Someone please tell me where the **** the English language has gone

Clarifying note (added later): Isn't substance the important thing, not grammar? In general, yes. I'm no grammarian and can never remember certain rules, if I ever knew them. I just have a few pet peeves.    

Grazing through LGM I come upon this post, whose first link leads me to this page from a Politico article, where I see this:

Boot continued to provide POLITICO with email correspondence between he [sic] and Rosen and he [sic] and Roberts throughout the day on Friday.

You don't have to know the rules of English grammar -- "between" is a preposition and therefore takes the object "him," not the noun "he" -- to know that "between he and Rosen" is wrong. It sounds wrong. Someone who has never cracked an English grammar text and whose native language is English should be able to write reasonably correct English if he or she has a reasonably good ear. 

So, all together now: "Between he and Rosen" is wrong. "Between he and I" is also wrong. "Between you and I" is also wrong. Thank you. Jesus ******* *****.

Added later: Technically, it should be "the first link in which," not "whose first link." But some rules can be broken. Other rules should never be broken. The way to tell the difference is to listen. 

New (to me) word of the day

Decoct = to extract the essence of something by boiling; boil down; concentrate.

Ran across it in James Wood's piece in the Jan. 23 New Yorker on the novelist Michel Houellebecq:

The power of Houellebecq's critique has less to do with its persuasiveness as social theory than with the spectacle it offers of the author's bared wounds. His relentless prosecution of his parental abandonment and his wild historicizing of what is only a personal fate give him license to decoct an uneasy mixture of Rousseau and Schopenhauer.

Grammar grumpiness

Things have come to a pretty pass when not even the BBC is capable of matching a singular subject with a singular verb:

South Africans are going to vote in local elections after one of the most bitterly fought campaigns in years.

The delivery of basic services like water, housing and jobs have [sic!] been among the issues dominating campaigning.

Sorry. This is one of my pet peeves.

Buzzwords (1): "Reification"

reify [from the Latin res (thing) + -fy]: to treat (an abstraction) as substantially existing, or as a concrete material object.

As the dictionary suggests, to reify is to thing-ify: to treat what is not a thing as a thing. (This is the sense the word carries in Marx's definition of commodity fetishism: reification of persons, anthropomorphizing of things.) In academic writing, however, "reify" and "reification" have become vague, almost catch-all terms of disapproval, used to indicate disagreement with whatever the author doesn't like.

So many examples of this usage are available that to single out one is unfair, but there is one example that's fresh in my mind. Recently I was glancing through an article that draws on Marxian work in international relations "to recast the socio-historical conditions of emergence and diffusion of the modern national form" (F.G. Dufour, "Social-property Regimes and the Uneven and Combined Development of Nationalist Practices," European Journal of International Relations 13:4 [2007], pp.583-604).

This article says there's a need to "move beyond the reification of a collective domestic identity" (p.588). I'm pulling this phrase out of context, because to supply the context would be rather tedious. But it is illustrative, I think, of the basic procedure: take an abstraction, assert that it's being reified, and you have a criticism that's often difficult if not impossible to refute, because it usually boils down to "I don't like the way scholar X is using this concept."

Howl time!!

I just heard a radio announcer say: "Gas prices in the D.C. area are a dollar cheaper [sic] than they were...."

I wish someone would inform this person that prices are not cheaper. Prices are lower. (Goods or services are cheaper.) Why does this minor mistake annoy me? Mostly, I think, because it represents a small instance of a larger phenomenon: presumably educated, intelligent people making basic English mistakes on the airwaves every day. This is not about informality or slang or colloquialisms, which I have nothing against. It's about locutions that are obviously, patently wrong. I know that languages evolve and all that, and I know no one is perfect, but it's getting to the point where formation of a Committee for the Defense of English would not be an irrational response.

If you don't like this post or think there are errors in it, please howl in the comments.

Hoarding and panicking

Watching coverage of the financial crisis some hours ago, I heard one or two commentators say that people are "hoarding cash." The verb "to hoard" has a somewhat old-fashioned ring to my ears, conjuring up images of misers in Victorian novels mooning over their gold and silver. Presumably what it means in this context is that people are withdrawing cash from their banks and storing it (or secreting it) in their homes. If this is indeed occurring, it suggests that "panic" (from the Greek panikos: of sudden fear, as supposedly inspired by the god Pan [to quote my dictionary]) may be the right word to apply to the current situation. (Alternatively, "people are hoarding cash" could just be a dramatic way of saying "people are not spending as freely as they ordinarily do.")

On a somewhat although not totally unrelated note, the PBS news program 'Worldfocus' made its debut in this area today. The idea -- a half-hour program drawing on the reporting of various news organizations -- is a sound one, though I thought the first show's execution and content were uneven. It did include a good report on the impact of rising food prices on the poor (and the not-so-poor) in Kenya.

VP debate: painful

I predicted to myself that watching and listening to this would be painful, and it was. The format made it less of a real debate than the previous (Obama-McCain) one. Partly for this reason and partly because they are vice-presidential candidates, Biden and Palin ended up talking past one another much of the time (as others have pointed out). A bit of the post-debate commentary on PBS was interesting, especially Ellen Fitzpatrick's remarks on how the politics of gender have changed in the last 20-25 years (I'm too tired to summarize them).

Substantively, Biden had a few good moments, but the intellectual level of this debate was lower than the McCain-Obama encounter, and the use of English was definitely worse. A complete English sentence -- subject, verb, object, clauses in the right places -- was a rather rare commodity in this debate. Palin at times sounds to me like a non-native speaker, or more specifically someone who has not grown up with the language. Admittedly, this may have something to do with regional differences: English is spoken differently in different parts of the country. Moreover, this reaction is not to meant to be snobbish or picky. I have no objection to her colloquialisms, and I don't really care deeply that she doesn't how to use the verb "to attribute." I just find it difficult to listen to her and, frankly, almost impossible to watch her (though I forced myself to do so a few times). Her efforts to channel Ronald Reagan will no doubt have greater appeal to some others, however, than they do to me.

Webster's to the rescue

A spokesman for the Obama campaign has denounced the cover of the current New Yorker, showing Barack Obama dressed in the garb of an observant Muslim and his wife carrying an assault rifle, and the two of them doing a "fist bump" in the Oval Office, as "tasteless and offensive."

From the BBC story: "Obama spokesman Bill Burton dismissed the cartoon, saying: 'The New Yorker may think [sic]... that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create, but most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.'"

Contra Mr. Burton, the New Yorker does not think it is satire; it is objectively a satire, which a standard dictionary (Webster's New World College Dictionary, 3rd edition) defines as (among other things) "the use of ridicule, sarcasm, irony, etc. to expose, attack, or deride vices, follies, etc." Whether it is tasteless or requires too much interpretation to be altogether effective can be debated, but to suggest that it is not a satire, that the New Yorker merely "thinks" it's a satire, is absurd. It is clearly sarcastic and therefore it is "the use of...sarcasm to expose...follies." In other words, it is satire.

P.s. Michael Eric Dyson (Georgetown Univ.) and Eric Bates (Rolling Stone) discussed the cartoon with Gwen Ifill on the PBS NewsHour tonight. Its website will have the transcript.