Language Log

As discussed at length in "Lucking out" (10/8/2011), luck out is a well-established American idiom meaning "to succeed through good luck". But it's not all that common — about one in ten million words in COCA — and even a few Americans seem to be be a bit uncertain about its meanings, confused into thinking that luck out might actually mean "to fail through bad luck"  (perhaps by echoes of "out of luck" or idioms like "ground out" or "drop out"). This idea is substantially more widespread in other parts of the English-speaking world, and perhaps has a significant proportion of mindshare in Australia; in any case, it caused the British novelist Lee Child to make an uncharacteristic mistake by using the "fail through bad luck" meaning in interior monologue attributed to his American hero, Jack Reacher.

But in the course of writing that earlier post, I came across a curious claim. According to the entry on luck out in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, the 1985 Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (2nd ed.) claimed that

. . . luck out was commonly used during World War II in some such sense as "to meet with bad luck; run out of luck," as in describing a soldier who was a casualty of battle ("He lucked out") or a poker player who lost his chips.

The editors of MWDEU note that "we have collected almost no evidence of the older sense cited by Harper", and add that "The little evidence we have showing luck used as a verb during World War II is suggestive of good luck, not bad".

If there really were an old U.S.-military-associated negative-valence luck out idiom, that would make Child's novelistic use more plausible, since Reacher is an army MP who was (fictionally) born around 1959 and raised in a military family on U.S. bases around the world. But I've done a bit more poking around in historical sources, and all the evidence I've found confirms MWDEU's suggestion that no such idiom ever existed.

Non-linguists frequently ask me whether I am avidly watching "Fry's Planet Word", the new five-part BBC television series on language written and presented by Stephen Fry. (A bit of googling will probably find it for those outside the UK who can't access the BBC iPlayer; there are various illicit copies around, including some on YouTube.) The answer is no; I simply cannot bear Fry on the topic of language. Such a fine actor (the quintessential Jeeves); such an insufferable twit on linguistic topics. So I know barely anything of this series except that even the radio trailers for it make my teeth itch. However, Edinburgh syntactician Manuela Rocchi is made of sterner stuff, and has watched some. She kindly contributes this guest post to inform you (and me) about it.

After almost a month, I'm finally following up on the results of the single-question surveys that I asked Language Log readers to participate in. Each survey received an overwhelming 1500+ responses, and I didn't realize that I needed a "pro" (= "paid") account on SurveyMonkey in order to view more than the first 100. I owe special thanks to Mohammad Mehdi Etedali, to whom I transfered the surveys and who kindly sent me the overall percentages.

Reader RG was surprised to see this in a BBC News item ("Violin world record broken in Taiwan", 9/18/2011):

A group of 4,645 violinists broke the world record for the most number of violins played simultaneously.

This sense of (the) most is presumably the superlative of many, and thus "the most number of violins" means the same thing as "the most violins". One motivation for adding the "number of" part may be that (the) most is also the superlative of much — in that case people sometimes specify "the most amount of". Thus another BBC News item, "Matthew Arnold pupils get chocolate for energy saving", 6/15/2011:

Matthew Arnold School was rewarded for saving the most amount of energy on Oxfordshire's School Switch Off day.

Grammar Girl (aka Mignon Fogarty) has posted a podcast today about the "needs washed" regionalism, which is mostly associated with the North Midland dialect region of the U.S. Though her goal is to provide prescriptive advice about when it's appropriate to use the "need + V-en" construction, she has conducted some nice data collection from her readers and has also consulted such resources as the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project and relevant Language Log posts.

This youtube clip, with a caption that shows Michele Bachmann asking a crowd "Who likes white people?", has occasioned a fair amount of discussion:

(The original http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE4OPMmdPsg has now been declared "private" — I've substituted one from another site.)

Examples of people who took the captioned video at face value are here, here, here, here, here, here, here,  here, …

To answer the many critics of his "whites have become black" diatribe, the Tudor historian and obnoxious TV personality David Starkey published an article in The Telegraph on August 19 defending his stance on the way Jamaican linguistic patterns are allegedly implicated in the cause of the English riots. The linguistically relevant point is that he has now shifted his reference away from "Jamaican patois", which is a synonym for Jamaican Creole, Ethnologue code JAM, henceforth JC (see my article in Times Higher Education on this). He now cites a "mixed race" critic of "ghetto grammar" to back up his condemnation:

Lindsay Johns, the Oxford-educated mixed-race writer who mentors young people in Peckham, argues passionately against "this insulting and demeaning acceptance" of a fake Jamaican — or "Jafaican" — patois. "Language is power", Johns writes, and to use "ghetto grammar" renders the young powerless.

Congratulations to Oxford University Press (OUP) on a special morning: it is publication day for the newest edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, marking its 100th anniversary. The first edition was in 1911, and this is the 12th. But I also want to thank OUP for a personal kindness to me. Or rather to my dad, who was celebrating a smaller anniversary of his own.

Driving on I-91N between New Haven and Hartford a couple of days ago, I saw this sign describing one of the exits:

Permitted loads are not allowed on Route ___.

At least that's what I think it said. According to Michael Quinion's World Wide Words (4/16/2011):

Gordon Drukier noted that new signs have appeared In the past few months on the approaches to State Route 3 from Interstate 91 in Connecticut. These warn: ROUTE 3 NO PERMITTED LOADS ALLOWED

I suspect that Mr. Drukier's attention and memory were better than mine, but I haven't been able to find a picture to verify either version.

Listening to this recent Freakonomics podcast episode, I heard a word variant that I'd never heard before: longetivity, being used to mean longevity. You can hear it at about the 8:35 mark of the podcast — I was listening on Stitcher, in case that matters. Coincidentally, the relevant portion of the podcast (from an interview with Dick Yuengling, beer lovers!) is transcribed on the episode's webpage, with the word "corrected" to longevity.

Fans of noun piles will enjoy the recent blog post by Mike Pope, a technical editor at Microsoft, "Fun (or not) with noun stacks." Mike shares a few of the lovely compound noun pileups he's encountered on the job:

• data bound control table row action links
• failed password security question answer attempts limit
• reduced minimum OS partition space available requirement

Mike goes on to explain why he thinks these problematic constructions continue to crop up in technical writing, driven by imperatives of terseness and concision at the expense of comprehensibility. He also gives helpful advice for untangling technical noun piles into something more user-friendly. That's all well and good, but you have to wonder just how deeply enmeshed in nerdview a writer must be to produce a whopper like "failed password security question answer attempts limit."

In the NYT this weekend, Ben Zimmer has a great piece on new horizons in humanities computing:  "The Jargon of the Novel, Computed", 7/29/2011. The article is illustrated with a bar chart of the frequency in COCA of "bolt upright" in various genres:

Among the nuggets you can find in Ben's article is an allusion to David Bamman and Gregory Crane, "The Logic and Discovery of Textual Allusion", LaTeCH2008, which alone is worth the price of admission. But the thing that mainly struck me was the possibility that I'd gotten "bolt upright" wrong, all these years.

A few days ago, Larry Horn sent this note to the  American Dialect Society's discussion list:

On an article lauding the Texas Rangers’ defense in today’s NYT sports section, I did a double-take on reading that

The defense—anchored by shortstop Elvis Andrus and the impregnable glove of Adrian Beltre at third base—has saved more runs above average than any other team but the Rays.

Once I got past the metaphor in which baseball gloves may or may not become pregnant, my first thought was that the writer (Neil Payne) had meant “unimpregnable”, i.e. incapable of being impregnated, just as “uninflammable” means 'incapable of becoming inflamed'.  I checked the OED and found to my surprise that, as they say, “there is no such word” as unimpregnable, and that the im- (i.e. iN-) of impregnable can only be a negative prefix, so that impregnable already (officially) means what I had thought unimpregnable would mean, rendering the doubly-prefixed form otiose.  Evidently, unimpregnable does not and never did exist.