A Quibbler Get His Due

A hundred years ago, Ambrose Bierce cranked out a compendium of usage rules: Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Many of the rules on his blacklist are still found in common style guides, e.g., less vs. fewer, can vs. may, lay vs. lie. Nevertheless, others seem like the pet peeves of a self-appointed expert in language. What was wrong with "We had a limited supply of food?" Why were children brought up, not raised? Why was a coating of paint preferable to a coat of paint? Did Bierce's fellow writers think “I am afraid it will rain” was bad English?

In Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right: The Celebrated Cynic's Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers, modern language critic Jan Freeman dissects Bierce's rules and examines how they have fared in the past century. Freeman takes on the blacklist, examining the history of the rule, Bierce's motivation for including it, and the state of actual usage. A typical entry has Bierce's rule first followed by Freeman's discussion:

All of. “He gave all of his property.” The words are contradictory: an entire thing cannot be of itself. Omit the preposition.

All of had only recently become a usage issue, and Bierce may have been following Vizetelly 1906, who used the same reasoning to demonstrate that all of was nonsensical: “You may say ‘ship some, or any definite number, say ten of them,’ or ‘ship them all,’ but not ‘ship all of them.’” That is, you can take “some of them”—some part of a whole—but once you take “all,” there's no “them” remaining, and so “of them” is meaningless.

Neither man mentions that Shakespeare, Addison, and Austen used all of, nor that Abraham Lincoln supposedly said you couldn't fool all of the people all of the time. This rule didn't fool any of the people any of the time; everybody went right on writing, “all his property” or “all of his property,” as idiom and rhythm demanded. People with nothing better to do may tell you that all of is wordy, but at least these days they won't claim that it's logically impossible

Will our language arguments seem as odd in 100 years as Bierce's do today? You can't help but notice the number of books on language endangerment and language death in bookstores these days. One thing is certain though: language is constantly changing. People leading modern lives need to express the concepts associated with those lives, and so they invent the words and terms that are well-suited to expressing those concepts. Grammar prescriptivists don't stand a chance.