Language Log

Tom Roeper sent the following "Summer question" around to the UMass Linguistics Department the other day, and I offered to put it onto Language Log as a guest post. What follows is all Tom's. (I've never worked on this topic myself).

For anybody who is intrigued: This is a summer question because you might have time in the summer to devote 10 minutes to it — if it captures your fancy. For several years [too many actually] in my various explorations of recursion, I have looked at cases like: hero after hero after dead hero => all the heroes are dead.

Today in the NYT, I read this quote from Ray Bradbury who just died: "it was one frenzy after one elation after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another" My question is: what does this sentence mean?  Is it a set of frenzies followed by a set of elations followed by a set of enthusiasms or are they systematically interspersed, or randomly interspersed? Any comments welcome– Tom

Bob Moore asks:

Has Language Log ever looked at the origins of "(I'm) just saying'" as a stand alone utterance (without an S or S-bar complement)? In last night's episode of "Downton Abbey" on PBS, one of the servants used it in a scene set in 1916. I am not aware of having heard it much before, say, 2005, so I am wondering if this was a howling anachronism. Just sayin' :-)

I don't think that we've discussed it, except for a comment or two.

In the spirit of this, this and this (but maybe not this):

Throughout my whole life it has been the standard British English metaphor for Sisyphean tasks, the jobs that are endless because by the time you get to the end you need to start over: It's like painting the Forth Bridge.

It is legendary that after finishing the magnificent rail bridge over the Firth of Forth north-west of Edinburgh in 1890 they started repainting it, and a hundred years later they were still at it. Every time they painted their way to the far end, which took years, the paint had worn off where they had started, and they had to go back over there and begin again immediately.

But there was a new development this week: they finally finished the job, and stopped. Now the simile's future looks bleak.

From the AP wire…

ARLINGTON, Texas (AP)—So what that the Texas Rangers won their only game this season against Detroit Tigers ace Justin Verlander.

This sentence tripped me up in a couple of different ways. First, I initially had trouble parsing the subordinate clause, "the Texas Rangers won their only game this season against Detroit Tigers ace Justin Verlander." Now, obviously it doesn't mean that the only game this season that the Rangers won was against Verlander. For a little while, I thought it was a muddled way to say that the only game this season that the Rangers won against the Tigers was against Verlander. Eventually, I got it: the only game in which the Rangers faced Verlander this season was a game that the Rangers won. In other words, it's:

the Texas Rangers [won [their only game this season against Detroit Tigers ace Justin Verlander]]

not:

the Texas Rangers [won [their only game this season] [against Detroit Tigers ace Justin Verlander]]

Now that's settled. But what about the introductory "So what that…"? Shouldn't it be "So what if…"?

"It's a mare's nest of vipers," said a colleague of mine today, hopelessly entangling two nest-related idioms (intentionally, for the humor, I think). But it was no higher in rank than number 2 in the contest for worst idiom entanglement of the day, because this morning I heard on the radio a Conservative Party politician saying perfectly seriously that "the dénouement is about to hit the fan". (At least, it was either an idiom entanglement or the strangest excremental euphemism I ever heard. And yet I realize, even as I write this, that almost immediately I have begun to think it's rather cute, and I might adopt it: "I had to use the plunger this morning — had a dénouement that wouldn't go down.")

Today's "Candorville," by Darrin Bell:

(As usual, click on the image for a larger version.)

"In no uncertain terms" is an idiom in which the "no" and the "un-" cancel, so that the result means something like "in very specific and direct language", "very clearly", "in a strong and direct way", or perhaps "emphatically". In other words, "in no uncertain terms" means "in certain terms", construing "certain" as in certainty. The earliest example that I've been able to find is this sentence from the Chicago Tribune, July 20 1863:

Our dispatches contain another circular from the Provost Marshal General's office, and accompanying, the voice of the Government, couched in no uncertain terms, that the draft will be enforced in every loyal State, without fear or favor.

And "in no uncertain terms" is still being used that way, as in this example from today's New York Times:

After last week, the question now is: Why am I writing a post this week instead of sleeping?

When more than 200 people tell you, in no uncertain terms, that the first step to dealing with the exhaustion incurred when a child does not sleep is to find ways and moments for you, yourself, to sleep, that’s a fair question.

But recently, through the miracle of misnegation, this elderly cliché has found a new role in life.

Reader HS asks about

…the extremely common construction 'these difficult economic times,' which strikes me as an awkwardly ordered way of saying 'these times of economic difficulty.' I wonder what is so attractive about something so awkward. It gets nearly 10 million Google hits.

A COCA search for / these [jj] [jj] times / turns up 20 instances of these tough economic times, 11 of these difficult economic times, six of these hard economic times, four each of these uncertain, rough, and dire economic times, two each of these lean, perilous, bad, tight, turbulent and troubled economic times, and one each of these parlous, miserable, sour, poor, uncertain, harsh, and challenging economic times.

I don't know, and I have no reason to care. But one of the more bizarre political stories of 2010 has been the series of Republican political operatives claiming to have had sexual relations with Nikki Haley, the leading Republican candidate for governor in South Carolina. (Haley denies the claims, and blames her political rivals for concocting the stories.)

I bring this up only because it's necessary background for a discussion of the second sex-related linguistic innovation to come out of South Carolina politics in the past year. The first, of course, was "hiking the Appalachian trail", which was one of the cover stories that the current S.C. governor, Mark Sanford, offered for a trip to Argentina to visit his mistress.

One of the first sites to flag that expression as an idiom-in-the-making was Talking Points Memo.  And in a recent post at TPM on the Nikki Haley story, Josh Marshall implicitly noted a gap in the word-stock of English, and proposed a way to fill it ("Somethin' in the Water Down There", TPM 6/2/2010):

I'm not sure which would make for a more colorful and entertaining story: Haley exposed as an inveterate … what I guess you'd call, man-izer or the idea that a series of different GOP operatives, each of whom is currently married, conspiring to publicly allege phony affairs with Haley. What say you?

All around the English-speaking world, pundits are wondering in print about how to pronounce the year 2010. Is it "twenty ten", or "two thousand ten", or "two thousand and ten", or what?

Following up on Mark's post about William Safire's latest On Language column, "Bending the curve," I wanted to share some of the citational history of this particular idiom, as I've been able to piece it together. The brief story can be found in my Aug. 21 Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, "The Lexicon of the Health Care Debate." What follows is the long story.

Every so often, here at Language Log Plaza we come across usage advice that's new to us. Today's find comes from Tim Moon, who's working on my OI! project at Stanford this summer. It's from Robert Burchfield's The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1998), on the expression by the hundreds and the like:

the unidiomatic with plural; either by the hundred or by hundreds (p. 775)

Notice the usage label: "unidiomatic". Where does this come from? Not from a search of texts, to see which variant is most used, especially by "good writers". Instead, this is an expression of Burchfield's personal taste in the matter (a lot of usage advice is expressions of personal taste). As it happens, this is not Tim Moon's taste, or mine; both of us judge by the hundreds to be the most natural of the three, though all of them are acceptable. We now have some evidence that there are others agree with us, and have so far been unable to find any other handbook that takes a position — any position — on the matter.