As an addendum: You can’t claim that “au jus” as a noun is wrong even though people use the phrase that way, and then say “Rio Grande” is correct because people use it that way. If “Rio Grande” is correct due to usage, so is “au jus.”
Sez who? How could you possibly know what these people are thinking and what they intend?
Actually, i don’t think you are talking about two equivalent cases here.
If i use the term Rio Grande as an English speaker, i’m using a term that is in the Spanish language, and i’m using it in a way that mirrors its Spanish usage.
But if i use the term “au jus” as a noun, i am not only using a French word as an English speaker, but am making a fundamental alteration to usage itself.
It is clear that “au jus” as a noun has fallen into common usage. But i still don’t think your comparison with Rio Grande is especially accurate.
In another message on this thread, I indicated this is something “I presume.”
Presumptions like this are generally pretty safe, though. If you wonder “Why did he do that,” you can often answer this question by asking yourself “Why would I do that under those circumstances?” You can get insight into the person’s mental states by looking into your own. We do this all the time, generally with (a certain adequate level of) success. Its basic to our ability to comprehend others as motivated and reason-driven beings.
-FrL-
Absolutely: prescriptivists get the same say in the langauge as anyone else. That is, they get to:
- Choose the words that they (and nobody else) uses; and
- Choose whether to deliberately misunderstand or get worked up over someone else’s usage whether or not they understand that usage.
Prescriptivists differ from most language users in that they choose to get worked up over some language usages that other folks don’t. They don’t differ in their ability to control other folks’ language usage or in their understanding of other folks’ language usage.
You could, and I would understand you, but it would make my brow wrinkle first. (Note that coming up with a sentence like this is probably pretty difficult for you: that’s a good indication that it’s a truly ungrammatical sentence). I need to put an addendum, then, on a competent speaker: a competent speaker conveys an idea such taht the audience understands it transparently. In this case, your nonstandard use of articles makes your meaning opaque, makes the listener devote unnecessary attention to decoding your meaning. That’s what makes it incompetent speech.
Remember, however, my thought experiment with ordering au jus? I propose that if you order your beef “with extra juice,” you’ll make the audience spend more time decoding your meanign than if you order your beef “with extra au jus.” As such, the former phrase is the one chosen by the less competent speaker.
I’m confused, then. Are you backing away from your earlier claim that
Or is the phrase “all along” integral to that earlier claim–that is, do you agree that people who say “au jus” are correctly thinking that they are using the phrase in the way that it’s been intended to be used by competent speakers in modern parlance?
Either way, I could use some clarification of your position here.
Also, I think that this thread can only have a factual answer if the question relates to dictionary definitions; in that case, it’s already been answered (and you’re right). The more interesting questions are evidently a matter for Great Debates :).
Daniel
Most, perhaps, but I know plenty of people that get worked up, or at least make fun of, others’ “stuffy” grammar and language. Implying, of course, that laidbackness is the “proper” way to speak.
The thing about “au jus” is that I really take it as a euphemism. You could put juice on the menu and everyone would know what it meant, but it would be blunt and visceral. Au jus obscures that the same way “eau de toilette” obscures the word “toilet” that has bad connotations for English speakers since it’s already in use for something gross. If you take away the “au” in “ au jus” then it really ruins the effect since jus and juice aren’t different enough for it to obscure that it’s “with fluid that oozed out.” So the au has a function. Asking for extra jus defeats the entire purpose of calling it “au jus” instead of “with juice.”
I had my first “au jus” experience recently where the “au jus” turned out to be “with terrible gravy” and I made a mental note if I ever ordered it from them again it would have to be “sans jus, since that stuff is NOT jus.” But I would probably say “without the ‘au jus’,” rather than, “without au jus,” or “without jus.” I really think that if I used the term “au jus” in any sentence, there would be invisible quotes around it and if I had to say anything about the ‘au jus’ I would use “the” in front of it to distinguish that I’m referring to part of the dish’s description, I’m not speaking in French.
In other words, nobody knows it, but I am really saying, “can I have extra ‘au jus’?”
That’s a very fair point. I’d be okay with calling those folks prescriptivists, too (although a competent speaker would clarify this usage 
). For the record, I used to get that sort of dumbass mockery all the time when I was a kid, and for awhile I made an effort to simplify my own vocabulary in order to avoid it; it got to the point where sometimes I’d be rendered silent by my inability to think of a monosyllabic synonym of a word that I wanted to use. So I don’t approve of that angle, either.
Daniel
Thing is, first time i heard someone say “with au jus,” i did exactly that: furrowed my brow and devoted “unnecessary attention” to decoding the meaning.
I’m no hard-line prescriptivist, but i also don’t have much time for the attitude that anything goes as long as we can get used to it.
Personally, i think that Brian Garner, in his Dictionary of Modern American Usage, draws a good balance between descriptive and prescriptive grammar and usage, shunning both unnecessary prescriptivism and anti-intellectual descriptivism.
True – and that’s probably not the best example I could come up with (if I need to deliberately construct a bad sentence I tend to imagine how a foriegner would conjugate it; for some reason it ends up sounding slavic). There are ways in English however to construct a sentence proplerly that would not necessarily be understood transparently. The common (if old) phrase, “Stone walls do not a prison make” is archaic, but is still a perfectly acceptable construct, even if it’s one we wouldn’t use these days. It was strange to me in my formative years – it was a margin quip in a Mad Magazine of the day – “Stone walls do not a prison make, but they sure help!” – and I couldn’t understand why the sentence was formed that way. I thought it was part of the joke so I didn’t get it.
The only reason this is acceptable though is because au jus doesn’t have a proper name by which it can be referenced. We thus simply ask for “more au jus” because, human speech following the path of least resistance as it does, turning it into a noun is easier than saying “more beef-flavoured liquid for dipping my sandwich in.”
I agree with all of this–I just don’t agree that anything you’ve described is a problem. People realized that there wasnt a good noun for this stuff, but there was an adjective used to describe it that could easily turn into a noun, and so they did so. Most folks understand what they mean; the noun easily fills the hole in the language. The noun is efficient, as you point out. Isn’t this a linguistic innovation that we should celebrate rather than disparage?
Daniel
If I wanted to order more juice in Spanish, would I say “mas au jus” or “au mas jus”?
Rio Grade au jus … =P
Incidentally, I just submitted this to the Merriam-Webster Open Dictionary Project; hopefully they’ll correct their dictionary with this usage soon :). I also found an interesting discussion of the term
(there’s mroe there, but this was the bit that I think is most interesting. They also compare it to “a la mode,” but as has already been pointed out here, we’ve already got a perfectly cromulent English word for ice cream).
Daniel
Tautology. This sentence violates breaks accepted norms considered acceptable of tautologous tautologies and redundant redundancies in grammatical grammar language and doubles terms used twice in this sentence. If you’d rather couch that as poor usage or poor style rather than poor grammar, fine.
If you’re comparing the two, you’re factually wrong. When you say “this sentence violates breaks,” you’ve used two verbs in a row in an ungrammatical fashion that no native English speaker would do without intentionally trying to break the language’s grammar. A person who uses “au jus” as a noun is doing nothing of the sort. Yes, “au” in a preposition in French, but it’s not in English, so there’s no repetition.
Daniel
Lots of this discussion has been about what is “correct” (that is, of course, appropriate because that’s the question asked by the OP).
There is universal agreement that a French phrase has been adopted by English speakers and then its usage corrupted to have a slightly different role grammatically than the original French phrase. Even the descriptivists who say that any sufficiently common usage is indistinguishable from correct grammar must admit that this usage arose out of corruption in the crossover. Any of us familiar with and respectful of the original usage find this corruption annoying and ignorant, however snooty we may be for finding it thus.
Is there a term like Engrish that applies to Americans incorrectly using French?
I guess that depends on which camp you sit in. I’m probably a little more prescriptivist in my application of language, though not to any extreme. Still, to the degree that a newly minted noun derived from a foriegn language whose usage in English is redundant when it is translated and conjugated, it tweaks my ears the same way the aforementioned acronyms do. The difference however is that “ATM” is a noun to begin with and the addition of “machine” is completely superfluous to the understanding of “ATM.” You can correct someone saying “ATM machine” (at the risk of being told to shut the hell up) and you’d be linguistically correct in doing so.
Au jus isn’t a noun by itself though; it is preceded by a preposition. Turning the whole thing into a noun is a conscious decision to ignore the preposition despite the fact that by doing so you have to use another preposition in order to use it. (Or a pronoun or adverb) Unfortunately there’s no choice but to use it this way because au jus isn’t referred to any other way – it doesn’t have a proper noun. It’s just that it should.
The real problem is its French usage. Au jus is like a la mode with respect to it referring to something nonspecific which is explicitly understood in its native context, yet makes no sense when translated whole into English.
I would like a slice of pie in the style.
I would like a shaved beef sandwich with juice.
The first is a sentence fragment. The second is ambiguous. You therefore create a peculiar dichotomy when you mix the two languages. We know what pie is. We know what a la mode means. We therefore transparently understand pie a la mode despite the above. It just doesn’t stand up to grammatical scrutiny. Just so with au jus.
Aren’t we all missing the point that “au jus” is usually just a salty, brown, foul fluid that ruins whatever it comes in contact with?