Language Log

The mouse-over title on the latest xkcd points us to a classic argument over etymology vs. usage:

I don't know what's more telling–the number of pages in the Wikipedia talk page argument over whether the 1/87.0857143 scale is called "HO" or "H0", or the fact that within minutes of first hearing of it I had developed an extremely strong opinion on the issue.

Christopher Hitchens, "American Inaction Favors Qaddafi", Slate 3/7/2011:

Our common speech contains numberless verbs with which to describe the infliction of violence or cruelty or brutality on others. It only really contains one common verb that describes the effect of violence or cruelty or brutality on those who, rather than suffering from it, inflict it. That verb is the verb to brutalize. A slaveholder visits servitude on his slaves, lashes them, degrades them, exploits them, and maltreats them. In the process, he himself becomes brutalized. This is a simple distinction to understand and an easy one to observe. In the recent past, idle usage has threatened to erode it. Last week was an especially bad one for those who think the difference worth preserving.

In this morning's post, I noted an early example of metaphorical literally in William Robertson's History of America (Volume I), 1777:

The Andes may literally be said to hide their heads in the clouds; the storms often roll, and the thunder bursts below their summits, which, though exposed to the rays of the sun in the centre of the torrid zone, are covered with everlasting snows.

This struck me as a perfect example of the case noted by Henry Bradley in the 1903 edition of the OED, where literally is "used to indicate that some conventional metaphorical or hyperbolical phrase is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense". A quick Google Books search showed that Robertson was by no means alone: in the last half of the 18th century, the phrase "may literally be said" was a fairly reliable indicator of metaphor or hyperbole.

In reading Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth, I noticed that  Prof. Dawkins is rather fond of the word literally, using it 38 times in the roughly 130,000 words of the cited work, for a rate of about 292 per million words. This is more than eight times greater than the overall rate of about 35 per million words in the COCA corpus, and 15 times greater than the rate of 15 per million words in the British National Corpus.

Most of Prof. Dawkins' uses of literally do not mean "word for word" or "in a literal as opposed to figurative way", but instead are a sort of intensifier. This is not at all surprising, since the emphasizing sense has been the commonest meaning of literally for a century or more, and Richard Dawkins is a very emphatic person. But all the same, I doubt that the legions of peevers who believe that literal should only be used to mean "not figurative" will even notice Prof. Dawkins' usage, much less work themselves into a froth over it. That's because his usage occupies a sort of middle ground, whose inconsistency with the "word for word" and "not figurative" meanings is subtle rather than blatant.

This letter to the editor of the Australian newspaper The Age, from Brian Cole of Yarragon, a small town in Victoria, ran under the title "What the…":

WHILE I recognise the evolutionary nature of the English language, I listen with increasing despair to the inappropriate use of the word "what".

"What" has an interrogatory sense, that is, it is a word looking for an answer. I have learned to cope with sports commentators using expressions such as "they moved the ball better than what the other team did". But in the second paragraph of The Sunday Age's editorial: "and that their culture was the opposite of what Mr Costello suggested"? No interrogative anywhere to be seen.

There are many ways to improve this phrase. It would be acceptable to simply replace "what" with "that" but nicer usage to write "and that their culture was the opposite of that suggested by Mr Costello".

Clark Whelton  ("What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness: The decline and fall of American English, and stuff", The City Journal, Winter 2011) has an unusually precise idea about when American English went to the dogs:

[It] began in the 1980s, that distant decade when Edward I. Koch was mayor of New York and I was writing his speeches. The mayor’s speechwriting staff was small, and I welcomed the chance to hire an intern. Applications arrived from NYU, Columbia, Pace, and the senior colleges of the City University of New York. I interviewed four or five candidates and was happily surprised. The students were articulate and well informed on civic affairs. Their writing samples were excellent. The young woman whom I selected was easy to train and a pleasure to work with. Everything went so well that I hired interns at every opportunity.

Then came 1985.

In a recent post at Jezebel, Sadie Stein documents the usage of literally as in intensifier, and the often-intense negative reaction, both to the word-sense itself and to its sometimes-spectacularly-frequent deployment ("Saying 'Literally' All The Time Is Literally An Issue").

Jan Freeman, "I could care less: A loathed phrase turns 50", The Boston Globe, 10/24/2010:

It was 50 years ago this month — Oct. 20, 1960 — that one of America’s favorite language disputes showed up in print, in the form of a letter to Ann Landers. A reader wanted Ann to settle a dispute with his girlfriend: “You know that common expression: ‘I couldn’t care less,’ ” he wrote. “Well, she says it’s ‘I COULD care less.’

Ann voted with her reader — “the expression as I understand it is ‘I couldn’t care less’ ” — but she thought the question was trivial. “To be honest,” she concluded, “this is a waste of valuable newspaper space and I couldn’t care less.”

She couldn’t have known it at the time, but her reader’s trivial question would be wasting newspaper space (and bandwidth, too) for decades, as it blossomed into one of the great language peeves of our time.

A couple of years ago, Ben Zimmer took a look at Stephen Fry's change of heart on things like  "none of these are of importance to me" ("Fry on the pleasure of language", 11/7/2008). Ben closed by quoting from the inaugural post on Fry's weblog, "Don't Mind Your Language", 11/4/2008. A couple of weeks ago, Matt Rogers created a typographical animation of the same passage, to the accompaniment of audio from Fry's podcast version:

The BBC is doing a day or two of filming on the roof terrace of the building that houses my department, and the parking lot below our windows is thick with dressing room trailers and wardrobe trailers and generator trucks. Plus there is one other vehicle: parked directly below the windows of the room where the faculty of the country's finest department of Linguistics and English Language hold their staff meetings is a large catering truck to provide lunch for the crew, and it is labeled DeluxDiner's.

The company that owns it is called "DeluxDiners". They have a website at http://www.deluxdiners.co.uk/. As you can see from that page, the company name is a regular plural. There is no trace of an apostrophe in the web page text. But there is a photograph of one of their lunch trucks, with the offending apostrophe up there in red.

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?

Recent mixtures of English into everyday use in other languages evoke mixed reactions, from amusement through annoyance to alarm.  It's important to recognize that this sort of thing has been going on for a long time — probably just as about as long as there have been languages to mix. And it's likely that reactions towards the negative end of the spectrum have also been around for many thousands of years.

Over the next few weeks, I'll post a few older examples. But I'll start with a relatively recent instance: the role of French in the speech of educated Russians of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Business Diary of a UK newspaper, The Independent (see it here) complains:

Taking liberties with language

Debenhams is a much-loved high-street institution, but surely it can't just reinvent the English language? The retailer seems to think it is acceptable to use the word "anniversary" as a verb. "This will anniversary as we move into the first quarter of 2011," its market update says of one of its businesses. Worse, the idea is catching on. Here's Investec on Marks & Spencer's progress: "Better-balanced autumn ranges should allow M&S to anniversary tougher comparisons". Stop it please.

If you know Language Log, you are probably thinking that I will point out that anniversary has often been used as a verb and the writer is a dope with no sense of how to check an empirical claim, and that in the comments after I have said what I think Mark Liberman will chime in with several examples from 18th century poetry. Isn't that right?