Language Log

My brother Carl, a science writer who blogs over at The Loom, has a regular gig on Bloggingheads.tv, interviewing science-y folks for "Science Saturday." For Carl's latest installment, the Bloggingheads producers suggested he interview me about lexicography and other wordy stuff. Many of the topics we cover, from lexical blends to snowclones, will be familiar to readers of Language Log and my Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus. So here is our nepotistic "diavlog" for your enjoyment. (Diavlog is a second-order blend, by the way: it blends dialog and vlog, with the latter element representing a blend of video and blog. Or make that third-order, since blog blends Web and log.)

Yesterday Rob S wrote to ask about a sentence from the newspaper ("Women's Work and Japan's Hostess Culture", NYT, 8/11/2009):

"A recent New York Times article described the Japanese profession of hostessing, which involves entertaining men at establishments where customers pay a lot to flirt and drink with young women (services that do not, as a rule, involve prostitution)."

So, does this quote mean that there exists a rule that says it cannot involve prostitution? Or is it rather stating that there is no rule that it must involve prostitution?

Is it forbidden, or just not required?

I responded, somewhat unsympathetically, with the opinion that "as a rule" is just a  quantifier over instances, meaning something like "in general" or "in most cases", and not evoking any concept of a rule in the deontic sense at all. This invalidated Rob's curiosity about "whether there was the absence of some rule mandating it, or the presence of a rule forbidding it".

Rob was a bit disappointed, I think, so I decided to try to do better, first by confirming my impression of how the expression "as a rule" is now used, and second by tracing its history to see if his interpretation has a basis in the past.

People's aversion to the word moist has attracted our attention for a while now (most recently in this post — see also the links in this one). Mark Peters recently wrote about the moist phenomenon for Good, quoting Language Log discussion as well as a Word Routes column I wrote for the Visual Thesaurus. And now Mark's Good column just got noticed by the folks at "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me!" on NPR — Mark and I were quoted in their "limericks" segment (skip to about 3:00 in):

After his NPR interview and MSNBC honor for debunking the Cronkiter myth, Ben Zimmer is subbing for William Safire as this week's NYT's On Language columnist: "How Fail Went From Verb to Interjection", 8/7/2009.

Time was, fail was simply a verb that denoted being unsuccessful or falling short of expectations. It made occasional forays into nounhood, in fixed expressions like without fail and no-fail. That all started to change in certain online subcultures about six years ago. In July 2003, a contributor to Urbandictionary.com noted that fail could be used as an interjection “when one disapproves of something,” giving the example: “You actually bought that? FAIL.” This punchy stand-alone fail most likely originated as a shortened form of “You fail” or, more fully, “You fail it,” the taunting “game over” message in the late-’90s Japanese video game Blazing Star, notorious for its fractured English.

It isn't often that I encounter an English word that I don't know other than names of chemical compounds, but I recently learned a new word for something not all that obscure. In a context in which I expected the word monopoly, I encountered monopsony. At first I thought it was a mistake, but it recurred. It turns out that economists distinguish between monopolies and monopsonies. When there is a single source for a product, that is a monopoly, but when there is only a single buyer for a product, that is a monopsony. Who knew?

The classic example of a monopsony is what I have hitherto known as the Chinese salt monopoly. Throughout most of Chinese history, anybody could produce salt, but they had to sell it to the government, which then sold it to consumers. This is why the classic work of Chinese economics, the proceedings of a conference held in 81 BCE with appended commentary, is entitled 塩鉄論 Discourses on Salt and Iron.

If you haven't picked up a copy of Michael Adams' new book, Slang: The People's Poetry, well, what are you waiting for? For starters, it's a lively and engaging look at English slang and its multitudinous forms. At the same time, it's a thoughtful interrogation of what "slang" actually is, and how we might determine its boundaries. One way that Michael expands traditional notions of slang is in his treatment of affixation, or what he amusingly calls "unorthodox lexifabricology." I talked to Michael about slangy affixation in the second part of my two-part interview with him for the Visual Thesaurus. An excerpt follows below.

The governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford, has been missing since Thursday ("SC governor's whereabouts unknown, even to wife", Associated Press, 6/22/2008).   The linguistic hook here is the way that his spokesman, Joel Sawyer, described his status ("Have you see [sic] this man? SC GOV, MIA", MSNC, 6/22/2009):

The governor put in a lot of time during this last legislative session, and after the session winds down it's not uncommon for him to go out of pocket for a few days at a time to clear his head. Obviously, that's going to be somewhat out of the question this time given the attention this particular absence has gotten. [emphasis added]

Paul JJ Payack, after all the run-up, has botched the story of the millionth word. The most amusing thing was that he forgot to write a script that would stop updating his headline when the millionth word was hit and exceeded, so at 11:30 a.m. in the UK he had this headline at his Global Language Monitor website:

The English Language WordClock: 1,000,001
0 words until the 1,000,000th Word

Oops! I think that should be minus one words, not zero words until the millionth!

The other thing he screwed up on was the fixing of the choice of word. He let his script decide — not a good idea when the whole point of the exercise is promotion and P.R. I'm not sure how his script works, but what it finally picked as the millionth "word" with at least 25,000 attestations on the web turned out to be: Web 2.0. Oops! First, that isn't a word, it's a phrase containing a noun (web) and a one of those stylish postpositive decimal numeric quantifiers; and second, it is boring boring boring. If phrases containing numbers are allowed, no wonder there are a million words. I was scheduled to go to the BBC Scotland studio and talk about this in a couple of hours, but when the people at the BBC World Service heard that the millionth word was Web 2.0, and that among the runners-up was the two-word Hindi exclamation jai hoo, they dumped the story and told me not to bother going over to the studio. Quite rightly. Payack should have hand-picked a more convincing and likable word.

Language Log readers who have been following our recent posts on word aversion and word attraction will want to check out Kristi Gustafson's article in the Albany Times Union, "Words we love, words we hate," which quotes Barbara Wallraff and me on the subject. As evidence for lexical likes and dislikes, I discuss some of the favorite and least favorite words that have been selected by subscribers to the Visual Thesaurus. And over on the VT website, I follow up on the Times Union article in my latest Word Routes column. As you might expect, the oh-so-vile word moist figures prominently.

[Update: And now BoingBoing has picked up the story.]

Barbara and I, having both seen so many Star Trek episodes, both from the first (Shatner) series and the second (Stewart) series, couldn't resist going to see the new prequel movie Star Trek at a huge cinema in London's Leicester Square the other day. (My god, is THX sound loud these days. Take earplugs unless you are fully accustomed to the sound of a full-scale artillery bombardment. We forgot to.) Of course, this is Language Log, not Science Fiction Movie Log, so to even mention it here I need a linguistic hook. And I don't have a really good one: there are no alien tongues like Klingon in this film (unless you count the young Chekhov's sometimes rather heavy Russian accent), and although I spotted some discreet rewording of the famous "seek out new life" prologue, recited before the closing credits, there's nothing very interesting. But I did notice one tiny thing: a sign on a big assembly of tubes and tanks in the bowels of the Enterprise that said "INERT REACTANT". I hate to be a pedant here (that's my day job), but really, was there no one on the set who could point out that a chemical substance is inert if and only if it cannot be a reactant? Am I wrong, chemists?

A little while back, a representative of the publishers of the third edition of Paul Dickson's Baseball Dictionary wrote to offer me a free copy, in the hope that I would review the book on Language Log. I replied that I was an idiot about baseball — yes, I know, this totally undercuts any claim I might have to being a real American man, but I coped with that long ago — and so was not the person they wanted to take on this task.

But I did buy the book, because I knew that Dickson's dictionary was a work of serious lexicographic scholarship (with careful citations and thoughtful definitions, the sort of thing that could be accommodated in a revision of the OED). Many specialized dictionaries are not like this, and for good reason: in many domains, the evidence for usages in written texts is very hard to come by, and very spotty.

Last December, an episode of Comedy Central's "Sarah Silverman Program" revolved around fanciful neologisms, culminating in a scene where the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary anoint their latest entries in a "Word Induction Ceremony." The FOX sketch comedy show "MADtv" (now in its final season) imagines the lexicographers of "Webster's Dictionary" announcing new words in a far less celebratory mood. Here (for the time being, at least) is a YouTube clip bringing together the three-part sketch and one outtake:

Forbes.com is running a special report on neologisms — a rather peculiar topic for Forbes, I suppose, but they put together a pretty decent lineup of contributors. From the Language Log family there's John McWhorter and me, with good friends of LL Grant Barrett and Mark Peters also pitching in. There really was no news hook for the report, unless you count the claim by Global Language Monitor that English will be adding its millionth word on April 29, 2009. No, make that June 8. Scratch that, June 10.