Sound & Sense: An Open Thread

The fourth of our recurring opportunities — currently, every other Thursday — to learn what your fellow subscribers are reading and writing and thinking about

Simon Vouet, Musa Erato, c. 1630 (Wikimedia Commons)

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I’ve never been a prescriptivist about language usage, insisting that English has a comprehensive set of grammatical rules that can never be violated. Or, at least, I’ve never prescribed my prescriptivism for others. Somewhere in college, I trained myself not to split infinitives in speech, for reasons now obscure, but I don’t wince when others do.

And yet, at the same time, I fix sentences with split infinitives when editing the work of others — my job for the majority of my professional life. And I think the reason is a sense of what we used to call “house style”: The journal that employs me has a rule against nearly all split infinitives, and it is the ethics of the profession to edit them out.

Many of these rule were arbitrary and some just bizarre. Most American publications have a rule against starting a sentence with the conjunctive “however,” which seems to derive from a verbal idiosyncrasy of William Strunk Jr., whose E.B. White-edited Elements of Style was once the present of choice for uncles whose nieces and nephews were heading off to college.

Still, most of the time, I’m a descriptivist about English. The language meanders where it will, and the best we can do is appreciatively or wryly observe its changes. Or, rather, I am a descriptivist prescriptivist. I don’t much care whether the plural of syllabus is syllabi or syllabuses. I just want those who use the word to decide which form they want — so, as an editor, I can fix it to consistency. It’s their job to choose, and my job to apply.

Once, while editing the poetry for a monthly journal, I received a poem from the wonderful New England formalist poet and Latinist, Deborah Warren. And she was quite cross with me when I changed the word “plough” in her poem to “plow.” My defense was that we were an American magazine, and in America, the word is spelled “plow.” It was the house style and demanded by a copy-editor’s profession, which is descriptivist to the extent it doesn’t much care about the historical argument, but prescriptivist to the extent that it wants the matter settled by those whose job it is to know (in the case of “plow,” by Noah Webster).

Those whose job it is to know — there’s an ethics here, perceived by Alasdair MacIntyre, involving the commitment of a profession. A path between relativistic ethics and absolutist ethics. Doesn’t make it right, of course. But words need some guiderails, and it’s the job of editors to insist on them.

Ah, well. What are you thinking about? Reading? Writing? This is an open-mic thread, available to both free and paid subscribers, where we learn what’s in your mind these days. In particular, we’d love to know what poems you’d like Sally Thomas and me to post in our daily poetry offerings — remembering that they must be out of copyright (currently pre-1929) or be from a living poet willing to give permission.

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