A Moment of Sympathy for the Old Fogeys and Snoots

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This morning I think I discerned in my heart a faint flicker of sympathy and fellow-feeling for judgmental prescriptive usage pontificators — the Simon Heffers, the John Simons, the people who proudly self-identify as snoots (as did both David Foster Wallace and Justice Antonin Scalia).

Such sympathizing doesn’t happen often, so I thought I’d admit to it and explain, since if you have regularly read my posts on usage you may be rather surprised.

I was reading a newspaper headline in which can not was used where (as I see it) cannot was clearly meant. But for some reason I was prompted to carry out a small investigation, and I realized I may have been harboring a false belief.

I should begin by explaining what I have been assuming is the correct and still valid generalization. It is best illustrated by a beautiful pair of examples (mentioned here once before) cited by Larry Horn in his Ph.D. dissertation:*

1. A good Christian can not attend church and still be saved.
2. A good Christian cannot attend church and still be saved.

Example 1 speaks uncontroversially of the possibility that good Christians may be forgiven for lax church attendance. Example 2, by contrast, states a radically anticlerical claim: that church attendance will wreck your chances of salvation.

Can not attend means “is permitted or able to abstain from attendance”; it’s cannot attend that means “is forbidden or unable to attend.”

The small empirical investigation I undertook was to check that, however much adherence to this rule may have diminished, newspaper prose was still respecting it as recently as three decades back. I checked a familiar suite of files containing 44 million words of 1987-89 Wall Street Journal articles, which I always keep on my laptop in plain-text form for rapid and easy searching. In a few seconds I had pulled out all cases of can not that weren’t followed by only (to exclude cases like investments can not only appreciate but also decline). I wanted to check that cases of can not + verb from that era nearly always had the possible not meaning (as in You can just not show up rather than not possible (as in You cannot just show up). And what I found shocked me. Here are the eight examples (lightly trimmed by removal of extraneous clauses):

• Another characteristic of turnkey contracting is that it removes much of the power from the bureaucrats; they can not intervene in the subcontracting and project management.
• Now we find … brand names which can not be distinguished from one another except by the price tags.
• The Fed can not be sanguine about the 0.6% rise in producer prices in January.
• Mr. Feinstein can not rely on the nostalgia vote but must mold the material to his own time.
• These are historical facts; they can not be changed, not even by Congress.
• Congress can not say the word “dollar” in the Constitution has a different meaning today than in 1789 …
• “I make every nickel I can but I can not be bought.”
• There is no reason that it can not be done for defense planning.

From the contexts, it is clear that these all display (what I thought was) the error. Under my beliefs (and Horn’s) about what is standard, all of these instances of can not should have been spelled cannot.

It looks as if those who believe that changes in the language that introduce ambiguities or collapse distinctions should be fought must face the disappointing fact that this battle seems to have been lost by the 1980s, and possibly much earlier.

To make absolutely sure the generalization had once held, I searched a million words of fiction from roughly a century ago. There were 270 cases of cannot and not a single occurrence of can not. (The reason can not didn’t come up with the meaning “possible not” seems to be simply that, at least in the novels I searched, situations involving prohibition or impossibility happen to be vastly more common than situations involving either permission to refrain or possibility of non-occurrence.)

The twinge of sympathy I had for the crazy old coots who write books pothering about “barbarism” and “illiteracy” came when I realized that I felt the distinction between can not and cannot was important, and regretted that it is (so it seems) dying. If I could push a button and ensure that nobody ever again wrote can not where cannot was meant, I would definitely press that button.

This, I suddenly realized, is what old fogeys and snoots must feel like all the time.

* Laurence R. Horn (1972), On the Semantic Properties of Logical Operators in English (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Linguistics Club)