They is coming! They is coming! Or is they?

"The case of the singular 'they'" sounds like a Sherlock Holmes story.

After discussions of the same subject on Twitter and CNN, here's some fascinating history of English grammar in The New York Times: On Language - All-Purpose Pronoun.

The authors, subbing for William Safire, are Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman, who once titled a book “Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language.”

"They," they say, was once acceptable as an indefinite singular pronoun.

The surprise: The authors blame an 18th century feminist grammarian for our abandoning a once-acceptable "they" in sentences like, "We don't know the murderer's identity, but they may strike again." The result was years of misleading (and sexist) use of "he" as a synonym for "he or she."

However, O'Conner and Kellerman say it looks like "they" may be on its way back:

"...so many people now use they in the old singular way that dictionaries and usage guides are taking a critical look at the prohibition against it. R. W. Burchfield, editor of The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, has written that it’s only a matter of time before this practice becomes standard English: 'The process now seems irreversible.'
"Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) already finds the singular they acceptable 'even in literary and formal contexts,' but the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) isn’t there yet."

If asked about this by [a student] (students), I probably would tell (them) [her or him] to listen to the sentence and make up (their) [his or her] own mind (minds) about "they" -- or consider rewording everything to avoid jarring people whose ears are tuned to one sound or the other.

Goodbye to some books at Bartleby.com

Alas, some old friends have disappeared from one of my favorite free online reference sites...

The "Welcome to Bartleby.com" page now carries this note:

"Due to financial and usage considerations the reference works licensed from Columbia University Press and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have been removed as of June 2009."

The word "usage" is ironic: My favorite among the missing items is The Columbia Guide to Standard American English by Kenneth G. Wilson, who I knew first as a wise, frank and good-humored professor at the University of Connecticut. He was vice president when I was a reporter covering the campus, and I just noticed that his career at UConn spanned 38 years, a "school spirit" you don't see often. He passed away in 2003.

Oops, that should be "whom I knew," shouldn't it? I'm mortified.

Fortunately, Wilson's 6,500-entry book about the language is still available as a searchable electronic edition for card-holders at subscribing libraries, including our McConnell Library at Radford.

And Bartleby.com continues to publish other mostly copyright-free, but still useful, resources for students, writers and researchers... as long as they can tolerate pop-up ads (with audio) telling them they have won $1,000 giftcard from a discount retailer. (I didn't see a quick place at Bartleby to look up the Latin "caveat emptor" or Tom Waits' more contemporary line, "The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away.")

Included on the long list of titles are the Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, the Cambridge History of English and American Literature (18 vols., 1907-21) and The Oxford Shakespeare. Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford -- not bad pedigrees, if you don't mind lurking in the early twentieth century.

For American English, Bartleby still has Strunk's The Elements of Style (1918, not the later edition expanded by E.B. White) and Mencken's The American Language (1921), and for that other kind it has Fowler's The King's English, up-to-date... as of 1908.

Oh, there's also Gray's Anatomy... the book, that is... 20th ed., 1918, where you can look up pictures of body parts they don't show on the television version.

A risible or banal glut of shibboleths for the feckless?

If you have accidentally double-clicked on any word in an online New York Times story recently, you've seen a question-mark icon indicating that one more click will get you a definition of the word. That's a huge improvement over the previous version of the "feature," which went straight to the dictionary after that second click, interrupting anyone with a twitchy mouse finger, including a journalism professor trying to highlight a well-turned phrase or tightly-edited lead for class discussion.

But here's another bonus: Now that a good many of those mistaken clicks have been eliminated, the Times is able to compile a list of the words people look up... including some word choices that aren't in the news writing textbooks.

• See this fascinating report and discussion of the words that generate the most clicks, thanks to Zachary M. Seward at Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab.

• My favorite copy editor, Pam Robinson, at Words at Work, found most of these links, including a "Wordle" map of the terms and a list of reasonably correct definitions, rescued from the depths of Metafilter's discussion thread.

• Also see this funny list of bad guesses at what the words mean.

• Finally, don't miss the lively discussion at Metafilter, or its great headline: "All the news that's fit to cromulate." (cromulate?)

No word on when the Times might add the click-for-definition feature to the print edition.

Happy Birthday to "the little book"

“The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White just came out in its 50th edition, so The New York Times "Room for Debate Blog" invited fans and skeptics for reactions... asking this question:

"But are its rules the be all and end all of writing? "

Happy Birthday, Strunk and White!

White's original, from before Strunk updated the book, is available for free online: http://www.bartleby.com/141/

Of course not everyone is celebrating, but even if you just want to argue about fine points of grammar, Strunk & White is a great place to start.

For more detailed questions of grammar, I point my students to Ken Wilson's Columbia Guide to Standard American English (close to 500 pages of advice) and the Guide to Grammar & Writing, a site started by Charles Darling in the early days of the Web at what was then Greater Hartford Community College.

(I knew both Ken and Charlie when they were alive, had great respect for both, and was charmed to find them both online.)

For more journalistic style and grammar issues, I suggest Gerald Grow's http://newsroom101.com