Language Log

Thanks to Sean H, Mike Fourman, Ian Leslie, Eddie, Electric Dragon, Lizzie, Jayarava, KGR, Will Watts, Alex, DW, Sean Case, (and probably many others still typing their comments) who commented on my earlier version of this post, for confirming that around 8 a.m. this morning James Naughtie of the BBC Radio 4 news magazine program "Today" suffered (or very nearly suffered) a catastrophic obscene spoonerism followed by an obliterative ill-muffled giggling fit. What a pity a coughing fit didn't halt the dumb discussion of nouns and verbs elsewhere in the program.

Sarah Palin's Twitter feed continues to attract a mind-boggling amount of international media attention, most recently for the act of "favoriting" a tweet from Ann Coulter, which contained a photograph of a church sign with inflammatory things to say about President Obama. Palin, or whoever runs her Twitter account, subsequently "unfavorited" the tweet, and Palin told ABC News that she had no knowledge of the original favoriting. The Telegraph reported:

The fact that she uses a hand-held device to write her Twitter messages without checking by her staff has led to errors before, such as calling on moderate Muslims to “repudiate” plans for a mosque near ground zero in New York.

…except, as we all know, the word that Palin used was refudiate. Mostly likely what we have here is a Cupertino-style miscorrection, in which a copy editor has allowed a spellchecker to substitute the "correct" word repudiate, thus missing the entire point. (This despite the fact that a sidebar of related articles links to the Telegraph's own recent discussion of Palinesque refudiation.)

I'm not quite sure what went wrong with this sentence (Metro [Scottish edition] Wed 6 Oct 2010, page 19; can't find it anywhere online), which is a quote from Erin Arvedlund, the author of Madoff:

‘Madoff was just the human face of this lie that Wall Street told us and that we told one another — that the endless rise in everything we owned was too good to be true.’

It seems to be a kind of undernegation. But I can't quite see what to do to put it right.

The Associated Press obituary for Mitch Miller includes this highly questionable tidbit:

Miller's square reputation in the post-rock era brought his name and music to unexpected places… During Queen's nonsensical camp classic, "Bohemian Rhapsody," the group chants "Mitch MILL-uh!" as if to affirm the song's absurdity.

Surely that's a mondegreen. The AP would have been well-served to consult Am I Right or Kiss This Guy, online repositories of misheard lyrics. It's not "Mitch Miller" that Queen is singing, but bismillah, the formulaic utterance in Classical Arabic that introduces each sura (chapter) of the Qur'an. (It means "In the name of God"; the full formula is bismi-llāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm, "In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.")

Yesterday, on our way to school, my four-year-old commented, "When you love somebody, it can't be unloved. That's 'irreversible change'." I'm not sure which I appreciate more, the sweet sentiment (don't we all wish this were 100% true?), the generalization of a concept he learned on Sid the Science Kid, or the example of unloved in this unconventional usage.

Why do I find this so compelling? On reflection, perhaps it's because instead of the adjectival un- prefix (unhappy, unclear), which is about states, what we have here seems from context to be the verbal un-, which is about reversing actions (unlock, untie). Love as an action, something that effects a change of state, not just a state.

Or maybe I'm just in a sappy mood. :-)

It was December 2009 when the intrepid syntactic explorer Andrew Dowd, hacking his way through virgin grammatical jungle, came upon this astonishing specimen:

In Michigan and Minnesota, more people found Mr Bush's ads negative than they did Mr Kerry's.

And now, after a further half a year out in the field, he has found another one on this website:

there were more artists breaking on their own, with no technology, than they are now, with technology

Another spectacular case of an utterance that we understand without any real trouble, despite a dawning realization, if we ever look back at it, that it couldn't possibly be claimed to have the right syntax to say what we (wrongly) thought it said.

The latest installment of WNYC's show Radiolab is entitled "Oops," and it's about how we so often get tripped up by the unintended consequences of our actions. Hosts Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad brought me in to the studio to share some classic word-processing Oops-es. I talk about various search-and-replace howlers, including the spellchecker-aided miscorrections known in these parts as "Cupertinos." Have a listen here.

Loyal Language Log readers will be familiar with many of my examples. They're sprinkled throughout the first half-hour of the show, so I've put together a listening guide with links to relevant posts.

The Economist had some letters in the last couple of weeks from people ruminating on terrible experiences of bookstore ignorance they had encountered: someone who asked for Dickens's A Christmas Carol and was sent over to the DVDs; someone who asked for Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and was told "If it's a book, it'll be over there"; and so on. I have encountered unhelpful bookstore assistants too, but I wasn't too ready to pile on with further stories, because I once (briefly) worked as a bookstore assistant. It was my first regular paying job, before I became a rock musician. And I still remember the day a middle-aged woman customer demanded to know if we had "Kreissoppa Tebberley" in stock.

Mark Liberman reports on care bomb (for car bomb). Where did that E come from?

Now we have an answer: from the extensive (but mostly subterranean) trading in letters. Note this E-less example from a posting today by Michael McGoff to the American Name Society mailing list:

Colleagues,

Please not the following important announcement from our colleague Wayne Finke

The Australian branch of Penguin Books is in a certain amount of trouble for publishing a cookbook containing a recipe for tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto that includes "salt and freshly ground black people".

The Associated Press reports:

America's first legal gigolo leaves rural brothel

LAS VEGAS — America's first legal male prostitute has left a rural Nevada brothel after a two-month stint that generated plenty of attention but fewer than 10 paying customers.

Brothel owner Jim Davis said Friday his Shady Lady Ranch had parted ways with the nation's first "prostitude."

Prostitude? Really? That caught the eye of Amy West, who read the wire story in The Boston Globe and posted about it on the American Dialect Society mailing list. Amy rightly suggested the blend should be prostidude.

The Apple is a site "where teachers meet and learn". It has a page where teachers can supposedly learn from "11 Grammar Mistakes to Avoid". And guess what: as Steve Jones has pointed out to Language Log, not a single one of these alleged grammar mistakes is both (a) genuinely relevant to English grammar and (b) actually a mistake. It is truly extraordinary what garbage teachers are exposed to when it comes to matters of how to describe what is and what is not grammatical in Standard English.

I have seen repellently bad poetry on various subjects (mortgage services and sewage disposal, to name but two); but my horror at the poem publicized by National Grammar Day was not evoked solely by the poetic standard, low though it is:

I love the King of Ing
He makes me want to sing
Add him to an action word
And it's a gerund… now a thing!

Nor was it that the poet, Nancy Wright, won a prize for it. What makes me shudder is that it does that noun/thing confusion again (the one that underlies Jon Stewart's terror error). Even under the traditional (but incorrect) notion that if you add -ing to a verb stem you get a "gerund" or verbal noun, it is not claimed that you get a thing. What is claimed is that you get a word of the syntactic category Noun, the category that includes (among other words) all of our most basic one-word ways of making reference to things. National Grammar Day is celebrating, rather than condemning, one of the worst and most elementary popular confusions about grammar.