User talk:49oxen

Due to

I love you for this edit. Will you marry me? Ground Zero | t 18:04, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Sorry...I'm already spoken for, but thanks for the appreciation. I used to teach media writing at a state university J-School and the misuse of "due to" was always one of the first of my students' bad habits I tried to correct. The second was dangling participles. I'm afraid it's a losing battle, though, with news reporters and cable TV documentaries liberally sprinkling their writing with those and other grammatical barbarities.49oxen (talk) 19:19, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

The Concise Oxford Dictionary disagrees with you. Among the meanings of "due" that it lists are "To be ascribed to cause, agent, etc." Examples include"the difficulty is due to our ignorance." This usage is well established, and generally accepted. DOwenWilliams (talk) 03:27, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Look again at your example. "Due to" is only properly used in a linking verb construction as in the sentence you included in your comment. To say, as in your example, "the difficulty is due to our ignorance" is grammatically correct. However, introducing a clause with "due to" as in "Due to our ignorance..." is not.49oxen (talk) 02:25, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

I can't find any reason why "due to", meaning "because of", should not be used at the start of a clause. It is commonly used that way, including by educated people. In English, educated usage is really the only standard of correctness. Unlike, for example, French and Spanish, which are regulated by bodies of people who have legal authority over what is linguistically correct, English has no formal rules, only customs of usage. The editors of French and Spanish dictionaries rush to produce new editions whenever anything is legally changed. The editors of English dictionaries observe what is written and spoken by educated people, and update their dictionaries accordingly. In English, dictionaries, grammar books, etc., are not arbiters of correctness, merely recorders of it.

I am reminded of a true story about the author J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote famous tales such as "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings". When millions of copies of his books had already been sold, someone told him that he had made a spelling mistake. In dictionaries, the only plural of the word "dwarf" was shown as "dwarfs". Tolkien had written "dwarves". He reacted to the criticism with exasperation. He was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, England (just across the square from my own college), and figured that he was educated enough that dictionaries should follow his usage, rather than the other way around. He was also a member of the editorial board of the Oxford English Dictionary, so he simply added the spelling "dwarves" to the next edition of the dictionary. Later, most, but not yet all, other dictionaries followed suit, so now there is no conflict between Tolkien's books and most dictionaries.

DOwenWilliams (talk) 15:42, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

P.S. I checked in Funk and Wagnall's dictionary. It describes the usage you dispute as "informal... widely used but still criticized by some". That was 35 years ago, when this edition of the dictionary came out. I don't think many people "still" criticize it now. DOwenWilliams (talk) 20:06, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

As I said earlier, I'm aware that "due to" has become a common synonym for "because" and that even professional writers tend to use it. I'm also aware, as you pointed out in your comment that English grammar tends to be more fluid than that of a more hidebound language such as French and that the use of "due to" isn't a settled matter as far as some sources are concerned. I was trained and I trained my students to prefer the primary or more formal usage in our style and reference sources as opposed to the secondary or informal. My sources that I used in teaching writing were more recent than the F&W you cited. It's worth noting that I was teaching writing to university journalism students and that the books I used were late 1980s editions of commonly used grammar and style texts for journalism and media writing.

These days, however, I work primarily as a data network engineer and though I do a fair amount of technical writing and editing, my personal library is currently better suited to presenting the fine points of syntax in scripting network routers.49oxen (talk) 10:42, 29 November 2011 (UTC)