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Oh, dear. It had to happen sooner or later: a direct clash with Chronicle editorial authority over a point of 19th-century prescriptive grammar. My post on Monday included the phrase “without it inevitably dying"; do you see the point that provoked the editorial intervention?
Our esteemed editor, Heidi Landecker, who has saved me from a thousand blunders in the past, demurred. Her job description requires her to follow The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage scrupulously. And here is what that revered text says under the (mistaken) heading “participles as nouns":
participles as nouns. Beware of a present participle (the ing form of a verb) when it directly follows a noun or a pronoun. Look twice at the meaning of the phrase, because the participle often plays the role of a noun in such a sentence. And when that happens, the previous word should be possessive (his, her, their, Ms. Lamm’s). Some examples: The teachers complained about the principal’s missing the meeting. (It was the missing they complained about, not the principal. Thus the possessive.) The doctors advise against pregnant women’s drinking. (Their advice is against drinking, not against women: so it is not against pregnant women drinking.) Sometimes a sentence works either way: Terry watched the biplane landing and Terry watched the biplane’s landing mean roughly the same thing. And sometimes the change to a possessive is awkward, and the sentence is best rephrased slightly. Thus:
To be avoided: The police tried to prevent him jumping.
Corrected but stilted: The police tried to prevent his jumping.
Corrected and tidier: The police tried to prevent him from jumping.
The traditional literature lying behind this confused and indecisive usage advice is a morass. If I were to just summarize the long and difficult sections headed “PARTICIPLE AND GERUND,” “PARTICIPLES,” and “THE GERUND” in The King’s English by H.W. and F.G. Fowler (1906), it would take thousands of words, and you would not thank me. In essence, the Fowler brothers are struggling to preserve the distinction between gerunds and present participles found in Latin but not in English. Latin amare “to love” has the gerund form amandum and the present-participle form amans, but English love has just the form loving (The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language calls it the gerund-participle).
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The Fowlers fret about “abandoning the gerund"; they want writers in English to show clearly when Latin would use the gerund rather than the present participle, by marking the subject with the genitive (or “possessive”) suffix ’s . They know that doing this would often make a sentence worse rather than better (consider without there being any sign of it, for example), but they do not relent; they say: “many types of sentence ... will have to be completely changed if the gerund is to be recognizable.” Formal signaling of the gerund/participle distinction ranks above expert writers’ preferences and well-established usage; sentences must be “completely changed.”
Their own examples give ample evidence of the frequency of the construction that the New York Times Manual tries to discourage. The magisterial entry “possessive with gerund” in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1994; required reading) points out that some Victorian writers freely vacillate between the two constructions within a single short text; for example, Lewis Carroll wrote a letter on March 11, 1867, with in hopes of his being able to join me at one point and the music prevented any of it being heard at another.
J. Lesslie Hall gathered further data rebutting the Fowlers (English Usage, 1917) and Otto Jespersen amassed still more (Society for Pure English Tract 25, 1926). It is undeniable: Genitive and nongenitive subjects of gerund-participles have been in free alternation for centuries.
Yet when two quirky Edwardian grammar grouches in Guernsey decide to start dinging established writers for writing stop it happening instead of stop its happening, etc., the whole early-20th-century education system in America buys their nonsense, treating it as a rule to be taught in schools and enforced by copy editors a century later. Whatever happened to American independence?
You can look back at my post on Monday to see which way the dispute about without it(s) inevitably dying was resolved. But a fictive rule invented by a couple of English curmudgeons 110 years ago should not have taken up any of our editor-vs.-author arm-wrestling time at all.
Especially since I had a battle over this topic back in June 2002. Stanley Fish used the putative rule here in The Chronicle as the basis for attributing “grammatical crimes” to an impromptu oral remark by Larry Summers (then president of Harvard). And I published a letter in The Chronicle (now sadly lost to history) lamenting the error of Fish’s grammar nitpicking.
