Language Log

Last night, the American Dialect Society (meeting in Baltimore in conjunction with the Linguistics Society of America) selected the final nominees for Word of the Year (2009) and Word of the Decade (2000-09). Here are the WOTY finalists:

-er A suffix used in such words as birther, someone who questions whether Obama was born in the United States; deather, someone who believes the government has death panels in its healthcare reform plan; Tenther, someone who believes the Federal government is mostly illegal because it usurps rights which belong to the States, in violation of the 10th Amendment; and truther, someone who doubts the official account of the 9/11 attacks.
fail A noun or interjection describing something egregiously unsuccessful. Usually used as an interjection: “FAIL!”
H1N1 The virus that causes swine flu.
public option A government-run healthcare program, desired by some to be part of the country’s healthcare reform.

Charlie Clingen writes:

This year I have started to notice an ambiguous use of the terms Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. In the good old days, it seems to me that those terms commonly were used to mean the evening of the day before Christmas Day/New Year’s Day. Now, in addition to those meanings, I have been hearing them used to mean the entire day before Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, especially in weather forecasts and financial news. Are the terms Christmas Eve Day and New Year’s Eve Day becoming less popular? I admit it does save a few bits here and there; maybe the occasional ambiguity is worth it.

A piece of fluff on the op-ed page of the NYT on December 28: Philip Niemeyer, "Picturing the Past 10 Years", with an item a year for 2000 through 2009 in twelve categories. The last two categories are words: Nouns and Verbs.

There are no statistics here, just someone's judgments about what was hot in each year; others would no doubt have made other choices. For the last two categories:

Here in the Edinburgh office of Language Log we are snowed in this morning. Thick, thick snow. (Though our language has only one word for it, we find that is quite enough.) There have been repeated falls overnight. This is unusual weather for Edinburgh. Part of the major London-to-Edinburgh highway, the A1, is being closed. Travel advisories of the don't-even-think-about-it type are being broadcast on the radio. And yet below the windows of our New Town apartment, cars and trucks and taxis belonging to those unable to understand broadcast warnings are sliding around and getting stuck on the snow-coated cobblestones of our street. People are digging spasmodically and hopelessly with rusty shovels they found in their basements to try and free these cars from their wintry doom. I saw one neighbour come out with an ice axe to try and free a truck that was unable to get up the hill. It was in vain. Linguists are helping too. We have teams out across the city doing comprehension tests: asking the drivers of stuck cars, "Which part of ‘unless absolutely necessary’ did you find hard to understand?"

Mark Leibovich and Grant Barrett have done another end-of-the-year buzzword catalog for the NYT Week in Review. There's a sampling on the front page: aporkalypse, Chimerica, octomom, car tone, ununbium. And then Grant's main list, from athey to wise Latina woman, on p. 3.

In doing the final work on the (first, not final, edition) of the Cheslatta Carrier dictionary, I came across a word that I have encountered only in this dialect that I just had to mention. Not only have I not encountered it in other dialects of Carrier, I'm not aware of any other language that has such a term.

The word is natsultook'ah [natsʌltuk'ah], a compound of "tears" and "tracks". It describes the portion of the face extending from the medial corner of the eye along the nose to the end of the nose. It's the route along which tears flow if not so copious that they spill out of the eye at other points. It doesn't refer only to the track left by tears, but to that portion of the face, even if no tears or traces thereof are present.

John McIntyre, "Meep me daddy, eight to the bar":

The principal of a high school in Massachusetts recently banned the word meep in his school, threatening any student who used it, spoken or written, with expulsion. His rationale is that the students were using the word in a disruptive manner.

Of course they were. That is what adolescents do. Few teen pleasures are keener than getting under the skin of officious adults. And the principal, one Thomas Murray, lost composure sufficiently to forward e-mails containing meep to the local police.

Comments on my "What is this question about?" posting have drifted off into a separate (and rather confused) thread about orange as referring to a fruit or a color and about orange juice. This is a case where the facts are well known and easily discoverable, but instead people have chosen to speculate and invent. So to set things straight …

From "Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception?" by Anand Giridharadas (New York Times/International Herald Tribune, 11/21/09):

In the Age of Metrics, vocation after vocation is discovering numbers. Doctors are going quant with evidence-based medicine, which promises to improve care by quantifying different treatments' probabilities of success. Wall Street has gone quant, with financial models automating trading — sometimes brilliantly, sometimes disastrously. Academia has gone quant, with once-humanistic fields like politics, on which I work at Harvard, studied in a more rigorous way, but at the price of having ever less to say about the world's big questions. Even charity, built on the instinct of altruism, has gone quant.

For a history of the phrase go quant, with links back to Mark Liberman's discussion of go rogue and other go + PREDICATIVE constructions, see my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus.

A couple of days ago, Jesse Sheidlower wrote to me about the recent climate-scientist email controversy.  Since Jesse is a lexicographer, he wasn't writing about whether this is the blue-dress moment for anthropogenic climate change, or a nontroversy based on the shocking discovery that scientists are not always scrupulously fair-minded in private.  Rather, Jesse was concerned about the argument structure of the verb hack.

Suppose that Edward is married to Susan and Michael is married to Susan's sister Judith. Edward is therefore Judith's brother-in-law, and Michael is Susan's brother-in-law. In my usage, and what I think is standard English usage, there is no named relationship between Edward and Michael. In particular, they are not brothers-in-law. I was therefore surprised to see a news item in which men in this situation (one of whom is accused of trying to hire an assassin to kill the other) were described as brothers-in-law.

There are languages in which the relationship between Edward and Michael has a name. In Carrier, this is the -loh relationship. One could say Lhloh 'uhint'oh "they are each other's spouse's sibling's spouse/sibling's spouse's sibling". (For extra credit, try to pronounce the onset cluster [ɬl].) German Schwippschwager seems to mean the same thing. The term "co-brother-in-law" is apparently used by some authors as a translation of such terms, but doesn't seem to be in natural use.

What I'm wondering is whether the news item that described Edward and Michael as brothers-in-law is simply in error or whether there are native English speakers for whom this is correct usage.

We've been remiss in not linking to the New Oxford American Dictionary's 2009 Word of the Year, which Rebecca Ford announced on the OUP Blog a couple of days ago.

The modern (non-obsolete) positive verb to friend isn't in the current NOAD yet, or for that matter in the OED,  so I hope that it gets in as part of the package deal.

In my recent go rogue posting, I reported a comment on an earlier posting from Daniel Gustav Anderson on go rogue as a sexual euphemism, saying that at first I suspected the comment of being spam, but decided it was legit. Then Jake Townhead commented on my posting, questioning my use of the word spam and suggesting that Anderson's comment was merely "bespoke mischief". So now some words on spam.