Comments on: Poetry Done Right

By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:34:47 +0000

Matt,

Whoever has the cane is right.

Thomas

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:03:33 +0000

huh? why punish someone who’s right?

By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:51:28 +0000

Robbins, in a rant against 19th century Latinate dons, writes three very ugly sentences:

“Prepositions have always been & continue to be perfectly fine to end sentences with.”

Ack!

“To schoolmarmishly refuse to split infinitives is to reveal a fundamental ignorance of the history of English usage.”

Ugh! (I’m making ‘history’ with my ‘usage!’)

“Don’t tell Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, President Obama, or I about how important case is.”

Wha…?

What say you, gentlemen?

How should we punish Robbins?

How many strokes with the cane?

Thomas

By: Michael J.

Michael J. — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:52:52 +0000

haaaa

By: Christopher Woodman

Christopher Woodman — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 06:30:39 +0000

“Falsely modelled on an apparently analogous prestigeful form”—like waving a pinkie as you raise a teacup, or pronouncing Vietnam as if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, or thought silver spoons were better, or were auditioning for CNN.

Too correct is good.

By: Christopher Woodman

Christopher Woodman — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 06:14:18 +0000

You know, Michael, quite honestly, words have no interest for me but what they actually say. If they sit and shiver, or are so high I can hardly see them, or wave and chatter like monkies, I’m neither impressed or distressed, They have to talk to me first.

The fact that some linguist, or even some whole school of linguistics, has come along and said that a word now means this or that, well that cuts no ice with me. The examples you give—splitting an infinitive, ending with a preposition—I’ve lived with those anomalies for years, as a student, as a teacher and as a writer, and each time I have encountered them I just do what any native speaker does, talk my best. “So what,” I say, even to my students. “Say what you mean.”

Hypercorrect is a new concept for me, not one that I’m probably going to need except to talk to you. So I’m going to use it as you presented it—too correct, anachronistic, atavistic even, in a hypercritical sense. Patriarchal maybe.

I like that. I’m not going to worry whether I’m right or not.

Christopher

By: michael robbins

michael robbins — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:55:16 +0000

Just to clarify: the term was invented within the field of linguistics (Jespersen, 1922, earliest citation) to describe exactly the phenomenon I noted: the false “correction” of a perfectly valid form. This is the only sense in which the word is used, hence this is its definition. Just because a word’s etymology suggests other meanings doesn’t mean it also denotes them.

By: michael robbins

michael robbins — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:50:56 +0000

What are you, Humpty Dumpty? The term is used in linguistics & has a specific meaning, which is not the one you think.

From the OED, which I suggest we let have the last word: “Of a spelling, pronunciation, or construction: falsely modelled on an apparently analogous prestigeful form. Also of a speaker using such a form.”

By: Christopher Woodman

Christopher Woodman — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:36:42 +0000

Zen in the Art of Archery
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
At least those are the words appearing on the splines of the copies on my shelves.

Re. The word “hypercorrect” applied to any activity means too correct. That’s a different concept altogether from incorrect.

By: michael robbins

michael robbins — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:27:29 +0000

P.S. “Hypercorrectness” is insistence that a particular usage is correct in an attempt to appear sophisticated when that usage is, in fact, incorrect. An example is “whom” is “the man whom I knew had just written a style manual,” when correct grammatical usage calls for “who.”