Language Log

[This is a guest post by David Bamman.]

It took me a while to really make sense of Twitter. For the longest time, it was (to me) the stomping ground of 14-year-olds and Ashton Kutcher, each issuing a minute-by-minute feed of their lives. Around the time Twitter arrived, however, I had just had a breakthrough on YouTube's enormous popularity – it was only after watching a dozen different videos of the Super Mario Brothers theme song performed a dozen different ways that I finally got it: I may not care about cats playing the keyboard or wedding parties dancing down the aisle, but somebody does, and without a distribution system for people to broadcast whatever their hearts felt like, I never would have had my life improved by that kid with the beatboxing flute or the one with the double guitar.

So I waited for a similar breakthrough with Twitter. It came, at long last, after I realized that it was exactly what I first thought it was: 14-year-olds (and Ashton Kutcher) chronicling the minutiae of their lives. It is colloquial language, constrained by 140 characters: everyday conversations about waiting in line at the grocery store, your flight just landing at ORD, what to do this Saturday night, "omg did u see hr dress?" In spurts it is, of course, much more than that, as its use during the protests of the 2009 Iranian election proved, but in its unmarked use, it's the language of how millions of people across the world talk to their friends.

I don't think we've had one of these before.

In many earlier posts (e.g. "Candidates must be a student", 4/16/2009; "Xtreme singular they", 4/18/2008; "'Singular they', God said it, I believe it, that settles it", 9/13/2006; "They are a prophet", 10/21/2004), we've noted that they/them/their is often used with non-specific singular human antecedents, not only as an alternative to "he or she", "him or her", "his or hers", but even in cases where the sex of the antecedent is known.

But here's a case where the antecedent is a snake, and a generically definite one at that ("How spitting cobras shoot for the eyes", Discover Magazine 5/14/2010):

It may seem a bit daft to provoke a snake that can poison you from afar, but Young’s antics were all part of an attempt to show just how spitting cobras make their shots. Their venom is a potent defensive weapon, but it’s also completely useless if it lands on the skin or even in the mouth. To work, the cobra must aim for the eyes. Just think about how hard that is. The cobra must hit a moving target that’s up to 1.5 metres away, using a squirt gun attached to their mouth.

Following up on "I'ma", 7/3/2005, Brett Reynolds sends this clip from the Art Blakey Quintet's A Night At Birdland, Vol. 2 [Live], the end of track 4, Now's The Time:

A transcription:

"Yes, sir, I'ma stay with the youngsters. When these get too old,  I'ma get some younger ones."

See Plethoric Pundigrions¹ for screen shots showing a version of Microsoft Word (I don't know which one) that for levelheaded suggests correcting it to level-headed and for level-headed suggests correcting it to levelheaded. That should give rise to a frustrating morning of trying to finalize the draft, shouldn't it?

¹ Hat tip to Bob Ladd.

English freely allows past participles to be used as pre-nominal modifiers, and in the natural course of events, such participle+noun combinations often become collocations or fixed expressions: fried chicken, pulled pork, mulled wine, hard-boiled eggs, rolled oats, cracked pepper, combed cotton, wrought iron, dropped ceiling,

English speakers also tend to weaken or omit final coronal consonants, a process that linguists call t/d deletion: thus [lɛf] for left.  Although t/d deletion is stigmatized, in fact all normal English speakers do it some of the time, at least in some contexts.  As a result, fixed expressions that start out as participle+noun are sometimes re-analyzed so as to lose their -ed ending.  This happened long ago to ice(d) cream, skim(med) milk, pop(ped) corn, wax(ed) paper, shave(d) ice, etc. It's happened more recently (I think) to ice(d) tea, cream(ed) corn, and whip(ped) cream.

A few weeks ago, reader JM reported one of these that's new to me: "bake goods" for baked goods, in a flier from his son's school.

Or maybe it should be text and meta-text. Anyhow, John D. Muccigrosso wrote to point out something that's obvious in retrospect, namely that all those pages that say "This page intentionally left blank" are thereby not, in fact, left blank.

I write this from gate 27 at SFO, on my way back to Philadelphia from a meeting that was interesting and productive, but didn't have a lot of direct linguistic relevance.  I did manage to fit in breakfast with Geoff Nunberg and lunch with Paul Kay, and  Paul pointed me to Andrea Baronchelli et al.,  "Modeling the emergence of universality in color naming patterns", PNAS 1/25/2010, which I'll post about after I've had a chance to read it — in combination with Paul's own recent paper, Terry Regier, Paul Kay, & Naveen Khetarpal, "Color naming and the shape of color space", Language 85(4) 2009, which has been at the top of my to-blog list for a week or so.

In the few minutes before my plane boards, I've got time to register one linguistic observation of possible interest:  earlier this morning, as I was checking out of the place I've been staying, something happened that made me wonder whether American "huh" might be heading in the direction of Canadian "eh".

A few days ago, TPM linked to an political ad in the New Orleans Coroner's race, which gives a good example of a particular NO accent (known as "Yat") about which A.J. Liebling wrote in The Earl of Lousiana:

There is a New Orleans city accent . . . associated with downtown New Orleans, particularly with the German and Irish Third Ward, that is hard to distinguish from the accent of Hoboken, Jersey City, and Astoria, Long Island, where the Al Smith inflection, extinct in Manhattan, has taken refuge. The reason, as you might expect, is that the same stocks that brought the accent to Manhattan imposed it on New Orleans.

Over the weekend, one of the guests on the NPR show "Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen" was the Malaysian singer-songwriter Zee Avi, who has managed to convert YouTube buzz into an indie recording contract and a well-received debut album. Most of her lyrics are in English, but one of her songs, which she performed on the show, code-mixes Malay and English. As she explains, the song "Kantoi" (meaning "Busted") is in "a hybrid of Malay and English called Manglish." I talked about Manglish a few years ago in the post, "Malaysia cracks down on 'salad language,'" where I discussed measures taken by the Malaysian government to ban Malay-English mixtures. I wonder how government officials feel now that Manglish is getting international exposure, thanks to a diminutive, ukulele-strumming songstress.

Following up on Mark Liberman's "2010" posting (and on an earlier "rigid complementarity" posting of mine), I've written a series of postings on my blog about year names, number names, and related matters:

on "bald assertion" here;
on decimal 'decimal point' here;
and on a cluster of issues surrounding these topics here.

One of the things that I acquired over the holiday was a Talking Obama Figure ("Hear His Historic and Inspirational Words") from Gemmy Industries Corp. of Coppell, TX, "the worlds largest provider of all your favorite seasonal decor, animation entertainment and lighting products". This is one of a large number of other Gemmy talking toys, from the "Animated Talking Head Skeleton" and the "Gemmy Talking Dancing Hamster 97 Kurt Busch", to the "Dora the Explorer Talking Christmas Doll in Santa Outfit" and the "Animated Talking Bouncing Van of Love", and  Gemmy's monster hit from 2000-2001, "Big Mouth Billy Bass".

As you press of the red button on its pedestal, the Talking Obama Figure cycles through nine passages from president Obama's speeches. What struck me first about this collection of inspirational oratory was that it's performed by somebody else.

From reader EG:

I am writing you because I encountered the perplexing singular y'all while watching trailers for Disney's newest film, The Princess and the Frog. Now, not being a Southerner I can't attest to my own usage of "y'all," but my linguistic intuition is in accord with your Language Log posting "Out of the y'all zone" (9/18/2005), namely that y'all is generally not used to address singular individuals, but plural and occasionally implied plurals. […] In the cited trailer, Tiana uses singular y'all three times. Addressing the frog with evident dismay, she says "So what now? I reckon y'all want a kiss." at 0:32. And then again, at 2:14, when the frog is dismayed that she will not kiss him after her apparent offer, she retorts "I didn't expect y'all to answer!" In the intervening time, she does refer to him (using apparently less careless or emotionally influenced wording) as standard second person singular "you." Finally, "Y'all don't look that much different… but how'd you get way up there?" 3:13. This last example is perhaps the most perplexing of all, as it contains both forms.

Following up on my commoner posting, I write to ask for some data. What I'm looking for is cases where person A uses an inflected adjective or adverb (comparative or superlative) and person B objects to it, saying that A should have used the periphrastic variant instead, or declaring that the variant A used is "not a word" or "not English". It's ok if you are person B, so long as you can cite the source of the material you objected to. It's also worth noting cases where someone says explicitly that they are unsure of which variant to choose.

Some things that need flagging: if person A is not a native speaker; if person A is a young child; if the original production is likely to have been a deliberate invention, intended as play or display, or to have been a quotation.

Now some information about what's in my files already. The items are listed in their base forms; some of these were collected in their comparative form, some in their superlative form, some in both. (Judgments on comparatives and superlatives aren't always parallel, by the way.)