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!
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:
(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.)
I've been using "lengthly" all this time; my mother used it; I believe her mother, an English teacher at a high school in Brooklyn, used it. Today, at almost 33, I saw a wiggly line from a word processor that was my first clue it's not actually a word. Wiktionary says "misspelled form of lengthy."
How did this happen? Is it widespread though (prescriptively) wrong?
Consider a distinctly US American product. Let’s say hot dogs: invented in 1870 on Coney Island and enjoyed in our great nation ever since. But in 2015, Korean scientists learn how to distill the noble hot dog into a lethal drug. Hotdogaine. International hot dog trafficking becomes a lucrative business and, over decades, people across Asia become addicted to hotdogaine, even while aw-shucks, overall-wearin’ Americans continue to enjoy the hot dog in its “natural” form.
You see where I’m going with this? In 2030, the world’s sole superpower (China) pushes a hot dog ban through the UN. As part of its war on hotdogaine, it supplies the US Government with planes to fire bomb hot dog factories. A quintessential part of American life has come under attack; do you think we’d be pissed off?
Former Berkeley County delegate and current Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Faircloth said Thursday that a joke he told referring to President Obama as "Sambo" and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as a "bimbo" was simply an attempt to "bring a little humor" to the campaign. […]
"There's nothing racist or feminist about me," Faircloth said in a telephone interview Thursday afternoon.
A couple of days ago ("On not allowing Bin Laden to back-burner", 5/3/2011), I noted that English (like other languages) often turns a noun denoting a place into a verb meaning "cause something to come to be in/on/at that place". I also noted that other causative change-of-state verbs generally have intransitive/inchoative uses as well (The sun melted the snow versus The snow melted), but denominal locative verbs typically don't.
Thus we have transitive causatives like She floored the accelerator and We tabled the motion, but not the corresponding intransitive/inchoative versions *The accelerator floored and *The motion tabled.
