The Passive Voice

By -
The Language Log has done a great job of noting a lot of the nonsense that goes on in "critiques" of use of the passive voice. (The critics often cannot even correctly identify the passive voice!) One of the frequent complaints of critics is that the passive voice is a way of "hiding responsibility" for the action performed in the sentence in question. But John McWhorter, in the course I mentioned in the post below, points out that the passive voice can actually be used to highlight agency. He gives the following example:

"This message was brought to you by the makers of Tide."

The "makers of Tide" did not phrase this in this fashion to hide the fact that they sponsored this show! By placing the agent in this unusual position, they were drawing attention to themselves, not hiding.

The passive voice is a perfectly fine grammatical construct. Just don't overuse it.

Comments

  1. Jonathan Finegold Catalán9:55 PM

    That's what I enjoyed the most when I wrote for Wikipedia -- they'd teach me grammar by heavily criticizing my writing. Unfortunately, since then I've forgotten most of what I should have learned.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more