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The Passive in English (2011)
- tkgally 4y agoI enjoyed this rant at the end of the article: “[T]he people who criticize the passive the most tend to use it more than the rest of us. George Orwell warns against the passive in his dishonest and rhetorically overblown essay "Politics and the English language". E. B. White does likewise in the obnoxiously ignorant little book by Strunk that he revised and put his name on, The Elements of Style. Both of these authors have a remarkably high frequency of passives in their work: more than 20 percent of their clauses with transitive verbs are cast in the passive, a distinctly higher frequency than you find in most of the prose written by normal people who don't spend their time pontificating hypocritically about the alleged evil of the passive.”
- msla 4y agoIt really points up the difference between linguists, who understand language, and grammarians, who merely peeve about it.
- oh_my_goodness 4y agoAbsolutely. The grammarians George Orwell and E.B. White are infamous for doing nothing with language except complaining about it.
- msla 4y agoGiven what they wrote about language itself, they didn't understand it as well as they thought they did.
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- LudwigNagasena 4y agoThere is a difference between understanding linguistics and understanding language. Many linguists who carry the banner of descriptivism completely fail to do the latter. It’s one thing to understand that wearing dark formal attire to a funeral is just a part of etiquette without intrinsic meaning; it’s a whole nother matter to come to a funeral in a Hawaiian shirt and dismiss all criticism as judgmental.
- defrost 4y agoAnother again to be some kind of bizzarro universalist . . . [1] is a funeral with Hawaiian shirts, [2] is a funeral but likely not as you know one. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8dmj_Gkq2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8dmj_Gkq2s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI6TRTBZUMM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI6TRTBZUMM
- LudwigNagasena 4y agoSorry for the tacit assumption of the audience of HN, but I think that demanding constant awareness of all possible cultural differences is quite inadequate. Anyway, I don’t see how those links disprove my point? Those cultures have different expectations; and my point is that those expectations are valid.
- defrost 4y agoYou're explicitly discussing language and linguistics. Last time I checked in at /r/linguistics that covered more than just your tacit assumption of the world at large. Your point also seems to be both that cultures have expectations and that those that do not meet those expectations will receive criticism (that would be wrong to shrug off as "merely judgemental"). As someone who's travelled widely in the past few decades across a number of cultures I've frequently stood out like the only person in black in a sea of Hawaiian shirts; it's rare that I've been criticised, more common to have been thanked for attending. I find communities that critically judge differences to their expectations to be relatively rare, many communities recognise that others have other behaviours, I myself do find that those communities with a rigid set of expectations that are overly judgemental of those that do not meet those expectations to be worrisome.
- torstenvl 4y ago> more than 20 percent of their clauses with transitive verbs are cast in the passive I smiled. Brilliantly played.
- gjvc 4y agoas always, source required for this statistic
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- pm3003 4y agoI read both these texts and made myself the same reflexion. I'm not as vehement and thought it was a matter of discourse (who they write as and for, where they write from etc). Anyway, I found Politics and the English language uninspiring.
- pjc50 4y agoThe lesson in "Politics and the English language" is about the use of the passive voice to obscure responsibility. The canonical example from current discourse is "officer-involved shooting"; incidents involving police often engage in strange linguistic contortions to avoid assigning responsibility to the obvious person. https://fair.org/home/copspeak-7-ways-journalists-use-police-jargon-to-obscure-the-truth/ https://fair.org/home/copspeak-7-ways-journalists-use-police...
- Veen 4y agoBut it does say "Never use the passive where you can use the active." That advice is harmful to clear and elegant writing. The passive really has nothing to do with politics and police and misleading people. It's a just a structuring device that can be abused in the same way as any aspect of language. It's just as easy to obscure responsibility in the active and attribute responsibility in the passive.
- oh_my_goodness 4y agoI felt the essay was undercut by overcomplicated and repetitive explanation. The passive voice is pretty easily identified.
- msla 4y agoThe essay was undercut by the very point of the essay. I must admit, that's a new one on me.
- oh_my_goodness 4y agoI guess. If the central claim of the essay is that it really genuinely takes three pages to explain what the passive voice is. On the other hand, sections 2 through 7 of the article really just belabor the same point made in section 1. If I just say "wow, 7 sections!" and stop reading, then, sure, it looks like the concept really is very difficult to explain. But when I read all those sections, I don't feel convinced anymore.
- pdonis 4y ago> The passive voice is pretty easily identified. Apparently many people who are supposed to know how, don't. Take a look at the "terrible example" the article links to in section 5: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922
- oh_my_goodness 4y agoYep. The collection of anti-examples is great. I love that part of the article.
- tshaddox 4y agoYeah, I was confused. The author explicitly sets up how complicated and deeply technical the true meaning of passive is, so I was prepared for some juicy learnings, then they just…repeat the simple definition that I learned in school when I was 12.
- bradrn 4y agoAnother great article by Pullum on the English passive: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html. (Better than the submitted one, in my opinion!)
- coliveira 4y agoI aways took the aversion of English speakers against the passive voice as a sign of linguistic incompetence. Instead of teaching students how to write well on the passive and active voices, they prefer to reduce the language to its minimum denominator. The confirmation is in [1]: many journalists and writers don't even know how to define the passive. It is a sad thing to watch. [1] http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html.
- yamtaddle 4y agoThe aversion comes from high school English, where getting students to avoid passive voice results in a quick, cheap improvement for nearly 100% of them. Since most people never get much better at writing than they are in high school, this is a net-good. The bigger lesson, which students who keep working at writing learn, is to be aware that active and passive exist and that it's worth keeping an eye out for sentences that read better with one or the other. But, for whatever reason, high school students use way the fuck too much passive voice, and they use it inappropriately. If the only rule you can get them to internalize is "stop using passive voice", that helps a ton. It stops being a "rule" if you know what you're doing, but they don't. Source: I'm close with a few English teachers, and with some authors.
- nicbou 4y agoThe hate is often justified. I write in English about German bureaucracy for non-native speakers from all over the world. Using active voice in the second person makes instructions far clearer if you have a tenuous grasp of the language. You know exactly who does what. I also find active sentences easier to parse in languages I'm not fluent in.
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- DonHopkins 4y agoI accidentally the passive; is this dangerous?
- tempodox 4y agoPassive voice should not be used in documentation of software.
- tgv 4y agoLet's ignore that your sentence is in the passive voice, your reason is?
- mdp2021 4y ago> Let's ignore that your sentence is (That - and the drastic tone lacking justifications - indicates a probable intention to joke...)
- tempodox 4y agoPassive voice typically does not specify the acting party. Merely stating that something will or should happen, without saying who or what is responsible for making it happen, is incomplete information. Using passive voice for my original comment was tongue-in-cheek.
- tut-urut-utut 4y agoYou should not use passive voice on documentation or software. FTFY
- mrkeen 4y agoIn Latin, deponent verbs are verbs which are written in the passive form but have an active meaning. The textbook I used said there are no deponent verbs in English. But it got me thinking, it must all be relative. Can native speakers of a language even think they have deponent verbs without having another language to compare to? English has "to be born". You could argue that it's passive (the active is "to bear"), but it's not how the word is used. But French has the active "naître" as "to be born". Does that mean French speakers think that English has deponent verbs?
- pm3003 4y agoI speak French and studied Latin. We have so many language oddities (and of course 'exceptions confirm the rule') that we're not so quick to judge English. The case of 'naître' is interesting. Naître is mostly used in the past (I/he was born). The direct translation is also in French its common past form 'Je suis né', which would also be the same as a passive voice, though in the present ('I am born' but the meaning wouldn't make much sense in French). In the end, 'I was born' appears very logical to young French students (typically 9 to 12 years old depending on school and chosen language). It's usually taught at first as idiomatic. Follow-up question for German speakers: I was sometimes asked 'When were you born?' as 'Wann bist du geboren?' which would be a word-for-word translation of the English. Is 'Wann wurdest du geboren?' with the passive auxiliary the only really correct form?
- mrkeen 4y agoAs a French speaker, do you feel that 'manquer' is the wrong way around (subject and object reversed)? Or does English have it backward? It's easy enough to just flip subject and object when translating, but I never gave much thought to how it would work in the passive voice. I tried a few examples with Google Translate, but perhaps it's even more confused than I am: I miss him. => Il me manque. He misses me. => Il me manque. I am missed by him => Il me manque. He is missed by me. => Il me manque.
- mmarq 4y ago
- euroderf 4y agoFWIW, "mistakes were made" is the all-weather all-terrain all-purpose phrase for the avoidance of political responsibility.
- thenoblesunfish 4y agoI think it is good advice to avoid passives, if you have no particular reason to use them, purely because they're usually longer and shorter and equally clear is better, usually. It's also a good idea to be more explicit, usually, and passives allow you to leave out information but don't have to, so I mostly agree with the pushback against the passive for that reason.