Language Log

Or, we could ask, is Brexit like Passchendaele or like The Somme?

I mean, of course, whether the noun Brexit should normally be used with a definite article ("Are you for or against the Brexit?") or without ("Are you for or against Brexit?").

We need to ignore all the constructions in which Brexit is a modifier of another noun: the Brexit vote, the Brexit campaigners, the Brexit turmoil, etc.  But when Brexit is the head of a noun phrase, I've been assuming that it's a strong proper name that should be anarthrous, like Christmas or Passchendaele or Language Log.

John Oliver on Last Week Tonight recently noted that "Brexit sounds like a shitty granola bar you buy at the airport":

Mitch Albom, "Austin pastor’s false cake charge sets real injustice back", Dallas Morning News 5/23/2016:

Brown set back every future case of intolerance, allowing critics to ask if it’s real or fabricated.

As Albom's column explains, Jordan Brown is the openly gay pastor who accused the bakery at Whole Foods of adding an anti-gay slur to the decoration of a cake that he ordered there. Store surveillance video from the check-out line demonstrated that part of his story was false,  and eventually he confessed to having fabricated the claim.

What motivated Vance Koven to send in this link  was the use of the verb set back in the headline and the body of Albom's column. Wiktionary defines the relevant sense of set back as "to delay or obstruct"– and Albom obviously meant that Brown's attempt at deception will delay or obstruct future campaigns against the type of "injustice" or "intolerance" that Brown claimed to have suffered.

The publisher's blurb for the fourth edition of Garner's Modern English Usage introduces a new feature:

With more than a thousand new entries and more than 2,300 word-frequency ratios, the magisterial fourth edition of this book — now renamed Garner's Modern English Usage (GMEU)-reflects usage lexicography at its finest. […]

The judgments here are backed up not just by a lifetime of study but also by an empirical grounding in the largest linguistic corpus ever available. In this fourth edition, Garner has made extensive use of corpus linguistics to include ratios of standard terms as compared against variants in modern print sources.

The largest linguistic corpus ever available, of course, is the Google Books ngram collection. And "word-frequency ratio" means, for example, the observations that in pluralizing corpus, corpora outnumbers corpuses by 69:1.

Geoff Hackelford, "Olympic Golf: (Some) 'Powers-That-Be-Whiffed'", 5/6/2016:

But as Marika Washchyshyn writes for Golf, the women's side has a very different view, with not a single player declaring themselves out in spite of the health scare […]

Ron Irving, who sent in the link, notes that themselves is used to refer to an individual (if generic) woman, and adds that "a few years back I would have stared at this sentence in disbelief".

Josh Marshall, "Prep for the Overshoot", TPM 4/19/2016 (emphasis added):

[P]eople had convinced themselves last week that Trump was basically done – largely on the basis of a few bad news cycles and a big loss in Wisconsin. As long as he didn't get to 1237, he was toast. But Wisconsin was obviously an outlier. Now though things look very different. And they are different. But part of that is that Trump was never in as bad of shape as people thought ten days ago.

At a workshop in June, a group of us will be presenting a report that includes this graph:

The x axis is the relative frequency of "filled pauses" UM and UH, from 0% to 8%, and the y axis is the proportion of filled pauses that are UM, from 0% to 100%. The individual plotting characters represent values from transcripts of 100 children's contributions to Q&A segments of a standard diagnostic interview, where the blue Ts are "typically developing" children, the green Ms are male children with an autism spectrum diagnosis, and the red Fs are female children with an autism spectrum diagnosis.

You can find the details in Julia Parish-Morris, Mark Liberman, Neville Ryant, Christopher Cieri, Leila Bateman, Emily Ferguson, and Robert T. Schultz, "Exploring Autism Spectrum Disorders Using HLT", Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology 2016.

Rebecca Tan, "Accent Adaptation (On sincerity, spontaneity, and the distance between Singlish and English", The Pennsylvania Gazette 2/18/2016:

The most difficult thing about speaking in a foreign country isn’t adopting a new currency of speech, but using it as though it’s your own—not just memorizing your lines, but taking center stage and looking your audience in the eye. It is one thing to pronounce can’t so that it rhymes with ant instead of aunt, but a whole other order to do that without feeling like a fraud. […]

Lately I’ve been wondering if I’ve taken this whole language situation a tad too personally. Till now, I have kept my Singaporean inflection close at hand, for fear that attempts at Americanisms will be wrong—or, worse, permanent. Yet I am beginning to feel myself grow tired of this stage fright, tired of this senseless preoccupation with the packaging of ideas rather than the ideas themselves. Away from all these theatrics, the simple facts are that I am 9,500 miles away from home, and will be for four more years. I came here looking for change, and the words forming in my mouth to accommodate that change are not jokes, lies, or betrayals. They are real, not strange, and they are mine.

Read the whole thing.

Stan Carey, "Sweary maps 2: Swear harder", Strong Language (A Sweary Blog About Swearing), 3/22/2016:

You may remember Jack Grieve’s swear maps of the USA. Now he has a nifty new web app called Word Mapper that lets anyone with an internet connection make use of the raw data behind those maps.

Being a mature grown-up, I put on my @stronglang hat and went searching for swears and euphemisms. What emerged were some intriguing – and visually very appealing – patterns of rude word use in contemporary discourse.

From Jack Grieve, in response to "Up (for) and down (with)", 3/17/2016:

By request for Mark Liberman @LanguageLog: "Down with" vs. "Up for"…a rough North vs. South pattern pic.twitter.com/t4kfZLpi3v

— Jack Grieve (@JWGrieve) March 29, 2016

From Peter Weinberger:

My group at work was discussing a proposed outing:
I said "I'm up for that".
Our intern said "I'm down with that".

Do you know if this is purely generational, or is there some sort of geographic component?

The entertainment potential of regional varieties of American English has apparently hit the late-night TV zeitgeist. Here's a brilliant trailer, for the imaginary movie Boston Accent (posted on YouTube 1/21/2016):

And a new kind of competition, the Accent-Off (also posted on 1/21/2016):

A LL reader sent in this picture of a "no hawkers or canversers" sign on a gate in a retirement community in Sawbridgeworth, England: