trying to keep track of my emerging pet peeves:
- the "you ask" pattern
i've noticed a huge increase in this over the past few years; people in tv shows, on youtube, sometimes in movies, will pronounce questions as if they were going to add "..., you ask?" to them. i hate it
- the "name in commas" pattern
this is becoming an absolute epidemic in social media; here are a few examples:
"Occultist, Aleister Crowley, was an accomplished mountain climber."
"Rheinmetall CEO, Armin Papperger, reports that the company will not only deliver ..."
"Iran sentences renowned director, Mohammad Rasoulof, to 8 years in prison and flogging"
the thing that's perhaps noteworthy about both of these is the vehemence with which they will be defended as supposedly correct. my fear, of course, is that they actually are.
khm
in reply to wayfinder • • •I think the ,name, pattern examples you cite are incorrect but would be correct if they'd used an article before the subordinate clause. e.g.
"The occultist, Aleister Crowley, was an accomplished mountain climber."
"Iran sentences a renowned director, Mohammed Rasoulof, to 8 years..."
as it stands the sentence doesn't survive the elision of the subordinate clause and so it sounds wrong. Fixing the sentence to be coherent without the ,name, goes a long way toward rehabilitating this
wayfinder likes this.
wayfinder
in reply to khm • •I think your first counterexample is still wrong, it needs to be an indefinite article, and even then, in the Crowley case, it's stylistically worse than the version without article or commas.
The underlying mechanism is, I think, that the information outside the commas ("Occultist") does not complete the sentence, but the information in the commas does, and is in fact necessary to complete it, so it can't be an appositive, and the commas are wrong.
The version with the definite article makes it sound as if there were just one occultist, or a previously mentioned but unidentified occultist.
The Rasoulof version with the indefinite article is an informationally and grammatically complete sentence, therefore his name is additional information and should be enclosed in commas (the original without the article would be grammatically incomplete without the name, so it's not additional information).
If the order of the information were reversed, the commas would be appropriate: "Mohammed Rasoulof, renowned director," and "Aleister Crowley, occultist,".
khm likes this.
khm
in reply to wayfinder • • •Yeah, I buy this take. I think the Crowley example in my head I was partially forgiving via the assumption it was an excerpt from some larger work, and it wasn't really fair of me to invent that context.
CC: @wayfinder@social.abraum.de
wayfinder likes this.
Kilian Evang
in reply to wayfinder • • •wayfinder
in reply to Kilian Evang • •yeah, basically.
rhetorical questions in particular fall victim to it a lot of the time.
Kilian Evang
in reply to wayfinder • • •Interesting, I'd never noticed the "name in commas" pattern. Using the terminology of Schneider and Zeldes (2021), I would describe it as name descriptors (more specifically: embellishments) treated incorrectly as appositives in orthography.
https://aclanthology.org/2021.udw-1.14.pdf
wayfinder likes this.