Language Log

Perhaps you saw the outrageous headline from The Daily Telegraph last week: "Secret vault of words rejected by the Oxford English Dictionary uncovered"! Michael Quinion called it "quite the daftest dictionary-related story I've ever read," and I tend to agree. In my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, I take a look at just how daft the story is, with its suggestion of a Dan Brown-style Dictionary Cabal locking up failed words. (Actually, Dan Brown could probably write a better story — that's how laughable it is.)

Yesterday, on our way to school, my four-year-old commented, "When you love somebody, it can't be unloved. That's 'irreversible change'." I'm not sure which I appreciate more, the sweet sentiment (don't we all wish this were 100% true?), the generalization of a concept he learned on Sid the Science Kid, or the example of unloved in this unconventional usage.

Why do I find this so compelling? On reflection, perhaps it's because instead of the adjectival un- prefix (unhappy, unclear), which is about states, what we have here seems from context to be the verbal un-, which is about reversing actions (unlock, untie). Love as an action, something that effects a change of state, not just a state.

Or maybe I'm just in a sappy mood. :-)

Rachel Aviv, "Backpacks Among the Briefcases", NYT 7/15/2010, writing about students at the New School's liberal arts college:

Suzanne Exposito, a junior from Jacksonville, Fla., who describes herself as a feminist and anticapitalist, says she can’t understand why some people fail to throw away their trash. “There’s this binary here between the people who have a cause and those who don’t,” she said. “Some people only came here to be in the city, and they just don’t care. I think they’re the ones who dump their cigarettes on the ground.” [emphasis added]

Yesterday, in discussing Kevin Fowler's song Pound Sign, there was some debate about the origin of the term "pound sign" for the symbol #.  I suggested that it all started with the substitution of # for £ on American typewriter keyboards, but others argued that # was a standard symbol for pound(s) avoirdupois. I've heard this theory before, but I expressed skepticism about it because I've never actually seen the symbol used that way.

Today, after some further research, I'm still not completely sure. But I've found a new theory, which I think has a better chance to be correct: it's all Emile Baudot's fault.

The word operandum, featured in this morning's post about highbrow spam, is as yet unknown to the Oxford English Dictionary. But nearly 50 years ago, it was the title of a paper by none other than B.F. Skinner — "Operandum", J. Exp. Anal. Behav. 5(2), 1962 — which reads in its entirety:

An editor recently objected to manipulandum as "not in the dictionary." (A form, manipulare, of which it could conceivably be the gerundive, is only late medieval Latin and therefore lacking in status.) Tolman, who seems to have introduced the term, defines manipulanda as "the characters of objects which support motor activity." In current usage, they are the objects themselves. Strictly speaking, the term does not describe a device such as a foot-pedal or a voice-key which is not operated by hand, but manipulate has long since been generalized beyond that restriction.

A better and simpler word can be derived from operari. A piece of apparatus operated by an organism could appropriately be called an operatus, but this is dangerously close to a pun and would certainly be confusing. The gerundive operandum ought to be considered, however, as an alternative to manipulandum. It is close to operant, and its similarity to manipulandum and operate makes its meaning obvious.

Five years ago, Geoff Pullum wrote a post here entitled, "Pick-up basketballism reaches Ivy League faculty vocabulary," about the spread of the apologetic interjection "my bad." In an addendum, Geoff raised the possibility that Manute Bol had popularized or even originated the expression while in the NBA in the late '80s (or a bit earlier, in his days playing ball in college). I had sent Geoff a bit of supporting evidence, two snippets from newspaper articles in early 1989 talking about Bol's use of the phrase when playing for the Golden State Warriors.

All of this came up again after Bol died this past weekend, as commentators were looking for ways to eulogize him. Geoff's post was frequently linked to by bloggers (e.g., Kottke, Boing Boing, Deadspin, The Atlantic Wire), and the Washington Post's Dan Steinberg gave the "my bad" story a thorough going-over on D.C. Sports Bog.

Continue to follow the Saga of Snuck, I thought that I'd check the relative frequency of snuck and sneaked in the LDC's collection of conversational transcripts, which amount to about 25 million words, mostly collected in 2003. These conversations involve people across all ages, regions, socio-economic levels and amounts of education. The verdict? Basically, sneaked is toast.

When Carl-Henric Svanberg raised such a fuss yesterday by explaining that at BP "we care about the small people", my first reaction was that he should have known better than to bring up the whole size thing, or for that matter the whole caring thing. But my second reaction was to wonder about contemporary American expressions for ordinary people.

The most obvious phrase, I think, is "ordinary people". It's roughly 25 times more common than "small people" in terms of raw frequency (1475 hits vs. 60 hits in the COCA corpus), and a majority of the instances of "small people" are literal references to people's height, or other irrelevant categories: "Small people can bend easier, with less low-back pain"; "I had a little Lilliputian hallucination. I saw very small people, pink people, before a migraine"; "Ellen, as a petite person herself, felt strongly that small people should avoid perkiness at all costs".

Of course, the phrase "small people" can be used in American Englsih to mean "ordinary people". But to a surprising extent, it seems to be used to refer to such people in other countries, often in quotations from people in other countries. The first five COCA hits (in the relevant meaning) are:

Brecht argues in the play that "everybody is responsible, even the small people."
"…so many of his donors are these small people who are sending checks for $50, $100" [from a story about Obama's 2008 campaign]
"… when you have the government and you have the multinational, it's very hard for small people like us to win." [from a story about farmers in rural Ireland]
"Some of us small people were always tired of the war, " says Bompa-Turay. [from a story about Sierra Leone]
"… involving the masses, the workers, the small people, but the movement was led by the middle class sons and daughters." [from a story about Indonesia]

Did you know Zulu has a word for "annoying three-foot-long one-note plastic trumpet"? Isn't that fascinating?

No. Of course it isn't fascinating. It's a wonderful example of why I tend to think the issue of what things different languages have words for (especially, have nouns for) is stupid and trivial.

In my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, I take a look at Harry McCracken's excellent historical analysis of the word fanboy, from something of an in-joke among underground cartoonists in the '70s to an all-purpose techie put-down in the '00s. I throw into the mix the acronymic mnemonic FANBOYS, standing for for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so, a list that is supposed to constitute a class of "coordinating conjunctions" that pattern alike. Geoff Pullum has already noted the bogosity of this list here, and my column relies on further dismantling of the FANBOYS myth by Brett Reynolds of English, Jack and Karl Hagen of Polysyllabic. My final question:

What I'm wondering is, could there have been any cross-pollination between the grammatical mnemonic and the fanboys of comics, science fiction, and the like? If teachers of English composition were keeping FANBOY(S) alive as an acronym in the '50s and '60s, perhaps that had an indirect effect on those underground cartoonists who started using it in the '70s. That's assuming they were paying attention during their language-arts classes and not just reading comic books!

Read the whole column here.

RR wrote:

I accompanied an elderly parent to a neurologist appointment recently.  As this was at a teaching hospital, the first meeting was with a resident who took a complete history and did an examination.  When the neurologist came in, the resident verbally reported the results of his history-taking as "The patient reports a sense of imbalance on standing.  The patient denies feeling dizzy." etc.  As my parent had few symptoms, the list of denials was quite long.

The use of 'denies' has a clear meaning in this medical context ("On being asked about symptom X, the patient said that they did not experience it"), but for the patient it carries unpleasant overtones (accusation, disbelief).

I tried to think of a more pleasant way that the same thing could be said, but couldn't come up with anything that wasn't cumbersome.  "The patient hasn't experienced…" doesn't make clear that the resident is only reporting what the patient has said, and 'The patient doesn't report…" allows for the possibility that the resident never asked).

We've often observed how fond people are of noting (or rather, claiming) that language L has an interesting number N of words for some concept X. N may be zero, which is taken to mean that the L-ians are unable to grasp the concept X, or at least have some special difficulty with it. Alternatively, N may be unusually large, which is taken as evidence that X has an especially central role in L-ian consciousness. In such cases, the factual claims about the L-ian lexicon are almost always false; and even if the word-count claims were true, the logic of the argument is unsound.

Occasionally, someone makes both sorts of claims about a single language; and there's a fine (though unserious) pair of specimens in Georgia Graham, "What has Iceland done for Britain?", The Telegraph 4/17/2010.

There's an old headline-parody that involves posing a disjunctive question between two functionally equivalent alternatives, and "X: Threat or Menace?" is the most familiar form of this joke. We've used it more than once here on Language Log, for example in Geoff Nunberg's post "'Still unpacked': Threat or Menace?", 5/17/2005.