Language Log

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.

In two recent posts, Mark Liberman has investigated the religious echoes in expressions from Sarah Palin: "I know that I know that I know" and "If I die, I die." In my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, I take up yet another religiously evocative Palinism: "Only dead fish go with the flow." Turns out that variations of this adage have been circulating in Christian circles for nearly two centuries.

Subtle dog whistle or a typical comment from someone who brags about being covered in fish slime? You be the judge!

It's not quite as ineffably koan-like as "The biggest self of self is self," but Gov. Mark Sanford delivered another parsing puzzler in his latest comments to the Associated Press, in which he admits to additional liaisons with his Argentinian mistress and further unspecified "line-crossing" with other women:

What I would say is that I've never had sex with another woman. Have I done stupid? I have.

The lines between different sorts of formulaic expressions are often hard to draw: idiom, snowclone, cliché, catchphrase, or what? Yesterday I posted on my blog about a case that combines features of snowclones and idioms: the formula THE WHOLE X 'the whole matter, everything to do with the matter', the most famous exemplar of which is the whole nine yards, as in:

We had a blowout celebration: champagne, ice sculptures, the whole nine yards.

In Thursday's Washington Post, Richard Leiby digs into the background of a political cliche: "measuring (for) drapes." In his stump speech, John McCain says that "Senator Obama is measuring the drapes," meaning that he is already presumptuously planning how to decorate the White House. President Bush used the line about Congressional Democrats before the 2006 midterm elections, and Bush the elder applied it to Bill Clinton in the 1992 campaign. Leiby took the drape expression back to a 1980 reference in the New York Times on John Anderson ("Obviously, it's much too soon for Mr. Anderson to start measuring for drapes at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue"), but its roots actually go back for several decades before that, as befits such a sturdy cliche.

In my Word Routes column over on the Visual Thesaurus website, I recently took a look at a peculiar turn of phrase used by Barack Obama in the Oct. 7 presidential debate: "Now, Senator McCain suggests that somehow, you know, I'm green behind the ears…" My initial assessment was that Obama had created an idiom blend, combining the more established expression "wet behind the ears" with the metaphorical extension of green implying immaturity. But as it turns out, the story of "green behind the ears" has some unexpected intricacies, including a surprising parallel in German.