Ánd she's a pro - in a "good" magazine!
Nancy Franklin writes in the March 23d New Yorker (I love how magazines are dated, don't you?) about Bernie Madoff's guilty plea. Unfortunately, she betrays not only her contempt for Madoff but her ignorance of English:
Two sentences later, Madoff said, “When I began the Ponzi scheme, I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme.” As he read this, he betrayed no sense of how absurd it was to use the passive voice in regard to his scheme, as if it were a spell of bad weather that had descended on him. Still, he had faith—he “believed”!—that it would soon be over. Yes, “soon.” In most of the rest of the statement, one not only heard the aggrieved passive voice but felt the hand of a lawyer: “To the best of my recollection, my fraud began in the early nineteen-nineties.”Passive? Aggrieved or not, she hasn't actually quoted any passive voice sentences here. There's nothing passive about "it would end shortly" or "my fraud began". Lawyers may have helped him write it, but nobody put in any passive voice. And for crying out loud, he's not even indulging in obscuring the agent here: "I began the Ponzi scheme" is about as clear to agency as you can get, and "my fraud" ditto - unless you think frauds have a life of their own, so "my fraud" is like "my dog"...
Granted, he doesn't say "I could end it shortly", but he's not hiding the "I" - it's right there in the previous clause.
Don't they have editors at the New Yorker any more?
1 Comments:
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At 12:05 PM, March 18, 2009
Barry Leiba had this to say...
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<-- Older Post ^ Home Newer Post -->I had quite an extended argument, a couple of years ago, with someone who insisted that any construction using a form of "to be" is in passive voice.
So, "We made mistakes," is active, while "Mistakes were made," is passive. "We require your presence," is active, and "Your presence is required," is passive.
Therefore, this person said, "The suspect is guilty," is in the passive voice. No amount of discussion would disabuse him of this misunderstanding. Rather like "God did it," he just kept coming back to his assumption that the presence of "to be" automatically made it passive... to prove that a sentence was passive.
There's a lot of confusion out there....
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