Passive Voice Day was held last week.
The linguistic phenomenon known as passive voice is hated by editors, checked by computers, and used by all of us. But it’s not well understood, and often misidentified in the press. How can it be spotted, and should it be eliminated entirely?
Passive voice will be explained once and for all by linguist Daniel Midgley in this episode of Talk the Talk.
Listen to this episode
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http://danielmidgley.com/talkthetalk/talk_classic.xmlShow notes
April 27 was determined to be Passive Voice Day by shaunm on Shaun’s Blog.
http://blogs.gnome.org/shaunm/2012/04/25/passive-voice-day-2012/
The move was praised by Language Log, where it was noticed that the passive voice was recognised correctly.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3924
Not everyone gets the passive voice. Strunk and White were early n00bz.
http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497
More recently, US president Barack Obama has been criticised for passive voice
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2010/07/linguists-debate-does-obama-talk-like-a-girl/23834/
by people who don’t know what that is.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2422
Grammar Girl’s take on the passive is pretty good.
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/active-voice-versus-passive-voice.aspx
Other languages have other voices besides active and passive. Greek has middle voice.
http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/docs/UndAncGrkVc.pdf
Hey, I was right — Mongolian (Classic version) is the one that has five voices.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_voice
“I prefer the passive-aggressive voice, but whatever it’s fine if you ignore me.”
http://www.metafilter.com/115358/mistakes-were-not-made#4316169
