SC is tempted to take up a collection to buy a tanker truck full of Maalox, so that it can be driven up to UC Santa Cruz and rescue Geoff Pullum before it's too late. Prof. Pullum is upset today about an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which semi-seriously defends the use of adjectives against their various and sundry critics, all self-proclaimed experts on English usage (Mark Liberman beat him to mentioning it, though). Prof. Pullum is at his best when working himself into a dyspeptic fit about other people's hypocrisies, and this time's no exception, although SC hopes that he didn't go all the way through The Elements of Style, muttering "there's an adjective on line 745...hmmm, 6th word on line 812 is an adjective...".
This reminded SC of an effort he read about last month, when Rachel commented about attempting to fit her writing into a style of English called "E-prime" by its backers, which is to say English without the verb "to be". What both cases have in common is that some feature of English is held to be undesirable, and that "good writing" is held to require eliminating this feature at all costs. (On an unrelated point, a belated thanks to Rachel for a well-written, extended discussion of the subtleties in translating "I love you" into Sindarin; SC had only expected a phrase or two.)
Singling out specific grammatical categories for scorn and derision seems to SC to be a dangerous task. Once you commit to eliminating a significant portion of the expressive power of a language, you're stuck with the problem of attempting to replicate the uses of that portion of the language with vocabulary and grammar that aren't intended for it. It's probably easier to commit to eliminating "be" from your language than adjectives, if only because the loss of a tense isn't as crippling as the loss of a whole lot of semantic features. But as a self-appointed commissar of English usage, SC thinks that committing to eliminating any part of your grammar is an overreaction to bad style. If SC were to drop all uses of the subjunctive and passive forms, it would make this blog an uninteresting read. Adjectives, meanwhile, are the lifeblood of SC's writing; without them, facts would no longer be amusing or nefarious -- they would just be. How boring. Two cheers for moderation in all things, stylistic tricks included (three would be...excessive).
E-prime sounds like the most utterly anal, boring, ignorant misuse of the language faculty since... since a very anal, boring thing.
I love the way Pullum hoes into those style guides.
There are people who want to codify into an imaginary logical style. Then there are people who understand how language works. Never the twain...
Posted by: NW | February 18, 2004 at 04:46 PM