Does this idiot author has a job? You make non issue an issue. Whether he was Kofi or Kwame, he became a great African.
Does this idiot author has a job? You make non issue an issue. Whether he was Kofi or Kwame, he became a great African.
GORGORDUTOR 8 years ago
My brother it is the likes of the MATEMEHO propagandists who make it an issue in their never ending campaign to calumnify, vilify and malign Osagyefo. Don't blame Master Kwarteng for setting the record straight!!
My brother it is the likes of the MATEMEHO propagandists who make it an issue in their never ending campaign to calumnify, vilify and malign Osagyefo. Don't blame Master Kwarteng for setting the record straight!!
DUTOR 8 years ago
Silly and irrelevant example with the exchange of Abena's birthday by the hospital authorities and a whole stupid article.
Silly and irrelevant example with the exchange of Abena's birthday by the hospital authorities and a whole stupid article.
Kwadwo Ahenkan 8 years ago
The disgraced idiotic anti-Nkrumah non-factual writers who have no valid references for their senseless articles,have now turned to "ENGLISH SPELLING PROFESSORS."HAHAHAHAH.I am still laughing.
The disgraced idiotic anti-Nkrumah non-factual writers who have no valid references for their senseless articles,have now turned to "ENGLISH SPELLING PROFESSORS."HAHAHAHAH.I am still laughing.
Fred Amoah 8 years ago
Please,ignore this mental patient who is hiding behind he name BOB.
Please,ignore this mental patient who is hiding behind he name BOB.
Kojo T 8 years ago
There was a man be he Ngolamah or Nkrumah .It does not matter.What is Nana Addo? He has mulitiple names or aliases.Any way does it matter if Jonas swallowed the whale or the whale swallowed Jonah.There was a whale and there w ... read full comment
There was a man be he Ngolamah or Nkrumah .It does not matter.What is Nana Addo? He has mulitiple names or aliases.Any way does it matter if Jonas swallowed the whale or the whale swallowed Jonah.There was a whale and there was Jonah
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Dear Readers,
Dr. Aggrey's mother's name: Abena Andua, Abna Andu or Abena Anowa.
Please read this about Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey:
"Born on Monday, 18th October, 1875, at Anomabo in the Central Region of the Gold Coast, of ... read full comment
Dear Readers,
Dr. Aggrey's mother's name: Abena Andua, Abna Andu or Abena Anowa.
Please read this about Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey:
"Born on Monday, 18th October, 1875, at Anomabo in the Central Region of the Gold Coast, of Princess Abena Anowa of Ajumako, and Okyeame Prince Kodwo Kwegyir, Chief Linguist in the court of King Amonoo V of Anomabu, Aggrey was the seventeenth child of his father and fourth of his mother Abena Anowa, the third and last wife of Okyeame Kwegyir. ( Okyeame Kwegyir had 21 children in total; 9 by his first wife, 4 by his second and 8 by his third wife – Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey’s mother ).
It must be noted that Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey was born amidst rumours of an Ashanti invasion of Anomabo. However in the midst of warlike-preparations time was set aside to name the child, since it was the eighth day after his birth, as tradition demanded.
At the naming ceremony and baptism on June 24th, 1883, Aggrey with his brother Kodwo Awir christian names of James and William, were by custom bestowed on him and his brother respectively. However other fantse names were given to young Aggrey and his full name was James Emman Kodwo Mensa Otsiwadu Humamfunsam Kwegyir Aggrey.
James was his baptismal name. The others are explained thus: Emman, ‘ Great city’ (this name was supposed to be spelled "Oman" in Fantse language but Cape Coast pronounciation affected it and Aggrey accepted it as such). Kodwo, ‘male child born on Monday’; Mensa, ‘third male child’; Otsiwadu, ‘tenth after Otsiwa’; Humamfunsam, ‘wide-ruling Agyeman’; Kwegyir, father’s name; Aggrey, family name. (Kwegyir is said to be a contraction of Kwaw Egyir. Egyir seems to have been the original family name, and have been anglicised ‘Aggrey’). The truth about the Fantse name Aggrey is that, Egyir has an alias as well as an appellation that is "Opusu" (Gurgling) and the Fantse people and their penchant for speaking English, Fantselized the "Gurgle" to Gegley" and out of Gegley the name Aggrey was born.
Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey’s father was not only a respected linguist ( spokesperson of a chief or king) but a warrior and his mother, was daughter of a great medicine man. It could hence be deduced that he was born into a traditional family but the family later became Christians and he (Dr. Aggrey) was baptised, hence the name James. (prior to this he was popularly known as Kojo, or Kodwo, Mensa. James recounted this when he stated..."
Additional information:
Kwadwo Ahenkan 8 years ago
There is absolutely no evidence that Nkrumah's father was a Liberian.Only semi-educated fools do not know the importance of EVIDENCE.They did the same thing to Head of state Acheampong and J.J. Rawlings.I was in Ghana when t ... read full comment
There is absolutely no evidence that Nkrumah's father was a Liberian.Only semi-educated fools do not know the importance of EVIDENCE.They did the same thing to Head of state Acheampong and J.J. Rawlings.I was in Ghana when there were rumours that Acheampong was a Nigerian and later there were reports that Rawlings was also a Togolese.
GORGORDUTOR 8 years ago
I will digress from the main topic. From what I gather Ahoofe is claiming Mabel Dove is British, I believe it is in line with his inferiority complex that is he is a KWESIBRONI wannabe. In his writings he constantly indicates ... read full comment
I will digress from the main topic. From what I gather Ahoofe is claiming Mabel Dove is British, I believe it is in line with his inferiority complex that is he is a KWESIBRONI wannabe. In his writings he constantly indicates his subconscious preference for KWESIBRONI case in point his last article about KNUST. Who else but Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) could have been the inspiration for Mabel Dove''s naming her son unless it was Vladimir of Kiev circa 7th century, which I doubt very much!! It is amazing the contortions Ahoofe will put himself through in an attempt to justify his bizarre theories!
Anyway Master Kwarteng nice one. Kindly excuse my digression from the topic. Peace & Harmony. Have a great weekend!!
Dr. SAS, Attorney at Law 8 years ago
Waa look.
And they think they have arrived with the Danquists!
Tweaa Kai!!!
Waa look.
And they think they have arrived with the Danquists!
Tweaa Kai!!!
Prof Lungu 8 years ago
Hoping TSU students, faculty, and every other employees is safe, in Houston, Texas. That, there is not another shooting incident as we've read, heard, and seen on TV today, Friday, 9 Sep.
Greetings & Peace!
Hoping TSU students, faculty, and every other employees is safe, in Houston, Texas. That, there is not another shooting incident as we've read, heard, and seen on TV today, Friday, 9 Sep.
Greetings & Peace!
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
SAS,
What's up?
I just read Kofi Ata's article "Judicial Scandal: Are Articles 146(1) and 151(1) being Misinterpreted?" and also read the comments--including yours--posted under it. I found the word "AMBIGUIIES" (parag ... read full comment
SAS,
What's up?
I just read Kofi Ata's article "Judicial Scandal: Are Articles 146(1) and 151(1) being Misinterpreted?" and also read the comments--including yours--posted under it. I found the word "AMBIGUIIES" (paragraph 4, second sentence) in your comments. You wrote:
"And a constitution or civil procedure need not define every term. Where ambiguiies exist, precedent and convention will come in to supplement meaning."
I am aware that there should have been a “T” between the two adjacent vowels (i’s) (Let me call them loosely vowel digraphs/diphthong)). Unlike you however, I will not characterize your typo as Krumagraphy/Kru Brofo because that won't be necessary.
After all, you need not have every word in its correct form for me to know what you want to say. The sound of a word alone is enough for me. It is also clear to me it is "AMBIGUITIES" you wanted to write/say. That is enough for me!
I come across these extraneous errors all the time but, as I have told you many times before, that is not what I look for when I read. I mean I come across such errors in the writings of some of the profoundest and sophisticated writers on the planet. As a result, I look beyond words and sounds for deeper meanings behind them.
How are you anyway?
Have a great weekend.
Thanks.
Sister Souljah 8 years ago
Thank you Kwarteng for calling out SAS for his childish pettiness!
Thank you Kwarteng for calling out SAS for his childish pettiness!
Kwadwo Ahenkan 8 years ago
Can you idiotic fools tell readers what you mean by "Ambiguiies"?
Can you idiotic fools tell readers what you mean by "Ambiguiies"?
Bob 8 years ago
The English grammatical bomber francis kwarteng has now started creating his own English vocaburaly because he is not conversant with the normal British or American English. He has started using mad words like "Ambiguiies" a ... read full comment
The English grammatical bomber francis kwarteng has now started creating his own English vocaburaly because he is not conversant with the normal British or American English. He has started using mad words like "Ambiguiies" a word which only he and his Morons alone can understand.
C.Y. ANDY-K 8 years ago
Look at these two semi-illiterates. You can't even read and understand that Francis was rather pointing out a mistake made by Dr SAS and counselling him not to be petty about typos others make. Rather, we should devote attent ... read full comment
Look at these two semi-illiterates. You can't even read and understand that Francis was rather pointing out a mistake made by Dr SAS and counselling him not to be petty about typos others make. Rather, we should devote attention to the substance of what someone has written.
Of course, Nyebro Yaw was at his demolition job best.
Andy-K
Dr. SAS, Attorney at Law 8 years ago
I am an accomplished linguist, writer, teacher and speaker in every sense and standard, and I am not going to pretend that writing "ambiguities" as "ambiguiies" could be justified upon a trite and infantile excuse that the er ... read full comment
I am an accomplished linguist, writer, teacher and speaker in every sense and standard, and I am not going to pretend that writing "ambiguities" as "ambiguiies" could be justified upon a trite and infantile excuse that the error sounds like the word; or that I don't worry about the error. I apologize for being slovenly....
The mistake you pointed out in my comment will help me to be more careful and mechanically accurate in the future. Thank you.
But my mistake does not justify your mistake in any way; neither does it sweep it under the carpet...Rather, you should use the same level of scrutiny you used to discover the error in my writing to make your writing better. That is how to profit from my mistake and become better.
However, you, as a minion of Nkrumah, will continue to rationalize your mistake and wax strong in it.
You will continue to say:
"The sound of a word alone is enough for me". That is the trope of "Krumagraphy". You never write right. Everything goes....
And that is why your essays are now riddled with a million errors. Just like Nkrumah, you hate to be corrected and can therefore never do the right thing even if you are prompted. I know that you would incarcerate me under the PDA if you were my president.
Please, continue to point out my errors wherever you see them. This will help me to become even better than I am. I am a Danquist; not an Nkrumaist!
Abra Kuma 8 years ago
Dear Dr. SAS,
Greetings!
We all have our good and bad days. Evidently, today is one of your good ones. I therefore take this opportunity to commend you on:
1. Your gracious apology for being “slovenly” re: “ambiguiie ... read full comment
Dear Dr. SAS,
Greetings!
We all have our good and bad days. Evidently, today is one of your good ones. I therefore take this opportunity to commend you on:
1. Your gracious apology for being “slovenly” re: “ambiguiies” and no doubt also for past undetected errors in your own writing. Certainly, pointing out errors should normally encourage a desire for self-improvement; nevertheless, you must agree this depends on the manner in which it is done. Although I have always sensed love and respect you have for the author, lately, I have become equally aware of the mischief in some of your comments probably because either you have been blinded by the contents of his articles, or by what you perceive the author’s ideology to be.
2. Your advice
“.Rather, you should use the same level of scrutiny you used to discover the error in my writing to make your writing better. That is how to profit from my mistake and become better.”
This( statement shows love and desire for unity which we, Ghanaians, must strive for)
3. Your admonition,” However, you, as a minion of Nkrumah, will continue to rationalize your mistake and wax strong in it. “
Is not only brutal and undeserved, but also presumptuous inasmuch as it seems to generalize – it stereotypes Nkrumah’s admirers.
Finally, a good example of your mischievousness is in your parting shot, “ I know that you would incarcerate me under the PDA if you were my president.”
What baffles me here, however, is that you ask that your errors always be pointed out to you because it would help you become better – because you are a Danquist; not an Nkrumaist. Why then do you never correct the Danquists who regularly criticize and point out perceived grammatical errors both of author and commenters while they themselves simultaneously display glaring ignorance in that area of study?
Wherefore art Thou thus biased, Brother Mine?
In today’s lingo: What’s up with that, Bro? We see what we see.
Peace and love!
Unity always!
Bless Ghana!
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Dear Abra Kuma,
This is my response to SAS:
SAS,
Good day.
In the first place you should not have apologized because that was unnecessary. You know English is not one of my problems. I mean grammar is not one of ... read full comment
Dear Abra Kuma,
This is my response to SAS:
SAS,
Good day.
In the first place you should not have apologized because that was unnecessary. You know English is not one of my problems. I mean grammar is not one of my problems.
I just spoke with a professor of English/literature (who is also a well-known writer, communication expert, and linguist. He is popular across Africa and in America. Besides he has a PhD in English, a BA in literature (English/French), an MA in linguistics and another MA in Creative Writing. He has published widely on grammar usage among others).
In fact he gave me a tall list of books, etc., (highly technical texts and published papers) dealing with ongoing controversial debates over grammar (English) and with disagreements among some of the world’s major scholars, writers, linguists, philologists, etymologists, and professors of literature on what constitutes "proper" grammar (with particular reference to English).
In other words, what you SAS may consider “proper” grammar is something else to another equally competent linguist, writer, and grammarian. That is, there is no "universal" agreement among some of the world's major scholars, linguists, etymologists, philologists, and grammarians over what actually constitutes "proper" grammar. Anyway I don’t follow anyone’s rules as far as grammar goes and therefore write as I deem fit---in my opinion (Is it strange that you prefer a cow’s innards while another prefers its bones?)
But I will not bother you with these highly technical texts and books (anyway I don’t need tutoring in grammar. I have all the technical texts in the world to consult for my own edification. I also have others in the field to consult on such issues. You can help Danquists like the Adjoa Wangaras (Bobs, GIRLS SP, etc., in that regard. Thanks anyway. A Danquist such as Adjoa Wangara could not tell who wrote “Miscellanious” and who wrote “Ambiguiies” after reading our comments).
That said, I would have wished if you had brought out cogent alternative theories, facts and assumptions to contradict what I have to say in my article. This is more important to me than grammar. Your fixation on grammar constitutes an unnecessary diversion. Ask questions based on the article and I shall answer you. I am not interested in grammar and English orthography. I think the best person you should be having this discussion with is Abubakar Mohammed Marzuq Azindoo. Please I am not interested (Please I can recommend others who need help with grammar if you will oblige me). I do not mean this as an insult though. I have a great deal of respect for you as an individual and in spite of our disagreements over Nkrumah. I will always love you no matter what).
I want to assure you that I have already read most of these technical texts and texts anyway (the ones my friend recommended). Fortunately, I have been following these debates my friend discussed with me this morning---for as long as I have been interested in the subject matter. On the other hand this little and straightforward discussion (see below) should tell you what I have been trying to put across to you all along (Please don’t come back saying I made errors in these comments too. I will not bother with it. Remember I have read most of the world’s important books on grammar---some of the copies of these books are with me here.
Have a great weekend
Here is what I want you to read (I am familiar with the contents of most of the works mentioned in this discussion. Do you see any technical errors in the comments of these discussants involved in language/grammar war? Tell me about these technical errors and also let me know why individuals who claim to know better should be making such technical errors!):
________________________________________
Welcome to another round of the Language Wars. By now we know the battle lines: As a “descriptivist,” I try to describe language as it is used. As a “prescriptivist,” you focus on how language should be used. If we were from the two extremes, I would open fire by saying that you preach stodgy nonrules that most people don’t obey, and that people like you don’t understand that language must grow and change. You would then call me a permissivist who ignores the fact that people can use language incompetently or well, and that people want to write and speak well.
But I believe that we’re both reasonable moderates, and have something more interesting to say than that old pantomime. Your excellent guide, “Garner’s Modern American Usage,” shows you to be, in your words, a “descriptive prescriber.” You give not just “right” or “wrong” rulings on usage, but often a 1-5 score, in which a given usage may be a 1 (definitely a mistake), 3 (common, but …) or 5 (perfectly acceptable). This notion of correctness as a scale, not a binary state, makes you different from many prescriptivists.
For my part, I glory in the real-world mess of dialects and slang, and think that some popular prescriptivists have imposed some bogus nonrules on too many schoolchildren. But as I have written before: “There is a set of standard conventions everyone needs for formal writing and speaking. Except under unusual circumstances, you should use the grammar and vocabulary of standard written English for these purposes.”
You’re free to prefer 'which' for extra information and 'that' for a crucial bit of definition. Let's just not use the word 'error' when someone prefers 'which' for both.
We still disagree on both some points of usage and on the underlying sources of authority. The usage books of the past hundred years, written by prescriptivists, very often prescribe rules that I don’t believe are part of standard English.
Where they insist “hopefully” should not be used to mean “I hope,” you differ with them. So why does the campaign against this “error” live on? Probably in large part because a few writers — E. B. White, half of Strunk and White, among them — think that using “hopefully” in this way is a mistake. Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style,” one of the most popular usage books of all time, is short and pithy and by and large a good guide to good writing. But where Strunk and White went wrong was in prescribing from their own intuitions rather than — what else am I going to say? — accurately describing standard English. Sometimes you join them.
For example, to pick on Strunk and White again, they prescribe a rule on “which” and “that” to introduce relative clauses: “which” must introduce a “nonrestrictive” relative clause (a mere extra bit of information). Only “that” can introduce a “restrictive” clause (a crucial bit of definition). You agree with White that “The lawn mower which is broken is in the garage” should have “that,” not “which.” However, even White doesn’t agree with White. As the linguist Geoff Pullum noticed, White used “which” in the “wrong” way in his essay “Death of a Pig”: “the premature expiration of a pig is, I soon discovered, a departure which the community marks solemnly on its calendar.” White would probably say he slipped. I’d console him; no, he didn’t. It’s a fine sentence from a fine American writer.
British English, including in my publication, The Economist, mostly ignores this rule, as you acknowledge. It was still common enough a century ago that the great H. W. Fowler, who preferred your rule, conceded that “The relations between that, who & which, have come to us from our forefathers as an odd jumble.” White even broke the rule in his own prose, probably unconsciously.
The bottom line for me would be this: You’re free to prefer different relative pronouns for different kinds of clauses, on the principle of “one word for one function, wherever possible.” I just wouldn’t use the word “error” in this case. The history of English usage tells us that the restrictive “which” is at the very heart of the language. Even the King James translators gave us “Our Father which art in heaven.” (In the 18th century, Bishop Robert Lowth, a godfather of prescriptivists, sought to correct this to “who art in heaven,” but that’s a topic for another day.)
________________________________________
The Labels Are Blurring
Bryan A. Garner 4:43 PM
It was telling, I think, that when we began talking about this exchange, you referred to me as a “successful descriptivist” — until I suggested that you re-examine your wording.
The labels “prescriptivist” and “descriptivist” are increasingly unhelpful. One could defensibly call me a descriptivist. I just describe something that dogmatic egalitarians don’t want described: the linguistic choices of a fully informed, highly literate but never uptight user of language. It’s a rational construct — rather like the law’s “reasonable person” — and a highly useful one at that. The moment one says, “If you want to be such a person — a fully informed, highly literate but never uptight user of language — then here’s how to do it,” one is prescribing.
But that’s all that the reputable usage experts were ever doing. I count among these writers H. W. Fowler, Eric Partridge, Margaret Nicholson, Theodore M. Bernstein, Ernest Gowers and Wilson Follett. I’d even add William Strunk and E. B. White. All of them were extraordinarily well read, sensitive to language, alert to nuance, versed in literary history and highly observant. They were describing the ideal writer or speaker, and they did it well — not infallibly, but well.
It sounds like wishful thinking when you say that 'no real-world descriptivist' still accepts that a native speaker can’t make a mistake. This is a thoroughly wrong-headed dogma that took many years to debunk — and still it persists.
Over the past three decades, linguists have become accustomed to using “prescriptivist” as a snarl word, essentially equivalent to “linguistic ignoramus.” The positions attributed to prescriptivists, even in your own work, almost never align with positions taken by Fowler, Partridge, Nicholson, Bernstein, Gowers, Follett or me. Instead, this “prescriptivist” is supposed to be someone who forbids sentence starting conjunctions and sentence ending prepositions. Yet no reputable prescriptivist — not even the 18th century grammarians — took such a position.
You’d object, I assume, if I were to define descriptivists as quantitative social scientists with no interest in literary style who nevertheless study language, reporting all findings in maladroit, leaden prose, fallaciously insisting, through a misguided relativism, that all forms of language are equal and berating anyone who dares to say that the nonstandard use of a word or phrase is “incorrect.”
The fact that this definition doesn’t fit you and many other modern writers on linguistics merely shows that descriptivists have moderated the indefensible positions they once took. The linguists have switched their position — without, of course, acknowledging that this is what they’ve done.
It sounds like wishful thinking when you say that “no real-world descriptivist” still accepts the dogma that a native speaker can’t make a mistake:
• “In language, what is used is right — and has to be.” (Ellsworth Barnard, 1979)
• “We believe, as do most linguists, that native speakers do not make mistakes.” (Peter Trudgill & Lars-Gunnar Andersson, 1990)
• “Unlike non-native speakers, native speakers do not make grammatical errors.” (Trudgill & Andersson, 1990 again)
• “When we consider variation in language, we must give up the idea of errors.” (Donna Jo Napoli, 2003)
This is a thoroughly wrong-headed dogma that took many years to debunk — and still it persists. Let me reiterate that I am not alone in seeing this deep-rooted weed: “During the period of American structuralism a myth became well established that the native speaker cannot make a mistake” (Charles A. Ferguson, 1984).
The fact that you and other linguists are now embracing the prescriptive tradition is cause for celebration. Nowhere is the flip-flop more apparent than in the work of Steven Pinker. In “The Language Instinct” in 1994, Pinker argued the “no native speaker can make a mistake” position with a bizarre metaphor: “To a linguist or psychologist, language is like the song of the humpback whale.… Isn’t the song of the humpback whale whatever the humpback whale decides to sing?” A few pages later in that bestselling book, Pinker referred to linguistic guidance about standard English as surviving “by the same dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations.”
Inflammatory words. Guidance about good English gets equated with genital mutilations. But now, in this topsy-turvy world of ours, the same Steven Pinker who once likened prescriptive rules to genital mutilations has been newly appointed chairman of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. He is now a guardian of the language. At least he has modified his views, tacitly acknowledging the criticism that David Foster Wallace and I and others laid at his doorstep.
His stance today? As usage-panel chairman, Pinker now says that it is “well worth preserving” the standard, traditional uses of “enervate,” “flaunt,” “fortuitous,” “fulsome,” “reticent,” and “untenable.” Bully for him. He says it’s “almost a miracle” that we continue to distinguish between “affect” and “effect.”
Rarely have I seen a more agreeable intellectual about-face. But of course he doesn’t acknowledge that he now takes a position that reputable prescriptivists have taken for over a century.
You, Lane, got into the linguistic game late enough to join the wave of descriptivists flocking to the position of enlightened prescriptivists. But in your book, “You Are What You Speak,” you tendentiously call prescriptivists “language cranks,” “oddballs,” “declinists,” “self-appointed language guardians,” and “scolds” who habitually fly into “spittle-flecked fury.” A little of that stuff is good-natured fun, but the condescending haughtiness is unrelenting.
As for “that” and “which,” you’re simply disagreeing with my description of how an ideal, fully informed speaker or writer of American English uses these relative pronouns. I can live with that disagreement, but I stand by my words.
Further, as a descriptive matter, you are quite wrong to call “restrictive which” part of the “heart of our language,” and the King James passage you cite isn’t at all pertinent, since it’s nonrestrictive — as you’d surely notice if you took a moment to analyze it.
The real point is this: We could go a long way toward reconciling the language wars if linguists and writers like you would stop demonizing all prescriptivists and start acknowledging that the reputable ones have always tried to base their guidance on sound descriptions.
________________________________________
Rules and Nonrules
Robert Lane Greene 4:43 PM
Thanks for an engaging response. There’s so much in it that I’ll work from the specific to the general, because one example can sometimes illuminate a lot. I hope readers less interested in subordinate clauses than you and I are might bear with this point a moment. It widens out, I promise.
You think I misunderstood the clause “which art in heaven” in the Lord’s Prayer. That clause begins with “which.” You think such clauses should be used only to add extra information when talking about the referent previously mentioned. In this case you might repunctuate it “Our Father (which art in heaven), hallowed be thy name.”
But that interpretation isn’t the right one. The writer of Matthew was in fact obsessed with the opposition between heaven and earth, so the phrase “father which is in heaven” appears 14 times in that book, and only once elsewhere in the New Testament. Matthew’s Jesus even tells his disciples at one point (23:9) “to call no man on earth your father” and to serve only their heavenly father. This is why “father which is in heaven” appears without commas so many times in the King James translation of Matthew: Matthew’s Jesus is constantly reminding the reader which father he is talking about: not dad back at home, but a new kind of father. If you think this clause is “nonrestrictive,” try bracketing off all of those 14 instances of “father which is in heaven” with commas: “father, which is in heaven, .…” The results are often nonsensical.
I submit a meta-rule: When a proposed rule and actual usage conflict, the proposed rule is false, and actual usage should be our guide.
Which makes the point: in 1611, a committee of experts in fine English writing thought “which” could be used as a restrictive relative pronoun. If there were a native English “rule” against this, one of these scholars would surely have pointed it out. Since there was no such rule, the scholars agreed. “Which” can be restrictive. Great English writers went on for centuries using restrictive “which.”
Around the end of the 19th century, a few usage commentators, though, decided to “correct” this, going against the actual usage up to that point. They thought it was best to reserve “which” for nonrestrictive clauses only. The best known proponent of this rule in this era was the great Fowler, as mentioned. But he didn’t succeed in establishing it, either. It was not until E.B. White repeated his old teacher Will Strunk’s “which"/"that” rule that this really got stuck into American English usage discussion. Fifty years later still, you (like many other commentators, and the Microsoft Word software I’m typing this on) recommend the “rule.”
For those readers who have stuck with me, here is the point: the rule has no root in great English usage. It appears to have appealed to a few usage-book writers, among them Fowler, Strunk, White and you, for its logical simplicity: one relative pronoun for this role, another for that role. But it’s simply not what great writers consistently do, not now or ever.
What do we do when what we want the rule to be conflicts with what great writers actually do? I submit a meta-rule: When a proposed rule and actual usage conflict, the proposed rule is false, and actual usage should be our guide.
This takes some unpacking. Whose usage, in particular, should constitute our rules? But this is not so hard: when we’re describing standard edited written English, we look at standard edited written English to derive the rules. If a usage appears only very rarely, and is widely condemned, we call it a mistake. If it appears again and again from the pens of great writers and is printed after oversight by professional editors, the usage must be accepted.
Sometimes, a usage will spread that is new, illogical and strikes commentators as tasteless. But if, over time, it becomes widespread among a critical mass of good writers and is accepted by many good editors, we must acknowledge a new rule. We must be descriptivists, in other words.
And this is exactly what you are. You tell people which usages they should prefer, but when a battle has been lost over several decades, you call it lost and suggest they move on. The label of “descriptive prescriber” is one you wear proudly, and you should.
So why are academic linguists, and others like me, so down on “prescriptivism”? Because of a curious asymmetry. Systematic description of actual language is mostly undertaken by academics, a relatively small group. But the masses engage in prescriptivism. “The Elements of Style” is not the only language-usage book to sell in the millions; so has Lynne Truss’s screed “Eats, Shoots and Leaves.” If you do a radio show on language (I know you’re a veteran of many more than I), no matter what your original topic, you’ll get call after call of people asking you to rule on their pet peeves. Split an infinitive in print and you will get angry letter after letter. In fact, the style guides of The Economist and The New York Times say that split infinitives are fine, but should be avoided because they annoy many readers.
You say that for a century the best prescriptivists have dismissed nonrules like “don’t begin a sentence with a conjunction,” “don’t split an infinitive” or “don’t end a sentence in a preposition.” But all three rules are incredibly widespread; all of them were enforced by college professors of mine in the mid-1990s.
When descriptivists fight back, it is partly on behalf of others: black Americans, Southern whites (like my Dad) and many who were just unlucky not to get a great education.
Facing these presciptivist masses, linguists and descriptivists are on the back foot in many ways. They defend unfashionable propositions like the idea that African-American vernacular English is logical, expressive and grammatical. They work with a vocabulary (“determiner,” “x-bar,” “right-node raising”) that even the best lay grammarians are turned off by. And then they must defend their work against two sets of critics: the popular, often incorrect prescriptivist masses and the well-read, reasoned prescriptivists. In books aimed at a mass audience, like the 1994 text you mention, of course Steve Pinker aims at debunking mass prescriptivism. But it didn’t take Pinker a decade to convert to the idea of rules and correct English; in 1999, in “Words and Rules,” Pinker wrote about how children learn to use irregular verbs correctly.
Pinker saw no conflict in being a descriptivist and speaking of “correct” grammar. I consider myself a “prescriptive descriptivist,” and have no qualms with the word “error.” Even the “no such thing as an error” linguists whom you cite ring-fence their statements with things like “for the most part” (Trudgill and Andersson, 1990). They mean that “when expressing themselves as they intend to,” not hurried, tired, distracted or drinking, native speakers do not make mistakes. Instead, they would say that those speakers constitute their own idiolects (individual ways of speaking) and when their speech patterns line up, they constitute stable dialects, and when enough dialects overlap, they constitute languages. I would never say “native speakers can’t make an error,” but I do see what they’re aiming for: a correction of the centuries-old view that error is everywhere because most people are ignorant.
That is why I sometimes use language like “cranks,” “curmudgeons” and “sticklers” to describe many prescriptivists. Descriptivists are not only fighting their own intellectual battles but also responding to centuries of peeving. Cicero, who thought improper Latin was “disgraceful,” was quoted by Robert Lowth (the bishop who wanted to “correct” the Lord’s Prayer) on the title page of his influential 1762 English grammar. Jonathan Swift called new pronunciations “barbarous.” The thoughtful Fowler occasionally stooped to calling usages he disliked “ignorant.” Lynne Truss jokes that people who misuse apostrophes should be “struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.” Simon Heffer, a more serious recent English prescriptivist, likes to throw around “illiterate.” If you still think I’m overstating the peevish streak within prescriptivism, read the comments on any online article about grammar and usage. I wish you, Bernstein, Partridge, Fowler and the other intellectuals were fully representative of prescriptivism. I truly do. But this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Finally, when descriptivists fight back, we also do so on behalf of others: black Americans (whose distinctive dialect has long been sneered at by whites), Southern whites (like my Dad, who used “might could,” “ain’t” and “y’all”), Eliza Doolittle (the poor thing was no fool) and many who were just unlucky not to get a great education. When we see prescriptivists call such people “ignorant” and “illiterate,” it can set the blood to boiling. I wish all commentators saw the world on a scale like yours and could acknowledge “nonstandard, but rule-bound, dialect.” But most do not.
For too long, the so-called descriptivists and prescriptivists have talked past each other. I hope this conversation helps narrow the gap. I hereby promise, as you ask, to “stop demonizing all prescriptivists and start acknowledging that the reputable ones have always tried to base their guidance on sound descriptions.” This should come naturally: I never demonized “all” prescriptivists, and I praise Fowler every chance I get.
I hope that you and other arbiters of standard English will publicly take on the mass prescriptivists and nonrules with the same verve and vigor with which you take on real solecisms and slip-ups.
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Some Biases Are Unfounded, and Some Aren’t
Bryan A. Garner 4:43 PM
Maybe we’re getting somewhere. If so, it’d be great if future writers were to take account of what we’re saying here. For many decades now, the needle in the prescriptive/descriptive long playing record has been stuck on a scratch. (I hope that metaphor is still comprehensible to our readers.)
The only thing that has kept me from being a “mass prescriptivist” is that there haven’t been more people buying “Garner’s Modern American Usage.” For my work in that book, a writer in The Economist recently called me a “highbrow prescriptivist.” But the sad fact is that there’s little call for usage guidance, whether highbrow or lowbrow.
People cling to their uninformed linguistic prejudices. I’ve countered them in print, at length, in such entries as the “Superstitions” essay in “Garner’s Modern American Usage.” Let us both continue to smite ignorance.
Hardly anyone wants to be a nonjudgmental collector of evidence. It’s far more interesting and valuable to assemble the evidence and then to draw conclusions from it. Judgments. Rulings.
You should acknowledge, however, that there’s often good reason for peeves. Some language is indeed “disgraceful” (Cicero’s word), “barbarous” (Swift’s), “ignorant” (Fowler’s) and “illiterate” (Heffer’s) — as judged against educated speech. (Some readers will suspect that the phrase “educated speech” is illogical — until they consult “Hypallage” in a dictionary or usage guide.) I avoid the Lynne Truss school of supercharged, hyperbolic sensationalism — partly because it’s lowbrow and partly because the sensationalists themselves are themselves typically ill informed. (See “Garner on Language and Writing,” pages 637–47.)
So you and I are getting closer together. But we’re not there yet. Your “meta rule” is flawed. You say: “When a proposed rule and actual usage conflict, the proposed rule is false, and actual usage should be our guide.” You can always find actual usage that contradicts any proposed linguistic ruling — and actual usage that contradicts other actual usages. The big problem with traditional descriptivism is that any evidence validates the usage. But descriptivists like you are (rightly) retreating from that position.
The better view, I submit, is the one I set forth in “Garner’s Modern American Usage”:
In the end, the actual usage of educated speakers and writers is the overarching criterion for correctness. But while actual usage can trump the other facts, it isn’t the only consideration.
There are several other factors to be accounted for, like the degree to which distinctions are being blurred, the age of an error that is becoming prevalent, and the extent to which a questionable word or phrase defies logic. For example, in my classification, “could care less” in place of the correct phrase “couldn’t care less” remains a stage-3 misusage.
If descriptivists believe that any linguistic evidence validates usage, then we must not be descriptivists. Hardly anyone wants to be a nonjudgmental collector of evidence. It’s far more interesting and valuable to assemble the evidence and then to draw conclusions from it. Judgments. Rulings. To the extent that “the masses” want such reasoning — as one could only wish — it’s because they want to use language effectively.
As for “that” vs. “which,” I’ll never hear the Lord’s Prayer again in quite the same way — given your convincing argument. But my basic point stands: In American English from circa 1930 on, “that” has been overwhelmingly restrictive and “which” overwhelmingly nonrestrictive. Strunk, White and other guidebook writers have good reasons for their recommendation to keep them distinct — and the actual practice of edited American English bears this out.
My most recent writing on “that” vs. “which” appears in “Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts.” My co-author, Justice Antonin Scalia, softened my words there because he sometimes (when I’m not around) uses “which” restrictively. When I tell him that’s a literary failing, he harrumphs. Fortunately, he has allowed me, in both our books, to change all his restrictive “whiches” to “thats.” It makes the style so much better.
I concede, though, that “mistake” is too strong a word for a “that”/“which” blemish. I maintain, however, that the practice in the best-edited American English is to confine “which,” as a relative pronoun, to either nonrestrictive uses or uses that follow prepositions (“by which,” “for which,” “in which,” and the like). I’m happy to live in disagreement with you on that tiny point — given that we have agreed on so much else.
Please, Lane, get the folks on your side of the fence to do something about that stuck needle. It’s hard on the ears and bad for one’s spirit to hear the same old epithets over and over. It’s time to move forward to a new track.
Once before I proposed a truce in the Language Wars, but only one linguist accepted my terms. If I had the power, I’d now declare the Language Wars officially at an end. It’s 3:43 p.m. Central Time on Sept. 27, 2012. The fighting must stop
________________________________________
Here’s a chilling thought: What if our English teachers were wrong? Maybe not about everything, but about a few memorable lessons. So many millions of writers have needlessly contorted their prose to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. So many well-intentioned editors have fought to change “a historic” to “an historic.” If it turns out that the guidelines we cling to (“to which we cling”?) are nonsense, maybe the texters have the right idea when they throw out the old rules and start fresh.
But if you aren’t ready to give up — if the “flaunt” in that headline raised your blood pressure — then how can you tell the difference between a sound rule of English and a made-up shibboleth? Where do good rules come from, and how do bad ones catch on?
Room for Debate invited two authors to answer and argue: the journalist Robert Lane Greene and the usage expert Bryan A. Garner. (Their responses, conforming to ”The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage,” may not represent their positions on style issues like hyphenation and serial commas.)
I started writing this essay five years ago, and then I stopped. That I was not able to finish the piece did not strike me at the time as ironic but as further proof that whatever I once had in me — juice, talent, will — was gone. In any case, completing it would have made moot the very point I was attempting to make: Not writing can be good for one’s writing; indeed, it can make one a better writer.
I hadn’t given up writing deliberately, and I cannot pinpoint a particular day when my not-writing period started, any more than one can say the moment when one is overtaken by sleep: It’s only after you wake that you realize how long you were out. Nor did I feel blocked at first. Lines would come to me then slip away, like a dog that loses interest in how you are petting it and seeks another hand. This goes both ways. When I lost interest in them, the lines gradually stopped coming. Before I knew it, two years had passed with scarcely a word.
I didn’t miss it, yet at the same time I felt something missing: A phantom voice, one might say. I had been pursuing writing since I was a kid, had published pieces in many places, and written three books back to back. I was nearing 50. To have silence and neither deadlines nor expectations for the first time in decades was sort of nice — and sort of troubling. Can one call oneself a writer when not-writing is what one actually does, day after day after day?
I never lied. If someone asked, I’d say I was not working on anything, and no, had nothing on the back burner, in the oven, cooking, percolating or marinating. (What’s with all the food metaphors anyway?) I wasn’t hungry either.
At a party one night, a very artistic looking young man with an Errol Flynn mustache warned me that I must not take a break for too long. “It won’t come back,” he said gravely. “I stopped writing in 1999, and now I can barely write a press release.”
I can’t say this didn’t scare me a bit. What if I really never wrote or published again?
I wouldn’t be in bad company, I told myself. After “Joe Gould’s Secret,” Joseph Mitchell published nothing new in his remaining 31 years. E.M. Forster published no more novels between “A Passage to India” and his death 46 years later. And then there were those hall of fame figures: J.D. Salinger, who published nothing for the last half of his life, and Harper Lee, whose post-Mockingbird silence should be enough to canonize her, the patron saint of not-artists of any discipline.
But let’s be real: I’m not them, and not-writing is not a way to support oneself. So I got a job (not writing-related), then moved to a new city, found another job, this time in fund-raising for a nonprofit organization, and eventually enrolled in a course to become a certified personal fitness trainer. Classes were held in the basement of a gym. I did it for fun, and more pragmatically, as a Plan B, a way to support myself if I got laid off (a real possibility). But it was there, unexpectedly, that I found my way back to writing full time, a framework for moving forward and validation for what I had done instinctively.
Fitness training today is generally built upon six major concepts (though they may go by different terms, depending upon the certifying agency), and each of these, I found, has a correlative in writing.
First, there is the Principle of Specificity. This states that what you train for is what you get: If it is strength you want, train for strength. In short, be specific. Writing 101, right? It’s all in the details.
Next: The Overload Principle, training a part of the body above the level to which it is accustomed. You must provide constant stimuli so the body never gets used to a given task; otherwise, expect no change. So too with writing: Push yourself, try new things — creative cross-training, I call it.
This leads to the Principle of Progression. Once you master new tasks, move on. Don’t get stuck — whether on a paragraph or an exercise regimen. If you do, this will lead to Accommodation. With no new demands placed upon it, the body reaches homeostasis — not a good place to find oneself. Here, everything flattens out. So, don’t get too comfortable; it will show on the page as clearly as in the mirror.
When stimuli are removed, gains are reversed — use it or lose it, the Principle of Reversibility. Just as movement in any form is better than none at all — walk around the block if you can’t make it to Spin class — one must do something, anything, to keep the creative motor running. After I stopped writing, for instance, I bought a camera and started taking photographs instead.
And finally, the Rest Principle, the tenet that gave me particular solace. To make fitness gains, whether in strength, speed, stamina or whatever your aim (see Principle of Specificity), you must take ample time to recover.
I had been working out as long as I had been writing, so this last principle was not new to me. Overtraining without taking days off can lead to injuries, chronic fatigue and, frankly, pain. But I had never observed this rule very strictly when it came to working on a piece of writing. Just as the body needs time to rest, so too does an essay, story, chapter, poem, book or a single page.
In some cases, it is not just the writing that needs a breather but the writer, too. On this matter, I quote from a National Council on Strength and Fitness training manual, one of the textbooks we used in our personal training course. Here, fatigue is defined as “an inability to contract despite continued neural stimulation” (what a bodybuilder might call a failure to flex, you and I might call writer’s block, in other words).
“As the rate of motor unit fatigue increases,” the manual goes on, “the effect becomes more pronounced, causing performance to decline proportionately to the level of fatigue. Periods of recovery enable a working tissue to avoid fatigue for longer periods of time… During the recovery period, the muscle fibers can rebuild their energy reserves, fix any damage resulting from the production of force, and fully return to normal pre-exertion levels.”
Translation: Don’t work through the pain; it will only hurt. Give yourself sufficient time to refresh.
How long should this period be? What is true for muscle fibers is true for creative ones as well. My rule of thumb in fitness training is 2-to-1: For every two days of intense workouts, a day off. However, “in cases of sustained high-level output,” according to my manual, full recovery may take longer. This is what had happened with me. I needed a really, really long rest.
Then I woke one day, and a line came to me. It didn’t slip away this time but stayed put. I followed it, like a path. It led to another, then another. Soon, pieces started lining up in my head, like cabs idling curbside, ready to go where I wanted to take them. But it wasn’t so much that pages started getting written that made me realize that my not-writing period had come to an end. Instead, my perspective had shifted.
Writing is not measured in page counts, I now believe, any more than a writer is defined by publication credits. To be a writer is to make a commitment to the long haul, as one does (especially as one gets older) to keeping fit and healthy for as long a run as possible. For me, this means staying active physically and creatively, switching it up, remaining curious and interested in learning new skills (upon finishing this piece, for instance, I’m going on my final open-water dive to become a certified scuba diver), and of course giving myself ample periods of rest, days or even weeks off. I know that the writer in me, like the lifelong fitness devotee, will be better off.
Just got back to read it. Much appreciated as always.
Obviously, we all are prone to making mistakes when we write;there are no exceptions, there's no two ways about that ... read full comment
Great food for thought.
Interesting rebuttal.
Just got back to read it. Much appreciated as always.
Obviously, we all are prone to making mistakes when we write;there are no exceptions, there's no two ways about that. But then isn't this all the more reason to go the extra mile -whenever time allows -(smile) in eliminating errors we can easily and normally identify when proof-reading our writing? Nobody is perfect!
It is another story altogether when errors are made out of ignorance/limitation of one's knowledge in language which is the specific tool being used in discussing a topic; since that cannot be helped, in such a case, readers must appreciate the writer's efforts with short-comings just as easily as listeners are wont do with speakers - especially with foreigners/non-native speakers. In other words, appreciate my efforts here at contributing to the topic, rather than being determined to nit-pick at inconsequential matters, and deliberately ignoring more important issues I bring forward for discussion just so you may publicly embarrass me for the fun of it.
Bless Ghana!
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Dear Abra Kuma,
Thanks.
Please be reminded that I consider you one of the wise voices on Ghanaweb, and that I cherish your contributions greatly.
Have a great weekend.
Thanks.
Dear Abra Kuma,
Thanks.
Please be reminded that I consider you one of the wise voices on Ghanaweb, and that I cherish your contributions greatly.
Have a great weekend.
Thanks.
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
SAS,
Good day.
In the first place you should not have apologized because that was unnecessary. You know English is not one of my problems. I mean grammar is not one of my problems.
I just spoke with a professor of ... read full comment
SAS,
Good day.
In the first place you should not have apologized because that was unnecessary. You know English is not one of my problems. I mean grammar is not one of my problems.
I just spoke with a professor of English/literature (who is also a well-known writer, communication expert, and linguist. He is popular across Africa and in America. Besides he has a PhD in English, a BA in literature (English/French), an MA in linguistics and another MA in Creative Writing. He has published widely on grammar usage among others).
In fact he gave me a tall list of books, etc., (highly technical texts and published papers) dealing with ongoing controversial debates over grammar (English) and with disagreements among some of the world’s major scholars, writers, linguists, philologists, etymologists, and professors of literature on what constitutes "proper" grammar (with particular reference to English).
In other words, what you SAS may consider “proper” grammar is something else to another equally competent linguist, writer, and grammarian. That is, there is no "universal" agreement among some of the world's major scholars, linguists, etymologists, philologists, and grammarians over what actually constitutes "proper" grammar. Anyway I don’t follow anyone’s rules as far as grammar goes and therefore write as I deem fit---in my opinion (Is it strange that you prefer a cow’s innards while another prefers its bones?)
But I will not bother you with these highly technical texts and books (anyway I don’t need tutoring in grammar. I have all the technical texts in the world to consult for my own edification. I also have others in the field to consult on such issues. You can help Danquists like the Adjoa Wangaras (Bobs, GIRLS SP, etc., in that regard. Thanks anyway. A Danquist such as Adjoa Wangara could not tell who wrote “Miscellanious” and who wrote “Ambiguiies” after reading our comments).
That said, I would have wished if you had brought out cogent alternative theories, facts and assumptions to contradict what I have to say in my article. This is more important to me than grammar. Your fixation on grammar constitutes an unnecessary diversion. Ask questions based on the article and I shall answer you. I am not interested in grammar and English orthography. I think the best person you should be having this discussion with is Abubakar Mohammed Marzuq Azindoo. Please I am not interested (Please I can recommend others who need help with grammar if you will oblige me). I do not mean this as an insult though. I have a great deal of respect for you as an individual and in spite of our disagreements over Nkrumah. I will always love you no matter what).
I want to assure you that I have already read most of these technical texts and texts anyway (the ones my friend recommended). Fortunately, I have been following these debates my friend discussed with me this morning---for as long as I have been interested in the subject matter. On the other hand this little and straightforward discussion (see below) should tell you what I have been trying to put across to you all along (Please don’t come back saying I made errors in these comments too. I will not bother with it. Remember I have read most of the world’s important books on grammar---some of the copies of these books are with me here.
Have a great weekend
Here is what I want you to read (I am familiar with the contents of most of the works mentioned in this discussion. Do you see any technical errors in the comments of these discussants involved in language/grammar war? Tell me about these technical errors and also let me know why individuals who claim to know better should be making such technical errors!):
________________________________________
Welcome to another round of the Language Wars. By now we know the battle lines: As a “descriptivist,” I try to describe language as it is used. As a “prescriptivist,” you focus on how language should be used. If we were from the two extremes, I would open fire by saying that you preach stodgy nonrules that most people don’t obey, and that people like you don’t understand that language must grow and change. You would then call me a permissivist who ignores the fact that people can use language incompetently or well, and that people want to write and speak well.
But I believe that we’re both reasonable moderates, and have something more interesting to say than that old pantomime. Your excellent guide, “Garner’s Modern American Usage,” shows you to be, in your words, a “descriptive prescriber.” You give not just “right” or “wrong” rulings on usage, but often a 1-5 score, in which a given usage may be a 1 (definitely a mistake), 3 (common, but …) or 5 (perfectly acceptable). This notion of correctness as a scale, not a binary state, makes you different from many prescriptivists.
For my part, I glory in the real-world mess of dialects and slang, and think that some popular prescriptivists have imposed some bogus nonrules on too many schoolchildren. But as I have written before: “There is a set of standard conventions everyone needs for formal writing and speaking. Except under unusual circumstances, you should use the grammar and vocabulary of standard written English for these purposes.”
You’re free to prefer 'which' for extra information and 'that' for a crucial bit of definition. Let's just not use the word 'error' when someone prefers 'which' for both.
We still disagree on both some points of usage and on the underlying sources of authority. The usage books of the past hundred years, written by prescriptivists, very often prescribe rules that I don’t believe are part of standard English.
Where they insist “hopefully” should not be used to mean “I hope,” you differ with them. So why does the campaign against this “error” live on? Probably in large part because a few writers — E. B. White, half of Strunk and White, among them — think that using “hopefully” in this way is a mistake. Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style,” one of the most popular usage books of all time, is short and pithy and by and large a good guide to good writing. But where Strunk and White went wrong was in prescribing from their own intuitions rather than — what else am I going to say? — accurately describing standard English. Sometimes you join them.
For example, to pick on Strunk and White again, they prescribe a rule on “which” and “that” to introduce relative clauses: “which” must introduce a “nonrestrictive” relative clause (a mere extra bit of information). Only “that” can introduce a “restrictive” clause (a crucial bit of definition). You agree with White that “The lawn mower which is broken is in the garage” should have “that,” not “which.” However, even White doesn’t agree with White. As the linguist Geoff Pullum noticed, White used “which” in the “wrong” way in his essay “Death of a Pig”: “the premature expiration of a pig is, I soon discovered, a departure which the community marks solemnly on its calendar.” White would probably say he slipped. I’d console him; no, he didn’t. It’s a fine sentence from a fine American writer.
British English, including in my publication, The Economist, mostly ignores this rule, as you acknowledge. It was still common enough a century ago that the great H. W. Fowler, who preferred your rule, conceded that “The relations between that, who & which, have come to us from our forefathers as an odd jumble.” White even broke the rule in his own prose, probably unconsciously.
The bottom line for me would be this: You’re free to prefer different relative pronouns for different kinds of clauses, on the principle of “one word for one function, wherever possible.” I just wouldn’t use the word “error” in this case. The history of English usage tells us that the restrictive “which” is at the very heart of the language. Even the King James translators gave us “Our Father which art in heaven.” (In the 18th century, Bishop Robert Lowth, a godfather of prescriptivists, sought to correct this to “who art in heaven,” but that’s a topic for another day.)
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The Labels Are Blurring
Bryan A. Garner 4:43 PM
It was telling, I think, that when we began talking about this exchange, you referred to me as a “successful descriptivist” — until I suggested that you re-examine your wording.
The labels “prescriptivist” and “descriptivist” are increasingly unhelpful. One could defensibly call me a descriptivist. I just describe something that dogmatic egalitarians don’t want described: the linguistic choices of a fully informed, highly literate but never uptight user of language. It’s a rational construct — rather like the law’s “reasonable person” — and a highly useful one at that. The moment one says, “If you want to be such a person — a fully informed, highly literate but never uptight user of language — then here’s how to do it,” one is prescribing.
But that’s all that the reputable usage experts were ever doing. I count among these writers H. W. Fowler, Eric Partridge, Margaret Nicholson, Theodore M. Bernstein, Ernest Gowers and Wilson Follett. I’d even add William Strunk and E. B. White. All of them were extraordinarily well read, sensitive to language, alert to nuance, versed in literary history and highly observant. They were describing the ideal writer or speaker, and they did it well — not infallibly, but well.
It sounds like wishful thinking when you say that 'no real-world descriptivist' still accepts that a native speaker can’t make a mistake. This is a thoroughly wrong-headed dogma that took many years to debunk — and still it persists.
Over the past three decades, linguists have become accustomed to using “prescriptivist” as a snarl word, essentially equivalent to “linguistic ignoramus.” The positions attributed to prescriptivists, even in your own work, almost never align with positions taken by Fowler, Partridge, Nicholson, Bernstein, Gowers, Follett or me. Instead, this “prescriptivist” is supposed to be someone who forbids sentence starting conjunctions and sentence ending prepositions. Yet no reputable prescriptivist — not even the 18th century grammarians — took such a position.
You’d object, I assume, if I were to define descriptivists as quantitative social scientists with no interest in literary style who nevertheless study language, reporting all findings in maladroit, leaden prose, fallaciously insisting, through a misguided relativism, that all forms of language are equal and berating anyone who dares to say that the nonstandard use of a word or phrase is “incorrect.”
The fact that this definition doesn’t fit you and many other modern writers on linguistics merely shows that descriptivists have moderated the indefensible positions they once took. The linguists have switched their position — without, of course, acknowledging that this is what they’ve done.
It sounds like wishful thinking when you say that “no real-world descriptivist” still accepts the dogma that a native speaker can’t make a mistake:
• “In language, what is used is right — and has to be.” (Ellsworth Barnard, 1979)
• “We believe, as do most linguists, that native speakers do not make mistakes.” (Peter Trudgill & Lars-Gunnar Andersson, 1990)
• “Unlike non-native speakers, native speakers do not make grammatical errors.” (Trudgill & Andersson, 1990 again)
• “When we consider variation in language, we must give up the idea of errors.” (Donna Jo Napoli, 2003)
This is a thoroughly wrong-headed dogma that took many years to debunk — and still it persists. Let me reiterate that I am not alone in seeing this deep-rooted weed: “During the period of American structuralism a myth became well established that the native speaker cannot make a mistake” (Charles A. Ferguson, 1984).
The fact that you and other linguists are now embracing the prescriptive tradition is cause for celebration. Nowhere is the flip-flop more apparent than in the work of Steven Pinker. In “The Language Instinct” in 1994, Pinker argued the “no native speaker can make a mistake” position with a bizarre metaphor: “To a linguist or psychologist, language is like the song of the humpback whale.… Isn’t the song of the humpback whale whatever the humpback whale decides to sing?” A few pages later in that bestselling book, Pinker referred to linguistic guidance about standard English as surviving “by the same dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations.”
Inflammatory words. Guidance about good English gets equated with genital mutilations. But now, in this topsy-turvy world of ours, the same Steven Pinker who once likened prescriptive rules to genital mutilations has been newly appointed chairman of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. He is now a guardian of the language. At least he has modified his views, tacitly acknowledging the criticism that David Foster Wallace and I and others laid at his doorstep.
His stance today? As usage-panel chairman, Pinker now says that it is “well worth preserving” the standard, traditional uses of “enervate,” “flaunt,” “fortuitous,” “fulsome,” “reticent,” and “untenable.” Bully for him. He says it’s “almost a miracle” that we continue to distinguish between “affect” and “effect.”
Rarely have I seen a more agreeable intellectual about-face. But of course he doesn’t acknowledge that he now takes a position that reputable prescriptivists have taken for over a century.
You, Lane, got into the linguistic game late enough to join the wave of descriptivists flocking to the position of enlightened prescriptivists. But in your book, “You Are What You Speak,” you tendentiously call prescriptivists “language cranks,” “oddballs,” “declinists,” “self-appointed language guardians,” and “scolds” who habitually fly into “spittle-flecked fury.” A little of that stuff is good-natured fun, but the condescending haughtiness is unrelenting.
As for “that” and “which,” you’re simply disagreeing with my description of how an ideal, fully informed speaker or writer of American English uses these relative pronouns. I can live with that disagreement, but I stand by my words.
Further, as a descriptive matter, you are quite wrong to call “restrictive which” part of the “heart of our language,” and the King James passage you cite isn’t at all pertinent, since it’s nonrestrictive — as you’d surely notice if you took a moment to analyze it.
The real point is this: We could go a long way toward reconciling the language wars if linguists and writers like you would stop demonizing all prescriptivists and start acknowledging that the reputable ones have always tried to base their guidance on sound descriptions.
________________________________________
Rules and Nonrules
Robert Lane Greene 4:43 PM
Thanks for an engaging response. There’s so much in it that I’ll work from the specific to the general, because one example can sometimes illuminate a lot. I hope readers less interested in subordinate clauses than you and I are might bear with this point a moment. It widens out, I promise.
You think I misunderstood the clause “which art in heaven” in the Lord’s Prayer. That clause begins with “which.” You think such clauses should be used only to add extra information when talking about the referent previously mentioned. In this case you might repunctuate it “Our Father (which art in heaven), hallowed be thy name.”
But that interpretation isn’t the right one. The writer of Matthew was in fact obsessed with the opposition between heaven and earth, so the phrase “father which is in heaven” appears 14 times in that book, and only once elsewhere in the New Testament. Matthew’s Jesus even tells his disciples at one point (23:9) “to call no man on earth your father” and to serve only their heavenly father. This is why “father which is in heaven” appears without commas so many times in the King James translation of Matthew: Matthew’s Jesus is constantly reminding the reader which father he is talking about: not dad back at home, but a new kind of father. If you think this clause is “nonrestrictive,” try bracketing off all of those 14 instances of “father which is in heaven” with commas: “father, which is in heaven, .…” The results are often nonsensical.
I submit a meta-rule: When a proposed rule and actual usage conflict, the proposed rule is false, and actual usage should be our guide.
Which makes the point: in 1611, a committee of experts in fine English writing thought “which” could be used as a restrictive relative pronoun. If there were a native English “rule” against this, one of these scholars would surely have pointed it out. Since there was no such rule, the scholars agreed. “Which” can be restrictive. Great English writers went on for centuries using restrictive “which.”
Around the end of the 19th century, a few usage commentators, though, decided to “correct” this, going against the actual usage up to that point. They thought it was best to reserve “which” for nonrestrictive clauses only. The best known proponent of this rule in this era was the great Fowler, as mentioned. But he didn’t succeed in establishing it, either. It was not until E.B. White repeated his old teacher Will Strunk’s “which"/"that” rule that this really got stuck into American English usage discussion. Fifty years later still, you (like many other commentators, and the Microsoft Word software I’m typing this on) recommend the “rule.”
For those readers who have stuck with me, here is the point: the rule has no root in great English usage. It appears to have appealed to a few usage-book writers, among them Fowler, Strunk, White and you, for its logical simplicity: one relative pronoun for this role, another for that role. But it’s simply not what great writers consistently do, not now or ever.
What do we do when what we want the rule to be conflicts with what great writers actually do? I submit a meta-rule: When a proposed rule and actual usage conflict, the proposed rule is false, and actual usage should be our guide.
This takes some unpacking. Whose usage, in particular, should constitute our rules? But this is not so hard: when we’re describing standard edited written English, we look at standard edited written English to derive the rules. If a usage appears only very rarely, and is widely condemned, we call it a mistake. If it appears again and again from the pens of great writers and is printed after oversight by professional editors, the usage must be accepted.
Sometimes, a usage will spread that is new, illogical and strikes commentators as tasteless. But if, over time, it becomes widespread among a critical mass of good writers and is accepted by many good editors, we must acknowledge a new rule. We must be descriptivists, in other words.
And this is exactly what you are. You tell people which usages they should prefer, but when a battle has been lost over several decades, you call it lost and suggest they move on. The label of “descriptive prescriber” is one you wear proudly, and you should.
So why are academic linguists, and others like me, so down on “prescriptivism”? Because of a curious asymmetry. Systematic description of actual language is mostly undertaken by academics, a relatively small group. But the masses engage in prescriptivism. “The Elements of Style” is not the only language-usage book to sell in the millions; so has Lynne Truss’s screed “Eats, Shoots and Leaves.” If you do a radio show on language (I know you’re a veteran of many more than I), no matter what your original topic, you’ll get call after call of people asking you to rule on their pet peeves. Split an infinitive in print and you will get angry letter after letter. In fact, the style guides of The Economist and The New York Times say that split infinitives are fine, but should be avoided because they annoy many readers.
You say that for a century the best prescriptivists have dismissed nonrules like “don’t begin a sentence with a conjunction,” “don’t split an infinitive” or “don’t end a sentence in a preposition.” But all three rules are incredibly widespread; all of them were enforced by college professors of mine in the mid-1990s.
When descriptivists fight back, it is partly on behalf of others: black Americans, Southern whites (like my Dad) and many who were just unlucky not to get a great education.
Facing these presciptivist masses, linguists and descriptivists are on the back foot in many ways. They defend unfashionable propositions like the idea that African-American vernacular English is logical, expressive and grammatical. They work with a vocabulary (“determiner,” “x-bar,” “right-node raising”) that even the best lay grammarians are turned off by. And then they must defend their work against two sets of critics: the popular, often incorrect prescriptivist masses and the well-read, reasoned prescriptivists. In books aimed at a mass audience, like the 1994 text you mention, of course Steve Pinker aims at debunking mass prescriptivism. But it didn’t take Pinker a decade to convert to the idea of rules and correct English; in 1999, in “Words and Rules,” Pinker wrote about how children learn to use irregular verbs correctly.
Pinker saw no conflict in being a descriptivist and speaking of “correct” grammar. I consider myself a “prescriptive descriptivist,” and have no qualms with the word “error.” Even the “no such thing as an error” linguists whom you cite ring-fence their statements with things like “for the most part” (Trudgill and Andersson, 1990). They mean that “when expressing themselves as they intend to,” not hurried, tired, distracted or drinking, native speakers do not make mistakes. Instead, they would say that those speakers constitute their own idiolects (individual ways of speaking) and when their speech patterns line up, they constitute stable dialects, and when enough dialects overlap, they constitute languages. I would never say “native speakers can’t make an error,” but I do see what they’re aiming for: a correction of the centuries-old view that error is everywhere because most people are ignorant.
That is why I sometimes use language like “cranks,” “curmudgeons” and “sticklers” to describe many prescriptivists. Descriptivists are not only fighting their own intellectual battles but also responding to centuries of peeving. Cicero, who thought improper Latin was “disgraceful,” was quoted by Robert Lowth (the bishop who wanted to “correct” the Lord’s Prayer) on the title page of his influential 1762 English grammar. Jonathan Swift called new pronunciations “barbarous.” The thoughtful Fowler occasionally stooped to calling usages he disliked “ignorant.” Lynne Truss jokes that people who misuse apostrophes should be “struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.” Simon Heffer, a more serious recent English prescriptivist, likes to throw around “illiterate.” If you still think I’m overstating the peevish streak within prescriptivism, read the comments on any online article about grammar and usage. I wish you, Bernstein, Partridge, Fowler and the other intellectuals were fully representative of prescriptivism. I truly do. But this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Finally, when descriptivists fight back, we also do so on behalf of others: black Americans (whose distinctive dialect has long been sneered at by whites), Southern whites (like my Dad, who used “might could,” “ain’t” and “y’all”), Eliza Doolittle (the poor thing was no fool) and many who were just unlucky not to get a great education. When we see prescriptivists call such people “ignorant” and “illiterate,” it can set the blood to boiling. I wish all commentators saw the world on a scale like yours and could acknowledge “nonstandard, but rule-bound, dialect.” But most do not.
For too long, the so-called descriptivists and prescriptivists have talked past each other. I hope this conversation helps narrow the gap. I hereby promise, as you ask, to “stop demonizing all prescriptivists and start acknowledging that the reputable ones have always tried to base their guidance on sound descriptions.” This should come naturally: I never demonized “all” prescriptivists, and I praise Fowler every chance I get.
I hope that you and other arbiters of standard English will publicly take on the mass prescriptivists and nonrules with the same verve and vigor with which you take on real solecisms and slip-ups.
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Some Biases Are Unfounded, and Some Aren’t
Bryan A. Garner 4:43 PM
Maybe we’re getting somewhere. If so, it’d be great if future writers were to take account of what we’re saying here. For many decades now, the needle in the prescriptive/descriptive long playing record has been stuck on a scratch. (I hope that metaphor is still comprehensible to our readers.)
The only thing that has kept me from being a “mass prescriptivist” is that there haven’t been more people buying “Garner’s Modern American Usage.” For my work in that book, a writer in The Economist recently called me a “highbrow prescriptivist.” But the sad fact is that there’s little call for usage guidance, whether highbrow or lowbrow.
People cling to their uninformed linguistic prejudices. I’ve countered them in print, at length, in such entries as the “Superstitions” essay in “Garner’s Modern American Usage.” Let us both continue to smite ignorance.
Hardly anyone wants to be a nonjudgmental collector of evidence. It’s far more interesting and valuable to assemble the evidence and then to draw conclusions from it. Judgments. Rulings.
You should acknowledge, however, that there’s often good reason for peeves. Some language is indeed “disgraceful” (Cicero’s word), “barbarous” (Swift’s), “ignorant” (Fowler’s) and “illiterate” (Heffer’s) — as judged against educated speech. (Some readers will suspect that the phrase “educated speech” is illogical — until they consult “Hypallage” in a dictionary or usage guide.) I avoid the Lynne Truss school of supercharged, hyperbolic sensationalism — partly because it’s lowbrow and partly because the sensationalists themselves are themselves typically ill informed. (See “Garner on Language and Writing,” pages 637–47.)
So you and I are getting closer together. But we’re not there yet. Your “meta rule” is flawed. You say: “When a proposed rule and actual usage conflict, the proposed rule is false, and actual usage should be our guide.” You can always find actual usage that contradicts any proposed linguistic ruling — and actual usage that contradicts other actual usages. The big problem with traditional descriptivism is that any evidence validates the usage. But descriptivists like you are (rightly) retreating from that position.
The better view, I submit, is the one I set forth in “Garner’s Modern American Usage”:
In the end, the actual usage of educated speakers and writers is the overarching criterion for correctness. But while actual usage can trump the other facts, it isn’t the only consideration.
There are several other factors to be accounted for, like the degree to which distinctions are being blurred, the age of an error that is becoming prevalent, and the extent to which a questionable word or phrase defies logic. For example, in my classification, “could care less” in place of the correct phrase “couldn’t care less” remains a stage-3 misusage.
If descriptivists believe that any linguistic evidence validates usage, then we must not be descriptivists. Hardly anyone wants to be a nonjudgmental collector of evidence. It’s far more interesting and valuable to assemble the evidence and then to draw conclusions from it. Judgments. Rulings. To the extent that “the masses” want such reasoning — as one could only wish — it’s because they want to use language effectively.
As for “that” vs. “which,” I’ll never hear the Lord’s Prayer again in quite the same way — given your convincing argument. But my basic point stands: In American English from circa 1930 on, “that” has been overwhelmingly restrictive and “which” overwhelmingly nonrestrictive. Strunk, White and other guidebook writers have good reasons for their recommendation to keep them distinct — and the actual practice of edited American English bears this out.
My most recent writing on “that” vs. “which” appears in “Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts.” My co-author, Justice Antonin Scalia, softened my words there because he sometimes (when I’m not around) uses “which” restrictively. When I tell him that’s a literary failing, he harrumphs. Fortunately, he has allowed me, in both our books, to change all his restrictive “whiches” to “thats.” It makes the style so much better.
I concede, though, that “mistake” is too strong a word for a “that”/“which” blemish. I maintain, however, that the practice in the best-edited American English is to confine “which,” as a relative pronoun, to either nonrestrictive uses or uses that follow prepositions (“by which,” “for which,” “in which,” and the like). I’m happy to live in disagreement with you on that tiny point — given that we have agreed on so much else.
Please, Lane, get the folks on your side of the fence to do something about that stuck needle. It’s hard on the ears and bad for one’s spirit to hear the same old epithets over and over. It’s time to move forward to a new track.
Once before I proposed a truce in the Language Wars, but only one linguist accepted my terms. If I had the power, I’d now declare the Language Wars officially at an end. It’s 3:43 p.m. Central Time on Sept. 27, 2012. The fighting must stop
________________________________________
Here’s a chilling thought: What if our English teachers were wrong? Maybe not about everything, but about a few memorable lessons. So many millions of writers have needlessly contorted their prose to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. So many well-intentioned editors have fought to change “a historic” to “an historic.” If it turns out that the guidelines we cling to (“to which we cling”?) are nonsense, maybe the texters have the right idea when they throw out the old rules and start fresh.
But if you aren’t ready to give up — if the “flaunt” in that headline raised your blood pressure — then how can you tell the difference between a sound rule of English and a made-up shibboleth? Where do good rules come from, and how do bad ones catch on?
Room for Debate invited two authors to answer and argue: the journalist Robert Lane Greene and the usage expert Bryan A. Garner. (Their responses, conforming to ”The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage,” may not represent their positions on style issues like hyphenation and serial commas.)
I started writing this essay five years ago, and then I stopped. That I was not able to finish the piece did not strike me at the time as ironic but as further proof that whatever I once had in me — juice, talent, will — was gone. In any case, completing it would have made moot the very point I was attempting to make: Not writing can be good for one’s writing; indeed, it can make one a better writer.
I hadn’t given up writing deliberately, and I cannot pinpoint a particular day when my not-writing period started, any more than one can say the moment when one is overtaken by sleep: It’s only after you wake that you realize how long you were out. Nor did I feel blocked at first. Lines would come to me then slip away, like a dog that loses interest in how you are petting it and seeks another hand. This goes both ways. When I lost interest in them, the lines gradually stopped coming. Before I knew it, two years had passed with scarcely a word.
I didn’t miss it, yet at the same time I felt something missing: A phantom voice, one might say. I had been pursuing writing since I was a kid, had published pieces in many places, and written three books back to back. I was nearing 50. To have silence and neither deadlines nor expectations for the first time in decades was sort of nice — and sort of troubling. Can one call oneself a writer when not-writing is what one actually does, day after day after day?
I never lied. If someone asked, I’d say I was not working on anything, and no, had nothing on the back burner, in the oven, cooking, percolating or marinating. (What’s with all the food metaphors anyway?) I wasn’t hungry either.
At a party one night, a very artistic looking young man with an Errol Flynn mustache warned me that I must not take a break for too long. “It won’t come back,” he said gravely. “I stopped writing in 1999, and now I can barely write a press release.”
I can’t say this didn’t scare me a bit. What if I really never wrote or published again?
I wouldn’t be in bad company, I told myself. After “Joe Gould’s Secret,” Joseph Mitchell published nothing new in his remaining 31 years. E.M. Forster published no more novels between “A Passage to India” and his death 46 years later. And then there were those hall of fame figures: J.D. Salinger, who published nothing for the last half of his life, and Harper Lee, whose post-Mockingbird silence should be enough to canonize her, the patron saint of not-artists of any discipline.
But let’s be real: I’m not them, and not-writing is not a way to support oneself. So I got a job (not writing-related), then moved to a new city, found another job, this time in fund-raising for a nonprofit organization, and eventually enrolled in a course to become a certified personal fitness trainer. Classes were held in the basement of a gym. I did it for fun, and more pragmatically, as a Plan B, a way to support myself if I got laid off (a real possibility). But it was there, unexpectedly, that I found my way back to writing full time, a framework for moving forward and validation for what I had done instinctively.
Fitness training today is generally built upon six major concepts (though they may go by different terms, depending upon the certifying agency), and each of these, I found, has a correlative in writing.
First, there is the Principle of Specificity. This states that what you train for is what you get: If it is strength you want, train for strength. In short, be specific. Writing 101, right? It’s all in the details.
Next: The Overload Principle, training a part of the body above the level to which it is accustomed. You must provide constant stimuli so the body never gets used to a given task; otherwise, expect no change. So too with writing: Push yourself, try new things — creative cross-training, I call it.
This leads to the Principle of Progression. Once you master new tasks, move on. Don’t get stuck — whether on a paragraph or an exercise regimen. If you do, this will lead to Accommodation. With no new demands placed upon it, the body reaches homeostasis — not a good place to find oneself. Here, everything flattens out. So, don’t get too comfortable; it will show on the page as clearly as in the mirror.
When stimuli are removed, gains are reversed — use it or lose it, the Principle of Reversibility. Just as movement in any form is better than none at all — walk around the block if you can’t make it to Spin class — one must do something, anything, to keep the creative motor running. After I stopped writing, for instance, I bought a camera and started taking photographs instead.
And finally, the Rest Principle, the tenet that gave me particular solace. To make fitness gains, whether in strength, speed, stamina or whatever your aim (see Principle of Specificity), you must take ample time to recover.
I had been working out as long as I had been writing, so this last principle was not new to me. Overtraining without taking days off can lead to injuries, chronic fatigue and, frankly, pain. But I had never observed this rule very strictly when it came to working on a piece of writing. Just as the body needs time to rest, so too does an essay, story, chapter, poem, book or a single page.
In some cases, it is not just the writing that needs a breather but the writer, too. On this matter, I quote from a National Council on Strength and Fitness training manual, one of the textbooks we used in our personal training course. Here, fatigue is defined as “an inability to contract despite continued neural stimulation” (what a bodybuilder might call a failure to flex, you and I might call writer’s block, in other words).
“As the rate of motor unit fatigue increases,” the manual goes on, “the effect becomes more pronounced, causing performance to decline proportionately to the level of fatigue. Periods of recovery enable a working tissue to avoid fatigue for longer periods of time… During the recovery period, the muscle fibers can rebuild their energy reserves, fix any damage resulting from the production of force, and fully return to normal pre-exertion levels.”
Translation: Don’t work through the pain; it will only hurt. Give yourself sufficient time to refresh.
How long should this period be? What is true for muscle fibers is true for creative ones as well. My rule of thumb in fitness training is 2-to-1: For every two days of intense workouts, a day off. However, “in cases of sustained high-level output,” according to my manual, full recovery may take longer. This is what had happened with me. I needed a really, really long rest.
Then I woke one day, and a line came to me. It didn’t slip away this time but stayed put. I followed it, like a path. It led to another, then another. Soon, pieces started lining up in my head, like cabs idling curbside, ready to go where I wanted to take them. But it wasn’t so much that pages started getting written that made me realize that my not-writing period had come to an end. Instead, my perspective had shifted.
Writing is not measured in page counts, I now believe, any more than a writer is defined by publication credits. To be a writer is to make a commitment to the long haul, as one does (especially as one gets older) to keeping fit and healthy for as long a run as possible. For me, this means staying active physically and creatively, switching it up, remaining curious and interested in learning new skills (upon finishing this piece, for instance, I’m going on my final open-water dive to become a certified scuba diver), and of course giving myself ample periods of rest, days or even weeks off. I know that the writer in me, like the lifelong fitness devotee, will be better off.
Funny haha funny hoho!! Why would any clear thinking Ghanaian want to be classified with the traitorous imperialist lackey inferiority complex laden danquists!! Unfortunately danquists emanate from the stagnant swamps of neoc ... read full comment
Funny haha funny hoho!! Why would any clear thinking Ghanaian want to be classified with the traitorous imperialist lackey inferiority complex laden danquists!! Unfortunately danquists emanate from the stagnant swamps of neocolonialism where they co-evolved with the virus of tribalism! Among the rituals of neocolonial imperialism are mass murder and genocide in company with unquenchable greed and last for power, and danquists imagine that proud Afrikans would deign to lower themselves into that abyss!!!
I have taken liberties with the immortal words of the "BLACKHEARTMAN"!!
GORGORDUTOR 8 years ago
Correction : danquists UNQUENCHABLE GREED AND LAST FOR POWER
Correction : danquists UNQUENCHABLE GREED AND LAST FOR POWER
Dr. SAS, Attorney at Law 8 years ago
Correction: "Last for power"???
Hehehehehehe!!
Nkrumagraphy indeed.
Correction: "Last for power"???
Hehehehehehe!!
Nkrumagraphy indeed.
GORGORDUTOR 8 years ago
As usual trying to pound the table. A self proclaimed attorney and English Don who can neither spell "MISCELLANEOUS" (miscellenious) nor "AMBIGUITIES" (ambigguiies) and incapable of mounting coherent, cogent and rational argu ... read full comment
As usual trying to pound the table. A self proclaimed attorney and English Don who can neither spell "MISCELLANEOUS" (miscellenious) nor "AMBIGUITIES" (ambigguiies) and incapable of mounting coherent, cogent and rational argument!! I suspect you are an expert plea bargain broker, I heard you are a PUBLIC PRETENDER!!
YAW 8 years ago
The simple fact is that the I.Q. of Francis Kwarteng cannot assist him to write any reasonable article on his own, he indeed lacks English grammatical and that is the main reason why he always copies from books, other writers ... read full comment
The simple fact is that the I.Q. of Francis Kwarteng cannot assist him to write any reasonable article on his own, he indeed lacks English grammatical and that is the main reason why he always copies from books, other writers or collumnist and paste as article.
YAW 8 years ago
Very funny! From Adjoa Wangara to Yaw Owusu, Bob, DUTOR, Dr Otto, Attafah, Kwame Joe etc to YAW again just to prove your Idiocy.
Very funny! From Adjoa Wangara to Yaw Owusu, Bob, DUTOR, Dr Otto, Attafah, Kwame Joe etc to YAW again just to prove your Idiocy.
Fred Amoah 8 years ago
FACTS are more important.Pro-Nkrumah writers have valid references but you anti-Nkrumah moronic writers are non-factual writers who depend on HEARSAY and falsehood.So,you eccentric writers are now Typo error professors.What a ... read full comment
FACTS are more important.Pro-Nkrumah writers have valid references but you anti-Nkrumah moronic writers are non-factual writers who depend on HEARSAY and falsehood.So,you eccentric writers are now Typo error professors.What a shame!
GORGORDUTOR 8 years ago
Ah gudu wan dere Mr Amoah, don mine dem dere, na huhudious, adufudecious omolokpaa people now!! Na craze wey dey craze abi!!
Ah gudu wan dere Mr Amoah, don mine dem dere, na huhudious, adufudecious omolokpaa people now!! Na craze wey dey craze abi!!
Prof Lungu 8 years ago
This, what we will call the Kofi-Ata-Type of Question (KAToQ) from the other side, with respect to the Anas revelations!
READ: "...If the British Colonial Government had deported foreigners such as Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria) ... read full comment
This, what we will call the Kofi-Ata-Type of Question (KAToQ) from the other side, with respect to the Anas revelations!
READ: "...If the British Colonial Government had deported foreigners such as Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria) and T.A. Wallace Johnson (Sierra Leone) for a sedition charge in 1935, what prevented the same government from deporting Nkrumah to Liberia for his anti-colonial struggles?..."
WE SAY: Good question!
Further, after all their lies and fabrications, we would have expected that the Nonentities, Liars, and Crooks (NLC) would have blasted that fact to Ghanaians, on that sorry day in February, 1966.
By the Way: Recently, we came across a story about another guy from Sierral Leone who was deported by Nkrumah's government to political-criminal activities in Ghana. We learned that he was against Nkrumah because he preferred the photo of the Queen of England on the money (cedi) bill, not Nkrumah's.
Tweaa Kai, more deservedly!
MARCUS AMPADU 8 years ago
Onuah Francis, I am beginning to find your articles too delimitting; too confining to history. Don't get me wrong, because I know that there is a place for history since it concerned with origins, roots & where we been; but b ... read full comment
Onuah Francis, I am beginning to find your articles too delimitting; too confining to history. Don't get me wrong, because I know that there is a place for history since it concerned with origins, roots & where we been; but because we now live in a world of rapid acceleration, we have to turn more and more to learn about futuristics which is about goals, purposes, and where we are going, and how to get there.
Sometimes I wish Dr. Kwame Nkrumah & Dr. J.B. Danquah had been knowledgeable about Futurology, our history would certainly have been different.
We the present generation have to embrace futures thinking to have robust image of our futures.
Bob 8 years ago
Marcus Ampadu, I have warned you on several ocassions not to augue with francis kwarteng because he will at long last use his stupidity to win you and pull you to join his likes like Lungu, Kojo T etc. the idiotic group.
I ... read full comment
Marcus Ampadu, I have warned you on several ocassions not to augue with francis kwarteng because he will at long last use his stupidity to win you and pull you to join his likes like Lungu, Kojo T etc. the idiotic group.
It has became crystal clear for a very long time that francis kwarteng is an imbecile who faces no reality, you can see it yourself that all what the stupid mad guy, kwarteng can do is to cut & paste any nonsense about Nkrumah which he himself sometimes don't comprehend.
He has been bashing you any time you try to swim a different direction, thus challenging him, saying "Marcus did you read the article" and that kind of intimidation which made you often try to lick that his dirty ass.
I am happy that you are gradually seeing the light.
Trust me the likes of francis kwarteng are all but I really mean all STUPID PEOPLE, you look at people like Lungu and Kojo T to mention just a few.
MARCUS AMPADU 8 years ago
I hope you come to realize soon that disagreement with someone should not merit insults. By the way, check your spelling of "augue". And get it inside your block head, whether you are masquerading as YAW, or using a different ... read full comment
I hope you come to realize soon that disagreement with someone should not merit insults. By the way, check your spelling of "augue". And get it inside your block head, whether you are masquerading as YAW, or using a different moniker, that Kwarteng is a friend, irregardless of occasional disagreements.
Bob 8 years ago
Sorry for you MARCUS AMPADU, you will forever remain the doormat of francis kwarteng, he has got you and will always use you to clean the dirt under his dirty shoe. Such fool like you is exactly what the braggart kwarteng is ... read full comment
Sorry for you MARCUS AMPADU, you will forever remain the doormat of francis kwarteng, he has got you and will always use you to clean the dirt under his dirty shoe. Such fool like you is exactly what the braggart kwarteng is looking for. People like you he can command like a slave and lastly pull you to the world of fools (fools paradise)
Attafah 8 years ago
Kwarteng's trailer and Ass-licker Marcus Ampadu, before pointing fingure about spellings check first your bogus spelling of "delimitting"
Kwarteng's trailer and Ass-licker Marcus Ampadu, before pointing fingure about spellings check first your bogus spelling of "delimitting"
Kwame Joe 8 years ago
Thanks for the correction, Attafah. But tell me briefly why you consider me Kwarteng trailer & Ass-Licker. Waiting for your answer.
Thanks for the correction, Attafah. But tell me briefly why you consider me Kwarteng trailer & Ass-Licker. Waiting for your answer.
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Dear Marcus,
How are you?
When is your futurology article coming?
Thanks.
Dear Marcus,
How are you?
When is your futurology article coming?
Thanks.
MARCUS AMPADU 8 years ago
Very soon. Thanks for asking menuah.
Very soon. Thanks for asking menuah.
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
Dear Marcus,
I look forward to it.
Have a great weekend.
Thanks.
Dear Marcus,
I look forward to it.
Have a great weekend.
Thanks.
Fred Amoah 8 years ago
DR SAS,where were you hiding when Prof Lungu gave you the TECHNICAL KNOCKOUT(TKO)?
DR SAS,where were you hiding when Prof Lungu gave you the TECHNICAL KNOCKOUT(TKO)?
YAW 8 years ago
Sick and tired of prejudice, distortions,and outright lies from Ahoofe and other Ignoble Scholars, Francis is fighting back with facts and knowledge. By the way, Sir Charles MacCarthy, son of a French immigrant changed his na ... read full comment
Sick and tired of prejudice, distortions,and outright lies from Ahoofe and other Ignoble Scholars, Francis is fighting back with facts and knowledge. By the way, Sir Charles MacCarthy, son of a French immigrant changed his name from Guerault to his mothers maiden name MacCarthy. Even George Washington"s date of birth was changed to suit the conditions that existed at the time. Do they have a problem with Sonny Liston"s unknown date of birth in USA?
Below is a PdF copy of... Gold Coast Annual Report submitted by Gordon Guggisberg... 1927-1928 with regards to birth and deaths registration in the Gold coast. I doubt whether the Village of Nkroful was listed as one of the 26 centres. To cap it all the governor even spelt efforts as [eliorts] yet Ahoofe and co will berate Nkrumah for a few minor errors the in English Language.
COLONIAL REPORTS—ANNUAL.
CHAPTER VIII.—PUBLIC HEALTH. The climate, though hot and damp, is cooler than that of most tropical countries situated in the same latitude. It is not in itself unhealthy; but an evil reputation has been earned for it in the past by the prevalence of mosquito borne diseases, against which all possible precautions have constantly to be taken. 2. The Gold Coast is peculiarly free from many of the discomforts associated with tropical countries. Hot nights and intense heat by day are the exception rather than the rule, while insects are comparatively unobtrusive. 3. The eliorts of the Medical and Sanitary authorities in promoting the treatment of disease and the knowledge of general hygiene, continue to exercise a beneficial effect on the general health 4. The rainfall varies with the configuration of the country and is highest in the mining Districts of Tarkwa, Upper and Lower Wasaw, etc, and also at Axim. The first rains, or rainy season proper, begin in March and end in July; the later rains are spread over the months of September and October, The rainy season is marked by a considerable fall in temperature, which is found to be refreshing to many Europeans, but proves trying to some. The Harmattan season begins in December and ends in February. 5. Registration of births and deaths is carried out only in twenty-six towns and generally speaking it is admittedly incomplete and inaccurate. At the census of 1921 the total population of the Gold Coast was approximately 2,112,000. No general death rate, birth rate, or infant mortality rate can be worked out, no>r can an accurate estimation be made of the more important causes of death, its age incidence or its distribution. 6. From the areas where registration is carried out 5,574 births and 4,884 deaths were reported for the calendar year 1927. The number of deaths under one year old was 679, The population of these registration areas is approximately 245,000. 7. The most common causes of death amongst adults as far as can be ascertained are due to diseases of the respiratory system, e.g., pneumonia, bronchitis and phthisis. Amongst infants the commonest causes in descending order of frequency are marasmus (including inanition), premature birth, diarrhoea (including enteritis, gastro-enteritis, etc), convulsions, bronchitis (including broncho-pneumonia) and malaria. 8. The most important means to combat these diseases are the improvement ol the housing conditions, provision of good water supplies, surface drainage, latrines, anti-mosquito woik and disposal of refuse. 9. There are four Infant Welfare Clinics (including one to which a hospital is attached) in which attempts are made to cope to $ome extent with the infant mortality. The attendances at the
GOLD COAST, 1947
YAW 8 years ago
I hope one day francis kwarteng aka YAW will see his own stupidity of copying and pasting from sections of books.
Learn to write essay in proper English on your own. But to facilitate that you will need to learn English Gr ... read full comment
I hope one day francis kwarteng aka YAW will see his own stupidity of copying and pasting from sections of books.
Learn to write essay in proper English on your own. But to facilitate that you will need to learn English Grammar plus I.Q. to think.
francis kwarteng 8 years ago
NAMESAKE,
Brilliant!
I enjoyed reading your comments. Very informative.
Thanks.
NAMESAKE,
Brilliant!
I enjoyed reading your comments. Very informative.
Does this idiot author has a job? You make non issue an issue. Whether he was Kofi or Kwame, he became a great African.
My brother it is the likes of the MATEMEHO propagandists who make it an issue in their never ending campaign to calumnify, vilify and malign Osagyefo. Don't blame Master Kwarteng for setting the record straight!!
Silly and irrelevant example with the exchange of Abena's birthday by the hospital authorities and a whole stupid article.
The disgraced idiotic anti-Nkrumah non-factual writers who have no valid references for their senseless articles,have now turned to "ENGLISH SPELLING PROFESSORS."HAHAHAHAH.I am still laughing.
Please,ignore this mental patient who is hiding behind he name BOB.
There was a man be he Ngolamah or Nkrumah .It does not matter.What is Nana Addo? He has mulitiple names or aliases.Any way does it matter if Jonas swallowed the whale or the whale swallowed Jonah.There was a whale and there w ...
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Dear Readers,
Dr. Aggrey's mother's name: Abena Andua, Abna Andu or Abena Anowa.
Please read this about Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey:
"Born on Monday, 18th October, 1875, at Anomabo in the Central Region of the Gold Coast, of ...
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There is absolutely no evidence that Nkrumah's father was a Liberian.Only semi-educated fools do not know the importance of EVIDENCE.They did the same thing to Head of state Acheampong and J.J. Rawlings.I was in Ghana when t ...
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I will digress from the main topic. From what I gather Ahoofe is claiming Mabel Dove is British, I believe it is in line with his inferiority complex that is he is a KWESIBRONI wannabe. In his writings he constantly indicates ...
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Waa look.
And they think they have arrived with the Danquists!
Tweaa Kai!!!
Hoping TSU students, faculty, and every other employees is safe, in Houston, Texas. That, there is not another shooting incident as we've read, heard, and seen on TV today, Friday, 9 Sep.
Greetings & Peace!
SAS,
What's up?
I just read Kofi Ata's article "Judicial Scandal: Are Articles 146(1) and 151(1) being Misinterpreted?" and also read the comments--including yours--posted under it. I found the word "AMBIGUIIES" (parag ...
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Thank you Kwarteng for calling out SAS for his childish pettiness!
Can you idiotic fools tell readers what you mean by "Ambiguiies"?
The English grammatical bomber francis kwarteng has now started creating his own English vocaburaly because he is not conversant with the normal British or American English. He has started using mad words like "Ambiguiies" a ...
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Look at these two semi-illiterates. You can't even read and understand that Francis was rather pointing out a mistake made by Dr SAS and counselling him not to be petty about typos others make. Rather, we should devote attent ...
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I am an accomplished linguist, writer, teacher and speaker in every sense and standard, and I am not going to pretend that writing "ambiguities" as "ambiguiies" could be justified upon a trite and infantile excuse that the er ...
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Dear Dr. SAS,
Greetings!
We all have our good and bad days. Evidently, today is one of your good ones. I therefore take this opportunity to commend you on:
1. Your gracious apology for being “slovenly” re: “ambiguiie ...
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Dear Abra Kuma,
This is my response to SAS:
SAS,
Good day.
In the first place you should not have apologized because that was unnecessary. You know English is not one of my problems. I mean grammar is not one of ...
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Great food for thought.
Interesting rebuttal.
Just got back to read it. Much appreciated as always.
Obviously, we all are prone to making mistakes when we write;there are no exceptions, there's no two ways about that ...
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Dear Abra Kuma,
Thanks.
Please be reminded that I consider you one of the wise voices on Ghanaweb, and that I cherish your contributions greatly.
Have a great weekend.
Thanks.
SAS,
Good day.
In the first place you should not have apologized because that was unnecessary. You know English is not one of my problems. I mean grammar is not one of my problems.
I just spoke with a professor of ...
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Why bother?
Funny haha funny hoho!! Why would any clear thinking Ghanaian want to be classified with the traitorous imperialist lackey inferiority complex laden danquists!! Unfortunately danquists emanate from the stagnant swamps of neoc ...
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Correction : danquists UNQUENCHABLE GREED AND LAST FOR POWER
Correction: "Last for power"???
Hehehehehehe!!
Nkrumagraphy indeed.
As usual trying to pound the table. A self proclaimed attorney and English Don who can neither spell "MISCELLANEOUS" (miscellenious) nor "AMBIGUITIES" (ambigguiies) and incapable of mounting coherent, cogent and rational argu ...
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The simple fact is that the I.Q. of Francis Kwarteng cannot assist him to write any reasonable article on his own, he indeed lacks English grammatical and that is the main reason why he always copies from books, other writers ...
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Very funny! From Adjoa Wangara to Yaw Owusu, Bob, DUTOR, Dr Otto, Attafah, Kwame Joe etc to YAW again just to prove your Idiocy.
FACTS are more important.Pro-Nkrumah writers have valid references but you anti-Nkrumah moronic writers are non-factual writers who depend on HEARSAY and falsehood.So,you eccentric writers are now Typo error professors.What a ...
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Ah gudu wan dere Mr Amoah, don mine dem dere, na huhudious, adufudecious omolokpaa people now!! Na craze wey dey craze abi!!
This, what we will call the Kofi-Ata-Type of Question (KAToQ) from the other side, with respect to the Anas revelations!
READ: "...If the British Colonial Government had deported foreigners such as Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria) ...
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Onuah Francis, I am beginning to find your articles too delimitting; too confining to history. Don't get me wrong, because I know that there is a place for history since it concerned with origins, roots & where we been; but b ...
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Marcus Ampadu, I have warned you on several ocassions not to augue with francis kwarteng because he will at long last use his stupidity to win you and pull you to join his likes like Lungu, Kojo T etc. the idiotic group.
I ...
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I hope you come to realize soon that disagreement with someone should not merit insults. By the way, check your spelling of "augue". And get it inside your block head, whether you are masquerading as YAW, or using a different ...
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Sorry for you MARCUS AMPADU, you will forever remain the doormat of francis kwarteng, he has got you and will always use you to clean the dirt under his dirty shoe. Such fool like you is exactly what the braggart kwarteng is ...
read full comment
Kwarteng's trailer and Ass-licker Marcus Ampadu, before pointing fingure about spellings check first your bogus spelling of "delimitting"
Thanks for the correction, Attafah. But tell me briefly why you consider me Kwarteng trailer & Ass-Licker. Waiting for your answer.
Dear Marcus,
How are you?
When is your futurology article coming?
Thanks.
Very soon. Thanks for asking menuah.
Dear Marcus,
I look forward to it.
Have a great weekend.
Thanks.
DR SAS,where were you hiding when Prof Lungu gave you the TECHNICAL KNOCKOUT(TKO)?
Sick and tired of prejudice, distortions,and outright lies from Ahoofe and other Ignoble Scholars, Francis is fighting back with facts and knowledge. By the way, Sir Charles MacCarthy, son of a French immigrant changed his na ...
read full comment
I hope one day francis kwarteng aka YAW will see his own stupidity of copying and pasting from sections of books.
Learn to write essay in proper English on your own. But to facilitate that you will need to learn English Gr ...
read full comment
NAMESAKE,
Brilliant!
I enjoyed reading your comments. Very informative.
Thanks.
Great man kwateng, bravo
Dear Marcus,
How are you?
When is your Futurology article coming?
Thanks.