Unpublished paper, submitted for publication December 2009. Copyright c© 2009 by Geoffrey K. Pullum.Address: School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, Dugald Stewart Building, 3 CharlesStreet, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AD, UK. Please do not cite or quote this version withoutchecking with the author (gpullum@ling.ed.ac.uk).

Prescriptive grammar in AmericaThe Land of the Free and The Elements of Style1

Geoffrey K. PullumLinguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh

AbstractThe Elements of Style is a book of advice on grammar and writing that originated as a course textprepared by Professor William Strunk at Cornell University. Revised by E. B. White and marketedto a wider audience, it sold more than ten million copies, and is much loved and revered by educatedAmericans. But just about everything it says about the grammar of Standard English is wrong. Thispaper presents a critique, and argues that the book should be regarded as harmful to the study ofEnglish and the teaching of writing.

1 IntroductionThe Elements of Style was conceived, written, and privately published by Professor WilliamStrunk, who made it a required text for his English 8 course at Cornell University. Onestudent who purchased it was a young man then known as Andy White, who went on tobecome, as E. B. White, one of the most respected writers for The New Yorker, and authorof much-loved children’s books like Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little.

After White published a New Yorker memoir about Strunk and his little book, White wasasked by the publisher Macmillan to revise and expand Elements for republication. Whitedid so. The book took off, and sold millions of copies. Today many Americans love andrevere it and travel with it. Charles Osgood (in an encomium added to the 4th edition (p. 87)claimed that he regularly carried a copy in his pocket; Jonathan Yardley in the WashingtonPost (5 September 2008) wrote that it had been his ‘constant companion’ for fifty years andadded that he would be pleased to be buried with it: ‘it might actually assure my passagethrough the Pearly Gates’.

In 2005 an expensively illustrated version of the book appeared with cartoons picto-rializing the examples, and some of it was performed to music at an event in New York.Antibooks have appeared (Hoffman and Hoffman 1997, latest edition 2003; Plotnik 2006).And 2009 saw the publication of a fawning book-length appreciation (Garvey, 2009) as wellas a fifty-year hardback anniversary reissue of the 4th edition.

Much of the advice about composition in Elements is vapid and obvious: ‘Do not over-write’; ‘Be clear’; and so on. I will say little about advice of this sort, which seems (as TheHitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy said of Earth) mostly harmless. My interest here will be in

1Some parts of this paper were presented at the workshop on Normative Linguistics at the ISLE confer-ence in Freiburg, October 2008. I am grateful to a number of friends including Rodney Huddleston, MarkLiberman, Geoffrey Nunberg, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, David Reibel, and Arnold Zwicky, for educa-tive comments and correspondence over several years, and to Chad Nilep and Andrea Olinger for researchhelp. Special thanks to Jan Freeman and David Russinoff for detailed comments and generous assistance withmatters bibliographical.

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the statements about grammar, which I think have had bad effects, and continue to do harmtoday.

It should not be thought, on the basis of the title, that the grammar claims are a sideissue. White actually begins his added final chapter, ‘An Approach to Style’, by saying:

Up to this point, the book has been concerned with what is correct, or acceptable, inthe use of English. In this final chapter, we approach style in its broader meaning:style in the sense of what is distinguished and distinguishing. Here we leave solidground.

So it is White’s own view of Elements that all of the first four chapters concern the ‘solidground’ of grammatical correctness and acceptability rather than style per se. And indeed,the book is frequently cited as a high authority on grammar. Hardly any of the college-educated Americans who cite it realize just how badly off-beam its syntactic claims are.And almost none are aware of the astonishing hypocrisy that lies behind some parts of it —particularly those added by White.

Most users of the book probably do not appreciate how extraordinarily out of date it is.Strunk is not just a 20th-century scholar whose education harked back to the 19th. He isa 19th-century figure. He was born in 1869, when General Custer could still look forwardto several more years of a successful military career. Strunk had learned his English, anddoubtless fixed most of his ideas about grammar, long before Oscar Wilde ever had a playon the stage. If his booklet seems somewhat Victorian, it is no surprise: Strunk’s birth,B.A., Ph.D., and entry into the professoriate at Cornell all fell during Victoria’s reign. Norwas White a child of the 20th century: he was born in July 1899, and was in many ways aconservative. The year in which he bought his copy of Strunk’s original version of the book,a year after its first publication, was 1919.

It astonishes me to see this work by two Victorian gentlemen still being recommendedto 21st-century college students as a guide for writing. But my main charges against TheElements of Style as a source of grammatical information have very little to do with its19th-century roots. They have to do with its inaccuracy — and in some cases, its outrightmendacity. It is not that the grammar content of the book is occasionally wrong; almosteverything it says about grammar is wrong. Its grammatical advice is a toxic mix of atavism,purism, sexism, and idiosyncratic peeving.

But unfortunately it has been enormously influential, and has fuelled some of the worstperversions of grammar teaching in America. (Much less in Britain; there are very few signsof it being treated as an important reference within UK universities.) It has induced millionsof educated Americans to fear prescriptive rules that the best British writers either ignoreor never even heard of. Anecdotal evidence from the many people who have told me theirStrunk and White stories suggests to me that the book has played a part in the trivializationof the teaching of English grammar in American schools and colleges. Grammar is widelythought to comprise a short list of superficially and inaccurately defined proscriptions andwarnings. I will catalogue a few examples in this paper.

In what follows I will try to minimize the need to distinguish between the half-dozenbibliographical strata of Elements, but it will be essential to distinguish the White revisionsfrom Strunk’s original 1918 version of the book. The text of the latter can be found onlineat http://www.bartleby.com/141, and I will trust this transcription, citing it as S1e, sincecopies of the original book are rare (I have never seen a copy of either the 1918 edition orthe retitled revision co-authored with Edward Tenney in 1934). The White revision of 1959was expanded slightly in 1972 and revised very slightly in 1979 and 2000. I will mostlycite the 4th edition (Strunk and White 2000, henceforth S&W4e), since it remains in print

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and there have been no substantive changes to the text since that edition (it has an index, anextra preface, and a few cosmetic updates like inserting ‘toner cartridges’ on p. 82 of S&W4e

where the 1979 edition spoke of ‘ink erasers’). Only where absolutely necessary will I referexplicitly to the 1959, 1972, and 1979 versions of the White revision.

2 InaccuracyIn this section I review several cases in which Strunk and/or White present accounts of thegrammatical facts about Standard English that are flagrantly contradicted by the facts ofeducated usage — not just the usage of the early 21st century but that of the early 20thcentury as well.

2.1 Verb agreementThe topic of §9 in S&W4e, added by White in the 1972 update of the 1959 revision, is therule that ‘The number of the subject determines the number of the verb.’ This is true, thoughnot complete (White ignores the relevance of person). The reader is told to ‘Use a singularverb form after each, either, everyone, everybody, neither, nobody, someone.’

A strange example is given at this point: Everybody thinks he has a unique sense ofhumor. No native speakers are tempted to use plural verb agreement with everybody — orwith everyone, nobody, no one, somebody, or someone. If the point of the example werereally supposed to be the verb form has, we would have to assume White was tone deaf toplausible ‘errors’ for native speakers.

But I believe White is grinding two different axes, and has mixed them up here. Thefirst is that we do sometimes find Standard English speakers using plural agreement witheach, either, and neither. I think White was trying to stamp this usage out. But I think thesecond point may have been the deeper motivation of his example, a point concerning thepronoun he. The example is ambiguous, but it is reasonable to think the intended meaningdid not involve an exophoric he, with no antecedent; rather, the example was intended tomean “Every person is an x such that x thinks x has a unique sense of humor.” In otherwords, White seems to be preparing us to be prejudiced against singular they — which isindeed deprecated later in the book (I return to the topic below).

‘With none,’ White goes on, ‘use the singular verb when the word means ‘no one’ or ‘notone’.’ Here White gives None of us are perfect as a ‘wrong’ example, the correction beingNone of us is perfect. But surely White must have known that this is a famous line fromliterature: it is uttered by the learned Canon Chasuble in the second act of Oscar Wilde’sThe Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Was Wilde depicting Dr. Chasuble as unable tocontrol Standard English? I don’t think so. White is simply handing us a rule that does notaccord in any way with Standard English practice — not even during the period of his youth,let alone the 1950s or later.

Further spot checks on the accuracy of his claim are easy to carry out. I took a randomnovel from about a hundred years ago — Dracula, by Bram Stoker (1897), published twoyears before White was born — and searched it for none of us. There are seven occurrences.Six are subjects of preterites or modals where there is no agreement; and the seventh is thissentence:

(1) I think that none of us were surprised when we were asked to see Mrs. Harker a littlebefore the time of sunset. (Bram Stoker, Dracula, chapter 25)

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So in the only example providing relevant evidence in that book, none of us takes pluralagreement.

Searching for none of us on Google with the restriction ‘site:gutenberg.org’brings up many more examples from classic literature; for example, It is a very remark-able thing that none of us are really Copernicans in our actual outlook upon things (G. K.Chesterton, The Defendant). And it brings up cases where none of us takes singular verbstoo; but the point is that there is variation here, and no one who looks for evidence couldthink that good writers avoid none of us are.

Did White do even as much searching in literature as I have already done? It seemsunlikely; he lacked both the modern tools of the Internet age and the old-fashioned patienceof an Otto Jespersen. So he presents a logic-based dictum — that none must be singular evenwhen it has a clearly plural partitive complement like of us — without a word of justificationand (not that the student would know this) without a shred of support.

Thomas Lounsbury remarked scathingly, ten years before S1e was published, in his bookThe Standard of Usage in English:2 ‘There is no harm in a man’s limiting his employmentof none to the singular in his own individual usage, if he derives any pleasure from thisparticular form of linguistic martyrdom. But why should he go about seeking to inflict uponothers the misery which owes its origin to his own ignorance?’ (Lounsbury 1908). One canonly say amen.

2.2 Pronoun caseSection 10 of S&W4e, also added by White, is headed ‘Use the proper case of pronouns’.Good if simple-minded advice, to be sure: everyone would like to be proper. But Whitepeddles some unmotivated stipulations.

Pronouns as copular complements White’s first block of examples of correct pronouncase includes this one:

(2) The culprit, it turned out, was he.

Any suggestion that this is normal style in the 21st century would of course be absurd. Butit is fairly clear that it would not have been normal even in 1918 (especially in the informalstyle suggested by the parenthetical ‘it turned out’ in (2)). This was true even in Strunk’s day.The characters in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Avonlea, a popular book published inthe USA in 1909, said things like if I was her rather than if I were she. How could anyonejustify teaching American undergraduates a hundred years later to write anything like theculprit was he? Like having on the statute books an ancient law that is no longer enforced,it brings the law into disrepute. And there is always the chance that some lunatic might tryto actually use it.3

Fused subject relative in object function Another example in the same block, also in-tended to illustrate proper pronoun case, exemplifies the interesting case of a fused relativeconstruction, with wh-phrase in subject function, used as object of a preposition:

2Quoted by Ben Zimmer in ‘Lounsbury on linguistic martyrdom and the transience of slang’, on LanguageLog at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/∼myl/languagelog/archives/005370.html on 7 February 2008.

3Recall that the awful ‘decency’ campaigner Mrs. Mary Whitehouse exhumed the almost-forgotten En-glish law of blasphemous libel in 1977, and managed to get a magazine editor sentenced to nine months’imprisonment for publication of a poem. Appeals were not successful (though ultimately the jail sentence wassuspended).

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(3) Give this work to whoever looks idle.

The statement in the text is that ‘whoever is the subject of looks idle; the object of thepreposition to is the entire clause whoever looks idle.’ But this fused relative cannot possiblybe a clause. Clauses cannot be objects of prepositions:

(4) *Give this work to that man over there looks idle.

The phrase whoever looks idle functions semantically as recipient, and syntactically as theobject of a preposition, and it denotes a person. Although it certainly has the form of aclause, any coherent theory of syntax has to make it a noun phrase (NP).

A resolution of this syntactic conundrum was a long time coming, but I think JohnPayne and Rodney Huddleston hit on the right answer (see chapter 5 of The CambridgeGrammar of the English Language by Huddleston and Pullum et al., Cambridge UniversityPress, 2002, henceforth CGEL). Without going into the technical details, that essence ofthe analysis is that whoever has two functions: it is both the head of an NP and the subjectof a relative clause inside it. And the quandary about what the case form should be isreal: White’s confidence that ‘nominative’ is the right answer here is just an unsupportedstipulation. The right answer is that it simply is not clear which case is right. Expert speakersdiffer in the choice that they make.

I am not suggesting that White should have been aware of a syntactic analysis workedout decades after he died, of course. I am merely pointing to the unwarranted character ofhis dogmatic pronouncements about syntax. He stipulated resolutions of disputes he didn’teven understand.

Relative pronouns and embedded subjects White continues with some examples of arelated awkward case, that of a relative pronoun keyed to subject function embedded in arelative clause but not at the top level. One of these is declared to be right and the otherwrong:

(5) a. Virgil Soames is the candidate who we think will win.b. Virgil Soames is the candidate whom we think will win.

White simply asserts that (5a) is right and (5b) is wrong: the nominative should be picked.Why? Because of what he thinks is the relevant rule of grammar. He states it thus (S&W4e,11):

(6) ‘When who introduces a subordinate clause, its case depends on its function in thatclause.’

But which clause does who introduce in (5)? It introduces the relative clause we thinkwill win. And who is NOT the subject of that relative clause; the subject is we. Althoughthere is a ‘gap’ in subject function embedded inside it, the pronoun who is, at least arguably,a non-subject relativiser here.

English certainly does distinguish syntactically between ‘subject of the relative clause’and ‘subject of a clause within the relative clause’. In the former case that-relatives areallowed but contact clauses are (in Standard English) disallowed, but in the latter case bothare permitted:

(7) Gap as subject of relative clause:

a. I need the attachment that goes with this thing.b. ∗ I need the attachment [∅] goes with this thing.

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(8) Gap as subject of clause embedded in relative clause:

a. I need the attachment that the vendor says goes with this thing.b. I need the attachment [∅] the vendor says goes with this thing.

So by White’s rule — that the case of the relative pronoun that introduces a subordinateclause ‘depends on its function in that clause’ — actually requires us to consider (5b), withthe accusative form, that should be correct, since whom is not subject of the clause it intro-duces.

The excellent Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1994) notes that Jes-persen disagreed with Fowler on this point, and cited numerous examples of excellent au-thors (Fielding and Dickens, for example), picking the accusative in cases like who(m) wethink will win, while others pick the nominative, and some (Shakespeare; Franklin; Boswell)vary between the two. The matter does not have a definitive resolution on the basis of goodliterary usage. White just grabs at an edict and announces it, failing to notice that it does notaccord with the rule that he gives as its justification. He is no syntactician, but he plays atbeing one when performing his role as writing guru.

2.3 HoweverS1e states an edict concerning the connective adjunct use of however that is unusually easyto falsify:

However. In the meaning nevertheless, not to come first in its sentence or clause.

It is preserved in S&W4e (pp. 48–49) in the following form:

Avoid starting a sentence with however when the meaning is “nevertheless”.

How could this possibly be represented as a rule of good writing, when it is so easy to seethat fine writers do not observe it, even just by casual reading?

Today such things can be rapidly checked on electronic texts. In a few seconds I verifiedthat Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has 19 occurrences of however followed by a comma,and all of them are initial in their clause. Did Lewis Carroll not know how to write?

Certainly, authors vary in their placement of connective adjunct however: Mark Liber-man has noted4 that Henry James was mostly in conformity with Strunk’s edict, placinghowever in non-initial position nearly 94% of the time (though even that leaves over 6% ofthe cases that are clause-initial, which would need explanation if the syntax of English for-bids it). But other authors differ massively. Liberman looked at Mark Twain, and found thatover two-thirds of Twain’s uses of the connective adjunct however are clause-initial. OscarWilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest is very similar: 8 sentence-initial instancesand only 4 later in a clause, a ratio of 2 to 1. And modern prose is not very different, evenwhen it has been through copy-editing. In the Wall Street Journal corpus of 1987–1989newspaper prose (henceforth WSJ), nearly 40% of the total are sentence-initial.

Strunk may have been trying to inculcate habits of writing like Henry James rather thanlike Mark Twain (not the best advice for everyone, surely!). But it is indefensible in the 21stcentury to maintain that good writing never uses however to introduce a clause.

His motivation may have been fear of what Arnold Zwicky calls temporary potentialambiguity.5 Strunk acknowledges that However you advise him, he will probably do as he

4‘The evolution of disornamentation’, on Language Log at http://158.130.17.5/∼myl/languagelog/archives/001912.html on 21 February 2005.

5‘Once you look for temporary potential ambiguity, you’ll find it everywhere’, on Language Log at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=267, 24 June 2008.

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thinks best (where however means “regardless of how”) is fine. He may have worried thatconfusion might threaten if we allowed the other however also to appear clause-initially.But if this was the worry, it is a very strange one. I have not been able to construct anyconvincing case of unresolvable ambiguity between the “regardless of how” meaning andthe “nevertheless” meaning. The comma after the latter invariably disambiguates.

And even if ambiguity did occasionally arise, a blanket ban on initial placement of theword in the latter sense would not be motivated. We don’t work on improving driving skillsby banning the internal combustion engine. We shouldn’t try to improve undergraduatewriting skills by insisting on blanket prohibitions that are wildly at odds with publishedprose.

2.4 Singular theyStrunk was perfectly well aware that they was used with morphosyntactically singular an-tecedents, especially quantified or indefinite ones, and that it was gaining ground even ninetyyears ago. Some of what he said was quite perceptive. He noted that perhaps in order toavoid clumsy he or she disjunctions, speakers were using the pronoun they with quantifiedantecedents like someone. He even added that ‘Some bashful speakers even say, “A friendof mine told me that they, etc.”.’ But the advice he laid down, nonetheless, was simply this:

They. A common inaccuracy is the use of the plural pronoun when the antecedentis a distributive expression such as each, each one, everybody, every one, many aman, which, though implying more than one person, requires the pronoun to be inthe singular. Similar to this, but with even less justification, is the use of the pluralpronoun with the antecedent anybody, any one, somebody, some one, the intentionbeing either to avoid the awkward “he or she,” or to avoid committing oneself toeither.

There is a little sleight of hand here. Strunk says a distributive expression ‘requires thepronoun to be in the singular.’ What is quite true of the expressions he cites (everyone, etc.)is that they require the tensed verb of their clause to be in the singular: it is everyone is, not*everyone are, and that is uncontroversial. But what is required of an anaphoric pronounhaving the expression as its antecedent is not determined by that. Pronouns in Englishhappen not to be deployed according to a rule that can be simplistically conflated with thesubject-verb agreement rule.

Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest is far from being abashful college kid wanting to conceal their friend’s gender, but she says (when explainingwhy she wants Algernon to arrange suitable music for a social event):

(9) It is my last reception, and one wants something that will encourage conversation,particularly at the end of the season when everyone has practically said whatever theyhad to say, which, in most cases, was probably not much.

The antecedent of they is everyone. It visibly takes singular agreement on has. Strunk’sedict stipulates that this formidable society grande dame must be dismissed as evincing a‘common inaccuracy’. (Notice, Earnest was very much a contemporary play for Strunk,who was 25 when it was first staged.)

The policy that Strunk stipulates is: ‘Use he with all the above words, unless the an-tecedent is or must be feminine.’ So he is recommending (10).

(10) ?This job is open to any boy or girl who thinks he can handle it.

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White’s 1959 revised edition kept this policy in place, and it remained through subse-quent editions. This is not because White simply didn’t know that singular they is normalStandard English. We do not know whether he was aware of the instances found in Chaucer,Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, and hundreds of other much-admired authors; but what iscertain is that, as Jan Freeman pointed out,6 you can read a character in White’s novel Char-lotte’s Web saying: ‘But somebody taught you, didn’t they?’

And if the defense here would be that he wanted to allow the ‘inaccuracy’ in dialoguebut not in formal prose — that what is at issue is really just a slight style difference — thenwhy wouldn’t The Elements of Style simply say so? It doesn’t. It says that didn’t they? iswrong. And in fact Strunk’s policy would have had the character in Charlotte’s Web saying:‘But somebody taught you, didn’t he?’ — which of course sounds ridiculous.

Later editions have added to the discussion of how to avoid the apparent sexist implica-tions of what CGEL calls ‘purportedly sex-neutral he’. The question is whether to risk theclumsiness of the disjunctive he or she, how to rephrase in the plural so the issue doesn’tarise, and so on. The reviewer for the journal Telephone Engineer and Management praisedthe book in a quote on the back cover of the third edition, in the 1970s, with the unintend-edly humorous remark, ‘It is hard to imagine an engineer or a manager who doesn’t needto express himself in English prose as part of his job.’ One wonders how often any womanengineer or manager needed to express himself in those days.

Of course, we should remember the great age of the book. When Strunk took the viewthat Everyone should cast their vote should be ‘corrected’ to Everyone should cast his vote,women still didn’t have the vote in America. There was much less excuse in the 1970s,however, for eschewing such a convenient and popular way to avoid sexually discriminatorypronoun choices. Dragging purportedly sex-neutral he into the 21st century, as S&W4e does,seems to me simply unconscionable.

2.5 The split infinitiveThe ‘split infinitive’ construction was not mentioned in the compendium of ‘Words and ex-pressions commonly misused’ in S1e (if the Bartleby.com transcription is accurate), but ap-pears to have been added two years later when the little-known first trade edition of Strunk’sbook was published by Harcourt, Brace and Howe (Strunk 1920, p. 45).7 Strunk simplysays:

Split Infinitive. There is precedent from the fourteenth century downward forinterposing an adverb between to and the infinitive which it governs, but the con-struction is in disfavor and is avoided by nearly all careful writers.

The construction was not in disfavor, and was not avoided by nearly all careful writers.George O. Curme would later make this clear with a huge collection from literary works, asample of which are supplied in his volume Syntax (1930, 458–467, esp. 461–465; see alsoCurme 1914). Curme asserts firmly that adjuncts between to and the verb of an infinitivalcomplement have been employed in English syntax throughout the history of the language;that the option is useful and effective; and that it is actually more characteristic of goodwriting than either conversation (where the phrase planning that leads to pre-head adjuncts isa bit less common) or the work of minor authors (who Curme suggests respect the prejudiceagainst split infinitives out of cowardice and insecurity).

6In her newspaper column ‘Frankenstrunk’, http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/10/23/frankenstrunk/ in the Boston Sunday Globe, 23 October 2005.

7I have not had access to an actual copy of this edition but I have studied a scanned facsimile.

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White retained the 1920 paragraph, and added to it inexpertly. In S&W4e (p. 58) he statesthat ‘the construction should be avoided unless the writer wishes to place unusual stress onthe adverb.’ Here his incompetence rears its head: he has it exactly wrong. It is not thepreverbal position that stresses the adverb, but (usually) the reverse, as Curme notes (1930,459–460). A sentence like It would be hard to adequately express it would be a suitableword order for emphasising the verb. To emphasise the contribution of the manner adverbone would shift the order to It would be hard to express it adequately, with the VP-finalnuclear stress falling on ad.8

White returns to the topic of placing adjuncts between to and the verb in chapter V ofS&W4e. He still calls the split infinitive a ‘violation’, but magnanimously terms it ‘harmlessand scarcely perceptible’ in cases like I cannot bring myself to really like the fellow, thealternative being ‘stiff, needlessly formal’. But the split infinitive is not a mark of informalstyle. What would be wrong with I cannot bring myself really to like the fellow is that itwould wrongly suggest that really is modifying bring rather than like. Curme’s examplesmake it quite clear that serious writing in formal style also contains split infinitives. Strunkand White are both ignorant of the relevant facts. Strunk wrote too early to have the benefitof Curme’s literary scholarship. White does not have that excuse.

2.6 Noun used as verbALL cases of nouns being ‘pressed into service’ as verbs are suspect, according to White(S&W4e, 54). One scarcely knows what to say. Except that of course the instances of noun-to-verb conversion that prescriptivists object to are entirely arbitrary. They froth and fumeabout any talk of ‘dialoguing’, ‘gifting’, ‘contacting’, and perhaps ‘scheduling’, but theynever seem to object to talk of booking a room, tabling a motion, or remaindering a book.The only honest way to give a general principle is that you should use as verbs those wordsthat other people generally use as verbs. But there’s not much zip or fire to that piece ofwisdom.

2.7 ‘Participle for verbal noun’The section with this heading appears to originate in Strunk (1920). The supposed erroris described, oddly, as substituting ‘participle for verbal noun’; but since no verb has dis-tinct forms for what are traditionally called the ‘present participle’ and the ‘verbal noun’or gerund, such a substitution would be impossible to detect. CGEL posits only one form:the ‘gerund-participle’. What is at stake is the case marking of the subject in clauses witha gerund-participial verb: Strunk insists that subjects of gerund-participial clauses must begenitive, and thus, almost unbelievably, he maintains that the familiar formula (11) is anerror of grammar (Strunk 1920, p. 43):

(11) Do you mind me asking a question?

He gives Do you mind my asking a question? as the ‘correction’. He gives this as a secondexample of the same fault:

(12) There was little prospect of the Senate acccepting even this compromise.

Strunk admits that the construction with the plain or accusative subject ‘is occasionallyfound, and has its defenders’; But nonetheless, (12) ‘has to do not with a prospect of the

8The second edition of the White revision contains an acknowledgment that Eleanor Gould Packard assistedin its preparation. The error introduced here may have been hers rather than White’s.

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Senate, but with a prospect of accepting’, so ‘the construction is plainly illogical’. (I confessthat I cannot follow his logic here.)

Strunk then cites two interesting examples where where the subject is rather long and itis clearly the genitive subject that seems unacceptable rather than the plain case. The first isthis one (Strunk 1920, p. 43; S&W4e, p. 56):

(13) ?In the event of a reconsideration of the whole matter’s becoming necessary

This would be much better phrased with the subject in the plain case (a reconsideration ofthe whole matter) rather than the genitive. But Strunk’s response to such cases is simply tobite the bullet: he sticks with his edict, and recommends recasting the entire sentence (usingIf it should become necessary to reconsider the whole matter), and White repeats all this.

There is no recognition here of the fact that the genitive subject was the innovation,and that use of the genitive had been controversial throughout the 19th century (for anenlightening discussion with many relevant literary examples see Merriam-Webster 1994,753–755, or Merriam-Webster 2002, 598–600). What Strunk asserts, and the White revi-sion carries into the 21st century in S&W4e, is that clauses with non-genitive subjects andgerund-participial verbs are not grammatical in English. This is not helpful usage advice;it is simply an untruth. The fact is that for gerund-participial clauses, literate native speak-ers sometime use genitive and sometimes plain (or accusative) subjects. For example, theMerriam-Webster article notes that Lewis Carroll used both in hopes of [his being ableto join me] and prevented [any of it being heard] on the same day (in correspondence, 11March 1867).

White kept the examples from (Strunk, 1920) in his 1959 revision (p. 44), and in thesecond edition (1972); but by 1979 he (or his editor) apparently lost faith, and found itimpossible to continue pretending that Do you mind me asking? is ungrammatical; so theexample (11) was quietly dropped, and the topic was introduced using just (12).

White had also dropped a paragraph of Strunk (1920) that acknowledged, correctly, thatthe plain case seems particularly acceptable after the verb imagine (Strunk had cited I cannotimagine Lincoln refusing his assent), with a citation of Fowler and Fowler (1906) — thoughagain Strunk had been prepared to bite the bullet, offering the opinion that there was only ‘aslight loss of vividness’ if the genitive was substituted, and that by sticking with the genitivecase ‘the writer will always be on the safe side’.

This is one place where the variation between editions is significant. There was nothingin S1e, and Strunk (1920) showed signs of recognizing that the issue was debatable. TheWhite revision in 1959 cut some of that recognition out, and the 1979 revision also tookout an especially dubious example. The drift is away from honesty, and toward a cleardetermination to oppose plain or accusative subjects of gerund-participials no matter whatthe usage evidence might suggest — and to tolerate as little debate as possible.

2.8 PeopleS1e insisted that ‘The word people is not to be used with words of number, in place of per-sons’. Strunk offers this reasoning: ‘If of “six people” five went away, how many “people”would be left?’ We are apparently being invited to say that there would be one people, andthat is ungrammatical.

Strunk appears to have lifted this pathetic argument (if it can be called an argument)without acknowledgment from a writer in The Critic in 1897, though objections to people

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as the plural for person goes back further, at least to 1866.9 People has been used in effectas a suppletive plural of person for hundreds of years, as even its detractors noted. TheStrunkian proscription is madness; but it will perhaps not amaze the reader too much thatWhite retained the madness in the revision, and it remains there in S&W4e (p. 56).

2.9 Shall and willThe claim that shall and will in effect show suppletive person agreement is a somewhatbetter known prescriptive chestnut. White tells (without attribution) the old joke about thesemodals: ‘A swimmer in distress cries “I shall drown; no one will save me!” A suicide putsit the other way: “I will drown; no one shall save me!” ’. (Jan Freeman has tracked this backto 1833, and Ingrid Tieken tells me that it goes back further, to the 18th century.)

White actually claims that although in relaxed speech this distinction is seldom made,nonetheless ‘we are quite likely to drown when we want to survive and survive when wewant to drown’. Jocular, one assumes; but the trouble is that educated Americans take suchprattle seriously, and come to mistrust or condemn their own natural usage. The fact is thatshall is mostly gone from contemporary American usage. In WSJ the ratio of I will to I shallis over 14 to 1, and shan’t is just about extinct: there are just two occurrences of shan’t inWSJ’s 44 milion words, and both are in free-form guest columns by editor emeritus VermontRoyster (1914–1996), a man well into his seventies.

3 Vanity and idiosyncrasyWhite’s vain assumption that his personal prejudices about individual words or constructionsshould be laws for everyone to live by is fairly extreme.10 He dislikes seeing degree adjunctsqualifying the word unique, so he just adds to the book a stipulation (not present in S1e orStrunk 1920) that it is a mistake. What’s unpleasant for him is an error for you, and there isno appeal. If necessary, he will bully you into agreement.

3.1 Hopefully as modal adjunctThe prize example of White’s vanity and bullying is his appalling paragraph on hopefully(S&W4e, p. 48). Strunk was long dead before the modal adjunct (or ‘sentence adverb’)use of hopefully started its upswing in frequency. Indeed, White missed mentioning it in1959, because the increase in popularity did not begin until the 1960s (Merriam-Webster2002, 393). But from the second (1972) edition on, the book includes this flailing, raving,undisciplined paragraph:

Hopefully. This once-useful adverb meaning “with hope” has been distorted and isnow widely used to mean “I hope” or “it is to be hoped.” Such use is not merelywrong, it is silly. To say, “Hopefully I’ll leave on the noon plane” is nonsense.Do you mean you’ll leave on the noon plane in a hopeful frame of mind? Or doyou mean you hope you’ll leave on the noon plane? Whichever you mean, youhaven’t said it clearly. Although the word in its new, free-floating capacity may be

9The evidence is provided by Ben Zimmer and others in ‘Who is this exalted parrot?’ on Language Log athttp://itre.cis.upenn.edu/∼myl/languagelog/archives/002488.html on 23 September 2005.

10It is not unexcelled, though. The prize for idiosyncratic usage grouchery must surely go to the over-opinionated dottiness of Ambrose Bierce’s Write It Right (see the eruditely but entertainingly annotated editionof it by Freeman 2009).

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pleasurable and even useful to many, it offends the ear of many others, who do notlike to see words dulled or eroded, particularly when the erosion leads to ambiguity,softness, or nonsense.

White justifies his furious hostility to the modal adjunct use in a bewildering variety ofdifferent ways. The word has been ‘distorted’ and ‘offends the ear’ — aesthetic judgments;it is ‘wrong’ (ungrammatical); it is ‘silly’ (unintelligent); it is ‘nonsense’ (illogical). Butwhich? His example about the noon plane illustrates none of these things: there is nocontradiction or incoherence, but at best only a possible ambiguity. (This is not a particularlyplausible charge, because to get the manner adjunct reading you have to assume a manneradjunct has been fronted for some special discourse effect, and this is very rare. At the veryworst, it is a case of temporary potential ambiguity.) And to raise topics like ambiguity andclarity is to switch from aesthetics and intelligence and logic to an entirely different topic,communicative efficiency.

But new charges follow: it is ‘new’ (and everything new is bad?), ‘free-floating’ (undis-ciplined?), and for some, ‘pleasurable’ (hedonistic?). The word has been ‘dulled’, like amisused knife; it has been ‘eroded’, like a river bank. . . White wanders from metaphor tometaphor. And then he starts repeating himself. He returns to the allegation of ‘ambiguity’,adds the new charge of ‘softness’ (if you use this word you’re a sissy!), and finally wheelsback once more to ‘nonsense’. He doesn’t know where he is going. He cycles through adozen different putative faults or sins, raving semi-repetitively like a drunk. Principles likeStrunk’s ‘Omit needless words’ and White’s own ‘Do not overwrite’ are forgotten.

It is quite astonishing that anyone concerned with good writing could admire White’suncontrolled blithering about hopefully, and more so that readers should continue to value ittoday. For the issue disappeared from serious discussion a quarter of a century ago. In 1965the popular hue and cry against the modal adjunct use had started (Follett 1966 voiced thedefinitive complaint, and probably inspired White); by 1975 the dispute was at its peak; andby 1985 it was basically over. Yet in The Elements of Style the forgotten dispute remainstrapped forever like a fly in amber.

3.2 Preposition strandingHopefully was not the only topic on which White issued wildly inaccurate off-the-wall ad-vice. We get some more unexamined nonsense in his brief treatment of the old worry aboutwhether prepositions can be separated from their objects, as in What were you thinkingof ? or Whatever he puts his hand to he does well.

This old chestnut of a grammatical topic, originating in an idiosyncratic grumble byJohn Dryden in 1672 and long forgotten in Britain, made no appearance in S1e. But Whitewanders into it oddly, in a section where you would never look for it: in a section entitled‘Avoid fancy words’ (S&W4e V.§14, 77–78). Starting with an injunction to avoid fancyLatinate words where Anglo-Saxon ones would do (toughness and plainness again), Whitedrifts off into the topic of having a good ear for the distinction between fancy and plain(S&W4e, pp. 77–78):

The question of ear is vital. Only the writer whose ear is reliable is in a positionto use bad grammar deliberately; this writer knows for sure when a colloquialismis better than formal phrasing and is able to sustain the work at a level of goodtaste. So cock your ear. Years ago, students were warned not to end a sentencewith a preposition; time, of course, has softened that rigid decree. Not only isthe preposition acceptable at the end, sometimes it is more effective in that spot

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than anywhere else. “A claw hammer, not an ax, was the tool he murdered herwith.” This is preferable to “A claw hammer, not an ax, was the tool with which hemurdered her.” Why? Because it sounds more violent, more like murder. A matterof ear.

An expert in writing is telling us that stranded prepositions sound like murder. When yourlover murmurs ‘You’re the only one that I want to tell my secrets to’ it sounds like murder,and you should brace yourself for the claw hammer.11 The advice White hands out hereis not just atavistic; it is flagrantly inaccurate. White cannot tell the slight informality ofpreposition stranding from risky dabbling in ‘bad grammar’ that one would use only whendepicting hideous violence. A man with a tin ear is advising students on the importance of‘ear’.

4 Hypocrisy and mendacityPerhaps the most obnoxious aspect of The Elements of Style — and it is mostly injected byWhite — is the hypocrisy. White berates others for sins that he privately practises, and evenStrunk practised. At the very least, several passages are self-undercutting in that the edictsenunciated are clearly and visibly not obeyed by the enunciator. It is as if he felt that therules do not apply to him. But sometimes it is worse than that, involving the concealment ofhighly relevant evidence. I offer four examples, the fourth being perhaps the worst.

4.1 Passive clausesFirst, consider the section in the chapter headed ‘Elementary Principles of Composition’,which insists you must ‘Use the active voice’ (S&W4e, 18–19). This section derives fromS1e. Strunk particularly deprecated the use of one passive dependent on another (as in He hasbeen proved to have been seen entering the building. But note the structure of his commenton what is wrong with it: he says that ‘the word properly related to the second passive ismade the subject of the first.’ His description is couched in the form of a passive reducedrelative (properly related to the second passive) in the subject, and a passive main clause(is made the subject. . . ).

Indeed, the very first sentence of S1e, the opening sentence of the introductory chapter,has two passives: This book is intended for use in English courses in which the practice ofcomposition is combined with the study of literature.

What is going on when a work that makes free use of the passive construction, as allwriters have done down the centuries, instructs undergraduate writers that they are supposedto avoid it? If the passive is wicked and improper, Strunk and White are hypocrites; if it isnot, they are liars. There seems to be no other possibility.

The attempt Strunk makes to convince students of the undesirability of passives is intel-lectually dishonest from the outset. He points out that (14a) is more ‘direct and vigorous’than is (14b).

(14) a. I shall always remember my first visit to Boston.b. ? My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me.

11Notice that preposition fronting in such a case is impossible: if your lover murmurs *You’re the only oneto that I want to tell my secrets, you’re having an affair with a foreigner.

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But this is ridiculous. The latter example is so clearly unacceptable that in the heyday ofconfusing semantics and pragmatics with syntax a number of theorists12 took it (incorrectly)to be syntactically ill-formed, in virtue of a constraint forbidding the application of thepassive transformation to at least some clauses with a first-person subject.

The correct statement about (14b) is not that it is syntactically barred but that the pas-sive construction is associated with strong information-structure pressure to make the in-ternalised complement (the ‘by-phrase’) express material newer to the discourse than thesubject. A first-person pronoun, denoting the utterer, cannot possibly be newer informationthan a trip to Boston that the utterance is reporting. As remarked in CGEL (p. 1444), ‘thespeaker and addressee count as discourse-old simply by virtue of their participation in thediscourse’, so I’m going to hold a press conference is vastly more natural than ??A press con-ference is going to be held by me. The effect is even stronger with a sentence like Strunk’s,which involves a statement about personal memory, where no one but the speaker couldplausibly be the rememberer of the Boston visit.

In sum, Strunk chooses an independently bizarre sentence which violates an informationpackaging constraint, and uses it illicitly to cast aspersions on all instances of the construc-tion it represents. He could hardly have been unaware that he had read and written tens ofthousands of passive clauses that were nothing like as unacceptable.

His student White, of course, drank in the prejudice against the passive, and kept theabsurd example word for word in the 1959 revision. It is there in S&W4e (p. 18). Perhapshe even believed that he had learned from Strunk to expunge the passive from his prose.But look at the evidence. In the first paragraph of the the introduction to the revised edition,where White tells of how much he learned from Strunk at Cornell, he calls S1ea textbookrequired for the course (that’s a passive clause used as an adjunct in noun phrase structure).The book was known on the campus as “the little book”, he tells us (that’s another passive);It had been privately printed by the author (that’s yet another). The paragraph is stuffedwith passives.

Was this done knowingly? Probably not. It is not fully clear that Strunk had a goodgrasp of exactly what was passive and what was active. After his dishonest introduction topassives he has some accurate remarks about how sometimes passives are appropriate, butthen he returns to his view that ‘The habitual use of the active voice . . . makes for forciblewriting’, and remarks (using a passive once again): ‘Many a tame sentence of description orexposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voicefor some such perfunctory expression as there is, or could be heard’. He cites these fourexamples as suitable cases for correction:

(15) a. There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground.b. The sound of the falls could still be heard.c. The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired.d. It was not long before he was very sorry that he had said what he had.

Here only the second is a passive. The first, (15a), is an existential construction with anintransitive (lying) in a modifier clause. The third, (15c), has a copular main clause that isnot a passive, with an active verb (left) in the clause inside the subject NP and a departicipialadjective (impaired) as complement of the active verb become in the second content clause.(Become does not form passives the way be does: *A letter became written by the bank isnot grammatical.) And (15d) has two occurrences of the copula (was), two preterite-tenseoccurrences of the perfect auxiliary had, and one active transitive verb, said.

12Among them, John Robert Ross, Paul M. Postal, John Grinder, Frederick J. Newmeyer, and TerenceMoore.

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So it may be that Strunk was clueless about identifying passives. The alternative is thathe may have been intending to change the topic from using the active voice to somethingmuch broader, like writing without copular or inchoative clauses. When we look at his‘corrections’ (Dead leaves covered the ground; The sound of the falls still reached our ears;Failing health compelled him to leave college; He soon repented his words) we see that theyall have transitive verbs in active clauses.

The plot thickens when we turn to later editions. In Strunk (1920) the second examplehas been changed to (16a), and the ‘correction’ is (16b):

(16) a. The sound of a guitar somewhere in the house could be heard.b. Somewhere in the house a guitar hummed sleepily.

And in the 1959 revision by White, the same example has been replaced again, this time bythe following pair:

(17) a. At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard.b. The cock’s crow came with dawn.

The trouble is, while S1e recommended ‘substituting a transitive in the active voice’ andgave a transitive (reached), and Strunk (1920) used the phrase ‘substituting a verb in theactive voice’, and gave a verb that was not passive (hummed), White reverts to ‘substitutinga transitive in the active voice’ but gives a verb that is not transitive (came). Thus in White’shands, the number of examples in the block illustrating replacement of a passive by a non-passive goes down to zero.

It is easy to see why Americans who have had S&W4e as their main or only guide togrammar and style end up decrying passives without being able to identify them. And theycertainly do.13 The commonest error is to imagine that all ‘passive’ means in grammaris ‘low degree of overtly expressed agency or responsibility’, so that clauses like A bombexploded or The case took on racial overtones are misdiagnosed as passives.14

I am convinced that the mixture of dishonesty, obscurity, incompetence, and hypocrisyin S&W4e has contributed to the frequency of such blunders. At least three different peoplehave told me they noticed writing instructors (in one case the director of a writing program)marking prose as incorrect for containing passives simply on grounds that the copular verbbe was present. One provided me with a scan of an actual paper where a teaching assistanthad marked ‘passive voice’ ten times, and the diagnosis was wrong in seven of the ten.Circling all forms of the copula in red and writing ‘don’t use passive’ in the margin is easywork. And those who do it can be confident that they will not be called on it: Americanundergraduate students do not know enough about grammar to point out the cases where thepassive accusation was false. Elements only amplifies their confusion.

4.2 Adjacency and relatednessAs a second example, section III.§16 of S1e (it is II.§20 of S&W4e), headed ‘Keep relatedwords together.’ The version in S1e is perhaps the most extraordinary. Strunk opens thesection thus:

13At http://ling.ed.ac.uk/∼gpullum/grammar/passives.html there is a long list of Language Log postsabout various aspects of the passive, many of them giving examples of people who objected to the use of thepassive voice where there had been no such use.

14See http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/∼myl/languagelog/archives/000236.html and http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/∼myl/languagelog/archives/000991.html for these examples.

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The position of the words in a sentence is the principal means of showing theirrelationship. The writer must therefore, so far as possible, bring together the words,and groups of words, that are related in thought, and keep apart those which are notso related.

The subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be sepa-rated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning.

Strunk is saying that the subject and the lexical (‘principal’) verb should be adjacent: theyshould not be separated by anything that could be preposed. And he says it with a subjectand lexical verb separated not only by the modal verb should, the negator not, and the copula(be — yes, he has used a passive) but also a parenthetically interpolated phrase (as a rule)that could have been preposed.

And his previous sentence had not just a modal (must) but also an adjunct (therefore)and a supplement (so far as possible) separating its subject (the writer) from its lexical verb(bring).

He also has a supplemental and-coordinate (and groups of words) separating a head nounfrom the relative clause modifying it.

Heidi Harley noted on Language Log15 that the section has only 11 sentences (excludingthe examples), and three of them (27%) directly violate the rule that the section affirms.

White’s revision expands and rewrites the section somewhat, but not in a way that elim-inates the self-refuting character of the prose. He adds new examples, suggesting that ‘ToniMorrison, in Beloved, writes about. . . ’ needs to be changed to ‘In Beloved, Toni Morrisonwrites about. . . ’ (S&W4e, p. 29); and about these he says:

Interposing a phrase or clause, as in the lefthand examples above, interrupts theflow of the main clause. This interruption, however, is not usually bothersome. . .

Both of these sentences have supplements between subject and verb phrase, so their formviolates the rule that is being presented.

Neither Strunk nor White seems to think the rule actually means anything at all for them.One can only speculate about whether they failed to notice, or noticed but thought they’dget away with it, or noticed but simply didn’t care.

4.3 Adjectives and adverbsAs a third case of hypocrisy, consider §4 of White’s chapter V, ‘An approach to style’, in therevised version of the book. ‘Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs’, itsays firmly (71). (Redundantly, White says in section V.§8, p. 73, that we should ‘Avoid theuse of qualifiers’ — many of these, like rather and very and pretty, being adverbs.) And thenin the very next sentence after he instructs us to use only nouns and verbs (a sentence which,incidentally, has a passive negative main clause, contrary to II.§14, ‘Use the active voice’,and II.§15, ‘Put statements in positive form’), White uses the adjective coordination weak orinaccurate and the adjective tight. The sentence after that uses the adjective indispensable(in relation to adjectives, surprisingly enough, since White acknowledges that adjectives andadverbs are ‘indispensable parts of speech’). The sentence after that begins with an adverb.And so it goes on. You can see from White’s prose in the very section in question that theclaim of his section heading is bunk.

15‘Keep related words, as a rule, together’ on Language Log at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4 on 8 April 2008.

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Looking elsewhere, in White’s introduction to the book the sixth word is an attributiveadjective and there is another in the fourth line. The first two chapters of the main part ofthe book both have titles that begin with an attributive adjective. And White added a sectionin chapter II (§16) headed ‘Use definite, specific, concrete language’ — three attributiveadjectives in five words.

S1e never advised students to restrict themselves to nouns and verbs. And White couldnot possibly have thought that Strunk would have accepted such advice, since Strunk putsan adjective in the first line of the text of his introductory chapter.16

How on earth can a book be taken seriously in its injunctions when it tells the reader towrite without adjectives and adverbs but says so in prose that is replete with them?

The injunction is irredeemably, inexcusably wrong — it states a precept that is neverfollowed and is impossible to follow. But it has encouraged the continuation of a prejudiceagainst adjectives and adverbs on the part of English teachers who cannot have seriouslythought about what they are saying. As Ben Yagoda (2004) pointed out, there are earlierantecedents: Voltaire (allegedly) saying that ‘the adjective is the enemy of the noun’; MarkTwain recommending ‘when you catch an adjective, kill it’ (the title of Yagoda’s amusingand erudite book on the parts of speech); William Zinsser claiming (in 1976 — late enoughthat he could be following White): ‘Most adjectives are . . . unnecessary. Like adverbs, theyare sprinkled into sentences by writers who don’t stop to think that the concept is already inthe noun.’

Zinsser’s claim is empirical, and easy to test. He is saying that if you read through apiece of prose looking for the sequence adjective + noun, in most cases there will usually bea noun that expresses the concept thus denoted. Try it, on any text. The first five adjective+ noun sequences in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are hot day, white rabbit, pink eyes,large rabbit-hole, and deep well. Not one of them has a noun that could express the sameconcept. Zinsser’s statement is a foolish falsehood (doubtless completely unchecked).

People seem to have a naive trust in such anti-adjectival propaganda. Alistair Cooke,describing the writing process he developed during his fifty years of writing his ‘LetterFrom America’ essays for BBC radio, said that after drafting a piece he would ‘beat thehell out of it, getting rid of all the adverbs, all the adjectives, all the hackneyed words.’ Didhe really think his 2,869 scripts contained no adjectives or adverbs? In a minute of workat the BBC’s official Letter from America site.17 it can be confirmed that it is not so. Inhis last piece, for example, the 6th and 7th words were adjectives; the 10th and 12th wereadverbs; the 15th and 20th and 24th were further adjectives; and so on. Whatever the sourceof Cooke’s belief about getting rid of adjectival and adverbial modification, he was clearlydeluded. And Elements (as modified by S&W4e) encourages such delusions.

4.4 Restrictive relative whichMy fourth example of hypocrisy is perhaps the worst. It relates to the prohibition of whichintroducing the kind of relative clause that is traditionally termed ‘restrictive’ or ‘defining’(CGEL refers to them as integrated relatives). The edict delivered in S&W4e is now perhapsthe most famous of all American copy-editor bugaboos: ‘That is the defining, or restrictive,pronoun, which the nondefining, or nonrestrictive.’ But none of this is right.

The word that is not a relative pronoun at all; notice that preposition fronting with it isimpossible:

16I discuss this further in ‘Those who take the adjectives from the table’ on Language Log at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/∼myl/languagelog/archives/000469.html (18 February 2004).

17See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/letter from america/default.stm for the home page.

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(18) a. the recession to which I attribute the fall of the governmentb. *the recession to that I attribute the fall of the government

White is in any case forced to undercut himself immediately by admitting that which is usedin restrictive relatives in the King James version of the Bible (he quotes Let us now go evenunto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass). Nonetheless, he insists that ‘Care-ful writers, watchful for small conveniences, go which-hunting, remove the defining whiches[sic], and by so doing improve their work.’ Why would this be regarded as improvement,rather than pointless tampering?

The fictive rule that White alludes to emerged during the 19th century, and is expoundedin full by H. W. and F. G. Fowler in The King’s English (1906). In the relevant passage(pp. 88–93) they admit that they are proposing the rule as a suggested reform: it is not drawnfrom practice. They also acknowledge that there would have to be numerous complicatedexceptions. In fact they go so far as to concede that ‘It may seem to the reader that a rulewith so many exceptions to it is not worth observing.’

The sole ground offered for advancing the rule is that if only people would assent to it,various ‘mishandlings’ of relative clauses ‘would be less common than they are.’ But thismeans nothing: the Fowlers clearly regard use of which in restrictive relatives as ‘mishan-dlings’, so the prospect of having people obey their rule is not being properly distinguishedfrom the supposed motivation for advocating it.

The trained-pigeon copy-editing that grew out of the Fowlers’ fictive rule seems to pre-suppose the irrelevance or impossibility of any semantic factor might distinguish that andwhich. I have done no significant investigation of this, but I think it is at least possible thatexpert users of English tend to favour which when introducing new discourse elements, and(a related matter) when modifying an indefinite NP, while preferring that when referring todiscourse-old elements and modifying definite NPs.

For example, in Dracula (1897) the sequence a thing which occurs twice, but the thingwhich never occurs at all. Yet with that it is the other way round: a thing that never occurs,while the thing that does occur. This could be accidental, or it could indicate that BramStoker preferred which for relative clauses modifying indefinite NPs and that for modifyingdefinite NPs. I do not aim here to confirm that. I just want to point out that if it is true thatthere is a subtle semantic or discourse-structure distinction between that and which, thenStrunk and White are recommending its erosion and loss — exactly the kind of change thatprescriptivists normally decry.

Strunk himself never mentioned the Fowlers’ rule in S1e. White added the section onthis topic. And he did something else as well. Jan Freeman of the Boston Sunday Globe18

discovered that White rewrote Strunk’s prose to eliminate every telltale case of restrictiverelative which. There were quite a few. For example, Strunk wrote ‘if the favor which youhave requested is granted’ in the paragraph immediately before where White inserted thesection on the which prohibition. White rewrote the sentence completely. Strunk wrote‘keep apart those which are not related’ (in the section ‘Keep related words together’), andWhite changed it to ‘keep apart those that are not related’. And so on. White altered thetext of the book he was revising to avoid revealing that his old mentor followed no ruleforbidding restrictive which.

This looks like deliberate concealment of evidence. It is possible, though, that White wassimply not aware that his own writing, too, ignores the alleged rule. When writing his own

18See her column at http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/theword/2008/09/return of the l.html(6 September 2008).

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novels, such as Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, White used restrictive which whenever itseemed right. Stuart Little has an apparent restrictive which on its first page.19

In sum, White is peddling a prohibition that originates in a quixotic 19th-century rec-ommendation for reform that failed; he shows no sign of respecting it in his own writing,and Strunk did not respect it; but to make it look more plausible he silently alters Strunk’soriginal text. I see no way to regard this as anything but straightforwardly dishonest.

5 ConclusionThere is more to be said against The Elements of Style. Much more. Given more space, forexample, I would discuss the fascinating recent essay in which Catherine Prendergast (2009)muses on the parallels between White’s values and those of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.But I hope I have done enough here to begin to substantiate some of my charges againstElements, and to give some sense of why I regard it as deleterious to grammar education inAmerica.

I do not think this issue is a trivial one. I believe The Elements of Style does real andpermanent harm. It certainly wastes precious resources like time for teachers, students, andcopy editors, and money for the publishers who pay copy editors. And it damages the self-esteem of students and college graduates, helping to convince them, falsely, that they havean imperfect grasp of their native tongue, and misdiagnosing genuine faults in writing.

I am no defender of the species that White once scornfully called ‘the modern liberalof the English Department, the anything-goes fellow’ (Guth 2006, 416). I have no timefor sloppy or ungrammatical writing. But I object to the time that is wasted in trying toteach students falsehoods about English grammar. And I think this is a linguistic issue ofunusually large practical importance. We linguists should not be shy about speaking out andcondemning this opinionated, influential, error-stuffed, time-wasting, unkillable zombie ofa book for all the harm it has done.

ReferencesCurme, George O. 1914. Origin and force of the split-infinitive. Modern Language Notes

29(2):41–45.

Curme, George O. 1930. Syntax. Boston: D. C. Heath. Volume III of A Grammar of theEnglish Language.

Follett, Wilson. 1966. Modern American Usage: A Guide. New York: Hill & Wang.

Fowler, H. W. and F. G. Fowler. 1906. The King’s English. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Freeman, Jan. 2009. Ambrose Bierce’s Write It Right: The Celebrated Cynic’s LanguagePeeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers. New York:Walker.

Garvey, Mark. 2009. Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White’s The Ele-ments of Style. New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster.

Guth, Dorothy Lobrano, ed. 2006. Letters of E. B. White. New York: Harper.19I noted this in ‘Don’t put up with usage abuse’ on Language Log at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/∼myl/

languagelog/archives/001803.html (15 January 2005).

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Hoffman, Gary and Glynis Hoffman. 1997. Adios, Strunk and White. Huntington Beach,CA: Verve Press.

Merriam-Webster. 1994. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. Springfield, CT:Merriam-Webster. Edited by E. Ward Gilman.

Merriam-Webster. 2002. Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage. Spring-field, CT: Merriam-Webster. Edited by E. Ward Gilman.

Plotnik, Arthur. 2006. Spunk and Bite. New York: Random House.

Prendergast, Catherine. 2009. The fighting style: Reading the Unabomber’s Strunk andWhite. College English 72(1):10–28.

Strunk, William. 1920. The Elements of Style. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe. Firstcommercially published edition.

Strunk, William and E. B. White. 2000. The Elements of Style. New York: Allyn and Bacon,4th ed.

Strunk, Jr., William. 1918. The Elements of Style. Privately printed in Geneva, NY, atthe Press of W. F. Humphrey. Quotations are from the online version of the text (http://www.bartleby.com/141).

Yagoda, Ben. 2004. The adjective – so ludic, so minatory, so twee. The Chronicle of HigherEducation, February 20.

Zinsser, William K. 1976. On Writing Well. New York: Harper and Row.

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