Language
The more facile and
overconfident you are … the
less likely you are to be right.
Leave Them a Loan
MORDECHAI SCHILLER
Today’s lesson: Don’t give advice that you weren’t asked for.
It won’t be appreciated or productive. And never — even if you’re a
hoo-ha language columnist whose family thinks you’re a gantze maven
and know everything because you could look it up — NEVER ever correct your family’s and friends’ English.
Remember these two laws:
Schiller’s Law of Correctional Facility: The likelihood of your correction being correct is in inverse proportion to the ease and certainty with
which you offer it. In other words, the more facile and overconfident you
are in correcting other people, the less likely you are to be right.
Schiller’s Law of Relativity: E=mc2. The energy (E) you have to
expend in cleaning up the relative mess (m) you make is a multiple of
the speed of sound (c) squared. That is, the closer you are to the person
you correct, the less likely what you say is to be correct. And the worse
the fallout.
Violate these laws at your own risk.
A case in point: I’ve become a casualty of the language wars. The hundred years’ language war rages on between descriptivists (those who
nonjudgmentally “describe” language as it is used, without prescribing
rules) and prescriptivists (those who value standards in language and
prescribe rules for effective communication). After spilling so much
innocent ink writing about permissive descriptivists and restrictive
prescriptivists (say that fast, five times), I fell over a tripwire of my own
setting.
A close friend told me, “I loaned them the money.”
Yup. You guessed it. Before I could catch myself, the words were
already out of my mouth:
“Loan is a noun. Lend is the verb.”
I knew my street creds were in the gutter when my friend replied,
“I’ve always said it that way.”
In response to this devastatingly descriptivist declaration, I sought
aid from the most prescriptivist purist I could find: Henry Watson
Fowler.
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But Fowler failed me. The listing for “loan” in Fowler’s Dictionary of
Modern English Usage said: “The verb has been expelled from idiomatic
southern English by lend, but it was formerly current, and survives in
the U.S. ...”
Et tu, Fowler?
In a panic, I opened Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage. Good old
Partridge. Even the book title has an edge. Surely, I could rely on the
man who, speaking of substituting “invite” for “invitation,” said: “invite
for (an) invitation is incorrect and ill-bred and far too common.”
But I was doomed to disappointment. As I read aloud, Partridge
sealed my fate: “loan as a verb for lend is good American, but it is not yet
good British English. ...”
“When was that written?” my friend asked.
“In 1942.”
“Well, I was born after that!”
Whammo!
Now I was truly desperate. Books started flying off the shelves. Aha!
In The Careful Writer, Theodore Bernstein still leaned toward lend for
the verb. But that was in 1965. Six years later, in Miss Thistlebottom’s
Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer’s Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears, and
Outmoded Rules of English Usage, Bernstein wrote:
“Although most expert users of English dislike loan as a verb … it
must be acknowledged that the usage is sanctioned by dictionaries. If
you are not offended by “Friends, Romans, countrymen, loan me your
ears” … you may go along with the dictionaries and you will always have
a defense.”
Time to call in the Texas Rangers. I went for Garner’s Modern American Usage (GMAU). Descriptivist desperadoes like to depict Bryan
Garner as hang-’em-high-Bryan. But, instead of a hanging-judge decision, Garner’s ruling sounded more like “Turn ’Em Loose Bruce.” (For
non-New Yorkers, the Harlem intersection of 138th Street and Adam
Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard was renamed “Judge Bruce Wright Place.”
Judge Wright earned the nickname “Turn ’Em Loose Bruce” for his controversial leniency in bail decisions.)
GMAU ruled on loan; lend: “In strict usage, lend is the verb and loan
the noun. The verb loan is considered permissible, however, when used
to denote the lending of money (as distinguished from the lending of
things).”
Then Garner classifies their stages of usage. Despite Garner’s being
a Texas law man, his “stages” have nothing to do with being sent out on
the next stage. They are part of his “Language-Change Index,” a 1-5 hierarchy of verbal changes. They range from (1) a new emerging form, still
substandard, to (5) “universally adopted except by a few eccentrics. It’s
a linguistic fait accompli.”
1. loan (money) for lend (money): Stage 5
2. loan (a thing) for lend (a
thing): Stage 3
Answers to Today’s Puzzle
Garner defines stage 3 as
E G G E D
P A N E
G R A M
“commonplace even among
S U A V E
I B E X
R I D E
many well-educated people,
C Y N I C
L E A P
I C O N
G L O B E T R O T T E R S
but it’s still avoided in careful
D E S
D U D
A T S E A
usage.”
E X U D E D
F O L K Y
For me, though, “careful
R I P E
E R A S E
G P A
usage” has a new meaning: be
B L O C K A D E R U N N E R S
Y
E
N
I
V
I
E
S
O
N I T
careful whose usage you corS T E T S
Z A N I E R
rect. Otherwise, you could wind
A R E T E
A I L
U S O
up in the loan star state. 
M E M O R Y J O G G E R S
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E A V E
A D E N
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R A B I D
T R A C E
S E R U M
16 Sivan 5775