commas and the which/that distinction

I'm normally  a bit of a critic of arbitrary pronouncements on how to phrase or punctuate restrictive and non-restrictive clauses. Most of the time the meaning is perfectly clear from context whether you use that or which and whether or not you put a comma. Not always though. It can can make quite a difference.

Nick Clegg is being interviewed on TV at the moment. He was saying that we won't be able to judge the coalition until the end of it, five years from now.

He went on to make a list that took the form "We will have to see whether..., whether..., whether... .

For one of the items in the list he clearly meant to say

"whether we have an education system that helps every single child".

Instead, thanks to his word choice and the clearly audible pause that the comma would mark, what I heard was

"whether we have an education system, which helps every child."

That's quite a different thing and, given the scale of cuts they are likely to be making, probably far closer to the truth than he'd like us to believe.

The passive voice is known to me.

Recently over at Language Log there have been a number of posts about passive voice, although when I say recently I should qualify it by pointing out that these are only the latest round in a long running series of posts.

Now as anyone will tell you I am as determinedly descriptive as the next determinedly descriptive grammarian but I am a little disturbed by the phenomenon these posts are describing. The passive voice is, or at least has historically been, a construction where the object of a verb (the thing or person it's being done to) is given prominence by being placed in what is usually the subject position and the subject (the thing or person doing it) is either left out altogether or replaced with some form of agent construction (for example a by...).

So

I kicked the cat. - active voice

The cat was kicked. - passive voice

This is, as Language Log notes, often being replaced with a new definition by newspapers and less grammatically savvy pundits. They use the phrase "passive voice" to mean any construction that is vague about agency. So they would claim that

Somebody kicked the cat.

was passive voice, which it certainly isn't.

There are plenty of examples to be found on Language Log and I don't really want to go into them here. The treatment of the topic over there is far better than anything I'm likely to write.

What I would like to go into is a difficulty this presents to me as a teacher. The level that I teach is the one where the difference between passive and active voice is normally taught so should I go on teaching what I know to be grammatically accurate or should I start teaching that any construction where we are avoiding responsibility is called "passive"?

It's a no-brainer really. Of course I shall go on teaching the passive voice as I have always taught it but I'll add a note that they will see the phrase used by people who don't know or don't care what it means. The thing is that this is a distinction that I think needs to be maintained. If this new usage takes hold then we are left without a name for the grammatical construction in question, we will either have to devise something else to call it or teach it as a construction without having any way to refer to it. I know it's only a name for a particular bit of grammar but names are important. By diluting the meaning to one which includes not only the original meaning but a whole host of others we'll lose the original meaning altogether.

The passive voice will be lost.

gr8 rItN

The Mail on Sunday has gone into full "hell-in-a-handbasket" mode once again deploring the use of txtspk on a poster designed to encourage kids to think about safety and security when using mobile phones and the internet. The poster uses text message spellings to list a number of safety points. This, of course, will make our children illiterate, undermine the work of English teachers the length and breadth of the land and probably cause the total collapse of society as we know it.

I don't really want to get off into a rant about one of the Mail's rants. Whether it's education, immigration, the economy or the national health service there's rarely a week passes without the Mail climbing onto some reactionary hobby-horse or other. It's almost too commonplace for comment.

The bit that intrigued me was on the poster itself.

Most of it I could only work out with extreme difficulty, but after all the tips have been given, we see this.

"Responsible adults include yr tchaz, parNts n d carers W whom u liv"

Apart from the lack of txtspk on some of the words (presumably because the adults who designed it couldn't work out a readable version) I love that "W whom u liv" a blend of a now uncommon grammatical construction (for most people, especially teens, in spoken English, "that you live with" or just "you live with" is far, far more common) and the txtspk of the poster.

Of course had they put that, the Mail could have had another complaint. Ending sentences with prepositions? The end really would be nigh!