Language Log

I often have to point out that English grammar is not a settled body of dull doctrine, it's a live field of scientific investigation in which new facts are emerging all the time. So how long is it since I last learned something entirely new about the grammar of English? Oh, about… two minutes. In a press report about Al Franken's win in the Minnesota recount, I read that Franken said, "It's time that Minnesota, like every other state, has two senators." [See below for Ben Zimmer's observation that the AP report in which I read this was in fact departing, outside of the direct quotation marks, from what Franken actually said! It turns out not to matter for my purposes. The discovery in what follows is not about Franken.] That present tense on has struck me as odd. I would say It's time Minnesota had two senators. The idiom demands the preterite (simple past) tense in my variety of English. So I picked the random word sequence it's time everyone and Googled it, and I found that It's time everyone flies is a corporate motto of Cebu Airlines in the Philippines. And then, although instances of the preterite vastly outnumber cases of the present among the Google hits, I soon found it's time everyone understands and it's time everyone takes a moment on the ESPN site… It's already clear to me that people are starting to say It's time X does Y instead of It's time X did Y. That's not a major discovery; it's not especially important or interesting as far as I can yet see, because it doesn't relate to some descriptive thorny point or theoretical crux; but it's a brand new fact about English syntax that I had no inkling of when I woke up this morning.

I just received an email from a total stranger that must have been inspired by
either my article in The Chronicle of Higher Education this week or the fark.com or metafilter.com discussions of it. I suppress her name, to save her embarrassment; but here, reproduced in full, is the text of her message:

Calling THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE Stupid mite display a drop of stupidity on your part or at least a lack of good manners.

Isn't that sweet? It gave me a giggle, anyway.

In the time leading up to April Fool's Day, the New York Times published a piece on puns ("Pun for the Ages" by Joseph Tartakovsky, 28 March, p. A17) and then a set of letters responding to it (under the heading "A Pod of Puns: Stop Me if You Herd Them", 3 March, p. A26).

Tartakovsky's column is mostly fluff, passing on a couple of centuries' dismissal of puns as the lowest form of humor. But he* [*just to note that  this is a pronoun with a possessive antecedent, something a few confused souls think is ungrammatical] does offer a reason for this judgment:

Puns are the feeblest species of humor because they are ephemeral: whatever comic force they possess never outlasts the split second it takes to restore the semantic confusion.

But this is wrong in both directions at once.

A few weeks ago, I posted on some work-in-progress on speaking rate ("How fast do people talk in court?", 3/21/2009).  Since then, I've added coverage in the same style of a few thousand telephone conversations from the Switchboard Corpus.

The main motivation of this work (done jointly with Jiahong Yuan and Linda Drake) is a simple and practical one: to establish a better-grounded set of expectations about the distribution of speaking rates in various sorts of material. Beyond that, it's obvious that the the ebb and flow of conversational interaction is visible to some extent in a graphical presentation of who said how much when, entirely independent of the content.  Here's a graph of the  local speaking rate on the A and B sides of a two-person conversation, calculated in a moving 30-second window that's stepped along five seconds at a time:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

Almost three years ago, a Language Log sequence about an obscure point of typographical history got featured on fark.com. And as I explained in "The Gray Lady goes up against fark.com", 6/20/2006, the result was about 10,000 extra LL readers on June 14, 2006:

(The spike on 6/20/2006 was due to a piece in the NYT.)

My Chronicle of Higher Education article was picked up by Arts & Letters Daily and from there picked up by fark.com. Now, I was aware that the quality of comments at Fark could be very low; but I didn't realize it could be THAT low. I've never seen anything like it, despite occasional ill-advised visits to places on the web where the ragged people go. As conversations go, it's like walking past a dog pound. The policy at Fark seems to be bark first, look at the article maybe later. Responding to such stuff is probably a waste of time. (One must never forget the reason why it is a bad idea to wrestle with a pig: you both get filthy, but the pig enjoys it.) So just very briefly, let me supply these short answers:

• To the guy who asked "why is a Scot writing invectives about an American style guide? That's like having a French writer comment on a style guide from French Canada": I've been an American citizen longer than you've been alive, and I have 25 years' experience of teaching about language at the University of California.
• To the various people who assert that I am a disappointed style-guide author plugging a rival text ("the article's author has his own competing book to flog"): I haven't written anything that could plausibly be recommended to a freshman taking English composition. When people ask me for recommendations, I tell them to look at the very sensible and intelligent book Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams.
• To the guy who said "my penis could type a better article": your girlfriend told me she doesn't think so.

In the April 17th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Geoff Pullum meditates on Strunk & White ("50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice"):

April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.

I won't be celebrating.

[ A dispatch from the Youth and Popular Culture Desk here at Language Log Plaza, where things have been kinda slow lately. Hat-tip to Jim Wilson. ]

It's been just over two days since Comedy Central aired the Fishsticks episode of South Park. (See the full episode here.) The basic premise: the fact that "fish sticks" kinda sounds like "fish dicks", and the assertion that this is "quite possibly the funniest joke ever conceived".

A: Do you like fishsticks?
B: Yes.
A: Do you like putting fishsticks in your mouth?
B: Yes.
A: What are you, a gay fish?

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 a post a few days ago ("Why you shouldn't use spellcheckers", 4/7/2009), Bill Poser argued that "if English had a decent writing system there would be no use for [spellchecking] software". I'm no defender of our current writing system — it makes life much harder than it should be for writers and readers alike, especially in the early stages of learning. But I think that Bill is overselling the potential benefits of reform.

Today's Cathy:

When I write a clause that begins with a clause-containing adjunct, I generally put a comma after the adjunct. The comma in that first sentence illustrates my practice. Some writers studiously avoid such a comma (sometimes my style is known as "heavy" punctuation and the other style as "light"). I also like the so-called "Oxford comma": I write Oregon and Washington, but I don't write California, Oregon and Washington. I use an extra comma and write California, Oregon, and Washington.

I couldn't wish for a better illustration of why I like my own policies than the following sentence, which I saw in The Economist last week (April 4, p. 11). It goes the other way on both of my policies, and it's disastrously misunderstandable in my opinion:

Traders and fund managers got huge rewards for speculating with other people's money, but when they failed the parent company, the client and ultimately the taxpayer had to pay the bill.

Oh dear. One of my favorite columnists, Nicholas Kristof, wrote this in his column today on animal rights:

Professor Singer wrote a landmark article in 1973 for The New York Review of Books and later expanded it into a 1975 book, “Animal Liberation.” That book helped yank academic philosophy back from a dreary foray into linguistics and pushed it to confront such fascinating questions of applied ethics as: What are our moral obligations to pigs?

No comment. Just a sad sigh. (I'm all for the animal rights topic, just "too" and not "instead".) I have no idea why he feels that way (or who he got it from.)