Author Topic: Four English grammar mavens help resolve a disputed usage  (Read 7097 times)

Joe Carillo

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Four English grammar mavens help resolve a disputed usage
« on: November 13, 2009, 11:15:55 PM »
As stated in the boxed introduction for this section, Readings in Language normally features links to interesting, instructive, or thought-provoking readings about the English language. This week, however, it departs from the usual fare by focusing on a grammar dispute that arose over a certain grammar usage of mine when I introduced last week’s reading of American mathematics professor John Allen Paulos’s provocative article in ABCNews, “True Tabloid Headlines—or Are They?" For what I believe is its high instructive value about language and conflict resolution, I am sharing with Forum members the process by which that grammar dispute was ultimately resolved.

The grammar dispute came about when I entitled my introduction to Paulos’ article as follows:

Quote
Inoculating ourselves against all those journalistic nonsense
 
How many times have we been taken in by seemingly literally true newspaper headlines and stories that turned out to be seriously misleading if not outright false? These travesties of language and logic are not the sole province of tabloids but of supposedly mainstream media as well, and John Allen Paulos, mathematics professor at Temple University in Philadelphia and author of the best-sellers Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, trots out for dispassionate analysis some of the usual suspects: “Thousands to Die After Swine Flu Vaccination,” “Math Formula Links Your Social Security Number to Your Age,” “Otherworldly Properties of Metal Found at Roswell,” and “Roswell UFOs Foretold in Bible.”

Paulos, who also wrote Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up, makes this prescription in ABCNews against all these journalistic tomfoolery masquerading as truth: “Don’t forget to inoculate yourself against the flu and, as much as possible, against nonsense as well.”
After I posted this passage, Max Sims, a Forum member in Australia, objected to my usage of the phrase “all those journalistic nonsense.” At first, he didn’t specifically state what his objection to it was, but I sensed that it was over my use of the plural article “those” for “nonsense.” I therefore justified that usage by pointing out that I was using “nonsense” in its plural sense, particularly because my summary of the story in this case involved four examples of such nonsense.

Max then posted the following rejoinder:

Quote
Joe, Joe, Joe.....

In all my born days, I have never encountered anyone who uses “nonsense” as a plural noun. “Nonsense,” like “malarkey,” “rubbish,” “garbage,” “stuff” and the like, may well have multiple elements and therefore be considered grammatically (if pedantically) plural, but their colloquial use is as all-encompassing singular nouns—names for all that which has gone before. And all those jazz!

I replied to Max as follows:

Quote
It does look like most people feel more comfortable attaching a noun right after the phrase “those nonsense,” but this practice doesn’t disprove the fact that “those nonsense” can be correctly used as a stand-alone noun phrase. Indeed, if anyone can convince me that the writers of the following passages are mistaken about their use of “those nonsense” as a stand-alone noun phrase, then I’ll concede that I was also mistaken in using it. (All italicizations mine)   

(1)
In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity
By José Faur

“Sanchez painted to the atmosphere of religious persecution and violence plaguing Europe, and those who ‘scrupulous about God and religion bravely spilled blood.’ Alluding to the ideological and religious conflicts of his days, he observed:

‘And in proving those nonsense, what kind of argument do they use? What shouts? What claims? What tortures? If false proofs are insufficient, then they resort to fraudulent truths, contemptuous remarks, rumours, invectives, and libels.’”

(2)
SkinX, A framework of a skin plug-in package
By Neil Yao

“There is a lot to talk about hooks and message processing, but let’s just skip those nonsense and give the solution directly. We define different classes for each different kind of window. For example, we define a CMacButton class to wrap the window procedure, which will give a button window the look & feel of Mac OS.”

(3)
NFS 2010, if/when released, would you buy without hesitation

“I’m just angry that EA is earning money because of their brand and not the games. They bring it big stars like Maggie, Josie Maran and Brooke Burke. For what? EA’s always hyping things up whenever a new game is released; teasers here and there, a new celebrity is introduced, gaming launch. They are wasting their time for all those nonsense when they could have taken their time to build one perfect game.”

I could cite perhaps half a dozen more of such usage of “those nonsense,” but I hope that these three examples would suffice to prove my point.

To these examples, Max Sims retorted:

Quote
Nope! You’ll have to do better than cite three dodgy examples. I don’t know who wrote (poorly) the third example, but the first two were by writers with somewhat non-Anglo-Saxon names, which suggest a lack of familiarity with colloquial English. In any event, anybody who uses oxymorons like “fraudulent truths” is immediately suspect.

Do you object to "all that jazz" when, colloquially, "jazz" encompasses a multiplicity of things?

To which I replied:
Quote
   
No, I have absolutely no objection to the expression “all that jazz”; I think it’s a finely wrought phrase. As to the validity of “those nonsense” as a stand-alone noun phrase, however, I stand my ground on the usage. It would be great, though, if we can get some third-party viewpoint about this usage—regardless of whether that third party has a somewhat non-Anglo-Saxon name or not.

In the sense of “similar but unspecified things,” I would prefer “all that jazz,” as when John Updike wrote “…that wind, and the waves, and all that jazz” (citation from Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary). In that sense “all that jazz” has indeed acquired strong idiomatic status.

On the other hand, I won’t be averse to using “all those jazz” in the sense of “jazz” in its literal sense, as American music developed especially from ragtime and blues and their various variations, as in “All those jazz they are playing at the club—excessively fast ragtime, overly depressing blues, and some poorly syncopated rhythm that I can’t even describe—are getting on my nerves.” In that sentence, “all those jazz” refers to the three types of jazz enumerated in the parenthetical.

At this point, another Forum member, Madgirl09, joined the discussion with the point that this usage was indeed one that had not been clearly resolved in grammar textbooks.

These are excerpts from Madgirl09’s posting:

Quote
Some non-countable nouns are really confusing and troublesome, attracting attention of various researchers in linguistics. Why English adopted these perennial headaches could be the secret of this language to remain interesting and ever growing, causing controversies...

Collective-noncountable nouns must always be in singular form?

Unfortunately, this case is not covered in the book I consider the grammar-bible. Although authored by a non-Anglo-Saxon, surname Celce-Murcia, this book co-written by an English native speaker/writer is considered a grammar authority by many educators worldwide. There’s no example given on “those” or “these” as determiner of non-countable nouns like “jazz” or “nonsense.” I think we have to suggest to researchers to investigate this topic further.

With this impasse, I thought of getting the opinion of two noted American English-grammar writers, Richard Lederer or Ben Yagoda, about the usage. I eventually decided to ask five noted English-grammar writers in all, and four of them graciously agreed to give their opinion.

The four are as follows (in alphabetical order): 

Ellie Grossman – “The Grammar Guru” columnist, The Buffalo News, and author of The Grammatically Correct Handbook: A Lively and Unorthodox Review of Common English, for the Linguistically Challenged

Richard Lederer – “Looking at Language” syndicated newspaper columnist in the United States and author of Miracle of Language

Jack Lynch – Associate professor of English of Rutgers University-Newark and author of The Lexicographer’s Dilemma

Ben Yagoda – Journalism professor at the University of Delaware, freelance journalist for The New York Times and Newsweek, and author of When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It

My question to each of them: Am I mistaken in using “those” in this headline for the passage below?

Inoculating ourselves against all those journalistic nonsense

This question was followed by the same three passages I cited earlier that used the phrase “those nonsense.”

Here are the answers of the four American English-grammar mavens:

Ellie Grossman: Hi, Joe! Actually, it should be “all that journalistic nonsense.” “Nonsense” is singular. Also, I’ve never seen “jazz” used in the plural sense. It, too, is singular, and the phrase should be “all that jazz.” There’s even a song “And All That Jazz.”

Richard Lederer: It’s “all that nonsense.” “Nonsense” is a singular noun that requires a single demonstrative adjective: “that.” 

Jack Lynch: “Nonsense” is what’s called a “mass noun”; it’s always in the singular, like “water” and “stuff.”  (The other possibility is "count nouns," which can be singular or plural, like "chair" and "thing.") Since the noun is always singular, it needs to agree with a singular demonstrative pronoun: “all that journalistic nonsense.”

Ben Yagoda: Hello, Joe! I regret to say I’m with Max on this (and also with your subsequent use of “these journalistic tomfoolery”). As he says, “those” is plural and “nonsense” is a singular collective noun, so they don’t match up. So you would say “this” or “that” instead of “these” or “those.” I guess the thing that really gets me is that you cite internet posts in your “defense.” On the internet, you could find multiple examples of every conceivable grammatical, usage, spelling, or (of course) factual error, right?  Numbers two and three make the same error you do, which merely proves that you are not the only person in the universe who has made this error. Number one (Jose Faur) is interesting because he is doing something else. He is basically saying, “And in proving those beliefs nonsense...” but leaves out the word “beliefs.” Do you see the difference?
-----

With the weight of the combined opinions of these four grammar mavens, I stand corrected and commend Max Sims for his genial tenacity in insisting on the correct usage for the phrase in question.
« Last Edit: November 14, 2009, 02:17:24 AM by Joe Carillo »

Joe Carillo

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Hey, one more English-grammar maven against me!
« Reply #1 on: November 16, 2009, 05:02:34 PM »
Paul Brians, emeritus professor of English at Washington State University-Pullman and author of the book Common Errors in English Usage and of the website that carries the same name, replied this morning to the same question I asked a few days ago about my disputable plural determiner “those” in the headline “all those journalistic nonsense.

Prof. Brian's opinion: “Normally it would be ‘all this journalistic nonsense.’ ‘Nonsense’ can never be treated as plural.”

That makes Australia’s Max Sims plus five American English-grammar mavens against one: Aw, I really must unconditionally surrender and sue for peace regarding that erroneous usage of mine!
« Last Edit: November 16, 2009, 05:15:24 PM by Joe Carillo »