Language Log

Jeff Tomczek has an article in the Huffington Post on the things people didn't tell him about getting cancer and undergoing the treatment. It's very good (those who have been through it or are very close to people who did will find much that resonates). But his title is a botch that I think must be due to the myth that English has a "past subjunctive" (which it does not). Here is the title under which his article was published:

The Things I Wish I Were Told When I Was Diagnosed With Cancer

That isn't well-formed English as I understand it. And I have used this language for quite a few years; I'm kind of used to it. I realize that your mileage may differ, but I would judge the above to be actually disallowed by the grammar.

My Breakfast Experiments™ aren't quite as rigorous as Mark Liberman's. He has direct access via a high-speed line to the entire Linguistic Data Consortium collection of corpora at his breakfast table, and writes R scripts for statistical analysis as if R was his native language (it may well be, come to think of it). My breakfast table has just a digital radio, a cereal bowl, and a mug bearing the legend "Keep calm and drink tea." But I'll give you some hard quantitative data for two different ways of expressing an affirmative response to a yes/no question or agreeing with a presented statement in contemporary British English. The frequency of people (especially experts) speaking to Radio 4 news programs saying "That's correct" falls in the monstrogacious to huge range (as measured by my casual early-morning impressions), while the frequency of that mode of affirmative responding in ordinary real-life conversation is roughly zero (source: vague memories of hearing people chat to each other). I hope that's rigorous enough for present purposes.

[This is a guest post by Bob Ladd.]

Following the wreck of the Costa Concordia last weekend (one Italian comic suggested it should be renamed Costa Codardia, where codardia means "cowardice"), I've been temporarily taken on as a correspondent by Language Log's Italian desk in order to report on a few linguistic aspects of the already notorious telephone call between the Coast Guard captain De Falco and the ship's much criticized captain Schettino.

A candidate for the Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding, in the form of a BBC News teaser:

A penguin chick that was hand-reared by zoo keepers in Devon who used a puppet to impersonate an adult dies.

Here's how not to place a temporal modifier. See if you readily understand this sentence (from the UK's Daily Mirror) on first reading:

[H]e callously instructed his lawyers to add to her family's pain by implying the 13-year-old ran away because she was unhappy at home during days of cross examination.

So this poor 13-year-old girl was undergoing day-long cross examinations in her home? That certainly would make a teenager inclined to run away.

Well, with this post yesterday I finally tempted a New Yorker staff member (whom I cannot name for obvious reasons) to let me in on the secret about the ban on subject-verb inversion in clauses with preposed direct quotation complements. You will recall that the august magazine refuses ever to publish a clause with a structure like "Good Lord!" cried the bishop, his mitre all a-quiver, and his vestments in disarray. The strictly enforced house rules require the alternative order: "Good Lord!" the bishop, his mitre all a-quiver, and his vestments in disarray, cried. The strange policy turns out to be due to one irascible and much-feared man, subeditor Mortimer Thelwell-Hart. His reaction to a lexical verb preceding its subject is to go apeshit. And neither the contributing writers nor the management know what they can do about it.

In a post here last June I asked for editorial staff at The New Yorker to come forward, anonymously if they wish, and explain something to me. Why do they so resolutely refuse to employ subject-verb inversion with reporting frames, even when the policy drives them to print sentences that are not just inept but almost incomprehensible?

Chris Potts first documented the strange practice in one of the earliest Language Log posts back in 2003.) Nobody from the magazine came forward to explain, either then or last year. Instead, New Yorker staff redoubled their efforts to show that nothing could make them consider verb-subject order. On March 21 (p. 54, left column) they published what I think is the worst example yet, buried in the middle of an article by Dana Goodyear about Hollywood writer's-block therapists Barry Michels and Phil Stutz:

"We're like carnies, always out there trying to sell some idea," another writer, who sees Michels, and whose husband, also a writer, sees Stutz, told me.

I continue to wonder, what the hell is wrong with them that they could believe this is fine prose style?

In the latest xkcd cartoon you can see a graph on which the frequency of intensificatory adverbs (fucking ____ in red, and ____ as shit in blue) accompanying a selection of adjectives, from annoying and pissed down through broadly decreasing frequencies to fungible and peristeronic. (The latter really does exist, and really does mean "of or pertaining to pigeons".)

The Economist article whose first sentence I quoted in this post about inverting subject and verb in dialog reporting frames ends with a textbook example of a very different kind of inversion:

Harder still than understanding the significance of such barbarism may be accepting that it can never be completely prevented.

This is a case of what The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (p.1385) calls subject-dependent inversion. It involves switching places between the subject of a main clause and some dependent from within the verb phrase (often a complement of the copula). In the above example, the subject is the subjectless gerund-participial clause accepting that it can never be completely prevented. The adjective phrase harder still than understanding the significance of such barbarism is a predicative complement licensed by the copular verb be. They have been switched. The most straightforward order of constituents would have been this:

Accepting that it can never be completely prevented may be harder still than understanding the significance of such barbarism.

The Economist's article on the Cumbrian shooting rampage opens with this nicely styled and balanced sentence:

"It's like watching something from America," said one resident of Whitehaven, a gentle Georgian town on the north-western English coast. [The Economist 5 June 2010 p.33]

The subject of said has been postposed. This improves intelligibility because the subject is rather long (it has an attached supplement, the noun phrase a gentle Georgian town on the north-western English coast).

Now compare the following glaringly inept piece of style from a recent issue of The New Yorker:

"Galleries and magazines send him things, and he doesn't even open them," Zhao Zhao, a younger artist who works as one of Ai's assistants, said. [The New Yorker 24 May 2010 p.56]

Grossly and unnecessarily clumsy, and hard to process. What on earth is wrong with them?

I received this email message this morning:

Dear Student Systems User

There are currently problems with the main database server, affecting NESI, EUCLID, WISARD, STUDMI, etc.

IS are investigating, but we have no timescale for a resolution. Sorry for any inconvenience

Regards
Student, Admissions & Curricula Systems

You might like to reflect awhile on the linguistic lessons you can learn from this. Then read on…

If I and my friends and colleagues could just have found the strength of will to not talk about Dan Brown's new novel The Lost Symbol, perhaps we could have stopped his march to inevitable victory as the fastest-selling and most renowned novelist in human history, and The Lost Symbol could have just faded away to become his Lost Novel. If only we could just have shut up. And we tried. But we just couldn't resist the temptation to gabble on about the new blockbuster. Sam Anderson at New York Magazine has set up a discussion salon devoted to The Lost Symbol, under the title the Vulture Reading Room, to allow us to tell each other (and you, and the world) what we think about the book. Already Sam's own weakness has become clear: he struggled mightily to avoid doing the obvious — a Dan Brown parody — and of course he failed. His cringingly funny parody is already up on the site (as of about 4 p.m. Eastern time on September 22). Soon my own first post there will be up. I know that Sarah Weinman (the crime reviewer) will not be far behind, and Matt Taibbi (the political journalist) and NYM's own contributing editor Boris Kachka will not be far behind her.

"For external use only", it says on many poisonous ointments and other medicinal products that should not be orally consumed. But, the naive patient might ask, external to what? Is it all right to eat the product if I step outside the building? This is another case of nerdview, you know. The person who draws a distinction between internal medicine and external medicine is the doctor, not you or me. If saving the patient from eating menthol crystals or drinking rubbing alcohol is what they have in mind, why on earth don't they simply say "Don't eat this", or "Not for drinking", or "Don't put this in your eyes or your mouth", or whatever they exactly mean? It is because (and I answer my own question here) they have not switched out of the doctor's-eye view and considered what things are like from the patient's perspective. That's nerdview.