The Eclectic Linda

John McIntyre, formerly a top copy editor at the Baltimore Sun, and a loser in the downsizing panic, writes about a book he’s just read:

I also note, with professional regret, the numerous typographical errors throughout the book, many of which have been corrected by a previous library patron. Apparently I am not alone in finding them irritating.

I used to do that, but then I felt bad about defacing library books. Can one deface that which is already defaced by error? At least, there is someone else who appreciates the impulse.

The news agency Reuters posted a story the day after the inauguration claiming:
“President Barack Obama’s inauguration generated an unprecedented 35,000 stories in the world’s major newspapers, television and radio broadcasts over the past day — about 35 times more than the last presidential swearing-in — a monitoring group said on Wednesday.”

Bloggers seem to like this story — I’ve run into it several times — but they also seem to be accepting it as legit, though the idea that the second inauguration of President Bush garnered a mere 1,000 stories is implausible on its face. Fewer than Obama? Sure, I believe that. But by a factor of 35? Not likely.

So who was Reuters relying on for what we journalists call a one-source story? Why, it was Paul JJ Payack, president of Global Language Monitor.

He’s got form as a purveyor of dubious linguistic self-promotions. The guys at Language Log nailed him good for a series of predictions about the millionth word in English. Benjamin Zimmer wrote:

Gullible reporters keep falling for a self-aggrandizing scam perpetrated by Paul J.J. Payack, who runs an outfit called Global Language Monitor. As regular Language Log readers know, Mr. Payack has been trumpeting the arrival of “the millionth word” in English for some time now. In fact, he’s predicted that the English language would pass the million-word mark in 2006… and 2007… and 2008… and now 2009. As reported in the Christian Science Monitor and The Economist, the date that Payack has now set for the million-word milestone is April 29, 2009.

In a previous installment of the Payack saga, I wrote that the Million Word March was “a progression that he turns on and off based on his publicity needs.” So I can’t say I was terribly surprised to learn that April 29, 2009 just happens to be the publication date of the paperback edition of Payack’s book, A Million Words and Counting: How Global English Is Rewriting The World. What a stupendous coincidence that Global Language Monitor’s word-counting algorithm has timed itself to accord with Payack’s publishing schedule!

Payack calls Obama “the biggest story of the century so far,” and Reuters quotes him further:

Payack said that according to his group’s monitoring, the Obama campaign and election story had generated 717,000 citations in print, television and radio across the world in 2008 and 254 million mentions on the Internet and in Web blogs.

That surpassed media interest generated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the global financial meltdown in 2008, the Iraq War in 2003 and the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, Payack said.

The tallies were calculated using the group’s proprietary algorithm which tracks the frequency of words and phrases in the global print and electronic media, the Internet and major databases.

People with editors are not supposed to fall for silly press releases.

Rocky Mountain News columnist Mike Rosen wrote about a few of his pet grammatical peeves last week, and like many people who have never studied linguistics and don’t know what it’s about, he managed to embarrass himself.

Rocky edit page editor Vincent Carroll asked if I wanted to respond, and I did.

For some reason, sportswriters and broadcasters have lately taken (I know, that’s a split infinitive, but I allow myself some of those) to writing or saying, “four RBI,” leaving out the “s.” They may believe they’re being grammatically correct but they’re wrong on two different levels.

Mike Rosen is quite correct (“The trouble with English,” Feb. 1) that there is nothing grammatically incorrect about a “split infinitive,” despite what Mrs. Wellington used to say in my seventh-grade English class, back in the prehistoric era when teachers still believed that it was a good idea for children to be taught the basics of English grammar.

However, the example he generously allows himself, “have lately taken,” is not an infinitive of any kind, just a verb form containing more than one word, and an adverb in its usual and customary place after the first of them.

An infinitive expresses the part of the meaning of a verb that is independent of person, number, gender and tense, as you likely know if there was a Mrs. Wellington in your past. Like “to take,” or “to be,” as infinitives are written in English. In Latin, they’re single words — esse — whence cometh the peculiar idea that they shouldn’t be split in English.

The rest of Rosen’s column illustrates another peculiar phenomenon — that people who know nothing at all about linguistics assume they do because they speak and write a language, and in absence of actual knowledge they just make stuff up.

“The election of the first woman or black president of the United States would surely be an historic event.” No it wouldn’t! But it would certainly be a historic event. Putting history and politics aside, let’s focus on the grammar.

This happens to be one of my pet grammatical peeves. I suspect it’s because people somehow feel “an historic” sounds more elegant than “a historic” that they break a fundamental rule in this case. If you aspirate the “h” at the beginning of a word — that is, if you can hear the “h” — you precede it with the article “a.” If you don’t hear the “h,” you precede it with “an.” So you eat a hot dog or you’re an heir to an estate. You wouldn’t say, “he hit an home run,” so why would you say “it’s an historic event?” (Don’t ask me about “herb;” that’s pronounced both ways.)

There are principles that govern the alternation of “a” and “an,” but they’re phonetic, not grammatical, and not as Rosen describes them. “A hot dog,” but “an uncooked hot dog” and “a delighted heir.”

First, sports jargon is often granted special exemption from the rules of grammar, as in expressions like “he went yard” or “you the man.” It’s a cultural thing.

Granted by whom, hmmm? I’m surprised he didn’t complain about the “passive tense.”

Secondly, “RBI,” in this case, is a compound noun treated as a unitary term. Hence, even though you’d say four “runs batted in” if you spelled out or spoke all the words, when you use the abbreviation as a term, you say four “RBIs.”

I’d probably say “four RBIs,” as Rosen prefers, but whether and where to put the “s” in an acronym is very idiosyncratic, and often different for abbreviations.

Or how about “height” pronounced, “hieth?” The only correct pronunciation is “hite.” Check the dictionary. “Weight” is spelled much the same way and you wouldn’t pronounce it “wayth.” “Height” ends in a “t,” not an “h,” like the word, “length.” It’s not spelled, “heighth.”

Rosen is correct that pronouncing height as “hithe” instead of “hite” is wrong, but so is explaining why by recourse to “weight,” which would argue just as cogently for “hayt.”

Then there’s the annoying use of the word “problematic.” It’s a great word as shorthand for describing some thorny issue or predicament that’s unsettled, uncertain, debatable, indeterminate, baffling or difficult to get your hands around. I don’t like it when broadcasters, reporters or analysts casually use it to describe something that’s merely troublesome or just a run-of-the-mill problem, as in “the snowstorm has made the rush hour drive problematic.”

Stick to politics, Mike. It’s less problematic, because in politics nobody knows what they’re talking about.

Linda Seebach, a former Rocky editorial writer, is a resident of Northfield, Minn.

Predictably, someone in the comments complained about “nobody . . . they”

Posted by Old_Grouch on February 7, 2008 at 6:20 a.m.

“Ms. Seebach might want to look at the principle of grammer that holds a singular noun — “nobody” — takes a singular pronoun — “he”, or “she”, NOT the plural, “they”. However . . . !

“One might ask if anybody at the RMN, really knows what he, or she, is talking about, in or out of ‘politics’.”

I used to write to OG back when I was moonlighting as the letters blog [Hall Monitor], and replied:

Posted by lindaseebach on February 7, 2008 at 10:11 a.m.

@Old_Grouch
As I noted, people who don’t know anything about linguistics often incorrectly believe they do. The so-called “principle of grammer” (sic) that “nobody” is always a singular noun (or “they” always a plural pronoun — it can be analyzed either way) allows for a variety of exceptions, going back to the King James Bible and earlier. See, for example, numerous posts on the linguistics Weblog “Language Log.” *

How would OG complete the tag question, “I guess nobody liked the dessert, did ____?”

And someone else, perhaps mildly irony impaired, informed me:

“Linda,Nobody granted the sports writers an exemption, because there never was a central authority in England to mandate correct grammar and pronunciation, as there was in France and Spain. This situation has led to centuries of bickering. If sports writer jargon is understood and accepted by sports fans, so be it. Just avoid using sports writer jargon in a scholarly article”

People really get into this language stuff.

* See, for instance, Mark Liberman’s post on syntactic and notional number, citing research indicating that pronouns tend to agree with a speaker’s meaning, while verbs are more likely to reflect the form of a noun such as “nobody.”

So what did Clinton Portis really say?

According to Mark Liberman, a University of Pennsylvania linguist who hangs out at the blog Language Log, the Redskins running back said during a July 27 meeting with the media, “I don’t know how nobody feel, I don’t know what nobody thinking. I don’t know what nobody going through. Only thing I know is what’s going on in Clinton Portis life.”

As Liberman explains, an Aug. 12 column by Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell prompted him to transcribe that passage from a videotape available on the team’s Web site. Howell’s column examined how the paper came to run two different versions of what Clinton Portis said, neither of them strictly accurate.

In a news story by Howard Bryant, readers learned that Portis had said, “. . . I don’t know what anyone else is going through.” In a column by Michael Wise, Howell said, that part of the quote was rendered as “. . . I don’t know what nobody doing, . . .”

Howell said the paper’s policy was clear. “When we put a source’s words inside quotation marks, those exact words should have been uttered in precisely that form.”

Given how people speak in real life, such a policy is unworkable. But in any case, Bryant said he had never heard about it. And neither, apparently, had the staffer who replaced Wise’s version with Bryant’s version without even telling Wise — which is wrong whatever you think about standardizing quotes.

Liberman accuses Wise of getting the supposedly verbatim quote wrong, with a broad-brush sideswipe at “the spectacularly lax standards of big-time journalistic quotation.” And then he goes on to ding Howell: “But what fascinates me here is that Howell didn’t bother to (have someone) take ten minutes to check what the verbatim version of the Portis quote actually was.”

Well now. It turns out that Wise relied on a staff transcription (something I found out by e-mailing him to ask). So Liberman cannot know that Howell “didn’t bother” to check the accuracy of the quote; perhaps she checked the same transcript Wise used. Did Liberman bother to ask?

Whether and when and how far to standardize quotes is contentious. Doing it may seem condescending; not doing it may seem mean-spirited.

Wise e-mailed, “I also feel a sense of compassion for some people I interview who aren’t necessarily savvy in the media. If it were a kid who had trouble with the language — and not a guy who loves to affect a persona and knows very well how he comes across when he speaks like that — I would have paraphrased. But it’s Portis, the guy who dresses up as Southeast Jerome and other assorted characters.”

I’m uncomfortable with putting altered words in quotation marks, even if the reason is benign. When I was working in Los Angeles, I went to a rally for supporters of a school-voucher initiative that was on the ballot that year, and the featured speaker was Polly Williams, who led the campaign for vouchers in Milwaukee.

She’s black, and the audience was almost entirely white, but they were also enthusiastically pro-Williams, and as the audience warmed up she gradually shifted from standard English (a descriptive term, not a normative one) to Black English Vernacular. So I had to decide when I wrote a column about the rally, do I quote her accurately, leaving the BEV grammatical markers intact, or do I pretend she spoke standard English throughout? I opted for accuracy, and further for not mentioning that it had been a choice, figuring that my obvious admiration for her would convey to readers that I wasn’t trying to make her look bad.

Still, if the Post’s policy is never to standardize quotes, writers and editors shouldn’t do it. And when in doubt, check the tape.