Mark Liberman
- Website: http://ling.upenn.edu/~myl
Posts by Mark Liberman:
How things have changed…
In today's Stone Soup, Val tries to catch up:
The implications of excessive praise
Just one word after another…
Does marriage exist in Texas?
From Dave Montgomery, "Texas marriages in legal limbo because of constitutional amendment, candidate says", Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 11/17/2009:
Texans: Are you really married?
Maybe not.
Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a Houston lawyer and Democratic candidate for attorney general, says that a 22-word clause in a 2005 constitutional amendment designed to ban gay marriages erroneously endangers the legal status of all marriages in the state.
… [T]he troublemaking phrase, as Radnofsky sees it, is Subsection B, which declares:
"This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage."
Architects of the amendment included the clause to ban same-sex civil unions and domestic partnerships. But Radnofsky, who was a member of the powerhouse Vinson & Elkins law firm in Houston for 27 years until retiring in 2006, says the wording of Subsection B effectively "eliminates marriage in Texas," including common-law marriages.
Oxford W.O.T.Y. 2009: unfriend
We've been remiss in not linking to the New Oxford American Dictionary's 2009 Word of the Year, which Rebecca Ford announced on the OUP Blog a couple of days ago.
The modern (non-obsolete) positive verb to friend isn't in the current NOAD yet, or for that matter in the OED, so I hope that it gets in as part of the package deal.
Faults "intollerable and euer vndecent"
I haven't read Jack Lynch's The Lexicographer's Dilemma yet — all I know about it comes from Laura Miller's review in Salon, "Memo to grammar cops: Back off!", 10/25/2009. But on the basis of her description, it seems to me that one of his claims is not quite right:
According to Lynch, the very notion of correct English is only 300 years old; in the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the idea that native English speakers could be accused of using their own language improperly would have seemed absurd. The advent of printing — and, especially, the growth of general literacy — led to efforts to establish authoritative standards of spelling and usage in the 18th century.
It's certainly true that Tudor and Elizabethan spelling was catch-as-catch-can, and it's also true that prescriptive rules of usage blossomed in the 18th century, along with the standardization of spelling. But it's not true that native speakers in Shakespeare's time never accused one another of using their own language improperly.
The Igon Value Effect
Steve Pinker's recent NYT review of Malcolm Gladwell's latest book suggests a valuable coinage ("Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective", 11/7/2009; emphasis added) :
An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.
In support of creative lexicography, I plan to be on the look-out for future opportunities to refer to the Igon Value Problem.
The hunt for the Hat Gene
Nicholas Wade is an inveterate gene-for-X enthusiast — he's got 68 stories in the NYT index with "gene" in the headline — and he's had two opportunities to celebrate this idea in the past few days: "Speech Gene Shows Its Bossy Nature", 11/12/2009, and "The Evolution of the God Gene", 11/14/2009. The first of these articles is merely a bit misleading, in the usual way. The second verges on the bizarre.
Meep Ban Update
Ethan Forman broke the Danvers High School meep-ban story in the Salem News on 11/10/2009 (See "Meep: Truth or Onion?"). Over the past few days, the story has been picked up by several wire services and other outlets, none of whom provided any information beyond what was in Forman's original story.
Yesterday, NPR's All Things Considered looked into it, and actually added something to the story by interviewing a student, Mike Spiewak ("Principal Tells Students 'Meep' Is Off-Limits"):
Dudespeak 2
In this morning's Stone Soup, another take on that highly efficient language, Dude:
Body and One: Corpus count fail
This morning we're continuing to explore the difference between somebody and someone, which all started on 11/10/2009, when David Landfair wrote to Arnold Zwicky ("Ask Language Log: someone, somebody") to ask for protection against the bizarre idea that someone is nominative (like he/she/who) while somebody is accusative (like him/her/whom).
Body loses Supreme Court appeal
This morning, I appealed the somebody-vs.-someone story to the Supreme Court of the United States. The decision came quickly — details are below.
#thingsdarkiessay
Dan Scherlis has pointed me to the recent #thingsdarkiessay TwitterStorm. Khaya Dlanga described it at length in a weblog post a week ago ("Yesterday, a short-lived war broke out between the US and SA"):
A virtual war between the United States and South Africa was full-on yesterday, the weapon of choice being Twitter. Unfortunately, the weapon was an American one too. Of course in the bigger scheme of things, even in the smaller scheme, this was an insignificant spat. The war was fought at 140 characters at a time.
It was between South African blacks and African Americans.
Syllepsis gone wild
From Joel Stickley at how to write badly well:
Language-is-landscape considered harmful
Jonathan Raban, "Summer with Empson", London Review of Books, 11/5/2009:
For an English-born reader, America is written in a language deceptively similar to one’s own and full of pitfalls and ‘false friends’. The word nature, for instance, means something different here – so do community, class, friend, tradition, home (think of the implications beneath the surface of the peculiarly American phrase ‘He makes his home in …’). These I’ve learned to recognise, but the longer I stay here the more conscious I am of nuances to which I must still remain deaf. The altered meanings and associations of American English, as it has parted company from its parent language over 400 years, reflect as great a difference in experience of the world as that between, say, the Germans and the French, but in this case the words are identical in form and so the difference is largely lost to sight.
Andrew Gelman, justifiably puzzled ("Two countries separated etc etc", 11/11/2009):
I can't tell if Raban is being serious or if he is making some sort of joke. The paradox of the statement above is that very few readers will be qualified to assess it.
In any case, if someone can explain to me how nature, community, class, friend, tradition, and home have different meanings in English and American, I'd appreciate it. I've read a lot of things written by English people but I have no idea whatsoever what he's taking about.
Less body in your lexicon?
Answering a reader's question about somebody vs. someone, Arnold Zwicky speculated yesterday that "you'd find all sorts of interesting variation according to the location / age / sex / class etc. of the speaker, genre, formality of the context, date when the corpora were collected, and so on". In the comments, Jerry Friedman suggested that "the -one words all sound more formal to me than the -body words", and he provided some evidence in the form of the ratio of Google Books counts for the words themselves and for the words combined with albeit.
This is a great topic for a Breakfast Experiment™, and despite several overdue work-related commitments, I couldn't resist.
Meep: Truth or Onion?
This story ("What's wrong with 'meep'? It's all in how you say it", 11/10/2009) comes from a real newspaper rather than from the Onion, but sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. Read the rest of this entry »
Authors of the month
A few weeks ago, we featured Elevate Embuggerance and Holistic Feisty, authors (according to Google Scholar) of The Linguistics of Laughter:
Now, thanks to research by Steven Landsburg and Aaron Mandel, we're proud to introduce you to the prolific writer "Ass Meat Research Group", who is listed at amazon.com as the author of 88 books:
Claude Lévi-Strauss
[Below is a guest post by Dan Everett]
On the 22nd of December, 1942, Franz Boas and Claude Lévi-Strauss were having lunch at the Faculty Club of Columbia University when Boas fell from his chair. Lévi-Strauss tried to revive him, but to no avail. The founder of American anthropology died of a heart attack, in the arms of the founder of French anthropology. Boas was 92. Lévi-Strauss was 34. At that moment, Lévi-Strauss assumed from his fallen colleague the symbolic mantle of leadership, becoming the most important living anthropologist of the twentieth century, a distinction he maintained for another 67 years.
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Does God want you to use more initial conjunctions?
In the comments on yesterday's post, Ran Ari-Gur raised the possibility that sentence-initial conjunctions are verbally and plenarily inspired of God, just as singular they is. Ran's evidence came from a sample consisting of the first 80 verses of Genesis in the original Hebrew and in the King James translation. I decided to check more systematically, and so this morning I downloaded the entire KJV and (wrote a script that) counted.