Language Log

Luke Yeomans (pictured) had a king cobra sanctuary in Nottingham, England, and planned to open it to the public this weekend, but instead one of his cobras killed him on Wednesday with a single bite, a hefty injection of neurotoxic and cardiotoxic venom that gave him a heart attack. Sadly, the linguistic signs that he would be killed this way were already present in the record, quite clear in something he had said. I wish someone could have warned him.

The Daily Telegraph quotes Yeomans as saying this about why the snakes offered no threat to him:

These king cobras know I provide them with food and fresh water so they're not going to go out of their way to do harm to me when I do no harm to them whatsoever. People say I’m mad but it’s better than saying that you’re bad and everything I do is good. My life is about the conservation of the king cobra.

Jim Reeves' classic country song "Distant Drums" (written by Cindy Walker) expresses a marriage proposal by a young man who wants his true love to marry him right now, before the drums and bugles that he already imagines he hears in the distance arrive and he is conscripted and forced to go off to war. The main part of the young man's argument is expressed in the chorus thus:

So Mary marry me, let's not wait
Let's share all the time we can before it's too late
Love me now, for now is all the time there may be
If you love me Mary, Mary marry me.

I have a question about the underlined part, addressed primarily to professional semanticists. Some of our posts get a bit nerdy on Language Log, and this is one. Skip it if you hate to see a capital A written upside down.

On CNN recently, this exchange:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Ari Velshi: You're more like an average guy.

Tim Pawlenty: I welcome that. I'm not, you know, going to light my hair on fire and shoot sparks out my ears, or whatever.

In my last post puzzling over even ("What does 'even' even mean?", 2/8/2011), I suggested that there's a new even idiom, exemplified in phrases like "How does that even work?" or "What does that even mean?", in which even has become simply an intensifier rather than a scalar focus particle. If this is true, it would be a rebirth of even's pre-16th-century use as (in the OED's gloss) "an intensive or emphatic particle" that can be "prefixed to a subject, object, or predicate, or to the expression of a qualifying circumstance, to emphasize its identity". However, the 94 helpful comments on that post left me wondering whether this is really happening.

So here's another even example that brought me up short — Michael Hinkelman, "Feds unveil 50-count indictment against 'Uncle Joe,' 12 others", Philadelpha Daily News 5/24/2011:

But Joseph C. Santaguida, Ligambi's attorney, said the reputed mob boss, who pleaded not guilty to all charges and has a bail hearing Thursday, claimed that the feds' case was "weak."

Asked if Ligambi, dressed in a white polo shirt and jeans, was the mob boss portrayed by prosecutors, the defense attorney said: "I don't know if [prosecutors] can even prove that. I don't think it's that strong a case."

The first sentence of this news report is perfectly fine, but it presents a linguistic puzzle:

The leader of the International Monetary Fund and a possible candidate for president of France was arrested Sunday in connection with the violent sexual assault of a hotel maid after being yanked from an airplane moments before it was to depart for Paris, police said.

The puzzle is how such a conjunction can denote a single person, as it clearly does in this sentence. It could even more easily denote two, but then we’d see “were arrested”, not “was arrested”.

First a descriptive query: do all languages allow such a conjunction of a definite and an indefinite singular noun phrase in subject position, interpreted as referring to a single person? And does English allow it quite generally, or is this a special newspaper style?

A couple of days ago ("On not allowing Bin Laden to back-burner", 5/3/2011), I noted that English (like other languages)  often turns a noun denoting a place into a verb meaning "cause something to come to be in/on/at that place".  I also noted that other causative change-of-state verbs generally have intransitive/inchoative uses as well (The sun melted the snow versus The snow melted), but denominal locative verbs typically don't.

Thus we have transitive causatives like She floored the accelerator and We tabled the motion, but not the corresponding intransitive/inchoative versions *The accelerator floored and *The motion tabled.

Ben Smith and Glenn Thrush, Osama bin Laden's death brings celebration, unity – and questions", Politico 5/2/11 (emphasis added):

Two years ago, Obama tasked CIA Director Leon Panetta to prioritize the hunt for the 9/11 mastermind, a response to the perception that the Bush administration had allowed the hunt for bin Laden to back-burner.

The bold-face usage struck me as unexpected.

Tom Scocca, in Slate magazine, is full of scorn for the language of the New York Times. It is not always easy to discern his meaning (he uses a metaphor of lard in pie crusts, which I didn't quite follow), but he seems to think the Times is desperately concerned to "preserve its sacred function (or the appearance of its sacred function) of neutrally and modestly recording events, not judging them" — it struggles so hard to be neutral that it becomes vapid. He is incensed that the phrase "showed just how broadly" in the print edition was replaced in a later online edition by "raised new questions about how broadly", in this passage about the reported deaths of Gaddafi's son and grandsons in Tripoli:

And while the deaths could not be independently verified, the campaign against Libya’s most densely populated areas raised new questions about how broadly NATO is interpreting its United Nations mandate to protect civilians.

Scocca's bitterly scornful remark about the language involved is this:

There: in the disembodied implied passive, questions were raised. About the interpretation of the mandate. And just like that, we have bounced gently away from the bomb crater to a discussion about the understanding of a policy.

The disembodied implied passive? What is this, exactly?

What is the link between (a) denigrating, (b) ceasing to hold in one's hand, (c) making written notes, and (d) euthanasia?

Ben Yagoda shows in this article in Slate (not for the first time) that he is one English professor cum journalistic writer who really is smart as well as witty when writing about language. In this article he actually does some empirical research on the extent to which the prescriptivist conservatives are holding their ground — he makes an attempt at quantitative assessment of the extent to which recently shifting word meanings have caught on (the words whose meanings he studies include decimate, disinterested, eke, fortuitous, fulsome, momentarily, nonplussed, presently, toothsome, and verbal).

From ABC World News, 3/22/2011, in a segment on the rescue of the downed American F-15 pilots in Libya, Diane Sawyer observes (about 6:55 into the program):

And it is hard to imagine
or to underestimate or overestimate
what it took in those heart-pounding moments when the pilots had to eject
the incredible velocity of that

Dick Margulis writes:

An NPR reporter this morning, talking about people in Libya: "…have never spoken to a Western reporter, much less seen one."

I hear this frequently (although I don't recall reading it). It is a reversal of what was intended: "have never seen a Western reporter, much less spoken to one."

This occurs with both "much less" and "let alone."

I wouldn't begin to know how to do a corpus search to detect the frequency with which people reverse the arguments of the expression in speech. It occurs to me, though, that the production error seems to be akin to the misnegation phenomenon that you've posted about more than once.

In this week's online BBC News magazine, Alan Metcalf reprises his recent book OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word. I haven't read the book, but Prof. Metcalf is an established scholar as well as a successful popularist, and I have every reason to think that the book is well worth reading. Still, I have a little semantic problem with the article.

The article mostly discusses the history of OK, saying that its widespread circulation probably dates back to an unfunny joke in an 1839 article in the Boston Morning Post. Fair enough: he and the OED agree on this point. Then he goes on:

But what makes OK so useful that we incorporate it into so many conversations?