Language Log

A note in "Random Samples" in the July 9 Science relates how in graduate school, evolutionary biologist James Harriman

wondered whether [quirks of personal taste in drinks] evolve into popular cocktails much as mutations give rise to new species, through a sort of taste-based natural selection.

So Harriman, now a visiting scientist at Cornell University, fired up a computer program for generating phylogenetic trees. Instead of genes, he plugged in the ingredients of 100 cocktails, taking vodka as the tree's common ancestor. The program divided cocktails into several distinct families–drinks based on champagne or Irish cream , for example, or punch bowl drinks … A poster of the tree, which doubles as a mixology guide, is available online [for $20] from ThinkGeek.

Such programs do phylogenetic reconstruction based on the Darwinian assumption of descent with modification from a common ancestor. The trick is in the mathematics, of course, but otherwise this is the program of comparative reconstruction suggested to Darwin by the achievements of 19th-century historical linguistics (and ultimately traceable back to the reasoning used by philologists in studying manuscript descent), though in these other applications there is usually no stipulating the common ancestor (vodka in the cocktail case).

File under "We are all post-racial now"; from a CNN report, "NAACP passes resolution blasting Tea Party 'racism'":

"Tea Party leaders reacted to the NAACP action with swift and angry derision.

"I am disinclined to take lectures on racial sensitivity from a group that insists on calling black people, 'Colored,' " Mark Williams, national spokesman of the Tea Party Express, told CNN. "The Tea Party [movement] is about the constitution of this country…[and] ensuring equality for each and every individual human being."

Contamination can happen with any surface that touches meat, like a counter top, she says. "There's nothing special about these bags than anything else that can become contaminated," she says.

[from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128105740&sc=tw June 25, 2010 ]

It was recently reported that Ray McBerry, a Republican candidate for governor of Georgia, sent a message to his supporters reading in part:

In recent weeks, I have been personally accused of, but not limited to, the following list of absurdities: that I attempted to have an affair with my former campaign manager… when she was fired for spending unacceptable amounts of time at the Capitol in lobbying efforts during our campaign; that I somehow “stole” sole custody of my son years ago from his mother, even though she tested positive for meth use in a court-ordered screening after she had been living outside our home for nearly a year; that I have had some sort of sexual or sexually improper relationship with underaged girls; that I am no longer allowed to teach in the state of Georgia, despite the fact that I retain my teaching certificate to this very day; and now that I am somehow unpatriotic because, as a Georgian who cherishes the constitutional Republic given to us by our Founding Fathers and wishes to see it restored, I choose to salute the Georgia flag and the original Betsy Ross American flag instead of the current federal flag which represents the present unconstitutional leviathan in Washington.

In the current (Jan 4, 2010) issue of The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead has a comment that is partly about what to call the previous decade:

Arguably, a grudging agreement has been reached on calling the decade "the aughts," but that unfortunate term is rooted in a linguistic error. The use of "aught" to mean "nothing," "zero," or "cipher" is a nineteenth-century corruption of the word "naught," which actually does mean nothing, and which, as in the phrase "all for naught," is still in current usage. Meanwhile, the adoption of "the aughts" as the decade’s name only accelerates the almost complete obsolescence of the actual English word "aught," a concise and poetic near-synonym for "anything" that has for centuries well served writers, including Shakespeare ("I never gave you aught," Hamlet says to Ophelia, in an especially ungenerous moment, before she goes off and drowns) and Milton ("To do aught good never will be our task / But ever to do ill our sole delight," Satan declares near the beginning of "Paradise Lost," before slinking up to tempt Eve).

I don't know whether Mead is right that we've settled on the aughts, and I won't comment directly on whether anyone has committed any errors. Instead, I'll try to explicate why a word like aught might take on senses close to that of nothing.

Stephen Fry — British comedian, quiz show host, and public intellectual — has just started a new series of his BBC Radio 4 program on the English language, "Fry's English Delight." In "So Wrong It's Right," Fry "examines how 'wrong' English can become right English." Our old friend the eggcorn makes an appearance about 11 minutes in. Jeremy Butterfield, author of A Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare, explains eggcorns to Fry (damp squid is an eggcornization of damp squib, in case you didn't know). Butterfield also talks about spelling changes, like the back-formation of pea(s) from pease, and how lexicographers use corpora to track changes in language (with specific reference to the Oxford English Corpus, the main subject of A Damp Squid).

You can hear the whole thing online, at least for the next week.

And for more of Fry's linguistic musings, see my post, "Fry on the pleasure of language."

(Hat tip, Damien Hall.)

The ordinary-language meaning of technical terms often wanders far from home, following paths of connotative association and denotative opportunity. We've followed the semantic travels of "passive voice" through meanings like "vague about agency", "stylistically listless", and "failure to take sides". I recently read that writers should "Use an active voice (putting things in present/future) instead of a passive voice (putting things in the past)".

The terminology of the "autism spectrum" seems to have started a similar journey through successive steps of family resemblance.

We've noted, more than once, that the grammatical meaning of "passive voice" is pretty much dead in popular usage, while the ordinary-language meaning, struggling to be born, remains inchoate, a sludgy mixture of dessicated grammatical residues and vaguely sexualized associative goo. Sometimes passive voice is used to mean "vague about who's at fault", which seems to be the grammatical sense gone adrift; sometimes it means "listless, energyless, lacking in vigor", which is one of the more general, non-grammatical senses of passive; sometimes it seems to mean "on the fence, not taking sides", which is a sort of transmuted combination of the two.

Recently, I've come across several additional pieces for the collection.

Geoff Pullum posted a little while ago on it's time (that) + a PST clause ("It's time (that) we left"), which he noted as an English construction that was new to him. [Correction 4/19/09: Geoff was actually commenting on the similar construction with a PRS clause.] One commenter, Stephen Jones, labeled this as an instance of the Recency Illusion, on the grounds that such expressions had been around for some time. But Geoff wasn't claiming that the construction was new in the language, only that it was (as far as he could tell) new to him; he replied:

My phrase "brand new fact about English syntax that I had no inkling of when I woke up this morning" meant "brand new in my experience". The post is explicitly about the personal experience of discovering things one didn't know before, not about the very difficult business of dating the start of an incipient change.

I read him as also suggesting (though not actually saying) that it hadn't been previously recognized by scholars (if it had, it would probably have come to his notice; but of course even distinguished scholars of English grammar miss things on occasion).

I know that Language Log has already (e.g. here) mentioned the widespread would of, though I haven’t seen a whole lot about the gradual expansion of that of into uses like hadn’t of where there never would have been a  have (oh! I tried to be funny and write ‘would of been’ but Word automatically turned it into 'would have been' – but at least its little pop-up offered the option of restoring it and even to “stop automatically correcting ‘would of been’” – that’s very open-minded of them!), suggesting that 'of' is becoming a general marker for counterfactual modality, but I just have to report a really beautiful example I heard on my favorite public radio station, WFCR of Amherst, on Feb. 16 during their recent fund drive, out of the mouth of a very literate member of their development staff, K***, –- I’ve even met her and been interviewed by her, and I won’t name her simply because she might be embarrassed and I wouldn’t want to cause that. You know how the announcers have to just keep talking all the time to try to fill the time interestingly enough in between repeating the phone number to call – I’m impressed that they stay as coherent as they do. Anyway, the other announcer, a regular classical music host, had just said something interesting about some composer, and K*** replied, “I didn’t know that, and certainly wouldn’t of have without listening to WFCR.”