Language Log

Reader KB sends in two interesting passages from E. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet, 1906, where it is used when one might have expected singular they (emphasis added):

Chapter 1 (in an Edwardian present) "I hope you notice that they were not cowardly enough to cry till their Father had gone; they knew he had quite enough to upset him without that. But when he was gone every one felt as if it had been trying not to cry all its life, and that it must cry now, if it died for it. So they cried."

Chapter 12 (from a Utopian future) "I can’t describe that house; I haven’t the time. And I haven’t heart either, when I think how different it was from our houses. The lady took them all over it. The oddest thing of all was the big room in the middle. It had padded walls and a soft, thick carpet, and all the chairs and tables were padded. There wasn’t a single thing in it that any one could hurt itself with."

Steven Pinker strikes back: "False Fronts in the Language Wars: Why New Yorker writers and others keep pushing bogus controversies", Slate 5/31/2012.

Nature or nurture. Love it or leave it. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.

If you didn’t already know that euphonious dichotomies are usually phony dichotomies, you need only check out the latest round in the supposed clash between “prescriptivist” and “descriptivist” theories of language.

Readers of The New Yorker might be getting the impression that the magazine has it in for a nefarious group of people known as "descriptivists." They're a terrible bunch, as far as I can tell. First came Joan Acocella's "The English Wars" in the May 14 issue (see Mark Liberman's posts, "Rules and 'rules'," "A half century of usage denialism"). And now the vendetta continues online with Ryan Bloom's post on the magazine's Page-Turner blog, "Inescapably, You're Judged By Language," which promises to unmask the dastardly descriptivists and their "dirty little secret."

In The H-word, I quoted MWDEU  to the effect that the sentence-adverb use of hopefully "was [traditionally] available if writers needed it, but few writers did". I also quoted MWDEU quoting Copperud 1970 to the effect that the "rapid expansion of use of hopefully as a sentence-modifier" began "about 1960", and I exhibited a Google Ngrams plot supporting this date. And I quoted Bryan Garner as saying, among other things, that "the battle is now over", and "Hopefully is now a part of AmE". I didn't quote the end of that sentence, which asserts that hopefully "has all but lost its traditional meaning".

This morning (Istanbul time), I thought I'd take a closer quantitative look at the history of hopefully, using evidence from Mark Davies' Corpus of Historical American English. The executive summary of my conclusions:

• MWDEU was right — going back at least to the 1880s, roughly one hopefully in a hundred was the evaluative type meaning "it is hoped" or "I/we/they hope" rather than the manner-adverbial type;
• Copperud was right — in the COHA sample from the 1940s, 2 of 182 instances of hopefully were evaluative adverbials rather than manner adverbials (1%); in the 1950s, the titre was 10 of 220 (4.5%); in the 1960s, it was 82 of 233 (35%).
• Garner was both right and wrong. By the 2000s, 76% of COHA's instances of hopefully are evaluative, many from esteemed writers in well-edited sources. So evaluative hopefully is certainly now part of American English. But the "traditional meaning" of hopefully, "in a hopeful manner", still accounts for 24% of instances, so it's misleading to say that this usage is "all but lost".

Today I learned a valuable new phrase. According to Nicholas Kulish and Paul Geitner's description of the recent European summit meeting in Brussels ("Euro Zone Crisis Boils as Leaders Argue, Failing at Pact", NYT 5/23/2012):

“Each of us spoke and put forward our position,” said Ms. Merkel, addressing the discussion of jointly issued debt, known as euro bonds, after the meeting. “François Hollande spoke as he said he would. It was a very differentiated discussion.”

Much better than "frank exchange of views".

I haven't been able to find video or audio of Chancellor Merkel's remarks — perhaps a reader can give us a link in the comments.

The Buranovskie Babushki ("Buranovsky Grannies"), Russia's entrants in this year's Eurovision Song Contest, have advanced to the final round of ten with their song "Party for Everybody":

Yesterday, I discussed Joan Acocella's strange misreading of two essays introducing the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary ("Rules and 'rules'", 5/11/2012).

John Rickford wrote that "the patterns of variation and change … are regular rather than random, governed by unconscious, language-internal rules and restrictions" — but Ms. Acocella took this defense of "vernaculars that are commonly regarded as lacking rules", from a scholar known for his defense of "Ebonics", as a stalwart affirmation of prescriptive standards.

Steven Pinker tried to explain how false beliefs about standard usage, like No Split Verbs or No Final Prepositions, can become widespread — but Ms. Acocella took this attempt to distinguish between true and false beliefs, from the author of a popular book on "Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language", as promoting the idea that "there are no rules", other than the false "old wives' tales" he debunked.

If you've read Acocella's review, you will have noticed something else about this hallucinated debate: she's really angry about it. In particular, she doesn't care for Hallucinated Steve Pinker at all.

Philipp Sebastian Angermeyer writes:

Is there going to be a language log comment on the article "The English Wars"  in the current issue of the New Yorker?  I find it completely shocking to see that an author who purports to be writing about prescriptivism vs. descriptivism has so little understanding of the subject, and that the editor (presuming that such a position still exists at the New Yorker) would not catch the absurd claim that John Rickford is a prescriptivist.

Years ago Bob Ramsey was highly amused by a tee shirt (of course!) in Korea with the slogan "SKY HIGH HORSE FAT".   Some time later he learned that that enigmatic slogan was nothing more than a direct translation of the much-loved (and to Koreans romantic) idiom referring to the bountiful harvest season, tiān gāo mǎ féi 天高馬肥.  Google Translate lamely renders that as "The days of horse manure", Baidu Fanyi gives the more terse "The horse manure", and Babel Fish hopelessly offers "Day Gao Mafei".  But what does tiān gāo mǎ féi 天高馬肥 (literally, "sky high horse fat") really mean?

Yesterday's Morning Edition took up the question of how "Bribery Accusations Hurt Wal-Mart's Stock Price". The segment takes the form of a conversation between NPR's Chris Arnold and Charles Elson, director of the Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, in which a metaphorically sticky wicket plays an important role. Like many Americans who use that phrase, Chris Arnold re-interprets the metaphor in a way that makes sense to those who are innocent of cricket:

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ARNOLD: It's, of course, too early to say what will happen at Wal-Mart. There many of the payments appear to have been aimed at getting building permits more quickly. And actually there is a grey area there in U.S. law. Companies are permitted to make what are called facilitating payments, quote-unquote, to avoid getting something like a building permit stuck on a minor bureaucrat's desk. But Charles Elson says that can be a sticky wicket to try to go through.

ELSON: When you cross the line from the payment which is acceptable, to a bribe, that's where you have your problems.

ARNOLD: What is the difference, though, between a facilitating payment and a bribe? I mean a bribe is a payment that uh facilitates something, right?

ELSON: Well, that's- that's why ((as I said)) – that's why it's such a sticky wicket.

ARNOLD: Legal experts say lately the Justice Department has been making that wicket even stickier. That is, it's been showing less tolerance for companies to make under the table payments of any kind.

John Barth is visiting Penn, and so I took the opportunity to catch up on his most recent meta-fictions, specifically The Development and Every Third Thought.  I read the second one first, and will make no comment on it here, except to note that (while suitably Barthian) it lacked the feature that struck me so forcefully in reading the first one.

We're about 29 minutes into the first episode, Rose, of the series featuring the ninth Doctor Who, played by Christopher Eccleston. Rose Tyler, a London department-store  clerk who's been caught up in an interdimensional adventure by accident, realizes that her boyfriend — turned into a plastic replica by the Nestene Consciousness — is probably dead.

I've been collecting wine tasting notes as part of an exploration of evaluative language, and have learned some new words as a result, among them leesy.