Benjamin Zimmer
- Website: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/
- I'm executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus. Since 2005 (when I became a regular contributor to Language Log), I have been a research associate at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. I've also worked as editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press (2006-2008) and consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. I currently serve on the Executive Council of the American Dialect Society.
Posts by Benjamin Zimmer:
Happy Web Day!
In my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, I consider the enormous linguistic impact of an internal memorandum published at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on November 12, 1990. The memo, by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, was entitled "WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project," and needless to say, we've all been webified ever since. Read all about it here.
The Cadillac of snowclones
In Sunday's "On Language" column in The New York Times Magazine, I use the recent discussion in Congress about "Cadillac health plans" as a news hook to consider the transferred usage of Cadillac in general. Most prominent is the phrase "the Cadillac of X" to refer to "the highest quality of (something)" (predated by the similar formation "the Rolls-Royce of X"). Around these parts, this is of course known as a snowclone, but space did not permit a discussion of the expression's snowclonosity (beyond referring to it as a "sturdy phrasal template").
Horn on personal datives
Mark Liberman's post, "On beyond personal datives?", has generated quite a bit of discussion in the comments section, much of it related to Larry Horn's paper, "'I love me some him': The landscape of non-argument datives", in Bonami & Hofherr (eds.), Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 7, 2008. Larry has sent along a response to the commenters, which is reproduced here as a guest post. Read the rest of this entry »
The Gubernator's acrostic mischief
Via The Swamp, the Chicago Tribune's political blog, comes news of an awesome (if spiteful) bit of gubernatorial wordplay from the office of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:
Snowe-clone
Stephen Colbert on Olympia Snowe (Colbert Report, Oct. 14):
We are now one step closer to a nightmare future where everyone has health insurance. And I will tell you who I blame: Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, the only Republican who voted in favor of the bill. And folks, I am angrier than an Eskimo… because I have 300 words for Snowe, and I can't say one of them on TV.
(Hat tip: Greg Howard.) The title for this post is lifted from the Twitter feed of Michael Covarrubias (aka Wishydig):
Susan Collins, R-Maine has hinted at a 'yes' vote. and only linguabloggers have "snowe-clone" in their repertoire of bad puns.
"Annoying word" poll results: Whatever!
Proving once again that peevology is the most popular form of metalinguistic discourse in the U.S., the media yesterday was all over a poll from the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, purporting to reveal the words and phrases that Americans find most annoying. As was widely reported, whatever won with 47%, followed by you know (25%), it is what it is (11%), anyway (7%), and at the end of the day (2%). As was not so widely reported, those were the only options that respondents to the poll were given, so it's not like half of Americans are really tearing their hair out about whatever.
For more on the poll and its media reception, see my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus. And check out recent Language Log posts on whatever (here) and at the end of the day (here, here, and here).
Further thoughts on the Language Maven
In this Sunday's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine (already available online here), I take a look back at the legacy of the column's founder, William Safire. As I write there, "Safire's acute awareness of the limits of his own expertise was often lost on fans and critics alike." Indeed, the "language maven" title that he liked to use was intended to be self-deprecating. (Some might say "self-depreciating," but let's not open that can of worms.)
Part of that self-awareness was a willingness to acknowledge his errors in judgment. In that spirit, I follow up the "On Language" tribute with my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, taking a look at one of Safire's early miscues: declaring, in 1979, that could care less was a "vogue phrase" on its way to extinction. Thirty years later, the verdict is: not so much. Fortunately, Safire didn't often confuse his language mavenry with futurology.
BBC signals crash blossom threat
Josh Fruhlinger sends along today's entry in the "crash blossom" sweepstakes, a headline from the BBC News website:
SNP signals debate legal threat
Crash blossoms (as we've discussed here and here) are infelicitously worded headlines that cause confusion due to a garden-path effect. Here we begin with SNP, which British readers at least will recognize as the abbreviation for the Scottish National Party. Then comes signals, which can be a plural noun or a singular present verb; following a noun, most readers would expect it to work as a verb. The third word, debate, can be a singular noun or a plural verb, and if you've parsed the first two words as Noun + Verb, then you'll be inclined to take debate as the direct object of the verb. So far, so good. But then comes legal threat. What to do now?
William Safire, 1929-2009
William Safire has passed away, and it is no small measure of his impact that even linguabloggers who were most critical of his "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine (Languagehat, Mr. Verb, Wishydig) have been quick to post their sincere condolences. Grant Barrett has written about his generosity of spirit, and I too was touched by his personal kindness.
I'll be posting a longer remembrance tomorrow in my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, but for now I'd like to note one example where Safire, despite his occasional prescriptivist predilections, showed a willingness to heed the work of descriptive linguists. In a 2006 column, he described political "template phrases" such as "No X left behind" and "We are all X now." At the time, I was disappointed that he was unfamiliar with the work of Language Loggers on snowclones. But earlier this year, when Safire approached me for my thoughts on the expression "I don't do X," I nudged him to an appreciation of snowclones, and of Language Log. He followed up the column with another one ("Abbreve That Template") explicitly acknowledging Language Log's pioneering work in snowclonology. Even at the end of his prolific career, he was eager to learn something new.
[Update, 9/28: My Word Routes remembrance is here.]
WTF? No, TFW!
The comments on my post "The inherent ambiguity of WTF" drifted to other possible expansions of WTF, like the World Taekwando Federation. That reminded me of something I saw back in July on the blog Your Logo Makes Me Barf, mocking the abbreviatory logo of the Wisconsin Tourism Federation. The ridicule got some attention from local Wisconsin media, such as Kathy Flanigan of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
Folks at the Wisconsin Tourism Federation couldn't possibly have seen how the Internet would change the lingo when it was established in 1979.
But now that it's been pointed out, the lobbying coalition might want to rethink using an acronym in the logo. To anyone online, WTF has a different meaning these days. And it's not the kind of thing you want visitors thinking about when they think Wisconsin.
I decided to check out the tourism board's website, and lo and behold, they've bowed to pressure and changed their name to the Tourism Federation of Wisconsin. The old logo lives on, however, at the Internet Archive. Compare:
The inherent ambiguity of "WTF"
I'd like to echo Arnold Zwicky's praise for the third edition of Jesse Sheidlower's fan-fucking-tastic dictionary, The F Word. (See page 33 to read the entry for fan-fucking-tastic, dated to 1970 in Terry Southern's Blue Movie. And see page 143 for the more general use of -fucking- as an infix, in use at least since World War I.) Full disclosure: I made some contributions to this edition, suggesting possible new entries and digging up earlier citations ("antedatings") for various words and phrases. I took a particular interest in researching effing acronyms and initialisms. For instance, I was pleased to contribute the earliest known appearance of the now-ubiquitous MILF — and no, I'm not talking about the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. (For the record, a Buffalo-based rock band adopted the name MILF in early 1991, based on slang used by lifeguards at Fort Niagara State Park.) Another entry I helped out on is the endlessly flexible expression of bewilderment, WTF.
Crash blossom du jour
A crash blossom, you'll recall, is an infelicitously worded headline that leads the reader down the garden path. Here's a fine example from today's Associated Press headlines:
(Hat tip: Stephen Anderson via Larry Horn.)
More curve-bending
Following up on Mark's post about William Safire's latest On Language column, "Bending the curve," I wanted to share some of the citational history of this particular idiom, as I've been able to piece it together. The brief story can be found in my Aug. 21 Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, "The Lexicon of the Health Care Debate." What follows is the long story.
Goo goo goo joob, coo coo ca-choo, boop-oop-a-doop
Last week, in the comments to Mark Liberman's post on the mystifying reggae chant at the beginning of Scotty's "Draw Your Brakes," I asked:
Now that we've looked into "Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa" and this one, what's the next impenetrable pop lyric/chant we should tackle?
KCinDC promptly responded:
How about "goo goo g'joob"? Is it the same as "coo coo ca-choo"?
Ask and ye shall receive. Just in time for the rollout of the Beatles remasters and the "Beatles: Rock Band" video game, my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus takes on "goo goo goo joob" (that's how it appears in the Magical Mystery Tour lyric sheet), "coo coo ca-choo," and, for good measure, "boop-oop-a-doop."
(I'll leave it to Mark to provide the requisite study in syncopation.)
Crash blossoms
From John McIntyre:
You've heard about the Cupertino. You have seen the eggcorn. You know about the snowclone. Now — flourish by trumpets and hautboys — we have the crash blossom.
At Testy Copy Editors.com, a worthy colleague, Nessie3, posted this headline:
Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms
(If this seems a bit opaque, and it should, the story is about a young violinist whose career has prospered since the death of her father in a Japan Airlines crash in 1985.)
A quick response by subtle_body suggested that crash blossom would be an excellent name for headlines done in by some such ambiguity — a word understood in a meaning other than the intended one. The elliptical name of headline writing makes such ambiguities an inevitable hazard.
And danbloom was quick to set up a blog to collect examples of "infelicitously worded headlines."
Chris Waigl, reporting on the same neologism, describes "crash blossoms" as "those train wrecks of newspaper headlines that lead us down the garden path to end up against a wall, scratching our head and wondering what on earth the subeditor might possibly have been thinking." Indeed, when such infelicitous headlines have come up here on Language Log, they have typically been discussed as examples of "garden path sentences." After the break, a recent headline of the classic "garden path" variety.
Bloggingheads: Of Cronkiters and corpora, of fishapods and FAIL
My brother Carl, a science writer who blogs over at The Loom, has a regular gig on Bloggingheads.tv, interviewing science-y folks for "Science Saturday." For Carl's latest installment, the Bloggingheads producers suggested he interview me about lexicography and other wordy stuff. Many of the topics we cover, from lexical blends to snowclones, will be familiar to readers of Language Log and my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus. So here is our nepotistic "diavlog" for your enjoyment. (Diavlog is a second-order blend, by the way: it blends dialog and vlog, with the latter element representing a blend of video and blog. Or make that third-order, since blog blends Web and log.)
Computational eggcornology
Chris Waigl, keeper of the Eggcorn Database, brings to our attention a paper that was presented at CALC-09 (Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity, held in conjunction with NAACL HLT in Boulder, Colorado, on June 4, 2009). As part of a session on "Metaphors and Eggcorns," Sravana Reddy (University of Chicago Dept. of Computer Science) delivered a paper entitled "Understanding Eggcorns." Here's the abstract:
An eggcorn is a type of linguistic error where a word is substituted with one that is semantically plausible – that is, the substitution is a semantic reanalysis of what may be a rare, archaic, or otherwise opaque term. We build a system that, given the original word and its eggcorn form, finds a semantic path between the two. Based on these paths, we derive a typology that reflects the different classes of semantic reinterpretation underlying eggcorns.
You can read the PDF of Reddy's paper here. Yet another advance in the recognition of eggcornology as a legitimate linguistic subdiscipline.
Fry's English Delight: So Wrong It's Right
Stephen Fry — British comedian, quiz show host, and public intellectual — has just started a new series of his BBC Radio 4 program on the English language, "Fry's English Delight." In "So Wrong It's Right," Fry "examines how 'wrong' English can become right English." Our old friend the eggcorn makes an appearance about 11 minutes in. Jeremy Butterfield, author of A Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare, explains eggcorns to Fry (damp squid is an eggcornization of damp squib, in case you didn't know). Butterfield also talks about spelling changes, like the back-formation of pea(s) from pease, and how lexicographers use corpora to track changes in language (with specific reference to the Oxford English Corpus, the main subject of A Damp Squid).
You can hear the whole thing online, at least for the next week.
And for more of Fry's linguistic musings, see my post, "Fry on the pleasure of language."
(Hat tip, Damien Hall.)
The "moist" chronicles, continued
People's aversion to the word moist has attracted our attention for a while now (most recently in this post — see also the links in this one). Mark Peters recently wrote about the moist phenomenon for Good, quoting Language Log discussion as well as a Word Routes column I wrote for the Visual Thesaurus. And now Mark's Good column just got noticed by the folks at "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me!" on NPR — Mark and I were quoted in their "limericks" segment (skip to about 3:00 in):
"Cronkiter" debunkorama!
It started off, simply enough, as a comment by Language Log reader Lugubert, who questioned a linguafactoid reported in the Associated Press obituary for Walter Cronkite: that in Sweden and Holland, news anchors are (or were) called "Cronkiters." I investigated the claim in my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, which led to an appearance on the NPR show "On the Media" over the weekend.
Earlier today, in an admirable display of media self-criticism, the Associated Press set the record straight in an article by the very same reporter who filed the Cronkite obituary. (The AP also issued a formal correction.) And from all this, I've somehow ended up as Keith Olbermann's second best person in the world today — just edged out by some entertaining crackpot whose faulty Bible translation "proves" that Obama is the Antichrist. It's been a fun ride, but I think the debunkorama is finally drawing to a close.