The Diacritics on Grammar Girl
One of Sandeep’s posts was adapted for a podcast produced by Grammar Girl.
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The Diacritics
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John Stokes
Crazy names (redux)
Hi everyone — Sandeep and I are both in the throes of finals, our apologies for the lack of posts! We’ll get back to regular posts as soon as we can, but in the meantime…
I wrote a post a couple months ago about crazy names, looking at some of the most interesting name changes that I’ve come across, and speculating as to why people might make the changes they do. Today, a couple more wild names, and motivations for taking them, came to my attention.
These are both crazy long names. A man who used to be known as Nicholas Usansky was simply going for fame, taking what was, at the time, the longest name in the world:
Barnaby Marmaduke Aloysius Benjy Cobweb Dartagnan Egbert Felix Gaspar Humbert Ignatius Jayden Kasper Leroy Maximilian Neddy Obiajulu Pepin Quilliam Rosencrantz Sexton Teddy Upwood Vivatma Wayland Xylon Yardley Zachary Usansky
He held the record until a woman hoping to gain publicity for her charity, Red Dreams, showed him up big time. Her name is an incredible 161 words long!
Red Wacky League Antlez Broke the Stereo Neon Tide Bring Back Honesty Coalition Feedback Hand of Aces Keep Going Captain Let’s Pretend Lost State of Dance Paper Taxis Lunar Road Up Down Strange All and I Neon Sheep Eve Hornby Faye Bradley AJ Wilde Michael Rice Dion Watts Matthew Appleyard John Ashurst Lauren Swales Zoe Angus Jaspreet Singh Emma Matthews Nicola Brown Leanne Pickering Victoria Davies Rachel Burnside Gil Parker Freya Watson Alisha Watts James Pearson Jacob Sotheran Darley Beth Lowery Jasmine Hewitt Chloe Gibson Molly Farquhar Lewis Murphy Abbie Coulson Nick Davies Harvey Parker Kyran Williamson Michael Anderson Bethany Murray Sophie Hamilton Amy Wilkins Emma Simpson Liam Wales Jacob Bartram Alex Hooks Rebecca Miller Caitlin Miller Sean McCloskey Dominic Parker Abbey Sharpe Elena Larkin Rebecca Simpson Nick Dixon Abbie Farrelly Liam Grieves Casey Smith Liam Downing Ben Wignall Elizabeth Hann Danielle Walker Lauren Glen James Johnson Ben Ervine Kate Burton James Hudson Daniel Mayes Matthew Kitching Josh Bennett Evolution Dreams
My previous post speculated that people might take strange names for reasons beyond simple narcissism, in support, for example, of a cause. I think something like that was the idea behind b-baller Metta World Peace’s name change. He wanted signify to the world that he had completed a personal journey from the Malice at the Palace (where he jumped into the stands during an NBA game, punched a fan, and was then suspended for an entire season (see also Grantland’s recap)), to the winner of the NBA’s Citizenship Award last year. Of course, things got a bit awkward for that narrative after he viciously elbowed a player in the back of the head a couple weeks ago, so there’s that as well. (So much for nominative determinism, I guess.)
Nevertheless, at least one of these new name changes supports my speculations. Ms. Dreams’s motivation (generate publicity for her charity) was admirable, even if the name itself is completely weird.
Mr. Usansky, it seems, thinks otherwise. He apparently told The Scottish Sun that he would consider trying to retake the longest-name crown from Ms. Dreams, as “there is no point to having a wacky name like that and not having the longest in the world.”
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jo
How about some short ones. Here’s a prisoner from Arizona, full name is Sittingdown.
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John Stokes
How the language of politics could doom Obamacare
For politicians there are lots of topics that are simply too hot to handle. Social security reform, abortion, gay marriage — these are all crucial issues, but many politicians hate taking strong positions on them. It’s not hard to see why: Do so, and there goes the vote of an entire demographic.
But if there’s one word, particularly in recent years, that is anathema to more than just one or another segment of the voting public, it’s the “T” word: taxes. At all costs, don’t tell people you’re hitting them with new taxes. Especially if you’re already trying to pass a controversial new mega-suite of laws like . . . say . . . Obamacare.
That’s precisely what Obama and the Democrats did with their healthcare reform package. They took great pains to tell people that reform did not mean new taxes.
One of the centerpieces of the bill is what the government calls the “minimum care provision.” Its opponents prefer to call it the “individual mandate.” Whatever you want to call it, it means (almost) everybody must obtain at least some health insurance by 2014. The government claims this is necessary to keep premiums down once insurers are forced to cover people they otherwise would not.
So far so good. But once 2014 rolls around, anybody that fails to get minimum coverage will be taxed . . . er, “penalized” . . . to cover their share of the expense. Here’s where things get tricky: Is this sanction a tax (gasp!)? Or is it a penalty? Well, in the law itself, Congress prefers to call it a penalty. This “penalty,” though, is assessed on a person’s tax returns, and the provision is even part of the tax code. It bears all the markers of a tax on those without minimum coverage, but, presumably for political reasons, Congress chose to call it a penalty instead.
What they perhaps didn’t realize was that their refusal to call the tax a tax might cause problems for the law’s constitutionality.
Congress has a broad authority under the Constitution to raise taxes. It uses this authority all the time to make people pay for things they might not otherwise want. Whether it be farm subsidies, alternative energy, or national defense, Congress’s tax power let’s them force us to buy things, and there’s nothing we can do about it. But Congress cannot constitutionally impose a penalty on people for refusing to buy a certain product. This is beyond even the reach of the commerce power. It’s a distinction simultaneously very fine and very intuitively obvious — the government can make you (help) pay for other people’s food stamps, but it can’t make you go out and buy broccoli.
The Sixth Circuit jumped on this distinction, and the lawmakers’ fear of the “T” word, in one of the challenges to the health law (though it eventually upheld the law on other grounds):
Congress might have raised taxes on everyone in an amount equivalent to the current penalty, then offered credits to those with minimum essential insurance. Or it might have imposed a lower tax rate on people with health insurance than those without it. But Congress did neither of these things, and that makes a difference. . . .
The individual mandate is a regulatory penalty, not a revenue-raising tax . . . . That is what Congress said. It called the sanction for failing to obtain medical insurance a “penalty,” not a tax. Words matter, and it is fair to assume that Congress knows the difference between a tax and a penalty . . . making it appropriate to take Congress at its word. That is all the more true in an era when elected officials are not known for casually discussing, much less casually increasing, taxes.
Thomas More L. Ctr. v. Obama, 651 F.3d 529, 550-51 (6th Cir. 2011) (emphasis added).
Even once the challenge reached the Supreme Court, the government did not push the Justices to uphold the law under the Taxing Clause. Instead they focused on Congress’s broad authority under the Commerce and Necessary and Proper Clauses to regulate what they consider to be economic activity (i.e., participation in the healthcare market, which, the argument goes, all of us do simply because we are entitled to treatment whether or not we can pay, forcing those that can to pay for those that cannot). The merits of that argument are not my point here, but if you’re interested check out SCOTUSblog‘s (very thorough) coverage.
Instead, what I’m interested in is the fact that the language of politics — avoid “taxes” at all costs — led the government to forfeit perhaps its surest defense of the law. The Sixth Circuit judge said as much in the two paragraphs above.
At first blush, it seems silly that saying “penalty” when you mean “tax” could be the difference between blatant unconstitutionality and perfect acceptability. But perhaps Judge Martin has a point. Don’t we want to hold politicians accountable for what they say and the language they use to say it? Isn’t that especially so when that language is meant to mislead?
That seems to be precisely what Judge Martin is doing. He’s telling politicians that he’s going to take seriously what they actually say, especially when there’s reason to believe they mean something different but don’t want to let the rest of us know.
If the language of politics can be used to mask an unpopular proposal, then it should have to be used subsequently to defend that proposal too. To put it differently: If you want to bamboozle the voting public with deceptive language, by all means do so. Once you’ve made your bed, however, you have no choice but to lie in it.
Oh, and when I say “lie,” there is no pun intended.
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Sandeep Prasanna
If I were Justin Bieber…
If I was your boyfriend, never let you go
Keep you on my arm girl, you’d never be alone
I can be a gentleman, anything you want
If I was your boyfriend, I’d never let you go, I’d never let you goJustin Bieber, “Boyfriend”
Truly stirring.
I don’t generally need one more reason to dislike Justin Bieber’s music. But the Biebs’s new song “Boyfriend” really gets on the nerves of my latent prescriptivist alter ego.
According to English grammarians, “If I was your boyfriend” should read “If I were your boyfriend.” Bieber is describing something that isn’t true — he isn’t the girl’s boyfriend — so he needs to use the subjunctive mood. Here is a lengthier description of the subjunctive. (Not all big pop stars get it wrong, though: Beyonce’s “If I Were a Boy” follows the rule correctly.)
My problem with substituting “if I was” for “if I were” in songs is that it doesn’t cost anything to be grammatically correct — you end up with the same number of syllables and stresses. Why not follow the rule? Is there a social cost to using the subjunctive? Like, is it automatically less cool?
There’s some evidence to suggest that the use of “if I was” is on the rise. Here’s the Ngram data for “if I was” (blue) versus “if I were” (red):
When “if I was” occurs in the middle of a sentence, writers are almost as likely to use it versus “if I were.” But writers are less likely to use “if I was” if it occurs at the beginning of the sentence (second graph).
The problem with this data is that “if I was” is occasionally grammatically correct, as in “If I was rude to you yesterday, I’m sorry.”
So I tried narrowing the searches to eliminate correct instances of “if I was.”
First, I thought of “if I was you” (blue) versus “if I were you” (red). But saying “if I were you” is pretty much idiomatic at this point. The data confirm that suspicion.
Here is “I wish I was” (blue) versus “I wish I were” (red). They’re nearly convergent now. I thought that “I wish I were” was idiomatic, just like “if I were you,” but apparently that’s not the case.
But maybe the subjunctive “was” isn’t really entirely encroaching on the territory of “were.” I compared the phrase “if I was your” to “if I were your,” thinking that a grammatically correct instance of “if I was your” was unlikely to occur. The difference is greater:
Separating the correct instances of “if I was” from incorrect instances is a challenge. Does anyone have other/better ideas on how to eliminate grammatically correct instances of “if I was” to compare it to “if I were”?
On a similar note, does anyone know of any studies that look at the loss of the subjunctive in English?
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johnwcowan
I think it’s hopeless to tease apart irrealis was from ordinary past-tense conditional was on the basis of string searches alone; you need too much real-world knowledge. For every If I were/was President, I’d balance the budget there is an If I was President, it was because the people voted for me as said by a former President.
In any case, I don’t think you can call irrealis was ungrammatical any more. The language has moved on; objections to irrealis was are mere prescriptivist heel-digging.
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Sandeep Prasanna
I sort of suspected that it wouldn’t be possible to fully parse out was/were, which is why I tried to get as close as possible. But I agree with you that we really shouldn’t care about the rise of the subjunctive “was” — but the prescriptivist tendencies latent somewhere in me still cry out.
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stuartnz
I agree totally and, thanks for introducing me to “irrealis”. I think it quite possible that “were” will survive as a “museum piece”, perhaps particularly in lyrics and poetry. A fate similar to that which seems to be happening to “whom”, as discussed by Stan Carey at sentence first recently.
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markonsea
You think the particular loss of the subjunctive you complain about is bad? What about its loss – almost total here in the UK – in what I shall call an agendum clause? Standard usage here is eg “She insisted all her guests left before midnight”, which I’m willing to bet any North American reader would misunderstand as speaking about events in the speaker’s past rather than laying down a rule. Similarly, “The bank demands that all debts are paid.” Begins to sound Pythonesque, doesn’t it? (But you can’t halt Language Change …)
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johnwcowan
Markonsea, the nearly-complete loss of the mandative or jussive subjunctive in the U.K. is pretty well known. However, if there is a genuine ambiguity, as in this case, it can be solved transatlantically with “She insisted all her guests should leave before midnight”, which works for everybody. In North America, the mandative subjunctive forms are still current and well understood (for me, automatic); I don’t know what the story is in the other anglophone countries.
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Lauren
The subjunctive has been losing ground in English for a while now. As another datapoint see “If I were a rich man” from the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof and then Gwen Stefani’s 2004 cover “If I was a rich girl.” In Australian English at least the subjunctive construction these days sounds slightly forced and archaic to most speakers.
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Sandeep Prasanna
Right — I had forgotten about the difference between Gwen Stefani’s “cover” (to use the term loosely) of the Fiddler song. I wonder why the word was changed. Perhaps it was for a reason similar to what you note — that “were” just sounds too archaic to use in a radio-ready song.
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Hannah
Here is a small piece on the subjunctive mood from the New Oxford English Dictionary. It displays well why the subjunctive is vanishing. I agree with you that it ought to be retained for its own sake.
“… if I were you; the report recommends that he face the tribunal; it is important that they be aware of the provisions of the act. These examples all contain a verb in the subjunctive mood. The subjunctive is used to express situations that are hypothetical or not yet realized and is typically used for what is imagined, hoped for, demanded, or expected. In English, the subjunctive mood is fairly uncommon (especially in comparison with other languages, such as Spanish), mainly because most of the functions of the subjunctive are covered by modal verbs such as might, could, and should. In fact, in English, the subjunctive is often indistinguishable from the ordinary indicative mood since its form in most contexts is identical. It is distinctive only in the third person singular, where the normal indicative -s ending is absent ( he face rather than he faces in the example above), and in the verb ‘to be’ ( I were rather than I was , and they be rather than they are in the examples above). In modern English, the subjunctive mood still exists but is regarded in many contexts as optional. Use of the subjunctive tends to convey a more formal tone, but there are few people who would regard its absence as actually wrong. Today, it survives mostly in fixed expressions, as in be that as it may; far be it from me; as it were ; lest we forget ; God help you; perish the thought; and come what may.”-
Sandeep Prasanna
Thanks for sending this along!
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Sandeep Prasanna
“Inimical to our own safety”: regulating heritage languages
With the country waiting for the Supreme Court to release its decision on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, I thought it would be fun to revisit an older Supreme Court decision — one where the Court directly considered the benefits and disadvantages of foreign language learning.
I was inspired to check out this case, Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923), by a section in Lane Greene’s fantastic book You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity, where Greene described it in the context of fervent “English-only” activism in the US.
The suit in Meyer v. Nebraska was brought against a teacher who had been caught teaching German reading skills to a 10-year-old child in a parochial school in Nebraska. This was back when German was still commonly spoken in the Midwest by recent immigrants. The relevant statute read in part as follows:
Section 1. No person, individually or as a teacher, shall, in any private, denominational, parochial or public school, teach any subject to any person in any language than the English language.
Section 2. Languages, other than the English language, may be taught as languages only after a pupil shall have attained and successfully passed the eighth grade …
[The statute discusses penalties.]
Section 4. Whereas, an emergency exists, this act shall be in force from and after its passage and approval.
Prior to the U.S. Supreme Court taking up the case, the Nebraska Supreme Court affirmed the validity of the statute. They wrote:
The Legislature had seen the baneful effects of permitting foreigners … to rear and educate their children in the language of their native land. The result of that condition was found to be inimical to our own safety. …
It was to educate them so that they must always think in that language, and, as a consequence, naturally inculcate in them the ideas and sentiments foreign to the best interests of this country. …
The obvious purpose of this statute was that the English language should be and become the mother tongue of all children reared in this state.
The U.S. Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Nebraska Supreme Court, holding that the statute infringed on the rights guaranteed by Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment (“… [n]o state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law…”). Specifically, the Court held that the statute unfairly infringed on the teacher’s right to teach, as part of his occupation, as well as the right of parents to engage that teacher in instructing their children.
Moreover, they noted that the sole purpose of the statute was to inhibit the teaching of modern languages alone, even though, they note, “Mere knowledge of the German language cannot reasonably be regarded as harmful. Heretofore it has been commonly looked upon as helpful and desirable.” Later, they write that foreign language learning is “not injurious to the health, morals or understanding of the ordinary child.”
But, lest you think the Supreme Court was being too progressive, they still warn:
The desire of the Legislature to foster a homogeneous people … is easy to appreciate. Unfortunate experiences during the late war [World War I] and aversion toward every character of truculent adversaries were certainly enough to quicken that aspiration.
Still, the means used were too intrusive, they concluded.
I’m in Tucson, Arizona, right now, working on a handful of legal projects with U.S.-Mexico border human rights organizations. The small-town reasoning evident in the Nebraska Supreme Court’s decision — foreign languages are bad, and they are dangerous for our youth and for American ideals — are alive and well today, not least in Tucson, where many people regard the exercise of Mexican-American pride as an assault on the US itself.
The Tucson Unified School District board recently decided to remove its Mexican-American studies courses in response to a finding by the Arizona Schools Chief that the program promoted racial disharmony. Regulating identity in our schools and fostering homogeneity with dire warnings of a multicultural dystopia don’t seem to have gone out of vogue yet, 89 years after Meyer‘s implicit remonstrances.
But, as Lane Greene writes, there’s nothing to fear from the teaching of heritage languages — because they’ll probably be lost within two generations, anyway, through the inexorable march of the American monoglot machine. As an Indian-American, I can offer anecdotal support — for better or worse, few among my cohort speak our heritage languages fluently, and those who do still speak English fluently. Of course, anecdotes aren’t data, so here are hard numbers: Hispanics in America today are learning English more rapidly than German Americans at the turn of the century — 95% of surveyed second-generation Hispanic children located in the heavily Hispanic areas of San Diego and South Florida spoke English fluently, and 40% spoke no Spanish. Hardly the bilingual disharmony English-only activists warn of.
Greene writes:
It is, to put it simply, nearly impossible to raise a child in the United States without the child learning English; it would require isolation from the outside world bordering on child abuse. Children born in America, and even those arriving at a young age, inevitably pick up English.
This fact, of course, does little to quiet the English-only activists.
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johnwcowan
There’s a deeper question, though: can you be a real American and not speak English? Civic nationalists say “of course”, ethnic (which often means racialist) nationalists deny it.
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Sandeep Prasanna
Surely even the most fervent “ethnic nationalists” can’t deny that Native Americans who don’t speak English are American? (Or can they?) Also, a frequently debated question: can a monolingual person who doesn’t speak one of the languages that government documents are regularly translated into (e.g., Spanish, sometimes French, sometimes Chinese) fully participate in American civic life?
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Dani
Plenty of native, English-speaking Americans do not participate in American civic life.
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johnwcowan
Ethnic nationalists don’t care about Native Americans; most of them speak only English anyway.
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Dani
During my time teaching in a heavily Hispanic (>85%) high school, I noticed that the only students who did not speak English were those who had immigrated to the US within the previous 5 years. Students who had arrived earlier spoke passable, if not fluent, English. Students born in the US to immigrant parents spoke English fluently and unaccented, even if their parents spoke only Spanish.
As you said, if a problem exists, it is that so many of my students barely knew Spanish.
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Peregrin
From my own experience I’ve found that first/second generation immigrants and their children have a much easier time learning the English language in America than, for instance, here in the UK. Although there is also a presence of ethnic “ghettoes” in the US, it seems to be more prevalent in some of the larger cities in England and Scotland. For example, here in London, especially the inner-city, it is possible to be born in an area or neighbourhood and never actually attain a full grasp of ‘native’ London English or British English. Cockney has been largely replaced by what’s called Multicultural London English (MLE). So while such individuals do learn a form of English, this variation is one based on the evolution and development of local varieties and ‘second-language’ English. Although many do understand the difference between the registers and can switch accordingly, there are those who, chiefly in the more impoverished areas, can only speak this variety with any real fluency.
A similar situation can be observed in Sweden. Speaking from personal experience, I found that some of the neighbourhoods and suburbs of Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmo, with large immigrant populations tended to exhibit this ‘second-language’ trait. There are men and women in their twenties and thirties who have been born in these suburbs having only a tentative grasp of Central Swedish (or Rikssvenska). A famous example is that of Rinkeby Swedish (Rinkebysvenska), named after the Stockholm suburb; it borrows heavily from Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Serbo-Croat, Syriac, and Kurdish.
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Sandeep Prasanna
This is really interesting. I wonder to what extent the political structures/laws regarding immigration and immigrant communities influence those patterns.
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John Stokes
Those narrow-minded, prescriptivist . . . texters?
Texting encourages us to be creative and unconstrained with our language, right? Traditional print media, fettered as they are by the bounds of Standard English, promote more rigid acceptability and grammaticality judgments, don’t they? Aren’t those prescriptivist editors and stodgy old style columnists just concerned with dictating how we speak and write?
Not so says some new research from University of Calgary linguist Joan Lee.
Lee’s Master’s thesis tested students with varying levels of exposure to text/instant messaging versus traditional media (newspapers, magazines, literature, nonfiction). She hypothesized that those with comparatively more exposure to the free-form nature of ‘text speak’ would be comparatively more lenient in their acceptance of novel and deviate forms of words, both morphological and orthographic. What she found was the opposite. Students who had spent more time reading books and newspapers were more likely to judge novel words or deviate forms of words as acceptable. Those who had more exposure to text speak tended to be considerably more rigid and constrained in their acceptability judgments.
This result is moderately mind-boggling. Think of all you know about texting and compare that to your expectations of the effects of traditional media on language use. From texters, we see such classics as ‘wot r u doin 2day‘ and ‘ur stoopid dood‘ and ‘kewl‘ and, perhaps best of all, ‘kthxbai‘. There’s a bunch of research discussing why texters say and spell things like this. In the preview of her thesis linked above, Lee cites one such study that says people are trying to be playful, spontaneous, socially interactive, and even creative. Compare this to what you read in the New York Times, where there’s actually someone who writes articles nitpicking the grammar of other traditional-print-media articles, including sometimes the NYTimes itself!
I haven’t read the whole 150-page thesis yet, but it seems there are several plausible explanations for what’s going on. One idea is that for a novel form to be acceptable to texters, it must be a novel form commonly seen in text speak. So while there may not be the same types of grammatical constraints, there are conventions that are respected nonetheless. Or perhaps text speak is still free-form and not subject to constraints in the ways that traditional media might be, but free-formedness doesn’t actually equate with creativity. So while you’re tossing standardized grammar out the window, you’re not necessarily looking for the most precise, novel, creative word to express a given idea. You may be using words with odd morphology and spelling, but you’re probably not reaching deep into the dictionary to find those words. This means that readers of text speak don’t often see words they’re unfamiliar with and thus don’t often have to figure what those unfamiliar words might mean.
If, on the other hand, you’re a big-time reader of traditional print media, you probably encounter unusual words all the time. To figure out what they mean, you either infer their meaning from context or use your knowledge of productive morphology like -ity or -ness. This could explain why texters are ok with ur and kthxbai and wot, but not some of the novel forms that Lee proposed in her study, like canality and groundness. If you read and don’t text, the textisms may be ridiculous to you, but you might be able to come up with a meaning for canality and groundness that makes sense, and thus conclude they’re acceptable words.
I’m sure much more will be said on this front in the near future. For now, I think it’s enough to note this interesting bit of research and sign off — TTYL, folks.
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Chad Nilep
I haven’t read the thesis at all, but but it seems there are several plausible arguments that this phenomenon is not going on. According to Lee’s abstract, she administered a questionnaire to 33 university students. Small sample size, homogeneity of the subject pool, or confounded variables might cause such research to turn up artefacts that don’t hold in the larger population, texters and newspaper-readers generally, that they are extrapolated to.
It sounds like an interesting study, and I’ll add it to my queue of things to read in my spare time. But I’m not confident that Lee’s findings would necessary hold up in a larger study. I’m more confident, however, that if much more will be said on this front in the near future some newspapers will report the results as though they were proven to be true among a much broader general public.
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Josh
I can’t see past page 17 of the article, but the abstract says the sample size is 33, which seems awfully low. I’d also be curious if she controlled for gender/income/some proxy for intelligence since it’s easy to imagine some variable like this being highly correlated with text/instant message frequency. But I imagine these issues were probably addressed in pages 18-150!
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Josh
Note: I didn’t see Chad’s comment when I first posted.
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Sandeep Prasanna
Parsing the Constitution
Some of the most delightful moments for an ex-linguistics student in law school are when legal analysis clearly intersects with linguistic analysis. That connection was part of what drove me to come to law school. This semester, for me, that close relationship has appeared most often in Contracts and Constitutional Law, two fields which depend heavily on the parsing of text to divine original and apparent meaning.
Seth Barrett Tillman, currently a lecturer in the Department of Law at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth (Ollscoil na hÉireann, Má Nuad) and previously an attorney and law professor in the United States, has written extensively on the interpretation of clauses in the U.S. Constitution.
In a piece that appeared in the American Journal of Legal History in 2010, Nora and Seth Tillman put forth the argument that our modern understanding of the words shall, may, and will in the Constitution are not consistent with their usage in the late 18th century, when it was written.
[W]here a word once had multiple meanings, but only one variant is now remembered and understood, we may be seriously mistaken when we ascribe near certainty to our understanding of how a constitutional term was used.
As we understand it, prevailing eighteenth century American usage, distinguished shall (indicating futurity) from will (indicating the emphatic tense), as it is still spoken in Anglo-English. Whereas today, we Americans conjugate will as “I will, you will, he will,” and shall as “I shall, you shall, he shall,” in the eighteenth century, the dominant American usage (following southern English standards) was will (I will, you shall, he shall) and shall (I shall, you will, he will).
…
[W]e suggest that standards … may have been of import to [the drafters], and, for that reason, knowledge of those (long moribund) standards may be a useful tool with regard to determining original public meaning …
It’s a short, fascinating piece. Read it here: Nora Tillman & Seth Barrett Tillman, A Fragment on Shall and May, 50 AM. J. LEGAL HIST. 453 (2010). (Opens PDF.)
Tillman also debated Northwestern Law Professor Steven G. Calabresi in 2008 in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review PENNumbra. Tillman argues that the Constitution did not require Barack Obama to relinquish his Senate seat upon inauguration as President.
He bases this argument over the precise definition of the word “officer” and whether the President falls into that category, drawing upon Article II, § 4 (the Impeachment Clause), Article II, § 3 (the Commissions Clause) and Article I, § 9, clause 8 (the Foreign Emoluments Clause) to make his point.
Calabresi rebuts, noting that the rub for Tillman’s argument rests in Article I, § 6, clause 2.
A fun read. Find it here: Seth Barrett Tillman & Steven G. Calabresi, Debate, The Great Divorce: The Current Understanding of Separation of Powers and the Original Meaning of the Incompatibility Clause, 157 U. PA. L. REV. PENNumbra 134 (2008). (Opens PDF.)
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Sandeep Prasanna
Toward(s?) a better understanding
Hi all, sorry about the delay in getting new posts out to you. Let’s get to it:
There are many well-documented differences between British and American English. Even those unacquainted with linguistics can point out some of the more obvious ones: color/colour, apartment/flat, spilled/spilt, and plenty more. Lynne Murphy, an American linguist abroad in the UK, maintains the wonderful blog Separated by a Common Language and writes about how language differs across the pond.
But some American-versus-British rules are less readily apparent. For example, for years, I struggled with whether to write “toward” or “towards.” A few years ago, Grammar Girl taught me that the rule was simple: “toward” is used in the US and “towards” is used in the UK.
The British newspaper The Guardian writes in its Style Guide:
-ward, wards. Contemporary usage … suggests that when it is an adjective a word like upward, downward, backward or forward should not end in s, but when it is an adverb it should.
I checked The Economist‘s Style Guide and found that it was silent on the issue, but it did write “forward” rather than “forwards” twice within the Style Guide itself. The Economist is published out of London and two-thirds of its journalists are based there, so I wonder whether there is or isn’t internal consistency on the use of the -ward(s) suffix.
According to a commenter on the Grammar Girl website, “toward” is correct AP style. (The AP Stylebook doesn’t have free access, so I can’t confirm.)
I wondered why we had that difference and whether it had always been that way. So I checked out the Google Ngram data for both American and British corpora. The data ended up raising more questions than it answered, so I’m hoping for more well-informed readers to suggest explanations for the patterns below.
Here is the frequency of “toward” versus “towards” in British English from 1800 to 2000.
It’s clear that “towards” has always been favored over “toward” in Britain during this period. There does seem to be a slight shift after 1980, with “toward” becoming more popular than “towards.”
Here is the American data from the same period, which is more interesting:
It appears that “toward” supplanted “towards” as the preferred spelling around 1900. The data show a steady decline in the frequency of “towards” starting around 1840. This trend is strange: why did the spelling preference change at all?
First, a little background: the Oxford English Dictionary regards “toward” and “towards” as variants of the same word. Their etymology is closely related. Similarly, the OED considers other -ward(s) words as variants of each other as well: e.g., forward(s), backward(s), onward(s). It also notes that while there is no difference in definition between -ward and -wards, there may be a slight semantic difference that ascribes more of a sense of “movement” to -wards. This slight difference is disputed, even by the OED authors.
The OED says:
In English the history of -wards as an [adverbial] suffix is identical with that of -ward … ; beside every adv. in -ward there has always existed (at least potentially) a parallel formation in -wards, and vice versa. The two forms are so nearly synonymous … that the choice between them is mostly determined by some notion of euphony in the particular context; some persons, apparently, have a fixed preference for the one or the other form.
It then goes on to observe the preference of Americans for -ward and Brits for -wards.
Two possible explanations for the American switch from “towards” to “toward” popped into my head at first.
The first was that Noah Webster’s dictionary, which set out determinedly American spellings for the nascent United States, expressed a preference for “toward.” His dictionary was first published in 1828. I couldn’t find a reliable online source for his original text, so maybe a reader with access to the text can clarify whether this is true. I’m still skeptical whether this is what drove the change. More famous changes like “colour” to “color” happened quicker, according to Google Ngram.
Another possibility depends on the OED’s observation that “the choice between [toward and towards] is mostly determined by some notion of euphony.”
According to The Cambridge History of the English Language: English in North America, rhotic accents (accents that pronounce the R in, e.g., “father”) became prestigious in the United States around the 1870s. It may have simply been more euphonic (more pleasing to the ear) for rhotic speakers to pronounce “toward” rather than “towards” — the former has just two consonants in a cluster, whereas the latter would have a three-consonant cluster, making it more difficult to pronounce. This, too, seems tenuous, because written language changes slower than spoken language and Google Ngram depends on data culled from written texts.
I can’t seem to think of any other explanations, but I encourage readers to share their thoughts below.
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Jonathon
I suspect that the American preference for toward is more of an artifact of copyediting than anything else. I see towards in unedited writing and hear it in speech quite often. And as a copyeditor, I know that a lot of editors have been trained to strike out that supposedly superfluous s.
I’ve got a copy of Webster’s 1828 dictionary in my office, and it actually combines toward, towards in its entries, so it apparently wasn’t Webster that kicked off the American preference.
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Sandeep Prasanna
Thanks for checking Webster’s dictionary out. The copyediting makes sense, but it still doesn’t answer why Americans suddenly preferred “toward” over “towards”… a desire for efficiency can explain it, but surely the Brits like being efficient too, right?
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Kevin
>> The Economist is published out of London <<
What springs immediately to the mind of this British English speaker on reading the foregoing sentence is the thought: "Oh no, it's not: The Economist is published IN London! "Out of London", to me, means "Not in London" — as in "Our facilites are located out of London, in Staffordshire" (i.e at least 200 kilometres distant from the capital) .
Is this yet another transatlantic difference? How exactly, in (presumably) US English, does "published out of London" differ in meaning from "published in London"?
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Sandeep Prasanna
Good question. To me, “published out of London” implies distribution outward from a central location. I guess it implies more movement, and (to me) seems particularly suited to describe a periodical like The Economist. But I could have (and maybe should have) written “published in London” instead.
So I don’t know if I’m wrong. I also don’t think it’s an American thing. I did a quick google search of “published out of” and I found a couple of other examples: “published out of New York City,” “published out of Delhi,” “published out of Alphadelphia.” This usage is definitely in the minority, though. It doesn’t even register as a blip on Google Ngram compared to “published in”: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=published+out+of%2Cpublished+in&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
Also, if I wanted to say that the facilities were located in Staffordshire, I would probably say “outside of London.”
tl;dr – I don’t think my usage is wrong, but it’s not common.
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John Stokes
Prop 8: The importance of being ‘married’
The 9th Circuit ruled today that California’s Proposition 8 was unconstitutional, saying that it violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. For a summary of the ruling and a link to the opinion itself, check out SCOTUSblog.
Most of us probably remember that Prop 8 was the anti-gay-marriage initiative that California adopted a couple years ago. More specifically, though, Prop 8 was a public initiative that amended the California Constitution to prevent same-sex couples from obtaining the official designation of ‘married.’ It left in tact all of the rights afforded to gay and lesbian couples — the same rights that married opposite-sex couples are entitled to — but it forbade them officially to call these relationships ‘marriage.’
One might argue–as indeed the proponents of Prop 8 did–that if none of the substantive rights of gay couples were taken away, the lack of official designation shouldn’t be a constitutional problem. Having the rights, after all, is more important than what they are called. But the 9th Circuit disagreed:
All that Proposition 8 accomplished was to take away from same-sex couples the right to be granted marriage licenses and thus legally to use the designation of ‘marriage,’ which symbolizes state legitimization and societal recognition of their committed relationships. Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite sex couples.
- Perry v. Brown. 9th Circuit 10-16696. (from Judge Reinhardt, writing for the panel that decided the case)
In other words, what you call something does matter. And this is a powerful idea. The 9th Circuit says it doesn’t care if you leave the substantive rights in tact; it doesn’t matter if you maintain all the other entitlements that come along with the word ‘marriage.’ No– certain words have such special significance, such special power, that to deny access to their use alone is enough to violate a right.
So indeed – the 9th Circuit’s ruling came down to the fundamental importance of being, specifically and officially, ‘married.’
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John Stokes
“Had Marilyn Monroe’s film been called ‘How to Register a Domestic Partnership with a Millionaire,’ it would not have conveyed the same meaning as did her famous movie, even though the underlying drama for same-sex couples is no different.”
-Judge Reinhardt putting the point slightly differently
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johnwcowan
Note that there is also an equivocation on married. In Romer v. Evans, gay people were denied certain rights tout court. But, as the anti-marriage-equality folks are forever pointing out, no adult in America is denied the right to marry as such — only the right to marry certain other adults.
I hope that when the Supremes take this up, as they inevitably must either now or later, that they will look back to Loving v. Virginia, which also purported to allow everyone the right to marry, just not people of another color. The Court struck that one down, and just before Mildred Loving died in 2008, she expressed herself on the subject of gay marriage: she was for it.
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John Stokes
Good point. The biggest problem with relying on Loving is that it was a race case and thus triggered strict scrutiny. Sexual orientation only gets rationality review. So it’s not clear that Loving would help on the Equal Protection front.
But there’s still some language in Loving that could buttress the Due Process claims. “Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”
This is reminiscent of the language in right-to-privacy cases, e.g. Griswold, Roe, and Casey, saying the state can’t make reproductive decisions for you (the freedom to make these decisions is a fundamental right, so laws that limit that right are put under strict scrutiny). This got pushed farther in Romer and Lawrence, where the Court said the state can’t make decisions about private sexual activity/partners. So the Loving language might be employed to extend the claim to decisions about who to marry — saying that this, too, is a fundamental right and thus gets analyzed under strict scrutiny.
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John Stokes
Meant to post this earlier, another good point from a close friend: The whole reason that Prop 8 was passed in the first place was that its proponents thought the word “marriage” was special to them. If the point were the rights associated with the word, they would either have done nothing or passed an initiative that affected the substantive rights of same-sex couples. Instead, the focus was on whether or not same-sex couples could use the term itself — an important difference.
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Laura Heymann
Shout-out from the Economist: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2012/02/gay-marriage
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John Cowan
The three levels of scrutiny are judge-made law, and judges can change them.
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John Cowan
I’ve read the whole opinion and dissent now, and it seems clear that the court remains within the bounds even of rational-basis scrutiny. There is no constitutional right to be on welfare, but a law that prevented Greek-Americans from receiving welfare would be facially unconstitutional, even though people of Greek descent don’t constitute a suspect class. By analogy, there is no constitutional right to marry, but given that people are allowed to marry, removing that right from a particular group is not the kind of law that our constitution allows our legislatures to pass.
As for the dissent, it’s not so much about rational-basis review as about irrational-basis review. The learned judge seems to think that it’s perfectly fine for a legislature (or the sovereign people) to criminalize the making of strawberry ice cream if they believe that eating strawberry ice cream increases the likelihood of criminal behavior (which is undoubtedly a legitimate state purpose). The fact that that idea is preposterous seems to make no difference to him.
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JP are discussing. 
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Kevin, and 
John Stokes
Who you callin’ Beezow Doo-Doo Zoppittybop-Bop-Bop?
Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-Bop-Bop is the name of a man who was arrested recently in Wisconsin. Yes, that is his legal name. Considering that for much of history, a person’s name was of such weighty import as to be the key to their “power” (in one way or another), Mr. Zopittybop-Bop-Bop is a sign of just how far that history is gone.
As Wikipedia tells us, certain cultures throughout history have thought that something’s name was so important that it was actually a “separate manifestation” of that thing. If you knew the name of a demon, you could exorcise it from a possessed person. If you invoked the name of a god or another spirit, you somehow impregnated your words with their power. If you knew the name of a person, that person was under your control.
Most of us probably think this is silly today. But given the names of these legal figures, maybe they were on to something with the idea that a person’s name can bear influence on the course of their life.
Learned Hand — Every law student comes to know the great Judge Learned Hand. He’s widely considered to be one of, if not the, greatest judge never to become a Supreme Court justice, and his formulation of the test for whether or not a person has been negligent dominates the tort law scene to this day.
William Wayne Justice — Judge Justice is famous (or infamous) for his role in what’s come to be known as the Texas Prison Litigation. This was a court battle that raged for two decades about the conditions in the Texas prison system. Justice dictated that the system be improved in order to meet minimum Constitutional standards, but his role (the role of Justice, that is) was considered by many to be ‘activist’ beyond what is proper for a judge.
Then again, maybe those names are just a happy coincidence. After all, someone, sometime was bound to have a name that coincided with their profession. Either way, in many other societies, your name had an entirely different type of influence on the course of your life. It’s not that if someone knew your name, they had power over you — it’s that if you had the right name, it meant you had power over others. I’m talking about titles of nobility – land, power, and status conferred by inheritance. No mysticism is needed to understand the importance of names in this type of society. With one type of name, you were guaranteed riches and power as a matter of right; with another, 
well, tough luck.
Today, there can be no question that one’s name is less important than it was during these other periods in history. This decline is probably the subject of some very interesting historical and sociological literature, but it seems likely that the end of hereditary ruling and aristocratic classes indeed had something to do with it. If there’s no longer a hereditary aristocracy, whereby your name entitles you to certain lands and status, it’s less important to be associated with a particular genetic line. (Interestingly, the US Constitution goes so far as to prohibit the federal and state governments from granting titles of nobility.)
Even so, one would not expect names to become entirely irrelevant (just ask a Kennedy or a Rockefeller). But, taking Mr. Zoppitybop-Bop-Bop as an example, it has become increasingly popular to forsake the name of one’s ancestors and adopt an appellation that’s slightly less traditional. Here are a couple of interesting examples from the sports world:
Ron Artest –> Metta World Peace. World Peace is an NBA player on the Los Angeles Lakers. His choice of names is interesting, as over the course of his career he has garnered more than his fair share of flagrant and technical fouls, and he has generally become reputed for his less-than-peaceful play.
Chad Johnson –> Chad Ochocinco. Chad Johnson is a renowned wide receiver with great talent and a huge mouth. He is now on the roster of the New England Patriots, where he’s had a less-than-stellar season. The name that’s currently on the back of his jersey, you guessed it, is the Spanglish translation of his jersey number – 85.
Jon Koppenhaver –> War Machine. This guy is a mixed martial artist who liked his nickname so much that he legally took it. Haven’t seen him in the Octagon recently? Well, that’s probably because he’s been in jail for the last three years…
Lloyd B. Free –> World B. Free. Lloyd came into the NBA to play for the 76ers in the mid ’70s. This name change is particularly cool because his actual nickname was World. He apparently got the nickname for having a 44 inch vertical that allowed him to do a 360 dunk (back in the days before that was a common feat among NBA players). So he went ahead and made it official–how convenient his middle initial!
Often times, these names smack of caprice and/or arrogance. But as a form of self-expression, changing one’s name can in theory be extremely meaningful. There’s literally no better way of identifying yourself with, say, World Peace than to actually make it your identity (though as I mentioned above, I’m not sure I buy that from Ron Artest).
And dropping one’s inherited name (though most often done in favor of names less crazy than these examples) is one of the strongest forms of dissociation available to us. Today we take that to mean dissociation from one’s family for one reason or another. But this is actually something the ancients also recognized: by changing your name, you could avoid an ugly fate associated with your inherited name. An interesting idea for sure — I just hope Mr. Zoppitybob-Bop-Bop’s children get that message before it’s too late.
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Laura Heymann
Love the blog! If you don’t mind a bit of self-promotion, an article I wrote on naming and trademark law might be of interest to readers: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1761614.
Laura Heymann
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Sandeep Prasanna
Hi, Professor Heymann. This is awesome. Thanks for passing it along. It’ll take a while for both of us to work through the paper, but we will definitely read it soon.
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Sandeep Prasanna
I can’t look at Beezow Doo-Doo Zoppity-Bop-Bop Bop’s name without thinking of this: http://i.imgur.com/8AVV9.gif
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johnwcowan
Google for “nominative determinism” and “aptonym|aptronym” for a lot more on this subject.
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randy
David Brooks book, The Social Animal, has any interesting chapter on how one’s name influences his life. The statistics are startling. Among a name’s many influences, if a name relates to a business orr profession, the bearer of that name is far more likely to enter it. For example, people named Lawrence are more likely to enter the legal profession than any other and enter it at a much higher rate than those with any other name. Check out the chapter for a fascinating review of the statistics on “what’s in a name.”
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emily
Fact – also in Madison WI, there is an actual MD named Dr. Bonebrake.
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John Cowan
Across the Pond from Judge Justice is Mr. Justice Judge, the current Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. (He’s now Baron Judge, or more formally The Right Honorable The Lord Judge.)
JP 7:39 am on May 28, 2012 Permalink |
“Page you requested could not be found”.
The Diacritics 8:07 am on May 28, 2012 Permalink |
Thanks for the catch – fixed.