Today I have a guest post about rules and style choices at Andy Hollandbeck's blog Logophilius. Go take a look, and while you’re there, check out the rest of his site.

Lately there’s been an article going around titled “The Real George Zimmerman’s Really Bad Grammar”, by Alexander Nazaryan. I’m a week late getting around to blogging about it, but at the risk of wading into a controversial topic with a possibly tasteless post, I wanted to take a closer look at some of the arguments and analyses made in the article.

The first thing that struck me about the article is the explicit moralization of grammar. At the end of the first paragraph, the author, a former English teacher, says that when he forced students to write notes of apology, he explained to them that “good grammar equaled a clean conscience.” (This guy must’ve been a joy to have as a teacher.)

But then the equivocation begins. Although Nazaryan admits that Zimmerman “has bigger concerns than the independent clause”, he nevertheless insists that some of Zimmerman’s errors “are both glaring and inexcusable”. Evidently, quitting one’s job and going into hiding for one’s own safety is no excuse for any degree of grammatical laxness.

Nazaryan’s grammatical analysis leaves something to be desired, too. He takes a quote from Zimmerman’s website—“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is that good men do nothing”—and says, “Why does Zimmerman insert an absolutely needless comma between subject (granted, a complex one) and verb? I can’t speculate on that, but he seems to have treated ‘is that good men do nothing’ as a nonrestrictive clause that adds extra information to the sentence.” This sort of comma, inserted between a complex subject and its verb, used to be completely standard, but it fell out of use in edited writing in the last century or two. It’s still frequently found in unedited writing, however.

I’m not expecting Nazaryan to know the history of English punctuation conventions, but he should at least recognize that this is a thing that a lot of people do, and it’s not for the reason that he suspects. After all, in what sense could the entire predicate of a sentence be a “nonrestrictive clause that adds extra information”? He’s actually got it backwards, in a sense: it’s the complement clause of the subject—“necessary for the triumph of evil”—that’s being set off, albeit with a single, unpaired comma. (And I can’t resist poking fun at the fact that he says “I can’t speculate on that” and the immediately proceeds to speculate on it.)

Nazaryan does make some valid points—that Zimmerman may be overreaching in his prose at times, using words and constructions he hasn’t really mastered—but the whole exercise makes me uncomfortable. (Yes, I have mixed feelings about writing this post myself.) Picking grammatical nits when one man has been killed and another charged with second-degree murder is distasteful enough; equating good grammar with morality makes me squirm.

This is not to say that there is no value in editing, of course. This recent study found that editing contributes to the readers’ perception of the value and professionalism of a story. I did a small study of my own for a class a few years ago and found the same thing. A good edit improves the professional appearance of a story, which may make readers more likely to trust or believe it. However, this does not mean that readers will necessary see an unedited story as a mark of guilt.

Nazaryan makes his thesis most explicit near the end, when he says, “The more I think about this, the more puzzling it becomes. Zimmerman is accused of being a careless vigilante who played fast and loose with the law; why would he want to give credence to that argument by playing fast and loose with the most basic laws of grammar?” I’m sorry, but who in their right minds—who other than Alexander Nazaryan, that is—believes that petty grammatical violations can be taken as a sign of lawless vigilantism?

But wait—there’s still an out. According to Nazaryan, all Zimmerman needs is a good copyeditor. Of course, the man has quit his job and is begging for donations to pay for his legal defense and living expenses, but I guess that’s irrelevant. Obviously he should’ve gotten his priorities straight and paid for a copyeditor first to obtain grammatical—and thereby moral—absolution.

Nazaryan squeezes in one last point at the end, and it’s maybe even more ridiculous than his identification of clean grammar with a clean conscience: “One of the aims of democracy is that citizens are able to articulate their rights in regard to other citizens and the state itself; when one is unable to do so, there is a sense of collective failure—at least for this former teacher.” You see, bad grammar doesn’t just indicate an unclean conscience; it threatens the very foundations of democracy.

I’m feeling a sense of failure too, but for entirely different reasons than Alexander Nazaryan.

I’m sharing my advice with aspiring superb writers in partnership with Grammarly grammar checker.

This isn’t going to be my typical sort of post, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to reflect on my own writing and the lessons I’ve learned from graduate school and from working on my own blog. There’s no foolproof formula that you can follow to ensure better writing, because everyone’s different and every piece of writing is different, but there are some general principles that have helped me and will likely help others too. I’m going to focus most on academic writing, but the principles are probably applicable to a lot of different genres.

Read

The first thing to do is read a lot. Read widely and deeply—newspapers, magazines, books, and blog posts, fiction and nonfiction. Read stuff just for fun, and read stuff that makes you think. Read stuff that challenges your opinions.

Try to engage with what you read, too; don’t just read passively. Pay attention to what works and what doesn’t. I’ve found this especially helpful for academic work. Try to evaluate whatever arguments the author is making; can you think of reasons why the author might be wrong, or can you see an aspect of the argument that they’ve overlooked? Spotting a weakness in someone else’s article or a gap in current research can provide you with a great jumping-off point for your own work.

Doing all of this will expose you not only to a wide range of ideas but also to different ways of expressing ideas—new words and phrases, new rhetorical strategies—that you can start to add to your writer’s toolkit.

Research

My first semester of grad school was a rather rude awakening. For one of my classes, I had to find, read, and give hundred-word summaries on thirty articles within about a month. Now that doesn’t sound so bad, but at the time it was just about overwhelming. As an undergraduate, I’d hardly ever had to do library research, so I simply didn’t know where to start. I knew how to find books, but finding good articles was something new. I felt like I’d been tossed in the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim.

It was rough, but I managed to get my head above water and write a decent paper at the end of the semester. But more importantly, I’d learned some valuable research skills that have served me well throughout the rest of my grad school experience. Even outside of academia, knowing how to research will allow you to explore subjects in much greater depth.

Take Notes

I’ll admit it: all through grade school and college, I was a terrible note-taker. I have a good enough memory that I never really needed to take notes in class, but I’ve found that taking notes as I read is one of the best things I can do for my own writing. Not only am I able to jot down a lot of quotes and citations that come in handy later, but it helps me better reflect on what I’m reading.

Even if you’re just blogging and not writing term papers, taking notes or keeping a list of interesting links can provide you with inspiration.

Practice

The only way to get good at writing is to do a lot of it. Maybe there are some truly gifted people out there who can sit down at a keyboard for the first time and bang out the great American novel, but for everyone else, no matter what their field or genre, good writing takes a lot of work. As the author Orson Scott Card says,

You learn more from writing a 100,000-word novel than from any number of classes. (Except, of course, the ones I teach.) (OK, I was including them as well.)

I also tell my students that every writer has to produce ten thousand pages of pure drivel. Some people have to write all ten thousand pages before they produce anything good. Some of us are luckier and get to have our lousy pages spread out over our whole career, so we can be earning money along the way.

Edit

This is one of my greatest weaknesses: I hate editing my own work. By the time I’m finished writing something, I usually don’t want to look at it anymore. But I’ve found that it’s best to sit on it for a few days and then take another look at it. If you start editing it immediately, you’re more likely to overlook your own errors; your ideas are still fresh in your mind, so your mental autocorrect takes over. Come back a few days later, though, and you’ll see it with fresh eyes. And if you can, get someone else to look over your work for you too.

Engage

This is something I’ve found especially helpful with my blogging. For the first few years, I blogged in fits and starts, sometimes going several months between posts. When you don’t post, nobody reads your blog, which saps your motivation to post. I finally broke the cycle after joining Twitter. Suddenly I’m able to interact much more closely with lots of interesting people, including fellow editors, linguists, lexicographers, and others. I’ve discovered some other great blogs that I now read regularly. Stuff I read on or via Twitter has often served as the inspiration for my own posts, and as I’ve posted more regularly, my readership has grown.

Final Thoughts

As I said above, there’s no secret formula for good writing, and even general tips like these might not work for everyone, especially if you’re writing in a completely different field. And I know that this is a bit of a departure from what I normally post, but hopefully it’ll be helpful to someone out there.

In case you haven’t heard, it’s National Grammar Day, and that seemed as good a time as any to reflect a little on the role of evidence in discussing grammar rules. (Goofy at Bradshaw of the Future apparently had the same idea.) A couple of months ago, Geoffrey Pullum made the argument in this post on Lingua Franca that it’s impossible to talk about what’s right or wrong in language without considering the evidence. Is singular they grammatical and standard? How do you know?

For most people, I think, the answer is pretty simple: you look it up in a source that you trust. If the source says it’s grammatical or correct, it is. If it doesn’t, it isn’t. Singular they is wrong because many authoritative sources say it is. End of story. And if you try to argue that the sources aren’t valid or reliable, you’re labelled an anything-goes type who believes we should just toss all the rules out the window and embrace linguistic anarchy.

The question is, where did these sources get their authority to say what’s right and wrong?

That is, when someone says that you should never use they as a singular pronoun or start a sentence with hopefully or use less with count nouns, why do you suppose that the rules they put forth are valid? The rules obviously haven’t been inscribed on stone tablets by the finger of the Lord, but they have to come from somewhere. Every language is different, and languages and constantly changing, so I think we have to recognize that there is no universal, objective truth when it comes to grammar and usage.

David Foster Wallace apparently fell into the trap of thinking that there was, unfortunately. In his famous Harper’s article “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage,” he quotes the introduction to The American College Dictionary, which says, “A dictionary can be an “authority” only in the sense in which a book of chemistry or of physics or of botany can be an “authority”: by the accuracy and the completeness of its record of the observed facts of the field examined, in accord with the latest principles and techniques of the particular science.”

He retorts,

This is so stupid it practically drools. An “authoritative” physics text presents the results of physicists’ observations and physicists’ theories about those observations. If a physics textbook operated on Descriptivist principles, the fact that some Americans believe that electricity flows better downhill (based on the observed fact that power lines tend to run high above the homes they serve) would require the Electricity Flows Better Downhill Theory to be included as a “valid” theory in the textbook—just as, for Dr. Fries, if some Americans use infer for imply, the use becomes an ipso facto “valid” part of the language.

The irony of his first sentence is almost overwhelming. Physics is a set of universal laws that can be observed and tested, and electricity works regardless of what anyone believes. Language, on the other hand, is quite different. In fact, Wallace tacitly acknowledges the difference—without explaining his apparent contradiction—immediately after: “It isn’t scientific phenomena they’re tabulating but rather a set of human behaviors, and a lot of human behaviors are—to be blunt—moronic. Try, for instance, to imagine an ‘authoritative’ ethics textbook whose principles were based on what most people actually do.”^[1]

Now here he hits on an interesting question. Any argument about right or wrong in language ultimately comes down to one of two options: it’s wrong because it’s absolutely, objectively wrong, or it’s wrong because arbitrary societal convention says it’s wrong. The former is untenable, but the latter doesn’t give us any straightforward answers. If there is no objective truth in usage, then how do we know what’s right and wrong?

Wallace tries to make the argument about ethics; sloppy language leads to real problems like people accidentally eating poison mushrooms. But look at his gargantuan list of peeves and shibboleths on the first page of the article. How many of them lead to real ethical problems? Does singular they pose any kind of ethical problem? What about sentential hopefully or less with count nouns? I don’t think so.

So if there’s no ethical problem with disputed usage, then we’re still left with the question, what makes it wrong? Here we get back to Pullum’s attempt to answer the question: let’s look at the evidence. And, because we can admit, like Wallace, that some people’s behavior is moronic, let’s limit ourselves to looking at the evidence from those speakers and writers whose language can said to be most standard. What we find even then is that a lot of the usage and grammar rules that have been put forth, from Bishop Robert Lowth to Strunk and White to Bryan Garner, don’t jibe with actual usage.

Edward Finegan seizes on this discrepancy in an article a few years back. In discussing sentential hopefully, he quotes Garner as saying that it is “all but ubiquitous—even in legal print. Even so, the word received so much negative attention in the 1970s and 1980s that many writers have blacklisted it, so using it at all today is a precarious venture. Indeed, careful writers and speakers avoid the word even in its traditional sense, for they’re likely to be misunderstood if they use it in the old sense”^[2] Finegan says, “I could not help but wonder how a reflective and careful analyst could concede that hopefully is all but ubiquitous in legal print and claim in the same breath that careful writers and speakers avoid using it.”^[3]

The problem when you start questioning the received wisdom on grammar and usage is that you make a lot of people very angry. In a recent conversation on Twitter, Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, said, “You would not believe (or maybe you would) how much grief I’m getting for saying ‘data’ can sometimes be singular.” I responded, “Sadly, I can. For some people, grammar is more about cherished beliefs than facts, and they don’t like having them challenged.” They don’t want to hear arguments about authority and evidence and deriving rules from what educated speakers actually use. They want to believe that there’s some deeper truths that justify their preferences and peeves, and that’s probably not going to change anytime soon. But for now, I’ll keep trying.

1. ^[1] David Foster Wallace, “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage,” Harper’s Monthly, April 2001, 47. ↩
2. ^[2] “Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). ↩
3. ^[3] Edward Finegan, “Linguistic Prescription: Familiar Practices and New Perspectives,” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2003) 23, 216. ↩

If you’ve ever had to learn a foreign language, you may have struggled to memorize plural forms of nouns. German, for example, has about a half a dozen ways of forming plurals, and it’s a chore to remember which kind of plural each noun takes. English, by comparison, is ridiculously easy. Here’s how it works for nearly every English noun: add -s to the end. Sometimes you need to insert an e before the s, and sometimes you need to change a preceding y to ie, but that’s the rule in a nutshell.

Of course, there are still plenty of exceptions: a couple that end in -en (oxen and the strange double plural children), a handful of umlaut plurals (man–men, foot–feet, mouse–mice, etc.), some uninflected plurals (usually for domesticated or game animals, such as sheep, deer, and so on), and a plethora of foreign borrowings (particularly from Latin and Greek) that often follow rules from their donor languages but occasionally don’t. There are a few other oddballs—like person–people, for example—but nearly every English count noun fits into one of these categories.

But there’s one plural that doesn’t fit into any of these categories, because it’s been caught for centuries in a strange limbo between count nouns, which take plural forms, and mass nouns, which don’t. It’s dice. If you need a refresher, mass nouns generally refer to things that are not discrete, such as milk or oil, though some refer to things that are made of discrete pieces “whose indivual identities are not usually important to us,” as Arnold Zwicky put it in this Language Log post—words like corn or rice. You could count the individual grains or kernels if you wanted to, but why would you ever want to?

And this is how dice slipped through the cracks of language change. Originally, die was a regular noun that formed its plural by adding an s sound to the end. (For the moment, let’s leave aside the issue of spelling, because Middle and Early Modern English spelling was anything but standard.) At some point in the history of English, the final -s in plurals was voiceless, meaning that it was always pronounced with an s sound, not a z sound. But then that changed, probably sometime in the 1500s, so that the final -s was always voiced—that is, pronounced as a z—unless it followed a voiceless sound. Strangely, this sound change seems to have affected only the plural and possessive -s endings and not other word-final s‘s.

But around that time, we start seeing the plural of die, when referring to those little cubes with pips used for games and whatnot, spelled as dice (and similar forms). In Modern English spelling, the final -s on a plural can be either voiced or voiceless, depending on the preceding word, but -ce is always voiceless. As the regular plural ending was becoming voiced for many many words, it remained voiceless in dice. Why?

Well, apparently because people had stopped thinking of it as a plural and started thinking of it as a mass noun, much like corn and rice, so they stopped seeing the s sound on the end as the plural marker and started perceiving it as simply part of the word. Singular dice can be found back to the late 1300s, and when the sound change came along in the 1500s and voiced most plural -s endings, dice was left behind, with its spelling altered to show that it was unequivocally voiceless. In other senses of the word, die was still thought of as a regular count noun, so its plural forms ended up as dies.*

Dice wasn’t the only word passed over in this way, though; truce (originally the plural of true, meaning “pledge” or “oath”), bodice (plural of body), and pence (a contracted plural form of penny) come to us the same way. Speakers subconsciously reanalyzed these words as mass nouns or singular count nouns, so their final s sounds stayed voiceless. Similarly, once, twice, and thrice were originally genitive forms, but they ceased to be thought of as such and consequently retained their voiceless sounds, respelled with ce.

But the strange thing is that whereas the words mentioned above made the transition to mass nouns or new singular count nouns, usage of dice has been split for centuries. We’ve never fully made the switch to thinking of dice as a mass noun, used regardless of the actual number of the things, because, unlike rice or corn, we do frequently care about the number of dice being used. Instead of a true mass noun, it’s become an uninflected count noun—one dice, two dice—for many people, though it exists alongside the original singular die. But singular dice is rare in print, because we’re told that it’s properly one die, two dice, even though some dictionaries note that singular dice is much more frequent in gaming than die.

So where does that leave us? You can go with singular die and possibly be thought of as something of a pedant, or you can go with singular dice and possibly be thought of as a little ignorant. As for me, I usually use singular die and feel twinges of self-loathing when I do so; I haven’t had the heart to correct my boys when they use singular dice.

*For more on the reconstruction of the plural ending in English, see the section on the English plural suffix in the chapter “Reconstruction” in Language History: An Introduction, by Andrew L. Sihler (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000).

Yesterday I heard an interesting construction that I’ve only heard of once before. Several months ago a coworker of mine was talking about a family reunion she’d been to, at which one of her cousins had offered her an apple and said, “Here’s you an apple.” I’d never heard anything like it before, but I’d completely forgotten about it until I heard it in person yesterday.

I decided to do a little research and see what I could find about the construction, but I came up mostly dry. Mark Liberman mentioned it in a Language Log post on personal datives but didn’t provide any further explanation. It was also mentioned, again without explanation, in a 1946 article in American Speech, “‘Swarp’ and Some Other Kentucky Words”.

Then there’s Here’s You a Blog, so named because the author encountered the construction in Kentucky and liked it. I also found this forum discussion, which includes some speculation on its distribution and origins. It sounds like it’s most common in the Southern US, especially the Gulf Coast, though I just heard it here in Utah, and my coworker heard it around here, too—her cousins apparently live about ten or fifteen minutes away from me. Perhaps it’s a little like the needs + past participle construction in that it’s especially frequent in one region (namely western Pennsylvania and Ohio) but can be found throughout most of the United States.

But while the needs + past participle construction apparently comes from Scottish, I can’t find any evidence about where here’s you a comes from. It doesn’t sound like German to me (though my German is certainly not good enough to say for certain), and though I suppose it could be a Scotch-Irish construction, my three weeks of trying to teach myself Scottish weren’t enough to give me any clue on this.*

What I find most interesting about this construction is that it’s a little different from both regular dative constructions in English, such as I gave him a book or He baked her a cake, and personal datives, such as I love me some ice cream or He caught him a fish. The regular dative appears with ditransitive verbs, that is, verbs that take both direct and indirect objects. The dative is the indirect object and is typically the recipient of the direct object. So in I gave him a book, him is the indirect object, receiving the book, the direct object. Dative pronouns can usually be moved to a prepositional phrase with to or for, as in I gave a book to him or He baked a cake for her.

With personal datives, the dative pronoun is coreferential with the subject—that is, the dative pronoun refers to the same entity as the subject—and in some cases can be replaced with a reflexive pronoun, as in He caught himself a fish. Note that this doesn’t work in many cases—*I love myself some ice cream is just flat-out strange if not ungrammatical. Generally, though, this kind of dative works much like the standard dative; it appears after a transitive verb and shows that the subject is in some way receiving or benefitting from the direct object. While not standard English, the personal dative is apparently fairly common in Southern and Appalachian English.

But here’s you a doesn’t use a transitive verb; it uses an intransitive verb—a copula verb, to be more specific—with a dummy subject. That is, though here fills the subject role of the sentence, it’s essentially a placeholder to call attention to what comes after the verb. And whereas the dative in the personal dative is coreferential with the subject, with here’s you a it is not, because there’s no real subject for you to refer to. What’s more, intransitive verbs—especially copula verbs like be—don’t take objects, but here we have one that seems to have an indirect object.**

So syntactically, there’s no real person or thing that is giving the direct object to the indirect object, and there’s no real action of giving something to someone. But as with some standard datives, this one can be paraphrased with for you. Just as we can transform He baked her a cake into He baked a cake for her, we could turn Here’s you an apple into Here’s an apple for you. This particular kind of dative is called a benefactive dative, meaning that something is being done for or on behalf of someone.

I still don’t feel like I know what’s going on with this construction, and unless I missed something in my searching, it seems that virtually nothing has been written about it yet. Do any of my readers happen to know more about it? Has anyone else heard it, and if so, where?

*Though now I can say such useful phrases as “Halò, Ciamar a tha thu? Tha gu math, tapadh leat. Tha mi a fuireach anns an taigh-òsda.” I’m sure that’ll come in really handy the next time I’m in the Scottish highlands.

**In the Language Log post referenced above, Liberman quotes Laurence Horn as saying that personal datives aren’t actually indirect object and that “they are not arguments at all, but non-subcategorized pronouns.” I don’t know enough syntax to really understand what this means; maybe someone will help out in the comments.

The other day a friend of mine complained about the use of the phrase “most-awarded” in a commercial for the Jeep Cherokee, which called it the “most-awarded SUV ever.” It bothered him, he said, because “they are saying lots of Cherokees get given away as awards, but that’s not what they mean.” I was surprised—I thought it was pretty clear that it meant “the SUV that has been given the most awards”—but several other people chimed in to say that they read it the other way—the SUV most given as an award. One person suggested that it was just another example of advertisers bastardizing the language, while another thought that it was an attempt to be funny by saying one thing but meaning another. And of course the question came up, “Can you correctly say that something has been ‘awarded’ if it is not the award?

There’s absolutely nothing incorrect about it, though it is technically ambiguous. The problem is that in this instance, “awarded” is a passive construction (technically a reduced one), meaning that what is normally an object has been moved to subject position. But it’s ambiguous because “awarded” is ditransitive, which means that it can take both a direct and an indirect object. Most transitive verbs (that is, verbs that take objects) can take only one object, as in “The boy kicked the ball,” but some can take two, as in “The boy gave his friend the ball.” In both sentences, the ball is the direct object, but in the second sentence, we also have an indirect object, his friend.

The same holds for the verb award—you award something to someone (or something), like “The committee awarded him (indirect object) the Nobel Prize (direct object)” or “Car and Driver awarded the Cherokee (indirect object) SUV of the Year (direct object).” (I don’t know if they actually did.) To put the sentence in the passive voice, we can move either one of the objects to subject position, giving us either “The Cherokee was awarded SUV of the Year (by Car and Driver)” or “SUV of the Year was awarded to the Cherokee (by Car and Driver).”

The structural ambiguity comes in when you turn a sentence like this into a reduced passive, as in “most-awarded SUV.” The adjectival phrase “most-awarded” derives from the fuller passive clause “The Cherokee was awarded the most.” Structurally speaking, because award is ditransitive, this could derive from something like either “The Cherokee was awarded to people the most” or “The Cherokee was awarded the most awards.” (Ignore the awkward repetition of the latter; we’re just interested in the structure here, not in elegance.)

Put back into the active voice, this could be either “(Someone) awarded the Cherokee to the most people” or “(Someone) awarded the Cherokee the most awards.” (In either case, it’s not relevant who the subject is, especially since it’s presumably multiple someones.) In the first sentence, the Cherokee is being given as an award; in the second, it’s receiving the awards.

At first, my intuition was that there was something strange about giving a car as an award; it could be a reward or a prize, but in my mind an award is something like the Nobel Prize or an Academy Award or some sort of cash prize. But then I remembered the infamous leg lamp from A Christmas Story, which the father repeatedly describes as “a major award.” So obviously an award could be something other than a medal or a cash amount.

Corpus data wasn’t very helpful, either. COCA gives only five hits for “most awarded,” but all of them support my reading—”the SUV that has received the most awards”—by making the subject the recipient of the award, not the thing being awarded to someone. The Google Books corpus provides more hits, and though most of them still use the “has received the most awards” sense, there’s a little more variation here, with some employing the “most given as an award” sense, such as “The Nobel Prize in physics is the most awarded of all the five prize categories.”

Next I turned to Twitter to solve the argument. I wrote, “Help me settle an argument: Does ‘most-awarded SUV’ mean ‘SUV most given as an award’ or ‘SUV that has received the most awards’?” The results were not terribly helpful. Out of five responses, three voted for “most given as an award” and two voted for “has received the most awards,” though one noted that either was possible.

Honestly, I was baffled, though I think there’s something of an answer in here somewhere. In most of the examples I came across in the corpora, it’s very clear from context what the award is and who or what is receiving it. If I tell you that Schindler’s List is the most-awarded movie in history (at least it was in 1994, when one of the corpus examples was written), you know that the movie received awards, not that someone received a movie as an award. And if I tell you that the PhD is the most-awarded degree, you know that someone is receiving the degree, not that the degree is receiving an award.

But with a car, it’s more ambiguous. Cars can receive awards, and people can presumably receive cars as awards. And although I think it’s clear that the first meaning is intended, a lot of people are irked by it or don’t get the intended meaning at all.

The upshot of this is that it underscores the importance of researching points of usage before declaring an answer. At first I was convinced that I was clearly right and everyone else was wrong. But though my intuition coincides with the intended meaning, intuition alone isn’t enough to explain what’s going on. You need real-world data for that, and sometimes you find that the answer is not as simple as you thought.

Several weeks ago, Bob Scopatz asked in a comment about the word however, specifically whether it should be preceded by a comma or a semicolon when it’s used between two clauses. He says that a comma always seems fine to him, but apparently this causes people to look askance at him.

The rule here is pretty straightforward, and Purdue’s Online Writing Lab has a nice explanation. Independent clauses joined by coordinating conjunctions are separated by a comma; independent clauses that are not joined by coordinating conjunctions or are joined by what OWL calls “conjunctive adverbs” require a semicolon.

I’ve also seen the terms “transitional adverb” and “transitional phrase,” though the latter usually refers to multiword constructions like as a result, for example, and so on. These terms are probably more accurate since (I believe) words and phrases like however are not, strictly speaking, conjunctions. Though they do show a relationship between two clauses, that relationship is more semantic or rhetorical than grammatical.

Since however falls into this group, it should be preceded by a semicolon, though it can also start a new sentence. Grammar-Monster.com has some nice illustrative examples:

I am leaving on Tuesday, however, I will be back on Wednesday to collect my wages.
I am leaving on Tuesday; however, I will be back on Wednesday to collect my wages.
I am leaving on Tuesday. However, I will be back on Wednesday to collect my wages.

The first example is incorrect, while the latter two are correct. Note that “however” is also followed by a comma. (But would also work here, though in that case it would be preceded by a comma and not followed by one.)

Bob also mentioned that he sometimes starts a sentence with “however,” and this usage is a little more controversial. Strunk & White and others forbade however in sentence- or clause-initial position, sometimes with the argument that in this position it can only mean “in whatever way” or “to whatever extent.”

It’s true that however is sometimes used this way, as in “However it is defined, the middle class is standing on shaky ground,” to borrow an example from COCA. But this is clearly different from the Grammar-Monster sentences above. In those, the punctuation—namely the comma after “however”—indicates that this is not the “in whatever way” however, but rather the “on the contrary” or “in spite of that” one.

Some editors fastidiously move sentence-initial “howevers” to a position later in the sentence, as in I will be back on Wednesday, however, to collect my wages. As long as it’s punctuated correctly, it’s fine in either location, so there’s no need to move it. But note that when it occurs in the middle of a clause, it’s surrounded by commas.

It’s possible that sentence-initial however could be ambiguous without the following comma, but even then the confusion is likely to be momentary. I don’t see this as a compelling reason to avoid sentence-initial however, though I do believe it’s important to punctuate it properly, with both a preceding semicolon or period and a following comma, to avoid tripping up the reader.

In a nutshell, however is an adverb, not a true conjunction, so it can’t join two independent clauses with just a comma. You can either join those clauses with a semicolon or separate them with a period. But either way, however should be set off by commas. When it’s in the middle of a clause, the commas go on both sides; when it’s at the beginning of a clause, it just needs a following comma. Hopefully this will help Bob (and others) stop getting those funny looks.

This is just a reminder for those who volunteered to participate in my edited usage survey. I know I said the deadline was very flexible, but I’m at the point where I need to start moving things along. If you volunteered and haven’t returned your manuscript to me yet but would still like to participate, could you please return it to me by February 15th?

Also, if you haven’t volunteered yet but would like to, you can still do so (provided you get your results to me by the 15th). Just go to this page and fill out the form. I’ll send you a manuscript to edit, and then you can email it back to me when you’re done.

Thanks!

A few days ago on Twitter, John McIntyre wrote, “A reporter has used ‘comprises’ correctly. I feel giddy.” And a couple of weeks ago, Nancy Friedman tweeted, “Just read ‘is comprised of’ in a university’s annual report. I give up.” I’ve heard editors confess that they can never remember how to use comprise correctly and always have to look it up. And recently I spotted a really bizarre use in Wired, complete with a subject-verb agreement problem: “It is in fact a Meson (which comprise of a quark and an anti-quark). “So what’s wrong with this word that makes it so hard to get right?

I did a project on “comprised of” for my class last semester on historical changes in American English, and even though I knew it was becoming increasingly common even in edited writing, I was still surprised to see the numbers. For those unfamiliar with the rule, it’s actually pretty simple: the whole comprises the parts, and the parts compose the whole. This makes the two words reciprocal antonyms, meaning that they describe opposite sides of a relationship, like buy/sell or teach/learn. Another way to look at it is that comprise essentially means “to be composed of,” while “compose” means “to be comprised in” (note: in, not of). But increasingly, comprise is being used not as an antonym for compose, but as a synonym.

It’s not hard to see why it’s happened. They’ve extremely similar in sound, and each is equivalent to the passive form of the other. When “comprises” means the same thing as “is composed of,” it’s almost inevitable that some people are going to conflate the two and produce “is comprised of.” According to the rule, any instance of “comprised of” is an error that should probably be replaced with “composed of.” Regardless of the rule, this usage has risen sharply in recent decades, though it’s still dwarfed by “composed of.” (Though “composed of” appears to be in serious decline. I have no idea why). The following chart shows its frequency in COHA and the Google Books Corpus.

Though it still looks pretty small on the chart, “comprised of” now occurs anywhere from 21 percent as often as “composed of” (in magazines) to a whopping 63 percent as often (in speech) according to COCA. (It’s worth noting, of course, that the speech genre in COCA is composed of a lot of news and radio show transcripts, so even though it’s unscripted, it’s not exactly reflective of typical speech.)

What I find most striking about this graph is the frequency of “comprised of” in academic writing. It is often held that standard English is the variety of English used by the educated elite, especially in writing. In this case, though, academics are leading the charge in the spread of a nonstandard usage. Like it or not, it’s becoming increasingly more common, and the prestige lent to it by its academic feel is certainly a factor.

But it’s not just “comprised of” that’s the problem; remember that the whole comprises the parts, which means that comprise should be used with singular subjects and plural objects (or multiple subjects with multiple respective objects, as in The fifty states comprise some 3,143 counties; each individual state comprises many counties). So according to the rule, not only is The United States is comprised of fifty states an error, but so is The fifty states comprise the United States.

It can start to get fuzzy, though, when either the subject or the object is a mass or collective noun, as in “youngsters comprise 17% of the continent’s workforce,” to take an example from Mark Davies’ COCA. This kind of error may be harder to catch, because the relationship between parts and whole is a little more abstract.

And with all the data above, it’s important to remember that we’re seeing things that have made it into print. As I said above, many editors have to look up the rule every time they encounter a form of “comprise” in print, meaning that they’re more liable to make mistakes. It’s possible that many more editors don’t even know that there is a rule, and so they read past it without a second thought.

Personally, I gave up on the rule a few years ago when one day it struck me that I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen it used correctly in my editing. It’s never truly ambiguous (though if you can find an ambiguous example that doesn’t require willful misreading, please share), and it’s safe to assume that if nearly all of our authors who use comprise do so incorrectly, then most of our readers probably won’t notice, because they think that’s the correct usage.

And who’s to say it isn’t correct now? When it’s used so frequently, especially by highly literate and highly educated writers and speakers, I think you have to recognize that the rule has changed. To insist that it’s always an error, no matter how many people use it, is to deny the facts of usage. Good usage has to have some basis in reality; it can’t be grounded only in the ipse dixits of self-styled usage authorities.

And of course, it’s worth noting that the “traditional” meaning of comprise is really just one in a long series of loosely related meanings the word has had since it was first borrowed into English from French in the 1400s, including “to seize,” “to perceive or comprehend,” “to bring together,” and “to hold.” Perhaps the new meaning of “compose” (which in reality is over two hundred years old at this point) is just another step in the evolution of the word.