Stroppy Editor

Here are two written versions of the same spoken utterance:

• What are you? Stupid?
• What are you, stupid?

The first version corresponds with the conventions of standard (if informal) written English: a syntactically complete question, with a question mark, and then a follow-up question presented as a sentence fragment (where ‘Are you’ is implicit), again with its own question mark.

But the second version feels more like speech. If you were saying this, you’d probably run the two elements of it together, without much of a pause after ‘you’ and without a rising pitch there to indicate a question; ‘stupid’ would have the rising pitch. The comma and single question mark capture that better.

Because of this mismatch between what’s supposed to be correct and what feels natural, a certain type of headline that often appears on news sites can come across a bit awkwardly. This particular headline structure is used for profile pieces about someone who’s been in the news recently, and it takes the format: ‘Who is [person’s name], [noun phrase describing the person]?’ Note the comma and single question mark. A few examples:

• Who is Hannah Spencer, the new Green Party MP in Gorton & Denton?
• Who is Abigail Spanberger, the Democrat who gave the State of the Union response?
• Who is Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the billionaire Ineos owner running Manchester United?
• Who is Maria Corina Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize winner?

My longtime social media mutual Tom Hamilton (not currently posting, alas) had a running joke in response to these headlines: ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Or ‘Yes, that’s her.’

Only an insufferably tedious fool with delusions of erudition and far too much time on his hands would try to explain such an obvious joke, so here we go.

These headline questions are, according to standard convention, well-formed. The commas are appositive, signalling (in theory) a bit of information about a possibly unfamiliar name to identify the reason why this person has been in the news. Grammatically, the noun phrase is part of the question. And the single question mark at the end is, according to standard convention, correct.

But that’s not how they read. They read as if they’re asking who (for instance) Hannah Denton is, and adding a guess that the answer might be that she’s the new Green Party MP in Gorton & Denton. A headline that’s nominally one question becomes a kind of double-question, one building on the other, joined with a comma splice. Hence the joke answer.

Comma splices have long been tut-tutted upon, but they’re commonly used in informal writing; they seem to be more in line with common patterns of speech, in which phrases and clauses often just follow one another rather than being demarcated into distinct sentences. If you’ve ever transcribed a recording of a conversation, you’ll know that it can be damned tricky to decide where to put the full stops. Punctuation marks are an imperfect way to achieve some of what we do in speech with pitch, emphasis, rhythm and so on.

Speech and writing have very different dynamics, and what we think of as ‘the rules of grammar’ are almost always based on the grammar of writing, which has received much more study and codification over the centuries. Sure, there’s plenty of common ground between speech and writing, but attempts to render conversational language on the page don’t always come out quite right, especially if you rigidly follow the rules of written English.

So, to get the right effect, we may lean away from some of those rules. One example of this is that ‘What are you, stupid?’ beats ‘What are you? Stupid?’ And then that template shapes how we read the ‘Who is…’ headlines.

So, for headline writers, I’d suggest alternative approaches:

• Who is Hannah Spencer? About the new Green Party MP in Gorton & Denton
• New Green Party MP in Gorton & Denton: who is Hannah Spencer?
• Hannah Spencer: who is the new Green Party MP in Gorton & Denton?
• Who is the new Green Party MP in Gorton & Denton Hannah Spencer?

These formats won’t always all deliver the goods; in this case the descriptive phrase is so long that the fourth one is a bit awkward. But the other three seem to work.

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.)