Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
Down with designer babies, Emersonian moral philosophy, Triumph of the Will, the Golden Mean, and labiaplasty! At least, that’s what the fine people at Lexus HQ believe. Good for them, and good on them for taking out a full-page ad on the back of The Weekend Australian Magazine (June 2-3, 2007) to tell the world about how they feel.
Seen any good grammatical foolishnesses lately?
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Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
What a lovely advertisement for carparks.
Loads. Admittedly, I blog like Im dyslexic (something about the screen rather than page that messes me up, along with the paciness of blogrants) but help me out here. In my day, one didnt “impact x”, one “impacted upon x”. Call me an old stiff, but I find that to be… well, and no offence guys … a bit Singlish. Makes me cringe.
Back to the point – Perfection not an option, hey? Nice one, losers. Yes, all manner of grievous abuses of the mother tongue are committed in the name of marketing.
Heh heh. Caught you, Lefty E. You said:
It’s actually “I blog as if I’m dyslexic…” or “I blog like a dyslexic…”
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of job ads on the intertubes. Demands for elite talent along the lines of: “For this role you will have excellent communication and trouble shooting skill’s also attention to detail.”
No time-wasters.
The local primary school’s newsletter is distributed through my son’s preschool, presumably to entice us to send him there. I might just do that, because I am intrigued by the “Athletic’s carnival” advertised on the front page.
No, it’s actually ‘I bolg as if I’m sydlxeic.’
But Laura, pardon me for exposing my ignorance, but I can’t see any grammatical problem with the headline. The semantic ambiguity is amusing, but as far as I can tell the headline is free of grammatical error…it’s just a clumsy semantic construction.
I’ve either just been terribly clever or terribly ignorant. Either way, I’ve been annoying. Happy Sunday.
Athletic’s Carnival, sounds like a blast.
I’ve been seeing too many stupidities like this one perpetrated in advertising copy, which is really a bit too much: presumably it’s been gone over and gone over by loads of people. They can’t all be illiterate, can they?
Mercurius, you’re right – there’s nothing wrong with the sentence if it’s supposed to mean that one should never be able to choose, opt for, or select perfection. But they were trying to say ‘cruise control etc should be standard features, not optional extras’, don’t you think? Clumsy, yes, because of failure to choose the right forms of words.
Thanks for the Happy Sunday wishes – same to you.
Heh. As somebody who worked in advertising for 13 years, and who has done my fair share of proof-reading, I can assure you that illiteracy has never been an option…
…it’s a standard feature. As it should be.
Laura on 9 June 2007 at 11:13 pm
How about:
to tell the world about [sic] how they feel.
Okay. Cheap cracks aside. Copy should read:
“Perfection should not be option[al].” As read “Perfection should not be an option” conveys a meaning exactly the opposite to that intended by the advertisers. Why do these guys get paid so much to do so little?
I never knew I was dyslexic until I went to a toga party dressed as a goat.
I always find car ads disappoint me terribly. The cars look absolutely ravishing in the photos and like just another car on the road.
Lexuses for instance, look like pimped out Camrys, and Ferraris look like those cheap fiberglass-shell-over-a-VW-chassis that had a brief fad in the 70s.
As to the exquisiteness of sensibility that the ad-jockies are trying to impute for Lexus choosers…I can say that when I see a steel-haired business man in a luxury car, I don’t think “There goes a wanker!”, I think “There goes a wanker who imagines that because he can blow $100K on a car, I should respect him as a man of style and taste. Wanker!”
Very similar sentiments I’ll concede, but there is a qualitative difference.
Lefty E, as for myself, I’m dyslexic like I blog.
I wish I could remember the exact wording of an ad for Navman, a kind of in-car GPS navigational device, I’ve seen on the side of buses lately. It’s some kind of play on “Keeping up with the Joneses”. For the sake of example, let’s say it’s “Keep ahead of the Jones’ “. You can see why I’ve forgotten everything except that glaring “Jones’ “. I’ve used it in tutorials as a discussion point for the proper use of apostrophes, i.e. what’s wrong with this? Whoever’s responsible–and it would seem to be a whole chain of people–some remedial classes are in order.
Good for you, Kirsty. I gave up on doing that after about three years of tutoring. It’s a battle that’s long been lost!
Sorta off topic: Why don’t people hate marketing execs more than politicians? They lie and bullshit just as much if not more. And they earn more!
“It’s a battle that’s long been lost!”
I hope not. But when you see a sign outside a Canberra’s optometrist’s place that reads “Free eye test’s“, you’ve got to wonder.
Ooops. Canberra, not Canberra’s. Still hav’ent woken’ up.
Fully [sic]!
Maybe they’re trying to flog ‘em to the Hillsongers.
“Have you driven the new Lexus Galilee lately?
When you glide on water,
Perfection……is a heavenly option.
Rapture yourself ahead of the rush!!
Now selling at Miracle Motors. While stocks last.”
Well it’s true Mark that nobody could tell me what was incorrect about it, and one girl declared that she hated apostrophes.
Why would anybody hate apostrophe’s? Their lovely. What about misplaced, commas?
Their lovely what?
It’s the ’s’ at the end of the ‘Jones’ that always gets me. Was there ever an original member of the Jones clan? And does that mean they would be named ‘Jone’, not ‘Jones’?
Do I think too much about these things? Noooooooooooooooo!
Uh Bob, that’s because marketing execs are better at marketing…
“Free eye test’s”
Rob, for goodness sake.
You mean you don’t get it?
It’s a very subtle and clever subliminal trick to get hetero girls and gay blokes into the shop. Eye candy. The missing letter is ‘e’.
It was so much fun in the 70s, (pre-robot manufacture), when “lemon” cars were quite common, (ie, apart from design faults, the rule was never to buy one made on Monday or Friday) and one could so easily take the piss out of their advertising generally and ignore the grammar.
Dave Allen, describing Leyland’s (with at best, dubious quality control in the UK) appeal to sex with an attractive blond lady slithering into the driving seat and almost having an orgasm when gripping the gear stick:
Leyland in Australia, the P76 and a common pisstake:.
Why can’t they do more funny ads like the 4WD and pulling the cow out of the bog when its head flies over the roof?:
A new block of apartments in Marrickville is called “The Arm’s”.
Oh no!
“A new block of apartments in Marrickville is called “The Arm’sâ€?.
No prob., there, Laura.
It is established O/T, thus must be good, and part of the.. “Arm’s length principle.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm’s_length_principle
You live closer to someone elses ‘armpit’, than you would like. It’s costing a fortune. You cannot stand the work hours to pay for the mortgage-’mort’ means death in French- but hell, “it’s our home”.
Just get a copy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, then.
Favourite paraphrase (my copy is at work) – “…does the Apostrophe Protection Society have a militant wing?”
There’s a big, expensively produced, sign on a new retail centre on Parramatta Road in Auburn that says ‘Limited Tenancy’s Available’. I wonder how many people must have seen the proposed text before it was too late to change it.
ff’s
the collective petite-bourgeoi’s grammar feti’sh is such a wonderfully mediocre rallying point
ye’s, if you can write gooderer, then one day the grammar police (in ur headz’s) might allow you to ’say ’something that i’s not utterly banal or trivial
the original po’st makes le’s’s ’sen’se than the ad
lol @ uz’s
Glen, thank you for setting me straight.
Time for me to take a really long holiday from blogging, I think.
You’re comparatively priviliged, Meredith.
There’s an apartment building on Bowen Tce called “South Pacfic Lodge”…
Yes it’s true, there’s no grammar problem in the ad, strictly speaking; it’s the sheer idiocy and carelessness of meaning that’s the thing.
There’s a famous old joke in the US (don’t know if you’ve heard it over there) about the old Chevy Nova, which in Spanish translates as something like “doesn’t work”/”doesn’t go” (i.e., “no va.”)
Lately in Southern California there’ve been ads for an Indian tribal casino hosted/owned by the Morongo Nation: the casino is called MORONGO (“moron, go.”) True, it really is the actual name of the tribe, but then of course they could have spelled the original Native American word any number of different ways using the Roman alphabet.
I suspect they did it that way on purpose.
The Mitsubishi Pajero is sold as the Montero in the US on account of ‘pajero’ meaning ‘wanker’ in South American Spanish.
Goes to show what happens when you start using made-up words for car models, rather than the real words the manufacturers used to employ. I’m nostalgic in particular for the model naming policies of the long-departed British motor industries – remember the (Hillman) Imp, (Austin Healy) Sprite, (Hillman) Minx, (Riley) Elf, (Humber) Snipe etc? Of course, quality and reliability were issues of secondary importance when your models were named after fairies at the bottom of the garden. Still, it was possible to imagine such a motor vehicle having a personality in its cantankerous refusal to operate reliably (think Basil Fawlty and the broken-down Morris 1100), something wholly lacking from any Lexus model.
As someone who works behind the scenes in TV news, I can tell you that poor grammar and spelling seems to be part of journalists’ DNA. Some of it is so bad as to be unintelligible! Isn’t it their job to communicate??
While I concede their writing doesn’t go to air as text, check out some of those tickers that run along the bottom of the screen during the news – there are often woeful errors.
In my day, one didnt “impact x�, one “impacted upon x�. Call me an old stiff, but I find that to be… well, and no offence guys … a bit Singlish. Makes me cringe.
Hoo-boy. In my day, impact was quite clearly a noun. One didn’t impact x or impact upon x, one wrote that Y would have AN impact ON x.
Call me an old stiff, you’d be completely accurate.
The local primary school’s newsletter is distributed through my son’s preschool, presumably to entice us to send him there. I might just do that, because I am intrigued by the “Athletic’s carnival� advertised on the front page.
My primary school newsletter contains howlers like this, too. Do I say something? I’ve been quiet about it for years due to not wanting to get a reputation as a smartarse.
Ah Glen, you’re just what Cultural Studies needs: another high-theory obsessessed bloke telling a wonderful, intelligent and articulate female colleague that her concerns are beneath his really important and earnest contemplation. Well done.
kirsty,
nice to meet you.
but, oh, one time car obsessed, thanks. i is just read a lot and at some theories good.
but, oh, does it matter that laura is wonderful? is that meant to change what is written here? wtf. play innernets extra super nice cause she is wonderful, intelligent and articulate female colleague? please. i engage bolshy with everyone indifferent to who they are. at least grant me that small concession
but, oh, maybe you didn’t get the jist of me first point. ‘grammar’ is very important. however, i am not the ‘concerns’ police. you, she, or anyone else can be concerned with whatever you want. my first point is that as a ‘rallying point’ concern with grammatical bollocks is shared with reactionary peanuts of the petite-bourgeois. is this merely a coincidence? meh? yeah, assembling those micro-fascisms. ie, historical and nationalist values as the grammar of citizenship. tally ho!
but, oh, i does gramarz good… lol
Glen we’ve met in cyberspace before, at Dogpossum’s or Mel Gregg’s, but maybe you didn’t notice.
Anyway, there are a lot examples of strange bed fellows out there Glen. Do we tar everyone with the same brush because there are points of agreement? I think you need to take account of the different sensibilities informing the argument, and since you’ve obviously been reading LP for a while, I do think you can properly take account of the history of Laura being wonderful. You know where she’s coming from; it’s quite disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
The (other) people in my house get a great deal of moral superiority and enjoyment out of finding grammatical errors and errors of fact in ABC broadcasts. Occasionally one of them has been known to ring or write and express their dissatisfaction at falling standards. It’s a good thing – it keeps them out of trouble and their wits sharp. Especially the 94 yr old. I reckon it’s a right of passage.
On the other hand, was there any instance above where you weren’t able to work out what the ad was about? Grammar and punctuation is only about interpretation. I’m with Glen on it’s place in the grand scheme of things.
But I’m still puzzling about what the ad in the original post was meant to mea. The downside of this is it made me think more about Lexi than I needed to!
First they came for the apostrophes…
I reckon it’s a right of passage.
I’m with Glen on it’s place in the grand scheme of things.
It’s obvious why some commenters are anti- proper riting. Saves a lot of work.
I accept the correction with the 2nd – my bad.
But were you in any doubt about what I meant? which was actually the point. If you genuinely thought the 2nd was a contraction then I apologise for misleading you
and by commenting on “riting” were you confusing this with “right of passage”, “write of passage (kind of contextually amusing) or did you think there is a “rite of passage” (which might involve incantations or something).
Oi, Helen, you left out Grammar and punctuation is only about interpretation. And sorry, Agharad, but only someone who knew very little about either would say that, with or without correct grammar.
You appear to be arguing that the elderly are inferior and their values are to be mocked. Is that really what you believe? How very elitist of you.
Glen says
Yeah, see, some of us call that “bullying”.
It’s petit-bourgeois and petite bourgeoisie, actually. One is an adjective and the other is a noun. We’re either either ‘reactionary peanuts of the petite bourgeoisie’ or ‘reactionary petit-bourgeois peanuts’.
/sarc
Yes PC – guilty as charged re lack of knowledge about grammar. Been educated in science and numbers.
No I don’t believe the elderly are inferior or their values to be mocked. But I don’t get concern about grammar or changing use of words. See first para.
A little clue about most Australian Car ads: they are all shot in the same car park in the Docklands of Melbourne. It has lovely views from the top in 3 directions.
But I don’t get concern about grammar or changing use of words
Since there has been an explosion of alternative media and activism through words, the importance of conveying your meaning clearly has never been more important.
I suppose that makes me petit-bourgeois, but since I’m a less-than-average wage office worker living in a three-bedroom weatherboard with 2.4 kids and a station wagon, I’m irretrievably petit-bourgeois anyway. Laugh away!
The whole point of good grammar, spelling and the other items being bitched about here is to clarify meaning and aid reading. Some (but by no means all) of [G]len’s sentences were clear in meaning, but, as they were unfamiliar, difficult to read.
The title of the book I linked to earlier is a good example – the addition of a comma in the wrong place totally changed the meaning of the partial sentence.
Does my, probably over-, use of subordinate clauses and unfamiliar structures slow reading or impair understanding? Despite them being, in my opinion, acceptable grammatically, perhaps I should not use them as they slow reading and annoy readers.
If [G]len agrees to spell and punctuate properly perhaps I will clarify my sentence structure.
OTOH, I enjoy being a touch pompous about it.
It’s spelling rather than grammar, but I took this photo last night just for this thread:
Shop window in West End on Hardgrave Road.
If we offend, it is with our good will.
Eh, you know the rest. Or you should. [FROWNS, ARCHES EYEBROW]
Mark,
That is wrong on a few levels – including syntax and simple ambiguity. Does “handle” include touching or not?
Angharad:
There’s only one confused person in this exchange, and it isn’t Helen. Rite of passage.
There’s no such thing as a ‘right of passage’, much less a ‘write of passage’, unless one is making a rather sophisticated pun, which — forgive me — I don’t think you were.
Well, in that case your meaning can’t be as clear as you thought it was.
End of your link dropped off, Pav – I think you meant to go here.
Tx v much, Z, that’s the one — it was right when I checked it, too. Perhaps teh intertubes are striking back at my ill-advised determination to boycott Wikipedia.
Rites of passage. Leave your Hornblower at home, abandon your Jack Aubrey rubbish, get yourselves a real sea-novel.
Grant you, hedgehog? </Lady Anne>
Get your hand off it, glen. Or at least, put away the pretence of humility when you’re bolsh[il]y engaging.
bully? in a blog post where everyone’s making fun of other people’s stupidities… touche becomes toush becomes stoush. a neologism for this thread, and perhaps the blogosphere at large: stouche.
well i am not little, so they’r'll petite or petty or something
sorry kirsty i didn’t realise we’d conversed before. i’d rather introduce myself twice than carry on as if i shouldn’t be saying hello or whatever.
To be fair, this was probably a spelling mistake for ‘pajaro’ rather than a made-up word.
See glen, I don’t think fun was being made carte blanche of other people’s stupidities. Laura’s post and the subsequent comments were clearly directed at advertisers and marketers, maybe printers, but people who are professional writers and proof-readers and should know and observe the formal rules of grammar, syntax and punctuation as part of their professional practice. (If they have any pride in their work, and I assume they do).
As people marking undergraduate assignments in the Humanities and Social Sciences as well, we are employed to be sticklers about such matters. There is a lot of frustration that we have to conduct remedial classes for things that should have been learned and consolidated by the early years of high-school. To think that people leave university, still, without knowing these things is a matter for concern, and, as Helen pointed out, such concern is not a distinction that is always along class lines. In fact, there is an argument that there might be a special motivation for people from lower socio-economic backgrounds to master the language of the ruling classes.
The examples of writing being held up and put down are not text messages or bolshie comments on the internet. There are very clear generic differences, and that is how they are being read and, so, judged as inadequate.
There has been some debate about whether the example advertisement was in fact gramatically incorrect, and perhaps this is the motivation for the dismissal of Laura’s post, but I think, aside from the grammatical issue, the question raised about the advocacy of perfection as an entitlement and the attendant value system is as repugnant as Laura suggested in her ironic reference to Triumph of the Will.
Anyway, glen, I think it would be impossible not to glean the meaning of Laura’s response to your first comment. It seemed to me she that was hurt and exhausted. Much of that response probably has nothing to do with you; it was probably the proverbial straw on the camel’s back. Still, if Laura is taking an extended break from the cut and thrust of blogging, I think many of us are already looking eagerly to her return.
PS Hello!
I don’t want to be another straw added to the pile on the broken back, but one could just as easily say that the above is an argument for writing “ungrammatically”. If most members of one’s audience are so incompetent at grammar that getting them to recognise that “it’s” is a contraction of “it is” rather than the possessive form of the “neutral” singular pronoun, and if conveying one’s meaning is what is important, then that that seems to me to be an argument for using “it’s” as the possessive form of “it”.
I love grammar — good and bad. I love thinking about grammar. I think grammar, or thinking about grammar, is incredibly important. That’s why I’m a real stickler for “correct” grammar when it comes to my professional writing, and whenever I’m reviewing the writing submitted to me from others in my profession. There’s almost nothing more that I love than getting into a debate over whether one can (i.e. “rightly”) use “however” as a coordinating conjuntion. (You can’t.)
But that’s also precisely the reason why I (largely) agree with the points made in (or by) glen’s interventions here. The fact is that the vast majority of the above criticisms of grammar proceed from a prescriptive model of universal grammar, which assumes that there is one set of grammatical rules that are utterly consistent and unchanging and applicable for all situations. This view, as glen implies, is somewhat authoritarian, to say the last. (Recognising this point also enables one to recognise that “grammar” is much more than a question of what order to put words in and what kinds of little marks to use in which places across that arrangment, but that’s an issue we can put aside for now.)
And so those people who are genuinely concerned about communicating clearly to their readers might better enact that concern by writing according to the grammar by which their readers appear to read.
That’s not to say that I favour abandoning the rules of grammar that make up what I just called “universal grammar”. That grammar has its uses (particularly in academic and legal contexts, for example); it’s also part of “our” heritage, and so I’d like to see it preserved via particular forms of practice within particular sites, etc. But that’s a very different goal from having everyone accord to the strictures of a universal grammar.
PS — I don’t doubt for a second that there’s a grammatical error somewhere in what I’ve just written, and I’m troubled by that thought for even less time than I spend thinking it. I love grammar, and I’m a bit of a stickler for it in certain contexts, but I lay no claim to being perfect.
Thanks for your comments everyone, Kirsty in particular.
I value good grammar because without it clear communication is almost impossible. As both Helen and Kirsty noted, there is a pressing equity issue at stake here. I have no sympathy with people who fixate on ‘proper’ grammar because they see it as a way of keeping the gate, although I must add that I don’t see much evidence that such ‘purists’ (or ‘prescriptivists’) really exist.
Glen charged that because ‘reactionary peanuts’ complain that literacy is declining, anyone else who voices the same complaint is either a reactionary peanut themselves, or is giving aid and comfort to said peanut brigade.
I don’t agree. I think that of all imaginable reasons to shut up on the subject of linguistic competence, this is the worst. If one position in the debate is dominated rhetorically by social and political conservatives, who are using it to further their own ends, then that is all the more reason why people who have different perspectives should speak up. To be afraid of seeming uptight would be cowardly and weak.
It’s easy to think of analogies: some religious fundamentalists and some radical feminists would both say that pornography is a social evil, but they would have vastly different reasons for thinking and saying so.
I do come at this from the position of a person who is employed to teach people how to think and express themselves cogently and clearly. Far too many of the essays I mark display deep confusion about language, and I don’t mean they make mistakes about punctuation marks. Those kinds of errors are obviously just that: errors. They slow down comprehension time, they lay the writer open to looking a bit foolish, but they don’t substantially impede the transmission of meaning. (I don’t tell students they can’t write “it’s” which some of my colleagues do stipulate. I tell them to try to write in their natural voice, and to use the simplest correct words for the job.)
What is much more troubling is the type of mistake made by the copywriter of the ad I posted. I don’t know what you would call that mistake: it’s related to the malapropism but lacks that sharpness whereby te reader can think for a moment and work out what the writer actually intended to say.
Here are examples from the essays in front of me (the essays are about different plays; I changed some names but nothing else.)
In reference to The Tempest, Prospero could be depicted as the settlers.
The audience gains a much greater depth of the situation.
The way in which Shakespeare has implicated his play is greatly effective.
The character Ariel is alike to that of Caliban.
These are not isolated examples and I’m not giving them in an attempt to demonstrate that education is failing or that people are dumber now than they used to be. On the contrary, the people who wrote these sentences are among the smartest class I’ve taught in seven years univeristy tutoring. But they can’t write clearly enough to say what they mean, and so they get worse marks than they probably deserve. I imagine this situation will continue for the rest of their lives in some form or another. It’s not their fault, but it is a real problem.
Yesterday the US Senate failed to pass a symbolic no-confidence motion in Att. Gen. Alberto Gonzales. Bush, commenting from Bulgaria, said of this: “This process has been drug out a long time.” He meant to say “dragged”. What a moron.
This grammar website says:
http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/031901.htm
… or maybe Bush has a drug-addled brain.
You can’t use “howeverâ€? as a coordinating conjunction, however hard you try.
This, as Kirsty has already pointed out, is where the real point of disjunction in this whole fraught dicussion lies. Laura was dissing advertising copywriters for not being able to do their (lucratively paid) job properly, and was initiating (or trying to initiate) a relatively light-hearted discussion about language use — about which, as Captain Oats says, he and many of the rest of us enjoy talking. Do I need to bleat ‘Freedom of speech!!’ at this point?
Yes. Your tone was indistinguishable from that of the misogynist, anti-feminist, right-of-Genghis-Khan boys who think women should be shoved out of the blogosphere, and you were directly attacking a particular person, not lightly mocking an absent, indifferent and unidentified copywriter.
Which brings us back to Captain Oats’s (or Oats’, depending on what school you went to) point: the problem is the people whose job it is to produce language for public consumption. Journalists, novelists, writers of news broadcasts and producers of advertising copy have a responsibility not to be illiterate in public where hundreds of thousands of people will see and copy what they do.
Can’t speak for anyone else, but what I personally am mocking is the attitude of people whose own written English is riddled with infelicities and misunderstandings (Captain Oats please note my careful avoidance of the word ‘mistakes’) but who are scornful of those of us who are interested in these things.
But nobody here is mocking non-professional-writing people with a less-than-perfect level of literacy as such. And even if they were, this is Australia in 2007 and literacy has long since ceased to be a class issue, as Kirsty has also said. As far as I can make out, it’s actually a generational issue rather than a class one: a particular cohort was taught in primary school that spelling and grammar don’t matter as long as you Be Creative, and furthermore they were taught to be as bolshie as all get-out about it.
This I know from years of marking semi-literate undergraduate essays and then being either ignored or abused when I attempted to teach my students better. As university students writing essays, they were obliged to learn how to do it properly, yet losing marks for not writing half-decent English in a university English subject was something they never got their heads around; they seemed remarkably resistant to moving on intellectually from a position in which they had become entrenched somewhere round Year Four.
But I don’t care what mistakes my local butcher makes with apostrophes and plurals and spelling on his daily specials board. I do reserve the right to be amused by them, and I’m quite sure that he is equally amused by my ignorance of the finer points of meat.
Since this is essay marking season, I can only concur. There are some essays that I’m marking which, had the meaning been expressed clearly, would have warranted a high distinction, but often the confused prose also masks a confused argument.
And, generally, well said, Laura.
I think the point about lefties intervening in debates where they might reach similar conclusions to righties but for totally different reasons is an extremely important one. Too many of the criticisms seem redolent of a “which side are you on?” attitude which is almost never helpful.
Sorry, Laura and Mark, comments crossed.
No probs, Pavlov’s Cat.
The point about generational cohorts is also well made. I recall going for a job interview about ten years ago and the job involved writing selection criteria for people. The interviewer commented that I wrote grammatically, and also observed that her experience (and her business was basically re-writing people’s job applications) was that the reason was that I was 28 and that anyone 26 and under from Queensland hadn’t been taught to write. That’s a salutary little tale, because I think it works against the notion that you’re patting yourself on the back if you understand the rudiments of expression, and dissing those who don’t.
Agreed, Mark and Laura. I’ve seen many young graduates who are mentally smart and verbally (orally?) sharp, but who were simply unable to convey even simple concepts in written speech. Somehow they could not reach a level of abstraction that enabled them to communicate thoughts, ideas or concepts – or even simple sequences of events – in a way that made sense to the reader.
I tell these folks to write as though they were themselves the reader: for example, try to understand what happens in the reader’s mind when you miss the second of a comma pair.
Viz: ‘My husband, Jack was born in Texas’, rather than ‘My husband, Jack, was born in Texas’.
To the writer, who knows what he or she meant, the first might look OK. But to the reader, it means – in fact, the rules of grammar compel it to mean – something completely different.
silkworm: cheers!
Pavlov’s Cat:
I’m at a loss here. First, since when has voicing an argument that is critical of another’s argument been the same as insisting that that person ought not to be allowed to hold and/or express that argument (much less been the same as actually preventing that person from voicing their arguments)? Second, the discussion in comments threads to blog postings — particularly when those threads start to get long — almost always shifts away from or around the topic and/or purpose of the original posting. I don’t know how my comment can be read as an attack on Laura for the original post — that certainly wasn’t my intent — but if it has doesn’t that just go to show that there are many factors bearing upon the communication of “meaning”, and that the grammar of one’s writing may even be less significant than other, contextual factors?
If we’re going to speak about grammar as shaping meaning, I would argue that it’s actually very difficult to separate the “grammar” we’ve been speaking of up to this point from less formal (or formalised) rules concerning how to participate in online debates, i.e. the rules stipulating how to write a comment in response to a blog posting. Think about it: what seems to have invoked most people’s ire here is not glen’s manifestly ungrammatical writing (even when he’s not taking the piss) but rather his “ungrammatical” reading of the humorous, non-serious “intent” of the original posting and his subsequent ungrammatical treatment of the debate as simultaneously significant (as worthy of counter-strike) and petty (as worthy of ridicule).
Or am I being “perverse” here by side-tracking us from the real issue of where to put those pesky apostrophes? If the discussion is about the issue of linguistic (in)competence after all, then I’ll wade right on in and say, “in that case, the issue is as much about social competence and about linguistic competence as social competence as about the rules of grammar (understood in the narrow sense of the term)”.
Laura:
I agree that questions of linguistic competence are important, but, as I’ve already hinted, I would argue that the first step towards recognising that importance is to refuse to see “linguistic” competence in terms of an ability to recognise and apply the rules of a formal grammar. There are a number of ways to respond to the politics that may may be entailed in such a recognition. These range from affirming the need to teach people (usually set up as “kids” in most indictments of literacy standards today) so-called universal grammar, since that is the language of power (as distinct from the power of language), through to promoting the “democratic” (i.e. potentially populist) principle of speaking the language of today’s kids and forgetting about all that stuffy-shirt formality.* I’m happy to debate such responses, but only if I’m debating with people who have already taken the above first step.
There’s one other point that I’d like to raise, in any case.
Is it not at all possible that your students are actually having difficulty in “meaning clearly”? Is it not possible that the grammatical (or syntactical) errors you’ve picked out are actually sense errors? The idea that your students are having difficulty clearly conveying what they (already or otherwise) mean presumes that “thought” simply precedes language, that language (in particular, certain linguistic habits) only ever expresses thought and never constitutes or shapes thought.
That’s another position I can’t agree with, if only because it means that, strictly speaking, thought is actually not grammatical (i.e. it’s a-grammatical). I’ll save the detail for my responses to the (inevitable?) counter-arguments I’ll get on that point, but I will say that I see in the examples you’ve provided a failure to achieve a certain level of intellectual or academic or disciplinary competence, rather than the combination of a high “general intelligence” and a poor linguistic competence.
That’s not at all to suggest that the students in question are “stupid” or aren’t “bright” (by other measures of “intelligence”, e.g. ability to verbalise arguments in a tutorial context), and even less to say that they can’t express themselves clearly in other (non-academic) contexts. Rather, what I’m stressing here is a fairly significant difference between the task of writing about Shakespeare (or literature in general) in a manner that makes use of a specialist disciplinary language, academic forms of syntax, etc. and the task of, say, reading a newspaper or the task of finding out about one’s social security or medicare entitlements, etc.
* It’s plainly obvious from my pathetic attempts at “with-it” informality that I am far from being versed in that language.
Oh, man! Spamulated! That was a long one, too.
Putting “no offence guys” before a racist remark doesn’t make it any less racist. Just as using impact as a verb doesn’t actually make it a verb.
Impact is a noun. The only thing that can be “impacted” is a wisdom tooth. Thus:
A had an impact on B.
Or
B was affected by A.
Under no grammatical circumstances does A impact B or is B impacted upon by A.
Sheesh.
Captain Oats, there is much in your comment that I haven’t got time to address now, but I thought I would observe that the things you describe as ’social competence’ are things I see as wholly intrinsic to linguistic competence.
For instance, the Cambridge Grammar of English (a descriptive guide to English, not prescriptive) has sections on turn-taking in conversation, phatic communication, and probable rules governing academic writing.
You said that thought doesn’t precede language, which is obviously true. I haven’t claimed that it does. What I do think is that spoken and written English operate differently. Many people are fluent in spoken English but when they try to translate their thoughts into written English, which has different rules, and rules they’re uncertain about, they fail. This would suggest we’re living in a predominantly oral culture. (Not any of us here in the blogosphere, of course. I find essay marking particularly harrowing because bloggers write better than essay writers. BBloggers get more practice.)
In all the examples I’ve put forward here – the essay sentences, and the car ad – somebody has had a thought which made sense. It’s then been conjugated into a different dialect, one the writer feels is more appropriate to the context. But they’ve buggered up morphologically. They think they are translating, when in fact they are sliding between variant forms of words, which have different senses – different meanings. “Shouldn’t be an optional extra” has clarity, but it lacks punch. “Not an option” sounds more like ad language….but it means something completely different.
It wasn’t, and I can’t find anything to suggest that it was.
I get the feeling that you think some of the remarks I was directing at Glen were actually directed at you; otherwise I can’t account for your response here. To the extent that Glen’s comment was intelligible at all, it wasn’t just ‘critical of another’s argument’ — it was quite a vicious attack on Laura’s post and on all the commenters who joined the discussion.
Yes, that’s how it seemed, given my qualified endorsement of glen’s comments and the citation from my comment that opened yours. I’ll chalk up the confusion to the proliferation of grammatical errors.
Laura, I too don’t quite have time, but I just wanted to say: no, you never claimed that thought precedes language, but the statement that “they can’t write clearly enough to say what they mean”, which is far from an unfamiliar or widely dusputed one, is nevertheless grounded in that assumption. And while I agree that, in a sense, there’s a similarity to the different examples you’ve cited, I don’t know that they can then be understood as “errors” of the same type. Certainly, I think they might warrant a different kind of analysis, but more on that another time.
Yes, I agree. Impact should remain a noun. For some reason I do find “impacted upon” less offensive, but I now accept thats also wrong.
Id argue with you about that alleged racist thang, Rebecca, but
*yawwwwn*
… cant be arsed.
Captain Oats, I was saying that like many people these students are better at spoken language than they are at written language.
This observation isn’t grounded in an assumption that thought precedes language. Like you, I regard that as pretty much nonsensical (though I think it’s not entirely wrong.) My observation just recognises that the skill sets pertaining to spoken and written English are different.
Angharad “Grammar and punctuation is only about interpretation. I’m with Glen on it’s place in the grand scheme of things….”
Wrong, sorry. Grammar and punctuation are also about meaning, both gross meaning and nuance. If you want people to be able to know what you mean unambiguously and quickly, learn how to get them right.
“Yes PC – guilty as charged re lack of knowledge about grammar. Been educated in science and numbers.”
Science exclusive of literacy is not an option.
As I keep telling our science students year after year, if they get a job related to their BSc, they will very likely have to produce endless technical reports or papers that need to be clear, structured and easy to read. The idea that you can avoid ever having to string two sentences together by majoring in science is utter drivel, or should be! And there is absolutely no excuse at all for avoiding acquisition of English skills by budding scientists pre-University.
Much scientific language has minimal redundancy, so that a slight typo or wrong grammatical form can completely change the meaning of a large section of text. This can have disastrous consequences, such as crashing rockets and astigmatic space telescopes. All scientists should be aware that although English is complex, there are ways of using it to mean exactly what you want to mean, ways of using it that are less exact, and when and how to switch between these modes of expression. Idiosyncracies that are unfamiliar to and unexpected by the reader (i.e. ‘mistakes’) add noise to the signal, and are counterproductive in efforts to communicate.
The be-creative-not-correct school of writing was moronic, incredibly destructive, and must be subverted and supplanted wherever possible. I still have a hard time understanding how and why this idiotic idea was unleashed on schools in the Anglosphere, more or less while I was completing a more traditional education.
Propagation of ignorance and bad writing by professionals such as advertisers and journalists, who should be role models, should be ridiculed loudly and stomped wherever possible. These people are paid to know better, and no-one should put up with crap from them.
Dare I suggest that you’ve overshot the mark a little, Andyc? I’m struggling to grasp what, in practice, your violent metaphors (“stomped” stands out) are supposed to mean.
Just a little word in favour of ambiguity.
There’s also the possibility that the lack of literal precision was deliberate. If we use “Perfection should not be an optional extra” or Perfection should be standard”. I just hear this ‘clunk’ in my head and a Lexus doesn’t go clunk, it goes ’snick’ and ‘woooooooooh’ like a gentle breeze through bamboo. And if we’re a bit baffled between whether it’s:
-you shouldn’t be able to choose perfection
-perfection should never be an option any more than paddle shift for automatic transmission should be ( I think one car manufacturer has a similar “Safety isn’t a Luxury”)
then we’re pondering, there’s the answer below, a list of what’s standard.
It’s the whole Lexus concept in a nutshell. An extravagant car that is very well built and simply catering for exceptional needs of the exceptional person. Not flash, just perfect. In the world of sashimi bars, the good customer doesn’t have to ask, the good customer gets.
My personal faves are the old volkswagen ads [link]
Yeah! The man at the parts desk at Honda is more than welcome to laugh at my “I need the box thing that makes the indicators flash” request.
LED stop lights – Light Emitting Diode stop lights…
Cheers…
More praise of bad writing. And it’s even got a typo in it.
Moderator/administrator: permission to bully Mick Strummer until he stops ‘cheersing’?
Adam Gall: “Dare I suggest that you’ve overshot the mark a little, Andyc? I’m struggling to grasp what, in practice, your violent metaphors (â€?stompedâ€? stands out) are supposed to mean.
“
Dare whatever you like. It’s only in my final para that my metaphors become remotely over-the-top. In practice, “stomped” is more likely to mean “complain about publicly and privately until they pull their heads in and go and sort themselves out” rather than “send the boys round with big boots on”. I’ll remember to be fluffier and less blood-curdling next time, sorry.
“Subvert” and “supplant” were meant literally. So was “ridiculed” and “putting up with crap”. I get very annoyed by ‘professionally’ written pieces that are badly structured, ungrammatical, or show an apparent inability to distinguish between homophones such as “bare” and “bear”, near-homophones like “affect” and “effect” and other notorious heffalump traps like “infer”/”imply”. The unintentional humour can be fun, but the example set is still a bad one.
The usual Aussie anti-intellectualism test applies. If you think that precision and accuracy in writing do not matter, what would you think of similar habitual sloppiness by your favourite player/team of your favourite sport while playing?
Anthony, your ingenious defence of ambiguity would be very convincing if the ad phrase was ambiguous, which it isn’t.
I’m with the descriptivists. There has been writing that doesn’t conform to grammatical rules for eons and the world has not collapsed. There has been crappy writing in the corporate world (at times I think there is only crappy writing in the corporate world) and yet they continue to carry out their business missions (impactfully no doubt).
Deciding the formal rules of grammar that applied when you were first taught them define what is good and proper English expression is of course, anybody’s prerogative. Fortunately, nobody who decided so has ever had the power to make it stick.
Long may that happy circumstance continue.
But zebbidies spring (and what a delightful name you have, to be sure), you are arguing as though you believed the
ruleslawsprinciples of grammar were entirely arbitrary, which of course they are not.Example: If you say ‘Facing the firing squad, the hero only requested a cigarette and a blindfold’ then what you have actually said is that all he did was request them, not demand them or beg for them. Technically, that is what you have said, whether that is what you meant to say or not, and regardless of whether your real intention has been understood, because language’s structure is a separate issue from its function.
In the example I’ve given, it all comes down to placement of the qualifying adverb ‘only’. Grammar and syntax, in their precision, are more like mathematics than anything else, and the speaker’s intention doesn’t come into it. If you say ‘Two and two make five’ then you may have intended to be right, but hey guess what.
Yes, of course life goes on and the wheels of commerce and so on continue to turn, regardless of whether someone’s sentence structure is regrettable or not. But language is a structured system and it has a beauty and order of its own, independently of what it is being used for.
I bet this kind of discussion is peculiar to countries like this one where most people are monolingual. It would never be in contention in most of the European countries, where most people have had at least basic instruction and/or experience in speaking and writing in more than one language, and therefore some insight into the systematic nature of language as such.
zebbidies spring “I’m with the descriptivists. There has been writing that doesn’t conform to grammatical rules for eons and the world has not collapsed…”
Believe it or not, I am with the descriptivists when describing informal language, regional and individual variability, and so on. And I don’t have a problem with people using quaint variants and failing to follow rules in non-critical communication. I do so all the time, myself.
But if people need to be precise, it is good to have a concensual standard which they can adhere to. This standard may well evolve through time and be different in different regions where a language is spoken (eg American versus British English). But since there exists such a concensual standard, in a given society at a given time, there is no reason why it cannot be taught so as to give folks at least the option of using it when it is advantageous to do so.
Avoiding all rules, precision and prescriptions may seem to be wonderfully small-l liberal, egalitarian, carefree, and drudgery-avoidant, but I would not be happy with someone who adopted that attitude when operating on my knee, rewiring my house or building a nearby overpass. Standards prevent small mistakes escalating into much larger ones.
I don’t see a problem with people applying professional standards in their use of English when necessary or desirable, either. Equally, I don’t see a problem with them being idiosyncratic with the language the rest of the time. The important thing is to be aware that different registers/styles of English exist, that different styles are most appropriate in different contexts, and that an individual can master more than one.
The descriptivist-prescriptivist dichotomy is a bit of a red herring, since the usual interpretation of ‘descriptivist’ is close to ‘every style of usage is equally valid at all times’ while ‘prescriptivist’ often seems to mean ‘there is only one correct usage’, and I’d argue that the optimal viewpoint is intermediate but more complex than either.
Anyway…TIME FOR BED!
Andyc, I thought it was axiomatic that time waits for no grammar stousher!
Im on yur computr, screwin up ur englsh
I’d disagree with AndyC about “descriptivist”. Descriptivism is about the scientific method. It’s about describing and explaining how language is used. This includes describing how different registers and dialects differ from each other in both structure and social context. Claiming that “every style of usage is equally valid at all times” is not descriptive; I’m not sure what it is.
About “impact”: “impact” is first attested in 1601 as a verb. Its usage as a noun came later. If you don’t like the verb “impact”, fair enough, but it’s wrong to claim that it isn’t a verb.
I think the question “is grammar important” is meaningless until we determine what we mean by grammar. Here are some things that we can mean by it (I copied this from http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Summer_2004/ling001/lecture1.html)
Established criteria of educated written language
third-person singular /s/: she goes, not she go.
no double negatives: he didn’t see anybody, not he didn’t see nobody.
complete sentences
Issues on which educated people differ (and which may be different in written and spoken forms):
who/whom did you see
you should speak like/as your teacher does
the data is/are unreliable
I disapprove of him/his doing it
get it done as quick/quickly as possible
hopefully, she’ll be there on time
Changes in the spoken language that some people resist:
between you and I
me and Harry went downtown
was for said
Pure inventions of self-appointed grammarians with no basis in historical usage:
prohibition of split infinitives
prohibition of prepositions at the end of a sentence
I shall vs. you will
It is I
And I’d add another definition: “conforming to the native speaker’s knowledge and use of the language.”
So in some dialects of English, He don’t know and I didn’t do nothing are grammatical, and in other dialects they are ungrammatical.
Pavlov’s Cat: “what you have actually said is that all he did was request them, not demand them or beg for them. Technically, that is what you have said, whether that is what you meant to say or not, and regardless of whether your real intention has been understood…”
And yet, mysteriously, when I read the example sentence, I immediately understood it in the non-technical way, viz., that the only things the hero requested were a cigarette and a blindfold. I suspect most other readers understood it that way, too, and waited with surprise to see how you’d spin it another way. This is partly because we all implicitly understood the cliches and contexts associated with the ould firing squad scene, and we also played the probabilities about what was likely to be meant. The technically ‘correct’ reading actually strikes the ear as somewhat perverse, because too many other sets of tendencies point towards the ungrammatical meaning.
Which means that if grammar is at all like math (which I think may be a stretch) then it may have more to do with the complex, mind-bending varieties of math that reach into probability and game theory and multiple dimensions and such, and not like children’s arithmetic or basic algebra.
And speaking of abdications of meaning, will people PLEASE stop saying “to the right of Ghenghis Khan”?! There was/is nothing demonstrably “rightist” about Mongol rule, and if you callowly cite their brutality then I’m just going to trot out the usual 20th-cent. suspects in response. I mean you’d have to be, well, to the left of Hitler to believe that meaning and history are as malleable as all that.
About the placements of only in ‘Facing the firing squad, the hero only requested a cigarette and a blindfold’
j_p_z: The technically ‘correct’ reading actually strikes the ear as somewhat perverse, because too many other sets of tendencies point towards the ungrammatical meaning.
I agree with you, except that what you’re calling the ungrammatical meaning is in fact the grammatical reading.
The position of only is not fixed. In speech, and in some prose as well, it is usually placed before the verb; the spoken intonation makes it clear what element is being modified. In heavily edited prose only is placed before the word it modifies. The reason being perhaps because speech doesn’t have the benefit of intonation. So this sentence follows the norms of English speech and speechlike prose, and it is understood to mean that the only things the hero requested were a cigarette and a blindfold.
The reason being perhaps because speech doesn’t have the benefit of intonation.
I mean of course prose doesn’t have the benefit of intonation.
Yes, of course, JPZ, that was precisely my point: structure separate from function. I wasn’t saying it was gooderer or badderer; I was saying it was what it was.
Oh for goodness’ sake, I did not ’spin’ it at all. Sheesh.
Strangely, that’s why I chose it, yes.
That, too, was precisely my point.
Oh, okay. But hey, we all implicitly understand the cliches and contexts associated with the ould Genghis Kahn reference, and I waited with surprise to see how you’d spin it.
(Ahem: you mentioned Hitler, so the discussion is over and I win.)
Look, we’re arguing at cross-purposes here. You’re taking issue because of the way language functions, and arguing, semi-implicitly, that its utilitarian function is to be valorised over its innate qualities and structures. All I’m trying to do is take this hierarchising of the issues out of the equation.
As it is, it’s as if I had said ‘A sonnet is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter’ and you had come back saying ‘No, no, a sonnet is something that churns up your feelings.’
Which is why Dusty Springfield’s ‘I Only Want To Be With You’ was always a sad tale of unrequited desire.
[JOKE]
Watch out Ayaan Hirsi Ali, grammar stoush is on your tail! C’mmmon 100 posts!
Gold.
Spoken English, IMHO, can easily ride the walrus of contorted or ‘incorrect’ grammar, because inflection, pauses and the like will paper over all the cracks. Try this some time: watch a speech or interview on the ABC, then go online and read the transcript. Often what was an abundantly lucid spoken delivery is riddled with “errors” on the page. Not just grammatical quirks that leave questions about meaning, but sentences left unfinished and abruptly changed.
With TEH FUTURE FOR TEH KIDDEHZ, the emphasis needs to be on finding ambiguity, vagueness and confusing syntax in the writing of others; their own writing skills will naturally develop to avoid the pitfalls. At least that’s what my momma done did. That and introduce me to cryptic crosswords.
How about “…shouldn’t be optional”?
What disturbs me most about this, by the by, is not that some copy writer or sloganeer thought up such an ugly phrase, but that it made it through the approvals procedure. Out of the entire creative team, the creative director, the copy checker, and no doubt the client as well, nobody spotted it. It’s like the choice of the name Dodo for an ISP (slow, flightless, easy prey and extinct – nice corporate image!) or that godawful logo for Hutchison 3 – at some point shouldn’t somebody stand up and say “wait guys… has anyone else noticed how fucking lame this whole idea is?”.
Look, we’re arguing at cross-purposes here. You’re taking issue because of the way language functions, and arguing, semi-implicitly, that its utilitarian function is to be valorised over its innate qualities and structures. All I’m trying to do is take this hierarchising of the issues out of the equation.
But you picked a bad example to demonstrate the innate qualities and structures of language. In speech, only is usually positioned before the verb. That does not mean, as you suggest, that verb is necessarily the element that only is modifying.
[Post coffee reflection]
whoops! Dusty’s boyfriend’s in I see.
Indeed. And as for ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ …
Also, NB The Platters:
Only you can make this world seem right
Only you can make the darkness bright
Only you and you alone
Can thrill me like you do
And fill my heart with love for only you
Only you can make this change in me
For it’s true, you are my destiny
When you hold my hand
I understand the magic that you do
You’re my dream come true
My one and only you
Only you can make this change in me
For it’s true, you are my destiny
When you hold my hand
I understand the magic that you do
You’re my dream come true
My one and only you
(One and only you)
The man who wrote these lyrics called himself Buck Ram; one wonders what other kinds of rams he thought there were. Wikipedia (yes yes, I know) has more:
Not that I’m changing the subject or anything.
Laura and FDB
Seriously, I think the slogan’s fine and still can’t see how there’s only one possible correct interpretation. An option is an optional extra in car speak. You’ll have to help me out here, I feel like I’m missing something.
What disturbs me most about this, by the by, is not that some copy writer or sloganeer thought up such an ugly phrase, but that it made it through the approvals procedure.
Me too. You’re right about Dodo as a terrible name for an ISP, also, but having used them I can see why they chose it.
Descriptivist grammar is not ‘anything goes’. (this is a descriptive grammar of English and it is full of examples of standard usage which look like the ABC transcripts FDB mentions. Some of these are accompanied by examples of usage which is not acceptable in English. For example: English speakers say “where did that come from?” but we don’t say “come from, where did that?”
I agree with Andyc that the importance of prescribed forms in various kinds of technical and professional writing is critical: Language Log gave an example once of service manuals for Boeing aircraft which have to be unambiguously clear and readable for technicians all over the world.
Morphail said: I think the question “is grammar important� is meaningless until we determine what we mean by grammar.
Yes. Grammar is defined by the OED (descriptive) thus:
Anthony, your ingenious defence of ambiguity would be very convincing if the ad phrase was ambiguous, which it isn’t.
You’re right. For a great many readers — including my “grammatically aware” self, until the new context (i.e. the blog posting) forced me to reflect on it a great deal more than I ordinarily would — the ad is conpletely unambiguous. It’s saying that perfection shouldn’t be optional; that perfection should never be (merely) an option.
When I first saw the add under a “Pick the grammar mistake” heading, I found nothing ungrammatical about it and assumed that the grammar mistake would be in the fine print. As the rest of the post didn’t elaborate on the problem, I looked again and, after ten or so seconds, realised what the problem was.
Undoubtedly, there are those readers who would immediately spot the problem, but there’s a strong case to be made that they are decoding abberantly: i.e. they are reading for syntactical precision rather than for intention, the irony of course being that those who most vocally champion the virtues of good grammar for precisely communicating one’s intent are the also the readers who seem least concerned with the intent. Then again, even these readers would also know what was “meant”.
I’m with anthony on the possibility, if not likelihood, that the “bad” syntax was deliberate, a device to attract the attention of as many readers as possible, and thus one designed to make productive use of the potential abberant decoding, whether by attracting the attention of that kind of reader and thereby ecouraging them to reader further, or by sparking yet another debate about “falling literacy standards” and getting a massive amount of free advertising space and thus a wider readership. These last two readerships may have been missed by “perfection should never be optional”.
And as for ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ …
Ha!
Getting back to the ad, surely it is deliberately designed to be ambiguous, so that the reader is forced to think about what it means, assuming that the reader gives a toss in the first place.
So you are meant to initially think that they are saying perfection is not possible, when really they are saying the exact opposite, that perfection is built in. Simple really, and much as I hate to admit it, quite clever.
Incidentally my pet grammatical hate: people, especially broadcasters and journalists, who don’t know the difference between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’.
In that case I can’t disagree further with you, since you think it comes down to readerly preference and the ‘car speak’ knowledge the ad depends on the reader possessing, and to argue about that is not much fun.
I just question the wisdom of creating a tagline which aims to have perfection, precision, self-sufficiency etc as its content, but to get that gist the reader has to dither between two possible and opposed readings, and if you’re right, take it upon herself to bluntly insert a (merely) in order to arrive at the interpretation which context suggests must have been intended.
And I think it’s sadly ironic that the car is called a Lexus.
English speakers say “where did that come from?� but we don’t say “come from, where did that?�
Talk like that do some.
Adrian, why would they write an ad about ‘perfection’ which has two clashing meanings? ‘Perfection’, if it means anything, would be instantly reconisable as such. You shouldn’t have to faff around trying to negotiate an uncontrolled and slipshod variety of possible interpretations.
Because it’s marketing-speak and they have a target audience in mind, probably one that reads a lot of car ads and takes the ‘option’ to mean ‘optional accessory’ reading first.
I don’t know Laura, not being in advertising, I would have thought their prime objective was to be noticed, to get the consumer to think about the product. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but if you are presented with a statement that may seem on first reading to be counter intuitive, but on reflection the real meaning is obvious, you have achieved your purpose.
Anyway, I think that there are far worse examples of ads that mangle the language. I’ll try to find some.
Here’s a good one. Comes pre-snarked for your enjoyment.
But I wasn’t talking about speech, I was talking about writing, and about writing based on the notion of language as a system rather than simply as an extension of human subjectivity. (Besides, ‘before the verb’ sounds wrong to me in any case.)
No, that’s not what I intended to suggest. My understanding has always been that (again, technically: Fowler is very sarky about doing it in practice, especially in speech) the word only qualifies whatever word it immediately precedes, whether it’s a verb or a noun or whatever.
So, technically, ‘I only have eyes for you’, ‘I have only eyes for you’, ‘I have eyes only for you’ and ‘I have eyes for only you’ would all mean different things.
Says Yoda:
Indeed do some, like for instance in Germany where they their verbs at the ends of their sentences are putting.
Anthony:
The phrase “not an option” is in common parlance as meaning “not one of the available options”. This is the crux of the problem with the Lexus ad.
But I wasn’t talking about speech, I was talking about writing, and about writing based on the notion of language as a system rather than simply as an extension of human subjectivity.
I wasn’t aware you were talking about writing.
However, and I might be mistaken here because I’m new, when you say “technically,” it seems to me that you’re talking about prescriptive grammar, which doesn’t have much to do with the innate structure of language, which I take to mean the unconscious knowledge of language that speakers share.
In speech, we position only before the verb, but only does not always modify the verb. And many good writers “misplace” only in prose as well. But of course they’re not misplacing it, they’re simply using one option available to them. This is part of the innate structure of language. Fowler’s opinion on the placement of only is not part of that.
Hey, it’s not a problem, it’s deliberate. See above!
This thread is a luxury ride for all who take an interest in communicating precisely; even for copywriters who endeavour to purvey “precision automotive engineering product”, formerly known as “flash cars”.
Thanks, Laura and all.
My understanding of the implications of what Winston Smith did for a quid has been reinforced. Don Watson’s “Death Sentence” and Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language” are now top-of-pile, bedside table.
The good oil is always worth the illumination.
And next time I’m in a Las Vegas dunny, I’ll try to Kerouac a jackpot, too. Nice little earner, despite the delay.
Morphail, we’re talking at cross-purposes in several places but it’s become too hard to disentangle. One thing I would like to know, though, is what source(s) you’re basing your opinions on, particularly this one:
See, I would have thought that prescriptive grammar evolved out of the unconscious knowledge and therefore did have quite a lot to do with it. I also don’t think you can separate Fowler out from a discussion of usage when usage is precisely what Fowler is about.
What are your sources? This is a genuine question and not meant in any way as a belligerent one (tone is so difficult en blog sometimes), because I haven’t read anything substantial on the subject for decades myself.
I have been greatly heartened to observe that the old “in case of fire do not use lifts” are being replaced by “do not the use the lifts if there is a fire”. All is not lost.
“Says Yoda: Talk like that do some.”
Christ, the puppety little bugger can’t even keep his own affectations straight. He should have said, Talk like that some do.
Sorry but I guess I can’t resist this…
I met him in a swamp down on Planet 10
Where you postpone a verb
Til it sounds like a musical coda.
C-O-D-A, coda.
He floated up to me
And he asked me to think,
I asked him his name
And in a dark green voice he said Yoda.
Y-O-D-A, Yoda.
Sorry…
“I Only Have Eyes for You”
Heh heh. I guess that one’s a big hit at the dance clubs in Saudi Arabia.
I find LP’s Gay Nobility just precious, along with the blogg policy; its also mean and discriminatory, seeking to banisch all it dont like.
“The usual Aussie anti-intellectualism test applies. If you think that precision and accuracy in writing do not matter, what would you think of similar habitual sloppiness by your favourite player/team of your favourite sport while playing?”
Precision and accuracy in writing do matter, I just felt that the extension of certain very important precepts of scientific and technical writing in a simplistic, and somewhat rigid way to all instances of professional writing was over-shooting the mark.
Otherwise, my first observation about the ad would be that it is talking past just about anybody who would be inclined to notice it’s silliness. That doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy ridiculing it, it’s just that the success of the ad will be measured elsewhere one way or the other. There is a certain superfluous or excessive aspect to taking it to task, to reading it literally in the face of it’s commercially sanctioned expressive laziness. I think in this case it is the space of play, in spite of it’s apparent conservatism, is also about producing a space beyond the assumed instrumentality of the ad.
Sorry Adam, but since we’re on the topic of grammar there’s a slight problem with the use of the apostrophe to indicate possession in ‘its’. It shouldn’t and should only be used to indicate a contraction from ‘it is’.
Pavlov’s Cat,
My source is what I know about linguistics… here are some crash courses
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Summer_2004/ling001/lecture1.html
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2003/ling001/prescription.html
Prescriptive grammar is often based on opinion, not actual usage. For instance AIUI Fowler felt that which should only be used to head nonrestrictive clauses. But in fact which is used more often to head restrictive clauses in prose.
Language has a formal structure, but what that structure is and what some people think it should be do no always match.
I don’t know much about only, but I do know that it does not always immediately proceed the element it is modifying. You seem to be saying that a sentence’s meaning is fixed and independent of how it is actually used… that the scope of only is fixed and independent of the sentence and the context. If the speaker and listener assign a certain meaning to the sentence ‘Facing the firing squad, the hero only requested a cigarette and a blindfold’, then I don’t see how you can argue that the technical meaning is something else. I think it makes more sense to say that the sentence is ambiguous – it has more than one possible meaning.
Morphail, I addressed some of those issues further up the thread.
Re sources, what I was actually asking was where your ideas about linguistics came from. It’s a contested field.
But that isn’t really what we’re disagreeing about, and I don’t know how I can explain what I’m saying more clearly than I already have at various points on this thread, except to say that I think about grammatical structures as existing independently from the construction of meaning within a human context, just as I think about mathematics as existing independently of the practical human uses to which mathematics is put.
Again, please let’s be clear: I’m not saying one is ‘right’ and one is ‘wrong’, or that one is ‘better’ than the other — only that they are two distinct categories of thinking about language.
But I do have to ask you this: if I say ‘Running for the train, our ice-creams melted’, what image does that conjure up for you?
Well, that doesn’t make much sense to me. It sounds like that means that your rules of grammar don’t necessarily describe how native speakers produce and comprehend the language. And if they don’t describe that, what good are they?
We’re running for the train, and our ice-creams melted. I know you could argue that Running for the train modifies ice-creams, but it clearly doesn’t. There’s much more going on with how predicative adjunct constituents modify clauses.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002153.html
Sorry, not much I can do about that.
Well, (1) they are hardly “my” rules, (2) we are still talking at cross-purposes, since your question ‘what good are they?’ presupposes a strictly utilitarian value set that I don’t share, and (3) it seems to me that you are being more of a zealot about this yourself than any prescriptivist could hope to manage.
As for the sprinting ice-creams, well, if that’s not what you see in your mind’s eye, then clearly your sense of language doesn’t entertain you as much as mine entertains me. But I can’t help wondering if you actually read all of that article you linked to, in which, despite his assertion that they are all around us, Pullum also says at one point:
Sorry, but they look startlingly bad to me too, and I bet Pullum himself wouldn’t dangle a modifier in public if you gave him $10,000. You seem to be arguing that if someone makes any utterance at all, then the very fact that it has been uttered is enough to make it ‘right’ and ‘good’ (words I have consistently tried to avoid), which is your prerogative. As it is mine to disagree with you.
But some dangling modifiers look worse than others. Your example doesn’t look as bad to me as Pullum’s examples. And as Pullum says, “we are convinced that dangling modifiers are so frequent in real life that they cannot possibly be syntactically forbidden.”
I’m not sure what you mean. I just want to understand what you’re saying, and I’m sorry if it sounds snarky because I certainly don’t mean to be.
Can I ask this: if they are not your rules, where did they come from? You seem to be saying that these rules (such as the rule against dangling modifiers and the rule about placement of only) are part of the “innate qualities and structures” of language. Is that correct?
If so, I don’t understand, because speakers and listeners violate these rules all the time: we place only before the verb in speech, and dangling modifiers are so common that the experts think that they are grammatical. So wouldn’t rules that describe the “innate qualities and structures” of language take these facts into account?
May I make an observation about the point of difference between Pavlov’s Cat’s and morphail’s respective views on language and grammar, perhaps going so far as to impute “intentions” that the imputee (as it were) might nevertheless dispute or deny? For it seems to me that the debate is forcing each participant to exaggerate his/her respective conception of language/grammar to the point that it not only appears utterly opposed to the other’s but also contradicts claims about language that he/she would otherwise endorse.
On the one hand, Pavlov’s Cat’s claim to thinking about “grammatical structures as existing independently from the construction of meaning within a human context” sets up a conception of language as a system that is autonomous from and that precedes (hence governs) individual or specific instances of language use. The rules of grammar (among other things) constitute part of this system, and both the production and reception of instances of language use are inevitably shaped by those rules — even when they “fail” to adhere to those rules.
The problem with this view (if not generally, then for morphail and me at least) is that, regardless of one’s claims or endeavours not to evaluate one usage as “gooderer or badderer” than another, it is implicitly and unavoidably prescriptive, not to mention universalist. No amount of demurring or denial can suppress the fact that, on this view, there is — in the end, “technically” — a correct form of usage and therefore a means for assessing the correctness of usage generally. (The use of the term “technically” is instructive here for the way that it can recall the sense of what is very different from, and thus incomparable with, what’s “common as well as the sense of authoritative knowledge and thus a form of understanding that can adjudicate over all other understandings). And this means must, on this view, be unequivocal since it is related to the “innate structure of language”, which itself “exists independently from” those uses of language which the knowledge of that structure is called upon to assess. Put simply, if the rules of grammar are conceived as belonging to the innate structure of language and as being autonomous from language use, then this conception cannot help but be prescriptive and universalist (both in the senses that it is understood to underpin all language use and that it can account for transformations to the conventions of language use only in terms of their being distortions of a natural grammar).
On the other hand, morphail’s rejections of this view sometimes appear to present a view of grammar as defined utterly by the specific instance of use. E.g.
Those statements might be read as suggesting that grammar is simply a matter of use, such that the grammatical use of language is however it gets used. Thus any use of language is, by definition, grammatical — precisely because it is an instance of language use — and so, perversely, there is actually no such thing as grammar (understood as a form of constraint on language use). The sheer fact of language’s having been used in this way means that this way of using language is grammatical.
Now I don’t think that that’s what morphail was intending here. I’m pretty certain that grammar is meant to refer to regularities of use, such that a given statement’s grammatical status is dependent upon the extent to which it conforms to forms of syntax that are commonly reproduced. So there are linguistic structures, but they do not constitute some metaphysical system that is autonomous from language use, but rather co-exist with language use: the rules of grammar hold, in other words, only for as long as they are “obeyed”, after which point they cease being rules.
The difference is basically one between a “naturalist” and a “positivist” conception of language. I place myself in the positivist camp, although I would say that things are actually more complicated than the view I laid out above may suggest. For starters, the appeals to “regularity” and “common usage” can hide the extent to which language use is organised differently within different institutional contexts and different social settings. Thus regularities are always context-bound rather than observable across “society” generally, and accordingly there is no such thing as a common grammar (least of all a universal grammar), only different forms of grammar. Second of all (and consequently), I don’t think that given forms of grammar become simply obsolete when they cease to be “obeyed” (or effective). Rather they continue to form part of a heritage, and therefore remain recoverable (more or less) and often continue to function in more restricted, less “public” contexts. The obvious example here is the form of grammar that informs Pavlov’s Cat’s “technically”, which has been displaced from its position as a quasi-general grammar to a more specialist form of grammar that is applicable (and observed) primarily in academic contexts. And this is as much as to insist that the form of grammar that Pavlov’s Cat depicts as belonging to the “innate structure of language” is actually a historical artifact, one no less prone to transformation than any other form of grammar.
Understood in this way, grammar is always tied to context. But then, of course, there’s the further complication that the limits between contexts are hardly well-defined or impermeable, and so even this idea of context-bound forms of grammar doesn’t quite capture the messiness of the issues we’re dealing with here.
Man, this spam-killer just hates me…
Yeah well, I say potahto.
Ug. That’s just wrong.
Yeoooowwww! This is all so simple and yet it has been made incomprehesively complex as the thread slid down the slippery slope.
First, the ad.
It is (a) grammatically correct – it has a subject, predicate and a verb; (b) it cleverly contains Lexus’s unique selling proposition (or mission statement).
But about headlines first, generally. Headlines do not have to be grammatically correct and they seldom are because a subeditor has to consider available space to fit. Hence, articles definite and indefinite go, as do prepositions. Furthermore, a headline works more dynamically if it is made up just of nouns serving the function of verbs and adjectives:
“Ex-priest in KX phone box drama”, for example. Try it at home: string together nouns for fun and profit.
About the Lexus ad. Lexus’s main competitors are Mercedes Benz and BMW. The ad is aimed at Mercedes, in particular. Mercedes has been marketing stripped-down versions of their marque, using the three-pointed star as a selling point but, at its base model, many of the things we expect in a luxury car are not included. So to get bring the car to their own expectation the buyers have to order those things as an option.
Lexus is simply exploiting this to its advantage saying, succinctly, that all those things come as standard in a Lexus and you do not have to pay any more. The Lexus ad even lists them at the bottom of the ad.
Grammar.
The spat between Morphail and Pav is instructive in the way confusions can be introduced into what are very simple matters.
Morphail introduced two grammar concepts. The first one was something very like Chomsky’s system of transformational grammar or syntactical structures. But as he didn’t step in to defend this notion from being misunderstood, i won’t go there. The other is of course, a system English grammar we all love and enjoy.
If we do not confuse split infinitives with verb phrases and do not dangle participles, there will be no problems.
The ice cream and the train: let us remember that participles look like verbs but are not (verbs). So, if they appear in a subordinate clause, as in that case, they must relate to the subject in the main clause.
If, Pav, you
sayask: “‘Running for the train, our ice-creams melted’, what image does that conjure up for me?” my answer would be that it conjures up an image of a blue pencil. And I would add personal pronouns to make it a verb and remove the ambiguity as to who was running for the train, recasting the sentence thus: “As we were running for the train our ice creams melted”.Yes Ken, the ad slogan is a complete sentence; nobody’s disputing that; but it doesn’t say what the Lexus people presumably want it to mean. That’s the issue.
What it says, literally, is this: ‘perfection should never be [one of the available choices.]‘ Make of that whatever you will. Personally I wouldn’t dream of buying a car offered by people who seemed determined set the bar so low.
On the other hand, it suits me just fine, because it’s clear the car is for somebody without much ambition. In my perfect world, the statement made in the ad would be axiomatic. Except that I can’t pursue that world, because I don’t think that worldwide perfection should be an available choice.
Laura,
The ad is self-qualifying, that is, it is marketing the car to people who are already in the market for a luxury car and have some pre-knowledge. After all, such a thing is not an impulse buy.
Lexus buyers will know what the punning headline means. The hidden component of the headline is understood, and it includes, by so doing, a dig at Mercedes. To deconstruct:
Perfection (understood – to which Mercedes and Lexus both aspire or claim as part of their mystique and selling point) is not an option (understood – with Lexus like it is with Mercedes where you have to pay extra for the options).
Conclusion of the complete message: Lexus is better value than Mercedes because for a lot less money you get optional extras included in the base price.
Nobody reads ads literally. Most people I know are capable of absorbing a finely nuanced message.
Which reminds me of a sign on a long-standing, suburban corner shop, ca. 1954, after a migrant family moved in and opened up in competition on the opposite corner. The new arrivals quickly extended their opening hours into the late evening.
The sign on the established shop read:
“Shop here before the day goes”.
Ken the ad says “should never be” but you are reading it as saying “is not”.
Yes. Should never be. Mercedes Benz “says” it SHOULD be an option because that is how they have structured their pricing policy. The lexus ad is asking you to draw that conclusion. Without the optional bits, Mercedes ceases to be a luxury car so to have them you have buy them as optional extras.
“Luxury is not an option” would not make sense in this context because it posits a comparison between Mercedes on the one hand and Lexus on the other.
In other words, Lexus ad indulges in a bit of gratuitous moralising at the expense of Mercedes, posting the selling message as a philosophy.
Would I be correct in assuming that your car is a 1998 Hyudai Excel GX 3-door hatchback?
LOL!
Ken Scott, that is just wicked!
No, you’d be wrong there, but don’t let the facts get in the way of your speculations.
Mine’s pretty close, though. And (just to invoke some seriously utiltarian values) it has never once broken down, much less spontaneously combusted at the midtown traffic lights at peak hour like my friend D’s new BMW did once so nyerdy nyer. I mean, what’s important is that it works, right?
I think cars snobs are a squillion times worse than grammar snobs.
Besides, here in SA there are better things to spend one’s money on, like seriously la-di-da wines at the cellar doors.
Pavlov’s Cat is correct. Car snobbery is tres infra dig. Wine is far more cultural.
And PC does write a more than competent book review, though one pines for some Flaubert or Homer or Dickinson, rather than the ephemeral fly-by-nighters she reports on.
Can we add “LOL!” to the list of crimes against the English language, please?
Look we all have our little snobberies, and hey, why not? Jeannette is into tables and chairs, La Pavlova is into viticulture, Roisin here is a serious canon snob (and why did your husband give Kaiser a start anyway? See what you started?), CK is a vintage aircraft snob and Manolo Blahniks, and I am a serious coffee snob with an occasional weakness for Sanpellegrino Aranciata Amara. Not to mention real film noir (The Man Who Wasn’t There excepted).
Herr Ken, I fail to see the aesthetic or moral equivalence of chairs and tables, viticulture, vintage aircraft or coffee, with either film noir or the canon by which you may or may not mean:
a) a law, or rule of doctrine or discipline, enacted by a council and confirmed by the pope or the sovereign; a decision, regulation, code, or constitution made by ecclesiastical authority.
b) The collection of books received as genuine Holy Scriptures, called the sacred canon, or general rule of moral and religious duty, given by inspiration; the Bible; also, any one of the canonical Scriptures. Or the English Canon, defined by Harold Bloom et al.
c) In monasteries, a book containing the rules of a religious order.
d) A catalogue of saints acknowledged and canonized in the Roman Catholic Church.
e) A musical composition in which the voices begin one after another, at regular intervals, successively taking up the same subject.
f) The largest size of type having a specific name; so called from having been used for printing the canons of the church.
g) The part of a bell by which it is suspended; — called also ear and shank.
And don’t forget me — a fat cop on TV in the 70s.
Surely Ken means the frilly bits around the bottom of seventeenth-century gentlemens’ pantaloons.
Children, children, please!
Now RG, pay attention.
Roisin mentioned Flaubert. Harold Bloom includes Madame Bovary; Sentimental Education; Salammbô; and A Simple Soul in his literary canon as per your point b, except Flaubert is not English, so go and stand in the corner.
We are talking about snobberies (as perceived by others) or good taste and discernment (as perceived by ourselves). Therefore, RG, there is no objective measurement of these things. Snobbery is subjective by definition.
You know RG, you remind me a lot of Eric Olthwaite of Castle Street, Denley Moor.
RG, am I to understand you are also Roisin Goss?
Faaaaa.
There’s nothing like a pair of long nines for chasers or a brace of carronades for work close-hauled. Some gunners swear by swivelled sweepers but I’m a long-range man myself. Either smash ‘em where they lie, or board them, that’s what I say about cannon.
Ken, I bet I could bore out and turbocharge that 98 Excel to fucken do your Lexus for dinner over the quarter mile. Nothing better than a light hatch for doing up to go quick.
Right glen?
Hey Fiasco, the chicks are attackin’ me, man! RG, if you are Roisin I’m gonna tell Mr Banisch about you changing your name without permission.
Anyway Fiasco, me Lexus is not for draggin, it’s got hydraulic shocks for hopping, and a 20 inch woofer in the boot. It’s for slow big bass cruisin’ down George Street.
I never mentioned Chomsky’s system of transformational grammar or syntactical structures, but I did mention linguistics. As Captain Oats explains, I certainly don’t think that the fact that someone makes an utterance is enough to make that utterance grammatical. I believe that my position is pretty similar to that of many linguists.
I guess what I objected to was Pavlov’s Cat mention of “innate qualities and structures,” and how he equated this with Fowler’s rule about only placement. I do believe that language has “innate qualities and structures,” but that they are quite different from the rules we find in your average prescriptive grammar book.
What a weird discussion this is.
Well, we’re in complete agreement about that at least. I am a she, for a start — although, having seen the amazing diva channeler (and diva indeed in his own right) Paul Capsis at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival last night, I am not quite as sure about that as I was yesterday.
In your last comment there are (at least) two misunderstandings of what I was saying:
(1) Fowler is in fact being scornful of the people who pedantically insist on precise placement of ‘only’, not of people who take a freer hand with it, though I now see I could have been a bit clearer about that.
(2) The innate qualities and structures, which I did not ‘equate’ with the point about Fowler and ‘only’ which in any case you misunderstood (see (1)), are in the relentless logic of grammar and syntax, where the places and forms of words in a sentence are determined by the placement and forms of the other words in the sentence — tenses, verb forms, plurals and so on. If I said ‘The cats is before the mat which were fireplace the front of in’, would you still be arguing that my intention and meaning were clear and that no blue pencil need be taken to this alleged sentence?
Roisin, I review whatever the literary editor gives me, which is how it works — we book reviewers are a bit powerless that way. But I think Flaubert et al have already had a pretty good going-over, critically speaking.
Paul is wonderful!
If you have tears, prepare to shed them now department: I wonder what Fowler would say about “the most unkindest cut of all”.
I see. But if that’s the case, where is your evidence that the placement of only gives a sentence a certain technical meaning, regardless of the speaker’s intent? I’d say it much more complicated than that, since it is possible in standard English to place only before the verb, which is the common location for adverbs.
I will only add this in the defence of our present Writers – John Dryden, “Defence of the Epilogue” 1672
Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach – Samuel Johnson, Preface to the Dictionary 1755
We see cherubs by Raphael, whose baby-innocence could only have been nursed in Paradise – Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun 1860
Maybe we agree more than I think we do, since I agree that language has a formal structure, and your example ‘The cats is before the mat which were fireplace the front of in’ clearly violated that structure. But it seemed to me that you used the bad example of only placement to demonstrate this structure.