987. This week, we look at why people sometimes double their subjects, writing sentences such as "John, he bought a car," and when it's OK (and not OK) to do so. Plus, we talk about the medial S, a strange F-like letter that makes an S-sound and shows up in old documents. We look at how it came to be, its role in English typography, and what made it finally go away.
987. This week, we look at why people sometimes double their subjects, writing sentences such as "John, he bought a car," and when it's OK (and not OK) to do so. Plus, we talk about the medial S, a strange F-like letter that makes an S-sound and shows up in old documents. We look at how it came to be, its role in English typography, and what made it finally go away.
| Edited transcript with links: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/left-dislocation/transcript
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today we're going to talk about weird sentences that sound like they might have broken bones, and why you sometimes see letters in really old documents that should be an S, but look like an F. What IS UP with those words that look like "fubject" instead of "subject."
But before we get started, I'm so excited to tell you that Grammar Girl is on the "Writer's Digest" list of 101 Best Websites for writers this year. And it's even better than that because we're on the list for the podcast in the Live Streams, Podcasts, and YouTube category, and there are only six podcasts in that category, so it actually means we're one of the six best shows for writers! Woohoo! So feel proud about spreading the word! You can tell your friends you listen to this great podcast they should try because "Writer's Digest" says it's fabulous too.
by Neal Whitman
For this first segment, I have a listener question: Helen wrote, "Would it be possible for you to suggest a way to teach my friend not to name a noun twice in a sentence?
[For] Example:
I can't even find a name for this faux pas in order to find a rule for it. Google doesn't understand what I am asking. Hope you are able to help me. Many thanks in advance!!!"
Well, thanks, Helen. I actually get some version of this question pretty regularly, so here is an explanation from a slightly updated piece Neal Whitman wrote for the podcast many years ago about a sentence a listener named Tom heard on "Planet Money" that went like this: "This whole fight, it doesn’t matter for the deficit."
So The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language refers to this kind of sentence as left-dislocation, which sounds unpleasantly like something that happened to one of my friends during a ski trip. In the "Planet Money" example, the noun phrase “this whole fight” has been moved, or dislocated, to the beginning of the sentence, which is on the far left when the sentence is written out in standard left-to-right fashion. This dislocated noun phrase has been replaced in the rest of the sentence by the pronoun “it,” so that we end up with the double subject that’s bothering Tom: “This whole fight, it doesn’t matter for the deficit.”
But left-dislocation doesn’t just happen with subjects. You also find it with direct objects. For example, at a baseball game, you might hear, “Cold beer! You want it? I got it!” Here, the direct object of “want” is “cold beer,” but instead of saying, “You want cold beer, I got it!”, the vendor dislocates “cold beer” to the front of the sentence, and fills the direct-object position with the pronoun “it”: “Cold beer! You want it, I got it.”
You can also left-dislocate the object of a preposition. Take this sentence: “My brother, a scout came looking for him at the football game.” Here, the left-dislocated noun phrase “my brother” shows up at the beginning of the sentence and is then repeated later in the sentence as “him,” the object of the preposition “for” — "for him," meaning "for my brother."
You can left-dislocate indirect objects, too, as in, “That drunk guy who kept trying to pick a fight, the police gave him a citation for disorderly conduct.” The big left-dislocated noun phrase is “that drunk guy who kept trying to pick a fight,” and it’s repeated in the rest of the sentence as the indirect object of “him”: “the police gave him a citation.”
You can even left-dislocate noun phrases that would have been possessives if they had stayed in their usual location. For example, in the sentence “That woman who just moved in, it turns out her daughter is a Girl Scout.” The left-dislocated noun phrase is “that woman who just moved in,” and it’s repeated in the rest of the sentence as the possessive pronoun “her”: “it turns out her daughter is a Girl Scout.”
Left-dislocation is considered informal English, because the dislocated noun phrase just sits there at the beginning of the sentence, syntactically disconnected from the rest of it. Or worse, the left-dislocated phrase may even turn into a sentence fragment, if you separate it completely from the rest of the sentence with a period or exclamation point. In our “Cold beer! You want it? I got it” example, “Cold beer!” is a sentence fragment.
So why do people use left-dislocation? Well, for one thing, left-dislocation is useful if you have a noun phrase that would sound awkward if it stayed in its expected position. Think about our example, “That woman who just moved in, it turns out her daughter is a Girl Scout.” It'd be pretty awkward to say, “That woman who just moved in’s daughter is a Girl Scout.”
Another benefit of left-dislocation is that it makes it easier for a listener to process a sentence. Sentences are easier to understand if they present old information first, and new information later. To see how left-dislocation lets sentences do this, let’s take another example from the same episode of "Planet Money":
The people who are less price-sensitive, who are willing to pay more, well, they just don’t spend that time, and they pay full price.
When you say, “The people who are less price-sensitive, who are willing to pay more,” you’re introducing a new piece of information. When you repeat it as the pronoun “they” — "they just don't spend the time … and they pay full price" — now it's old information, and is easier to process with the new information about how they end up paying the full price.
Finally, because sentences with left-dislocation are considered informal, they can help set a friendly tone in presentations that are trying to make things simple and fun, such as the "Planet Money" podcast. When I listen to "Planet Money," it sounds as if the hosts are having an unscripted conversation, even though each episode is carefully researched and planned. (In fact, I occasionally use left-dislocation in this podcast for the same reason myself.)
Even with those advantages, though, left-dislocation is still considered informal, so you should avoid it in your formal writing. It’s more appropriate in places like advertising copy, dialogue, or speech. But as you point out, Helen, it can stand out if people do it too often. Also, in your friend's case, if the sentences really are as simple as "John, he bought a new car," and "The Reds, they won the game," there isn't a big benefit to using it since it's not solving some of the problems we talked about like introducing new information or working around a tricky possessive.
So in summary: Left-dislocation, it’s a useful rhetorical tool! But limit it to your informal writing or speech, and even then, use it sparingly, unless you want to become known for your language mannerisms.
That segment was written by Neal Whitman, an independent writer and consultant specializing in language and grammar and a member of the Reynoldsburg, Ohio, school board. You can search for him by name on Facebook, or find him on Twitter as @literalminded and on his blog at literalminded.wordpress.com.
by Samantha Enslen
If you studied the U.S. Bill of Rights as a kid — or traveled to the National Archives in Washington, DC, to see it in person — you might have noticed something curious.
The very first line describes who’s speaking: “Congress of the United States, begun and held at the City of New York, on Wednesday the fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine.”
And in the very first word of that phrase — "Congress" — the second to last letter looks suspiciously like a lowercase F instead of a lowercase S. Almost as though you would pronounce the word “congref.”
What is this weird letter? Well, it's called the medial S, or long S for short. Medial means “in the middle,” and between the 8th and 19th centuries, whenever the letter S appeared in the middle of the word, this elongated form was used.
The medial S looks like a lowercase F if you took away the bar across the center — or if the bar only stuck out on the left side.
This form was a holdover from how the letter S was written back in ancient Rome. In Roman cursive, an S was drawn like a checkmark with a tail at the top that floated out to the right.
So why did English hang on to this long S—while still using a regular letter S—even though they both made the same sound? We don’t know, other than to say, “That’s how they did things back then.”
But what we do know is how the medial S was used.
It was used only to replace a lowercase S — never an uppercase S.
It was used when an S appeared at the beginning of a word or in the middle, as in “subject” or “reason.” It was never used at the end of a word, as in “lotus” or “hummus.”
If a double S was in the middle of a word, as in “possum,” two long Ss were used, making it look a lot like there are two Fs in the middle. But if a double S appeared at the end of a word, as in “bless,” a long S was paired with a regular S after it, so it looks like B-L-E-F-S.
That’s a lot to remember!
It’s worth noting that S wasn't the only letter with mixed-up rules in Middle English, which spanned the 12th through 15th centuries. For example:
U and V were essentially the same letter. A V shape was used at the beginning of words and a U shape everywhere else—regardless of which sound you wanted to make.
The letter I was used for both the I and the J sound, though a capital J was occasionally thrown in at the beginning of a word.
Y was commonly swapped in for the letter I.
Finally, a silent E was added to the end of all kinds of words, not only to mark a long vowel like “place” or “bite.” It was added simply … for fun? Or for looks? We’ll never know.
Were all these rules confusing? Absolutely.
In fact, this confusion spurred the push to standardize English spelling that started in the late 1400s. This push was reinforced by the introduction of the printing press in the 15th century. Printers began to standardize the spelling and punctuation of manuscripts in the name of simplicity. Their newfound ability to distribute multiple, identical copies of a manuscript reinforced this more consistent spelling, punctuation, and grammar across a wide audience.
Even with this push, it took quite a while for the medial S to disappear.
We can blame that partly on ligatures: two letters that are joined together on a piece of moveable type. SH, ST, and FS were common ligatures. Their use sped up the typesetting process and saved space on the printed page.
However, this meant that printers who wanted to drop the medial S couldn’t throw away one block of type. They had to replace every ligature that included a medial S. All these combinations had to be recast in metal, and the wooden cases that held printers’ type redesigned.
The nail in the coffin may have been the publication of “Bell’s English Theatre” in 1792. This compilation of plays, including Shakespeare’s, left out the long S.
This sent a signal to other publishers: if you’re not going to use old-timey letterforms in Shakespeare, why use them at all?
One final note. The medial S did stick around in handwriting even after it disappeared in print. We can see it in handwritten letters and documents up through the 19th century.
Furthermore, it lives on today in the German double S (ß), a ligatured form that looks like a capital B. We also find it in calculus! The symbol for “integral” (∫) looks like an even more elongated medial S. The character [actually] comes from the S in the word “summa,” Latin for “sum.”
So that's the story of the medial S. If you're ever in Washington DC, stop by the National Archives and look at the Bill of Rights. You'll get a first-hand look at the medial S taking center stage in one of the most important documents in U.S. history.
And finally, if you want to try out the medial S yourself, you can create it using the Unicode combination U+017F.
That segment was written by Samantha Enslen, who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at DragonflyEditorial.com.
Finally, I have a familect story from a Grammarpaloozian named Amanda.
Hi, Mignon. This is Amanda from Lincoln, California. I have a family word that I'm hoping we can bring some justice to. Growing up when my sister and I were hungry, or it was dinner time, or lunch, or snack, we would ask my pop what was for any one of those occasions, and he would tell us, "Schwen schwen on dill." We had no idea what he was saying. The words semi-ran together like that, and I hesitate to break them apart because I really don't know if they are meant to be broken, but again, the word is "schwen schwen on dill" was what we were having for dinner. Schwen schwen on dill. It's what's for dinner. I love being a Grammarpaloozian. I love the show. I love the knowledge that you impart on us grammarians. I look forward to hearing from you. I hope we can solve this age's old puzzle."
Thanks so much Amanda, for your support and for sharing your familect! It's another one of those mysteries. Maybe it's something your pop completely made up, or maybe it's something other people say or said too. If anyone listening has heard this phrase or something close, please let me know! Tag me on social media or call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL. If you want to share your familect, that's the number to call too.
And if you're a Grammarpalooza subscriber like Amanda, you can also send a voice memo. I send text messages with fun facts a couple of times a week. It's a great way to support the show and the first two weeks are free. To sign up, visit https://joinsubtext.com/grammar or text "hello" to (917) 540-0876.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to ad operations specialist, Morgan Christianson; digital operations specialist, Holly Hutchings; marketing assistant, Kamryn Lacey; director of podcasts, Brannan Goetschius; marketing associate, Davina Tomlin; and audio engineer, Nathan Semes, who is currently in Brazil picking up his fiancee because her visa was finally approved, and they're ready to get married. Huge, huge congratulations, Nathan. We're all so happy for you.
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. Remember to look for "Grammar Girl Conversations" in your feed. This Thursday, I have an interview with Peter Sokolowski from Merriam-Webster about a really cool little dictionary that was made for the military in World War II, and about the upcoming Scripps National Spelling Bee.
That's all. Thanks for listening.
***
The following reference for the "left-dislocation" section did not appear in the audio but are included here for completeness.
Huddleston, Rodney, and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2003. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, pp. 1408-1411.
The following references for the "medial S" section did not appear in the audio but are included here for completeness.
Adams, Cecil. Why did 18th-century writers use F instead of S? The Straight Dope. Posted Nov. 6, 1981.
Barker, Richard. Late Modern English. History of English. Posted October 16, 2023.
Bear, Jacci Howard. Basics of Ligature in Typography and Publishing. ThoughtCo. Posted October 16, 2019.
CSU Northridge University Library. The Long S. Posted Jan. 22, 2019.
Gannon, Megan. Why does the letter 'S' look like an 'F' in old manuscripts? Live Science. May 26, 2019.
Kratz, Jessie. The Long S, in the U.S. National Archives Pieces of History blog. Posted Dec. 14, 2021.
Norman, Jeremy. The Gradual Disappearance of the Long S in Typography. HistoryofInformation.com.
Okrint, Arika and Sean O’Neill. Blame the Printing Press, pp. 116–146, in Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme—And Other Oddities of the English Language. Oxford University Press, 2021.
Weiner, Edmund. Early modern English: grammar, pronunciation, and spelling. Oxford English Dictionary
Young, Mindy. Medial S: The Old English S That Looks Like F. Online Writing Jobs. Posted April 27, 2017.