Language Log

John McIntyre writes a column in the Baltimore Sun's online content pages called "Leave it lay" in which he discusses the perennial difficulty of getting students to distinguish the verbs lie and lay in their writing. (See my post Lie or lay? Some disastrously unhelpful guidance for the details of the two horribly intertwined paradigms.) He recommends giving the topic a rest, since teaching it is such a dead loss as regards imparting really valuable information. And a commenter named Tom (the second commenter on the post) immediately pipes up to say this:

The point you make is indeed true, however the example of lie and lay is a curious one. In Australia, the word lie not only survives, but has not become confused with lay in the slightest. The two retain their distinct meanings more or less unabated, forming a sharp contrast to the developments in the US. I would imagine the same would be true of most other English-speaking countries and those learning English as a second language outside the US.

When will people learn that nowadays everyone can fact-check linguistic claims of this sort?

Yesterday we discussed this puzzling passage from Ange Mlinko's 9/7/2010 review in The Nation of Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass:

Edward Sapir, Whorf's teacher, was an armchair linguist influenced by Bertrand Russell and Ludvig [sic] Wittgenstein's work on the limits of language.

Where in the world, I wondered, did Ms. Mlinko get the bizarre idea that Edward Sapir was an "armchair linguist"? Well, now we know.

A couple of weeks ago, I promised to say something about Guy Deutscher's 8/26/2010 NYT magazine article, "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?".  I was reminded of this still-unfulfilled obligation by Ange Mlinko's 9/7/2010 piece in The Nation, "Bluer Rather Than Pinker", which is a review of the new book (Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages) that Deutscher's NYT article was promoting. I'm still putting off Deutscher, but I'm going to take Mlinko to task for two howlers about the history of linguistics, one major and one minor.

Mlinko is a poet who occasionally writes on linguistic topics for The Nation. But poetic license applies at best only to poems, not to book reviews.  Even poets should be responsible for basic historical truth.

Pakistan is playing England in a series of cricket matches, and on Sunday, August 29, Mike Brearley filed from the famous Lord's cricket ground an unbearably pompous article in The Observer about how things are going. "Cricket is the cruellest game," he began; "It is also, by the same token, the kindest" — I will spare you the rest of the self-contradictory pseudo-literary drivel of his first paragraph. But with his second paragraph he moves into linguistics and theology, and I think Language Log has to comment on the former:

There is no future tense in Urdu; the future is in the hands of Allah, it is not for mortal men to speak as if they presume to know what it holds. But Pakistan's players must at least have feared for their future as the day wore on.

Can you guess what I did on seeing this, Language Log readers? (Apart, that is, from muttering imprecations under my breath, not for the first time, about how I simply do not understand the tendency for people to talk about language as if they can just make stuff up and nothing needs to be fact-checked.) I know a little about the Indic languages, and I do have some of the right books. So I got up, walked across my office, and plucked my rather ancient (1962) copy of Teach Yourself Urdu from the shelf.

From the Fox TV forensic psychology police-procedural show Lie To Me (Male Investigator is talking to Female Investigator about a suicide note she has decided is fake):

Male Investigator: Let me ask you something: how can you tell if this thing is fake if it's been typed?

Female Investigator: Word choice, repetition, and the use of passive or active voice can tell you a lot about the person who wrote this.

Of course! Passive versus active voice. Why didn't I think of it. That should tell us what we need to know about who wrote the note.

This is from an actual job listing on BusinessWorkforce.com, advertising a position at the "marketing innovations agency" Ignited:

Integrated Copywriter/Etymologist
Sure, the Eskimos have 40 words for “snow,” but Ignited has 40 words for “next.” That’s because we’re kind of obsessed with what’s next, whether that be in technology or media or Eskimo etymology. If you’ve got that same kind of curiosity and you fit the bill of skills below, you may be the next person we think of when we hear the words “Integrated Copywriter.”

Actual etymologists need not apply.

(See links here and here for more on the much-abused "Eskimo words for snow" trope. Hat tip, Nancy Friedman.)

In his latest article, "Packing a Series of Pluses," New York Times tech columnist David Pogue went 1 for 2 in his phonetic terminology:

Apparently, the people in positions of power at Palm weren’t completely pleased with the plethora of P’s in the appellations “Palm Pre” and “Palm Pixi,” the app phones Palm produced for Sprint. Palm has now expanded the parade of P’s with a pair of improved products: the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus.
(We’ll pause while you repair your palate after all those plosives.)

It is an exhausting business trying to keep up with the extraordinarily dumb content of the continuing flow of truly awful grammar texts as the amateurs crank them out. I am so grateful to Brett Reynolds for having shouldered some of the burden by putting reviews of recent ghastlies on his blog English, Jack. He has discussed the over-loose definition of "phrase" in the Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics; he has critiqued Eric Henderson's Writing by Choice; he has excoriated Ron Cowan's The Teacher's Grammar of English in at least four posts, this one, this one, this one, and this one; he has done battle with the "Grammatically Speaking" column from TESOL's Essential Teacher magazine; and there are other posts accessible from these. He is fighting the good fight. Thank you, Brett. When I say that grammar books are being written by the incompetent and published by the blind or uncaring, I do not exaggerate. Just take a little time to read Brett Reynolds on this topic.

Let me return to the issue of wildly incompetent grammar text writing and the question (which I posed here) of whether and how you can find three adjective phrases in the following list of word sequences:

1. thank you said Jim
2. Janet ran home
3. the poor injured duck
4. a shivering and frightened
5. give me that
6. with a heavy bag

If you would like the answer, read on.

Now for another piece of evidence (I gave one here) that even if you have no clue about grammar you can write grammar textbooks or reference handbooks and make good money by doing so. Here is an exercise set in Pupil Book 4 in the Nelson Grammar series (published by Thomas Nelson, now Nelson Thornes Ltd in the UK; ISBN 0-17-424706-0):

Three of the examples below are adjective phrases and three are sentences. Find the three adjective phrases. Add a verb and any other words you need to make each one into a sentence. Find the three sentences and write them with their correct punctuation.

1. thank you said Jim
2. Janet ran home
3. the poor injured duck
4. a shivering and frightened
5. give me that
6. with a heavy bag

Can you do this homework, Language Log readers? It appears to be aimed at children in elementary school, not older than 8 or 9. You will need the definition of "phrase", which is given on the previous page: "A phrase is a group of words that does not contain a verb" [sic; I swear I am not making this up]. I will now leave you to do the exercise (comments are open). Later I will come back to this and discuss it.

Looking for a job? How about one where you set your own hours, you don't have a boss, you have nothing to do but write at your own pace, you end up receiving fat royalty checks, and you don't have to know anything at all about the topic that you write about? The job is to write non-fiction (textbooks and handbooks), only it's OK if you don't have a clue about the subject matter.

One word about your new career (and it's not "Plastics"): grammar! The field where nobody much cares about anything that's been discovered since the 18th century, and you don't even need to get the 18th-century stuff right!

I'll give you some examples over the next few days or weeks — it depends how much time I get (unfortunately I have a real job where I have to attend meetings, teach things that are true, respond to questions, write sensible exam questions, and so on). Here's just one example for today.

A note from Bob Ladd:

Yesterday I received a complimentary copy of Intelligent Life, the Economist's foray into general magazine publishing.  One of the feature articles was entitled "The last days of the polymath?", with profiles of a few people who "know a lot about a lot" and ruminations on the age of specialisation.  The article includes a little box entitled "Living polymaths: who qualifies?", which lists about twenty people who were regarded as qualifying for that title in an informal office poll of staffers at the Economist and Intelligent Life.  The list includes a number of names that LL readers might have been expected to come up with, including Jared Diamond, Douglas Hofstadter, and Noam Chomsky (no Daniel Dennett, though).

The Reverend Angela Tilby ended her scandalously unresearched little "Thought for the Day" talk of 1 October 2009 (part of which I have already discussed in this recent post) by suggesting that during the British political party conference season (i.e., right about now) we should try taking a blue pencil and editing out all the adjectives from the political speeches so that we could "see what is really being said about people, places, things, deeds and actions". She holds to the ancient nonsense about how nouns tell us the people, places, and things while verbs give us the deeds and actions but adjectives give us nothing but qualifications and hot air and spin — they contribute no content. And she is clearly implying that she (cynically) expects political speeches to be full of adjectives. But as before, she hasn't done any checking at all, she has just spouted her conjectures straight into the microphone. So let's try a second breakfast experiment, shall we?