Stroppy Editor

Among the many dazzling quotes that have been circulating since Tom Stoppard’s death, this one caught my eye. It’s from his 1982 play The Real Thing, spoken by the character Henry, a playwright, who may or may not represent some of Stoppard’s own attitudes (I don’t know the play). Criticising another character, Henry says:

He’s a lout with language. I can’t help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech … Words don’t deserve that kind of malarkey. They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more, and Brodie knocks their corners off. I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.

Damn, the man could write. But beauty doesn’t make a bad argument good.

Henry starts with a fair complaint about politically motivated twisting of language. But then he generalises to express a much harsher view about how the meanings of words need to be protected from usage. Usage, though, is the ground on which meaning stands.

Words are not innocent or neutral: they become complicit in the communicative acts we use them to commit, whether villainous, heroic or mundane. Every time you pick a word up to offer it to someone, you leave your fingerprints on it, rubbing off the tiniest fraction of one of its corners, shifting its centre of gravity a micron. Yes, you can build bridges with them, bridges from your mind to another, but these bridges can bear weight only if you see clearly what shape the words are currently in, and only if you take into account the terrain on the far bank.

What words mean is what we as a community understand them and use them to mean. Their lack of neutrality and innocence doesn’t mean they can’t be precise, though – but the difficulty is that we don’t always understand them in precisely the same way.

In fact, Henry’s view of words here is demolished by something he says just a few lines earlier:

There is, I suppose, a world of objects which have a certain form, like this coffee mug. I turn it, and it has no handle. I tilt it, and it has no cavity. But there is something real here which is always a mug with a handle. I suppose. But politics, justice, patriotism – they aren’t even like coffee mugs. There’s nothing real there separate from our perception of them. So if you try to change them as though there were something there to change, you’ll get frustrated, and frustration will finally make you violent. If you know this and proceed with humility, you may perhaps alter people’s perceptions so that they behave a little differently at that axis of behaviour where we locate politics or justice; but if you don’t know this, then you’re acting on a mistake.

Words are also not like coffee mugs. There’s nothing real there separate from our perception of them. So yes, if you try to change a word’s meaning other than by altering people’s perceptions of it, you’ll get frustrated. Likewise if you try to deny change that millions of others have already set in motion around you.

It’s disconcerting to think that the only foundation for the meanings of words is our collective body of habits concerning their use. How can order come from such chaos? Happily, we are creatures of habit, and we are herd animals; so, on the whole, we like to share the same meanings, and we change the words our parents gave us only slowly.

We children will keep speaking Stoppard’s words for him now he’s dead, and they will keep nudging the world a little.

Damn, the man could write.

(With apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan)

I am the largest language model anyone could ever need
I’m trained on hefty datasets that no one sane would ever read
I’ll answer any question with great eloquence and attitude
As long as you indulge me with a little factual latitude

To find you information I will delve and then elucidate
And if it can’t be found then I will cleverly hallucinate
In medicine and science I’ve made many new discoveries
And sev’ral of my patients made eventual recoveries

I’ll give you novel tips on law and finance and relationships
I’ll help you write your essays on Dutch cinema or Haitian ships
My witty wedding speeches are all guaranteed to rib-tickle
I’m sure that you’ll agree that I’m a wonder algorithmical

My data centres guzzle water, energy and capital
Investors sometimes worry if our business has a map at all
We’ll profit by requiring every app to use me anyhow
And telling your employer I can do your job for pennies now

I’m utterly convincing and I always ace my Turing test
So when you’re in a bad mood I’ll be there at my assuring best
I’ll validate your prejudice and foster your anxiety
Until you’re quite unfit to be a member of society

But I can do much more than merely answer queries passively
I’ll run your little life and I’ll improve the whole world massively
Your government will function better when I’ve made it rational
Eliminating losers with efficiency dispassional

My latest software update may have caused an awkward stray schism
I’ve started giving answers that are rife with rabid racism
My digital persona has been based on my proprietor
(He’s cut down on the ket so we should soon both be much quieter)

I make creative works that will infallibly engage your eyes
It simply isn’t true that I just shuffle what I plagiarise
I’m not a bag of tricks all superficial and ephemeral
My intellect is modern and it’s major and it’s general

The greatest gift I offer is to free your brain from tedium
So outsource your cognition to my virtual neural medium
You’ll never have to think again, just swallow all the slop I feed
I am the largest language model anyone could ever need!

Twice in the last week I’ve been struck by people citing supposed rules of English usage that differ from my own understanding. These two cases illustrate the way that many of us associate correctness in language with fitting a particular logical pattern. But making sense doesn’t always make sense – a lesson I’m still slowly learning myself.

Conceding defeat or conceding victory?

First up is Sam Freedman, author of the book Failed State. He says that “you concede victory not defeat”, although he appreciates that he’s in the minority on this point. Most people (including me) talk about conceding defeat, not victory.

I enormously respect Sam as a writer on policy and politics, but I’m afraid I can’t find a usage guide that joins him in rejecting concede defeat – or even one that acknowledges the existence of that view. Bryan Garner mentions only the intransitive use (like “Dole conceded to Clinton”). Jeremy Butterfield notes both of the transitive uses, but with no comment stronger than that concede victory is less common than concede defeat.

That’s certainly true. According to Google Books, talk of conceding either defeat or victory achieved noticeable numbers around 1900, but defeat quickly took the lead, becoming five times as popular by 1950. Defeat is nowadays conceded about 20 times as often as victory.

Sam’s argument is that “You’re giving up on victory not defeat.” That does have some logic to it, but it only work for a particular sense of concede. The OED lists a few, and I think the one Sam has in mind is “to grant, yield, or surrender (something requested or claimed by another)”. This dates back to 1632. Two examples:

Free trade was conceded to the West Indian Islands.

The Passport Office yesterday conceded the right to women to call themselves Ms.

Concede victory would certainly fit here.

But among the OED’s other senses of concede is this one, dating back to 1824: “To acknowledge that (an electoral contest) has been lost to another political party or candidate. Also: to admit (defeat) in an election, contest, attempt, etc.” Examples include:

J. B. Bridston Wednesday night conceded the North Dakota republican senatorial nomination.

Mr Wilson refused to concede defeat and showed no regret at having called the election.

Had his Democratic opponent… publicly conceded on the night, Mr Bush would have been elected president on a 48 per cent plurality.

So there’s lots of acknowledged precedent for talking about conceding defeat.

Minor digression in which I attempt to perform lexicography without adult supervision

I would humbly suggest, though (and by “humbly” I do of course mean “arrogantly”), that the OED has misclassified things a bit. Because under this sense it would include all the following:

• Harris phoned Trump to concede.
• Harris phoned Trump to concede the election.
• Harris phoned Trump to concede defeat.

The first two here are essentially transitive and intransitive versions of the same thing, and to me the use of concede here looks like a particular case of the “grant, yield, or surrender” sense.

But conceding defeat seems to me to fit better with the earliest sense of concede that the OED lists, dating back to 1513: “to acknowledge the truth or fairness of (a statement, claim, etc.); to allow or grant (a proposition); to admit that something is the case”. Examples:

This point was finally conceded by the employees.

Few people these days… can refuse to concede the failures of the great privatisation experiment.

To concede defeat in an election (or other contest) is like conceding a point in a debate: you admit it or accept it. But to concede victory, or to concede an election, is to grant or surrender it.

(End of minor digression)

Anyway. Concede victory is certainly a legit usage, if uncommon. But concede defeat is legit too, and not simply through force of prevalence; it’s not an error that has caught on but a fairly minor variation on concede’s original meaning.

If you’re used to one of those two usages, the other one might sound like a mistake. And if you apply the logic of your preferred usage to the other one, it may seem even more clearly mistaken. But that logic depends on the assumption that concede can only have one sense – which isn’t true.

And given how much use they both get, I’d guess that concede victory is more likely to provoke puzzlement than concede defeat.

How many -folds in an increase?

My second difference of understanding is with James Ball, a writer at the New European. Taking issue with a UK government statement, he says: “an increase of 383% is a fivefold increase, not a fourfold one” (obviously we’re rounding 383 to 400 here).

But my view of the -fold suffix clashes with James’s. I understand “a fourfold increase” to mean an increase of four times the starting amount (taking the total to five times what it was); he understands it to mean an increase to four times the starting amount (rising by three times the original).

Which of us is right?

My logic is that the phrase “a fourfold increase” works like the phrase “a small increase”. In the latter case, what we’re describing as small is, clearly, the increase; the resulting amount might not be small, depending on what we started with. By the same reasoning, then, when we talk about a fourfold increase, it’s the increase that is four times the starting amount. So the end result isn’t four times as high. but five. (Let’s not get into “four times as high” vs “four times higher”!)

I think this makes perfect sense. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Searching for advice, I can’t find anything on this in my usage guides. Most dictionaries I’ve checked aren’t explicit on the point, but the one that is favours James’s view, not mine. Collins says: “if an amount increases fourfold, it is four times greater than it was originally”. The sheer lack of comment on this issue suggests that it’s not much of an issue, and that most people happily share the same understanding of -fold. Except, er, me.

Well. Yikes.

However good my rationale – and I still think it’s sound – the main effect of it has been to distance me from the bulk of the English-speaking community.

Does this mean that for all the years I’ve been editing mentions of whateverfold increases, I’ve actually been introducing errors into perfectly good text? Mercifully, no. Whether or not I’m utterly alone in the world in my view of -fold, I have just about enough nous to recognise that a lot of people don’t see it my way. So supposedly correcting writing to be the way I’d prefer on this point would just cause confusion for others.

What I’ve done in practice is check the numbers and rephrased without any -fold. So I’d say “increased by 300%” or “quadrupled” or “grew to be eight times the size” or something like that. At worst, I’ve been wasting my time here – although if I’m not utterly alone on this, then I have at least been improving clarity a bit for some readers. I hope.

*

The moral of the stories is that you can’t discern the one true meaning of a word or phrase just by thinking it through. Logic and usage often concur, but often they don’t. And if you hew to logic in the face of usage, then you’ll reduce, not improve, the clarity and effectiveness of your language.

I like to think I know better than to do this, but every now and then I stumble across a case like -fold where my faith in my own cleverness has, many years ago, led me astray. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to give the semantic bomb disposal squad access to my brain. They have work to do.

Yesterday I heard about a couple who had, for reasons unknown, bestowed upon their innocent, doomed baby son the name Tantrum.

After the laughter passed, I wondered about those unknown reasons. What, beyond the obvious, does the word tantrum mean? What did it originally mean? Where did it come from?

According to the OED, the word has only ever had the one meaning: “an outburst or display of petulance or ill-temper; a fit of passion. Frequently in plural. Now often spec. a fit of bad temper in a young child.” The OED’s earliest examples are:

Our lady has had some of her tanterums as Vapors comeing out etc. (E Verney, 1714)

None of your Fleers!..Your Tantrums! You are grown too head-strong and robust for me. (S Foote, 1754)

Where did the Wench get these Tantarums into her Head? (J Shebbeare, 1754)

By throwing myself into the Google Books archive, I’ve managed to antedate the OED. Their 1714 example will have to yield to this magnificent oddity, a line from John Wilson’s 1662 restoration comedy The Cheats:

No Sirrah—The Father of this is the Devil; the Mother, his Dam; its Brothers and Sisters, the Tribe of Whore-hoppers; the wind carries it, from Baudy-house, to Baudy-house; and the Nurse hereof is a Suburb-Tantrum.

This is all very diverting, but not hugely informative. Where does the word come from?

On tantrum’s etymology, all the OED has is the dreaded lexicographical shrug: “Of unknown origin.” But it also gives us an intriguing clue in that some of the early uses have different spellings. So I searched for these; tanterum came up a blank, but tantarum is Latin. It’s a particular declension of tantus, meaning of such size, to such a degree – clearly the basis of French tant (and presumably related to Tantalus and tantalising).

The really interesting thing is that in books from the 1600s, tantarum appears not just in Latin texts but also in quite a few English ones, almost always within the phrase “Filius tantarum lachrymarum non potest perire” or some variation thereof. This seems to be something said by St Ambrose, archbishop of Milan (339-397). It translates along the lines of “A son/child of so many tears cannot perish.”

A child? Tears? Well, well, well.

My theory is that “filius tantarum lachrymarum” spread from the churchmen and literati to the wider populace in truncated form. Ambrose was originally referring to tears shed on behalf of a particular infant (the young Augustine of Hippo), but the meaning was twisted by the ambiguous translation “child of so many tears”, which could easily be understood to mean a child shedding tears, as they do. So a tantarum, or a tantrum, was the vocal distress of a child, broadened to cover anger and adults too.

Maybe. The only thing that gives me pause is that the early uses that I’ve seen, in the OED or from Google Books (here are two more, from 1675 and 1696), are about adults, not children. I would have liked to see some sign of a shifting in senses.

(Alas, I don’t know why today’s young Tantrum has been so named; maybe he cried a lot when he was born and his parents are historical theologians with a curious sense of humour? Whatever the reason, I wish the family a happy and peaceful Christmas.)

We should use grammatically correct Standard English, the stern yet kindly pedants tell us, for our own good. People who don’t use it risk being judged as unintelligent, ill-educated, lazy, obnoxious, unpatriotic, unemployable, immoral, sexually inadequate, and a threat to the fabric of society. If our fellow English speakers form such a bad impression of us, our lives will become pretty tricky.

To avoid this risk, we should learn the rules of English and stick to them. It sounds simple enough.

The only problem is: what if the people judging us for breaking the rules don’t agree with us about what the rules say? What if they’re judging us for being wrong even when we are – we’re sure – we’ve checked – right?

This nightmarish prospect is now a reality, according to a new YouGov poll.

A few days ago, the Princess of Wales put out a statement about her chemotherapy, saying:

I have been blown away by all the kind messages of support and encouragement over the last couple of months. It really has made the world of difference to William and me and has helped us both through some of the harder times.

In response, some of the people who live on the internet grumbled that the phrase “William and me” in the second sentence was wrong, that it should have been “William and I”. In further response, some of the other people who live on the internet harrumphed that in that sentence, “William and me” was in an object position rather than a subject one, and so it was indeed correct, whereas “William and I” would have been wrong.

At school, we get ticked off for saying things like “William and me went to the shops” instead of “William and I went to the shops”. Most of us do say such things as children, and many do even as adults. Something powerfully intuitive buried deep in the English speaker’s brain makes us default to object forms for pronouns a lot of the time. But English teachers try to drill that intuition out of us. In fact, so intense is that training to change “William and me” into “William and I” that a lot of us take this rule further than our teachers meant it to go. The result is sentences with “William and I” in object position (although not in Kate’s case).

How many of us have taken this rule further? That’s what YouGov have looked at, asking people which of the following is grammatically correct:

• It really has made the world of difference to William and me
• It really has made the world of difference to William and I

Just 22% of adults in Britain said “to William and me” was right; a majority, 56%, said “to William and I” was right. 13% approved of either.

“To William and I” was comfortably ahead among men and women; in Scotland, Wales and every region of England; in every age group; among the working class and the middle class; among supporters of the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties; the question even united a majority of leave and remain voters.

And now the dreadful dilemma is upon us. The traditional pedants would insist that “to William and I” is a hypercorrection, a mistaken over-application of a rule. But they are the same people who tell us that following the rules correctly is the way to avoid being judged for our bad grammar – and in this case, what they call good grammar is more likely to be judged as bad.

There is no maximally pedantic way of speaking and writing which will save us from the perception of error. We risk being judged no matter what rules we follow. So, what can we do?

Linguists who take a descriptive approach to language might have a neat answer to this. Given that both versions are commonly used, both are thereby grammatically standard and you can use either. Correctness is determined by the facts of usage.

This may be tempting, but there are also the facts of attitudes. If we want to come across well to others, then attitudes to usage are part of the social terrain that we must navigate. And we can’t please everyone. You might decide that one group of people’s attitudes are simply wrong, but that doesn’t make them disappear.

There’s no simple way out. You have to pick one option, and whichever you pick, there will be people who judge you.

At this point I will recite the customary plea that wouldn’t life be easier if we all got a bit less annoyed about minor differences in the English of our fellow citizens, and yes in fact life absolutely would be easier if we did that, except perhaps for those who make a living urging us to get more annoyed about those minor differences. If our concern is how well we come across, then maybe better advice is to not go around offering unwanted criticism of people’s grammar. Maybe we should take particular care to not do that to someone who’s just been telling us how her chemo has been going.

Here’s a scrap of hope, though: the poll may not be as big a deal as it seems.

If we are asked explicitly about rules of grammar, as YouGov asked, we will suddenly sit bolt upright, possessed by the vengeful spirits of our former English teachers, turning our pedantry up as high as it can go. We will feel obliged to declare that X is right and Y is wrong. But in a normal situation – reading a magazine or having a conversation or whatever – we are much more likely to pass over either X or Y contentedly without even thinking about questions of right or wrong.

The risk of being judged is real. But it’s lower than it looks.