Archive for the ‘Navel Gazing’ Category
Monday, November 9th, 2009As some of you know, I spend a small, but still unjustifiably large amount of time railing against linguistic prescriptivism, at least about rules that don’t matter. One of the ones that has continued to bother me since I began thinking about this topic was MSWord’s incessant complaining that “which” clauses must follow a comma while “that” clauses can under no circumstances do so. The vast majority of times I seemed to be in violation of the rule Word was applying, and on reflection I could hear no mistake in the grammar as I had it originally.
So I planned to write a post in response to this analysis of the mistake, which seemed to be to illustrate what was wrong with this distinction. It explains the commonly held view (“that” is for restrictive clauses; “which” for nonrestrictive clauses) and provides examples to demonstrate. So:
The painting, which was hanging in the foyer, was stolen.vs.
The painting that was hanging in the foyer was stolen.
But while my first reaction was to simply point out that competent language users don’t really hear a mistake when “that” and “which” are used interchangeably, I a better explanation of what is going on here:
Which and who (occasionally whom, but that’s another thread) can be used in restrictive relatives. And so can that. And, if the relative word isn’t the subject of the clause, you can also just use [ZERO] if you like.
On the other hand
In non-restrictive relative clauses, that MAY NOT be used. If you did use that, you’d have to do without the commas or intonation dip, and you’d convert the clauses to restrictive use:
The turkey that was overcooked was nonetheless flavorful.
(implies there was another one that wasn’t overcooked)I deducted the cost of the duck that I gave to an orphanage.
(implies there was another, undonated, duck)
I can see the distinction invoked here. My one reservation is the intonation dip seems to be what signals that the nonrestrictive meaning is intended, so it’s not clear that over time we won’t just increasingly find “that” following a dip. But there might be stronger resistance to this than to using “which” in restrictive clauses, having to do with broader semantic role of “that” (e.g., that it serves to pick out one thing from several; it “points to” the turkey that was overcooked versus the turkey that wasn’t).
Such are my admittedly naïve thoughts on the topic. What are yours?
While trying to find a place to have dinner tomorrow night, I discovered an awesome blog. The Eaten Path features gorgeous food-photography, thoughtful, well-written reviews, a blog template that includes a Piggly Wiggly, and a whole series on a road trip designed around eating barbecue at fifteen restaurants between Washington, DC and Austin, TC. The guy has even been to Family Pie Shop. What more could you possibly hope to find in a blog?
Tomorrow is my birthday, and we’ll be driving up to Seal Beach to dine at Beachwood BBQ, in large part due to this review (and this beer menu). We would normally do something fancier, but so many of our attempts to have a nice meal in Orange County have met with disappointment due to relatively average food being sold at exceptional prices. I’m stoked, because I don’t believe another Family Pie Shop patron would lead me astray.
My post from May about PZ Myers’ over-reaction to a car dealership’s radio ad has found a long comment, and since it’s my blog I decided to reply with a new post. Commenter Lilia has clearly never seen me get tipsy and start offending not only religious people, but less-strident nonbelievers as well:
And I assume you know what it’s like to be an atheist in the United States, which is why you can make this claim? For your information, it’s not at all like being a Yankees fan.
I have a post-it on my desktop with half a dozen subjects for posts, which I hope to get to in the next week or so. A couple of them will be on the other blog, but content is content.
The first is just this picture, which I took after Ruth spotted the sign. We were in the process of boarding a flight from Orange County home.
Ruth looked up and said, “Caution, interpretive dance may occur.”
Maybe you had to be there?
The last two posts on my personal blog were of the sort that I would usually have put here, if not for YLTLSWC. Here are links: Don’t Marry Career Women? and Guess Who?. The “guess who” is a good one, I think.
FYI, we just moved over to a new hosting company. We stopped leeching off of our friends and got an account with Network Redux, who (so far) I like very much. But you always like a new hosting company a lot for the first month or two, so we’ll see how that goes. One interesting thing is that they have a very active forum, and all of the long-time users there seem pretty pleased. They also host ImageMagick and Adium — two fairly important open source projects — which is good for a ton of brownie points in my book.
Anyway, I think everything should be in place and working smoothly, but please let me know if anything seems funny.
In just a few weeks, Ruth and I will be leaving from my mom’s house in North Carolina, headed for Irvine, Califronia. We’re taking 40 most of the way, and if you know of anything interesting along that road, we’d love to hear about it. We got a copy of Roadfood, but we’d give even more weight to recommendations from people we know, and we want stop and see as many interesting sights at we can. Unfortunately, the world’s largest ball of twine is in Kansas and the House on the Rock is in Wisconsin, but surely there’s something good along the way.
I had the website named “tonguebutnodoor.net” in some config file. But the server was redirecting requests sent there to “www.tonguebutnodoor.net”, and this difference blew some CGI script’s mind. Awesome.
In order that this post not be a complete waste, I bring you this story. A Missouri school district let some Answers in Genesis creationist visit a bunch of schools and talk to students during their science classes. This generated an editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which ended with this:
Last year, the percentage of Potosi seventh- and 10th-grade students who scored “proficient” or “advanced” in standardized science tests was below the state average. Perhaps instead of hearing about creationism, those students would be better off spending their science classes learning about science.
That’s ridiculous. The problem is obviously that there aren’t enough questions about Genesis on the state’s standardized tests.
Hat tip: Afarensis.
Apologies for the comments not working. I’m looking into it; I need to talk to Adam about getting access to the server.
Meanwhile, a link for Monica, because she’s the only person I know who does this.
This school year, the University of Michigan Law School became the latest graduate school to block wireless Internet access to students in class, joining law schools at UCLA and the University of Virginia.[...]
“When you focus primarily on transcribing everything said, you are not making good use of the class as a practice opportunity,” she wrote in an e-mail to her law students, explaining her decision to ban laptops.
See. I knew it. This is why I never took notes as an undergraduate. Of course, Professor Hawks disagrees:
It seems to me there is an unrecognized selection effect here. Aren’t the students who take notes using laptops in graduate schools very likely to be the same few who did so as undergraduates? Except now they are many because they got admitted?
Or they’re not awesome enough to remember everything the first time. Law schools should only want awesome students.
I would be remiss if I did not point out that this is the best blogging under the TBND umbrella in a long while.
As if West Virginia hasn’t been in the national news enough, now they’re getting flack for using Dance Dance Revolution in the middle schools gym classes.
Thursday morning, Bill Littlefield had a commentary on Boston’s public radio station WBUR criticizing the policy. He compared using video games in fitness to using junk food to get children to eat healthier. He said kids will run around and play games outside not because it’s competitive, but because it’s fun, like all you need is a playground and a ball to keep kids from getting obese.
Littlefield needs to leave skinny New England more often. There are playgrounds and balls all over the country, yet child obesity continues to rise. It’s a major problem in rural areas, but the obesity epidemic is growing everywhere, as Bad Blood, the recent New York Times series on Diabetes makes clear. There’s obviously a major problem, and Littlefield refuses to recognize that traditional methods aren’t addressing it.
Read the rest of Monica taking Littlefield to task.