http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/126/focus/Tallying_your_tastes_in_usage+.shtml

Tallying your tastes in usage

By Jan Freeman, 5/6/2001

Who says people don't want to serve on juries? Some 6,000 readers completed The Word's opinion poll, published two weeks ago, so today's summary of the results only skims the surface. All the examples were actual quotations from manuscripts or publications. (Percentages, rounded off, are from the online survey; snail mail, tallied separately, accounted for less than 1 percent of responses, and would not significantly change any of the figures.)

1. Ladies and gentlemen, we will be landing momentarily in Las Vegas.

Momentarily has been a disputed usage at least since H. W. Fowler, 75 years ago, insisted that it should mean ''for a moment,'' not ''in a moment.'' Both senses, however, have been common in America for a century, without causing notable confusion. Readers' votes reflected a tolerance for the facts of life, with 30 percent calling this momentarily acceptable, 36 percent on the fence, and 34 percent labeling it wrong.

2. Roe admits that his cousin played a big part in him choosing Amherst.

This example generated the most lopsided vote by far, with 80 percent of readers declaring it wrong; '' his choosing Amherst,'' with a possessive before the gerund, is what they want to see. (Another 13 percent ruled it dubious; only 7 percent called it OK.) This was surprising, for two reasons: First, writers alternate freely between the his and him constructions, and rarely do readers protest; sometimes the possessive sounds natural, sometimes it doesn't.

Second, the rule mandating possessives with gerunds used as objects, as in this example, has never been firmly supported even by the titans of traditional grammar. His choosing Amherst would have been a mistake in the eyes of early-19th-century usagists, and Fowler jousted with Otto Jespersen over the question in the early 20th century. See A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (Evans and Evans, 1957), The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (Burchfield, 1996), or Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1994), for evidence of the shakiness of this obviously popular ''rule.''

3. A nostalgia-primed Rockwell continues to wax on about his youthful escapades in Cambridge.

Another surprise: Though wax on has only recently morphed into a synonym for ''talk at length,'' 47 percent of readers found it acceptable. Even my most recent dictionary says wax means ''increase gradually,'' like the waxing moon, and is followed by an adjective (''he waxed sentimental about his school days''). But usage has obviously outstripped the lexicographers: Only 23 percent of readers called wax on wrong.

4. Who did you play with at recess?

Even though no parent would say whom in this sentence, 57 percent of readers stood up for the objective case, in defiance of actual practice. Another 26 percent said who was fine, and that minority will one day be a majority; who in the initial position is so widely used - even by the people who call it wrong - that it will have to be accepted as standard idiom.

5. Cokie, as she is known to intimates, replied, ''Bread and butter.''

This quotation from William Safire's ''On Language'' column was the real puzzler; almost nobody seems to notice the missing as in this common construction. Consider: She is called Cokie. She is nicknamed Cokie. She is known as Cokie. (Note that you can't say She is known Cokie; the as functions as part of the verb.) Recast any of those with an ''as'' clause, and you should get the following: Cokie, as she is called. ... Cokie, as she is nicknamed. ... Cokie, as she is known as. That last one sounds silly, so we simply collapse the two as -es - the one introducing the clause and the one that goes with known - into one.

If you don't hear this missing as already, though, you may never hear it - and since 65 percent of readers declared the usage fine, I'm not proposing to mount a campaign against it. Notice, though, how willingly we modify our syntax when the ''correct'' usage sounds awkward.

6. He tried to imagine empty space in something like its actual enormity, each star an island light-years from the next.

This is John Updike, writing in a recent issue of The New Yorker. I figure if Updike and the New Yorker's copy editors endorse enormity in the sense of ''vastness,'' there's no point in waxing nostalgic for the earlier, approved sense of ''great wickedness.'' And while 40 percent of readers held out for the older meaning, 29 percent accepted Updike's enormity without reservation and 32 percent were merely dubious.

7. He is a self-confessed pervert, crying in a wilderness of pop junk and Jesus.

Self-confessed seems to have arrived on the same boat as self-worth, self-actualization, and other self-regarding compounds of the psychobabble era. But it's an obvious redundancy: Nobody can confess for someone else. The 64 percent of readers who called it acceptable will presumably resist complaining about free gifts, safe havens, and other idiomatic redundancies.

8. Thinking he was holding his wife back from enjoying the trip, his spirits sank.

The dangling modifier that has ''his spirits'' doing the ''thinking,'' rather than the man himself, was no problem for 38 percent of readers, but utterly wrong for 35 percent. Some danglers are nearly invisible, others far more blatant than this one; a howler like ''Gasping with terror, his eyes bulged grotesquely'' would probably have pulled more negative votes.

9. Vladimir's butterfly collection comprises several rare specimens.

In her 1996 usage book, ''Woe Is I,'' Patricia O'Conner gives this as an example of the proper usage of comprise, saying the word means ''include or contain.'' But in strict construction, comprise can't equal ''include''; the whole comprises all the parts, as in ''The United States comprises 50 states.'' That comprise no longer sounds natural, though, and when a usage writer who thinks she's upholding tradition gets it wrong, we know the end is near.

Opposition to the passive form, is comprised of, had dwindled to 35 percent among the 1996 usage panelists of the American Heritage Dictionary. The Word's readers were tougher, with 56 percent calling O'Conner's usage wrong, but I wonder if they're such sticklers in real life; comprise just doesn't seem useful enough to warrant a bloody battle.

10. Everyone in the crowd gave themselves up to merriment.

James J. Kilpatrick, the avowedly conservative and charmingly cranky usage columnist, calls this an example of proper English, an instance where the singular antecedent can take a plural referent. I'm not sure what his reasoning is, but many readers went along with it: A fairly low 39 percent called the sentence wrong, and 32 percent said it was normal usage.

This suggests, and I agree, that English is moving toward acceptance of anyone/their, everyone/them, and similar constructions. And it's only partly because of the his/her problem: Even people who use him to mean him or her may find it unnatural to say ''If anyone needs me, tell him I'll be back at 4.''

Idiom and convenience would be enough to justify ''Did everyone get their press materials?'' But for a more sophisticated argument, check out Chapter 12 of ''The Language Instinct,'' by MIT cognitive scientist Steven Pinker; he explains why this everyone and their are different from the traditional ''antecedent'' and ''pronoun,'' and thus have their own more flexible rules of agreement.

In weeks to come, I'll cover responses to the remaining poll questions. And though I appreciate the advantages of an online poll - accessibility, instant feedback, automatic tallying - it's a chilly medium: There's no clue to how any single respondent lines up (liberal down the line? all over the place?), or even to whether readers are addressing the intended question. So keep those cards and e-mails coming, please.

...and the poll...

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/112/focus/You_the_jury+.shtml

-- Anonymous, May 07, 2001