Far from the Madding Gerund: And Other Dispatches from Language Log

I don't like to read blogs off the net, it seems that you are just getting into the meat of things and you've reached the end of the entry, or, often the entry simply isn't worth taking the time to read it. On the other hand, taking a collection of the best entries from a blog and converting them into a book makes for very enjoyable reading. The Language Log consists of comments on the English language. Here is a collection of the best entries posted by a wide range of interested people. Surprisingly they are not too dogmatic in their approach. English is a vibrant, working language being expanded by words that describe new things and by the addition of foreign words as more and more people speak English from around the world. Indeed it's becoming the lingua franca of the world (in spite of what the French think). The entries range from the somewhat confusing to the very funny. Perhaps the best are where a consumate master of literature deliberately uses a grammatical error to make a point. I don't see, however, any defense of the southern word ya'll. We need something for the second person plural, maybe I'll go make an entry.

I've always been sort of a grammar freak (which is not to say I don't make my share of mistakes), but I now know I'm not quite ready to play with the big boys. Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K. Pullum are definitely two of the big boys, and they do indeed like to play. That's part of the reason they started an online magazine called Language Log and began filling it with mini-essays, observations, and occasional rants on all sorts of grammatical topics. Their overriding goal was to reintroduce the general public to linguistics and the proper use of the English language. Even now, it sounds like a crazy dream - after all, I certainly don't remember the last time a break room conversation at work turned into a debate over linguistics - but I think it is safe to say the site has been wildly successful. It's not all that hard to see why. Liberman and Pullum are not your prototypical linguistics professors, and they don't write boring, pedantic, stodgy old posts about arcane topics. Instead, their writing is witty, pithy, sometimes surprisingly irreverent, and - well - fun. Most of their posts are borne of things they hear on the news, read in a book, come across on a web page, etc. Scholars by day - working on articles that take months to appear in journals only those in the profession will likely ever read - these fellows, as they readily admit, have a blast working on The Language Log, largely because the site affords them the luxury of instant publication, grants them the means to correspond with a growing readership of laymen genuinely interested in the proper use of language, and allows them to express ideas they could never truly address in a peer-reviewed journal. Far From the Madding Gerund is the natural outgrowth of their online mission, bringing together a wide range of Language Log posts. It's obvious how much these men love and care about linguistics, especially now that it is becoming a lost art in the world of academia. They want to communicate their own feelings for the subject matter to others and thereby help right some of the wrongs being perpetrated in the grammatical world of today. They are not knights defending a 19th-century treasure horde of golden rules, either. I was quite surprised by the flexibility and adaptability they show toward modern-day usage. The language changes constantly, and they are right there in the middle of it, warning us of the dangers and obstacles that lurk around each corner and shining the light of truth on those who would mislead us. They absolutely excoriate Strunk and White, long-recognized authority figures in the field, take copy editors to task for mangling perfectly acceptable grammar into highfaluting nonsense, and bemoan those who are propagating grammatical myths to many a student. Some of what they say goes against what I was taught, but the authors go to great lengths to defend their positions - not only do they tell us that, to take one example, the commandment "thou shalt

Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K. Pullum could be accused of making the best of an already satisfactory situation in publishing this book that reiterates their ongoing blog on linguistics. But for this reader, having never visited their blog (until now), this book is a treasure trove of quips and oops and pooh bahs and evidences of the strangely twisted manner in which we communicate. Written in a casual style that makes the faux pas revelations more cogent, the authors share embarrassingly poor writing from the media, from authors, from those in control of the country (as though the mentality of the US might somehow be reflected in the malapropisms of George W. ...Yikes!), and yet reading this blogline of information never seems vitriolic. Criticism is one of the most substantial ways to create change and hopefully this book and blogline will focus many minds on the misuse of the English language, perhaps effecting some much needed corrections. FAR FROM THE MADDING GERUND (didn't you always wonder why Thomas Hardy used that word in the title of his great novel 'Far from the Madding Crowd'?) is a book to pleasure the mind - and humor - and a fine resource for perusing before writing or speaking to a group of wise souls. So maybe it is a print form of a blogline, but for those of us who tire of wading through the computer for reading, it is a complete (?compleat?) pleasure! Grady Harp, June 06

Doing a proper review, or even justice to their weblog, is really beyond my powers, but this book seems to capture quite perfectly their mixture of whimsy, skepticism, accessible scholarship, and pure good-natured zeal for their subject. If you have been reading them, then you will find these little essays as good as you remembered, if not better, and you'll wonder how you forgot about some; if you have not been reading Language Log, then their book should convince you to start. Either way, reading it will make you better and happier. (Disclaimer: I got an unsolicited review copy of this book this week, which didn't help my productivity any. Also, when I gave a talk at Penn on April Fool's Day last year, Mark was kind enough to let me crash in the hospitality suite at One Language Log Plaza.)

It's hard to imagine any lover of words who wouldn't be susceptible to this wonderful book. Flip it open at random and forget about whatever you were doing before... The first chapter is titled "Random monkeys & mendacious pontificating old windbags", enough right there to justify the purchase. It's all from the Language Log blog, to which I've pointed repeatedly in my own blog (http://oook.info/mt/), but there's definitely value-added in the printed form, not least in the index and the many interesting callouts sprinkled here and there. It's simply ideal bathroom (or bedtime) reading. My advice: Run right out and buy multiple copies, and place them with those most in need.