{"id":180,"date":"2005-06-08T15:09:03","date_gmt":"2005-06-08T15:09:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/the_language_po\/"},"modified":"2005-06-08T15:09:03","modified_gmt":"2005-06-08T15:09:03","slug":"the_language_po","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/language\/the_language_po\/","title":{"rendered":"The Language Police Wonder"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Question_marks\"<\/a>Mark at Language Log<\/em> made a post<\/a> on Friday that touched a nerve and brought up something I’ve been pondering recently: the acceptability of using a question mark with a wonder statement. Specifically, he said:<\/p>\n

"I wonder how many such templatic clich\u00e9s we have in English?"<\/p>\n

Is he asking the readers whether he wonders this? <\/p>\n

Heck no. BUT maybe he’s soliciting responses from readers, in which case the sentence literally means: "How many such templatic clich\u00e9s do we have in English?" In that case, his declarative sentence punctuated by a question mark would be idiomatic usage (if it has indeed achieved the rank of idiom.) The words are arranged like a declaration, but are meant to act as a question. <\/p>\n

I’m debating whether to make such usage acceptable in my own personal stylebook. You see, I’m very touchy on the use of question marks with wonder statements because I have emotions at stake. Frequently when people write "I wonder if X is Y?", they are using a sloppy formation of "I wonder: Is X Y?" Irrefutable cases of this terrible mistake (Mark’s is ambiguous) have become a pet peeve–here’s where the emotions come in–because of an experience in 5th grade. <\/p>\n

One day, my English teacher read us sentences and we had to name them fact or opinion. I received a sentence along the lines of "My favorite color is blue." This is a fact, albeit a fact about someone’s opinion. The teacher insisted the sentence was an opinion. As if it were: "Blue is the best color." My stubborn resolution halted class and resulted in raised voices and hurt feelings. Sixteen years later, I still feel the sting of anger.<\/p>\n

Facts about opinions are still facts. And declarations about questions are still declarations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark at Language Log made a post on Friday that touched a nerve and brought up something I’ve been pondering recently: the acceptability of using a question mark with a wonder statement. Specifically, he said: "I wonder how many such templatic clich\u00e9s we have in English?" Is he asking the readers whether he wonders this? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silverjacket.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}