Language Log

Geoff Pullum posted a little while ago on it's time (that) + a PST clause ("It's time (that) we left"), which he noted as an English construction that was new to him. [Correction 4/19/09: Geoff was actually commenting on the similar construction with a PRS clause.] One commenter, Stephen Jones, labeled this as an instance of the Recency Illusion, on the grounds that such expressions had been around for some time. But Geoff wasn't claiming that the construction was new in the language, only that it was (as far as he could tell) new to him; he replied:

My phrase "brand new fact about English syntax that I had no inkling of when I woke up this morning" meant "brand new in my experience". The post is explicitly about the personal experience of discovering things one didn't know before, not about the very difficult business of dating the start of an incipient change.

I read him as also suggesting (though not actually saying) that it hadn't been previously recognized by scholars (if it had, it would probably have come to his notice; but of course even distinguished scholars of English grammar miss things on occasion).

(Mark Liberman and I posted on this topic at nearly the same time. Consider this to be an amplification of Mark's posting.)

Yesterday was Strunk & White day — the actual 50th anniversary of the publication of The Elements Of Style — which National Public Radio celebrated twice. Morning Edition had "Strunk And White's Venerable Writing Guide Is 50", in which Renee Montagne interviewed Barbara Wallraff, and then in the afternoon Talk of the Nation had "A Half-Century Of 'Stupid Grammar Advice'", in which our very own Geoff Pullum fielded questions from host Neal Conan and from listeners who called or e-mailed in. You can listen to both programs here. And read some related material, like this remarkable item:

This telegram [of August 20, 1959] from California Book Co. (supplier to the Berkeley college bookstore) is an indicator of the book's early success. Placing an order for more copies, it ends with the words "Whole campus gone wild."

Plus photographs of Strunk and White.

Geoff Pullum was on the NPR radio program Talk of the Nation yesterday, in a segment entitled "A Half-Century of Stupid Grammar Advice".

For those who want more, lists of past LL posts mentioning Strunk can be found here and here.

Another Zits cartoon on this topic:

I recently learned about a praiseworthy initiative, the Google Lime Scholarship for Students with Disabilities, whose eligibility requirements are expressed (in part) as follows:

Candidates must be:

• A student entering their junior or senior year of undergraduate study […]
• […]
• A person with a disability (defined as someone who has, or considers themselves to have, a long-term, or recurring, issue […]) […]

Rhymes With Orange plays with less/fewer:

This is a familiar topic here on Language Log. Some previous postings:

ML, 11/15/06: If it was good enough for King Alfred the Great… (link)

AZ, 8/10/08: 10 English majors or less (link)

AZ, 8/31/08: More on less (link)

AZ, 9/4/08: Still more on less (link)

Yesterday, an editor at Fox News seems to have been cruising on automatic pilot when adding metric equivalents to an AP story on crash test results ("Small Cars Get Poor Marks in Collision Tests", 4/14/2009):

The tests involved head-on crashes between the fortwo and a 2009 Mercedes C Class, the Fit and a 2009 Honda Accord and the Yaris and the 2009 Toyota Camry. The tests were conducted at 40 miles per hour (17 kilometers per liter), representing a severe crash.

Try making sense of this sentence, out of today's free Metro newspaper in the UK:

Having been in Australia for 17 years, a foreign national wishing to work in Australia must be of good character.

You must only be of good character after you have completed your 17 years of residence, but for the first 17 years you get a pass? Or does it mean even after you've been a foreigner in Australia for 17 years you still have to show you're of good character? Does this make any sense even in the crazy world of immigration law? Give up?

Via the Language Typology mailing list:

From: Inna Kaysina <kaysina.fds@uni-bremen.de>
Date: Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 11:26 AM
Subject: Festival of Languages

The IAAS (Institut für Allgemeine und Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Bremen) in cooperation with different other institutions is organising a FESTIVAL OF LANGUAGES which will be happening from 17 September to 7 October 2009 at various sites in the entire city-state of Bremen (Germany).

The main objectives of the FESTIVAL are to familiarise the general public with the idea of the linguistic diversity of our world and to emphasise the central role language plays in all aspects of human life.

The programme of the FESTIVAL consists of two major components, namely an academic part with a series of national and international conferences and a part which includes over 100 popular events and addresses the general public.

For more information, please, visit our website http://www.festival.uni-bremen.de/.

Stanford offices that provide services of one kind or another e-mail every so often to tell faculty what they can offer us. So a little while back I got a message from the Stanford Ombuds Office, and recognized the usage as one I'd seen before but didn't find entirely natural. Well, the world (or at least part of it) has shifted, and it turns out that the standard dictionaries haven't caught up.

Martin Filler, "Maman's Boy", New York Review of Books 56(7), 4/30/2009

[Frank Lloyd] Wright's self-portrait as a heroic individualist served as the prototype for Howard Roark, the architect-protagonist of Ayn Rand's 1943 best-seller, The Fountainhead. But the novelist transmogrified Wright's entertaining egotism into Roark's suffocating megalomania, an image closer to that of another contemporary coprofessional: Le Corbusier, the pseudonymous Swiss-French architect and urbanist born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in 1887, twenty years after Wright.

Successful architects are generally not shy, apparently, and Le Corbu was even less shy than the others. But wait:

Most architects give lectures primarily to advertise themselves, and Le Corbusier was no less shy than his colleagues in basing his talks on his own work.

So in addition to being even less shy than his colleagues, he was also no less shy than his colleagues?

A new advertising campaign by the cellphone company Boost Mobile is a real head-scratcher, in large part due to its creative (possibly too creative) experimentations in English morphology. Morphological innovation has driven some other recent ad campaigns, notably the creation of "Snacklish" by the good people at Snickers (discussed by Arnold Zwicky here, linking back to earlier morpholiciousness from Snickers here). Both the Snickers and Boost Mobile campaigns revolve around self-conscious neologisms, but the similarity ends there. Whereas Snickers introduces lexical blends fusing a variety of words and word-parts, Boost Mobile exploits one particular morphological frame: un____ed.

What do you call it when each player on a team is responsible for defending against just one specific player on the opposing team? If you're playing in such a system, what do you call the player you're responsible for guarding? OK, now what if the players are female? I asked myself such questions several times last week as I watched the final exciting games in the NCAA women's basketball tournament.