PROLOGUE
1. From the introduction to The Elements of Style (Strunk & White, 1999), p. xv.
2. Pullum, 2009, 2010; J. Freeman, “Clever horses: Unhelpful advice from ‘The Elements of Style,’” Boston Globe, April 12, 2009.
3. Williams, 1981; Pullum, 2013.
4. Eibach & Libby, 2009.
5. The examples are from Daniels, 1983.
6. Lloyd-Jones, 1976, cited in Daniels, 1983.
7. See Garvey, 2009, for a discussion of criticisms that have been leveled at Strunk & White for its insistence on plain style, and Lanham, 2007, for a critique of the one-dimensional approach to style which runs through what he calls The Books.
8. Herring, 2007; Connors & Lunsford, 1988; Lunsford & Lunsford, 2008; Lunsford, 2013; Thurlow, 2006.
9. Adams & Hunt, 2013; Cabinet Office Behavioural Insights Team, 2012; Sunstein, 2013.
10. Schriver, 2012. For more on plain language laws, see the Center for Plain Language (http://centerforplainlanguage.org) and the organizations called Plain (http://www.plainlanguage.gov) and Clarity (http://www.clarity-international.net).
11. K. Wiens, “I won’t hire people who use poor grammar. Here’s why,” Harvard Business Review Blog Network, July 20, 2012, http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html.
12. http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/online-dating-advice-exactly-what-to-say-in-a-first-message/. The quotation is from the writer Twist Phelan in “Apostrophe now: Bad grammar and the people who hate it,” BBC News Magazine, May 13, 2013.
CHAPTER 1: GOOD WRITING
1. From “A few maxims for the instruction of the over-educated,” first published anonymously in Saturday Review, Nov. 17, 1894.
2. Though commonly attributed to William Faulkner, the quotation comes from the English professor Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his 1916 lectures On the art of writing.
3. R. Dawkins, Unweaving the rainbow: Science, delusion and the appetite for wonder (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 1.
4. According to the Google ngram viewer: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com.
5. R. N. Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The renegade Jew who gave us modernity (New York: Nextbook/Schocken, 2006), pp. 124–125.
6. Kosslyn, Thompson, & Ganis, 2006; H. Miller, 2004–2005; Sadoski, 1998; Shepard, 1978.
7. M. Fox, “Maurice Sendak, author of splendid nightmares, dies at 83,” New York Times, May 8, 2012; “Pauline Phillips, flinty adviser to millions as Dear Abby, dies at 94,” New York Times, Jan. 17, 2013; “Helen Gurley Brown, who gave ‘Single Girl’ a life in full, dies at 90,” New York Times, Aug. 13, 2013. I have altered the punctuation to conform to the style of this book, and in the Phillips excerpt I have quoted two of the four “Dear Abby” letters in the original obituary and reordered them.
8. Poole et al., 2011.
9. McNamara, Crossley, & McCarthy, 2010; Poole et al., 2011.
10. Pinker, 2007, chap. 6.
11. M. Fox, “Mike McGrady, known for a literary hoax, dies at 78,” New York Times, May 14, 2012.
12. I. Wilkerson, The warmth of other suns: The epic story of America’s great migration (New York: Vintage, 2011), pp. 8–9, 14–15.
CHAPTER 2: A WINDOW ONTO THE WORLD
1. Versions of this saying have been expressed by the writing scholar James C. Raymond, the psychologist Philip Gough, the literary scholar Betsy Draine, and the poet Mary Ruefle.
2. For a discussion of the ubiquity of concrete metaphors in language, see Pinker, 2007, chap. 5.
3. Grice, 1975; Pinker, 2007, chap. 8.
4. Thomas & Turner, 1994, p. 81.
5. Thomas & Turner, 1994, p. 77.
6. Both quotations are from p. 79.
7. B. Greene, “Welcome to the multiverse,” Newseek/The Daily Beast, May 21, 2012.
8. D. Dutton, “Language crimes: A lesson in how not to write, courtesy of the professoriate,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 5, 1999, http://denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm.
9. Thomas & Turner, 1994, p. 60.
10. Thomas & Turner, 1994, p. 40.
11. Most likely said by the Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White, http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/29/substitute-damn/.
12. “Avoid clichés like the plague” is one of the many self-undermining rules of writing popularized by William Safire in his 1990 book Fumblerules. The genre goes back at least to 1970s campus xeroxlore; see http://alt -usage-english.org/humorousrules.html.
13. Keysar et al., 2000; Pinker, 2007, chap. 5.
14. From the historian Niall Ferguson.
15. From the linguist Geoffrey Pullum.
16. From the politician, lawyer, executive, and immortal Montreal Canadiens goaltender Ken Dryden.
17. From the historian Anthony Pagden.
18. The Dickens simile is from David Copperfield.
19. Roger Brown, in an unpublished paper.
20. A. Bellow, “Skin in the game: A conservative chronicle,” World Affairs, Summer 2008.
21. H. Sword, “Zombie nouns,” New York Times, July 23, 2012.
22. G. Allport, “Epistle to thesis writers,” photocopy handed down by generations of Harvard psychology graduate students, undated but presumably from the 1960s.
23. From the Pennsylvania Plain Language Consumer Contract Act, http://www.pacode.com/secure/data/037/chapter307/s307.10.html.
24. G. K. Pullum, “The BBC enlightens us on passives,” Language Log, Feb. 22, 2011, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2990.
CHAPTER 3: THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE
1. Sword, 2012.
2. Named after Robert J. Hanlon, who contributed it to Arthur Bloch’s Murphy’s Law Book Two: More reasons why things go wrong! (Los Angeles: Price/Stern/Sloan, 1980).
3. The term “curse of knowledge” was coined by Robin Hogarth and popularized by Camerer, Lowenstein, & Weber, 1989.
4. Piaget & Inhelder, 1956.
5. Fischhoff, 1975.
6. Ross, Greene, & House, 1977.
7. Keysar, 1994.
8. Wimmer & Perner, 1983.
9. Birch & Bloom, 2007.
10. Hayes & Bajzek, 2008; Nickerson, Baddeley, & Freeman, 1986.
11. Kelley & Jacoby, 1996.
12. Hinds, 1999.
13. Other researchers who have made this suggestion include John Hayes, Karen Schriver, and Pamela Hinds.
14. Cushing, 1994.
15. From the title of the 1943 style manual by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The reader over your shoulder: A handbook for writers of prose (New York: Random House; revised edition, 1979).
16. Epley, 2014.
17. Fischhoff, 1975; Hinds, 1999; Schriver, 2012.
18. Kelley & Jacoby, 1996.
19. Freedman, 2007, p. 22.
20. From p. 73 of the second edition (1972).
21. Attentive readers may notice that this definition of syllepsis is similar to the definition of zeugma I gave in connection with the Sendak obituary in chapter 1. The experts on rhetorical tropes don’t have a consistent explanation of how they differ.
22. G. A. Miller, 1956.
23. Pinker, 2013.
24. Duncker, 1945.
25. Sadoski, 1998; Sadoski, Goetz, & Fritz, 1993; Kosslyn, Thompson, & Ganis, 2006.
26. Schriver, 2012.
27. Epley, 2014.
CHAPTER 4: THE WEB, THE TREE, AND THE STRING
1. Florey, 2006.
2. Pinker, 1997.
3. Pinker, 1994, chap. 4.
4. Pinker, 1994, chap. 8.
5. I use the analyses in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002) with a few simplifications, including those introduced in the companion A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar (Huddleston & Pullum, 2005).
6. The incident is described in Liberman & Pullum, 2006.
7. Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Huddleston & Pullum, 2005.
8. Bock & Miller, 1991.
9. Chomsky, 1965; see Pinker, 1994, chaps. 4 and 7.
10. Pinker, 1994, chap. 7. For more recent reviews of the experimental study of sentence processing, see Wolf & Gibson, 2003; Gibson, 1998; Levy, 2008; Pickering & van Gompel, 2006.
11. From Liberman & Pullum, 2006.
12. Mostly from the column of Aug. 6, 2013.
13. I have simplified the tree on page 100; the Cambridge Grammar would call for two additional levels of embedding in the clause Did Henry kiss whom to represent the inversion of the subject and the auxiliary.
14. The first example is from the New York Times “After Deadline” column; the second, from Bernstein, 1965.
15. Pinker, 1994; Wolf & Gibson, 2003.
16. Some of the examples come from Smith, 2001.
17. R. N. Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the existence of God: A work of fiction (New York: Pantheon, 2010), pp. 18–19.
18. From “Types of sentence branching,” Report writing at the World Bank, 2012, http://colelearning.net/rw_wb/module6/page7.html.
19. Here and elsewhere, I use the label Noun Phrase for the constituent the Cambridge Grammar calls “Nominal.”
20. Zwicky et al., 1971/1992. See also http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/langugelog/archives/001086.html.
21. Pinker, 1994, chap. 4; Gibson, 1998.
22. Boston Globe, May 23, 1999.
23. Fodor, 2002a, 2002b; Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989; Van Orden, Johnston, & Hale, 1988.
24. R. Rosenbaum, “Sex week at Yale,” Atlantic Monthly, Jan./Feb. 2003; reprinted in Pinker, 2004.
25. The unattributed source for most of these emails is Lederer, 1987.
26. Spotted by Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4401.
27. Bever, 1970.
28. Pinker, 1994, chap. 7; Fodor, 2002a; Gibson, 1998; Levy, 2008; Pickering & van Gompel, 2006; Wolf & Gibson, 2003.
29. Nunberg, 1990; Nunberg, Briscoe, & Huddleston, 2002.
30. Levy, 2008.
31. Pickering & Ferreira, 2008.
32. Cooper & Ross, 1975; Pinker & Birdsong, 1979.
33. The example is from Geoffrey Pullum.
34. Gordon & Lowder, 2012.
35. Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Huddleston & Pullum, 2005.
CHAPTER 5: ARCS OF COHERENCE
1. Mostly from Lederer, 1987.
2. Wolf & Gibson, 2006.
3. Bransford & Johnson, 1972.
4. M. O’Connor, “Surviving winter: Heron,” The Cape Codder, Feb. 28, 2003; reprinted in Pinker, 2004.
5. Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Huddleston & Pullum, 2005.
6. Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Huddleston & Pullum, 2005.
7. Gordon & Hendrick, 1998.
8. Mostly from Lederer, 1987.
9. Garrod & Sanford, 1977; Gordon & Hendrick, 1998.
10. Hume, 1748/1999.
11. Grosz, Joshi, & Weinstein, 1995; Hobbs, 1979; Kehler, 2002; Wolf & Gibson, 2006. Hume’s connections between ideas, as he originally explained them, are not identical to those distinguished by Kehler, but his trichotomy is a useful way to organize the coherence relations.
12. Clark & Clark, 1968; G. A. Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976.
13. Grosz, Joshi, & Weinstein, 1995; Hobbs, 1979; Kehler, 2002; Wolf & Gibson, 2006.
14. Kamalski, Sanders, & Lentz, 2008.
15. P. Tyre, “The writing revolution,” The Atlantic, Oct. 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-writing-revolution/309090/.
16. Keegan, 1993, p. 3.
17. Clark & Chase, 1972; Gilbert, 1991; Horn, 2001; Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Huddleston & Pullum, 2005; Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976.
18. Gilbert, 1991; Goldstein, 2006; Spinoza, 1677/2000.
19. Gilbert, 1991; Wegner et al., 1987.
20. Clark & Chase, 1972; Gilbert, 1991; Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976.
21. Huddleston & Pullum, 2002.
22. Liberman & Pullum, 2006; see also the many postings on “misnegation” in the blog Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/.
23. Wason, 1965.
24. Huddleston & Pullum, 2002.
25. Huddleston & Pullum, 2002.
26. To be exact, he said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard . . . ,” http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm.
27. Keegan, 1993, pp. 3–4.
28. Keegan, 1993, p. 5.
29. Keegan, 1993, p. 12.
30. Williams, 1990.
31. Mueller, 2004, pp. 16–18.
CHAPTER 6: TELLING RIGHT FROM WRONG
1. Macdonald, 1962.
2. G. W. Bush, “Remarks by the President at the Radio-Television Correspondents Association 57th Annual Dinner,” Washington Hilton Hotel, March 29, 2001.
3. Skinner, 2012.
4. Hitchings, 2011; Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994.
5. Lindgren, 1990.
6. American Heritage Dictionary, 2011; Copperud, 1980; Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Huddleston & Pullum, 2005; Liberman & Pullum, 2006; Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994; Soukhanov, 1999. Online dictionaries: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (http://www.ahdictionary.com/); Dictionary.com (http://dictionary.reference.com); Merriam-Webster Unabridged (http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/); Merriam-Webster Online (http://www.merriam-webster.com/); Oxford English Dictionary (http://www.oed.com); Oxford Dictionary Online (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com). Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll. Other sources consulted in this discussion include Bernstein, 1965; Fowler, 1965; Haussaman, 1993; Lunsford, 2006; Lunsford & Lunsford, 2008; Oxford English Dictionary, 1991; Siegal & Connolly, 1999; Williams, 1990.
7. M. Liberman, “Prescribing terribly,” Language Log, 2009, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1360; M. Liberman, 2007, “Amid this vague uncertainty, who walks safe?” Language Log, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004231.html.
8. E. Bakovic, “Think this,” Language Log, 2006, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003144.html.
9. The errors are taken from Lunsford, 2006, and Lunsford & Lunsford, 2008.
10. Haussaman, 1993; Huddleston & Pullum, 2002.
11. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, p. 218.
12. Nunnally, 1991.
13. This analysis is based on Huddleston & Pullum, 2002.
14. G. K. Pullum, “Menand’s acumen deserts him,” in Liberman & Pullum, 2006, and Language Log, 2003, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000027.html.
15. B. Zimmer, “A misattribution no longer to be put up with,” Language Log, 2004, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001715.html.
16. M. Liberman, “Hot Dryden-on-Jonson action,” Language Log, 2007, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004454.html.
17. These and other examples of errors in student papers are adapted from Lunsford, 2006, and Lunsford & Lunsford, 2008. For an explanation of tense and its relationship to time, see Pinker, 2007, chap. 4.
18. Called out as an error by the New York Times’ “After Deadline” column, May 14, 2013.
19. Huddleston & Pullum, 2002.
20. Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, pp. 152–154.
21. Pinker, 2007, chap. 4.
22. G. K. Pullum, “Irrational terror over adverb placement at Harvard,” Language Log, 2008, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=100.
23. Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, pp. 1185–1187.
24. M. Liberman, “Heaping of catmummies considered harmful,” Language Log, 2008, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=514.
25. G. K. Pullum, “Obligatorily split infinitives in real life,” Language Log, 2005, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002180.html.
26. A. M. Zwicky, “Not to or to not,” Language Log, 2005, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002139.html.
27. A. M. Zwicky, “Obligatorily split infinitives,” Language Log, 2004, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000901.html.
28. From Winston Churchill.
29. This analysis is based on Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, especially pp. 999–1000.
30. Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, p. 87.
31. Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Huddleston & Pullum, 2005.
32. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, p. 343.
33. G. K. Pullum, “A rule which will live in infamy,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 7, 2012; M. Liberman, “A decline in which-hunting?” Language Log, 2013, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5479#more-5479.
34. G. K. Pullum, “More timewasting garbage, another copy-editing moron,” Language Log, 2004, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000918.html; G. K. Pullum, “Which vs that? I have numbers!” Language Log, 2004, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001464.html.
35. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, p. 895.
36. Pinker, 1999/2011.
37. Flynn, 2007; see also Pinker, 2011, chap. 9.
38. M. Liberman, “Whom humor,” Language Log, 2004, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000779.html.
39. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, p. 958; G. K. Pullum, “One rule to ring them all,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 30, 2012, http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/11/30/one-rule-to-ring-them-all/; Huddleston & Pullum, 2002.
40. According to the Google ngram viewer: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com.
41. A fifteenth-century curse discussed in my book The stuff of thought, chap. 7.
42. Quoted in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, p. 959.
43. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, pp. 689–690; Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, p. 506; American Heritage Dictionary, 2011, Usage Note for one.
44. For an analysis of the language of stuff and things, see Pinker, 2007, chap. 4.
45. J. Freeman, “One less thing to worry about,” Boston Globe, May 24, 2009.
46. Originally published as “Ships in the night,” New York Times, April 5, 1994.
47. White House Office of the Press Secretary, “Statement by the President on the Supreme Court’s Ruling on Arizona v. the United States,” June 25, 2012.
48. D. Gelernter, “Feminism and the English language,” Weekly Standard, March 3, 2008; G. K. Pullum, “Lying feminist ideologues wreck English language, says Yale prof,” Language Log, 2008, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005423.html.
49. Foertsch & Gernsbacher, 1997.
50. From G. K. Pullum, “Lying feminist ideologues wreck English language, says Yale prof,” Language Log, 2008, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005423.html, and Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994.
51. Foertsch & Gernsbacher, 1997.
52. From G. J. Stigler, “The intellectual and the market place,” Selected Papers No. 3, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, 1967.
53. H. Churchyard, “Everyone loves their Jane Austen,” http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html.
54. G. K. Pullum, “Singular they with known sex,” Language Log, 2006, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002742.html.
55. Pinker, 1994, chap. 12.
56. Foertsch & Gernsbacher, 1997; Sanforth & Filik, 2007; M. Liberman, “Prescriptivist science,” Language Log, 2008, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=199.
57. Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, pp. 608–609.
58. Nunberg, 1990; Nunberg, Briscoe, & Huddleston, 2002.
59. Truss, 2003; L. Menand, “Bad comma,” New Yorker, June 28, 2004; Crystal, 2006; J. Mullan, “The war of the commas,” The Guardian, July 1, 2004, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jul/02/referenceandlanguages.johnmullan.
60. Huddleston & Pullum, 2002; Huddleston & Pullum, 2005, p. 188.
61. Lunsford, 2006; Lunsford & Lunsford, 2008; B. Yagoda, “The most comma mistakes,” New York Times, May 21, 2012; B. Yagoda, “Fanfare for the comma man,” New York Times, April 9, 2012.
62. B. Yagoda, “Fanfare for the comma man,” New York Times, April 9, 2012.
63. M. Norris, “In defense of ‘nutty’ commas,” New Yorker, April 12, 2010.
64. Lunsford, 2006; Lunsford & Lunsford, 2008; B. Yagoda, “The most comma mistakes,” New York Times, May 21, 2012.
65. The examples that follow are from Wikipedia, “Serial comma.”
66. Siegal & Connolly, 1999.
67. At least according to the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (Siegal & Connolly, 1999). Other manuals make an exception to this exception for classical names ending in –as or –us, and then make an exception to the exception to the exception for Jesus—but he would get by without the ’s by virtue of the sound of his name anyway.
68. Pullum, 1984.
69. B. Yagoda, “The rise of ‘logical punctuation,’” Slate, May 12, 2011.
70. D. F. Wallace, “Tense present: Democracy, English, and the wars over usage,” Harper’s, April 2001; D. Gelernter, “Feminism and the English language,” Weekly Standard, March 3, 2008; J. Simon, Paradigms lost (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1980), p. 97; J. Simon, “First foreword,” in Fiske, 2011, p. ix; Fiske, 2011, p. 213; Truss, 2003.
71. G. K. Pullum, “Lying feminist ideologues wreck English, says Yale prof,” Language Log, 2008, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005423.html. See also M. Liberman, “At a loss for lexicons,” Language Log, 2004, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000437.html.
72. Deck & Herson, 2010.
73. Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982; Schacter, 2001.
74. K. A. McDonald, “Many of Mark Twain’s famed humorous sayings are found to have been misattributed to him,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 4, 1991, A8.
75. Haidt, 2012; Pinker, 2011, chap. 8.