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With wit, style, linguists compile words on words Far From the Madding Gerund William, James & Co. 360 pp. $22 Reviewed by Katie Haegele Color me excited: Language Log has a book. Far From the Madding Gerund is a collection of some of the more interesting posts from the language-oriented blog, written mostly by Mark Liberman, a phonetics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Geoff Pullum, a linguistics professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz. With its witty, stylish writing and a title that sounds like Thomas Hardy does sci-fi, the book is even better than I thought it would be. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I majored in linguistics at Penn and took a yearlong graduate phonetics class with Liberman as my professor. I remember him as being scary-smart and very kind; in retrospect, I understand that I was mostly out of my depth in the class, which I shared with doctoral candidates and which required the on-the-fly learning of a bit of a computer-programming language, the name of which I can't even remember now. But his attitude - that my interest in being there was enough to assure me of some success - made me, I'm sure, more successful than I would have been otherwise. Anyway, the class was awesome. Liberman and Pullum's book is about language, something that concerns us all. In the introduction, the authors write that at first they wondered if they weren't a little crazy to think that anyone would be as interested in this stuff as they are. But plenty of people click on Language Log; by the time the book went to press, the blog had gotten more than two million visitors. The beauty of the project is, in fact, its universal appeal. These two are full-time language experts, but their short essays are, for the most part, inspired by things like newspaper headlines, overheard conversations, questions posed by ATMs - in other words, regular life. One post that made it to the book was about a criminal case that was overturned on appeal because a single word was changed in a statute. Another is a nearly philosophical discussion of some seemingly ungrammatical bathroom graffiti. In every case, the writers seem to be enjoying themselves. Their playfulness makes for can't-not-read-'em headlines, like "Mad cow words," "Pickle jinx," and of course, "Far from the madding gerund," which you should probably read about to understand but has to do with the way language changes over time, and how things that sound wrong to older speakers can sound just fine to a younger generation. Unfortunately, even linguists get the blues. They get pretty heated on certain topics; to my surprise and amusement they refer to Strunk and White's The Elements of Style as that Horrid Little Book, and to its usage guidelines as "prohibitions." This is not the only time the issue of descriptivism versus prescriptivism comes up. See, linguists (or descriptivists) are sometimes accused by grammarians (self-styled or otherwise) of believing that anything that comes out of any speaker's mouth is "correct," because their interest lies in observing how the language is used rather than in policing it. And it is true that they get agitated by what they call the "pointless, unthinking, anti-intellectual game of grammar Gotcha," which is perpetrated by the sort of people who write shrill letters to newspaper editors calling them out on "mistakes" like split infinitives that violate the terms set forth in some musty old usage book but that were never ungrammatical in the first place. However, if you mangle the language to the point where you can't be understood, Liberman and Pullum just might blog about you. They might even giggle a little. It's not that language standards are pointless, they say; it's that nonstandard usages are not moral trespasses. The truth is that these two guys are open-minded to the point of being radical, which means they're apt to take surprising viewpoints, like this one: "Linguistic catastrophes befall everyone, not just George W." Didn't expect them to say that, did you? Now, some of the topics get us into serious nerd territory. The phrases irrealis construction and explicit scalar predicates are used, and there's an entry about a parlor game using the works of Jacques Derrida. Still, our heroes are not unhip. They seem to really like younger speakers and their little language quirks. Also, if you flip through the book (it's best read as though it's a blog, rather than straight through), you'll find an analysis of various pop-culture utterances, such as Pete Rose's apologies and a commencement speech by Jon Stewart (who apparently doesn't know what a noun is. Ugh, Jon, the engagement's off). Even the posts about celebrity gaffes aren't mean-spirited, though. They're just, well, spirited. In reading this charming, engaging book, I couldn't help but notice that the language loggers used one word no less than three times: beautiful. (They refer, for instance, to a beautiful discussion of the usage of what and which.) Here's what I think is beautiful: that an obscure academic discipline like linguistics can be so subversive, delightful, and universally meaningful. That this book exists for any layperson with an interest in the topic. That I can make this sentence, and the one before it, incomplete, and its OK, 'cause you get the idea. And if you don't, feel free to write me a letter. Katie Haegele is a freelancer who lives in Jenkintown. Her
e-mail address is katieahaegele@yahoo.com. |