This is really dangerous. I’m going way out on a limb here. Given the trouncing Dubner got yesterday, I really should be more circumspect. But hey, what the heck?
There was a really silly mistake in The Economist last week.
I am so glad I got that off my chest.
In a book review, we read that “her father became an alcoholic, addicted to prescriptive drugs, chronically adulterous and so violent that divorce was inevitable.”
I wondered what a prescriptive drug might be. A drug you are required to take, by someone else, the pharmaceutical equivalent of a grammar nazi? Or a typo? Or something else entirely, a usage I was unfamiliar with. Chastened by Dubner’s fate, I turned to Google.
I’m no expert at these super spiffy searches that the Language Log mavens use all the time, but I did find ‘about 7,340 English pages for “prescriptive drugs”‘ as against ‘about 8,290,000 English pages for “prescription drugs”‘. That seemed pretty persuasive to me, but just in case I went to the first five hits for “prescriptive drugs”. Here’s what I found.
- The Free Dictionary. Doesn’t count; the word prescriptive is there, but not next to the word drug.
- Drugs.com. Doesn’t count; the word prescriptive isn’t even visibly there.
- Cartoonstock.com. Lame joke that does indeed use “prescriptive drugs” but I fancy is making the same mistake.
- WikiAnswers. “What is about the prescriptive drugs?” Doesn’t count; utterly meaningless rubbish. Not surprised that “this question has not been answered yet”.
- Pharmaceutical Society of Singapore. Bingo! At last, someone using it in the same mistaken sense as The Economist, as “prescription drug”.
All of which is really rather gratifying.
Now, please, please, please, let me have avoided Hartman’s Law, in any of its guises.1
Footnotes:- “Any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror”. [↩]
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Hmm, well I know what proscriptive drugs are … a lot of us musicians smoke those.
As sad and as difficult as it is to wean myself off it, being an ex-copy editor and proof reader and all, I’ve had to give up being a language pedant. Partly because it’s just not worth the toll on my blood pressure, and partly because of the hurt and deflated look on my husband’s face every time he says “criteria” and I bark “criteriON!” without being able to stop myself. But also because, as I’ve got older, I increasingly find I ENJOY breaking grammatical rules out of expressive bloody-mindedness.
I saw a wonderful case of Hartman’s Law in reverse on the Guardian’s online comment pages a while back, where somebody criticised Polly Toynbee’s grammar and she responded by calling him a pendant.
@Rebsie Fairholm -
That Toynbee remark is perfect. But has the Grauniad lost its reputation as the mangler of all text?
@Jeremy –
Not at all, in the transitory and shoddily edited world of online news they are screwing up with aplomb.