More on substituting

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Aug 14, 2011, at 9:45 AM, Ron Butters wrote:
>
> Well, the reversal does not [completely miscommunicate information]. It takes next to no thought whatever to understand the utterance in question, which is probably why the editors ( if there were editors) did not notice the reversal.

what we're confronting here is a phenomenon i've called (on Language Log) "intransigence". Goncharoff and Lighter have their own variety of English, in which reversed "substitute" has no place.  so they're insisting on understanding other people's varieties in terms of their own, disregarding other people's clear intent -- essentially, intransigently *refusing* to understand. (this is uncooperative and inconsiderate as well as silly -- especially silly when the usage seems to be spreading fast in the U.S., in contexts well beyond its original British sporting context.)

(i don't *use* reversed "substitute" myself, but, like any reasonably cooperative person, i've figured out how to understand it.)

The Goncharoff-Lighter (and, earlier, Berson) objection to reversed "substitute" is the same as the objection to "double negation" as involving people's saying the opposite of what they mean, which mavkes it look like willful pig-ignorance.

>
> ------Original Message------
> From: Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Date: Sunday, August 14, 2011 12:05:08 PM GMT-0400
> Subject: Re: [ADS-L] More on substituting
>
> Dan, I could not have said it better.
>
> JL
>
> On Sun, Aug 14, 2011 at 11:29 AM, Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: More on substituting
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Do you really think the lack of intelligibility of a substitution
>> reversal is inflated?
>>
>> I am shocked that a substitution reversal could survive an editing
>> process, not because it is grammatically incorrect but because it
>> completely miscommunicates information. That could not be said about
>> any of the other items on Arnold's list. A distinction with a
>> difference.

potential ambiguity is part of what you're complaining about -- the very complaint leveled against some of the items on my list (most famously, "literally" and "hopefully").

(some of the others are labeled pleonastic.  but the peeve literature labels all of them as simply ungrammatical, and some writers then go on to say that that makes them incomprehensible.)

arnold

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