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.