How to Correct Someone's Usage, or: (Not) Making Usage Great Again

I used to date a philosopher.  He was (is still, I'm sure) brilliant.  I remember having a long, adversarial conversation with him about the use of "beg the question."  In case you don't know--and many people don't--"beg the question" is a technical term.  It's used to refer to a flaw in logic/argumentation in which the assertion you're making essentially assumes that the basis of the assertion is true.  If I say that G-d exists because G-d said "I AM," then I'm begging the question: it's already assumed in my assertion--that G-d said "I AM"--that G-d exists.  (This possible logical fallacy is not a problem for me as a Christian, because I haven't confused logic with faith, and I don't require that my faith be logically sound.  But that's a conversation for another day.)  The philosopher was making what philosophers would call a "strong" claim that anyone who misuses "beg the question" should be corrected lest the phrase lose its meaning because of (but not due to) misuse.  That is, if everyone uses it to mean "presents the question" or "requires you to wonder," then no one will know its (true) technical meaning!!  And how will we sleep at night??

The point I made in response to him was descriptive (though he took it as prescriptive): the phrase is already being misused, so don't get too hung up on correcting everyone, because that's a Sisyphean task. 

The philosopher was not amused.

What is Usage?

Usage has to do with how we use language--from punctuation to turns of phrase--to communicate.  It's governed by convention, not divine law and not dictionaries.  It changes over time.  What you learned about the "right" (read: customary) way to say or write this or that can differ greatly from the way that someone else who lives a few blocks, states, or continents away from you.  I'll never forget telling a flatmate of mine in London to stop talking about her "pants" because the Londoners in the room were getting uncomfortable thinking that she was talking about her underwear (to them, she meant "trousers"). 

Do you have a pet peeve about a phrase that gets commonly misused (or so you think)?  They're everywhere.  Some of my favorite examples:

• "for all intensive purposes" should be "for all intents and purposes"
• "flushed out" should be "fleshed out" ("I fleshed out the details")
• "moment being" should, to my ears, be "time being" ("I'm home, at least for the time being")

Some pet peeves might turn out just to be regional variations that you didn't know about.  My hillbilly kinfolk say "you'ns" to indicate the plural second-person.  Think that's annoying?  Sorry, but it's not wrong, at least not according to certain dialects of regional English.  It's just not customary to use outside of that regional variation.  For all I know, "moment being" might be the same way.

Here's what you can't attribute what you think is a misuse of English to:

• stupidity
• neglect
• moral failure
• an untrained mind
• poor parenting
• economic background
• poor education.

The philosopher was convinced that he had it "right," and he did, in a technical sense.  But people who say "beg the question" in a non-technical sense probably don't have his extensive and excellent training in philosophy.  It's not because they're dumb or lazy or had parents who didn't discipline and/or love them sufficiently.  It's because they just don't know.  People rarely like getting usage wrong; we hang so much judgment on using "correct grammar" (which people usually use incorrectly to refer to both "correct" and "grammar," so add that phrase to my pet peeve list), so it's unlikely that the misuser is doing so on purpose.  Hard to judge someone for not doing something right that they didn't know was wrong.

Correcting Misusers

Oh, wait.  The subheading here and the title of this post kinda beg the question, don't they?  We're assuming that we should correct people who misuse language conventions!  I don't accept that assumption, actually, so let's approach this issue somewhat algorithmically.

How to determine whether you should correct someone's usage:

• The most important question must be: do you know FOR A FACT that the phrase (or whatever) in question has been used in a way that does not adhere to current convention?  Could you point to a passage in a handbook, for example, that unequivocally proves that whatever you're about to lay down a correction for is, in fact, in need of correction?  If not, abandon your intention.  In this case, you do not possess the requisite knowledge, expertise, or validation to issue a correction. 
  • What can you do instead?  At best, you could ask a question: "Oh, that's interesting.  You said 'beg the question.'  I thought it was only used to refer to logical fallacies.  Have I gotten that wrong?"  Always, always assume the position of humility.  Do not ask, "Where did you learn to say it that way?" or "Were you aware that it's actually...?"  Your objective is to make, not alienate, friends, right?
• Is the person you want to correct a loved one to whom you are not a parent?  If yes, then...
  • What can you do?  Don't correct them.  Why would you want to?  Just let them be.  That said, parents get the right to correct their children's everything: behavior, attitudes, use of salad forks, and language.  Parents, you still need to answer question 1 in the affirmative before you correct your kid's language use without an appeal to a handbook or authoritative resource.  But if you think that your kid has misused a phrase or word, you can say, "I don't think that 'beg the question' means what you think it means.  Go get your English handbook [or tablet or dictionary, etc.] and look it up and come tell me what it says."  That way, you'll both learn things!  And you'll be modelling for kiddo that it's okay not to know things and to risk being wrong.  Takes a lot of strength, that.
• Is the person you want to correct someone over whom you have some kind of managerial authority?  That is, you're his boss or you're her mentor or you're their teacher.  In that case...
  • What can you do?  Never, ever, ever correct that person in front of other people.  Again, the less-enlightened among us still judge others for their "correct" usage of conventions.  Be aware of that before you go shaming someone for misusing "flushed out."  That said, in large office settings, if you're the boss, you might be able to get away with a general email that says something like "I want to make sure we're using 'flush out' correctly.  Unless we're talking about plumbing, we ought to avoid it.  Let's make sure we're using 'flesh out' from here on to refer to adding details or looking at additional information.  That'll help us stay consistent across the whole office."  But in individual contexts, I would recommend adding a comment about a misuse as an afterthought to something else: "It really was a great first draft.  I'm glad we've spent the last 30 minutes discussing it.  By the way, before we talk about when we're having our next conversation, I noticed that you use 'flushed out' when I would have used 'fleshed out.'  I looked it up in my usage dictionary, and where you have 'flushed out,' it should be 'fleshed out.'  I wanted to make sure I mention it to you so that you adjust this draft.  It's important to impress your readers, so I wanted to make sure that you've got the tightest prose possible."  Wordy?  Yes.  Tactful?  Mostly.  Better than red ink with no explanation for the correction or why it was important to make?  Totally.
• Is the person a stranger to you?  Then stop.  You'll exhaust yourself trying to be everyone's real-time, flesh-and-blood copyeditor.  It's not your job to make usage great again.  Change comes to all things, and if "flesh out" becomes "flush out," what's the difference?  If "begging the question" has both a technical and a colloquial sense, the Earth will continue to spin around the sun without your correcting this hapless (mis)user.

There are surely other scenarios I'm not thinking of, but the upshot is this: how should you correct someone's usage?  Generally, you shouldn't.  You should only intervene--and then, tactfully and empathetically--when the quality of your/your employee's/your student's/your child's work and/or reputation are at stake.  And that's if and only if you know for sure that the correction you're making is actually a correction and not, say, just your imposition of your own personal standards.

Life's short.  There are some battles worth fighting.  "Begging the question," in most (but not all) circumstances, isn't one of them.

Much Ado about Singular "They"

I promised myself that I'd only spend an hour on this post, because rapid rivers of ink have gushed forth from those smarter and more qualified than I to opine on the matter of the use of singular "they."  But a friend and colleague asked the other day whether it's right or wrong to use the singular "they," so let's have that conversation.

Neither right nor wrong

As with most usage issues in English, it's not as if there's a definitively right or wrong way to use singular "they."  I say that with my descriptivist hat on: I'm trying just to describe how English gets used, not lay down proscriptions about whether it should be used in this way or that.  The "should" approach is called the prescriptivist approach.  We'll get to that.  But the upshot is that you'll never hear me or anyone from the Laughing Saint Editorial's crew say that singular "they" is right or wrong per se.  We're going to talk about whether it's appropriate once we get into the prescriptive side of things later on.

So, what are you going to learn in this post?  A little bit about what other experts say, a little about gender theory, and a little about yourself.

Please ignore Grammar Girl

I've got a post I'm saving up about why Grammar Girl isn't your friend (do you use WebMD instead of a doctor?  No.  So you shouldn't use Grammar Girl and assume you've gotten accurate grammar/usage advice.  I digress).  That said, we do need to start this conversation by looking at what experts (i.e., not Grammar Girl) have said about the use of singular "they," both descriptively and prescriptively.

I'm a rhetorician with a background in linguistics (my dissertation director was a nationally-recognized linguist who helped create the Dictionary of American Regional English, and I have something like a master's worth of coursework in English grammar, including English-language history and functional, cognitive, and generative grammars), which means I think of language/linguistics as the foundation of rhetoric.  Rhetoric is, more or less, how we use communication--verbal and otherwise--to do things.  Note the importance there of the word "use."  "English language usage" refers to customs of language usage, not the rules (flexible and dynamic though they may be) of grammar, which is really about how words get put together to make sense (but whether they achieve some purpose, well, that's a question for rhetoric and usage and style rather than grammar).  Grammar is how the Lego blocks fit together; rhetoric is whether you've used your blocks to make a castle or a bridge and why you'd want to build one or the other.

So, before we can understand whether and how to use (!) singular "they," we have to understand its basis in language and the history of the language.  The fact is that singular "they" has been used in the English language since before "correct spelling" was a thing.  There's something like four centuries of time lag between the two, actually: singular "they" is at least as old as the 14th century, and spelling and other matters of language use were being codified in the 18th and 19th centuries.  That's just the descriptive facts.  So the historical argument suggests that there's precedent both for using singular "they" and for not using it, as language standards started to be implemented.

Since history won't save you, how about the brain?  Here's a great analysis from the Bible of approachable linguistics scholarly news, Language Log, about how using the singular "they" has been shown to require increased processing time (meaning: it does seem to take a handful of milliseconds longer to understand what "they" or "their" refers to when it refers to a singular noun).  But we're talking about milliseconds, not a complete breakdown in semantics (how sentences make meaning).  So cognitive arguments aren't going to save you, either, because it would be patently risible to claim that understanding singular "they" creates such a significant cognitive burden that singular "they" should never be used.

What about semantics, though?  Can you argue that the use of singular "they" creates vagueness in sentences that can't be overcome?  Actually, I think this is the best argument against using it.  Note that the sentence "The student took their book to class" makes perfect sense to some folks.  To me, it causes at least momentary confusion: Wait, did this person intend to use "their"?  Are we suddenly talking about some other group of people?  Did I miss the change in subject or meaning?  Grammatically, we can change the rules (or change them back) such that "they" is officially alright to use in singular contexts, but just like I have to read some sentences a couple of times before I understand whether "read" is past or present tense, I might have to read a sentence that uses singular "they" a couple of times before I'm assured of whom we're talking about, and there might still be some ambiguity.  Furthermore, at the moment, we don't allow for "themself," which would be the singular reflexive form of the plural pronoun, which suggests to me that we're still not there, descriptively, when it comes to the singular use of the plural pronoun.  I could be asking for too much (we use "themselves" as the singular reflexive instead), but I think that when we get to "themself," we'll be fully in singular "they" semantics.  Right now, we're not.

On the ground

That said, when it comes to language use on the ground, some folks use singular "they" to promote a gender-neutral perspective.  In many ways, I support this, but that's not my only reason for using singular "they," though I don't use it all that often (see the semantic argument against it, above).  That said, I do use singular "they" not only in speech but occasionally in my Oratoria posts and elsewhere.  There are good reasons to use singular "they," just a few of which include:

1. Respecting other people's wishes when it comes to the pronouns they prefer.  Don't be a self-righteous jerk: if someone asks that you use "she" or "they" or "he," just do your best to do that.  There's no reason to make a big deal about it.  If that person changes their (!) mind about it later (an argument I've heard against having to keep up with personal pronoun choices), what's it to you?  You can be forgiven slip-ups, in that case, but remember that most of the time, making that kind of change isn't something an individual takes lightly, so don't plan on being asked to adjust more than once per person.
2. Accepting linguistic (and social) change.  It's not so much that words change, but our use of and rules for them change.  Happens all the time.  Don't imagine that you've got the form of English that G-d loves best.  Unless you've got some stone tablets lying about that you wanna tell us about, and those tablets are about grammar and usage, there's no reason to be upset about language change.  Unless you're trying to use language as a tool of oppression or control, that is.
3. It fits the context you're writing or speaking for.  If I'm editing a blog post written for a website geared to people in their teens, I'm giving a pass to singular "they."  If I'm editing a book written by one of my clients in the business world, there shall be no singular "they" if I have anything to say about it.  The Chicago Manual of Style is unequivocal about their rejection of singular "they" (I have to believe it's because it occasionally creates ambiguities that can't be resolved semantically/grammatically), for example.  So is The New Yorker.  As a rule, for me, I decide to allow singular "they" if and only if:
   1. It doesn't create ambiguities that can't be resolved easily by the reader
   2. The applicable style guide allows for it
   3. The audience is likely not to have a fit about it
   4. The writer wrote it (i.e., I won't go adding it where it isn't already).

So, it's not as if this is a right-or-wrong issue.  It's really a matter of rhetoric: how do you plan to use singular "they," and why?  Will it work in your specific context?  Those are the salient questions.

A Quick Fix for Impossible Sentences

Nearly every day, I find myself grappling with an impossible sentence.  It's an occupational hazard.  Most of the time, they don't bother me.  This is probably because I think of editing as an exercise in verbal Tetris: I get not-entirely-random bits of information, sort them into an order that fits (grammar), produces meaning (semantics), and achieves some effect (pragmatics).  When the words stack up just right, I get to move up a level.  Bit by bit, everything's supposed to come together in a way that fits.

But what happens when it doesn't work that way?  What happens when pile of blocks at the bottom of the screen looks like a jumbled mess? 

A jumbled mess is what an impossible sentence feels like.  There are words there, yes, but they don't make sense, or they've been used to make all the sense all at once, or their sense is ambiguous at best.  Trying to straighten them out just seems to make them harder to deal with. 

So You Think You've Got an Impossible Sentence.  How Do You Fix It?

In an ideal scenario, I can talk or write to the author of the impossible sentence in question.  I'll read the sentence aloud or have the author read the sentence aloud, and then I'll say something like: "So, I wasn't sure of what you meant in that sentence" or "There was a lot going on in that sentence."  And the clincher: "Forget the writing.  Step outside the paper for a moment.  Don't think about the imaginary audience you're trying to impress or convince.  Just between you and me, what are you really trying to say in this sentence?  What is it that you're trying to get it to do?"

I get one of two types of responses to that question:

Type 1: The long explanation about whatever is being asserted in the impossible sentence. Sometimes it takes my student or client two, four, six, or more sentences to explain what he or she was really trying to say.  My response to that is straightforward: "How many sentences did it take you to explain that to me?"  Wait for response.  "And you're trying to fit all that into one sentence?  Try writing all that out, just like you said it.  Then determine whether it's so long and detailed that it needs to be its own paragraph.  You can polish up the language later, after you get the ideas clarified."

Type 2: The brief explanation about whatever is being asserted, plus a long explanation about why it was necessary to put that idea in that particular place in the paper.  This is the more-likely response for writers who have an impossible sentence that repeats an idea that's stated elsewhere in the paper (i.e., that's repetitious).  Depending on the circumstances, I would suggest that the author use multiple sentences to explain the idea and how it connects to other ideas in the paper (see Type 1, above), or I'd recommend leaving out whatever has been unnecessarily repeated.

Possibly Making Sense from an Impossible Sentence

Here's an example from a recent paper I edited (the words have been changed to protect the innocent, but the parts of speech and punctuation in this sentence are the same):

The artwork is a golden arch with an obvious curve, the work different from Freud’s principle of impulse control but it can rapidly abstract viewer’s gaze.

That's a whopper.  In this case, I didn't have access to the writer to ask "What are you really trying to say here?" about the sentence.  So I had to employ the Tetris strategy: What are the main blocks of this sentence?  How do they make sense independently?  How can I rearrange and reshape them so that they achieve a pragmatic and semantic purpose?

I identified the following blocks: the artwork, the golden arch, the golden arch's curve, the principle of impulse control, the viewer's gaze, and the rapid [something] of the viewer's gaze.

Already, I can see that I don't understand the vocabulary choice for "abstract," which is like being able to see the left-hand side of a straight-line piece in Tetris without being able to see its right-hand side (is it an L-shaped piece, or is it just straight?).  Here's how I rearranged the sentence to give it some clearer meaning:

The artwork is a golden arch with an obvious curve.  Its appeal is not based on Freud’s principle of impulse control, despite the fact that the artwork immediately draws the viewer’s gaze to the work’s abstract features.

I made sure to append a note to that change asking the author to ensure that the edit preserved the intended meaning.

In short, if you're looking for a quick fix to a sentence that's hard to read or doesn't make sense, set back and ask "What are you really trying to say here?"  If the answer takes more than one brief sentence, consider breaking your impossible sentence into smaller bits.  If it requires lots of apologia about trying to connect the dots to other ideas in the paper, try simplifying your points and eliminating redundancies. 

If all else fails, you can always ask your friendly neighborhood copyeditor to take a look and provide some solutions!