Language Log

If you have even a passing interest in crosswords, you may know the legendary name of Merl Reagle, whose syndicated Sunday puzzle appears in many major newspapers (the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, etc.). In the 2006 documentary Wordplay, he gave a stunning demonstration of his pencil-and-paper method of constructing crosswords, and in 2008 he showed up in an episode of The Simpsons with New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz.

Reagle, it turns out, is an eggcorn enthusiast, and for this Sunday's puzzle he managed to squeeze ten twelve eggcorns into the grid. Though most are included in the Eggcorn Database, a couple of them have only appeared in the forum. All are clued with Reagle's signature wit.

You can solve the puzzle online here in its Java version, or print out the PDF here.

Just a pointer to a bit of whimsical language play described by Erin McKean in the Boston Globe's "The Word" column: composites of the form X Y Z, created by overlapping a composite X Y with a composite Y Z. So: sweet tooth fairy, from sweet tooth plus tooth fairy. Examples that make "a certain cockeyed sense" (parlor game warden) or those "merging wildly divergent things" (magnetic personality disorder) are especially entertaining.

Post comments to Erin's column.

Paul Krugman in an op-ed piece ("Tidings Of Comfort") in today's NYT:

In the past, there was a general understanding, a sort of implicit clause in the rules of American politics, that major parties would at least pretend to distance themselves from irrational extremists. But those rules are no longer operative. No, Virginia, at this point there is no sanity clause.

On her Fritinancy blog, Nancy Friedman has recently posted (under the heading "the tastiest suffix") an inventory of playful -licious brand names and brand descriptors, from Bake-a-Licious through Zombielicious. The -licious words come up every so often on Language Log, starting with 2006 postings by me (here) and Ben Zimmer (here), and going on with additional examples in 2007 (here) and this year (here).

Once again, Zippy plays with English morphology. This time it's -ity day in Dingburg:

… or something very close to it, under the heading

Proposal for a new kind of slang following the pattern "metal fork" for "metaphor"

The idea is to replace boring abstract words with very specific concrete things that sound pretty close to the original word. I'd like to build on the single example of "metal fork" for "metaphor."

This idea is based on a recent mishearing. Did I hear "metaphor" and think I heard "metal fork" or was it the other way around?

Here the re-shaping began with a mishearing, which Althouse then reproduced deliberately. When such a re-shaping happens without conscious design, we have some sort of malapropism, and when the re-shaping yields something that seems (to some people) to be especially appropriate semantically, we have an eggcorn (hundreds of examples on the Eggcorn Database).

I've written about deliberately invented examples under the name mock, or play, malaprops. See my posting on "mock eggcorns and their kin", with examples of several sorts.

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

Last week, in the comments to Mark Liberman's post on the mystifying reggae chant at the beginning of Scotty's "Draw Your Brakes," I asked:

Now that we've looked into "Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa" and this one, what's the next impenetrable pop lyric/chant we should tackle?

KCinDC promptly responded:

How about "goo goo g'joob"? Is it the same as "coo coo ca-choo"?

Ask and ye shall receive. Just in time for the rollout of the Beatles remasters and the "Beatles: Rock Band" video game, my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus takes on "goo goo goo joob" (that's how it appears in the Magical Mystery Tour lyric sheet), "coo coo ca-choo," and, for good measure, "boop-oop-a-doop."

(I'll leave it to Mark to provide the requisite study in syncopation.)

Ever since Michael Jackson's unexpected death yesterday, his music has been omnipresent. The iTunes sales charts are overwhelmed by Michael Jackson songs: as of this afternoon, New York Magazine's Vulture blog reports, Jackson appears on 41 songs in the iTunes Top 100 singles chart. One of the top songs is "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," the infectious opening song from the 1982 album Thriller. The lyrics can be a bit befuddling ("You're a vegetable, you're a vegetable…"), but there's no denying the song's catchiness, especially the chant at the end: "Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa." The story behind these seemingly nonsensical syllables is a fascinating one, originating in the Cameroonian language Duala.

I may have imagined it, but this is what I thought I saw yesterday morning at about 6:15, written as graffiti on a wall in Washington, DC (unless the Metro train was still zipping through Silver Spring at the time):

MORE MORE MORE MORE COMMA COMMA COMMA COMMA MORE MORE MORE MORE

The reason I think I might have misread it is that it seems so unlikely that a graffiti artist would be inspired to paint an apparent plea for more punctuation.

Last month the phrase potty parity appeared on the front page of the New York Times (13 April), in connection with laws designed to provide (roughly) equal treatment for women and men in the provision of toilets in public places (arenas, concert halls, and the like). The substantive issue is interesting in itself, and complex: merely supplying the same number of toilet stalls for women and men won't do for obvious reasons, so the question is how to balance things out, and doing that in a reasonable way will depend on the ratios of women and men in various venues. (There's a brief Wikipedia page.)

But I'm talking here in my linguist voice, and what attracted me about the story was the everyday poetry of potty parity.

In the time leading up to April Fool's Day, the New York Times published a piece on puns ("Pun for the Ages" by Joseph Tartakovsky, 28 March, p. A17) and then a set of letters responding to it (under the heading "A Pod of Puns: Stop Me if You Herd Them", 3 March, p. A26).

Tartakovsky's column is mostly fluff, passing on a couple of centuries' dismissal of puns as the lowest form of humor. But he* [*just to note that  this is a pronoun with a possessive antecedent, something a few confused souls think is ungrammatical] does offer a reason for this judgment:

Puns are the feeblest species of humor because they are ephemeral: whatever comic force they possess never outlasts the split second it takes to restore the semantic confusion.

But this is wrong in both directions at once.

Reported last week in the NYT: an advertising campaign by the Mars company for its best-selling candy bar, Snickers, centered on a made-up "language" called Snacklish. Yes, it's not an actual language, but just some playful vocabulary.

The "Bushisms" industry, mined so thoroughly by Slate's Jacob Weisberg for eight long years, is now a thing of the past. But Weisberg's colleague at Slate, Christopher Beam, got an exclusive scoop on a behind-the-scenes eleventh-hour Bushism when he managed to get into a farewell party for the outgoing administration on Sunday night. Here's what Bush told the crowd, according to Beam:

"I am glad we made this journey," he went on. Then he engaged in a little reminiscence. "Remember the time in 2003 when Bartlett came to work all hung over?" Laughs. "Nothing ever changes."
He continued: "We never shruck—"
"Shirked!" someone yelled.
"Shirked," Bush corrected, smiling. "You might have shirked; I shrucked. I mean we took the deals head on."