Strictly Speaking

Pullum deems student pompous

Over at languagelog, Geoffrey Pullum takes a student to task for writing on a test that some phrases in an example sentence “were not deemed noun phrases.”  He feels that students shouldn’t be “deeming” anything, as they’re the students and he’s the professor, and that further pomposity was added by the passive voice.  When I read his post, I realized that if I had been grading that paper, I would have interpreted the student’s locution entirely differently: it’s possible that the student used the passive voice to invoke unnamed experts who have already done the deeming elsewhere, and the student was merely reporting on that fact.  I’m sure it would have struck me that the student was weighing in a bit too heavily to make his point, however it’s not entirely clear to me that it was the student who intended to do the deeming in this case.

Either way, it couldn’t have been a very high-level course, as the task was to identify noun phrases in a sentence, so I think all the deeming on that subject has been done.