'Avoid potential ambiguity'

[Dan Puckett]

Arnold Zwicky has started a series of posts on the subject at Language Log; see this post and the following for the first two parts.

He is making some powerful points about the argument against certain usages.

[Jim Thomsen]

I might actually be interested in seeing what his points are if his preamble prose wasn't so impenetrably dense, twee, smug and pseudo-authoritative — like much of what goes up at The World's Most Obnoxious Web Site.

Just talk like real damn people and stuff your wrongheaded moral superiority, you snifter-sniffing jackanapes.

[Dan Puckett]

I don't see anything dense, twee, smug or pseudo-authoritative in there at all. It's clear exposition of a complex subject; there's a little attitude there, but Zwicky backs it up with logical arguments — much more logical and detailed than I'm sure many of us are accustomed to hearing in discussions like these.

It's worth reading, no matter what your emotional reactions to Zwicky might be.

[Jim Thomsen]

"Clear"

[To avert misunderstandings: I'm not, omigod, advocating (effective) ambiguity as a good thing in general, or saying that (effective) ambiguity is not sometimes genuinely troublesome (of course it is, and I have my own collection of texts gone awry). But I am arguing against the absurd position that potential ambiguity should always be avoided, and the only slightly less absurd position that certain (disputed) usages should be disparaged or proscribed because they have the potential to lead to ambiguity.]

If you want to make effective points about the danger of ambiguity, it might help to be a little (or even a lot) less ambiguous yourself.

Language Log is largely ridiculous, and largely a waste of time. In my opinion.

[john.mcintyre]

I'd be extremely reluctant to discount anything on the Language Log posts. Despite the tendentious remarks about prescritivism, the people who post there are formidably learned; and if we ignore what they say, we risk undermining whatever authority we have beyond idiosyncratic preferences.

[Jim Thomsen]

The Language Log authors have no authority other than what they arbitrarily claim for themselves. The most dominant or haughty personalities in any given room are rarely the most intelligent, however. Just the most stultifyingly obnoxious. There's a solar system of difference between having an air of authority and having the genuine article. I think the authors do little to settle the prescriptivist/descriptivist debate, and much to muddy it and make it worse. These are people who in my view argue because they like to argue and shout down everybody else in the room, not because they're trying to help.

What does "most learned" mean, anyway?

[Dan Puckett]

What does "most learned" mean, anyway?

Since you're the only one who used the phrase, you might have to tell us what you meant by it.

John described the Language Log posters as "formidably learned," which as a Google search will quickly confirm, they are.

Whatever "authority" the LL people have or don't have — and I'm not even sure how that would be defined — among them they do have many decades of studying languages in general and English in particular. They may not always be right, and we may not always agree with what they say, but they have spent a very long time studying linguistics and applying it to the real world, so I always hesitate about deciding that they're mistaken.

I've had a few contacts via e-mail with them, and I've always found them polite, pleasant and willing to discuss a point. They don't seem haughty at all.

Any one of them knows vastly more about how languages work, and about how this language works, than I ever will. I find their insights fascinating. I'm impressed with how clear and unacademic their writing is, and delighted by how often it's humorous and playful.

Language Log is one of my favorite blogs.

You may disagree; they may bore you. But I would think that anyone who routinely edits the written word, assuming responsibility for changing this word to that, this usage to that, would be interested in what the scientists of language have to say about the subject.

[Dan Puckett]

One more thing about the role of linguistics in our work:

Science speaks to many areas, but not all. For example, science can describe the mechanism by which you breathe, but it can't tell you if you ought to keep doing so, or if so, to what end. Science is great at "is," but not so much so on "ought."

In a job like ours, we are balancing both ises and oughts, how things are and how they should be. How we judge those things is up to us, but the more we know, the sounder our judgments will be.

We have to make judgments on language all the time, and we have to explain them to the people whose work we change. The more we know, the better our decisions will be, and the better and more credible our explanations of those decisions.

That's where people in linguistics come in. They can, among many other things, help steer us away from making judgments based only on prejudice and whim; they can provide us with facts about the language that we can use, and they can show us where judgments we've made previously lack the basis we thought they had.

That's what Zwicky's doing in his series on "Avoid potential ambiguity." There may be valid reasons to uphold the proscriptions he's arguing against, but he has some important points to make about arguments commonly used to justify them, points that, even if they don't overturn the proscriptions, may show that those proscriptions need another justification.

Sometimes "ought" overrides "is," and that's a decision for us to make. But our decision should be well informed.

Making us better informed is exactly the kind of service that specialists in linguistics can render us. It's a valuable service, and I'm grateful that the Language Log people provide it online — for free.

[Jim Thomsen]

Life's too short, man. I just want to make stories clearer for readers, and do it as well as I can under horrific time constraints, while I'm on the clock. The rest of the time, I want to play and enjoy life and seize the damn day. Tomorrow may never come, after all.

If the authors at Language Log truly wish to perform a "valuable service," I recommend feeding the homeless or finding any number of ways to help the less fortunate. And there's a lot of trash that needs to be picked up.

[dfisher]

Sorry, Jim. I don't mean to sound cross, but that's a cop-out, and one taken by too many people in this business over the years. *I'm overworked and just trying to shovel* doesn't cut it. It never should have, and it certainly can't if one has a desire to see journalism as we know and love it survive.

Yeah, I guess I'm officially an "academic" now, though I still edit, occasionally report, and had 30+ years in the biz.

But the anti-intellectualism evidenced in your posts has no place in journalism. Sadly, too often it is the case.

If you go back and read the work of some really good people who were looking at this business in the 1990s, you would find that what we're going through was entirely predictable - and in many cases predicted. Only it was in things such as Newpaper Research Journal.

If you want to keep abreast of the changes in the language -- changes ever more rapid because of the Net -- you have to pay attention to those who study such things, whether you like how they are presented or not. (And I will be the first to condemn a lot of tripe that passes for academic writing -- I know of one colleague who was actually challenged once because his writing was "too conversational.")

Journalists need to pay more attention to those who study both the business and the tools they use to conduct it. No, no need to slavishly follow. But to ignore is idiocy.

BTW: If you want the "other side," stick your head in at Vocabula Review. Unfortunately, it's a subscription site, which makes it less effective in these days of interconnected posts/blogs/etc. But you'll get a flavor. Needless to say, these are the M-W haters, but their writings are no less thought-provoking than Zwicky & Co.

[fev]

The Language Log folks earn their authority by close and objective observation of natural phenomena -- the same way people who say the earth goes around the sun gained greater authority than people who proclaim that the earth sits at the middle of the universe atop the backs of four great turtles.

I think Zwicky's an exceptionally clear writer, and his examples of how different kinds of potential ambiguity do or don't work are worth a dozen mandates from the AP Stylebook.

Want to have some fun? Turn on the readability stats in Word, then run some prose through 'em. Zwicky's explanation of 'distributed' vs. 'narrow' readings -- more or less, why "old men and women" is likely to be read as "old men" and "old women," while "old men and linguists" will be read "old men" and "linguists" -- comes in at 11.3 on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level.

Here's a columnist in my morning paper describing a trial:

But that was before U.S. District Judge Paul Borman put the kibosh on defense attorney Gerry Spence's plan to make Fieger's trial a referendum on the Bush Justice Department's conduct under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who Spence says spearheaded a legal offensive against Fieger and other high-profile Democrats.

Now, as the two sides gird for a Monday showdown that could take a month or more to play out in Borman's downtown Detroit courtroom, U.S. v. Fieger is beginning to look eerily like the murder trial in which Fieger's most famous client, assisted-suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian, crashed and burned 10 years ago.

Grade level 23.5, or somewhere north of PhD level. Who's dense, twee and smug?

[john.mcintyre]

Anyone who wants to be taken seriously as an editor ought to be working to increase mastery of the craft. That sometimes means paying attention to smart colleagues at ACES conferences. It should also involve looking into what linguists say (for example, the "Language Mavens" chapter in Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct") and measuring personal preferences and shibboleths against that.

Otherwise, the risk is that instead of being an editor, one will be a mere processor.

[Jim Thomsen]

Let me be clear on this: I am NOT anti-intellectualism. I am anti-PRETENSE-of-intellectualism.

The difference is this: Intellectuals want to advance, clarify and illuminate a given area of study for the benefit of all. Pretend intellectuals want to appropriate the tools of intellectualism for their own aggrandizement and status elevation.

Based on my read of Language Log, it's my belief that its authors fall squarely in the latter category. I believe they want to control the debate, to be seen as the arbiters through which all differences of opinion must be settled, to demoralize others who should know better into seeing them as people of superior knowledge.

I think they're essentially playing a sick, slick confidence game on the world of intellectuals, bluffing and browbeating their way into a seat at the head table of the banquet of knowledge.

[dfisher]

I believe they want to control the debate, to be seen as the arbiters through which all differences of opinion must be settled, to demoralize others who should know better into seeing them as people of superior knowledge.

Oh, like more than a few editors I've known in my career ...

Gotcha. Roger clear on that now. :)

[fev]

Yeah, I think that's the problem -- there is a camp that's trying to control the debate by setting itself apart as the voice of authority. But in the main, that's the camp of stylebooks and journalism texts, not of descriptive language science.

What the Log folks do is sort of the core of the whole objectivity thing. They look at stuff, describe and categorize it, lay out the rules by which all that is done, and then draw inferences from what they see and measure. If you think you'll come to a different conclusion by measuring the same stuff again -- well, that's sort of the point of testable hypotheses. When you can make a better and more parsimonious fit from the data, go right ahead. That's how the empirical method works.

What the texts and stylebooks tend to do is argue from authority: this usage is correct, because I'm the Great and Powerful Oz and I say so. If you read the Zwicky post that Dan linked to back at the outset of this thread, that's exactly what Zwicky is trying to contradict. One of his examples is "since." APA style forbids using "since" to mean "because" on grounds that it's ambiguous and thus not precise enough for "science" (APA isn't AP, but stylebooks tend to have that WTF air about their pronouncements).

Zwicky's point is that such a claim -- certainly a claim to be the sort of arbiter "through which all differences of opinion must be settled" -- doesn't hold up in the face of the evidence. But he's not telling you what to do. He's telling you that if somebody's trying to demoralize you with a false claim, you not only "should know better," but you probably do.

I really do think that's the sort of view we ought to encourage. If more people looked at language objectively and fewer people lived in fear of patently nonsensical prescriptions they remember from their basic reporting class, we'd all have more time to spend making the writing good and the facts ironclad.

[LisaMc]

If more people looked at language objectively and fewer people lived in fear of patently nonsensical prescriptions they remember from their basic reporting class, we'd all have more time to spend making the writing good and the facts ironclad.

Amen to that.

[dfisher]

Yeah, those nonsensical prescriptions, I fear, come at least partly from journalism's desire to be "loved" on campus. The late James Cary had a wonderful retrospective on journalism education along with the argument that putting it in the social sciences was one of the worst things that could have happened.

I invite you to read it.

He argues it should be in the humanities, and were it, perhaps these kinds of absolutist arguments would be more readily avoided. (Oh, of course we'd argue about something else, that's our nature.)

But thanks to Mencken and others we have been "tarred" with the brush of science. The term alone carries some sense of certainty and pronouncement. After all, in all the "sciences," 2+2 always =4, etc.

So in the desire to be accepted within the other sciences/social sciences, I think we have created this need and framework for testable absolutes. As I've written here before, I sense some "teaching envy" -- why that physicist can just go into his frosh/soph classes and make a few pronouncements that X=Y, produce a multiple choice test, and go on about his or her "real" job, the one by which all academics are judged -- research.

Compare that with the poor J-prof confronted with a fresh-faced group of writing students for whom the mysteries of the comma may forever remain mysterious. Why, the temptation to create some absolutes, right or wrongs, is just too great.

(And that J-prof's research will also be more likely judged more by "scientific" standards than by those of the humanities - there's a reason "quants" dominate most faculties over "quals.")

Using social sciences to advance our reporting is great But I think the irresistible application of selected "scientific" techniques to teaching journalistic writing is an academic culture issue and is what produces and prolongs these arguments. (Augmented, of course, by an industry that for decades saw itself more as a rigid assembly line needing conformity rather than innovation.)

Read some more here http://commonsensej.blogspot.com/2008/0 ... ampus.html

[editer]

Interesting post, Doug. Thanks.

I can't resist:

[dfisher]

Fantastic!

[editer]

(And that J-prof's research will also be more likely judged more by "scientific" standards than by those of the humanities - there's a reason "quants" dominate most faculties over "quals.")

(Anyone in grad school should check out Piled Higher and Deeper, by the way.)

[Dan Puckett]

Arnold Zwicky had a new post on potential ambiguity yesterday on Language Log; the art with it is priceless.

It's a bit long, but it's worth reading. And it contains this:

[In advance: I am certainly not down on copy editors in general. I've had several bad experiences of my own, and I've heard much worse from others. But I've also been well served by excellent copy editors, and I've even spent some time being one. (By the way, I also have a growing fund of stories from copy editors suffering under the thumbs of bosses who are unreasonable about language matters.)]