Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

The World’s 2nd Greatest Editor Strikes Again

I’m really in no position to criticise anybody’s grammar (and certainly not spelling). I’m forced to rely on an erratic cat for proofreading and even that arrangement is still an improvement on my raw and unadulterated verbiage. Still, it’s Vox Day and it is time for a cheap laugh at his expense. Here is an excerpt he just put on his blog from his 2014 story The Wardog’s Coin.

“It was hard to count exactly how many of the enemy light infantry there was, since the cruel whips of the orcs that drove them mercilessly onward wasn’t able to keep them marching in no sort of recognizable formation.”

I’ll let others sort out what should be a was and what should be a were, I feel my domain is strictly worrying about the double negatives. The whips are trying to make them march in NO formation but failing and so they ARE walking in formation?

OK, people in glass grammar houses shouldn’t throw stones and all that. I’ll concede his spellink is better than mine.

camestrosfelapton

35 responses to “The World’s 2nd Greatest Editor Strikes Again”

    • P.S Sigh. Sadly not.

      But I can’t resist editing:

      “It was hard to count exactly how many of the enemy light infantry there WERE(1), since the cruel whips of the orcs that drove them mercilessly onward WEREN’T(2) able to keep them marching in ANY(3) sort of recognizable formation.”

      1. failure of subject/verb agreement — if the subject is plural, the verb should also be plural. This gets a little bit trickier here, since “infantry” can be considered a collective noun; however, in cases where the individual members are being emphasized (“how many of”), the verb should still be plural. see CMoS 5.131
      2. another failure of subject/verb agreement — “whips” plural, therefore “weren’t” plural. see CMoS 5.131
      3. double negative — “were not” plus “no sort” means they were actually marching in formation.

      see Merriam-Webster:
      double negative noun
      : a now nonstandard syntactic construction containing two negatives and having a negative meaning

      I should charge for this.

      😉

      And that’s just one sentence. Can you IMAGINE a whole book of that?

      Liked by 2 people

  4. Sort of like trying to read a whole book where the pronoun “she” is used regardless of gender? Or where the pronoun “they” is used to indicate intermediate gender?

    A writer plays with grammar at his/her peril. Only certain kinds of modifications are easy for readers to adjust to.

    Liked by 1 person

      • The problem is that you never get used to them. (Or, at least, I don’t.) It’s not like with a dialect, where your brain shifts gears and then it’s all okay. With any of the alternatives to “he/she” that I’ve seen, the result is awful.

        There’s nothing wrong with the desire to find a way to get around the inherent sexism of English (which wants you to use “he” for the indeterminate case). But the solution has to actually work. Nothing I’ve seen so far works. It just spoils the story.

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        • I’ve always found ‘they’ to be natural but that may be a dialect thing. ‘Tha’ (for ‘you’ )was still hanging around among older people with strong dialects when I grew up (North of England) and the Scouse accent near-by had the plural ‘youse’ (not unique to Scouse of course). Never mind the weird use of ‘himself’ and ‘herself’ from Irish relatives…

          Liked by 1 person

      • Laura: I am still amazed by how much using alternates to ‘he’ bothered people.

        Me as well. It was a bit disconcerting at first, and it took me about 10 pages to adjust, and then my brain was like, “okay, this is how it’s done now”, and it never bothered me again. I think that the various reactions to that book are probably an indicator of how flexible one’s thinking is (or is not).

        Liked by 1 person

      • @Camestros There’s a big difference between “they” used to mean “he or she but I don’t know which” (nonspecific “they”) and using “they” to mean “neither male nor female” (nonbinary “they”). The nonspecific “they” is quite easy to get used to, since it functions similarly to a lot of other “underspecified” words in English (and, indeed, in almost all languages). “There was someone outside. They were trying to get into the basement.” In this case, “they” is just a compact form of “he or she.” A similar phenomenon happens with singular and plural “you.” Eventually we figure it out from context or else it ends up not mattering.

        But when you use “she” to mean “he,” that’s a bridge too far. Likewise when you use “they” for a specific person known to the narrator who is meant to be neither male nor female.

        Nor do brand new pronouns like xe, xim, and xis work. In linguistic terms, the set of pronouns in English is closed, and in normal conversation, one never tries to add to it. (As opposed to nouns and verbs, which are open and which we’re very free with.) That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to add to the set–just that it’s very difficult.

        I have a theory that a problem with words like xe and xim is that they’re irregular–mimicking the pattern of existing pronouns is a mistake. What might work would be to mint a new word (e.g. “kai”) and then make it regular. So you’d say “Kai gave it to me; I gave it to kai; this is kai’s; Kai told it to me kaiself.” I’m not 100% sure that would work, but it reads much more smoothly to me. I’d be willing to read something lengthy that tried to make it work, anyway.

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        • @greg —

          “But when you use “she” to mean “he,” that’s a bridge too far. ”

          Why?

          After all, biologically, the default state is generally female (without the influence of testosterone, an embryo in most families will follow a female developmental path — though let’s not get into arguing about fish, reptiles, and amphibians, which can be screwy). Why not the default pronoun?

          Liked by 1 person

      • I would hypothesize that the trouble is that “she” is extremely specific. Unlike “he,” the language never allows for she to be indefinite in person, number, or gender. Maybe you could get used to it over a period of years, but not in the span of a book or two. It would be an interesting experiment to see how many people actually can adjust to it. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that women can do it but most men can’t. But I also wouldn’t be surprised to learn that alomst no one can do it; that people claiming to adjust to it are really just enduring it. (You can test for that by having people listen to the text read aloud and monitoring their EEG. Things that cause the brain to do a double-take stand out.)

        As for the other question, reproductive biology has no bearing on linguistics. Ontology doesn’t recapitulate phonology. 🙂

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        • @Greg —

          “As for the other question, reproductive biology has no bearing on linguistics. Ontology doesn’t recapitulate phonology. ”

          But it does in some ways. For example, we say things like “he felt it deep in his breast” and so on.

          I’m gonna go organize a rally — “Adopt the feminine pronoun default! Ontology equals vocabulary! Nature is language!”

          😉

          Liked by 1 person

      • Grin. That’s something that expresses human experience though. The fact that mammalian embryos start off female is something we know intellectually, but it’s not something we experience on a day-to-day basis.

        I still favor taking the trouble to say “he or she” rather than “they” simply because I don’t believe you can include people by leaving them out. If you stick with “they,” soon enough it will end up meaning “he.” That is, most people will visualize a man.

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    • @Camestros. We do that too here in America, but you can only do it for something that hasn’t really got a gender. If you try to apply it to a person or an animal that’s male, people will reject the sentence. (Linguists would say “native speakers don’t licence that.”)

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    • The difference is that in Acilary justice the “she” had a specific purpose (i.e. showing the confusion of the narrator about genders) and it served the purpose.
      In the case Camestros shown us here, its a mistake. MIstakes happen, the question is how often.

      Liked by 1 person

      • I thought the use of “she” in the Ancillary books was subtle genius. Completely natural, but knowing one “she” was male was a gentle nudge that you didn’t know anyone else’s gender and it really didn’t matter in this society. I imagine being female might have made this easier. I actually thought it was refreshing that the default was she. I also like it when people use “she” for hypothetical examples.

        I also find singular “they” pretty natural. I prefer that over the cumbersome “he or she” which leaves out those who consider themselves neither. It can momentarily trip me up when used for a specific person, but it’s similar to singular you. (Living in the Southern US for a while made me appreciate the usefulness of “ya’ll.”)

        I was actually surprised that I adjusted fairly quickly to the use of “ze” and “zir” for a third gender in Runtime (novella by S.B. Divya).

        Unless I’m already reasonably familiar with a particular dialect that can distract me for far longer because I’m struggling to parse out meaning. Even then, the writer must have a real ear for it to do it well.

        As peer said, all of these are deliberate, consistent, and grammatically acceptable. Unlike the mess up top there.

        Liked by 1 person

      • “She” in Ancillary was about a 10 page adjustment for me, too. It did several clever things at once and eventually you just went along swept up in the story. It really mattered not at all what gender anyone was, except for that one case on the extremely gendered and hetero tea planet, where it was spelled out why the two families had a falling-out. Frankly I didn’t see what all the fuss was about; the book reads the same if you take everyone as female, or if you randomly assign genders.

        “They” (singular or hypothetical) hasn’t ever been confusing to me either. I can deal with invented pronouns as long as the author uses them clearly and consistently. Ian McDonald had a third-gender pronoun “yt” for people who had become medically neuter-gender.

        In the case given here, it’s singular-plural confusion, as well as double negatives. That’s not a stylistic choice or gimmick, just bad writing mechanics.

        Liked by 1 person

        • With Ancillary, I very briefly tried to guess genders. Then decided that was silly and pictured everyone as sort of androgynous.

          In Runtime, I thought the “ze” pronoun for the third gender worked well to gracefully key the reader into the situation without “as you know, Bob” explanations.

          Liked by 1 person

  5. Does anyone want to join me in guessing how many of Beale’s “authors” are “Beale under a different pseudonym”?

    More than he wants to admit, I’m starting to think.

    Liked by 1 person

      • Yeah, going through “Thrown off Scales” more or less convinced me that “Corrosion” is pure Beale. (To be fair, I tend to skim. I have to.) Same awkward ungainly prose, same bizarre leaps of logic, same unsympathetic characters who imagine they’re sympathetic. He has a style and it’s horribly recognizable.

        Liked by 1 person

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