Disagreeing to Agree

[A column that appeared in the September 2011 Vocabula Review.]

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I

s it just me, or have failures of subject-verb agreement been on the uptick recently? Here is an example from the New York Times:

*As Karen Dynan of the Brookings Institution has found, well over half of the decline in the nation’s debt levels are due to foreclosures and consumer credit write-downs . . .
(July 31, 2011)

And one from the Decatur Herald and Review, here in Illinois:

*A compromise solution, such as the one put together by the “Gang of Six” senators, have been rejected.
(July 31, 2011)

In the first case, “are” should be “is,” of course, to agree with the long noun phrase “well . . . levels”;   in the second, which leaps off the page, “have” should be “has,” to agree with “solution” [not “senators,” for pity’s sake!]

I keep poor notes, or I could furnish endless further examples, for I have been noticing this problem again and again. The blunder seems especially common in a situation that is admittedly a little tricky, when a linking verb joins a singular subject to a plural complement.

*The thing we truly care about are jobs, jobs, jobs.

*The weak point in the Democrats’ argument are the hundreds of broken promises that have brought us to this point.

Is! of course, and again, is! Handbooks, those great unused treasuries, explain that the verb must agree with the subject, not the complement: a fine, firm principle that carries the day even if the subject is so abstract that it seems neither plural nor singular in itself:

*What troubles Progressives are the many unexpected concessions the President made in the negotiations.

Not are, is!  But I have been encountering specimens like this one so often I suspect an increase in more than my own tendency to notice. To many people, it seems, the single-ness of the noun clause “what troubles Progressives” is less than obvious, or at any rate, less dispositive than the plural-ness of concessions.

There are many other troublesome and borderline cases, which the handbooks work through in a systematic way that is oddly satisfying to the teacher, though the students will soon be making faces if she actually tries to teach that chapter. Collective nouns cause trouble:

*The marching band have gone home.

*The buffalo herd migrate in the fall and spring.

But either sentence might be correct over in England, where usage differs, and the gang are less likely to be seen as a single lump. Compound subjects are a fruitful source of nuance and difficulty, requiring several pages of handbook discussion. Such prophylaxis notwithstanding, even as excellent a writer as Jeffrey Toobin can slip, in a brilliant article on Clarence Thomas in the August 29 New Yorker:

*Thomas wrote a concurring opinion, which laid out a template that he, and to some extent the Court, has since followed.

Toobin and his editor seem to be treating the bit between the commas as if it were a parenthetical, rather than noticing that “the Court” joins “he” as the other half of the verb’s compound subject. Their interpretation is interesting but wrong.

Elsewhere in the agreement chapter, indefinite pronouns pose special cases that have to be settled one by one — and of course some that keep coming unsettled. The handbooks and I favor none is, but none are seems be gaining ground. And the increasing use of they/them/their in a singular sense may be working back through the system to pluralize the indefinites, so that eventually we will face such horrors as nobody are and everybody have. (It will happen so gradually that, like frogs being  boiled, we hardly notice.)

But the most common source of subject-verb disagreement, by far, is the occurrence somewhere between those two elements of a noun that disagrees in number with the subject; that is, it’s plural if the subject is singular or vice versa. Here is an invented but I think fairly typical example:

*The fact that a small but determined minority of members can trample not just the wishes but the reasoned arguments of their colleagues for weeks on end give us cause for real concern.

The writer looks back from give/gives in search of the grammatical subject and  sees “weeks,” “colleagues,” “wishes,” and “members,” and his courage fails before he makes it to “fact.”  An argument for a revival of sentence diagramming, if you like: but were such missteps really rarer in the old days of more buttoned-down English classes?  My habit in such cases, back when I still read student papers for a living, was simply to circle the verb and the subject and connect them with a line, passing on without further comment, not greatly annoyed because, after all, this student was attempting a sentence of some complexity and should be encouraged. (Really. There is far too much Dick-and-Jane prose in undergraduate papers, taking ages to make the simplest points, fulfilling the length requirement before real thought has begun.)

But sentences like the two first quoted are more bothersome. Here is the second of them again:

*A compromise solution, such as the one put together by the “Gang of Six” senators, have been rejected.

In this case the English teacher, poor devil that he is, tired and wanting to get this batch done and watch a little Leno before bed, may take a moment nonetheless and scribble, “Solution HAS, of course,” or “Proofread more carefully,” or something still more icy and splenetic. If the heaviness of his own red strokes surprises him, he may then mutter that, for crying out loud, the error is so obvious that it seems deliberate.

Deliberate, yes: this, I want to say, is the crux of one’s irritation. Suspected volition changes the mistake from a sin to a heresy, from an accident to a challenge, from funny or pitiable to strangely troubling. Language proceeds by endless imitation; every sentence is a model for countless other sentences, and in that sense, whatever else we may be talking about, we are also talking about language itself. Like it or not, to say something is to take a stand on how that thing should be said. On this level of meta-communication, the speaker of our sample sentence is impudently and seductively whispering: Has, have, who cares? You get my meaning, don’t you? We don’t really need two forms of this verb.

Part of the trouble, as always, is that the Philistine has substantial reason on his side. Quick, try the following: change the sentence from present (or present-perfect) to simple past, but preserve the error.  You can’t!

A compromise solution, such as the one put together by the “Gang of Six” senators, had been rejected. [Fine.]

Compromise solutions, such as the one put together by the “Gang of Six” senators, had been rejected. [No problemo.]

You inevitably choose had because there is no competing form. In the past tense, to have and most other English verbs already dispense with the inflection that, in the third person present, reaffirms the number of the subject. Yet we get along fine without it, relying purely on syntax to tell us who does what. So why not do likewise in the present tense? Indeed, backwoods and inner city English already seem to have made this choice. The following are correct, or at least perfectly ordinary, on their own turf, though I would circle them without hesitation in a college paper:

He have all kinda trouble with that coon hound.

She meet with her boss today about that raise.

John discuss that all the time.

What troubles the teacher is not that the “obvious” error is illogical, but that it is all too logical, making its case, citing precedent, unsettling a fragile compromise that is, nonetheless, The Way We Are Doing Things Just Now. It is perceived insurgency that makes her grit her teeth: those old what-are-we-coming-to blues, that feeling that the language is about to unravel.

Linguists, of course, would tell her to relax. They mostly take an Olympian view, insisting that “change is normal” (as the case was put in a famous apologia for Webster’s Third New International Dictionary) and that we always deal with it just fine, indeed, quite brilliantly if we are not distracted by the false laws of the traditional grammarian. In the specific matter of subject-verb disagreements, linguists might rub their collective chin and point out that the few remaining inflected forms in English ultimately derive from the glorious eight-case system of Proto-Indo-European (c. 4000 BC), that nearly all Western languages have been dropping case endings ever since (down to six in classical Latin, then four in late Latin, on down to barely two in modern English), that no real harm or confusion ever comes from it (because speakers always adjust), and that, in short, you shouldn’t worry. These are fascinating, valid notions in their place, but their value to speakers and writers trying to choose effective phrasing right now is precisely zero. That is the grammarian’s game, always messier and chancier.

But I often wish I could take the linguist’s advice. Life might be simpler if I could turn off the small internal alarm that sounds whenever the talking heads perpetrate the mistake du jour. It is never a question of real misunderstanding, after all.

*What our situation require are many small adjustments in the larger strategy.  

*The President and his Cabinet believes the essence of the problem are the tax cuts made in 2001.

But I can’t do it; the bell rings insistently, for me and for many others, surely a majority of Vocabula Review readers, quite likely a majority (still) of all English speakers. Our cavil is no hoity-toity affectation, no quarrel we are going out of our way to pick with the spontaneous natural usage of others. For us it is the mistake that is unnatural, a pointless aggression against received usage.

And even those who might sharply disagree in this case would prove equally fastidious in others. We are all inhabited (some more, some less) by a peevish genie of correctness that aims to keep language steady and consistent, down to the tiniest details. Given all its own way, this surly spirit would no doubt stifle innovation and creativity and make language too aridly formal. But luckily it works in tandem with the opposite impulse, a fiery inventiveness that focuses on getting the thing said no matter the cost to language itself. And together the two demons get along quite handsomely, shaping language to the needs of the moment but also preserving its intelligibility for the long term. Particular issues in usage shift and shift again, as do the answers given, but this tug-of-war between opposite impulses — between utility and correctness, self-expression and grammaticality, innovation and continuity, parole and langue — goes on and on because it is implicit in speech itself. If the prescriptivist curmudgeon at one end of the rope ever dropped it, the hippie poet (or descriptive linguist) at the other end would fall over backwards, and no one would be happy.

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Discussions of correctness in language tend to shift quietly back and forth between two different senses of the term that, in a strong light, seem actually quite different. In the first, simpler case, “correct” means “adequately performed according to noncontroversial standards.” Only the speaker’s competence is in question, not the language itself.

But in the second case, correctness has to do with competing usages and dialects, and things can get ugly. A large part of what has given English teachers and prescriptive grammarians a bad name in some circles is that, in trying to address the first kind of correctness, we stumble into the second. In trying to teach students only what we think they want to know — how to speak, what this means, what sounds right — we end up imposing the standards of an imperious preferred dialect on the divergent dialect they find natural. In the process we seem to question their competency and peg them as outsiders, so we soon find ourselves in the doghouse.

I had a conversation like that not long ago with my granddaughter, who is older now. She said something like, “Me and Ethan are going to the pool,” and I took a stab at selling her on “I” as the correct subject pronoun.  “‛Ethan and I,’ you mean?”  She looked at me. “Why do you tell me that?”

And suddenly I was back on my heels a bit. “Well, that’s considered the correct way. In school, at least, that’s the way you’re supposed to say it, and lots of people do. ‘Ethan and I.’” She thought it over for a moment and said firmly, “I say ‘me and Ethan.’” She knew perfectly well what sounded natural in her ears, what she hears every day here in Beantown, Illinois, proud home of Soybean State University. And that was that. I had exactly the same experience with her mother, by the way, a quarter of a century before, trying to convince her to say “by accident” instead of “on accident.” Everything you have heard about kids listening to their peers not their parents is true.

But it’s best not to be too dogmatic about usage when you are talking with someone who might still be around fifty years from now. What is correct today might not be correct tomorrow, even if, today, it was noncontroversial. The inevitability of linguistic variation and change used to be taken by some linguists and even a few English teachers as an argument for complete laissez-faire, an undiscriminating acceptance of all usage as equally correct. But the fallacy here is blatant. Of course you can depart from a shared norm a little bit and still be understood; but do so repeatedly, with never any correction or recoil, and soon no one is understanding anyone. Conventions in themselves are arbitrary, but the need to have them — to settle certain issues just to have them settled — is absolute.

And all this is something we know in our bones: for without ever thinking about it, we react to innocent solecism amiably and indulgently, but greet ambitious solecism with sudden annoyance and punitive bad temper. It seems that we chattering bipeds are wired not just to learn language and use it, but to preserve it in good shape as a social property. Which, when you think about it, only makes sense. Why have one instinct without the other?

Go ahead and mark the error. Firmly. In red.

Notes On a Secret History

[An essay that appeared on the Vocabula Review website in April 2014, lightly revised here.]

“Bridge May Ice,” the signs say, or sometimes, “Bridge Ices Before Road.” I have noticed these especially on interstates, especially in the South and West, but also in the Midwest, and for all I know they exist everywhere in the country. Clearly, this way of using the word “ice” is favored by massive precedent and high authority.  So who am I to find it awkward?

I do, though, quite consistently and involuntarily. Every time I pass one of the signs, my eye catches on it, with a little surge of annoyance that may last twenty or thirty whole nanoseconds. Shouldn’t that be . . .?  Perhaps by writing this I will finally desensitize the reflex, and find myself able to drive right past the signs like a normal person, caring only about content, alert to the danger of ice on this next overpass, glinting in the August sun.

For now, though, I find the usage elliptical and ungainly. My problem is that ice, as a verb, wants to be transitive; it requires a direct object. Icing is not something you do by yourself, as you rise in the morning, but something you do to something or someone else, as you raise the blind for a peek outside. You can ice a cake, or a sprained ankle, or (unusually but comprehensibly) a soda or a just-caught fish, or a kicker or foul shooter (in sports slang, by calling time out). But if you say I’m going to ice now, people just stare.  Bill ices with the best of them does not seem to be a meaningful proposition. Nor does the clock ices in February or even the mountain iced in the storm. The biggest dictionary I own (Random House, 1987) does give an intransitive sense for the word, but far down the list, at number 23, and the example provided — the sherbet is icing in the freezer — sounds quite odd to me.

Yet my inner censor, finicky thing that it is, seems ready to allow various modifiers in place of a full-fledged direct object. The bridge ices over gets by, as does the jet engines are icing up. Handy things, prepositions; they do for English what case endings did for Latin, specifying relationships, assigning words to particular grammatical roles. In these two instances, they quietly transform ice from transitive to intransitive, and icing becomes, not an action aggressively visited upon an object, but more an intrinsic change of condition. The subconscious never objects because the switch has been flipped in time. “Bridge Ices Before Road,” in contrast, remains a bit of a stopper (at least for me), and “May Ice In Winter” (say) improves nothing; the somewhat breathier modifiers are too detached, off on a different branch of the tree diagram if we drew it, and leave “ice” still hankering for an object.

Would it be possible to correct the signs? I think so. “Bridge May Ice Over,” adding just the one word, would improve clarity and grace and still fit legibly on the shiny yellow diamond. So would “Bridge May Be Icy,” notwithstanding the weirdness of the message during most of the year. For now, though, the offending text is hanging all across the nation, very prominently and durably, and “Bridge May Ice” is simply a fact of English, a recognizable catchphrase. Usage proceeds not just by obedience to abstract rules and definitions, but by direct imitation of specific models — perhaps mostly that way, indeed — and by now there must be plenty of speakers who have been influenced by the signs to say things like the windshield iced and that road is icing pretty bad and man, my toes are icing, using the word to mean “become icy” rather than “apply ice to” or “cause to freeze.” (Freeze, indeed, can be either transitive or intransitive without causing any problem: I’m freezing and I’m freezing the fish both work. Grammar is inherently unjust.) Pressed by semantic need and government action, the word has been thrown slightly off-center.

For grammar grouches — that is, everybody sometimes — the worry that attends such trifling changes is that they will prove consequential in the long term. When we frown, the thought implicit in the reflex is, now what? Do we all begin using to ice intransitively, leading to Lord knows what changes down the line, not just in that word but in dozens of others drawn into the force field of its analogy? Is the whole system of distinguishing transitive from intransitive verbs threatened? Or does the intransitive use prove to be an adventure from which ice recovers, returning to its former shape, so that, by 2150 or so, when the current signs have all rusted and fallen and been replaced — why not? — with my amended versions, the sherbet is icing in the freezer sounds stranger than ever?

Histories of language mostly tell a story of permanent, one-way changes. Latin turns into French and Spanish and Romanian, but it never goes back and becomes Latin again. English collects loan words from scores of other languages, but it never pays them back. When the Indo-European case system dies out, over several millennia, no scholarly crusade can resurrect it. From history’s majestic remove, everything appears to be a tale of fateful, irreversible change, like the drifting apart of the continents. Even the choices of Chaucer or Shakespeare hardly matter to the saga, because usage participates in an immense determinism that sweeps us all along.

Likewise, folk wisdom, fortified by descriptivist ideology, teaches that efforts to resist language change are always futile. Even the Tories often concede this. Defenders of the subjunctive and future tenses, or the old sense of disinterested, or the distinction between imply and infer, or generic he, tend to speak in wistful, ironic tones; like the Elves in Tolkien, they fight their battles because they must, but they know they will lose in the end. Thus Robert Greene, in a thoughtful column a few years back, mournfully conceded the death of “beg the question” in the traditional sense; the new sense of “urgently pose the question” had taken over, and that was that, forever. I read recently that “error is the engine of language change.” Don’t get me started on what a howling example of false teleology that remark is; but notice the same implicit fatalism and resignation.

Even Bryan Garner, an authority as amiable and upbeat as anyone could wish, joins the mournful chorus. His influential guide, Modern American Usage, comes with a curious “Language-Change Index” that assigns disputed usages to one of five Steps, from 1, newly emergent, to 5, universally accepted. At its best, the Index admits needed nuance into debates grown too uncompromising. But the device carries a certain overtone of millennialist gloom; it seems to imply that Error of every kind, wherever encountered, however detested, is always on a conveyor belt to eventual triumph.

Pretty obviously, though, the other side of the story is the constancy and continuity of language. Chaucer’s word for day was (wait for it) day, and for man (prepare yourself) he said man. Linguists can sleuth out the structures of languages far older and deader than Latin because so many words and rules persist so doggedly over the ages, filtering down to us, still alive in successor languages.

So it should follow that many particular linguistic changes are not fateful departures at all, but episodic adventures, out-and-back journeys that end where they began. Probably, indeed, such outcomes are subtly encouraged by the way our linguistic sensibility works. We often greet even fairly lame coinages with laughter and other signs of approval; then for a while we tolerate copious imitation and repetition-with-variation. Only when the novelty begins to harden into a new paradigm does that too much derided faculty, the Curmudgeon Reflex, our capacity for linguistic snobbery and sarcasm, take hold in earnest. The Mean Girls begin sneering at last year’s slang, swiftly killing most of it off. Cliches become the target of late-night comedians, and truly persistent ones attract scholarly diatribes. Even old-fashioned print-media scolds score an occasional hit. Before you know it, the language is more or less restored to its prior condition, and it’s time to start messing with it again.

There seems to be another kind of history, hidden in the cracks of the official one: a micro-history of changes that get made but then unmade, of  abused words and flouted conventions that spring back into shape like grass a day after you trample on it: a tale of language’s sturdiness and resilience, the surprising way it survives fad after fad. If the saga is ever written, the heroes are likely to be the same grouches who take such abuse in the conventional histories: the dyspeptic editors and teachers and critics who are supposedly always fighting a losing battle.

Of course, many particular changes really are fateful departures, real metamorphoses destined to survive conservative reaction and take the language on into the uncharted future. The problem lies in telling one kind of change from the other. This is something no one ever seems to know for certain. Who could have guessed, in 1950 or so, that laudatory cool would still be with us in 2014? Yet here it is, more entrenched than ever, increasingly accepted even in formal venues.

But who can resist playing prophet?  Not I. Here is a collection, short and entirely unsystematic, of word vagaries I have been noticing recently, and my guesses as to whether they will prove lasting or not.

Transitive “grow.” Early in President Clinton’s first term, I heard the new chief say, “We have to get to work and grow this economy!” I winced, but the usage, which Clinton himself probably did not invent, seems to have caught on, and these days one hears not just of growing the economy, but of growing the network, growing the sales force, growing one’s vocabulary, and so on.

The problem (for me at least) is the mirror image of the one I have with “Bridge May Ice.” Grow is something you normally do by yourself, intransitively, unless you are a farmer, and in that case, your choices for a direct object are starkly limited: corn, beans, alfalfa, and a dozen-odd other crops. This kind of growing is sharply different from the kind Clinton meant; he did not imagine planting a whole new economy and harvesting it in the fall, but only wanted to enlarge the economy that was already there. “Get this economy growing” might have served his turn, or “expand this economy,” but maybe not. Increase? Augment? Intensify?  Every choice seems less pithy or connotatively poorer or otherwise unsatisfactory. Perhaps transitive grow will prevail, but listeners of my vintage will always picture tractors, straw hats, overalls.

“Relatable.” A few years ago, the students in my literature classes were all suddenly using this one to mean “sympathetic” or “readily identified with” — as in “relatable hope,” “relatable problem.”  Like all grave linguistic sins, this one has the excuse of addressing a genuine need; there seems to be nothing else in English that hits the intended target quite cleanly. Sympathetic, the least bad choice, carries an unwanted overtone of pity. But life isn’t fair, and language never promises to have one-word solutions for every semantic need. I foresee a speedy death for the usage, whose underlying logic seems faulty; unless you are saying and hearing “I can relate, man” all the time, the meaning most readily suggested is, “capable of being told or described.”

“Issue” in the sense of “problem” or “defect” seems to have been a bureaucratic and business school euphemism that escaped quarantine and infected general usage. For perhaps a decade and a half, I have been patiently waiting for the fever to break. No luck so far, but I still see a 50/50 hope of recovery.

“Concerning.” Piggybacking on the buzzword status of “concern,” this has recently come into vogue as a very awkward substitute for worrisome, serious, grave, and so on. I miss my guess badly if it proves more than a flash in the pan.

Singular or hypothetical they/them/their. Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a TVR piece that mildly opposed this usage and favored more traditional solutions like generic he/him/her. Since then, of course, I have been noticing singular plurals everywhere, as in this sentence, to me stupefyingly strange, from Geoffrey Miller’s brilliant book The Mating Mind:

Your sexual partner will have mutations of their own, but they are almost certain to be different mutations on different genes.

What to think, when one’s intellectual heroes are writing such things? Either the use of they/them/their  as the English pronoun of all work really has been coming on like gangbusters, or, having voiced my doubts, I have fallen into what Language Log calls “the recency illusion” and “the frequency illusion” — the sensation that whatever usage annoys you appeared just yesterday but has somehow already overtaken the idiolect of everyone but you. In fact, as the laissez-faire crowd love to tell you, “singular they” has been around since before Shakespeare, fighting an endless battle with “generic he” and he or she and other alternatives, all of them patently imperfect. Call me Pollyanna, but examples like the above convince me, not that numberless they/them/their/ is approaching ultimate triumph, but only that the pendulum has swung about as far as it can go in that direction, for now. The forecast here is for a mild resurgence of generic he in the near term.

“Advocate for.” For most of my life, “advocate,” with its sturdy Latin etymology, has been a straightforward proposition: to advocate is to speak for a given thing, to support it. You can advocate Irish independence, or abolition of the death penalty, or flossing at bedtime, and in every case the verb engages cleanly with its direct object, no preposition needed.

But suddenly, over the past few years, people have begun saying “advocate for” — a muddier notion. Apparently the “for” was initially a way of bringing an indirect object on board, a somewhat tricky maneuver in English. (Hence the old joke: “Call me a cab.” “Okay, you’re a cab.”) You might simply advocate the stoning of rap artists, but if you did so in your capacity as a paid lobbyist, you advocated for some third party, such as the Texas Christian Voters League; or at least, you did so systematically and professionally. To advocate for was to lobby, electioneer, speak for, represent. More recently, however, the preposition seems to intercede indiscriminately between the verb and either kind of object. “He advocates for sound fiscal policy.” “He advocates for the Moose Club.”

I advocate dropping the awkward for in every case. It adds nothing but confusion when it intercedes before a direct object, and if an indirect object is meant, represent or lobby is a better word anyway. No one will listen to me, but it seems possible that the traditional virtues of advocate, by itself, will reassert themselves over time, while the current fad departs as mysteriously as it came.

Nominalized modifiers or conjunctive participles, or call them any damn thing you please. Recently my file of ugly oddments has been filling up with examples of including, like, and unlike attempting to govern long adverbial modifiers, like toy poodles trying to get their jaws around Apatosaurus femurs. 

     Scientists believe there are at least 405 dead zones worldwide, including near
     South America, Japan, China and southeast Australia.

     But Dolan points out that, unlike at many other companies, most Zappo’s
     workers are full-time employees.

     Mr. Scorsese fills the film with haunting tableaus and performances —    
     including from Tadanobu Asano, as the Interpreter — that tug from the 
     edges, pulling attention away from its center. 

     Unlike in many other environmental negotiations, it was possible for 
     negotiators to calculate the exact effects of their proposals in real time. 

Ugh! The affectation murders clarity and fetishizes clumsiness. Undo the crime by putting a noun after “including,” “unlike,” or whatever word is doing equivalent duty.

But enough! You will have your own miscellany of doubtful and disliked usages, and so will all of your friends and neighbors. If you have a moment, kindly record one or two of your own favorite peeves in the comment section, below. I like to collect such things, because linguistic peeves can be deeply, weirdly instructive. Nearly always, they stem from structural tensions deep in the language —  not from mere ignorance, as the prescriptive demon likes to insist, nor from arbitrary fussiness, as his descriptive counterpart promptly rejoins.

No two lists are ever quite the same, and the outcome of every particular battle is in doubt, by definition. But the net effect of our resistance, of the fact that we are all conservatives sometimes, is surely positive. Without it language might change with bewildering, destructive, pell-mell haste. You might need a translator to speak to your own grandchildren.