10 ‘grammar rules’ it’s ok to break (sometimes) (II)
By Steven Pinker Like, as, such asLong ago, in the Mad Men era when cigarettes were advertised on radio and television, every brand had a slogan. “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.” “Lucky Strike means fine tobacco.” “Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country.” And most infamously, “Winston tastes good, like […]
By Steven Pinker
Like, as, such as
Long ago, in the Mad Men era when cigarettes were advertised on radio and television, every brand had a slogan. “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.” “Lucky Strike means fine tobacco.” “Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country.” And most infamously, “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should.”
The infamy did not come from the fact that the company was using a catchy jingle to get people addicted to carcinogens. It came from the fact that the jingle allegedly contained a grammatical error. “Like” is a preposition, said the accusers, and may take only a noun phrase object, as in “crazy like a fox” or “like a bat out of hell”. It is not a conjunction and so may not be followed by a clause. The New Yorker sneered at the error, Ogden Nash wrote a poem about it, Walter Cronkite refused to say it on the air, and style guide icons Strunk and White declared it illiterate. The slogan, they all agreed, should have been “Winston tastes good, as a cigarette should.” The advertising agency and the tobacco company were delighted by the unpaid publicity and were only too happy to confess to the error in the coda, “What do you want, good grammar or good taste?”
Like many usage controversies, the brouhaha over “like a cigarette should” is a product of grammatical ineptitude and historical ignorance. The ad’s use of “like” with a clause was not a recent corruption; the combination has been in use for 600 years. It has been used in literary works by dozens of great writers (including William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, HG Wells and William Faulkner) and has flown beneath the radar of the purists themselves, who have inadvertently used it in their own style guides. This does not show that purists are only human and sometimes make errors; it shows that the alleged error is not an error. The RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company was confessing to the wrong crime; its slogan was perfectly grammatical. Writers are free to use either “like” or “as”, mindful only that “as” is a bit more formal, and that the Winston-tastes-good controversy became such a bloody shirt in the grammar wars that readers may mistakenly think the writer has made an error.
A related superstition, ruthlessly enforced by many copy editors, is that “like” may not be used to introduce examples, as in “Many technical terms have become familiar to laypeople, like ‘cloning’ and ‘DNA’.” They would correct it to “such as ‘cloning’ and ‘DNA’”. According to this guideline, “like” may be used only for resemblance to an exemplar, as in “I’ll find someone like you” and “Poems are made by fools like me.” Few writers consistently follow this bogus rule. “Such as” is more formal than “like”, but both are legitimate.
Preposition at the end of a sentence
Winston Churchill did not, as legend has it, reply to an editor who had corrected his prose with “This is pedantry up with which I will not put.” Nor is that witticism (originally from a 1942 Wall Street Journal article) a particularly good example of the construction that linguists call “preposition stranding”, as in “Who did you talk to?” or “That’s the bridge I walked across.” The particle “up” is an intransitive preposition and does not require an object, so even the most pedantic of pedants would have no objection to a phrase like “This is pedantry with which I will not put up.”
Though the attribution and the example are spurious, the mockery is appropriate. The prohibition against clause-final prepositions is considered a superstition even by the language mavens, and it persists only among know-it-alls who have never opened a dictionary or style manual to check. There is nothing, repeat nothing, wrong with “Who are you looking at?” or “The better to see you with” or “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” or “It’s you she’s thinking of”. The pseudo-rule was invented by John Dryden based on a silly analogy with Latin (where the equivalent to a preposition is attached to the noun and cannot be separated from it) in an effort to show that Ben Jonson was an inferior poet. As the linguist Mark Liberman remarked, “It’s a shame that Jonson had been dead for 35 years at the time, since he would otherwise have challenged Dryden to a duel, and saved subsequent generations a lot of grief.”
The alternative to stranding a preposition at the end of a clause is allowing it to accompany a “wh” word to the front, a rule that the linguist JR (Haj) Ross dubbed pied-piping, because it reminded him of the way that the Pied Piper lured the rats out of the village of Hamelin. The standard question rule in English converts “You are seeing what?” into “What are you seeing?” and hence “You are looking at what?” into “What are you looking at?” The pied-piping rule allows the “what” to pull the “at” with it to the front of the sentence, yielding “At what are you looking?” and similar clauses, such as “The better with which to see you,” or “It’s you of whom she’s thinking.”
How should you choose? Most obviously, pied-piping sounds better in a formal style. Abraham Lincoln knew what he was doing at the graves of the fallen soldiers at Gettysburg when he vowed “increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion”, rather than “increased devotion to that cause which they gave the last full measure of devotion for”. The problem with stranding a preposition is that it can end the sentence with a word that is too lightweight to serve as its focal point, making the sentence sound like “the last sputter of an engine going dead”. By the same principle, a preposition should be stranded at the end of a sentence when it contributes a crucial bit of information, as in “music to read by”, “something to guard against”, or when it pins down the meaning of an idiom, as in “It’s nothing to sneeze at” or “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about”.
Predicative nominative
When you come home after a day at the office, do you call out, “Hi, honey, it’s I”? If you do, you are the victim of a schoolteacher rule that insists that a pronoun serving as the complement of “be” must be in nominative case (I, he, she, we, they) rather than accusative case (me, him, her, us, them). According to this rule, Psalms (120:5), Isaiah (6:5), Jeremiah (4:31), and Ophelia should have cried out, “Woe is I,” and the cartoon possum Pogo should have reworded his famous declaration as “We have met the enemy, and he is we.”
The rule is a product of the usual three confusions: English with Latin, informal style with incorrect grammar and syntax with semantics. Accusative predicates have been used for centuries by many respected writers (including Samuel Pepys, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf), and the choice between “It is he” and “It is him” is strictly one of formal versus informal style.