On a billboard advertising an investment firm is a photo of a young-middle-aged guy described by Caroline Sams (on Twitter, 6 Nov 2012) as a "smug George Clooney look-alike" she'd like to punch. The slogan below his handsome twinkly-eyed unpunched face says:
I ask my team for 100%. If they give me more is OK too.
Another Twitter user asked if that second sentence isn't missing some commas or some extra words or something. But I think not. I think we have an incipient new construction here. I think this is an if-phrase used as subject of a clause in a way that isn't quite the same as anything I've seen before (I could be wrong). The semantic interpretation of if they give me more here has to be something like "for them to give me more".
Indiana's News Center reports that a student, Austin Carroll, has been expelled from Garrett High School for posting this tweet on his own Twitter account:
Fuck is one of those fucking words you can fucking put anywhere in a fucking sentence and it still fucking makes sense.
The school says he posted from a school computer; he says he did it from home and it's none of their business.
What saddens me is that Austin was making a linguistic observation, and it's basically almost true. This may be a budding linguist, and he's been kicked out of his high school for a syntactic observation.
A furious Daniel Schwammenthal at The Commentator excoriates The Economist for accusing the Israeli government of being delusional and paranoid. Asking rhetorically why there continues to be conflict between Israel and the Palestinians according to The Economist’s view, Schwammenthal adds a linguistic element to his political critique:
"Violent clashes and provocations erupted whenever the peace process seemed on the verge of concrete steps forward," the Economist explains. And, as Journalism 101 courses explain, the passive voice erupts whenever the journalist is trying to obscure the truth. Violence did not spontaneously or anonymously break out, as the article suggests.
And he goes on to hammer home the point that it's the Palestinians who fire the rockets. Well, it's true that Journalism 101 courses often follow grammatically clueless critics in their prejudice against the passive, and in wrongly associating the passive voice with deviousness and mendacity. But I hope there are at least some journalism teachers who can tell passive clauses from active ones. Schwammenthal evidently can't.
We've had some discussion lately about the sports subjunctive/baseball conditional/bare paratactic conditional. I'm going to stay out of any naming controversies, but I do want to pick up on the fact that this construction typically involves using a present tense verb form to describe a future event. Like this:
We've also been discussing Keith Chen's controversial proposal that the grammatical marking of future tense leads to unwise spending and eating habits—allegedly, these behaviors are curtailed when the same form is used for both present and future time, since people are encouraged to perceive a stronger continuity between their present and future interests. (Commentary on the subject has been offered by Geoff Pullum, Mark Liberman and myself.)
It only seems right, then, to point out to proponents of Chen's hypothesis that perhaps they should consider that the construction in question offers some excellent potential for persuasive applications. You want to cut the deficit, you know how to address your colleagues in Congress. You want your patients to stop smoking, you avoid the future tense. You want to cut back on your credit card debt, you walk around talking like this all day.
The so-called sports subjunctive (discussed some years ago on Language Log as the "baseball conditional") has been in the news, and was discussed in this post by Mark Liberman. I'm quite sure Mark is right in his interpretation of the crucial example under discussion (Judge Martin did not claim to be a Muslim, he used a colloquial counterfactual conditional with the meaning "if I were a Muslim"); but rarely has a construction been so badly named. "Sports subjunctive" is not a good term; nor is Barbara Partee's "baseball conditional"; nor Mark's suggested "sports conditional". We should resist adopting any of them.
You're the prime minister of Australia. (Well, you're not, actually, but this is my little rhetorical way of plunging you imaginatively in medias res. I want you to imagine that you're the prime minister of Australia.) Your foreign minister is a former prime minister that you ousted from the leadership in 2010, and now a bitter rival who looks like he's plotting to get back the leadership. You haven't been exactly assiduous in publicly rebutting criticisms of him emanating from your wing of the party, because frankly you wouldn't piss on him if he caught fire. He suddenly decides, while on a trip overseas representing the country, that he's had enough of the insults and attacks, and it's time to make his play. So he resigns his ministerial post and announces his resignation to a press conference at 1:30 a.m. in Washington DC so as to catch the 6 p.m. news in Australia.
Your mission, should you decide to accept it: to say something prime-ministerial about his accomplishments in office without giving one iota of extra support to his candidacy now that he's quite clearly going to come back to Oz and challenge you for your job. What do you say? You don't want to say that he achieved anything, yet you have to uphold the foreign policy record of your government. Is it time for the passive construction?
A so-called sovereign citizen in Washington, recently sentenced to three years for threatening to “arrest” a local mayor, is now suing federal prosecutors for conspiring against him using poor grammar, or as he calls it, “backwards-correct-syntaxing-modification fraud.”
David Russell Myrland filed a (virtually incomprehensible) lawsuit in federal court in Washington in late January, accusing federal prosecutors and Department of Homeland Security officials of violating his civil rights through “babbling-collusion-threats” and “grammar-second-grade-writing-level-fraud.”
Language Log has been asked more than once to comment on an unpublished working paper by Yale economist Keith Chen that is discussed in various online sources, e.g. here and here, and most recently David Berreby's post at Big Think. Briefly, Chen's paper alleges that a certain simple grammatical property of languages correlates robustly with indicators of profligacy and lack of prudence, as revealed in the speakers' lack of concern for their financial and medical prospects. Language Log does not really want to comment on an unpublished working paper about language by a non-linguist that is not written for publication and has not had the benefit of serious critical attention from academic referees. But neither does it want to disappoint its readers by clamming up. So I will make a few remarks about Chen's work, and the journalistic reporting that it is beginning to attract. I will not be very rigorous; but as I will explain, it is too early for that.
That was the headline on the front page of the Saturday, January 21 Dōngfāng rìbào 東方日報 (Oriental Daily): "Xiānggǎng rén shì gǒu" 香港人是狗 (Hong Kong people are dogs). See here and here (with video).
Almost the end of January, and not a single Language Log reader hasn't failed to complain about the lack of over-negation in any of this year's posts. But here's some naughtily nutty negation anyway:
"It's not that I don't doubt the sincerity of their desire to protect the talent. And believe it or not, we have the same ambition," Christian Mann, general manager of Evil Angel Productions who also serves on the porn industry's Free Speech Coalition, said last week after the council's vote. "We just don't believe their way is the best way." (Associated Press, LA mayor signs law requiring condoms in porn films, Jan. 24, 2012; widely syndicated story.)
Hmm. That's a curious lack of non-self-doubt. So does it mean Mann does in fact doubt the sincerity of "their" desire to protect the talent? I don't think so.
I want to share something with you Language Log readers. But for heaven's sake don't mention it to anyone at The Chronicle of Higher Education or its Lingua Franca blog. This is just between us. There is no telling what would happen over at the Chronicle if they read this, so just keep it dark, OK?
After so many posts by Geoff Pullum (ok, rants, but I agree with him!) about journalists who use the word "passive" without knowing what it means, it actually caught my eye just now to see "passive" used perfectly correctly! Has it come to this? Should I say "Congratulations to Nate Silver!"? Here it is:
First, Mr. Romney eliminated Rick Perry from the nomination contest. Of course, Mr. Romney got a lot of help from Mr. Perry himself. Maybe we should use the passive voice — Mr. Perry was eliminated from the nomination contest.
Many have begged me to give up on my campaign to get journalists to stop using the term "passive" in its grammatical sense when they have no idea what it means. Some warn me that the quest is hopeless and no one will ever listen; some say I have failed to see that some sort of metaphorical passivity is being alluded to and I should get with the lexicographical program; and some just find the experience of me pointing these cases out is like being repeatedly hit over the head with The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. But I will not give up. I will never surrender. If we are going to be told on a weekly basis that evil is being done through the dastardly use of passive clauses — crimes being concealed, lies smuggled into our brains — then it is my job to warn Language Log readers that grammatical falsehoods are being retailed. Today we have a good example of Matt Taibbi making the usual blunder:
Obama is simply not telling the truth about the supposedly insufficient penalties available to regulators. Employing the famous "mistakes were made" use of the passive tense, Obama copped out in his December 6 speech by saying that "penalties are too weak."
