Language Log

This post from Amy Hamblin's Community Blog was on the front page of the Obama-Biden web site for a while last night:

We're still awaiting the final results tonight, but one thing is clear — this grassroots movement can never be underestimated. Thank you to everyone who helped us make an astounding 1,053,791 calls today! I know it wasn't easy and many of you kept calling long after you were tired and your voice had grown hoarse, but your calls to get our supporters out the polls helped tip the scales in key battleground states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. [emphasis added]

We've discussed the general phenomenon of overnegation — semantic problems typically arising from the combination of modals, negatives, and scalar predicates —  many times in the past. The particular case of cannot/must not underestimate/overestimate is discussed here, here, and here.

We've commented several times on the rhetorical template X is the Y of Z ("X as the Y of Z", 7/28/2006; "X as the Y of Z, again", 3/25/2008), and several others have joined us. Following Barack Obama's historic victory in yesterday's election, it occurred to me to wonder which versions of this pattern would be instantiated over the next few news cycles. The first one that I've seen was produced by John F. Harris and Jim Vendehei at 5:28 a.m.("A new world order", Politico, 11/5/2008):

Obama is the Google of politics: He has technological expertise and an audience his political competitors simply cannot match. Looking ahead to 2010, House and Senate Democrats will be jealously eyeing Obama’s e-mail lists and technology secrets — giving him even greater leverage over them. Republicans will be forced to invest serious money and time to narrow the technology gap.

Robert James Hargrave has pointed out to Language Log that several regional councils in England are prohibiting their employees from using "elitist" Latinate phrases like "bona fide" or "vice versa" The Daily Telegraph has an article about it. I quote:

Bournemouth Council, which has the Latin motto Pulchritudo et Salubritas, meaning beauty and health, has listed 19 terms it no longer considers acceptable for use.

This includes bona fide, eg (exempli gratia), prima facie, ad lib or ad libitum, etc or et cetera, ie or id est, inter alia, NB or nota bene, per, per se, pro rata, quid pro quo, vis-a-vis, vice versa and even via.

Its list of more verbose alternatives, includes "for this special purpose", in place of ad hoc and "existing condition" or "state of things", instead of status quo.

In instructions to staff, the council said: "Not everyone knows Latin. Many readers do not have English as their first language so using Latin can be particularly difficult."

The Supreme Court hears oral arguments today in FCC v. Fox Television Stations, the case of the fleeting expletive. Bono got things going when exclaimed "really, really fucking brilliant" at the 2003 Golden Globe Awards.[*] The FCC first judged such usage non-offensive, then back-tracked in the face of pressure from the Parents Television Council. In this note, the FCC declares that

given the core meaning of the "F-Word," any use of that word or a variation, in any context, inherently has a sexual connotation

Language Loggers have commented on this and related topics before, and Arnold recently went meta on the Times coverage of the case. I recently spoke with Jess Bravin at the Wall Street Journal about the FCC's statement and the coming Supreme Court hearings. (His article with Amy Schatz appeared today, along with a cool wordle-like graphic on the results below.) During out conversation, Jess asked how a linguist might test the FCC's claim about the connotations of the F-word. Does it in fact have sexual connotations even when used as an intensive, as in Bono's "really, really fucking brilliant"?

It didn't make William Safire's list of "'08-isms", but for me, the most prominent phrase of this political campaign has been ground game. Thus Bob Drogin and Robin Abcarian, "In Ohio, Obama's ground game outguns McCain's", LA Times 11/3/2008:

Learning from the Bush effort, Obama has taken his fight directly into suburban and rural GOP strongholds in an effort to curb McCain's potential margins. Obama has 82 offices in the state, nearly twice as many as McCain. Labor unions are backing his effort with more than 12,000 volunteers.

"McCain does not have the kind of ground organization that Obama has, not even close," said Nancy Martorano, associate professor of political science at the University of Dayton.

"I've never seen anything like the Obama ground game," agreed Paul Beck, professor of political science at Ohio State University in Columbus. "It is light-years ahead of what the Democrats did four years ago."

Studs Terkel, who died recently, at the age of 96, had a special place in the hearts of some linguists — those who were studying the syntax (and accompanying pragmatics) of colloquial English, back in the old days, before very large corpora and automated search techniques were easily available.

Gene Buckley wrote a little while back about the wording of of the proposed amendment in California's Proposition 8:

Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

Gene pointed out that there are two possible scopings for only in this sentence: over marriage between a man and a woman ("wide" scope) — 'the only thing (specifically, institution) that is valid or recognized in California is marriage between a man and a woman' — or just over marriage ("narrow scope") — 'the only marriage that is valid or recognized in California is marriage between a man and a woman'. The intended scoping is the narrow one, and everyone recognizes that (because the wide-scope reading is ridiculous in the real world), but Gene had to go through a very brief process of rejecting the wide-scope reading, which is the one he entertained first.

And he notes that in other cases the wide-scope reading is almost surely the intended one.

Out of context, many interjections merely express strong emotion, which could be either positive or negative, and intonation won't clarify things. And sometimes, even the context doesn't make the interpretation clear, as in this Zits cartoon:

In a recent posting mostly on parts on speech, in particular the category of wise in "The wise talk because they have something to say", I quoted a book of advice for writers in which this example is attributed to Plato. I didn't pursue the attribution, but now Rochelle Edinburg, a philosophy grad student at Princeton, writes to ask about it:

… the quote in question is attributed to Plato. However, I have been searching for any hint of the original in Plato's works, and have yet to find one. Do you know where this quote originally appears? Or, for that matter, why someone would use such a poorly attributed quote in a textbook on writing style?

Although I posted on this on ADS-L earlier today, I thought that maybe in honor of the U.S. elections on Tuesday it would be entertaining to post a version of it here. The usage in question is the verbs early/absentee vote (not vote early/absentee).

As preface to today's taboo-language story, an Ariel Molvig cartoon from the latest New Yorker:

The story is a column by Adam Liptak in the Week in Review section of today's New York Times: "Must It Always Be About Sex?", about the word fuck, which the Times is committed to avoiding — so that if Liptak is going to report on a current U.S. Supreme Court case about this word, he has to do some deft side-stepping.

A couple of days ago, in response to John Gonzalez's question "Where does this unit rank among the most beloved Philly sports teams of all time?", Phil Sheridan answered:

For me, this team has to rank up there with the Flyers' Stanley Cup-winning teams for sheer beloved-osity.

This reminded me of a question from a reader that arrived in my inbox the same day:

I wonder if you know of any explanation for why the final -ed is made into a syllable in some words used as adjectives, such as blessed, beloved, learned, and dogged, though when these words are used as verbs, the final -ed is not pronounced as a syllable.

The short answer: liturgical habit protected a few words from a sound change, half a millennium ago (and also, "dogged" is not derived from the verb dog). A longer answer is after the jump.

At a rally a few weeks ago in Newport News, Obama criticized McCain's economic program, claiming that the average CEO would get a $700,000 tax break, and then added: "Not only is it not right, it ain't right." Apart from the obvious "just folks" implications of the register shift, the line exploits a subtle distinction in evidentiality that Tom Wasow pointed out to me some years ago, which I worked into a "Fresh Air" piece back in 2002:

A while ago my Stanford colleague Tom Wasow sent me an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education that quoted a dean at a prestigious Eastern university: "Any junior scholar who pays attention to teaching at the expense of research ain't going to get tenure." That ain't was a nice touch: it made it clear that the dean's conclusion wasn't based on expert knowledge or some recent committee report — it was something that should be clear to anyone with an ounce of sense.

That's the message that ain't conveys in all those common expressions like "It ain't over till the fat lady sings" or "If it ain't broke don't fix it" —ain't tells you that you're dealing with a nitty-gritty verity that you don't need a college education to understand.