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Comment by tkgally | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed this rant at the end of the article:

“[T]he people who criticize the passive the most tend to use it more than the rest of us. George Orwell warns against the passive in his dishonest and rhetorically overblown essay "Politics and the English language". E. B. White does likewise in the obnoxiously ignorant little book by Strunk that he revised and put his name on, The Elements of Style. Both of these authors have a remarkably high frequency of passives in their work: more than 20 percent of their clauses with transitive verbs are cast in the passive, a distinctly higher frequency than you find in most of the prose written by normal people who don't spend their time pontificating hypocritically about the alleged evil of the passive.”

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The lesson in "Politics and the English language" is about the use of the passive voice to obscure responsibility. The canonical example from current discourse is "officer-involved shooting"; incidents involving police often engage in strange linguistic contortions to avoid assigning responsibility to the obvious person.

https://fair.org/home/copspeak-7-ways-journalists-use-police...

But it does say "Never use the passive where you can use the active." That advice is harmful to clear and elegant writing. The passive really has nothing to do with politics and police and misleading people. It's a just a structuring device that can be abused in the same way as any aspect of language. It's just as easy to obscure responsibility in the active and attribute responsibility in the passive.

It really points up the difference between linguists, who understand language, and grammarians, who merely peeve about it.

Absolutely. The grammarians George Orwell and E.B. White are infamous for doing nothing with language except complaining about it.

Given what they wrote about language itself, they didn't understand it as well as they thought they did.

There is a difference between understanding linguistics and understanding language. Many linguists who carry the banner of descriptivism completely fail to do the latter. It’s one thing to understand that wearing dark formal attire to a funeral is just a part of etiquette without intrinsic meaning; it’s a whole nother matter to come to a funeral in a Hawaiian shirt and dismiss all criticism as judgmental.

I am fully onboard with the descriptive cause with respect to specific ideas like getting rid of the "split infinitive" formalism. Proudly put that adverb squarely between the "to" and the verb whenever the sentence flows better that way. It is bold to boldly go!

That said, whenever I hear or read "begs the question" when "raises the question" is meant, it feels like nails on chalkboard. If more people recognized actual question begging our politicians and pundits would have to work harder to lie.

Apparently, one can be a centrist on the prescriptivism-descriptivism axis

Can you provide any examples? In my (limited) experience, linguists have been just as aware of pragmatics, social convention, or current culture as anyone else. (And lexicographers are even more attuned than most.)

Linguists are descriptive for the same reason physicists are: You can't understand something if you come into it with preconceived ideas about how it ought to behave. More to the point:

> It’s one thing to understand that wearing dark formal attire to a funeral is just a part of etiquette without intrinsic meaning; it’s a whole nother matter to come to a funeral in a Hawaiian shirt and dismiss all criticism as judgmental.

In this analogy, linguists are the ones who try to figure out why people like you tend to wear dark clothes to a funeral, why other groups do not, and how those distinctions occurred. Peevers are the ones who insist that all good people wear dark clothes to funerals, ill-bred mongrels wear other kinds of clothing to funerals, and resist any notion that their culture is not universal.

Moving back to linguistics: Linguists understand people have linguistic preferences. Linguists have linguistic preferences. Linguists are opposed to people dressing up their preferences as laws of nature and insisting that everyone must speak according to those preferences. Going back to physics: A physicist may wish for perpetual motion, but a crank insists they have it and demands everyone hail them as the inventor of the perpetual motion device.

There's one famous US magazine that set up a UK branch. They hired an editor who said in his two-sentence biography that he's "a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist". As a result, this editor didn't edit. And given that he was writing to an audience of nerds, most of the responses to his articles were people taking issue with sentences like "Thanks to the improvements in AI that have happened due to Moore's Law..."

Needless to say, the UK branch got closed down.

Your analogy with funeral attire and Hawaiian shirts is excellent.

Another again to be some kind of bizzarro universalist . . .

[1] is a funeral with Hawaiian shirts, [2] is a funeral but likely not as you know one.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8dmj_Gkq2s

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI6TRTBZUMM

Sorry for the tacit assumption of the audience of HN, but I think that demanding constant awareness of all possible cultural differences is quite inadequate.

Anyway, I don’t see how those links disprove my point? Those cultures have different expectations; and my point is that those expectations are valid.

You're explicitly discussing language and linguistics.

Last time I checked in at /r/linguistics that covered more than just your tacit assumption of the world at large.

Your point also seems to be both that cultures have expectations and that those that do not meet those expectations will receive criticism (that would be wrong to shrug off as "merely judgemental").

As someone who's travelled widely in the past few decades across a number of cultures I've frequently stood out like the only person in black in a sea of Hawaiian shirts; it's rare that I've been criticised, more common to have been thanked for attending.

I find communities that critically judge differences to their expectations to be relatively rare, many communities recognise that others have other behaviours, I myself do find that those communities with a rigid set of expectations that are overly judgemental of those that do not meet those expectations to be worrisome.

But isn't that also the point of descriptivism in linguistics? That linguistics is the study of language as it's actually used in the context of different groups and cultures, rather than as an officially described, created thing?

For example, the habitual be isn't part of any prescribed English dialect, but it still has its own grammar, and can be used correctly or incorrectly. The goal of descriptivism here is not to say "you can say anything you want, and others have to accept you", but rather to say "dialects spring up organically, and our job is to study them as they arise, rather than to define them from the top down".

I read both these texts and made myself the same reflexion. I'm not as vehement and thought it was a matter of discourse (who they write as and for, where they write from etc). Anyway, I found Politics and the English language uninspiring.

> more than 20 percent of their clauses with transitive verbs are cast in the passive

I smiled. Brilliantly played.

as always, source required for this statistic

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