Category: ngram

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Proved / proven

Not all behavior descends to Nixon’s level, particularly when so little of it is proved. – NYT (comments)

‘Proved‘ or ‘proven‘? Which one? Does it matter?

I think the NGRAM shows that ‘proved wrong’ is proven right. Who knew? But ‘proven’, after a slow start, has caught up to ‘proved’.

Keylor Navas has proved he deserves to be Real Madrid’s first-choice goalkeeper. – FourFourTwo

They narrowed down their findings to 33 foods proven to ease rheumatoid arthritis symptoms and slow down the progression of the disease. – Medical News Today

In science reporting, both forms figure equally. ‘Have proved’ is commonplace and efficient:

It was Charles Darwin who originally suggested that birds use their wings not only to fly but to communicate as well. Now, approximately 150 years later, scientists have proved him right, and in the process explained why pigeons make such a racket taking off. – Telegraph

In certain constructs, ‘is proven’ seems more refined:

Woodward is convinced it is proven, replicated and will scale to fast interstellar travel. – Next Big Future

He is talking about mach effect propulsion.

Proved or proven? It really doesn’t matter. Write it, then read it aloud and go with whichever is pleasing to the ear.

Goodall discusses what it’s like to be proven correct all these years later, as well as why she thinks the argument that trophy hunting is a valuable way to fund conservation is ‘rubbish’. – Mongabay

In the following radio interview, with Jane Goodall, the announcer has chosen ‘proven’ at the 2:20 mark. Jane herself uses ‘‘proved’‘ at 7:10:





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NGRAMs

Wikipedia defines n-gram like this:

In the fields of computational linguistics and probability, an n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sample of text or speech. When the items are words, n-grams may also be called shingles.

An n-gram shows how often a word or phrase appears (e.g., in books, or in newspapers) over time. Google describes their NGRAM program as follows:

When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how [often] those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., “British English”, “English Fiction”, “French”) over the selected years.

That’s where we get our data.

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All is (not) well

Not all is well in the state of english grammar. Never has been, apparently.

I just can’t let this one go. It seems so obvious (to me) that ‘Not all is well’ is what most people mean to say. ‘All is not well’ must mean that ‘Nothing is well’; that ‘everything is bad’ and ‘nothing is good’. But total and unambiguous wretchedness is not that common, therefore ‘All is not well’ is not so useful, right?

But the NGRAM tells us that ‘All is not well’ is what (nearly) everyone chooses to write. Shakespeare himself is responsible for this mess, when he lets us know that Hamlet suspects some dirty dealings in the death of his father:

All is not well;
I doubt some foul play.
– Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 2

It’s early in the play; how could matters already be so thoroughly pernicious? Hamlet, and by extension Willy S., should have instead observed that Not all is well. Something’s off, I don’t yet know what it is, but I am going to get to the bottom of this, that’s what Hamlet meant.

Yet in a thoughtful forum on WordReference, attracting english speakers from two continents, one discussant suggested that subtlety was in order:

I wouldn’t say it means “everything is bad” – “All is not well with their marriage” is saying that their marriage is not perfect, but I hear it as something of an understatement. In fact it usually means . . . “things look really bad.”

Another discussant said that when the phrase is spoken out loud, stress is everything:

All is not well. = Everything is bad.
All is not well. = Not everything is well (but some things are).

The second is the way it’s usually understood.

Yeah, they’re probably right. All is not well.

OK. All good. No, really. All good.