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Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

Philosophy of Language graduate here (though a linguist may be more appropriate).

First off, discriptivism is the only logical way to view language. Rules are meant to be broken, slowly, over a long period of time. You use "hopefully" (an adverb) completely incorrectly all the time. Get over the schoolmarm rules.

Secondly, this usage is purely fashion. Dostoevsky used them to excess, Hemingway did the opposite. Hemingway is cool these days; Dostoevsky is about as cool as that semicolon i just used.

Thirdly, proper writing is important, you should consider your audience more than you do these flame wars about adverbs and one or two spaces after a period.

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Grammar rules should certainly be descriptive, no argument there. But the proscription against adverbs is a stylistic rule, not a grammatical one. Arguing descriptive vs prescriptive on a rule of style doesn't make much sense to me; isn't the point of style rules to be prescriptive?

Other than that, I largely agree with your broader points. Even when used, this should be a 'soft' rule and not a hard one. It can be ignored or purposely broken depending on the audience and tone of the work.

I think it's a good rule (or challenge or constraint) to give students who are starting to write, because mediocre authors can reach to adverbs as a cheap way to beef up their descriptions, and this becomes a crutch that prevents them from exercising other descriptive methods. I'm a fan of putting on other constraints as well (e.g. no 'internal' descriptions of emotions, only inferences from actions) in order to force them to develop other skills.

I was about to say the exact same thing. A lot of rules of writing happen to be current trends in literature, not actual hard and fast rules.

Adverbs are a useful language construct; if you teach people not to use them, they'll end up with a stilted grasp of writing rather than a balanced one.

For example, from the article:

> In our next class, I pointed out that using an adverb as a means of revealing a character's thoughts or actions was almost always a tip-off that the writer is telling instead of showing. For example, if I write:

> Nancy yelled angrily whenever someone questioned her.

>...I'm getting my point across by telling the reader how the character reacts. Sure, this might be just fine at times, but it's often better to write something like this:

> Nancy's boss approached holding the report she'd turned in the day before. She felt her heart start to race – what was the problem now? She'd met her deadline. The clients would be happy.

> "Hey, Nancy," Jim said. "I just wanted to ask you if you're sure this is ready to go out with the courier. Did you double-check it? Triple-check it?

> Nancy felt her face heat up, and the words were spilling out before she could stop herself. "What do you think, Jim?" she said, as she took a step towards him. "Did I remember the most basic component of submitting a report? Did I?"

But this is completely ignoring the negative effect: You've replaced one line with a dozen or more. You don't necessarily need this, some things in your story can be glossed over. If you don't want your book's word count to spiral out of control, maybe you need to cut some of this wasted text that's better represented by a simple adverb....

The article directly addresses your exact point immediately after that example:

"Readers can't be shown everything that happens to a character, or novels would be 800 pages and cover 15 minutes in the protagonist's life. Sometimes adverbs help to move the story along through summary or time compression. But for young writers, learning to do without them is a good first practice."

Oops, thanks. Should probably pay closer attention!

Maybe this highlights the pitfalls of excessively long writing. Or more likely the pitfalls of me commenting at 3am :(

Did you read the article? It was about it being bad style (in fiction) because it bluntly tells the reader how to react instead of inferring it from a more fulfilling description. Nothing to do with some prescriptivist proposal to excise it from the language.

And the author admits it's only a heuristic, with exceptions, so they don't even disagree with you about the need to break rules at times.

I did and gritted my teeth the whole way through.

It looked like a lecture from Rembrandt telling a young Matisse the "correct" way to paint.

I understand the compulsion for people with knowledge of linguistics to wield their descriptivist stick at any and every opportunity, but your complaint is completely irrelevant here. This article says nothing of grammar; it's about style and the art of prose.

> Get over the schoolmarm rules.

Language wouldn't work at all without rules. The lack of rule enforcement for words like biweekly, biannually and bimonthly have made them functionally useless.

The rules you've consciously learned about language constitute a tiny fraction of the rules that govern our use of language. Many of them ("don't split infinitives!", "no prepositions at the end of a sentence!") fail to be descriptive.

Not that it matters, but "biweekly", "biannually", and "bimonthly" have always only had a single meaning for me. I've heard the debate about them, but I don't think I've ever actually seen them used to mean "once every two weeks/months/years".

Drawing grammar rules for English from Latin might be a bad idea, but it tells us nothing about the value of rules as such.

Every dictionary gives multiple definitions of biweekly, etc. To professional linguists, this is an example of the wonderful flowering of the diversity of language or whatever and is probably much more exciting to study. Everyone else just cares about when to pick up their paycheck.

My point is that if you think the rules we learn in school about language are the same rules that allow us to communicate and understand each other, you're failing to realize the massive complexity of language.

As for those "bi-" words, there seems to be more consistency with "biannually", than with "biweekly", or "bimonthly". Oxford only gives a single definition for "biannual":

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/biannua...

As a professional linguist, there are millions of questions about language I find more exciting than this :)

I've yet to hear an argument for why the needs of professional linguists should take priority. If you don't standardize the language, then it evolves to become unpredictable, inconsistent and impossible for non-natives to learn without years of immersion.

The language you prefer is also exclusionary. Imagine if Ivy League universities used a complex idiosyncratic dialect that was opaque to anyone who didn't grow up in an upper-middle class New England suburb. It would create a barrier for outsiders to gain access to those colleges, and a lot of other elite institutions. Standardizing and simplifying rules eliminates that barrier, allows the language to be taught to people who would be otherwise marked as outsiders.

I am not following much of what you're saying. I think you are deeply out of touch with what it is that linguists actually do -- this has nothing to do with the "needs of professional linguists".

If you don't standardize the language, then it evolves to become unpredictable, inconsistent and impossible for non-natives to learn without years of immersion.

Imagine if Ivy League universities used a complex idiosyncratic dialect

English and all other languages on the planet are idiosyncratic, inconsistent, and impossible to learn without years of immersion. You can try to prescribe away some surface irregularity ("the singular of data is datum!"), with maybe limited success among a small network of people, but that won't even make a dent in the overall complexity of a language.

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