This is point of inquiry for Monday, November 10th, 2014. Hello and welcome to Point of Inquiry, a prediction, the Center for Inquiry. I’m your host, Lindsay Beyerstein. And my guest today is Dr. Steve Pinker, the Harvard psychology professor and bestselling author of How the Mind Works, The Language, Instinct and the Better Angels of Our Nature. He’s here today to talk to us about his new book, The Sense of Style A Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. It’s a science based manual that tells us how to use the real rules of grammar to craft more elegant and effective prose. Along the way, he debunks many of the myths promulgated by grammar patents. Steve, welcome to the show.
Thank you. There are a lot of style manuals out there. How is your is different.
I call it a thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st century. And both parts of the subtitle Tell a Story The Thinking Person’s Guide. Because I don’t issue dictates frontline high as most manuals do. But explain why the various guidelines will improve writing what they do to the language, what they do to the readers experience in the hope that the users will apply the rules judiciously, knowing what they’re designed to accomplish rather than robotically. I found that many bits of writing advice are good in some cases, but bad if they are applied mindlessly. In fact, I was inspired to write the book when one of my previous books was edited by a copy editor. Clearly, he took a bunch of rules too literally. For example, it’s well known that academics overuse the passive voice. The study was performed that the data were collected and the analysis was performed instead. I performed the analysis. However, it is not true that you make prose better by converting every single passive voice sentence into an active voice. And I can make prose worse. It’s clear that the person applying these rules didn’t understand their rationale, just applied and has overall rules of thumb. So I want to explain the basis of the rules, including a number of rules that should not be in the rulebook in the first place, because I think a person would realize that they are based on this superstition. A lot of the bogus rules like don’t ever set with a preposition, don’t begin a sense and build split infinitive, just probable when you look at their rationale. Like who says she can’t get a sense with a preposition? Can you find out? No. No one would take offense to the 21st century. Part is partly that in the 21st century we have new knowledge about how language works. We have online databases of written language that you can consult. We have evidence based dictionaries and grammars. We have laboratory research on what makes sense is easier or harder to comprehend. And then the language itself changes so that the words that are a common use of the 21st century aren’t the same ones that were in common use in the 1910s. When Professor William Strunk wrote The Elements of Style.
So what is the research that says that the passive voice can be extremely useful and actually help in comprehension?
So the passive voice, the difference between the dog with the man and the man was bitten by the dog. Solve a problem that is inherent to the design of language, which is that language is like English use word order to convey information about who did what to whom. So the dog that the man and the man at the dog to active voice sentences, they don’t have different orders. We get mental mental pictures. They are need different things. But that creates a problem, namely that the code that you use it for who did what to whom. Also necessarily put some information at the beginning of a sentence that is at the end and that affects the order in which you process those words with you. You understand the sentence early material in a sentence naturally connects back to the context. It ought to refer to what the conversation is about so far. Late material in the sentence should introduce the new actors that are walking onto the stage. How can you do that if you, early and late in the sentence, are determined by English syntax to identify who’s the accurate who’s acted upon? Well, the passivist is our work around. If I say the dog, was it by the man? I get to start the sentence with the dog, which is what I’d want to do if your attention is spent on the dog or are we talking about the dog and at the same time convey the message that the dog was party to it. So the principle ought to be used, among other contexts, when the acted upon or target of the action is the current topic of the discourse.
Where do Thirty’s get the idea that the passive was inherently bad?
You often see the passive overused by academics and there a lot of legalese subparts by politicians when they say mistakes were made. I want to look at who it is that they. The stake. The passive. For one thing, it allows you to hide the agent as if mistakes were made. You can get away without saying who made those mistakes. And if it’s you said you could exculpate yourself. More generally, though, one of the biggest sins of writing is to. Ideas on the page. Which in the order in which they occur to you. The writer, because the order in which you think affects is not the order, but best for the reader. This is the writer always knows how a story turned out.
They’re always tempted to begin with the outcome, then throw in the clause as an afterthought, whereas powerful writing narrates a story in real time that allow that to be true. Visualize so you can say that the mind was attacked by a little old lady. You’re starting off with the theme that you know the attack and you’re throwing in the Kaiser as an afterthought, whereas it’s more effective to have the agent, mover and shaker the protagonist, the cause of the action come first. You can actually see the act unfold in real time. Good writing is written for the mind’s eye. It depicts a scene that the beta can visualize and the passive makes it easy to avoid that.
Can you see a little bit about the insidious phenomenon of normalization and why it sucks the life out of prose?
Yes, novelization. It sounds like a very abstruse technical concept in linguistics, but it really just means turning something into a noun. So instead of someone appearing, they make an appearance instead of anticipating that you might have to cancel something. You say there is an anticipation there that there might be a cancelation. So suffixes like Asian plants and Iogen meant allow you to think fire and action turn it into a thing which you then point to, and that destroys the sense that you are watching an event unfold before your eyes. And it makes prose stuffy, turgid and pompous and lifeless.
You chair the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. How did you get that job?
Well, I was on the panel. The panel is a group of about 200 writers and public figures, linguists, poets, novelists, sports writers, journalists, essayists, popular science writers who so that they put some care into their choice of words and serve as a sounding board for questionable usages, ones where the dictionary editors may not want to issue a decree as to what’s right or wrong, but the kind of people that good writers write for, namely literate people who themselves pay attention to distinctions and language.
And once a year, we send about a questionnaire, a ballot, and they get to say whether they would ever use the word in that sense or use that construction after serving on it for a number of years, that it was time to find a new chair. And they asked if I would do it and are very happy to do so. It’s fun to consider these issues and also get an inside look as to how a dictionary is made.
There’s some people on the committee who just kind of mavericks that want to let any new word into the language like they would have put Louris in three years ago.
Has there? There are such people and they get there in a minority. They get drowned out if they’re in a majority. That’s telling us something. It’s telling us that the language has changed. And we consider good, careful writers to be the ultimate authority. There’s no higher authority. It’s not like there is a council of elders of the English language or an academy. So we have to take them seriously. So I’ll give you some examples of one of the ballots. As far as you say, as far as something to do on the weekend, we don’t even have miniature golf. What do you have to say as far as something to do on the weekend is concerned? We don’t even have miniature golf or between between only have two objects of comparison. Or can you use it when there’s three or do you have to switch to a month? So another item is how does one choose between mutual funds, stocks, bonds? Do you like that or do you say that it has to be a market?
And what reasons do the panelists give? Are they saying, I just wouldn’t use that or I wouldn’t understand that or I don’t like that?
We only require them to say what you yourself use it. The literal wording is please read the following according to how acceptable you find each usage. We also give them a comment box, but they are not required to fill out a comic box and make a pitch for a much maligned construction.
It’s not every day I get the chair of the usage committee on my show. Is it acceptable currently to use the construction was like to describe the manner in which somebody reacted to a statement you could usually use, said. But if you want to highlight the fact that you’re paraphrasing or interpreting or drawing attention to the non-verbal aspect to the conversations, like I dropped the ball and he was like, what the hell is your problem? But he didn’t necessarily literally say that. That’s just my paraphrase of his reaction. Is there anything grammatically wrong with that? And should it be allowed in?
Yes. It’s not clear that you’re under warranty. You’d find that in the dictionary. I would have to consult with the editors as to whether that said even you what, Wolf? What what would you look up?
Fill it up like and have all the different senses, I suppose, like, yes.
That certainly is a construction that most people associate with other speakers with with teenagers or twenty somethings. It’s the kind of thing you don’t see in print much. It tends to be far more in speech. It does great early years of many people. If we figured out where to put that in the dictionary, I think that we would have a usage note that is separate from the definition, which informs the reader how what the range of opinions is on a construction, including warning them that it may sound too many years as grammatical or jocular or offensive. The underlying philosophy is that there is no right or wrong language independently of what people perceive to be right or wrong. So a classic convention is something that is more or less agreed upon without any overt consultation or discussion within a community of careful writers and readers. But in cases where there is a disconnect between a construct of this common use and one that would be approved in careful writing or in cases where the experts disagree, we present the issue to the reader in a usage note, and they can then make the choice judiciously. They can say, I am eating for a breezy or casual style or I don’t want to tick off people who care about writing and we give them the information that they need. That that’s the underlying philosophy.
You talk in the book about advertising slogans that grate on people. And I have an example for you, the Procter& Gamble Brands campaign that’s been appearing in the New York City subway. And the headline is Last night’s cheesy slice on dishes is tough. Dawn is tougher. And my boyfriend maintains this is not even an English sentence. But it sounds like to me. What do you think?
Did you say that again?
Sure. Last night’s cheesy slice on dishes is tough.
Cheesy slice.
Cheesy slice. Yeah. So the idea is you’ve got last night’s residue on your plate and you it off and you used on this. It’s the greatest copywriting ever, but it definitely makes sense.
Yes. Yes. I mean, ask you to repeat it one more time.
Sure. Last night’s possessive, cheesy slice on dishes is tough. Dawn is tougher.
Semicolon.
When you look it up online, they have to they divide it up as a sentence. But that’s not how the text reads in the ad. You can’t really see it, but it’s divided at all. Just the line.
Break our line back. I say yes. What’s the objection?
He maintains that there’s something about last night’s cheesy slice that just isn’t suitable for the rest of the sentence.
Oh, I see. Yes, I think I guess I imagine that most writers would be okay with that. That last night’s is just the context that identifies the point in time. So I think, yeah, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.
Let’s talk about the use of the singular there. For nonsexist language, as in everyone brought their physics homework today. You debunk a lot of myths in the book about reasons why that’s wrong or unwieldy or inappropriate. Can you tell us more?
Yes, it’s one of the constructions that gets on the nerves of certain tourists. I quote President Obama who said, No American should be under a cloud of suspicion just because of what they look like. And the tourists would say the. That’s a grammatical error because they use a plural pronoun and it’s being forced into agreement with a singular Hatice, no American. It’s a convenient construction because the alternative he would seem to exclude with it. Likewise c he or she is clumsy. They is clasper. It actually is not a grammatical error in the sense that it’s been in common use of the English language for centuries, including by some of the greatest writers of the language. Jane Austen used it something like 87 times. So it’s not an innovation. It is not even an invention to allow nonsexist usage. For one thing, people didn’t worry about that the 19th century when the construction was quite common and you just even see it used. When someone is referring to only one sex that even if they’re referring only to women, you’ll see they being used.
People insist that he stands in for a gender neutral pronoun when it’s used that way. There’s evidence that that’s not true, right?
That is right. So the alternative in which you as traditional grammar books is to say the masculine embraces the feminine. Even in grammar turns out to be untrue. That is, if you if you see people read it as he you can sense that even in blatant violations of the assumption that he includes both genders like Jack and a sister had him who could find uglier pictures of himself. Himself clearly can refer to either of them.
And likewise, if you say that every American listens to the radio as he begins the day shaving or putting on his pantyhose, then it’s clear that he and his camp refer to both genders in the lives of the speakers. So the problem exists. The so-called singular deconstruction is a solution, although that’s not why it entered the language in the first place. But it is a handy solution and it isn’t even really a violation of no, because that use of say is not a plural pronoun. But it’s what logicians call a bound variable legally. What it means is sex in a construction of all X or there exists an X. So no American should be under a cloud of suspicion because of what they look like. What’s the meaning of. The meaning is X and for all X if X is an American actually thought the cloud of suspicion because of what X looks like. So it’s not even a logical error as tourists like to get us.
There is a controversy raging on the Internet right now about what we should do about pronouns for people who reject the gender binary. What’s your preferred solution?
Hoefer. Are you talking about transsexuals or intersex people?
People who are transgender or are really basically anyone who doesn’t want to answer to he or she?
I think that the general convention is that inclusive transgender individuals. It’s the gender that they prefer.
Right. But some alternate pronouns. People who reject the use of a female pronoun and even if they identify as female. Let’s say. But they just don’t like that pronoun or their gender fluid or gender queer or something like that. There’s Z and Zam and, you know, various other.
Oh, yes. What do you think the best alternative of that is even before that?
They’ve been probably a dozen gender neutral pronouns that have been floated simply to avoid committing yourself to male or female. Putting aside transgender individuals, I think is a good idea of principle. But the thing is that it’s extraordinarily difficult to engineer linguistic change, particularly when it comes to grammatical words like pronouns, articles, conjunctions and so on. It’s easier to change the nouns and verbs. You can talk about a firefighter instead of a fireman or a letter carrier instead of a postman. These are what was called the upper class items, because there are thousands of new ones get added to the class all the time. But for the articles about some for prepositions to from under four pronouns, he see they I those tend to change much more slowly. And it’s not that it’s impossible to change over the centuries. But they don’t change easily. And in general, if you have several hundred million English speakers, it’s not so easy to get them all to change their practice overnight.
One term that seems to be getting a lot of traction and it seems to work more naturally for some people. I don’t know whether this has to do with the structure of language, but people seem to be better about using. They are singular, they for a singular person. So they went to the store. Meaning Mary?
Yes. Out of the blue like that.
If it is preceded by a quantifier, like all-American or everyone, then it could very well be confusing unless it’s some context in which it is reasonable to expect that it’s been used generically.
Do you have an opinion on the larger controversy about the use of the terms CIS gender and transgender to refer to people who respectively identify with the sex they were assigned at birth or don’t identify with it?
I think it’s unlikely to catch on. But it makes the point, of course, that there’s a symmetry between people who accept the gender they’re born with and decide to take it into their own hands. I think there’s a danger with setting traps by which people who aren’t in the know about the latest sahakian are targeted as prejudiced. I don’t think it does. The transgender community much good to constantly be offended and outraged and aggrieved. If people who just haven’t given much thought to it use language in the way that it’s commonly used.
But I’m also sort of perplexed about why assist people when somebody uses that word. Some people get really huffy about the idea of being called CIS gender in much the same way that when I was really young, I could remember old people are grouching about being called straight because it was coming up as the opposite to gay. When we were talking more about that all of a sudden go, yes, right.
Yes. I mean, I know people are offended.
I’m not offended. The standard is that they do it for me. But, you know, I don’t take offense. I think people would start to get annoyed if they thought that they were constantly being censored, accused of prejudice when they’re just minding their own business without a prejudiced bone in their body, laying of traps for people to inadvertently reveal themselves as prejudiced I think is counterproductive and a waste of time. And I think that may be why there is some resistance. It’s like you don’t have a problem with it. Please. Don’t make me walk on eggshells or class. We need to be proved that I am I am prejudiced.
Can we just accept that the philosopher James Flynn, who discovered the Flynn effect, attributed some of the IQ gains over the decades to the fact that technological and academic language is filtering down to everyday people? How did that work?
So there is this puzzling phenomenon named after the philosopher cheap slave called the Flynn effect, according to which IQ scores have been increasing for more than a century. And given that IQ is largely heritable within that given time, slice question is why is everyone been kind of floating upward? And it may not be a single phenomenon, but a part of it may be that our ability to think abstractly has been goosed upward by greater amounts of education. More people graduate high school than dead in the first part of 20th century. And the fact that all of our discourse is increasingly informed by concepts and ideas from higher education, science, math, logic and so on, concepts like tradeoff or win win situation or placebo or control group or chaos originated in science, but now are part of the vocabulary. Every educated person and can be applied to think through certain abstract problems to make it a little easier. Put these concepts at your fingertips in a way that they have increased measured intelligence.
I mean, do you think things like CIS, gender and transgender could be examples of that, of really abstract idea that’s eventually encouraging people to think differently?
It’s possible, although I think their intent is more emotional than cognitive or political lately, is that there’s is not that there a problem that you’re better able to solve, but it’s an attempt to change people’s attitudes. That is to implicitly assert that there is a cemetery between transgendered individuals. And it’s unclear that there’s a problematic to that helps solve.
But it is making kind of political statement of a cognitive leap, though a lot of people don’t really understand what it would mean to be CIS gender, to have never thought about themselves as being part of a category that’s an opposition.
You’d have to think it through and ask yourself, why is this topic floated that you understand the intent behind the wetzler were floating?
In the book, you talk a lot about people who just seemed to confabulate rules to disallow. You suggest that they don’t like. What are some of your favorite examples of ad hoc grammar Nazi ism that really are baseless?
Yes. Well, one of the earliest examples was the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition, which apparently was cooked up by John Wright in order to argue that Johnson was an inferior poet. And there’s no basis for that rule in the logic of English grammar or the practice of grading which writers have six to say. We are such stuff as dreams are made on the part to prove that. And since then, there are many other examples. Perhaps the most recent is the idea that you can’t have A possessives now and B and C to a pronoun. She can’t say Toni Morrison’s genius earns her a great deal of respect. Where the her is Toni Morrison’s apostrophe s. This was the subject of controversy over what the correct answer is. A. as a tea. And the idea that this is incorrect seems to have been pulled out of a hat. There’s just no basis for the logic of English or in the practice of reading which writers.
When a lot of these grammar mavens object to certain things, they often claim that the usage itself is illogical, but when it’s in fact not illogical, can you give us some examples of those?
In many cases, they’re just badly analyzed and it’s actually the grammar mavens who are being illogical. We already talked about the singular vé where the purists simply misstated the semantics of they. They did not refer to a group of individuals in that construct, but refers to a bound variable. I doubt that there is a grammar tenant alive who even knows what the concept of bound variable is. So a lot of the objection that these errors float rules of logic are just spelling errors that are based on any real understanding of logic. Another example is the idea that you could never use a tweet to refer to or the two items. And if you actually analyze the semantics of between, there is some distinction there, but it doesn’t refer to the total number of items, but rather to the relationship between them. That is if they’re being examined two at a time. So to say I brought sand on my toes or it’s good to avoid snacking among meals. Crazy, because it’s really understanding the nature of the between among distinction, which is about the number of items entering into a two place predicate rather than number of items that are considered worst examples of usage where you really personally draw the line and say.
So this is literally not acceptable.
He has stated that I think that the rules of usage are the least important part of good writing. I think they tell their reports next to clarity, concreteness and anticipating the knowledge of the leader and coherence we have in each sentence. The extensive context as a continuation of the preceding sentence. But I do think that some usage distinctions are well worth respecting. I think that distinctions among similar sounding words like credible and credulous, fulsome and full, simple and simplistic, fortunate, fortuitous are worth respecting because not only does it make prose more expressive, it makes it more transparent, but it also avoids the greeting sensation that someone is trying to be fancy SHYMANSKY or Highfill by using words that they barely understand.
How do you feel about the ancient conflict between nauseated and nauseous?
That’s a great example of a purist’s rule that is now obsolete. So it used to be said that that noshes must mean causing nausea, nauseated. So that was a nice roller coaster ride or a ISIS movie, whereas the vast majority of people use not just to be isolated. The roller coaster ride between office. That’s probably a historical flip that took place probably within the last 50 to 100 years. But the oldest speakers and those who remember being told that they should not use devices to be nauseated will will still Sloggett. But that horse has left the bar that we’ve confirmed that at the usage panel, the American Heritage Dictionary, the vast majority of successful writers today interpret not just to beat nauseated.
Many grammar mavens complain that the language is in decline or that writing skills or self-expression skills are in decline. Is there any hard evidence to support that contention?
No, there isn’t. And one can find the defenders of the language saying that in every decade, in every century and they can’t be right. Otherwise, we would be grunting like Tarzan.
And we’re not we’re having the conversation right now or over some fairly abstruse topics. So language is doing fine. There are people who make regrettable choices. There are people who have spent very little time reading. And when they are called upon to write, they will make all manners of error. And that’s always true. But what happens is that as people get older, they tend to do this violations or they use changes in their own words with just the language. So there’s no such thing as language. There are hundreds of millions of English speakers and some write atrociously or something like, well, for those who write well and those who have read the resources of the language are there to be used.
On that note, thank you so much, Steven Pinker, for coming on the show. That’s all the time we have for today. Thanks for having me.
