Language Log

Jesse Sheidlower, who as editor-at-large of the Oxford dictionary has a special right to an opinion about such things, emails:

Please, please, someone write about this. I especially love the mouseover text.

"This" is a recent xkcd strip:

The mouseover text is "Except for anything by Lewis Carroll or Tolkien, you get five made-up words per story. I'm looking at you, Anathem."

While I'm saying nice things about general-audience books on linguistic matters, I'll add a mention of Ammon Shea's Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages (Perigree), which came out in August. Shea, who describes himself as a collector of words, did indeed read the OED (the second edition, from 1989), from beginning to end, over the period of a year, and tells us about the experience in this off-beat but charming book. (Shea tells me he was aiming for dyspeptic, but it doesn't come off that way to me.)

NASA is reporting that the Mars lander has observed snow falling, though it vaporizes before it reaches the ground. NASA is silent about how many words the Martians have for snow.

Lucy Mangan ("Every little helps", The Guardian, 9/13/2008), is the troubled child of a mixed marriage:

As a family, we have few abstract points of contention. Generally, we like to keep arguments specific and concrete – who ate the last peppermint cream, who lost the door keys, who killed Grandma, that kind of thing. But let a grammatical solecism rear its ugly head and the dinner table is awash with bloodlust. My mother, as you might expect from a woman who used to break my fingers for putting our beige napkins down "the wrong way", believes that the rules of grammar are semi-divine and wholly immutable. A split infinitive, "different to" or "none are": these are the things that try her soul, at least if there aren't any inverted napkins around.

Dad, meanwhile, embraces "mistakes" as part of the natural evolution of language. Presented with an empurpled wife insisting that "to aggravate" means "to make worse", not "to annoy", he will proclaim that "effete" once meant "having given birth". Each seeks my support. Bending my head to my plate, I feel like the trembling victim of a soon-to-be-broken home.

The dangers of TV-studio live mics were demonstrated again yesterday, this time by Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy after an interview by Chuck Todd on MSNBC. Political content aside, the discussion provided a lovely example of how a term from literary theory has established itself in American political discourse. The relevant segment:

Mike Murphy: They're all bummed out.
Chuck Todd: Yeah, I mean is she really the most qualified woman they could have turned to?
Peggy Noonan: The most qualified? No! I would think they went for this — excuse me– political bullshit about narratives, and ((unintelligible)) picture …
Chuck Todd: Yeah they went to narrative.
Mike Murphy: I totally agree.
Peggy Noonan: Every time the Republicans do that — because that's not where they live and it's not what they're good at — they blow it.

As unneeded further testimony to the lasting damage done by George Orwell's dishonest and stupid essay "Politics and the English language", with its pointless and unfollowable insistence that good writing must avoid all familiar phrases and word usages, Robert Fisk treated his readers in The Independent on August 9 to some ranting about his most hated clichés.

I supply below an exhaustive list of the alleged clichés about which he raved. All that is striking about them (for there is certainly nothing interesting or noteworthy about the choices made in his lexical hate list) is their utter arbitrariness and unreasoned character.

Towards the end of Will Self's recent meditation on "other people's nether garments" ("Garment District", NYT 8/26/2008), he writes:

Mal had on a suit of blue denim that made him look like an aging sociology lecturer at the Sorbonne, the type who conducts fraudulent anecdotes of mixing Molotov cocktails with Guy Debord during les evenements of ’68. [emphasis added]

The New York Times carries an obituary today for lexicographer Larry Urdang, who was the managing editor of the first edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language and the founding editor of the language quarterly Verbatim. He studied linguistics at Columbia University and lectured on the subject at New York University, but he never completed his dissertation. His wife Nicole told the Times, "He always said he considered the Random House dictionary his dissertation."

My little posting on Nico Muhly's "I like the crotch on the idea that …"  has elicited a flood of e-mail suggesting that crotch is just a malapropism of some kind — an eggcorn, perhaps — for crux. I've dismissed this proposal, in part because of the preposition on in Muhly's sentence, in part because R. Kelly's song "I like the crotch on you" seemed to me to be an obvious model, and in part because I'm disinclined to jump to simple error as the explanation for examples I find remarkable at first (especially in the writing of people who take some care about their style).

From composer Nico Muhly's blog, about responses to his music:

Anyway, I like the crotch on the idea that people I don’t know are behaving in a non-cynical, almost linear way with music (“I saw this thing that I liked, I want to go see more of that thing that I liked, even though I don’t know much about what-all is going to happen”) rather than in a jaded, non-exploratory way (“new music is bullshit, whatever”). If you like something, find a path through it and then follow the path outwards, to other pieces, other composers, other musics. If you don’t like it, close your eyes and think about Brahms; it soothes the mind and calms the bowels.

The source of the expression is R. Kelly's song "I Like the Crotch on You", from the album 12 Play, where it's pretty much literal. Maybe Muhly's extension takes the crotch to be the central or essential aspect of something, in particular of the woman the song is addressed to. (Googling doesn't seem to pull up any other such extensions; it looks like all R. Kelly and various literal senses of crotch, mostly having with the crotches of pieces of clothing.)

(Hat tip: Ned Deily)

I wonder how many of Language Log's tens of thousands of American readers will have done a quick double-take on seeing the sentence that Bill Poser just quoted: "Jones's father had considered attaching him to a chambers to get a legal education". A chambers? Not a chamber? Or a bunch of chambers? Isn't chambers the regularly formed plural of chamber, meaning "room"? And isn't the indefinite article a(n) incompatible with plural nouns? Well, as I write this, the buzz and chatter in the comments below Bill's post does not include anyone asking this question, but I wouldn't be surprised if some found the phrase a chambers odd-looking. Especially since I believe it is almost entirely limited to British English (perhaps someone will correct me on this). A chambers is really just a law practice. A group of lawyers working together would take a suite of rooms in some suitable district of London proximate to the major law courts, e.g. the Temple area or the Grays Inn Road, and that suite of rooms would be referred to as their chambers; and from there, "chambers" seems to have morphed into a singular count noun denoting a law practice. That's how I understand the history to have run, anyway. (Perhaps someone will correct me on this too. But more likely the prattle in the comments area below will digress into talk of chamber pots, and from there to flower pots, and from there to the Chelsea Flower Show, and from there to the Chelsea football club, and so on… Comment warp seems uncontrollable, like the Dark Energy that cosmologists report is forcing the universe to fly apart.)

The other day, I dropped a passing reference to the misuse of infer to mean "imply". The facts, as John Cowan reminded me in a comment, are more complicated. A few minutes of research reveals that the truth about infer is even more complex — and more interesting — than I suspected.

Let's start with the simplest version. We have a person P, an audience A, some evidence E, and a conclusion C. We put these ingredients together in three ways:

(A) The evidence E leads to the conclusion C: "E implies C".
(B) The person P deduces the conclusion C [from the evidence E]: "P infers C [from E]".
(C) The person P indirectly communicates C [to the audience A]: "P implies C [to A]".

This roughly describes how I use infer and imply, and what most usage authorities prescribe for these words.

All of these uses have been around in English since the 16th century; and all of them are in all the dictionaries. But there's a serious problem with this simple story: infer has also been used since the 16th century in meaning (A) — and this sense is also in the standard dictionaries.

In my recent posting on uses of non-dual (outside the domain of the philosophical/religious position of nonduality or nondualism), I (informally) characterized the meaning of the expression as follows:

a non-dual X is simply something (of the appropriate category) that is not a dual X

This characterization incorporates an important observation about expressions of the form non-dual X, like non-dual citizen: they exhibit a "bracketing paradox", in that these expressions have one syntactic bracketing,

[non- + dual] + [X]

but a different composition for the purposes of semantics,

[non-] + [dual + X] 'something that is not a dual X' (e.g. 'someone who is not a dual citizen')

(and not 'a X that is not dual', e.g. 'a citizen who is not dual'). If you were hoping that semantic interpretation could build directly on morphological and syntactic structure, then cases like these are problematic.