Language Log

Neetzan Zimmerman, "Pronunciation Nazi Pat Sajak Steals Thousands of Dollars from Wheel of Fortune Contestant Over Dropped ‘G’", Gawker 12/21/2012:

A failure to enunciate to Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak's liking cost a contestant a bundle of money earlier this week along with the rest of the game.

Renee Durette, a Navy Intel Specialist from Merritt Island, Florida, thought she had the puzzle in the bag.

In fact, she did: Durette correctly answered "seven swans a-swimming" with seven missing letters. Except that, in her twang, swimming became "swimmin'," a pronunciation Sajak found unacceptable.

Durette subsequently lost her turn as well as $3,850, and the puzzle was turned over to the next contestant, Amy Vincenti, who promptly solved it.

Anthony Gardner, "Absurd Persons Plural", The Economist 12/12/2012:

Earlier this month I went to a lecture by the American novelist Richard Ford. Called "Why novels are smart", it was brilliant and thought-provoking. But my thoughts were also provoked by the British academic who introduced him, commending—among other things—his "prose styles".

Now, Richard Ford is without doubt a great stylist; but he only has one style. He has honed it over many years, and having brought it pretty much to perfection, he very sensibly sticks to it. So why this mysterious use of the plural?

The same question might have occurred to those listening that morning to BBC Radio 4’s "Start the Week". In the course of a discussion about Germany, one panelist referred to the country’s "pasts". I suppose you could argue that, since the country was divided for 40 years into East and West, it has two pasts—but that strikes me as sophistry. The sorry truth is that we are facing a new linguistic fad: the use of the plural where the singular has always been used before, and indeed would make much more sense.

Specifically, we’re talking about abstract nouns. I first noticed the shift a few months ago when another speaker on Radio 4 came out with "geographies". For a while I thought it might be confined to academia; then I realised that it was creeping into the high-faluting vocabulary beloved of arts organisations. One spoke proudly of its "artistic outputs" and what the public wanted "in terms of outcomes".

Here in Macau, a few people still speak Portuguese. (And even fewer speak Macanese Patuá, which mixes Portuguese with Cantonese, Malay, Sinhalese, and a few other linguistic ingredients.) But according to Isabel Trancoso, who is attending the same conference here that I am, the local variety of Portuguese lacks the extreme reductions that are transforming the Iberian version.

On both sides of the War of the Iptivists, many people seem to believe that opinions about linguistic usage reflect attitudes towards innovation.  The story goes like this: A new word, a new form, or a new construction is invented; at first, most people reject the innovation and deprecate the innovators; but the innovation spreads all the same; eventually it becomes normal and accepted, and no one even remembers that there was a problem. While this process is underway, one side supports tradition, insists on standards, and mutters about Kids Today; the other side supports innovation, points out that many of the Best People Are Doing It, and mutters about peevish old snoots.

Historical processes of that kind certainly do happen — see "In this day of slack style…", 9/2/2012, for a couple of examples. But overall, as an explanation of attitudes towards linguistic variation, this story is a failure. Usage peeving, though usually claiming to protect traditional usage, in fact aims to eliminate older forms at least as often as it tries to hold the line against newer ones. We've documented many examples of this over the years — see "At a loss for lexicons" (2/9/2004), "'Singular they': God said it, I believe it, that settles it" (9/13/2006), "Hot Dryden-on-Jonson action" (5/1/2007), "Preaching the incontrovertible to the unconvertible" (12/6/2012).

In the third edition of Garner's Modern American Usage, Bryan Garner has adopted a form of the linguistic rags-to-riches story as the basis of his five-step "Language-Change Index", whose "purpose is to measure how widely accepted various linguistic innovations have become". And unfortunately, he sometimes applies this scale to characterize the status of cases where the innovation-to-acceptance history just doesn't apply.

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"Cartoonist On Sikh Superhero Who Fights Prejudice", Tell Me More (NPR) 11/23/2012:

If you're just joining us, you're listening to TELL ME MORE, from NPR News. I am Celeste Headlee. I'm speaking with Sikh comic artist Vish Singh.

The problem was is that you wrote this op-ed in which you were talking about tolerance and trying to find a way to make people maybe more aware and more tolerant, and the response was negative.

Language Hat took special note of the preterite form of Isis a few years ago ("Is is, was is", 10/21/2009), and we've discussed Isis and Wasis here from time to time:

"The thing is is people talk this way. The question is is why? The answer is is (drumroll please) …", 6/27/2004
"A bird in the hand is, is…", 6/29/2004
"Isis Fest, with emergent free-bees", 6/29/2004
"Isis bibliography", 7/5/2004
"Xtreme Isisism", 8/13/2011
"The elusive triple 'is'", 9/25/2011
"Obama's 'is is'",  10/23/2012

My latest column for the Boston Globe is about some fascinating new research presented by Tyler Schnoebelen at the recent NWAV 41 conference at Indiana University Bloomington. Schnoebelen's paper, co-authored with Jacob Eisenstein and David Bamman, is entitled "Gender, styles, and social networks in Twitter" (abstract, full paper, presentation).

Richard Roeper, "Election prediction: Electoral votes will add up to Barack Obama victory", Chicago Sun-Times 11/4/2012:

Please understand, we’re not talking about my preference. This is all about the cold hard business of predicting. If you handed me a suitcase of money and sent me to a casino where they allowed wagering on elections and I had to put all of it on one candidate in this race, I wouldn’t hesitate to put that money on Obama.

Of course it’s not Romney’s fault that allies such as Hannity, Limbaugh, Trump and Giuliani seem increasingly shrill and desperate in their criticism of Obama in the last week or so. Of course Romney couldn’t do anything about a force of nature that allowed the president to be presidential while the Mittster was relegated to the sidelines, comparing the massive undertaking on the East Coast with the time when he and his chums had to clean up a high school football field after a big game. (“The field was covered with rubbish and paper goods from people who’d had a big celebration there at the game.” Rubbish?) [emphasis added]

"Colin Powell endorses Barack Obama for president", CBS News 10/25/2012:

With 12 days to go before the presidential election, Powell publicly endorsed President Obama for re-election on "CBS This Morning" Thursday

"I voted for him in 2008 and I plan to stick with him in 2012 and I'll be voting for he and for Vice President Joe Biden next month."

For some background — including a similar quotation from Mitt Romney, "I like he and Callista" — see "Coordinate object 'he' in the news", 1/3/2012. (And for some further discussion of the grammatical issues, see "Does Julia Gillard know subjects from objects?", 12/19/2006, and "Patterns of prestigious deviance", 10/3/2011.)  But "…voting for he and for Vice President Joe Biden" has extra interest because the pronouns are not, strictly speaking, coordinated.

During last night's presidential debate, usage maven Bryan A. Garner opined on Twitter that "President Obama is addicted to 'is is.'" Garner also directed Twitter followers to his treatment of "is is" in Garner's Modern American Usage, where he writes, "Rarely is this form found in writing, even when speech containing it is transcribed. In any event, it isn't an expression for careful speakers." But few would characterize Obama (despite his occasional lapses) as a careless speaker, and we do in fact have accurate transcripts of all three presidential debates to test the claim that Obama has an "is is" addiction. So let's check.

John Wells, "with, regretful", 10/19/2012:

I found myself being just a tiny bit querulous when commenting on a posting in 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.