Today in getting off my lawn

From the June 1924 edition of Popular Radio, also featuring this tantalizing ad from Brandes:

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Order now, of course, if you want the "momentous proceedings and orations" of Cleveland "in all their original naturalness."

Peever and peeveress He created them

How are things on the Get Off My Lawn front over at The Journalist's Bible?

Q. Is it permissible (by today's rules) to start a sentence with "And"? – from Vancouver, Wash. on Thu, Nov 05, 2015

A. Yes, but avoid overusing that phrasing.

Apparently we're not going to set this one to rest without appealing to a Higher Power, so -- how about it, Creator of Heaven and Earth?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
 
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

OK, so it takes the almighty all of two verses to drop a coordinating conjunction on an independent clause. Surely He wouldn't overuse that phrasing, would He?

• And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.*
• And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
• And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
• And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
• And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
• And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Calm down, ye peevers, and notice a few things God didn't do. "It's official: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," for example. The gloves goeth not on, the gloves cometh not off, and Christmas cometh not early (though -- spoilers! -- that's a plot point in the sequel). But if your question is whether "today's rules" allow you to begin a sentence with "and," the answer is: Yes, and they have ever since "today's rules" meant Shakespeare. And you could look it up, but you (and the AP editors) probably have better stuff to do.

* I know it's traditional to number the verses, but bullets would have looked better on the PowerPoint

Smite them, Lord Apis

No, he didn't. Had Mr. Trump actually said "God damn the Bush-Rubio relationship," that might have been interesting. Instead:

KEENE, New Hampshire -- GOP frontrunner Donald Trump came out on the attack in New Hampshire on Wednesday, with strong language to describe Florida senator Marco Rubio's warm relationship with his former mentor, Gov. Jeb Bush.

How strong?

"They hate each other," Trump said of his rivals for the Republican nomination. "They hate, trust me I know. They hate so much. They hate more than anybody in this room hates their neighbor. But it's political bullsh*t, do you understand? It's true."

CBS might faint at the very thought of the elongated yellow barnyard epithet being used in polite company (assuming it can figure out where all the pronouns attach and what Mr. Trump is actually trying to say, which are preconditions to figuring out whether this round of gibberish is remotely a lede). But on behalf of copy editors everywhere, I reserve the right to be annoyingly prescriptive on this topic: Without the presence of a certified bull god, "bullshit" is not profanity.

Dainty asterisks aside, is he describing the "warm relationship" itself as bullshit, or saying that his rivals' alleged public facade of enmity is bullshit? Or does the day's top political news from the elongated yellow primary state actually boil down to Grownup Says Bad Word? (Given that we're reduced to taking a wire story on Grownup Mistakenly Says True Word, there's cause to be concerned about the distribution of staff resources here.)

Covering the bull race is one thing. Ignoring everything but the bullshit is another. Beware the wrath of Apis.

Keep calm and look it up

There's really a limited number of times we ought to have to say this, but -- shut up, BuzzFeed. You're as entitled to your peeves as anyone, but you shouldn't imagine that they're universal, and if you think you've just demonstrated in some novel way that the world is going to semantic hell in a handbasket, you should calm down and read the stuff you're citing.

The OED, for instance. It does indeed point out that figurative "literally" is "now one of the most common uses, although often considered irregular in standard English." But it does not suggest that the usage is new or that Those Kids with their baseball caps and rock 'n' roll have somehow forced it upon an unwilling public. Rather, it traces the not-literally form of "literally" to -- um, 1769. "Literally" has literally meant "figuratively" longer than the US has been a country, and if you have a problem with that, take it up with Mark Twain. And, yes, it still manages to mean "literally" as well; that's literally like being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

'It actually means something'

"Literally" seems to have set off a bit of a flap again, so here's a leftover from the weekend. It's not just a clueless prescriptivist rant, and not just a clueless prescriptivist rant from the National Review Online; it's a clueless prescriptivist rant that pivots on a descriptivist rant, and it manages to screw that up too. At issue is this sentence, ending a Times story:

“The issue is far more prevalent and far more important,” he said, “when you’re dealing with younger children who’ve come to this country and are here for 10, 15 years and are literally as American as anyone else.”

Take it away, freedom-loving stalwart Mark Krikorian!

Literally? Look, this isn’t like a dangling participle or split infinitive, the bans on which are stupid English-teacher rules followed by neither Shakespeare nor the King James Bible.

Partly right, in that vocabulary and syntax aren't the same thing and that the "ban" on split infinitives is a fiction that good, bad and indifferent writers alike were ignoring well before it was a rule. Your dangling participle, now, that's a different matter. There are ultra-bizarre variations on the dangler rule that do show up in journalism textbooks and the like, banning constructions that do show up (without any major risk to the souls of the faithful) in the King James Bible, not to mention Churchill's memoirs and myriad lesser works.* And then there are dangling modifiers that deeply and genuinely screw up the intended meaning. One of my favorite in-class examples is this from the Classic Log days:

Without Washington's support, however, Saddam Hussein quickly crushed the revolt.

So it's hard to see how a guideline whose point is "pay attention to what your modifiers modify" should be summarily classed as a "stupid English-teacher rule." This, on the other hand:

Nor is it a matter of colloquial speech seeming out of place in writing. “Literally” actually means something, and it doesn’t mean “almost” or “for all intents and purposes.”

Bad news. "Literally" actually means several things, one of which is "not figuratively" and another of which is -- well, more or less "for all intents and purposes." The OED puts it more formally:

Used to indicate that some (freq. conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense: ‘virtually, as good as’; (also) ‘completely, utterly, absolutely’.

And if you don't like that, as the citations suggest, you can take it up with Mark Twain. (Or Charles Dickens, cited in the MWCDEU's patient explanatory note.) Back to the NRO rant:

I suppose what we’re seeing is “literally” being used figuratively, which is a problem since they’re opposites.
Sure. Grownup reference books note that the extended sense reverses the original meaning. And as the nice folks at Merriam-Webster put it, "hyperbole requires care in handling." But the world didn't end when this meaning crept into English in the 18th century, and it's at little risk of collapsing from a touch of well-worn hyperbole in the 21st.

There is, I expect, something afoot besides the NRO's well-documented inability to look up words like "literally." What do you suppose that might be?

*This very sentence, for one.