During the past few days, I received emails (from the UK) that contained the following phrases:
An Out-of-Office reply: Please note I work Monday – Wednesday’s onlyProblems with the apostrophe have already been reported elsewhere in this blog: why not abolish them altogether?
“Flat Adverbs” are defined by the OED as follows: “Not distinguished by a characteristic ending, as an adverb which has the same form as an adjective or substantive, or a substantive used as an adjective” (OED, s.v. flat, adj., adv. and n3) . The OED adds that they “often go back to an Old English form ending in -e”.
An interesting account of flat adverbs as a usage problem is given in a Youtube film called “Merriam-Webster Ask the Editor – Drive Safe: In Praise of Flat Adverbs”.
Nevalainen (2008:294), citing an article by Tagliamonte and Ito (2002), notes that “the influence of linguistic prescriptivism on adverb form [i.e. the variation between flat adverbs and adverbs marked by –ly] was not so strong in the United States as it was in England”.
Jane Austen, too, used flat adverbs. On the first page of Lefaye’s edition of her letters (OUP, 3rd ed. 1995) we find as many as four of them:
you are very near of an ageThe term itself is not as old as that: the quotations in the OED illustrate suggest that it originates from the 1870s. And given the fact that flat adverbs are often criticised today, it won’t be hard to find any postdatings which the OED will be able to use in their revision process by the time they reach F. Quotations will be welcome.
References:
Nevalainen, Terttu (2008), Social variation in intensifier use: constraint on -ly adverbialization in the past?, English Language and Linguistics 12/2, 289-315.
Tagliamonte, Salli A. and Rika Ito (2002), Think really different: Continuity and specialization in the English dual form adverbs, Journal of Sociolinguistics 6, 236-266.
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If today’s pet linguistic hates for BBC journalists and news writers are try and (for try to), concede defeat/victory, gone missing and Americanisms (e.g. turning nouns into verbs and attaching prepositions to verbs: hospitalize, meet with) (see elsewhere in this blog), different ones are listed in Robert Burchfield’s … Continue reading
At the 17th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, one of the plenary papers will be on prescriptivism. The speaker is Anne Curzan, from the University of Michigan, and her paper will be called “Prescriptivism: More Than Descriptivism’s Foil”.
The conference will take place at the University of Zurich (Switzerland), from 25-28 August, 2012. For more information on the conference, see the conference website.
When setting out to fill in our fourth language poll, one of the readers of this blog found she wanted to leave all the boxes blank for the ‘less’ and ‘try and’ questions, but that the poll wouldn’t allow that. It is interesting to see that this issue only arose now. It didn’t come up with any of the other usage items, though one of our readers did comment a while ago that she considered that there were no problems in acceptability with any of the usage problems thus far.
The avoid any kind of unwanted presuppostion as to the acceptability of the constructions we are asking you about, we added an option “unacceptable under any circumstances”. At this point – the change was made early today – no one has selected this option yet, so it’ll be interesting so see when it first happens and what for, and also whether any of the other constructions comes in for this option as well. We will keep you posted.
Let us know what you think about these constructions by filling in our fourth usage poll. You’ll find the poll under the button Usage polls, immediately below the banner of this blog.
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This is the title of an article by John Honey, published in 1995 in English Today. In the article Honey makes a plea for “agree[ing] upon [a] reasonable form of prescriptivism”, discussing as a case study the occurrence of pronoun … Continue reading
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In a very interesting paper called “BBC Style: A look at the style guides and language of BBC Radio News bulletins”, Anya Luscombe, from Roosevelt Academy, Middelburg (The Netherlands), analyses the views on a number of top “pet hates” among … Continue reading
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On the subject of what is called singular they (Everyone has their off-days) Mittins et al. write that Jane Austen “uniformly employs this usage”. The authors refer to S.A. Leonard’s Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage (1929) here, where we … Continue reading
Mind Your Language is a fantastic blog run by The Guardian on usage problems, the use of style guides and many related matters. Particularly the entries by David Marsh are well worth reading.
Among the usage items dealt with we find: the use of square brackets, the differences between that and which (also discussed elsewhere in this blog), the who/whom problem, the subjunctive, the Oxford comma, Railspeak, the controversial issue of the hyphen, the use of capitals (several blog posts), the split infinitive (again, a topical issue also in this blog), the occurrence of Americanisms in The Guardian, whether it should be data is or data are …
Many of these are so-called “old chestnuts” of usage guides. What we would like to know for the Bridging the Unbridgeable research project is what new usage problems there are. What are readers of The Guardian bothered by that isn’t already dealt with in the standard usage guides? David Marsh, can you help us find out please?
Bridging the Unbridgeable 