Firsten's fictions

This time, in his "Grammatically Speaking" column in TESOL's Essential Teacher magazine, Richard Firsten, who has a track record for mis-explaining grammar, appears to have taken to just making stuff up. His correspondent asks,

"My friend said, "I'm going to get a sundae," and then she asked me, "How about you?" After telling her what I wanted, it suddenly dawned on me that it wouldn't sound right if my friend had said, "What about you?" Now I'm confused. Are both questions still interchangeable or not?"

Instead of simply saying, "you're deluded" or something kinder like, "either would be fine," Firsten agrees, saying,

"There are many situations in which the two questions What about . . . ? and How about . . . ? are interchangeable... But when asking about what another person wants, it's more common to use How about . . . ?"

Of course, no evidence is proffered to support this strange claim, nor is any explanation given. So it appears to be up to us, the readers, to go out and find some data.

Corpus		COCA	BNC
Total "what about you"		25	9
	asking about want to	14	4
	asking about want something	4	3
Total "how about you"		21	1
	asking about want to	10	0
	asking about want something	6	0

In other words, in direct contradiction to Firsten's confident assertion, what about you is actually more common, even when asking about what somebody wants.

I think I'd like some more scholarship and integrity from this guy. What about you?

New Yorker Cartoon by Zachary Kanin

Check it out here.

The categorisation of 'otherwise'

It occurred to me over the weekend that otherwise has the same classification problems that so does.

No time to elaborate.

Early attestations of the FANBOY(S) acronym

My earliest and still most popular post on this blog was about the FANBOYS mnemonic for recalling the "coordinating conjunctions": for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so. At the time, I wondered about the source of this notion. While not pinning down the source, Karl Hagan has found a 1951 publication mentioning FANBOY (without the S).

"The earliest source (so far) is Learning to Write by Reed Smith, Bill Paxton, William Paxton, and Basil G. Meserve, 3rd ed. Heath, 1951. Google only gives a snippet view, but that's enough: '[the] chief co-ordinating conjunctions are sometimes called the fanboy words.' (p. 398)."

And then the full acronym:

"The next work found in Google Books, and the first that actually gives FANBOYS as an acronym, is dated 1970:

Gertrude B. Corcoran, Language arts in the elementary school: a modern linguistic approach, Ronald Press Co. 1970, p. 140:
'Coordinating conjunctions can be remembered by thinking of the acronym FANBOYS'."

Asians/agents

As an instructor/entertainer (sorry, I simply hate to call myself a teacher), I usually have one or more courses where I explain/present (sorry, but I just don't like to refer to what I do as 'teach') English pronunciation.

One of the many things I discuss is the inevitable similarity between such pairs as 'mince/mints' and 'prince/prints'. You can differentiate one from the other, but they tend to sound very similar. In fact, some speakers (chiefly American speakers) find it difficult to distinguish them.

Just this morning I found a delightful clip to add to my presentation material:



If you happen to know anything like this (or indeed anything of linguistic interest), please let me know. Really, I am easily pleased.

The decline of the -ly adverb

A correspondent writes, "I've been amazed at the loss of the derivational suffix -ly that routinely marks adverbs." When I pointed out that many adverbs have both the inflected and flat versions (e.g., quick), he replied, "as far as I know, quickly has been the adverb form and quick the adjective form for some time now. Dictionaries often list quick as a colloquial adverb only and not a formal one."

The OED notes "Now usually considered less formal than quickly, and found chiefly in informal or colloquial contexts." The now at the beginning of that sentence is of interest. The entry has quotations for quick as an adverb from 1300 until the present day with everything in between, and with both formal and informal examples.

In other words, this is not a change, but a continuation, though perhaps we are currently on the ebb of an -ly-ful wave. The Corpus of Current American English shows a slight decline in -ly adverb frequency from 1990-2008 with 11,515 instances per million words in 1990-1994, 11, 291 in '95-'99, 11,146 in 200-2004, and 11,074 in 2005-2008 where, over the same period, all adverbs actually increased in frequency from 35,072 PMW to 35,373.

The Time Corpus shows the same overall increase in adverb use, but for -ly adverbs, it shows a gradual increase from the 1920s with a peak in the 1970s followed by a drop off, today's levels being about the same as they were a century ago.


Also, check out Jan Freeman's "The Word" column from Sept 17, 2006.

Missing pronouns and prepositions

Yesterday's Toronto Star has a review by Raju Mudhar of Chuck Palahniuk's latest book, Pygmy. Mudhar claims, "one thing is missing from his latest narrative: pronouns like 'I' and most prepositions." Leaving aside the question of whether pronouns and prepositions constitute one thing or not, are they indeed missing?

Well, you can get the first 30 pages of the book here and see for yourself. The writing is obviously nonstandard.

"Fellow operatives already pass immigrant control, exit through secure doors and to embrace own other host family people. Operative Tibor, agent 23; operative Magda, agent 36; operative Ling, agent 19. All violate United States secure port of entry having success."

Quoted material, however, appears to be standard English, so we'll generously assume that Mudhar means that these elements are missing only outside of dialog.

Well, on the first page, we get me used three times and that's it for pronouns. Certainly less than usual for fiction, but not entirely missing. The only other pronoun I could dig up (outside of dialog) was one instance of them.

Prepositions are more common though. The first 30 pages inclde all of the top 10 prepositions (of, in, to, for, with, on, at, from, for, about) except about.

"Really, the genesis of Pygmy's language was to try to make an entire language out of a small number of largely inappropriate words. And the rules were no definite article `the,' no conjunctions and there had to be very specific redundancies, like `colour red,' `arm limb' and `baby puppy,'... There were just very specific logical rules." Palahniuk is quoted as saying.

I find only one instance of is, one of were, and two of am and no apostrophes at all. The article a is used twice and the five times. And there are lots of conjunctions; and, but, and or are all there. So, despite Palahniuk's claims of logical rules, really it just seems like a half-baked gimmick.

But then what's the point of going to all the trouble to construct an entire language around broken English anyhow? Nobody would actually be anal enough to check if you're being consistent about it, would they?

Deliberate practice & teaching TESL

I've recently been reading Practice in a Second Language. When Amazon recommended it to me, I was very interested, especially given some of the work that Robert DeKeyser has done around the issue of practice. But when I started reading it, I realised that the definition of practice around which the book is based is so milquetoast as to turn it into another bland review of general second language acquisition research.

That's why I was so excited when I came upon the concept of deliberate practice where I wasn't expecting it at all: in The Cambridge Guide to Second Language Teacher Education. Having just completed my first year teaching in our TESL program, I was looking for some ideas to help me understand and rethink how my experience there had been different from experiences teaching English.

The guide started out rather tediously with a lot of talk of politics, colonialism, and professionalism. "Our increased attention to the complexities of teacher learning," concludes the introduction, "is grounded in an epistemology of practice." For some reason, I have a personal aversion to the word epistemology, and find it difficult to take seriously texts that use it.

Anyhow, I had almost given up on it when I came across Nat Bartels's chapter, "Knowledge about language", which isn't really about knowledge about language at all, but rather about deliberate practice. (To be fair, Practice in a Second Language also starts out talking about deliberate practice, but then quickly backs away from it.)

So what is deliberate practice? It is repeated attempts at the same or similar tasks under the following conditions:

1. high motivation to attend to the task and exert effort
2. clear goals and purposes
   
3. challenging but not overly difficult tasks
4. authentic but controlled tasks
   
5. immediate feedback
   

This sounds somewhat banal. It's a lot like drill on the surface. But extensive research by Anders Ericsson and others suggests that the difference between experts and merely experienced amateurs is that experts constantly engage in deliberate practice. It is rarely because of some inherent talent. Experts problematize aspects of what they do, in other words they take the acceptable and examine it for points of weakness. They form hypotheses or get instruction about better ways to perform, and then they try them out repeatedly, attending closely to success and failure.

For teacher learners, Bartels says, practicum is not a good place to engage in deliberate practice for a number of reasons:

1. it's too complex, not allowing them to attend sufficiently to the target aspect
2. it's too difuse, not allowing numerous repetitions of the target task
3. feedback is often be delayed

On the other hand, simply talking or reading about how to do a task also fails to meet the conditions that will help learners become experts.

The TESL course that I taught was designed to move from talking about grammar to teaching grammar in peer teaching activities, and then to the practicum. Nowhere was there any opportunity for deliberate practice, but at least now I'm thinking about it.

(By the way, The Cambridge Guide to Second Language Teacher Education actually ended up being much more enlightening on the whole than I had expected. Along with the Bartels chapter, Chapter 18: The Novice Teacher Experience and Chapter 19: Teaching Expertise: Approaches, Perspectives, and Characterizations in particular were also very interesting, both for a novice teacher educator like me, and, I would expect, even to novice ESL teachers.)

Phonemics as the new thing in language testing

Alan Davies posting the following to the L-Test mailing list.

Robert Lado (1961) mentions three approaches to the role of pronunciation: ignoring it is an error; reaching for native pronunciation is wishful thinking; intelligibility is attractive but hard to define.

'Phonemics' he claims ' offers the way out of this problem ... testing pronunciation with a phonemic criterion of accuracy is the new thing' (: 140). He deals with both recognition and production of the sound segments in chapters 7 and 8 and in later chapters with stress and intonation. Because, he says, production presents more problems than testing recognition, his advice is to test production through what he calls partial production, which is wholly paper based. Yesterday's print is today's machine?

In the 1960s, recognition tests of pronunciation by means of phonemic contrasts were popular. I used two in the English Proficiency Test Battery (1965), the precursor of ELTS and IELTS. The first of these contained 65 triplets. Results indicated:

"phonemic discrimination bore little if any relation to the other components (grammar, reading and listening comprehension).... The practice of insisting on the inclusion of a phoneme test seemed rather like requiring a knowledge of astrology for students of meteorology. Hindsight has not dealt kindly with phonemic discrimination, nor indeed with phonetics more generally, displaced as it is from its central role in the linguistic sciences, a place now occupied by theories of social interaction and cognitive science."

(Davies 2008, Assessing Academic English: 21)

Stuffies

It appears that the word stuffy/stuffie is becoming the common way for children in southern Ontario and elsewhere to refer to stuffed toys.

Just thought you might want to know.

The Cambridge Guide to English Usage

The Cambridge Guide to English Usage has been around since 2004, but it only just came to my attention recently. As the blurb says, it's the first totally new major English usage book published in the 21st century, and it's "based on the Cambridge International Corpus and the British National corpus, highlighting the points of contrast between American and British usage."

Jumping off from this trans-Atlantic difference, the website includes a diagnostic quiz, which says, "If you don't get the questions right, this is the book you need." But seven of ten "usage" differences are simply spelling variations.

The physical book itself is a lovely hardback with a glossy cover, high-quality paper, and a thoughtful use of type faces. It appears sturdy and would likely endure a good deal of use.

And the contents then? I don't plan to actually read the book cover to cover, so the following observations will be somewhat scattered:

• On the positive side, Peters doesn't begin by assuming that you know what she's talking about. The entry for passive verbs, for example, is broken into three sections: 1 the grammar of the passive, 2 style in the passive, and 3 the passive in scientific writing, with part 1 being a reasonable explanation of what a passive verb is: "one in which the subject undergoes the process or action expressed in the verb."
• If we jump over to see what a subject is, however, we run into the usual problems: "the person or thing which operates the verb." This definition simply cannot logically coexist with the definition of the passive given above. Fortunately, the book does go beyond that, though, to mention that the subject governs subject-verb agreement.
• Skipping back to the entry for passive, we find that Peters repeats the general slander against this maligned voice. Passive clauses, "are not the stuff of lively narrative when you want to know who is doing what. Used too often as in some academic and official styles, they make for dreary reading." She at least admits that the passive has its place, but she gives no examples of these dreary passives. The only examples she does give seem contrived: "The employment of staff with less than six months service will be terminated" is said to be better than, "We, the senior management, will terminate the employment of staff with less than six months service."
• On the same spread as passive is an entry for parvenu or parvenue. Apparently this is one of the 4,000 entries that Peters though was disputed enough to include. To be honest, I don't think I'd even met the word before. The COCA says it occurs about 5-15 times per 100 million words with the BNC being at the upper range of that. So, hardly a common word. But is this actually a smouldering question: parvenu or parvenue? Hmm... (Mind you, it's not like this kind of trivial point seems to be displacing weightier issues. Never did I think to look something up only to find it not addressed.)
  
• I asked my wife what to look up, and she suggested conditionals. There is indeed a short entry on conditionals, though oddly enough it seems to focus on French and Italian, viz, "English verbs have no conditional forms, and instead the modal verb would is commonly used to translate conditionals from French and Italian," (should you have the opportunity to do so...). The entry goes on to say, "conditional statements in English are often attached to a conditional clause, prefaced by if, unless or provided that, which are a type of adverbial clause." I'm not sure whether this is a subject-verb agreement error (i.e., *a conditional clause are a type of adverbial) or a factual error (i.e., if, unless or provided that, which are a type of adverbial clause).
• As I typed viz, above, I thought, "now here's a chance to put this book to use." I looked it up, and learned that the z is actually the printer's substitute for ezh (ʒ), an abbreviation for -et. Interesting, but what I really wanted to know was, should I italicize it?
• The entry for logogram, logograph, logotype, and logo is pretty much all news to me, but ignores the meaning I do know: the type of writing system exemplified by Chinese characters (e.g., 手 is the logograph for hand). On the same page, we find loony or loonie, which correctly describes the situation here in Canada (loony = adj. crazy, loonie = n. one dollar coin.)
• The entry for decimate is generally quite good with clear examples showing the reduce-by-10% sense, the reduce-to-10% sense, and the more common, but less mathematical, meaning, along various others.
• Ravage or ravish is also well done. Of ravish, Peters writes, "the two kinds of meaning have their respective clichés in ravished virgins and ravished audiences, which are symptomatic of the fact that the word is usually either euphemistic or hyperbolic."
  

After spending a couple of hours with the book, I sadly find few entries particularly helpful. Despite the corpus-based approach, very few examples of use are typically given and though the author occasionally lets her voice shine through (as in ravish, above) these entertaining bits are not the norm. In contrast, Peters's opinions are obvious, and it's often unclear what, if any, corpus evidence has been brought to bear in forming them (as in passive, above). All in all, the hype about the book being corpus-based is accurate, but I find the actual implementation somewhat superficial. The most prominent application seems to be to the endless disputed spellings to which far too much of the book is given over: doughnut or donut; doyly, doyley, or doiley; drily or dryly; drivable or driveable; driveling or drivelling; dyarchy or diarchy; dullness or dulness, and on and on. If you really don't know which to use, you can check the COCA or the BNC for free and save yourself the cost of the book. For other issues, Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage displays much more scholarship and will only cost you half as much.

English as she is spoke

In one of the comments on the previous post, Nick asks about the blog's tag line "Second thoughts on English and how she's taught". It's actually a nod to the classic, English as She Is Spoke by Jose da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino.

But, in particular, Nick is curious about the use of personal pronouns, such as she, for inanimate objects.

"I know in French, one can take an inanimate object and treat it as though it were alive, such as "la maison" is feminine" so the pronoun would be "elle", which is "she", but in English, how is the word English a "she" and not an "it" in that sense? Just some fodder to chew on."

There are some interesting points here. Of course, it is possible for people to anthropomorphize things, as this Clavin & Hobbes strip from May 4, 1995 shows:
But is using a pronoun or determinative (e.g., French la) marked for gender really treating inanimate things as if they were alive? It certainly seems that way when we use the word gender to refer both to grammatical categories of masculine and feminine and to biological categories of male and female. But in Japanese, for example, gender is marked in the verb iru/aru いる／ある meaning roughly exist/be/have. But the gender distinction here is animate-inanimate, not male-female.

Even where the male-female-(neuter) gender is maintained, the grammatical gender doesn't always match up with the biological gender. The German word Mädchen, meaning little girl, is grammatically neutral. And there is the Dyirbal language made famous by the book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, which has the following genders:

1. animate objects, men
2. women, water, fire, dangerous things
3. edible fruit and vegetables
4. other

In other words, gender is simply a way of classifying nouns. Although it does commonly correspond to biological categories, I don't think it would be wise to conclude that by using a gender-marked pronoun, the speaker is treating something as if it is alive.

The second question, then, is why English speakers might occasionally use personal pronouns that do not match the expected uses. The she in the tag line was produced by a speaker of Portuguese who basically knew no English and was simply (I expect) following the norms of his native language, so it's not really an interesting example.

English speakers do occasionally use it and this (a determinative, not a pronoun) to refer to humans (e.g., Hi, it's Brett. or This is my bother, Michael.) And we use personal pronoun she for a variety of things from boats to rivers to moons, to something being passed between two people (e.g., here she comes.)

My sense is that such use of he is much more limited, though the OED gives,

"2. Of things not sexually distinguished:

a. Things grammatically masculine. Obs. b. Things personified as masculine, as mountains, rivers, oak-trees, etc.

with the added comment:

"It is not easy to say when grammatical gender ceased to be used, this differing according to dialect. In dialect speech, he is still used for most things of definite shape, without any feeling of personification."

But I have no idea why we do any of this...

IATEFL conference vids free online

A number of sessions and interviews from the recent IATEFL conference in Cardiff have been put online and made available for everyone, no membership or payment necessary. I'm not sure how they've chosen the links from that main menu, but if you click on each of the days at the top, you find a mixture of new presentations and presentations from the main video page.

One that caught my attention was by Jeff Stranks, whose presentation makes the point that texts given to learners as a source of information are great, but ultimately students are in our classrooms to learn English, not other stuff, so we need to also bring attention to the language in the texts: the vocabulary, the collocations, the grammar, the punctuation, and the style. Stranks presents a number of simple ways of doing this. Unfortunately, he's plagued by the perenial issue of a malfunctioning PowerPoint, but both his slides and his handout are linked to below the video. This is indeed a good idea. Students should be revisiting texts that they're familiar with and focusing on the language.

Another talk that gets it wrong is "What kind of vocabulary do advanced students need to learn?" by Stuart Redman. Granted, he's looking at advanced learners, but bringing students' attention to expressions like having second thoughts or being of two minds, as he suggests in his talk and does in his textbook, is a waste of time. The expression two minds occurs at a rate of about once per two million words. Second thoughts is more common, especially in fiction, but even there it occurs only at a rate of 5.7 times per million words. The top 2,000 words of English occur above a rate of 30 times per million words, and it would take many thousand more words to fill the gap between 30/mw and 5.7/mw. In other words, as I've said before, there's more important stuff to be teaching them.

TESL certification

If you're going to teach English as a second language here in Ontario, you need to be certified and there are a number of potential pitfalls that are rather easy to get caught in.

The first is the difference between TESL Canada and TESL Ontario. You would think that the national body would have more stringent certification requirements than the provincial body. You'd be wrong. While both organisations require an undergraduate degree, TESL Canada level 1 certification (which is the only national level available for pre-service teachers without a Master's degree in TESOL or applied linguistics) requires only 100 hours of theory and methodology study in a "recognized TESL training program or equivalent" and a supervised practicum of at least 20 hours (10 hours of observation and 10 hours of teaching). Applicants must also show evidence of English language proficiency (roughly TOEFL iBT 80).

In contrast, TESL Ontario requires 250 hours of TESL course work from an institution recognized by TESL Ontario and a supervised practicum of at least 50 hours (30 hours of observation and 20 hours of teaching). Applicants must also show evidence of English language proficiency (roughly TOEFL iBT 103).

In other words, TESL Canada level 1 certification is basically useless in Ontario.

The next problem is programs offered by non-accredited institutions. According to TESL Ontario's own application documents, the only certified institutions are Brock, Carleton, U of T, York, and U Sask; Algonquin, Centennial, Conestoga, George Brown, and Humber colleges; Thames Valley, Toronto, and York Catholic school boards; and among private institutions, the Canadian College of Educators and the Canadian Centre for Language & Cultural Studies. The teach abroad courses offered by, for example, Oxford Seminars do NOT meet TESL Ontario certification standards.

Of course, I teach in the Humber program, which far exceeds TESL Ontario requirements, and consequently produces many of the most sought-after graduates in Ontario. The program is unique in having 500 hours of coursework, and 80 hours of graduated practicum which is entirely arranged by the school (many courses leave it up to students to arrange their own practicum hours, which is becoming more and more difficult in the saturated GTA). Humber is a two-semester daytime program, but come September, it looks like we'll probably be delivering it three days a week. If you or anyone you know is interested, please get in touch.

The categorization of 'so'

The other day I got an e-mail from a colleague who asked about complements to linking verbs. As I was thinking about the various possible complements, the clause it seems so came to mind. "What in the world is so," I wondered. Not really expecting to find any help, I checked a number of dictionaries. The OED has entries for so as an adverb/conjunction and predictably other dictionaries follow suit. But that can't be right.

The word seem can take a variety of complements apart from so. These include:

1. Noun phrases (NPs) and adjective phrases (AdjPs), typically grouped as predicate complements (aka subjective complements).
   He seems happy. (AdjP)
   She seems a good sort. (NP) more common in British English
   
2. Content clauses (aka noun clauses): bare, with subordinator that, and with relative pronoun what
   It seems (that) they have arrived early.
   That did not seem what they intended to convey.
   
3. to infinitives
   It seems to be the right one.
4. Preposition phrases (PPs)
   It seems like a good solution.
   They seem out of place.
5. And, of course, the word so. [My aunt reminds me that not can also work here.]
   

They do not include:

1. Determinative phrases (DPs)
   *It seems any.
   *It seems the.
   *It seems those.
   
2. Adverb phrases (AdvPs)
   *It seems quickly.
   *It seems really.
   *It seems always.
   *It seems too.
3. Content clauses introduced by when, why, how
   *It seems how they did it.
   *It seems why they did it.
   *It seems how they did it.
4. Bare infinitives
   *It seems be OK.
   

So, if adverbs are illegal as complements [but note the possibility of not], why call so an adverb? I suppose the reasoning is: if something doesn't fit another category, it must be an adverb, but that's pretty silly.

And what do I think so is? I haven't figured that one out yet. I'll try to get back to you on it.

[Added May 25, 2009: otherwise also seems to have similar properties.]

A primmer primer

This morning on CBC, Andy Barrie said that later they would have a /prɪmɚ/ on something or other (i.e., basic information about a topic). "You mean /praɪmɚ/," I thought. But he went on to say that he used to say /praɪmɚ/ but he had been told by a listener that, in fact, the correct pronunciation was /prɪmɚ/. "That's right," chimed in Jill Dempsey. "Nonsense," I thought, never having heard anybody pronounce it that way in my life. So when I got to work, I grabbed all the dictionaries I could find.

The Oxford Canadian Dictionary gives both pronunciations, with /praɪmɚ/ listed first. I teach English as a second language, so most of the dictionaries I have on my desk are for learners of English; The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary lists only /praɪmɚ/, as does the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, and the Collins COBUILD English Dictionary, all of which are British. Merriam Webster's Online Dictionary, along with their Learner's Dictionary, gives the American pronunciation as /prɪmɚ/, but also lists /praɪmɚ/noting "chiefly British". The American Heritage Dictionary is the only one I can find that does not list the /aɪ/ pronunciation.

So, dispite the prim listener's protestations about this point, it appears that Metro Morning's host and listening audience have had another incorrection foisted upon them.

Editing poetry

My brother, Michael Eden Reynolds, has won both first and second place in Prism's inaugural poetry contest.

I am not a poet. I rarely read poetry, nor do I write it. It is neither a regret nor a point of pride, merely a reality. But I do try to take an interest in the things that people close to me are doing, so when Michael started getting his poetry published, I was curious. Unfortunately, I must admit finding much of what he sent to me opaque. There were lines I liked, and occasionally a whole poem that would grab me, but often I really didn't know where to start.

When he told me that he was having part of his manuscript edited, I became even more curious. Perhaps the editor's comments would help me understand Michael's poetry. What kind of changes would an editor make anyhow?

When Michael forwarded me the marked up manuscript, I was somewhat disappointed. There was no obvious egress from my comprehensional umbra, but strangely enough, I suddenly understood how you might go about editing something as flexible and creative as poetry, even when you don't understand the whole poem. It would be much the same as when one edits prose, only more stringent.

Now, in general, I think Strunk's injunction to omit needless words is often rather useless advice, but in poems there is more of an imperative to pack the utmost meaning into the fewest mental gestures possible. The editor Michael had engaged seemed to have it in for "gerunds and abstractions and... extra pesky small words, particularly articles." I don't believe in this kind of categorical discrimination, but suddenly I did begin to see lines that would benefit from pruning, and I offered Michael my own editing services.

I began by editing his editor, telling Michael where I agreed and where I didn't. I think he found this a bit of a relief as he had perhaps been a bit intimidated by a lot of the advice he'd received.

During this process, there were times when a more precise or apt word would occur to me. At other times, I found preachy lines where the images had already communicated what needed to be said. With this shift of attention to the technical details of the poems, more meanings began to present themselves and I was able to enter a few more poems, but I also felt that I now had permission to simply say, "I can't make any sense of this at all."

Sometimes, when Michael and I discussed these, it would turn out that he was just stretching the language too far. For example, in the following , I queried arrested... from...

Maze of one, speck of time, arrested
in my pocket from the wide and cloudless
night that apprehends me.

Michael wanted to convey that the speck time had been taken by force, but in the end, we agreed that from is not a legal complement to arrest and that the intended reading simply wasn't available to most readers.

Many times I suggested orthodox punctuation where Michael's was heterodox, often with no obvious benefit either prosodic or semantic. And occasionally, the syntax was simply muddled:

On the boat there’s a slow coil
of water heaps the prow.

became

A slow coil of water
heaps the prow.

There were also questionable metaphors. Consider the following lines:

"It’s the night before garbage day,
the wind’s as warm as a breath
of frogsong, "

I commented that although frogsong may have associations with the warmth of spring, or that it may warm the soul, "a breath of frogsong" itself doesn't strike me as warm at all.The line became:

It’s the night before garbage day,
warm wind stirring the frogs
into song,

There was also some overly-familiar rhyme and the occasional cliche: "rain against the windowpane", "heaves a sigh."

And of course, I got to make positive comments on lovely descriptions like this one of writing in a foreign script

"characters with sloping
shoulders, cats and lizards, coiled shrubs."

I will admit that much of the editing advice I provided Michael was rather mechanical, surface-level stuff: copy editing mostly. To go beyond that, I'd need to learn a lot more about poetry, something I'm afraid I probably won't do soon. But what I have learned was interesting, and it was a privilege to be able to work with Michael on this project.

Clauses vs. phrases

Our final Firsten disection for this quarter begins with the question: "Are non-finite clauses the same thing as what we used to call 'phrases'?"

The distinction between clauses and phrases is indeed a muddy one. I've shown before how it confused the Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics. Apparently, its authors are not alone in their confusion.

The reality of the situation is that the words are used differently by different people, or even sometimes by the same person. And that's fine. Just as long as we can figure out who's using which word what way.

Traditionally, then, a phrase is merely any contiguous group of words that has some connection in expressing a concept, but which is not in itself a clause. A clause, on the other hand, is a whole simple sentence or one part of a complex or compound sentence that contains a subject and a predicate.

These two concepts are generally distinct enough that the distinction is maintained, but things can get messy. What does it mean to contain a subject? Imperatives are thought to be clauses and are said to include implied subjects: you. But then a predicate adjunct such as speaking slowly in Speaking slowly, he explained why he disagreed also has an implied subject: he. Traditionalists, though, would not consider speaking slowly a clause.

Firsten tries to explain this traditional idea of clauses vs. phrases and how it overlaps with the idea of being finite or non-finite.

"Non-finite clauses are the same thing as "phrases." In addition, finite clauses are the same thing as "clauses." The terminology underwent a change some years ago, and now most grammarians use the terms finite and non-finite clauses... A finite clause must have a subject and a verb that carries tense."

This rule of thumb isn't very useful as it ignores the possibility of phrases that contain no verbs at all, while mostly just switching one label for the other without adding any clarity.

So what does it mean for something to be finite? The idea of finite verb has been with us since at least the late 18th century when Lindley Murray wrote, "Finite verbs are those to which number and person appertain." This explains the reason for the label: if something is finite, it has certain limitations. A verb like runs cannot go together with just any old subject; I goes will not do. The verb go in to go, on the other hand, is not limited in this way. That is to say, it is non-finite.

Firsten's explanation is at odds with Murray's use. Murray applies the concept to verbs, where Firsten applies it to entire clauses. But given that English subject-verb agreement occurs only with present-tense verbs and with past-tense be, it seems that they agree that it applies when the verb carries the tense. Firsten doesn't stop there though. He says,

"Come with me to the next TESOL convention is also a finite clause even though the subject you is hidden and the verb is in the imperative form."

Yet, there is no tensed verb here and subject-verb agreement does not apply.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language takes a position rather closer to Firsten's than Murray's, albeit one which is much clearer while at the same time admittedly unorthodox. Like Firsten, the CGEL applies the concept to clauses, not verbs. But it is silent about a subject. Rather it includes the following as finite clauses:

1. clauses headed by tensed verbs (i.e., present tense or past tense; there is no future tense)
2. clauses headed by plain-form verbs in the imperative or the subjunctive.

This has already gone on far too long, so I'll get back to why this is a useful classification in another post.

Backshift and remote relationships

In Richard Firsten's most recent Grammatically Speaking column, he claims that was in the sentence "Was there something you needed to see me about?" is an example of backshifting.

The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Applied Linguistics: A Handbook for Language Teaching doesn't even mention backshifting. Nor does the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Even the OED fails to mention backshift. The Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, Third Edition has no entry for backshifting, but under back-shift it instructs us to see direct speech. Unfortunately, this reference resolves to an entry that is entirely unhelpful on the matter. Apparently, this term is not widely used.

But do not despair. The Oxford English Grammar steps up to the plate. George Yule also talks about backshift in Explaining English Grammar, as does the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. But these books are unanimous in defining and discussing backshift in relation to reported speech, and Firsten's topic has nothing to do with reported speech. Even Wikipedia concurs. Yule, for example, says:

"The change of forms, such as present tense (e.g., 'I am ill') to past tense (e.g., 'He said he was ill') in indirect speech."

Terminology aside, the explanation offered strikes me as generally correct. But for those of us who are obsessed with categorizing grammar, it cries out for a label. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language observes, "three uses of the preterite (past tense): past time, backshift, and modal remoteness." This last term, modal remoteness, is what we're looking at here. The question Is there something you want to see me about? is very immediate. It tramples social distance. This can make things more or less comfortable, depending on what each party gains or loses from recognizing social distance.

The point that tenses have uses beyond the signification of time is one that is not made often enough. Certainly, backshift, being one of those uses, is related to the topic at hand, but only remotely. There may actually be grammar references out there that use backshifting in the way Firsten does, but I've never come across them and some fairly anally retentive searching on my part has failed to turn up any.

[On an almost completely unrelated note, did you hear about the cosmologist who went to the costume party dressed all in red? He would move away from people and then ask them what he was. Answer: redshift]

A whole nother issue

A few days ago, I promised to get back to fixing up Richard Firsten's problematic answers to grammar questions. Although, I said I'd look at backshift, this morning, I was more in the mind to address his second letter, which poses the perennial question: why do we say a whole nother? Richard's reply:

"because it either sounds cute or humorous. And what's really interesting is that you can now find nother in some dictionaries!"

Both of these strike me as true. But one word stuck in my craw: now. A careful reader would be left with the impression that nother is a recent form, perhaps coming out of the seventies when Luke Skywalker famously whined at his uncle, "but that's a whole nother year..." You certainly wouldn't get the impression that it has been in use fairly consistently since at least the 14th century:

• "c1330 Otuel 83 Ich am comen her..To speke wi charles..& wi a knit at heet Roulond & a noer hatte oliuer."
• "c1390 MS Vernon Homilies in Archiv f. das Studium der Neueren Sprachen (1877) 57 280 He wolde him say his onswere on a noer day. "
• "1559 J. AYLMER Harborowe sig. E4, Of Paul I shal speak of at a nother time."
• "1850 ‘M. TENSAS’ Odd Leaves from Louisiana Swamp Doctor 152 Lizey Johnson's middle darter, Prinsanna,..left her husband in the state of Georgy, and kum to Luzaanny an' got marred to a nother man."
• "1963 Word Study Feb. 7, I have to grade a whole nother set of themes."

So why do we have both other and nother? The OED explains:

"From the beginning of the Middle English period, the coexistence of two forms of the indefinite article (an before vowels and a before consonants) often led to metanalysis (the same phenomenon occurs in other languages where the indefinite article ends in -n, e.g. French, Italian, etc.). Variants arising by metanalysis sometimes alliterate with words with initial n- in alliterative verse, and in some cases have become established as the regular modern forms (so that e.g. Middle English a nadder became an adder; compare also apron, auger, etc.), while conversely some vowel-initial forms have gained n- (so that e.g. Middle English an ewt became a newt; compare also nickname). The following examples show the latter process in cases where the variants arising by metanalysis did not become established as the regular modern form."

Michael Eden Reynolds facebook group

You've seen his poetry before. Now comes the facebook group!

Another thought about post-

A while ago, I mused about post- being a preposition-forming prefix. It now occurs to me that I fell into the trap of confounding the function and the category. I wrote, "Clearly though, the word post-Walkerton as used above is neither adjective, verb, nor noun." This is mistaken.

The context was How is the water post-Walkerton? Of course, post-Walkerton can be replaced with a prepositional phrase such as after Walkerton. It can also be replaced with an adverb such as recently. But what I overlooked was that it can also be replaced with a noun phrase such as these days or (with a slight adjustment to the verb tense) last year, or Monday. Given that, I think that post-Walkerton would make most sense as a noun, and that post- is not, in fact, a preposition-forming prefix.

So, it appears, sadly, that there is no productive way of creating new prepositions, though -wards is weakly productive (again, of intransitive prepositions, which many people wrongly call adverbs).

Incidentally, Geoff Pullum recently credited me with discovering post as a new preposition. This is true for certain senses of discover, but not for the sense that I was the first human to realise the situation. As commenters on Language Log have mentioned, the OED lists it. But the OED seems to miss a distinction between post and after, which commenter Mike Keesey explains nicely when he says, "'After' is neutral. 'Post' implies that the event/period in question has fundamentally changed the state of things."

The self-righteous fury of the blogs

If you don't read Carl Zimmer's blog, The Loom, you should. He has a magnificent post about the cl/rash between blogs and the mainstream media (Zimmer also writes for Discover, The New York Times, and other more traditional news sources) in which he writes,

"Take, for example, a recent righteous rant from Ben Goldacre, a British doctor who writes the blog Bad Science. Goldacre is doing fabulous work on his blog, taking on irresponsible sensationalism and misinformation about vaccines, quack medicine, and other offenses. His guns are blazing particularly hot in a recent post about some awful reporting on recent studies on prostate cancer. He concludes with this sweeping condemnation of our trade:

Journalists insist that we need professionals to mediate and explain science. From today’s story, their self belief seems truly laughable.

Goldacre is big on evidence and down on anecdote, but as Zimmer notes here, he's guilty when it comes to condemning the MSM based on cherry-picked stories.

When I am critical, as I often am, I do worry about this, and I hope that I have taken a fair line with who I blame. If I haven't I trust you to let me know.

Coordinating and stacking modifiers

One of the teachers here came by Friday with a question about commas in pre-head modifiers in NPs. In other words, she was asking about the difference between things like:

• a serious political problem
• a serious, unsolvable problem

where these are both noun phrases (NPs) headed by the noun problem and modified by two words coming before the noun. Notice that one has a comma and one doesn't.

The textbook that had led her into this said that there are two types of adjectives: cumulative and coordinate. With coordinate adjectives, you put a comma, but with cumulative ones, you don't.

It's hard to know if this is simply a confusing description of a real situation or whether it is wrong. It suggests that adjectives belong to these two types, which is wrong, but if it really means that adjectives can be listed in two ways, then that's true.

The important point is that it has nothing to do with any particular type of adjective as you can have exactly the same two adjectives with a comma or without. Rather it is a question of coordinated modifiers versus stacked (or what they call cumulative) modifiers. Coordination looks like this: (m , m) h, but stacking looks like this: (m (m h)), where m is a modifier and h is a head noun.

1a) a powerful, new tool (coord)
1b) a powerful new tool (stacked)

In 1a, we have a tool that is both new and powerful. In 1b, we have a new tool that is powerful. This is probably not a distinction worth drawing, but look at this:

2a) a powerful, political force
2b) a powerful political force

In 2a, we have a force that is powerful but also political (as opposed to, say, moral). In 2b) we have a political force that is powerful (as opposed to weak).

3a) a small, happy family
3b) a small happy family

In 3a, the family happens to be both small and happy, but in 3b, the happy family is small (in comparison to most happy families, which we may expect to be big).

Where a modifier is a noun, it is usually indicative of a type and so lends itself to stacking. This also indicates why nouns will come at or towards the end of a string of modifiers.

4a) a big, ugly brick house

But it can also be coordinated:

4b) a big, ugly, brick house

4a is a brick house that is big and ugly. 4b is a house that is big, ugly, and made of brick.

Grammatically Speaking incoherent

Richard Firsten continues to provide questionable answers to grammar question in his "Grammatically speaking" column for TESOL . I must say, I'm disheartened that nobody in the editorial department there seems to have cottoned on to it yet. This time around there are enough problems that we're going to have to break things out into multiple posts.

We'll begin with the following question: is the -ing word in this sentence a present participle or a gerund?

He was famous for consistently picking stocks that gave high returns.

Firsten answers,

"What gives this away as a present participle and not a gerund is the word consistently. A gerund is like the noun form of a verb, so if it's preceded by nothing at all or by an adjective, we can see that it's a gerund, working as a noun."

Amid the confusion here, there are two useful hints. Adjectives do not modify verbs and adverbs do not modify nouns. So if your choice is between a word being a noun and a verb, and it's being modified by an adjective, you can bet the house it's not a verb. Equally, if it's being modified by an adverb, it's not a noun.

The rest of this is nonsense. "A gerund is like the noun form of a verb." And this is "a gerund, working as a noun." So, putting those together, we get: picking described as being like the noun form of a verb, working as a noun. So, is it a noun or a verb? Firsten doesn't seem to know, or if he knows, he's not telling. Maybe he's been reading Cowan's Teacher's Grammar of English.

Anyhow, let's look at another sentence: He was famous for his tan. It would be very unhelpful to say the NP his tan is "working as a noun." Rather, we would say it's functioning as the object of the preposition for. So, being the consistent folk we are, we'd say the clause consistently picking stocks that gave high returns is functioning as the object of for in the sentence in question.

What about picking itself? It's a verb. It's modified by an adverb, as Firsten points out. So, despite some confusion, he gets us to the right answer. But rather than stopping there, he bumbles on:

"If we tweak the sentence and have He was famous for picking stocks that gave high returns, we have a gerund."

No! No! No! This is to suggests that picking is a gerund by default, and that it is only by adding the adverb consistently that we turn it into a verb. That's backwards. Rather, it is because picking is a verb that it becomes possible to modify it by an adverb. But whether there is indeed an adverb there or not is irrelevant.

Then he gets the next part right:

"We also see that picking has a direct object, stocks, so that's another way we know that in this case, picking is a present participle"

Of course, this directly contradicts what he said earlier about it being a gerund, but don't let that bother you. It doesn't seem to bother the editors at TESOL.

Next time, what is backshift?

From blogosphere to hereosphere

Goofy from Bradshaw of the future came by today and we had a nice chat. If there's anyone else reading in the Toronto area, look me up.

pre- and post- as preposition-forming prefixes

[please see the reconsideration of this post here]
This morning coming in to work, I heard Andy Barrie on CBC say something like "How is the water post-Walkerton?" I've forgotten the actual sentence, but it ended "post-Walkerton." (See here for an explanation of the Walkerton Tragedy.)

It struck me that post-Walkerton sounded, prosodically, like one word rather than two, and that, if it were one word, it would be a preposition (albeit an intransitive one, explained briefly here.) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language claims that pre- and post- can form adjectives, nouns, and verbs, but doesn't allow for the possibility of prepositions. Clearly though, the word post-Walkerton as used above is neither adjective, verb, nor noun.

The other way to look at this, I suppose, is that post is itself a preposition rather than a prefix.

TOEFL TV

Just in case you needed to know, the good folks at ETS have found another way to market their juggernaut Test of English as a Foreign Language: their very own YouTube chanel. Teachers and students share their TOEFL tips in some of the most compelling TV you've seen. Actually, it's probably no worse than most of what's on YouTube.

Japanese as a distant language?

We all make mistakes, big and small. I know I do. So I usually do not criticise others for trivial mistakes. Not that I am particularly magnanimous; it is simply that, hey, life is short, let's look for good rather than bad.

So I am not lamenting nor ranting when I say I often come across strange things about the Japanese language written by, of all people, professional linguists. They baffle me. I will give you just a few examples.

While discussing Japanese classifiers on page 70 of Concise encyclopedia of grammatical categories, Craig gives the following:

empitsu ni-hon 'two (long) pencils'
inu no-hiki 'two (animal) dogs'
no' chiyo 'the (animal) chicken'
ixim wah 'the (corn) tortilla'

All these are labelled 'Japanese', which happens to be my mother tongue; yet I have difficulties. The first one is fine. The second contains a simple mistake: 'no-hiki' should read 'ni-hiki'. But I simply cannot make out what the third and fourth examples are. Maybe they are some esoteric expressions that I know nothing about - or something has gone awfully wrong (perhaps these two are from some other language).

An introduction to language and linguistics, edited by Fasold & Conner-Linton (2006), is a fine textbook, but apparently the editors did not have enough time to check certain simple facts. On page 29, you have the following warning:

In Tokyo, you want to be careful to order [bi:ru] 'a beer' rather than [biru] 'a building,' and to ask directions to a certain [tori] 'street,' rather than a [to:ri] 'gate' or [to:ri:] 'bird.'

Alas, they will still be lost in Tokyo, ordering some fried gates or grilled streets in a restaurant. The correct combinations, if you care, are: [to:ri] - street, [tori:] - gate, and [tori] - bird. To my knowledge there is no such word as [to:ri:] in Japanese, except perhaps for phonetic translation for 'Tory'.

Incidentally, the same textbook (on page 410) gives a Japanese sentence meaning 'The boy who hit the dog is my brother' - but wait. The Japanese sentence says 'The boy who hit against [i.e. whose (entire) body hit] the dog is (my) brother'. Small difference on paper, big difference in the real physical world.

Even Pinker sometimes nods. In his wonderfully entertaining The stuff of thought, he gives bakatara as a Japanese word meaning 'stupid' (on p.336 of the Penguin edition); the correct word is bakatare. Yes, it's just a single small letter - a tiny letter that distinguishes, say, fad and fed ('The dog has just been fad'? hmm ...)

I will readily admit that language professionals are usually careful, indeed skilled, in dealing with foreign languages (in fact, they are the ones who get my Japanese name right every time, while banks, shops and other institutions get it wrong). George Lakoff discusses the Japanese classifiers in his Women, fire and dangerous things with admirable accuracy; yes, he checked with a Japanese speaking person (whom he thanks in the Acknowledgments). All it takes is just a little time and care.

But then, that's the hardest thing to do - especially when what you are dealing with is something as distant as the Japanese language - or, in my case, something as distant as the English language. That's why it takes me so long to translate - oops, time to get back to work. I have some translation to do, a distant trip. I'll get all trippy.

Pronunciational self delusion

I was having dinner earlier this week with a number of colleagues when the topic got around to pronunciation. After an initial discussion of being laughed at by Americans for our pronunciation of out, the conversation went something like this: A and B are Canadian, and C is British and knows a lot more about phonology than I do.

• A: Canadian English is the clearest. Even the main US networks are hiring Canadians as anchors or their anchors sound Canadian.
• B: Clearer than British English you think?
• C: Oh, yeah.
• me: Which British English?
• C: If you could hear the way my brother talks...
• me: But it just depends what you're used to, doesn't it?
• C: But Canadians pronounce all the sounds clearly. It must be easier for students learning English to study here.
  
• A & B: Sure.
• me: Come on, how do you say Toronto?
• A: toe Ron toe
• me: Really? You don't say Trawna?
  
• B: Maybe the younger people do, but not our generation.

Far be it for (OK, from) me to argue, but I just wanna point out that Patrick Corrigan's editorial cartoon in today's Toronto Star has mayor David Miller's bicycle being eaten by a pothole. A street sign in the background says, "Trawna".

The decline of the subjunctive

There's no doubt that the subjunctive in English has lost much of its historical scope. There used to be present and past subjunctive for all verbs, but the only vestige of the past subjunctive is the irrealis use of were that I referred to yesterday. When you've only got one form, it's hardly worth calling it a system. The simple past tense has taken over much of the work in sentences like If you saw it, you'd know.

Many claim that the subjunctive continues its fade today, but there are a brave few, such as Charles Finney of the University of Tennessee, who actually argue that it's making a comeback. I'm very pleased to see that Finney is at least somewhat interested in the data. He keeps a list of examples that he runs across to illustrate his point. The problem is that you can't show a revival by looking at a single point in time.

So to get a time series, I went to the TIME Corpus and the COCA and used that [pronoun] be as my stand-in for the whole of the subjunctive. I'd say it's a reasonably representative sample, though clearly far from perfect. If you're playing along at home, the query would look like this:
The result from the TIME corpus shows a clear drop off over the last century with only the 1930s and 1990s going slightly against trend. The most recent decade has, however, been very hard on the subjunctive:
The drop off in the last two decades is confirmed by the COCA, though it doesn't look quite as desperate:
The thing I found most interesting is that spoken English appears to be the biggest user of the subjunctive, though academic English isn't far behind.
So it appears that the subjunctive really is continuing its decline.

Whether Grayling know the subjunctive

In making a point about the (in)accuracy of internet sources, A. C. Grayling remarks in passing on the grammar of the following:

Look thy last on all things lovely, Every hour. Let no night Seal thy sense in deathly slumber Till to delight Thou have paid thy utmost blessing.

-Walter de la Mare

Grayling claims that Thou have is an error, and one committed by the poet. It should, he says, be Thou hast. But Alan Larman, of Congleton, Cheshire, UK, writes to NewScientist that this is the subjunctive mood and no error at all.

In modern English, the use of the subjunctive is highly restricted and occurs mainly in subordinate clauses introduced by that (e.g., It's important that he be on time; I take were in if I were you to be an isolated irrealis form and not part of the subjunctive, which uses the plain form of the verb). My problem is this: I don't know enough about the grammar of early modern English (the style, if not the time, in which la Mare was writing) to know whether the subjunctive is possible here. The poet was writing in the early part of the twentieth century, at which time thou had been out of use for perhaps 250 years. So it is indeed possible that, in trying to be poetic, he goofed.

There is, however, a still-used frozen form that displays exactly the pattern in question: until death do us part, which suggests strongly that the error is Grayling's.

If anybody can settle this definitively, I'd appreciate hearing from you.

Pearson Test of English

On Wednesday night, we were discussing how to deal with graduates of our college who had great credentials and ability, but who couldn't land a job because of their spoken English. We agreed that one issue is having some kind of objective benchmark of speaking ability, and so I brought up (again) the Versant tests.

The next day the associate dean sent me an e-mail about the Pearson Test of English (PTE), which has been in development for a number of years and will be available this October. Pearson is trying to get colleges and universities to say they will accept the PTE for admissions purposes, and somebody there had contacted our registrar about it. She'd forwarded it to the associate dean and he forwarded it to me with the question, "Is the oral test you spoke about yesterday a part of this test?"

This wikipedia article claims that that indeed appears to be the case, though there's nothing to back the claim up.

The makers of the Versant tests have claimed for a long time that they can produce valid reliable scores automatically in a fraction of the time it takes a behmouth like the TOEFL. The problems is that, even if it's true, nobody believes it. The PTE is about 3 hours as compared to Versant's 10-15 minutes, so it will be interesting to see how the statistical properties of each line up.

No word for X

A standard (journalistic) trope for exoticising a language is to claim that it has no word for x. According to an article in the Native Times, Doris Jean Lamar McLemore is the last person alive who can fluently speak "the language of the Wichita Indians," a language so complex that

"it takes 60 to 90 minutes to transcribe even a small portion of it.

There are no words for “hello” or “good-bye,” for example. The closest to a “hello” you can give someone is a phrase for “How are you?” – “e : si : raci : ci.”

I can think of another really exotic language with no words for hello: French. The closest to a "hello" you can give someone is to wish them a good day or good health. I can't say I know much about transcribing, but it seems to me that the speed would have to do much more with familiarity than with complexity.

Finally, it's interesting that nowhere in the article is the language actually named. It's simply called the language of the Wichita Indians.

Only a couple letters off

A few months ago, I wrote about a couple + plural noun (e.g., a couple things vs. a couple of things). Today it's in the news, as pointed out by Geoff Pullum over at Language Log. When there was a typo on a gift from Hillary Clinton to her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, the Clinton adviser Philippe Reines is reported to have protested that the word they printed is only a couple letters off.

Geoff puts only a couple letters off in quotes, but I'm not sure whether he means to attribute that to the newspaper story or to Reines. I can't actually find any stories with those words in quotes, and indeed a Google news search only turns up two stories with that wording, one from Fox and one from Asian News International.

A love letter

Walrus Magazine has just announced the winners of their love letter contest. The following took second prize:

Dearest;

I still remember the day we met; my grade-eight grammar teacher recommended you with forget-me-not, fire-engine-red ink in place of a capriciously employed em-dash.

Only the bravest and worthiest of young grammarians were permitted to adopt you in their prose; hence, from that day forth I've worn you like a badge of honour.

I still recall the moment my juvenile narrative first profited from your mature wisdom. A reluctant convert, I snuck you into a three-hundred-word handwritten exposition on "Casey at the Bat"; I even used you outside of the quotation marks.

Since that day I've been your faithful admirer. My longing for your is even evident when I type en français; my heart commands that I not separate you with a space from the word that precedes you.

In my vintage 1982 edition of The Chicago Manual of Style yours is the best thumbed of all pages–dog-eared number one-forty-seven–where into six little vignettes from 5.68 to 5.73 those know-it-all Chicagoans squeezed your every known use in the English language; e.g. when you appear before the expression e.g. if the break in continuity is greater than that signaled by a comma. (For comparative examples see 5.54.)

But I know you're worth much more than these grammarians perceive; surely the greatest poets and philologists toiling in tandem could never describe the fullness of your beauty.

Oh, how I've sinned in the name of loving you: pride, in objectifying you when no other mark can satisfy me punctually; lust, for the time when I may again see at the tip of my pen your seductive point-and-bend; envy, when those like Vonnegut and Hemingway treat you better than I; wrath, my rage when I see a perfidious comma in what was previously your domain; sloth, when thoughtlessly I start a new sentence rather than employ a coordinate clause; greed, when I wish to hoard you all to myself and not share your muted grandeur with others; and gluttony, my sin when I use you six times in a horrendously long sentence.

Mine is a love unrequited, I know, for you are just a fleeting fleck between a colon and a comma.

But dearest, I would never misuse you, as so many do, next to a callous conjunction that connects two independent clauses, and my love for you is greater than my desire to exploit you as do your many Internet sycophants.

Should you never return my love still I shall remain forever your humble and faithful applicant; accordingly, never will I remit watchfulness of your applicability as semi-colon, the connector of two coordinate clauses; semi-colon, the clarifying attribute dividing a series of two or more objects in a post-colonal sequence with internal punctuation; and semi-colon, the super comma, where an ordinary comma would just be too damn confusing!

I love you always ;
R.A. Johnson

Simplifying rules

After the talk I had with my son the other day, I suggested that he ask his teacher the same questions he asked me. I was disappointed to learn that the response was: "sometimes authors (who begin sentences with and) forget the rules." This was not what I was hoping for, so I sent a gentle letter to school (my wife insisted on editing it to ensure gentleness). I received the following response:

Thank you for sharing your expertise! You certainly know the rules thoroughly!
For grade 2, to simplify things, we generalize that we use 'and' once in a sentence, as a joining word or part of a list. Also, to reinforce the idea of joining words, not to start a sentence with 'and'. Certainly as they enter older grades, refinements as to the use of 'and' and 'but' will be made.
Thanks again for sharing!

I'm glad to learn that she views this as a simplification rather than a real rule. As I said last time, I don't believe it's a needed simplification because I feel confident that a seven-year-old can understand that you can use and at the beginning of a sentence as long as you don't do it too much. I'm also less sanguine about the chance of refinements being made in future grades. Most of the students (pre-service teachers) in my current TESL class came in believing in a no-sentence-initial-coordinator rule, and in some cases I haven't been able to overcome a lifetime's faith in it.

National Grammar Day

In the US, today is National Grammar Day. Bradshaw of the future has an apropos explanation of what grammar is.

It has begun

I think today is the first day that my son asked me about a prescriptive grammar rule. He's in grade two, and he asked me if it was true that you can't start a sentence with and. I asked him why he was curious, and he said that he'd seen it in books but his teacher had said that it was against the rules.

I asked him why his teacher might do that, but he couldn't imagine a reason, so we talked about how kids often tell stories with and between every "sentence" and I asked him how it sounds if you use the same word(s) too many times. In the end, we agreed that you can start a sentence with and but that you just shouldn't do it too much.

Which seemed to satisfy him, until he added, "but you can't have two ands in the same sentence, right?" So we got to look at the difference between coordinating clauses and phrases, and he had no trouble seeing the difference once it was brought to his attention.

If a bright seven-year-old can notice a discrepancy between what he's being told and what he sees, and if he can understand the facts of grammar with a little Socratic questioning, why do we teach all these fake oversimplifications?