Woe Is I
Why Adverbs, Maligned by Many, Flourish in the American Legal System. In case you were sleeping restlessly last night, wondering about this.
Grammar Creep
So . . . I was doing some construction work on my Web site (more on this below) and blog, and I found myself typing the words Web site in an Update to an old post (this one, if you must know). As I typed the words in the update, I wondered–because I often forget things like this–whether it was Web site or web site. I googled the term, and among other things, I found this, a post by the Grammarist:
A few editorially conservative publications still use the two-word Web site, but this relic of the 1990s has fallen out of favor throughout the English-speaking world. The one-word, uncapitalized website now prevails by an overwhelming margin.
Now, given that I’d just been updating my own post about checking sources, I decided to check the Grammarist’s claims–he or she didn’t give any sources, though s/he did give some examples, all of which date from 2011 to 2012. (Based on this, I assume the undated post also dates to 2012.)
I have a favorite place to go to do this kind of thing: The Corpus of Contemporary American English or COCA. Unfortunately, I just realized, apparently COCA’s database only includes words through 2012; as a result, it’s difficult to test the Grammarist’s claim about what’s happening right “now.” Today. 2014. That said, I could test his/her claim as of 2012. Drum roll . . .
And the winner is! . . . . Web site or web site at 15,245 hits–my COCA search returned both versions in one batch. (A quick and very unscientific scan of the results tells me that it’s about 2/3rds to 1/3rd Web site to web site.) The one-word version, website, comes in at about half that, 7,318.
The Grammarist was correct about The New York Times. It’s Web site all the way, but so is The Washington Post–again, that’s as of 2012. (Though I did a search of The Washington Post’s Web site–web site, website, who can keep track–and discovered The Post must be of two minds in 2014 since I found instances of both the two-word, capitalized version and the one-word version. Oh well.)
Me? I’m in a quandary. Is mine an “editorially conservative” blog much like the politically liberal Times? Or should I position myself on the vanguard of the one-word, uncapitalized movement? I think I’ll stick with The New York Times on this one. Though I’m no prescriptionist, I do tend to move slowly when it comes to the English language. The AP Style Guide disagrees with me, The Times, and The (bi-polar) Post, by the way.
The Passive Voice Discussed by Someone Other Than Me.
Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy has two worthwhile posts about the passive voice. Enjoy:
“The supposed sins of the passive voice (part 1 — misidentification)”
and
I agree with most everything in these two posts, but I want to stress two things. First, as Volokh says:
It seems . . . that passive voice is indeed often bad, for three reasons: (1) It tends to be less engaging, (2) it usually adds a few more words and some extra grammatical complexity, and (3) it sometimes obscures who’s actually doing something. “The dog was bitten by the man” is an example of passive voice bringing less verve, and requiring more words, than the active. “Mistakes were made” is the cliche example of passive voice as obfuscation or barrier to analysis.
Second, the most important point, the one I stress every time I talk about the rules of English with my students, is this: You are the boss of your writing. You’re in charge. Thus, you can break any rule in A Writer’s Reference if you do it purposefully and intelligently.
On another note, I must stand up for Strunk and White The Elements of Style*. Volokh quotes Geoff Pullum of Language Log, who casts a disparaging word in the direction of the little book or at least its advice on the passive voice (though, having read Pullum’s post before, I know he’s not a fan of the entire book). I disagree for two reasons.
First, the book lays out grammar and punctuation in an engaging style, one that will hold the reader’s interest from start to finish, unlike most books on grammar and punctuation. And because the reader will actually read the book, she will come away knowing much more than she would had she bought a thicker, boring guide, one of those “longer, lower textbooks–books with permissive steering and automatic transitions.”
Second, as I’ve written elsewhere, The Elements of Style is worth all the other grammar and usage guides if only to read and re-read the introduction. Strunk’s advice to “Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!” ring in my ear every time I write or revise. Oddly, Pullum criticizes even this advice. He’s wrong, of course. Writers–student or otherwise–need constant reminders to omit needless words, even when they know which words are needless.
White’s paragraph describing the reader as “a man floundering in a swamp” is a description of audience I use again and again to help my students understand their job as writers. And so, contra Mr. Pullum, I recommend you get “the little book”!
*For reasons I outline here, I prefer the 3rd edition to the 4th.