Language Log

I'm about to leave for Hong Kong, and the travel agency that arranged my tickets sent me an email with reservation details that contained various other helpful notes, including this one:

DOT Announcement Regarding Aircraft Disinsection

Some Language Log readers may feel that the two rules I discuss in my latest post on Lingua Franca, "One Rule to Ring Them All," are stated too loosely for their consequences to be clear. Let me explain here just a little more carefully. The topic under discussion is whether who should be in the nominative form (who) or the accusative form (whom) in sentences with structures broadly like [1]:

On the Muskegon Opinion page at m live in Michigan, Paula Holmes-Greeley posed a Question of the Day: After this election, what will pull our country together. Among the clowns who answered the call for comments (people saying that we should start an impeachment movement, or that all the Republicans should jump into the sea), Harry Masters posted this comment:

What will pull the country together?

The question should be "What/Whom has so divided our country?"

My question is different: What or who is responsible for teaching Americans grammar so badly that when commenting online, i.e. communicating publicly rather than conversing, they will change who to whom just as a shot in the dark, to cover themselves against the vague fear that who might be incorrect? What or who is the source of the nervous cluelessness that leads to this sort of panic-attack accusative?

English speakers have been verbing nouns and nouning verbs since before English was called English. Still, this kind of zero derivation (also known as "conversion") is only quasi-regular, like most other kinds of derivational morphology: it spreads word by word. And new conversions are sometimes surprising, like this one from "Red Sox Act Swiftly, Fire Valentine After One Season", AP 10/4/2012:

“This season was by far the worst we have experienced in over ten years here. Ultimately, we are all collectively responsible for the team’s performance,” Red Sox chairman Tom Werner said. “We are going to be working tirelessly to reconstruct the ballclub for 2013. We’ll be back."

“We thank Bobby for the many contributions he made and for the energy he brought each day. He is a baseball man through and through.”  [General manager Ben] Cherington, who replaced Theo Epstein last offseason, will headman the search for a replacement.

Today's Scenes from a Multiverse:

According to the UK Daily Mirror's report on Whitney Houston's funeral:

The funeral service included a eulogy by Kevin Costner, who starred with Whitney in her hit film The Bodyguard, and a performance by Alicia Keys, who sung with tears in her eyes.

What the linguist notices here is that the system of around 200 irregular verbs in English is so complex and hard to memorize that native-speaking professional journalists and editors are unable to pick the right preterite form for extremely common verbs. Alicia Keys, of course, sang with tears in her eyes.

I'm going to play this for my morphology class next week when we start talking about affixation… but there's no reason why you all shouldn't enjoy it now, now, now!

Thanks to Alex Trueman.

If you enjoyed this, you may also want to check out this oldie but goodie: How I met my wife. Happy Valentine's, if you're into that sort of thing!

From Miika Sillanpää:

A Finnish tabloid presented this beautiful crash blossom today:

Disregarding the tragic subject, it can be read either as
"Father kills his daughter's dog with hammer"
OR
"Father kills his daughter with dog's hammer"

Well-tended crash blossoms such as this are exceedingly rare in the Finnish-language media, so it was a pretty delightful find on this grim and dark Friday the 13th. Though I wonder where the dog had gotten the hammer in the first place.

Google Translate presents another possibility (I think incorrectly): "The father of her daughter's dog was killed with a hammer".

I feel ashamed. I am so unobservant that I never noticed before that the name of the Italian dessert called tiramisu is simply the Italian phrase that translates into English as "pull me up". And I never noticed that until last Thursday night when I happened to eat at an Italian restaurant in Edinburgh (Librizzi, on North Castle Street) with a menu that translated the Italian word on the dessert list into the English phrase pick-me-up.

Two conferences I really want to attend are currently in progress. The one I'm at is in Milwaukee, on Language Death, Endangerment, Documentation, and Revitalization; there have been some wonderful talks here, highlighted by "Searching for our talk" by Daryl Baldwin, head of the Myaamia Project at Miami University (that's Miami in Ohio, not Florida): an inspiring and moving description of his and his tribe's efforts to revive and revitalize the Miami language, an Algonquian language that had not been spoken (until Baldwin began his personal journey) for over a hundred years but that is richly documented from past times, from Jesuit missionaries onward.

After several days, I'm still thinking about the very funny Dilbert strip of September 1, at http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2011-09-01/, which made me laugh out loud. Alice is asked by her boss to simplify the wording on a slide so that it can be explained to the company's executives. She does not suffer fools gladly and her immediate suggestion for the simplified wording is: "MONEY BE GOOD. THIS MAKE MORE. OOGAH!". What I'm thinking about is the nature of the stereotype Alice has concerning the sort of language that would be understandable to people like company executives who are (in Alice's jaundiced opinion) virtually brainless.

Listening to this recent Freakonomics podcast episode, I heard a word variant that I'd never heard before: longetivity, being used to mean longevity. You can hear it at about the 8:35 mark of the podcast — I was listening on Stitcher, in case that matters. Coincidentally, the relevant portion of the podcast (from an interview with Dick Yuengling, beer lovers!) is transcribed on the episode's webpage, with the word "corrected" to longevity.

It is traditional for readers of The Daily Telegraph to write letters to their editor saying how "appalled" they are by the terrible abuse the English language suffers daily. One little neologism, one split infinitive or other such stupid shibboleth that's easy to spot, and they're on it like wolves, excoriating the usage and protesting that the syntactic sky is falling. Well, earlier browsers of the photo gallery that the Telegraph has put up on its website concerning the riots and looting in Tottenham (north London) over the weekend will be shocked not only by the scenes of masked looters, buildings ablaze, police cars torched, and a double-decker bus going up like a roman candle, but also by the caption under a photo of a trashed and gutted ATM lying on its side round the corner from a bank:

A looted cash machine lays down an alley

(Added a day later: I've been surprised that the Telegraph hasn't yet changed the caption. When CNN wrote that clues to the earth's future may lay in the past, they changed it soon after Language Log commented on it. The Daily Telegraph's people clearly don't read Language Log.)