Language Log

Responding to the popularity of this morning's post on the politico-lexical economy of fair, here's a list of some earlier LL posts on aspects of the No Word for X meme and its rhetorical deployment [updated for some later ones as well…]:

"No word for 'runoff'?", 12/23/2020
"'No words for mental health'", 9/8/2020
"Two few words to describe emotions", 2/12/2019
"No word for rape", 5/29/2018
"Candidate for careless Whorfian nonsense of the year", 3/11/2018
"Failing words in Myanmar", 7/20/2015
"No word for 'fetch'", 11/25/2014
"No word for 'father'", 10/22/2014
"When there's no Hebrew word for something, it's a bad idea", 4/4/2014
"No word for rape" (11/20/2013)
"No word for normal parts of early childhood?" (7/23/2013)
"Wade Davis has no word for 'dubious linguistic claim'" (1/14/2013)
"No word for 'privacy' in Russian?" (1/15/2012)
"It's baaack . . . and upside-down!" (1/2/2012)
"No word for Rapture" (5/20/2011)
"No word for 'mess'" (4/21/2011)
"We have not the word because we have so much of the thing" (4/19/2011)
"No word for dyslexia in languages with good spelling systems" (2/28/2011)
"Annals of 'No Word for X'" (1/23/2011)
"No word for 'retroactive loss of modifier redundancy'?" (10/9/2010
"No word for journalistic indolence" (10/6/2010)
"No virgins on Danger Island" (10/6/2010)
"Whorfian tourism" (9/23/2010)
"There is No Word in Japanese for 'Compliance'" (7/15/2010)
"Icelandic: no word for 'please', 45 words for 'green'?" (4/18/2010)
"40 words for 'next'" (4/2/2010)
"Pop-Whorfianism in the comics again" (7/29/2009)
"Hay foot straw foot" (7/29/2009)
"No word for bribery" (7/3/2009)
"From the 'words for X' annals" (5/31/2009)
"No concept of X in Y" (3/29/2009)
"Rainbow sparkling air sequins" (2/2/2009)
"No word for lying?" (1/31/2009)
"No words, or too many" (1/30/2009)
"No word for fair?" (1/28/2009)
"Another 'words for X' competition" (1/1/2009)
"No word for integrity?" (12/31/2008)
"Reverse Whorfianism and the value of SHAs" (12/23/2008)
"Burger King Whopper Virgins" (12/4/2008)
"Journalistic dreamtime" (3/8/2007)
"Solving the world's problems with linguistics" (12/17/2006)
"Does anybody have a word for this? Probably not." (11/2/2006)
"Parts of a fish head: Let me count the ways" (10/4/2006)
"Ineffability" (9/21/2006)
"No concept of the future, no yuccas either" (5/11/2006)
"No Word for Thank You" (5/6/2006)
"New ideas and new words" (4/23/2006)
"Whorf in a bottle" (5/5/2006)
"Ayn Rand psychologizes a trope" (3/19/2006)
"Ayn Rand, linguist?" (3/15/2006)
"'60 Minutes' doomed to repeat itself" (12/24/2005)
"Snowclone blindness" (11/19/2005)
"The miserable French language and its inadequacies" (9/30/2005)
"Football in Navajo, anyone?" (9/23/2005)
"Crisis ≠ Danger + Opportunity" (4/29/2005)
"No word for 'lazy hack parroting drivel'" (4/1/2005)
"No word for sex" (3/12/2005)
"It's like a glimmer on the horizon" (12/3/2004)
"Arctic folk at loss for words again" (11/23/2004)
"No word for robins" (11/16/2004)
"46 Somali words for camel" (2/15/2004)
"Somali words for camel spit" (2/11/2004)

Over on The Loom, the blogging home of my brother Carl Zimmer, a discussion about bad science writing was sparked by a particularly noxious Esquire article. (The description of cardiologist Hina Chaudhry as "a lab-worn doctor-lady" is just the tip of the iceberg.) In the comments, David Fishman left the cryptic remark, "Consider the armadillo." Carl revealed that this was an in-joke dating back to 1989, when the two of them were budding science reporters at Discover Magazine:

Our editors always warned us against writing openings and transitions with words no sane person would ever utter. Which we epitomized as, "Consider the armadillo."

"Consider the armadillo" does indeed sound like journalistic hackwork, all the more because it's in the form of a snowclone. In one early formulation, Geoff Pullum defined snowclones as "some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists." In this case, the crutch for lazy (science) writers goes all the way back to the New Testament.

Snowclones, those endlessly flexible phrasal templates, have already spawned their own database, launched by Erin O'Connor in March 2007. Now Mark Peters, who has helped bring snowclones to the masses in articles for Psychology Today, the Columbia Journalism Review, and Good, has created an even cozier online niche: a blog devoted to a single snowclone. It's called "The Rosa Parks of Blogs," and as you can guess from the title it's based on the "X is the Y of Z" snowclone, discussed here, here, and here. Mark explains:

Everybody is the Rosa Parks of something—or at least the Michael Phelps, Cap'n Crunch, Dick Cheney, Elmer Fudd, or Paris Hilton of whatever. This blog collects examples of the adaptable idiom "X is the Y of Z", which is a snowclone. Feel free to use these descriptions when discussing your beautiful children, longtime companions, sworn enemies, favorite foods, and elected congressvermin.

A few days ago I posted about (among other things) the snowclonelet "X virgin", conveying (roughly) 'someone who hasn't experienced X'. I reported there on two instances with sexual content: "oral virgin" and "anal virgin". There are others, including the fuller versions "oral sex virgin" and "anal sex virgin", the variants "blowjob virgin" and "butt-sex virgin", the pair "gay-sex virgin" and "straight sex virgin", the electronic "phone sex virgin", "cyber-sex virgin", and "Skype sex virgin", plus "pornography virgin" and "porn virgin". No doubt there are more.

Then W Shore wrote to say:

I hope it won't be long before, just as the "electric guitar" created the "acoustic guitar", we begin to hear about "sex virgins." Much like, "I'm a chocoholic, but for alcohol".

The suggestion is that the widespread use of "X virgin" will incline people to create the retronym "sex virgin" (similar to "acoustic guitar" and "analog watch"). And it's happened; here's a clear example:

I'm 15 years old and i am a sex virgin. i get vaginal flatulance … (link)

There are probably more to be found, but they're very hard to search for; "sex virgin" pulls up vast amounts of irrelevant stuff (plus some of the "X virgin" examples above).

Yesterday, 10 November, was International Human Rights Day, and for the occasion two San Franciscans spearheaded a protest and boycott (across the U.S.) on behalf of gay rights and in opposition to California's Proposition 8 (which banned same-sex marriage).  Two points of linguistic interest: the name of the event is "A Day Without a Gay" (sometimes reported as "A Day Without Gays"), and people are encouraged to "call in gay" to work.

We've commented several times on the rhetorical template X is the Y of Z ("X as the Y of Z", 7/28/2006; "X as the Y of Z, again", 3/25/2008), and several others have joined us. Following Barack Obama's historic victory in yesterday's election, it occurred to me to wonder which versions of this pattern would be instantiated over the next few news cycles. The first one that I've seen was produced by John F. Harris and Jim Vendehei at 5:28 a.m.("A new world order", Politico, 11/5/2008):

Obama is the Google of politics: He has technological expertise and an audience his political competitors simply cannot match. Looking ahead to 2010, House and Senate Democrats will be jealously eyeing Obama’s e-mail lists and technology secrets — giving him even greater leverage over them. Republicans will be forced to invest serious money and time to narrow the technology gap.

Peter Ringeisen writes to ask "why it is that educated people use ungrammatical obsolete verb endings?" — a question inspired by this passage in Thomas L. Friedman's New York Times op-ed column today:

Globalization giveth — it was this democratization of finance that helped to power the global growth that lifted so many in India, China and Brazil out of poverty in recent decades. Globalization now taketh away — it was this democratization of finance that enabled the U.S. to infect the rest of the world with its toxic mortgages. And now, we have to hope, that globalization will saveth.

Three things to comment on here. The use of obsolete verb endings in the first place. Then the extension of them to contexts where they're historically incorrect, as in will saveth (and by Friedman, an accomplished writer). Finally, the snowclone (actually, snowclone family) GivethTaketh ("X giveth and X taketh away"), which we haven't looked at here on Language Log and doesn't seem to be anywhere in the Snowclone Database.

Rhymes With Orange plays with the snowclone of linguification "not know the meaning of X":

Here we get the figurative sense of the expression (in the snowclone) confronting its literal sense.

As unneeded further testimony to the lasting damage done by George Orwell's dishonest and stupid essay "Politics and the English language", with its pointless and unfollowable insistence that good writing must avoid all familiar phrases and word usages, Robert Fisk treated his readers in The Independent on August 9 to some ranting about his most hated clichés.

I supply below an exhaustive list of the alleged clichés about which he raved. All that is striking about them (for there is certainly nothing interesting or noteworthy about the choices made in his lexical hate list) is their utter arbitrariness and unreasoned character.

Zippy produces an elaborate instance of the snowclone Are We X Yet? (see here for our last mention of the snowclone, in Zippy's "Are we playing “Risk” in an underground bunker beneath th’ White House yet??"), and Griffy replies with a variant of the proverb "If the shoe fits, wear it" (which the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy says was originally "If the cap fits, …", possibly referring to a fool's cap).