blame (was: Prescriptivism and the cinema)

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:22 PM -0700 7/15/10, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>...
>now, the big fuss among peevers is over the two argument structures:
>
>(a) blame SOURCE (for CONSEQUENCE)  (blame Kim (for the disaster))
>(b) blame CONSEQUENCE on SOURCE  (blame the disaster on Kim)
>
>the peevers' claim (since the mid-19th century 
>or so) is that only (a) is acceptable and that 
>(b) is simply wrong wrong wrong: you can't blame 
>*something*, they say, majestically (you can put 
>the blame on Mame, you can blame Mame for it, 
>but you can't blame it on Mame).  but (b) has 
>been used by polished, good writers for a very 
>long time, and continues in such use today 
>(alongside (a); the two variants have different 
>virtues).  some handbooks still deprecate it, 
>and some mark it as colloquial, but these 
>attitudes bordered on the loony a hundred years 
>ago, and there's no rational defense for them 
>now.  (of course, if you choose not to use the 
>(b) structure and opt for (a) instead, that's 
>your business.)
>
>now observe that even the loonies have "blame" 
>as a verb (in structure (a)), and that's been 
>around, undisturbed, since early middle english.
>
>you can see why i'd be interested in seeing a 
>textbook that actually says that "blame" cannot 
>be used as a verb, period, which entails that 
>(a) is as unacceptable as (b) is sometimes 
>thought to be.
>
>in terms that i have sometimes used, this would 
>be a case where the claimed unacceptability of 
>(b) *contaminates* the innocent (a).
>
If so, the situation would be similar to what 
MWDEU sees as having happened with "infer" in 
what it refers to as the "More 1533" sense: 
"infer" meaning 'imply' or 'lead someone to 
conclude' with an non-human subject (where, of 
course, no confusion is possible, since only 
humans--or maybe other higher mammals--can draw 
inferences).  This sense is widely attested since 
Sir Thomas More used it in 1533 (5 years after he 
introduced the universally approved "More 1528" 
sense of "infer" with the meaning 'conclude, 
deduce'.  This usage, as shown both by MWDEU and 
the OED ("infer" sense 4: 'To lead to (something) 
as a conclusion; to involve as a consequence; to 
imply. Said of a fact or statement; sometimes, of 
the person who makes the statement') has a 
lineage that includes Shakespeare, Milton, 
Jonathan Edwards, James Boswell, Jane Austen, 
Thomas Hardy, Joshua Whatmough ("the levels of 
restricted syntactic relationships infer an 
individual complication of language") and William 
Faulkner ("to be a literary man infers a certain 
amount of--well, even formal education"), but it 
has become the target of prescriptivists since 
the early 20th c., probably because of guilt by 
association with the use of "infer" *with a human 
subject* to mean 'imply', where confusion can 
indeed occur.  This latter is what MWDEU dubs 
"Terry 1896", for its first attested written 
example in a letter from actress Ellen Terry: "I 
should think you DID miss my letters. I know it! 
butŠyou missed them in another way than you 
infer, you little minx!"  The OED adds the more 
recent cite "I can't stand fellers who infer 
things about good clean-living Australian 
sheilahs".  If MWDEU is right, and their argument 
does seem plausible, the Terry 1896 use of 
"infer" (= 'imply', with a human subject) has 
come to "contaminate" the More 1533 use (= 
'imply, lead to a conclusion', with a non-human 
subject).

LH

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