Funniest peeve ever
« previous post | next post »
Allie Brosh, over at Hyperbole and a Half, is annoyed by people who leave out the space in "a lot" ("The Alot is Better Than You at Everything", 4/13/2010):
Think how much better life would be if all linguistic peeves had to be presented as cartoons! Or some other form of creative expression: a poem, a short story, … Peeves in the form of cartoons and poems are all too rare, though there are some notable precedents.
Follow the link to see several other excellent examples from the same post at Hyberbole and a Half, like this one:
If I come across a person who seems to completely ignore the existence of apostrophes and capital letters and types things like "im an eagle and im typing with my talons, so dont make fun of me cuz this is hard," I like to imagine that they actually are an eagle typing with their talons. It would be a hassle if you had to hop in the air and use your feet to karate-chop two keys simultaneously every time you wanted to use the shift key to make a capital letter. Also, eagles lack manual dexterity, so I can understand why they'd want to leave out apostrophes. Eagles are all about efficiency.
Nathan said,
April 22, 2010 @ 9:25 am
how did the eagle type the exclamation points.
[(myl) Language Log, where even the commenters fact-check cartoons.]
Randall said,
April 22, 2010 @ 9:38 am
I suppose I shouldn't blatantly disregard as this as prescriptivist piffle, but I do.
I seem to recall once being counted off of a term paper for using the spelling 'all right', as opposed to the (now standard?) alright. I believe the same thing has happened with altogether and already, which don't mean what all together and all ready now do.
Why not the same for a lot (as in the sort of lot which signifies land, or a parking lot) and alot (the one which signifies many or much?)
Henning Makholm said,
April 22, 2010 @ 9:47 am
&nathan: french keyboard!
greg said,
April 22, 2010 @ 9:59 am
I like to allot alot a' lots.
greg said,
April 22, 2010 @ 10:01 am
or perhaps,
A Lot allots alot of lots to a lot of alot of Lots' lots
Breffni said,
April 22, 2010 @ 10:14 am
The fact that it can be modified – "an awful lot" – suggests that it's not yet a single word.
Sandy Nicholson said,
April 22, 2010 @ 10:18 am
One reason is that it removes the (to me) obvious parallelism between ‘a lot of people’, ‘lots of people’, ‘one lot of people’, ‘another lot of people’, ‘a different lot of people’, ‘a strange lot of people’ and so on. In other words, there’s nothing special about the determiner ‘a’ here that calls for it to be fused with ‘lot’. And why not ‘aload’, ‘abunch’, ‘agroup’ and so on? Admittedly, I’m in danger of being accused of applying logic to language (which we should of course always be wary of).
I wonder if I’d be allowed to keep an alot (or even a mating pair of alots) on an allotment (though I wouldn’t have a whole lot of time to look after them). That’s my allotted time up …
Sili said,
April 22, 2010 @ 10:27 am
I think that's a whole nother kettle of lots.
Spell Me Jeff said,
April 22, 2010 @ 10:33 am
@Breffni
A whole nother thing . . .
Spell Me Jeff said,
April 22, 2010 @ 10:33 am
Oops. Shoulda kept reading.
Ellie said,
April 22, 2010 @ 10:42 am
Re: eagle and exclamation points, I don't believe the eagle is incapable of hitting the shift key, but rather is chosing to use the leaping double-taloned SHIFT+[Key] only in places where it makes the most impact…maximizing the returns from his energy expenditure, if you will.
Faldone said,
April 22, 2010 @ 10:44 am
I've even heard "an entire nother".
Ellen K. said,
April 22, 2010 @ 10:46 am
I notice she uses "says" in her post. While I'm okay with "says" for something written, still, it doesn't seem appropriate when one is specifying spelling, not word choice.
Z. D. Smith said,
April 22, 2010 @ 10:51 am
I assure you, you shouldn't be too eager to see too much poetical linguistic peeving. What there is is execrable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kdrsPRZnK8
[(myl) Well, to start with, just the requirement to peeve (pseudo-)poetically would cut down on the frequency of the phenomenon. And then if the result is of poor quality, the discussion can shift to criticism of the scansion or the imagery or whatever, which would make a change from the recital of historical and grammatical facts, which gets tedious after a while.]
fev said,
April 22, 2010 @ 10:56 am
At least the eagle doesn't have to dive headfirst onto the keys.
[(myl) Eagles aren't really pecking types of birds, not being seed-eaters — their beaks are more adapted for tearing gobbets of flesh out of carrion. But chickens can be trained to play a winning game of tic-tac-toe, as you doubtless know — and a properly trained chicken might well be able to pass a Turing test, if the competition were random YouTube commenters.]
Randall said,
April 22, 2010 @ 11:04 am
@Smell Me Jeff
See, a whole nother thing actually annoys me, if simply because I think it should be a whole other…
Sili said,
April 22, 2010 @ 11:17 am
Stop being an an-hole.
Faldone said,
April 22, 2010 @ 11:35 am
At least the eagle doesn't have to dive headfirst onto the keys.
He could've done caps with SHIFT LOCK.
Leonardo Boiko said,
April 22, 2010 @ 12:26 pm
I suppose you must have seen this cartoon, but just to make the discussion complete: http://www.angryflower.com/aposter.html
It pops up now and again in the Internet. I understand it has become more popular than the “Bob the Angry Flower” strip altogether.
[(myl) Yes, Ben Zimmer blogged it back in 2005, along with a Mallard Fillmore rant.]
JKD said,
April 22, 2010 @ 12:26 pm
And that Apple logo doesn't look like an apple: it looks like a C with an accent ague over it — suggesting that this is a Polish eagle. And if there's one pet peeve I wave higher than all the rest, it's against Polish eagles with typing skills.
Leonardo Boiko said,
April 22, 2010 @ 12:26 pm
Is the “alot” creature a pun I’m missing?
Leonardo Boiko said,
April 22, 2010 @ 12:27 pm
Nevermind, I did actually read the article now (^^);
Amy Stoller said,
April 22, 2010 @ 12:44 pm
@Breffni: I believe you mean "a nawful lot."
John Cowan said,
April 22, 2010 @ 12:48 pm
Eagles?! Eagles are noble birds. No, such commentators are plainly relatives of archy the cockroach, only without his greatness of soul. "toujours gai mehitabel toujours gai".
[(myl) I'm ashamed not to have made this crucial connection. I stumbled over a copy of archy and mehitabel when I was six or so, and my immediate reaction was that a cockroach wouldn't be able to generate enough momentum to work a typewriter, no matter how hard he jumped. My mother accused me, quite fairly, of quibbling.]
Faith said,
April 22, 2010 @ 1:29 pm
Here's a whole series of cartooned peeves: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=4553329&id=54761311260
The discussion of "alot" reminds me that when I was an undergraduate there were three campus parking lots designated as A, B, and C, which we, naturally, referred to as a lot, blot, and clot.
fev said,
April 22, 2010 @ 2:03 pm
"He would climb painfully upon the framework of the machine and cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward."
Kids these days. I swear.
uberVU - social comments said,
April 22, 2010 @ 3:21 pm
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by PhilosophyFeeds: Language Log: Funniest peeve ever http://goo.gl/fb/BrjzR…
Adam Norwood said,
April 22, 2010 @ 5:07 pm
There was a teacher at my elementary school (I wasn't in her class, but she was teaching in the room next door) who wanted to convey to her class that the correct phrase is "a lot" and not "alot". To make it emphatic she wrote a large "A" on a chalkboard on one side of the room, and then sprinted to the chalkboard on the other side of the room to write the "LOT" — before she got there, though, she tripped on a desk and broke her arm. That's definitely one way to get kids to remember a word usage peeve for a long, long time!
[(myl) That's much better than my suggested creativity requirement. All peeves must result in hospital visits for the author, preferably as a result of spectacular falls! Definitely raises the bar.]
John Laviolette said,
April 22, 2010 @ 5:50 pm
In another location, we were discussing the Alot cartoon, and I noticed that the cartoon covers "alot more" + adjective, but not "alot more" + noun. I think the latter must indicate that the Alot speaks like Hulk. "READ ALOT MORE CARTOONS! GRRR!"
Joe Fineman said,
April 22, 2010 @ 9:03 pm
I am all for extending to eagles the indulgence we have granted to cockroaches for 95 years.
Troy S. said,
April 23, 2010 @ 6:12 am
I see the eagle is typing on a Mac, but if it were a Windows machine, he could use StickyKeys. Hit the Shift Key 5 times. Pretty neat!
Paul Kay said,
April 23, 2010 @ 7:52 pm
OK, some (not all) of you guys are pretty clever with the puns, but Breffni deserves some credit for making a legitimate linguistic observation. The point he or she makes about a lot being interruptible is valid. Consider, a whole lot, a great lot, a terrific lot, a terrible lot, an awful lot, a frightful lot, a huge lot, a tremendous lot,.. need I go on? On the other hand a whole nother is pretty darn fixed; it gets 2,900,000 raw Google hits, and this particular three-word expression is the subject of many comments pro and con. In contrast An entire nother gets 26,100 Goggle hits. I'm not aware of any other candidates to fill the slot in a(n) __ nother. If they exist I predict they'll be quite rare. Also for me a whole nother is jocular, and I'd like to believe it's so considered by most of those who use it. (The OED says it's U.S. colloquial, which I admit is going a bit farther than I'm willing to.) Then there's the fact that this same word lot, meaning something like 'many' shows up in lots of, where it's pluralized. So I don't think the observations about a whole nother invalidate Breffni's point… which he or she may have meant a surprising lot less seriously than I have taken it.
Sridhar Ramesh said,
April 23, 2010 @ 8:36 pm
Well, of course "a whole nother" is fixed and jocular. The proper comparable interruptions of "another" would be "a whole other", "an entire other", etc. Analyzing "another" as "an other" (parallel to "alot" as "a lot"), the /n/ only appears in the right phonetic environment, which can be disrupted or displaced by interruption.
Aaron Davies said,
April 23, 2010 @ 8:42 pm
@Troy S.: sticky keys works on, and was invented on, the mac.
Aaron Davies said,
April 23, 2010 @ 8:43 pm
@myl: my world of warcraft guild once made a rule that guild members were only allowed to insult each other (in our chat channel) in haiku form. it was quite effective in stopping flamewars. (iirc, i was the only person who actually bothered to compose any insulting haiku…)
Mark P said,
April 24, 2010 @ 1:41 am
I'm not aware of any other candidates to fill the slot in a(n) __ nother. If they exist I predict they'll be quite rare
I think it un-bloody-likely that people from less cultured British backgrounds would agree with you.
Breffni said,
April 24, 2010 @ 4:30 am
Paul,
He meant it seriously! I didn't think the "a whole nother" argument was meant entirely seriously, though. To the extent that there are speakers who use "a whole nother" unselfconsciously, then the initial hypothesis would have to be that "nother" is in fact a word for them. You do get a handful of apparently non-joking hits for "the nother one(s)".
Sili said,
April 24, 2010 @ 10:02 am
If interuptability was the only argument, I wouldn't be able to say "a sweet orange" and "a wet newt" in place of "a sweet norange" and "a wet eft".
Breffni said,
April 24, 2010 @ 11:46 am
Sili,
My point isn't that "a lot" and "another" can't undergo metanalysis as "orange" and "newt" have done, nor even that they haven't already done so for some speakers. It's that (a) it hasn't happened for the vast majority of speakers, and (b) even for individuals where you might argue it has, you'd need more evidence than just the spelling. If "nother" has become a word for some speakers, then you should find those speakers saying things like "the nother one" – and you do, so maybe there are some such speakers. And if "alot" truly is a word for some speakers, then we should find "a whole alot" and "an awful alot" – and lo and behold, we do.
But my guess is that the vast majority of those who write "alot" do not say "a whole/awful/etc. alot", and for those individuals, "alot" isn't a lexeme. So Randall's analogy with "altogether" and "already" doesn't hold.
Gregg said,
April 25, 2010 @ 12:12 pm
For the record, "alot" is easily the single most common misspelling on my high school English papers. I wouldn't be surprised if it were accepted by dictionaries (labeled as nonstandard) in twenty or thirty years.
Daniel said,
April 27, 2010 @ 2:41 am
Which sounds right:
A lot of people are coming to my party.
A lot of people is coming to my party.
Also:
Paul Kay pointed out the following: "a whole lot, a great lot, a terrific lot, a terrible lot, an awful lot, a frightful lot, a huge lot, a tremendous lot"
Most of these aren't used nearly as often as "alot" itself–definitely not as often as "a whole nother" (which I use unironically and hear all the time)–and would sound archaic and/or pretentious to me in casual conversation. The most common of that list are "a whole lot" and "an awful lot," which are usually pronounced as "a whollot" and "anawfullot," which practically stand on their own. I don't think people are thinking separately of the concepts "a," "whole," and "lot" when they say "a whole lot."
Rodger C said,
April 28, 2010 @ 11:17 am
@Daniel: Compare "Sixteen tons is alot of coal."