tersest proscription of the week (was PSAT Glitch)

[Arnold Zwicky]

david colburn cites the Editorial Notebook item (by stephen s.
pickering, who describes himself as "a career language guardian")
in today's NYT.  pickering agrees that possessive antecedents
are errors, segues into some wooly-minded stuff about "American
English's genius l[ying] in its ability... to exist in two places
or forms simultaneously" (this prompted by his realization that
"Toni Morrison's genius" is understood as "The genius of Toni
Morrison" and so could have a reading in which the true antecedent
of "her" is "Toni Morrison"), and ends with a rousing defense
of clarity of thought, as reflected in clarity of language (with
the obligatory mention of George Orwell).

well, this is rich, given the practices of the New York Times
itself, as i documented here last week.

(i note that pickering doesn't actually formulate the "rule" -
a good thing, because unless he very carefully states it as
"a non-possessive pronoun cannot have a possessive antecedent",
he will have violated the rule himself, in "English's genius...
its ability...")

if we take pickering at his word ("solving [problems in copy he was
editing] depended not so much on how many grammar rules I knew, but on
determining the clearest, briefest way to get to the next sentence"),
then we have to believe that he actually finds "Toni Morrison's genius
enables her to create novels..." unclear (not merely a violation of
some rule from a grammar book).  this is where we came in, where the
only people who seemed to find a problem with the sentence were those
who'd been exposed to the proscription; everybody else finds it
utterly clear.  meanwhile, professional writers use parallel examples
all the time, and professional editors see no reason to alter them.

looks to me like a few people are Blinded by the Rules.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), repeating old observations
  in new words