PSAT Glitch

[Arnold Zwicky]

john baker:
 >There doesn't seem to have been much recognition of the brouhaha in
 >the mainstream media, but Internet sources are all over this story,
 >with the weight of informed opinion coming down heavily in favor of
 >genitive nouns as pronoun antecedents.  My favorite quote so far is
 >from one Richard R. Hershberger in the alt.english.usage newsgroup:
 >"I, on the other hand, find the whole affair rather inspirational.
 >I still live in a country were a person can make up a rule of
 >English and, through the sweat of his brow, get it accepted by a
 >pseudo-authority ."

wonderfully sharp, and i've been damn tough on the proscription(s)
myself.  still, there's the question of where these things come from.
MWDEU guessed that this one came from an 18th-century critic applying
"logic" to language, but so far we've gotten it back only to the early
20th century.  maybe there's a different source.

look at the examples given in the handbooks.  most of them really
*are* clunky, imperfect (especially if they're looked at out of
context).  so maybe composition teachers collected such edgy examples
and tried to generalize from them, in the hope that they could say
useful things to their students.  yes, they did this *wrong*, by
failing to look at actual usage (and instead assuming Exteriority), by
not testing putative "rules" against anything like a full range of
data (which, of course, is exactly what linguists are trained to do),
by relying on remarkably simplistic assumptions about language
structure and use, by looking for simple structural constraints when
much more subtle, uncrisp, and contextually variable conditions having
to do with discourse organization are at work, and by trying to cut
corners with IISIIAU.  but maybe they weren't just inventing rules for
the sake of it, despite my invective on this point.  maybe they were
just trying to help.

yes, they got it wrong.  pretty spectacularly, i think.  but maybe
they weren't just inventing rules for their own sake.  maybe they were
bewitched.

there are still lots of things to complain about.  the handbooks are
remarkably unscholarly.  where *does* this stuff come from?  why don't
they cite sources? why are the handbook examples so similar across the
years?  why don't people *test* their hypotheses?

it's a lot like diet and exercise advice.  well-intentioned, but quite
possibly screwy, and sometimes based on antique or folk theories of
physiology.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)