Rule-bound tut-tutters?

I mentioned, in a discussion on editing, that editors don’t want to be seen as a bunch of arbitrarily rule-bound tut-tutters. One of my colleagues replied (tongue in cheek, she assures me), “at least when we’re NOT at work – after all, the essence of most editing is being a rule-bound tut-tutter!”

To which I replied:

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOO!

Sorry for the emphasis, but I must respectfully disagree at the top of my lungs. We are, or we certainly should be, pragmatists, and friendly, helpful ones at that. That means that we understand that rules are made for the sake of communication, not the other way around, and everything we do is to help the author communicate well with the audience. We don’t enforce a rule if there’s no good reason for it – and we have to be able to explain the reason – and we should be helpful, encouraging, and empathetic, not prissy tut-tutters.

English is too good, fun, and useful to be some kind of gotcha game. One of our primary jobs as editors is to pry it loose from the morbid grips of those who would make it simply an arbitrary and devious status game (you know, those who say “Aaargh! I hate idiots who start a sentence with ‘hopefully’!” or who insist coolly “Split infinitives are a sign of poor breeding”). We are not bound by rules; we understand them and understand why each rule exists and we apply them intelligently, not dogmatically. And we ought not to tut-tut! Such is for those who are still in the middle school of the mind, pretending to be adults but maintaining their status by trying to bring others down.

Email joke writers, please read this

I receive and forward a lot of email jokes. I’m pretty well known among my friends for being a nexus for humour. But in my years of reading emailed jokes, I have observed that there are many people out there who really don’t understand how to tell a joke well. I’ve had to edit quite a few just to un-kill them. So I’ve decided to give some advice for those who want to write down some joke they recently heard to send around. Please read this and heed these pointers if you want to be funny.

A couple things to know

I just encountered yet another person talking about how “a couple things” (rather than “a couple of things”) is wrong and is a sign of the decline of the English language.

It is true that you do well to be aware that “a couple things” will seem informal or even sloppy to some people. But it is a change in progress (and has been for more than 80 years). And such changes herald not the destruction but the continued vitality of the language. Languages that don’t change are dead.

“A couple” is following a course like “a dozen”: from countable noun to quantifying modifier. Some people insist that “a couple” must take “of,” but you will find that those same people happily and without a second thought use a variety of grammatical structures and usages that at one time or another were innovations. “Dozen” passed through the “of” dropping (except when plural, “dozens”) in the 18th century. “Myriad” can still be used with equal justification as countable noun (“a myriad of reasons”) or as modifier (“a myriad reasons”).

Here’s a general rule of thumb: people who decry certain usages and bemoan the declining state of the language generally have a very limited knowledge of the history of the English language and don’t look things up as much as they should.

Why “fetuses”?

A colleague asked why it was that dictionaries seemed to prefer fetuses rather than, say, fœtii, to follow the same rule (she said) as octopus, rather than the “stupid sounding” octopuses.

Well, first of all, the plural of an -us ending is -i, not -ii; the Latinate plural of octopus is octopi, not octopii. Only words that end in -ius pluralize to -ii.

Second, octopi is not really any more correct than octopuses. Octopus was a loan word in Latin and is a loan word in English, and in each case the language has applied its own inflection ending for the plural. The original is Greek octopous (“eight” + “foot”) and the plural of that is octopodes, though those who insist on saying octopodes in English conveniently forget that we don’t say octopous for the singular.

In regard to œ versus e, in many words we have gotten from Latin, the digraph has been simplified in North American English, but that’s hardly the first spelling change ever enacted on Latin loans, and efforts to retain Latin etymology (or resurrect it) have had a lot to do with the poor match between spelling and pronunciation in English. In this case, however, fetus is the more etymologically correct spelling; fœtus is an error – a misconjecture. The original Latin is fetus with a long e.

Anyway, feti is used, but rarely. Fetuses is used commonly because, after all, we’re speaking English, and we more often than not conform loan words to English morphological patterns rather than keeping them in the morphology of the source language. (Quick, what’s the plural of sauna? And why do you say that? Also, why does nobody object that the alcohol and the albatross are redundant, since the al in the source means “the”? Answer: they’re ours now [evil laugh].) I suspect that the fact that feti would sound like “feet eye” has some little something to do with the preference in this case – we don’t always like to confuse ourselves. At any rate, dictionaries document usage. They can have some prescriptive effect, but their main function is to tell people what educated people use a word to mean and how they spell and inflect it. So the usage comes first. Even Noah Webster, when he made a number of spelling reforms in his dictionary, used only spellings that had already been used in real life. (And not all of his changes stuck, either.)

Latinate plurals serve nicely as a sign of desire to sound erudite, and they keep the language nice and difficult the way we like it, but they do have practical limits, beyond which they become rather funny. I seem to recall some humorous prose or verse referring to travelling on omnibi and so forth. (-ibus, by the way, is an inflectional ending of its own and not -ib plus -us, so -ibi is no kind of Latin).

Whoever tells you to always avoid splitting infinitives is wrong

Yet another colleague has called for backup to respond to someone who insists that splitting infinitives is always and without exception wrong.

Siiigggghhhhh. Really, do these people never, ever look anything up?

If I were using the subjunctive…

The subject of the subjunctive came up in a recent email discussion. English does have a subjunctive – or, I should say, some versions of English do have a distinct subjunctive. Some people will say “If I was you,” meaning right now, and they’re not using a special subjunctive form. But others (me included) will say “If I were you,” because I couldn’t possibly actually be you, and they are using a special subjunctive form. And I will be addressing the kind of English that does use these forms.

There are actually a variety of places where the subjunctive gets used in English, although rather fewer than there used to be, and I’m not going to go into detail about all of them, but they all involve a posited alternate reality – one that is desired (as in “I ask that he come to see me”) or merely posited as possible (“If music be the food of love, play on”), or one that is  definitely expressed as other than the current state (“If I were a rich man…”).

The discussion began with the sentence “He felt as if he were at a crossroads.” And the question: The character is indeed at a crossroads, so should it be “was”?

What flavour of English do you want?

This is taken from a presentation I gave at the Editors’ Association of Canada conference in Edmonton, June 2008. For the bibliography and a concise summary of some key points, see the handout (PDF, 72 KB)

I thought I wouldn’t call this “Register, collocation, and reflected meaning” because, well, that sounded a little dry. And I’m going to be starting into this subject with the use of a metaphor of sort. The metaphor I’m going to be using—and I think it’s a pretty viable one—is, as you may have guessed, that a piece of a text is like a piece of food. A document is like a dish. Words are like ingredients.

Tonnes of options

Today’s discussion on the Editors’ Association of Canada listserv has brought forth an ad looking for performers with “tonnes of energy.” Hm! That would be “tons,” right? Boy, give these people 2.5 cm and they’ll take 1.6 km…

Except that there actually is a case to be made for it.

The majority of these second-guesses are wrong

There are some bits of usage that people are more likely to get wrong if they stop and try to get them right. I encountered one of the most noteworthy and commonly confounding cases in a recent edit, when I had to change “the majority was” to “the majority were” and “the remainder was” to “the remainder were.”

In ordinary speech, we generally have a natural feel for these things.

Let her who is without error…

I’m told Carol Fisher Saller of the Chicago Manual of Style, in her new book The Subversive Copy Editor, recounts how she convinced an author that that of him who seeks should be that of he who seeks.

Tsk, tsk, tsk. Ms. Saller! You’ve clearly been staring at this stuff too long! You’ve simultaneously overthought and underthought this one. Overthought because you’re letting your ideas override your ear; underthought because you haven’t properly analyzed what’s going on here.