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Usage Showdown: Who Are You Going to Listen to?
Yesterday we presented the first part in our usage showdown on "whom," from Baltimore Sun copy editor John E. McIntyre, a self-professed "moderate prescriptivist." Today we present the descriptivist side of the debate, from Arnold M. Zwicky, Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University, who frequently writes about matters of English usage on the group weblog Language Log. Let us know in the comments section which perspective you find more convincing, or sound off with your own opinion!
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Last month on the VT, a commenter complained about the use of the word "who" in a sentence beginning, "Joshua Kendall, who we interview this week..." This wasn't the first time that one of our readers objected to the use of "who" instead of "whom." Since this is such a contentious point of English usage, we thought we'd offer two different perspectives on the great "whom" debate. Today we present the viewpoint of John E. McIntyre, assistant managing editor for the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun, who runs an entertaining blog on copyediting, You Don't Say. Tomorrow we'll hear from a descriptive linguist, Arnold Zwicky of Stanford University. Let the showdown begin!
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The "Letters to the Editor" section of the Los Angeles Times has featured some heated discussion about what kind of vocabulary is suitable for printing in a newspaper. And no, this doesn't have anything to do with the "seven dirty words" famously satirized by the late lamented George Carlin. Instead, it's about some moderately challenging vocab items that you might expect to find on a Visual Thesaurus word list.
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In the United Kingdom, the "nice decade" is over. When Bank of England governor Mervyn King announced recently that "the nice decade is behind us," he didn't mean that British pleasantness was at an end. Rather, he was using an acronym, NICE, which stands for "Non-Inflationary Consistent Expansion," a condition that King says has characterized the last ten years of British economic prosperity. One economist says the country is now heading into VILE years, playing off NICE with his own readymade acronym for "Volatile Inflation, Less Expansionary," while another says things are going to be EVIL ("Exacting period of Volatile Inflation and Low growth").
BBC News greets the end of the NICE decade with the question, "What's the point of niceness?" Was the acronym an appropriate one to label Britain's sustained economic boom, or is nice just too... nice?
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Last week on the Visual Thesaurus, William Safire and Nancy Friedman both weighed in on "Bittergate," the political furor that arose over Senator Barack Obama's comments about small-town Pennsylvanian voters ("It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion"). Now Obama has found himself under the microscope again for his use of a particular word, but this time the context is more "sweet" than "bitter." Responding to a question from television reporter Peggy Agar at an automobile plant outside of Detroit, Obama said, "Hold on one second, sweetie." Later he left Agar a voicemail apologizing about using the word sweetie to address her, calling it a "bad habit of mine." Lisa Anderson of the Chicago Tribune wryly wrote, "Welcome to 'Sweetie-gate,' a place paved with eggshells, where terms of endearment turn into political peccadilloes at the drop of a diminutive."
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Our two-part interview with William Safire about the new edition of his Political Dictionary focused on the lasting contributions of political talk to the English lexicon. But sometimes the language of politics is more idiosyncratic. High-profile politicians who are speaking publicly on a daily basis inevitably develop their own verbal mannerisms, their peculiar linguistic likes and dislikes. Take New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, for instance. We've recently learned that he's a big fan of the word unconscionable, but he's got a problem with the word maintain.
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For the past three decades Professor Connie Eble has been pursuing a unique project: Tracking the slang of her students. The in-house linguist of the University of North Carolina's English Department, she polls her students every semester about their non-standard language. This long-term research has given Professor Eble a singular window into the function of language in society, which she discusses in her book Slang and Sociability. Professor Eble recently gathered the latest crop of slang from her students, so we called her to find out what she found, and what it means.
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