The Volokh Conspiracy

An interesting project, covered in this New York Times ArtsBeat item. An excerpt:

To demonstrate the validity of Twitter-based research, Mr. Russ searched through some 400,000 Twitter posts coming from identifiable locations and zeroed in on three different linguistic variables, starting with the regional distribution of “soda” vs. “pop” or “Coke,” something that has been well-studied by scholars and amateurs alike. Next, he tracked the use of “hella,” an intensifier (as in “hella boring”) that is associated with Northern California but whose regional distribution has only been examined anecdotally. Finally, he looked at the well-documented syntactic construction “needs X-ed” (as in “the car needs washed”), which is common in the Midwest and especially around Pittsburgh.

Mr. Russ’s results for carbonated beverages, plotted onto a Google map, track closely with previous research, with “pop” predominant from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest, “Coke” predominant in the South and “soda” ruling the Northeast and Southwest while also cropping up elsewhere. But his map for “hella” shows the word leap-frogging up the West Coast to Seattle (and, more puzzlingly, popping up in St. Louis and Kansas City).

Thanks to Donna Colin for the pointer.

In addition to the scores of specific words and phrases dissected in Lawtalk: The Unknown Stories Behind Familiar Legal Expressions, we also discuss more generally what may be the most ridiculed characteristic of legal language — its predilection for redundancy: “aid and abet,” “over and above,” “goods and chattels,” “ordered, adjudged, and decreed,” and so on and so forth. In law school it was explained to me that this was the result of combining words from Old English (like goods) with substantially synonymous words of French origin (like chattels) to assure comprehension in an age in which both languages were used in England, particularly in legal contexts.

But this common explanation doesn’t hold water. Aid and abet, for example, are both from French; over and above are both native English. In Lawtalk we point out a number of considerations that fostered — and in many cases still foster — the use of such phrases, such as the fear that omitting some customary word would open the door to an argument that some shade of meaning is not covered. A factor now mostly forgotten is that for centuries court clerks, and even some lawyers, were paid by the page — an approach unaccountably neglected in the search for alternatives to billing by the hour, about which Beth Thornburg wrote in this space two days ago. And we emphasize an even more overlooked factor: that the use of redundant expressions is not specifically a lawyerly habit, but a common stylistic feature of general English, sometimes adding gravity (e.g. wrack and ruin) and sometimes whimsy (jot and tittle).

An e-mail the other day from Eugene Volokh, however, raises the interesting question of how redundant such phrases really are. He noted that abet historically referred to verbal encouragement rather than physical assistance, so that aiding and abetting actually covered two different types of participation in a crime.

The point is a good one. It is undoubtedly the case with any number of fixed phrases of this sort that the words have, or originally had, different meanings or different nuances, but the distinction blurs to the point of nonexistence when they are used together. For example, at least originally, a nook was an interior corner, and a cranny was a small hole or fissure in a wall. Possibly in some early uses the phrase nooks and crannies was a deliberate conjunction of two distinctly different types of small partially enclosed space, but it is doubtful that many people today are conscious of the distinction.

So it is with aid and abet. It is quite true that the original meaning of abet was to “urge on, incite.” The word is actually distantly related to bait as in bear-baiting, in which dogs were incited to attack a chained bear. It thus was distinguishable from aid in the narrow sense of providing concrete assistance. So it is no doubt true that the phrase aid and abet in the common law was chosen to cover the gamut of participatory conduct by a secondary actor in a crime.

But the concepts could never be entirely distinguished. Physical assistance encourages one to proceed with a task, and verbal encouragement helps one to accomplish it. That’s why football teams have cheerleaders.

Moreover, in law it seldom matters anyway whether one directly aids or only solicits or encourages the commission of a crime. Blackstone’s definition of “principal in the second degree” in 1769 (Commentaries, vol. 4, p. 34) was “he who is present, aiding, and abetting the fact to be done.” (Blackstone then immediately explained that “presence” may be constructive rather than actual.) And modern law likewise lumps the two together: the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code, § 2.06, defines an “accomplice” as including anyone who “(i) solicits . . . or (ii) aids or agrees or attempts to aid” the commission of the crime. The confederate of a second-story man would get nowhere by arguing that she merely requested the thief to steal certain jewelry but did not help him, or merely held the ladder but did not encourage him. The law doesn’t care. (On personification of “the law,” see our entry on “the law is a ass.”)

The impossibility and pointlessness of distinguishing “assistance” from “encouragement” led to a loss of the distinction, so that now the Oxford English Dictionary defines abet as “To encourage or assist (a person) to do something,” and gives examples as early as 1840 of aid and abet — and 1883 of abet alone — used in everyday nonlegal contexts in which only physical assistance is referred to.

Why, then, do we continue to use both words when just “abet” would do? The answer is that such redundancies — and we cite lots of examples in the book — are characteristic not just of legal writing but of English generally. Why else would Abraham Lincoln, in a public address celebrated as a model of concision, say that it was not just fitting but “altogether fitting and proper” to dedicate a portion of the Gettysburg battlefield as a cemetery for the fallen soldiers — and then go right on to use three virtually synonymous words to say that “in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground”?

And why the particular words “aid and abet,” and not, say, “help and encourage” or “assist and exhort”? Because if there’s one thing English likes even better than redundancy, it’s alliterative redundancy, like hale and hearty, safe and sound, and even, as in my opening sentence above, so on and so forth.

To borrow a legal expression: for the rest, residue, and remainder of what we have to say on this subject, see the book!

Thanks so much to Eugene Volokh for the invitation to guest blog about Lawtalk:  Unknown Stories Behind Familiar Legal Expressions this week.  Working on the book was tons of fun (and a dramatic lesson in the amount of historical material now available online), and my co-authors and I are enjoying the opportunity to share what we’ve learned with those who are interested.  Today’s topic is time, both in the sense of the provenance of legal expressions and as a measuring stick for legal fees.

In many cases, we discovered that law-related expressions are much older than people generally believe, and older than the earliest cites in the Oxford English Dictionary.  For example, I initially bought into the myth that Los Angeles police chief William H. Parker coined the phrase thin blue line in the 1950s (thanks, Wikipedia).  Not true:  in its laudatory metaphorical form (referring to the police as a line protecting the citizenry from crime), we traced this play on “thin red line” (referring to red-coated British soldiers in the Crimean War) back to a speech given by the Bishop of Coventry to the annual meeting of supporters of the Birmingham Police Institute in 1900–and as a literal reference to lines of policemen, all the way back to 1855.

A different kind of surprise, though, was how comparatively new the expression billable hour is.  In fact, billable in this sense is even now absent from the OED; it has the word only as a legal term meaning “liable to be served with a bill; indictable,” and its only cite is from 1579. Billable as an accounting term meaning ‘something one can bill for’ seems well established by the turn of the twentieth century, although LexisNexis shows the earliest case law use of this version of billable in a 1929 case, and the earliest billable hour (actually “non-billable hours”) in 1947 – and neither instance is about lawyers.

Lawyers didn’t always bill by the hour (and some still do not). Early twentieth century lawyers used various methods for billing clients. Some matters were billed at a flat rate, some on a percentage basis, and many used a method called value billing. Bills were sent only sporadically and were not itemized, noting only “for services rendered.”

By the 1920s, state and local bar associations began to publish minimum fee schedules, listing the appropriate charge for various kinds of legal matters.   For example, the schedule would “suggest” one fee for handling a real estate closing, another for drafting a will, and yet another for a contested divorce.  Lawyers ignored these schedules at their peril, as habitual under-charging could be treated as professional misconduct.

A mid-century movement toward “legal economics” marked a shift to charging for time rather than tasks.  In 1940, Reginald Heber Smith wrote four articles for the American Bar Association Journal advocating a more organized approach to law firm management. Among other things, he recommended monitoring and documenting lawyer productivity through “Daily Time Sheet” forms.

Then in 1957 the ABA created the Committee on Economics of Law Practice, and in 1958 went on a crusade to promote hourly billing with its pamphlet, The 1958 Lawyer and His 1938 Dollar.  This tract pointed out that lawyers who kept track of their time and billed clients accordingly made more money than those who did not. (It also noted that lawyers’ earnings had failed to keep up with those of doctors and dentists). The problem, said the ABA, was that by concentrating on “devotion to public interest,” lawyers were failing as businessmen, and that they should start recording and charging for their time, their “sole expendable asset.”  State bar associations responded, as when a committee of the Wisconsin State Bar calculated in 1959 that an average billing rate of $18 per hour was necessary to sustain a net return of $14,500 per year.

The ABA’s efforts continued into the 1960s.  The Committee published a series of pamphlets covering many phases of law practice management, culminating in the 1962 Lawyer’s Handbook.  In 1966 the President of the ABA noted that 35,000 lawyers had copies of the handbook, but he still worried that too many lawyers failed to use efficient practice methods to assure an “adequate economic return.”  It was during this period that billing by the hour gradually caught on, spreading from large firms to small ones, and by the late 1970s hourly billing became the norm.

The term billable hour seems to have crept into legal vocabulary only as its adoption as a billing method became established. A 1968 case is the first to use “billable hour” with respect to lawyers, and it uses quotation marks and defines the term. It seems likely, though, that bar association meetings and publications were the earliest adopters of this lingo, and those sources (including a law student letter to the editor) routinely used billable hour without explanation by the early 1970s.  As late as 1975, however, the author of an article in the journal Legal Economics still felt the need to explain “the ‘billable hour’ concept.”

Today the billable hour is very much in the news.  Just last week the online ABA Journal reported that a law firm associate claimed he was fired for refusing to fraudulently bill 3,000 hours a year, and its weekly survey question asked “How many hours will you bill in 2011?”

But has there really been much change?  A 2007 survey showed a slight increase in alternative billing methods, and the protracted economic recession that began in December of that year encouraged further rethinking of billing practices, with the result that some large law firms report using flat rate billing or other methods more often nowadays.  But the billable hour remained firmly entrenched. As one industry observer was quoted as saying in 2007, “alternative fees are like teenage sex. There are more people talking about it than doing it, and those that are doing it don’t know what they’re doing.”

A few thoughts — perhaps helpful to law review editors and authors — about what’s customary in American legal publications. [Added: My sense is that this is also customary in most other books and journals, but I can speak with the most confidence about the custom in legal publications.]

1. Place commas and periods inside quotation marks, e.g.,

The Court’s answer to this was “no.”

2. Place all other punctuation marks outside quotation marks, unless they are logically parts of the quotation. I have seen some departures from this where semicolons or question marks are involved, but my sense is that those departures remain rather rare exceptions in modern legal publications.

The Court’s answer to this was “no”; but two years later, the Court changed its mind.
Was the Court’s answer “yes” or “no”?
The Court’s response was, in essence, “Says who?” [The question mark is logically part of the quotation.]

3. Place footnote calls after all punctuation marks (other than em dashes), except if the footnote relates solely to a parenthetical, in which case place the call within the parentheses. I have likewise seen some departures from this, but again my sense is that they remain rare exceptions.

The Court disagreed.¹
The Court disagreed in the first case,² but then changed its mind.
The Court disagreed in the first case;³ but in the later case . . . .
The Court reversed (except as to the jurisdiction issue⁴), holding . . . .

See, for example, this Harvard Law Review article, including footnote calls 73 (p. 24) and 141 (p. 40).

The reasons for these practices are obviously not solely logic; they are chiefly aesthetics and custom (which are related, because once a custom is established many people will find adherence to the custom to be more aesthetically pleasing). Nonetheless, unless I’m mistaken, the practices are pretty well-settled, and editors risk annoying readers — and being inconsistent even within their own publications — if they depart from this custom.

I should note, by the way, that many people are quite opposed to the custom of placing periods and commas in quotation marks, even when the periods and commas don’t logically fall within the quoted material; as I understand it, the modern British style is indeed to place periods and commas within quotation marks only when they are themselves being quoted. But I don’t want to get into this debate here (see this Slate article for one view of the debate), or enter into a similar logical debate as to footnote calls. Rather, I’m just trying to report what the custom actually is, for those who feel they ought to follow the custom.

I should also note that it’s possible that I have misunderstood or incompletely described the custom, or missed a major and broadly accepted competing view. (Among other things, it’s not easy for me to use Westlaw or Lexis to quickly confirm my sense of the dominant view here; it would be much easier if the question had to do with rival spellings or phrase constructions, which are more readily searchable.) Please let me know if I have indeed erred in this respect.

Earlier this month, I blogged about assertionism — my label for usage claims that sound like prescriptivism, but are actually bare assertions: They don’t rely on any claims about what the (supposed) Linguistic Authorities say, on any detailed logical arguments, or on claims about allegedly superior clarity or precision; they just consist of a person’s bare assertions. And when one asks for evidence supporting the claim, all one gets is more bare assertions. Prescriptivists ought to dislike assertionism as much as descriptivists do, partly because assertionism often comes across as unintentional parody of prescriptivism.

Here’s an interesting example, which started on the wilful vs. willful thread. I started my post with, “A student saw ‘wilful’ used in an opinion, and asked whether it was a typo.” A commenter then responded that the sentence

does not conform to proper English usage. The “whether” indicates that what follows is speculative, requiring that the verb be rendered in the subjunctive mood. “Was” is always indicative.

And the commenter then gave several assertedly “proper renderings of the sentence,” the first of which was:

A student saw “wilful” used in an opinion, and asked whether it were a typo.

The trouble is that “whether it were” is nearly never used in modern American English, and while it was once a bit more common, it was never the dominant usage (either in American English or British English). Consider this Google Ngrams graph of the usage of “wondered whether it was” (blue) vs. “wondered whether it were” (red) — I used “wondered” just to better test the commenter’s assertion, which is limited to “speculative” uses:

The one problem with Google Ngrams is that it doesn’t show raw numbers, so when one of the terms is very rare compared to the other, it’s hard to find the ratio. I therefore did a Westlaw search through the USNEWS database (which contains many U.S. newspapers). The search for “wonder! #whether it was” yields 4812 results. The search for “wonder! #whether it were” yielded 8 results. That’s right: “whether it was” in this context is 600 times more common than the assertedly more “proper” “whether it were.”

Continue reading ‘If Only There Were No Assertionism’ »

Our readers likely know that I have many disagreements with prescriptivists when it comes to English usage. But while I have philosophical disagreements with prescriptivists in general, my main practical disagreements are with people who might best be labeled “assertionists” — people who don’t just say that prescriptions set forth by some supposed authorities define what is “right” in English, but who simply assert a prescription even in the face of what those supposed authorities say. Usage X is wrong, they say. Why? Because it violates this rule. What’s your authority for the proposition that this is a rule? Well, it violates the rule.

The recent exchange about starting sentences with “and,” “but,” or “or” offers an excellent example. I pointed out that this is common usage — including among prominent authors, in leading newspapers such as the New York Times, and in leading legal sources such as the opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court. I also noted that the supposed usage authorities that I checked do not in fact condemn it.

Yet some people still argued that such a usage is wrong, at least in “formal” writing (though you’d think that Supreme Court opinions would be classified as pretty formal). When I inquired why this might be so, I got three basic replies:

1. “I learned basic grammar long ago. A conjunction joins two related thoughts in a sentence.” But this is mere assertion. One can equally say that conjunctions (or at least the kind we’re discussing) “link units of equal status”; indeed, this is precisely what the Oxford English Grammar (1996) says. This could mean two words in a sentence, two clauses in a sentence, two sentences in a paragraph, or two paragraphs in a work; and indeed the Oxford English Grammar gives an example of a sentence that starts with “But,” without any objection.

Now one could try to dismiss such an authority (and I’ve heard many assertionists do that in other contexts) by saying that the authority is merely descriptivist, and that therefore we shouldn’t trust its claims. I don’t buy that argument, because I’m a descriptivist; but let’s accept it for a moment. Even if one dismisses the Oxford English Grammar as an authority for the proposition that conjunctions “link units of equal status” as opposed to just “two related thoughts in a sentence,” one still needs an authority for the contrary proposition. What is that authority?

2. One commenter did try to point to such an authority, writing,

I have a Ph.D. in linguistics and I taught grammar at a university for 20 years – for what it is worth. It is indeed a rule in formal English that you cannot begin a sentence with a conjunction. See grammar texts by Azar.

Formal English = written English in a formal context = English that is meant to be read in a formal context, e.g. academic research.

In conversation, however, you can start a sentence with a conjunction. Blogging is often intended to be conversational, so we see conjunctions at the beginning of sentences a lot. I do it in my own blog.

To be formal, use ‘also’ for ‘and’; use ‘however’, for ‘so’. Make sure you use commas.

Please note: Language changes. This is one of those areas of English that we see changing before our eyes. My children will know how to use ‘however’ and ‘thus’, and know how to punctuate them, but I don’t expect that their public schooled peers will.

So I got a text by Azar (Betty Schrampfer Azar). As best I can tell, Azar generally writes schoolbooks, so I got Fundamentals of English Grammar, a “developmental skills text for lower-intermediate and intermediate students of English as a second or foreign language.” And, sure enough, Azar does say that “Except in very formal writing, a conjunction can also come at the beginning of a sentence,” though without (as best I can tell) explaining what writing qualifies as “very formal.”

But Azar doesn’t explain the basis for her assertion, so it’s basically her word against the Oxford English Grammar’s, Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage, the Supreme Court, and others (at least unless “very formal writing” is such a vanishingly small category that none of the sources thought of noting the exception, and that Supreme Court opinions do not fit within it). Again, then, we have argument by assertion, with no explanation for why we should follow Azar rather than the others.

3. Finally, one of the commenters also argued, “My impression is that, in casual English, sentences beginning with conjunctions are usually incomplete sentences. However, they may contain complete thoughts with the missing words implied.” Now I think that functional arguments are often sound arguments for why we should avoid some usage (though not that the usage is “wrong”). But again this seems to me argument by assertion. The commenter thinks that sentences beginning with conjunctions (such as “but”) are usually incomplete sentences, but I don’t know of any evidence for that proposition. (Why would such sentences be incomplete more often than sentences that start with, say, “However” or “Moreover”?) Nor does the commenter offer argument in support of the more relevant proposition that we should avoid complete sentences beginning with “but” just because many such sentences are incomplete.

I’ve discussed this before, here, here, and here. But I thought it was worth noting, and worth breaking assertionism out as a separate category, and to call on people who make prescriptivist arguments to at least identify the supporting evidence or argument for their prescriptions — and to explain why this evidence or argument trumps the evidence or argument on the other side — rather than just relying on bare assertion.

Some people categorically criticize the passive voice, a criticism that Prof. Geoffrey Pullum (of Language Log) has long and colorfully condemned; his latest salvo is an excellent post in the Chronicle of Legal Education‘s Lingua Franca blog on the subject. (For my thoughts on the subject, see here.)

Some editors, for some reason, tend to try to change each though I use into an although. I don’t get it — both are fully standard, both are commonplace in edited legal prose, and have been for centuries. A quick Lexis NEWS;US database search reveals that “although” and “though” are roughly equally common today; and “though” is no newcomer, at least according to Google Ngrams, which reports that “though” was actually even more common in English-language books in the past.

Why change an author’s “though” into “although”? The only explanation that I can see is that some people think “though” is some sort of new and not-fully-standard shortening of “although.” But if that’s their belief, it’s an incorrect one: Both words have been used since the time of Middle English, and, as I’ve noted, “though” is used routinely in standard published prose. And while I agree that legal writing shouldn’t be informal to the point of being unprofessional (you won’t find any OMGs or ROTFLs in my articles), “though” is hardly slang or otherwise unusually casual.

In response to my post defending sentences that start with “and” and “but,” commenter ptt writes, “Or they’re called conjunctions for a reason. EV should create a new tag: Rules of English I Don’t Like.”

Actually, my claim in the post was that there is no rule of English against starting sentences with conjunctions. Educated writers at the highest levels routinely start sentences with conjunctions (I gave some examples in the post, but we can find many more). And even if one looks at Rules that are set by ostensible Authorities (I don’t, but of course prescriptivists do), I’m unaware of any consensus of authority in favor of a rule prohibiting conjunctions at the start of sentences. The commenter certainly doesn’t point to one.

The commenter does seem to appeal to logic, by apparently suggesting, in his first sentence, that conjunctions must connect together two parts of a sentence. But like many appeals to supposed logic when it comes to language, this appeal assumes the conclusion. The term “conjunction” does suggest that a word is connecting two things, but it doesn’t tell us that those two things must be parts of the same sentence. Why can’t a conjunction serve as a transition that logically connects two consecutive sentences?

So if you want to argue that some usage is wrong because you’re a prescriptivist and it violates some authoritative prescription, that’s fine: You won’t persuade descriptivists (except insofar as the prescription accurately captures common usage), but you might persuade other prescriptivists. But you still need to actually point to credible authorities that issue such a prescription, rather than just asserting that some usage is a violation of the “Rules of English” as you personally believe those rules to be.

I occasionally run across people — including law review editors — who seem to take the view that there’s something wrong with starting a sentence with “and,” “but,” or “or.” I don’t see any basis for that view. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage notes, this doesn’t violate any established usage or grammar practices. It’s commonplace in edited writing, including in legal writing; for instance, a Lexis search for caps(but) and date(> 1/1/2000) in the Supreme Court database found over 900 results since 2000, and a Lexis search for caps(but) and date(> 9/16/2011) in the New York Times database found over 1100 results in just the last week. Nor is this just something new; the Constitution contains sentences that begin with “and” and “but,” as do the works of Dickens and many others.

Moreover, starting a sentence this way is useful: An initial “and,” “but,” or “or” is a good transition that shows the relationship of this sentence to the previous one, with as little formality and complexity as possible. The usual alternatives, such as “however” or “moreover” strike me as stuffier, though sometimes “moreover” adds an emphasis that “and” doesn’t.

Now if you just find these locutions aesthetically displeasing, and want to avoid them in your own writing, there’s not much I can say about that. But I see no basis for faulting others’ use of them, or for editors’ trying to edit them out.

I’m losing my battle to keep the initial capital “I” in “the Internet.” I’m starting see references to “the internet” everywhere; the latest to fall seems to be The Economist (see headline from July 30: “An internet with Chinese characteristics” – I’m quite certain that it was “the Internet” up until quite recently).

It actually matters. I had a footnote in the first chapter of my “Jefferson’s Moose” book about why I was keeping it as “the Internet,” and the more I think about it, the more I think it matters — for our understanding of the Internet and its role in the world, which is surely something we need to understand.

Suppose we live someplace that only has one bookstore. You write to me: “I’m going to the bookstore; let’s meet there.” I understand what you mean — after all, there’s only one bookstore.

Now, suppose we live in a place with lots of bookstores. Now if you write “I’m going to the bookstore; let’s meet there,” I have no idea what you mean.

Finally, suppose we live in a place with lots of bookstores, but — it being a college town — it has one that is often referred to as “the Bookstore.” You know, the Bookstore. If you write “I’m going to the Bookstore,” I know where to meet you — it’s a way of designating one bookstore out of many.

There are a hundred million internets — or 82 million, or 461 million, or who knows how many. Ranging from little teeny-tiny ones (like the one that connects my home network to my service provider’s network) to big ones (the LAN in my law school building to the University network), to one really, really gigantic one. It would be nice to have a proper noun for that one, because we need to talk about it separately from all the others; it has many, many characteristics that distinguish it from all the others. The Bookstore.

[Update: A bunch of commenters suggest that because the smaller networks (e.g. home network, Univ. network, etc.) are known as "intranets," the problem I'm describing goes away.

So I'll repeat what I said. We have hundreds of millions of internets. There's one that's of particular interest. What we call it is a proper noun, whether that's "the Internet" or "Ellen" or what have you.]

Or suppose, with all the millions and millions of trees in the world, there was one that was 411 miles tall. Wow! Referring to that one as “the tree” doesn’t work — it won’t help us talk about how the Tree got to be so damned tall, and why the Tree is different from the other trees, and whether some virus might be attacking the Tree, and whether one of the other trees might supplant the Tree in height, and . . .

Back in 2002, I asked: “Why is ‘tasty’ good but ‘smelly’ bad?” Now there’s a linguistic attempt to answer this, in a book chapter titled — I kid you not — A Note on an Asymmetry in the Hedonic Implicatures of Olfactory and Gustatory Terms. The author’s main explanation seems to be,

[T]he things that we taste and the things that we smell differ systematically in how pleasant and unpleasant they are. The reason is that we have generally more control over what we put into our mouth than what enters our nose. If one guiding principle of our behavior is the maximization of pleasure, and if there are roughly equally many pleasant and unpleasant smells and tastes available, then we should draw more pleasure out of the sense that we can control, than out of the sense that we cannot control as easily. Consequently, what we taste will be more likely pleasant than what we smell.

Thanks to Prof. Kai von Fintel (Language Log) for the pointer.

I’m generally not an early adopter of such products, but this sounds interesting. For the original report, see here.

My Beloved and I saw an excellent production today of the “Comedy of Errors” at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC.  Late in the play, however, I noticed the usage of a word I had not heard before, and which, had I not been sitting Amidst the Words of the Bard, I would have taken for an ugly neologism.  Albeit an ugly neologism I might well have used; forsooth, such is the corrupting Influence of the Conspiracy upon me so to use Words of Mine Own Invention: O Fie, & Alackaday, &tc., &tc.

The word is “defeatured.” I note that WordPress spellcheck rejects it resolutely. It appears at Act 2, Scene 1:

By him not ruin’d? Then is he not the ground of my defeatures?  My decayed fair.  A sunny look of his would soon repair ...

“Defeatures” here, as in marred or decayed features, eg an aged face.  Interesting.  I rather like it.  I’ll be on the lookout for a place to work it into a post.  And conversation!

Yes, that was apparently the view among some grammarians in the late 1800s; see here for some examples. I did not know that! Here’s an example of such a condemnation:

This modern form ["is being ..."] is very seldom used among writers of the highest class.... “The house is being built” does not express what is intended; being built denotes existence in the state experssed by built; as, “Our house being built, we have now a home.” It would be better for those who are not satisfied with the well-established classical form ["The house is building"] to say, “The house is becoming built” — coming into the state expressed by built.

Thanks to Prof. Mark Liberman (Language Log) for pointing this out. (He reports that “the progressive passive [e.g., 'is being built' -EV] first appeared in the English language in the second half of the 18th century, replacing what historians of English grammar call the passival [e.g., 'is building' -EV].”

Today, of course, “the house is building” (or, to give another example offered as proper in the late 1800s, “While these arrangements were making”) is so rarely used that it is likely nonstandard, or at least highly unidiomatic, and “the house is being built” is fully standard. And we say “the house is being built” because we wisely adhere to Horace’s advice: Follow “the will of custom, in whose power is the decision and right and standard of language.”