Language Log

Earlier today, a journalist wrote to ask me about "the way 'nonplussed' gets mistaken for 'unfazed'" . In accordance with my recent policy of turning public service into blog fodder, my answers to her questions are posted below the jump.

If your experience with an expression has been limited to a particular context, you're likely to assume that the meaning it has in that context is its "true", "real" meaning. If you then come across it in other contexts, you might well assume that its occurrences there are somehow connected to the uses you're familiar with. This belief might have nothing to do with the facts of linguistic history.

Case in point: a recent discussion of uses of the term non-dual (or nondual) on Jerry Katz's Nonduality Blog, which treats nondualism, "the understanding or belief that dualism or dichotomy are illusory phenomena" (as the Wikipedia article puts it). Katz explains:

I monitor in a non-scientific way the appearances of the words nondual, nonduality, nondualism, in blogs and the press. I don’t think there is any question that in the last ten years there has been a significant increase in the use of those words in the mainstream press. I also think there is no question that the increase in the awareness and usage of those terms has occurred within the field of spirituality in general.

But what I have realized is that the term non-dual is being used increasingly in ways unrelated to spirituality, philosophy, expressions of reality, or even science. I’m not going to speculate on what that means or whether what I’m seeing is real phenomenon. I’m only pointing it out.

I found all the following usages of non-dual in the last two months. It seems like an explosion in these findings. I wonder if it presages a greater spiritual explosion.

(Note the probable instance of the Recency Illusion, signaled by "increasingly".)

The "About Us" page for the new search engine Cuil says that

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.

There has been considerable discussion at the Wikipedia discussion page for Cuil about whether this is really true.

Reading Arnold Zwicky and Mark Liberman talking about when something is a real in-the-dictionary word (see the last two posts here), I was reminded of an occasion one summer a long time ago when I watched a nervous international student giving her first presentation to a graduate phonology class at a Linguistic Society of America Linguistic Institute. The student's hesitancy was enhanced by the presence of two extremely famous phonologists, MIT professor Morris Halle and Linguistic Inquiry editor Samuel Jay Keyser. The student was referring to a phonological alternation whereby certain vowels became consonants in certain phonetic environments, and called this consonantalization. She stammered over the word, and asked, uncertain of her command of English, "Is that a word?"

"Yes!" said Keyser very firmly, without a second's hesitation. "It used to be called Istanbul."

I don't know if the resultant gale of laughter relaxed the nervous student a little. I hope so. But I know I still remember the laugh many years later.

Arnold Zwicky complained yesterday about people who take dictionaries as defining rather than documenting the existence of words ("In the dictionary or not", 7/27/2008). But sometimes, people take their own reactions as definitive, even when dictionaries disagree. Writing on Saturday about Lito Sheppard's contract dispute with the Philadelphia Eagles, Les Bowen went with a linguistic lede:

Granted, "disappreciation" might not be an actual word, but it was what Lito Sheppard came up with to characterize the Eagles' handling of him yesterday, and, syntax aside, his point was clear.

Technically, the evaluation of wordhood belongs to lexicography or morphology, not syntax. But in fact, Lito's choice is sanctioned by the OED, on the authority of none other than Noah Webster.

There's a long tradition of popular peeving about dictionaries and what they have entries for: non-standard items, slang, taboo words, slurs, and so on. The complaint is that by listing these items the dictionaries are recognizing them as acceptable in the language, are "condoning" them (even when the items have appropriate usage labels attached to them). The complainers' position is that these items simply are "not words" of the language, an idea I have criticized here once, and plan to do so again.

The underlying idea is that dictionaries should be directive and prescriptive — authorities on how people SHOULD speak and write. Lexicographers do not, of course, think that way, though they are not in general opposed to the offering of advice on language use; it's just not what they do.

The underlying idea surfaces in another way, in criticisms of usages that are perceived to be (and actually may be) innovative on the grounds that they are "not in the dictionary". William Safire took up one of these in his "On Language" column last Sunday (20 June): inartful.

On his "Freakonomics" blog on the New York Times website, Stephen J. Dubner has just learned the perils of the Bierce/Hartman/McKean/Skitt Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation (corrections of linguistic error are themselves prone to error). In a July 8th post entitled "Dept. of Oops," he notes this lead sentence in a recent article in The Economist:

In the hills north east of Mexico City it is not uncommon to find Cornish pasties for sale.

Dubner writes:

They meant to write "pastries" but, considering that miners work really hard, they might also be hoping to encounter the kind of people who go shopping for pasties.

Most of us haven't thought much about the word chad since the 2000 presidential recount in Florida. The word dominated the news so much back then that the American Dialect Society anointed it Word of the Year. But now the HBO docudrama Recount has brought back memories of chad — taking us back to the innocent days when the word was a novelty even to experienced political operatives.

Here's the key exchange between two Gore staffers, Ron Klain (played by Kevin Spacey) and Michael Whouley (played by Denis Leary):

Klain: How does a thing like that even happen?
Whouley: Because punch card ballots are primitive. You get cardboard chad that get punched, but don't go all the way through the holes so they're hanging off the edge of the ballot.
Klain: Hanging chads.
Whouley: Chad.
Klain: What?
Whouley: There's no S.
Klain: The plural of chad is chad?
Whouley: That's great democracy.
Klain: Jesus.

Back on April 15, Robert Beard posted an entry on "Dr. Goodword's Language Blog" about the word superdelegate, writing that "the US press is pushing a new word into our collective vocabulary in an apparent attempt to tilt the US elections in the direction it prefers" (i.e., in the direction of Barack Obama to the detriment of Hillary Clinton). He hammered the point home, calling superdelegate a "new pejorative term," a "new epithet," and so forth. A few days later I pointed out here that the word is in no way new: it can be documented from 1981 and was becoming firmly entrenched in non-pejorative political usage by the time of the 1984 Democratic National Convention. Dr. Beard/Goodword has now responded in the comments section and has revised his original post, so I'd like to follow up on his latest points.

Back in January 2004 Mark Liberman engaged with Dr. Robert Beard, then doing business as "Dr. Language" on yourDictionary.com, on the politics of pronunciation. Dr. Beard now goes by a new nom de blog, "Dr. Goodword," on yourDictionary's successor, alphaDictionary.com. It turns out he's interested in presidential politics as well, as demonstrated by the most recent Dr. Goodword post on "superdelegates." He takes grave offense at the term and its popularization in the 2008 Democratic primary season:

The US press is pushing a new word into our collective vocabulary in an apparent attempt to tilt the US elections in the direction it prefers. Political leaders are now called superdelegates because they have more power at a political convention than rank-and-file members of the party.

Of course, this has always been the case. In fact, it should be the case since it is the leaders of the party who must ultimately decide what is best for the party and who are responsible for its health and success. So why do we need this new pejorative term this year (2008)?

This would be an intriguing argument — if, you know, the word "superdelegate" was actually new. The Recency Illusion strikes again.

Recently the news has been full of horrible and terrible things — or, to be more precise, horribles and terribles. In last week's Senate hearings on Iraq, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker outlined what might happen following a hasty withdrawal of U.S. forces, testimony that Barack Obama described as a "parade of horribles." Meanwhile, the actor Rob Lowe went public with an extortion attempt from a former nanny who he said was threatening to accuse him and his wife of "a vicious laundry list of false terribles." The entertainment blog Defamer sarcastically applauded Lowe's "keen ability to turn an adjective into a noun." Neither horrible or terrible are particularly new as nouns, but their latest appearances still merit a closer look.