“The yellow one is the SUN!!”
Passive voice was certainly available to and used by Shakespeare and earlier writers.
“of his bones are coral made” (The Tempest, II.ii)–of course, much of this song depends on inversion, but that is certainly a passive construction.
“Not where he eats but where he is eaten.” (Hamlet, IV.iii)–for comic effect.
Earlier in that act, more ordinary use of passive voice:
He’s loved of the distracted multitude,
Who like not in their judgment, but their eyes;
And where tis so, the offender’s scourge is weigh’d,
But never the offence. To bear all smooth and even,
This sudden sending him away must seem
Deliberate pause: diseases desperate grown
By desperate appliance are relieved,
Or not at all.
(Hamlet, IV.iii)
And earlier, from Chaucer:
Love wol nat been constreyned by maistrye.
Whan maistrie comth, the God of Love anon
Beteth his wynges, and farewel, he is gon!
Love is a thyng as any spirit free.
Wommen, of kynde, desiren libertee,
And nat to been constreyned as a thral. . . .
(The Franklin’s Tale)
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I did not know it’s etymology, so thanks.
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“The specialtie of rule hath beene neglected.”
“Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York”
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more”
(This is exactly the kind of ahistorical nonsense that justifiably drives poor folks like Pullum up the wall)
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It’s referred to in Jurgen, by James Branch Cabell, I think, where the Master Philologist proves that Jurgen is merely a solar myth.
But isn’t that itself an opaque and pretentious piece of writing? Or have I missed something and this is supposed to be an example of how not to write? The “; and conversely” coming when the reader will already have forgotten what the sentence was about, and the second example of massive convolution, are the sort of thing that give simultaneous translators nightmares. Like having to translate Bulgarian Marxist-Leninist dialectic into French.
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Umberto Eco has commented on the difference between Europe and the English speaking world on this very issue.
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Poop! You are quite right, and I take off my hat to you. I had been told that ages ago, and never thought to check. Ye Gods, I hate being a vector for false information.
Thanks
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Been there.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading Language Log it’s that most of this stuff goes a lot further back then you’d assume. Like maybe there’s this slightly ungrammatical sounding slang phrase that seems like it was probably invented by kids in California circa AD 1982, but then it turns out there are examples of similar constructions in the writings of Ælfric of Eynsham circa AD 982 or something.
If it helps, I think the progressive passive specifically is more recent (e.g., “A house is being built on 4th street”), having come into fashion within just the last two or three hundred years, and more or less killing off an earlier construction called the ‘passival’ (which would be e.g., “A house is building…”, and does indeed sound a bit odd to my ears).
That’s only a small part of what people label ‘passive’ though, and I still wouldn’t bet on not being able to find examples from 1600 or whatever.
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“then” and “than” are two different words.
I have heard of him. I read Language Log for many years:
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/
I don’t think it is terribly obscure. I ran across it following other blogs like this one.
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Having spent a sleepless night, I now remember being taught this by a passionate English teacher. I don’t feel so bad about exorcising a 45-year old fact, given to me by a respected expert at the time. We shall none of us be free of error. But the important thing is to try.
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Maybe it is an age thing. My mother felt in her bones that splitting an infinitive was uncouth, yet it has never troubled me. I don’t have trouble with this. Yes, it is dated, and we can disagree with some of their examples as English has moved on. But it is over twice as old as 'The Elements of Style" and I feel it is an easier read. Does ‘and conversely’ jar more than ‘and vice-versa’, which they might have used?
I think my sister told me about ‘jargon’. She studied that sort of thing at University.
It was an invention of the Latinists, because they pretended that English had a grammar like Latin and the “to” was part of the verb. But it isn’t. It’s a construct designed to distinguish between the infinitive usage and the present tense, as otherwise you couldn’t distinguish them. The truth is really that English has dropped the infinitive in favour of the main form of the present tense, and it feels the need of a signifier even though it is not really necessary (for instance in Russian the conditional, where we would use an infinitive in English, is bi + the past tense. It’s just a convention.)
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Yes. My mother accepted that “to boldly go” could put the stress on the adverb, and there was no harm in it. But it was still fingernails down the blackboard for her. Like reading “might of” instead of “might have” does to me. That doesn’t really matter - the new ‘alternative’ form is shorter, and it is all just symbols for meanings when you come down to it. But, icky!
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[Mind blown.]
I… never knew.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Now, after a morning of research, I’m learning there is a whole class of words like this, known as ‘homophones’. It’s amazing.
What’s more, it looks like I might be the first person ever to mistype one when I meant the other! Linguistic history being made right here, folks. Boy, is there egg on my face though.
Anyway, in other news, I just bought a motorcycle from Craigslist. You all should come over later and check out my sweat new ride.
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Since you’re comparing to the French, it’s worth pointing out that they have a very specific answer to that question. 
Your language use is wrong if, in the society in which you’re using it, the target audience considers it so. What goal are you trying to achieve with your language? Do your word and grammatical choices allow you to achieve that goal?
Sorry, it’s a pet peeve of mine. Every time I stumble upon “then” instead of “than” or (more rarely) the other way around, it makes me trip in my reading, forcing me to pause briefly to restore the meaning of the sentence. The fact that they are homophones (in every place English is spoken?) is irrelevant, written text doesn’t produce sounds.
As for style guides, I used to derive some guilty pleasure from Quiller-Couch’s observations:
It’s weird – I think I used to notice homophone errors a lot more, but lately, not so much. And I find I make a lot more it’s/its/than/then/etc. errors than (ahem) I think I used to.
While it’s possible it’s just a result of a silent stroke or some kind of super early onset dementia, I think it also corresponded to shifting to a more fluid/easier-going personal writing process. Somehow I think maybe that meant using a more verbal/auditory portion of by brain, and the homophones started to blur together.
Things like sweat/sweet misspellings still leap out of the page like a slap in the face to me though, so I know what you mean.
(And while my ear doesn’t hear a difference between then/than, it does seem to depend on one’s dialect. People also make fun of how I pronounce ‘bagel’ even though I say it the exact same way they do, so YMMV.)
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One problem is that the English speaking world is not an homogeneous target audience.
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