Silly Little Country

The Evolution of 'Passive Voice'

No, not the passive voice itself, but the usage of the term in some prominent articles lately. Mark Liberman reflects on a recent instance from the NY Times.
Earlier he had reflected more generally:

But despite this long history, I'm afraid that the traditional sense of passive voice has died after a long illness. It has ceased to be; it's expired and gone to meet its maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It's an ex-grammatical term.

Specically with respect to the NY Times article, he observes, as an example:

The "passive voice" spotted in the first Madoff quote is apparently the phrase "it would end shortly", which is technically an active-voice intransitive, but one where (as Franklin observes) Madoff is evading the fact that the scheme could end if and only if he himself took steps to end it — or, on the most charitable interpretation, if his investment strategy miraculously began to work as he falsely claimed it did.

My guess is that the current generation of writers includes many people who never had a grammar lesson, but know that the phrase 'passive voice' is important, and so use it in a way that seems logical.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 11:40 PM