Customer Reviews

Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log

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I write for most of the day, every day. That's my chosen occupation, to write content for web pages. I was therefore quite interested in Far from the Madding Gerund, which is a collection of blog entries from the Language Log. I normally don't have much free time to read blogs, and the book form seemed to be a nice way to read snippets during breakfast or other non-computer times.

I found a lot of really interesting information pieces in here. There's discussion about Dan Brown and the DaVinci Code, and the many flaws in Dan's writing style. There is commentary about various political leaders. There are nit-picky (to most of us, at least) arguments about how often X word is used instead of Y word. It's interesting that as "proof" they turn to Google to see which is used most often. Since a large number of web pages are created by illiterate young teenagers, I don't think I'd ever use a random Google search as a sign of anything :) Heck, if we went by Google, then the most important issues facing the world today involve Paris Hilton and a baby born in Africa.

But the real problem I had with the book, while it's a really cool concept, is that it is pretty much a verbatim dump of the blog. I'm talking straight to the book, with sentences such as:

"Follow-ups in our pages and elsewhere (here, here, here, here, here) discussed many cases of developments of a different kind ..."

The five "heres" are all in light grey text, meaning a little sidebar gives a one-line summary of that thread's topic and then gives you a (I kid you not) 63 character long URL that you have to type in to see what the reference is. On a blog, this works fine - you hit the link and go read the reference. In a book?? You completely miss half the story. This doesn't just happen once a chapter. It happens over 10 times on some pages, and is happening pretty much on EVERY page. I found it a little amusing at first - but as I worked my way through the book, it got more and more frustrating. If you are interested by the topic, the whole point is that you want to understand what they're saying - and you are unable to because they don't provide the content. They just say "Go read it elsewhere, manually, later on".

I'm not saying the book is uninteresting - I read it through in an afternoon (when I suppose I should have been writing web content). But that's part of the problem. The topics of the book ARE interesting - but you are constantly being bombarded with messages about "and the rest of the story can be found online here ..."

I suppose you could pose the argument that, had they included the related posts, the book would have been much larger. On the other hand, the chapters are completely unrelated to each other. The Dan Brown content has nothing at all to do with the Monkeys Typing Shakespeare content. Or maybe they are related (grin). In any case, they could easily have made a book on ONE of the topics presented, and presented it fully, so you got all of the meaning. They could have had an editing team summarize the related posts, if they didn't feel like including them fully, so that you received all the meaning while you went. However, as it stands, it feels like giant chunks of the book are missing. It really does make you wonder, just why am I reading this in book form? If I was going to do this, maybe I should have just gone online and read it there, where it is in fact a linked blog, instead of putting up with this disjointedness.

When I finished the last page, I wondered what I had really learned here. Maybe it was that blogs are meant by their nature to be read online, with links intact. Maybe it was that the book was really just a way to make quick money without having to write any new content at all - they hit "print screen", sent it to a publisher, and were done. Maybe they didn't have time to actually edit and work on "a book". I also had to wonder if the book was Funded By Google, given the huge amount of credence given to what is, in essence, just a search engine. As much as I love Google and use it daily, I would never consider it to be a serious research tool without applying some rather serious filters to the sites being used.

In any case, maybe I'll actually go visit the Language Log website someday, where I can read the content for free, with links intact. But since that would seem to be a multi hour time sink, maybe it's better that I keep my addiction level low while I still have free will.

When I found out that I was going to get the opportunity to review Far From the Madding Gerund, I was a bit intimidated. I had a mental image of two men who would pick my review apart, pointing out every misplaced modifier. And God forbid I would ever end a sentence with a preposition. So I dug out my ancient copy of Strunk and White's Elements of Style and set it next to my computer, ready to refer to as I wrote.

Then I began reading the book. On page 5, Strunk and White are called "perennially clueless." And it gets better from there. I gleefully tossed my ancient copy back into the hole from which I had pulled it, and settled in for an enjoyable read. I also promptly subscribed the the RSS feed for The Language Log -- which only makes sense. The book is a collection of posts from the blog. Not just random posts, though, but a "best of" compilation that fans of The Language Log will enjoy. It will quickly get newcomers hooked on the blog.

But the target audience is not language pedants -- those people who never split their infinitives, or dangle their participles. Those people who know that a preposition is not the sort of thing with which to end a sentence. In fact, Liberman and Pullum will raise the ire of liguistic prescriptivists. They split infinitives. They break rules. And they make people think and laugh at the same time, which is important.

Just a few examples of targets that get skewered in the book (and on the blog):

* Those who mock George W. Bush for his "Bushisms": there is, in fact, a standing invitation for author Jacob Weisenberg to join Liberman for dinner (Liberman's treat) at the restaurant of Weisenberg's choice, provided that the conversation can be taped and studied for "howlers" that would later be published in a book of "Weisbergisms."
* Best-selling author Dan Brown: Brown is taken to task for his repetitive plotlines ("[t]he simple fact is that if you are ever mentioned on page 1 of a Dan Brown novel you will be mentioned with an anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier ... and you will have died a painful and horrible death by page 2, along with several curiously ill-chosen cliches and mangled idioms" is just one example of their criticism of Brown's writing). It's refreshing to read someone who doesn't like Dan Brown because he's not a good writer. Popularity does not mean quality, and Liberman and Pullum are quick to point out the syntactic flaws in Brown's works. And yes, they've read them all.

The point of much of the book is that rules, including grammatical ones, are meant to be guidelines. They aren't engraved in stone, and often need to be broken so that someone can make their point.

A point needs to be made about the whole "blog as book" idea. One of the things that has always worried me about blogs turning into books is how the use of hyperlinks would be handled. Footnotes are one obvious solution, but constantly looking down at the bottom of the page to check what the footnote is about can get tedious, especially when there are a lot of notes. Liberman and Pullum avoid this by using light gray lettering (rather than black) for links, and placing the corresponding URLs in the outside margin of the page, next to the referral. This makes checking the link content a lot easier, and if it's not a standard procedure for blogs-turned-books, it should be.

Far From the Madding Gerund is a fun book, and an interesting look into linguistics. The study of language doesn't have to be boring - it can even be fun.

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

Language Log is an on-line magazine founded by Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum, specifically dealing with the right and wrong way to use language (the polite kind mostly.) More than two million people have ventured through the virtual doors of the site since launch time, and this book is made up of excerpts from the site, neatly categorized into printed chapters for those who can't retain everything they read and need some back-up to tame that madding gerund.

I'm not a blog person, preferring the feel of a crisp piece of paper between my fingers (and the computer is a trifle uncomfortable and hard to balance for reading in bed), but be warned that the information here is taken directly from the internet, and it contains links which unfortunately can't yet be accessed from printed pages.

Written by the aforementioned duo, who happen to be Professors of Linguistics, this book aims to share observations about everyday topics like the quality of Dan Brown's writing style, Bushisms, popular malapropisms (say that six times fast - I dare you), grammar and the rules of writing fiction, but targets the more general audience of the linguistically-challenged.

For a preview of the content of the book you can always check the website, but if you've a yen for the printed word, this is a handy reference tool.


Amanda Richards, June 24, 2006

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.

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.

Culled from their marvelous Language Log, Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullman have put together a volume of choice morsels for those of us who love the complexities of the English language, and they do it with wit and a sharp eye and ear for the way other linguists, grammarians, authors, and "the man on the street" are using (and misusing) the Queen's, and the President's English. Yes, there is an amusing post by Liberman about President Bush's "linguistic miscues," and how "you can make any public figure sound like a boob," with enough scrutiny.

Like the universe, English is ever expanding, ever changing, with some words slowly dying, and according to Liberman, the yearly new word count could be as high as 5000, with some claiming it is as high as 20,000 a year! Going where few linguists have gone before, Liberman and Geoffrey cover a lot of territory, give a few jabs to Strunk and White's "Elements of Style" (a slender book I've never been able to get through), and do it all with a fresh and sassy attitude that will appeal to many. Among the dying words is "Whom," in Pullman's hilarious "The coming death of WHOM: photo evidence," on pg. 26, although he uses "whom" on pg. 62, in another humorous post, "Monkeys saying things again-NOT," proving there are no hard and fast rules in English.

As someone who is almost entirely self-educated (Mom taught me my ABC's, the rest was left up to me), I appreciate books on language, and simply adore them when they are brainy and bright, and keep me laughing. "Far From the Madding Gerund" is one of those gems.

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 not split infinitives" is without merit, they explain why.

I had several different reactions to the information in this book. Early on, I was disheartened to find Pullum allowing for the fact that the singular they (one of my own biggest pet peeves) is becoming standard, but it just goes to show you how separated both authors are from prescriptivists who oppose any and all changes in the English language. Once they began arguing that split infinitives are perfectly OK, though, they had my full attention and maintained it all the way through the book's hilarious ending (several Pullum essays devoted to what he regards as the stylistic mess of mega-author Dan Brown's writing - starting with the very first sentence of The Da Vinci Code).

Far From the Madding Gerund isn't a particularly easy read, however. While the authors are in many ways writing for the non-linguistic crowd, their essays are littered with linguistic terms I never knew or forgot the meanings of long ago (preterites, past and present subjunctives, etc.). On the other hand, most of the material they address comes from pop culture in the form of comments from government leaders, articles in newspapers, and well-known books of literature. They also make heavy use of Google searches as an unscientific yet demonstrative means of gauging the prevalent usage of certain words or phrases (proving that certain ones are far from the brink of extinction, no matter what others might say).

Before closing, I think it would behoove me to say that Liberman and Pullum are not grammar policemen; in fact, they have no use whatsoever for those who yell Gotcha and make a big deal out of every single grammatical mistake they come across (unless, of course, it's Dan Brown's). They will, however, pounce upon anyone they find corrupting young grammatical minds with completely wrong notions about the proper use of English. Through it all, their overriding goal is simply to show the public that linguistics is not only important, it can also be a lot of fun.

"Approximately three people still haven't read Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code: Mark Liberman, David Lupher, and reportedly at least one other person (as yet unidentified)." ~ gkp

As a reviewer tentatively observing "Far from the Madding Gerund" with contemplative speculation, I found myself drawn into a world of intriguing intellectual insight and charming introspection.

"Far From the Madding Gerund" is a collection of online articles written by professional linguists who are as willing to challenge the system in irreverent musings as they are to freely slap experts "upside the head" and indulge in sardonic treatise of famous novelists. When discussing "execrable expository prose" Geoffrey K. Pullum says:

"I'm so confident that such sentences are ungrammatical that I would be prepared to lecture it to a hostile audience."

While reading this delicious book, I will admit to laughing with delight on more than one occasion. Geoffrey K. Pullum has a wicked streak of playful rabble-rousing in his writing that inspires more than a few giggles. He does seem to have a penchant for railing against Strunk and White because he claims they fail to follow their own advice.

The authors "take on" language myths, snow jobs and "which" hunts with flair as they pull problems from the literary bog for further contemplation. Mark Liberman provides astute observations while Geoffrey K. Pullum truly wields his words with comedic flair.

Does common usage online make a word correct?
What does mind reading have to do with cell phones?
Will reading "The Elements of Style" enhance or harm your writing?
What are the sixteen first rules of fiction?

Since this is an online publication now presented in a very readable edition, there are numerous URLs for further explanation and intellectual intoxication. If you are wandering on one page, you may find yourself skipping ahead to a page of posts pertinent to the comments at hand to then research topics of high intrigue.

"Kiss whom goodbye." ~ pg. 27

With what elation I read this comment! For seriously this has been a confusing issue against which I have rebelled consistently and I much prefer the use of "who" in all cases. Additional enjoyment was encountered while reading through the discussion of using a trademark as a noun and the discussion of the confusing usage of "that" and "which." The complexities of "what" and "which" also gave insight into formality vs. practicality.

Commonsense often rules over grammatical correctness and confirms your original suspicion that you were right all that time you were tiptoeing around in your writing, fearful of your own dissenting opinion.

~The Rebecca Review, reads dictionaries for fun, but
currently guilty of not having read or reviewed
The Da Vinci Code! :) Darn, they found me!