Language Log

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.

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.