tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38508422011-09-01T20:52:33.146-04:00Copy-editing on the wild frontier between prescriptivism and descriptivism.tongue-tiedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10008961131057359669noreply@blogger.comBlogger111100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3850842.post-1143822877783878982006-03-31T11:18:00.000-05:002006-03-31T11:36:08.460-05:00

There was an amusing article in Slate a couple of weeks ago debunking those news items that say "So-and-so costs the U.S. economy some-odd billion dollars a year." The piece was inspired by a recent claim that workplace interruptions like e-mail messages, IMs, and chatty co-workers cost the economy $588 billion a year. That got me wondering what sort of damage the economy is sustaining from the

tongue-tiedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10008961131057359669noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3850842.post-1142524132565393802006-03-16T10:29:00.000-05:002006-03-16T10:48:52.576-05:00

I had dinner the other night with a friend from out of town who's a newspaper editor and writer. I was explaining to him what my blog was about and he mentioned that at his paper there is a strict preference for "such as" over "like" in references to examples of a set ("Bands such as [not 'like'!] the Stooges and the New York Dolls helped set the stage for punk rock").The reasoning behind the

tongue-tiedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10008961131057359669noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3850842.post-1141835058563098912006-03-08T11:20:00.000-05:002006-03-09T12:23:17.013-05:00

Here's the opening paragraph of a post Monday by an Iraqi blogger at Iraq the Model. It flouts rules of punctuation, hyphenation, syntax, and consistency (and is a run-on sentence), but it's perfectly clear:We woke up this morning to the sounds of many explosions in Baghdad and since we are familiar with those sounds we recognized that these were no doubt mortar shelling but not like the usual

tongue-tiedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10008961131057359669noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3850842.post-1141232608952791472006-03-01T11:51:00.000-05:002006-03-03T11:58:08.750-05:00

Soon after starting Tongue-Tied, I was excited to discover a book called Verbal Hygiene, by Deborah Cameron, a British linguist. Verbal hygiene is Cameron's term for the myridad ways in which people try to control language, ranging from school children making fun of the way other kids on the playground talk to usage "mavens" writing books about the atrocious state of English. Toward the latter

tongue-tiedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10008961131057359669noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3850842.post-1139860558734542052006-02-13T14:47:00.000-05:002006-02-13T21:40:58.246-05:00

Here's a sentence from an article in The New York Times Magazine by Daphne Merkin. Note the use of "proved" as an adjective:Writers in the business of trend-spotting have to come up with trends, after all, and Sheehy, the author of the best-selling "Passages," is a proved virtuoso at this genre.People normally say "proven" in this situation. And I'm sure most people write "proven" as well. Is

tongue-tiedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10008961131057359669noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3850842.post-1139504771479060462006-02-09T12:03:00.000-05:002006-02-10T15:29:15.580-05:00

Recently I discussed how copy editors sometimes cultivate irritation excessively, assiduously accumulating pet peeves to arm themselves as language guardians. Now I'm feeling irritated--at a language guardian. The indispensable copy-editing blog A Capital Idea pointed me to an article by Shawn Moynihan in Editor & Publisher, a prescriptivist rant (really and truly) against the phrase "It is what

tongue-tiedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10008961131057359669noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3850842.post-1139258115439245302006-02-06T15:15:00.000-05:002006-02-06T16:38:24.340-05:00

Among other valuable neurotic traits (like a sense of irritation, which helps you spot errors), copy editors have to cultivate a certain level of paranoia. It's productive to be irrationally suspicious of every sentence. But when you're at home reading, say, the Sunday New York Times, you'd like to be able to turn off the skepticism switch and sit back and enjoy.That was my state of mind

tongue-tiedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10008961131057359669noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3850842.post-1138816165792738192006-02-01T12:48:00.000-05:002006-02-01T14:51:59.993-05:00

“Gantlet” and “gauntlet” are either (1) two words that people confuse or (2) the same word spelled differently. The prescriptivist line is that “gauntlet” means glove, so you throw down the gauntlet, and “gantlet” means ordeal, so you run the gantlet. The problem is, most people say “run the gauntlet,” so usage enforcers, such as copy editors, have to keep reminding people they are wrong.I came

tongue-tiedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10008961131057359669noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3850842.post-1137950819663082442006-01-22T12:19:00.000-05:002006-01-28T19:24:07.113-05:00

In what amounts to some kind of cosmological convergence, the entire history of Tongue-Tied (all two posts!) has come together today in The New York Times Magazine. To review: In my first post, I questioned Charles McGrath's recent prescriptivist wisecrack about an author's supposed misuse of the word "peruse." In my second post, I questioned Geoffrey Pullum's prescriptivist rant--or so I

tongue-tiedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10008961131057359669noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3850842.post-1137557376407915872006-01-17T23:07:00.000-05:002006-01-18T18:39:15.830-05:00

A curious thing happened at Language Log the other day. Geoffrey Pullum, one of the descriptive linguists who regularly posts there, submitted a thoroughly prescriptivist rant, the kind of testy complaint about improper word usage that descriptivists deplore in principle, and that the contributors to Language Log deplore frequently in practice.Pullum pounced on The Smoking Gun for using the word

tongue-tiedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10008961131057359669noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3850842.post-1135787698365365212005-12-28T11:34:00.000-05:002006-01-06T17:27:04.733-05:00

Charles McGrath recently reviewed Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary in the New York Times Book Review. Dr. Johnson's dictionary, of course, is something of a ground zero in the history of English-language prescriptivism, and McGrath indulges in a little prescriptivism himself in the review, wisecracking that Henry Hitchings, the book's author, "is an

tongue-tiedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10008961131057359669noreply@blogger.com5