[stylist] The Elements of Clunk

Tue Feb 15 02:35:38 UTC 2011

That was a very fascinating article.  I am generally an excessive comma user 
also, as most of probably tend to be.  I love to write poetry and some 
British spellings of words do grab my fancy I like to use c o l o u r now 
and then, but not always.  I do use g r e y sometimes because that sounds 
like a prettier color than g r a y.  There again, I don't use it all the 
time.
I need to pull out my old "Elements of Style" book and look at it.
Barbara

Through the sunny fields of yesterday
Echo voices of children now grown,
Their golden peals of laughter
Ring upon the ivied stone.
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From: Joe Orozco
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Subject: [stylist] The Elements of Clunk

The Elements of Clunk

The Elements of Clunk 1
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By Ben Yagoda

Four years ago, I wrote an essay for The Chronicle Review cataloging "The
<http://chronicle.com/article/The-Seven-Deadly-Sins-of-St/17229/> Seven
Deadly Sins of Student Writers"-the errors and infelicities that cropped up
most frequently in my students' work. Since then a whole new strain of bad
writing has come to the fore, not only in student work but also on the
Internet, that unparalleled source for assessing the state of the language.

Consider:

For our one year anniversary, my girlfriend and myself are going to a
Yankees game, with whomever amongst our friends can go. But, the Weather
Channel just changed their forecast and the skies are grey, so we might go
with the girl that lives next door to see the movie, "Iron Man 2".

Those two hypothetical sentences contain 11 instances of this new type of
"mistake" (I put the word in quotes to include usages that would almost
universally be deemed errors, ones that merely diverge from standard
practice, and outposts in between). They are as follows:

1. There should be no comma after "But."

2. The period after "Iron Man 2" should be inside the quotation marks around
the title (which would be italicized in most publications, including The
Chronicle).

3. No comma is needed after "movie."

4. "Its," not "their," is needed with "Weather Channel."

5. "Whomever" should be "whoever."

6. "Myself" should be "I."

7. "Girl that" should be "girl who"

8. "Gray" is the correct spelling, not "grey."

9. "Amongst" should be "among."

10. "One year anniversary" should be written as "one-year anniversary," but,
really, "first anniversary."

11. It's a "Yankee," not "Yankees," game.

Are you surprised by the absence of smiley faces, LOL-type abbreviations,
and slang terms like "diss" or "phat"? A reading of the typical lament about
student writing would lead you to think all are rampant. However, I have yet
to encounter a single example in all my years of grading. Students realize
that this kind of thing is in the wrong register for a college assignment
(even an assignment for my classes, which for the most part cover
journalism, broadly defined-that is, writing for publication in newspapers
and magazines, in print or online). Maybe students are being too careful.
Slang can streamline or lend poetry to language, or both. The new errors and
changes, on the other hand, make it longer and more prosaic. They give a new
sound to prose. I call it clunk.

The leadoff hitters are Nos. 1 to 3; punctuation is a train wreck among my
students. I have no doubt as to the root of the problem: Students haven't
spent much time reading. Punctuation, including the use of apostrophes and
hyphens, is governed by a fairly complicated series of rules and
conventions, learned for the most part not in the classroom but by
encountering and subliminally absorbing them again and again. Students have
a lot of conversations and texting sessions, but that's no help. You need to
read a lot of edited and published prose.

Unfamiliarity with written English has brought about the other mistakes and
changes as well. They may not appear at first to have much in common, but
note: All except Nos. 2 and 8 lengthen the sentence they're in. This is the
opposite of the way language usually changes. "God be with you" becomes
"goodbye"; "base ball" becomes "base-ball" and then "baseball"; "disrespect"
becomes "diss." Two hundred years ago, Jane Austen wrote, "It is a truth
universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune,
must be in want of a wife." A copy editor today would cut both commas.

Standard written English is a whole other language from its spoken (and
texted) counterpart, with conventions not just of punctuation but also of
many shortcuts to meaning-streamlined words and phrases, ellipses (omitted
word or words), idioms, figures of speech-that have developed over many
years. You learn them by reading. And if you haven't read much, when you set
pen to paper yourself, you take things more slowly and apply a
literal-minded logic, as you would in finding your way through a dark house.

Thus, in No. 1, it seems natural to place a comma after "But" because in
speaking you would pause there. (So natural that commas after "But," "And,"
or "Yet" at the start of a sentence now show up frequently in Associated
Press dispatches and The New York Times, as well as in blogs and other
writing on the Web.) And in No. 2, it makes sense to put a period after the
title Iron Man 2-after all, a film title is a unit. But in both cases the
rules, animated by a general urge to make writing smooth and efficient,
allow us and in fact compel us to punctuate in an illogical and
counterintuitive way.

The question in No. 3, of whether to put a comma after the word "movie,"
relates to the famously difficult issue of defining or nondefining clauses
and phrases-the whole "that/which" thing. It's a slam dunk that students
would be clueless here. What I want to point out is that they're much more
likely to err by putting a comma in than by taking one out. In other words,
every day I see mistakes like "the movie, Iron Man 2" or "my friend, Steve."
But rarely do I encounter something along the lines of "We live in the
richest country in the world the United States."

As for No. 4, every student of mine who is not the child of a high-school
English teacher uses the third-person plural pronoun ("they," "them,"
"their") to refer to companies, organizations, and rock bands with nonplural
names, such as the Clash and Arcade Fire. That is eminently reasonable,
given that these outfits consist of multiple individuals, and in fact the
plural pronoun is standard in Britain. However, we live in the United
States, where it is not.

(Even English teachers' children use "they" for the epicene pronoun-that is,
to stand for a person of indeterminate sex. Thus, "Everyone who wants to
come on the trip should bring their passport." In that sentence, "their" is
so much better a choice than "his or her," "her or his," or "her/his" that
it will almost certainly become standard in written English in the next 10
years.)

Nos. 5 and 6 are examples of "hypercorrection": errors that are induced by a
combination of grammatical confusion and a desire to sound fancy, such as
the chorine who refers to "a girl like I." Her equivalent today would say "a
girl like myself." The enormous popularity of that last word stems in part
from understandable uncertainty over whether "I" or "me" is correct. The
same goes for "who" and "whom," about which almost nobody is completely
confident.

But there is more going on here; stay with me. In No. 5, while "whoever" is
correct (you would say "we'll go with he who can make it," not "with him who
can make it"), the error is reasonable because most of the time prepositions
like "with" take an object, like "whom." But people often use "whomever"
even when the error is not reasonable. A Google search quickly yields a
Facebook group called "Quazie's Hair Fan-club" (put up by college students,
significantly), which has a discussion called "Whomever wants an office in
this group."

Here's what's happening, as I see it. My students aren't unique but
represent a portion of the millennial generation: at least moderately
intelligent, reasonably well-educated young people. When they write in a
formal setting-for a class assignment or for publication in a blog or a
magazine-they almost always favor length over brevity, ornateness over
simplicity, literalness over figuration. The reasons, I hypothesize, are a
combination: the wandering-the-house-in-the-dark factor, hypercorrection
brought on by chronic uncertainty, and the truth that once people start
talking or writing, they like to do so as long as they can, even if the
extra airtime comes from saying "myself" instead of "I."

Examples of the trend may seem trivial in isolation. Take "a person that"
instead of "a person who." It's not a crime against the language. But the
language, in its wisdom, has offered us "who" as a relative pronoun when
referring to a person rather than a thing. It's there to make your prose
marginally more fluid, to save a letter, and to be used. Why not use it?

Another manifestation is a boom in Britishisms: not only the weirdly popular
"amongst," but also "amidst," "whilst"-I actually have gotten that more than
once in assignments-and "oftentimes." (In a parallel move, the stretched-out
and unpleasant "off-ten" has become a vogue pronunciation among youth, as
has "eye-ther.") In spelling, "grey" has taken over from the previously
standard "gray." I haven't seen "labour" yet, but the day is young.
"Advisor" isn't British-in fact, dictionaries label it an Americanism-but it
seems so, or at least fancier and more official than good old "adviser." The
"-or" spelling has become so prevalent-85 million in Google, against 26
million for "adviser"-that although the Times, The New Yorker, and the
Associated Press, along with The Chronicle, cling to "-er," it has started
to look funny in their articles.

Rampant hyphen confusion is part of the general punctuation problem, but the
particular usage in No. 10 is also an example of a concise locution replaced
by an awkward literalism. People: We've always had a way to indicate the day
when something is a year old, and it's "first anniversary." A Google search
yields 1.2 million hits for "one-year anniversary" (or "one year
anniversary") to 2.4 million for "first anniversary"-and I predict the
margin will quickly vanish. (It just occurred to me to Google "one-year," as
opposed to "first," birthday. I have to admit I am shocked: nearly two
million hits.)

A lot of venerable expressions have had their seams let out recently. One
change (picked up and then propelled by Facebook) is from the traditional
"he's my friend" or "he's a friend of mine" to the longer, clunkier, and
more literal "I'm friends with him." In similar fashion, "too big a" has
turned into "too big of a"; "can't help thinking" into "can't help but
think"; "this kind of thing" into "these kinds of things"; "I would like to
have gone" and "I would have liked to go" combined into "I would have liked
to have gone."

And then we come to the Yankees and their contests. I know there will be
skeptics on this one, so let me start with some numbers. In The New York
Times, from 1851 to 1980, the phrase "a Yankee game" occurred 39 times. And
"a Yankees game"? Zero. Contrast the period between January 2005 and June
2010. The Times used "a Yankee game" 19 times and "a Yankees game" 65 times:
more than three times as often.

To understand the change, let's first look at the previously dominant
"Yankee game." I would characterize "Yankee game," "Yankee pitcher," or
"Yankee fan" as metonymy: a figure of speech in which the part (a Yankee)
stands for the whole (the Yankees collectively). The convention still holds
for some expressions: We say "I'm a cookie lover" or "Let's go to the shoe
store," even though I like cookies (plural) and the store stocks many pairs
of footwear. The dropping of the "s" is one of those shortcuts that
streamline the language.

Not for sports teams, however-not anymore. Trying to get a more precise fix
on when the change occurred, I compared a "Yankees game" with a "Yankee
game" in the Times database for various chunks of time. It turns out that
"Yankees" surged ahead between 1996 and 2000, beating out the previously
preferred "Yankee" 35 to 22 and setting the stage for dominance in the
2000s. What was going on in the late 1990s? I confess I do not have a clue,
only a conviction that this was an early sign of the coming of clunk.

Ben Yagoda is a professor of English at the University of Delaware and
author, most recently, of Memoir: A History (Riverhead Books, 2009).

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