I certainly would never write ‘We were delayed due to traffic’, not so much because I’m a hardliner on the subject of ‘due to’ – I’m perfectly happy with David Sedaris’s use of it – but because in that particular example it would surely be better simply to say ‘We were delayed by [the] traffic’.
Of course, I may be being inconsistent here, but I prefer not to analyse too closely! Hasn’t it got something to do with ‘the reason … is because’ being ‘wrong’ and ‘the reason … is that’ being ‘right’?
I’m now seventy, by the way, which I see as giving me extra authority, hoho.
A lot of peeves are about words/phrases being used as “the wrong part of speech”.
This is such a common part of English usage that the peevers just show an ignorance of hows English is actually used.. I am particularly struck that anyone can still complain about nouns being used as verbs.
And I’m 80 and even more willing to accept new usages than I was when I was younger, and fascinated by the way the whole rhythm of English has changed in my lifetime.
Not so much the “due to” as its “hanging” feel in “due to his … I always thought” or conflict between “his” and “I”. Still find such things disturbing in considered prose.
Harry: Better, perhaps – certainly simpler and more direct. But in practice we don’t always need (or get the chance) to hone our syntax to the degree we might like, and due to is a popular and available construction.
Bev: Hear, hear! It’s striking how much hostility there is towards conversion, given how productive a process it is. If English didn’t rely on it so much it wouldn’t be nearly so robust a language. In an old Sentence first post about linguistic doom-mongering, I speculated on why people use language “as a hook on which to hang their worries about an uncertain future”: I think one reason language change disturbs people is because they see in it a reflection of genuinely disturbing changes in society. More power to you for seeing past that and finding language change unthreatening and intrinsically interesting.
Ed: That’s fair enough. If the construction jars or is potentially ambiguous, I would prefer to reword. But I think we often pass over such usages without noticing them.
Oh Ed, that ambiguity argument is hopeless. English is a profoundly ambiguous language. Small example: three word noun phrases are almost always ambiguous: compare [pink [fire extinguisher]] and [[electrical fire] extinguisher]. But there could be a pink fire or an electrical extinguisher.
It’s at its feeblest in justifying genitive apostrophes.
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I certainly would never write ‘We were delayed due to traffic’, not so much because I’m a hardliner on the subject of ‘due to’ – I’m perfectly happy with David Sedaris’s use of it – but because in that particular example it would surely be better simply to say ‘We were delayed by [the] traffic’.
Of course, I may be being inconsistent here, but I prefer not to analyse too closely! Hasn’t it got something to do with ‘the reason … is because’ being ‘wrong’ and ‘the reason … is that’ being ‘right’?
I’m now seventy, by the way, which I see as giving me extra authority, hoho.
A lot of peeves are about words/phrases being used as “the wrong part of speech”.
This is such a common part of English usage that the peevers just show an ignorance of hows English is actually used.. I am particularly struck that anyone can still complain about nouns being used as verbs.
And I’m 80 and even more willing to accept new usages than I was when I was younger, and fascinated by the way the whole rhythm of English has changed in my lifetime.
Not so much the “due to” as its “hanging” feel in “due to his … I always thought” or conflict between “his” and “I”. Still find such things disturbing in considered prose.
Harry: Better, perhaps – certainly simpler and more direct. But in practice we don’t always need (or get the chance) to hone our syntax to the degree we might like, and due to is a popular and available construction.
Bev: Hear, hear! It’s striking how much hostility there is towards conversion, given how productive a process it is. If English didn’t rely on it so much it wouldn’t be nearly so robust a language. In an old Sentence first post about linguistic doom-mongering, I speculated on why people use language “as a hook on which to hang their worries about an uncertain future”: I think one reason language change disturbs people is because they see in it a reflection of genuinely disturbing changes in society. More power to you for seeing past that and finding language change unthreatening and intrinsically interesting.
Ed: That’s fair enough. If the construction jars or is potentially ambiguous, I would prefer to reword. But I think we often pass over such usages without noticing them.
Oh Ed, that ambiguity argument is hopeless. English is a profoundly ambiguous language. Small example: three word noun phrases are almost always ambiguous: compare [pink [fire extinguisher]] and [[electrical fire] extinguisher]. But there could be a pink fire or an electrical extinguisher.
It’s at its feeblest in justifying genitive apostrophes.