28.2201, Review: English; General Linguistics; Lexicography: Garner (2016)

Mon May 15 13:59:54 UTC 2017

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-2201. Mon May 15 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.2201, Review: English; General Linguistics; Lexicography: Garner (2016)

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Date: Mon, 15 May 2017 09:59:44
From: Jessie Sams [samsj at sfasu.edu]
Subject: Garner's Modern English Usage

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-1656.html

AUTHOR: Bryan A. Garner
TITLE: Garner's Modern English Usage
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Jessie Sams, Stephen F. Austin State University

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

In the fourth edition of “Garner’s Modern English Usage: The authority on
grammar, usage, and style,” Bryan A. Garner identifies the goal for his usage
dictionary in the preface: “to help writers and editors solve editorial
predicaments” (xiv) through entries that are a combination of “scholarship and
criticism” (xvii). In the preface to the fourth edition, Garner indicates that
the content has shifted from the first three editions to include a “more
global emphasis of ‘English’” (ix)—rather than a focus on American
English—with supporting quantitative data from Google’s Ngram Viewer to show
“the frequency of one form (the prevalent one) as contrasted with another (a
variant)” (ix).

The book opens with nearly 60 pages of introductory material, including two
prefaces and two essays, both of which are summarized below. Following the
introductory material, the usage dictionary includes roughly 11,000 entries
(li); an overview with samples of entries are included in this summary.
Finally, reference aids follow the dictionary, including a glossary and index.

The preface to the fourth edition focuses on describing the changes that
have been made to 
the dictionary, including its inclusion of quantitative data
from Google’s Ngram Viewer; Garner 
argues for “the advantages of big data” in lexicography (x)
and supports the use of empirical 
data, writing that “these snapshots of the language,
especially when viewed in their 
relationship to usage over time, can provide a sound basis
for understanding linguistic 
developments and usage trends” (ix). Garner provides the
basic settings he used for collecting 
data from the Ngram Viewer so readers can conduct their
own searches; in fact, he invites 
readers to enjoy for themselves the “possibilities [that]
make it an exciting time to be a 
lexicographer” (xii). 

The preface to the first edition is also included in the
front matter. In this preface, Garner uses 
language that suggests he is a soldier involved in a war
on the English language. He writes, 
“There are good, clarifying forces at work on the language.
There are also bad, obscuring 
forces at work” (xiii). He calls for fellow prescriptivists
to “avoid refighting battles that were long 
ago lost” (xiv) and instead focus energy on those battles
that are ongoing. Garner outlines his 
approach to compiling the usage dictionary, which he
summarizes in a list of ten principles, 
including realism (“recommendations on usage must be genuinely
plausible”), conservatism, 
and tightness (“[o]mitting needless words is important”) (xiv).
Included in his list of principles 
are five characteristics of an “undesirable” word: “(a) it
sounds newfangled; (b) it defies logic; 
(c) it threatens to displace an established expression (but
hasn’t yet done so); (d) it originated 
in a misunderstanding of a word or its etymology; (e) it
blurs a useful distinction” (xiv). The 
tenth principle listed is “the actual usage of educated
speakers and writers” (xiv). Garner points 
out that many linguists will disagree with his ten
principles: “Reasonable though these points 
may seem to the professional writer or editor, they’re
likely to induce hissy fits among modern 
linguists, for whom #10 [actual usage] is the only valid
concern (and only after deleting the 
word ‘educated’)” (xiv). 

The preface also introduces the reader to debates surrounding
descriptivism and 
prescriptivism; Garner’s writing makes his opinion on the
debate clear: “Descriptivists want to 
record language as it’s actually used, and they perform a
useful function—though their audience is generally limited to those
willing to pore through vast tomes of dry-as-dust research.
Prescriptivists—not all of them, perhaps, but enlightened ones—want to figure
out the most effective uses of language, both grammatically and rhetorically”
(xiv-xv). As a self-proclaimed prescriptivist, Garner writes that he does not
“shy away from making judgments” (xvi) about language use. He also bemoans the
state of writing in the linguistics discipline: Linguists do not “write well,”
and their articles are “dreary gruel. If you doubt this, go pick up any
journal of linguistics. Ask yourself whether the articles are well written. If
you haven’t looked at one in a while, you’ll be shocked” (xviii).

Following that preface, Garner’s essay “Making Peace in the
Language Wars” (xxxiii-xlv) first introduces historical evidence
for the divide between descriptivism and prescriptivism and
then proposes a truce for the two sides. In the essay,
Garner identifies himself as a “descriptive prescriber” (xl) because he
uses quantitative methods to search actual usage to help make judgments on
language. He argues that descriptivists do not view language “as the product
of human conduct and human decision, or its use as a skill that can either be
left rudimentary or be honed” (xxxv). On the other hand, he suggests that
prescriptivists are often too subjective and, at times, ineffective:
“Prescribers want to evaluate linguistic change as it occurs. They endorse the
changes they consider fortunate and resist the ones they consider
unfortunate—often with little success in the long run” (xxxvii). In attempting
to reconcile the two sides, he argues that part of the divide is due to a
difference in perspective: “The prescriber cares about how language is used
here and now. The describer views language more distantly, observing that
linguistic change is inevitable” (xxxviii). He argues that “good usage depends
on the here and now” (xxxviii) and that poor usage will result in “a loss of
credibility” (xliii). The truce he proposes is best summarized with this
statement: “Prescribers should be free to advocate a realistic level of
linguistic tidiness—without being molested for it—even as the describers are
free to describe the mess all around them” (xliv).

The next essay, “The Ongoing Tumult in English Usage”
(xlvii-lvi), opens with Garner titles “A Solecistic Summary”:
a summary that “contains no fewer than 63 more or less
prevalent misusages” (xlviii), meant to humorously make a
point about “poor” language use. He compares solecisms to
“linguistic infections,” stating that “[t]here are thousands of
outbreaks throughout the English-speaking world at any one
time” (xlviii), and he laments that “some 
teachers now validate the demotic idea that no native
speaker of any language can ever make a ‘mistake’”
(xlviii). In writing about how descriptivists welcome language
change, Garner further compares language change to infections
by writing, “if descriptive linguists welcome dialectal
varieties and resist the teaching of a standard language
because a standard language makes their linguistic laboratory
less interesting, they’re like epidemiologists who get excited
about the spread of new viruses” (xlix). In other words,
while the first essay compares the English language to an
ongoing war, this essay compares it to a population prone
to infectious 
outbreaks. 

Garner moves on to explain the five stages of language
change, which he uses throughout the dictionary entries; these
five stages are based on Heller and Macris (1967). A
summary of those five stages is presented in the “Key to
the Language-Change Index” (xxxi): 

Stage 1: Rejected 
Stage 2: Widely shunned 
Stage 3: Widespread but… 
Stage 4: Ubiquitous but… 
Stage 5: Fully accepted 

He uses these five stages to rank entries to “measure how
widely accepted various linguistic innovations have become”
(li). He concludes the essay with two arguments: (1)
descriptivists who write in standard English are hypocritical
(liii-lv), and (2) prescriptivists “continue to hold sway”
(lv).  

The main content of the book is, of course, the usage
dictionary itself, which “contains two types of entries: (1)
word entries, which discuss a particular word or set of
words; and (2) essay entries, which address larger questions
of usage and style” (xxi). For example, some of the essay
entry topics are class distinctions, diacritical marks, gerunds,
numerals, phrasal adjectives, and tenses. Many of the essay
entries are broken down into smaller parts; for instance,
the adverbs essay entry is broken into four parts:
placement of adverbs, awkward adverbs, double adverbs, and
adverbs versus adjectives (xxi). Throughout the dictionary,
essay entry headwords are written in all capital letters to
distinguish them from the word entries. Many entries
reference other entries through the use of all capital
letters (to refer to essay entries) and bolded words (to
refer to word entries). Roughly 2,000 word entries include
Garner’s ranking on the language-change index (li), and many
entries include ngram data from Google to compare usages.
Throughout the dictionary, there are roughly 5,600 quotations
that serve as examples (xv). 

For example, the word entry for ‘gases’ is as follows
(424): 

“… “gases,” not ‘gasses,’ is the plural form of the noun
‘gas.’ Still, for the verb ‘gas,’ ‘gassed’ is the accepted
past tense and ‘gasses’ is the third-person singular in the
present tense. Cf. “bus.” See SPELLING (B). / Current ratio
(‘the gasses’ vs. *’the gasses’): 42:1”

In the example above, the words in double quotation marks
are bolded in the original entry, and the words in single
quotation marks are italicized. The word ‘spelling’ is in
all capital letters to indicate that an essay entry is
being referenced. The current ratio provided is the ngram
data. 

An example of a more controversial word entry is the
entry for ‘hopefully’ (471): 

“… though the controversy swirling around this word has
subsided, it is now a SKUNKED TERM. Avoid it in all
senses if you’re concerned with your credibility: if you
use it in the traditional way, many readers will think it
odd; if you use it in the newish way, a few readers
will tacitly tut-tut you. / LANGUAGE-CHANGE INDEX / ‘hopefully’ as
a sentence adverb: Stage 4 / 
Current ratio (‘I hope it won’t’ vs. ‘Hopefully it won’t’):
17:1”

The phrases ‘skunked term’ and ‘language-change index’ refer
to essay entries (and appear in all capital letters). The
entry for ‘hopefully’ includes both ngram data and a
ranking on the language-change index. 

Finally, following the dictionary entries are reference
materials: a glossary for specialized terms used in entries;
a chronological list of over 500 books that deal exclusively
with usage, ranging from publication dates of 1758 to 2016;
a selected bibliography for more resources; and an index
of writers who were quoted or mentioned in the dictionary.
Inside the front book cover is a “Quick Editorial Guide”
that provides 100 frequent editorial marks/comments, and inside
the back cover is the pronunciation guide used in the
dictionary. 

EVALUATION 

Garner’s goal and intended audience are included in the
preface: 

“The reality I care about most is that some people still
want to use the language well. They want to write
effectively; they want to speak effectively. … They want to
understand how to use words well, how to manipulate
sentences, and how to move about in the language without
seeming to flail. They want good grammar, but they want
more: they want rhetoric in the traditional sense. That
is, they want to use language deftly so that it’s fit
for their purposes” (xiii).

If we consider only his goal and intended audience, his book
successfully achieves what he set out to do: provide a
usage dictionary that includes both qualitative and
quantitative evidence for his advice. As such, this book
is an excellent resource for composition or rhetoric
professors/teachers, advanced academic or formal writers, and
professional editors. Beginning writing students would likely
be overwhelmed with the text (e.g., students in 100-level
college composition courses), but more advanced writing
students could benefit from having a text like 
this one as a reference (e.g., students in 300- or
400-level writing-intensive courses or graduate students). 

Linguists (as a general whole) are missing from that list
of suggested readers. Some linguists will find the book
inflammatory and perhaps overly judgmental—both in the
introductory material and the entries themselves. For example,
the entry on ‘irregardless’ reads:  

“… a semiliterate PORTMANTEAU WORD from ‘irrespective’ and
‘regardless,’ should have been stamped out long ago… Perhaps
the most surprising instance of this barbarism occurs in a
linguistics text, four times on a single page… Although this
widely scorned NONWORD seems unlikely to spread much more
than it already has, careful users of language must
continually swat it when they encounter it.” (529) 

Some linguists may prefer to instead refer to usage notes
in dictionaries: as a basis for comparison, the usage note
in the third edition of “The New Oxford American
Dictionary” states, “‘Irregardless’ is widely heard… but
should be avoided by careful users of English,” while the
fifth edition of “The American Heritage Dictionary of the
English Language” writes that it is “a word that many
people mistakenly believe to be correct in formal style,
when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or
casual writing… it has never been accepted in Standard
English and is almost always changed by copyeditors to
‘regardless’” (927). However, other linguists will appreciate
the benefits offered by Garner’s text—especially those
interested in current state-of-the-art usage dictionaries. 

The best qualities of Garner’s book are the inclusion of
empirical data, including the language-change index rankings and
Google’s ngram data. Also, the extensive use of quotations
throughout the entries is especially helpful to illustrate his
points. However, the introductory material focuses too much
on the descriptivism/prescriptivism divide, and Garner’s arguments
against descriptivism, while passionate, include fallacies
(especially hasty generalizations) that only distract from the
points he is trying to make. In focusing on these
arguments, Garner misses the opportunity to provide more
detailed information about the entries themselves, including how
they were selected. Furthermore, he mentions in passing how
he arrived at the language-change index rankings, yet he
could have gone into more detail on those rankings,
especially for anyone conducting their own language-change
studies and wanting to replicate or validate those findings. 

Some entries use language that potentially overstates usages, including the
word entry on ‘office’ being used as a verb: “‘office’, vb., has become a
commonplace expression in the American business world, but not among
fastidious users of language… No one seems to ‘have an office’ anymore;
instead, everyone ‘offices’” (648). Taking more time to explain how evidence
was collected to deem the verbal ‘office’ as a “commonplace expression” would
have been beneficial; while four quotations are provided to show that ‘office’
can indeed be used as a verb, the use of the word ‘commonplace’ might be an
overstatement. Readers are left wondering how judgments such as those were
made. Finally, more information on the collection of ngram data would be
useful, particularly for linguists or others interested in corpora research.
Garner writes, “A little ingenuity was required to arrive at many of the
ratios displayed throughout the text” (x), supporting that with only one
example of inflecting a verb to isolate instances of ‘home in’ versus ‘hone
in.’ Some readers will want much more information; perhaps focusing an essay
on methodology would have been more beneficial than essays on language wars.

His final statement in the introductory material is indicative of his approach
throughout the usage dictionary: “the proliferation of error can definitely be
the source of a perverse joy. Let there be no doubt about that. Or about the
fact that not everyone is incorrigible” (lv). Based on that sentence alone,
readers may be able to decide for themselves if this book will be helpful for
their own goals.

REFERENCES

American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition. 2011.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Heller, Louis G., and James Macris. 1967. English usage and modern linguistic
theory. American Speech 42(2): 131-135.

New Oxford American Dictionary, 3rd edition. 2010. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Jessie Sams is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Stephen F. Austin
State University. Her primary research interests include the interface of
syntax and semantics, especially the intersection of the two within written
English quotatives; English grammar; history of the English language and
English etymology; and constructed languages.

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