My faith in the possibility of integrity and self-criticism in humankind got a real boost the other day when I read a post on Lingua Franca in which an editor (who is also a professor in an English department) stopped to think about whether she was in the right about a construction she had been proscribing for years in the journal papers she edited, and decided that she wasn't.
Is it legitimate to say "On the other hand, …" in a text where you have not first used "On the one hand, …"? Professor Anne Curzan thought the answer was no. And for years she told authors to change on the other hand to something like in contrast if they hadn't got a preceding instance of on the one hand somewhere nearby. But then one day she got to thinking: Am I right? Is it really an error to use on the other hand alone? So she did what people interested in grammar only rarely do: she started looking at the evidence, and decided that it refuted her rule.
Her question cries out for empirical investigation. After all, if it's a rule of good English that on the one hand is obligatory as a precursor to a use of on the other hand, then in competently produced prose that has been through an editing process you should always be able to find the former in any document containing the latter. If the rule is a myth, you won't find any such regularity.
When I read Curzan's piece I immediately started writing a little script that assesses text files to see how many on the other hand tokens and how many on the one hand tokens they contain (see the end of this post if you're interested in the code).
It's a rather simplistic piece of programming. One shortcut was that I treated the whole file as a unified text regardless of its actual content (in actuality a text file could be composed of several distinct texts having nothing to do with each other).
I also ignored the order in which the two phrases occurred in the file and relied solely on the count (though as we shall see, this almost certainly does not matter).
I ran the script first on the widely available Wall Street Journal corpus (WSJ), which consists of 313 files each containing around 180,000 words of random news stories and features from 1987-1989. Ideally one would want to treat each story separately, because my script would allow on the one hand to count as a match for an on the other hand that occurred half a dozen stories later on a different day. Here are the results I got (all independently checkable, of course):
Occurrences of on the one hand:
138
Occurrences of on the other hand:
1303
Files with unmatched on the other hand tokens:
1165
Files in which on the other hand tokens were always matched:
24
Files with unmatched on the one hand tokens:
2
That last number turns out to be spurious. The two files that my script reports as having orphan on the one hand tokens turned out merely to contain sentences with ellipsis of hand, as in demand on the one hand and supply on the other, which should be counted as cases of matching. There are no cases where the writer began with on the one hand but forgot to continue with an on the other (hand) later.
This indicates that that the frequency of truly unmatched on the one hand cases in texts is probably close to zero: instances of on the one hand are probably almost always matched by an on the other hand following it and discourse-connected to it in the same text. I say this because while orphan cases of on the one hand do not occur in WSJ, orphan cases of on the other hand are not just frequent, but run at a full order of magnitude above the total number of tokens of on the one hand. Almost 90 percent of the tokens of on the other hand (1165 out of 1303) occur in files that do not even have a case of on the one hand anywhere, whether matching or not. And that's in copy-edited, published prose by experienced journalists on a newspaper of national and international prestige.
So the case against the rule that Curzan used to believe in is overwhelming. It would be irrational to go on believing that a rule of correct English bars uses of on the other hand that are not matched with preceding tokens of on the one hand. It's not just that exceptions occur, perhaps due to momentary carelessness. Any defender of the rule would face two compelling unexplained facts: (i) Why do the exceptions utterly swamp the cases where the putative rule is respected? And (ii) why are there never any cases of momentary carelessness that lead to unmatched instances of on the one hand?
The generalization that on the other hand always needs a matching instance of on the one hand preceding it is simply false, and Curzan was right to change her mind. Kudos to her for being ready to accept that evidence might bear on questions of grammar.
I wrote the script in the C Shell command language, which isn't everybody's favorite. But here it is in pseudocode:
Initialize the variables one_hand, otherhand,
difference, anomalous_files, and matched_files to zero.
BEGIN FOR-LOOP
For each file in the list supplied,
set x to the number of occurrences of "on the one hand" in it, and
add the value of x that to the value of one_hand;
set y to the number of occurrences of "on the other hand" in it, and
add the value of y to the value of otherhand;
if the value of y is less than the value of x,
add 1 to the value of anomalous_files;
if the value of y is equal to the value of x,
add 1 to the value of matched_files.
END FOR-LOOP
If the value of otherhand exceeds the value of one_hand,
set difference to otherhand - one_hand.
Print out:
"Occurrences of 'on the one hand':" one_hand
"Occurrences of 'on the other hand':" otherhand
"Files with unmatched 'other hand' tokens:" difference
"Files with 'other hand' always matched:" matched_files
"Files with unmatched 'one hand' tokens:" anomalous_files
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