Language Log

Reader TM writes:

A language anomaly of sorts that has entertained me for some time is the term "grown man."

First, it's a term that we use ONLY in circumstances where someone is, in fact, not acting like a grown man; yet the use of the term is literal, not ironic. E.g., "I can't believe that a grown man would act this way." The term is not used in any other context, as far as I know.

Second, there is no such term as "grown woman." No one ever says that.

"Judge likely to hew jury's prison recommendation in slay sentencing of ex-U.Va. lax player", Washington Post (from AP) 8/27/2012:

Does this headline mean that, compared to the jury's recommended prison term, the judge is likely to
A) Increase the term slightly
B) Increase the term substantially
C) Decrease the term slightly
D) Decrease the term substantially
E) Leave the term as recommended

"Seriously," said Bruce Springsteen's guitarist Steven Van Zandt, "When did England become a police state?"

"Let's have lunch at that café — you know the one . . . Aquamarine," said my friend. And realized immediately, before even getting to the end of the word, that the café was not called anything like that. There is no Aquamarine café in Edinburgh. The one I rapidly guessed my friend was alluding to is a very nice Turkish place on Nicholson Street, and it's called Turquaz (their sign says "TurQuaz"). What the hell was going on with that crazy error? A random brainslip?

I was first struck by the expression "parade of horribles" back in April 2008, when then-Senator Barack Obama used it to describe testimony by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker about what might happen if U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq too hastily. I wrote a Language Log post about it, tying it to another expression that was in the news at the time: "false terribles," used by Rob Lowe to describe things that his nanny accused him of doing. "False terribles" turned out to be pretty much a one-off, but "horribles," usually of the parading variety, have shown up again and again in legal discussions, most recently in the Supreme Court's health care decision on Thursday — which featured, in Justice Ginsberg's pungent opinion, a "broccoli horrible" (referring to the slippery-slope argument that if government can make you buy health insurance, they might someday make you buy broccoli, too).

For a full explanation of how the legal putdown took shape, read my latest Boston Globe column (online now, in print on Sunday). I trace how "the parade of horribles" emerged as a satirical Independence Day tradition in mid-19th century New England, then made the metaphorical jump into discussions of judicial argumentation c. 1921, thanks to the legal scholar Thomas Reed Powell. Since then, the expression has lived a double life: with various shore towns in Massachusetts and Rhode Island keeping the actual "parades of horribles" going, and lawyers and judges debating over figurative ones. Fortunately, I was able to get The Broccoli Horrible into the column under the wire, noting that it would make a pretty awesome band name.

[Update, 7/4: For further documentation, see my followup Word Routes column.]

A real treat for rare word spotters in the UK press this week: the words claustrophilia and koumpounophobia both actually appeared today in news stories where the thus-named conditions figured centrally. Words ending in the Greek combining form -philia denote weird conditions of extreme delight, and those ending in -phobia concern pathological horror. In this case, the -philia story has a very sad ending and the -phobia story has a happy ending.

Over at Lingua Franca, where I do weekly blog posts for The Chronicle of Higher Education, I tried to refer to some ongoing research other day, and called it that, and I was slapped down by my editor (she knows the New York Times style manual prohibitions far too well), quoting a remark by the managing editor: "If I see someone using ongoing in The Chronicle, I will be downcoming and he or she will be outgoing."

Lexical fascism! They would fire me for using ongoing as an adjective? Thank goodness for Language Log, I thought, where lexical liberty survives. So I'm back over here today, choosing my own words, ruminating resentfully on this stylistic bullying.

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.