Well why? Do you claim that there is no way to parse the OP sentence that’s grammatically correct? Let’s be clear to distinguish grammatical error vs poor style.
Which part? UDS parsed the sentence logically and described exactly what was being said.
There is something wrong with that, although it is not as obviously egregious. Again, this is like saying “He talked to Joe, Jane, and myself”–which is common but wrong (nonstandard).
Reflexivity!
Joe can be hoisted by his own petard. He cannot be hoisted by Jane’s own petard.
Your example is precisely the opposite of the OP sentence - one sounds fine but is technically grammatically wrong, the other sounds wrong (to some people) but is technically grammatically correct.
He talked to Joe, Jane, and myself
This is a sentence that to most people sounds fine, but when “stripped down” most native speakers would agree that it seems to contain a grammatical mistake, because we would not say
He talked to myself
He did not see me hidden among his own adversaries
This is quite the reverse. To some people (not all) it sounds wrong. But, per UDS’s analysis, it is shown to be grammatically fine. It’s just that it can sound off because it lends itself to mis-parsing.
Again, unless you can find fault with
He did not see the flag hidden among his own adversaries
I do not see how you can claim that there is no correct way to parse the same sentence with “me” substituted for “the flag”.
And for the avoidance of doubt - I’m not arguing against the fact that the sentence might be ambiguous, confusing, poor style, etc., but that’s a different question from grammatical mistake.
They are both wrong, but the second one could be okay if the intended meaning were different. The first one is just so wrong (although admittedly common) and I can’t even imagine it sounding right. I don’t want to imagine that. :eek: Yes, I am a snob.
As I said, the flag example is clever. So I will acknowledge the point and still insist that there has to be something reflexive in the wider passage, to justify the use of “his own”. (Do we agree that grammar can extend beyond the bounds of a single sentence?) To wit:
“I didn’t see him, as he was hidden among my adversaries. He did not see me, hidden among his own adversaries.” (This is acceptable.)
There has to be something to grammatically trigger the “his own”. Otherwise, the word “own” is not just superfluous, it is wrong, an unwelcome interloper. (Note that I inadvertently illustrated how grammar can extend beyond the bounds of the sentence – since the word “otherwise” would be grammatically wrong in that sentence if the previous sentence had been something different.)
I don’t think it’s a question of snobbery, it’s a question of what you mean by “wrong” with regard to language. To linguists, a grammatical error in a complicated and potentially misleading sentence is one that turns out to violate the consensus structural rules that speakers follow when they actually use the language. You’d generally figure this out by pulling a sentence apart, looking at simpler analogous structures, and referring back to native speakers (as with He talked to myself). On the other hand, to prescriptivists or style advocates, “wrong” may just mean something that violates arbitrary personal preferences. Neither sense of wrong is necessarily wrong, but we just need to be clear which we mean, and not misrepresent one kind of wrong as the other kind of wrong.
I totally understand what you mean, and I completely agree that “own” here is superfluous without the “reflexivity”. And if I were writing a style guide for such as the New Yorker, I think that I would fully endorse this nice distinction.
But unfortunately, such impeccable logic does not determine whether an expression is actually valid in the illogical mess that is real language. Including the casual and superfluous “own” without any “reflexivity” is certainly not wrong (at least in my dialect). And I wouldn’t categorize that question as a syntactical issue - it’s just colloquial usage.
to quickly hijack my own thread…
Hey - a new one on me!
Thanks!
(a big however - bad enough having to say “heaven forbid”, but “heaven for-fend”?)
Not a Tina Brown fan, either? Recently found out that apparently NY’er veteran Ian Frazier got right out of dodge when she was there and didn’t return until she left.
(hopefully this thought can just stand on its own - otherwise it could almost use its own thread)…You’re not the only one who shudders when misused language is used enough to become part of the lexicon. Twerpbots like Noam Chomsky (actually he’s got a lot a valid shit to say, but…) espousing the evolution of language, regardless of how much misused wordage is introduced into it, really crankles my drankle. What really makes me slap the top of my head repeatedly, like some old school pro wrestler, is (for example) how “momentarily” FUCKING NOW means “soon”. It sure didn’t used to mean that. It only used to mean “briefly”. And “precipitous” used to ONLY mean “steep”, but now bumblefarts have misused it enough so that it now also means “fast” (which was what “precipitate” was supposed to fucking mean! Fuck.)
Phoo-hoo it: call me a snob, too, then.
ok
that felt better.
you may now return to regular programming.
I assume that, for consistency, that you will endeavor to correct the following mistakes in your post:
Valid means strong and effective, or perhaps we can accept the recent technical sense of “legally binding”. I have no idea what other new-fangled mistaken meaning you intend, but it is certainly to be resisted by all civilized men who value the integrity of the English language.
To evolve means to unroll, to open out. Let’s agree to hold the line on the meaning of this one, since the wrongheaded mistakes only started to occur as recently as the nineteenth century.
A snob is somebody of the lower classes, nothing more. There are plenty of other words for those who value higher social rank, why on earth should we accept a wrong meaning for a word that already has a perfectly clear and acceptable meaning?
Fast means firmly fixed. Perhaps you are casually using it in the unfortunate recent slang sense of “quick”, but only a Chomskyite twerpbot would accept such a mistaken incorrect meaning, and I trust that we can rely upon you to resist such bumblefartery, before such a misuse becomes acceptable in writing (shudder)!
How about these other new-fanged mistaken synonyms for valid (equally pertinent to the bulk of Mr. Chomsky’s work): well founded, sound, reasonable, rational, logical, justifiable, defensible, viable.
Ok that could be one of the flimsier, douchier, pettier semantic distinctions I’ve come across in this site for some time.
That’s making my earlier claim of being a snob sound like I’m Oscar Madison or something. I believe SlackerInc called himself one, and I did so in the same spirit of adhering to not misusing language. No higher social rank shenanigans going on there.
Like your other Franklin Pangborn-inspired attempts - grasping at straws. Using “fast” to mean only “firmly fixed” is ridiculously floundering in some weird bubble-world, Riemann, that 99.9% people don’t exist in.
Are you now asserting that the meaning of these words might have changed since the sixteenth century? Heaven forfend! Thou art a Chomskyist bumblefart, sir! (Can I say that outside the Pit? In my defense, I have no idea what it means.) Where is my fainting couch?
I never stated a problem with change, but if it’s done through misuse - different matter.
As already noted, you keep coming up with extremely flawed analogies. “Joe, Jane, and myself” is clearly wrong (though common) because “myself” is a reflexive pronoun. The case of “own” is far less clear. “… because I was wearing one of his own disguises” has a significantly different emphasis and tone than “… because I was wearing one of his disguises” – the dry factual content is the same, but the literary effect and the underlying message is vastly different. The construction serves a linguistic purpose. So stating that the quoted sentence has “something wrong with [it], although it is not as obviously egregious” is at best ultra-extremist prescriptivist pedantry raised beyond the bounds of absurdity. And I say this as something of a prescriptivist myself.
“He chased me into a room where he kept his collection of antique silverware. As he backed me into a corner, I reached for the nearest object to defend myself. I attacked him with one of his own knives, in his own house, in his own vaunted collection room.”
If this is ungrammatical I hereby renounce my prescriptivist credentials and join the ranks of happily non-judgmental descriptivists.
Except it’s not.
A distinction without a difference. Although the ironic point of my post was lost on you, our current use of valid, evolve, snob, and fast would all have constituted “misuse” by the standards of the more or less distant historical English language.
Your definition of “misuse” would no doubt be anything that fails to correspond to the snapshot of evolving language that is the dialect of your particular time and place, perhaps tempered with some reasoned arguments about how you’d like certain words to be restricted in certain ways, notwithstanding that they aren’t. But however much you it might crankle your drankle, the language will be quite different in the future, just as it was in the past, and the evolution will be driven by what you’d call “misuse” (often by the younger generation) that becomes slang that becomes an acceptable variant of standard usage that ultimately becomes the only standard usage.
You have no more power to change the way language functions and evolves than you can alter the orbit of the Earth around the Sun by disagreeing with physical laws. You have a choice whether or not to understand and celebrate the process of linguistic evolution, or whether to just tell the abusers of your precious snapshot in time to get of your linguistic lawn.
Well, some of this can get bogged down into distinctions of grammar vs. usage vs. syntax vs. style. And there’s descriptive vs. prescriptive linguistic perspectives. But FWIW, when I say “wrong”, I mean “nonstandard”, and although this cannot be precisely defined, my favorite dictionary American Heritage has long employed a Usage Panel of various grandees and luminaries. And although they don’t seem to have addressed this one, I think a majority of that panel would frown upon using this in writing (they tend to be much more lax when it comes to speech).
And of course we can go back to Old English, to Indo-European, etc. All very fair. Fundamentally I’m a descriptivist.
But I do have my share of prescriptivist tendencies, and I don’t think all prescriptivism is the same. A pet peeve is when we start with two different words that have different meanings. Perhaps subtly different, but usefully so. And then they evolve to mean exactly the same thing. What could we possibly have gained? We didn’t pare down the number of words we need to be able to recognize, but we did lose the ability to make some sort of fine distinction. I see examples of this all the time, but an easy example is what I talked about upthread: making “myself” an exact synonym for “me”.
It’s not, but there is still **reflexivity **here. He was attacked by his own knife, in his own house, in his own collection room. There’s a suggestion of irony conveyed by “his own”. Contrast this with:
“He chased me into a room where Jane kept her collection of antique silverware. As he backed me into a corner, I reached for the nearest object to defend myself. I attacked him with one of Jane’s own knives, in Jane’s own house, in Jane’s own vaunted collection room.”
Do you think that’s an acceptable use of “own”? Or should it be excised? I say the latter.
My previous post should have obviously indicated to you that I realised, ok - this dude isn’t some American Gothic obsessive.
Misuse is not only much closer between generations, it often bypasses the slang stage and goes straight to some variant of dictionary. Slang is way more derived from the concocted than the misused, making it, to this hombre, a more valid basis for language evolution than the doltish incorporation of misused words.
Really? I cant change the way language functions? hmph! ::stomps up and down::
Thanks, but I do understand the process of linguistic evolution, but no way am I celebrating it whenever it advances through misuse.
I agree that this kind of prescriptivism is something rather different from simply inventing entirely arbitrary “rules” that don’t correspond to reality, and it’s unfair to tar both with the same brush. But, however strong the logical justification, I’m still skeptical that it matters much in the end. These things only tend to come up as “pet peeves” when they are already lost causes - in other words when a spontaneous change in meaning is already well underway. And, overall, there’s no evidence that our ability to distinguish subtle and complex ideas has decreased over time. It’s an extremely common prescriptivist claim that a change will lead to unresolvable ambiguity, but in my experience (to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum), language will invariably find a way.
I think my only remaining bone of contention is whether “reflexivity” is a sensible word to describe when it’s appropriate to use “own”. As you say, wolfpup’s example is one of ironic emphasis, and it’s clear you agree that there’s no limitation on exactly what can belong to whom in the structure of the sentence. Stylistically, it just seems that when we insert “own” there should be a good reason to emphasize ownership; otherwise the reader may be left puzzled as to whether they have missed some subtle ironic element.
I don’t think we’re too far apart on a lot of this. I don’t share your Panglossian optimism about “language finding a way”, however. Through various historical accidents, English has a larger and more varied vocabulary than most other languages. That allows, I suspect, for finer expressions of literary and poetic subtlety than many of those others. And we can’t just assume it will always stay so. In fact, it strikes me as more likely that the tendency would be toward regression to the mean. And I think that would be a loss, and a shame.