English in the Real World

https://themillions.com/2023/01/english-in-the-real-world.html

by samclemens • 3 years ago

66 34 3 years ago

You can pull Strunk's from my cold, dead hands.

Perhaps one of the biggest blights on English writing instruction that that book isn't just ignored. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/50years.pdf

ghaff• 3 years ago

I've read it before. It's a bit of a rant and is also probably a bit unfair--but I'm not sure it's wrong either.

mold_aid• 3 years ago

Yeah I'm always shocked at how frequently it's used by my colleagues. I will say it is used in a lot of non-writing disciplines, but I remember my first English class putting that thing in my hands and ugh.

It's part of a broader issue in writing instruction that mistakes etiquette for style.

ranko2• 3 years ago

Ironically, it was ignored by the authors in much of their writing, both in "Elements" and other works.

tuukkah2• 3 years ago

The point is that around you and Strunk, the language keeps evolving.

actionfromafar• 3 years ago

It’s not that good.

jjgreen• 3 years ago

Amusingly, the original PEP-8 had "When writing English, Strunk and White apply" rather than "applies" (so treating "Strunk & White" as a plural). That subsequently corrected to "When writing English, follow Strunk and White".

troad• 3 years ago

Linguists universally make fun of S&W.

S&W is a series of misinformed and inconsistent stylistic preferences that mediocre English majors use to status signal to other mediocre English majors.

tkgally• 3 years ago

David Foster Wallace wrote an essay on usage guides, including Garner’s, for Harper’s Magazine in 2001. It was titled “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage.” Still worth reading if you enjoy—or at least can tolerate—Wallace’s own writing style:

https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-...

tuukkah2• 3 years ago

TLDR their approach:

In Garner’s view, the best course is to “follow idiom and usage” but “otherwise apply logic.” Such advice circumvents the descriptivism-prescriptivism binary often invoked in discussions of grammar. Garner is saying, essentially, be descriptivist when you can and prescriptivist when you can’t.

ubercore4• 3 years ago

I've noticed the "less" vs "fewer" issue a lot more in the last few years. I feel like we're losing that battle. I will continue to (kindly!) remind people of the difference, though. I can't help it.

snazz01• 3 years ago

It'd be one less thing to worry about ;)

linguistics__2• 3 years ago

It's almost like it's an unimportant distinction for normal speech and that the spoken language is moving on, as it inevitably does.

ubercore4• 3 years ago

100% understand that. It's just something that's stuck with me for some reason.

VoodooJuJu• 3 years ago

Nitpicking is unkind. Saying that you're kind about nitpicking doesn't make you kind. If you want to be kind, I recommend not nitpicking.

Language is driven by users with skin in the game, not nitpickers with dictionaries. Word use and meaning will shift naturally over time. If I say less and, given the context, you understand it to mean few, then the mission was accomplished, the mission being communication. That you understood me is an example of word use/meaning shift in action. It happens.

fknorangesite2• 3 years ago

not nitpickers with dictionaries.

And indeed, the writers of those dictionaries would be against the prescriptivist nitpicking, too.

ubercore4• 3 years ago

Ok, my attempt at self deprecating humor didn't land. I don't actually correct anyone on this, I only make hacker news comments about it. But it won't stop standing out to me.

xioxox• 3 years ago

Wasn't this rule made up by someone in the 18th century because he thought it sounded better [1]? Therefore, it's not even more correct to say fewer rather than less. The only reason to care about it is to stop people trying to correct your language usage.

[1] e.g. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/495/less-vs-fewe...

ubercore4• 3 years ago

Never tried to claim it wasn't pedantic of me! Just one of those things that sticks, because it was taught to me that way.

NeoTar2• 3 years ago

I've always thought that might be an interesting feature to have in an esoteric programming language - for floats you must use the 'less than' comparison, but for integers use the 'fewer than' comparison.

shadowgovt3• 3 years ago

I like this better than SML/NJ's 'andalso' and 'orelse' because they'd already used 'and' and 'or' for bitwise logic computations and the language disallows function overloading.

shadowgovt3• 3 years ago

At this point, the battle is over. Any remaining resistance in the "fewer" camp had a stake driven through its heart when Lin-Manuel Miranda used "That's one less thing to worry about" in one of the most popular musicals in a decade.

As Shakespeare showed, when you're a playwright, you can change the language.

fknorangesite2• 3 years ago

Except that this was a common idiom long before Miranda used it.

jareklupinski• 3 years ago

i'm doing good thinking about it less times

denton-scratch• 3 years ago

“hone in” for “home in.”

That's for people that have never used a straight razor.

doetoe• 3 years ago

I'm not a native English speaker. I didn't get what is wrong with the sentence

“States were further required to limit soot from power plants, cars and other sources to 2.5 microns, or 28 times smaller than [who can be sure what this means?] the width of a human hair.”

that is quoted in the text. Should they have said "soot particles"? Or is it something else? And why can't we be sure what "28 times smaller than" means?

ranko2• 3 years ago

"28 times smaller than" (and the like) is one of my bugbears. I think it means "1/28th of the size", but then you get constructions like "three times smaller than" instead of the clearer and more obvious "one third the size of". Trying to think too hard about what it means to be "N times smaller than" becomes pretty confusing, I think.

In a newspaper, I'd rather see something like "4% of the width of a human hair", which is surely accurate enough given the variability of hair widths and clearer too.

NeoTar2• 3 years ago

Steve Mould, the YouTuber, has a fun takedown of the phrase "6 times colder than", and how in every reasonable interpretation it is completely meaningless.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C91gKuxutTU

jccalhoun• 3 years ago

I found the section in the book that explains it:

X Times less than. Brand Y may cost twice as much as Brand X, but that doesn’t mean Brand X is twice as cheap as Brand Y. Farburg may be two times as far away as Nearville, but that doesn’t mean Nearville is two times closer than Farburg. Big Dog may be twice the size of Little Dog, but that doesn’t mean Little Dog is two times smaller than Big Dog.
One time is 100% of the cost, distance, size, or any other measure. If you take away “one time” something, you’ve taken away all there is. If you walk toward me and cover all the distance, you can’t get any closer—you can’t be twice as close as you were before. If the price is discounted one time or 100%, the item is free. Two times cheaper, if it means anything, might imply that the store will pay you the full price of Brand Y if you will take Brand X home with you. That mangles the meaning of cost, and it surely isn’t what the writer means.

Personally, I can see what the author is going for but I disagree that it implies the store will pay you.

zanderz• 3 years ago

Prescriptivist in the streets, descriptivist in the sheets!

English in the Real World

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