Language Log

On the MBTA train ticket I bought the other day, entitling me to travel seven zones on the commuter rail system, it says boldly: One Way Adult Interzone.

Does that sound exactly like a name for a pornography website, or is it just me? "Welcome to the One-Way Adult Interzone (must be 18 or older to enter)…" Perhaps it's just me. Never mind.

Someone who heard me interviewed on the radio wrote to ask:

Do you know the derivation of "sleeping in"? I know it means sleeping late, but why do people say "sleeping in" instead of "sleeping late"?

Short answer: "sleep in", in the meaning of "sleep late(r than normal)", seems to have developed as an idiom within the past 100 years, apparently borrowed from Scots.  It's common in English for verbs in combination with intransitive prepositions — sometimes called "phrasal verbs" — to develop idiosyncratic uses and meanings, related in some metaphorical or analogical way to the meanings of the verbs and prepositions involved, but not entirely predictable from them.

Reader and fan Will Thompson wrote to Mark Liberman, who passed his letter on to me, about a recent article by Ellen Barry in The New York Times, discussing a book by the Russian political analyst Nikolai V. Zlobin in which he explains weird/different American cultural norms to Russians.

Will notes that towards the end, the reviewer states:

He [Zlobin] devotes many pages to privacy, a word that does not exist in the Russian language[.]

And Will is suspicious of that claim.

In a review of the game Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw goes on at length about what a ridiculous word "warfighter" is ("Medal of Honor Warfighter & Doom 3 BFG Edition", Zero Punctuation 11/7/2012):

So this week I've been playing a bit of Medal of Honor: Warfighter {laughs}  Sometimes I do a thing where I incrementally alter a game's name each time I say it until it's something stupid, but I'm feeling pretty fucking undercut here — you know, "Warfighter", because he just fights wars all over the place, and then he gets his tax return done by his friend Numbers Accountant.  I don't know anyone who didn't immediately laugh at this fucking name, so why didn't anyone involved in its development put their hand up, or is that a flogging offense in the EA slave pits?

He continues in the same general vein for few dozen clauses, and throughout his review, he makes a point of emitting a loud fake laugh whenever he mentions the game's name. But I thought I'd stop with his question "Why didn't anyone involved in its development put their hand up?", because even though he means this to be a rhetorical question, in fact it has an easy answer.

The annual Thanksgiving feast may have had its origins in Massachusetts, but "Black Friday" is one of  Philadelphia's contributions to American culture. Ben Zimmer told the story in his 11/25/2011 Word Routes column, reporting on research by Bonnie Taylor-Blake:

Today is the day after Thanksgiving, when holiday shopping kicks off and sales-hunters are in full frenzy. The day has come to be known in the United States as "Black Friday," and there are a number of myths about the origin of the name. Retailers would like you to believe that it's the day when stores turn a profit on the year, thus "going into the black." But don't you believe it: the true origins come from traffic-weary police officers in Philadelphia in the early 1960s. […]

Philadelphia merchants disliked the label "Black Friday" and tried to get people to use a more positive term: "Big Friday." That effort failed, of course, and "Black Friday" caught on, spreading to other cities in the 1970s and '80s.

As soon as I heard that the 5th edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD) had come out, I rushed to the nearest Barnes & Noble bookstore (yes, they still exist — that was Borders that closed) and plunked down two Bens (hundred dollar bills) to buy three copies at $60 each:  one for my office at Penn, one for my study at home, and one for a friend.  The 5th ed. was actually published in November, 2011, but I was in China then, and didn't get a chance to buy my own copies until the day I arrived back on American soil.

For the "Word for X" (or "No Word for X") file, from Sidsel Overgaard, "Danes May Bring Back Butter As Government Rolls Back Fat Tax", NPR News 11/13/2012:

Toothbutter: noun. Butter spread so thickly as to reveal teeth marks upon biting.

The fact that this word exists in the Danish language should help to explain what politicians were up against when they introduced the so-called "fat tax" just over a year ago. This is a country that loves it some butter (and meat, and all things dreadful to the arteries).

Gene Buckley sent this photograph of a sign in Los Angeles:

For the linguistically sensitive, one of the burning questions stemming from last night's election-night coverage was, "When did vote become a mass noun?" Several observers picked up on the usage: Monica Macaulay on the Mr. Verb blog, Nancy Friedman on the Fritinancy blog, and Josef Fruehwald, Jonah Ostroff, Dane Pritchard, Kate Stafford, and Elizabeth Preston on Twitter. If you missed the mass-nounification of vote, you can hear several examples in this clip documenting the remarkable moment on Fox News when Megyn Kelly confronts her number-crunching Decision Desk colleagues after Karl Rove questioned their call of Ohio for Obama:

The other day, I bought a soda from a vending machine that was adorned with this sticker:

Commenters on Mark's post about my remarks to the BBC about Briticisms asked if I really had it in for Briticisms in general, and in particular, what was I found so objectionable about "spot on." For the first, the answer is no; as I told Ms Hebblethwaite, some loans are quite useful, like "sell-by date" and "one-off." And I like "twee," with its evocation of Laura Ashley preciosity, though it seems to have lost some of those associations in its application to a genre of indie pop.

But there are others which add nothing more than the fact of their Englishness—what I think of as "motorcar" words. "I liked the funny bits"—what does that convey that "the funny parts" doesn't, other than to say that the speaker is familiar with how the English talk? And given that Anglicisms generally flow to us via a narrower pipe than the one that pours Americanisms into British speech, and one that with some exceptions tends to deposit its effluvia into the cultural upper stories, the practice often suggests a whiff of pretension.  But with "spot on," there's something else going on. I don't think I would have called it ludicrous, as Ms H reports me as saying. But I might very well have said "awfully silly."

I just really like this sentence from the Baltimore Orioles' Nolan Reimold, who is recovering slowly from a herniated disk in his neck. "I can do pretty much whatever minus not being stupid." I find that a great sentence that could be used in a lot of situations, e.g. retirement …

No big linguistic point. Just three nice little dialectal variants in a row — that use of "whatever"; "minus" in place of "except for", and the inclusion of "not" in such a context. I think they've all been discussed in posts at one time or another, but this three-in-a-row is a gem, plus [oh, there's a 'plus'; I'm infected] I love the sentiment.

In an otherwise reasonably well-reported BBC piece on American adoptions of British — really English — expressions, Cordelia Hebblethwaite described me, accurately, as generally deploring the practice, but tricked out my remarks in a tone that made it sound unfamiliar to me or others, as Mark noted in his post.

"Spot on – it's just ludicrous!" snaps Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley.

"You are just impersonating an Englishman when you say spot on."

"Will do – I hear that from Americans. That should be put into quarantine," he adds.

Now, as Mark surmises, that report wasn't entirely spot on. For one thing, I wasn't snapping anything (at best, I was going for a crackle). To be sure, that could be the fault of it one of those cross-cultural misunderstandings arising out of intonational differences that John Gumperz explored in his research.

But I suspect that it was something more deliberate than that, particularly since Hebblethwaite later has me "quivering" with "revulsion" over British loans. Listen, when I quiver, I quiver, but the target is generally United Airlines, not some piece of English usage. But it's a weary cliché among the feature-writing classes that opinions about usage are made to sound more comical when they're rendered in the tone of operatic indignation that Lynn Truss has made a specialty of, even when that tone has to be spun from the writer's imagination. Indeed, it wasn't only my tone that Ms Hebblethwaite, well, misremembered.