compromise that only needs one additional word rather than three to overcome any implicature felt from the “for”? Note that that works better with gerunds than nouns: “indicted for allegedly killing so-and-so” flows naturally whereas “indicted for the alleged murder of so-and-so” feels a bit fussy/overwordy. At least to my ear.
One possible difference of perspective here as suggested upthread is that people who work inside the legal system are sufficiently attuned to what an indictment does and doesn’t mean that the “for” adds no additional semantic content at all to a statement using the phrase “indicted for.” And that is, if I may say so, the correct perspective. The preposition “for” really adds no semantic content at all to the statement if the statement is correctly parsed. This is often the case with prepositions, where a particular preposition is mandatorily paired with a particular verb in a particular structure. It is a purely conventional, and thus non-compositional, thing that the verb “indict” takes for one of its arguments a prepositional phrase as a complement and that “for” is the semi-arbitrary preposition that is conventionally paired with it. If you are relying on what you think the freestanding meaning of “for” is to try to help illuminate the resultant sentence, it just means you don’t really understand what the verb “indict” means and how it relates to the argument in the for-phrase, and are thus to some extent fumbling around in the dark to try to come up with an educated guess.
If there is a genuine risk that a material percentage of non-specialist readers will interpret “indict for” in that fashion, then the sensible conclusion to draw is that “indict” is too technical a word to use in news stories for a general readership. Which would be fine. I mean, really fine with me. I know and use lots of legal jargon that I would certainly not recommend a journalist use in a story for a general readership without an explanatory digression that would probably not be worth it and I certainly don’t think it any shortcoming on the part of the general readership that they don’t understand the specialized jargon. Why should they? One tricky thing here may be that because criminal prosecutions, as opposed to certain more technical or boring legal proceedings, loom large in popular culture as morality plays etc it is more likely that non-specialists have routinely heard jargon-words like indict[ment], which can then maybe make it more difficult to assess if they actually understand them.
The gerund is indeed the problem. But you don’t need to couch the gerund. You just write a better sentence all around, without it. “For murder in the case of.” The problem is creating a narrative phrase or clause that seems to describe what he did as the object of for. That makes it sound like the answer to What for? Meaning Why rather than What for? Meaning For what charge?
Factivity (the property of a verb or preposition that implies or implicates the truth of the clause it governs) is discussed by Allan Hazlett in “The Myth of Factive Verbs”, which discusses the assorted views of philosophers of language with particular reference to “X knows p”, which he claims is not factive, though “X is aware that p” perhaps is. I refuse to try to summarize the article.
If you’re going to drag philosophers into the business of editing stories then newspapers would still be reserving judgment on whether the Titanic sank.
There is no need to drag them in. Many philosophers would jump at the chance to earn a little money writing for newspapers, to top up their earnings from delivering them. Times are hard.
Just Say No to discussions about “factivity”. With the time saved, Get A Life.
“Bob was indicted on a charge of credit card fraud” is slightly weaker in its implicature: the circumlocution subtly reminds the reader that the validity of the charge remains unproven.
Maybe. Or maybe it leaves open the possibility that Bob was also indicted on several other charges, or should have been. If anything “on a charge of” might be slightly worse.
The first problem is that editors are assuming the general public do not understand what “indict” means. The second and by far greater problem is that editors are almost certainly correct in that assumption, but this work around of “on a charge of” doesn’t help matters.