OT: thusly/thus

[Guest guest]

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> OFFTOPIC: *But* because you mentioned that you're in linguistics, I

> have to give you a little beef! " Thusly " is no more a word than

> " seldomly " , or " quicklyly " , for that matter. In his authoritative " A

> Dictionary of Modern American Usage " Garner speaks thus:

>

> " Thus " itself being an adverb, it needs no " -ly " . Although the

nonword

> " thusly " has appeared in otherwise respectable writing, it remains a

> serious lapse.

>

> Now it may be that you're an extreme descriptivist and think that

any

> common crime of grammar or diction ought become law (My former

> roommate was a research assistant in cognitive science at town

> and quite the descriptivist, which runs rampant in that particular

> lab.). Well, Garner also lays out his thoughts on prescriptivism

> versus descriptivism in the introduction to said work, and he makes

a

> good case for the former. It's a great reference that I highly

> recommend if you aren't familiar with it; Lord knows my grammar,

> diction, and style have improved from reading it.

>

> Tom

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well, you nailed it down right there--i'm as hard-nosed a

descriptivist as they come! that's not to say there isn't a (tiny)

place in the world for (careful, scientifically informed)

prescriptivism. but language is what people say!

as far as " thusly " in particular, my feeling for a long time has been

that " thus " is prototypically used with sentential scope (i.e. as a

link between sentences, like " however " , " hence " , " therefore " , etc)

and doesn't function robustly in our current lexicon with smaller

scope (i.e. verb phrases), so using the **very** productive

morpheme " -ly " is a nicer option in these narrow scope situations,

giving it more clarity and naturalness. you'll note that i never

use " thusly " with wide scope. that's my intuition, and people's

intuition is what defines language, which changes constantly and

adapts to any context. if it feels right to me, then it is right!

and if it feels right to most people in a given speech community,

then it's the convention of that speech community. so

many " prescriptions " are actually awkward deviations from the

authentic conventions of the speech community they target. Garner's

calling " thusly " a " non-word " is gaudy haughty prescriptivism at its

most pitiful; there are plenty of completely valid, perfectly well-

formed words that have never even been used before due to the random

gaps of history, and the productivity (meaning " combinatorial freedom

and power " ) and creativity of language is what linguaphiles like

Garner should be celebrating, not denigrating. it reminds me of some

small-minded nonsense i saw a few months back where some guy

said " impactful " wasn't a word! it's kind of like someone saying

social ethics doesn't exist! you want to say something like " uh, so

do other things you might happen to dislike yourself also not *exist*

in your private fantasy version of your physical surroundings, like

polka-dot shirts or acorn flour?? Garner would probably also refuse

to confer his holy title of " word " to such beautiful, elegant, and

potentially useful words as " NT-ly " ( " we did it NT-ly to see if they

would notice the difference and offer unsolicited praise " ), " kefir

(verb) " ( " i'm kefiring my twinkies for a few weeks before that sacred

moment when i drop them into a bubbling cauldron of walnut oil " ),

etc. people like Garner want language to fit their clean little

theories, but language, like most other biological systems

(especially the other ones somehow wedged together in our three-pound

grey mushy things) are wet, dirty, messy, and could never be

delineated in the information-theoretically trivial space of a book,

or even a whole bookshelf. if language was really as simple as neat

little grade-school categories like " adverbs " , then linguists

would've gone out of business a long time ago!

well, enough of this!

mike parker