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The Editor's Department: Editing, prescriptivism, and free speech
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 February 2026
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- Copyright © 2003 by Linguistic Society of America
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1 Dictionaries of English (e.g. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000)) actually allow both forms in contemporary usage.
2 Indeed, even my prose in this journal is not exempt from editorial scrutiny and rewriting at the hands of the copyeditor and the journal's editorial assistants; while I could in principle overrule them, to date virtually all of their suggestions have been useful, even necessary, and certainly welcome!
3 Clearly a passage itself desperately in need of some serious rewriting.
4 I count as ‘misspellings’ here the correct but geographically inappropriate cases where I ask authors to use American norms for spelling, e.g. color for British (and elsewhere) colour, reasoning that this is the journal of the Linguistic Society of America, after all.
5 Though see Geoffrey K. Pullum's 1984 article (Punctuation and human freedom, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 4.419–25) for a scathing (and characteristically witty and insightful) reassessment of copyeditors' punctuation practices.
6 Although I have yet to find an example in a recent issue of Language, I am fairly sure I would not change a sentence with a stranded preposition, even if it were one that there was a suitable alternative to (though our copyeditor and proofreader, as well as my editorial assistants, undoubtedly would). I would, however, resist any urge or argument to allow to stand the not infrequent doubled preposition, such as the multiple ins in the line from Paul McCartney's song ‘Live and Let Die’: ‘But if this ever changing world in which we live in makes you give in and cry ...‘. See Michael Montgomery and Guy Bailey 1991 (In Which: A new form in written English?, American Speech 66.2.147–63) for discussion of this interesting and apparently innovative use of prepositions in relativization.
7 The use of cf. is an instructive case in point concerning issues of usage versus prescriptivism and precedence of one guiding principle over another. I quote here from a note about cf. found in the introduction (‘On language, change, and language change‘) that Richard Janda and I wrote to the Handbook of Historical Linguistics (Blackwell Publishing, 2003, 133, n. 4):
partly for convenience (and welcome variety), but also in order to provide an iconic illustration of language change at work in a work on language change, we follow the growing practice of using cf. to mean 'confer, see'—taking it to abbreviate English (finally-stressed) confér—even though its etymon, Latin (initially-stressed) cónfer, actually meant (among other things) 'collect, compare, contrast'. But we draw the line at this point, and so do not join those writers of Modern English who, by analogy to i.e. and e.g., use c.f. as an alternative punctuation. In other disciplines, though, cf. retains adversative, even adversarial meaning, as Grafton 1997:8 [The footnote: A curious history (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)] points out: 'Historians . . . often quietly set the subtle but deadly cf. ('compare') before ... [a citation of a work; t]his indicates, at least to the expert reader, both that an alternate view appears in the cited work and that it is wrong'.
8 My own preference—largely irrelevant here—is for this noun to be treated as a singular (contra prescriptivist usage).
9 Meaning here, of course, ‘that is’.
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