Flock of Cats

Today, I read an excellent article entitled “Tense Present” by David Foster Wallace. The article is partly a review of Garner’s Modern American Usage and partly an overview of the “seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography”. For anyone interested in grammar and style, both the article and the book are worth reading.

The “seamy underbelly” referred to by Mr. Wallace is the rift between “prescriptivists” and “descriptivists”. I won’t delve into the details of the “Usage Wars” in this post; in brief, prescriptivists aim to define rules that govern best usage in Standard Written English, whereas descriptivists eschew normative judgments and aim to document the language as it’s actually used.

As an editor, I am favorably inclined toward the prescriptavists because standard usage is my primary concern. Although I agree with descriptivists that y’all is a valid word and not inherently “bad”, I’m not going to use it in a scholarly paper. However, other cases require more careful consideration: different from vs. different than, due to as an adjectival phrase vs. due to as an adverbial phrase, clearly/hopefully/etc. as sentence adverbs, U.S. vs. US vs. United States, very/somewhat/fairly (necessary?), split infinitives, and so on.

Having edited many papers in the last year, I have formed various opinions on style and usage.

To occasionally split infinitives / To split infinitives occasionally

An absolute rule against splitting infinitives is completely unfounded, even though this notion is widely held. Instead a careful writer ought to minimize the extent to which an infinitive is split – for example: <Good style requires the author to not, as I have done here, split an infinitive too widely.>.

Sometimes clarity requires an infinitive to be split — for example: <We plan to carefully inspect frozen food imported from Europe.>. Here, there is no other place to put carefully without changing the meaning of the sentence.

1) We carefully plan to inspect frozen imported from Europe.>

2) We plan to inspect carefully frozen food imported from Europe.>

3) We plan to inspect frozen food carefully imported from Europe.>

4) We plan to inspect frozen food imported from Europe carefully.>

In the above sentences, carefully modifies 1) plan, 2) inspect/frozen (unclear), 3) imported, and 4) imported. Here, splitting the infinitive is not only defensible, but optimal.

Due to

When I first started my editing job, I was unaware that due to has been traditionally used only as an adjectival phrase and not as an adverbial phrase — for example: <The program’s cancellation was due to poor ratings. (adjectival phrase)> vs. <The program was canceled due to poor ratings. (adverbial phrase)>. I thought this distinction in usage was old-fashioned and pedantic when I first noticed it in the American Chemical Society Style Guide. But after reading several papers revised by other editors who adhered to the traditional usage of due to, I came to like the phrases that these editors typically used as substitutes: because of and owing to.

The compound degraded due to its high reactivity. –> The compound degraded, owing to its high reactivity.

The compound degraded due to its high reactivity. –> The compound degraded because of its high reactivity.

Hopefully

Although hopefully does not often appear in scientific writing, I fully embrace its new role as a sentence adverb. Traditionally, hopefully has been used to mean “in a hopeful manner” — for example: <He looked on hopefully as the horses ran down the homestretch.>. Nowadays, the phrase is widely used to mean “I hope that” — for example: <Hopefully, the surgery will succeed.> — usage that drives grammatical sticklers batty. Because this new usage is so widespread and firmly established, traditionalists are fighting not only a losing battle, but a battle that has already been lost. Since this point is unlikely to come up at work, I hopefully (in the traditional sense!) cast my lot with the victors.