![]() ![]() What matters, in the context of what he is talking about, is truth conditions. Perhaps the first sign that Dan Barry doesn't quite get it about language is there in his two-word opening paragraph: "Words matter," he says. What on earth does he think these terms mean? Nouns have nothing at all to do with either the grammatical concept of passive voice or the rhetorical concept of distancing oneself from the content of a claim. His "active verb" is not transitive, so it doesn't have a passive version and his "passive, distancing" counterpart is not verbal at all, and hence has nothing to do with passive constructions. To say that someone has "lied," an active verb, or has told a "lie," a more passive, distancing noun, is to say that the person intended to deceive. Like almost everybody who has been to college in America, he vaguely knows that passive is bad in some way that he can't quite put his finger on, but he doesn't actually know when it is appropriate to use the term "passive" and when it isn't (see this paper of mine for a couple of dozen similar cases of mistaken allegations of using the passive). Dan Barry's recent article in The New York Times is headed: "In a Swirl of ‘Untruths’ and ‘Falsehoods,’ Calling a Lie a Lie." And pretty soon, he is of course reaching for the dread allegation of writing in the "passive". ![]()
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