tersest proscription of the week (was PSAT Glitch)

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:11 AM -0400 5/25/03, David Colburn wrote:
>  >
>>  but wait!  i have a new entry in the terseness competition.  this
>>  is from X. J. Kennedy & Dorothy M. Kennedy, The Bedford Guide for
>>  College Writers, 2nd ed.  Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's
>>  Press, 1990.  on p. 639, they give the rule, and this is the whole
>>  thing:
>>
>>    Watch out for possessive nouns.  They won't work as antecedents.
>>
>Unfortunately, the New York Times is perpetuating this silly notion. The
>following is from an "editorial observer" item in Sunday's paper:
>
>"The teacher certainly was right on the technical question. Those who take a
>dark view of where the language is headed can only stare open-mouthed in
>disbelief that the College Board experts, specifically focused on composing
>a grammatically correct sentence, wrote an error into it."
>
Indeed.  The column got a little less silly as it went along, but the
author (whose expertise apparently comes from being a copy-editor)
persists in accepting it as received wisdom that this is an "error".
What's especially depressing is that they have a linguist on call,
Geoff Nunberg, who has written at least 5 columns for the Week in
Review (the same section in which this "observer", Stephen S.
Pickering, editorially observed).  I don't know if Geoff submitted a
piece on this which wasn't accepted, but we know (from Arnold's
postings) that he would have a lot of well-considered points to make
about the "error" in question.  But it's Mr. Pickering from whom we
get to hear.

Larry