Eggcorn Forum

I’m totally prescriptivist along idiosyncratic lines: If I like it, it’s in. If I don’t, I think it’s wrong.

(well, not really wrong, but I scorn it)

In reality, I have prescriptivist leanings but bow to the idea that language is a democracy, and words only have true meanings if the two people using them (speaker & hearer/writer & reader) agree on what they mean. And so I mourn the lost of clarity that comes when “disinterested” slips into “uninterested,” and vice versa.

I also have different standards for the hoi polloi, and those who would claim to be experts in the clear usage of language. I would never correct someone who used “uninterested” to mean “having no stake in the outcome,” but I would expect an editor, a professional writer, a wordsmith, to use the word “disinterested.”

(I love “monologing” and have no problem w/ “dialoging.”)

Yes, but many of those things that you consider non-erroneous are still things that many people say are bad form.

And surely a student’s ability to find the common norms and decide when to conform to them is also an indicator of the level of care and effort they’ll put into their studies?

kem, you are the master of the bon mot!

TootsNYC wrote:

And surely a student’s ability to find the common norms and decide when to conform to them is also an indicator of the level of care and effort they’ll put into their studies?

I’m not trying to be merely contrarian in this post and the last one, but I really strongly disagree—at least in regard to students and their writing. (I think it’s possible I’d feel differently if I were editing the raw products of professional writers rather than those of students.)

Sure, there’s a tendency for papers with excellent arguments and exposition to have good presentation. And there’s a tendency for papers with terrible arguments and exposition to have poor presentation. But beyond the identification of that general tendency, all bets are off.

I once had a student whose papers were consistently picture-perfect in regards to grammar and punctuation. But he never did anything but recount what had happened in the plot of the narrative he was writing about—no thesis, just plot summary. He seemed to ignore the techniques we discussed in class and the examples I gave him in office hours. He cared about the correct placement of the comma, but I couldn’t really tell whether he cared about his studies in general. He was pretty unusual, admittedly, but essays with boring arguments and good proofreading aren’t unusual at all.

And very interesting papers with casual proofreading aren’t unusual either. In fact, I often find that some students who’ve gotten really usefully excited about the ideas they’re writing about have so many different things whizzing around in their brains that they have trouble getting everything to fit together on the page—and presentation suffers. And on the other hand, some students who appear to be going through the motions also seem to think, “Well, I should at least get the punctuation right….” They aren’t spending a lot of time really thinking hard about the topic, so they’ve got a little more time to double-check things. (And please don’t misunderstand me—most students probably don’t fit either description.)

I try to be patient with the students who fall into both camps, and occasionally I have real success in 14 weeks in showing someone that a marriage of analysis and presentation is an ideal worth working towards. But my experiences don’t at all indicate to me that a student’s level of concern for the norms is a good indicator of their intellectual curiosity or devotion to learning. They’re apprentices, and part of what they’re learning is as much about priorities and balance as it is about proofreading or interpretation. Most of them are almost certainly still working on getting those things right when they’re applying to grad schools. And “priorities” and “balance” are two concepts I end up thinking about when I think about people turned away from a graduate program because of a typo.

Here’s the entry on “hoi polloi” from Paul Brians’ Common Errors in English, a well-known American usage website:

Hoi polloi is Greek for “the common people,” but it is often misused to mean “the upper class” (does “hoi” make speakers think of “high” or “hoity-toity”?). Some urge that since “hoi” is the article “the hoi polloi” is redundant; but the general rule is that articles such as “the” and “a” in foreign language phrases cease to function as such in place names, brands, and catch phrases except for some of the most familiar ones in French and Spanish, where everyone recognizes “la”—for instance—as meaning “the.” “The El Nino” is redundant, but “the hoi polloi” is standard English.
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/hoipolloi.html

The MWDEU editors have a somewhat different take, but I think they ultimately agree, more or less, with Brians, admitting “hoi polloi” without the article as a possibility but favoring the version with “the.” They write

Hoi polloi without the is certainly standard, but it sometimes has an unidiomatic ring to it (Bernstein 1977 [his Do’s, Don’ts & Maybes of English Usage] describes it as “clumsy”).

For me, naked “hoi polloi” just feels, well, naked.

Last edited by patschwieterman (2008-06-18 13:48:56)

In Classical and Hellenistic Greek the singular is ho polus in the masc. nominative. Polus is just an ordinary adjective in Greek-it takes the gender, case and number of the noun it modifies. Polus frequently modifies singular nouns. When it does, we can’t translate it with the English word “many,” of course, since “many” in English can only modify a plural noun. The translation of the singular adjective would have to be something like “great,” “large,” “long,” or “strong,” depending on the context.

Like most Greek adjectives, polus can be used substantively, without the noun it replaces. So yes, it would not be unusual to see ho polus, he polle, to polu (masc, fem, neut singular) in Greek. When the masc. plural, polloi, is used substantively, with the meaning “many (people),” it is often used without the article. Those who lifted it in the nineteenth century to make an English idiom could have said “the polloi” just as correctly as “the hoi polloi.” By bringing over the Greek article along with the substantized adjective they stoked the fires of prescriptivism.

Last edited by kem (2008-06-18 22:49:59)

I always think “hoi polloi” sounds sort of onomatopoeic.

And I do know what you mean, Pat, about people w/ perfect mechanisms and no depth. I have always considered my undergrad degree to be a teeny bit cheapened bcs I graduated w/ someone like that—and unfortunately he was not capable of even understanding why his 1-page, perfectly punctuated story was not worthy of consideration as an “in-depth feature article.”

So, yes, I can see.

But surely, on an application, which is such a one-shot, they’d avoid the most egregious problems?

I’ll admit—I hire copyeditors, not thinkers, so those standards work well for me.

I see what you are getting at, David. Calling what you are looking for a “bastardized back-formation” is exactly right. Hoi polloi has taken on a life of its own in English, wandering through semantic deserts where no Greek would ever have gone. I think the expression may have wandered too far away from its fons et origo to tap the source a second time. But if you want to try something grammatically sound on your erudite friends, you could refer to “eis ton pollon,” one of the polloi.

Thinking about hoi polloi again. It’s English pronunciation is a good indication that it is a late borrowing. The majority of Greek loanwords in English arrived in twelfth through sixteenth centuries. European scholars in that period learned their Greek from Greek teaching masters who came from Greece or the Greek colonies and who pronounced their Greek in a way that is close to modern Greek. This is why, for example, loanwords deriving from Greek words that have an upsilon usually pronounce the letter transcribing the upsilon with a short i sound (The word “physics,” with its short i sound for the “y,” is derived from the Greek word for nature, “phusis.” The native Greek teachers of the medieval/early Renaissance periods would have pronounced that word “fis-is” or “fee-sis.”). Late Renaissance scholars, arguing that classical Greek was pronounced in a different way than sixteenth century Greek, came up with artificial pronunciations systems for classical Greek. The so-called “Erasmian pronunciation” eventually became the standard pronunciation for the classroom Greek of English Enlightenment scholarship. These English classical scholars would have pronounced hoi polloi as “hoy pahloy.” Which is why we pronounce the late loanword the same way. In modern Greek, and presumably in the Greek of the early Renaissance, the phrase is/was pronounced “hee pohlee.” If we had borrowed hoi polloi in the sixteenth century, we would probably not pronounce the loanword the way we do.

The standard English meanings aren’t terribly far from that.

Perhaps I’m not that familiar with the English phrase “hoi polloi.” To me it has always had a distinctly negative connotation. Something like “the rabble.” The word “polloi” in Classical and Hellenistic Greek did not usually have a negative connotation. In the lingo of Athenian politics, for example, the “polloi” were the democratic majority, who were often opposed by the “oligoi”, the power hungry elite.

Interesting discussion of “hoi polloi”. Thanks, folks – food for thought.

Many of the comments made re the (mis-)application of the term also apply to Australian usage. One of my observations is that those in Oz who (mis-)use it to mean “the nobs” / “hoity-toity” almost invariably precede it with “the”, but when I hear or read the term as used by more informed folk (defined by the meaning/s they attach to it) “the” is generally missing.

Perhaps this difference is real – or perhaps I have selective hearing / vision.

Apologies if I’ve upset anyone with my diversion.