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Santa Cruz Sentinel Chris Watson, Bookends: If your brilliant writing has ever been red-pencilled by a
teacher or you've ever been harangued by a copy editor to never
split infinitives, begin a sentence with "However"
or end one with a preposition, then "Far From the Madding
Gerund, and Other Dispatches from Language Log," written
by linguists Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K. Pullum William, James
& Co., $22, is the ammunition you need to fight back. Giving style and usage advice, Pullum says, can be very tricky, even down-right wrong. For evidence, he cites what he calls the most fascistic of all style guides, "The Elements of Style" by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. Filled with rules and principles for good writing, the Strunk and White guide has, Pullum says, very little basis in reality. "'The Elements of Style' is a feeble little book of time-worn prohibitions that were never even respected 100 years ago. "It's out of date and repeats every old-fashioned piece of nonsense about what you should and shouldn't do. "It stinks." As a descriptivist, Pullum finds almost every word of Strunk and White's guide distasteful — from the simplistic advice to "Be Clear""duh," says Pullum, to E.B. White's pointless prohibition never to begin a relative clause with "which" something White himself did all the time in his children's books and including the principle to "write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs." All a bunch of hooey, says Pullum, who says that good writers don't pay attention to this garbage. He writes: "'The Elements of Style' offers prejudiced pronouncements on a rather small number of topics, frequently unsupported, and unsupportable, by evidence. It simply isn't true that the constructions they instruct you not to use are not used by good writers." Strunk and White are not Pullum's only victims. An ornery, opinionated and very funny man, Pullum is also displeased when: * anthropologist claim that animals have language; Regarding the last, often as not, Pullum's "all in favor of sending copy editors to jail." Here! Here! A man who takes his work seriously, Pullum reads widely, listens to television, radio, peruses court documents and newspapers and scours the Internet for interesting clues to English grammar. He's an anti-authoritarian in many ways. Still, on occasion, even Pullum is called upon to make a writing suggestion. An example is a recent NPR broadcast in which the reporter said, "Without Washington's support, however, Saddam Hussein quickly crushed the revolt." In "Language Log," Pullum dissects the problems with this statement: Good politics, it appears, should also include good grammar. For the most part, though, Pullum is a freedom-fighter. "If I have one ambition for my professional life," he writes, "It is to do something to drive back the dark forces of grammatical fascism." Recognizing that many of us still require help with basic writing skills, Pullum recommends purchasing a copy of Merriam-Webster's "Concise Dictionary of English Usage," a book that shows you how really good writers get the job done. Pullum writes: "Throw your Strunk & White away, and hang the pages on a nail in the guest outhouse for emergency use." One more thing. If you've got an extra $165 burning a hole in your pocket, there's another book you might be interested in purchasing. "The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language" is not a usage or style guide but a reference work, a definitive grammar of modern English based "on reasoned argument." It also just happens to have been co-authored by our own smarty-pants linguist Geoff Pullum. Linguistics 101 According to Webster's 'New World College Dictionary' (fourth edition), linguistics is 'the science of language.' What linguistics is not, according to Geoff Pullum, is a study of vocabulary. So don't even mention to him that Eskimos have dozens of words for snow. He'll throw a fit, for sure. 'Language is not the study of words but of inference and encoding,' he said recently. 'The largest part of what makes a language useful is the system we use to structure a sentence. It doesn't matter if we add new nouns or drop old ones.' Pullum became interested in the field in the '60s when Noam Chomsky threw a wrench into the study of language by saying that linguistics had nothing to do with communication but was about the internal workings of the human mind. 'Chomsky's always been an advocate for unusual views that are shockingly different,' Pullum said. 'It was very exciting. There was a sense of revolution in the air after he started publishing.' Because Chomsky's pronouncement came on the heels of an expansionary age in American universities, linguistics soon gelled into its own field of study. You can read about the issues that plague and pique linguists by visiting the Language Log blog at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/. Pullum, who once made his living as a piano player in rock and soul bands in England, had no qualms about giving up music for linguistics. 'Music,' he said, 'was a tedious way to make a living. I moved into linguistics because I sought glamour and excitement.' Contact Chris Watson at cwatson@santacruzsentinel.com |