on the other hand

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Mar 5, 2009, at 10:54 AM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> I'm with you, Charlie. I'm no fan of Dubya, needless to say, but,
> "September _the_ eleventh"? What in the world is wrong with that?!...

in both cases -- September (the) eleventh, on (the) one hand -- i find
both variants acceptable, but i definitely prefer the arthrous variant
in the second case.  it seems clear that just googling is not going to
provide any evidence about the relative frequency of the variants (the
search results are way too noisy to be useful), but even a little
googling shows that in both cases, both variants are reasonably
common.  i conclude from this, and from the discussion here, that in
both cases, both variants should count as standard.  individual
speakers, or groups of speakers, will have their preferences, of
course, as they will for other pairs of variants within the standard
language.

i haven't found prescriptions on either of these points in the advice
literature, though they'd both be candidates for Omit Needless Words
advice.  but they're hard to search for.  still, tentatively, i
conclude that there's no evidence in the advice literature to suggest
that one item in the pair is standard and the other not.

> It's "standard" BE and also probably "standard" SE. It's far and
> away more common than "on _the_ one hand," in my experience.

here i'm going to object (once again) to subjective impressions of the
frequency of forms as estimates of those frequencies; adding "in my
experience" doesn't really help, since you can't possibly have been
tracking the frequency of these variants in the language you hear and
read -- especially for the"September (the) eleventh" case, since it's
not this specific expression that's at issue, but an abstract pattern
for referring to days:
   MONTH (the) ORDINAL

worse still, trying to compare the frequency of the arthrous variant
in one case to the frequency of the arthrous variant in the other case
is a difficult enterprise at best.  even if we can clean up the
searches, and can settle on which texts to search, it won't do to
compare frequencies in texts, since the two *cases* almost surely
differ in their text frequencies: (a) references to days via the MONTH
(the) ORDINAL pattern and (b) comparisons of the form "on (the) one
hand ... on the other hand" are surely not equally frequent.

so the relevant comparison would be between ratios:
   arthrous variant for (a) : anarthrous variant for (a)
and
   arthrous variant for (b) : anarthrous variant for (b).
suppose we could somehow manage to calculate these ratios.  how do we
interpret the results?  the ratios are probably different, but so
what?  ok, suppose they're significantly different (in the statistical
sense), but again, so what?  we already know that both variants occur
in each case, we know that other cases of variation between X and Y
show big differences in X:Y ratios, and we have no reason to think
that the variations in (a) and (b) are related to one another (or to
other cases of arthrous/anarthrous variation) -- so why should this
particular difference of ratios be of interest?  (the ratios
themselves might be of interest, just as any X:Y ratio might be.)

arnold

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