Language Log

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.)

Reader David Landfair writes to ask about someone vs. somebody (and, by extension, other indefinite pronouns in -one vs. -body):

A friend was looking over something I'd drafted this morning and corrected "there's somebody here" to "there's someone here," citing a "rule" that someone is subjective case like he/she/who, while somebody is its objective case correlate. He couldn't cite any authority on this, not even Strunk & White, who seem to only mention someone in their verb agreement section.

I've never heard of this rule, and frankly, it seems preposterous, but I've been wrong before. Is there maybe a regional usage (or British?) that he might have grown up with or read somewhere? I had always thought that someone and somebody were universally identical in both meaning and grammar, with perhaps a preference for someone in more formal registers.

Well, yes, it is preposterous.

I was trying to keep up with the news on Iran's "secret new nuclear enrichment facility" a couple of weeks ago, as I'm sure many of our readers were also doing. In reading one update in the NYT, I came upon this quotation:

[Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran's nuclear program, said in an interview with ISNA news agency on Sunday, said] that Iran had taken defensive measures against possible military threats against the facility into consideration. "We are always faced with threats," he said. "We don't think that those threats would necessarily take place but we have prepared ourselves for the worse."

Recently, we've been talking, here and here, about the choice of preposition to go with the adjective bored: the older with (or by) or the innovative (and now spreading) of. Commenters added some other choices of of where another preposition might have been expected: with the adjectives concerned, embarrassed, and fed up; and with verbs in appreciate of and succumb of. There are several possible routes to these usages — analogy with P choice for semantically similar words (bored of on analogy with tired of), blending (bored of = bored with x tired of), and reversion to of as the default P in English — but the cases are at least superficially similar (though they are probably not related at a deeper level; people with one of these usages can't be expected to have any, or all, of the others).

And then a commenter (on the first of these postings) moved to a very different case; dw asked about off of, adding, "It drives me nuts". The only thing that this case — of what some handbooks term "intrusive" of in combination with certain prepositions — has to do with things like bored of is that the word of is involved. Still, people like dw, and a great many usage critics as well, are inclined to "bundle" disparate phenomena under a single heading for no reason beyond the involvement of a particular word. As I said recently, people are inclined to "blame it on a word".

Some corrections to and clarifications of my posting on by the hundreds / by hundreds / by the hundred.

From an interview with a high-school pitching prospect at a Milwaukee Brewers' fan site, "BCB Interview: 26th-round LHP Lex Rutledge", 6/12/2009":

BCB: So, speaking of football and late-round baseball picks, did you hear about this Florida State defensive tackle recruit the Brewers drafted? Jacobbi McDaniel. He's a 285-pound third baseman.
LR: [laughs] No, I didn’t. Dang. Does he even play baseball anymore?
BCB: He said he wants 1.5 million to sign, and now the Noles fans are freaking out because there's a report the Brewers offered him 800k.
LR: Wow. I wish they would offer me that. He must can hit.
BCB: Yeah, no kidding. Gain some weight and become a five-star DT recruit and you can make the big bucks.
LR: [laughs] I just don’t see that happening. Oh well, maybe I can throw 103 and get the big bucks like Strasburg.

There are two links in this passage. The first one is to a note on an FSU fan site, about whether Jacobbi McDaniel plans to play baseball or football. The second one is to a Language Log post by Geoff Pullum, "Do double modals really exist?", 11/20/2007.

From time to time, I have written about the mutual (un)ntelligibility of Sinitic languages, including here.  Of course, the distance between Cantonese or Shanghainese and Mandarin is immense.  But even within Mandarin there is tremendous variation.  A friend recently sent me a video about patient abuse in a Chinese mental hospital, along with this short note:  "The video footage shows three hospital staff workers in white lab coats kicking and beating an elderly patient with a mop and tying her to a bed. Staff are also shown making her sit naked from the waist down on top of a plastic cloth during winter."

Over on the American Dialect Society mailing list, we've returned to a topic last aired there in 2007: the alternation between and and zero in numerical expressions like "two hundred (and) six" (in speech and in writing), in particular when they are used as determiners, as in "two hundred (and) six elephants". These discussions quickly range over a variety of types of numerical expressions, uses of them, and contexts for these uses. Plus a lot of back-and-forth about the acceptability of the variants.

Several sorts of numerical expressions recur in these discussions, among them those expressing a whole number plus a fraction, and those in the related case of a dollar amount plus a cent amount. Until this morning, I'd attributed the appearance of these cases (which seemed to me to be irrelevant to case above) to simple thread drift, one phenomenon reminding people of phenomena that are similar to it in some respect. But then Russ McClay posted a collection of net discussions that suggested to me that something much more interesting — something familiar to me from discussions of other alternations — is going on.

I send daily cards (by snail mail) to a small number of friends. Mostly I just write about what I've been doing, which these days means a kind of log of my postings (Language Log, my blog, ADS-L, mostly). I realized a few weeks ago that I sometimes said

I posted yesterday to X

(where X is the place the posting appeared, not the topic of the posting), sometimes

I posted yesterday on X

and sometimes

I posted yesterday in X

and that my choices seemed essentially whimsical. There were to cards and in cards and on cards, but I was certainly not making some distinction in truth-functional meaning; in my cards I wrote the three variants pretty much interchangeably (though I tended to be consistent on any particular card).

About a month ago, Brad DeLong took Ross Douthat to task for his unpleasant description of a failed undergraduate hook-up ("Fear of Reese Witherspoon Look-Alikes on the Pill", 3/16/2009). DeLong made his case mainly by quoting Douthat's own words, from p. 184 of his 2005 book Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. The quoted passage was picked up and reproduced in more than a dozen other blog posts, for example in Wonkette ("Misogynist Neck-Beard Ross Douthat Shares his Sexy Stories", 3/18/2009).

It's hard to disagree with the rather negative tone of the comments on Mr. Douthat's attitude towards the young woman "who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon", and who "bored and somewhat disgusted" him by "drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks" and "pushing her tongue into my mouth". Perhaps the most temperate of these remarks was "it's clear he is no gentleman".

But I'm here to defend Douthat from the many commenters who also accused him of being an incompetent writer — e.g. Froborr at slacktivist.com who suggested that "once again we note the curious association between being a horrible person and being a bad writer".

Now it's time to clarify some of the details of what I'll call the I-T-PST construction (as in "It's time that I left"), introduced by Geoff Pullum here. In fact, there are three relevant constructions, differing in which inflectional form they have in the subordinate clause:

I-T-PST: It's time (that) he had some success.
I-T-PRS: It's time (that) he has some success.
I-T-BSE: It's time (that) he have some success.

(The labeling here anticipates some results of the discussion to follow.)

People differ as which of these constructions they have and, when they have several, whether the constructions differ semantically or pragmatically, and whether there are contexts in which one construction is preferred to another. There are probably subtle differences between the that and zero variants and between the contracted and uncontracted variants, and there's certainly more to be said about the modifier about, as in the title of this posting (there's also it's high time …). But here I'm going to talk about less subtle matters.