Language Log

Reporting live from San Francisco, where the American Dialect Society is holding its annual meeting in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America… In a year overshadowed by the financial crisis, the ADS has voted for bailout as its Word of the Year for 2008. As usual, it was a standing-room-only event, with ADS-ers, LSA-ers, and members of the public jamming the conference room to take part in the lighthearted selection process.

I was just reading a year-old article in the NYT reporting on Molly Ivins's death, and in discussing her friendship with Ann Richards, they said, "The two shared an irreverence for power and a love of the Texas wilds."

I was surprised that Katherine Q. Seelye could say that, and that the copy-editors didn't mind. I hadn't ever noticed this phenomenon before, but others must have. So while "a reverence for power" is fine, for me "an irreverence for power" is ungrammatical, though cute, and certainly understandable, and maybe it was intentionally tongue in cheek — after all, they had just been discussing the slogan "Molly Ivins can't say that, can she?", which her editors had put on billboards to defend her and which became the title of one of her books.

Similarly, I can say "a passion for politics", but I can't say "a dispassion for politics".

Well, I should check Google. … Hmm, supportive, to some extent, but not conclusive.

My wife's (very scholarly) Forbes Library book club is reading Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn this month. The book seems to be full of wonderfully inventive swearing. Last night, my wife read this one aloud to me (p. 170):

If I wanted a gun, I'd get a gun, you diphthong.

I had a how's-that-again moment on Christmas Day as I was reading a New York Times story by Ken Belson and Eric Lichtblau about the short-lived presidential pardon of Isaac Toussie:

Neighbors say the elder Mr. Toussie built the fence a decade ago to  keep rabble-rousers away from the shoreline promenade on the Rockaway Inlet that abuts his family’s waterfront homes, including one where  Isaac lives. While Mr. Toussie’s fence, which has No Trespassing signs in English and Russian, has largely kept the derelicts at bay, it has also alienated neighbors who might otherwise have little bad to say about him.

After a double-take, I conjectured that rabble-rouser here must have been a thinko for rabble — I mean, they're talking about keeping derelicts at bay, not communist agitators. And I can see how the rouser might follow as a kind of unconscious reflex, since the two words are so closely associated.  In Nexis's US Papers and Wires, better than 80 percent (421/524) of the instances of rabble over the last six months occurred in forms like rabble-rouser or rabblerouser, rabble-rousing, etc. And two-thirds (215/316) of the occurrences of rouser are preceded by rabble (actually it's more like 90 percent if you exclude the uses of Rouser as a proper name). Given the mutual priming here, it wouldn't be surprising that rabble should evoke rouser even when that wasn't the intended meaning. But it turns out that I'm behind the curve on this one. 

Gullible reporters keep falling for a self-aggrandizing scam perpetrated by Paul J.J. Payack, who runs an outfit called Global Language Monitor. As regular Language Log readers know, Mr. Payack has been trumpeting the arrival of "the millionth word" in English for some time now. In fact, he's predicted that the English language would pass the million-word mark in 2006… and 2007… and 2008… and now 2009. As reported in the Christian Science Monitor and The Economist, the date that Payack has now set for the million-word milestone is April 29, 2009.

In a previous installment of the Payack saga, I wrote that the Million Word March was "a progression that he turns on and off based on his publicity needs." So I can't say I was terribly surprised to learn that April 29, 2009 just happens to be the publication date of the paperback edition of Payack's book, A Million Words and Counting: How Global English Is Rewriting The World. What a stupendous coincidence that Global Language Monitor's word-counting algorithm has timed itself to accord with Payack's publishing schedule!

Back in October, Allan Brown wrote a piece in Times Online about the money being spent on promoting and broadcasting the basically moribund Scots Gaelic language. It seemed at first that he was making a reasonable critique: spending about $30,000,000 on a digital TV service for a language with no more than 50,000 speakers, all of them bilingual in English and most of them without digital TV, could be argued (though linguists aren't supposed to think this way) to be an enterprise of doubtful value. But just as I was getting interested, Brown blundered into linguistics and revealed his dumb side:

I say language but Gaelic isn't one, not really. Its vocabulary is tiny, with no form of saying yes or no and attuned to a distant, pre-technological world. It's essentially a kind of rural patois, a bonsai idiolect; a way of specifying concepts central to a particular, highly codified way of life.

Yecchhh. Everything about the layman's concept of a language that I rail against is there.

Swearing is risky behavior. Many of its implications are out of the speaker's control. Thus, it is advisable to know your audience well before, say, dropping the F-bomb. I think this is basically true in any setting, and I expect it to be even more powerfully felt in situations where swearing is highly transgressive.

The Enron email dataset provides a nice chance to test out these claims. It is large (about 250,000 distinct messages, sent and received by over 11,000 distinct email addresses), and it contains a moderate amount of bad language. Not everyone swears, but a fair number of people do. The topics range widely: fantasy football, faith, energy markets, vacation time (and of course bankruptcy and the FERC). So, with some qualifications that I'll get to, it is a useful testing ground for claims about swearing and risky verbal behavior. The following email network graph is my first stab at conducting such a test:

This morning's serendipity is the history of gas, which turns out to come from chaos, and to have been coined almost 400 years ago by J. B. Van Helmont in association with another word, blas, that never caught on.

I was curious about a slang use of gas in Edith Nesbit's The Magic City, to mean something like "boastful talk". So I looked it up in the OED, where I was waylaid by the etymology:

[A word invented by the Dutch chemist, J. B. Van Helmont (1577-1644), but avowedly based upon the Gr. χάος (‘halitum illum Gas vocavi, non longe a Chao veterum secretum.’ Ortus Medicinæ, ed. 1652, p. 59a); the Dutch pronunciation of g as a spirant accounts for its being employed to represent Gr. χ; perh. suggested by Paracelsus's use of chaos for the proper element of spirits such as gnomes: see GNOME².

Van Helmont's statement having been overlooked, it has been very commonly supposed that he modelled his word on Du. geest spirit, an idea found at least as early as 1775 (Priestley On Air Introd. 3). Van H. also invented the term BLAS, which has not survived, while gas has been adopted (usually in the same form) in most European languages; the spelling in F. and Pg. is gaz, which was also employed by English writers for a time.]

On 30 Rock's "Christmas Special" episode this past Thursday, Tracy Morgan's character (Tracy Jordan) says to Tina Fey's character (Liz Lemon): "What's the past tense for scam? Is it scrumped? Liz Lemon, I think you just got scrumped!" See it at the end of this clip here (or better yet, watch the whole episode):

The intended joke here is that scrump (or skrump; the alternative spelling is irrelevant) is a slang term for sex, with more precise popular definitions ranging from the relatively benign "to have convenient sex; usually brief and decidedly unromantic" to the more disturbing "[t]o physically violate". (Some believe the word to be a blend of "screw" and "hump"; others assume a biblical link to the story of Adam & Eve, euphemistically speaking of stealing fruit/apples.) So, Tracy Jordan is informing Liz Lemon that she just got fucked.

The latest episode of Comedy Central's "Sarah Silverman Program" (first aired Dec. 4, check your local listings for repeats) is sure to warm the hearts of neologophiles. Here's the blurb:

In this week's episode, "Kangamangus," Sarah strives to leave a legacy by creating a popular slang word, "Ozay." While she struggles to get others interested, Brian effortlessly succeeds in the same pursuit with his word, "Dot-nose." Also, British actor, Matt Berry, ("The IT Crowd") makes a guest appearance.

Matt Berry, awesomely enough, plays the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, who arrives to tell Brian that dot-nose is entering the dictionary, complete with a Word Induction Ceremony. Video clips after the jump.

Yesterday afternoon, Josh Marshall titled a post "Neo-Hooverite Republicans". About an hour later, Matt Yglesias posted a sort of snide blogospheric RIAA letter:

A clever coinage from Josh Marshall. Why didn’t I think of that sooner (or this)?

Matt's point, apparently, was that he used the words neo-Hooverite and neo-Hooverism back in October, and so Josh should have credited him for the invention.

It all started with an entry in the "Sic!" section of Michael Quinion's World Wide Words newsletter #614, on 11/22/08 (boldface added):

Rachael Weiss found an item on a menu in Turkey: "Aubergine Kebap. Ground veal patties with aborigine arranged on a layer of sauteed pita bread, topped with tomatoes and spices." She observed, "We white Australians haven't treated the original owners of our land very well, but this seems to go too far."

This is not just a simple substitution of aborigine (in the sense 'aboriginal inhabitant of Australia') for aubergine (a mostly British variant referring to the egg-shaped fruit of a plant in the genus Solanum, eaten as a vegetable, and otherwise known in English as eggplant), since the two versions occur together in this very short text. The menu writer seems to be treating the two as alternative versions of "the same word", referring to a foodstuff, perhaps along the lines of aluminium and aluminum; aboriginal inhabitants of Australia probably don't come into it at all.

The variant aborigine 'eggplant' is widespread in food writing (especially in menu items and recipes). Literally widespread, in writing about food from places from Greece and Turkey through China and Japan (these from the first hundred Google webhits on {aborigine aubergine} on 11/25/08; no doubt I've missed some cuisines in this search).  I'll give a sampling of these occurrences, and then talk about what we might make of them.

It's Word of the Year season again, and a dark-horse candidate is surging on the inside turn to the home stretch: malus.  (OK, well, it appeals to me at least — my poor past record in predicting WOTY choices suggests that my lexical tastes are in the minority.) A press release from the Union Bank of Switzerland, dated 11/17/2008,  explained that "[b]eginning in 2009, UBS will adopt a new compensation model for the Board of Directors and the Group Executive Board", according to which

Variable cash compensation for the Group Executive Board is based on a bonus / malus system.