Well, I just learned something about berries.
Jargon is the one area where I see prescriptivism as being vital, like stoplights are vital for traffic. If people use specialized terms to mean whatever, then people end up talking past each other. In my field, when someone uses the word “random,” they don’t mean haphazard or arbitrary; they mean it in the specific probabilistic sense.
I understand that mathematicians are quite put-out with the way that the rest of the world uses the term “lowest common denominator”.
It’s a very good idea to have a “standardized” English. It facilitates communication, slows the trans-generational evolution that tends to make it difficult to read the past and write to the future, and makes non-standardized English fun by giving it something to contrast with playfully. But “standardized” isn’t more right in any intrinsic sense. The zeal of pedants arises out of a confusion of standard with correct. Anyone who thinks it’s simply wrong to end a sentence with a preposition betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the English language.
The thing with jargon is, it’s restricted to its field. If someone says “Man, I did a lot of work getting my tax returns filled out”, I wouldn’t correct them by pointing out that the forms don’t have all that much mass, and they stayed at the same height on the table and didn’t accelerate, anyway. By the physics-jargon definition of “work”, it’s hardly any work at all to fill out tax forms, but that’s only relevant to people using the physics-jargon definition.
I thought that was one of those rules that even pedants see as nonsensical, along with refusing to split infinitives. The reason the latter was even an issue, I recall, is that pedants wanted to make English roughly equivalent to Latin in that regard. As I understand it (never took Latin), infinitives are single words, so it’s impossible to split them. But English isn’t Latin, so there’s no reason to not split them.
The Fiske book, although the subtitle is “The Curmudgeon’s Compendium of Excruciatingly Correct Grammar,” doesn’t actually get into much grammar. It’s just a dictionary of so-called “misused” words. I’m actually a bit more prescriptivist when it comes to grammar. It bothers me when someone writes “The books is on the table,” rather than “The books are on the table,” for example. I also don’t like the use of apostrophes to indicate possession (“The book’s are on the table”). However, I’m lenient (as is my dissertation advisor, more importantly) when using apostrophes to indicate plural variables, as in “each of the x_i’s is a predictor variable.”
I don’t really know why I’m bothered by some things and not others. I suppose one distinction between my pet peeves and Fiske’s is that there doesn’t seem to be a good reason to break from tradition (which is really all prescriptivists have with respect to English). Traditionally, we like to make the number of the subject and the verb agree. “Books” is a plural word, so why not use “are”? For the apostrophe example, we have a traditional way of making singular nouns possessive for most words–ad an s or es. The apostrophe doesn’t need to be conscripted to do the job of something else. However, “x_i” is not a word, so tradition doesn’t say what to do. There, using an apostrophe seems okay to me.
Quite a few pedants still cling ferociously to those old rules, and I even unconsciously follow them occasionally, but by and large the war on them has been won. Or more accurately, the war they waged on actual English has been lost.
I can agree with this. The way I see it, certain fields have set up what amount to rules of the game. If you’re talking about the scientific theory of whatever, and you use the word “theory” in a way completely antithetical to how scientists use it, then it’s not that you’re using it incorrectly per se, but rather it’s that you’re breaking the rules of the game that scientists have set up. Knock yourself out using the word however you’d like, but understand that you’re not part of the conversation scientists have as scientists.
It’s really, really hard to split an infinitive in English, too, and I’ve yet to find an example that wouldn’t make a native speaker cringe. What you just posted there is not, despite what you probably intended, a split infinitive: “to not split” is a perfectly valid infinitive form of the compound verb “not split”.
“To boldly go where no man has gone before” makes people who adhere to faux Latin rules cringe. The rest of us don’t care.
“To boldly go” isn’t a split infinitive, either. But “To where boldly go no man has gone before”, which is a split infinitive, would make a native speaker cringe.
You are not using the most widely understood definition of a split infinitive.
[
](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_infinitive)
[
Explain please because to go sure looks like an infinitive to me and that boldly is splitting it right down the middle.
He’s saying that “boldly go” should be treated as one verb, something like “boldlygo” – “To boldlygo where no man has gone before.” It’s a sensible way to look at it, but (as already mentioned) not what most people understand by “split infinitive”.
Why should we do that? There’s no reason why we should want to treat boldly go as one verb and no evidence that people do.
An equally no evidence that “to go” forms an infinitive that cannot or should not ever by “split” by an adverb.
The argument is that “go” is the infinitive form of the verb, and that the phrase “to go” is only one way the infinitive can be used in English. For example, “She will go” and “Let us go” are other sentences containing the infinitive “go”.
That’s another way to look at it, but probably not the one that was intended, as then it would be impossible to split an infinitive. This would invalidate his example “To where boldly go no man has gone before”.
Right. He’s saying it’s possible to split an infinitive but denying that adverbs like “not” or “boldly” do it, which runs counter to every definition of “split infinitive” I’ve ever seen.
As far as I can tell, he’s saying that split infinitives are still ungrammatical in English, so ‘to boldly go’ can’t be a split infinitive because it’s grammatical.
It’s like saying atheists are immoral, so John can’t be an atheist because he’s a nice guy.
No. He’s saying that “to boldly go” is not a split infinitive because “boldly go” is a compound verb, the infinitive of which is “to boldly go.” It’s just a different perspective from what most would be used to. (… different from … that to which … most would be used, er.)
(As an aside, why is Tapatalk not obeying my sig preferences? Argh.)
Right, that’s his rationalization.