Language Log

J.M. wrote to alert me to a frightening prospect for hunters and bears in Maryland, revealed by the Washington Post's Afternoon Buzz email newsletter:

The new hunting season opens today, with more hunters and more bears allowed to be killed.

Reader Jacob Baskin wrote with an interesting ambiguity that he was reminded of reading my recent post about "the wife and mother of two men killed in a fire". He writes

In the context of third-world development, I recently heard the factoid that "$1 in the hands of a woman is, on average, worth $10 in the hands of a man" (here, for instance).

Does this mean, "Each dollar that a woman has is worth, to her, what ten dollars would be to a man"? Or, "Each dollar that a woman has would be worth, if it were in the hands of a man, ten dollars"? Clearly the former meaning is intended, but as with that "duck/rabbit" optical illusion, I can make myself see the sentence in either way.

I'm hard pressed to think of other sentences with two possible meanings in direct opposition to each other. I also can't quite figure out what's going on with the sentence to create this ambiguity. Just thought this might be interesting to you.

Yes, it’s interesting! Here are my first thoughts, for what they’re worth. I also easily hear both meanings, (plus a third, I discovered as I wrote this) and I think both (maybe all three) patterns are probably common.

Local radio station WFCR on Thursday, October 11 started a report with a sentence that gave me a big double-take:

“The wife and mother of two men killed in a fire in Northampton has filed suit …”

And the next morning, October 12, I saw almost the same words in the local paper, the Hampshire Gazette:

Photo caption:

Alleged arsonist Anthony Baye has been sued by Elaine Yeskie, the widow and mother of the two men killed in a Northampton house fire he allegedly set.

Beginning of story:

The widow and mother of men killed in a house fire in 2009 filed a wrongful death lawsuit Wednesday against alleged fire-starter Anthony P. Baye. Elaine Yeskie, 77, is seeking monetary and punitive damages against Baye, …

The version under the photo caption makes the description an appositive phrase, so we already know that it’s a description of one person. But the beginning of the radio story really took me by surprise and made me grab my pen. I feel subjectively sure, though I could of course be wrong, that I could never say that that way. All the ways I could express it take more words; about the shortest acceptable version I can find is “The wife of one and mother of the other of two men killed in a fire …”

I just really like this sentence from the Baltimore Orioles' Nolan Reimold, who is recovering slowly from a herniated disk in his neck. "I can do pretty much whatever minus not being stupid." I find that a great sentence that could be used in a lot of situations, e.g. retirement …

No big linguistic point. Just three nice little dialectal variants in a row — that use of "whatever"; "minus" in place of "except for", and the inclusion of "not" in such a context. I think they've all been discussed in posts at one time or another, but this three-in-a-row is a gem, plus [oh, there's a 'plus'; I'm infected] I love the sentiment.

Here are two items of ambiguity in advertising, one intentional and one not. First the apparently unintentional ambiguity: a new commercial from the Romney presidential campaign entitled "Failing American Families."

As the terse voiceover puts it, “Barack Obama. More spending. More debt. Failing American Families.”

"Grammar Fail!" wrote someone on Facebook beside a picture showing the printed words "Milk it for all it's worth." But Fiona Hanington pointed out to Language Log that it's not necessarily a fail. It's the wrong spelling if worth is the noun meaning "value", so the intended meaning was "Milk it for all the worth (= value) that it has." The genitive pronoun its is not spelled with an apostrophe; the right spelling would be Milk it for all its worth. However, there's another meaning, where worth is an adjective: it could be intended to mean "Milk it for all that it is worth." And there the apostrophe would be correct (indeed, required): Milk it for all it's worth. (English is loaded with little gotcha things of this sort, isn't it?) Since both mean roughly the same thing (they put it in different ways, but it's hard to imagine one of the meanings making a true claim where the other didn't), Fiona is right to note that this is one of the very rare cases where it's and its are both correct in the same context with the same meaning. You won't find many of those.

From the After Deadline blog of Phil Corbett, style guru at the New York Times, comes this 1924 letter to the editor calling for a Congressional investigation into the imperiled state of the English subjunctive:

You know, people keep telling me that I shouldn't blame Strunk & White for the way so many Americans are clueless about identifying passive clauses. Others tell me I'm being prescriptive: I should let people use the word 'passive' however they want. (And you can, of course; you can use it to mean "box containing electrical equipment" if you want.) But I'm unrepentant in my conviction that page 18 of The Elements of Style has been confusing people for decades. Let me give you (if you can bear it) another example of why.

I did a double-take at a photo caption in yesterday's NY Times: "Zara Phillips, a granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II’s, was part of the team that won a silver medal in eventing on Tuesday."

"A granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II's"—why the unusual double genitive (was the term originally Jespersen's)? Despite all the attention given to Zara Phillips, that phrase appears only twice in Google, excluding duplicates, and "a granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth's" appears not at all—this against more than 600 hits returned for "a granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II" and "a granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth." (Google actually estimates 230,000, but you know how much that means.) The double genitive seems to be very rare when speaking of family members, even those of whom one can have an indefinite number, unless the genitive itself is realized as a pronoun ("a granddaughter of yours," "no son of mine"). But of course the construction is fine when one is speaking of friends, colleagues or other alienable relationships. Search me. There's an extensive literature on this construction, from several schools, including contributions by Ray Jackendoff, John Taylor, Barbara Partee, Chris Barker, Gianluca Storto, and a number of others (see the bibliography in Chris's 2008 paper), and no doubt this point is covered somewhere — but where?

Levi Montgomery writes to me:

I have read the question in this report (TSA Let 25 Illegal Aliens Attend Flight School Owned by Illegal Alien, CNS News, 18 July 2012) at least a dozen times now, and I'm not sure which answer means what (although I freely admit the intent is clear, both from the questioner and from the answerer). I thought you'd like to see it.

Stephen Lord, who is the GAO's director of Homeland Security and Justice Issues, testified about the matter Wednesday in Rogers' subcommittee. Rogers asked him: "Isn't it true that, based on your report, the Transportation Security Administration cannot assure the American people that foreign terrorists are not in this country learning how to fly airplanes, yes or no?"

Mr Lord responded: "At this time, no."

Ye gods, that sort of crazy multiple negation makes me afraid, very afraid, of having to take the witness stand.

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.

In the Glossary of Terms attached to the UK's National Literacy Strategy it says this about the subjunctive (as I learned from a useful and appropriately scathing post on Michael Rosen's blog):

The subjunctive form of a verb is occasionally used in very formal contexts to indicate unreality, uncertainty, wish, emotion, judgement, or necessity. Its inflection is complicated, because it does not always differ from nonsubjunctive forms.

What an unbelievable piece of outright burbling nonsense.

While shopping for a card for my dad the other day (he will be 90 on August 7) I noticed a sign of the times: a birthday card with a big silver "100" on it — one of quite a few, in fact, manufactured specifically for birthdays of people who reach that age. The extreme longevity made possible by modern medicine, nutrition, and social care may be a disaster for pension plans and health insurance companies, but it has inspired a new niche product for card manufacturers. They didn't make Happy 100th Birthday cards fifty years ago. I was puzzled, though, when I looked inside. The inscription was distinctly peculiar.