December 15, 2025
The recent death of the great Jane Goodall brought me back to an old post about the use of who-pronouns with non-human animals, as in ‘swallows who flew past her window’, as opposed to ‘swallows that/which flew past her window’.
Goodall’s first scientific paper was returned to her with who replaced by which, and he or she replaced by it, in reference to chimpanzees. Goodall promptly reinstated her choice of pronouns, presumably seeing them as markers of the animals’ intrinsic value, and their substitution as an unwarranted moral demotion.1
Since then I’ve made note of other examples of animals who that I’ve read in books.2 This post compiles them in one place, where they form a kind of homemade menagerie of zoolinguistic solidarity. It extends, as we have seen, to swallows:
She watched the sudden, fast shadows of swallows who flew past her window in fleeting pairs, subtracting light from her room, and marvelled how living things could suspend themselves in mid-air. (Claire Keegan, ‘Men and Women’, in Antarctica)
And, from the same writer, sheep:
I sit by the window and keep an eye on the sheep who stare, bewildered, from the car.
Ducks:
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13 Comments | 
animals, birds, books, grammar, language, nature, usage, writing | Tagged: anaphora, animals, birds, books, grammar, Jane Goodall, language, literature, nature, pronouns, relative pronouns, usage, which, who, writing | 
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Posted by Stan Carey
May 6, 2025
On many vexed matters of English usage, people can be divided into the following groups:
1. those who neither know nor care
2. those who do not know, but care very much
3. those who know and condemn
4. those who know and approve
5. those who know and distinguish.
Thus with wry wit did H. W. Fowler address the existence of split infinitives in his landmark usage dictionary of 1926. He concluded that the first group ‘are the vast majority, and are a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes’.
Dangling catkins in the rural west of Ireland
Even more people are happily unaware of dangling or misplaced modifiers. I mean this kind of thing: Cycling downhill, a truck almost hit me. The writer was cycling, but the grammar implies, absurdly, that the truck was. Or: Born in India, Diya’s education took her to Europe. Diya was born in India, but the line says her education was.
As a copy-editor I’m in category 5: I routinely edit danglers to accord with the norms of formal written English. But they’re not always a flagrant error, and they’ve occurred in English since at least Chaucer’s day.
Let’s take a closer look.
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13 Comments | editing, grammar, language, pragmatics, syntax, usage, writing | Tagged: ambiguity, dangling modifiers, descriptivism, editing, English usage, grammar, language, misplaced modifiers, pragmatics, prescriptivism, reading, syntax, usage, writing, writing style | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
January 22, 2025
Myths have serious sticking power. This is true not just of the myths of antiquity but also of more modern and niche types, like the myths of English usage. It seems that nothing will ever stop people peeving pointlessly about split infinitives, double negatives, passive voice, singular they, &c.
One thing that makes usage myths sticky, and spready, is that when we’ve gone to the trouble of learning something, we’re often reluctant to unlearn it, even in the face of contradictory truth – especially when that knowledge gives us a pleasurable feeling of authority or expertise. Renouncing it means accepting that we’ve wasted our time, so instead we double down.
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11 Comments | books, grammar, humour, language, phrases, usage | Tagged: books, E.B. White, grammar, humour, language, neologisms, peevology, phrases, prescriptivism, The Elements of Style, usage, William Strunk Jr | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
January 9, 2024
Lorrie Moore’s 2009 novel A Gate at the Stairs offers among its attractions several passages and exchanges of lexical and linguistic interest. This post looks at some of them.
The book’s narrator, Tassie, is a Midwestern farm girl now in college. She’s also employed as a nanny by Sarah, a restaurateur. One of their early conversations has commentary on the semantic inflation of awesome:
“You have a mother?” I said. “I mean, your mother’s alive?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Awesome,” I said, in that peculiar way, I knew, our generation had of finding that everything either “sucked” or was “awesome.” We used awesome the way the British used brilliant: for anything at all. Perhaps, as with the British, it was a kind of antidepressant: inflated rhetoric to keep the sorry truth at bay.
The word’s vexed usage gets another mention later, when Sarah gives Tassie a sweet delicacy to taste:
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2 Comments | books, language, literature, words, writing | Tagged: A Gate at the Stairs, American literature, awesome, books, dialect, grammar, grammatical tense, language, laughter, literature, Lorrie Moore, prepositions, quasi, usage, words, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
August 15, 2023
The verb greenlight, or green-light, means to give something approval or permission to proceed: you give it the green light, metaphorically. What past-tense form of the verb would you use in these lines?
HBO just [greenlight] Season 2.
Marting said it [greenlight] less conventional works.
The lines are from recent articles in the New York Times. The first uses greenlit; the second, greenlighted. So whatever you chose you probably concurred once, but only once, with the NYT.
If you’re wondering which is correct, the short answer is both. The long answer – well, you’re in the right place for that.
In this post I’ll look at the usage patterns of greenlit and greenlighted, based on corpus data (graphs! lots of graphs!). I’ll describe the verb’s origins and analyze it with reference to irregular verbs generally and -light compounds specifically. Finally, I’ll discuss which to choose, with an eye on future trends.
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18 Comments | editing, etymology, grammar, language, linguistics, morphology, spelling, usage, words, writing | Tagged: corpus linguistics, editing, etymology, film, gaslight, grammar, greenlight, irregular verbs, jargon, language, linguistics, morphology, slang, spelling, usage, Vanity Fair, verbs, words, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
February 27, 2023
Sometimes what I read tells me what to write about. Other times the hints come from what I watch. This time it’s both. First I read a line in Richard Pryor’s autobiography Pryor Convictions with this mighty stack of intensifying negatives:
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47 Comments | dialect, grammar, language, language history, linguistics, pragmatics, speech, syntax, usage, writing | Tagged: 000000, 1, 2, ambiguity, descriptivism, dialect, double negatives, ffffff, grammar, language, language history, language myths, linguistics, misnegation, multiple negation, negation, negative concord, Otto Jespersen, politics of language, pragmatics, prescriptivism, Richard Pryor, sociolinguistics, speech, standardized English, syntax, usage, usage myths, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
December 19, 2022
One of my pet linguistic topics is Irish English dialect, which I explored at length in an essay a while back. Here are 10 words, usages, and grammatical features characteristic of English as it’s used in Ireland.
Links point to previous blog posts with more discussion on usage, origins, and so on.
1. Grand is a popular adjective/interjection in Ireland to express modest satisfaction, approval, wellbeing, or simply acknowledgement. It’s handy for understatement and not overdoing one’s enthusiasm, but in certain situations it can be a biteen (see below) ambiguous.
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27 Comments | dialect, Hiberno-English, Ireland, language, phrases, words | Tagged: dialect, grammar, Hiberno-English, idioms, Ireland, Irish, Irish English, Irish English grammar, Irish language, Irish slang, language, linguistics, semantics, slang, usage, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
Sentence first 