Language Log

I was just reading a year-old article in the NYT reporting on Molly Ivins's death, and in discussing her friendship with Ann Richards, they said, "The two shared an irreverence for power and a love of the Texas wilds."

I was surprised that Katherine Q. Seelye could say that, and that the copy-editors didn't mind. I hadn't ever noticed this phenomenon before, but others must have. So while "a reverence for power" is fine, for me "an irreverence for power" is ungrammatical, though cute, and certainly understandable, and maybe it was intentionally tongue in cheek — after all, they had just been discussing the slogan "Molly Ivins can't say that, can she?", which her editors had put on billboards to defend her and which became the title of one of her books.

Similarly, I can say "a passion for politics", but I can't say "a dispassion for politics".

Well, I should check Google. … Hmm, supportive, to some extent, but not conclusive.

On 30 Rock's "Christmas Special" episode this past Thursday, Tracy Morgan's character (Tracy Jordan) says to Tina Fey's character (Liz Lemon): "What's the past tense for scam? Is it scrumped? Liz Lemon, I think you just got scrumped!" See it at the end of this clip here (or better yet, watch the whole episode):

The intended joke here is that scrump (or skrump; the alternative spelling is irrelevant) is a slang term for sex, with more precise popular definitions ranging from the relatively benign "to have convenient sex; usually brief and decidedly unromantic" to the more disturbing "[t]o physically violate". (Some believe the word to be a blend of "screw" and "hump"; others assume a biblical link to the story of Adam & Eve, euphemistically speaking of stealing fruit/apples.) So, Tracy Jordan is informing Liz Lemon that she just got fucked.

Mark Liberman has reported on a use of the transitive verb quiesce 'render inactive', in a passive used adjectivally: "Server is currently quiesced". Transitive quiesce seems to be almost entirely restricted to computer contexts, and also to be recent enough to have escaped general dictionaries.

Although I posted on this on ADS-L earlier today, I thought that maybe in honor of the U.S. elections on Tuesday it would be entertaining to post a version of it here. The usage in question is the verbs early/absentee vote (not vote early/absentee).

My posting a while back on countification (M(ass)>C(ount) conversion of nouns, with accompanying individuating semantics) elicited e-mail and blogging about other cases of zero relationships in English (of which there are a lot, though all  pretty much irrelevant to my topic in that posting), and now Bill Poser's posting on moose has set off a comments thread on zero plurals (moose being an example of a noun with a zero plural).

There's an important point here: formal relationships — like phonological identity ("zero relationship"), suffixation by /z/, and systematic vowel alternations, are "just stuff". They have no intrinsic meaning on their own, but are available to serve all sorts of grammatical ends.

Etymology is not destiny, as we keep pointing out here. Thinking that it is is subscribing to the Etymological Fallacy (see here, among many other places). But even synchronically, you can't always trust what you see: derived lexical items are often specialized semantically (as are noun-noun compounds and also combinations of non-predicating adjective plus noun). This is especially true of technical terms; as I am fond of saying: labels are not definitions.

Which brings us to financial derivatives. Derivative here is derived from derive, right? So we can tell what it means in this expression from its morphological composition, right? Well, no. But people want that to be true.

I agree with Mark that James Wood's condescending comments about Palin's use of verbage are pure de-haut-en-bushwa. On the other hand, let's not delude ourselves about this item. Palin's verbage is not simply a term for "language" or "wording" that has been happily circulating in vernacular speech since it was first attested 200 years ago, in defiance of the assaults of prescriptivists. Verbage is not colloquial English — I mean, people don't go around saying, "Hey, Sparky — watch your goddamn verbage!" It arises as an approximation of a fancy-pants word that people have seen in print: it's a lot more plausible to assume that people would misread verbiage as verbage than that they would mishear it that way, particularly since this is a re-analysis favored by analogy. The fact is that in both its form and its meaning, verbiage is a weirder word than most people — including the editors of the OED — realize.

At some time in the middle 1970s, Deirdre Wilson and I noticed that we had never seen the past participle of the verb stride anywhere. In fact we didn't even know what it was. When you stride off, what is it that you've done? How would it be described? Have you strided? Have you strode? Have you stroded? Have you stridden? Have you strodden? We realized that we hadn't a clue. None of them sounded familiar or even mildly acceptable to us as native speakers. And this odd gap had some potential for theoretical significance. Let me explain why. And then I'll tell you how the world's most distinguished English grammarian stumbled across a real-life sentence that seemed to clear up the mystery. And I'll fill in a bit of subsequently discovered history as well. But first, before you read on, write down what you think is the correct form for the past participle of stride in English as spoken by you.

Along with "I like the crotch on the idea…" on composer Nico Muhly's blog (commented on here) comes a use of the verb gay marry, in

I did an interview with a guy in Seattle – totally random, I had never met him before – who had such a smart, interesting read on the piece [Muhly's most recent album, Mothertongue], I wanted to gay marry him right there on the phone.

The moderately common gay marry is undoubtedly a back-formation from gay marriage (with its non-predicating modification), the result being a compound verb of a pattern (Adj + V) that's not at all productive in English. Meanwhile, some people have asked me why anyone would use gay marry at all; why not just use marry?

A very tiny thing, but I was entertained by Natalie Angier's morphological inventiveness in a piece "Life Is Short…" (NYT Science Times 8/19/08, front page) about the Furcifer labordi chameleon of Madagascar:

… the chameleon spends some two-thirds of its abbreviated existence as an egg buried in sand, with a mere 16 to 20 weeks allocated to all post-shellular affairs.

Post-shellular is a morphological hybrid, built on the native English shell, with the Latin-derived prefix post- and suffix -ul-ar.

English has many hybrid words that combine Greek and Latin elements (automobile, homosexual, television); though these are sometimes objected to by sticklers who insist on etymological purity, they can be seen simply as combinations of English elements from the learnèd portion of the lexicon, and most people find them unremarkable.

Combinations of native English bases with learnèd affixes, however, usually stand out, and often have a playful character (playful morphology is a topic we've returned to a number of times on Language Log, for instance here). Angier could have said "allocated to all affairs outside the shell" or "for life after hatching" or something similar, but "allocated to all post-shellular affairs" is more fun. And science writers are always looking for ways to lighten up their material.

I understood that it was a

(1) [big penis] [book] 'book [about big penises]'

but it was only when it arrived that I realized it was also a

(2) [big] [penis book] 'big [book about penises]'

It's big, in both size (12.2 x 11.8 x 1.5 inches) and weight (7.1 pounds). (There's some scholarly joke to be made here about iconicity.)

The ambiguity of big penis book is a familiar one in English linguistics; little girls' school is a much more decorous textbook example. And the parsing of it in (1) illustrates some nice little facts about English morphology/syntax.