Language Log

There are some nice examples in Leah Rozen, "Hey, Ryan, Talk to the Dress", NYT 2/10/2010:

RYAN, Ryan, Ryan. It’s Journalism 101: who, what, when, where and why, as in, “Who are you wearing?” […]

Susan Kaufman, editor of People StyleWatch, said she lost it when Mr. Seacrest didn’t immediately quiz an elegant-looking Sandra Bullock — who would later win as Best Actress — about her shimmery frock (by Marchesa). “I’m screaming at the TV: ‘Ask her who’s she wearing!’ ” Ms. Kaufman said. “I was so angry, my husband was laughing at me.”

Reading Dana Stevens "Ferguson and Fry Rock Late Night by Having Actual Conversation", Slate 2/24/2010, Mark Paris came across this sentence:

There was no part of their chat that wasn't something one might not overhear at an interesting dinner party.

His reaction, in email to me, was "I know what was meant, but didn't it go one negation too far?"

From Paul Kay, this passage from an email recently sent by the Chair of the UC Berkeley Academic Senate:

As background, the state continues to anticipate a very large deficit this year.  While the Governor's budget did call for restoring approximately $300M in funds cut last year from the UC budget, it would probably not be prudent – in my view – to assume that our budgetary situation for 2010-11 will be better than 2009-10.  In addition, the Governor's proposed constitutional amendment, which called for shifting money to higher education by privatizing the state prison system, has attracted no political support (and a great deal of criticism as a policy proposal).  While UCOP has been apparently working with to develop alternative constitutional amendments, it would again be imprudent not to expect a silver bullet.

An interesting misnegation was broadcast today on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, in a segment under the title "Exactly How Do We Go Forth and Innovate".  Liane Hansen quoted president Obama's SOTU passage about innovation and leadership in science and technology, including the phrase "Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America".

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And she asked Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, "The president referred to innovation several times in his speech. What did you think? Was there anything new there?"

His response began:

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There wasn't a- a lot new there,  I think I- I- what I was most impressed with was when he said "we can't be second to none".

"Just because you collect them doesn't make them collectibles," says a wife to a dopey-looking husband in the cartoon that Bob Ladd peeled off his New Yorker calendar last December 23. And she's right. There's a difference in meaning between the -ible suffix, which attaches mainly to roots with a Latin origin, and the word possible: what is possible for you to X may not meet the standard for being Xible. As so often, the cartoonist (Barbara Smaller in this case) draws on not just a familiarity with life and relationships but also a pretty good implicit analytical knowledge of semantics and derivational morphology.

Ismael Tohari emailed me from Saudi Arabia to ask this:

Sorry to bother you but… I really find it very hard to pinpoint any difference between the two sentences below:

[1]   He was playing a violin when the visitor arrived.

[2]   He was playing the violin when the visitor arrived.

A fascinating question. I wonder if you can see what the difference in meaning is, and why it is so tricky to specify?

In the current (Jan 4, 2010) issue of The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead has a comment that is partly about what to call the previous decade:

Arguably, a grudging agreement has been reached on calling the decade "the aughts," but that unfortunate term is rooted in a linguistic error. The use of "aught" to mean "nothing," "zero," or "cipher" is a nineteenth-century corruption of the word "naught," which actually does mean nothing, and which, as in the phrase "all for naught," is still in current usage. Meanwhile, the adoption of "the aughts" as the decade’s name only accelerates the almost complete obsolescence of the actual English word "aught," a concise and poetic near-synonym for "anything" that has for centuries well served writers, including Shakespeare ("I never gave you aught," Hamlet says to Ophelia, in an especially ungenerous moment, before she goes off and drowns) and Milton ("To do aught good never will be our task / But ever to do ill our sole delight," Satan declares near the beginning of "Paradise Lost," before slinking up to tempt Eve).

I don't know whether Mead is right that we've settled on the aughts, and I won't comment directly on whether anyone has committed any errors. Instead, I'll try to explicate why a word like aught might take on senses close to that of nothing.

Andrew Dowd sends me a genuine, attested case of the kind of sentence that I have elsewhere called plausible angloid gibberish. It is a particular kind of mangled comparative that somehow seems English when it isn't. It has absolutely no right to be called grammatical, and nothing can explain why it is that we (falsely) believe that it has a meaning that could be accounted for in the regular way — it doesn't and it couldn't. No syntacticians that I know of can say why it sort of slips by, in comprehension and sometimes (as here) even in production. The sentence came from http://www.backspace.com/notes/2004/06/, citing AdAge, and it reads thus:

In Michigan and Minnesota, more people found Mr Bush's ads negative than they did Mr Kerry's.

Complete and utter syntactic nonsense. And yet when you read it you see what they meant long before you realize that they couldn't have meant it.

Following up on my post about the often-puzzling semantics of the pattern "No NOUN is too ADJECTIVE to VERB", here's an up-to-date list of LL postings on a cluster of related topics, which I will keep updated as the years roll by:

Decades ago, when I was little, I read this joke in Mad Magazine:

Do your feet smell? Does your nose run? You may be built upside-down.

I giggled for a short time — just a couple of days, I think — at the surprising coincidence of the two verb senses, and the double pun, and then got on with whatever boys in short pants do during those parts of the day that are not taken up with giggling. But I see now that there is something linguistically interesting about the joke: the two questions convey the effect of a conditional. So the content of the joke could be phrased (though for some reason much less amusingly) like this:

If your feet smell and your nose runs then you may be built upside-down.

This similarity of effect between interrogative clauses and conditional clauses has a connection to the historical reason for an identity of form between the words introducing the interrogative subordinate clause in (1) and the conditional clause in (2).

    (1) I don't know if the car will start.
    (2) We won't go if the car won't start.

The two ifs share an etymology, but they have grown apart.

What does "Complimentary High-speed Internet access on the lobby level" mean? You can see the phrase on the website of the Hilton Washington Dulles Airport hotel. Did you imagine it meant that if you opened your laptop on the lobby level of the hotel a wireless Internet network would come up and you could connect for free? Oh, you are so naive. You are not a sophisticated jet-setter like Robert Langdon and me.

My view on the classic prescriptive bugaboo known as dangling modifiers or dangling participles (henceforth, danglers) is, I think, a bit unusual. I don't regard danglers as grammatical mistakes; that is, I think the syntax of English does not block them. Yet I do think they constitute mistakes, in a broader sense, so in a way I am with the prescriptivists on this one. A dangler is an error in a domain that I have compared (for want of a better way to put it) to courtesy or manners. I regard danglers as minor offenses against communicational etiquette, but not against grammar. The argument against danglers being grammar errors is simple: they are too common in even careful published writing, and come too fluently to the keyboards of even excellent writers, and are accepted without remark by too many educated readers. If you ask what evidence there is that, for example, verbs come before objects in English, the answer is that it is overwhelmingly clear from just about all of everybody's usage just about all the time, and from the blank "What's gone wrong with you?" reactions if you try putting the object before the verb. The evidence on danglers goes entirely the other way. Here, for example, is an example in the carefully edited prose of The Economist (October 3rd, 2009, p. 79):

A report to the British House of Commons this year highlighted the case of an elderly British citizen called Derek Bond, who was arrested, at gunpoint, in February 2003 while on holiday in South Africa. After being held for three weeks, it turned out that the American extradition request was based on a fraudster who had stolen Mr Bond's identity.

From a NYT story (Shaila Dewan, "Pollster's Censure Jolts News Organizations", October 3) on the polling company Strategic Vision, which has been reprimanded by a professional society of pollsters for failing to disclose "essential facts" about its methods:

As for the accusation that the company's claim to be based in Atlanta was misleading, Mr. Johnson [David E. Johnson, the founder and chief executive of Strategic Vision] acknowledged that the main Strategic Vision office was in Blairsville, Ga., 115 miles away, but said the difference was "semantic".

Yeah, yeah, blame it on the words. "Semantic" here means 'only semantic, not substantive' and locates the problem not in differences of matters of fact but in differences in the meanings of linguistic expressions. The claim is that some people use certain expressions (like based in Atlanta) one way, while other people use these expressions somewhat differently, so that any dispute about the state of things is "just / merely / only" a dispute about word meanings.