Joining up

<digression subject="linking">
A recently broadcast and less than memorable TV drama (The City and the City) was set in a divided city. Wordplay was a feature of the writing and the linking building between one side and the other was called "Copula House".  Students of language will have met the term copula; many of the actors though, not having met it, assumed there had been a typo and said "Cupola House".

It  was this sort of ignorant slip that made suspension of disbelief impossible, so I didn't stick with the series. (With the growing trend of wacky cerebral TV dramas, there needs to be some way of getting the actors to understand the reality they're playing with, or the silliness just gets compounded.  Alternatively, of course, one could just get a life and switch off.)

<meta_digression>
Checking out the Wikipedia entry on copula, I notice that while many languages (like English) have a copular verb (be, in that case), some languages use a suffix to do the same job (linking a subject to its predicate), which ties in quite neatly with today's theme. To see how, read on.
 </meta_digression>

{Thinks: All these digressions and he hasn't even started yet.}

</digression>

My eye was caught last week by an old article in The Week  – one of those '10 things you didn't know about <thing>'  articles. It makes a number of interesting points and – not unpredictably – misses a few tricks. It starts with a quite telling image:

Think about when you were a kid discovering the wonder of glue. Hey, why not glue Barbie to this teacup? Let's glue Daddy's fancy pen to Mommy's ceramic figurine! But when you try to unglue them, you discover that glue can be strong — sometimes stronger than the things you were gluing. Now Barbie is permanently holding a teacup handle and Daddy's pen has a ceramic arm on it.

Words can be like that.

This is pretty suggestive (in a good way), and I'm afraid I missed it at first, thinking Where's the beef? and starting right in on the list – looking for trouble: what do they mean? The very idea of me not knowing something! (In fact, the slight wasn't "you didn't know", but just saying words were badly broken; I had one foot in the stirrup of my high horse, ready to say "words can't be badly broken, except if you're the sort of nincompoop who complains about words like decimated that come to be used in a way less stringent than that required by Mrs Thistlebottom and her ilk.

But, having read that first paragraph, I now  see that "badly broken" doesn't mean "seriously mangled" (referring to a supposed "lamentable decline in linguistic standards, why in my day kids... etc etc") but to a bad (that is, misplaced) break between a root and a prefix. And as a result the expression "the glueline" struck me at first as a rather arch metaphor.

My fault-finding zeal was not, however, entirely misplaced. In the first word on the list, for example:

Are any of your apps broken? Your app is! You know it's short for application.

Well yes, up to a point. That's where the new word comes from. But you can't therefore take it that "App and application mean the same thing; 'app' is just a shortened form of 'application':  the two are interchangeable".  They're not.

An application, or to give it its full dress name an application program (one that does stuff of interest to a user, unlike a systems program – which just makes the computer behave) does not need to have a Graphical User Interface;  many don't. An app does, and it has to run on a hand-held device. Also, an app almost always interacts with the Internet in some way. The ones that don't tend to be used once and uninstalled at the first opportunity; even obvious counter-examples – like graphics apps – often tie in with the Internet for things like clip-art libraries.

Next on The Week's list  is copter.

Ask someone what helicopter is made from, and they'll probably say heli plus copter. But actually it's helico- ("spiral") plus pter ("wing"), same as in pterodactyl, "wing finger". Obviously nobody says it like "helico-pter" — pronunciation trumps etymology. So this is one whirlybird that flies even when broken off badly.

There's a missed trick here; the (misconstrued) "ending" copter has taken on a life of its own, not only as a free-standing word (meaning helicopter) but also as a suffix used to name new inventions such as the gyrocopter.*

The item dealing with demo was new to me, for which thanks. The last line, though, was a bit of a throwaway (in two senses – both an unpursued possible digression and a gratuitously wasted opportunity): "There's also a bit of a history in English of making short forms that end in o." This tendency is more common in some parts of the world. In Australian English , for example, a relative is a relo. And I suspect the ready adoption into informal British English of the abbreviation arvo (for afternoon) owes something to early scripts of Neighbours and Home and Away.

But the lawn needs attention, not to mention the pyracanthus.

<autobiographical_note>
I usually prefer to leave the pyracanthus to get straggly, so that the smaller birds have first dibs on the less accessible berries. After I've done my boring topiary, life's too easy for the fat pigeons gorging themselves on the tabula rasa, leaving the tits to clear up the berries left in the less accessible places. But needs must...
</autobiographical_note>

So I'll leave you to read that The Week article; it's definitely worth a visit.


b

PS: A couple of clues:

• Mischief-makers interrupting least dark recycled document. (10)
• Turned up with every other unsisterly character, but fashionably outmoded first. (10)

Update: 2018.10.08.11.35 – Added PPS

And the same thing (bad break between prefix and word) can happen to names too. Santo Iago (St James) became Santiago, leaving (after an underdone abbreviation) the name Tiago. (And whether/how Tiago and Diego are related is a matter of some debate. Start here if this sort of thing floats your boat.)

Update: 2018.10.12.11.45 – Added footnote

* Researching other neologisms such as gyrocopter (are there any?) I (having accused them of missing a trick) missed a trick. There are two survivors of a bad break  – what comes before (heli- in this case) and what comes after (-copter). Heli- has had a much more productive career: the Macmillan English Dictionary lists  helipad, heliport, and heli-skiing, but others crop up regularly: heli-boarding, for example.

Update: 2019.03.09.12.30 – Added PPS

PPS
The answers to those clues: PALIMPSEST, RETROUSSÉ (quite pleasing, that one TISIAS)

Its easier than that

The frequent substitution of its for it's, and vice versa, which some of you will have remarked on in my subject line (and those who didn't can expect a stern look from Mrs Thistlebottom), is not unlike a similar misspelling of two common French homophones, et and est. I'm not sure how to search for the origins of this confusion, but this exercise attests to the currency of the problem. If the confusion goes back long enough...

<autobiographical_note date_range="1971-1972" theme="embarras de richesses">
When, at the end of my first year, I had to choose options for Part II of my language degree, I bore in mind the amount of linguistic data there was relating to French (my main language at the time) and its documentation. I knew I wanted to study Romance Philology, and there were also several papers called 'History of <language-name>'. But French was a huge area, with many internally contradictory records; and the lecturer on the History of French had written the one book all students would have to read. And his reputation as a lecturer was not inviting.

So in 1972 I took up Portuguese, with a view to studying the History of Portuguese in my final year, thus avoiding a field of study that would have given me some insight into the origins of the es/est confusion – central to the madcap theory I mentioned last time. For further details of that theory – which is mine – read on.
</autobiographical_note>

...I don't think my madcap theory is TOO mad. Unproven and undocumented, but not entirely implausible.

The royal coat of arms of Great Britain bears the motto Dieu et mon droît (a reference to the divine right of kings). Google finds well over 200,000,000 hits for the rather feeble (not to say meaningless) translation 'God and my right'.

Somewhere (when I had reading rights in the old BM reading room) I found a French bible with the words Le Seigneur est ma justesse, which appears in the AV (no refs. today, my battery's about to die, as is my brain) as 'The Lord is my righteousness'.

Jean Bodin, the French mid-late-sixteenth century jurist, first introduced the idea of the divine right of kings to govern, basing his ideas on Roman Law. It was perhaps this authority that appears (uncited) in Bossuet's "Sermons choisis de Bossuet": 

                                  Image in Google Books

James VI of Scotland published his Basilikon Doron in Edinburgh in  1599, but he obviously wanted the English to understand his view of The Kingly Gift, as a London edition followed in 1603.

The Scots textbooks of the divine right of kings were written in 1597-98 by James VI of Scotland before his accession to the English throne. His Basilikon Doron, a manual on the powers of a king, was written to edify his four-year-old son Henry Frederick [sic but I imagine at least a colon is meant, if not a new sentence] king "acknowledgeth himself ordained for his people, having received from the god a burden of government, whereof he must be countable."

From Wikipedia on the Divine right of k'ings.

Cutting to the chase, let's imagine Dieu e[s]t mon droît was the translation in some French bible of the verse that appears in the AV as 'The lord is my righteousness'. The French-speaking Plantagenets would have met it. What better motto for Henry V (the first king of Great Britain to adopt the motto) to adopt as a statement of a newly defined right (Henry having picked it up from his forebear Richard I, who favoured it as a crusading battle cry [meaning, roughly, 'God's on my side'])?


b


Update 2014.06.0910.16:10 – Added this PS:
PS
I must have dreamed my attribution of 'the Lord is my righteousness' to the Authorized Version: according to the searchable text provided by the University of Michigan, that exact phrase doesn't occur. A candidate for an alternative occurs at various places in the Book of Jeremiah, notably 23:6 – 'THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS'.

Update 2014.06.09.16:55 – Added this PPS:

PPS
The quote in blue explains the bit about James's view of Basilikon Doron. He was the first major contributor to the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Other blue phrases are additions that fill in other bits of the argument.

Update 2014.06.15.18:55 – Fixed typos and added editorial gloss.

Update 2014.08.01.21.15 – Added 'translation' in maroon.

Update 2018.06.04.11:00 – Various typo fuxes and deleted old footer.

Pedants of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your PEDAI

I recently came across this question in the Using English Ask a Teacher forum:

Are those three sentences correct? all the same? Thanks!

This is the room in which we stayed.

This is the room which we stayed in.

This is the room where we stayed.

After a helpful and correct answer from a fellow teacher, I added:

And some pedants would prefer a fourth option:

This is the room that we stayed in.

The trouble for these people is that they are forced to apply one of two groundless prescriptive rules that are mutually exclusive "(that for a defining subordinate clause" and "not ending a sentence with a preposition")

b
PS People interested in etymology may like to imagine chains attached to each arm of the person choosing between the two 'rules'. The Greek for chains is πεδαι (pedai).

Not wanting to be one of those teachers with bees in their bonnets, which they sick onto unsuspecting students, I didn't add my further thoughts on this issue. You've guessed it – here they are.

I wrote here about phrasal verbs and what happens to them when they get used in subordinate clauses; the 'preposition' part, more commonly called the 'particle', gets moved to the end of the  clause (more often than not, to the end of the sentence).

Users of Microsoft Word will have (perhaps unwittingly) crossed swords with the little Hitler that is Word's built-in 'grammar checker' – a sort of 'Strunk and White incarnate'. For example, section II.14 of that book has the title 'Use the active voice'; Word's 'grammar checker' duly objects whenever it catches the merest whiff of a passive. It wields a green underline rather as Mrs Thistlebottom† wielded a ruler in the English classroom, and helpfully suggests 'Consider rewriting' (code for 'Unless you rewrite, I'll keep nagging you as long as I have breath.')

One of the grammar checker's shibboleths is 'that in defining relative clauses' (and now the gloves are off – the underline is RED.)

<grammar_point importance="negligible" skip="yes, if you value your sanity" status="shibboleth">
Suppose I have two lawn mowers. The green one is in the shed and the red one (a 'ride-on' job), is in the garage. Woe betide you if you refer to the green one as 'the mower which is in the shed'. However, you will have Mrs Thistlebottom's blessing if you say 'The red mower, which is newer, is in the garage.'
</grammar_point>

Now which  has a full complement of inflexions: which for the subject, whose (borrowed from who) for the possessive, and the same form can be used in all sorts of object positions – by which, to which, from which ... and so on. Who is similar: who (subject) whose (possessive), whom for all kinds of object. That doesn't enjoy any of this flexibility:

The mower that is in the garage is red

 <inline-ps>
"That" in subject position is fine, but as any kind of object it doesn't work:
 </inline-ps>

The mower thats power source is petrol...
The mower on that you can sit while mowing...

There is the obviously/(apparently?)  related word what [I am doing this,/What are you doing/Don't do that.], but it couldn't be pressed into service to bolster that.

The mower whats power source is petrol...
The mower on what you can sit while mowing...

No improvement on the that versions.

Personally – though not for reasons of 'correctness' – I try to use that (or nothing) for defining subordinate clauses: 'the mower I'm sitting on' rather than 'the mower on which I'm sitting'. I am cursed by a premonition of what Word's 'grammar checker' would say; all around me I see red underlines that I have to ignore. [For some reason  – just contrary, I suppose – a vision came to me just then of Lulu singing The boat which I row.] But because of the grammatical inflexibility of that I find myself from time to time having to fall back on which. I know the rule is hooey, but...

And speaking of hooey, the other thing about using that in subordinate clauses is that it forces you to 'break' another 'rule', by relegating a phrasal verb's particle to the end. (I have mentioned this before, in the red excursus in the middle of this post).

And that is the point on which I shall end.

b
† Mrs T is not my invention; I have mentioned her before. She haunted Dave Barry's Mister Language Person columns, which have gone the (sorely lamented) way of the songs of Tom Lehrer.


PS #WVGTbook update. I've finished OA, OE, and OI as far as the raw data is concerned. Now for the HTML bit! The scheduled 3.1 release is looking good for next month.

Update 2017.09.01.10:55 – Removed old footer

Update 2024.03.01.20:55 –  Added <inline-ps />

Noam's spark

It all started with a little stick, or in Latin regula.  (The Greek for 'little stick' was βακτηριον, but that's another story – this post is going to be about rules, not bacteria.) Regula is another of those diminutives that we've seen before. It's the root of our 'regulation'; and when things conform to a norm they are 'regular'; they may match up to a yardstick.

When I was a student of Linguistics, in the early seventies, Chomsky was the Big Cheese.  We were presented with recorded highlights of what had gone before The Man (the BC of linguistics, we thought: Before Chomsky) – von Humboldt, the brothers Grimm, de Saussure, Jakobsen, The Structuralists (chief Fall Guy B.F. Skinner) – and then Saint Noam. We learnt to laugh off B.F Skinner in a sentence (or at most two).

I 'did' Linguistics again at the Open University about 5 years ago. The Man now was Halliday. And – annoyingly for someone who has actually read both Syntactic Structures and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and thinks their author is the bee's knees – we were expected to dismiss the new Fall Guy just as glibly and superficially as we in our time had been taught to dismiss B.F. Skinner. Academic karma. (I suspect that I could usefully spend some time finding out what he really did say, rather than the caricature I was fed over forty years ago.)

The thing about Chomsky is that he used the word 'grammar' with what he called (conveniently, and not without humour, I think) 'a systematic ambiguity' and in the two sorts of grammar the word 'rule' has a different meaning. Broadly – not to say trivially – in Transformational-Generative Grammar (TG) a 'rule' is not something you ought to do in order to speak grammatically, it's a step in the TG process that just happens (although it can be described rigorously – indeed, describing these rules is the job of the linguist [in the modern sense of someone who 'does' linguistics], not of the language learner).

So the rule, or regula wielded by Dave Barry's Mrs Thistlebottom (mentioned before, in the last paragraph of this post) mixes the metaphor painfully. If you get your grammar wrong you get a rap across the knuckles. Hers were prescriptive rules ('rules_p') Chomsky's grammar does not have rules that an everyday user can 'get wrong' (once the mother tongue has been successfully acquired – by a marvellous reiterative process that involves surface errors as the learner refines those descriptive rules – 'rules_d').

I'm not sure that Chomsky's views can affect the way we teach English. I had for a time a student who had read Chomsky and thought he could learn without 'rules_p'. What he didn't allow for was the fact that he was no longer a baby and didn't behave like one – playing with and practising new sounds and exercising new rules_d , just for the fun of it.

So I read with interest Mike Griffin's blogpost entitled* Making Grammar Relevant to Teaching with Chomsky and Halliday. With interest but disappointment.

Mike: Are you saying that we don’t need to teach grammar rules?
Chomsky: Exactly. There is no point...

I was initially confused. Chomsky wouldn't have said this, I thought. He would have pointed out that the rules that he thought there was ' no point' in teaching just couldn't be taught. But this doesn't mean that a teacher can't teach useful rules of thumb†, bypassing the sort of natural language acquisition of a mother-tongue that is simply unavailable to a non-native speaker. So I agreed with the rest of the imagined exchange:

Chomsky: ... Students need to use and hear the language in order to
figure out on their own how the language they are studying works.
Mike: I like the sound of that.

But I just don't see how an English teacher can make use of an understanding of TG.

* 

<rant>
And 'Spare us, O Lord' , from the gruesome 'titled'. There are three things in the culture that has nurtured British English.:

1. (of a document) – bearing a title
2. (of a person) – having a justifiable right
3. (of a person) – bearing a title

And there are only two words, 'titled' and 'entitled'. Obviously the only possible solution (if your culture requires you to deal with all three meanings) is to pair one of them off. British English, with its cultural baggage of a class-system and honorific titles, pairs 1 off with 2: either a person or a document can be 'entitled', and only a person can be 'titled'. There is no question of ambiguity; if a person is entitled  it's a question of entitlement, but if a document is entitled it's a question of nomenclature. American English., with its egalitarian background, just doesn't feel it necessary to recognize 3. Two words/two meanings => one word for each is the AE rule. Fine: just don't force it (and thus your cultural background) on me.
</rant> 


News from the word face

IA is done. I am about to embark (interesting image – the 'bark' in question feels a bit like a coracle, hard to steer and making almost indiscernible progress) on IE. As I said in an earlier post, work on this may involve a period of purdah, but when it's done I'll be more than half-way there (as IA + IE > II + IO + IU).

b 

†Update 2013.05.10:22.05 
Couldn't help thinking about this phrase. The Phrase Finder, after dismissing an unconvincing story involving a ruling on domestic violence, says:

It is likely that it refers to one of the numerous ways that thumbs have been used to estimate things - judging the alignment or distance of an object by holding the thumb in one's eye-line, the temperature of brews of beer, measurement of an inch from the joint to the nail to the tip, or across the thumb, etc. 

I favour the last of these, not least because the French pouce can mean either 'inch' or 'thumb'. Like the English 'foot',  pouce is a metaphor that uses a part of the body to measure things. And Noah's Ark, coincidentally, measured '300 cubits by 50 by 30' (a cubit being an ancient measure of length based on the length of the forearm according  to the Collins English Dictionary.)

Update 2013.05.11:11.40 : A few tweaks.

Update 2013.05.12:19.00:  Added this:

 
In view of the pun in the title, I'm tempted to end with the reference to Noah's Ark. But another Biblical quotation adds to the store of measurements based on body parts  – Goliath's 'six cubits and a span'. The reality behind this is still up in the air, and presumably always will be. RECONSIDERING THE HEIGHT OF GOLIATH  makes him just quite tall (no taller than many modern day basketball players). But the later   RECONSIDERING THE HEIGHT OF GOLIATH (you'd think feuding academics would at least agree not to wear the same frock) says 'no, Goliath was Really Pretty Big, but we can't be sure because David (who must have measured him before cutting off his head) was only a squirt with a tiny cubit, but we don't know how tall David was'. But a span, again according  to the Collins English Dictionary was a unit of length based on the width of an expanded hand, usually taken as nine inches (though the author of the later Goliath  article would beg to differ on the nine inches thing).

Update 2013.05.13:10.35: A few tweaks.

Update 2019.08.28.12:30: Deleted old footer

Sez who? Take 2

Excuse my recent silence. What with the Crystal talk, -EE- words that make the /i:/ sound*, and furniture removals, it's been a busy week. It started out to be a report of the Monday talk, but ended up being a bit of a rant about intellectual bullying - which had the same theme as the Crystal talk (language and culture).

Last Monday, David Crystal delivered the 'inaugural English Language/Council lecture' (or so it was described by the first speaker) on the subject of The future of English: coping with culture. It was, as he said at the outset, 'little more than a string of stories', but for all that it was an enjoyable and enlightening string of stories. I wonder if he chose his first anecdote - about a break-down in communication over eggs in a diner in the US - with a private hat-tip to William Caxton's similar anecdote reported by many other commentators (including Crystal himself, in The Stories of English). The word 'similar' may need some justification; it was similar in that it involved eggs (in Caxton's case the rival words egges [Northern] and eyren [Southern]) , a culture-clash in a public eating place, and a traveller who was perhaps not as naïve as the reporter made him out to be:

...in my days happened that certain merchants were in a ship in Thames for to have sailed over the sea to Zealand, and for lack of wind they tarried at Foreland, and went to land for to refresh them.  And one of them named Sheffield, a mercer, came into a house and asked for meat, and especially he asked after eggs; and the good wife answered that she could speak no French, and the merchant was angry, for he could speak no French, but would have had eggs, and she understood him not.  And then at last another said, that he would have "eyren"; then the goodwife said that she understood him well.  Lo, what should a man in these days now write, eggs or eyren? 

from a Boucher.edu (slightly modernised) extract from Caxton's prrologue to his edition (1490) of Virgil's Eneydos

Of this oft-quoted story Crystal says:

More likely [than a reading of the story at face value] the story arose from a piece of banter, much as one might find today in a London pub when someone with, say, an American accent orders some drinks, the barman fails to catch what was said, and another customer intervenes with a comment about the Americans 'not speaking English'.

 The Stories of English p. 208. The imagined pub conversation is not, incidentally, the same as Crystal's own story, which is at 13'55-15'05 here.

By chance I had mentioned the importance of cultural understanding earlier this year in this blog. And by another chance I had just bookmarked with the tag toblog (clearing the decks for my trip to London) a piece with the intriguing title Why Only Some Grammar Rules Are Breakable. And - coincidence upon coincidence (like London buses, three coming at once [and there's a cultural referewnce that I bet doesn't travel well]) - it was written in response to an article that I had previously written about here.

My response to the Breakable piece may seem rather ad-Hebraist (that's not a rather arbitrary bit of anti-semitism - its author's doctorate was in Hebrew grammar); but that is rather my point (and Crystal's): speaking another person's language is only the first step on the journey to mutual comprehension.

Hoffman (its author) begins by making the traditional tripartite division, so beloved of a  certain kind of writer: 'There are three distinct ways to look at grammar' or, as Caesar might have said 'Grammatica est omnis divisa in partes tres';  Caesar, though had the advantage that very few of his contemporary readers might ever find themselves in a position to ask 'Sez who?'

Hoffman's first way to look at grammar (which it isn't - a 'way to look' that is) is 'prescriptive grammar'. For reasons best  known to Hoffmann he gives this the rather clunky soubriquet of 'the "Who Died and Made You King?" school' (a well-chosen word, 'school' - though not his - as the challenge to authority is redolent of the US schoolyard‡). After an unsurprising overview of this sort of grammar, his final 'Ms. O'Conner and Mr. Kellerman [authors of the article I discussed here] are simply wrong [my emphasis] when they say that "to" isn't part of the infinitive in English' comes somewhat out of left field. Previously he has said '...that's the way it goes. The kings told us so. And the same is true of properly positioning [my emphasis again] prepositions and not inserting items into infinitives.'  So his position on split infinitives is clear - not to say clearly outdated. He could look to any one of dozens -  probably hundreds - of authorities. OUP put its blessing on the split infinitive last century. I use that rather arcane dating system because I remember a colleague gleefully citing the preface to a '90s edtion of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary [that may not be the precise edition] and she was made redundant before the turn of the century.


But Hoffmann's 'simply wrong' reminded me of another culture-clash in my first CELTA lesson (training to be an EFL/ESOL teacher) nearly seven years ago. I've been studying foreign languages, off and on, for about 50 years. In French, Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian (that's the approximate order of the onset of study) the infinitive was one word; and to translate manger we learnt that we had to use two words - even to the extent of having a teacher correcting us: 'No, it's not just "eat", it's "to eat"!' That was the culture I had known as a student of foreign languages.

In my CELTA class, though, my trainer used 'infinitive' differently. The infinitive (the form of the verb with no tense marking - whence the name, incidentally†) took two forms: the 'to-infinitive' and the 'bare infinitive', and the default sort of infinitive tout sec was the bare infinitive. So as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language one learns to say things like 'To form the -ing- form of "eat" you add "-ing" to the infinitive'. 'Simply wrong'? What is simple is that the view is born of a culture clash - the culture of people who study languages and the culture of people learning and teaching English as a Foreign Language. In the words of Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme 'Nous avons changé tout ça!'

Let's return to Hoffmann's ways to look at grammar: 'The second way to look at grammar is both more interesting and less appreciated...[:] descriptive linguistics'. Quite so. It's a shame he didn't just say that rather than dress it up in another bit of 'man o' t'people' slang (which, in any case, is misleading): But Everyone's Doing It! The example he gives is this.

For example, in English, "I am" and "I'm" mean the same thing: "I am going to the movies" is the same as "I'm going to the movies." But even so, an English speaker might say, "he's taller than I am," but never "he's taller than I'm." Hundreds of millions of Americans, Brits, and more all agree on this basic fact, in spite of mostly never having thought about it before....

True. Unarguable. Language is what  everyone's doing, linguistically, and behind it lurk rules like this. But the schoolyard self-jusification 'But Everyone's Doing It!' is used to justify a mistake or an infraction of a cultural norm, rather than an unremarked truth. And is this, in the words of the title, an unbreakable rule? Probably - though Hoffmann doesn't say as much, saving the words for a catchy headline. People don't say  "he's taller than I'm" for the same reason that a footballer - the culture-clash here is intentional; 'he only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases'; I mean Association Football - doesn't pick up the ball. If they do, it becomes a different game. That's the way the language is. This sort of rule is unbreakable simply because if you break it you're not playing the game; it's not the sort of rule that allows cognoscenti to ask 'Shall I break it?' I wonder if that makes it unbreakable?

Finally, the third way: 'the third is art: what's the best way to put words together to achieve a certain goal?' Hoffmann cites various great writers, writing ungrammatically for art's sake. Fine. But it's not a way of looking at grammar. The suspension of grammaticality is not the breaking of a rule. I don't have very much to say about this 'way' because it's vacuous [see Update].

So what have we got? A tripartite division that doesn't work; an overview of prescriptive grammar with an implied blessing of some prescriptive rules on entirely arbitrary grounds; an overview of descriptive grammar that misses the point; and a third bit left over that says 'All bets are off if you're a great writer.' There are no three divisions; there are two - let's call a spade a spade: prescriptive and descriptive. And the bailiwick of art doesn't extend beyond prescriptive rules (unless you're James Joyce!) This doesn't remotely justify the title of Hoffmann's post.

But. generally, culture underlies all this. Hoffmann belongs to the same genus as Dave Barry's 'Mrs Thistlebottom' in his Mister Language Person columns . The world of language is full of arbitrary prescriptive rules, and he will pick and choose which ones will prescribe for him things like 'properly positioning prepositions'. All well and good; dinosaurs dominated the Earth for millions of years, and some of them were pretty scary; but they didn't survive the rise of the mammals. And this mammal resents being told how to write and speak by someone who brandishes his academic prowess but who doesn't understand my culture.

b
* This category represents a large majority (nearly 90% of all words that include the vowel-pair -EE-), and I shall have added it to the work-in-progress version of V2 of When Vowels Get Together Real Soon Now.
‡I don't know whether Hoffmann's high-school education was indeed in the USA, though he has taught in enough US high-schools, to judge from his CV.
† The infinitive is non-finite. In Portuguese it is even called o infinito.

Update, 2013.02.19:11.35 I should make it clear that when I referred to Hoffmann's discussion of 'the third way to look at grammar', using the word 'vacuous', I didn't mean 'vacant'. There are several interesting observations, which you can see in the article itself. But they are observations that are clearly examples typical of descriptive linguistics.

Update: 2013.10.02.15:55
HeadFooter updated
Update: 2014.01.05.12:35
And again:

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 Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?)

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources:  nearly 36,000 views  and  5,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with 1806 views/840 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.