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I’ve moved the blog to WordPress, and it can now be found here.

I’ve seen a lot of people object to the “or not” in the phrase “whether or not” because of its redundancy. In response to someone at painintheenglish.com who wanted to know why “whether or not” seems to be in such common usage and “if or not” doesn’t, I wrote this (without having any authority to back me up):

Among other things, it should be noted that “whether” can help avoid a common ambiguity created by “if”. The example “we’ll see if she comes” could mean “if she comes, we’ll see” as easily as “we’ll see whether she comes.”

Secondly, yes, there is an inherent redundancy in the phrase “whether or not,” though one could argue that it emphasizes that the options are binary rather than open ended (consider “we’ll see whether she comes at 3:15, 3:30, or later”), which seems a little clearer when the other option is written out, as in “we’ll see whether she wins or loses,” though because of the ambiguity I would be inclined to write it with “if” (“we’ll see if she wins or loses”) or to use something additional to make it clear, as in “what we’ll soon find out is whether she wins or loses.” All of this aside, the fact that it’s a common set phrase makes the redundancy quite irrelevant, in my mind. Set phrases don’t really need justification, for the most part. Note that it is not redundant to use “or not” to indicate that the result is the same regardless of which scenario is correct: “Whether or not it rains, I’m going to work.”

On the other hand, “if or not” is by no means a common set phrase, so anytime someone uses it, they are either being stylized/sloppy or they have some special intention (e.g., to emphasize the binary nature of the options). Note that it can be used to clear up the ambiguity I mentioned earlier “we’ll see if she comes or not” is hardly likely to be misunderstood, though interestingly enough the same ambiguity is reintroduced when one then switches the “if” to “whether”: “we’ll see whether or not she comes” could mean “whether or not she comes, we’ll see” or “we’ll see whether she comes”.

So there you have it. One of the reasons that the two phrases are different is because “whether” has the additional meaning of “regardless of whether” and “if” has the additional meaning of “should it happen that,” both of which can introduce ambiguities into a sentence at various points. Putting aside the fact that “whether or not” is a set phrase, you can best determine whether the “or not” in “whether or not” or “if or not” is contributing anything to the sentence by fully writing out the scenario that that “or not” represents and seeing if it still seems useful.

I’m sure I will revisit the subject in the future, as this seems to come up a lot. Hopefully I’ll find some more considered or researched opinions on the matter for next time.

On a side note, it’s a pet peeve of mine that so many self-proclaimed “grammar nazis” (or “grammar police”) work themselves into such a frenzy by taking set expressions and idiomatic phrases, breaking them down into their literal components, and then pointing to them as being a part of the continued degradation of the language. There seems to be an endless number of online communities that are dedicated to this task, along with an endless posting of egregious (or not so egregious) typos that they encounter in their daily lives (the worst examples being typo-riddled excerpts from IM conversations and casual e-mails). I’m not sure where the motivation for this comes from, but I certainly don’t see it as improving the language in any way.

This isn’t to say that I mind venting, but I do find it puzzling that people feel the need to vent about such things, and that there exist support groups precisely for this kind of venting.

If the English language is degrading in any way, it is because it is losing its vocabulary so rapidly and replacing the lost words with such ugly new ones (there’s nothing especially nice about “Internet,” “Third World,” and “Website”, and terms like “emoticon,” “IM,” “cell phone,” “rerun,” and “sitcom” definitely leave me cold. “Google” isn’t so bad. I hope it sticks around).

As something I’ve known intuitively my whole life, but have received very little formal education in, one thing I enjoy about English is that it’s a subject that gives me the opportunity to try to draw connections, see patterns, and categorize situations based on a strong sense of what feels “wrong” or “right”. Unlike, say, morality—which I deal with in a similar fashion—I can then compare my results to some authoritative text and see how accurate I was in my intuition.

One of many mistakes I’ve made in this process is in believing the gerund and present participle to be basically the same thing. I’m sure I’m not the only person to make this mistake, since the words themselves look the same, but they are distinct parts of speech (which is supposed to be quite clear in some other languages). The present participle is a verb being used as an adjective, while the gerund is the use of a verb as a noun (“he is swimming” versus “he likes swimming”). In some cases, a present participle phrase could itself contain a gerund as an object or in a prepositional phrase, as in “Fred is thinking about swimming.” Obviously some verbs are more likely to be used this way than others.

What’s more interesting to me is the connection between the present participle and the past participle. One is active–“the smashing machine”–while the other one is passive–“the smashed machine.” This actually seems to be the main difference between the two, more important than the time at which it took place. Why is it that we don’t have a simple form for past, active participles or present, passive participles? I guess it’s because we just don’t have enough conjugations to pass around—English tends to be pretty lazy about conjugations, and very few words have more than four simple forms (e.g., walk, walks, walked, walking, and Christopher Walken). All of the possible participles that we could have (past, present, and future x passive and active) can be expressed in English, but we only have shortcuts for these two.

It is interesting to imagine what it would look like if English were a more conjugation-friendly language. Suppose we had simple forms for each of the participles? For fun, I’ll pretend that we take the base form of each verb in English and conjugate them according to this improbable scheme:

• past: append -ed
• present: append -ing
• future: append to-
• active: (default)
• passive: prepend be-, but in the case of future, put it between to- and the verb

Then we have these forms:

• The car has smashed the baby stroller. -> The smashed car. and The car is smashed.
• The car was smashed by the truck. (I.e., The smashed car) -> The besmashed car. and The car is besmashed.
• The car is smashing the baby stroller. -> The smashing car. and The car is smashing.
• The car is being smashed by the truck. -> The besmashing car. and The car is besmashing.
• The car is to smash the baby stroller. -> The tosmash car. and The car is tosmash.
• The car is to be smashed by the truck. -> The tobesmash car. and The car is tobesmash.

There, now I’ve fixed it. Nice and systematic. I guess this is why English wasn’t designed by computer programmers.

According the Sarah N at Pain in the English, there exists such a thing as a squinting modifier. A quick Google search confirms this. I’ve never heard of one before–though I suspect I’ve run into more than a few–and I feel they present an excellent example of the kind of problems of ambiguity the English language suffers from.

A squinting modifier is a modifier that could be interpreted as modifying either the word before it or the word after it. Consider: “This cat that I’m petting affectionately purrs.” This sentence could mean that I’m petting a cat affectionately and it purrs as easily as it could mean that I’m petting a cat that affectionately purrs.