Language Log

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.

From Kenneth P. Vogel, "GOP operatives crash the tea party", Politico 4/14/2010:

As for the bus tours, [Sal] Russo said “they work for us. It’s a great vehicle to go to a lot of places and get a lot of people involved and engaged. I am proud of what we do. Who else goes out there and motivates people and insinuates involvement and activity and actually is making a difference in what is going on?”

The latest xkcd:

(For more on non-literal literally, see here, here, and here.)

A Language Log reader named metanea points out to us that the Urban Dictionary claims aibohphobia is a technical term for the irrational fear of palindromicity. The etymology will raise a smile. Just stare at the word for a few seconds, and it will reveal itself to you.

What is the connection between (a) successfully executing something tricky that not everyone could get away with, like an escape or an acrobatic maneuver or a daring sartorial fashion statement, and (b) removing by tugging, stripping, or peeling?

You've met the femivores, now "Meet the Hegans".

Erin McKean, "Hey guys! Yes, ladies, this means you", Boston Globe, 3/21/2010:

In the study of peevology, language subdivision, one of the more fertile areas of inquiry is the long list of things that people are annoyed to be called. Not the truly offensive terms — none of which can be printed here, and all of which have a level of discomfort far higher than “pet peeve’’ — but the more general terms, whose offense is often magnified when they’re used by strangers involved in a commercial transaction.

Some people hate to be called “honey,’’ or “sugar.’’ A few feel that any use of “hey’’ as an attention-getter is rude (with the classic retort being “Hey is for horses’’). Others believe that being called “ma’am’’ ages them 10 years. But one of the more widespread vocative peeves, at least for women, is being addressed as “you guys.’’

Whether it’s the group e-mail that opens “Hi Guys!’’ or the waiter who says “OK, guys, your table is ready,’’ the use of “you guys’’ for groups of mixed gender (and even for all-female groups) can send the needle on many peeve-ometers into the red.