A Grammar Question

Factual Questions
21

I would agree with you to some extent here; at very least, it’s well-worth learning the standards of formal writing even though it must be understood that these standards are in many cases artificial. But many of the rules that get passed along here are simply erroneous - that is, they are not actually used in formal writing. The old example of rules about “split infinitives” (a misnomer, incidentally) is one of those; examples of infinitives being split in formal writing are abundant. Violation of the “rule” about which and that is a well-honored tradition as well. Forgive me if I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s one of my favorite examples of the silliness of the prescriptivist brigade. When E.B. White decided to update and edit The Elements of Style, written by his old professor, William Strunk, he added in the rule about restrictive and non-restrictive clauses, and undertook to edit out several examples of Strunk “violating” that rule in the very same text! Unless Strunk wasn’t writing “formal English”, it seems rather presumptuous that White would have decided to “correct” his old mentor’s grammar. But that’s how these rules work - they are grafted onto language quite arbitrarily, and it must be remembered that many of those who critique others for these “errors” are found to make them themselves.

Being able to write in formal English is necessary for anyone who wishes to pursue a professional career; however, a great number of these prescriptive rules simply don’t accurately describe eminently formal (and elegant) writing at all.

I can’t quite parse this sentence. Are you implying that “It is I” is correct? It’s certainly not. It comes from an 18th century misapprehension that the English copula, be, ought to operate exactly like the Latin copula ESSE, and that therefore the items on either side ought to be in the same case. Nonsense, of course, as English is not Latin, and that rule has never been a part of any register of English usage (either before or after it was proclaimed); certain people wishing to appear even more scrupulously “correct” than their colleagues might use it, but it’s a self-conscious and unnatural style that is contrary to the norm of formal English usage. You may certainly do it; you may also ask if there are any remaining “agenda” at your next faculty meeting (since that is, after all, a Latin plural!) You may pluralize “trauma” as “traumata” if you wish (that, at least, was indeed the prevailing English usage at one point, unlike the other two.) However, be warned that other people will laugh at you - and quite rightly so; there is a long and beautiful tradition of laughing at people who try to show off with language.

“It is I”, though, in contrast with many of these other rules, is not just fussy or overly restrictive; it is, quite simply, an incorrect usage, and one that does not exist except in the most self-conscious and artificial speech. Another language’s grammatical rule was falsely held to apply to English, even though that rule contradicted the very natural English habit - one that, of course, existed long before (and will obviously outlast) the Latinate affectation - of treating the second item as an object of the verb. It is simply false to imply that your affected Latinity is “correct”, as it violates the long-held rule of the language you’re speaking.

22

Polycarp, your analogy is faulty; I won’t bother to point out how because I’m certain you know where it lies.

But the more basic point is this: there is no general agreement even among style manuals on the point in question. Therefore, it is presumptuous to assert that any one particular approach is “correct,” or even “more formal.”

You may have learned it differently, but that doesn’t make what you learned “correct.”

I guess this simple point I keep making gets lost somehow… :dubious:

23

But you wouldn’t have the same problem comprehending the other (basketball) sentence I cited. Problem wouldn’t give the language a moment’s though, as you would be attending to the meaning.

The point made by the example of “Our Father, which art in Heaven…” is well taken, and provides some backing for the suggested use of ‘which’ to focus on the office/role as much as on the person in formal situations.

As for the prescriptive/descriptive chestnut, the tendency is so strong in educated people who have a dog in the language fight to view their own usage as correct as to make the distinction all but academic when the gloves come off.

24

Ah, so there ARE incorrect and correct uses. Myself would like to use the all-purpose “myself” in every instance of first person that myself sees, so that myself is never wrong. Myself presumes that this very common solecism is okay with yourself, because many people use it routinely.

25

Certainly there are incorrect and correct usages, or rather, usages that are grammatical or ungrammatical. However, the rules we learn in school have nothing to do with those usages, since grammar is learned quite thoroughly and quite automatically without help from teachers - and in my opinion, this would be clearer and more helpful if the rules of writing, which of course are learned, were not referred to as “grammar” - conventions of writing must be acquired by children through teaching, but they’re not grammatical; they have nothing to do with grammar.

Your examples of “myself” as a replacement for all other first-person pronouns are obviously ungrammatical, and no native speaker speaks that way (despite what you claim) except when deliberately trying for some effect. I assume you’re talking about the use of “myself” as a replacement for the object of a preposition - as in, “Maria sent the letter to myself” - which strikes me as simply an emphatic. I don’t think it’s particularly an attractive usage, and like many phenomena speakers will disagree as to its grammaticality; it’s something that’s present in some idiolects but not others (though whether people truly avoid the feature or simply claim to as it’s stigmatized would be hard to study empirically, since no doubt many people who use it would claim they don’t.) I do believe that it’s a relatively novel usage, but I simply don’t know enough about it to render a judgment as to how common it is or exactly what semantic purpose it serves. Your usage in the quote is a gross exaggeration, and it would likely pose serious problems in comprehension were you to speak that way in your daily life, but that’s because - as I said - that’s not how anyone actually speaks.

Your case would be stronger if you avoided artless attempts to lampoon stigmatized speech forms that you don’t understand very well; I assume your general drift is the common (but nonsensical) claim that if people don’t start talking “right” - that is, following prescription from the likes of yourself (oops! I just did it!) without reservation - we’ll be reduced soon to grunting and pointing. Clearly the instinct to use language is far stronger than that, and somehow the Anglophone world survived about a thousand and a half years without universal education (most of those before the silly rules you like to recite were even invented, as that only began in the 18th century) and yet in that time we produced Chaucer, Shakespeare, and countless other great authors. None of whom had to grunt and point to express themselves. (Such authors are of course an eternal embarrassment to prescriptivists, as the greatest pieces of literature in our language frequently violate these “rules” of “correct English” - you wouldn’t believe how many great authors used “they” as a singular of indefinite gender, for example. I take this as a signal of the arrogance of linguistic prescription - it takes quite the ego to sit and claim that Shakespeare was a nice enough guy but he simply mutilated the language at every opportunity!)

26

Care to rephrase this concept? As stated, it simply identifies you as a fool intent on arguing for the supremacy of natural grammar, who can destroy his own arguments much better than I can. From this, I assume there is absolutely no need for the teaching of English (or any other language), a concept from which I choose to dissent.

Have you actually read Chaucer or Shakespeare, by the way, or are you merely using them to bolster your argument? Is the concept that they (as all writers do on occasion) simply misspoke less attractive to you than canonizing every error they ever made as Good English?

27

The alternative being the eminently logical and defensible course of applying Latin grammatical rules to English? Of course “natural grammar” (interesting term) is supreme - creating arbitrary and fake grammatical rules based on false analogies to other languages is nonsensical.

Of course I have; and again, it’s awfully arrogant of you to decide that they were great writers, but they sure coulda used you as an editor to fix all their fuck-ups.

28

Emphasis added. What you seem to be saying, Excalibre, is that prr’s examples are clearly ungrammatical, even though they are simply multiple instances of a particular usage (the replacement of an ordinary pronoun by a reflexive pronoun) that you admit is debatably grammatical.

How many “myselfs” do you have to use before it stops being grammatical and becomes ungrammatical? I doubt that you could give a definite answer from “descriptivist” grammar. In fact, there aren’t clear and definite boundaries between “grammatical” and “ungrammatical” in the language that we allegedly learn “quite thoroughly and quite automatically without help from teachers”. And that’s why language users naturally formulate, and apply, somewhat arbitrary rules dividing so-called “correct” usages from “incorrect” ones.

This is why I don’t buy most of the self-described “descriptivist” railing against “prescriptivism”. Prescriptivism, or consciously applied rules of grammatical usage, is simply a natural development of language use. It shows up not just in elaborate treatises written by dusty old pedants, but in everyday situations, such as when a parent corrects a small child for saying “I is” instead of “I am”. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with it.

Most of what the descriptivists actually complain about in English-grammar prescriptivism is simply the same four or five tired old stalking-horses that have generally been abandoned anyway: the split infinitive, the predicate nominative, ending a sentence with a preposition, and a couple of other clumsy attempted Latinizations. Those few examples hardly support the argument that all formal grammatical rules are worthless or pernicious.

Sure, there are few if any formal grammatical rules that are absolutely indisputable or will never be subject to change. However, most of them do a pretty good job of identifying current correct usage in non-colloquial language, especially written language.

And yes, according to most modern descriptions of standard grammatical usage, the usage “[number] of which” is correct when referring to things, but not when referring to persons. The OP’s linked source, when talking about human detainees, should have said “24 of whom”.

The use of “which” instead is potentially defensible as a survival from early modern English, as some posters here have argued, but it’s much less widely accepted. And when you’re writing for a general audience, it’s a good idea to use “standard” usages, ones that are generally accepted as “correct”, as much as possible.

29

After reading this thread, I wish to either spank or praise each of you. With which and with whom should I begin?
:slight_smile:

30

No. I don’t think I’ve ever heard subject pronouns replaced with reflexive pronouns. It’s not a matter of quantity at all - she’s generalizing a stigmatized usage - the replacement of me in prepositional phrases - to all first person singular pronouns in any context. No one replaces I with myself - that’s ungrammatical - as in, it’s not something that can be generated by the internalized grammar capacity of the brain. pseudotriton ruber ruber is trying to use this stigmatized usage to provoke me into accepting prescriptive rules, but she’s using it in a way that English speakers don’t actually speak.

What’s intrinsically wrong is taking ungrammatical usages like It is I and claiming they’re “correct” because they’re pleasing to some invisible authority on high or something, even though they’re not actually used (see this thread for more discussion on this very same issue!) by native speakers except those who’ve been taught to deliberately suppress their internal understanding of grammar, and even they don’t do it consistently (the other thread has some good examples going of places where It is I is not generalized to other phrases with the first person singular as the object of the copula - this is really entirely a learned phrase, parroting back syllables without analysis.)

Hey, baby, we got range! We also complain about the stigmatization of the singular gender-indefinite they! And I actually once convinced someone here on these very boards that the nonstandard pronunciation /nu kju l@r/ was actually unexceptional (and not “wrong”) compared to many other accepted pronunciations.

The reason we focus on many of these particular examples (and oh, how I wish that awkward contrivances to avoid split infinitives or stranded prepositions actually were no longer found in writing) is that there are few other circumstances in which descriptivists actually deign to muss their hands with grammar. Most of the rest of my English classes in school, at least, were concerned with matters of orthography - how to spell, how to use punctuation, and so on - and I certainly have no issue with them.

I feel that teaching writing style ought to be accomplished without resorting to making up rules, and it’s clear that at least some people still mistakenly believe that It is I is correct; helping students to become fluent in formal or academic prose is an important task but it ought to be done without denigrating the way they speak normally. This is a particularly relevant issue when discussing speech communities using stigmatized dialects of English. I think it’s a significant and troubling social issue when black children are told that AAVE is “bad English” and are supposed to be linguistically deficient speakers of Standard English rather than competent speakers of a stigmatized dialect. As we’re all demonstrating in this thread, people feel strongly about their language, and perhaps it seems histrionic to you to worry about the stigmatizing of other ways of speaking, but I think it’s a significant issue for a child to be told by teachers that the way he speaks is wrong.

Actually, I would agree that whom is preferable in this context; it leaped out to me immediately when I read it. I would say the writer did indeed violate the norms of written English. My deal here is that I wish these discussions could be uncoupled from dogmatic notions of “correct” and “incorrect” and instead understood to be what they are: conventions of usage that apply in particular contexts or registers, rather than what we all ought to be aspiring to when we’re drunkenly phoning our exes on the way home from the bar. There’s a time and a place for different styles of speech, and this is a concept that - in large part simply for reasons of accuracy - ought to be communicated without pitting standard varieties against non-standard, or highly formal usages against colloquial usage.

31

A good post overall. Your comments in that last paragraph was what I, in my less-than-felicitous writing above, was trying to say: “Prescriptivism” is actually the description of what are the accepted conventions of use in that category of written communication that we refer to as “formal English.” Just as a mother conditions a small child to the conventions of colloquial English, “It’s not ‘me want cookie’; it’s 'I want a cookie, please”, so the usage gurus condition us to the conventions of formal written English.

32

I hear what you’re saying, and I agree with some reservations, because I suspect that many of the prescriptions are not followed consistently even in formal text; I used that example above regarding The Elements of Style to demonstrate that in many cases prescriptions simply don’t capture the norm even of formal usage, though in other cases they do. Double negatives, for instance, are common in all sorts of non-standard English dialects, but they sound truly odd in formal speech and speakers competent in formal English don’t in any circumstances I’ve heard of accidentally insert them into formal speech. Some prescriptions are adequate description of formal usage, but others simply do not describe what even the prescribers actually do; no juicy examples come to mind, but there’s plenty of times when the erstwhile “language mavens” like William Safire are documented to frequently violate the rules they themselves espouse.

33

I can think of lots of counterexamples when the first person singular pronoun is part of a plural subject, for instance: “Bob and myself faced a difficult decision”, and so forth. This is certainly considered incorrect, or at least bad style, in “standard” English, but it occurs quite a lot in colloquial usage nonetheless.

You’re right that “myself” as a singular subject is not (currently) used, but I’m skeptical of sweeping claims that “the internalized grammar capacity of the brain” necessarily and automatically forbids it. There is a great deal of fluidity in “natural” or “intuitive” language use, and usages change all the time. Prescriptive grammar rules have a sort of cyclical relationship with those changes, first restraining them and then (if they’re too vigorous to restrain) caving in and changing in order to accomodate them. I see nothing wrong with that; it’s how all the forms of human art develop.

Now you’ve lost me. I thought the point of linguistic descriptivism is that it does deal with grammar, with grammar as it actually appears in natural language.

I can certainly get behind all of this. But who here is really disagreeing with any of it? It seems to me that from the OP onward, everybody in this thread was quite clear that what was being sought was the “convention of usage that applies” in this particular context. We all know that informal or colloquial speech works somewhat differently, and rightly so.

(Personally, I would guess that phrases like “[noun], [number] of which” or “[noun], [number] of whom”, with a relative pronoun serving as the object of the preposition “of” following its antecedent, aren’t really part of colloquial/informal English anyway. The “natural” usage would be more like what Tevildo suggested, with a personal pronoun in an independent clause rather than a relative pronoun in a dependent clause: “… 27 detainees were participating in hunger strikes; 24 of them were being force-fed.” In that case, the sentence as originally written isn’t even a case of correct informal usage showing up in formal writing; it’s simply an incorrect formal usage.)

34

Excalibre wrote: “my English classes in school, at least, were concerned with matters of orthography - how to spell, how to use punctuation, and so on - and I certainly have no issue with them.”

Why not? Talk about arbitrary–many spelling and punctuation “rules” were standardized at roughly the same time as many of the grammatical rules you reject. Shakespeare, your model of infallibility in grammar (“If Willie did it, even 1% of the time, then it can’t be considered wrong 400 years later”), supposedly spelled his last name sometimes with an “X.” Why can’t I spell it “Shaxpere” and be exempt from correction?

Because we have formed a contract to recognize “Shakespeare” as the standardized spelling. Now, why is this contract a valid one and the contract to recognize “him or her” as the correct referent for a singular noun like “somebody” (rather than “them”) invalid?

You, like me, are simply setting your standard of correct English at a point you’re comfortable with. But unlike me, you’re claiming that your arbitrary standards are correct and that all less permissive standards than yours have no basis.

I’m curious: what’s your response to “He gave the toffeebar to Bob and myself”? Do you accept the “myself” as “English as she is spoke”? For my part, it is an obvious neologism to accomodate the needs of those who are confused about the nominative and objective case. To me, it marks the speaker as educationally deficient is some small way (differently than someone who uses “…to Bob and I”) and when it is my job to point out variations from standard usage, I will consider myself derelict if I let that pass without comment. If you encountered “to Bob and myself” in a manuscript, say, that you were asked to comment on, would you have any qualms about suggesting that “myself” be changed to “me” in that sentence? if you would point it out, why? It’s certainly common enough to be accepted.

35

[QUOTE=pseudotriton ruber ruber.

I’m curious: what’s your response to “He gave the toffeebar to Bob and myself”? Do you accept the “myself” as “English as she is spoke”? For my part, it is an obvious neologism to accomodate the needs of those who are confused about the nominative and objective case. [/QUOTE]

It’s been entertaining watching this thread, but I must point out that the reflexive construction as an emphatic is hardly a neologism. As the American Heritage Dictionary writes in its usage note: “Although these usages have been common in the writing of reputable authors for several centuries, they may sound overwrought.”

Personally, I find that usage has no place in formal writing. Any good communicator is aware of several grammars. I speak a different English to my neighborhood Chicago friends than I do with my college buddies than I do with foreigners than I do in an academic setting. Personally, while I don’t like the reflexive as emphatic construction, it’s a perfectly valid construction in my colloquial grammar. I would never correct a friend for using that orally. Just like I let the common “borrow” for “lend” swap (as in “can you borrow me a buck?”) slide.

As for the “which” for “whom” debate–it doesn’t really bug me. It looks like “whom” is working itself out of the English language, and that’s okay by may. And this is a good example of a word that is pretty much never used in my neighborhood, so when I revert back to my “neighborhood English,” I swap "who"s for "whom"s, as the local grammar does.

I mean, you can argue all you want, but there is no one English grammar. There is one generally accepted code of rules for formal writing, but after that, it’s a free-for-all.

36

Actually, the appositive use of a reflexive as intensifier is common, and considered proper usage. I myself would never demand that anyone accept or use it, however. :wink:

While I agree that the general substitution of “myself” for “me” is a less-than-felicitous fad, I have seen occasions where the “modest ‘myself’” seems to be acceptable, at least in informal written use: “Among the people who have contributed to to this thread are excalibre, pseudotriton, pulykamell, and of course myself.” In such a use it seems to downplay one’s own importance in contradistinction to the way that “me” seems to emphasize it. I’m aware that Fowler and Follett are probably doing about 120 RPM in their graves at the thought, but that strikes me as a good alternative construction to have available.

37

Yeah, yeah, yeah…the appositive. Forgot about that one.

Now, and here’s a thought, is it possible that people who hear “myself” and don’t object to the usage are really parsing it as “my self”? Because it seems to me that saying “Among the people who have contributed to this thread are Bob, Mary, Joe, and my self” is not gramatically objectionable.

I guess what I’m getting at, perhaps a bit unclearly, is there’s an intuitive functional distinction for me between “myself” as in “I myself agree with you,” and “myself” meaning “my self” as in “Bob, Mary, Joe, and myself.” In the first example, it doesn’t really make sense to break down “myself” into its two components. The reflexive pronoun loses its function that way. In the second instance, “myself” isn’t being used as a reflexive, but rather as, quite literally, “my self,” a possessive adjective modifying a noun.

Is this making any sense?

38

Mr. R.R., I tend to agree with about 97% of your posts around here, but Gaudere’s Law compels me to ask, Shouldn’t this be "differently ***from ***. . . "? I realize there are gray areas between the uses of “from” and “than” when comparing difference (a binary comparison) and degree of difference (a comparison along a scale), but your usage is one of the non-gray examples that sets me a-cringing.

39

My personal rule is, “When you’ve gotten to the point where you need to choose between ‘different(ly) [than/from],’ immediately drop back and recast the sentence!” :slight_smile: