Seebach: Brown's body of work lies a-smouldering on the Web

Published June 3, 2006 at midnight

Text size

More Opinion Columns & Blogs

The halls at Language Log Plaza are alive with the musical sounds of linguists celebrating the object of their research - the vagaries and mysteries of human communication.

But they have a lot more fun with it on the blog Language Log (http://itre.cis. upenn.edu/~myl/ languagelog/) than academics are permitted in stuffier forums for scholarly publication. Two contributors to LL, Mark Liberman of the University of Pennsylvania and Geoffrey Pullum of the University of California at Santa Cruz, have assembled some of the best posts into a book, Far from the Madding Gerund.

If you liked Eats, Shoots and Leaves, this book is much funnier, and it has one great advantage over Lynne Truss' intolerant diatribe: It's written by people who actually know what they're talking about.

Linguistics is a field beset by people who don't know what they're talking about (or don't even know that linguistics is a scholarly field) but write about language anyway. Many journalists, alas, fall into this class. (I used to be a grad student in linguistics; I'm not expert, but I'm not hopeless.) "I tell you honestly," Pullum writes, "I wish English had a word meaning 'lazy journalists eagerly repeating hogwash about natural language.' " His target was a 60 Minutes program about a hunter-gatherer tribe who escaped the tsunami that "wanders on into a whole slew of traveler's tales" about all the words their language doesn't have.

As if the lack of specific words told you anything about a society.

You've seen claims about the number of words for snow found in Eskimo languages. Pullum also lamented the lack of a single word for "this kind of reusable customizable easily-recognized twisted variant of a familiar but nonliterary quoted or misquoted saying. (I say 'or misquoted' because there is actually no original source for 'The Eskimos have N words for snow,' people only think it once appeared in some reputable source.)"

Someone soon proposed "snowclone," which was officially adopted at LL Plaza.

Have you ever wondered whether Winston Churchill really said, "This is the sort of arrrant nonsense up with which I shall not put?"

Maybe, sorta, something like that, according to a guest post by Benjamin Zimmer.

And what's grammatically wrong about ending a sentence with a preposition, anyway? Nothing.

The book includes Pullum's 2004 posts about Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code, timely again as the movie is in theaters. He focused on Brown's odd habit of opening novels with phrases such as "Renowned curator Jacques Saunière . . ." which wouldn't sound odd in a newspaper but does in fiction.

Pullum titled his post, "Renowned author Dan Brown staggered through his formulaic opening sentence," which you will agree is itself a memorable and no doubt unique sentence in English.

Fortunately, the post will not be lost to posterity. Noted columnist Mark Steyn recycled large parts of it, for an article he wrote for the Canadian magazine Maclean's May 15 issue.

"It seems clear to me," Liberman wrote in a May 15 post (/archives/003147), "that in Steyn's 550-word discussion of Dan Brown's style, he took the terminology, most of the basic ideas, all of his three examples (in order), a couple of turns of phrase, and his punch line from one of Geoff Pullum's Language Log posts."

Steyn contributed only one word to his borrowed "punch line"; he substituted "novelist" for "renowned author."

He did mention Pullum, but only in a cursory and entirely inadequate fashion, giving him credit for the obscure linguistics term "anarthrous," without acknowledging other similarities to what Pullum had written. That's like thanking your great-aunt Matilda for the $20 she sent you for your birthday without mentioning that she also paid your tuition at Stanford.

Pullum e-mailed to ask whether a more appropriate acknowledgment was possible (at the time he had seen only the online version of Steyn's article) and as Liberman recounts in a May 17 post (/archives/003155), an assistant answered that it was not, as the printed article had already appeared.

The assistant went on to say, "Mark had never heard of your Web site till last week and we will be able to demonstrate in court that nobody in our office clicked on two of your three allegedly plagiarized pieces until we received your e-mail. The points you claim Mark stole from you were made by others, including Mark and Mark's colleagues in London, long before we ever clicked on your Web site, as we would again prove in court."

She ended her communication, "It is up to you whether you wish to escalate this any further. . . . But, given the intemperate nature of your e-mails, I think it would be better if you spoke to your lawyer and we will refer him to ours."

Court? Who said anything about court? "As Geoff made very clear," Liberman writes, "he doesn't see this as a legal issue but as a moral one, where the appropriate and courageous response would be a forthright apology."

An apology seems very much in order, but failing that, let us - as Liberman said - refer the case to the court of public opinion.

Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the News. She can be reached by telephone at (303) 892-2519 or by e-mail at seebach@RockyMountainNews.com.

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News