But “literally” doesn’t mean “figuratively.” It is being used in a figurative manner, but doesn’t mean “figuratively.”
I’m not entirely sure why you think literature is a better arbiter of what is considered “proper English” by grammarians vs. something like journalistic prose. If you did, you would find “literally” being used in the figurative sense by such greats as Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alexander Pope, James Joyce, etc. If anything, I would argue as above: journalism is stricter than literature in what is and isn’t “allowed.” I mean, hell, you’ll find double negatives all over literature, but you won’t (or shouldn’t) in a news piece (except possibly as a quotation.)
But I’m still wondering. Why is “this one” okay, but “these ones” not? I don’t understand the logical basis for allowing one and not the other.
The Language Log entry on this, which I believe Grammarphobia references, is quite interesting:
I agree with Kathman’s observation. It’s a more emphatic construction than “these.” Heck, if I want even more emphasis, I can append “here” to it, as well, as in “these ones here.” There’s subtle differences in meaning between the forms. I also happen to be from Chicago, so perhaps it’s common usage to me and not as jarring as to a speaker from a dialect that doesn’t use the construction. (Although, right now, the poll is 60-40 in favor of “these ones” being “proper.”)
As it stands, the reasonable conclusion is that in American English, “these ones”/“those ones” appears to be judged as non-standard by many (perhaps even most) speakers, but is wholly unremarkable and standard elsewhere.
This is the first time in my life I’ve come across the idea that there’s something wrong with the phrase “these ones,” and I’m frankly baffled by it. Is it equally incorrect if you use larger numbers? Is “these two” also wrong?
Imposing logic on grammar is unfair. Lots of grammar couldn’t pass your test of a “logical basis for following [it] and not [something else].” Some grammar just is.
“He runned to the store” is bad grammar. What’s the logical basis for allowing *ran *and not runned?
I guess I defer to literature because it’s so scrupulously vetted before it is published and presented to the masses. Editors have gone over it dozens, or even hundreds of times to correct it and make sure it’s “right”, vs. news journalism which is often thrown together and uploaded without much oversight. You can find typos and poor grammar in every newspaper in the world, every day. That’s not to say it’s always bad; you can be a great journalist but maybe you don’t know how to spell, for instance. And with the ease of immediate worldwide distribution, readers from all over may be subjected to regionalisms or colloquialisms that sound right to some peoples’ ears, but wrong to others’. Contrast that with the editing process that a novel goes through, which gets rid of all of that and smooths it out to what is generally understood as the “right” way to turn a phrase.
And as to this one/these ones, there is no logical reason that I know of. One sounds right and the other one doesn’t.
I actually do agree with this. (I typically fall on the descriptivist side of a language debate, with some caveats.) But usually grammar pedants, in my experience, try to impose some sort of logic on a grammatical proscription, and I’m curious what that logic (if any) there is in this case. For example, they insist double negatives are illogical, because two negatives make a positive, when that is not what happens in English. They insist that a preposition must never end a sentence because the “preposition” suggests it’s positioned before somethig, so how can you end a sentence in it? You’re not supposed to split infinitives because Latin didn’t (and couldn’t) split them. And so on and so forth. Usually it is the presecriptivists that insist logic on language. Hence, I’m wondering what possible logical reason they would have for this proscription.
OK, that’s valid. Your dialect apparently does not allow for such a construction. Mine does, and I’d be willing to wager the majority of English spoken throughout the world has no issue with it.
May I recommend Words and Rules, by Stephen Pinker? It focuses on almost this exact question: why are there irregular past-tense verbs, and what can we learn about how humans create language from their existence?
It’s been many years since I read it, but I think his explanation is that there are only a few dozen irregular verbs in English, and most of them are among the most common verbs (run, sit, be, read, write, etc.) and are some of our oldest words. They tend to be past-tensified according to older rules, often involving transmuting the verb’s vowel to a different vowel. Because the words are so common, they’ve not changed to match grammatical fads like -ed for past-tense in the way that other verbs have: their old past tenses just got used too much to be discarded.
I’m probably leaving out some details and getting others wrong, but my point is this: you can apply logic to grammatical rules, just from a different perspective. You say, “There must be a reason why people do it this way; what could that reason be?” Because we live in a rational universe, there’s a cause for every phenomenon, and learning about the causes for the various phenomena of speech is much of what makes real grammar (as opposed to prescriptivist maveneering) so delightful.
I should amend this, as double negatives are rhetorically used to make a positive statement in English by negating the opposite (“he can’t not take the job,”) but they’re just as often used in English colloquially either emphatically or in a “negative agreement” sense, as in “I can’t get no satisfaction” or “I ain’t got no money.”
It’s grammatically fine, in that it correctly follows the prescriptivist rules of grammar. “These” is the rare plural adjective, and thus needs a plural object to modify. And “ones” is the correct plural of “one.”
It is stylistically strange to my ears, though. I can see it being used for emphasis, but, most of the time, the plural of “this one” is just “these.” It doesn’t even strike me as a lower class thing, as I would not expect an uncontracted form of “one” in that context. It’s “these’uns”, and that colloquialism is never written out except to deliberately indicated dialect. I guess some might transcribe it as “these ones” but I’d just write “these.”
There are some that seem to believe that grammatical is the same thing as either “formal speech” or “not awkward”, neither of which are correct. “These ones” is perfectly grammatical, even if I wouldn’t use that construction. The question is, what does the OP mean by “proper English”? I always assumed it meant the same thing as “grammatical.”
Because “this” has a tendency to refer back to something previously said in a sentence rather than to objects. Hence “this one” makes it clear you’re referring to an object. The disambiguation is so frequent that people say “this one” even when no ambiguity is possible.
“These” rarely has this problem, as there are rarely two phrases of the sme kind in a previous sentence, and, when there are, there are rarely two or more objects that need to be discussed. The ambiguity is infrequent.
That said, it’s not a rule. It’s a stylistic choice. Redundancy is the rule, not the exception in English.
Those are a lot of weasel words. I don’t see how making it where there are no illegal consonant clusters somehow makes the topic more useful. Without a citation, it just looks like some editor personally disagreed and changed the article.
I guess you could make a distinction between consonants that can be said together and those that are distinct. But then /sr/ would still count as illegal, as we just don’t run those consonants together. Even “Sri Lanka” is more often pronounced with an /ʃ/ (“sh”).
I’d say the opposite. “These” is an adjective; it’s modifying “ones”. You could say just “these” without including the object “ones” and people will understand you from the context. But it’s grammatically more correct to include the object with its modifier.
If I’m reading the above correctly, it works from an assumption that “these” is always and only an adjective, but I don’t think that’s right. In the sentence “Eat these,” I think “these” is functioning as a noun.
The use of a pronoun or an adjective without its object (subject?) may be proper is some cases. But it’s hard to think of a situation where their non-use is improper. So while saying “I borrowed this at the library” is proper, you can certainly say “I borrowed this book at the library” without being redundant.