Language Log

An interesting query from reader M.Y.:

I read your article on the alphabet olympics yesterday and followed one of the links, and then one of its links, and so on.  I was merrily traipsing thru the internet when I came upon a page that threw me: "The Rules and Misrules of English Spelling".

The note on "th" (note (f)) gives a list of words with the "this" sound (what I'd call "voiced th" — ð rather than θ) that includes the word "with".  I was surprised — I have always used unvoiced as the pronunciation of that word, and had never noticed anyone doing otherwise.  Sure, voicing gets *added* sometimes due to context, but surely unvoiced is the target — right?  Apparently wrong.  My Pocket Oxford gives only the voiced pronunciation, and my Houghton Mifflin Canadian gives the voiced version first, as does my New Lexicon Websters.  The two pronunciation sites I found online also gave voiced pronunciations.

Josh Barro, "The Final Word on Mitt Romney's Tax Plan", Bloomberg 10/12/2012:

Rosen also depends on aggressive assumptions about macro-level dynamic effects, where taxes rise not because individual taxpayers report more taxable income but because the economy grows as a whole. In other words, he is depending on rosy — and not necessarily warranted — economic assumptions to make the numbers pencil. [emphasis added]

"To make the numbers pencil"? Economists can certainly make numbers do almost anything, but can they also make numbers crayon, or chalk, or dry-erase marker? And what would it mean if they did?

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.

I just really like this sentence from the Baltimore Orioles' Nolan Reimold, who is recovering slowly from a herniated disk in his neck. "I can do pretty much whatever minus not being stupid." I find that a great sentence that could be used in a lot of situations, e.g. retirement …

No big linguistic point. Just three nice little dialectal variants in a row — that use of "whatever"; "minus" in place of "except for", and the inclusion of "not" in such a context. I think they've all been discussed in posts at one time or another, but this three-in-a-row is a gem, plus [oh, there's a 'plus'; I'm infected] I love the sentiment.

In the recently released film The Master, Amy Adams plays Peggy Dodd, the wife of cult leader Lancaster Dodd. On Thursday, Terry Gross interviewed Adams ("From Sweet To Steely: Amy Adams In 'The Master''", Fresh Air 9/27/2012), and something that Adams said struck my ear:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

… he'd just say hey, come to set, I want you to- to do something …

"He" is the film's writer and director, Paul Thomas Anderson. And what struck me was Adams' inclusion of set in the class of singular count nouns that can be used in a prepositional phrase without a determiner, in a non-referential or generic interpretation: come to bed, go to college, stay in school, and so on.

According to Cordelia Hebblethwaite, "Britishisms and the Britishisation of American English", BBC News 9/26/2012:

There is little that irks British defenders of the English language more than Americanisms, which they see creeping insidiously into newspaper columns and everyday conversation. But bit by bit British English is invading America too.

"Spot on – it's just ludicrous!" snaps Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley.

"You are just impersonating an Englishman when you say spot on."

"Will do – I hear that from Americans. That should be put into quarantine," he adds.

And don't get him started on the chattering classes – its overtones of a distinctly British class system make him quiver.

But not everyone shares his revulsion at the drip, drip, drip of Britishisms – to use an American term – crossing the Atlantic.

Reader JM writes:

In a situation where I want to compare my grades (for example) with someone else's, I default to saying "I have just as good of grades as she does." I don't know why I feel like the of should be there, but to me, saying "I have just as high grades as her" seems strange.  I know that I can say "I have just as high a grade as she does" but I get tripped up when the object is plural.

I'm not sure if I'm the only one who does this or what the "standard" construction might be. I've asked a few of my linguist friends and they can't figure out which construction they prefer.

Bob Moore:

Did you hear the piece on NPR this morning about sleep walking? They interviewed a teenage girl who at one point uttered the sentence "I slept walked." I don't think I have ever heard anything like that before. She not only analyzed "sleep walk" as a verb-verb compound (where I would have called it a noun-verb compound), but she inflected both verbs to make it past tense. Is this a complete one-off, or is this pattern that is more common than I am aware of?

Bob is referring to a quote in "Lack Of Sleep, Genes Can Get Sleepwalkers Up And About", Morning Edition 8/27/2012, where Miranda Kelly says

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I usually don't realize when I do it. Like every couple months I'll wake up in an odd place, and realize "Oh, I slept walked."

In a comment on "'Over the pail'", Ken Brown asked

Is "pail"/ bucket more common in US English than in British? It seems a bit quaint to me. Neither it nor "pale"/fence are a productive part of my use vocabulary I think.

And Brett responded:

"Pail" also sounds a bit quaint (or perhaps "cutesy") to my American ear. There are contexts in which use of "pail" would be completely unremarkable, but they are contexts that are generally quaint or cutesy already—for example: milking a cow by hand, shoveling sand at the beach, or picking blueberries.

Here's a map of the traditional pail/bucket isogloss, from Hans Kurath, "A word geography of the eastern United States", 1949  (via William A. Kretzschmar Jr., "Quantitative areal analysis of dialect features", Language Variation and Change 1996):

From Elmore Leonard, Raylan: A Novel (2012), a representation of the English immediate future marker as "on":

Rita closed the door after him and locked it, hurried over to Mister, got her face down close to his and heard him breathe. She knew it. You don’t kill this dog with one shot. Rita said to him, “Honey, don’t move. I’m on get you to the hospital.”

Rita is a young African-American woman living in Kentucky, so it would make sense for this to be a differently-spelled version of the I'ma form discussed in Shana Poplack and Sali Tagliamonte, "The grammaticization of going to in (African American) English", Language Variation and Change, 11 (2000), 315-342:

[T]he phonological reduction of [going to] is said to be “highly characteristic” of AAVE (Labov et al., 1968:250). Some authors have associated these variant forms with different meanings. Joan Fickett (personal communication, cited by Labov et al., 1968:25) suggested that the reduced form I’ma denotes immediate future, in contrast to I’m gonna, which would be more remote.

For more on other pronunciations and spellings of reduced forms of I'm going to, see "I'ma" , 7/3/2005; "I'monna", 7/3/2005; "'On' time", 8/4/2005; "I'm a?", 9/19/2009; "I'ma stay with the youngsters", 5/14/2010; "Ima", 1/11/2012; "Prime time for 'Imma'", 4/26/2010.

Matt Flegenheimer, "A Voice of New York’s Streets, Saying That It’s Safe to Wawk" (New York Times, 7/7/2012):

In a city increasingly conditioned to the automated droning of public address systems, GPS guides and disembodied cellphone sages, Dennis Ferrara stands out, precisely because he seems to fit right in. Mr. Ferrara, 55, the supervisor electrician for the city’s Transportation Department, provides the audio recording at 15 intersections for the department’s so-called accessible pedestrian signals, designed to help people with limited sight cross the street safely.

And for pedestrians at some of New York’s busiest crossings — in Downtown Brooklyn and the Flatiron district of Manhattan, along a main road in Astoria, Queens, and at an oddly shaped junction on Staten Island — he is the distinctly localized soundtrack of the streets.

In Mr. Ferrara’s New York, “Avenue” takes on an “h” or three. The “a” in “Jay Street” is drawn out. And at least one “w” is appended to the first syllable of “Broadway.”

“I grew up in Brooklyn,” Mr. Ferrara said, in a bit of self-diagnosis. “What can I tell ya?”

If you're a native speaker of American English, a Dutch linguist needs your responses to an accent questionnaire:

In this questionnaire we will ask you as a native U.S. English speaker to rate the pronunciation of different speakers, some of whom were born outside the U.S. We ask you to rate how native-like the pronunciations are. While we offer a set of 50 speech fragments, you are free to rate as few or as many as you'd like (of course we'd prefer more, but there is no required minimum).

Lori Levin writes:

What is going on with "will have had gone"?   It gets 122,000,000 hits in Google.   I thought there could only be one auxiliary "have" per clause.    Did the English auxiliary verb system change while I wasn't looking?

Some of my students say "will have had gone" sounds completely normal to them, and some won't accept it at all.