Language Log

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.

Banner headline in this morning's Daily Pennsylvanian:

I interviewed Simon Winchester some years ago for the City Arts and Lectures series in San Francisco, just after the publication of his book The Professor and the Madman (British title The Surgeon of Crowthorne). He's a personable and engaging story-teller, and of all the interviews I've done in that series, from Robert Pinsky to A. S. Byatt, his was the easiest and most entertaining (I said afterwards that it was like pitching batting practice to Barry Bonds). A few years later he published The Meaning of Everything, a very readable book about the creation of the OED, and the one I usually recommend to people who are interested in the topic. So he was a very good choice to review Jonathon Green's Dictionary of Slang for the New York Review of Books a few weeks ago. The review took an unfortunate turn, though, when Winchester brought in Jonathan Lighter's still uncompleted Historical Dictionary of American Slang and compared it invidiously, and quite unfairly, to Green's work. It's another in a long line of ill-conceived evaluations of dictionaries by writers who mistake their literacy and passion for the language for lexicographical expertise—think of Dwight Macdonald on Webster's Third, for example. I wrote the following letter to the New York Review. They haven't run it (not surprising, considering its length and the relative marginality of the topic), but because I think the review did an injustice to Lighter, I'm posting it here.

To the editor: When it comes to the topic of slang, even writers as imaginative as Emerson, Chesterton, and Anthony Burgess have had only two or three things to say. You can celebrate the poetry and effervescence of the language of the common folk, you can revel in raffish identification with long-gone rakes and rowdies, and you can proclaim your embrace of slang in defiance of the (even longer gone) pedants and purists who disdain it. The thing can only be done badly or well. So one could do a lot worse than assign the review of Jonathon Green's Dictionary of Slang to Simon Winchester, an engaging writer who has produced two very readable popular books about dictionaries.

Tom Chivers, "Sadly, Jamie Redknapp is literally correct", The Telegraph 3/12/2012; "Literally, a discussion about literally", BBC Radio 4 Today.

Philip Spaelti writes:

I am having one of those moments. Correcting a student's paper I came across:  "This behavior seems to shed doubt on treatments which always regard V2 as head."  "Shed light",  "cast doubt (on)", OK, but "shed doubt (on)" doesn't quite compute for me. Or have I just been in Japan too long?

From Hyman R.:

I managed to confuse my (nearly twelve) son last night. We were talking politics, and I was explaining to him that there were Jewish Republicans who were going to be taking out ads in the Jewish Week newspaper to try to convince Jews to vote against Obama. He said that he didn't understand why they would do that, and I tried to explain, and we went round and round for a bit until I realized that he didn't know that "take out an ad" is the same thing as "put in an ad"! He thought that they were removing such ads, and so was justifiably confused.

Alexander Burns, "Obama super PAC to advertise in Ohio", Politico 2/28/2012:

The pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action is poised to start airing ads in Ohio, according to a source monitoring the 2012 air war.

Priorities USA has already put down $61,530 in the Columbus media market for a flight running March 1-6. That's a small sum compared with what Republican groups are spending — the Romney super PAC Restore Our Future has a $1,130,750 TV and radio flight running Feb. 27-March 6 — but it's probably going to be enough to drive a narrative Democrats are looking for.

When I first posted here in 2006 about the indifferent interjection meh ("Meh-ness to society") I never imagined that this unobtrusive monosyllable would provide such rich linguistic fodder for years to come. I returned to it in 2007 ("Awwa, meh, feh, heh") and 2008 ("Mailbag Friday: 'Meh'" on the Visual Thesaurus; "The 'meh' wars" and "The 'meh' wars, part 2" here). But the meh well has hardly run dry: in today's Boston Globe, I have a column on "The meh generation" that sheds some new light on the exclamation's history and current use.

I'm going to play this for my morphology class next week when we start talking about affixation… but there's no reason why you all shouldn't enjoy it now, now, now!

Thanks to Alex Trueman.

If you enjoyed this, you may also want to check out this oldie but goodie: How I met my wife. Happy Valentine's, if you're into that sort of thing!

The Simile of the Week award (it's a bit early for Simile of the Year) goes to Matt Taibbi, who in a spectacularly delicious piece of political feature-writing described observing the Republican party's primary process as "like watching a cruel experiment involving baboons, laughing gas and a forklift." As Alice said about the Jabberwocky poem in Through the Looking Glass, "somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas–only I don't exactly know what they are!"

In a series of Language Log posts, Geoff Pullum has called attention to the prevalence of polysemy and ambiguity:

The people who think clarity involves lack of ambiguity, so we have to strive to eliminate all multiple meanings and should never let a word develop a new sense… they simply don't get it about how language works, do they?

Languages love multiple meanings. They lust after them. They roll around in them like a dog in fresh grass.

The other day, as I reading a discussion in our comments about whether English draftable does or doesn't refer to the same concept as Finnish asevelvollisuus ("obligation to serve in the military"), I happened to be sitting in a current of uncomfortably cold air. So of course I wondered how the English word draft came to refer to military conscription as well as air flow. And a few seconds of thought brought to mind several others senses of the the noun draft and its associated verb. I figured that this must represent a confusion of several originally separate words. But then I looked it up.

Everyone has a private terror—often abetted by a checkered family medical history or having witnessed the torment of a loved one—of being struck with some particular affliction. For some, it's the ravages of a slow and painful cancer. For others, it's being caught in a freak accident that renders them quadriplegic in their prime. For me, it's the fear of surviving a stroke that blasts away tracts of neural tissue in the left hemisphere of my brain, leaving me with profound aphasia.

As usual, the degree of fear is based on a calculus of probability and of loss. In my case, there is the specter of probability: My father suffered a fatal stroke in his sixties. His own father, unluckier, was bedridden after a stroke in his early forties until another one finished him off a few years later. But it's the prospect of the loss that is overwhelming. How could I, ardent worshipper at the altar of language, ever cope with being left unable to talk or write fluently about language or anything else? For that matter, would I even be able to think about language? Or think in any meaningful way at all? It's the afflictions that strip you of who you are that seem most unthinkable.

So it was a sense of morbid attraction that led me to Diane Ackerman's newest book One Hundred Names for Love, in which she documents the stroke and subsequent language deficit suffered by her husband, novelist Paul West.

In yet another of his fine Chronicle of Higher Education blog posts, this one on the ADS Word of the Year balloting, Geoff Pullum dismisses the choice of occupy:

Overall winner as Word of the Year, with twice as many votes as its nearest rival, was occupy. Rather disappointing, I thought: the Mitt Romney of the field of candidates. Just an ordinary and rather moderate verb, not a neologism. But its profile rose so much during the tent-city protests of 2011 that it seemed a true representative of the zeitgeist. It was unstoppable. New Words Committee Chair Ben Zimmer had predicted its win six weeks ago, and he was right.

I thought occupy had more going for it when I made it my WOTY choice in a Fresh Air piece a few weeks ago, though I didn't mention one feature that ought to recommend it to a syntactician, even an English one: its serendipitously symbolic syntactic versatility. In a brief time it went from transitive verb to intransitive verb to adjective ("the occupy movement") to noun*, a demonstration that in America, words don't have to live out their lives as the part of speech they were born as.

*As in Occupy Oakland, which if you think about it is most plausibly analyzed as a noun-noun compound like Macy's San Francisco.