The Sense of Style

翻译原则：

• 随时补充，随时沟通
• 人名地名书名：翻译，首次出现时括号注明原文，举例“斯蒂芬·平克（Steven Pinker）”
• 意译还是直译？建议适度意译，书中有大量语义的缠绕，完全直译不可能。
• glossary：要译。
• note：要译，谁的章节谁译，最后归并到书末，如英文版。
• References：不译，但建议放附录。
• Acknowledgments：不译
• 术语：翻术语时要做出列表，每天彼此对表，有不同马上sort out
• 成段引文用楷体标明

时间进度

• 1月5日 返回试译稿
• 3月2日 返回一半译稿（这是一个中耕流程，主要是看一下进度，不一定要返回定稿）
• 4月1日 完成初稿
• 5月1日 返回全部译稿

网络资源

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翻译感悟

不能滥用汉语的成语和典故，例如“事后诸葛亮”，那样不伦不类。如果原文中有生动的表达，不要用汉语成语替换。例如：“雨后蘑菇”不要替换成“雨后春笋”。

Chapter 3

The Curse of Knowledge

第三章

知识的诅咒

The main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not to know something that you know.

文章写得晦涩难懂的主要原因是：你很难想象，在你看来理所应当具备的知识，对局外人来说却并非如此。

Why is so much writing so hard to understand? Why must a typical reader struggle to follow an academic article, the fine print on a tax return, or the instructions for setting up a wireless home network?

为什么有那么多文章令人费解？为什么一位典型的读者要花费九牛二虎之力去理解学术论文、退税指南、或者家庭无线网络组建说明书？

The most popular explanation I hear is the one captured in this.

我听过最普遍的解释像下面这幅漫画说的一样。

（漫画标题：“开篇不错，但还缺些令人云山雾罩的胡话。”）

According to this theory, opaque prose is a deliberate choice. Bureaucrats and business managers insist on gibberish to cover their anatomy. Plaid-clad tech writers get their revenge on the jocks who kicked sand in their faces and the girls who turned them down for dates. Pseudo-intellectuals spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to say. Academics in the softer fields dress up the trivial and obvious with the trappings of scientific sophistication, hoping to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook. Here is Calvin explaining the principle to Hobbes:

根据这一理论，晦涩的文章是故意而为之的。颟顸的官僚和长袖善舞的商人为避免被人洞察心迹，而坚持不懈地使用令人费解的胡言。穿着文气的技术人员决心用一种看不懂的文风来报复童年欺负人的坏小子和追不到的好姑娘。假模假式的知识分子喷出一腔难懂的废话，只为掩盖自己事实上什么也没说。

在大众熟悉的软学科领域，学术界把针头线脑、路人皆知的大道理进行繁琐的学术包装，以期用夸夸其谈的官样文章糊弄读者。在下面这幅漫画里，凯文（Calvin）向霍布斯（Hobbes）传授秘辛。

（漫画文字内容）

1. 凯文：以前写作业是种痛苦，现在是种享受。
2. 凯文：我悟到了写作的真谛了：虚张论点，模糊论证，隐藏清晰。
3. 凯文：稍加训练，写作就能变成云里雾里。想看一下我的读书报告吗？
4. 霍布斯：“论迪克和简之间的交互存在与monological imperative：跨越性别的物理互动关系模式之研究。”
5. 凯文：学术界，我来了！

Calvin and Hobbes (c) 1993 watterson. Reprinted with permission of universal uclick. all rights reserved.

（漫画的版权不译）

I have long been skeptical of the bamboozlement theory, because in my experience it does not ring true. I know many scholars who have nothing to hide and no need to impress. They do groundbreaking work on important subjects, reason well about clear ideas, and are honest, down-to-earth people, the kind you’d enjoy having a beer with. Still, their writing stinks.

我对这种“文章故意欺诈论”怀疑已久，因为经验告诉我，这不是真的。据我所知，许多学者并无何事需要隐瞒，也并无何人需要取悦。他们就重要的学术课题筚路蓝缕、以启山林。思路清楚，立论讲理，诚实可靠，脚踏实地，是那种可以在酒吧里一起喝上一杯的朋友。可是，他们的文章还是很烂。

People often tell me that academics have no choice but to write badly because the gatekeepers of journals and university presses insist on ponderous language as proof of one’s seriousness. This has not been my experience, and it turns out to be a myth. In Stylish Academic Writing (no, it is not one of the world’s thinnest books), Helen Sword masochistically analyzed the literary style in a sample of five hundred articles in academic journals, and found that a healthy minority in every field were written with grace and verve.1

常有人告诉我，学术圈别无选择，因为期刊和大学出版机构的编辑们认为，如果文风不沉闷，意味着写作不认真。我从没经历过这种事，这种说法纯属迷思。在《风格化学术写作》一书中，Helen Sword以没罪找罪受的心态，取样了500篇学刊文章，发现无论哪个领域，只有极少数文风优美而鲜活。（注1）

In explaining any human shortcoming, the first tool I reach for is Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.2 The kind of stupidity I have in mind has nothing to do with ignorance or low IQ; in fact, it’s often the brightest and best informed who suffer the most from it.

为解释任性的弱点，让我们首先使用“汉隆剃刀理论”（Hanlon’s Razor），在用愚蠢足以解释的情况下，不要用恶意推测别人，即“宁信其愚，不信其恶”。（注2）这里所说的愚蠢不是指无知和弱智，事实是，越是消息灵通的聪明人，越容易犯愚蠢的错误。

I once attended a lecture on biology addressed to a large general audience at a conference on technology, entertainment, and design. The lecture was also being filmed for distribution over the Internet to millions of other laypeople. The speaker was an eminent biologist who had been invited to explain his recent breakthrough in the structure of DNA. He launched into a jargon-packed technical presentation that was geared to his fellow molecular biologists, and it was immediately apparent to everyone in the room that none of them understood a word. Apparent to everyone, that is, except the eminent biologist. When the host interrupted and asked him to explain the work more clearly, he seemed genuinely sur- prised and not a little annoyed. This is the kind of stupidity I am talking about.

我曾经参加过一次TED生物演讲，全程录像上网向网民播放。主讲人是一位著名的生物学家，主题是他最近在DNA结构研究上的一次突破。他的演讲被密不透风术语所包裹，只有他的分子生物学同仁才能开启。很显然全场除了他自己之外，没有人明白他在说什么。当主持人打断他的话请他更清楚地解释一下自己的伟业，他露出很吃惊的表情，是吃惊，不是懊恼。这就是我所说的愚蠢。

Call it the Curse of Knowledge: a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. The term was invented by economists to help explain why people are not as shrewd in bargaining as they could be, in theory, when they possess information that their opposite number does not.3 A used-car dealer, for example, should price a lemon （蹩脚货）at the same value as a creampuff （保养极好的二手车）of the same make and model, because customers have no way to tell the difference. (In this kind of analysis, economists imagine that everyone is an amoral profit-maximizer, so no one does anything just for honesty’s sake.) But at least in experimental markets, sellers don’t take full advantage of their private knowledge. They price their assets as if their customers knew as much about their quality as they do.

这被称为“知识的诅咒”：你很难想象，在你看来理所应当具备的知识，对局外人来说却并非如此。这是经济学家发明的一个词汇，用来解释为什么一方明明掌握了对手不知道的信息，却没有狡猾地用在讨价还价时为自己获得更大的利益。[注3]例如，二手车经销商应该把同一工艺和型号的次车与好车标上同样的价钱，因为客户没有能力分辨两者的区别。（在此类分析中，经济学家设想人人都是对道德冷漠的利益最大化追求者，无人为了诚实而牺牲利益。）但是，至少在实验的交易市场中，卖方并没有充分利用其独有的知识来赚足便宜。他们的定价就像买方跟他们对商品的质量知根知底一样。

The curse of knowledge is far more than a curiosity in economic theory. The inability to set aside something that you know but that someone else does not know is such a pervasive affliction of the human mind that psychologists keep discovering related versions of it and giving it new names. There is egocentrism, the inability of children to imagine a simple scene, such as three toy mountains on a tabletop, from another person’s vantage point.4

知识的诅咒可不仅仅是经济学理论中的趣谈。心理学家发现，误把“我知”当成“你也知”是人类心智中普遍存在的疾痛，并且存在多种相联系的变种，不得不一一命名。一种叫“自我中心主义”，（由于空间感没有完全发展起来），孩子们无法想象一个简单的空间场景，例如在桌子上搭三座玩具山，但是成年人认为孩子理所应当有空间概念。（注4）

（译注：为翻译本句，查了注释中皮亚杰的论文The Child’s Conception of Space，根据这一研究，儿童在8-9岁之前空间感的发展是不完善的，例如，无法理解一条直线。但很多成年人以自我为中心，认为孩子也应该有跟成年人一样的空间感。原文不明之处，在这里补译出来。）

There’s hindsight bias, the tendency of people to think that an outcome they happen to know, such as the confirmation of a disease diagnosis or the outcome of a war, should have been obvious to someone who had to make a prediction about it before the fact.5 There’s false consensus, in which people who make a touchy personal decision (like agreeing to help an experimenter by wearing a sandwich board around campus with the word repent) assume that everyone else would make the same decision.6

一种叫“后见之明的偏见”，人们倾向于认为自己碰巧知道的一些后果，如疾病确诊、战争创伤等，别人也同样知道，事实上别人只能在事前揣测、不能确定。（注5）有一种叫“虚假的共识”，做出过激的决定的人想当然地以为别人也会做出同样的决定，例如答应实验者穿上写着“你悔改吧”字样的纸板在校园里游荡。（注6）

There’s illusory transparency, in which observers who privately know the backstory to a conversation and thus can tell that a speaker is being sarcastic assume that the speaker’s naÔve listeners can somehow detect the sarcasm, too.7 And there’s mindblindness, a failure to mentalize, or a lack of a theory of mind, in which a three-year-old who sees a toy being hidden while a second child is out of the room assumes that the other child will look for it in its actual location rather than where she last saw it.8

有一种“臆想的透明度”，被实验者事先与演讲者交谈，了解到一些背景故事，从而能听得出演讲中所带的讥讽，于是被实验者想当然地认为，台下那些幼稚的听众也能发现其中的微言大义。（注7）还有一种“心盲症”，意思是指，缺乏心智的能力或没有心智的概念。一个房间里有两个儿童和一个玩具，一个儿童离开房间之后，当着另一个三岁儿童的面把玩具藏在另一处，这个三岁儿童会认为小伙伴回来时，会从现在藏玩具的地方开始找玩具，而不是从她最后一次看到玩具的地方开始找。（注8）

(In a related demonstration, a child comes into the lab, opens a candy box, and is surprised to find pencils in it. Not only does the child think that another child entering the lab will know it contains pencils, but the child will say that he himself knew it contained pencils all along!) Children mostly outgrow the inability to separate their own knowledge from someone else’s, but not entirely. Even adults slightly tilt their guess about where a person will look for a hidden object in the direction of where they themselves know the object to be.9

（在另一个实验中，一个儿童走进实验室，打开糖果盒子却发现里面装的是铅笔。这个孩子不仅会认为后来进来的孩子也知道盒子里是铅笔，而且他还会说，自己没打开盒子之前，一直知道盒子里装的是铅笔。）孩子们最终会通过成长克服“心盲症”等认知缺陷，从而能够分辨哪是自己知道的知识，哪是别人的知识，但是并不能百分之百克服。即便是成年人也有这种轻微的倾向，认为寻物者会朝只有他自己知道的藏东西的方向去找（事实上寻物者根本不知道）。(注9)

Adults are particularly accursed when they try to estimate other people’s knowledge and skills. If a student happens to know the meaning of an uncommon word like apogee or elucidate, or the answer to a factual question like where Napoleon was born or what the brightest star in the sky is, she assumes that other students know it, too.10

成年人在评估他人的知识与技巧时，特别容易被诅咒。如果一个学生学会了生僻单词或者掌握了一些类似拿破仑的出生地、天空中最明亮的星星之类的百科知识，她会臆断地认为其他学生也知道。[注10]

When experimental volunteers are given a list of anagrams 变位词，相同字母异序词，指变换某个词或短语的字母顺序构成的新词或短语（’triangle’ is an anagram of ‘integral’）to unscramble 解码，还原, some of which are easier than others because the answers were shown to them beforehand, they rate the ones that are easier for them (because they’d seen the answers) to be magically easier for everyone.11

一群志愿者接受一个实验，把字母乱序的单词正常排序，一些单词因为事先已经向志愿者展示过了，所以比较容易排。最后，实验者让这些志愿者对单词排序的难易程度打分，他们会认为对自己来说容易排序的单词（实际上是他们事先看过的），对所有人都会一样神奇地容易。

And when experienced cell phone users were asked how long it would take novices to learn to use the phone, they guessed thirteen minutes; in fact, it took thirty-two.12 Users with less expertise were more accurate in predicting the learning curves, though their guess, too, fell short: they predicted twenty minutes. The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn.

当问深度手机用户们多长时间才能教会一个新手用手机，他们猜测需要13分钟，实际上，需要32分钟。[注12]用过手机但不熟练的用户猜测需要20分钟，他们对学习曲线的预测更准确一些，虽然也猜短了。你对一样东西知道得越多，就越容易忘记它当初学起来有多难。

The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.13 It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows-that they haven’t mastered the patois of her guild, can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day.* And so she doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail.

divine . (formal) to find out sth by guessing • 猜到；领悟: ▪ [V wh-] »She could divine what he was thinking just by looking at him. 她一看就知道他在想什么

为什么好人写出坏文章？据我所知，知识的诅咒是最佳且唯一的解释。[注13]很简单，写作者全然忘记了她的读者并不知道她所掌握的知识，也不熟悉她业内的行话，无法推测她忽略的步骤，更无法把她当成小葱拌豆腐–一清二白的场景进行视觉化。于是，写作者一条道走到黑，不肯解释术语行话，不肯给出推导逻辑，也不啃提供必要的细节。

The ubiquitous experience shown in this New Yorker cartoon is a familiar example:

这种无处不在的体验被《纽约客》这幅漫画描绘得入木三分。

Anyone who wants to lift the curse of knowledge must first appre- ciate what a devilish curse it is. Like a drunk who is too impaired to realize that he is too impaired to drive, we do not notice the curse

任何想摆脱知识的诅咒的人必须先要了解这种诅咒有多严重。就像醉酒阻碍司机意识到自己不能开车一样，知识的诅咒也阻碍我们意识到我们受到了诅咒。这种盲目阻碍我们交流的每一步。我的学生在分组学习的时候，总是喜欢用任课老师的名字来命名他们的作业，所以我经常收到一打email，附件取名为pinker.doc

(以下是January 12, 2015 1:37 PM 开始翻译的)

The professors rename the papers, so Lisa Smith gets back a dozen attachments named “smith.doc.”

教授收到邮件之后，把附件改成学生的名字，于是，丽莎·史密斯收到了一打附件为smith.doc的邮件。

I go to a Web site for a trusted-traveler program and have to decide whether to click on GOES, Nexus, GlobalEntry, Sentri, Flux, or FAST-bureaucratic terms that mean nothing to me.

我到一个信得过的旅游网站浏览，面对下面这种官样文章气十足的导航文字一下子变得无所适从：GOES, Nexus, GlobalEntry, Sentri, Flux, FAST。

A trail map informs me that a hike to a waterfall takes two hours, without specifying whether that means each way or for a round trip, and it fails to show several unmarked forks along the trail.

一张小道穿越地图告诉我步行道游览瀑布需要两个小时，没有告诉我是单程还是来回，并且它在好几个岔路口都没有标注路标。

My apartment is cluttered with gadgets that I can never remember how to use because of inscrutable buttons which may have to be held down for one, two, or four seconds, sometimes two at a time, and which often do different things depending on invisible “modes” toggled by still other buttons. When I’m lucky enough to find the manual, it enlightens me with explana- tions like “In the state of {alarm and chime setting}. Press the [SET] key and the {alarm ‘hour’ setting}?{alarm ‘minute’ setting}?{time ‘hour’ setting}?{time ‘minute’ setting}?{‘year’ setting}?{‘month’ setting}? {‘day’ setting} will be completed in turn. And press the [MODE] key to adjust the set items.” I’m sure it was perfectly clear to the engineers who designed it.

我住的公寓里充斥着各种电子玩意，但我从来记不住每一个的按钮要长按多久，有的要一秒，有的要两秒，有的要四秒，还有的是一个按钮按住两秒，然后再与其他的按钮组合按下去，才能开启某种“模式”。终于，我很幸运地找到了说明书，上面提示我：在“闹钟与铃声设定”下，按住[设定]键，然后依次按{闹钟小时设定} {闹钟分钟设定}{时间小时设定}{时间分钟设定}}{时间年份设定}{时间月份设定}{时间日期设定}，最后按下[模式]键让设置生效。我敢肯定对于设计它的工程师来说，心里肯定清楚地知道如何设定。

Multiply these daily frustrations by a few billion, and you begin to see that the curse of knowledge is a pervasive drag on the strivings of humanity, on a par with corruption, disease, and entropy. Cadres of expensive professionals-lawyers, accountants, computer gurus, help- line responders-drain vast sums of money from the economy to clar- ify poorly drafted text. There’s an old saying that for the want of a nail the battle was lost, and the same is true for the want of an adjective: the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War is only the most famous example of a military disaster caused by vague orders. The nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979 has been attributed to poor wording (operators misinterpreted the label on a warning light),

把这种日常生活中的沮丧乘以数十亿倍，你就了解知识的诅咒怎样同腐败、疾病、熵一样，拖了人类进步的后腿。律师、会计师、服务热线的接线生，各种高薪职业人士中的骨干，每年从经济中吸金无数，用于澄清那些粗制滥造的文本。古人有谚：“少根钉，输战争”，少个形容词，亦复如是。克里米亚战争中“轻骑兵的冲锋”（Charge of the Light Brigade）就是一个命令命令含混而酿成军事灾难的范例。1979年发生的“三哩岛核电站融毁事故”归咎于警示灯上含混的指示文字让操作员会错了意。

特内里费空难（英语：Tenerife Disaster）

The CurSe of KnoWledge 63

as has the deadliest plane crash in history, in which the pilot of a 747 at Tenerife Airport radioed he was at takeoff, by which he meant “taking off,” but an air traffic controller interpreted it as “at the takeoff posi- tion” and failed to stop him before he plowed his plane into another 747 on the runway.14 The visually confusing “butterfly ballot” given to Palm Beach voters in the 2000 American presidential election led many sup- porters of Al Gore to vote for the wrong candidate, which may have swung the election to George W. Bush, changing the course of history.

就像历史上伤亡最惨重的特内里费空难（Tenerife Disaster）中，波音747的飞行员发出无线电广播说他“在起步”（at takeoff），意思是“在起飞”（taking off），但是空管解读为“在起飞点上”（at the takeoff position），等发现错误时为时已晚，波音客机已经像铁犁一样插进跑道上另一架飞机的身体。（注：14）2000年美国总统大选中，长滩选民领到的视觉指示混乱的“蝴蝶选票”（butterfly ballot），致使许多支持阿尔·戈尔的选民误把票投给了另一候选人，从而很可能使得乔治·W·布什逆转选情，从而改变了历史的进程。

How can we lift the curse of knowledge? The traditional advice- always remember the reader over your shoulder-is not as effective as you might think.15 The problem is that just trying harder to put your- self in someone else’s shoes doesn’t make you a whole lot more accurate in figuring out what that person knows.16 When you’ve learned some- thing so well that you forget that other people may not know it, you also forget to check whether they know it. Several studies have shown that people are not easily disabused of their curse of knowledge, even when they are told to keep the reader in mind, to remember what it was like to learn something, or to ignore what they know.17

如何摆脱知识的诅咒？老生常谈的建议是永远记得越过你肩头来窥视的读者，但这一条并非如你想的那样有效。【15】问题在于无论你如何设身处地为他人着想，你并不能更精确地知道他人到底知道多少。【16】对一样东西太了解很容易使你忘记别人可能一无所知，你甚至连【确认】（黑体）一下他们是否知道这点都忘了。好几项研究显示，尽管事先得到提醒，要把读者放在心头、记住初学是什么样子，以及忽略掉自己所知道的，但真正不滥用“只是的诅咒”还是诚不易也。

But imagining the reader over your shoulder is a start. Occasionally people do learn to discount their knowledge when they are shown how it biases their judgments, and if you’ve read to this point, perhaps you will be receptive to the warning.18 So for what it’s worth: Hey, I’m talking to you.

for what it’s worth ​ infml used to show that you know someone may not care, but you are going to say something anyway: Nonetheless, I’d like to give my opinion, for what it’s worth.

“For what it’s worth” is useful to emphasize humility by prompting the reader to provide their judgment of worth against the statement being made; i.e., it may be useful information, it may not be, or perhaps differs in opinion from that of the recipients.

Your readers know a lot less about your subject than you think they do, and unless you keep track of what you know that they don’t, you are guaranteed to confuse them.

话说回来，想象有一个读者越过你肩头偷读是一个良好的开端。有些时候，当人们认识到自己的知识让判断跑歪的时候，真的会故意让自己的知识打折。如果你已经读到这一点，也许你也会接受这个警告。【18】那这就值了【(So for what it’s worth: )，嘿，说你呢！对于你的话题，你的读者知道的远远没有你多。除非你能定位出哪些知识是你知而他不知的，否则，你绝对会给他一剂迷魂药。

A better way to exorcise the curse of knowledge is to be aware of specific pitfalls that it sets in your path. There’s one that everyone is at least vaguely aware of: the use of jargon, abbreviations, and technical vocabulary. Every human pastime-music, cooking, sports, art, theo- retical physics-develops an argot to spare its enthusiasts from having to say or type a long-winded description every time they refer to a familiar concept in each other’s company. The problem is that as we become proficient at our job or hobby we come to use these catchwords so often that they flow out of our fingers automatically, and we forget that our readers may not be members of the clubhouse in which we learned them.

一个祛除知识的诅咒的更好的办法是当心你在路上设置的陷阱。其中至少有一个众人隐约皆知的就是术语、缩略语和技术名词的使用。人类每一种用来消遣的活动，无论是隐约、厨艺、体育、艺术、理论物理，都发展出一套行话，使其行内人提起一种大家都熟悉的东西时，免于说出或打出冗长的解释。由于我们对于自己的职业和爱好太熟悉， 这些行话都会从指尖自动地流淌出来，问题在于，我们忘记了我们的读者并非跟我们来自同一个兴趣俱乐部。

Obviously writers cannot avoid abbreviations and technical terms altogether. Shorthand terms are unobjectionable, indeed indispensable, when a term has become entrenched in the community one is writing for. Biologists needn’t define transcription factor or spell out mRNA every time they refer to those things, and many technical terms become so common and are so useful that they eventually cross over into everyday parlance, like cloning, gene, and DNA. But the curse of knowl- edge ensures that most writers will overestimate how standard a term has become and how wide the community is that has learned it.

显而易见，写作者不可能完全不用缩略语和技术术语。在同一个圈子里，缩写是无可厚非，甚至是不可或缺的。生物学家谈及“transcription factor”和mRNA的时候，不需要每次都给出定义和拼写。而且，一些科技术语也最终进入了日常用语，比如克隆、基因、DNA。但是技术的诅咒提醒我们，写作者往往高估了这些术语的标准化程度和普及范围。

A surprising amount of jargon can simply be banished and no one will be the worse for it. A scientist who replaces murine model with rats and mice will use up no more space on the page and be no less scientific. Philosophers are every bit as rigorous when they put away Latin expres- sions like ceteris paribus, inter alia, and simpliciter and write in English instead: other things being equal, among other things, and in and of itself. And though nonlawyers might assume that the language of con- tracts, such as the party of the first part, must serve some legal purpose, most of it is superfluous. As Adam Freedman points out in his book on legalese, “What distinguishes legal boilerplate is its combination of archaic terminology and frenzied verbosity, as though it were written by a medieval scribe on crack.“19

数量惊人的术语可以轻而易举地驱逐出境同时不会对任何人有害处。科学家可以把“鼠科动物”（murine model）替换成“老鼠”和“鼠类”，除了节省字节之外，并不损害其科学性。哲学家把下面的拉丁语换成日常语言将会更为清晰【rigorous】：eteris paribus（其他同等事物）, inter alia（在其他事物之中）, simpliciter（居于并属于其中）。尽管很多不从事法律专业的人认为“作为第一方的甲方”（the party of the first part）是为了法律上的需要，事实上，这样的表达是啰嗦无用的。正如亚当·弗里曼（Adam Freeman）在他论法律术语的书中所说：“法律语言出类拔萃之处在于它是模糊不清的术语和令人发狂的冗词的组合，就像是中世纪在石头上刻下的律法一样。”【19】（此句需要精译）

Abbreviations are tempting to thoughtless writers because they can save a few keystrokes every time they have to use the term. The writers forget that the few seconds they add to their own lives come at the cost of many minutes stolen from the lives of their readers. I stare at a table of numbers whose columns are labeled DA DN SA SN, and have to flip back and scan for the explanation: Dissimilar Affirmative, Dissimilar Negative, Similar Affirmative, Similar Negative. Each abbreviation is surrounded by many inches of white space. What possible reason could there have been for the author not to spell them out? Abbreviations that are coined for a single piece of writing are best avoided altogether, to spare the reader from having to engage in the famously tedious

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memory task called paired-associate learning, in which psychologists force their participants to memorize arbitrary pairs of text like DAX? QOV. Even moderately common abbreviations should be spelled out on first use. As Strunk and White point out, “Not everyone knows that SALT means Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and even if everyone did, there are babies being born every minute who will someday encounter the name for the first time. They deserve to see the words, not simply the initials.“20 The hazard is not limited to professional prose. Some of us receive annual Christmas letters in which the house- hold spokesperson cheerily writes, “Irwin and I had a great time at the IHRP after dispatching the children to the UNER, and we all continue work on our ECPs at the SFBS.”

对于写字不经过大脑的人来说，使用缩略语是一种诱惑，因为可以少敲几次键盘。只是写作者忘记了，他们为自己生命所省下的几秒钟是以偷窃读者的数分钟为代价的。在我读图表看到某一栏中写着DA DN SA SN，我不得不翻到后面看它们的解释，原来分别代表：不相同肯定，不相同否定，相同肯定,相同否定的意思。每个缩写旁边都留有大片空白，让人实在不能理解不写全称的原因何在。为单篇文章而生造的缩写更应该避免，这是为了把读者从配对学习（paired-associate learning）的繁琐记忆任务中解脱出来，配对学习是指心理学家会强迫参加实验者记住类似DAXQOV这类缩写字所对应的原文。纵然是寻常普通的缩写在文中首次出现时也应当给出解释。正如《风格要素》的作者史都克和怀特指出的，“并非人人都知道SALT是战略武器限制谈判（Strategic Arms Limitation Talks）的所写，即使路人皆知，每分钟都在出生的新生儿有一天也会初次遇到这个缩写。他们有权利知道全文，而非缩写。”此种灾难并非只袭击专业人士的文章。我们中有人也会每年收到这样的圣诞信，信中一位家庭发言人（household spokeperson）意气奋发地写道：“自从把孩子们送到UNER，我跟艾文在IHRP过得很棒，我们将在SFBS继续搞我们的ECPs。”

A considerate writer will also cultivate the habit of adding a few words of explanation to common technical terms, as in “Arabidopsis, a flowering mustard plant,” rather than the bare “Arabidopsis” (which I’ve seen in many science articles). It’s not just an act of magnanimity: a writer who explains technical terms can multiply her readership a thousandfold at the cost of a handful of characters, the literary equiv- alent of picking up hundred-dollar bills on the sidewalk. Readers will also thank a writer for the copious use of for example, as in, and such as, because an explanation without an example is little better than no explanation at all. For example: Here’s an explanation of the rhetorical term syllepsis: “the use of a word that relates to, qualifies, or governs two or more other words but has a different meaning in relation to each.” Got that? Now let’s say I continue with “. . . such as when Benja- min Franklin said, ‘We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.’” Clearer, no? No? Sometimes two examples are better than one, because they allow the reader to triangulate on which aspect of the example is relevant to the definition. What if I add “. . . or when Groucho Marx said, ‘You can leave in a taxi, and if you can’t get a taxi, you can leave in a huff’"?21

一位审慎的写作者也会培养为科技术语加上一点解释的习惯，比如：拟南荠（Arabidopsis），一种开花的芥末类植物，而不是像我经常在科技书籍上看到的那样，只列个术语。这不仅是一种显示雅量之举，而且要看到，一个作家对术语稍作解释就可以省下读者的千言万语，这跟从人行道上捡百元大钞一样。读者对于喜欢举例的作者也心存感激，因为一个没有例子的解释聊胜于不解释。例如，解释“一语双叙”修辞用法：“同一个词语使用两次或多次，但每次汉译都不同。”明白吗？现在让我继续：“……比如本杰明·富兰克林说过‘我们必须绞在一起，否则就会分别绞死。’”清楚些了吗？没有？有时两个例子强于一个，因为可以让读者找出不同例子与定义相关的成分【需精译】。再加一个例子怎么样？“正如Groucho Marx说‘你可以打车走，如果没车打，你就把车打一顿。’”

And when technical terms are unavoidable, why not choose ones that are easy for readers to understand and remember? Ironically, the field of linguistics is among the worst offenders, with dozens of

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mystifying technical terms: themes that have nothing to do with themes; PRO and pro, which are pronounced the same way but refer to different things; stage-level and individual-level predicates, which are just unintuitive ways of saying “temporary” and “permanent”; and Principles A, B, and C, which could just as easily have been called the Reflexive Principle, the Pronoun Principle, and the Noun Principle.

如果技术术语不可避免，为何不用都大家易懂易记的词汇呢？讽刺的是，语言学恰恰是用术语冒犯读者的重灾区。主题句跟主题无关，PRO的大小写发音相同、内容完全不同。动态谓词(stage-level predicates)和静态谓词(individual-level predicates)其实应该叫“临时谓语”和“长期谓语”更加能让人无师自通。A、B、C定理不如更平易地称为"反身代词定理”、“代名词定理”和“名词定理”。

For a long time I got a headache reading papers in semantics that analyzed the two meanings of some. In a loose, conversational sense, some implies “some, but not all”: when I say Some men are chauvinists, it’s natural to interpret me as implying that others are not. But in a strict, logical sense, some means “at least one” and does not rule out “all”; there’s no contradiction in saying Some men are chauvinists; indeed, all of them are. Many linguists refer to the two meanings as the “upper-bounded” and “lower-bounded” senses, labels borrowed from mathematics, and I could never keep them straight. At last I came across a limpid semanticist who referred to them as the “only” and “at-least” senses, labels from everyday English, and I’ve followed the literature ever since.

长期以来，我一读到语言学关于“一些”（some）两种用法就感到头疼。在宽松的会话语境里，some的意思是 “一些，而非全部”，例如我说“一些人是沙文主义者”时，听者很自然地解读为“另外的人不是沙文主义者”。然而，在严格的逻辑语境中，some表示“至少一个”但并不排除“全部”，所以当说“一些人是沙文主义者”时与说“所有人是沙文主义者”并不矛盾。许多语言学家借鉴数学词汇把这两种词义称为“上限”用法和“下限”用法。直到有一天我遇到一位语言学家，踏实一位明白人，用日常语言把这两种用法称为“只有”和“至少”用法，我一下子就茅塞顿开。

This vignette shows that even belonging to the same professional club as a writer is no protection against her curse of knowledge. I suffer the daily experience of being baffled by articles in my field, my subfield, even my sub-sub-subfield.

这个细节表明，即便是同属于一个职业圈子里的写作者，也难免会暴露在知识的诅咒之下。我每天都苦于应付来自我专业领域、子领域、子子领域的艰涩文章。

Take this sentence from an article I just read by two eminent cognitive neuroscientists, which appeared in a journal that publishes brief review articles for a wide readership:

我刚读到一篇由两位著名的认知神经学家发表在一个给圈外人看的期刊上的短评：

The slow and integrative nature of conscious perception is confirmed behaviorally by observations such as the “rabbit illusion” and its variants, where the way in which a stimulus is ultimately perceived is influenced by poststimulus events arising several hundreds of milliseconds after the original stimulus.

意识知觉

After I macheted my way through the overgrowth of passives, zombies, and redundancies, I determined that the content of the sentence resided in the term “rabbit illusion,” the phenomenon which is supposed to demonstrate “the integrative nature of conscious perception.” The

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authors write as if everyone knows what the “rabbit illusion” is, but I’ve been in this business for nearly forty years and had never heard of it. Nor does their explanation enlighten. How are we supposed to visual- ize “a stimulus,” “poststimulus events,” and “the way in which a stim- ulus is ultimately perceived”? And what does any of this have to do with rabbits? Richard Feynman once wrote, “If you ever hear yourself saying, ‘I think I understand this,’ that means you don’t.” Though the article had been written for the likes of me, the best I could say after reading this explanation was, “I think I understand this.” So I did a bit of digging and uncovered a Cutaneous Rabbit Illusion, in which if you close your eyes and someone taps you a few times on the wrist, then on the elbow, and then on the shoulder, it feels like a string of taps running up the length of your arm, like a hopping rabbit. OK, now I get it-a person’s conscious experience of where the early taps fell depends on the location of the later taps. But why didn’t the authors just say that, which would have taken no more words than “stimulus this” and “poststimulus that”?

The curse of knowledge is insidious, because it conceals not only the contents of our thoughts from us but their very form. When we know something well, we don’t realize how abstractly we think about it. And we forget that other people, who have lived their own lives, have not gone through our idiosyncratic histories of abstractification.

There are two ways in which thoughts can lose their moorings in the land of the concrete. One is called chunking. Human working memory can hold only a few items at a time. Psychologists used to think that its capacity was around seven items (plus or minus two), but later downsized even that estimate, and today believe it is closer to three or four. Fortunately, the rest of the brain is equipped with a work- around for the bottleneck. It can package ideas into bigger and bigger units, which the psychologist George Miller dubbed “chunks.“22 (Miller was one of the greatest stylists in the history of the behavioral sciences, and it’s no coincidence that he co-opted this homey term rather than inventing some technical jargon.)23 Each chunk, no matter how much

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information is packed inside it, occupies a single slot in working mem- ory. Thus we can hold in mind just a few of the letters from an arbitrary sequence like M D P H D R S V P C E O I H O P. But if they belong to well-learned chunks such as abbreviations or words, like the ones that pop out when we group the letters as MD PHD RSVP CEO IHOP, five chunks, we can remember all sixteen. Our capacity can be multiplied yet again when we package the chunks into still bigger chunks, such as the story “The MD and the PhD RSVP’d to the CEO of IHOP,” which can occupy just one slot, with three or four left over for other stories. Of course this magic depends on one’s personal history of learning. To someone who has never heard of the International House of Pancakes, IHOP takes up four slots in memory, not one. Mnemonists, the per- formers who amaze us by regurgitating superhuman amounts of infor- mation, have spent a lot of time building up a huge inventory of chunks in their long-term memories. Chunking is not just a trick for improving memory; it’s the lifeblood of higher intelligence. As children we see one person hand a cookie to another, and we remember it as an act of giving. One person gives another one a cookie in exchange for a banana; we chunk the two acts of giving together and think of the sequence as trading. Person 1 trades a banana to Person 2 for a piece of shiny metal, because he knows he can trade it to Person 3 for a cookie; we think of it as selling. Lots of people buying and selling make up a market. Activity aggregated over many markets gets chunked into the economy. The economy now can be thought of as an entity which responds to actions by central banks; we call that monetary policy. One kind of monetary policy, which involves the cen- tral bank buying private assets, is chunked as quantitative easing. And so on. As we read and learn, we master a vast number of these abstrac- tions, and each becomes a mental unit which we can bring to mind in an instant and share with others by uttering its name. An adult mind that is brimming with chunks is a powerful engine of reason, but it comes with a cost: a failure to communicate with other minds that have not mastered the same chunks. Many educated adults would be

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left out of a discussion that criticized the president for not engaging in more “quantitative easing,” though they would understand the process if it were spelled out. A high school student might be left out if you spoke about “monetary policy,” and a schoolchild might not even fol- low a conversation about “the economy.”

The amount of abstraction that a writer can get away with depends on the expertise of her readership. But divining the chunks that have been mastered by a typical reader requires a gift of clairvoyance with which few of us are blessed. When we are apprentices in our chosen specialty, we join a clique in which, it seems to us, everyone else seems to know so much! And they talk among themselves as if their knowl- edge were second nature to every educated person. As we settle in to the clique, it becomes our universe. We fail to appreciate that it is a tiny bubble in a vast multiverse of other cliques. When we make first con- tact with the aliens in other universes and jabber at them in our local code, they cannot understand us without a sci-fi Universal Translator. Even when we have an inkling that we are speaking in a specialized lingo, we may be reluctant to slip back into plain speech. It could betray to our peers the awful truth that we are still greenhorns, tenderfoots, newbies. And if our readers do know the lingo, we might be insulting their intelligence by spelling it out. We would rather run the risk of confusing them while at least appearing to be sophisticated than take a chance at belaboring the obvious while striking them as naÔve or condescending. It’s true that every writer must calibrate the degree of specialization in her language against her best guess of the audience’s familiarity with the topic. But in general it’s wiser to assume too little than too much. Every audience is spread out along a bell curve of sophistication, and inevitably we’ll bore a few at the top while baffling a few at the bottom; the only question is how many there will be of each. The curse of knowledge means that we’re more likely to overestimate the average reader’s familiarity with our little world than to underestimate it. And in any case one should not confuse clarity with condescension. Brian Greene’s explanation of the multiverse in chapter 2 shows how a classic stylist can explain an esoteric idea in plain language without patronizing his audience. The key is to

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assume that your readers are as intelligent and sophisticated as you are, but that they happen not to know something you know. Perhaps the best way to remember the dangers of private abbrevia- tion is to recall the joke about a man who walks into a Catskills resort for the first time and sees a group of retired borscht-belt comics telling jokes around a table with their pals. One of them calls out, “Forty- seven!” and the others roar with laughter. Another follows with “A hundred and twelve!” and again the others double over. The newcomer can’t figure out what’s going on, so he asks one of the old-timers to explain. The man says, “These guys have been hanging around together so long they know all the same jokes. So to save time they’ve given them numbers, and all they need to do is call out the number.” The new fellow says, “That’s ingenious! Let me try it.” So he stands up and calls out, “Twenty-one!” There is a stony silence. He tries again: “Seventy- two!” Everyone stares at him, and nobody laughs. He sinks back into his seat and whispers to his informant, “What did I do wrong? Why didn’t anyone laugh?” The man says, “It’s all in how you tell it.”

A failure to realize that my chunks may not be the same as your chunks can explain why we baffle our readers with so much shorthand, jargon, and alphabet soup. But it’s not the only way we baffle them. Sometimes wording is maddeningly opaque without being composed of technical terminology from a private clique. Even among cognitive scientists, “poststimulus event” is not a standard way to refer to a tap on the arm. A financial customer might be reasonably familiar with the world of investments and still have to puzzle over what a company brochure means by “capital changes and rights.” A computer-savvy user trying to maintain his Web site might be mystified by instructions on the maintenance page which refer to “nodes,” “content type,” and “attach- ments.” And heaven help the sleepy traveler trying to set the alarm clock in his hotel room who must interpret “alarm function” and “sec- ond display mode.” Why do writers invent such confusing terminology? I believe the answer lies in another way in which expertise can make our thoughts

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more idiosyncratic and thus harder to share: as we become familiar with something, we think about it more in terms of the use we put it to and less in terms of what it looks like and what it is made of. This transition, another staple of the cognitive psychology curriculum, is called func- tional fixity (sometimes functional fixedness).24 In the textbook experi- ment, people are given a candle, a book of matches, and a box of thumbtacks, and are asked to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax won’t drip onto the floor. The solution is to dump the thumbtacks out of the box, tack the box to the wall, and stick the candle onto the box. Most people never figure this out because they think of the box as a container for the tacks rather than a physical object in its own right, with handy features like a flat surface and perpendicular sides. The blind spot is called functional fixity because people get fixated on an object’s function and forget its physical makeup. The toddler who ignores the birthday present and plays with the wrapping paper reminds us of how we lose our appre- ciation of objects as objects and think of them as means to an end. Now, if you combine functional fixity with chunking, and stir in the curse that hides each one from our awareness, you get an explana- tion of why specialists use so much idiosyncratic terminology, together with abstractions, metaconcepts, and zombie nouns. They are not try- ing to bamboozle us; that’s just the way they think. The mental movie of a mouse cowering in the corner of a cage that has another mouse in it gets chunked into “social avoidance.” You can’t blame the neurosci- entist for thinking this way. She’s seen the movie thousands of times; she doesn’t need to hit the play button in her visual memory and watch the critters quivering every time she talks about whether her experi- ment worked. But we do need to watch them, at least the first time, to appreciate what actually happened. In a similar way, writers stop thinking-and thus stop writing- about tangible objects and instead refer to them by the role those objects play in their daily travails. Recall the example from chapter 2 in which a psychologist showed people sentences, followed by the label true or false. He explained what he did as “the subsequent presentation of an assessment word,” referring to the label as an

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“assessment word” because that’s why he put it there-so that the par- ticipants in the experiment could assess whether it applied to the pre- ceding sentence. Unfortunately, he left it up to us to figure out what an “assessment word” is-while saving no characters, and being less rather than more scientifically precise. In the same way, a tap on the wrist became a “stimulus” and a tap on the elbow became a “poststim- ulus event,” because the writers cared about the fact that one event came after the other and no longer cared about the fact that the events were taps on the arm. But we readers care. We are primates, with a third of our brains dedicated to vision, and large swaths devoted to touch, hearing, motion, and space. For us to go from “I think I understand” to “I understand,” we need to see the sights and feel the motions. Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images, like the sentences on the right: 25

The set fell off the table.

The measuring gauge was covered with dust.

Georgia O’Keeffe called some of her works “equivalents” because their forms were abstracted in a way that gave the emotional parallel of the source experience.

The ivory chess set fell off the table.

The oil-pressure gauge was covered with dust.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s landscapes were of angular skyscrapers and neon thoroughfares, but mostly of the bleached bones, desert shadows, and weathered crosses of rural New Mexico.

Notice how the abstract descriptions on the left leave out just the kind of physical detail that an expert has grown bored with but that a neo- phyte has to see: ivory chessmen, not just a “set”; an oil-pressure gauge, not just a generic “measuring gauge”; bleached bones, not just “forms.” A commitment to the concrete does more than just ease communica- tion; it can lead to better reasoning. A reader who knows what the Cutaneous Rabbit Illusion consists of is in a position to evaluate

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whether it really does imply that conscious experience is spread over time, or whether it can be explained in some other way. The profusion of metaconcepts in professional writing-all those levels, issues, contexts, frameworks, and perspectives-also makes sense when you consider the personal history of chunking and func- tional fixity in the writers. Academics, consultants, policy wonks, and other symbolic analysts really do think about “issues” (they can list them on a page), “levels of analysis” (they can argue about which is most appropriate), and “contexts” (they can use them to figure out why something works in one place but not in another). These abstractions become containers in which they store and handle their ideas, and before they know it they can no longer call anything by its name. Compare the professionalese on the left with the concrete equivalents on the right:

Participants were tested under conditions of good to excellent acoustic isolation.

Management actions at and in the immediate vicinity of airports do little to mitigate the risk of off-airport strikes during departure and approach.

We believe that the ICTS approach to delivering integrated solutions, combining effective manpower, canine services and cutting-edge technology was a key differentiator in the selection process.

We tested the students in a quiet room.

Trapping birds near an airport does little to reduce the number of times a bird will collide with a plane as it takes off or lands.

They chose our company because we protect buildings with a combination of guards, dogs, and sensors.

What we see as “a quiet room” an experimenter sees as “testing condi- tions,” because that’s what she was thinking about when she chose the room. For a safety expert at the top of the chain of command, who lives every day with the responsibility for managing risks, the bird traps set out by her underlings are a distant memory. The public-relations hack for a security firm refers to the company’s activities in a press statement

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in terms of the way she thinks about them when selling them to poten- tial clients. Slicing away the layers of familiar abstraction and showing the reader who did what to whom is a never-ending challenge for a writer. Take the expository chore of describing a correlation between two variables (like smoking and cancer, or video-game playing and vio- lence), which is a staple of public-health and social-science reporting. A writer who has spent a lot of time thinking about correlations will have mentally bubble-wrapped each of the two variables, and will have done the same to the possible ways in which they can be correlated. Those verbal packages are all within arm’s reach, and she will naturally turn to them when she has to share some news:

There is a significant positive correlation between measures of food intake and body mass index. Body mass index is an increasing function of food intake. Food intake predicts body mass index according to a monotonically increasing relation.

A reader can figure this out, but it’s hard work, like hacking through a blister pack to get at the product. If the writer de-thingifies the vari- ables by extracting them from their noun casings, she can refer to them with the language we use for actions, comparisons, and outcomes, and everything becomes clearer:

The more you eat, the fatter you get.

The curse of knowledge, in combination with chunking and func- tional fixity, helps make sense of the paradox that classic style is diffi- cult to master. What could be so hard about pretending to open your eyes and hold up your end of a conversation? The reason it’s harder than it sounds is that if you are enough of an expert in a topic to have something to say about it, you have probably come to think about it in abstract chunks and functional labels that are now second nature to

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you but still unfamiliar to your readers-and you are the last one to realize it.

As writers, then, we should try to get into our readers’ heads and be mindful of how easy it is to fall back on parochial jargon and private abstractions. But these efforts can take us only so far. None of us has, and few of us would want, a power of clairvoyance that would expose to us everyone else’s private thoughts. To escape the curse of knowledge, we have to go beyond our own powers of divination. We have to close the loop, as the engineers say, and get a feedback signal from the world of readers-that is, show a draft to some people who are similar to our intended audience and find out whether they can follow it.26 This sounds banal but is in fact profound. Social psychologists have found that we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think, even the people who are closest to us.27 Only when we ask those people do we discover that what’s obvious to us isn’t obvious to them. That’s why professional writers have editors. It’s also why politicians consult polls, why corporations hold focus groups, and why Internet companies use A/B testing, in which they try out two designs on a Web site (versions A and B) and collect data in real time on which gets more clicks. Most writers cannot afford focus groups or A/B testing, but they can ask a roommate or colleague or family member to read what they wrote and comment on it. Your reviewers needn’t even be a represen- tative sample of your intended audience. Often it’s enough that they are not you. This does not mean you should implement every last suggestion they offer. Each commentator has a curse of knowledge of his own, together with hobbyhorses, blind spots, and axes to grind, and the writer cannot pander to all of them. Many academic articles contain bewildering non sequiturs and digressions that the authors stuck in at the insistence of an anonymous reviewer who had the power to reject it from the journal if they didn’t comply. Good prose is never written by a committee. A writer should revise in response to a comment when

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it comes from more than one reader or when it makes sense to the writer herself. And that leads to another way to escape the curse of knowledge: show a draft to yourself, ideally after enough time has passed that the text is no longer familiar. If you are like me you will find yourself thinking, “What did I mean by that?” or “How does this follow?” or, all too often, “Who wrote this crap?” I am told there are writers who can tap out a coherent essay in a single pass, at most checking for typos and touching up the punctua- tion before sending it off for publication. You are probably not one of them. Most writers polish draft after draft. I rework every sentence a few times before going on to the next, and revise the whole chapter two or three times before I show it to anyone. Then, with feedback in hand, I revise each chapter twice more before circling back and giving the entire book at least two complete passes of polishing. Only then does it go to the copy editor, who starts another couple of rounds of tweaking. Too many things have to go right in a passage of writing for most mortals to get them all the first time. It’s hard enough to formulate a thought that is interesting and true. Only after laying a semblance of it on the page can a writer free up the cognitive resources needed to make the sentence grammatical, graceful, and, most important, transparent to the reader. The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader. The advice in this and other stylebooks is not so much on how to write as on how to revise. Much advice on writing has the tone of moral counsel, as if being a good writer will make you a better person. Unfortunately for cosmic justice, many gifted writers are scoundrels, and many inept ones are the salt of the earth. But the imperative to overcome the curse of knowledge may be the bit of writerly advice that comes closest to being sound moral advice: always try to lift yourself out of your parochial mindset and find out how other people think and feel. It may not make you a better person in all spheres of life, but it will be a source of con- tinuing kindness to your readers.

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The authors propose that distinct selection pressures have influenced cognitive abilities and personality traits: mutation- selection balance accounts for differences in cognitive ability, whereas balancing selection accounts for differences in personality traits. Note, too, how parallel syntax can allow a reader to make sense of even the most unintelligible of the garden path sentences: Though the horse guided past the barn walked with ease, the horse raced past the barn fell. Attachment to the phrase next door. Finally, we get to the panel on sex with four professors. Here we have a bias that is mainly geometri.cal. Go back to the trees on page 117. Why is the tree on the bottom, with the unintended meaning, the one the reader arrived at? The dif.ference is in where the phrase with four professors is attached. When given a choice, readers tend to attach phrases lower in the tree rather than higher. Another way of putting it is that they like to absorb words into the phrase they are working on for as long they can, rather than closing off the phrase and figuring out somewhere else to place the incoming words. Since readers tend to link a phrase to the words that came just before it, they will misunderstand a sentence when the writer had a more remote association in mind. Together with the sex with professors, this bias explains the foreplay of several weeks’ duration, the cow that does not smoke or drink, the job candidate with no qualifications, the cyclist who was killed twice, the trail that was mistaken for a bear, and the coup that rattled Beijing. Many authors of stylebooks, such as Strunk and White, try to pro.tect writers against this accidental hilarity with the advice to “keep related words together.” Unfortunately, the advice is unhelpful because it is stated in terms of strings rather than trees. In a panel on sex with four professors, trying to keep related words together won’t help: they already are together. The mischievous phrase on sex is smack-dab next to the related phrase a panel on the left, where it belongs—but it’s also

Noun Phrase

AMBIGUOUS VERSION smack-dab next to the unrelated phrase four professors on the right, where it doesn’t. What the writer has to worry about is connectedness in the tree (a panel on sex versus sex with four professors), not just adja.cency in the string. In fact the obvious way to clarify the sentence— flipping the order of the two phrases, yielding a panel with four professors on sex—pulls related words apart (a panel and on sex) rather than keeping them together, at least in the string. As the diagrams on pages 128 and 129 show, the related words are still connected in the tree, just in a different order. The advice is better stated as “pull unrelated (but mutually attracted) phrases apart.” If the panel had been about controlled substances rather than amorous interactions, the opposite order would be safer: A panel with four professors on drugs promises as interesting an evening as the panel on sex with four professors, but the writer would be better off wording it as a panel on drugs with four professors. That’s because of

Noun Phrase Article Noun Prep. Phrase

Prep. Noun Phrase Prep. Phrase Noun

a panel with four on sex professors

UNAMBIGUOUS VERSION the effect of statistically frequent word sequences: the pair sex with attracts the phrase on the right; the pair on drugs attracts the phrase on the left. Writers need to look in both directions, and shunt phrases around to keep them from dangerous liaisons with an inappropriate next-door neighbor. Here are some reorderings of the examples from pages 117–18, with the ambiguities eliminated: For several weeks the young man had involuntary seminal fluid emission when he engaged in foreplay. Wanted: Man that does not smoke or drink, to take care of cow. This week’s youth discussion in the church basement will be on teen suicide. I enthusiastically recommend, with no qualifications whatsoever, this candidate.

Prosecutors yesterday confirmed they will appeal the “unduly lenient” sentence of a motorist who escaped prison after being convicted for the second time of killing a cyclist. A teen hunter has been convicted of second-degree manslaughter for fatally shooting a hiker he had mistaken for a bear on a popular Washington state trail. The guideline to move a phrase close to the words it belongs with, and away from those it doesn’t belong with, is useful only insofar as the rules of English syntax allow a phrase to be moved. Our language puts us at a disadvantage here. In many other languages, such as Latin and Russian, writers have the freedom to scramble the order of words to suit their rhetorical purposes, because case markers on the nouns, or agreement markers on the verbs, will keep the relationships straight in the reader’s mind. English, which has a rudimentary system of case and agreement, must be more tyrannical about order. This puts the writer in a bind. The rules of English syntax force him to put the subject before the verb, and the verb before the object. But he may not want the reader to think about the content of the subject before she thinks about the contents of the verb and object. Why should a writer want to control the order in which the reader thinks her thoughts? Preventing unwanted attachments, as we have just seen, is one reason. There are two others, and each is a monumen.tal principle of composition. Save the heaviest for last. The Scottish prayer asks the Lord to deliver us from “ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night”—not from “things that go bump in the night and long-leggedy beasties and ghoulies and ghosties.” The order fits with our cognitive processes: it’s taxing to work on a big heavy phrase (things that go bump in the night) while you are holding in mem.ory an incomplete bigger phrase it’s part of (in this case, the four-part coordination embracing things, beasties, ghoulies, and ghosties). A big heavy phrase is easier to handle if it comes at the end, when your work assembling the overarching phrase is done and nothing else is on your mind. (It’s another version of the advice to prefer right-branching trees over left-branching and center-embedded ones.) Light-before-heavy is one of the oldest principles in linguistics, having been discovered in the fourth century bce by the Sanskrit grammarian P.n. ini.32 It often guides the intuitions of writers when they have to choose an order for items in a list, as in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle; and Faster than a speeding bul.let! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!

Topic, then comment. Given, then new. These are more precise ver.sions of the Strunkian advice to “put the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.” Paul McCartney was mindful of the advice when he sang, “So may I introduce to you, the act you’ve known for all these years: Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band!” Once he had the listen.ers’ attention, and reminded them that they were there to be intro.duced to someone, he used the end of the sentence to provide the newsworthy information; he did not sing, “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the act you’ve known for all these years; may I introduce them to you?”33 Once again, it’s good cognitive psychology: people learn by integrating new information into their existing web of knowledge. They don’t like it when a fact is hurled at them from out of the blue and they have to keep it levitating in short-term memory until they find a relevant background to embed it in a few moments later. Topic-then-comment and given-then-new orderings are major contrib.utors to coherence, the feeling that one sentence flows into the next rather than jerking the reader around. English syntax demands subject before object. Human memory demands light before heavy. Human comprehension demands topic before comment and given before new. How can a writer reconcile these irreconcilable demands about where the words should go in a sentence? Necessity is the mother of invention, and over the centuries the English language has developed workarounds for its rigid syntax. They consist of alternative constructions that are more or less synonymous but that place the participants in different positions in the left-to-right ordering of the string, which means they appear at different times in the early-to-late processing in a reader’s mind. Fluent writers have these constructions at their fingertips to simultaneously control the content of a sentence and the sequencing of its words.

Foremost among them is the unfairly maligned passive voice: Laius was killed by Oedipus, as opposed to Oedipus killed Laius. In chapter 2 we saw one of the benefits of the passive, namely that the agent of the event, expressed in the by.phrase, can go unmentioned. This is handy for mistake-makers who are trying to keep their names out of the spot.light and for narrators who want you to know that helicopters were used to put out some fires but don’t think you need to know that it was a guy named Bob who flew one of the helicopters. Now we see the other major benefit of the passive: it allows the doer to be mentioned later in the sentence than the done-to. That comes in handy in implementing the two principles of composition when they would otherwise be sty.mied by the rigid word order of English. The passive allows a writer to postpone the mention of a doer that is heavy, old news, or both. Let’s look at how this works. Consider this passage from the Wikipedia entry for Oedipus Rex, which (spoiler alert) reveals the terrible truth about Oedipus’s parentage. A man arrives from Corinth with the message that Oedipus’s father has died. . . . It emerges that this messenger was formerly a shepherd on Mount Cithaeron, and that he was given a baby. . . .  The baby, he says, was given to him by another shepherd from the Laius household, who had been told to get rid of the child. It contains three passives in quick succession (was given a baby; was given to him; had been told), and for good reason. First we are intro.duced to a messenger; all eyes are upon him. If he figures in any subse.quent news, he should be mentioned first. And so he is, thanks to the passive voice, even though the news does not involve his doing any.thing: He (old information) was given a baby (new information).

Now that we’ve been introduced to a baby, the baby is on our minds. If there’s anything new to say about him, the news should begin with a mention of that baby. Once again the passive voice makes that possible, even though the baby didn’t do anything: The baby, he says, was given to him by another shepherd. The shepherd in question is not just newswor.thy but also heavy: he is being singled out with the big, hairy phrase another shepherd from the Laius household, who had been told to get rid of the child. That’s a lot of verbiage for a reader to handle while figuring out the syntax of the sentence, but the passive voice allows it to come at the end, when all of the reader’s other work is done. Now imagine that an editor mindlessly followed the common advice to avoid the passive and altered the passage accordingly: A man arrives from Corinth with the message that Oedipus’s father has died. . . . It emerges that this messenger was formerly a shepherd on Mount Cithaeron, and that someone gave him a baby. . . . Another shepherd from the Laius household, he says, whom someone had told to get rid of the child, gave the baby to him. Active, shmactive! This is what happens when a heavy phrase with new information is forced into the beginning of a sentence just because it happens to be the agent of the action and that’s the only place an active sentence will let it appear. The original passage had a third passive—who had been told to get rid of the child—which the copy editor of my nightmares has also turned into an active: whom someone had told to get rid of the child. This highlights yet another payoff of the passive voice: it can unburden memory by shortening the interval between a filler and a gap. When an item is modified by a relative clause, and its role inside the clause is the object of the verb, the reader is faced with a long span between the filler and the gap.34 Look at the tree at the top of the next page, which has a relative clause in the active voice:

Noun Phrase

Article Noun Clause a shepherd Noun Phrase Clause

whom Noun Phrase Verb Phrase

someone Verb Verb Phrase had Verb Noun Phrase Verb Phrase (object) told to get rid of the child

You can see a long arrow between the filler whom and the gap after told, which spans three words and three newly introduced phrases. That’s the material a reader must hold in mind between the time she Noun Phrase

Article Noun Clause a shepherd Noun Phrase Clause

had Verb Verb Phrase

been Verb Verb Phrase told

to get rid of the child

encounters whom and the time she can figure out what the whom is doing. Now look at the second tree, where the relative clause has been put in the passive. A puny arrow connects the filler who with a gap right next door, and the reader gets instant gratification: no sooner does she come across who than she knows what it’s doing. True, the passive phrase itself is heavier than the active, with four levels of branching rather than three, but it comes at the end, where there’s nothing else to keep track of. That’s why well-written prose puts object relative clauses in the passive voice, and difficult prose keeps them in the active voice, like this: Among those called to the meeting was Mohamed ElBaradei,
the former United Nations diplomat protesters demanding Mr. Morsi’s ouster have tapped __ as one of their negotiators over a new interim government, Reuters reported, citing unnamed official sources. This sentence is encumbered, among other things, by a long stretch between the filler of the relative clause, the former United Nations dip.lomat, and the gap after tapped seven words later. Though the sentence may be beyond salvation, passivizing the relative clause would be a place to start: the former United Nations diplomat who has been tapped by protesters demanding Mr. Morsi’s ouster. The passive voice is just one of the gadgets that the English language makes available to rearrange phrases while preserving their semantic roles. Here are a few others that are handy when the need arises to separate illicit neighbors, to place old information before new, to put fillers close to their gaps, or to save the heaviest for last:35 Basic order: Preposing:
Oedipus met Laius on the road to On the road to Thebes, Oedipus met
Thebes. Laius.
Basic order: Postposing:
The servant left the baby whom Laius The servant left on the mountaintop
had condemned to die on the the baby whom Laius had condemned
mountaintop. to die.

Double-object dative: Prepositional dative:
Jocasta handed her servant the infant. Jocasta handed the infant to her
servant.
Basic construction: Existential:
A curse was on the kingdom. There was a curse on the kingdom.
Clause as subject: Extraposed clause:
That Oedipus would learn the truth It was inevitable that Oedipus would
was inevitable. learn the truth.
Basic construction: Cleft:
Oedipus killed Laius. It was Oedipus who killed Laius.
It was Laius whom Oedipus killed.
Basic construction: Pseudo-cleft:
Oedipus killed Laius. What Oedipus did was kill Laius.

The versions on the right are a bit longer, wordier, or more formal than the ones on the left, and the last four, with their needless words (there, it, what), are often good candidates for replacement by their snappier near-synonyms. But by now you can see why they’re some.times useful: they give the writer additional freedom in ordering phrases in the tree. Preposing allows the writer to move a modifying phrase leftward, which can separate it from a pesky little phrase to which it might other.wise attach itself (as with the young man who had involuntary seminal emissions if he engaged in foreplay for several weeks). The next four constructions allow a writer to shift a phrase rightward when it is too heavy or too newsworthy to be taking up space in the middle of a sen.tence. The last two allow a writer an additional lever of control over what the reader will treat as given and what she will treat as new. The cleft inverts the usual ordering: the new information is thrust into the spot.light early, and the given information, which serves as its background, comes at the end. The pseudo-cleft retains the usual order (given-to-new), but both kinds of clefting add an important twist: the given information is not old news, in the sense of having been mentioned earlier in the discussion, but presupposed: the reader is asked to accept it as true, and is now being informed what it is true of. It was Oedipus who killed Laius, for example, takes it for granted that someone killed Laius, the only question being who; the main clause of the sentence informs us who the who is.

Another major resource that English puts at a writer’s disposal is the choice of verb. Some verbs have a counterpart which narrates the same scenario but fills its grammatical slots (subject, object, oblique object) with different role-players (the mover, the thing moved, the source, or the recipient):
Jocasta gave the infant to her servant. The servant received the infant from Jocasta.
She robbed her uncle of a cigar. She stole a cigar from her uncle.
Morris sold a watch to Zak. Zak bought a watch from Morris.
I substituted margarine for the lard. I replaced the lard with margarine.
The vandals fled the police. The police chased the vandals.
The goalie sustained an injury from the onrushing forward. The onrushing forward inflicted an injury on the goalie.

Like the menu of constructions, the menu of verbs can give a writer several options on where to place a given, new, light, or heavy phrase. Holding the crime constant, the verb rob places the ill-gotten gains at the end (She robbed her uncle of an expensive hand.rolled Cuban cigar); the verb steal places the victim at the end (She stole a cigar from her greedy lascivious uncle). Good writers may have no explicit awareness of how these con.structions and verb types work, and they certainly don’t know their names. The words and structures lie waiting in memory, bearing little tags like “here’s a way to delay mentioning a modifier” or “my direct object is the thing being transferred.” Accomplished wordsmiths iden.tify a need while writing, or spot a problem in a sentence while revis.ing, and when all goes well the suitable word or construction pops into mind.

Just below the surface of these inchoate intuitions, I believe, is a tacit awareness that the writer’s goal is to encode a web of ideas into a string of words using a tree of phrases. Aspiring wordsmiths would do well to cultivate this awareness. It can help rid their writing of errors, dead ends, and confusing passages. And it can take the fear and boredom out of grammar, because it’s always more inviting to master a system when you have a clear idea of what it is designed to accomplish.

Chapter 5 ArCs of CoherenCe

how to ensuRe that ReadeRs will gRasp the topiC, get the point, keep tRaCk of the playeRs, and see how one idea follows fRom anotheR S o many things can go wrong in a passage of prose. The writing can be bloated, self-conscious, academic; these are habits that classic style, which treats prose as a window onto the world, is designed to break. The passage can be cryptic, abstruse, arcane; these are symptoms of the curse of knowledge. The syntax can be defective, convoluted, ambiguous; these are flaws that can be prevented by an awareness of the treelike nature of a sentence. This chapter is about yet another thing that can go wrong in writ.ing. Even if every sentence in a text is crisp, lucid, and well formed, a succession of them can feel choppy, disjointed, unfocused—in a word, incoherent. Consider this passage: The northern United States and Canada are places where herons live and breed. Spending the winter here has its advantages. Great Blue Herons live and breed in most of the northern United States. It’s an advantage for herons to avoid the dangers of migration. Herons head south when the cold weather arrives. The earliest herons to arrive on the breeding grounds have an advantage. The winters are relatively mild in Cape Cod.

The individual sentences are clear enough, and they obviously pertain to a single topic. But the passage is incomprehensible. By the second sentence we’re wondering about where here is. The third has us puz.zling over whether great blue herons differ from herons in general, and if they do, whether these herons live only in the northern United States, unlike the other herons, who live in Canada as well. The fourth sentence seems to come out of the blue, and the fifth seems to contra.dict the fourth. The paragraph is then rounded out with two non sequiturs. Now, I doctored this passage to make it bewilderingly incoherent, just to dramatize the topic of this chapter. But lesser failures of coher.ence are among the commonest flaws in writing. Consider some of the clumsy sentences I fixed in earlier chapters, repeated here in their improved versions: The researchers found that in groups with little alcoholism, such as Jews, people actually drink moderate amounts of alcohol, but few of them drink too much and become alcoholics. For the third time in a decade, a third-rate Serbian military is brutally targeting civilians, but beating it is hardly worth the effort; this view is not based on a lack of understanding of what is occurring on the ground. Even with the syntax repaired, the sentences are difficult to under.stand, and the original contexts don’t make them any clearer. The problem is coherence: we don’t know why one clause follows another. No further tinkering with the syntax will help. We need a context that leads the reader to understand why the writer felt the need to assert what she is now asserting:

One might think that the reason some ethnic groups have high rates of alcoholism is that drinking is common in the group. According to this hypothesis, drinking even moderate amounts of alcohol puts people at risk of drinking too much and becoming alcoholics. If so, we should find that the groups with the lowest rates of alcoholism are those in which drinking of any kind is forbidden, such as Mormons or Muslims. But that’s not what the researchers discovered. . . . Many policy analysts write as if the obvious way to deal with armies that commit human rights violations is to invade them with our vastly superior military forces. Anyone who opposes a military invasion, they argue, must be ignorant of the atrocities taking place. But that’s not why I and other statesmen favor a different strategy for ending this crisis. Make no mistake: . . . Whenever one sentence comes after another, readers need to see a connection between them. So eager are readers to seek coherence that they will often supply it when none exists. One category of frequently emailed bloopers consists of sequences which are amusing not because of problems in syntax but because of problems in coherence:1 Miss Charlene Mason sang, “I Will Not Pass This Way Again,” giving obvious pleasure to the congregation. The sermon this morning: “Jesus Walks on the Water.” The sermon tonight will be “Searching for Jesus.” Dog for sale: Eats anything and is fond of children. We do not tear your clothing with machinery. We do it carefully by hand. The patient has been depressed ever since she began seeing me in 2008. In fact, it’s the hunger for coherence that drives the entire process of understanding language. Suppose a reader has successfully parsed a sentence and now has an understanding of who did what to whom or what is true of what. Now he must integrate it with the rest of his knowledge, because a factoid floating around in the brain unlinked to anything else is as useless as a book filed on a random shelf in a library or a Web site with no links to it. This linking must be repeated with each sentence in the text. That is how the content of a passage of text becomes integrated into the reader’s web of knowledge.

This chapter is about the sense of style in passages longer than a sentence—a paragraph, a blog post, a review, an article, an essay, or a book. Some of the principles of style that apply within a sentence, such as building an orderly tree and placing given before new information, apply to extended passages as well. But as we shall see, coherent dis.course also uses devices that differ from the branching of a tree, and our metaphors must expand accordingly. At first glance, the organization of a text really does seem like a tree, with passages of language embedded in still larger passages of lan.guage. Several clauses are joined or embedded in a sentence; several sentences make up a paragraph; several paragraphs make up a section, several sections a chapter, several chapters a book. A text with this hierarchical structure is easy for a reader to assimilate because at any level of granularity, from clauses to chapters, the passage can be repre.sented in the reader’s mind as a single chunk, and the reader never has to juggle more than a few chunks at a time as he figures out how they are related. To compose a passage with this orderly structure, a writer must orga.nize the content she hopes to convey into a neat hierarchy. Sometimes she may be lucky enough to begin with a firm grasp of the hierarchical organization of her material, but more often she will have an unruly swarm of ideas buzzing in her head and must get them to settle down into an orderly configuration. The time-honored solution is to create an outline, which is just a tree lying on its side, its branches marked by indentations, dashes, bullets, or Roman and Arabic numerals, rather than by forking line segments. One way to fashion an outline is to jot your ideas on a page or on index cards more or less at random and then look for ones that seem to belong together. If you reorder the items with the clusters of related ideas placed near one another, then arrange the clusters that seem to belong together in larger clusters, group those into still larger clusters, and so on, you’ll end up with a treelike outline.

But now you face a major difference between the syntactic tree of a sentence and the outline tree of a text. When it comes to putting the units into a left-to-right order, the rules of English syntax leave writers with only a few possibilities. The object, for example, pretty much has to come after the verb. But if you’re writing an essay on mammals, it’s up to you whether to write first about the rodents, then the primates, then the bats, and so on, or first the primates, then the felines, then the whales and dolphins, or any of the other 403,291,461,126,605,635,584, 000,000 logically possible orderings of the twenty-six subgroups. The writer’s challenge is to come up with a scheme to order these units of text—to turn a dangly mobile into a rigid tree. Often an author will pick an order more or less arbitrarily and use verbal signposts or numbered headings to guide the reader on his jour.ney through the text (Part II Section C Subsection 4 Paragraph b, or Section 2.3.4.2). But in many genres, numbered headings are not an option, and as we saw in chapter 2, excessive signposting can bore and confuse a reader. And regardless of how many headings or signposts you use, it’s always best to lay an intuitive trail through the territory: a scheme for stringing the units into a natural order that allows readers to anticipate what they will encounter next. There is no algorithm for doing this, but let me give you a couple of examples. I once had the challenge of explaining an unruly literature on the neurobiology and genetics of language, which embraces a vast range of topics, including case studies of neurological patients, computer sim.ulations of neural networks, and neuroimaging of the brain areas that are active during language processing. The first temptation was to order the studies historically, which is how textbooks do it, but this would have been an indulgence in professional narcissism: my readers were interested in the brain, not in the history of the doctors and pro.fessors who study the brain. It dawned on me that a clearer trajectory through this morass would consist of zooming in from a bird’s-eye view to increasingly microscopic components. From the highest van.tage point you can make out only the brain’s two big hemispheres, so I began with studies of split-brain patients and other discoveries that locate language in the left hemisphere. Zooming in on that hemisphere, one can see a big cleft dividing the temporal lobe from the rest of the brain, and the territory on the banks of that cleft repeatedly turns up as crucial for language in clinical studies of stroke patients and brain scans of intact subjects. Moving in closer, one can distinguish various regions—Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area, and so on—and the discussion can turn to the more specific language skills, such as recognizing words and parsing them into a tree, that have been tied to each area. Now we can switch from the naked eye to a microscope and peer into models of neural networks. From there we can crank the microscope one more turn to the level of genes, which is an opportunity to review studies of dyslexia and other inherited language disorders. All the research fell into place along a single global-to-local continuum. I had my ordering.

The ways to order material are as plentiful as the ways to tell a story. On another occasion I had to review research on English, French, Hebrew, German, Chinese, Dutch, Hungarian, and Arapesh, a lan.guage spoken in New Guinea. English was the natural starting point, but in what order should I bring up the others? I suppose I could have reviewed them in terms of how familiar they are to me or to American readers, or the order in which the studies were done, or even alphabet.ically. But instead I marched backwards in time to older and older (and more and more inclusive) language families: first the languages begot.ten by Germanic tribes who lived about 2,000 years ago, including Dutch and German; then to other Indo-European tribes, such as the Italic people who split from their Germanic brethren about 3,500 years ago, which brings in French; then to the Uralic tribes, which probably coexisted with the Indo-Europeans about 7,000 years ago and left us with Hungarian; and so on, back through history and outward in lan.guage families.

There are many other ordering schemes: leading the reader on a trek across a geographical territory; narrating the travails of a hero who must overcome obstacles on his way to achieving a goal; mimicking a debate in which the two sides present their positions, rebut each other, sum up their cases, and await a verdict; and, sometimes, recounting the history of discovery that culminated in our current understanding. Appreciating the treelike nature of a text can also help you under.stand one of the few devices available in nontechnical prose to visually mark the structure of discourse: the paragraph break. Many writing guides provide detailed instructions on how to build a paragraph. But the instructions are misguided, because there is no such thing as a para.graph. That is, there is no item in an outline, no branch of a tree, no unit of discourse that consistently corresponds to a block of text delimited by a blank line or an indentation. What does exist is the paragraph break: a visual bookmark that allows the reader to pause, take a breather, assimilate what he has read, and then find his place again on the page. Paragraph breaks generally coincide with the divisions between branches in the discourse tree, that is, cohesive chunks of text. But the same little notch must be used for divisions between branches of every size, whether it’s the end of a minor digression, the end of a major sum.mation, or anything in between. Sometimes a writer should cleave an intimidating block of print with a paragraph break just to give the read.er’s eyes a place to alight and rest. Academic writers often neglect to do this and trowel out massive slabs of visually monotonous text. Newspa.per journalists, mindful of their readers’ attention spans, sometimes go to the other extreme and dice their text into nanoparagraphs consisting of a sentence or two apiece. Inexperienced writers tend to be closer to academics than to journalists and use too few paragraph breaks rather than too many. It’s always good to show mercy to your readers and peri.odically let them rest their weary eyes. Just be sure not to derail them in the middle of a train of thought. Carve the notch above a sentence that does not elaborate or follow from the one that came before. For all the cognitive benefits of hierarchical organization, not all texts have to be organized into a tree. A skilled writer can interleave multiple story lines, or deliberately manipulate suspense and surprise, or engage the reader with a chain of associations, each topic shunting the reader to the next. But no writer can leave the macroscopic organi.zation of a text to chance.

Whether or not a text is organized to fit into a hierarchical outline, the tree metaphor goes only so far. No sentence is an island; nor is a para.graph, a section, or a chapter. All of them contain links to other chunks of text. A sentence may elaborate, qualify, or generalize the one that came before. A theme or topic may run through a long stretch of writ.ing. People, places, and ideas may make repeat appearances, and the reader must keep track of them as they come and go. These connec.tions, which drape themselves from the limbs of one tree to the limbs of another, violate the neatly nested, branch-within-branch geometry of a tree.2 I’ll call them arcs of coherence. Like the mass of cables drooping behind a desk, the conceptual con.nections from one sentence to another have a tendency to get gnarled up in a big, snaggly tangle. That’s because the links connected to any idea in our web of knowledge run upwards, downwards, and sideways to other ideas, often spanning long distances. Inside the writer’s brain, the links between ideas are kept straight by the neural code that makes memory and reasoning possible. But out there on the page, the connec.tions have to be signaled by the lexical and syntactic resources of the English language. The challenge to the writer is to use those resources so that the reader can graft the information in a series of sentences into his web of knowledge without getting tangled up in either. Coherence begins with the writer and reader being clear about the topic. The topic corresponds to the small territory within the vast web of knowledge into which the incoming sentences should be merged. It may seem obvious that a writer should begin by laying her topic on the table for the reader to see, but not all writers do. A writer might think that it’s unsubtle to announce the topic in so many words, as in “This paper is about hamsters.” Or she herself may discover her topic only after she has finished laying her ideas on paper, and forget to go back and revise the opening to let the reader in on her discovery.

A classic experiment by the psychologists John Bransford and Mar.cia Johnson shows why it’s essential to let the reader in on the topic early.3 They asked participants to read and remember the following passage: The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different groups depending on their makeup. Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step, otherwise you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo any particular endeavor. That is, it is better to do too few things at once than too many. In the short run this may not seem important, but complications from doing too many can easily arise. A mistake can be expensive as well. The manipulation of the appropriate mechanisms should be self-explanatory, and we need not dwell on it here. At first the whole procedure will seem com.plicated. Soon, however, it will become just another facet of life. It is difficult to foresee any end to the necessity for this task in the immediate future, but then one never can tell. Needless to say, the passage made little sense to them, as I expect it made little sense to you, and they could remember few of the sentences. Another group of people got the same passage but with a new tidbit slipped into the instructions: “The paragraph you will hear will be about washing clothes.” The level of recall doubled. A third group was given the topic after reading the story; it didn’t help them at all. The moral for a writer is obvious: a reader must know the topic of a text in order to understand it. As newspaper editors say: Don’t bury the lede (lede being journalist jargon for “lead,” which might otherwise be misread as the heavy metal). Now, you might object that the experimenters stacked the deck by writing a passage about a concrete physical activity in vague and abstract language. But they also ran a study in which almost every sentence referred to a concrete object or action:

A newspaper is better than a magazine. A seashore is a better place than the street. At first it is better to run than to walk. You may have to try several times. It takes some skill but it’s easy to learn. Even young children can enjoy it. Once successful, complications are minimal. Birds seldom get too close. Rain, however, soaks in very fast. Too many people doing the same thing can also cause problems. One needs lots of room. If there are no complications, it can be very peaceful. A rock will serve as an anchor. If things break loose from it, however, you will not get a second chance.

Make sense? How about with this clue: “The sentences are about mak.ing and flying a kite.” Stating the topic is necessary because even the most explicit language can touch on only a few high points of a story. The reader has to fill in the background—to read between the lines, to connect the dots—and if he doesn’t know which background is appli.cable, he will be mystified. Together with the topic of a text, the reader usually needs to know its point. He needs to know what the author is trying to accomplish as she explores the topic. Human behavior in general is understandable only once you know the actor’s goals. When you see someone waving her arms, the first thing you want to know is whether she is trying to attract attention, shoo away flies, or exercise her deltoids. That is also true of writing. The reader needs to know whether a writer is rabbiting on about a topic in order to explain it, convey interesting new facts about it, advance an argument about it, or use it as an example of an important generalization. In other words, a writer has to have both something to talk about (the topic) and something to say (the point).

Writers often resist telegraphing their point at the outset. Sometimes they feel it would spoil the suspense. Sometimes they are victims of professional narcissism and write as if the reader were interested in every blind alley, fool’s errand, and wild-goose chase they engaged in while exploring the topic. Most often, they themselves don’t know the point of their essay until they have written a first draft, and never go back to reshape the essay so that the point is clear at the beginning. An old cartoon captioned “The PhD thesis” shows a little boy firing an arrow into the air, seeing where it lands, walking over to it, and paint.ing a target around that spot. It’s not how science should work, but it’s sometimes how writing must work. Some genres, such as the scholarly journal article, force an author to lay out her point in a summary, an abstract, or a synopsis. Others, such as magazines and newspapers, help the reader with a tag line (an explanation beneath the cutesy title) or a pull quote (an illustrative sentence displayed in a box). Some style guides, such as Joseph Wil.liams’s excellent Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, provide a formula. Williams advises writers to structure every section as an “issue” (the topic) followed by a “discussion,” and to state the point of the text at the end of the issue. The exact place in which the point of a text is displayed is less important than the imperative to divulge it somewhere not too far from the beginning. There are, to be sure, stand-up comedians, shaggy-dog raconteurs, consummate essayists, and authors of mystery novels who can build up curiosity and suspense and then resolve it all with a sudden revelation. But everyone else should strive to inform, not dumbfound, and that means that writers should make it clear to their readers what they are trying to accomplish.

As a reader works his way through a text, the next challenge is to keep track of the ideas that run through it and to discern the logical relationship between one idea and the next. Let’s work through a sim.ple text in which the author makes it easy. My model of coherent discourse is the original version of the text that I doctored for the opening of the chapter. It comes from a weekly feature in a local tabloid, The Cape Codder, called “Ask the Bird Folks.” The Bird Folks actually consist of one bird folk, Mike O’Connor, who owns the Bird Watcher’s General Store in Orleans, Massachusetts. Soon after opening the store O’Connor found himself fielding so many questions from curious customers that he tried his hand at writing a column. In this one, he responded to a reader worried about a heron which showed up at a bog near her house and was unable to feed because the bog had frozen over.4 After reassuring her that herons can survive a few days without eating, he provides the backstory to this pathetic scene:

Great Blue Herons live and breed just about anywhere in the northern United States and most of Canada. When the cold weather arrives, the herons head south. A few come to Cape Cod where the winters usually aren’t too bad. Most of these herons are either inexperienced young birds or lost adult males too stubborn to ask for directions south. Spending the winter here has its advantages, and I’m not talking about the free off-season parking in Provincetown. Herons are able to avoid the dangers of migra.tion, plus they can be one of the earliest to arrive on the breeding grounds. However, there is a risk with staying this far north. Yes, our winters are often mild and pleasant. Then there is this winter, the winter that never ends. Snow, ice and cold are not kind to birds and I’d bet many herons won’t be booking a visit to Cape Cod next year. Herons have one thing in their favor: they are excellent hunters and are total opportunists. When the fish are frozen out, they’ll eat other things, including crustaceans, mice, voles and small

birds. One hungry heron was seen chowing down a litter of feral kittens. I know, I know, I too was upset to read about the herons eating small birds. Herons also have one odd behavior that is not in their favor. In the winter they seem to choose and defend a favorite fishing hole. When these areas become frozen solid, some herons don’t seem to catch on and often will stand over a frozen stream for days waiting for the fish to return. Boy, talk about stubborn. The primary lifeline between an incoming sentence and a reader’s web of knowledge is the topic. The word “topic” in linguistics actually has two meanings.5 In this chapter we have been looking at the topic of a discourse or text, namely the subject matter of a series of connected sentences. In chapter 4 we looked at the topic of a sentence, namely what that sentence is about. In most English sentences, the topic is the grammatical subject, though it can also be introduced in a separate phrase, like As for fruit, I prefer blueberries, or Speaking of ducks, have you heard the one about the man who walked into a bar with a duck on his head? In that chapter we saw that in a coherent passage the topic of the discourse is aligned with the topic of the sentence. Now let’s see how O’Connor uses this principle over an extended discussion. The topic of the column is obviously “herons in winter”; that’s what the reader asked about. The point of the column is to explain why a heron might stand over a frozen bog. The topic of the first sentence, namely the subject, is also the topic of the column: “Great Blue Herons live and breed . . .” Imagine that it had begun with something like my doctored version, “Canada is a place where herons live and breed.” It would knock the reader off balance, because he has no reason at this moment to be thinking about Canada. As the passage proceeds, O’Connor keeps the herons in subject position. Here is a list of the subjects in order, with the ones referring to herons in the left column, the ones referring to something else in the right column, and horizontal lines separating the paragraphs:

Great Blue Herons live the herons head
A few come Most of these herons are

Spending the winter here has Herons are able to avoid there is a risk our winters are there is this winter Snow, ice and cold are not kind Herons have one thing they are excellent hunters they’ll eat One hungry heron was seen I too was upset

Herons also have they seem to choose some herons don’t seem to catch on [You] talk about Putting aside the interjections at the ends of the last two paragraphs, in which the author addresses the reader directly for humorous effect (I know, I know, I too was upset and Talk about stubborn), the subjects (and hence the sentence topics) are remarkably consistent. In the first, third, and fourth paragraphs, every subject but one consists of herons. The consistent string of sentence topics, all related to the column topic, forms a satisfying arc of coherence over the passage. Better still, the herons are not just any old subjects. They are actors who do things. They migrate, they avoid danger, they hunt, they eat, they stand. That is a hallmark of classic style, or for that matter any good style. It’s always easier for a reader to follow a narrative if he can keep his eyes on a protagonist who is moving the plot forward, rather than on a succession of passively affected entities or zombified actions.

It’s worth looking at a couple of tricks that allow O’Connor to keep this unblinking focus on his protagonists. He strategically slips in a passive sentence: One hungry heron was seen, as opposed to Birdwatch.ers saw one hungry heron. Though the heron is merely being observed by an unidentified birdwatcher at this point in the passage, the passive voice keeps it in the reader’s spotlight of attention. And O’Connor fre.quently moves temporal modifiers to the front of the sentence: When the cold weather arrives; When the fish are frozen out; In the winter; When these areas become frozen solid. This preposing avoids the monotony of a long string of similar sentences, even though herons are the grammatical subjects of every one. Those temporal modifiers all have something to do with cold weather, and that is also a deliberate choice. The new information in each sen.tence is about how the herons react to cold weather. So in each of these sentences, some aspect of cold weather (mentioned in the modifier at the beginning) sets the stage for an announcement of what herons do about it (mentioned in the main clause that follows). Given always pre.cedes new. In the second paragraph, cold weather takes its turn on the stage as a topic in its own right. The transition is orderly. The switch of topic is announced in the penultimate sentence of the first paragraph (Spend.ing the winter here has its advantages), and it is maintained consistently in the second, where two of the sentences have cold things as their subjects, and the other two have them in complements to There is, which are like subjects. We have a second arc of coherence spanning the text, which links all the manifestations of cold weather. The arc linking the sentences about herons and the arc linking the sen.tences about cold weather are two instances of what Williams calls topic strings: they keep the reader focused on a single topic as he proceeds from sentence to sentence. Let’s turn now to another arc of coherence, which connects the different appearances of an entity on the reader’s mental stage as they come and go over the course of a passage. The noun system of English provides a writer with ways to distin.guish entities the reader is being introduced to for the first time from the entities he already knows about. This is the major distinction between the indefinite article, a, and the definite article, the.6 When a character makes his first appearance on stage, he is introduced with a. When we are subsequently told about him, we already know who he is, and he is mentioned with the:

An Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Jew are sitting in a doctor’s waiting room and each is told he has twenty-four hours to live. They are asked how they plan to spend their final day. The Englishman says, “I’m going to my club to smoke my pipe, sip some sherry, and chat with the blokes.” The Frenchman says, “I’m going to call my mistress for a sumptuous dinner, a bottle of the finest wine, and a night of passionate lovemaking.” The Jew says, “I’m going to see another doctor.” A (or an) and the are not the only way that the English language dis.tinguishes indefinite from definite nouns. Indefinite plurals and mass nouns can be introduced with the article some (Some mud was on the floor; Some marbles were on the floor), and they can also appear without an article at all (Mud was on the floor; Marbles were on the floor). Defi.niteness can be marked by other th.words such as this, that, these, and those, or with a genitive noun, as in Claire’s knee or Jerry’s kids. The distinction between a first appearance on stage and subsequent appearances can also be marked by the use of names or indefinite nouns on the one hand and pronouns on the other. Pronouns such as he, she, they, and it do more than save keystrokes. They tell the reader, “You’ve already met this guy; no need to stop and think about a new kid in town.”

Stanley Goldfarb died and his relatives and the congregation gathered for an evening of prayers and mourning. When the time came for the mourners to come up and eulogize him, no one stirred. After several minutes, the rabbi was getting anxious. “Someone must have something nice to say about him,” he implored. More silence. Finally a voice piped up from the back of the room: “His brother was worse.” Helping a reader keep track of the entities that make repeated appearances in a text is a tricky business. Repeating a name or an indefinite noun can confuse readers by making them think that some.one new has walked onto the stage.7 (Imagine Stanley Goldfarb died and Stanley Goldfarb’s relatives gathered for an evening of mourning.) On the other hand, if new characters walk into the scene in the interim, or enough time has passed that the first entrance is a distant memory, a pronoun or definite noun can leave them wondering who the he or the man is. Bloopers make the danger plain:8 Guilt, vengeance, and bitterness can be emotionally destructive to you and your children. You must get rid of them. After Governor Baldwin watched the lion perform, he was taken to Main Street and fed 25 pounds of raw meat in front of the Cross Keys Theater. The driver had a narrow escape, as a broken board penetrated his cabin and just missed his head. This had to be removed before he could be released. My mother wants to have the dog’s tail operated on again, and if it doesn’t heal this time, she’ll have to be put away. Now let’s go back to the herons and see how O’Connor refers to them. He introduces them with an indefinite noun phrase: Great Blue Herons live. Now that they are on stage, he switches to a definite noun phrase: the herons head. At this point he wants to refer to a subset of those herons, so he introduces just these ones with the indefinite arti.cle: A few come to Cape Cod. He refers to that subset a second time, and so it’s time to switch back to the definite: Most of these herons. Then he makes a rare slip: he tells us that herons—indefinite—can avoid the dangers of migration. Since these are herons he introduced us to a few sentences ago, the ones who stop in Cape Cod rather than continuing farther south, I say it should be The herons or These herons.

After the interlude of the paragraph whose topic is winter, which introduces yet another subset of herons (the hypothetical ones who aren’t booking a return trip), we need a reset, and so it’s indefinite Her.ons again; on next mention they can safely be identified with the pro.noun they. The kitten-eating heron is different from the rest, and he’s introduced with indefinite One hungry heron, followed by a reference back to the little-bird-eating herons; we’ve already met them, so they’re the herons, their identity further pinpointed by a reduced relative clause [that were] eating small birds. Pay attention as well to what O’Connor does not do as he repeatedly refers to the herons. Other than shifting from Great Blue Herons to her.ons, he doesn’t strain for new ways of referring to the birds. The herons are herons; they don’t turn into Ardea herodias, long-legged waders, azure airborne avians, or sapphire sentinels of the skies. Many style experts warn against the compulsion to name things with different words when they are mentioned multiple times. Henry Fowler, author of Modern English Usage (next to Strunk and White, the most influ.ential style manual of the twentieth century), sarcastically stigmatized the practice as “elegant variation.” Theodore Bernstein called it mono.logophobia, the fear of using the same word twice, and synonymomania, the “compulsion to call a spade successively a garden implement and an earth.turning tool.” Newspaper editors sometimes warn their writers that if they obey the opposing guideline “Don’t use a word twice on one page” they are likely to slip into journalese, peppering their prose with words that journalists use but that people never say, such as the nouns blaze, eatery, moniker, vehicle, slaying, and white stuff (snow), and the verbs pen, quaff, slate, laud, boast (have), and sport (wear).

In fairness to journalists and other synonymomaniacs, there are times when a writer really does need to avoid repeating words in close succession. Take the second sentence in the preceding paragraph, in which I switched from herons to birds. The alternative would have been “Other than shifting from Great Blue Herons to herons, he doesn’t strain for new ways of referring to the herons.” That third “herons” is clunky, even confusing, for the same reason that repeating the name Stanley Goldfarb in the funeral joke would have been confusing. Or consider the sentence from the Wikipedia entry on Oedipus: The baby, he says, was given to him by another shepherd from the Laius household, who had been told to get rid of the child. The entry uses “the child” because a second mention of “the baby” would not have worked. When a noun is repeated in quick succession, readers may assume that the second mention refers to a different individual and fruitlessly scan the stage for him. They do this because the natural way to refer to an indi.vidual a second time is with a pronoun, the word that signals, “You know who this guy is.” But sometimes a pronoun doesn’t work—in the Oedipus sentence, get rid of him would have left it unclear who him was referring to—and in that case a generic definite noun phrase like the child or the birds can serve as an honorary pronoun. So which guideline should a writer follow, “Avoid elegant variation” or “Don’t use a word twice on one page”? Traditional style guides don’t resolve the contradiction, but psycholinguistics can help.9 Wording should not be varied capriciously, because in general people assume that if someone uses two different words they’re referring to two differ.ent things. And as we shall soon see, wording should never be varied when a writer is comparing or contrasting two things. But wording should be varied when an entity is referred to multiple times in quick succession and repeating the name would sound monotonous or would misleadingly suggest that a new actor had entered the scene. When wording is varied, only certain variations will be easy for the reader to track. The second label is acting as a pseudo-pronoun, so it should be pronounish in two ways. First, it should be more generic than the original noun, applying to a larger class of entities; that’s why the first of these two sequences (which were used in an experiment on understanding stories) is easier to understand than the second:

A bus came roaring around a corner. The vehicle nearly flattened a pedestrian. A vehicle came roaring around a corner. The bus nearly flattened a pedestrian. Also, the second label should easily call to mind the first one, so that readers don’t have to rack their brains figuring out who or what the writer is talking about. A bus is a typical example of a vehicle, so the backward association from vehicle to bus is effortless. But if the first sentence had been A tank came roaring around the corner, which refers to an atypical example of a vehicle, a reader would have had a harder time making the connection. One of the reasons that O’Connor avoided referring to the herons as birds is that a heron is not a typical example of a bird, so readers would not have readily thought “heron” when they saw the word bird. It would be another thing if the column had been about sparrows. In chapter 2 I promised to explain what zombie nouns like antici.pation and cancellation (as opposed to anticipate and cancel) are doing in the English language. The main answer is that they serve the same role as the pronouns, definite articles, and generic synonyms we have just examined: they allow a writer to refer to something a second time (in this case a situation or an event rather than a person or a thing) without tedium or confusing repetition. Suppose we begin a passage with The governor canceled the convention today. At this point it’s more coherent to continue it with The cancellation was unexpected than with It was unexpected that the governor would cancel the convention or The fact that the governor canceled the convention was unexpected. So zombie nouns do have their place in the language. The problem with them is that knowledge-cursed writers use them on first mention because they, the writers, have already been thinking about the event, so it’s old hat to them and is conveniently summarized by a noun. They forget that their readers are encountering the event for the first time and need to see it enacted with their own eyes.

In addition to a consistent thread of sentence topics and an orderly way of referring to repeated appearances, there is a third arc of coherence spanning sentences, and that is the logical relationship between one proposition and another. Let’s go back to some examples from the chapter opening. What’s so confusing about this sequence? It’s an advantage for herons to avoid the dangers of migration. Her.ons head south when the cold weather arrives. And what’s so funny about these? The patient has been depressed ever since she began seeing me in 2008. Miss Charlene Mason sang, “I Will Not Pass This Way Again,” giving obvious pleasure to the congregation. In the doctored passage about herons, the second sentence is a non sequitur: we can’t understand why the author is telling us that the birds migrate south just after saying that herons should avoid the dangers of migration. In the original passage, the two statements appeared in the opposite order, and the author connected them with the sentence noting that a few herons come to Cape Cod, where the winters are not too cold. That sentence lays out two arcs of logical coherence: Cape Cod is an example of southward migration, and the fact that its winters are not too cold is an explanation of why some herons end up there. Readers might still expect herons to choose a warmer destination than Cape Cod—it may not be as cold as some places, but it’s a lot colder than others—so in his next sentence O’Connor acknowledges this violated expectation and supplies two explanations for the anomaly. One is that some herons (the young and inexperienced ones) may arrive on Cape Cod by accident. The other is that wintering at a relatively northern latitude has advantages that make up for the disadvantage of its coldness. O’Connor then elabo.rates on this explanation (that there are compensating advantages) with two specific advantages: it’s safer not to travel far, and the local herons have first dibs on the breeding grounds come spring.

Now let’s turn to the bloopers. The psychiatrist who wrote the first blooper presumably intended his second clause to convey a temporal sequence between two events: the patient saw the doctor, and since that time she has been depressed. We interpret it as a cause.and.effect sequence: she saw the doctor, and that made her depressed. In the second blooper, the problem does not lie in the relationship between clauses— it’s cause-and-effect in both interpretations—but in exactly what causes what. In the intended reading, the pleasure is caused by the singing; in the unintended one, it’s caused by the not-passing-this-way-again. Examples, explanations, violated expectations, elaborations, se.quences, causes, and effects are arcs of coherence that pinpoint how one statement follows from another. They are not so much components of language as components of reason, identifying the ways in which one idea can lead to another in our train of thought. You might think there are hundreds or even thousands of ways in which one thought can lead to another, but in fact the number is far smaller. David Hume, in his 1748 book, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, wrote, “There appear to be only three principles of connections among ideas, namely Resemblance, Contiguity in time or place, and Cause or Effect.”10 The linguist Andrew Kehler argues that Hume basically got it right, though he and other linguists have subdivided Hume’s Big Three into about a dozen more specific kinds of connection.11 And more to the point for the language of coherence, they have shown how the connec.tions among ideas are expressed as connections among sentences. The key linguistic couplers are connective words like because, so, and but. Let’s take a look at the logic of the coherence relations and how they’re typically expressed. In a resemblance relation, a statement makes a claim that overlaps in content with the one that came before it. The most obvious two are similarity and contrast:

Coherence Relation Example Typical Connectives
Similarity Herons live in the and, similarly, likewise,
northern United States. too
Herons live in most of
Canada.
Contrast Herons have one thing but, in contrast, on the
in their favor: they are other hand, alternatively
opportunistic hunters.
Herons have one thing
not in their favor: they
defend a fishing hole
even when it is frozen.

Similarity and contrast link two propositions that are similar in most ways but different in at least one way. They call the reader’s atten.tion either to the similarities or to the difference. These relations may be conveyed without even using a connective word: all the writer has to do is write the statements using parallel syntax and vary only the words that indicate the difference. Unfortunately, many writers blow the opportunity and capriciously vary their wording as they compare two things, a pernicious kind of synonymomania which flummoxes the reader because he doesn’t know whether the writer is directing his attention to the difference between the contrasting things or to some difference between the synonyms. Imagine that O’Connor had written Herons are opportunistic hunters, but great blues defend a fishing hole even when it’s frozen. The reader would wonder whether it’s only great blue herons that defend frozen fishing holes, or all herons. It’s always surprising to me to see how often scientists thoughtlessly use synonyms in comparisons, because the cardinal principle of exper.imental design is the Rule of One Variable. If you want to see the effects of a putative causal variable, manipulate that variable alone while holding everything else constant. (If you want to see whether a drug lowers blood pressure, don’t enroll your participants in an exercise program at the same time, because if their blood pressure does go down, you’ll never know whether it was the drug or the exercise.)

Parallel syntax is just the Rule of One Variable applied to writing: if you want readers to appreciate some variable, manipulate the expres.sion of that variable alone while keeping the rest of the language unchanged. On the left below are two examples—the first expressing similarity, the second expressing contrast—in which scientists do in their prose what they would never do in the lab. On the right are the more rigorously controlled alternatives: In the ten nations with the largest In the ten nations with the largest online populations, non-domestic online populations, non-domestic news sites represent less than 8% of news sites represent less than 8% of the 50 most visited news sites, while in the 50 most visited news sites; in France, 98% of all visits to news France, the figure is just 2%. sources are directed to domestic sites. Children’s knowledge of how to use Children’s knowledge of how to use a tools could be a result of experience, tool could be a result of their but also object affordances defined by experience with the tool; alternatively, shape and manipulability may provide it could be a result of their perceiving cues such that humans do not require the tool’s affordances from shape and much time experimenting with an manipulability cues. object in order to discover how it functions. The first sentence, which says that most Internet users go to news sites in their own country, subverts its attempt to express a resemblance rela.tion in three ways. It inverts the syntax (news sites represent versus visits to news sources), it flips the measurement scale (from the percentage of visits to non-domestic sites to the percentage of visits to domestic sites), and it uses a connective that is perversely ambiguous. If while is used in a temporal sense (“at the same time”), it implies similarity; if it is used in a logical sense (“although”), it suggests contrast. Rereading the passage a few times reveals that the authors meant similarity. The second example also trips over its message. It upends the syntax from one proposition to the other (Children know how to use tools from experience and Object affordances provide cues [to children about tools]), and it uses the connective also in a confusing way. Also implies similarity or elaboration (another resemblance relation, which we’ll get to soon), and the author uses it here to mean that there are at least two hypotheses for how children know how to use tools (rather than the single hypothesis that they know from experience). But he is actu.ally trying to contrast the two hypotheses, so also pulls the reader in the wrong direction (the author presumably chose it because there is “also” another hypothesis on the table for scientists to consider). The author seems to realize the problem as he proceeds, so he tacks on such that to signal that he is contrasting the two hypotheses after all. But it would have been better to rewrite the sentence to convey the contrast from the start, using an unambiguous connective such as alternatively. (Affordance, by the way, is a psychologist’s term for the aspect of an object’s appearance that suggests what you can do to it, such as its lift-ability or its squeezability.)

Similarity and contrast are not the only resemblance relations. In elaboration, a single event is first described in a generic way and then in specific detail. Then there are four relations that fall into two neat pairs, depending on which event the author wishes to mention first. There’s exemplification (a generalization, followed by one or more examples) and generalization (one or more examples, followed by a generalization). And there’s the opposite, exception, which can be intro.duced either generalization first or exception first. Coherence Relation Example Typical Connectives
Elaboration Herons have one thing : (colon), that is, in other
in their favor: they are words, which is to say,
total opportunists. also, furthermore, in
addition, notice that,
which
Exemplification Herons are total for example, for
opportunists. When the instance, such as,
fish are frozen out, including
they’ll eat other things,
including crustaceans,
mice, voles, and small
birds.

Coherence Relation Example Typical Connectives
Generalization When the fish are frozen in general, more
out, herons will eat generally
other things, including
crustaceans, mice, voles,
and small birds. They
are total opportunists.
Exception: Cape Cod winters are however, on the other
generalization first often mild and pleasant. hand, then there is
Then there is this winter,
the winter that never
ends.
Exception: exception This winter seems like it nonetheless,
first will never end. nevertheless, still
Nonetheless, Cape Cod
winters are often mild
and pleasant.

The second of Hume’s family of relations is contiguity: a before.and-after sequence, usually with some connection between the two events. Here, too, the English language gives us the means to mention the events in either order while holding the meaning constant. Coherence Relation Example Typical Connectives
Sequence: before-and- The cold weather arrives and, before, then
after and then the herons
head south.
Sequence: after-and- The herons head south after, once, while, when
before when the cold weather
arrives.

The language gives writers a second way of controlling the order in which two events are mentioned. Not only can they choose between before and after, but they can also choose whether to prepose a tempo.ral modifier or leave it in its place: After the cold weather arrives, the

herons head south versus The herons head south after the cold weather arrives. But here the language may be a bit too clever for its own users. Though English cleanly distinguishes the order in which two things happened in the world from the order in which they are mentioned in a text, English speakers tend to be more concrete, and naturally assume that the order in which events are mentioned is the order in which they took place (as in the old wisecrack They got married and had a baby, but not in that order). All things being equal, it’s good for a writer to work with the ongoing newsreel in readers’ minds and describe events in chronological order: She showered before she ate is easier to understand than She ate after she showered. For the same reason, After she showered, she ate is easier than Before she ate, she showered.12 Of course, things are not always equal. If the spotlight of attention has been lingering on a later event, and now the writer must introduce an earlier one, the imperative to mention given before new trumps the imperative to mention early before late. For example, if you had been staring at the wet footprints leading to the breakfast table and were seeking an explanation, it would be more help.ful to hear Before Rita ate, she showered than After Rita showered, she ate. And this brings us to Hume’s third category of connections, cause and effect. Here again the English language is mathematically elegant and provides the writer with a neat group of symmetries. She can state the cause first or the effect first, and the causal force can either make something happen or prevent it from happening. Coherence Relation Example Typical Connectives
Result (cause-effect) Young herons are and, as a result,
inexperienced, so some therefore, so
of them migrate to Cape
Cod.
Explanation (effect- Some herons migrate to because, since, owing to
cause) Cape Cod, because they
are young and
inexperienced.

Coherence Relation Example Typical Connectives
Violated expectation Herons have a tough but, while, however,
(preventer-effect) time when the ponds nonetheless, yet
freeze over. However,
they will hunt and eat
many other things.
Failed prevention (effect- Herons will hunt and despite, even though
preventer) eat many things in
winter, even though the
ponds are frozen over.

One other major coherence relation doesn’t easily fit into Hume’s trichotomy, attribution: so-and-so believes such-and-such. Attribu.tion is typically indicated by connectives like according to and stated that. It’s important to get it right. In many written passages it’s unclear whether the author is arguing for a position or is explaining a position that someone else is arguing for. This is one of the many problems in Bob Dole’s sentence about intervening in Serbia (page 112). There are a few other coherence relations, such as anticipations of a reaction by the reader (yes; I know, I know). There are also gray areas and various ways to lump and split the relations, which give linguists plenty of things to argue about.13 But these dozen or so cover most of the terri.tory. A coherent text is one in which the reader always knows which coherence relation holds between one sentence and the next. In fact, coherence extends beyond individual sentences and also applies to entire branches in the discourse tree (in other words, to items in an essay out.line). Several propositions may be interconnected by a set of coherence relations, and the resulting chunk is in turn connected to others. For example, the heron chowing down feral kittens was similar to the herons eating crustaceans, mice, and small birds. The entire set of these meals is now united as a single block of text which serves as an exemplification of herons eating things other than fish. And their ability to eat nonfishy meals is, in turn, an elaboration of their being opportunistic hunters. Coherence relations among sets of sentences need not be perfectly treelike. They also drape across long stretches of text. The odd behavior of defending a frozen fishing hole connects all the way back to the reader’s question at the beginning of the column. It is an explanation, a cause of the effect she was asking about.

As a writer bangs out sentences, she needs to ensure that her readers can reconstruct the coherence relations she has in mind. The obvious way to do this is to use the appropriate connectives. The “typical” con.nectives in the charts, however, are only typical, and writers can leave them out when the connection is obvious to the reader. It’s an impor.tant choice. Too many connectives can make it seem as if an author is belaboring the obvious or patronizing the reader, and it can give prose a pedantic feel. Just imagine the sequence Herons live in the northern United States; similarly, herons live in most of Canada. Or Herons have one thing in their favor. . . . In contrast, herons have one thing not in their favor. Too few connectives, on the other hand, can leave the reader puzzled as to how one statement follows from the last. Even more challenging, the optimal number of connectives depends on the expertise of the reader.14 Readers who are familiar with the subject matter will already know a lot about what is similar to what else, what causes what else, and what tends to accompany what else, and they don’t need to have these connections spelled out in so many words. They may even get confused if the writer spells out the obvious ones: they figure that she must have a good reason to do so and therefore that she must really be making some other claim, one that isn’t so obvious, which they then waste time trying to discern. In the case of where herons live, most readers know that the northern United States is contiguous to Canada and that the two have similar ecosystems, so they don’t need a similarly. If the author had mentioned less familiar birds and territories—say, that crested honey buzzards live in Yakutsk and Shenyang—the reader might appreciate being told whether the territories are similar, which would imply that the species is adapted to a specific ecosystem, or dissimilar, implying that it is widespread and flexible. Figuring out the right level of explicitness for coherence relations is a major reason that a writer needs to think hard about the state of knowledge of her readers and show a few of them a draft to see whether she got it right. It’s an aspect of the art of writing which depends on intuition, experience, and guesswork, but there is also an overarching guideline. Humans are cursed with attributing too much of their own knowledge to others (chapter 3), which means that overall there is a greater danger of prose being confusing because it has too few connec.tives than pedantic because it has too many. When in doubt, connect.

If you do indicate a connection, though, do it just once. Prose becomes stuffy when an insecure writer hammers the reader over the head with redundant indicators of a connection, as if unsure that one would be enough. Perhaps the reason so many people are Perhaps the reason so many people are in the dark is because they want it that in the dark is that they want it that way. [explanation] way. There are many biological influences There are many biological influences of psychological traits such as of psychological traits such as cognitive ability, conscientiousness, cognitive ability, conscientiousness, impulsivity, risk aversion, and the like. impulsivity, and risk aversion. [exemplification] We separately measured brainwide We separately measured brainwide synchronization in local versus long-synchronization in local and long-range channel pairs. [contrast] range channel pairs. The first redundancy, the reason is because, is widely disliked, because the word reason already implies that we are dealing with an explana.tion, and we don’t need a because to remind us. (Some purists also frown on the reason why, but it has been used by good writers for cen.turies and should be no more exceptionable than the place where or the time when.) Gratuitous redundancy makes prose difficult not just because readers have to duplicate the effort of figuring something out, but because they naturally assume that when a writer says two things she means two things, and fruitlessly search for the nonexistent second point.

Coherence connectives are the unsung heroes of lucid prose. They aren’t terribly frequent—most of them occur just a handful of times every 100,000 words—but they are the cement of reasoning and one of the most difficult yet most important tools of writing to master. A recent analysis of underperforming high school students showed that many of them, even those who read well, were stymied by the challenge of writing a coherent passage.15 One student, asked to write an essay on Alexander the Great, managed to come up with “I think Alexander the Great was one of the best military leaders,” then turned to her mother and said, “Well, I got a sentence down. What now?” A failure to com.mand coherence connectives turned out to be among the skills that most sharply differentiated the struggling students from their success.ful peers. When these students were asked to read Of Mice and Men and complete a sentence beginning with “Although George,” many were stumped. A few wrote, “Although George and Lenny were friends.” The teachers introduced a program that explicitly trained the students to construct coherent arguments, with a focus on the connections between successive ideas. It was a radical shift from the kind of assign.ment that dominates high school writing instruction today, in which students are asked to write memoirs and personal reflections. The stu.dents showed dramatic improvements in their test scores in several subjects, and many more of them graduated from high school and applied to college. It’s no coincidence that we use the word “coherent” to refer both to concrete passages of text and to abstract lines of reasoning, because the logical relations that govern them—implication, generalization, coun.terexample, denial, causation—are the same. Though the claim that good prose leads to good thinking is not always true (brilliant thinkers can be clumsy writers, and slick writers can be glib thinkers), it may be true when it comes to the mastery of coherence. If you try to repair an incoherent text and find that no placement of therefores and moreovers and howevers will hold it together, that is a sign that the underlying argument may be incoherent, too.

Coherence depends on more than mechanical decisions such as keep. ing the topic in subject position and choosing appropriate connectives. It depends as well on impressions that build up in a reader over the course of reading many paragraphs and that depend on the author’s grasp of the text as a whole. Let me explain what I mean by sharing my reaction to another pas. sage, this one much loftier in tone and ambition than “Ask the Bird Folks.” It is the opening of John Keegan’s 1993 magnum opus, A His. tory of Warfare: War is not the continuation of policy by other means. The world would be a simpler place to understand if this dictum of Clause.witz’s were true. Clausewitz, a Prussian veteran of the Napoleonic wars who used his years of retirement to compose what was destined to become the most famous book on war—called On War—ever written, actually wrote that war is the continuation “of political intercourse” (des politischen Verkehrs) “with the inter.mixing of other means” (mit Einmischung anderer Mittel). The original German expresses a more subtle and complex idea than the English words in which it is so frequently quoted. In either form, however, Clausewitz’s thought is incomplete. It implies the existence of states, of state interests and of rational calculation about how they may be achieved. Yet war antedates the state, diplomacy and strategy by many millennia. Warfare is almost as old as man himself, and reaches into the most secret places of the human heart, places where self dissolves rational purpose, where pride reigns, where emotion is paramount, where instinct is king. “Man is a political animal,” said Aristotle. Clausewitz, a child of Aristotle, went no further than to say that a political animal is a warmaking animal. Neither dared confront the thought that man is a thinking animal in whom the intellect directs the urge to hunt and the ability to kill.16

Keegan is among the most esteemed military historians who ever lived, and A History of Warfare was a critically acclaimed best.seller. Several reviews singled out the quality of his writing for praise. Certainly the mechanics here are sound, and at first glance, so is the coherence. The topics are war and Clausewitz, and we have a number of connectives, like however and yet. Nonetheless, I found this para.graph barely coherent. The problems begin in the first sentence. Why is a book on warfare starting out by telling us what war is not? I recognized the dictum from Clausewitz, but it was hardly uppermost in my mind as I began a book on war, if for no other reason than that I always found it obscure—an impres.sion confirmed by Keegan’s equivocating explanation in the third and fourth sentences. If Clausewitz’s dictum is so subtle, complex, and misun.derstood, how is the reader being enlightened by being told it is false? And if even the people who are familiar with the dictum don’t know what it means, how could the world be “simpler” if it were true? For that matter, is the dictum false? Keegan now tells us that it’s merely “incomplete.” Should he have begun, “War is not just the continuation of policy by other means”? OK, I tell myself, I’ll wait for the rest of the explanation. Soon we are told that war reaches into a place where emotion is paramount, where instinct is king. But two sentences later we’re told that the instinct to hunt and kill is directed by the intellect. These can’t both be true: kings don’t take orders, so instinct cannot be a king and be directed by the intellect. Let’s go with the last thing we were told and assume it’s the intellect that’s in charge. So what part of this thought did Clausewitz and Aristotle (and what’s he suddenly doing in this conversation?) fail to confront: the fact that man is a thinking animal, or the fact that what he thinks about is how to hunt and kill? The confusing opening of A History of Warfare provides us with an opportunity to look at three other contributors to coherence, which are conspicuous here by their absence: clear and plausible negation, a sense of proportion, and thematic consistency.

The first problem is Keegan’s maladroit use of negation. Logically speaking, a sentence with a naysaying word like not, no, neither, nor, or never is just the mirror image of an affirmative sentence. Saying that the integer 4 is not odd is logically the same as saying that it is even. If something is not alive, then it’s dead, and vice versa. But psychologi.cally speaking, a negative statement and an affirmative statement are fundamentally different.17 More than three centuries ago, Baruch Spinoza pointed out that the human mind cannot suspend disbelief in the truth or falsity of a state.ment and leave it hanging in logical limbo awaiting a “true” or “false” tag to be hung on it.18 To hear or read a statement is to believe it, at least for a moment. For us to conclude that something is not the case, we must take the extra cognitive step of pinning the mental tag “false” on a proposition. Any statement that is untagged is treated as if it is true. As a result, when we have a lot on our minds, we can get confused about where the “false” tag belongs, or can forget it entirely. In that case what is merely mentioned can become true. Richard Nixon did not allay suspicions about his character when he declared, “I am not a crook,” nor did Bill Clinton put rumors to rest when he said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Experiments have shown that when jurors are told to disregard the witness’s remarks, they never do, any more than you can follow the instruction “For the next minute, try not to think about a white bear.”19 The cognitive difference between believing that a proposition is true (which requires no work beyond understanding it) and believing that it is false (which requires adding and remembering a mental tag) has enormous implications for a writer. The most obvious is that a negative statement such as The king is not dead is harder on the reader than an affirmative one like The king is alive.20 Every negation requires mental homework, and when a sentence contains many of them the reader can be overwhelmed. Even worse, a sentence can have more negations than you think it does. Not all negation words begin with n; many have the concept of negation tucked inside them, such as few, little, least, seldom, though, rarely, instead, doubt, deny, refute, avoid, and ignore.21 The use of multiple negations in a sentence (like the ones on the left below) is arduous at best and bewildering at worst:

According to the latest annual report According to the latest annual report on violence, Sub-Saharan Africa for on violence, Sub-Saharan Africa for the first time is not the world’s least the first time is not the world’s most peaceful region. violent region. The experimenters found, though, that The experimenters predicted that the the infants did not respond as infants would look longer at the ball if predicted to the appearance of the it had been swapped with another ball, but instead did not look object than if it had been there all significantly longer than they did along. In fact, the infants looked at the when the objects were not swapped. balls the same amount of time in each case. The three-judge panel issued a ruling The three-judge panel issued a ruling lifting the stay on a district judge’s that allows same-sex marriages to take injunction to not enforce the ban on place. There had been a ban on such same-sex marriages. marriages, and a district judge had issued an injunction not to enforce it, but a stay had been placed on that injunction. Today the panel lifted the stay. As the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland explained, “The moral of that is—‘Be what you would seem to be’—or, if you’d like it put more simply—‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’” It’s not just readers who are confused by negations. Writers them.selves can lose track and put too many of them into a word or sentence, making it mean the opposite of what they intended. The linguist Mark Liberman calls them misnegations, and points out that “they’re easy to fail to miss”:22 After a couple of days in Surry County, I found myself no less closer

to unraveling the riddle. No head injury is too trivial to ignore. It is difficult to underestimate Paul Fussell’s influence. Patty looked for an extension cord from one of the many still unpacked boxes. You’ll have to unpeel those shrimp yourself. Can you help me unloosen this lid? The difficulty posed by negations has long been noted in style manuals. Dave Barry’s “Ask Mr. Language Person” satirized their typical advisory: writing tip for professionals: To make your writing more appealing to the reader, avoid “writing negatively.” Use positive expressions instead. wrong: “Do not use this appliance in the bathtub.” right: “Go ahead and use this appliance in the bathtub.” The satire makes a serious point. Like most advice on style that is couched as a commandment rather than an explanation, the flat direc.tive to avoid negations is almost useless. As Mr. Language Person implies, sometimes a writer really does need to express a negation. How long could you go in a day without using the words no and not? The sarcas.tic question “What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?” reminds us that negation is perfectly easy for people to handle in everyday speech. Why should it be so hard in writing? The answer is that negation is easy to understand when the propo.sition being negated is plausible or tempting.23 Compare the negations The sentences in the left-hand column all deny a proposition that it would be reasonable for readers to entertain. A whale looks like a big fish; Obama has been the subject of rumors about his religion; Nabokov was denied the Nobel Prize in Literature that many critics thought he deserved. Experiments have shown that statements like the ones in the left column, which deny a plausible belief, are easier to understand than statements in the right column, which deny an implausible belief. The first reaction to reading a sentence on the right is, “Who would ever have thought it was?” (Or she was? Or he did?) Negative sentences are easy when the reader already has an affirmative in mind or can create one on short notice; all he has to do is pin a “false” tag onto it. But concocting a statement that you have trouble believing in the first place (such as “A herring is a mammal”), and then negating it, requires two bouts of cognitive heavy lifting rather than one. in these two columns:
A whale is not a fish. A herring is not a mammal.
Barack Obama is not a Muslim. Hillary Clinton is not a Muslim.
Vladimir Nabokov never won a Nobel Vladimir Nabokov never won an
Prize. Oscar.

And now we see why the opening to A History of Warfare is so puz.zling. Keegan began by denying a proposition that was not particularly compelling to the reader in the first place (and which became no more compelling upon further explanation). The same is true for the two baffling sentences I used on page 140, the ones about moderate drink.ers and Serbian intervention. In all these cases, the reader is apt to think, “Who ever thought it was?” When an author has to negate something that a reader doesn’t already believe, she has to set it up as a plausible belief on his mental stage before she knocks it down. Or, to put it more positively, when a writer wants to negate an unfamiliar proposition, she should unveil the negation in two stages: 1. You might think . . .

But no.

That’s what I did in repairing the sentences on page 141. The other feature of negation that Keegan mishandled is making the negation unambiguous, which requires nailing down two things: its scope and its focus.24 The scope of a logical operator such as not, all, or some consists of the exact proposition it pertains to. When the Boston–New York train arrives at smaller stations along the route, the conductor announces, “All doors will not open.” I momentarily panic, thinking that we’re trapped. Of course what he means is that not all doors will open. In the intended reading, the negation operator not has scope over the universally quantified proposition “All doors will open.” The conductor means, “It is not the case that [all doors will open].” In the unintended reading, the universal quantifier all has scope over the negated proposition “Doors will not open.” Claustrophobic passengers hear it as “For all doors, it is the case that [the door will not open].”

The conductor is not making a grammatical error. It’s common in colloquial English for a logical word like all, not, or only to cling to the left of the verb even when its scope encompasses a different phrase.25 In the train announcement, the not has no logical business being next to open; its logical scope is All doors will open, so it really belongs out.side the clause, before All. But English is more flexible than what a logician would have designed, and the context generally makes it clear what the speaker means. (No one on the train but me seemed in any way alarmed.) Similarly, a logician might say that the song “I Only Have Eyes for You” should be retitled “I Have Eyes for Only You,” because the singer has more than just eyes, and he uses those eyes for more than ogling someone; it’s just that when he does ogle someone with those eyes, it’s you he ogles. Likewise, the logician would argue, You only live once should be rewritten as You live only once, with only next to the thing it quantifies, once. This logician would be unbearably pedantic, but there is a grain of good taste in the pedantry. Writing is often clearer and more elegant when a writer pushes an only or a not next to the thing that it quanti.fies. In 1962 John F. Kennedy declared, “We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard.”26 That sounds a lot classier than “We don’t choose to go to the moon because it is easy but because it is hard.” Not only is it classier; it’s clearer. Whenever a sentence has a not and a because, and the not remains stuck to the auxiliary verb, readers may be left in the dark about the scope of the negation and hence about what the sentence means. Suppose that Kennedy had said, “We don’t choose to go to the moon because it is easy.” Listeners would not have known whether Kennedy was choosing to scuttle the moon program (because it was too easy) or whether he was choosing to go ahead with the moon program (but for some reason other than how easy it was). Pushing the not next to the phrase it negates eliminates the scope ambiguity. Here’s a rule: Never write a sentence of the form “X not Y because Z,” such as Dave is not evil because he did what he was told. It should be either Dave is not evil, because he did what he was told, where the comma keeps the because outside the scope of the not, or Dave is evil not because he did what he was told (but for some other reason), where the because occurs next to the not, indicating that it is within its scope.

When a negative element has wide scope (that is, when it applies to the whole clause), it is not literally ambiguous, but it can be madden.ingly vague. The vagueness lies in the focus of the negation—which phrase the writer had in mind as falsifying the whole sentence. Take the sentence I didn’t see a man in a gray flannel suit. It could mean: I didn’t see him; Amy did. I didn’t see him; you just thought I did. I didn’t see him; I was looking away. I didn’t see him; I saw a different man. I didn’t see a man in a gray suit; it was a woman. I didn’t see a man in a gray flannel suit; it was brown. I didn’t see a man in a gray flannel suit; it was polyester. I didn’t see a man in a gray flannel suit; he was wearing a kilt. In conversation, we can stress the phrase we wish to deny, and in writ.ing we can use italics to do the same thing. More often, the context makes it clear which affirmative statement was plausible in the first place, and hence which one the writer is going to the trouble of deny.ing. But if the subject matter is unfamiliar and has many parts, and if the writer doesn’t set the reader up by focusing on one of those parts as a fact worth taking seriously, the reader may not know what he should

no longer be thinking. That is the problem with Keegan’s puzzling speculation about the multipart thought that Clausewitz and Aris. totle dared not confront, that man is a thinking animal in whom the intellect directs the urge to hunt and the ability to kill: were they spooked by the possibility that man thinks, that he’s an animal, or that he thinks about hunting and killing? Now let’s give Keegan a chance to explain the thought. He does so in the book’s second paragraph, which I’ll use to illustrate, by its absence, another principle of coherence—a sense of proportion: This is not an idea any easier for modern man to confront than it was for a Prussian officer, born the grandson of a clergyman and raised in the spirit of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. For all the effect that Freud, Jung and Adler have had on our outlook, our moral values remain those of the great monotheistic religions, which condemn the killing of fellow souls in all but the most con.strained circumstances. Anthropology tells us and archaeology implies that our uncivilised ancestors could be red in tooth and claw; psychoanalysis seeks to persuade us that the savage in all of us lurks not far below the skin. We prefer, none the less, to recognise human nature as we find it displayed in the everyday behaviour of the civilised majority in modern life—imperfect, no doubt, but certainly cooperative and frequently benevolent. Culture to us seems the great determinant of how human beings conduct them.selves; in the relentless academic debate between “nature and nur.ture,” it is the “nurture” school which commands greater support from the bystanders. We are cultural animals and it is the rich.ness of our culture which allows us to accept our undoubted potentiality for violence but to believe nevertheless that its expres.sion is a cultural aberration. History lessons remind us that the states in which we live, their institutions, even their laws, have come to us through conflict, often of the most bloodthirsty sort. Our daily diet of news brings us reports of the shedding of blood, often in regions quite close to our homelands, in circumstances that deny our conception of cultural normality altogether. We succeed, all the same, in consigning the lessons both of history and of reportage to a special and separate category of “otherness” which invalidate our expectations of how our own world will be tomorrow and the day after not at all. Our institutions and our laws, we tell ourselves, have set the human potentiality for vio.lence about with such restraints that violence in everyday life will be punished as criminal by our laws, while its use by our institu.tions of state will take the particular form of “civilised warfare.”27

I think I see what Keegan is getting at—humans have innate impulses toward violence, yet today we try to deny it—but the momentum of his presentation pushes in the other direction. Most of this passage says the opposite: that we couldn’t help but be aware of humanity’s dark side. Keegan loads us up with reminders of the dark side, including Freud, Jung, Adler, anthropology, archaeology, psychoanalysis, the sav.age in all of us, our undoubted potentiality for violence, history lessons about conflict, bloodthirsty violence, our daily diet of news, reports of the shedding of blood, the human potentiality for violence, and vio.lence in everyday life. The reader starts to think, Who is this “we” who fail to appreciate them? The problem here is a lack of balance, of proportionality. An impor.tant principle in composition is that the amount of verbiage one devotes to a point should not be too far out of line with how central it is to the argument. If a writer believes that 90 percent of the evidence and argu.ment supports a position, then something like 90 percent of the discus.sion should be devoted to the reasons for believing it. If a reader is spending only 10 percent of his time on why it’s a good idea, and fully 90 percent on why he might reasonably think it’s a bad idea—while the writer insists all along that it really is a good idea—then the reader’s mounting impressions will be at cross-purposes with the author’s intent. The author then must furiously try to minimize what she has been saying, which only arouses the reader’s suspicions. Keegan tries to dig himself out from under his own heap of counterevidence by repeatedly issuing pronouncements about what an unidentified “we” stubbornly and defensively believe—which only prompts the reader to think, “Speak for yourself!” The reader gets the feeling that he’s being bullied rather than persuaded.

Of course, responsible writers have to deal with counterarguments and counterevidence. But if there are enough of them to merit an extended discussion, they deserve a section of their own, whose stated point is to examine the contrary position. A fair-minded examination of the counterevidence can then occupy as much space as it needs, because its bulk will reflect its importance within that section. This divide-and-conquer strategy is better than repeatedly allowing coun.terexamples to intrude into the main line of an argument while brow.beating readers into looking away. After a page-long digression on pacifism, Christianity, and the Roman Empire, Keegan returns to what is wrong with Clausewitz’s dictum and with the modern understanding of war it captures. The passage will help us appreciate a third principle of text-wide coherence: [Clausewitz’s dictum] certainly distinguished sharply between the lawful bearer of arms and the rebel, the freebooter and the brigand. It presupposed a high level of military discipline and an awesome degree of obedience by subordinates to their lawful superiors. . . . It assumed that wars had a beginning and an end. What it made no allowance for at all was war without beginning or end, the endemic warfare of non-state, even pre-state peoples, in which there was no distinction between lawful and unlawful bearers of arms, since all males were warriors; a form of warfare which had prevailed during long periods of human history and which, at the margins, still encroached on the life of civilised states and was, indeed, turned to their use through the common practice of recruiting its practitioners as “irregular” light cavalry and infantrymen. . . . During the eighteenth century the expansion of such forces—Cossacks, “hunters,” Highlanders, “borderers,” Hussars—had been one of the most noted contemporary military developments. Over their habits of loot, pillage, rape, murder, kid.nap, extortion and systematic vandalism their civilised employers chose to draw a veil.28

This is all quite fascinating, but over the next six pages the paragraphs jump around between descriptions of the Cossacks’ way of war and still more exegesis of Clausewitz. Like the “we” of the second para.graph, who supposedly see plenty of violence while denying its impor.tance, the hapless “Clausewitz” character in this narrative shows plenty of awareness of the Cossacks’ cruel and cowardly ways, but, according to Keegan, he still failed to come to grips with them. Once again the bulk of the verbiage pushes in one direction while the content of the author’s argument pushes in the other. Keegan concludes the section: It is at the cultural level that Clausewitz’s answer to his ques.tion, What is war?, is defective. . . . Clausewitz was a man of his times, a child of the Enlightenment, a contemporary of the Ger.man Romantics, an intellectual, a practical reformer. . . . Had his mind been furnished with just one extra intellectual dimension . . . he might have been able to perceive that war embraces much more than politics: that it is always an expression of culture, often a determinant of cultural forms, in some societies the culture itself.29 Now, wait a minute! Didn’t Keegan tell us in the second paragraph that the problem with Clausewitz and his heirs is that they all put too much stock in culture? Didn’t he say that it’s our culture which allows us to believe that violence is an aberration, and that the primitive war.fare we choose to ignore is a manifestation of nature, biology, and instinct? Then how can Clausewitz’s problem be that he didn’t put enough stock in culture? For that matter, how can Clausewitz be a prod.uct both of the Enlightenment and of the German Romantic movement, which arose in reaction to the Enlightenment? And while we’re at it, how can his being the grandson of a clergyman, and our moral values being those of the monotheistic religions, be reconciled with all of us being children of the Enlightenment, which opposed the monotheistic religions?

To be fair to Keegan, after reading his book I don’t think he is quite as confused as the first few pages suggest. If you put aside the slaphappy allusions to grand intellectual movements, you can see that he does have a point, namely that the disciplined warfare of modern states is a departure from the opportunistic rapacity of traditional tribes, that traditional warfare has always been more common, and that it has never gone away. Keegan’s problem is that he flouts another principle of coherence in writing, the last one we will visit in this chapter. Joseph Williams refers to the principle as consistent thematic strings, thematic consistency for short.30 A writer, after laying out her topic, will introduce a large number of concepts which explain, enrich, or comment on that topic. These concepts will center on a number of themes which make repeated appearances in the discussion. To keep the text coherent, the writer must allow the reader to keep track of these themes by referring to each in a consistent way or by explaining their connection. We looked at a version of this principle when we saw that to help the reader keep track of a single entity across multiple men.tions, a writer should not flip-flop between unnecessary synonyms. Now we can generalize the principle to sets of related concepts, that is, to themes. The writer should refer to each theme in a consistent way, one that allows the reader to know which is which. Here, then, is the problem. Keegan’s topic is the history of warfare— that part is clear enough. His themes are the primitive form of warfare and the modern form of warfare. But he discusses the two themes by traipsing among a set of concepts that are only loosely related to the theme and to one another, each in a way that caught Keegan’s eye but that is obscure to the whipsawed reader. With the benefit of hind.sight, we can see that the concepts fall into two loose clusters, each corresponding to one of Keegan’s themes:

Clausewitz, modern warfare, states, Primitive warfare, tribes, clans,
political calculations, strategy, irregulars, freebooters, brigands,
diplomacy, military discipline, Cossacks, looting and pillaging, instinct,
“we,” the intellect, Aristotle, the nature, Freud, the emphasis on instinct
pacifist aspect of monotheistic in psychoanalysis, anthropological
religions, the criminal justice evidence for violence, archaeological
system, civilized constraints on evidence for violence, conflict in history,
warfare, the intellectualizing aspect crime in the news, the ways in which
of the Enlightenment, the ways in culture encourages violence
which culture constrains violence

We can also reconstruct why each term might have reminded him of some other term. But it’s better when the common threads are made explicit, because in the vast private web of a writer’s imagination, any.thing can be similar to anything else. Jamaica is like Cuba; both are Caribbean island nations. Cuba is like China; both are led by regimes that call themselves communist. But a discussion of “countries like Jamaica and China” which fails to identify their commonality—being similar in some way to Cuba—is bound to be incoherent. How might an author have presented these themes in a more coherent way? In The Remnants of War, the political scientist John Mueller covers the same territory as Keegan and picks up where Keegan left off. He argues that modern war is becoming obsolete, leaving primitive, undisci.plined warfare as the major kind of war remaining in the world today. But Mueller’s exposition of the two themes is a model of coherence: Broadly speaking, there seem to be two methods for developing combat forces—for successfully cajoling or coercing collections of men into engaging in the violent, profane, sacrificial, uncertain, masochistic, and essentially absurd enterprise known as war. The two methods lead to two kinds of warfare, and the distinction can be an important one. Intuitively, it might seem that the easiest (and cheapest) method for recruiting combatants would be to . . . enlist those who revel in violence and routinely seek it out or who regularly employ it to enrich themselves, or both. We have in civilian life a name for such people—criminals. . . . Violent conflicts in which people like that dominate can be called criminal warfare, a form in which combatants are induced to wreak violence primarily for the fun and material profit they derive from the experience.

Criminal armies seem to arise from a couple of processes. Some.times criminals—robbers, brigands, freebooters, highwaymen, hooligans, thugs, bandits, pirates, gangsters, outlaws—organize or join together in gangs or bands or mafias. When such organiza.tions become big enough, they can look and act a lot like full-blown armies. Or criminal armies can be formed when a ruler needs combat.ants to prosecute a war and concludes that the employment or impressment of criminals and thugs is the most sensible and direct method for accomplishing this. In this case, criminals and thugs essentially act as mercenaries. It happens, however, that criminals and thugs tend to be unde.sirable warriors. . . . To begin with, they are often difficult to con.trol. They can be troublemakers: unruly, disobedient, and mutinous, often committing unauthorized crimes while on (or off) duty that can be detrimental or even destructive of the military enterprise. . . . Most importantly, criminals can be disinclined to stand and fight when things become dangerous, and they often simply de.sert when whim and opportunity coincide. Ordinary crime, after all, preys on the weak—on little old ladies rather than on husky athletes—and criminals often make willing and able executioners of defenseless people. However, if the cops show up they are given to flight. The motto for the criminal, after all, is not a variation of “Semper fi,” “All for one and one for all,” “Duty, honor, country,” “Banzai,” or “Remember Pearl Harbor,” but “Take the money and run.”. . . These problems with the employment of criminals as combat.ants have historically led to efforts to recruit ordinary men as combatants—people who, unlike criminals and thugs, commit violence at no other time in their lives. . . .

The result has been the development of disciplined warfare in which men primarily inflict violence not for fun and profit but because their training and indoctrination have instilled in them a need to follow orders; to observe a carefully contrived and tenden.tious code of honor; to seek glory and reputation in combat; to love, honor, or fear their officers; to believe in a cause; to fear the shame, humiliation, or costs of surrender; or, in particular, to be loyal to, and to deserve the loyalty of, their fellow combatants.31 There’s no mistaking what the themes of Mueller’s discussion are; he tells us in so many words. One of them he calls criminal warfare, and he then explores it in five consecutive paragraphs. He starts by reminding us what a criminal is, and explaining how criminal warfare works. The next two paragraphs elaborate on each of the ways in which criminal armies may form, and the two after that explain the two prob.lems that criminal armies pose for their leaders, one problem per para.graph. These problems naturally lead Mueller to his second theme, disciplined warfare, and he explains that theme in the two consecutive paragraphs. The discussion of each theme coheres not just because it is localized in a string of consecutive paragraphs but because it refers to the theme using a set of transparently related terms. In one thematic string we have terms like criminals, criminal warfare, crime, fun, profit, gangs, mafias, thugs, mercenaries, troublemakers, preys on the weak, execu.tioners, violence, desertion, flight, whim, opportunity, and run. In the other we have ordinary men, training, indoctrination, honor, glory, rep.utation, shame, loyalty, code, and believe in a cause. We don’t have to puzzle over what the words in each cluster have to do with one another, as we did for Keegan’s Clausewitz, culture, states, policy, Enlightenment, political animal, criminal justice, monotheistic religions, Aristotle, and so on. The threads that connect them are obvious. The thematic coherence in Mueller’s exposition is a happy conse.quence of his use of classic style, particularly the imperative to show rather than tell. As soon as we see the thugs preying on little old ladies and fleeing when the cops show up, we appreciate how an army com.posed of such men would operate. We also see how the leader of a mod.ern state would seek a more reliable way to deploy muscle to advance its interests, namely by developing a well-trained modern army. We can even understand how, for these modern states, war can become the continuation of policy by other means.

In all of my previous examples of bad writing I picked on easy marks: deadline-pressured journalists, stuffy academics, corporate hacks, the occasional inexperienced student. How could a seasoned author like John Keegan, a man who shows frequent flashes of writerly flair, serve as a model of incoherent writing, comparing badly with a guy who sells birdseed on Cape Cod? Part of the answer is that male readers will put up with a lot in a book called A History of Warfare. But most of the problem comes from the very expertise that made Keegan so qualified to write his books. Immersed as he was in the study of war, he became a victim of professional narcissism, and was apt to confuse the History of Warfare with the History of a Man in My Field Who Gets Quoted a Lot about Warfare. And after a lifetime of scholarship he was so laden with erudition that his ideas came avalanching down faster than he could organize them. There is a big difference between a coherent passage of writing and a flaunting of one’s erudition, a running journal of one’s thoughts, or a published version of one’s notes. A coherent text is a designed object: an ordered tree of sections within sections, crisscrossed by arcs that track topics, points, actors, and themes, and held together by connec.tors that tie one proposition to the next. Like other designed objects, it comes about not by accident but by drafting a blueprint, attending to details, and maintaining a sense of harmony and balance.

Chapter 6 tellinG riGht from WronG

how to make sense of the Rules of CoRReCt gRammaR, woRd ChoiCe, and punCtuation M any people have strong opinions on the quality of language today. They write books and articles deploring it, fire off letters to the editor, and call in to radio talk shows with their criticisms and complaints. I have found that few of these objec.tions single out clarity or grace or coherence. Their concern is correct usage—rules of proper English such as these: • The word less may not be used for countable items, as in the sign over the supermarket express lane which restricts customers to Ten Items or Less; the sign should read Ten Items or Fewer.

• A modifier may not contain a dangling participle, such as Lying in bed, everything seemed so different, where the implicit subject of the participle lying (I) is different from the subject of the main clause (everything).

• The verb aggravate does not mean “annoy”; it means “make worse.”

The purists who call out these errors see them as symptomatic of a decline in the quality of communication and reasoning in our culture today. As one columnist put it, “I’m concerned about a country that’s not quite sure what it’s saying and doesn’t seem to care.”

It’s not hard to see how these worries arose. There is a kind of writer who makes issues of usage impossible to ignore. These writers are in.curious about the logic and history of the English language and the ways in which it has been used by its exemplary stylists. They have a tin ear for its nuances of meaning and emphasis. Too lazy to crack open a dictio.nary, they are led by gut feeling and intuition rather than attention to careful scholarship. For these writers, language is not a vehicle for clarity and grace but a way to signal their membership in a social clique. Who are these writers? You might think I’m referring to Twittering teenagers or Facebooking freshmen. But the writers I have in mind are the purists—also known as sticklers, pedants, peevers, snobs, snoots, nit.pickers, traditionalists, language police, usage nannies, grammar Nazis, and the Gotcha! Gang. In their zeal to purify usage and safeguard the language, they have made it difficult to think clearly about felicity in expression and have muddied the task of explaining the art of writing. The goal of this chapter is to allow you to reason your way to avoid.ing the major errors of grammar, word choice, and punctuation. In announcing this goal shortly after making fun of the language police, I might seem to be contradicting myself. If this is your reaction, you are a victim of the confusion sown by the sticklers. The idea that there are exactly two approaches to usage—all the traditional rules must be fol.lowed, or else anything goes—is the sticklers’ founding myth. The first step in mastering usage is to understand why the myth is wrong. The myth goes like this: Once upon a time, people cared about using language properly. They consulted dictionaries to look up correct information about word meanings and grammatical constructions. The makers of these dictionaries were Prescriptivists: they prescribed correct usage. Prescriptivists uphold standards of excellence and a respect for the best of our civilization, and are a bulwark against relativ. ism, vulgar populism, and the dumbing down of literate culture. In the 1960s an opposing school emerged, inspired by academic linguistics and theories of progressive education. The ringleaders of this school are Descriptivists: they describe how language actu.ally is used rather than prescribing how it ought to be used. Descriptivists believe that the rules of correct usage are nothing more than the secret handshake of the ruling class, designed to keep the masses in their place. Language is an organic product of human creativity, say the Descriptivists, and people should be allowed to write however they please.

The Descriptivists are hypocrites: they adhere to standards of correct usage in their own writing but discourage the teaching and dissemination of those standards to others, thereby denying the possibility of social advancement to the less privileged. The Descriptivists had their way with the publication of Web.ster’s Third New International Dictionary in 1961, which accepted such errors as ain’t and irregardless. This created a backlash that led to Prescriptivist dictionaries such as The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Ever since then, Prescriptiv.ists and Descriptivists have been doing battle over whether writ.ers should care about correctness. What’s wrong with this fairy tale? Pretty much everything. Let’s begin with the very idea of objective correctness in language. What does it mean to say that it is incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition, or to use decimate to mean “destroy most of” rather than “destroy a tenth of”? After all, these are not logical truths that one could prove like theorems, nor are they scientific discoveries one could make in the lab. And they are certainly not the stipulations of some governing body, like the rules of Major League Baseball. Many people assume that there is such a governing body, namely the makers of dic.tionaries, but as chair of the Usage Panel of the famously prescriptive American Heritage Dictionary (AHD), I am here to tell you that this assumption is false. When I asked the editor of the dictionary how he and his colleagues decide what goes into it, he replied, “We pay atten.tion to the way people use language.” That’s right: when it comes to correct English, there’s no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum. The editors of a dictionary read a lot, keeping their eyes open for new words and senses that are used by many writers in many contexts, and the editors add or change the definitions accordingly. Purists are often offended when they learn that this is how dictionaries are written. In his famous 1962 smack-down of Webster’s Third, the literary critic Dwight Macdonald declared that even if nine-tenths of English speakers were to use a word incor.rectly (say, nauseous meaning “nauseated” rather than “nauseating”), the remaining tenth would be correct (he did not say by what criterion or on whose authority), and the dictionaries should back them up.1 But no lexicographer could carry out Macdonald’s mandate. A dictionary that instructed its users to write in a way that guaranteed they would be misunderstood would be as useless as the Hungarian–English phrasebook in the Monty Python sketch which translated “Can you direct me to the train station?” as Please fondle my buttocks.

At the same time, there is something that is objectively true about usage. We can all agree that George W. Bush spoke incorrectly when he asked, “Is our children learning?”—and when he used inebriating to mean “exhilarating,” referred to the citizens of Greece as “Grecians,” and lamented policies that “vulcanize” (rather than Balkanize) society. Even Bush, in a self-deprecating speech, agreed that these were errors.2 So how can we reconcile the conviction that certain usages are wrong with the absence of any authority that ever decided what was right? The key is to recognize that the rules of usage are tacit conven.tions. A convention is an agreement among the members of a commu.nity to abide by a single way of doing things. There need not be any inherent advantage to which choice is made, but there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice. Familiar examples include stan.dardized weights and measures, electrical voltages and cables, computer file formats, and paper currency. The conventions of written prose represent a similar standardiza.tion. Countless idioms, word senses, and grammatical constructions have been coined and circulated by the universe of English speakers. Linguists capture their regularities in “descriptive rules”—that is, rules that describe how people speak and understand. Here are a few of them:

• The subject of a tensed verb must be in nominative case, such as I, he, she, and they.

• The first-person singular form of the verb be is am.

• The verb vulcanize means “to strengthen a material such as rubber by combining it with sulfur and then applying heat and pressure.”

Many of these rules have become entrenched in a vast community of English speakers, who respect the rules without ever having to think about them. That’s why we laugh at Cookie Monster, LOLcats, and George W. Bush. A subset of these conventions are less widespread and natural, but they have become accepted by a smaller virtual community of literate speakers for use in public forums such as government, journalism, literature, business, and academia. These conventions are “prescrip.tive rules”—rules that prescribe how one ought to speak and write in these forums. Unlike the descriptive rules, many of the prescriptive rules have to be stated explicitly, because they are not second nature to most writers: the rules may not apply in the spoken vernacular, or they may be difficult to implement in complicated sentences which tax the writer’s memory (chapter 4). Examples include the rules that govern punctuation, complex forms of agreement, and fine semantic distinc.tions between uncommon words like militate and mitigate and credible and credulous. What this means is that there is no such thing as a “language war” between Prescriptivists and Descriptivists. The alleged controversy is as bogus as other catchy dichotomies such as nature versus nurture and America: Love It or Leave It. It is true that descriptive and prescriptive rules are different kinds of things and that descriptive and prescriptive grammarians are engaged in different kinds of activities. But it’s not true that if one kind of grammarian is right then the other kind of grammarian is wrong.

Once again I can write from authority. I am, among other things, a descriptive linguist: a card-carrying member of the Linguistic Society of America who has written many articles and books on how people use their mother tongue, including words and constructions that are frowned upon by the purists. But the book you are holding is avowedly prescriptivist: it consists of several hundred pages in which I am bossing you around. While I am fascinated by the linguistic exuberance of the vox populi, I’d be the first to argue that having prescriptive rules is desirable, indeed indispensable, in many arenas of writing. They can lubricate comprehension, reduce misunderstanding, provide a stable platform for the development of style and grace, and signal that a writer has exercised care in crafting a passage. Once you understand that prescriptive rules are the conventions of a specialized form of the language, most of the iptivist controversies evaporate. One of them surrounds the linguist’s defense of nonstan.dard forms like ain’t, brang, and can’t get no (the so-called double neg.ative) against the common accusation that they are products of laziness or illogic (an accusation that easily mixes with racism or class preju.dice). History tells us that the reason that standard English prefers the alternatives isn’t, brought, and can’t get any is not that the two versions were ever weighed on their merits and the standard forms discovered to be superior. No, they are just frozen historical accidents: the “cor.rect” forms are those that happened to be used in the dialect spoken in the region around London when written English first became stan.dardized several centuries ago. If history had unfolded differently, today’s correct forms could have been incorrect, and vice versa. The London dialect became the standard of education, government, and business, and it was also the dialect of better-educated and more afflu.ent speakers throughout the Anglosphere. Double negatives, ain’t, and other nonstandard forms soon became stigmatized by their associa.tion with the less prestigious dialects of English used by its poorer and less educated speakers. But the claim that there is nothing inherently wrong with ain’t (which is true) should not be confused with the claim that ain’t is one of the conventions of standard written English (which is obviously false). This distinction is lost on the purists, who worry that if we point out that people who say ain’t or He be working or ax a question are not lazy or careless, then we have no grounds for advising students and writers to avoid them in their prose. So here is an analogy. In the United Kingdom, everyone drives on the left, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that convention; it is in no way sinister, gauche, or socialist. Nonetheless, we have an excellent reason to encourage a person in the United States to drive on the right. There is a joke about a commuter who’s on his way to work when he gets a call on his mobile phone from his wife. “Be careful, honey,” she says. “They just said on the radio that there’s a maniac driving on the wrong side of the freeway.” “One maniac?” he replies; “There are thousands of them!”

And not even the supposedly descriptivist dictionaries leave their users in doubt as to what the standard forms are. The endlessly repeated claim that Webster’s Third treated ain’t as correct English is a myth.3 It originated in a press release from the publisher’s marketing depart.ment which announced “Ain’t gets official recognition at last.” The dic.tionary, quite reasonably, contained an entry in which people could learn about the word, including, of course, the fact that many speakers disapprove of it. Journalists misinterpreted the press release as saying that the dictionary listed ain’t without comment. Another firestorm can be extinguished by recalling that the conventions of usage are tacit. The rules of standard English are not legislated by a tribunal of lexicographers but emerge as an implicit con.sensus within a virtual community of writers, readers, and editors. That consensus can change over the years in a process as unplanned and uncontrollable as the vagaries of fashion. No official ever decided that respectable men and women were permitted to doff their hats and gloves in the 1960s or to get pierced and tattooed in the 1990s. Nor could any authority with powers short of Mao Zedong have stopped them. In a similar manner, centuries of respectable writers have grad.ually shifted the collective consensus of what is right and wrong while shrugging off now-forgotten edicts by self-appointed guardians of the language. The nineteenth-century prescriptivist Richard White had no luck banning standpoint and washtub, nor did his contemporary Wil.liam Cullen Bryant succeed in outlawing commence, compete, lengthy, and leniency. And we all know how successful Strunk and White were in forbidding to personalize, to contact, and six people. Lexicographers have always understood this. In resigning themselves to the role of chronicling ever-changing usage, they are acknowledging the wisdom of Thomas Carlyle’s famous reply to Margaret Fuller’s statement “I accept the universe”: “Gad! She’d better.”

Although lexicographers have neither the desire nor the power to prevent linguistic conventions from changing, this does not mean, as purists fear, that they cannot state the conventions in force at a given time. That is the rationale behind the American Heritage Dictionary’s Usage Panel: two hundred authors, journalists, editors, scholars, and other public figures whose writing shows that they choose their words with care. Every year they fill out questionnaires on pronunciation, meaning, and usage, and the dictionary reports the results in usage notes attached to entries for problematic words. The Usage Panel is intended to be a sample of the virtual community for whom careful writers write. When it comes to best practices in usage, there is no higher authority. The powerlessness of dictionaries to enforce the prescriptivists’ dream of preventing linguistic change does not mean that the dictio.naries are doomed to preside over a race to the bottom. Macdonald titled his 1962 review of Webster’s Third “The String Untuned,” an allu.sion to the calamitous violation of the natural order that Ulysses fore.saw in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: “The bounded waters should lift their bosoms higher than the shores and make a sop of all this solid globe. Strength should be lord of imbecility and the rude son should strike his father dead.” As an example of the cataclysm that would result from Webster’s untuning of the string, Macdonald wor.ried that the dictionaries of 1988 would list without comment the sole.cisms mischievious, inviduous, and nuclear pronounced as “nucular.” Here we are more than a quarter-century after the prophesied date and more than a half-century after the prediction, and we can check to see what happened. A peek at the entries for these words in any dictionary will show that Macdonald was wrong about the inevitable degenera.tion of a language that is not policed by lexicographers. And though I can’t prove it, I suspect that even if the dictionaries had approved mis.chievious, inviduous, and “nucular,” the bounded waters would not have lifted their bosoms higher than the shores, nor would rude sons have struck their fathers dead.

And now we come to the most bogus controversy of all. The fact that many prescriptive rules are worth keeping does not mean that every pet peeve, bit of grammatical folklore, or dimly remembered les.son from Miss Thistlebottom’s classroom is worth keeping. As we shall see, many prescriptive rules originated for screwball reasons, impede clear and graceful prose, and have been flouted by the best writers for centuries. Phony rules, which proliferate like urban legends and are just as hard to eradicate, are responsible for vast amounts of ham-fisted copyediting and smarty-pants one-upmanship. Yet when language scholars try to debunk the spurious rules, the dichotomizing mindset imagines that they are trying to abolish all standards of good writing. It is as if anyone who proposed repealing a stupid law, like the one forbid.ding interracial marriage, must be a black-cloaked, bomb-clutching anarchist. Experts on usage (not to be confused with the purists, who are often ignoramuses) call these phony rules fetishes, folklore, hobgoblins, superstitions, shibboleths, or (my favorite) bubbe meises, Yiddish for “grandmothers’ tales.” (Each word has two syllables; the u is pro.nounced like the vowel sound in “book,” the ei like that of “mice.”) Linguistic bubbe meises arise from a number of sources. Some of them originated in the first English writing guides published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and have been handed down in an oral tradition ever since.4 In those days Latin was considered the ideal language for the expression of thought. Guides to English gram.mar were written as pedagogical steppingstones to mastery of Latin grammar, and they tried to shoehorn English constructions into the categories designed for Latin. Many perfectly good English construc.tions were stigmatized because they had no counterparts in the lan.guage of Lucretius and Cicero.

Other hobgoblins were the brainchildren of self-proclaimed experts who cooked up idiosyncratic theories of how language ought to behave, usually with a puritanical undercurrent in which people’s natural inclinations must be a form of dissoluteness. According to one of these theories, Greek and Latin forms must never be combined, so automo.bile should have been either autokinetikon or ipsomobile, and bigamy, electrocution, homosexual, and sociology were abominations (the words, that is). According to another theory, words may never be derived by back-formation, that is, by extracting a piece of a complex word and using it on its own, as in the recent verbs commentate, coronate, incent, and surveil, and the slightly older ones intuit and enthuse. Unfortu.nately, this theory would also retroactively outlaw choreograph, diag.nose, resurrect, edit, sculpt, sleepwalk, and hundreds of other verbs that have become completely unexceptionable. Many purists maintain that the only correct sense of a word is the original one. That’s why they insist, for example, that transpire can only mean “become known,” not “take place” (since it initially meant “release vapor,” from the Latin spirare, “breathe”), and that decimate can only mean “killing one in ten” (since it originally described the execution of every tenth soldier in a mutinous Roman legion). The misconception is so common that it has been given a name: the etymological fallacy. It can be debunked with a glance at any page of a historical reference book, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, which will show that very few words retain their original senses. Deprecate used to mean “ward off by prayer,” meticulous once meant “timid,” and silly went from “blessed” to “pious” to “innocent” to “pitiable” to “feeble” to today’s “foolish.” And as Kory Stamper, an editor at Merriam-Webster, has pointed out, if you insist that decimate be used only with its original meaning, “kill one in ten,” shouldn’t you also insist that December be used with its original meaning, “the tenth month in the calendar”? The last refuge of the stickler is the claim that proper usages are more logical than the alternatives. As we shall see, the claim gets it backwards. Many of the commonest usage errors are the result of writ.ers thinking logically when they should be mindlessly conforming to convention. Writers who spell lose as loose (which would make it follow the pattern in choose), who punctuate the possessive of it as it’s (just as we punctuate the possessive of Pat as Pat’s), or who use enormity to mean “the quality of being enormous” (just as we use hilarity to mean the quality of being hilarious) are not being illogical. They are being too logical, while betraying their lack of familiarity with the conven.tions of the printed page. This may be grounds for suspicion by the reader and a prod to self-improvement for the writer, but it is not a failure of consistency or logic.

And this brings us to the reasons to obey some prescriptive rules (the ones accepted by good writers, as opposed to the phony ones that good writers have always ignored). One is to provide grounds for con.fidence that the writer has a history of reading edited English and has given it his full attention. Another is to enforce grammatical consist.ency: to implement rules, such as agreement, that everyone respects but that may be hard to keep track of when the sentence gets compli.cated (see chapter 4). The use of consistent grammar reassures a reader that the writer has exercised care in constructing his prose, which in turn increases her confidence that he has exercised care in the research and thinking behind the prose. It is also an act of courtesy, because consistent trees are easier to parse and harder to misunderstand. Still another reason to care about usage is to ratify a certain attitude to language. Careful writers and discerning readers delight in the pro.fusion of words in the English lexicon, no two of which are exact syn.onyms. Many words convey subtle shades of meaning, provide glimpses into the history of the language, conform to elegant principles of assem.bly, or enliven prose with distinctive imagery, sound, and rhythm. Careful writers pick up the nuances of words by focusing on their makeup and their contexts over the course of tens of thousands of hours of reading. Their readers’ reward consists of partaking in—and, if they themselves write, helping to preserve—this rich patrimony.

When a not-so-careful writer tries to gussy up his prose with an upmarket word that he mistakenly thinks is a synonym of a common one, like simplistic for simple or fulsome for full, his readers are likely to conclude the worst: that he has paid little attention to what he has read, is affecting an air of sophistication on the cheap, and is polluting a common resource. To be sure, the language, to say nothing of all this solid globe, will survive such lapses. Many preferred senses stand their ground over long stretches of time despite constant battering by careless writers. There is no lexicographical version of Gresham’s Law in which the bad meaning of a word always drives out the good one. The preferred sense of disinterested as “impartial,” for example, has coexisted for centuries with its frowned-upon sense as “bored.” This should not be all that surprising, because many words embrace happily coexisting senses, such as literate, which means both “able to read” and “familiar with literature,” and religious, which means both “pertaining to religion” and “obsessively thorough.” The senses are usually sorted out by the context, so both survive. A language has plenty of room for multiple meanings, including the ones that good writers hope to preserve. Still, writers will do themselves a favor, and increase the amount of pleasure in the world, if they use a word in the senses that are accepted by literate readers. This raises the question of how a careful writer can distinguish a legitimate rule of usage from a grandmother’s tale. The answer is unbelievably simple: look it up. Consult a modern usage guide or a dictionary with usage notes, such as Merriam.Webster Unabridged, American Heritage Dictionary, Encarta World English Dictionary, or Random House Dictionary (the one behind www.dictionary.com). Many people, particularly sticklers, are under the impression that every bubbe meise ever loosed on the world by a self-proclaimed purist will be backed up by the major dictionaries and manuals. In fact, these reference works, with their careful attention to history, literature, and actual usage, are the most adamant debunkers of grammatical non.sense. (This is less true of style sheets drawn up by newspapers and professional societies, and of manuals written by amateurs such as

critics and journalists, which tend to mindlessly reproduce the folklore of previous guides.)5 Take the quintessential bogus rule, the prohibition of split infinitives, according to which Captain Kirk should not have said to boldly go where no man has gone before, but rather to go boldly or boldly to go. Here’s what you will find if you look up “split infinitive” in the major guides: American Heritage Dictionary: “The only rationale for condemning the construction is based on a false analogy with Latin. . . . In gen.eral, the Usage Panel accepts the split infinitive.” Merriam.Webster Unabridged online dictionary: “Even though there has never been a rational basis for objecting to the split infinitive, the subject has become a fixture of folk belief about grammar. . . . Modern commentators . . . usually say it’s all right to split an infinitive in the interest of clarity. Since clarity is the usual reason for splitting, this advice means merely that you can split them whenever you need to.” Encarta World English Dictionary: “There is no grammatical basis for rejecting split infinitives.” Random House Dictionary: “Nothing in the history of the infinitive in English . . . supports the so-called rule, and in many sentences . . . the only natural place for the modifying adverb is between to and the verb.” Theodore Bernstein, The Careful Writer: “There is nothing wrong with splitting an infinitive . . . except that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century grammarians, for one reason or another, frowned on it.” Joseph Williams, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace: “The split infini.tive is now so common among the very best writers that when we make an effort to avoid splitting it, we invite notice, whether we intend to or not.” Roy Copperud, American Usage and Style: The Consensus: “Many writers believe they will not go to heaven if they split the infinitive. . . . 

After the folly of [the Latin-based] system of grammar was noted, English was analyzed on its own terms, and the rule against splitting infinitives went out the window. . . . The consensus of seven critics is that infinitives may be split when splitting makes the sentence read more smoothly and does not cause awkwardness.” So split if you need to (as I did in the first line on the preceding page); the experts have your back. What follows is a judicious guide to a hundred of the most common issues of grammar, diction (word choice), and punctuation. These are the ones that repeatedly turn up in style guides, pet-peeve lists, newspaper language columns, irate letters to the editor, and inventories of common errors in student papers. I will use the following criteria to distinguish the legitimate concerns of a careful writer from the folklore and super.stitions: Does the prescriptive rule merely extend the logic of an intuitive grammatical phenomenon to more complicated cases, like enforcing agreement in a sentence with a bushy tree? Do careful writers who inad.vertently flout the rule agree, when the breach is pointed out, that some.thing has gone wrong? Has the rule been respected by the best writers in the past? Is it respected by careful writers in the present? Is there a con.sensus among discerning writers that it conveys an interesting semantic distinction? And are violations of the rule obvious products of mishear.ing, careless reading, or a chintzy attempt to sound highfalutin? A rule should be blown off, in contrast, if the answer to any of the following questions is yes. Is the rule based on some crackpot theory, such as that English should emulate Latin, or that the original meaning of a word is the only correct one? Is it instantly refuted by the facts of English, such as the decree that nouns may not be converted into verbs? Did it originate with the pet peeve of a self-anointed maven? Was it routinely flouted by the great writers of the past? Is it rejected by the careful writers of the present? Is it based on a misdiagnosis of a legiti.mate problem, such as declaring that a construction which is some.times ambiguous is always ungrammatical? Do attempts to fix a sentence so that it obeys the rule only make it clumsier and less clear?

Finally, does the putative rule confuse grammar with formality? Every writer commands a range of styles that are appropriate to differ.ent times and places. A formal style that is appropriate for the inscrip.tion on a genocide memorial will differ from a casual style that is appropriate for an email to a close friend. Using an informal style when a formal style is called for results in prose that seems breezy, chatty, casual, flippant. Using a formal style when an informal style is called for results in prose that seems stuffy, pompous, affected, haughty. Both kinds of mismatch are errors. Many prescriptive guides are oblivious to this distinction, and mistake informal style for incorrect grammar. My advice will often shock purists and occasionally puzzle readers who have always been under the impression that this word meaning or that grammatical usage is an error. But the advice is thoroughly con.ventional. It combines data from the ballots given to the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, the usage notes of several dictio.naries and style guides, the erudite historical analyses in Merriam.Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, the meta-analysis in Roy Copperud’s American Usage and Style: The Consensus, and the view from modern linguistics represented in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and the blog Language Log.6 When the experts disagree, or when the examples are all over the map, I will offer my own best judgment. I divide the hundred usage issues into points of grammar, the expression of quantity and quality, word choice, and punctuation. GrAmmAr adjectives and adverbs. Every now and again a language grump com.plains that the distinction between adverbs and adjectives is disap.pearing from English. In fact, the distinction is alive and well, but it is governed by two subtleties that go beyond the vague memory that adverbs are words that modify verbs and end in –ly.7 The first subtlety is a fact about adverbs: many of them (the ones called flat adverbs) are identical to their related adjectives. You can drive fast (adverb) or drive a fast car (adjective); hit the ball hard or hit a hard ball. The list of flat adverbs differs across dialects: real pretty (as opposed to really pretty) and The house was shaken up bad (as opposed to badly) are common in nonstandard dialects of English and have made inroads into casual and folksy speech in the standard dialect. This crossover is what gave rise to the vague impression that adverbs are endangered. But the historical trend is in the opposite direction: adverbs and adjectives are more often distinguished today than they were in the past. Standard English used to have many flat adverbs that have since been separated from their adjectival twins, such as mon.strous fine (Jonathan Swift), violent hot (Daniel Defoe), and exceeding good memory (Benjamin Franklin). When today’s purists reflect on the ones that remain, like those in Drive safe, Go slow, She sure fooled me, He spelled my name wrong, and The moon is shining bright, they may hallucinate a grammatical error and promulgate prissy alternatives such as She surely fooled me and the one in this Bizarro cartoon:

The second subtlety is a fact about adjectives: they don’t just modify nouns, but can appear as complements to verbs, as in This seems excel.lent, We found it boring, and I feel tired. They can also show up as an adjunct to a verb phrase or clause, as in She died young and They showed up drunk. Recall from chapter 4 that grammatical categories like adjec.tive are not the same thing as grammatical functions like modifier and complement. People who confuse the two may think that the adjectives in these sentences “modify the verb” and hence ought to be replaced by adverbs. The result is a hypercorrection like I feel terribly (which really should be I feel terrible). The related expression I feel badly may have started out in previous generations as a hypercorrected version of I feel bad. Badly has now become an adjective in its own right, meaning “sor.rowful” or “regretful.” Thankfully, James Brown was never tempted to hypercorrect “I Got You (I Feel Good)” to “I Got You (I Feel Well).” A failure to appreciate the multiple functions of adjectives also gave rise to the false accusation that Apple made a grammatical error in its slogan Think Different. The company was right not to revise it to Think Differ.ently: the verb think can take an adjectival complement which refers to the nature of the thoughts being entertained. That is why Texans think big (not largely) and why in the musical Funny Face the advertising slogan that set off a lavish production number was Think Pink, not Think Pinkly.8 To be sure, surveys of typical errors in student papers show that inexperienced writers really do mix up adjectives and adverbs. The phrase The kids he careless fathered is just careless, and in The doctor’s wife acts irresponsible and selfish the writer stretched the ability of act to take an adjectival complement (as in act calm) further than most readers are willing to go.9 ain’t. No one needs to be reminded that ain’t is frowned upon. The prohibition has been drilled into children for so long that they have made it into a jump-rope rhyme: Don’t say ain’t or your mother will faint. Your father will fall in a bucket of paint.

Your sister will cry; your brother will die. Your dog will call the FBI. I like this poetic warning of what will happen if you violate a pre.scriptive rule better than Dwight Macdonald’s prophecy that the bounded waters will lift their bosoms higher than the shores and make a sop of all this solid globe. But both warnings are overstatements. Despite the taint of ain’t from its origin in regional and lower-class English, and more than a century of vilification by schoolteachers, today the word is going strong. It’s not that ain’t is used as a standard contraction for negated forms of be, have, and do; no writer is that oblivious. But it does have some widely established places. One is in the lyrics of popular songs, where it is a crisp and euphonious substitute for the strident and bisyllabic isn’t, hasn’t, and doesn’t, as in “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” “Ain’t She Sweet,” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” Another is in expressions that are meant to capture homespun truths, like If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, That ain’t chopped liver, and It ain’t over till it’s over. This use of ain’t may be found even in relatively formal settings to emphasize that some fact is so obvious as to be beyond further debate—as if to say, “Anyone with a lick of sense can see that.” Hilary Putnam, perhaps the most influential analytic philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century, pub.lished a famous article called “The Meaning of Meaning” in a learned academic volume. At one point he summed up his argument with “Cut the pie any way you like, ‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head!” As far as I know, his mother did not lose consciousness. and, because, but, or, so, also. Many children are taught that it is ungrammatical to begin a sentence with a conjunction (what I have been calling a coordinator). Because they sometimes write in fragments. And are shaky about when to use periods. And when to capitalize. Teachers need a simple way to teach them how to break sentences, so they tell them that sentences beginning with and and other conjunc.tions are ungrammatical.

Whatever the pedagogical merits may be of feeding children misin.formation, it is inappropriate for adults. There is nothing wrong with beginning a sentence with a coordinator. As we saw in chapter 5, and, but, and so are among the commonest coherence markers, and they may be used to begin a sentence whenever the clauses being connected are too long or complicated to fit comfortably into a single megasentence. I’ve begun about a hundred sentences with and or but in the book so far, such as “And we all know how successful Strunk and White were in forbidding to personalize, to contact, and six people,” which capped off a series of sentences about purists who failed to change the language. The coordinator because can also happily sit at the beginning of a sentence. Most commonly it ends up there when it introduces an expla.nation that has been preposed in front of a main clause, as in Because you’re mine, I walk the line. But it can also kick off a single clause when the clause serves as the answer to a why.question. The question can be explicit, as in Why can’t I have a pony? Because I said so. It can also be implicit in a series of related assertions that calls for a single explana.tion, which the author then provides, as in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s reflection on the twentieth-century’s genocidal tyrants: Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagina.tion and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. between you and I. This commonly heard phrase is often held out as an excruciating grammatical blunder. I spelled out the reason in chapter 4 when discussing the example Give Al Gore and I a chance to bring America back. Rigorous tree-thinking demands that a complicated phrase behave in the same way as a simpler phrase in the same posi.tion. The object of a preposition like between must be in the accusative case: we say between us or between them, not between we or between they. Therefore, according to this way of thinking, the pronouns in a coordination must also be accusative: between you and me. The phrase between you and I appears to be a hypercorrection, which arose when speakers who were corrected for Me and Amanda are going to the mall took away the crude moral that you should always say X and I, never me and X or X and me.

But the conviction that between you and I is an error needs a second look, together with the explanation that the phrase is a hypercorrec.tion. When enough careful writers and speakers fail to do something that a theory of syntax says they should, it could mean that it’s the theory that’s wrong, not the writers. A coordination phrase is a strange entity, and the logic of trees that applies elsewhere in English syntax does not apply to it. Most phrases have a head: a single word inside the phrase that determines its prop.erties. The phrase the bridge to the islands has the head bridge, which is a singular noun, so we call the phrase a noun phrase, interpret it as refer.ring to a kind of bridge, and treat the phrase as singular—that’s why everyone agrees that one should say The bridge to the islands is crowded, not are crowded. Not so for a coordination, which is headless: it cannot be equated with any of its components. In the coordination the bridge and the causeway, the first noun phrase, the bridge, is singular, and the second noun phrase, the causeway, is also singular, but the coordina.tion as a whole is plural: The bridge and the causeway are crowded, not is crowded. Perhaps the same is true of case: the case that applies to a whole coordination phrase is not necessarily the same as the case that applies to its parts. When we strive to apply tree-thinking as we write, we may furrow our brows and consciously force the parts to harmonize with the whole. But because coordination phrases are headless, the har.mony is not a requirement of our intuitive grammar, and few of us can consistently pull it off. Thus even an assiduous speaker might say Give Al Gore and I a chance or between you and I. The Cambridge Grammar suggests that in contemporary English many speakers have settled on a rule that allows a nominative pronoun like I or he after the coordina.tor and. And even more of them—the ones who say Me and Amanda are going to the mall—allow an accusative pronoun before and. It is a natural preference, because the accusative is the default case in English, occurring in a motley range of contexts (such as the bare exclamation Me!?), pretty much anywhere it is not preempted by the more selec.tive nominative or genitive.

You might think that the standard prescriptive recommendation, with its ironclad application of tree analysis, is more logical and ele.gant, and that we should all just try harder to implement it and thereby make our language more consistent. But when it comes to coordina.tion, this is an unrealizable dream. Not only does the grammatical number of a coordination systematically differ from the number of the nouns inside it, but sometimes the number and person of a coordina.tion cannot be determined from the tree at all. Which alternative in each of these pairs of sentences is correct?10 Either Elissa or the twins are sure to be there. Either Elissa or the twins is sure to be there.
Either the twins or Elissa is sure to be there. Either the twins or Elissa are sure to be there.
You mustn’t go unless either I or your father comes home with you. You mustn’t go unless either I or your father come home with you.
Either your father or I am going to have to come with you. Either your father or I is going to have to come with you.

No amount of tree-thinking will help you here. Even the style manuals throw up their hands and suggest that writers just look at the linear order of words in the string and make the verb agree with the noun phrase closest to it, like the versions in the left column. Coordination phrases simply don’t follow the logic of ordinary headed phrases. Writ.ers are well advised to avoid between you and I, since it makes many readers bristle, but it is not a heinous error. can versus may. This cartoon explains a traditional rule about two common modal auxiliaries:

At least Mrs. O’Malley didn’t give the standard grown-up’s answer to a child’s request with can: “You can, but the question is, may you?” A col.league of mine recalls that whenever she said, “Daddy, can I ask you a question?” the response was “You just did, but you may ask me another.” As the puzzlement of the young man in the cartoon suggests, the traditional distinction between the meaning of can (capability or pos.sibility) and the meaning of may (permissibility) is tenuous at best. Even many sticklers don’t have the courage of their convictions, such as the maven who insisted on the distinction in one entry in his usage guide but slipped up in another entry and ruled that a certain verb “can only be followed by for.”11 (Gotcha! He should have written may.) Con.versely, may is commonly and innocuously used for possibility rather than permission, as in It may rain this afternoon. In formal style we see a slight preference for using may for permis.sion. But as Mrs. O’Malley suggested, it is only when one is asking (or granting) permission that may is preferable, not when one is merely talking about it. The sentence Students can submit their papers anytime Friday might be said by one student to another, but Students may sub.mit their papers anytime Friday is more likely to be an announcement of the policy by the professor. Since most prose neither grants nor requests permission, the distinction is usually moot, and the two words may (or can) be used more or less interchangeably. dangling modifiers. Do you see a problem with the sentences that follow?

Checking into the hotel, it was nice to see a few of my old classmates in the lobby. Turning the corner, the view was quite different. Born and raised in city apartments, it was always a marvel to me. In order to contain the epidemic, the area was sealed off. Considering the hour, it is surprising that he arrived at all. Looking at the subject dispassionately, what evidence is there for this theory? In order to start the motor, it is essential that the retroflex cam con.necting rod be disengaged. To summarize, unemployment remains the state’s major economic and social problem. According to an old rule about “dangling modifiers,” these sen.tences are ungrammatical. (Sometimes the rule is stated as applying to “dangling participles,” namely the gerund form of a verb ending with –ing or the passive form typically ending in –ed or –en, but the exam.ples include infinitival modifiers as well.) The rule decrees that the implied subject of the modifier (the one doing the checking, turning, and so on) must be identical to the overt subject of the main clause (it, the view, and so on). Most copy editors would recast the main clause, supplying it with a subject (underlined) to which the modifier can be properly fastened: Checking into the hotel, I was pleased to see a few of my old class. mates in the lobby. Turning the corner, I saw that the view was quite different. Born and raised in city apartments, I always found it a marvel. In order to contain the epidemic, authorities sealed off the area. Considering the hour, we should be surprised that he arrived at all. Looking at the subject dispassionately, what evidence do we find for this theory?

In order to start the motor, one should ensure that the retroflex cam connecting rod is disengaged. To summarize, we see that unemployment remains the state’s major economic and social problem. Newspaper columns on usage are filled with apologies for “errors” like these, spotted by ombudsmen or managing editors who have trained themselves to flag them. Danglers are extremely common, not just in deadline-pressured journalism but in the works of distinguished authors. Considering how often these forms turn up in edited prose and how readily they are accepted even by careful readers, two conclu.sions are possible: either dangling modifiers are a particularly insidi.ous grammatical error for which writers must develop sensitive radar, or they are not grammatical errors at all. (Did you notice the dangler in the sentence before last?) The second conclusion is the right one: some dangling modifiers should be avoided, but they are not grammatical errors. The problem with dangling modifiers is that their subjects are inherently ambigu.ous and sometimes a sentence will inadvertently attract a reader to the wrong choice. Many style guides reproduce (or contrive) dangling modifiers with unintentionally comical interpretations, such as these ones from Richard Lederer’s Anguished English: Having killed a man and served four years in prison, I feel that Tom Joad is ripe to get into trouble. Plunging 1,000 feet into the gorge, we saw Yosemite Falls. As a baboon who grew up wild in the jungle, I realized that Wiki had special nutritional needs. Locked in a vault for 50 years, the owner of the jewels has decided to sell them. When a small boy, a girl is of little interest. It’s easy—and wrong—to diagnose the problem as a violation of a grammatical rule called subject control. Most verbs that take subjectless complements, such as try in Alice tried to calm down, are governed by an ironclad rule that forces the overt subject to be identical to the miss.ing subject. That is, we have to interpret Alice tried to calm down as “Alice tried to get Alice to calm down,” rather than “Alice tried to get someone to calm down” or “Alice tried to get everyone to calm down.” But with modifiers there is no such rule. The missing subject of a mod.ifier is identified with the protagonist whose point of view we are assuming as we read the sentence, which is often, but need not always be, the grammatical subject of the main clause. The problem is not one of ungrammaticality but of ambiguity, as in the examples we saw in chapter 4. The jewelry owner who was locked in a vault for fifty years is like the panel on sex with four professors and the recommendation of the candidate with no qualifications.

Some so-called danglers are perfectly acceptable. Many participles have turned into prepositions, such as according, allowing, barring, concerning, considering, excepting, excluding, failing, following, given, granted, including, owing, regarding, and respecting, and they don’t need subjects at all. Inserting we find or we see into the main clause to avoid a dangler can make the sentence stuffy and self-conscious. More generally, a modifier can dangle when its implied subject is the writer and the reader, as in To summarize and In order to start the motor in the examples above. And when the subject of the main clause is the dummy element it or there, the reader glides right over it, and it poses no danger of attracting a dangler. The decision of whether to recast a sentence to align its subject with the subject of a modifier is a matter of judgment, not grammar. A thoughtlessly placed dangler can confuse the reader or slow her down, and occasionally it can lure her into a ludicrous interpretation. Also, even if a dangler is in no danger of being misinterpreted, enough read.ers have trained themselves to spot danglers that a writer who leaves it incurs the risk of being judged as slovenly. So in formal styles it’s not a bad idea to keep an eye open for them and to correct the obtrusive ones.

fused participles (possessives with gerunds). Do you have a problem with the sentence She approved of Sheila taking the job? Do you insist that it should be She approved of Sheila’s taking the job, in which the gerund (taking) has a subject (Sheila’s) that is marked with genitive case? Perhaps you think that the first version, the one with the unmarked subject, is an increasingly common symptom of grammatical laziness. If so, you are a victim of the spurious rule about so-called fused parti.ciples. (The term was coined by Fowler to suggest that the participle taking has been illicitly fused with the noun Sheila into the mongrel Sheila.taking: the theory made little sense, but the term stuck.) In fact, gerunds with unmarked subjects were the historically earlier form, have long been used by the language’s best writers, and are perfectly idio.matic. Unfusing a participle can make a sentence clumsy or pretentious:12 Any alleged evils of capitalism are simply the result of people’s being free to choose. The police had no record of my car’s having been towed. I don’t like the delays caused by my computer’s being underpowered. The ladies will pardon my mouth’s being full. And often it cannot be done at all: I was annoyed by the people behind me in line’s being served first. You can’t visit them without Ethel’s pulling out pictures of her grand.children. What she objects to is men’s making more money than women for the same work. Imagine a child with an ear infection who cannot get penicillin’s los.ing his hearing. In these cases, dropping the ’s results in a perfectly acceptable sentence: I was annoyed by the people behind me in line being served first. A sub.stantial majority of the AHD Usage Panel accept the so-called fused participle, not just in these complicated sentences but in simple ones like I can understand him not wanting to go. For sentences that have been repeated verbatim in questionnaires over the decades, the rate of acceptance has increased over time.

How should a writer choose? Any semantic difference between the alternatives is elusive, and the choice mainly hinges on style: the genitive subject (I approve of Sheila’s taking the job) is appropriate in more formal writing, the unmarked subject (I approve of Sheila taking the job) in informal writing and speech. The nature of the grammatical subject mat.ters, too. The clumsy examples above show that long and complicated subjects are best left unmarked, whereas simpler ones like pronouns work well in the genitive, as in I appreciate your coming over to help. Some writers sense a subtle distinction in the focus of attention. When the focus is on the entire event, packaged into a conceptual whole, the geni.tive subject seems better: if the fact that Sheila is taking the job had been mentioned previously, and we were all discussing whether this was a good thing or a bad thing (not just for Sheila but for the company, her friends, and her family), I might say I approve of Sheila’s taking the job. But if the focus is on the subject and her possible courses of action, say, if I was a friend of Sheila’s and had been advising her whether to stay in school or accept the offer, I might say I approve of Sheila taking the job. if.then. Something is slightly off in these sentences, but what? If I didn’t have my seat belt on, I’d be dead. If he didn’t come to America, our team never would have won the championship. If only she would have listened to me, this would never have happened. Many conditional constructions (those with an if and a then) seem bewilderingly picky about which tenses, moods, and auxiliaries may go into them, particularly had and would. Fortunately, there is a for.mula for writing graceful conditionals, and it becomes clear once you recognize two distinctions. The first is that English has two kinds of conditional constructions:13 If you leave now, you will get there on time. [an open conditional]

If you left now, you would get there on time. [a remote conditional] The first is called an open conditional, from the expression “an open possibility.” It refers to a situation that the writer is uncertain about, and it invites the reader to draw inferences or make predictions about that situation. Here are a couple of other examples: If he is here, he’ll be in the kitchen. If it rains tomorrow, the picnic will be canceled. With these conditionals, anything goes: you can use pretty much any tense in the if and then clauses, depending only on when the relevant events take place or are discovered. The second kind is called a remote conditional, from the expression “a remote possibility.” It refers to a counterfactual, highly improbable, blue-sky, or make-believe world, one that the writer thinks is unlikely to be true but whose implications are worth exploring: If I were a rich man, I wouldn’t have to work hard. If pigs had wings, they would fly. Remote conditionals are the finicky ones, though their demands, as we shall see, are not as arbitrary as they at first seem. The formula is that the if.clause must have a past-tense verb, and the then.clause must con.tain would or a similar auxiliary such as could, should, or might. If we take a typical double-would conditional (left side) and put the if.clause into the past tense, it instantly sounds classier: If only she would have listened to me, If only she had listened to me, this this would never have happened. would never have happened.

The problem with the left-hand version is that would have does not belong in the if.clause, only in the then.clause. The job of the condi.tional would is to explain what ought to happen in the make-believe world; it does not set up that world, a task that is reserved for the if.clause and its past-tense verb. By the way, this is true for counterfac.tuals in general, not just for ones that are found in if.then construc.tions. Doesn’t the right-hand version in this pair sound better? I wish you would have told me about I wish you had told me about this this sooner. sooner. Now here’s the rationale behind the formula. When I said that the if.clause must be in the past tense, I did not mean that it refers to a past time. “Past tense” is a grammatical term referring to one of the forms an English verb can take, namely the verb plus –ed, or, in the case of irregular verbs, some variant such as make.made, sell.sold, or bring.brought. “Past time,” in contrast, is a semantic concept referring to an event that took place before the moment of speaking or writing. In English, a past-tense form is typically used to refer to past time, but it can also be used with a second meaning, factual remoteness. That’s the meaning it’s expressing in the if.clause. Consider the sentence If you left tomorrow, you’d save a lot of money. The verb left couldn’t possibly refer to an event in the past: the sentence says “tomorrow.” But the past-tense form is fine, because it refers to a hypothetical (factually remote) event. (By the way, with 99.98 percent of the common verbs in English, the same verb form, past tense, is used to convey both past time and factual remoteness. But one verb has a special form to express remoteness: be, which distinguishes If I was from If I were. We’ll deal with it in the discussion of the subjunctive.) What about the second half of the conditional, the then.clause, which calls for the auxiliaries would, could, should, or might? It turns out they are just like the verbs in the if.clause: they are in the past tense, with a factual-remoteness meaning. The d’s and the t at the ends of these auxiliaries are a giveaway: would is just the irregular past-tense form of will, could the past-tense form of can, should the past-tense form of shall, and might the past-tense form of may. We can see this in the contrast between open conditionals in the present tense and their remote conditionals in the past tense:

If you leave now, you can get there on time. If you left now, you could get there on time.
If you leave now, you will get there on time. If you left now, you would get there on time.
If you leave now, you may get there on time. If you left now, you might get there on time.
If you leave now, you shall get there on time. If you left now, you should get there on time.

So the rule for remote conditionals turns out to be simpler than it looks: the if.clause contains a verb which sets up a hypothetical world; the then.clause explores what will happen in that world, using a modal auxiliary. Both clauses use the past tense to express the meaning “fac.tual remoteness.” There is one more piece to the puzzle of how to write classy condi.tionals. Why do they so often contain the verb form had, as in If I hadn’t had my seat belt on, I’d be dead, which sounds better than If I didn’t have my seat belt on, I’d be dead? The key is that had turns up when the if.clause refers to an event whose time of occurrence really is the past. Recall that the if.clause in a remote conditional demands the past tense but has nothing to do with past time. Now when a writer really does want to refer to a past-time event in a remote conditional, he needs the past tense of a past-tense form. The past-of-the-past is called the pluperfect, and it is formed with the auxiliary had, as in I had already eaten. So whenever the time of the make-believe world of the if.clause is prior to the time of writing, the clause needs to be in the pluperfect: If you had left earlier, you would have been on time.

Though the rules are perfectly logical, the conditions are hard to keep track of. Together with forgetting to use had in a past-time if.clause, writers sometimes overcompensate by using too many of them, as in If that hadn’t have happened, he would not be the musician he is today—a hypercorrection sometimes called the plupluperfect. One instance of have is enough: it should be If that hadn’t happened. like, as, such as. Long ago, in the Mad Men era when cigarettes were advertised on radio and television, every brand had a slogan. “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.” “Lucky Strike means fine tobacco.” “Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country.” And most infamously, “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should.” The infamy did not come from the fact that the company was using a catchy jingle to get people addicted to carcinogens. It came from the fact that the jingle allegedly contained a grammatical error. Like is a preposition, said the accusers, and may take only a noun phrase object, as in crazy like a fox or like a bat out of hell. It is not a conjunction (what I have been calling a coordinator) and so may not be followed by a clause. The New Yorker sneered at the error, Ogden Nash wrote a poem about it, Walter Cronkite refused to say it on the air, and Strunk and White declared it illiterate. The slogan, they agreed, should have been “Winston tastes good, as a cigarette should.” The advertising agency and the tobacco company were delighted by the unpaid publicity and were only too happy to confess to the error in the coda, “What do you want, good grammar or good taste?” Like many usage controversies, the brouhaha over like a cigarette should is a product of grammatical ineptitude and historical igno.rance. To start with, the fact that like is a preposition, which typically takes a noun phrase complement, does not mean that it may not take a clausal complement as well. As we saw in chapter 4, many prepositions, such as after and before, take either one, so the question of whether like is a conjunction is a red herring. Even if it is a preposition, it could very well precede a clause. More important, the ad’s use of like with a clause was not a recent corruption. The combination has been in use for six hundred years throughout the English-speaking world, though with greater frequency in the nineteenth century and in the United States. It has been used in literary works by dozens of great writers (including Shakespeare, Dick.ens, Twain, Wells, and Faulkner) and has flown beneath the radar of the purists themselves, who have inadvertently used it in their own style guides. This does not show that purists are only human and some.times make errors; it shows that the alleged error is not an error. The

R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company was confessing to the wrong crime; its slogan was perfectly grammatical. Writers are free to use either like or as, mindful only that as is a bit more formal, and that the Winston-tastes-good controversy became such a bloody shirt in the grammar wars that readers may mistakenly think the writer has made an error. A related superstition, ruthlessly enforced by many copy editors, is that like may not be used to introduce examples, as in Many technical terms have become familiar to laypeople, like “cloning” and “DNA.” They would correct it to such as “cloning” and “DNA.” According to this guide.line, like may be used only for resemblance to an exemplar, as in I’ll find someone like you and Poems are made by fools like me. Few writers con.sistently follow this bogus rule, including the mavens who insist on it (one of whom, for example, wrote, “Avoid clipped forms like bike, prof, doc”). Such as is more formal than like, but both are legitimate. possessive antecedents. Ready for another example of pointless purist dudgeon? Then consider this question from a 2002 College Board exam, which asked students to identify the grammatical error, if there was one, in the following sentence: Toni Morrison’s genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African Americans have endured. The official answer was that the sentence did not contain an error. A high school teacher complained that it did, because the possessive phrase Toni Morrison’s cannot serve as the antecedent of the pronoun her. The College Board caved in to his pressure and retroactively gave credit to all the students who had identified her as incorrect. On cue, pundits moaned about declining standards.14

But the rule against possessive (more accurately, genitive) anteced.ents is a figment of the purists’ misunderstanding. Far from being an established principle of grammar, the rule seems to have been conjured out of thin air by a usage maven in the 1960s and has been uncompre.hendingly copied by others ever since. Genitive antecedents have been considered unexceptionable throughout the history of English, and may be found in Shakespeare, the King James Bible (“And Joseph’s master took him, and put him into the prison”), Dickens, and Thack.eray, together with Strunk and White (“The writer’s colleagues . . . have greatly helped him in the preparation of his manuscript”) and one of the irate pundits himself (“It may be Bush’s utter lack of self-doubt that his detractors hate most about him”). Why would anyone think that this perfectly natural construction is ungrammatical? The rationale stated by one rule-giver was that “there is in fact no person named for the him to refer to.” Say what? Is there a neurologically intact reader anywhere who can’t figure out whom the pronoun refers to in Bob’s mother loved him or Stacy’s dog bit her? The other rationale is that Toni Morrison’s is an adjective, and pro.nouns must refer back to nouns. But Toni Morrison’s is not an adjective, like red or beautiful; it’s a noun phrase in genitive case. (How do we know? Because you can’t use genitives in clear adjectival contexts like That child seems Lisa’s or Hand me the red and John’s sweater.) The confusion comes from the vague impression that the phrase is a “mod.ifier.” But the impression not only confuses a grammatical category (adjective) with a grammatical function (modifier) but also gets the function wrong. Toni Morrison’s isn’t functioning as a modifier, which shades the meaning of genius, but as a determiner, which pins down its referent, in the same way that an article like the or this would do. (How do we know? Because a count noun cannot stand on its own—you can’t say Daughter cooked dinner—and a modifier doesn’t help; Beautiful daughter cooked dinner is still bad. But add either an article, as in A daughter cooked dinner, or a genitive, as in Jenny’s daughter cooked dinner, and the sentence is complete. This shows that genitives have the same function as articles, namely determiner.)

As with any pronoun, a writer can confuse his readers if he fails to make the antecedent clear, such as in Sophie’s mother thinks she’s fat, where we don’t know whether it’s Sophie or her mother who is thought to be fat. But that has nothing to do with the antecedent being in the genitive case; it’s just as much of a problem in Sophie and her mother think she’s fat. Though it’s only fair that the students who thought they spotted an error got credit for their answer (since they may have been misedu.cated by purists), the ire of language lovers ought to be directed at the stylistic clumsiness of the godawful sentence about Toni Morrison, not at a fictitious error in it. preposition at the end of a sentence. Winston Churchill did not, as legend has it, reply to an editor who had corrected his prose with “This is pedantry up with which I will not put.”15 Nor is that witticism (orig.inally from a 1942 Wall Street Journal article) a particularly good example of the construction that linguists call preposition stranding, as in Who did you talk to? or That’s the bridge I walked across. The par.ticle up is an intransitive preposition and does not require an object, so even the most pedantic of pedants would have no objection to a phrase like This is pedantry with which I will not put up. Though the attribution and the example are spurious, the mockery is appropriate. As with split infinitives, the prohibition against clause-final prepositions is considered a superstition even by the language mavens, and it persists only among know-it-alls who have never opened a dictionary or style manual to check. There is nothing, repeat nothing, wrong with Who are you looking at? or The better to see you with or We are such stuff as dreams are made on or It’s you she’s thinking of. The pseudo-rule was invented by John Dryden based on a silly analogy with Latin (where the equivalent to a preposition is attached to the noun and cannot be separated from it) in an effort to show that Ben Jonson was an inferior poet. As the linguist Mark Liberman remarked, “It’s a shame that Jonson had been dead for 35 years at the time, since he would otherwise have challenged Dryden to a duel, and saved subse.quent generations a lot of grief.”16

The alternative to stranding a preposition at the end of a clause is allowing it to accompany a wh.word to the front, a rule that the linguist J. R. (Haj) Ross dubbed pied-piping, because it reminded him of the way that the Pied Piper lured the rats out of the village of Hamelin. The standard question rule in English converts You are seeing what? into What are you seeing? and hence You are looking at what? into What are you looking at? The pied-piping rule allows the what to pull the at with it to the front of the sentence, yielding At what are you looking? The same rule creates relative clauses that begin with a preposition and a wh-word such as the better with which to see you or It’s you of whom she’s thinking. Sometimes it really is better to pied-pipe a preposition to the begin.ning of a clause than to strand it at the end. Most obviously, pied-piping sounds better in a formal style. Abraham Lincoln knew what he was doing at the graves of the fallen soldiers at Gettysburg when he vowed “increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full mea.sure of devotion,” rather than “increased devotion to that cause which they gave the last full measure of devotion for.” Pied-piping is also a good choice when a stranded preposition would get lost in a hubbub of little grammatical words, such as One of the beliefs which we can be highly confident in is that other people are conscious. The sentence is easier to parse when the role of the preposition is settled before we get to that busy crossroads: One of the beliefs in which we can be highly confident is that other people are conscious. A good piece of advice on when to pied-pipe and when to strand comes from Theodore Bernstein, who invokes the principle empha.sized in chapter 4: select the construction that allows you to end a sen.tence with a phrase that is heavy or informative or both. The problem with stranding a preposition is that it can end the sentence with a word that is too lightweight to serve as its focal point, making the sentence sound like “the last sputter of an engine going dead.” As an example

Bernstein cites He felt it offered the best opportunity to do fundamental research in chemistry, which was what he had taken his Doctor of Phi.losophy degree in. By the same principle, a preposition should be stranded at the end of a sentence when it contributes a crucial bit of information, as in music to read by, something to guard against, and that’s what this tool is for, or when it pins down the meaning of an idiom, as in It’s nothing to sneeze at, He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or She’s a woman who can be counted on. predicative nominative. When you come home after a day at the office, do you call out to your spouse, “Hi, honey, it’s I”? If you do, you are the victim of a schoolmarm rule that insists that a pronoun serving as the complement of be must be in nominative case (I, he, she, we, they) rather than accusative case (me, him, her, us, them). According to this rule, Psalms (120:5), Isaiah (6:5), Jeremiah (4:31), and Ophelia should have cried out, “Woe is I,” and the cartoon possum Pogo should have reworded his famous declaration as “We have met the enemy, and he is we.” The rule is a product of the usual three confusions: English with Latin, informal style with incorrect grammar, and syntax with seman.tics. Though the referent of the noun phrase after be is the same as that of the subject (enemy = we), the case of the noun phrase is determined by its position after the verb, which can always be accusative. (The accusative case is the default in English, and it can be used anywhere except in the subject of a tensed verb; thus we have hit me, give me a hand, with me, Who, me?, What, me get a tattoo?, and Molly will be giving the first lecture, me the second.) Accusative predicates have been used for centuries by many respected writers (including Pepys, Steele, Hemingway, and Woolf), and the choice between It is he and It is him is strictly one of formal versus informal style. sequence of tenses and other perspective shifts. A common error in student writing is to shift the tense from a main clause to a subordinate one even when they refer to the same time period.17

She started panicking and got stressed She started panicking and got stressed out because she doesn’t have enough out because she didn’t have enough money. money. The new law requires the public school The new law requires the public school system to abandon any programs that system to abandon any programs that involved bilingual students. involve bilingual students. The incorrect versions on the left make the reader feel like she is being yanked back and forth along the time line between the moment at which the sentence was written (present) and the time of the situation being described (past). They belong to a family of “inappropriate shifts” in which the writer fails to stay put at a single vantage point but van.ishes from one and pops up at another. The reader can get vertigo when the writer flip-flops within a sentence between persons (first, second, and third), voices (active and passive), or types of discourse (a direct quotation of the speaker’s exact words, usually set off with quotation marks, versus an indirect report of the gist, usually set off with that): Love brings out the joy in people’s Love brings out the joy in people’s hearts and puts a glow in your eyes. hearts and puts a glow in their eyes. People express themselves more People express themselves more offensively when their comments are offensively when they deliver their delivered through the Internet rather comments through the Internet rather than personally. than personally. The instructor told us, “Please read the The instructor told us that we should next two stories before the next class” read the next two stories before the and that she might give us a quiz on next class and that she might give us a them. quiz on them. Sticking to a consistent vantage point is the first step in getting the tenses in a complex story to come out right, but there’s more to it than that. A writer also has to harmonize the tenses according to a scheme called sequence of tenses, tense agreement, or backshift. Most readers sense that there is something askew in the sentences on the left:

But at some point following the shootout and car chase, the younger brother fled on foot, according to State Police, who said Friday night they don’t believe he has access to a car. Mark Williams-Thomas, a former detective who amassed much of the evidence against Mr. Savile last year, said that he is continuing to help the police in coaxing people who might have been victimized years ago to come forward.18 Security officials said that only some of the gunmen are from the Muslim Brotherhood. But at some point following the shootout and car chase, the younger brother fled on foot, according to State Police, who said Friday night they didn’t believe he had access to a car. Mark Williams-Thomas, a former detective who amassed much of the evidence against Mr. Savile last year, said that he was continuing to help the police in coaxing people who might have been victimized years ago to come forward. Security officials said that only some of the gunmen were from the Muslim Brotherhood.

In indirect discourse in the past tense (a staple of news reporting), the tense of a verb often sounds better when it, too, is in the past tense, even though the event was in the present from the vantage point of the person speaking.19 This is clear enough in simple sentences. One would say I mentioned that I was thirsty, not I mentioned that I am thirsty, even though what I actually mentioned at the time was “I am thirsty.” Though backshifting usually occurs when someone said something in the past, it also occurs when a proposition was generally believed in the past, as in This meant that Amy was taking on too many responsibilities. At first glance, the conditions that govern sequences of tenses seem daunting. Bernstein’s The Careful Writer, an informal style manual, takes five pages to explain fourteen rules, exceptions, and exceptions to the exceptions. Surely not even the most careful writer has learned them one by one. It’s better to understand a few principles that govern time, tense, and discourse than to try to memorize a list of regulations that are tailored to the sequence-of-tense phenomenon itself. The first is to remember that past tense is not the same thing as past time. Recall from the discussion of if.then constructions that the past tense is used not just for events that took place in the past but for events that are remote possibilities (as in If you left tomorrow, you’d save a lot of money). We now see that the past tense has a third meaning in English: a backshifted event in a sequence of tenses. (Though the meaning of backshifting may seem to be just past time, there are subtle semantic differences between the two.)20

The second principle is that backshifting is not mandatory, which means that violating the sequence-of-tense rules and keeping the reported content in the present tense is not always an error. Grammar.ians distinguish the “attracted” or backshifted sequence, in which the tense of the embedded verb is metaphorically attracted to the tense of the verb of saying, from the “vivid,” “natural,” or “breakthrough” sequence, in which the embedded verb metaphorically breaks out of the story line of its clause and is located in the real time of the writer and reader. The vivid, nonbackshifted sequence feels more natural when the state being spoken about is not just true at the time that the speaker was speaking but true for all time, or at least indubitably true at the time that the writer is writing and the reader is reading. It would be odd to say The teacher told the class that water froze at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, which seems to suggest that perhaps it no longer does; one should violate the backshifting rule here and say The teacher told the class that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. This leaves plenty of leeway for judgment, depending on whether the writer wishes to emphasize the continuing truth of some idea that was bruited in the past. The backshifted Simone de Beauvoir noted that women faced dis.crimination is neutral as to whether such discrimination is a persistent feature of our society. Simone de Beauvoir noted that women face dis.crimination takes the more feminist position that it is. A third principle is that indirect discourse is not always introduced with an expression like he said that or she thought that; sometimes it is implicit in the context. Journalists get tired of repeating he said, and novelists sometimes skip it by using a technique called free indirect style, in which the narration of the author incorporates the interior monologue of a protagonist:

According to the Prime Minister, there was no cause for alarm. As long as the country kept its defense up and its alliances intact, all would be well. Renee was getting more and more anxious. What could have happened to him? Had he leapt from the tower of Fine Hall? Was his body being pulled out of Lake Carnegie? A writer can do the opposite, too, and interrupt his narration of an indirect discourse with an aside directed to the reader, which breaks out of the backshifted tense and into the present: Mayor Menino said the Turnpike Authority, which is responsible for the maintenance of the tunnel, had set up a committee to investigate the accident. The final key to using sequences of tenses should be familiar from our discussion of if and then. The past-tense forms of can, will, and may are could, would, and might, and these are the forms to use in back- shifting:
Amy can play the bassoon. Amy said that she could play the bassoon.
Paul will leave on Tuesday. Paul said that he would leave on Tuesday.
The Liberals may try to form a coalition government. Sonia said that the Liberals might try to form a coalition government.

And the past tense of a past tense (the pluperfect) uses the auxiliary had, so when the backshifted verb refers to a past time, had is sum.moned into action: He wrote it himself. He said that he had written it himself.

It’s not obligatory, though; writers often simplify things by using the simple past tense in both places (He said that he wrote it himself), which (for complicated reasons) is technically consistent with the semantics of backshifting. shall and will. According to another old rule, when speaking about an event in the future one must use shall in the first person (I shall, we shall) but will in the second and third person (you will, he will, she will, they will). But when expressing determination or permission, it’s the other way around. Thus Lillian Hellman, when she defied the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, properly declared I will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions. Had her comrades been speaking on her behalf, they would have said She shall not cut her con.science to fit this year’s fashions. The rule is suspiciously complicated for something as basic to every.day expression as future time, and it turns out not to be a rule at all. The authors of Merriam.Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, having sur.veyed the uses of the two forms over six hundred years, conclude, “The traditional rules about shall and will do not appear to have described real usage of these words precisely at any time, although there is no question that they do describe the usage of some people some of the time and that they are more applicable in England than elsewhere.” Even with some Englishmen some of the time, it can be hard to distinguish future time in the first person from determination in the first person because of the metaphysical peculiarity of future time: no one knows what the future will bring, but we can choose to try to affect it.21 When Churchill said, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, . . . we shall never surrender,” was he fiercely proclaiming the determination of the British people, or was he calmly prophesying a future that was certain because of the determination of the British people? With everyone else—the Scots, Irish, Americans, and Canadians (other than those with traditional English schooling)—the rule about shall and will never applied. In his manual Plain Words, Ernest Gowers wrote, “The story is a very old one of the drowning Scot who was mis.understood by English onlookers and left to his fate because he cried, ‘I will drown and nobody shall save me!’” Outside England (and for a growing number of speakers there as well), shall sounds prissy as an expression of future tense: no one says I shall pick up the toilet paper at Walmart this afternoon. And when shall is used at all, particularly in the first person, it tends to defy the rule and convey non-future senses such as permission (Shall we dance?) and determination (as in General Douglas MacArthur’s famous declaration “I shall return” and the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome”). As Copperud wrote, “Shall, then, seems well on the way to extinction, much like the hapless Scot.”

split infinitives. Most mythical usage rules are merely harmless. The prohibition of split infinitives (as in Are you sure you want to perma.nently delete all the items and subfolders in the “Deleted Items” folder?) and the even more sweeping prohibition of “split verbs” (as in I will always love you and I would never have guessed) is downright perni.cious. Good writers who have been brainwashed into unsplitting their infinitives can come out with monstrosities such as these: Hobbes concluded that the only way out of the mess is for everyone permanently to surrender to an authoritarian ruler. David Rockefeller, a member of the Harvard College Class
of 1936 and longtime University benefactor, has pledged $100 million to increase dramatically learning opportunities for Harvard undergraduates through international experiences
and participation in the arts.22 The split-verb superstition can even lead to a crisis of governance. During the 2009 presidential inauguration, Chief Justice John Roberts, a famous stickler for grammar, could not bring himself to have Barack Obama “solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States.” Abandoning his strict constructionism, Roberts unilaterally amended the Constitution and had Obama “solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully.” The garbled oath raised fears about whether the transfer of power had been legitimate, and so they repeated the oath verbatim, split verb and all, in a private meeting later that afternoon.

The very terms “split infinitive” and “split verb” are based on a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in which it is impossible to split a verb because it consists of a single word, such as amare, “to love.” But in English, the so-called infinitive to write consists of two words, not one: the subordi.nator to and the plain form of the verb write, which can also appear without to in constructions such as She helped him pack and You must be brave.23 Similarly, the allegedly unsplittable verb will execute is not a verb at all but two verbs, the auxiliary verb will and the main verb execute. There is not the slightest reason to interdict an adverb from the position before the main verb, and great writers in English have placed it there for centuries.24 Indeed, the spot in front of the main verb is often the most natural resting place for an adverb. Sometimes it is the only resting place, particularly when the modifier is a negation or quantifier such as not or more than. (Recall from chapter 5 that the placement of not affects its log.ical scope and thus the meaning of the sentence.) In each of the examples below, unsplitting the infinitive either changes the sense or leads to garble: The policy of the Army at that time was to not send women into combat roles.25 The policy of the Army at that time was not to send women into combat roles.
I’m moving to France to not get fat [caption of a New Yorker cartoon].26 I’m moving to France not to get fat.
Profits are expected to more than double next year. 27 Profits are expected more than to double next year.

More generally, the preverbal position is the only one in which the adverb unambiguously modifies the verb. In a sentence in which the author may have taken pains to unsplit an infinitive, such as The board voted immediately to approve the casino, the reader has to wonder whether it was the vote that was immediate, or the approval. With the infinitive

left unsplit—The board voted to immediately approve the casino—it can only be the approval. This does not mean that infinitives should always be split. When the adverbial modifier is long and heavy, or when it contains the most important information in a sentence, it should be moved to the end, just like any other heavy or newsworthy phrase: Flynn wanted to more definitively Flynn wanted to identify the source of identify the source of the rising IQ the rising IQ scores more definitively. scores. Scholars today are confronted with Scholars today are confronted with the problem of how to non-arbitrarily the problem of how to interpret the interpret the Qur’an. Qur’an non-arbitrarily. Indeed, it’s a good habit to at least consider moving an adverb to the end of the verb phrase. If the adverb conveys important information, it belongs there; if it doesn’t (such as really, just, actually, and other hedges), it might be a verbal fluffball that is best omitted altogether. And since there are benighted sticklers out there who will mistakenly accuse you of making an error when you split an infinitive, you might as well not ask for trouble if it makes no difference to the sentence anyway. Finally, in many cases a quantifier naturally floats leftward away from the verb, unsplitting the infinitive, as in the examples on the right: It seems monstrous to even suggest It seems monstrous even to suggest the possibility. the possibility. Is it better to never have been born? Is it better never to have been born? Statesmen are not called upon to only Statesmen are not called upon only to settle easy questions. settle easy questions.28 I find it hard to specify when to not I find it hard to specify when not to split an infinitive. split an infinitive. The unsplit versions sound more elegant to me, though I can’t be sure that my ears haven’t been contaminated by a habit of cravenly unsplit.ting infinitives to avoid spitballs from the Gotcha! Gang.

subjunctive mood and irrealis were. For several hundred years com.mentators on the English language have been predicting, lamenting, or celebrating the imminent extinction of the subjunctive mood. But here we are in the twenty-first century and it refuses to die, at least in writ.ing. To appreciate this, one has to get straight what the subjunctive is, because most people, including traditional grammarians, are confused about it. There is no distinctive subjunctive form in English; the construc.tion just uses the unmarked form of the verb, such as live, come, and be. This makes subjunctives hard to spot: they are noticeable only when the verb has a third-person singular subject (in which case it ordinarily takes the suffix –s, as in lives and comes) or when the verb is to be (which ordinarily shape-shifts to am, is, or are). Subjunctives can be sighted in a few clichés that have come down to us from a time in which the form was more common in English: So be it; Be that as it may; Far be it from me; If need be. Long live our noble queen. Heaven forbid. Suffice it to say. Come what may. But otherwise the subjunctive is found only in subordinate clauses, generally with mandative verbs and adjectives, which indicate that something is demanded or required:29 I insist that she be kept in the loop. It’s essential that he see a draft of the speech before it is given. We must cooperate in order that the system operate efficiently. Subjunctives also turn up with certain prepositions and subordinators that specify hypothetical situations:

Bridget was racked with anxiety lest her plagiarism become known. He dared not light a candle for fear that it be spotted by some prowl.ing savage. Dwight decided he would post every review on his Web site, whether it be good or bad. Some of the examples are a bit formal and can be replaced by the indicative, such as It’s essential that he sees a draft and whether it is good or bad. But many subjunctives can be found in everyday writing and speech, such as I would stress that people just be aware of the danger, showing that reports of the death of the subjunctive are greatly exag.gerated. Traditional grammarians get tripped up by the verb be because they have to squeeze two different forms, be and were (as in If I were free), into a single slot called “subjunctive.” Sometimes they call be the “pres.ent subjunctive” and were the “past subjunctive,” but in reality there’s no difference in tense between them. Rather, the two belong to differ.ent moods: whether he be rich or poor is subjunctive; If I were a rich man is irrealis (“not real”). The irrealis mood is found in many lan.guages, where it expresses situations that are not known to have hap.pened, including hypotheticals, imperatives, and questions. In English it exists only in the form were, where it conveys factual remoteness: an irrealis proposition is not just hypothetical (the speaker does not know whether it is true or false) but counterfactual (the speaker believes it’s false). Tevye the Milkman was emphatically not a rich man, nor were Tim Hardin, Bobby Darin, Johnny Cash, or Robert Plant (all of whom sang “If I Were a Carpenter”) in any doubt as to whether they were carpenters. Counterfactual, by the way, need not mean outlandish— one can say If she were half an inch taller, that dress would be perfect—it just means “known to be not the case.” So what’s the difference between the past-tense was, in those con.texts in which it has the meaning of factual remoteness, and the ir.realis were, which also has the meaning of factual remoteness? The obvious difference is the level of formality: irrealis I wish I were younger is fancier than past-tense I wish I was younger. Also, in careful writing, were conveys a somewhat stronger sense of remoteness than was does, implying that the scenario is contrary to fact: If he were in love with her, he’d propose accuses him of not being in love; If he was in love with her, he’d propose leaves the door open a crack, and the present-tense open conditional If he is in love with her, he’ll propose doesn’t commit the writer either way.

Some writers, dimly sensing that were is posher, hypercorrect them.selves and use it with open possibilities, such as He looked at me as if he suspected I were cheating on him and If he were surprised, he didn’t show it.30 In both cases, was is appropriate. than and as. Is anything wrong with the sentences on the left? Rose is smarter than him. Rose is smarter than he. George went to the same school George went to the same school as me. as I. Many students are taught that they are ungrammatical, because than and as are conjunctions (which precede clauses), not prepositions (which precede noun phrases). The material that follows them must be a clause, albeit an elliptical clause, from which the predicate has been amputated: the full versions are Rose is smarter than he is and George went to the same school as I did. Since the noun phrases coming after than and as are the subjects of the truncated clauses, they must be in nominative case: he and I. But if you squirm at the thought of using the “correct” versions on the right because they sound insufferably fussy, you have grammar and history on your side. Like the words before and like, which we exam.ined earlier, the words than and as are not conjunctions in the first place but prepositions that take a clause as a complement.31 The only question is whether they may also take a noun phrase as a complement. Several centuries of great writers—Milton, Shakespeare, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Austen, Thurber, Faulkner, Baldwin—have voted with their pens, and the answer is yes. The difference is just one of style: than I is more suited to formal writing, than me to writing that is closer to speech.

Though the pedants are mistaken in insisting that than and as may only be conjunctions, the tree-thinking that motivates their judgment is sound. First, if you do opt for a formal style, don’t go overboard and write things like It affected them more than I. The chopped-off material after than is it affected me, not it affected I, so even the snootiest of the snoots would call for me in this sentence. Second, the two elements being compared should be grammatically and semantically parallel, a requirement that’s easy to flub when the first is complex. The condition of the first house we visited was better than the second can pass unnoticed in speech but can be grating on the page, because it compares apples (the condition) with oranges (the house). A careful reader will be hap.pier with was better than that of the second; the cost of the additional empty words is outweighed by the pleasure of parallel syntax and semantics (a condition in each case). Finally, the casual version (than me, as her, and so on) can be ambiguous: Biff likes the professor more than me can mean that he likes the professor more than he likes me or that he likes the professor more than I do. In these cases, using a nom.inative subject is technically clear but a bit stuffy—Biff likes the profes.sor more than I—and the best solution is to saw off less of the sentence, leaving Biff likes the professor more than I do. The debate on the correct syntactic category of than also feeds the tempest over whether you can say different than the rest, where than, once again, is a preposition with a noun phrase object, or you must say different from the rest, using the uncontroversial preposition from. Though different than NP is disliked by a slim majority of the AHD Usage Panel, it has long been common in carefully written prose. H. L. Mencken reported that a futile attempt to ban it in the 1920s elicited the following comment from the editors of the New York Sun: “The excellent tribe of grammarians, the precisians who strive to be correct and correctors, have as much power to prohibit a single word or phrase as a gray squirrel has to put out Orion with a flicker of its tail.”32

that and which. Many spurious rules start out as helpful hints intended to rescue indecisive writers from paralysis when faced with a choice provided by the richness of English. These guides for the perplexed also make the lives of copy editors easier, so they may get incorporated into style sheets. Before you know it, a rule of thumb morphs into a rule of grammar, and a perfectly innocuous (albeit second-choice) con.struction is demonized as incorrect. Nowhere is this transition better documented than with the phony but ubiquitous rule on when to use which and when to use that.33 According to the traditional rule, the choice depends on which of two kinds of relative clause the word is introducing. A nonrestrictive relative clause is set off by commas, dashes, or parentheses, and expresses a comment from the peanut gallery, as in The pair of shoes, which cost five thousand dollars, was hideous. A restrictive relative clause is essen.tial to the meaning of the sentence, often because it pinpoints the refer.ent of the noun from among a set of alternatives. If we were narrating a documentary about Imelda Marcos’s vast shoe collection and wanted to single out one of the pairs by how much she paid for it and then say something about that pair alone, we would write The pair of shoes that cost five thousand dollars was hideous. The choice between that and which, according to the rule, is simple: nonrestrictive relative clauses take which; restrictive relative clauses take that. One part of the rule is correct: it’s odd to use that with a nonrestrictive relative clause, as in The pair of shoes, that cost a thousand dollars, was hideous. So odd, in fact, that few people write that way, rule or no rule. The other part of the rule is utterly incorrect. There is nothing wrong with using which to introduce a restrictive relative clause, as in The pair of shoes which cost five thousand dollars was hideous. Indeed, with some restrictive relatives, which is the only option, such as That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and The book in which I scribbled my notes is worthless. Even when which isn’t mandatory, great writers have been using it for centuries, as in the King James Bible’s “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” and Franklin Roosevelt’s “a day which will live in infamy.” The linguist Geoffrey Pullum searched through a sample of classic novels by authors such as Dickens, Conrad, Melville, and Brontë and found that on average readers will bump into a restrictive relative clause with which by the time they are 3 percent of the way into it.34 Turning to edited prose in twenty-first-century English, he found that which was used in about a fifth of the restrictive relative clauses in American newspapers and in more than half of those in British newspapers. Even the grammar nannies can’t help them.selves. In The Elements of Style E. B. White recommended “which.hunting,” but in his classic essay “Death of a Pig” he wrote, “The premature expiration of a pig is, I soon discovered, a departure which the community marks solemnly on its calendar.”

The spurious rule against restrictive which sprang from a daydream by Henry Fowler in Modern English Usage in 1926: “If writers would agree to regard that as the defining relative pronoun, & which as the non-defining, there would be much gain both in lucidity & in ease. Some there are who follow this principle now; but it would be idle to pretend that it is the practice either of most or of the best writers.” The lexicographer Bergen Evans punctured the reverie with an observation that should be embossed on little cards and handed out to language pedants: “What is not the practice of most, or of the best, is not part of our common language.”35 So what’s a writer to do? The real decision is not whether to use that or which but whether to use a restrictive or a nonrestrictive relative clause. If a phrase which expresses a comment about a noun can be omitted without substantially changing the meaning, and if it would be pronounced after a slight pause and with its own intonation contour, then be sure to set it off with commas (or dashes or parentheses): The Cambridge restaurant, which had failed to clean its grease trap, was infested with roaches. Having done so, you don’t have to worry about whether to use that or which, because if you’re tempted to use that it means either that you are more than two hundred years old or that your ear for the English language is so mistuned that the choice of that and which is the least of your worries. If, on the other hand, a phrase provides information about a noun

that is crucial to the point of the sentence (as in Every Cambridge restaurant which failed to clean its grease trap was infested with roaches, where omitting the underlined phrase would radically alter the mean.ing), and if it is pronounced within the same intonation contour as the noun, then don’t set it off with punctuation. As for the choice you now face between which and that: if you hate making decisions, you gener.ally won’t go wrong if you use that. You’ll be a good boy or girl in the eyes of copy editors, and will have avoided a sibilant, which many read.ers find ugly. Some guidelines recommend a switch to which when the relative clause is separated from the noun it modifies, as in An applica.tion to renew a license which had previously been rejected must be resub.mitted within thirty days, where the underlined clause modifies the faraway noun application, not the next-door noun license. Otherwise you could tilt toward that depending on the degree of restrictiveness, that is, the degree to which the meaning of the sentence critically depends on the relative clause. When the modified noun is quantified with every, only, all, some, or few, the relative changes everything: Every iPad that has been dropped in the bathtub stops working is very different from Every iPad stops working, and with those noun phrases that tends to sound a bit better. Or you could trust your ear, or flip a coin. Level of style won’t help you here: unlike the alternatives set apart by other pseudo-rules in the oral tradition, neither which nor that is more formal than the other. verbing and other neologisms. Many language lovers recoil from neologisms in which a noun is repurposed as a verb:

Other denominal verbs which have shattered the worlds of anal.retentives include author, conference, contact, critique, demagogue, dialogue, funnel, gift, guilt, impact, input, journal, leverage, mentor, mes.sage, parent, premiere, and process (in the sense of “think over”). But the retentives are misdiagnosing their anomie if they blame it on the English rule that converts nouns into verbs without an identify.ing affix such as –ize, –ify, en–, or be–. (Come to think of it, they hate many of those, too, like incentivize, finalize, personalize, prioritize, and empower.) Probably a fifth of English verbs started out life as nouns or adjectives, and you can find them in pretty much any paragraph of English prose.36 A glance at the most emailed stories in today’s New York Times turns up arriviste verbs such as biopsy, channel, freebase, gear, headline, home, level, mask, moonlight, outfit, panic, post, ramp, scapegoat, screen, sequence, showroom, sight, skyrocket, stack up, and tan, together with verbs derived from nouns or adjectives by affixation such as cannibalize, dramatize, ensnarl, envision, finalize, generalize, jeopardize, maximize, and upend. The English language welcomes converts to the verb category and has done so for a thousand years. Many novel verbs that set purists’ teeth on edge become unexceptionable to their grown children. It’s hard to get worked up, for example, over the now-indispensable verbs contact, finalize, funnel, host, personalize, and prioritize. Even many of the denominal verbs that gained traction in the past couple of decades have earned a permanent place in the lexicon because they convey a meaning more transparently and succinctly than any alternative, including incentivize, leverage, mentor, monetize, guilt (as in She guilted me into buying a bridesmaid’s dress), and demagogue (as in Weiner tried to demagogue the mainly African.American crowd by playing the victim). What really gets on the nerves of Ms. Retentive and her ilk is not verbing per se but neologisms from certain walks of life. Many people are irritated by buzzwords from the cubicle farm, such as drill down, grow the company, new paradigm, proactive, and synergies. They also bristle at psychobabble from the encounter group and therapy couch,

such as conflicted, dysfunctional, empower, facilitate, quality time, recover, role model, survivor, journal as a verb, issues in the sense of “concerns,” process in the sense of “think over,” and share in the sense of “speak.” Recently converted verbs and other neologisms should be treated as matters of taste, not grammatical correctness. You don’t have to accept all of them, particularly instant clichés like no.brainer, game.changer, and think outside the box, or trendy terms which tart up a banal mean.ing with an aura of technical sophistication, like interface, synergy, paradigm, parameter, and metrics. But many neologisms earn a place in the language by making it easy to express concepts that would otherwise require tedious circumlocu.tions. The fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, published in 2011, added ten thousand words and senses to the edition published a decade before. Many of them express invaluable new concepts, including adverse selection, chaos (in the sense of the theory of nonlin.ear dynamics), comorbid, drama queen, false memory, parallel universe, perfect storm, probability cloud, reverse.engineering, short.sell, sock puppet, and swiftboating. In a very real sense such neologisms make it easier to think. The philosopher James Flynn, who discovered that IQ scores rose by three points a decade throughout the twentieth century, attributes part of the rise to the trickling down of technical ideas from academia and technology into the everyday thinking of laypeople.37 The transfer was expedited by the dissemination of shorthand terms for abstract concepts such as causation, circular argument, control group, cost.benefit analysis, correlation, empirical, false positive, percent.age, placebo, post hoc, proportional, statistical, tradeoff, and variability. It is foolish, and fortunately impossible, to choke off the influx of new words and freeze English vocabulary in its current state, thereby preventing its speakers from acquiring the tools to share new ideas efficiently. Neologisms also replenish the lexical richness of a language, com.pensating for the unavoidable loss of words and erosion of senses. Much of the joy of writing comes from shopping from the hundreds of thousands of words that English makes available, and it’s good to remember that each of them was a neologism in its day. The new entries in AHD 5 are a showcase for the linguistic exuberance and recent cul.tural history of the Anglosphere:

Abrahamic, air rage, amuse-bouche, backward-compatible, brain freeze, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, camel toe, community policing, crowdsourcing, Disneyfication, dispensationalism, dream catcher, earbud, emo, encephalization, farklempt, fashionista, fast-twitch, Goldilocks zone, grayscale, Grinch, hall of mirrors, hat hair, heterochrony, infographics, interoperable, Islamofascism, jelly sandal, jiggy, judicial activism, ka-ching, kegger, kerfuffle, leet, liminal, lipstick lesbian, manboob, McMansion, metabolic syndrome, nanobot, neuroethics, nonperforming, off the grid, Onesie, overdiagnosis, parkour, patriline, phish, quantum entanglement, queer theory, quilling, race-bait, recursive, rope-a-dope, scattergram, semifreddo, sexting, tag-team, time-suck, tranche, ubuntu, unfunny, universal Turing machine, vacuum energy, velociraptor, vocal percussion, waterboard, webmistress, wetware, Xanax, xenoestrogen, x-ray fish, yadda yadda yadda, yellow dog, yutz, Zelig, zettabyte, zipline If I were allowed to take just one book to the proverbial desert island, it might be a dictionary. who and whom. When Groucho Marx was once asked a long and orotund question, he replied, “Whom knows?” A 1928 short story by George Ade contains the line “‘Whom are you?’ he said, for he had been to night school.” In 2000 the comic strip Mother Goose and Grimm showed an owl in a tree calling “Whom” and a raccoon on the ground replying “Show-off!” A cartoon entitled “Grammar Dalek” shows one of the robots shouting, “I think you mean Doctor Whom!” And an old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon contains the following dialogue between the Pottsylvanian spies Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale: Natasha: Ve need a safecracker! Boris: Ve already got a safecracker! Natasha: Ve do? Whom? Boris: Meem, dat’s whom!

The popularity of whom humor tells us two things about the dis.tinction between who and whom.38 First, whom has long been perceived as formal verging on pompous. Second, the rules for its proper use are obscure to many speakers, tempting them to drop whom into their speech whenever they want to sound posh. As we saw in chapter 4, the distinction between who and whom ought to be straightforward. If you mentally rewind the transforma.tional rule that moves the wh.word to the front of a sentence, the dis.tinction between who and whom is identical to the distinction between he and him or between she and her, which no one finds difficult. The declarative sentence She tickled him can be turned into the question Who tickled him? in which the wh.word replaces the subject and appears in nominative case, who. Or it can be turned into the question Whom did she tickle? in which the wh.word replaces the object and hence appears in accusative case, whom. But the cognitive difficulty of mentally undoing the movement rule, combined with the historical disappearance of case-marking from English (except for the personal pronouns and the genitive ’s), has long made it hard for English speakers to keep track of the distinction. Shakespeare and his contemporaries frequently used who where the rules would call for whom and vice versa, and even after a century of nagging by prescriptive grammarians the who.whom distinction remains tenuous in speech and informal writing. Only the stuffiest prig would use whom to begin a short question or relative clause: Whom are you going to believe, me or your own eyes? It’s not what you know; it’s whom you know. Do you know whom you’re talking to? And when people do try to write with whom, they often get it wrong: In 1983, Auerbach named former Celtics player K.C. Jones coach of the Celtics, whom starting in 1984 coached the Celtics to four straight appearances in the NBA Finals.

Whomever installed the shutters originally did not consider proper build out, and the curtains were too close to your window and door frames. The exploration of syntactic trees in chapter 4 turned up an espe.cially common fumble of whom. When the deep-structure position of the wh.word is the subject of a clause (demanding who), but it occurs adjacent to a verb which takes the clause as its complement (whispering whom), writers lose sight of the tree and allow their eyes to be caught by the adjacent verb, resulting in The French actor plays a man whom she suspects __ is her husband (pages 101 and 102). These sequences have been so common for so long, and arouse so little reaction even in many careful writers, that some linguists have argued that they are no longer errors at all. In the dialect of these writers, they argue, the rules for whom call for it to be used when it links to the position following a verb, even if it is the subject of a clause.39 Like the subjunctive mood, the pronoun whom is widely thought to be circling the drain. Indeed, tabulations of its frequency in printed text confirm that it has been sinking for almost two centuries. The declining fortunes of whom may represent not a grammatical change in English but a cultural change in Anglophones, namely the informal.ization of writing, which makes it increasingly resemble speech. But it’s always risky to extrapolate a downward slope all the way to zero, and since the 1980s the curve seems to be leveling off.40 Though whom is pompous in short questions and relative clauses, it is a natural choice in certain other circumstances, even in informal speech and writing. We still use whom in double questions like Who’s dating whom?, in fixed expressions like To whom it may concern and With whom do you wish to speak?, and in sentences in which a writer has decided not to strand a preposition at the end of a clause but to pied-pipe it to the front. A scan of my email turns up hundreds of hits for whom (even after I discarded the ones with the boilerplate “The information in this email is intended only for the person to whom it is addressed”). Here are a few unmistakably informal sentences in which whom is so natu.ral as to be unnoticeable:

I realize it’s short notice, but are you around on Monday? Al Kim from Boulder (grad student friend of Jesse’s and someone with whom I’ve worked a lot as well) will be in town. Not sure if you remember me; I’m the fellow from Casasanto’s lab with whom you had a hair showdown while at Hunter. Hi Steven. We have some master’s degree applicants for whom I need to know whether they passed prosem with a B+ or better. Are those grades available? Reminder: I am the guy who sent you the Amy Winehouse CD. And the one for whom you wrote “kiss the cunt of a cow” at your book signing.41 The best advice to writers is to calibrate their use of whom to the complexity of the construction and the degree of formality they desire. In casual prose, whom can be reserved for the object of a preposition and other positions in which who would be conspicuously wrong; all other uses will sound pompous. In formal prose, a writer should men.tally move the wh.word back to its original position in the tree and choose who or whom accordingly. But even in formal prose, an author may want a voice that is lean and direct rather than ornate and flowery, and in that case who has a place in simple constructions. If William Safire, who wrote the New York Times’ “On Language” column and coined the term language maven in reference to himself, could write, “Let tomorrow’s people decide who they want to be president,” so can you.42

QuAntity, QuAlity, And deGree The rules of usage we just examined were centered on grammatical form, such as distinctions among grammatical categories and the marking of tense and mood. But other prescriptive rules—those that govern the expression of quality, quantity, and degree—are alleged to be closer to the truths of logic and mathematics than to the conventions of gram.mar. To flout these rules, the purists claim, is no mere peccadillo but an assault on reason itself.

Claims of this kind are always fishy. Though language certainly provides writers with the means to express fine logical distinctions, none of the distinctions is mechanically conveyed by a single word or construction. All words have multiple meanings which must be sorted out by the context, and each of those meanings is far subtler than the ones invoked by purists. Let’s examine some of the sophistry behind claims that issues of usage can be settled by logical or mathematical consistency. absolute and graded qualities (very unique). They say you can’t be a little bit married or a little bit pregnant, and purists believe that the same is true for certain other adjectives. One of the commonest insults to the sensibility of the purist is the expression very unique and other phrases in which an “absolute” or “incomparable” adjective is modified by an adverb of degree such as more, less, somewhat, quite, relatively, or almost. Uniqueness, the purists say, is like marriage and pregnancy: something is either unique (one of a kind) or not unique, so referring to degrees of uniqueness is meaningless. Nor can one sensibly modify absolute, certain, complete, equal, eternal, perfect, or the same. One may not write, for instance, that one statement is more certain than another, or that an inventory is now more complete, or that an apartment is rela.tively perfect. A glance at the facts of usage immediately sets off Klaxon horns. Great writers have been modifying absolute adjectives for centuries, including the framers of the American Constitution, who sought a more perfect union. Many of the examples pass unnoticed by careful writers and are approved by large majorities of the AHD Usage Panel, including nothing could be more certain, there could be no more perfect spot, and a more equal allocation of resources. Though the phrase very unique is universally despised, other modifications of unique are unobjectionable. Martin Luther King wrote, “I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson, and the great grandson of preachers.” The New York Times science section recently had an article which said, “The creature is so unique in its style and appearance that the biologists who discovered it have given it not just its own species name . . . but have declared that it is an entirely new phylum.”

Even very unique might have a place. Last night while I was walking by a cabaret in Provincetown, I was handed a glossy postcard invit.ing passersby to the show. The card showed a well-toned man wear.ing a silver lamé dinner jacket with matching bow tie, pasties, codpiece, and nothing else, surrounded by a bevy of voluptuous big-haired showgirls of both genders, and at his feet an androgynous waif with a pencil mustache in a turquoise sequined sailor suit. The copy read: “The Atomic Bombshells. A Drag-tastic burlesque Extravaganza! Featuring Boyleseque superstar Jett Adore! Hosted by Seattle’s Pre.miere Fancy Lady Ben DeLaCreme.” The hostess who handed me the card promised that it would be a “very unique show.” Who would argue? Here is the flaw in the purists’ logic. Uniqueness is not like preg.nancy and marriage; it must be defined relative to some scale of mea.surement. I am told that all snowflakes are unique, and so they may be under a microscope, but frankly, they all look the same to me. Con.versely, each of the proverbial two peas in a pod is unique if you squint hard enough through a magnifying glass. Does this mean that nothing is unique, or does it mean that everything is unique? The answer is neither: the concept “unique” is meaningful only after you specify which qualities are of interest to you and which degree of resolution or grain size you’re applying. Occasionally we can state the quality explicitly and the scale is dis.crete, as in Hawaii is unique among states in being surrounded by water, or The number 30 may be factored into the unique set of primes 2, 3, and 5. Purists would like to reserve the word unique for those circumstances, in which adverbs of comparison are indeed incongruous. But often our eye is caught by many qualities, some of them continuous, and the item we are considering may either be close to others on the scale or be miles away. Calling something quite unique or very unique implies that the item differs from the others in an unusual number of qualities, that it differs from them to an unusual degree, or both. In other words, pick any scale or cutoff you want, and the item will still be unique. This “distinctive” sense has coexisted with the “having no like or equal” sense for as long as the word unique has been in common use. The other supposedly absolute adjectives also depend on the granularity of the comparison scale, and thus may be qualified by how coarse or fine a scale is being used in that comparison.

This doesn’t mean that you should go ahead and use very unique, even if you are handing out postcards for The Atomic Bombshells. As we saw in chapter 2, very is a soggy modifier in the best of circum.stances, and the combination with unique grates on enough readers that it’s wise to avoid it. (If you must qualify the word, really unique and truly unique, which convey degree of confidence rather than degree of distinctness, will meet with fewer objections.) But comparisons of supposedly absolute adjectives are not illogical, and often they are un.avoidable. singulars and plurals (none is versus none are). The neat dichotomy in English grammar between singular and plural leaves many situa.tions out in the cold. The problem is that there is a mismatch between the simplistic theory of number baked into our grammar and the true nature of number in all its mathematical and logical glory. Suppose I name a bunch of things and ask you to sort them into two piles, one pile for quantities equal to 1 and the other pile for quantities greater than 1. Here’s how our dialogue might go. Ready? “A cup.” Easy! 1.
“The potted plants.” Easy! More than 1.
“A cup and a spoon.” Still easy! 1 + 1 = 2, which is more than 1.

“A pair of gloves.” Well, that depends . . . I see two objects, but they count as one item on my sales receipt, and when I decide whether I can use the
express checkout lane.
“The dining room set.” Gee, that also depends. It’s one set, but four chairs and a table.
“The gravel under the flowerpot.” Hey, am I supposed to count every pebble, or can I consider it just a saucerful of gravel?
“Nothing.” Hmmm . . . Neither, I guess. What am I supposed to do now?
“The desk or the chair.” Huh?
“Each object in the room.” Wait—do you want me to stand back and consider all those things at once (that would be greater than 1) or zoom in and examine them one at a time (that would be 1 each time)?

These are the brainteasers that English writers must solve when they shoehorn expressions with none, every, and other quantifiers into the singular-plural dichotomy. Purists insist that none means “no one” and therefore must be sin.gular: None of them was home, not None of them were home. This is false; you can look it up. None has always been either singular or plural, depending on whether the writer is pondering the entire group at once or each member individually. The singular (None of the students was doing well) feels a bit more specific and emphatic than the plural (None of the students were doing well), and is often stylistically preferable for that reason. But when an additional quantifier forces us to carve out a subset of the group and say something about that subset, the plural is irresistible: Almost none of them are honest (not is); None but his closest friends believe his alibi (not believes). Any can also swing both ways: Are any of the children coming? Any of the tools is fine. And so it is with no, depending on the number of the noun it quantifies: No man is an island; No men are islands.

In contrast to these three terms, which specify pure not-ness and lack an inherent number, some quantifiers do single out one individual at a time. Neither means “not one of the two,” and it is singular: Neither book was any good, not Neither book were any good. The same is true of either, even when it picks one item from a pair: Either of the candidates is experienced enough to run the country, not are. Likewise, the one in anyone and everyone, the body in somebody and everybody, and the thing in nothing shout that they are referring to one thing at a time (even though the words rope in the entire universe of individuals), and that makes each of them singular: Anyone is welcome to try; Everyone eats at my house; Everybody is a star; Nothing is easy. When two singular nouns are coordinated with and, the phrase is usually plural, as if the language is acknowledging that one plus one equals two: A fool and his money are soon parted; Frankie and Johnny were lovers. But when the duo is mentally packaged as a single entity, it can be singular: One and one and one is three; Macaroni and cheese is a good dinner for kids. This is part of a larger phenomenon called notional agreement, in which the grammatical number of a noun phrase can depend on whether the writer conceives of its referent as singular or plural, rather than on whether it is grammatically marked as singular or plural. A writer can mentally package a conjoined phrase into a single unit (Bobbing and weaving is an effective tactic). Or he can do the opposite: peer into a singular collective noun and see the plu.rality of individual members composing it (as in The panel were in.formed of the new rules). This is far more common in British English; Americans do a double take when they read The government are listen.ing at last, The Guardian are giving you the chance to win books, and Microsoft are considering the offer. What happens with other words that join nouns together, like with, plus, and or? With is a preposition, so the phrase a man with his son is not a coordination at all but an ordinary phrase with the head a man, modified by with his son. It inherits the singular number of its head, so

we say A man with his son is coming up the walk. The word plus began as a preposition, and again we say All that food plus the weight of the backpack is a lot to carry. But plus is increasingly being used as a coor.dinator as well, and it’s natural to say The hotel room charge plus the surcharge add up to a lot of money. And then we have to figure out what to do with or (an issue we met on page 207). A disjunction of two singular nouns is singular: Either beer or wine is served. A disjunction of two plurals is plural: Either nuts or pretzels are served. With a disjunction of a singular and a plural, traditional grammar books say that number agreement goes with the noun closest to the verb: Either a burrito or nachos are served; Either nachos or a burrito is served. But that policy leaves many writers queasy (the Usage Panel divides up the middle on it), and it may be best to spare readers from stretching their grammatical intuitions and recast the sentence, such as They serve either nachos or a burrito. Certain nouns specify a measure and then indicate what they’re measuring using an of.phrase, such as a lot of peanuts, a pair of socks, and a majority of the voters. These Zelig-like nouns can be singular or plural depending on the number of the of.phrase: A lot of work was done; A lot of errors were made. (It’s possible that their trees differ, with a lot being the head of the phrase in the first version but a determiner of the head errors in the second.) When the of.phrase is absent, the writer mentally supplies it, and the phantom phrase determines the number: A lot [of people] were coming; A lot [of money] was spent. Other chameleonic quantifiers include couple, majority, more than one, pair, percentage, plenty, remainder, rest, and subset. And then there is the puzzling construction one of those who. Recently I endorsed a book by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander with a blurb that began, “I am one of those cognitive scientists who believes that analogy is a key to explaining human intelligence.” Hofstadter thanked me but sheepishly asked if I would mind correct.ing who believes to who believe. I even more sheepishly agreed, because Hofstadter (as his readers might expect) was engaging in impeccable tree-thinking. The relative clause beginning with who is attached to the plural cognitive scientists, not the singular one: there is a set of cog.nitive scientists (plural) who value analogy, and I belong to that set. So it must take the plural verb believe.

Though I couldn’t defend my original wording, it still sounded fine to my ears, so I did a bit of research on the construction. It turns out I am not alone. For more than a thousand years the siren song of singu.lar one has overridden the syntactic demand of the plural those, and writer after writer has gone with the singular. This includes the über.purist James Kilpatrick, who to his chagrin repeatedly found himself using it even after having been corrected by the UofAllPeople Club. (He wrote, for example, “In Washington, we encounter ‘to prioritize’ all the time; it is one of those things that makes Washington unbear.able.”) Often the technically correct version sounds off-kilter. More than 40 percent of the Usage Panel rejected The sports car turned out to be one of the most successful products that were ever manufactured in this country. Sometimes the dilemma can be sidestepped by artful rewording (in this example, deleting that were), but not always. In Tina is one of the few students who turns to the jittery guidance counselor, Emma, for help with her feelings, a switch to turn would require a par.allel switch of her feelings to their feelings, which makes it seem as if each girl sought counseling for all the girls’ feelings, not her own. The Cambridge Grammar suggests that the construction is a hybrid of two trees that mingle in the reader’s mind: one in which the relative clause is attached to the downstairs noun (cognitive scientists who believe), and it determines the meaning, and one in which it is attached to the upstairs noun (one . . . who believes), and it determines the num.ber agreement. Usage guides today suggest that either the singular or plural is acceptable in this construction, depending on whether one or those looms larger in the writer’s mind.43 duals and plurals (between/among and other distinctions between two and more than two). Many languages distinguish three quantities in their number system: singular (one), dual (two), and plural (many). Hebrew, for example, distinguishes yom, “day,” yomayim, “two days,” and yamim, “days.” English doesn’t have dual number marking, but it does recognize twoness in words like pair and couple, and, with vary.ing degrees of controversy, in other quantifying words.

between and among. Many students are taught that between must be used with just two items (since tween is related to two and twain) and among with more than two: between you and me but among the three of us. This is only half right. It’s certainly true that among may not be used with a twosome: among you and me is impossible. But it’s not true that between is reserved for two: no one would say I’ve got sand among my toes, I never snack among meals, or Let’s keep this among you, me, and the lamppost. Nonetheless some writers have dutifully followed this pseudo-rule to the bitter end and have concocted fussy expressions like sexual intercourse among two men and a woman, a book that falls among many stools, and The author alternates among mod slang, clichés, and quotes from literary giants. The real principle is that between is used for a relationship of an individual to any number of other individuals, as long as they are being considered two at a time, whereas among is used for a relationship of an individual to an amorphous mass or collectivity. Thistles grew between the roses suggests an orderly row in a formal gar.den, and Thistles grew among the roses more of an entwined profusion. each other and one another. A traditional rule of the same ilk assigns each other to twosomes and one another to groups larger than two. If you don’t trust your ear you will never get into trouble if you follow the rule, and that’s what a majority of the Usage Panel claims to do. But the common practice is to use them interchangeably—the teammates hugged each other, the teammates hugged one another—and the major dictionaries and usage guides say that’s fine. alternatives. There is a claim in Prescriptistan that alternative refers only to two possibilities, never more than two. It’s a bubbe meise; forget it. either and any. The twosome restriction is on firmer ground with either, at least when it is used as a noun or a determiner. The phrases Either of the three movies and Either boy of the three are decidedly odd, and either should be replaced with any. But when either is used in an either.or construction, threesomes are more acceptable, if not always

graceful: Either Tom, Dick, or Harry can do the job; Either lead, follow, or get out of the way. –er and –est; more and most. Adjectives can be inflected for degree, giving us comparatives (harder, better, faster, stronger) and superlatives (hardest, best, fastest, strongest). Tradition says that you should reserve the comparative for two things and use the superlative for more than two: you should refer to the faster of the two runners, rather than the fastest, but it’s all right to refer to the fastest of three runners. The same is true for polysyl.labic adjectives that shun –er and –est in favor of more and most: the more intelligent of the two; the most intelligent of the three. But it’s not a hard.and-fast rule: we say May the best team win, not the better team, and Put your best foot forward, not your better foot. Once again the traditional rule is stated too crudely. It’s not the sheer number of items that determines the choice but the manner in which they are being compared. A comparative adjective is appropriate when the two items are being directly contrasted, one against the other; a superlative can work when an item is superior not just to the alternative in view at the time but to a larger implicit compari.son group. If Usain Bolt and I happened to be competing for a spot on an Olympic Dream Team, it would be misleading to say that they picked the faster of the two men for the team; they picked the fastest man. things and stuff (count nouns, mass nouns and ten items or less). Finally, let’s turn to the pebbles and gravel, which represent the two ways that English speakers can conceptualize aggregates: as discrete things, which are expressed as plural count nouns, and as continuous substances, which are expressed as mass nouns. Some quantifiers are choosy as to which they apply to. We can talk about many pebbles but not much pebbles, much gravel but not many gravel. Some quantifiers are not choosy: We can talk about more pebbles or more gravel.44 Now, you might think that if more can be used with both count and mass nouns, so can less. But it doesn’t work that way: you may have less gravel, but most writers agree that you can only have fewer pebbles, not less pebbles. This is a reasonable distinction, but purists have extended it with a vengeance. The sign over supermarket express checkout lanes, Ten Items or Less, is a grammatical error, they say, and as a result of their carping whole-food and other upscale supermarkets have replaced the signs with Ten Items or Fewer. The director of the Bicycle Trans.portation Alliance has apologized for his organization’s popular T-shirt that reads One Less Car, conceding that it should read One Fewer Car. By this logic, liquor stores should refuse to sell beer to customers who are fewer than twenty-one years old, law-abiding motorists should drive at fewer than seventy miles an hour, and the poverty line should be defined by those who make fewer than eleven thousand five hundred dollars a year. And once you master this distinction, well, that’s one fewer thing for you to worry about.45

If this is all starting to sound weird to you, you’re not alone. The caption of this cartoon reminds us that while sloppy grammar can be a turnoff, so can the kind of pedantry that takes a grammatical distinc.tion too far:

What’s going on? As many linguists have pointed out, the purists have botched the less.fewer distinction. It is certainly true that less is clumsy when applied to the plurals of count nouns for discrete items: fewer pebbles really does sound better than less pebbles. But it’s not true that less is forbidden to apply to count nouns across the board. Less is perfectly natural with a singular count noun, as in one less car and one less thing to worry about. It’s also natural when the entity being quan.tified is a continuous extent and the count noun refers to units of mea.surement. After all, six inches, six months, six miles, and a bill for six dollars don’t actually correspond to six hunks of matter; the units, like the 1–11 scale on Nigel Tufnel’s favorite amplifier in This Is Spinal Tap, are arbitrary. In these cases less is natural and fewer is a hypercorrec.tion. And less is idiomatic in certain expressions in which a quantity is being compared to a standard, including He made no less than fifteen mistakes and Describe yourself in fifty words or less. Nor are these idi.oms recent corruptions: for much of the history of the English lan.guage, less could be used with both count and mass nouns, just as more is today.

Like many dubious rules of usage, the less.fewer distinction has a smidgen of validity as a pointer of style. In cases where less and fewer are both available to a writer, such as Less/fewer than twenty of the stu.dents voted, the word fewer is the better choice in classic style because it enhances vividness and concreteness. But that does not mean that less is a grammatical error. The same kind of judgment applies to the choice between over and more than. When the plural refers to countable objects, it’s a good idea to use more than. He owns more than a hundred pairs of boots is more classic-stylish than He owns over a hundred pairs of boots, because it encourages us to imagine the pairs individually rather than lumping them together as an amorphous collection. But when the plural defines a point on a scale of measurement, as in These rocks are over five million years old, it’s perverse to insist that it can only be more than five million years old, because no one is counting the years one by one. In neither of these cases, usage guides agree, is over a grammatical error. I can’t resist the temptation to sum up this review with a short story by the writer Lawrence Bush (reproduced with his kind permission), which alludes to many of the points of usage we have examined (see how many you can spot) while speaking to the claim that the tradi.tional rules reduce misunderstanding:46

I had only just arrived at the club when I bumped into Roger. After we had exchanged a few pleasantries, he lowered his voice and asked, “What do you think of Martha and I as a potential twosome?” “That,” I replied, “would be a mistake. Martha and me is more like it.” “You’re interested in Martha?” “I’m interested in clear communication.” “Fair enough,” he agreed. “May the best man win.” Then he sighed. “Here I thought we had a clear path to becoming a very unique couple.” “You couldn’t be a very unique couple, Roger.” “Oh? And why is that?” “Martha couldn’t be a little pregnant, could she?” “Say what? You think that Martha and me . . .” “Martha and I.” “Oh.” Roger blushed and set down his drink. “Gee, I didn’t know.” “Of course you didn’t,” I assured him. “Most people don’t.” “I feel very badly about this.” “You shouldn’t say that: I feel bad . . .” “Please, don’t,” Roger said. “If anyone’s at fault here, it’s me.” masculine and feminine (nonsexist language and singular they). In a 2013 press release President Barack Obama praised a Supreme Court decision striking down a discriminatory law with the sentence “No American should ever live under a cloud of suspicion just because of what they look like.”47 In doing so he touched one of the hottest usage buttons of the past forty years: the use of the plural pronouns they, them, their, and themselves with a grammatically singular antecedent like no American. Why didn’t the president write because of what he looks like, or because of what he or she looks like? Many purists claim that singular they is a LOLcat-worthy grammat.ical howler which is tolerated only as a sop to the women’s movement.

According to this theory, the pronoun he is a perfectly serviceable gender-neutral pronoun; as grammar students used to be taught, “The masculine embraces the feminine, even in grammar.” But feminist sensibilities could not abide even the illusory sexism of using a masculine form to represent both genders, and so they engaged in a campaign of linguistic engineering that started with a mandate to use the clumsy he or she and slipped down a slope that ended in singular they. The computer scientist David Gelernter explains: “Unsatisfied with having rammed their 80-ton 16-wheeler into the nimble sports-car of English style, [feminist authori.ties] proceeded to shoot the legs out from under grammar—which col.lapsed in a heap after agreement between subject and pronoun was declared to be optional.”48 (He should have written “antecedent and pro.noun”—the issue has nothing to do with subjects.) The webcomic artist Ryan North addresses the same usage problem with a lighter touch and no hostility toward feminism. One of his cre.ations, T-Rex, is more skeptical than Gelernter about how nimble English really is, and confronts the language in the second person, ask.ing it to admit one of the gender-neutral pronouns that have been pro.posed over the years, such as hir, zhe, or thon:

But in a subsequent panel in this strip, the talking dinosaur equivo.cates, first worrying that “invented pronouns always sound strange,” and then reversing himself and wondering whether he should learn to like There comes a time when thon must look thonself in the mirror.

Let’s try to sort this out. To begin with, T-Rex is right and the pur.ists are wrong: English has no gender-neutral pronoun. At least in grammar, the masculine does not embrace the feminine. Experiments have shown that when people read the word he they are likely to assume that the writer intended to refer to a male.49 But the experiments hardly needed to be run, because it’s a brute fact of English grammar that he is a masculine and not a common-gender pronoun. If you don’t believe it, just read these sentences:50 Is it your brother or your sister who can hold his breath for four minutes? The average American needs the small routines of getting ready for work. As he shaves or pulls on his pantyhose, he is easing himself by small stages into the demands of the day. She and Louis had a game—who could find the ugliest photograph of himself. I support the liberty of every father or mother to educate his children as he desires. Do you still think that he is gender-neutral? It’s hard to disagree with T-Rex’s accusation that there is a bug in the English language. It would seem that a writer who wants to embrace both sexes in a quantified sentence must either make an error in number by writing No American should be under a cloud of suspicion because of what they look like or make an error in gender by writing No American should be under a cloud of suspicion because of what he looks like. And as the dinosaur explained, other solutions—it, one, he or she, s/he, his/her, novel pro.nouns like thon—have problems as well. One theoretical possibility is no longer an actual possibility: blow off concerns with gender inclusiveness, use masculine terms, and let the reader read between the lines and infer that women are included, too. No major publication today will allow this “sexist usage,” nor should they. Quite aside from the moral principle that half of humanity should not be excluded from generic statements about the species, we now know that the major objections to nonsexist language that were first voiced forty years ago have been refuted. Not only have the grace and expressiveness of the English language survived the substitution of gender-neutral terms for masculine ones (humanity for man, firefighter for fireman, chair for chairman, and so on), but the generation of read.ers that has grown up with the new norms has turned the traditional.ists’ startle reaction on its head. Today it is sexist usage that stops readers in their tracks and distracts them from the writer’s message.51 It’s hard, for example, not to cringe when reading this sentence from a famous 1967 article by a Nobel laureate: “In the good society a man should be free . . . of other men’s limitations on his beliefs and actions.”52

This brings us back to the solution of singular they. The first thing to realize about the usage is that it is not a recent contrivance forced on writers by militant 1970s feminists. Gelernter pines for “Shakespeare’s most perfect phrases” and Jane Austen’s “pure simple English,” but this turns out to be a pratfall of slapstick proportions, because both writers were exuberant users of—you guessed it—singular they. Shakespeare used it at least four times, and in a paper entitled “Everyone Loves Their Jane Austen,” the scholar Henry Churchyard counts eighty-seven instances in her works, of which thirty-seven were in her own voice rather than her characters’ (for example, “Every body began to have their vexation,” from Mansfield Park).53 Chaucer, the King James Bible, Swift, Byron, Thackeray, Wharton, Shaw, and Auden also used the form, as did Robert Burchfield, editor of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary and the most recent edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage. A second thing to understand about singular they is that even though it offers a handy solution to the need for a gender-free pronoun, that is not its only or even its primary appeal. Many writers use it even when the gender is unambiguously male or female. George Bernard Shaw, for example, wrote the lines “No man goes to battle to be killed.”“But they do get killed.” Since the dialogue was about men, Shaw had no need to pander to feminism, but he used singular they anyway, because the sup.posedly correct form with he would have turned the exchange into hash: “No man goes to battle to be killed.”“But he does get killed.” (The same is true for a sentence I used two paragraphs ago: No major publi.cation today will allow this “sexist usage,” nor should they. The alterna.tive nor should it would make it sound as if I had a particular publication in mind and raise the question “Nor should which?”) A contemporary example with an unambiguous female referent comes from a spoken interview with Sean Ono Lennon in which he specified the kind of person he was seeking as a romantic partner: “Any girl who is interested must simply be born female and between the ages of 18 and 45. They must have an IQ above 130 and they must be honest.”54 Once again he did not need they as a gender-neutral pronoun; he had already stipulated the congenital and current sex of his desired mate (nowadays perhaps you have to specify both). But since he was speaking not of an individual female but of the entire pool, they felt right to him. In each of these cases they takes part in a kind of notional agreement. No man and any girl are grammatically singular but psychologically plural: they pertain to classes with many individuals. The mismatch is similar to the one we saw in examples like None are coming and Are any of them coming?

Indeed, “singular they” is a misnomer. In these constructions, they is not being used as a singular pronoun being wrenched into agree.ment with a singular antecedent like each dinosaur, everyone, no Amer.ican, the average American, or any girl. Remember when we tried to sort descriptions of objects into piles for “one” and “more than one”? We discovered that the very idea of the numerosity of a quantified expression like nothing or each object is obscure. Does no American refer to one American or to many Americans? Whom knows? 0 ≠ 1, but then 0 >/ 1 either. This indeterminism forces us to realize that the word they in the sentences we have been considering does not have the usual semantics of a pronoun and an antecedent, as it does in The musicians are here and they expect to be fed. Rather, the pronoun they is function.ing as a bound variable: a symbol that keeps track of an individual across multiple descriptions of that individual. So-called singular they really means “x” in an expression like “For all x, if x is an American, then x should not be under a cloud of suspicion because of x’s appearance,” or “For all x, if Sean Ono Lennon considers marrying x, then x is born female & x has an IQ above 130 & x is honest.”55

So singular they has history and logic behind it. Experiments that measure readers’ comprehension times to the thousandth of a second have shown that singular they causes little or no delay, but generic he slows them down a lot. 56\ Even T-Rex, in a subsequent Dinosaur Comics strip, conceded that his purism was mistaken:

Assuming you aren’t willing to start a campaign for thon, does that mean you should go ahead and use singular they? It depends on the level of formality, the nature of the antecedent, and the available alter.natives. Obviously singular they is less acceptable in formal than in informal writing. It is also more conspicuous when the antecedent is an indefinite noun phrase like a man, whose singular aroma makes the apparent plurality of they stand out. It’s not as problematic with a uni.versally quantified antecedent like everyone, and barely noticeable with a negative quantifier like no or any. The judgments of the Usage Panel are sensitive to this difference. Only a minority accepts A person at that level should not have to keep track of the hours they put in—though the size of that minority has doubled in the past decade, from 20 percent to almost 40 percent, one of many signs that we are in the midst of a historical change that’s returning singular they to the acceptability it enjoyed before a purist crackdown in the nineteenth century. A slim majority of the panel accepts If anyone calls, tell them I can’t come to the phone and Everyone returned to their seats. The main danger in using these forms is that a more-grammatical-than-thou reader may falsely accuse you of mak.ing an error. If they do, tell them that Jane Austen and I think it’s fine.

For many decades usage manuals have recommended two escape hatches for the singular pronoun trap. The easiest is to express the quantified description as a plural, which makes they a grammatically honest pronoun. If you think that you can improve on Jane Austen’s prose, for example, you could change Every body began to have their vexation to They all began to have their vexations. This is the solution that experienced writers use most often, and you would be surprised how many generic or universal sentences can be recast with plural sub.jects without anyone noticing: Every writer should shorten their sentences is easily transformed into All writers should shorten their sentences or just Writers should shorten their sentences. The other escape hatch is to replace the pronoun with an indefinite or generic alternative and count on the reader’s common sense to fill in the referent: Every body began to have their vexation becomes Every body began to have a vexation, and Every dinosaur should look in his or her mirror becomes Every dinosaur should look in the mirror. Neither solution is perfect. Sometimes a writer really does need to focus on a single individual, which makes a plural inappropriate. In Americans must never live under a cloud of suspicion just because of what they look like, the generic plural Americans can be interpreted to mean “the typical American” or “most Americans,” which under.mines Obama’s declaration that freedom from discrimination must apply to each and every one without exception. With Shaw’s dialogue, plural subjects in Men never go to battle to be killed. But many of them do get killed would have undercut the point of the exchange, in which the listener is asked to ponder the foolhardiness of an individual enlistee, and the replacements would also have sabotaged Shaw’s jux.taposition of the low probability that any given individual will be killed with the high probability that some of them will be killed. Nor can a pronoun always be replaced by an indefinite or generic noun:

During an emergency, every parent During an emergency, every parent must pick up their child. must pick up a child. The replacement makes it seem as if a parent could choose a child at random to pick up, rather than being responsible for picking up his or her own child. Because of these complexities, writers always have to consider the full inventory of devices that the English language makes available to convey generic information, each imperfect for a different reason: he, she, he or she, they, a plural antecedent, replacing the pronoun, and who knows, perhaps someday even using thon. For some purists, these complexities provide an excuse to dismiss all concerns with gender inclusiveness and stick with the flawed option of he. Gelernter complains, “Why should I worry about feminist ideol.ogy while I write? . . . Writing is a tricky business that requires one’s whole concentration.” But the reaction is disingenuous. Every sentence requires a writer to grapple with tradeoffs between clarity, concision, tone, cadence, accuracy, and other values. Why should the value of not excluding women be the only one whose weight is set to zero?

diCtion Even writers who are skeptical of traditional prescriptions on gram.mar tend to give more weight to prescriptions on word choice. Fewer superstitions have grown up around word meaning than around grammar, because lexicographers are pack rats who accumulate vast collections of examples and compose their definitions empirically rather than kibitzing in an armchair with half-baked theories about how English ought to work. As a result, the definitions in contempo.rary dictionaries are usually faithful to the consensus of literate read.ers. A writer who is unsure of the consensus for a word is well advised to look it up rather than embarrass himself and annoy his readers with a malaprop. (The word malaprop, short for malapropism, comes from Mrs. Malaprop, a character in Richard Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals, who misused words to comic effect, such as reprehend for apprehend and epitaph for epithet.)

Though less nonsense is disseminated about word meanings than about grammar, the nonsense factor is far from zero. With the backing of data from the AHD Usage Panel, historical analyses from several dictionaries, and a pinch of my own judgment, I will review a few fuss.budget decrees you can safely ignore before turning to living distinc.tions you’d be wise to respect. Word Only Sense Allowed by Purists Sense Commonly Used Comment
aggravate make worse (aggravate the crisis) annoy (aggravate the teacher) The “annoy” sense has been in use since the 17th century and is accepted by 83% of the Usage Panel.
anticipate deal with in advance (We anticipated the shortage by stocking up on toilet paper.) expect (We anticipated a pleasant sabbatical year.) The “expect” sense is accepted by 87% of the Usage Panel.
anxious worried (Flying makes me anxious.) eager (I’m anxious to leave.) The Usage Panel splits 50-50, but the “eager” sense has long been in use and is included
without comment in
most dictionaries.
comprise contain (The US comprises 50 states.) compose, make up (The US is comprised of 50 states.) The “compose” sense is often used and increasingly accepted, particularly in the passive.

264 The SenSe of STyle
Word Only Sense Allowed Sense Comment
by Purists Commonly Used

convince cause to believe (She convinced him that cause to act (She convinced him to have Convince supposedly contrasts with
vaccines are harmless.) his child vaccinated.) persuade, which means “cause to act,” but few writers care.
crescendo gradual increase (a long crescendo) climax, peak (reach a crescendo) The insistence on the “increase” sense is an etymological fallacy, based on the Italian
source and the
technical term in
music. The “climax”
sense is entrenched, and accepted by a slim majority of the Usage Panel.
critique noun (a critique) verb (to critique) The verb is widely disliked but venerable, and usefully different from criticize in
implying analysis rather than censure.
decimate destroy a tenth destroy most An etymological fallacy, based on the Roman punishment of mutinous legions.
due to adjective (The plane crash was due to a storm.) preposition (The plane crashed due to a storm.) Actually, both are prepositions, and both are fine.57

Word Only Sense Allowed Sense Comment
by Purists Commonly Used
Frankenstein the fictional scientist a monster If you insist on We’ve
created a
Frankenstein’s
monster! you probably
also popped
champagne on Jan. 1,
2001, wondering
where all the other
revelers were. (“You
see, there was no
Year 0, so the third
millennium really
begins in 2001 . . .”)
Give it up.
graduate transitive and usually intransitive (She The “correct” sense in
passive (She was graduated from the passive is
graduated from Harvard.) increasingly obscure,
Harvard.) though it persists in
the active Harvard
graduated more
lawyers this year. The
Usage Panel embraces
the intransitive,
though it hates the
flipped transitive She
graduated Harvard.
healthy possessing good healthful, conducive Healthy meaning
health (Mabel is to good health (Carrot “conducive to health”
healthy.) juice is a healthy has been more
drink.) common than
healthful for 500
years.

266 The SenSe of STyle
Word Only Sense Allowed by Purists Sense Commonly Used Comment
hopefully verb phrase adverb: in a hopeful manner (Hopefully, he invited her upstairs to see his etchings.) sentence adverb: it is to be hoped that (Hopefully, it will stop hailing.) Many adverbs, such as candidly, frankly, and mercifully, modify both verb phrases and sentences. Hopefully is just newer, and became a purist cause célèbre in the 1960s.
Irrational resistance
lingers, but dictionaries and
newspapers increasingly accept it.
intrigue noun: a plot (She got involved in another intrigue.) verb: to interest (This really intrigues me.) This innocent verb is a target of two quack theories: verbs from nouns are bad; loan words from French
are bad.
livid black and blue, the color of a bruise angry Look it up.
loan noun (a loan) verb (to loan) The verb goes back to 1200 ce, but after the 17th century was lost in England and preserved in the US; that was enough to taint it.
masterful domineering (a masterful personality) expert, masterly (a masterful performance) One of Fowler’s harebrained schemes to tidy up the language. A few purists slavishly copied his rule into their stylebooks, but writers ignore him.

Word Only Sense Allowed Sense Comment
by Purists Commonly Used
momentarily for a moment (It in a moment (I’ll be The “in a moment”
rained momentarily.) with you sense is more recent,
momentarily.) and less common in
Britain than in the
US, but completely
acceptable. The two
meanings can be
distinguished by the
context.
nauseous nauseating nauseated (The smell Despite furious
(a nauseous smell) made me nauseous.) opposition, the
“nauseated” sense has
taken over.
presently soon now The more transparent
“now” sense has been
in continuous use for
500 years, particularly
in speech, and the
word is rarely
ambiguous in context.
About half the Usage
Panel reject it, but for
no good reason.
quote verb (to quote) noun, a truncation of A matter of style: the
quotation (a quote) noun is acceptable in
speech and informal
writing, a bit less so in
formal writing.
raise nurture a farm animal rear a child, nurture a The childrearing
or grow a crop (raise a child (raise a child) sense dropped out of
lamb, raise corn) British English but
remained in
American, and is
accepted by a
resounding 93% of the
Usage Panel.

Word Only Sense Allowed by Purists Sense Commonly Used Comment
transpire become known (It transpired that he had been sleeping with his campaign manager.) happen (A lot has transpired since we last spoke.) The “become known” sense is fading; the “happen” sense has taken over, though it is perceived by many as pretentious.
while at the same time (While Rome burned, Nero fiddled.) whereas (While some rules make sense, others don’t.) The “whereas” sense has been standard since 1749 and is as common as the “same
time” sense. Usually it creates no ambiguity; if it does, rewrite the
sentence.
whose of a person (a man whose heart is in the right place) of an entity (an idea whose time has come; trees whose trunks were coated with ice) This handy pronoun can rescue many a phrase from awkwardness, e.g., trees the trunks of
which were coated
with ice. There’s no
good reason to avoid it with nonhuman
antecedents.

And now the moment I’ve been waiting for: I get to be a purist! Here is a list of words which I am prepared to try to dissuade you from using in their nonstandard senses. (I’ll use the linguist’s convention of mark.ing them with an asterisk.) Most of the nonstandard usages are mal.aprops traceable to a mishearing, a misunderstanding, or a kitschy attempt to sound sophisticated. A general rule for avoiding malaprops is to assume that the English language never tolerates two words with the same root and different affixes but the same meaning, like amused and bemused, fortunate and fortuitous, full and fulsome, simple and simplistic. If you know a word and then come across a similar one with a fancy prefix or suffix, resist the temptation to use it as a hoity-toity synonym. Your readers are likely to react as Inigo Montoya did in The Princess Bride to Vizzini’s repeated use of inconceivable to refer to events that just happened: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Word Preferred Usage Problematic Usage Comment
adverse detrimental (adverse effects) averse, disinclined (*I’m not adverse to doing that.) It should be I’m not averse to doing that.
appraise ascertain the value (I appraised the jewels.) apprise, inform (*I appraised him of the situation.) It should be I apprised him of the situation.
as far as As far as the money is concerned, we should apply for new funding. *As far as the money, we should apply for new funding. The is concerned (or goes) is redundant and wordy, but without it readers wait for the
other shoe to drop. The error is
encouraged by the lure of the similar As
for, which needs no such continuation.

Word Preferred Usage beg the assumes what it question should be proving (When I asked the dealer why I should pay more for a German car, he said I would be getting “German quality,” but that just begs the question.) bemused bewildered cliché noun (Shakespeare used a lot of clichés.) credible believable (His sales pitch was not credible.) Problematic Usage Comment
raises the question (The store has cut its hours and laid off staff, which begs the question of whether it will soon be closing.) The “raise the question” sense is more transparent (particularly when the question is urgent, as if it were begging to be raised), and it is common enough that many dictionaries list it. But the “circular
reasoning” sense is standard in the
scholarly communities that
originated the expression and has no good substitute, so using beg to mean “raise” will irritate
such readers.
amused Dictionaries and the
Usage Panel are clear on this.
adjective (“To be or not to be” is so cliché.) Don’t be fooled by the French –é, which often creates
adjectives like passé and risqué; the adjective is clichéd, “being a cliché,” analogous to talented, “having talent.”
credulous, gullible (*He was too credible when the salesman –ible and –able mean “able,” in this case “able to be believed,
delivered his pitch.) able to be credited.”

Word Preferred Usage Problematic Usage Comment
criteria plural of criterion (These are important criteria.) singular of criterion (*This is an important criteria.) Nails on a chalkboard.
data plural count noun (This datum supports the theory, but many of the other data refute it.) mass noun (*This piece of data supports the theory, but much of the other data refutes it). I like to use data as a plural of datum, but I’m in a fussy minority even among scientists. Data is rarely used as a plural today, just as candelabra and
agenda long ago ceased to be plurals. But I still like it.
depreciate decrease in value (My Volvo has depreciated a lot since I bought it). deprecate, disparage (*She depreciated his efforts.) The “disparage” sense is not a malaprop, and it’s accepted in dictionaries, but
many writers like to reserve that sense for
deprecate.
dichotomy two mutually exclusive alternatives (the dichotomy between even and odd difference, discrepancy (*There is a dichotomy between what we see and what A tacky attempt to sound fancy-shmancy. The tom means “cut,” as in atomic
numbers) is really there.) (originally “unsplittable”), anatomy, and tomography (x-ray cross sections).

272 The SenSe of STyle
Word Preferred Usage Problematic Usage Comment
disinterested unbiased; without a uninterested (*Why The “uninterested”
vested interest (The are you so sense is older, and has
dispute should be disinterested when I a continuous and
resolved by a tell you about my respectable history.
disinterested judge.) day?) But since we have the
word uninterested and
lack an exact
synonym for
disinterested, readers
will appreciate your
maintaining the
distinction.
enervate sap, weaken (an energize (*an Literally “to remove
enervating commute) enervating double the nerves” (originally
espresso) “to remove the
sinews”).
enormity extreme evil enormousness The allegedly
incorrect usage is
both old and
common, but many
careful writers reserve
enormity for evil.
Some use enormity in
the hybrid sense
“deplorable
enormousness,”
writing of the
enormity of
population pressure
in India, the task
faced by teachers in
slums, or the stockpile
of nuclear weapons.

Word Preferred Usage Problematic Usage Comment
flaunt show off (She flaunted her abs.) flout (*She flaunted the rules.) A malaprop based on the similar sound and spelling, together with the shared meaning “brazenly.”
flounder flop around ineffectually (The indecisive chairman floundered.) founder, sink to the bottom (*The headstrong chairman floundered.) In practice flounder and founder are often interchangeable, being two ways of slowly failing. To keep them straight, remember that to flounder is
what flounders do; to
founder is related to
other bottom-words
like foundation and
fundamental.
fortuitous coincidental, unplanned (Running into my ex.husband at the party was purely fortuitous.) fortunate (*It was fortuitous that I worked overtime because I ended up needing the money.) Many writers, including a majority of the Usage Panel, approve the “fortunate” sense (particularly in the hybrid sense of good luck), and it is recognized in most dictionaries. But some
readers still bristle.
fulsome unctuous; excessively and insincerely complimentary (She didn’t believe his fulsome valentine for a second.) full, copious (*a fulsome sound; *The contrite mayor offered a fulsome apology.) The “copious” sense is historically respectable, but the Usage Panel hates it, and it could get you into trouble, because readers may assume you’re impugning something when you don’t mean to.

Word Preferred Usage
homogeneous with the suffix .eous,
pronounced “homo. genius”

hone sharpen (hone the knife, hone her writing skills) hot button an emotional, divisive controversy (She tried to stay away from the hot button of abortion.)

Problematic Usage with the suffix .ous, pronounced like “homogenized” home in on, converge upon (*I think we’re honing in on a solution.) hot topic (*The hot button in the robotics industry is to get people and robots to work together.) Comment homogenous is listed in dictionaries, but it’s a corruption which crept in after homogenized milk became popular. Similarly, heterogeneous is preferable to heterogenous. AHD accepts to hone in on, but it is a malaprop of to home, “return home” (what homing pigeons do). The overlap in meaning (“gradually converge on a precise point or edge”) conspires with the similar sounds to encourage the malaprop. Slang and vogue words give rise to malaprops, too (see also New Age, politically correct, urban legend). The button metaphor pertains to eliciting an instant, reflexive response, as in He tried to press my buttons.

Word Preferred Usage Problematic Usage Comment
hung suspended (hung the picture) suspended from the neck until dead (*hung the prisoner) Hung the prisoner is not incorrect, but the Usage Panel and other careful writers prefer hanged.
intern (verb) detain, imprison (The rebels were interned in the palace basement for three weeks.) inter, bury (*The good men do is oft interned with their bones.) It’s interred with their bones. The meanings overlap, but listen for the terr (earth, as in “terrestrial”) in inter, and for the internal
related to intern.
ironic uncannily incongruent; seemingly designed to violate expectations (It was ironic that I forgot my textbook on human memory.) inconvenient, unfortunate (*It was ironic that I forgot my textbook on organic chemistry.) You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
irregardless There isn’t one. regardless, irrespective Purists have been ranting about this misnegated portmanteau for decades, but it’s not
particularly common, and virtually all the Web hits are to claims
that “irregardless is not a word.” The
purists should declare victory and move on.

Word Preferred Usage literally in actual fact (I literally blushed.) luxuriant abundant, florid (luxuriant hair, a luxuriant imagination) meretricious tawdry; offensively insincere (a meretricious hotel lobby; a meretricious speech)

Problematic Usage figuratively (*I literally exploded.) luxurious (*a luxuriant car) meritorious (*a meretricious public servant, *a meretricious benefactor) Comment The “figuratively” sense is a common hyperbole, and it is rarely confusing in context. But it drives careful readers crazy. Like other intensifiers it is usually superfluous, whereas the “actual fact” sense is indispensable and has no equivalent. And since the figurative use can evoke ludicrous imagery (e.g., The press has literally emasculated the president), it screams, “I don’t think about what my words mean.” The “luxurious” sense is not incorrect (all dictionaries list it), but as a showy synonym for a perfectly good word it’s in bad taste. The word originally referred to prostitutes. My advice: Never try to compliment something by calling it meretricious. See also fulsome, opportunism, simplistic.

Word Preferred Usage Problematic Usage Comment
mitigate alleviate (Setting out traps will mitigate the ant problem.) militate, provide reasons for (*The profusion of ants mitigated toward setting out traps.) Some good writers have been caught using mitigate for militate, but it’s widely considered a malaprop.
New Age spiritualistic, holistic (He treated his lumbago with New Age remedies, like chanting and burning incense.) modern, futuristic (*This countertop is made from a New Age plastic.) Just because the expression contains the word new, that does not mean it can refer to any new thing.
noisome smelly noisy It’s from annoy, not from noise.
nonplussed stunned, bewildered (The market crash left the experts nonplussed.) bored, unimpressed (*His market pitch left the investors nonplussed.) From the Latin non plus, “no more.” It means “nothing more can be done.”
opportunism seizing or exploiting opportunities (His opportunism helped him get to the top, but it makes me sick.) creating or promoting opportunities (*The Republicans advocated economic opportunism and fiscal restraint.) The correct sense can be a compliment (“resourcefulness”) or an insult (“unscrupulousness”), more often the latter.
As with fulsome, if
you use it carelessly you may insult something you meant to praise.

Word Preferred Usage parameter a variable (Our prediction depends on certain parameters, like inflation and interest rates.) phenomena plural of phenomenon
(These are interesting
phenomena.)
politically dogmatically left- correct liberal (The theory
that little boys fight
because of the way
they have been
socialized is the
politically correct one.)
practicable easily put into
practice (Learning
French would be
practical, because he
often goes to France on
business, but because
of his busy schedule it
was not practicable.)

Problematic Usage a boundary condition, a limit (*We have to work within certain parameters, like our deadline and budget.) singular of phenomenon (*This is an interesting phenomena.) fashionable, trendy (*The Loft District is the new politically correct place to live.) practical (*Learning French would be practicable, because he often goes to France on business.) Comment The pseudo-technical “boundary” sense, a blend with perimeter, has become standard, and is accepted by most of the Usage Panel. But as with beg the question, the sloppy usage gets on the nerves of technically sophisticated readers who need the original sense. See criteria. See hot button, New Age, urban legend. The correct is sarcastic, lampooning the idea that only one kind of political opinion may be expressed. The –able means “able,” as in ability. See also credible, unexceptionable.

Word Preferred Usage Problematic Usage Comment
proscribe condemn, forbid (The policies proscribe amorous interactions between faculty and students.) prescribe, recommend, direct (*The policies proscribe careful citation of all sources.) A doctor writes a prescription, not a proscription, when he tells you what you should do.
protagonist actor, active character (Vito Corleone was the protagonist in The Godfather.) proponent (*Leo was a protagonist of nuclear power.) The “proponent” sense is definitely a malaprop.
refute prove to be false (She refuted the theory that the earth was flat.) allege to be false, try to refute (*She refuted the theory that the earth was round.) Refute is a factive or success verb, like know and remember, which presupposes the objective truth or falsity of the proposition. Many writers, including a slim majority of the Usage Panel, accept the non-factive “try to refute” sense, but the
distinction is worth
respecting.
reticent shy, restrained (My son is too reticent to reluctant (*When rain threatens, fans are The Usage Panel hates the “reluctant” sense.
ask a girl out.) reticent to buy tickets to the ballgame.)

280 The SenSe of STyle
Word Preferred Usage Problematic Usage Comment
shrunk, sprung, stunk, sunk past participle (Honey, I’ve shrunk the kids.) past tense (*Honey, I shrunk the kids.) Admittedly, Honey, I shrank the kids might not have worked as
the title of the Disney movie, and past-tense shrunk and similar
forms are venerable
and respectable. But it’s classier to
distinguish pasts from participles (sank–has sunk, sprang–has sprung, stank–has stunk) and to avail oneself of other lovely irregular forms like shone, slew, strode–has
stridden, and strove–
has striven.
simplistic Naïvely or overly simple (His proposal to end war by having children sing Kumbaya was simplistic.) simple, pleasingly simple (*We bought Danish furniture because we liked its simplistic look. ) Though not uncommon in art and design journalism, using simplistic for simple sets many readers’ teeth on edge, and can insult
something it means to praise. See also fulsome, opportunism.
staunch loyal, sturdy (a staunch supporter) stop a flow, stanch a flow (*staunch the bleeding) Dictionaries say that both spellings are fine with both meanings, but it’s classier to keep them distinct.

Word Preferred Usage Problematic Usage Comment
tortuous twisting (a tortuous torturous (*Watching Both come from the
road, tortuous Porky’s Part VII was a Latin word for “twist,”
reasoning) tortuous experience.) as in torque and
torsion, because
twisting limbs was a
common form of
torture.
unexceptionable not worthy of unexceptional, Unexceptional means
objection (No one ordinary (*They “not an exception.”
protested her getting protested her getting Unexceptionable
the prize, because she the prize, because she means “no one is able
was an was an to take exception to
unexceptionable unexceptionable it.”
choice.) actress.)
untenable indefensible, painful, unbearable The hybrid sense “so
unsustainable (Flat. (*an untenable unbearable as to be
Earthism is an tragedy; *untenable unsustainable” is
untenable theory; sadness) accepted by the Usage
Caring for quadruplets Panel, as in Isabel
while running IBM Wilkerson’s “when life
was an untenable became untenable.”
situation.)
urban legend an intriguing and someone who is See also hot button,
widely circulated but legendary in a city New Age, politically
false story (Alligators (*Fiorello LaGuardia correct. The legend
in the sewers is an became an urban pertains to the
urban legend.) legend.) original sense “a myth
passed down for
generations,” not the
journalistic sense “a
celebrity.”

Word Preferred Usage Problematic Usage Comment
verbal in linguistic form (Verbal memories fade more quickly than visual ones.) oral, spoken (*A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.) The “spoken” sense has been standard for centuries and is by no means incorrect (the famous Goldwynism wouldn’t work
without it), but sometimes it is
confusing.

The differences between two other families of similar-sounding words are so tortuous (and torturous) as to need a bit more expla.nation. The words affect and effect come in both noun and verb versions. Though it’s easy to confuse them, it’s worth mastering the distinction, because the common errors in the third column will make you look like an amateur. Word Correct Use and Spelling Incorrect Use and Spelling
an effect an influence: Strunk and White had a big effect on my writing style. *Strunk and White had a big affect on my writing style.
to effect to put into effect, to implement: I effected all the changes recommended by Strunk and White. *I affected all the changes recommended by Strunk and White.
to affect (first sense) to influence: Strunk and White affected my writing style. *Strunk and White effected my writing style.
to affect (second sense) to fake: He used big words to affect an air of sophistication. *He used big words to effect an air of sophistication.

But the most twisted family of look-alike and mean-alike words in the English lexicon is the one with lie and lay. Here are the gruesome details: Verb Meaning and Syntax Present Tense Past Tense Past Participle
to lie to recline (an intransitive irregular verb) He lies on the couch all day. He lay on the couch all day. He has lain on the couch all day.
to lay to set down, to cause to lie (a transitive regular verb) He lays a book upon the table. He laid a book upon the table. He has laid a book upon the table.
to lie to fib (an intransitive regular verb) He lies about what he does. He lied about what he did. He has lied about what he has done.

The imbroglio arises from the fact that we have two distinct verbs fighting over the form lay: it’s the past tense of lie, and it’s the plain form of lay, whose meaning—just to torment you further—is “cause to lie.” It’s no wonder that English speakers commonly say lay down or I’m going to lay on the couch, collapsing the transitive and intransitive versions of lie. Or are they collapsing the past and present tenses of lie? Both have same result: *to lay to recline (an intransitive *He lays on the *He laid on the *He has laid on regular verb) couch all day. couch all day. the couch all day. Don’t blame the usage on Bob Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay” or Eric Clap.ton’s “Lay Down, Sally”; careful English writers have been using it since 1300, right up to William Safire’s “The dead hand of the present should not lay on the future” (no doubt triggering a flurry of mail for his UofAllPeople file). Intransitive lay is by no means incorrect, but to the ears of many, lie sounds better:

punCtuAtion The main job of punctuation is to eliminate the ambiguities and gar.den paths that would mislead a reader if print consisted only of vowels, consonants, and spaces.58 Punctuation restores some of the prosody (melody, pausing, and stress) that is missing from print, and it provides hints about the invisible syntactic tree that determines a sentence’s meaning. As the T-shirt observes, punctuation matters: Let’s eat, Grandma has a different meaning from Let’s eat Grandma. The problem for the writer is that punctuation indicates prosody in some places, syntax in others, and neither of them consistently any.where. After centuries of chaos, the rules of punctuation began to settle down only a bit more than a century ago, and even today the rules differ on the two sides of the Atlantic and from one publication to another. The rules, moreover, are subject to changes in fashion, includ.ing an ongoing trend to reduce all punctuation to the bare minimum. They fill scores of pages in reference manuals, and no one but a professional copy editor knows them all. Even the sticklers can’t agree on how to stickle. In 2003 the journalist Lynne Truss published the unlikely bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (whose title comes from the punch line of a joke about a panda who shot up a restaurant because he had read a mispunctuated description of his dietary habits). In her book Truss decries the punc.tuation errors she spotted in ads, signs, and newspapers. In a 2004 New Yorker review, the critic Louis Menand decries the punctuation errors he spotted in Truss’s book. In a Guardian article on the response to Truss, the English scholar John Mullan decries the punctuation flaws he spotted in Menand’s review.59

Still, a few common errors are so uncontroversial—the run-on sen.tence, the comma splice, the grocer’s apostrophe, the comma between subject and predicate, the possessive it’s—that they have become tan.tamount to the confession “I am illiterate,” and no writer should be caught making them. As I mentioned, the problem with these errors is not that they betray an absence of logical thinking but that they betray a history of inattention to the printed page. In the hope that an ability to distinguish the logical and illogical features of punctua.tion may help a reader master both, I’ll say a few words about the design of the system, highlighting the major bugs that have been locked into it. commas and other connectors (colons, semicolons, and dashes). The first of the comma’s two major functions is to separate parenthetical comments about an event or a state—the time, place, manner, purpose, result, significance, writer’s opinion, and other by-the-way remarks— from the words that are necessary to pin down the event or state itself. We already met this function in the distinction between restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses. A restrictive relative clause, such as the one in Sticklers who don’t understand the conventions of punctuation shouldn’t criticize errors by others, is free of commas, and thereby sin.gles out a subset of sticklers, namely those who don’t understand the conventions of punctuation. The same phrase set off by commas, Sticklers, who don’t understand the conventions of punctuation, shouldn’t criticize errors by others, slips in a snide comment on the competence of a typical stickler, but that jibe is irrelevant to the advice conveyed by the sentence, which is offered to sticklers across the board.

The traditional terms “restrictive” and “nonrestrictive” are misno.mers, because the comma-less versions (called “integrated relative clauses” by the Cambridge Grammar) don’t always restrict the referents of the noun to some subset. What they do is specify information that is necessary to make the sentence true. In the sentence Barbara has two sons whom she can rely on and hence is not unduly worried, the under.lined relative clause does not pare down the set of Barbara’s sons from the full brood to just the two she can rely on; she may only have two. It indicates that because those two sons are sons on whom Barbara can rely, therefore she has no need to worry.60 And that is a key to understanding where to put commas in other constructions. Commas set off a phrase that is not an integral constit.uent of the sentence, and which as a result is not essential to under.standing its meaning. The sentence Susan visited her friend Teresa tells us that it’s important for us to know that Susan singled out Teresa as the person she intended to visit. In Susan visited her friend, Teresa, it’s only significant that Susan visited a friend (oh, and by the way, the friend’s name is Teresa). In the headline National Zoo Panda Gives Birth to 2nd, Stillborn Cub, the comma between the two modifiers indicates that the panda gave birth to a second cub and (here’s another fact) the cub was stillborn. Without the comma, the stillborn would be embedded beneath the 2nd in the tree, and the meaning would be that this is the second time she has given birth to a stillborn cub. Strings of modifiers without commas progressively narrow down the referent of a noun, like nested circles in a Venn diagram, whereas strings of mod.ifiers with commas just keep adding interesting facts about it, like overlapping circles. If the phrase had been 2nd, stillborn, male cub we would now know one more fact about the dead offspring, namely that it was male. If it had been 2nd stillborn male cub we would know that the previous stillborn cub was male, too.

This doesn’t sound all that hard. So why are there so many comma errors out there for the zero-tolerance squad to get incensed about? Why do comma errors account for more than a quarter of all language errors in student papers, occurring at a rate of about four errors per paper?61 The main reason is that a comma does not just signal a syntac.tic break (marking a phrase that is not integrated into a larger phrase) together with the corresponding semantic break (marking a meaning that is not essential to the meaning of the sentence). It also signals a prosodic break: a slight pause in pronunciation. Now, often these breaks line up: a supplementary phrase, the kind that calls for a comma, is typically preceded and followed by a pause. But often they do not line up, and that lays out a minefield for an inexperienced or inattentive writer. When a supplementary phrase is short a speaker naturally skates right over it to the next phrase in the sentence, and the current rules of punctuation give writers the option of going with the sound and leav.ing out the commas—as I did just now, omitting the comma after short. The rationale is that too many commas too close together can give a sentence a herky-jerky feel. Also, since a sentence may have many levels of branching while English provides only the puny comma to separate them all on the page, a writer may choose to keep the comma in reserve to demarcate the major branches in the tree, rather than dic.ing the sentence into many small pieces that the reader must then reas.semble. The reason I refrained from inserting a comma after When a supplementary phrase is short was that I wanted the comma between the end of that clause and the beginning of the next one to neatly cleave the sentence in two. The cleft would have been obscured if the first clause had also been riven by a comma. Here are some other sentences in which the comma may be omitted, at least in a “light” or “open” punc.tuation style, because the following phrase is short and clear enough not to require a pause before it: Man plans and God laughs. If you lived here you’d be home by now.

By the time I get to Phoenix she’ll be rising. Einstein he’s not. But it’s all right now; in fact it’s a gas! Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

That is the choice that Lynne Truss made in the dedication to Eats, Shoots & Leaves: To the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution. Menand poked fun at her, pointing out that the relative clause begin.ning with who was nonrestrictive (Truss meant to dedicate her book to all the striking printers, not to a subset who demanded payment for punctuation) and thus demanded a comma before it. Truss’s defenders pointed out that the alternative (To the striking Bolshevik printers of St Petersburg, who, in 1905, demanded . . .) would have been awkwardly thick with commas, forcing the reader to hopscotch through that part of the sentence a word or two at a time. One pointed out that Menand was universalizing the famously eccentric policy of his major outlet, The New Yorker, which sets off all supplementary phrases with com.mas, no matter how gratuitous in context or how juddering the pro.nunciation. Consider this sentence from a 2012 New Yorker article on electoral strategists for the Republican Party:62 Before [Lee] Atwater died, of brain cancer, in 1991, he expressed regret over the “naked cruelty” he had shown to [Michael] Dukakis in making “Willie Horton his running mate.” The commas around of brain cancer are there to make it clear that the cause of death is mentioned as a mere comment: it isn’t the case that Atwater died multiple times and that he expressed remorse only after his brain-cancer death, not after the other ones. This fussiness is too much even for some of The New Yorker’s own copy editors, one of whom kept a “comma-shaker” on her desk to remind her colleagues to sprinkle them more sparingly.63

Not only are commas partly regulated by prosody, but until recently that was their principal function. Writers used to place them wherever they thought a pause felt natural, regardless of the sentence’s syntax: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in posses.sion of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. Jane Austen and the framers of the American Constitution would get poor grades from composition teachers today, because commas are regulated less by prosody and more by syntax (this is the trend that The New Yorker has taken to an extreme). Austen’s sentence today would be stripped of both commas, and the Second Amendment would get to keep only the one after “free state.” Though the comma which demarcates a supplementary phrase may be omitted when the pronunciation zips right through it, the converse is no longer true: a comma may not separate the elements of an inte.grated phrase (such as a subject and its predicate), no matter how badly its narrator may want to take a breath at that juncture. With the rules for comma placement being such a mishmash of syntax and prosody, it’s no wonder that the complaints of composition instructors about comma placement in their students’ writing fall into the same two cat.egories as the complaints of people writing to Ann Landers about sex in their marriages: (1) too much, and (2) too little.64 In the “too much” category we have errors in which students place a comma in front of an integrated phrase, usually because they would pause at that point in pronouncing it:

[Between the subject and a predicate:] His brilliant mind and curios.ity, have left. [Between the verb and its complement:] He mentions, that not know.ing how to bring someone back can be a deadly problem. [Between a noun for an idea and a clause spelling out its content:] I believe the theory, that burning fossil fuels has caused global warming. [Between a noun and an integrated relative clause:] The ethnocentric view, that many Americans have, leads to much conflict in the world. [Between a subordinator and its clause:] There was a woman taking care of her husband because, an accident left him unable to work. [Within a coordination of two phrases:] This conclusion also applies to the United States, and the rest of the world. [Between a definite generic noun and the name identifying its refer.ent (neither comma is correct here):] I went to see the movie, “Midnight in Paris” with my friend, Jessie. And in the “too little” category, students forget to insert a comma to set off a supplementary word or phrase: [Surrounding a sentence adverb:] In many ways however life in a small town is much more pleasant. [Between a preposed adjunct and the main clause:] Using a scooping motion toss it in the air. [Before a result adjunct:] The molecule has one double bond between carbons generating a monounsaturated fat. [Before a contrast adjunct:] Their religion is all for equal rights yet they have no freedom. [Before a supplementary relative clause:] There are monounsaturated fatty acids which lack two hydrogen atoms.

[Before a direct quotation:] She said “I don’t want to go.” [Compare the complementary error with an indirect quotation: She said that, she didn’t want to go.] Sloppy writers also tend to forget that when a supplementary phrase is poked into the middle of a sentence, it needs to be set off with com.mas at both ends, like matching parentheses, not just at the beginning: Tsui’s poem “A Chinese Banquet,” on the other hand partly focuses on Asian culture. One of the women, Esra Naama stated her case. Philip Roth, author of “Portnoy’s Complaint” and many other books is a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize. My father, who gave new meaning to the expression “hard working” never took a vacation. The other comma mistake is so common that composition teachers have invented many terms of abuse for it: the comma splice, comma error, comma fault, and comma blunder. It consists in using a comma to join two complete sentences, each of which could stand on its own: There isn’t much variety, everything looks kind of the same. I am going to try and outline the logic again briefly here, please let me know if this is still unclear. Your lecture is scheduled for 5:00 pm on Tuesday, it is preceded by a meeting with our seminar hosts. There is no trail, visitors must hike up the creek bed. Unskilled writers are tempted to splice two sentences with a comma when the sentences are conceptually linked by one of the coherence relations discussed in chapter 5 and seem to want to snuggle up together in a single ensemble. But there are two reasons that comma splices drive careful readers crazy. (I won’t tolerate them in my students’ writ.ing, not even in email.) They always create a garden path, distracting and annoying the reader. And they are easy to avoid, requiring no greater skill than the ability to identify a sentence.

There are several legitimate ways to splice two sentences, depending on the coherence relation that connects them. When two sentences are conceptually pretty much independent, the first should end with a period and the next should begin with a capital, just like they teach you in third grade. When the two are conceptually linked but the writer feels no need to pinpoint the coherence relation that holds between them, they can be joined with a semicolon; the semicolon is the all-purpose way to elimi.nate a comma splice. When the coherence relation is elaboration or exem.plification (when one is tempted to say that is, in other words, which is to say, for example, here’s what I have in mind, or Voilà!), they may be linked with a colon: like this. When the second sentence intentionally interrupts the flow of the discussion, requiring the reader to wake up, think twice, or snap out of it, a writer can use a dash—dashes can enliven writing, as long as they are used sparingly. And when the writer pinpoints the coher.ence relation he has in mind with an explicit connective such as a coordi.nator (and, or, but, yet, so, nor) or a preposition (although, except, if, before, after, because, for), a comma is fine, because the phrase is a mere supple.ment (like the underlined clause, which I fastened to the preceding one with a comma). Just don’t confuse these connectives with sentence adverbs, such as however, nonetheless, consequently, or therefore, which are themselves supplements of the clause they precede. The clause with the adverb is a freestanding sentence; consequently, it cannot be joined to its predecessor with a comma. Here, then, are the possibilities (the asterisk indicates an illicit comma splice): *Your lecture is scheduled for 5 pm, it is preceded by a meeting. Your lecture is scheduled for 5 pm; it is preceded by a meeting. Your lecture is scheduled for 5 pm—it is preceded by a meeting. Your lecture is scheduled for 5 pm, but it is preceded by a meeting. Your lecture is scheduled for 5 pm; however, it is preceded by a meeting.

*Your lecture is scheduled for 5 pm, however, it is preceded by a meeting. The other bit of comma jargon that has spread beyond the world of copyediting is the serial comma or Oxford comma. It pertains to the second major function of the comma, which is to separate the items in a list. Everyone knows that when two items are joined with a conjunc.tion, they cannot have a comma joining them, too: Simon and Garfun.kel, not Simon, and Garfunkel. But when three or more items are joined, a comma must introduce every subsequent item except—and here comes the controversy—the last one: Crosby, Stills and Nash; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The controversial question is whether you should also put a comma before the final item, resulting in Crosby, Stills, and Nash, or Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. This is the serial comma. On one side we have most British publishers (other than Oxford University Press), most American newspapers, and the rock group that calls itself Crosby, Stills and Nash. They argue that an item in a list should be intro.duced either with and or with a comma, not redundantly with both. On the other side we have Oxford University Press, most American book publishers, and the many wise guys who have discovered that omitting a serial comma can result in ambiguity:65 Among those interviewed were Merle Haggard’s two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall. This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God. Highlights of Peter Ustinov’s global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector. The absence of a serial comma in a list of phrases can also create garden paths. He enjoyed his farm, conversations with his wife and his horse momentarily calls to mind the famous Mister Ed, and a reader who is unfamiliar with the popular music of the 1970s might well be tripped up by the sentence on the left, stumbling over the mythical duo Nash and Young and the run-on sequence Lake and Palmer and Seals and Crofts:

Without the serial comma: With the serial comma: My favorite performers of the 1970s My favorite performers of the 1970s are are Simon and Garfunkel, Crosby, Simon and Garfunkel, Crosby, Stills, Stills, Nash and Young, Emerson, Nash, and Young, Emerson, Lake, and Lake and Palmer and Seals and Crofts. Palmer, and Seals and Crofts. I say that unless a house style forbids it, you should use the serial comma. And if you’re enumerating lists of lists, then you can eliminate all ambiguity by availing yourself of one of the few punctuation tricks in English that explicitly signal tree structure, the use of a semicolon to demarcate lists of phrases containing commas: My favorite performers of the 1970s are Simon and Garfunkel; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; Emerson, Lake, and Palmer; and Seals and Crofts. apostrophes. The serial comma is not the only punctuation sin that will hurt you in life: The disenchanted girlfriend, I surmise, is referring to three common errors with apostrophes. If I were her companion, I would advise her to consider which quality she values more in a soulmate, logic or liter.acy, because each of the errors is thoroughly systematic, albeit contrary to accepted usage.

The first is the grocer’s apostrophe, as in Apple’s 99¢ Each. The error is by no means restricted to grocers; the British press had a field day when a protesting student was spotted with the sign Down with Fee’s. The rule is straightforward: the plural s may not be connected to a noun using an apostrophe, but must be jammed right up against it without punctuation—apples, fees. The error seduces grocers and students with three lures. One is that it is easy to confuse the plural s with the genitive ’s and the contraction ’s, both of which require an apostrophe: the apple’s color is impeccable, as is This apple’s sweet. Second, the grocers are, if anything, too con.scious of grammatical structure: they seem to want to signal the differ.ence between the phoneme s that is an intrinsic part of a word and the morpheme –s that is tacked on to mark the plural, as in the distinction between lens and pens (pen + –s), or species and genies. Marking a mor.pheme boundary is particularly tempting with words that end in vow.els, because the correct, unpunctuated plural makes the word look like something else entirely, as in radios (which looks like adios) and avo.cados (which looks like asbestos). Perhaps if the grocers had their way and plurals were consistently marked with apostrophes (radio’s, avoca.do’s, potato’s, and so on), no one would ever mistakenly refer to a kudo (the word is kudos, a singular Greek noun meaning “praise”), and Dan Quayle would have been spared the embarrassment of publicly miscor.recting a schoolchild’s potato to potatoe. Most seductively of all, the rule banning apostrophes in plurals is not as straightforward as I said it was. With some nouns, an apostrophe really is (or at least was) legit.imate. The apostrophe is mandatory with a letter of the alphabet (p’s and q’s) and common with words mentioned as words (There are too many however’s in this paragraph), unless they are clichés like dos and don’ts or no ifs, ands, or buts. Before the recent trend toward light punctuation, apostrophes were often used to pluralize years (the 1970’s), abbreviations (CPU’s), and symbols (@’s), and in some newspapers (such as the New York Times) they still are.66

The rules may not be logical, but if you want your literate lover not to leave you, don’t pluralize with an apostrophe. It’s also a good idea to know when to keep an apostrophe away from a pronoun. Dave Barry’s alter ego Mr. Language Person fielded the following question: Q: Like millions of Americans, I cannot grasp the extremely sub.tle difference between the words “your” and “you’re.” A: . . . The best way to tell them apart is to remember that “you’re” is a contraction, which is a type of word used during childbirth, as in: “Hang on, Marlene, here comes you’re baby!” Whereas “your” is, grammatically, a prosthetic infarction, which means a word that is used to score a debating point in an Internet chat room, as in: “Your a looser, you morron!”

The first part of Mr. Language Person’s answer is correct: an apostro.phe must be used to mark the contraction of an auxiliary with a pro.noun, as in you’re (you are), he’s (he is), and we’d (we would). And his first example (assuming you get the joke that you’re baby is mispunc.tuated) is also correct: an apostrophe is never used to mark the genitive (possessive) of a pronoun, no matter how logical it may seem to do so. Although we write the cat’s pajamas and Dylan’s dream, as soon as you replace the noun with a pronoun the apostrophe goes out the window: one must write its pajamas, not it’s pajamas; your baby, not you’re baby; their car, not they’re car; Those hats are hers, ours, and theirs, not Those hats are her’s, our’s, and their’s. Deep in the mists of time, someone decided that an apostrophe doesn’t belong in a possessive pronoun, and you’ll just have to live with it. The last of the great apostrophe errors is explained in this cartoon, in which the boy shows that an unconventional family does not neces.sarily lead to unconventional punctuation:

“I have two mommies. I know where the apostrophe goes.” The possessive of a singular is spelled ’s: He is his mother’s son. The possessive of a regular plural is spelled s’: He is his parents’ son, or, with a same-sex couple, He is his mothers’ son. As for names ending in s like Charles and Jones, go with grammatical logic and treat them as the singulars they are: Charles’s son, not Charles’ son. Some manuals stip.ulate an exception for Moses and Jesus, but grammarians should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, and the exception in fact applies to other ancient names ending in s (Achilles’ heel, Sophocles’ play).67 It also applies to modern names which already end with a ses sound, whose genitives contain the tongue-twister seses (Kansas’, Texas’). quotation marks. Another insult to punctuational punctiliousness is the use of quotation marks for emphasis, commonly seen in signs like We Sell “Ice”, Cell Phones May “Not” Be Used in This Area, and the disconcerting “Fresh” Seafood Platter and even more discon.certing Employees Must “Wash Hands”. The error is common enough to have inspired the cartoon on the following page.

Why do so many signmakers commit the error? What they are doing is what we all used to do in the Paleolithic days of word process.ing, when terminals and printers lacked italics and underlining (and what many of us still do when composing email in plain text format), which is to emphasize a word by bracketing it with symbols, like this or this or . But not like “this”. As Griffy explains in the car.toon, quotation marks already have a standard function: they signal that the author is not using words to convey their usual meaning but merely mentioning them as words. If you use quotation marks for emphasis, readers will think you’re unschooled or worse. No discussion of the illogic of punctuation would be complete with.out the infamous case of the ordering of a quotation mark with respect to a comma or period. The rule in American publications (the British are more sensible about this) is that when quoted material appears at the end of a phrase or sentence, the closing quotation mark goes out.side the comma or period, “like this,” rather than inside, “like this”. The practice is patently illogical: the quotation marks enclose a part of the phrase or sentence, and the comma or period signals the end of that entire phrase or sentence, so putting the comma or period inside the quotation marks is like Superman’s famous wardrobe malfunction of wearing his underwear outside his pants. But long ago some American printer decided that the page looks prettier without all that unsightly white space above and to the left of a naked period or comma, and we have been living with the consequences ever since. The American punctuation rule sticks in the craw of every computer scientist, logician, and linguist, because any ordering of typographical delimiters that fails to reflect the logical nesting of the content makes a shambles of their work. On top of its galling irrationality, the American rule prevents a writer from expressing certain thoughts. In his semi-serious 1984 essay “Punctuation and Human Freedom,” Geoffrey Pul.lum discusses the commonly misquoted first two lines of Shakespeare’s King Richard III: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York.”68 Many people misremember it as “Now is the winter of our discontent”, full stop. Now suppose one wanted to comment on the error by writing:

Shakespeare’s King Richard III contains the line “Now is the winter of our discontent”. This is a true sentence. But an American copy editor would change it to: Shakespeare’s King Richard III contains the line “Now is the winter of our discontent.” But this is a false sentence, or at least there’s no way for the writer to make it unambiguously true or false. Pullum called for a campaign of civil disobedience, and with the subsequent rise of the Internet his wish has come true. Many logic-conscious and computer-savvy writ.ers have taken advantage of the freedom from copy editors they enjoy on the Web and have explicitly disavowed the American system, most notably on Wikipedia, which has endorsed the alternative called Log.ical Punctuation.69 Punctuation nerds may have noticed that I myself recently defied the American rule in four places (underlined): The final insult to punctuational punctiliousness is the use of quotation marks for emphasis, commonly seen in signs like We Sell “Ice”, Cell Phones May “Not” Be Used in This Area, and the disconcerting “Fresh” Seafood Platter and even more disconcerting Employees Must “Wash Hands”. But not like “this”.

Many people misremember it as “Now is the winter of our discontent”, full stop. These acts of civil disobedience were necessary to make it clear where the punctuation marks went in the examples I was citing. You should do the same if you ever need to discuss quotations or punctuation, if you write for Wikipedia or another tech-friendly platform, or if you have a temperament that is both logical and rebellious. The movement may someday change typographical practice in the same way that the feminist movement in the 1970s replaced Miss and Mrs. with Ms. But until that day comes, if you write for an edited American publication, be prepared to live with the illogic of putting a period or comma inside quotation marks. I hope to have convinced you that dealing with matters of usage is not like playing chess, proving theorems, or solving textbook problems in physics, where the rules are clear and flouting them is an error. It is more like research, journalism, criticism, and other exercises of dis.cernment. In considering questions of usage, a writer must critically evaluate claims of correctness, discount the dubious ones, and make choices which inevitably trade off conflicting values. Anyone who reviews the history of prescriptive grammar can’t help but be struck by the misplaced emotion the topic evokes. At least since Henry Higgins decried “the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue,” the self-proclaimed defenders of high standards have been outdoing each other with tasteless invective.70 David Foster Wallace expressed “despair” at the “Evil” inherent in “voguish linguistic meth.ane.” David Gelernter refers to advocates of singular they as “language rapists,” while John Simon has likened the people who use words in ways he disapproves of to slave traders, child molesters, and the guards at Nazi death camps. The hyperbole often shades into misanthropy, as when Lynne Truss suggests that people who misuse apostrophes “deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.” Robert Hartwell Fiske, after calling humongous a “hideous, ugly word,” adds, “Though it’s not fair to say that people who use the word are hideous and ugly as well, at some point we come to be—or at the least are known by—what we say, what we write.”

The irony, of course, is that all too often it is the targets of the vitu.peration who have history and usage on their side, and the vilifiers who are full of baloney. Geoffrey Pullum, whose Language Log analyzes claims about the use and misuse of language, has noted the tendency among faultfinders “to move straight to high dudgeon, skipping right over the stage where you check the reference books to make sure you have something to be in high dudgeon about. . . . People just don’t look in reference books when it comes to language; they seem to think their status as writers combined with their emotion of anger gives them all the standing they need.”71 Though correct usage is well worth pursuing, we have to keep it in perspective. Not even the most irksome errors are portents of the death of the language, to say nothing of civilization, as the webcomic XKCD reminds us:

Yes, writers today sometimes make unfortunate choices. But so did the writers of yesterday and the day before, while many of the kids today, the target of so much purist bile, write gorgeous prose, comment incisively on usage, and even develop their own forms of purism (such as the Typo Eradication Advancement League, which stealthily cor.rects grocers’ signs with correction fluid and felt markers).72

And for all the vitriol brought out by matters of correct usage, they are the smallest part of good writing. They pale in importance behind coherence, classic style, and overcoming the curse of knowledge, to say nothing of standards of intellectual conscientiousness. If you really want to improve the quality of your writing, or if you want to thunder about sins in the writing of others, the principles you should worry about the most are not the ones that govern fused participles and pos.sessive antecedents but the ones that govern critical thinking and fac.tual diligence. Here are a few which are commonly flouted—not least in purist rants—and which are worth bearing in mind every time you put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. First, look things up. Humans are cursed with the deadly combina.tion of a highly fallible memory and an overconfidence in how much they know.73 Our social networks, traditional and electronic, multiply the errors, so that much of our conventional wisdom consists of friend-of-a-friend legends and factoids that are too good to be true. As Mark Twain said, “The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that aren’t so.” Actually, he didn’t say that—I looked it up.74 But whoever said it (probably Josh Billings) made an important point. We are blessed to live in an age in which no subject has gone unresearched by scholars, scientists, and journalists. The fruits of their research are available within seconds to anyone with a laptop or smartphone, and within minutes to anyone who can get to a library. Why not take advantage of these blessings and try to restrict the things you know (or at least the things you write) to things that are true? Second, be sure your arguments are sound. If you are making a factual claim, it should be verifiable in an edited source—one that has been vetted by disinterested gatekeepers such as editors, fact-checkers, or peer reviewers. If you’re making an argument, it should proceed from premises that reasonable people already agree upon to your newer or more contentious assertion using valid if.then steps. If you’re mak.ing a moral argument—a claim about what people ought to do—you should show how doing it would satisfy a principle or increase a good that reasonable people already accept.

Third, don’t confuse an anecdote or a personal experience with the state of the world. Just because something happened to you, or you read about it in the paper or on the Internet this morning, it doesn’t mean it is a trend. In a world of seven billion people, just about any.thing will happen to someone somewhere, and it’s the highly unusual events that will be selected for the news or passed along to friends. An event is a significant phenomenon only if it happens some appreciable number of times relative to the opportunities for it to occur, and it is a trend only if that proportion has been shown to change over time. Fourth, beware of false dichotomies. Though it’s fun to reduce a complex issue to a war between two slogans, two camps, or two schools of thought, it is rarely a path to understanding. Few good ideas can be insightfully captured in a single word ending with -ism, and most of our ideas are so crude that we can make more progress by analyzing and refining them than by pitting them against each other in a winner.take-all contest. Finally, arguments should be based on reasons, not people. Saying that someone you disagree with is motivated by money, fame, politics, or laziness, or slinging around insults like simplistic, naïve, or vulgar, does not prove that the things the person is saying are false. Nor is the point of disagreement or criticism to show that you are smarter or nobler than your target. Psychologists have shown that in any dispute both sides are convinced that they themselves are reasonable and upright and that their opposite numbers are mulish and dishonest.75 They can’t all be right, at least not all the time. Keep in mind a bit of wisdom from the linguist Ann Farmer: “It isn’t about being right. It’s about getting it right.” All of these principles lead us back to why we should care about style in the first place. There is no dichotomy between describing how people use language and prescribing how they might use it more effec.tively. We can share our advice on how to write well without treating the people in need of it with contempt. We can try to remedy shortcom.ings in writing without bemoaning the degeneration of the language. And we can remind ourselves of the reasons to strive for good style: to enhance the spread of ideas, to exemplify attention to detail, and to add to the beauty of the world.

Acknowledgments

I’m grateful to many people for improving my sense of style and The Sense of Style. For three decades Katya Rice taught me much of what I know about style by copyediting six of my books with precision, thoughtfulness, and taste. Before editing this one, Katya read it as an expert, spotting problems and offering wise advice. I have the good fortune of being married to my favorite writer. In addition to inspiring me with her own style, Rebecca Newberger Gold.stein encouraged this project, expertly commented on the manuscript, and thought up the title. Many academics have the lamentable habit of using “my mother” as shorthand for an unsophisticated reader. My mother, Roslyn Pinker, is a sophisticated reader, and I’ve benefited from her acute observations on usage, the many articles on language she’s sent me over the decades, and her incisive comments on the manuscript. Les Perelman was the director of Writing Across the Curriculum at MIT during the two decades I taught there, and offered me invaluable support and advice on the teaching of writing to university students. Jane Rosenzweig, director of the Writing Center of Harvard College, has been similarly encouraging, and both commented helpfully on the manuscript. Thanks go as well to Erin Driver-Linn and Samuel Moul.ton of the Harvard Initiative for Learning & Teaching.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and The Ameri.can Heritage Dictionary, Fifth Edition, are two great accomplishments of twenty-first-century scholarship, and I have been blessed with advice and comments from their overseers: Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum, coauthors of the Cambridge Grammar, and Steven Kleinedler, executive editor of AHD. Thanks go as well to Joseph Pickett, former executive editor of AHD, who invited me to chair the Usage Panel and gave me an insider’s look at how a dictionary is made, and to the cur.rent editors Peter Chipman and Louise Robbins. As if this expertise weren’t enough, I have benefited from the com.ments of other wise and knowledgeable colleagues. Ernest Davis, James Donaldson, Edward Gibson, Jane Grimshaw, John R. Hayes, Oliver Kamm, Gary Marcus, and Jeffrey Watumull offered penetrating com.ments on the first draft. Paul Adams, Christopher Chabris, Philip Corbett, James Engell, Nicholas Epley, Peter C. Gordon, Michael Halls-worth, David Halpern, Joshua Hartshorne, Samuel Jay Keyser, Stephen Kosslyn, Andrea Lunsford, Liz Lutgendorff, John Maguire, Jean-Baptiste Michel, Debra Poole, Jesse Snedeker, and Daniel Wegner answered questions and directed me to relevant research. Various examples in the book were suggested by Ben Backus, Lila Gleitman, Katherine Hobbs, Yael Goldstein Love, Ilavenil Subbiah, and emailers too numerous to list. Special thanks go to Ilavenil for the many subtle variations and shadings of usage she has called to my attention over the years, and for designing the diagrams and trees in this book. My editors at Penguin, Wendy Wolf in the United States and Thomas Penn and Stefan McGrath in the United Kingdom, and my literary agent, John Brockman, supported this project at every stage, and Wendy provided detailed criticism and advice on the first draft. I’m grateful, too, for the love and support of the other members of my family: my father, Harry Pinker; my stepdaughters, Yael Goldstein Love and Danielle Blau; my niece and nephews; my in-laws, Martin and Kris; and my sister, Susan Pinker, and brother, Robert Pinker, to whom this book is dedicated.

Parts of chapter 6 have been adapted from my essay on usage in The American Heritage Dictionary, Fifth Edition, and from my article “False Fronts in the Language Wars,” published in Slate in 2012.

Glossary active voice. The standard form of a clause, in which the actor or cause (if there is one) is the grammatical subject: A rabbit bit him (as opposed to the passive voice: He was bitten by a rabbit). adjective. The grammatical category of words that typically refer to a prop.erty or state: big, round, green, afraid, gratuitous, hesitant. adjunct. A modifier which adds information about the time, place, manner, purpose, result, or other feature of the event or state: She opened the bottle with her teeth; He teased the starving wolves, which was foolish; Hank slept in the doghouse. adverb. The grammatical category of words that modify verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and other adverbs: tenderly, cleverly, hopefully, very, almost. affix. A prefix or suffix: enrich, restate, blacken, slipped, squirrels, cancellation, Dave’s. agreement. Alterations of the form of a word to match some other word or phrase. In English a present-tense verb must agree with the person and num.ber of the subject: I snicker; He snickers; They snicker. AHD. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

anapest. A foot with a weak-weak-strong meter: Anna Lee should get a life; badda.bing!; to the door. antecedent. The noun phrase that specifies what a pronoun refers to: Biff for.got his hat; Before Jan left, she sharpened her pencils. article. A small category of words which mark the definiteness of a noun phrase, including the definite article the and the indefinite articles a, an, and some. The Cambridge Grammar subsumes articles in the larger category determinative, which also includes quantifiers and demonstratives like this and that. auxiliary. A special kind of verb which conveys information relevant to the truth of the clause, including tense, mood, and negation: She doesn’t love you; I am resting; Bob was criticized; The train has left the station; You should call; I will survive. backshift. Changing the tense of a verb (usually in indirect or reported speech) to match the tense of the verb of speaking or believing: Lisa said that she was tired (compare with Lisa said, “I am tired.”) Traditionally called sequence of tenses. Cambridge Grammar. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, a 2002 reference book written by the linguists Rodney Huddleston and Geof.frey Pullum in collaboration with thirteen other linguists. It uses modern linguistics to provide a systematic analysis of virtually every grammatical construction in English. The terminology and analyses in this book are based on the Cambridge Grammar. case. The marking of a noun to indicate its grammatical function, including nominative case (for subjects), genitive case (for determiners, including pos.sessives), and accusative case (for objects and everything else). In English, case is marked only on pronouns (nominative I, he, she, we, and they; accusa.tive me, him, her, us, and them; and genitive my, your, his, her, our, and their), except for genitive case, which can be marked with the suffixes ’s on singular noun phrases and s’ on plural ones. classic prose. A term introduced by the literary scholars Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner in their 1994 book, Clear and Simple as the Truth, to refer to a prose style in which the writer appears to direct the reader’s attention to an objective, concrete truth about the world by engaging the reader in conversa.tion. It contrasts with practical, self-conscious, contemplative, oracular, and other styles.

clause. The phrase type that corresponds to a sentence, whether it stands alone or is embedded in a larger sentence: Ethan likes figs; I wonder whether Ethan likes figs; The boy who likes figs is here; The claim that Ethan likes figs is false. coherence connective. A word, phrase, or punctuation mark that signals the semantic relation between a clause or passage and one that preceded it: Anna eats a lot of broccoli, because she likes the taste. Moreover, she thinks it’s healthy. In contrast, Emile never touches the stuff. And neither does Anna’s son. complement. A phrase that is allowed or required to appear with a head, completing its meaning: smell the glove; scoot into the cave; I thought you were dead; a picture of Mabel; proud of his daughter. conjunction. The traditional term for the grammatical category of words that link two phrases, including coordinating conjunctions (and, or, nor, but, yet, so) and subordinating conjunctions (whether, if, to). Following the Cambridge Grammar, I use the terms coordinator and subordinator instead. coordinate. One of two or more phrases in a coordination. coordination. A phrase consisting of two or more phrases with the same function, usually linked by a coordinator: parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme; She is poor but honest; To live and die in LA; Should I stay or should I go?; I came, I saw, I conquered. coordinator. The grammatical category of words that link two or more phrases with the same function, such as and, or, nor, but, yet, and so. definiteness. A semantic distinction marked by the determiner of a noun phrase, indicating whether the content of the head noun is sufficient to iden.tify the referent in context. If I say I bought the car (definite), I am assuming that you already know which car I’m talking about; if I say I bought a car (indefinite), I’m introducing it to you for the first time. denominal verb. A verb derived from a noun: He elbowed his way in; She demonized him.

determinative. The name used in the Cambridge Grammar for the grammat.ical category of words that can function as determiners, including articles and quantifiers. determiner. The part of a noun phrase that helps determine the referent of the head noun, answering the question “Which one?” or “How many?” The deter.miner function is carried out by articles (a, an, the, this, that, these, those), quantifiers (some, any, many, few, one, two, three), and genitives (my mother; Sara’s iPhone). Note that determiner is a grammatical function; determina.tive a grammatical category. diction. The choice of words. Not used here to refer to clarity of enunciation. direct object. The object of the verb (or, if the verb has two objects, the second of the two), usually indicating the entity that is directly moved or affected by the action: spank the monkey; If you give a muffin to a moose; If you give a moose a muffin; Cry me a river. discourse. A connected sequence of sentences, such as a conversation, a para.graph, a letter, a post, or an essay. ellipsis. Omission of an obligatory phrase that can be recovered from the context: Yes we can __! Abe flossed, and I did __ too; Where did you go? __To the lighthouse. factual remoteness. Whether a proposition refers to a remote possibility, namely a state of affairs that is untrue, highly hypothetical, or extremely improbable. The difference between If my grandmother is free, she’ll come over (an open possibility) and If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a trolley (a remote possibility). foot. A sequence of syllables pronounced as a unit and with a specific rhythm: The sun / did not shine. / It was too / wet to play. genitive. The technical term for what is loosely called “possessive” case, namely the case of a noun which functions as a determiner, such as Ed’s head or my theory. Marked in English by the choice of certain pronouns (my, your, his, her, their, and so on) and, with all other noun phrases, the suffix ’s or s’: John’s guitar; The Troggs’ drummer. gerund. The form of the verb with the suffix –ing, often functioning like a noun: His drinking got out of hand.

government. A traditional grammatical term covering the ways in which the head of a phrase may determine the grammatical properties of other words in the phrase, including agreement, case-marking, and the selection of comple.ments. grammatical category. A class of words that are interchangeable in their syntactic positions and in the way they are inflected: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, determinative (including articles), coordinator, sub.ordinator, interjection. Also called a part of speech. grammatical function. The role that a phrase plays inside a larger phrase, including subject, object, predicate, determiner, head, complement, modifier, and adjunct. head. The word in a phrase that determines the meaning and properties of the whole phrase: the man who knew too much; give a moose a muffin; afraid of his own shadow; under the boardwalk. hypercorrection. The overextension of a poorly grasped prescriptive rule to examples in which it does not apply, as in I feel terribly; They planned a party for she and her husband; one fewer car; Whomever did this should be punished. iambic. A weak-strong meter: Michelle; away; To bed! indicative. A term from traditional grammar for the mood of ordinary state.ments of fact, in contrast to subjunctive, imperative, interrogative, and other moods. indirect object. The first of two consecutive objects of a verb, usually indicat.ing a recipient or beneficiary: If you give a moose a muffin; Cry me a river. infinitive. The plain, untensed form of the verb, sometimes (but not always) appearing with the subordinator to: I want to be alone; She helped him pack; You must go. inflection. The modification of the form of a word according to its role in the sentence, including the declension of nouns (duck, ducks, duck’s, ducks’) and the conjugation of verbs (quack, quacks, quacked, quacking). Not to .e con.fused with intonation or prosody. intonation. The melody or pitch contour of speech.

intransitive. A verb that does not allow a direct object: Martha fainted; The chipmunk darted under the car. irrealis. Literally “not real”: a form of the verb that indicates factual remote.ness. In English it is marked only on the verb be: If I were a rich man, as opposed to If I was sick, I’d have a fever. In traditional grammars, it tends to be conflated with the subjunctive. main clause. The clause that expresses the principal assertion of a sentence, and in which subordinate clauses may be embedded: She thinks [I’m crazy]; Peter repeated the gossip [that Melissa was pregnant] to Sherry. metadiscourse. Words that refer to the current discourse: To sum up; In this essay I will make the following seventeen points; But I digress. meter. The rhythm of a word or set of words, consisting of a pattern of weak and strong syllables. modal auxiliary. The auxiliaries will, would, can, could, may, might, shall, should, must, and ought. They convey necessity, possibility, obligation, future time, and other concepts related to modalities. modality. Aspects of meaning relevant to the factual status of a proposition, including whether it is being asserted as fact, suggested as a possibility, posed as a question, or laid out as a command, a request, or an obligation. These are the meanings expressed by the grammatical system for mood. modifier. An optional phrase that comments on or adds information to a head: a nice boy; See you in the morning; The house that everyone tiptoes past. mood. Distinctions among the grammatical forms of a verb or clause that convey the semantic distinctions of modality, including the distinctions between an indicative statement (He ate), a question (Did he eat?), an imper.ative (Eat!), a subjunctive (It’s important that he eat), and, for the verb be, an irrealis (If I were you). morpheme. The smallest meaningful pieces into which words can be cut: walk.s; in.divis.ibil.ity; crowd.sourc.ing. nominal. Something nouny: a noun, pronoun, proper name, or noun phrase. nominalization. A noun formed out of a verb or an adjective: a cancellation; a fail; an enactment; protectiveness; a fatality.

noun. The grammatical category of words that refer to things, people, and other nameable or conceivable entities: lily, joist, telephone, bargain, grace, prostitute, terror, Joshua, consciousness. noun phrase. A phrase headed by a noun: Jeff; the muskrat; the man who would be king; anything you want. object. A complement that follows a verb or preposition, usually indicating an entity that is essential to defining the action, state, or situation: spank the monkey; prove the theorem; into the cave; before the party. Includes direct, indirect, and oblique objects. oblique object. An object of a preposition: under the door. open conditional. An if.then statement referring to an open possibility, one that the speaker does not know to be true or false: If it rains, we’ll cancel the game. participle. A form of the verb without a tense, which generally needs to appear with an auxiliary or other verb. English has two: the past participle, used in the passive voice (It was eaten) and perfect tense (He has eaten), and the gerund-participle, used in the progressive present tense (He is running) and in gerunds (Getting there is half the fun). Most verbs have regular past-participle forms, formed by the suffix –ed (I have stopped; It was stopped), but about 165 have irregular forms (I have given it away; It was given to me; I have brought it; It was brought here). All gerund-participles in English are formed with –ing. part of speech. Traditional term for a grammatical category. passive voice. One of the two major voices in English. A construction in which the usual object appears as the subject, and the usual subject is an object of by or absent altogether: He was bitten by a rabbit (compare the active A rabbit bit him); We got screwed; Attacked by his own supporters, he had nowhere else to turn. past tense. A form of the verb used to indicate past time, factual remoteness, or backshift: She left yesterday; If you left tomorrow, you’d save money; She said she left. Most verbs have regular past-tense forms, formed by the suffix –ed (I stopped), but about 165 have irregular forms (I gave it away; She brought it). Also called the preterite. person. The grammatical distinction between the speaker (first person), the addressee (second person), and those not participating in the conversation (third person). Marked only on pronouns: first person I, me, we, us, my, our; second person you, your; third person he, him, she, her, they, their, it, its.

phoneme. A minimal unit of sound, consisting of a spoken vowel or consonant: p.e.n; g.r.oa.n. phrase. A group of words that behaves as a unit in a sentence and which typi.cally has some coherent meaning: in the dark; the man in the gray suit; dancing in the dark; afraid of the wolf. predicate. The grammatical function of a verb phrase, corresponding to a state, an event, or a relationship which is asserted to be true of the subject: The boys are back in town; Tex is tall; The baby ate a slug. The term is also sometimes used to refer to the verb that heads the predicate (e.g., ate), or, if the verb is be, the verb, noun, adjective, or preposition that heads its complement (e.g., tall). preposition. The grammatical category of words that typically express spa.tial or temporal relationships: in, on, at, near, by, for, under, before, after, up. pronoun. A small subcategory of nouns that includes personal pronouns (I, me, my, mine, you, your, yours, he, him, his, she, her, hers, we, us, our, ours, they, them, their, theirs) and interrogative and relative pronouns (who, whom, whose, what, which, where, why, when). prosody. The melody, timing, and rhythm of speech. quantifier. A word (usually a determinative) which specifies the amount or quantity of a head noun: all, some, no, none, any, every, each, many, most, few. relative clause. A clause that modifies a noun, often containing a gap which indicates the role the noun plays inside that phrase: five fat guys who rock; a clause that modifies a noun; women we love ; violet eyes to die for ; fruit for the crows to pluck . remote conditional. An if.then statement referring to a remote possibility, one that the speaker believes to be false, purely hypothetical, or highly improbable: If wishes were horses, beggars would ride; If pigs had wings, they could fly. semantics. The meaning of a word, phrase, or sentence. Does not refer to hairsplitting over exact definitions.

sequence of tenses. See backshift. subject. The grammatical function of the phrase that the predicate is saying something about. In active sentences with action verbs it corresponds to the actor or cause of the action: The boys are back in town; Tex is tall; The baby ate a slug; Debbie broke the violin. In passive sentences it usually corresponds to the affected entity: A slug was eaten. subjunctive. A mood, marked mainly in subordinate clauses, which uses the plain form of the verb, and indicates a hypothetical, demanded, or required situation: It is essential that I be kept in the loop; He bought insurance lest someone sue him. subordinate clause. A clause embedded in a larger phrase, as opposed to the main clause of the sentence: She thinks I’m crazy; Peter repeated the gossip that Melissa was pregnant to Sherry. subordinator. A grammatical category containing a small number of words that introduce a subordinate clause: She said that it will work; I wonder whether he knows about the party; For her to stay home is unusual. It corre.sponds roughly to the traditional category of subordinating conjunctions. supplement. A loosely attached adjunct or modifier, set off from the rest of the sentence by pauses in speech and by punctuation in writing: Fortunately, he got his job back; My point—and I do have one—is this; Let’s eat, Grandma; The shoes, which cost $5,000, were hideous. syntax. The component of grammar that governs the arrangement of words into phrases and sentences. tense. The marking of a verb to indicate the time of the state or event relative to the moment the sentence is uttered, including present tense (He mows the lawn every week) and past tense (He mowed the lawn last week). A tense may have several meanings in addition to its standard temporal one; see past tense. topic. A sentence topic is the phrase that indicates what the sentence is about; in English it is usually the subject, though it can also be expressed in adjuncts such as As for fish, I like scrod. A discourse topic is what a conversation or text is about; it may be mentioned repeatedly throughout the discourse, some.times in different words.

transitive. A verb that requires an object: Biff fixed the lamp. verb. The grammatical category of words which are inflected for tense and which often refer to an action or a state: He kicked the football; I thought I saw a pussycat; I am strong. verb phrase. A phrase headed by a verb which includes the verb together with its complements and adjuncts: He tried to kick the football but missed; I thought I saw a pussycat; I am strong. voice. The difference between an active sentence (Beavers build dams) and a passive sentence (Dams are built by beavers). word-formation. Also called morphology: the component of grammar that alters the forms of words (rip . ripped) or that creates new words from old ones (a demagogue . to demagogue; priority . prioritize; crowd + source . crowd.source). zombie noun. Helen Sword’s nickname for an unnecessary nominalization that hides the agent of the action. Her example: The proliferation of nominal.izations in a discursive formation may be an indication of a tendency toward pomposity and abstraction (instead of Writers who overload their sentences with nouns derived from verbs and adjectives tend to sound pompous and abstract).

Notes

proloGue

1. From the introduction to The Elements of Style (Strunk & White, 1999), p. xv.

2. Pullum, 2009, 2010; J. Freeman, “Clever horses: Unhelpful advice from ‘The Elements of Style,’” Boston Globe, April 12, 2009.

3. Williams, 1981; Pullum, 2013.

4. Eibach & Libby, 2009.

5. The examples are from Daniels, 1983.

6. Lloyd-Jones, 1976, cited in Daniels, 1983.

7. See Garvey, 2009, for a discussion of criticisms that have been leveled at Strunk & White for its insistence on plain style, and Lanham, 2007, for a critique of the one-dimensional approach to style which runs through what he calls The Books.

8. Herring, 2007; Connors & Lunsford, 1988; Lunsford & Lunsford, 2008; Lunsford, 2013; Thurlow, 2006.

9. Adams & Hunt, 2013; Cabinet Office Behavioural Insights Team, 2012; Sunstein, 2013.

10. Schriver, 2012. For more on plain language laws, see the Center for Plain Language (http://centerforplainlanguage.org) and the organizations called Plain (http://www.plainlanguage.gov) and Clarity (http://www .clarity-international.net).

K. Wiens, “I won’t hire people who use poor grammar. Here’s why,” Har.vard Business Review Blog Network, July 20, 2012, http://blogs.hbr.org/cs /2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html.

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/online-dating-advice-exactly -what-to-say-in-a-first-message/. The quotation is from the writer Twist Phelan in “Apostrophe now: Bad grammar and the people who hate it,” BBC News Magazine, May 13, 2013.

ChApter 1: Good WritinG 1. From “A few maxims for the instruction of the over-educated,” first pub.lished anonymously in Saturday Review, Nov. 17, 1894.

Though commonly attributed to William Faulkner, the quotation comes from the English professor Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his 1916 lectures

On the art of writing. 3. R. Dawkins, Unweaving the rainbow: Science, delusion and the appetite for wonder (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 1.

According to the Google ngram viewer: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com.

R. N. Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The renegade Jew who gave us moder.nity (New York: Nextbook/Schocken, 2006), pp. 124–125.

Kosslyn, Thompson, & Ganis, 2006; H. Miller, 2004–2005; Sadoski, 1998; Shepard, 1978.

M. Fox, “Maurice Sendak, author of splendid nightmares, dies at 83,” New York Times, May 8, 2012; “Pauline Phillips, flinty adviser to millions as Dear Abby, dies at 94,” New York Times, Jan. 17, 2013; “Helen Gurley Brown, who gave ‘Single Girl’ a life in full, dies at 90,” New York Times, Aug. 13, 2013. I have altered the punctuation to conform to the style of this book, and in the Phillips excerpt I have quoted two of the four “Dear Abby” letters in the original obituary and reordered them.

Poole et al., 2011.

McNamara, Crossley, & McCarthy, 2010; Poole et al., 2011.

Pinker, 2007, chap. 6.

M. Fox, “Mike McGrady, known for a literary hoax, dies at 78,” New York Times, May 14, 2012.

I. Wilkerson, The warmth of other suns: The epic story of America’s great migration (New York: Vintage, 2011), pp. 8–9, 14–15.

ChApter 2: A WindoW onto the World

1. Versions of this saying have been expressed by the writing scholar James C. Raymond, the psychologist Philip Gough, the literary scholar Betsy Draine, and the poet Mary Ruefle.

For a discussion of the ubiquity of concrete metaphors in language, see Pinker, 2007, chap. 5.

Grice, 1975; Pinker, 2007, chap. 8.

Thomas & Turner, 1994, p. 81.

Thomas & Turner, 1994, p. 77.

Both quotations are from p. 79.

B. Greene, “Welcome to the multiverse,” Newseek/The Daily Beast, May 21, 2012.

D. Dutton, “Language crimes: A lesson in how not to write, courtesy of the professoriate,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 5, 1999, http://denisdutton.com /bad_writing.htm.

Thomas & Turner, 1994, p. 60.

Thomas & Turner, 1994, p. 40.

Most likely said by the Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White, http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/29/substitute-damn/.

“Avoid clichés like the plague” is one of the many self-undermining rules of writing popularized by William Safire in his 1990 book Fumblerules. The genre goes back at least to 1970s campus xeroxlore; see http://alt -usage-english.org/humorousrules.html.

Keysar et al., 2000; Pinker, 2007, chap. 5.

From the historian Niall Ferguson.

From the linguist Geoffrey Pullum.

From the politician, lawyer, executive, and immortal Montreal Cana.diens goaltender Ken Dryden.

From the historian Anthony Pagden.

The Dickens simile is from David Copperfield.

Roger Brown, in an unpublished paper.

A. Bellow, “Skin in the game: A conservative chronicle,” World Affairs, Summer 2008.

H. Sword, “Zombie nouns,” New York Times, July 23, 2012.

G. Allport, “Epistle to thesis writers,” photocopy handed down by gener.ations of Harvard psychology graduate students, undated but presum.ably from the 1960s.

From the Pennsylvania Plain Language Consumer Contract Act, http:// www.pacode.com/secure/data/037/chapter307/s307.10.html.

G. K. Pullum, “The BBC enlightens us on passives,” Language Log, Feb. 22, 2011, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2990.

ChApter 3: the Curse of KnoWledGe 1. Sword, 2012.

Named after Robert J. Hanlon, who contributed it to Arthur Bloch’s Murphy’s Law Book Two: More reasons why things go wrong! (Los Ange.les: Price/Stern/Sloan, 1980).

The term “curse of knowledge” was coined by Robin Hogarth and popu.larized by Camerer, Lowenstein, & Weber, 1989.

Piaget & Inhelder, 1956.

Fischhoff, 1975.

Ross, Greene, & House, 1977.

Keysar, 1994.

Wimmer & Perner, 1983.

Birch & Bloom, 2007.

Hayes & Bajzek, 2008; Nickerson, Baddeley, & Freeman, 1986.

Kelley & Jacoby, 1996.

Hinds, 1999.

Other researchers who have made this suggestion include John Hayes, Karen Schriver, and Pamela Hinds.

Cushing, 1994.

From the title of the 1943 style manual by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The reader over your shoulder: A handbook for writers of prose (New York: Random House; revised edition, 1979).

Epley, 2014.

Fischhoff, 1975; Hinds, 1999; Schriver, 2012.

Kelley & Jacoby, 1996.

Freedman, 2007, p. 22.

From p. 73 of the second edition (1972).

Attentive readers may notice that this definition of syllepsis is similar to the definition of zeugma I gave in connection with the Sendak obituary in chapter 1. The experts on rhetorical tropes don’t have a consistent explanation of how they differ.

G. A. Miller, 1956.

Pinker, 2013.

Duncker, 1945.

Sadoski, 1998; Sadoski, Goetz, & Fritz, 1993; Kosslyn, Thompson, & Ganis, 2006.

Schriver, 2012.

Epley, 2014.

ChApter 4: the Web, the tree, And the strinG 1. Florey, 2006.

Pinker, 1997.

Pinker, 1994, chap. 4.

Pinker, 1994, chap. 8.

I use the analyses in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002) with a few simplifications, including those introduced in the companion A Student’s Introduction to English Gram.mar (Huddleston & Pullum, 2005).

The incident is described in Liberman & Pullum, 2006.

Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Huddleston & Pullum, 2005.

Bock & Miller, 1991.

Chomsky, 1965; see Pinker, 1994, chaps. 4 and 7.

Pinker, 1994, chap. 7. For more recent reviews of the experimental study of sentence processing, see Wolf & Gibson, 2003; Gibson, 1998; Levy, 2008; Pickering & van Gompel, 2006.

From Liberman & Pullum, 2006.

Mostly from the column of Aug. 6, 2013.

I have simplified the tree on page 100; the Cambridge Grammar would call for two additional levels of embedding in the clause Did Henry kiss whom to represent the inversion of the subject and the auxil.iary.

The first example is from the New York Times “After Deadline” column; the second, from Bernstein, 1965.

Pinker, 1994; Wolf & Gibson, 2003.

Some of the examples come from Smith, 2001.

R. N. Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the existence of God: A work of fiction (New York: Pantheon, 2010), pp. 18–19.

From “Types of sentence branching,” Report writing at the World Bank, 2012, http://colelearning.net/rw_wb/module6/page7.html.

Here and elsewhere, I use the label Noun Phrase for the constituent the Cambridge Grammar calls “Nominal.”

Zwicky et al., 1971/1992. See also http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/langua gelog/archives/001086.html.

Pinker, 1994, chap. 4; Gibson, 1998.

Boston Globe, May 23, 1999.

Fodor, 2002a, 2002b; Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989; Van Orden, Johnston, & Hale, 1988.

R. Rosenbaum, “Sex week at Yale,” Atlantic Monthly, Jan./Feb. 2003; reprinted in Pinker, 2004.

The unattributed source for most of these emails is Lederer, 1987.

Spotted by Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4401.

Bever, 1970.

Pinker, 1994, chap. 7; Fodor, 2002a; Gibson, 1998; Levy, 2008; Pickering & van Gompel, 2006; Wolf & Gibson, 2003.

Nunberg, 1990; Nunberg, Briscoe, & Huddleston, 2002.

Levy, 2008.

Pickering & Ferreira, 2008.

Cooper & Ross, 1975; Pinker & Birdsong, 1979.

The example is from Geoffrey Pullum.

Gordon & Lowder, 2012.

Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Huddleston & Pullum, 2005.

ChApter 5: ArCs of CoherenCe 1. Mostly from Lederer, 1987.

Wolf & Gibson, 2006.

Bransford & Johnson, 1972.

M. O’Connor, “Surviving winter: Heron,” The Cape Codder, Feb. 28, 2003; reprinted in Pinker, 2004.

Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Huddleston & Pullum, 2005.

Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Huddleston & Pullum, 2005.

Gordon & Hendrick, 1998.

Mostly from Lederer, 1987.

Garrod & Sanford, 1977; Gordon & Hendrick, 1998.

Hume, 1748/1999.

Grosz, Joshi, & Weinstein, 1995; Hobbs, 1979; Kehler, 2002; Wolf & Gib.son, 2006. Hume’s connections between ideas, as he originally explained

them, are not identical to those distinguished by Kehler, but his trichot.omy is a useful way to organize the coherence relations. 12. Clark & Clark, 1968; G. A. Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976.

Grosz, Joshi, & Weinstein, 1995; Hobbs, 1979; Kehler, 2002; Wolf & Gib.son, 2006.

Kamalski, Sanders, & Lentz, 2008.

P. Tyre, “The writing revolution,” The Atlantic, Oct. 2012, http://www .theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-writing-revolution /309090/.

Keegan, 1993, p. 3.

Clark & Chase, 1972; Gilbert, 1991; Horn, 2001; Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Huddleston & Pullum, 2005; Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976.

Gilbert, 1991; Goldstein, 2006; Spinoza, 1677/2000.

Gilbert, 1991; Wegner et al., 1987.

Clark & Chase, 1972; Gilbert, 1991; Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976.

Huddleston & Pullum, 2002.

Liberman & Pullum, 2006; see also the many postings on “misnegation” in the blog Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/.

Wason, 1965.

Huddleston & Pullum, 2002.

Huddleston & Pullum, 2002.

To be exact, he said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard . . . ,” http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm.

Keegan, 1993, pp. 3–4.

Keegan, 1993, p. 5.

Keegan, 1993, p. 12.

Williams, 1990.

Mueller, 2004, pp. 16–18.

ChApter 6: tellinG riGht from WronG 1. Macdonald, 1962.

G. W. Bush, “Remarks by the President at the Radio-Television Corre.spondents Association 57th Annual Dinner,” Washington Hilton Hotel, March 29, 2001.

Skinner, 2012.

Hitchings, 2011; Merriam.Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994.

Lindgren, 1990.

American Heritage Dictionary, 2011; Copperud, 1980; Huddleston & Pul.lum, 2002; Huddleston & Pullum, 2005; Liberman & Pullum, 2006; Merriam.Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994; Soukhanov, 1999. Online dictionaries: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (http://www.ahdictionary.com/); Dictionary.com (http://dic tionary.reference.com); Merriam.Webster Unabridged (http://unabridged .merriam-webster.com/); Merriam.Webster Online (http://www.merriam -webster.com/); Oxford English Dictionary (http://www.oed.com); Oxford Dictionary Online (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com). Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll. Other sources consulted in this discussion include Bernstein, 1965; Fowler, 1965; Haussaman, 1993; Lunsford, 2006; Lunsford & Lunsford, 2008; Oxford English Dictionary, 1991; Siegal & Connolly, 1999; Williams, 1990.

M. Liberman, “Prescribing terribly,” Language Log, 2009, http://langua gelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1360; M. Liberman, 2007, “Amid this vague uncertainty, who walks safe?” Language Log, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl /languagelog/archives/004231.html.

E. Bakovic, “Think this,” Language Log, 2006, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl /languagelog/archives/003144.html.

The errors are taken from Lunsford, 2006, and Lunsford & Lunsford, 2008.

Haussaman, 1993; Huddleston & Pullum, 2002.

Merriam.Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, p. 218.

Nunnally, 1991.

This analysis is based on Huddleston & Pullum, 2002.

G. K. Pullum, “Menand’s acumen deserts him,” in Liberman & Pullum, 2006, and Language Log, 2003, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/langua gelog/archives/000027.html.

B. Zimmer, “A misattribution no longer to be put up with,” Language Log, 2004, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001715.html.

M. Liberman, “Hot Dryden-on-Jonson action,” Language Log, 2007, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004454.html.

These and other examples of errors in student papers are adapted from Lunsford, 2006, and Lunsford & Lunsford, 2008. For an explanation of tense and its relationship to time, see Pinker, 2007, chap. 4.

Called out as an error by the New York Times’ “After Deadline” column, May 14, 2013.

Huddleston & Pullum, 2002.

Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, pp. 152–154.

Pinker, 2007, chap. 4.

G. K. Pullum, “Irrational terror over adverb placement at Harvard,” Lan.guage Log, 2008, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=100.

Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, pp. 1185–1187.

M. Liberman, “Heaping of catmummies considered harmful,” Language Log, 2008, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=514.

G. K. Pullum, “Obligatorily split infinitives in real life,” Language Log, 2005, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002180.html.

A. M. Zwicky, “Not to or to not,” Language Log, 2005, http://itre.cis .upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002139.html.

A. M. Zwicky, “Obligatorily split infinitives,” Language Log, 2004, http:// itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000901.html.

From Winston Churchill.

This analysis is based on Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, especially pp. 999– 1000.

Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, p. 87.

Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Huddleston & Pullum, 2005.

Merriam.Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, p. 343.

G. K. Pullum, “A rule which will live in infamy,” Chronicle of Higher Educa.tion, Dec. 7, 2012; M. Liberman, “A decline in which-hunting?” Language Log, 2013, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5479#more-5479.

G. K. Pullum, “More timewasting garbage, another copy-editing moron,” Language Log, 2004, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives /000918.html; G. K. Pullum, “Which vs that? I have numbers!” Language Log, 2004, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001464 .html.

Merriam.Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, p. 895.

Pinker, 1999/2011.

Flynn, 2007; see also Pinker, 2011, chap. 9.

M. Liberman, “Whom humor,” Language Log, 2004, http://itre.cis.upenn .edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000779.html.

Merriam.Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, p. 958; G. K. Pullum, “One rule to ring them all,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 30, 2012, http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/11/30/one-rule-to-ring -them-all/; Huddleston & Pullum, 2002.

According to the Google ngram viewer: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com.

A fifteenth-century curse discussed in my book The stuff of thought, chap. 7.

Quoted in Merriam.Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, p. 959.

Merriam.Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, pp. 689–690; Hud.dleston & Pullum, 2002, p. 506; American Heritage Dictionary, 2011, Usage Note for one.

For an analysis of the language of stuff and things, see Pinker, 2007, chap. 4.

J. Freeman, “One less thing to worry about,” Boston Globe, May 24, 2009.

Originally published as “Ships in the night,” New York Times, April 5, 1994.

White House Office of the Press Secretary, “Statement by the President on the Supreme Court’s Ruling on Arizona v. the United States,” June 25, 2012.

D. Gelernter, “Feminism and the English language,” Weekly Standard, March 3, 2008; G. K. Pullum, “Lying feminist ideologues wreck English lan.guage, says Yale prof,” Language Log, 2008, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl /languagelog/archives/005423.html.

Foertsch & Gernsbacher, 1997.

From G. K. Pullum, “Lying feminist ideologues wreck English language, says Yale prof,” Language Log, 2008, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl /languagelog/archives/005423.html, and Merriam.Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994.

Foertsch & Gernsbacher, 1997.

From G. J. Stigler, “The intellectual and the market place,” Selected Papers No. 3, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, 1967.

H. Churchyard, “Everyone loves their Jane Austen,” http://www.crossmyt .com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html.

G. K. Pullum, “Singular they with known sex,” Language Log, 2006, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002742.html.

Pinker, 1994, chap. 12.

Foertsch & Gernsbacher, 1997; Sanforth & Filik, 2007; M. Liberman, “Pre.scriptivist science,” Language Log, 2008, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn .edu/nll/?p=199.

Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, pp. 608–609.

Nunberg, 1990; Nunberg, Briscoe, & Huddleston, 2002.

Truss, 2003; L. Menand, “Bad comma,” New Yorker, June 28, 2004; Crystal, 2006; J. Mullan, “The war of the commas,” The Guardian, July 1, 2004, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jul/02/referenceandlanguages .johnmullan.

Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Huddleston & Pullum, 2005, p. 188.

Lunsford, 2006; Lunsford & Lunsford, 2008; B. Yagoda, “The most comma mistakes,” New York Times, May 21, 2012; B. Yagoda, “Fanfare for the comma man,” New York Times, April 9, 2012.

B. Yagoda, “Fanfare for the comma man,” New York Times, April 9, 2012.

M. Norris, “In defense of ‘nutty’ commas,” New Yorker, April 12, 2010.

Lunsford, 2006; Lunsford & Lunsford, 2008; B. Yagoda, “The most comma mistakes,” New York Times, May 21, 2012.

The examples that follow are from Wikipedia, “Serial comma.”

Siegal & Connolly, 1999.

At least according to the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (Siegal & Connolly, 1999). Other manuals make an exception to this exception for classical names ending in –as or –us, and then make an exception to the exception to the exception for Jesus—but he would get by without the ’s by virtue of the sound of his name anyway.

Pullum, 1984.

B. Yagoda, “The rise of ‘logical punctuation,’” Slate, May 12, 2011.

D. F. Wallace, “Tense present: Democracy, English, and the wars over usage,” Harper’s, April 2001; D. Gelernter, “Feminism and the English language,” Weekly Standard, March 3, 2008; J. Simon, Paradigms lost (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1980), p. 97; J. Simon, “First foreword,” in Fiske, 2011, p. ix; Fiske, 2011, p. 213; Truss, 2003.

G. K. Pullum, “Lying feminist ideologues wreck English, says Yale prof,” Language Log, 2008, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives /005423.html. See also M. Liberman, “At a loss for lexicons,” Language Log, 2004, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000437.html.

Deck & Herson, 2010.

Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982; Schacter, 2001.

K. A. McDonald, “Many of Mark Twain’s famed humorous sayings are found to have been misattributed to him,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 4, 1991, A8.

Haidt, 2012; Pinker, 2011, chap. 8.

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Index

Page numbers in boldface refer to glossary entries and main discussions; page numbers in italics refer to cartoons and other illustrations. a and an, 153–56, 310 abbreviations, 63–65, 70 absolute and graded qualities, 244–46 abstraction vs. abstract subject matter, 31–35, 48–49 in bad writing, 36, 48–49 as dehumanizing, 24–25 functional fixity, 70–72, 73–75 See also classic style or prose; concreteness; metadiscourse abstract nouns, 36, 48–50, 73, 87 See also nominalizations abstracts, 149 academic writing, 31, 57–58 capricious syntactic variation in, 126 cartoons about, 37, 51, 57, 58 examples of bad, 35–36, 66 in linguistics, 65–67 overly long paragraphs, 145 professional narcissism in, 38, 40–42, 149 See also curse of knowledge accusative case, 206–7, 222, 310 accusative pronouns, 97, 100, 310 between you and I, 205–7 I vs. me, 97–99, 206–7, 222, 234 who vs. whom, 99–102, 240–43 acronyms. See abbreviations active voice, 55–56, 223, 309 Ade, George, 240 adjectives, 84, 201–3, 309 comparatives and superlatives, 252 vs. genitives, 86–87, 219 in good writing, 14, 22 nouns formed from, 314 verbs formed from, 238 zombie adjectives, 50–51 See also specific words adjuncts, 309, 317

adverbs, 84, 201–3, 202, 309 in good writing, 16, 22 hedging with, 43–44 sentence adverbs, 266, 292–93 split infinitives and, 199, 228–30 See also specific words adverse, 269 affect and effect, 282 affixes, 309 after, 88, 164–65, 217 agents protagonists in good writing, 48–49, 152–53 unmentioned, passives for,

55–56, 132 aggravate, 187, 263 agreement, 309 tense agreement, 310 See also number; sequence of tenses; subject-verb agreement AHD (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language), 189, 198, 239, 240 Usage Panel, 189, 194, 199, 201, 212, 234, 244, 249, 250, 251, 260, 263, 264, 265, 267, 270, 273, 275, 278, 279, 281 See also specific problem words and usages ain’t, 192–93, 202–3 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 173 alleged, 44 Allen, Woody, 122 alliteration, 12, 21 Allport, Gordon, 52–53 a lot, 249 also, 162–63, 204–5 alternative, 251 ambiguity. See lexical ambiguity; syntactic ambiguity American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD), 189, 198, 239, 240 Usage Panel, 189, 194, 201 See also specific problem words and usages American Usage and Style: The Consensus (Copperud), 199–200, 201, 228 among, 251 analogies, 32, 34, 37 anapest, 310 and, 161, 164, 165, 204–5 See also coordinations Anguished English (Lederer), 118n25, 210, 324 Annie Hall, 36 antecedents, 310 possessive antecedents, 218–20 anticipate, 263 anxious, 263 any, 247, 251, 259, 260 apologetic language, 38, 42–43 apostrophes, 294, 294–97, 297 appraise, 269 articles, 84, 86, 153–57, 310, 312 for disambiguation, 122–23 for initial vs. repeated appearances, 153–54, 155–56 See also a and an; the as, 217–18, 233–34 as far as, 269 “Ask the Bird Folks” heron text, 148–53, 155–57, 159–60 attribution (coherence relation), 166 Austen, Jane, 233, 258, 261, 289 auxiliaries, 95, 176, 213–17, 226–27, 310 can vs. may, 207–8, 208 in conditional constructions, 213–17 had, 216–17, 226 modal auxiliaries, 207, 216, 314 past-tense forms, 216–17, 226 shall and will, 227–28

awesome, 14 back-formation, 196 backshifting, 222–27, 310 See also sequence of tenses bad writing, hallmarks of, 36, 56 See also academic writing; apologetic language; bureaucratic language; capricious variation; clichés; coherence; convoluted syntax; curse of knowledge; embedding; hedging; metaconcepts; metadiscourse; mixed metaphors; postmodernism; professional narcissism; self-conscious style; structural parallelism; syntactic ambiguity; specific problem usages Bad Writing Contest, 35–36, 50 Barry, Dave, 174, 296 be irrealis were, 215, 231–33, 314, 317 predicative nominative, 222 subjunctive. See irrealis were because, 165, 168, 177, 204–5 before, 88, 164–65, 217 before-and-after relations, 160, 164–65 beg the question, 270 Bellow, A. (quoted), 48 bemused, 270 Bernstein, Theodore, 78, 156, 199, 221–22, 224 Betraying Spinoza (Goldstein), 15–18 between, 205–7, 251 Bible, 125, 219, 222, 235 Billings, Josh, 302 both . . . and, 96, 97 Bransford, John, 147–48 brevity, 1–2, 30, 104–6, 122–24 See also “omit needless words” rule Brown, Helen Gurley, obituary of, 20, 21–22 Brown, Roger (quoted), 48 Bryant, William Cullen, 194 bureaucratic language, 7, 41, 44, 50, 56, 62, 110 plain language laws, 9, 53 Bush, George W., 63, 190 Bush, Lawrence, 254–55 but, 161, 166, 204–5 Butler, Judith, 36 Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, The, 86, 201, 250, 310 can and may, 207–8, 208 capricious variation, 125–26, 156–57, 161–63 Careful Writer, The (Bernstein), 199, 224 See also Bernstein, Theodore Carlyle, Thomas, 194 Carroll, Lewis, 173 case, 97–102, 310 See also accusative case; accusative pronouns; genitive case; genitive pronouns; nominative case; nominative pronouns cause-and-effect coherence relations, 160, 165–66, 167 Caxton, William, 5 Charge of the Light Brigade, 62 Chomsky, Noam, 91 chronological order, 160, 164–65 chunking, 67–69, 74–75, 142 Churchill, Winston, 125, 220, 227 Churchyard, Henry, 258

clarity, 7, 9, 29, 37, 69–70, 106, 262 brevity-clarity tradeoffs, 122–24, 262 See also classic style or prose; coherence classic style or prose, 28–31, 37–38, 45–46, 74–75, 152, 302, 310–11 examples of, 23–24, 31–35, 74–75, 150–51, 183–85 hallmarks of, 28–29, 37–39,
41–43, 48–49, 53, 55–56,
152, 185–86, 254

vs. other styles, 29–31 See also good writing; writer- reader relationship; writing

clauses, 311 main clauses, 314 subordinate clauses, 317 See also embedding; punctuation; relative clauses; syntax Clausewitz, Carl von. See History of Warfare, A Clear and Simple as the Truth (Thomas and Turner), 28, 29, 30, 44, 310 See also classic style or prose clefting, 136–37 cliché, as an adjective, 270 clichés, 13, 14, 17, 25, 38, 42–43, 45–48, 231, 239, 295 Clinton, Bill, 98–99, 172 cognition chunking, 67–69, 74–75, 142 functional fixity, 70–72, 73–75 semantic memory (web of knowledge), 79–83, 103, 115, 131, 142, 146, 151 See also coherence; comprehension; imagery; memory; perspective; psycholinguistics; sentence processing; tree-awareness coherence, 139–86, 302 failures of coherence, 139–41, 159, 162, 170, 173, 178–79, 180–81 with negation, 172–77 phrase order and, 131 proportionality, 178–80 repeated appearances, 146, 153–58 themes and thematic consistency, 145–46, 182–86 topics and topic strings, 39–41, 131, 146–49, 151, 151–53, 182, 317 See also text structure and organization coherence connectives, 160, 169, 311 and or because beginning a sentence, 204–5 for cause-effect relations, 165–66 for contiguity relations, 164–65 punctuation and, 292–93 for resemblance relations, 161, 162–63, 168 coherence relations, 159–69, 324–25n11 attribution and anticipation, 166 cause and effect, 160, 165–66, 167 contiguity, 160, 164–65 resemblance relations, 160–64 Colbert, Stephen, 95 College Board exam question,

218–19, 220 colon, 21, 163, 292 commas, 285–94 comma splice, 285, 291–93 errors with, 121–22, 285, 287,

288–92 functions of, 120–21, 286, 289, 293 negation and, 177 quotation marks and, 298–300 serial or Oxford comma, 293–94 with supplementary phrases, 236, 285–86, 288, 289–91, 292 and syntax, 107–8, 121–22, 177,

235–36, 285, 287–89 comparative adjectives, 252 comparisons and contrasts (coherence relations), 157, 161–63, 166, 168 like and as, 217–18 than and as, 233–34

complements, 85, 93, 203, 217, 222, 233, 311 See also objects comprehension chunking and, 67–69, 74–75, 142 See also sentence processing comprise, 263 concreteness, 29, 53–54, 72–74 in good writing, 14, 16–17, 21, 25, 26, 34–35, 186 See also abstraction; classic style or prose; clichés; impersonal language conditionals, 213–17, 224–25, 315, 316 conjunctions, 84, 88, 94, 311 See also coordinations; coordinators; specific words connectives. See coherence connectives; specific words contact, 3–4, 194, 238 contemplative style, 29 contiguity coherence relations, 160, 164–65 contractions, 295, 296 contrast (coherence relation), 13, 161–63 control. See subject control conversation, 27–28, 44, 53 in classic style, 29, 38–39, 44, 53, 54, 311 convince, 264 convoluted syntax, 112–15 coordinates, 311 coordinating conjunctions. See coordinators coordinations, 94–97, 98–99, 106–8, 206–7, 248–49, 311 See also coordinators coordinators, 84, 88, 94, 96, 311 See also coordinations; specific words Copperud, Roy, 199–200, 201, 228 Corbett, Philip, 95 correct usage, 187, 189–91, 200–201, 193–94, 300–304 Prescriptivist-Descriptivist pseudo-controversy, 188–89, 191–92, 194–95, 303–4 and reference works, 23, 198–200, 262, 301, 302 See also prescriptive rules; purism; word choice; specific problem words and usages could, 216, 226 count nouns, 252–55 credible, 270 crescendo, 264 criteria, 271 critique, 264 Cronkite, Walter, 217 curse of knowledge, 59–63, 61, 139, 302 abstraction and, 67 chunking and, 69, 73, 74–75 coherence connectives and, 168 exorcising, 63–64 jargon, abbreviations, and technical terms, 63–67 respecting your audience,
69–70 zombie nouns and, 158–59

curse of knowledge (cont.) See also functional fixity; professional narcissism dangling modifiers or participles, 187, 208–11 Darwin, Charles, 27 dash, 21, 235, 236, 292 data, 271 datives, 136 Dawkins, Richard, 13–14, 16 Dear Abby obituary, 19–20, 21 “Death of a Pig” (White), 235 decimate, 189, 196, 264 deep structure, 91–93, 92, 100, 242 See also gaps and fillers; syntax; tree structure definiteness, 154, 311 for repeated appearances, 154–56 See also articles; determiners; specific words Defoe, Daniel, 202 degree. See quality and degree dehumanizing language, 24–25 demonstratives. See articles; that; these and those denominal verbs, 52, 237, 237–39, 311 depreciate, 271 Derrida, Jacques, 43 descriptive rules, 190–91 Descriptivist-Prescriptivist pseudo- controversy, 188–89, 191–92, 194–95, 303–4 determinatives, 84, 310, 312, 316 See also articles determiners, 84, 86–88, 311, 312 genitives as, 82, 86, 87–88, 154, 219–20, 310 See also articles; quantifiers; specific words diagramming sentences, 77–78, 82–83 dichotomy, 271 Dickens, Charles, 48, 218, 219, 236 diction, 262–63, 312 See also word choice; specific problem words

dictionaries, 23, 188–90, 193–95, 198–200, 239–40, 262–63 See also lexicography; specific dictionaries dictionary.com. See Random House Dictionary different than, 234 direct objects, 87, 312 discourse, 142, 312, 166 See also conversation discourse topic, 151, 317 disinterested, 272 Dole, Bob, 112–13, 166 double negatives, 173–74, 192 Dryden, John, 220–21 Dryden, Ken (quoted), 47 dual number, 250–52 due to, 264 Dutton, Denis, 35 each other, 251 Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Truss), 285,

288, 300 editors, 75–76 effect and affect, 282 egocentrism, 59–60 See also professional narcissism 800.pound gorilla, 47–48 either, 96, 207, 248, 249, 251–52 elaboration (coherence relation), 160, 163, 166, 292 elegant variation, 156–57, 161 See also repetition; variation, capricious

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (Gray), 14 Elements of Style, The (Strunk and White), 6, 8–9, 30 on acronyms, 65 on brevity, 1–2 on like as coordinator, 217 on neologisms of their time,

3–4, 194 possessive antecedents, 219 on syntax, 2, 127, 131 on which, 236

ellipsis, 233–34, 312 embedding, 81, 83, 107–15, 286 See also convoluted syntax; sentence processing; tree structure

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 47 emphasis backshifting and, 225 fused participles and, 213 new-information-last rule, 130–37, 153, 221–22 quotation marks for, 297–98 Encarta World English Dictionary, 198, 199 enervate, 272 English word order, 83, 109, 130–32, 135–37 See also syntax; tree structure enormity, 272 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, An (Hume), 160 “Epistle to Thesis Writers” (Allport), 52–53 etymological fallacy, 196, 264 euphemism, 17–18 Evans, Bergen, 236 every, 237, 247, 261 exception (coherence relation), 163, 164 exemplification (coherence relation), 159, 163, 166, 168, 292 like to introduce examples, 218 existentials, 17, 105, 136, 153 See also there expectations, violated (coherence relation), 159, 166 expertise chunking and, 69, 74–75 functional fixity and, 74–75 of readers, coherence connectives and, 69–70, 167–68 See also curse of knowledge explanation (coherence relation), 159–60, 164, 167, 168 because to begin a sentence, 205 extraposed clauses, 136 factual remoteness, 214–16, 312, 314 remote conditionals, 214–17, 224–25, 316 subjunctive and irrealis were, 231–33, 314, 317 false consensus, 60 false title, 123 Faulkner, William, 218, 233–34, 320n2 feet (meter), 310, 312 feminism. See nonsexist language Ferguson, Niall (quoted), 46 fewer vs. less, 252–54 Feynman, Richard, 67 first person and shall vs. will, 227–28 unnecessary avoidance of, 40, 52–54 See also I Fiske, Robert Hartwell, 300–301 flat adverbs, 201–2 flat-branching trees, 107–8, 114–15 flaunt, 273 Florey, Kitty Burns, 78–79 flounder, 273 Flynn, James, 239 formality in style, 6, 201, 213, 222,

232, 241, 242, 243, 260 fortuitous, 273 Fowler, Henry, 156, 212, 236, 266 Fox, Margalit, 18–23 Fox in Socks (Dr. Seuss), 111–12 Frankenstein, 265 Franklin, Benjamin, 65, 202 Freedman, Adam, 64 free indirect style, 225–26 Fuller, Margaret, 194 fulsome, 273 Fumblerules (Safire), 321n12 functional fixity, 70–72, 73–75 function words and disambiguation, 122–23 for negation, 172–73 See also articles; auxiliaries;

coordinators; determiners; prepositions; subordinators; specific words fused participles, 212–13 future tense, shall and will, 227–28 gaps and fillers, 89–93, 94, 97–98, 101, 114, 133–35 garden paths commas and, 291–92, 293–94 example sentences, 119–20, 293–94 function words and, 122–23 prevention of, 120–27 See also syntactic ambiguity Gelernter, David, 256, 258, 262, 300 gender, 28n, 61n, 255–61, 256, 260 generalization (coherence relation), 162, 164 genitive case, 88, 310, 312 genitives as determiners, 82, 86, 87–88, 154, 219–20, 310 possessive antecedents, 218–20 vs. possessive case, 88 See also possessives genitive pronouns, 86, 88, 97, 310, 312 gerunds and gerund-participles, 312, 315 dangling participles, 187, 208–11 fused participles, 212–13 Gettysburg Address, 221 “given, then new” rule, 130–37, 153, 221–22 Goldstein, Rebecca Newberger, 15–18, 106–9 good writing, 8–9, 11–12, 26, 302–4 consulting references, 23, 198–200, 262, 301, 302 examples analyzed, 13–14, 15–18, 19–23, 23–26, 31–35, 106–9, 125, 150–60, 183–86 feedback and revision, 75–76 See also classic style or prose; coherence; text structure and organization Gore, Al, 63 government (grammatical), 93–94, 313 government, language of, 24–25, 51–52, 52, 62 See also bureaucratic language; politicians Gower, Ernest, 227–28 graded qualities, 45, 244–46 graduate, 265 grammar, 2, 78–79, 79, 201 reasons for learning, 78–79, 83, 88–89, 137–38 usage issues, 201–43

See also grammatical categories; grammatical functions; inflection; syntax; specific words grammatical categories, 84, 86–87, 313 vs. grammatical functions, 84–85, 86–88, 203, 219 vs. semantic categories, 86, 87–88, 222 grammatical functions, 84–87, 313 vs. grammatical categories, 84–85, 86–88, 203, 219 vs. semantic categories, 86 Gray, Thomas, 14 Greek and Latin forms combined, 196 Greene, Brian, 31–35, 69 Gresham’s Law, 198 grocer’s apostrophe, 285, 295–96 had, 215, 216–17, 226–27 Haig, Alexander, 51, 52 Hall, Robert A., 112 Hanlon’s Razor, 58–59, 322n2 he, generic use of, 257–58 headlines, 110–11, 117, 121, 123 heads (of phrases), 82, 84–85, 206, 313 healthy, 265 “heaviest last” rule, 130–37, 154, 221–22 hedging, 38, 43–45 Hellman, Lillian, 227 heron text, 148–53, 155–57, 159–60 hindsight bias, 60 History of Warfare, A (Keegan), 171, 186 negation problems in, 171, 172, 175 passages quoted, 170, 178–79, 180–81 proportionality problems in, 178–80, 181 thematic inconsistency in, 180–83 Hofstadter, Douglas, 249 homogenous, 274 hone, 274 hopefully, 266 hot button, 274 however, 164, 166, 292–93 Huddleston, Rodney, 310 Hume, David, 160, 324–25n11 humongous, 300–301 hung, 275 hypercorrections, 98, 203, 206, 217, 233, 254, 313 between you and I, 205–7

I avoidance of, 53 between you and I, 205–7 vs. me, 97–99, 206–7, 222, 234 See also pronouns I Am America (And So Can You!) (Colbert), 95 iambic meter, 313 idioms. See clichés if.then statements. See conditionals illusory transparency, 60 imagery, 71–74, 79, 80 in the avoidance of clichés, 46–47, 48 in good writing, 14, 16–17, 21, 25, 32, 186 See also concreteness imperative, 54, 126, 232, 314 impersonal language, 24–25,
52–54 See also nonsexist language;

passive voice incredible, 14 indefiniteness, 154, 155, 156, 311 See also a and an; articles; definiteness; determiners; some

indicative mood, 232, 313 See also mood; subjunctive mood indirect discourse, 223, 224–27, 291 See also free indirect style indirect objects, 136, 313 infinitives, 313 split infinitives, 199–200, 228–30 inflection, 313 informal style, 6, 201, 242, 260 vs. ungrammaticality, 201, 213, 222, 241, 242–43, 260, 267 integrated relative clauses, 286, 290 See also relative clauses, restrictive vs. nonrestrictive intensifiers, 45, 276 See also quality and degree; superlatives; specific words intern (verb), 275 Internet memes, 89, 117–18, 121 interrogatives. See mood; questions; specific words intonation, 236–37, 313 See also meter; prosody intransitive verbs and prepositions, 124, 220, 265, 283, 314 intrigue, 266 IQ scores, 239 ironic, 275 ironic style, 30 irrealis verb forms, 231–33, 314, 317 See also factual remoteness; subjunctive mood irregardless, 275 irregularity. See past tense, irregular; plurals, irregular Jameson, Fredric, 35–36 jargon, 61, 63–67, 71–72 See also curse of knowledge Johnson, Marcia, 147–48 Jonson, Ben, 220–21 journalism and journalese elegant variation, 156 false titles, 123 headlines, 110–11, 117, 121, 123 hedging in, 44 indirect discourse in, 224–26 paragraphing, 145 professional narcissism in, 41 syntactic ambiguities in, 117, 118–19, 121, 123 tag lines and pull quotes, 149 Keegan, John, 171, 186 See also History of Warfare, A “keep related words together” rule, 127 Kehler, Andrew, 160, 324–25n11 Kellogg, Brainerd, 77 Kennedy, John F., 176–77, 325n26 Kilpatrick, James, 250 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 25, 125, 245 King John (Shakespeare), 47 Lakoff, Robin, 112 language change lexicography and, 189–90, 193, 194–95 seen as degeneration, 3–6, 194–95, 196, 301 semantic change, 196, 198 See also neologisms Language Log, 111, 201 Latin, 6, 130, 195–96, 199–200, 222, 220, 229, 277, 281 Latinate words and phrases, 22, 64 lay and lie, 283, 284 Leave Your Language Alone (Hall), 112 Lederer, Richard, 118n25, 210, 324 left-branching trees, 109–12 legalese, 44, 53, 64 legend, 281 Lennon, Sean Ono, 259 less, 187, 244, 252–54 lexical ambiguity, 116, 162–63 lexicography, 189–90, 193, 194–95

See also dictionaries; prescriptivism Liberman, Mark, 173–74, 220–21 lie and lay, 283, 284 like, 217–18 Lincoln, Abraham, 221 linguistics, 3, 6, 28n, 78, 111, 112, 131, 160, 188, 190–91, 192, 201, 220, 242, 253, 268, 298, 310 confusing terminology in, 65–67 See also psycholinguistics; syntax; tree-awareness linguists, 20, 55, 91, 111, 112, 166, 173, 220, 221, 235, 303 literally, 276, 301 little words. See function words livid, 266 Lloyd-Jones, Richard, 6 loan, 266 logic, as rationale for rules, 192, 196–97, 243–44 logical distinctions and and or, 207, 248–49 bound variables, 259–60 modality, 213–17, 314 negation, 172–78, 192, 247–48,
259, 310 quantifiers, 66, 86, 310, 312, 316 scope, 175–77, 229 some and all, 66, 259–60 Logical Punctuation, 299–300 LOLcats, 89 Lolita (Nabokov), 48 luxuriant, 276 MacArthur, Douglas, 228 McCartney, Paul, 131 Macdonald, Dwight, 190, 194–95, 204 McGrady, Mike, obituary of, 22–23 malaprops, 262–63, 268–69, 273, 274, 277, 279 See also word choice; specific

problem words many, 252 Marx, Groucho, 65, 240 masculine pronouns, generic uses of, 257–58 mass nouns, 153, 252–55 masterful, 266 may and can, 207–8, 226 me between you and I, 205–7 vs. I, 97–99, 206–7, 222, 234 meaning. See semantics “Meaning of Meaning, The,” (Putnam), 204 memory, 71, 79–80 abbreviations and, 64–65 chunking, 67–69, 74–75, 142 concreteness and, 72 as network of nodes, 79–80 sentence processing and, 78, 89, 103, 106, 107, 124 See also cognition, semantic

memory Menand, Louis, 285, 288 Mencken, H. L., 234 meretricious, 276 Merriam.Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 201, 227 Merriam.Webster Unabridged, 198, 199 metaconcepts, 36, 49–50, 73–74, 105 metadiscourse, 38, 314 introducing topics, 38–39, 146–47 signposting, 38–40, 143 metaphor, 29n2, 35, 46–48

mixed metaphors, 46–48 meter, 26, 310, 312, 313, 314 might, 216, 226 Miller, George, 67 mitigate, 277 mixed metaphors, 46–48 modal auxiliaries, 207–8, 213–17, 314 See also specific words modality, 314 See also imperative; indicative mood; irrealis verb forms; questions; subjunctive mood Modern English Usage (Fowler), 156, 212, 236, 266 modifiers, 82, 86, 314 adjectives vs., 86–87, 219 adjuncts, 309 dangling modifiers, 187, 208–11 determiners vs., 86–87, 219 noun piles, 109–11 preposing and postposing, 135, 136, 153 prepositional phrases as, 123–24 supplements, 317 See also adjectives; adjuncts; adverbs; relative clauses momentarily, 267 mood, 310, 314 indicative, 313 subjunctive, 231–33, 314, 317 more, 244, 252, 254 morphemes, 295, 314 morphology. See inflection; word-formation most, 252 much, 252 Mullan, John, 285 multiverse, 31–35 murder your darlings, 12 Nabokov, Vladimir, 48 Nash, Ogden, 217 nauseous, 190, 267 needless words, 1–2, 104–6, 122 See also “omit needless words” rule negation, 172–78, 192, 259, 310 neither, 96, 172, 247 neologisms, 3–4, 194, 196, 237–40 See also jargon New Age, 277 New Yorker, 217, 285, 288–89 cartoons, 61, 229 New York Times, 43, 238, 245, 296 “After Deadline” excerpts, 95–96 Margalit Fox’s obituaries, 18–23 See also Bernstein, Theodore; Corbett, Philip; Safire, William New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, The, 125–26 Nixon, Richard, 172 no, as quantifier, 247–48,
258–59, 260 noisome, 277 nominalizations, 50, 55, 314 zombie nouns, 50–51, 51, 52, 54, 105, 158–59, 318 nominals, 314, 324n19 nominative case, 310 predicative nominative, 222 nominative pronouns, 97–102, 205–7, 310 See also specific words none, 246–47 nonetheless, 164, 165 nonplussed, 277 non sequiturs, 139, 140, 159 See also coherence nonsexist language, 28n, 255–61, 256, 260

nonstandard usages, 188, 192–93, 202, 203–4, 274 See also specific problem usages North, Ryan, 256 notional agreement, 248, 259 not only . . . but also, 96–97 noun phrases, 82, 85, 315, 324n19 noun piles, 110–11 nouns, 82, 84, 87, 315 abstract, minimizing, 48–50 conjoined nouns and number, 248–49 distinguishing first appearance from subsequent ones, 153–56 verbs derived from, 52, 237, 237–39, 311 See also case; nominalizations; pronouns; subjects number, 246–54 coordinations and, 206, 207, 248–49 count nouns vs. mass nouns, 252–55 duals and plurals, 250–52 irregular plurals, 4 singulars and plurals, 246–50 singular they, 255–61, 260 See also subject-verb agreement Obama, Barack, 228–29, 255 objects, 82, 85, 315, 318 case marking, 310 direct objects, 312 indirect objects, 136, 313 oblique objects, 315 See also prepositional objects O’Connor, Mike (“Ask the Bird Folks”), 148–53, 155–57, 159–60 “omit needless words” rule, 1–2, 104–6, 122–24 See also brevity one another, 251 one of those who, 249–50 onomatopoeia. See phonesthetics open conditionals, 214, 216, 315 opportunism, 277 or, 96, 204–5, 207, 249 either . . . or, 96, 207, 249, 251–52 oracular style, 29 oral (vs. verbal), 282 oratorical style, 29 order of events, 160, 164–65 Orwell, George, 2, 24–25 outlines, 142–43 over (as quantifier), 254 Oxford comma, 293–94 Oxford English Dictionary, 196 Pagden, Anthony (quoted), 47 Pa-n.ini, 131 paragraphs, 26, 145 parallel constructions. See structural parallelism parameter, 278 parentheses, 235, 236, 291 parsing, 103 See also sentence processing participles, 187, 208–11, 212–13, 315 Parton, Dolly, 37 parts of speech. See grammatical categories; specific categories passive voice, 2–3, 50, 52–56, 315 appropriate uses of, 55–56, 132–35, 152 inappropriate voice shifts, 223 past participles, 315 past tense, 215, 224–25, 315 irregular, 215, 216, 226, 275, 280, 283, 284 vs. past time, 215, 216, 224–25, 226–27

past tense (cont.) in remote conditionals, 214–17, 224–25 in sequence of tenses (backshift), 223–27 See also pluperfect; tense people and persons, 4, 194 periods, 204, 292 quotation marks and, 298–300 person (grammatical), 207, 223, 315–16 persons, 4 perspective, 21, 26, 28–29, 48, 55–56 perspective shifts, 222–27 See also imagery phenomena, 278 Phillips, Pauline, obituary of,
19–20, 21 phonemes, 316 phonesthetics, 22, 26 phrases, 316 pied-piping, 221–22, 242–43 plain language, 7, 12, 22 plain language laws, 9, 53 plain style, 30 Plain Words (Gowers), 227–28 pluperfect, 216–17, 226–27 plurals grocer’s apostrophe, 285, 295–96 indefinite vs. definite, 154, 155–56 irregular, 4, 271, 278 plural possessives, 297 See also number; subject-verb agreement plus, 249 poetic language, 14, 25 point (of text), 148–49, 179–80 politically correct, 278 politicians, 25, 51–52, 52, 55 See also government, language of; specific individuals “Politics and the English Language” (Orwell), 2, 24–25 possessives, 88, 97, 310, 312 apostrophes and, 295, 296–97, 297, 310 with gerunds (fused participles), 212–13 possessive antecedents, 218–20 See also genitive case; genitive pronouns postmodernism, 30, 35, 37, 43 postmodern style, 30, 43 postposing, 135, 136 practicable, 278 practical style, 29–30, 31 predicate, 85, 316 predicative nominative, 222 preposing, 135, 136, 153, 164–65,
205, 290 prepositional objects, 82, 85, 88, 97, 136, 315 intransitive prepositions, 220 See also prepositions; specific words prepositional phrases, 82 as modifiers, 123–24 prepositions, 84, 88, 316 with clausal complements, 82, 88, 217–18, 233–34 at end of sentence, 220–22 government and, 93–94 participles as, 211 pied-piping, 221–22 See also prepositional objects;

specific words prescribe, 279 prescriptive rules, 2–3, 191–93 distinguishing legitimate from spurious, 200–201 logic as rationale for, 192, 196–97, 243–44

myth of objective correctness, 189–91, 193–94, 300 about punctuation, 284–85 spurious rules and their origins, 195–97, 235, 236 as tacit conventions, 190–91,

193–94 usefulness of, 192, 195, 197–98, 200 about word choices, 262 See also correct usage; word choice; specific problem words and usages prescriptivism, 188–89, 191–92, 194–95, 303–4 See also correct usage;
prescriptive rules presently, 267 Princess Bride, The, 269 professional narcissism, 38, 40–42, 149, 186 progressive participle and tense, 315 See also gerunds and gerund-participles pronouns, 84, 315–16, 316 apostrophes and, 296 avoidance of, 52–54 case of, 97–99, 205–7, 222 first and second person, avoidance of, 53–54 nonsexist language, 28n, 255–61, 256, 260 for repeated appearances, 154–55, 156 See also antecedents; specific pronouns and pronoun types prophetic style, 29 proportionality, 178–80 proscribe, 279 prose styles, 29–31 See also classic style or prose prosody, 120, 284, 287–89, 316 See also intonation; meter protagonist, 279 pseudo-clefts, 136–37 psycholinguistics, 2, 119, 120, 157 See also comprehension; embedding; garden paths; sentence processing; syntactic ambiguity Pullum, Geoffrey, 46, 55, 235–36, 299, 301, 310 punctuation, 120–22, 284–300 apostrophes, 294, 294–97, 297 cartoons about, 294, 297, 298 colon, 21, 163 dash, 21, 236, 292 for disambiguation, 120–22, 284 hyphen, 121 prosody and, 284, 287–89 quotation marks, 42–43, 297–300, 298 semicolon, 292, 294 to set off relative clauses, 236 See also commas

“Punctuation and Human Freedom” (Pullum), 299 See also Pullum, Geoffrey purism, 2–6, 5, 187–97, 300–301, 301 See also correct usage; prescriptivism Putnam, Hilary, 204 quality and degree absolute and graded qualities, 45, 244–46 comparatives and superlatives, 252 hedging and qualifiers, 43–45 literally, 276 quantifiers, 86, 310, 312, 316 agreement and, 249–50

quantifiers (cont.) to introduce coordinates, 96 relative clauses and, 237 split infinitives and, 230 See also specific words Quayle, Dan, 295 questions, 91–93, 221 because as answer to, 205 to introduce a topic, 39, 41 whom in, 241, 242 Quiller-Couch, Arthur, 12, 320n2 quotation marks, 42–43, 223, 297–300, 298 quotations, 223 See also indirect discourse quote, 267 rabbit illusion, 66–67 raise, 267 Random House Dictionary, 198, 199 Reader Over Your Shoulder, The (Graves and Hodge), 63n15 readers, 28 anticipating knowledge and intelligence of, 44, 62–63, 69–70, 75, 167–68 writer’s relationship with, 28, 29, 30, 36, 40, 69–70, 311 See also curse of knowledge; perspective; sentence processing

redundancy, 105, 167–68 See also elegant variation; repetition; synonyms, capricious Reed, Alonzo, 77 Reed-Kellogg sentence notation, 77–78 refute, 279 relative clauses, 93, 133–35, 221, 235–37, 316 commas to set off, 285–86, 288, 290, 291 restrictive vs. nonrestrictive, 235–36, 285–86, 288 relative pronouns for disambiguation, 122 that and which, 235–37 who and whom, 99–102, 240–43, 249–50 whose, 268 relativism, 30, 35

See also postmodernism Remnants of War, The (Mueller), 183–86 remote conditionals, 214–17, 224–25, 316 repetition phrase structures, 13, 14, 26, 96–97, 124–27, 161–62, 234 words, 14, 155, 156–58 See also structural parallelism

resemblance coherence relations, 160–64 result (coherence relation). See cause-and-effect coherence relations reticent, 279 revision, 75–76, 115, 147 rhythm. See meter right-branching trees, 108–9, 130–31 Rivals, The (Sheridan), 262–63 Roberts, John, 228–29 romantic movement, 125, 181 romantic style, 29 Roosevelt, Franklin, 235 Rosenbaum, Ron, 116 Ross, J. R. (Haj), 221 rules descriptive vs. prescriptive,
190–91

See also prescriptive rules;
specific rules

Russell, Bertrand, 125 Safire, William, 243, 283, 321n12 scare quotes, 42–43 scientists as good writers, 35 scope. See logical distinctions, scope Scott, Rick, 51 self-conscious style, 30, 31 See also hedging; metadiscourse; shudder quotes semantic categories, 86, 87–88, 222 semantic memory. See cognition, semantic memory semantics, 197–98, 316 lexical ambiguity, 116, 162–63 number and, 248 semantic change, 196, 198 See also logical distinctions; malaprops; word choice; specific problem words semicolon, 292, 294 Sendak, Maurice, obituary of, 18–19, 20–21 sentence adverbs, 292–93 hopefully, 266 sentence processing ambiguity and, 116 cognitive mechanics of, 82, 89, 93, 103–4, 108–9, 115–16, 124, 127, 131–32 frequent word strings and senses, 123–24, 128–29 gaps and fillers, 89–93, 94, 97–98, 101, 114, 133–35 syntactic ambiguity and, 118, 119, 120 See also garden paths; psycholinguistics; tree structure sequence of tenses, 222–27, 310 sequences (coherence relations), 160, 164–65 “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” 131 serial comma, 293–94 Seuss, Dr., 111–12 sexist language. See nonsexist language Sex Week at Yale, 116–17, 127–28, 128, 129 Shakespeare, William, 194 “incorrect” usages in, 218, 219, 222, 241 King John example, 47 King Richard III example, 299 Macdonald on Troilus and Cressida, 194 metaphor in, 47, 48 singular they in, 258 Solzhenitsyn on Macbeth and Othello, 205 shall and will, 227–28 Shaw, George Bernard, 121–22, 258, 261 Sheridan, Richard, 262–63 shrunk, 280 shudder quotes, 42–43 signposting, 38–40, 143 similarity and contrast coherence relations, 157, 161–63, 166, 168 simile, 25, 32, 48 Simon, John, 300 simplistic, 280 since, 165 singulars and plurals,
246–50 See also plurals singular they, 255–61, 260 slang, 274

slang (cont.) See also informal style; nonstandard usages so, 165, 204–5 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 205 some, 66, 153, 237, 259–60 sound, 22, 26 See also intonation; meter; phonesthetics; prosody speech, 8, 27 classic prose as conversation, 29, 38–39, 53, 311 reading your writing aloud, 115, 120 syntactic ambiguity and, 120 See also conversation; prosody; sound Spinal Tap, 48, 254 Spinoza, Baruch, 172 split infinitives, 199–200, 228–30 spoken language. See speech sprung, 280 Stamper, Kory, 196 staunch, 280 Stewart, Jon, 87 stranded prepositions, 220–22 “String Untuned, The” (Macdonald), 190, 194–95, 204 structural parallelism, 96–97, 124–27, 161–62, 234 examples in good writing, 13–14, 25–26, 124–25 See also repetition Strunk, William, 1–2, 3, 6, 8 See also Elements of Style, The stunk, 280 style guides, 1–4, 6, 7, 12 consulting, 198–200, 301 earliest English guides, 195–96 See also American Usage and Style: The Consensus; Careful Writer, The; Clear and Simple as the Truth; Elements of Style, The; Merriam.Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage; Modern English Usage; Reader Over Your Shoulder, The; Style: Toward Clarity and Grace styles of writing, 28–31, 37–38 See also classic style or prose Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (Williams), 149, 182, 199 Stylish Academic Writing (Sword), 58 subject control, 210–11 subjects, 82, 85, 317 before comma, 121, 289, 290 in comparative constructions,

233–34 of dangling modifiers, 207–11 of fused participles, 212–13 omission in stuffy prose, 48–49, 50–53, 152–53 in predicative nominatives, 222 as sentence topics, 151–53 with singular they, 256, 261 See also nominative case; nominative pronouns; subject-verb agreement subject-verb agreement, 89–93, 103, 247–50, 309 coordinations and, 206, 207, 248–49 subjunctive mood, 231–33, 314, 317 subordinate clauses, 317 subordinators (subordinating conjunctions), 84, 88, 311, 313, 317 See also specific words such as, 163, 217–18 summaries, 38, 39–40, 149 sunk, 280 superlatives, 14, 252 supplements, 285–87, 289, 292, 317

See also commas; parentheses; relative clauses, restrictive vs. nonrestrictive surface structure, 91–93, 92 Swift, Jonathan, 202 Sword, Helen, 50, 58, 318 syllepsis, 65, 322n21 synonyms absence of, in English, 197–98 capricious, 156–57, 161 generic, as quasi-pronouns,

157–58 incorrect, 198

syntactic ambiguity, 116–18 causes and prevention, 120–30 dangling modifiers and, 210–11 frequent word strings and senses, 123–24, 128–29 little words and, 122–23 negations, 175–76 prosody and, 120 punctuation and, 120–22, 284 structural parallelism and, 124–27 unwanted attachments, 127–30 See also garden paths; Sex Week at Yale syntax, 80–89, 317 case problems, 97–102 circumventing word order rigidity, 130–37 deep structure and movement, 91–93, 92, 100–102 and negation words, 175–77 tree metaphor for, 81–83, 102–3 understanding, 78–79, 88–89, 197 See also diagramming sentences; sentence processing; subject-verb agreement; tree-awareness; tree structure; specific syntactic elements technical terms, 62, 63–67, 123, 239 See also curse of knowledge;
jargon temporal sequences, 160, 164–65 Tenerife airport disaster, 62–63 ten items or less, 253 tense, 310, 317 past tense, 315 in remote conditionals, 214–17,

224–25 sequence of tenses, 222–27, 310 subjunctives and, 232 text structure and organization, 142–45 hierarchical organization, 142–43, 145–46 paragraph breaks, 145 topic switches, 153 See also coherence; discourse; themes; topic(s) than, 233–34 that, 86–87, 122, 154, 235–37 the, 122–23, 154–56 themes, 66, 146, 182–86 there, 105, 136, 153 the reason is because, 168 thesaurus, 23 these and those, 154, 156 they, singular, 255–61, 260 Think Different, 203 Thomas, Francis-Noël, 28, 29, 30,
44, 310 See also classic style or prose those and these, 154, 156 Three Mile Island, 62 Toles, Tom, 51 “topic, then comment” rule, 130–36 topic(s), 317 coherent handling of, 146–48, 149–53, 153–58

topic(s) (cont.) introducing, 38–39, 146–47 sentence vs. discourse topic, 151 tortuous, 281 transitions. See coherence transitive verbs, 318 See also accusative case; intransitive verbs and prepositions; objects

transpire, 196, 268 tree-awareness benefits for writers, 78–79, 88–89, 103, 137–38 grammatical errors avoided by, 103, 205–7, 234, 249–50 sentence processing and, 103–4, 108–9, 115–16, 124 tree structure center-embedded trees, 112–15 flat trees, 107–8, 114–15 left-branching trees, 109–12 right-branching trees, 108–9, 130–31 for syntax, 81–83, 102–3 for texts, 142–43, 145–46

Trillin, Calvin, 99 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 194 Truss, Lynne, 285, 288, 300 truth, 35, 37–38, 302 accuracy of writer’s ideas or statements, 9, 37, 44–45, 302 negation and, 172 Turner, Mark, 28, 29, 30, 44, 310 See also classic style or prose Twain, Mark, 45, 218, 302 2000 American presidential
election, 63 Typo Eradication Advancement League, 301 unexceptionable, 281 unique, 244–46 untenable, 281 Unweaving the Rainbow (Dawkins), 13–14 urban legend, 281 usage manuals. See dictionaries; style guides; specific authors and works U.S. Constitution, 228–29, 244, 289

U.S. presidential election (2000), 63

variation, capricious, 125–26, 156–57, 161–63 verbal, 282 verbing, 52, 237, 237–39, 311 verb phrases, 82, 84–85, 316, 318 verbs, 82, 84, 318 adjectives formed from, 50–51 avoiding light verbs, 105 denominal verbs, 52, 237, 237–39, 311 formed from adjectives, 238 intransitive verbs, 314 nouns formed from, 50–52, 53, 54, 105, 158 semantically related verbs to vary word order, 137 split infinitives, 199–200, 228–30 transitive verbs, 318 See also auxiliaries; infinitives; mood; nominalizations; objects; participles; subjects; subject-verb agreement; tense; voice; specific words very, 45, 244–46 violated expectation (coherence relation), 159, 166 virtually, 43 vision metaphor (classic prose), 29, 56

reader’s perspective, 26, 28–29, 48, 55–56 replacing signposts, 39–40 visual imagery. See concreteness; imagery; perspective voice, 223, 318 See also active voice; passive voice Wallace, David Foster, 300 Warmth of Other Suns, The (Wilkerson), 23–26 warning labels, 54, 62 was and were, 231–33 web of knowledge. See cognition, semantic memory Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, 189, 193 Macdonald’s critique of, 190, 194–95, 204 were, irrealis, 231–33, 314, 317 which, 122, 162, 235–37 while, 162, 164, 166, 268 White, E. B., 1–2, 4, 8, 235 See also Elements of Style, The White, Richard, 194 White, William Allen, 321n11 who and whom, 99–102, 240–43 in relative clauses, 285–86, 288 whose, 268 why-questions, 205 Wikipedia, 299, 300 Wilde, Oscar, 11 Wilkerson, Isabel, 23–26 will and shall, 227–28 Williams, Joseph, 149, 182, 199 “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should,” 217–18 with, 248–49 word choice, 262 acceptable nonstandard senses, 263–68 freshness, 14, 22–23, 25–26, 48 problematic nonstandard senses, 269–84 See also concreteness; synonyms; specific words and phrases word-formation, 318 See also neologisms word order, 81, 83, 84, 109, 130–32, 135–37 See also English word order; sentence processing; syntax; tree structure World Wide Web, effect on language, 7-8 would, 226 in conditional constructions, 213–17 as hedge, 43 past tense of will, 216–17, 226

writer-reader relationship, 28, 29, 30, 36, 40, 69–70, 311 See also curse of knowledge writing goals of, 29, 30, 37–38 vs. spoken language, 8, 27–28 See also bad writing, hallmarks of; classic style or prose; good writing; writer-reader relationship yet, 166 you, 53–54 See also pronouns zeugma, 20–21, 322n21 zombie adjectives, 50–51, 51 zombie nouns, 50–51, 51, 52, 54, 105, 158–59, 318

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