Language Log

Quentin Atkinson, Claire Bowern, and Russell Gray have launched a web-based "North American English Dialect Survey".

Five years ago, Geoff Pullum wrote a post here entitled, "Pick-up basketballism reaches Ivy League faculty vocabulary," about the spread of the apologetic interjection "my bad." In an addendum, Geoff raised the possibility that Manute Bol had popularized or even originated the expression while in the NBA in the late '80s (or a bit earlier, in his days playing ball in college). I had sent Geoff a bit of supporting evidence, two snippets from newspaper articles in early 1989 talking about Bol's use of the phrase when playing for the Golden State Warriors.

All of this came up again after Bol died this past weekend, as commentators were looking for ways to eulogize him. Geoff's post was frequently linked to by bloggers (e.g., Kottke, Boing Boing, Deadspin, The Atlantic Wire), and the Washington Post's Dan Steinberg gave the "my bad" story a thorough going-over on D.C. Sports Bog.

Continue to follow the Saga of Snuck, I thought that I'd check the relative frequency of snuck and sneaked in the LDC's collection of conversational transcripts, which amount to about 25 million words, mostly collected in 2003. These conversations involve people across all ages, regions, socio-economic levels and amounts of education. The verdict? Basically, sneaked is toast.

The Economist article whose first sentence I quoted in this post about inverting subject and verb in dialog reporting frames ends with a textbook example of a very different kind of inversion:

Harder still than understanding the significance of such barbarism may be accepting that it can never be completely prevented.

This is a case of what The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (p.1385) calls subject-dependent inversion. It involves switching places between the subject of a main clause and some dependent from within the verb phrase (often a complement of the copula). In the above example, the subject is the subjectless gerund-participial clause accepting that it can never be completely prevented. The adjective phrase harder still than understanding the significance of such barbarism is a predicative complement licensed by the copular verb be. They have been switched. The most straightforward order of constituents would have been this:

Accepting that it can never be completely prevented may be harder still than understanding the significance of such barbarism.

I just learned that Gösta Bruce died last week.

His 1977 dissertation Swedish Word Accents in Sentence Perspective was one of those works that seems to open up a whole new intellectual continent for exploration — when I first read it, I immediately felt that "it smells of horizons", as my grandfather used to say.

"I don't really believe anything any more," said my dad, reflecting on the increasing skepticism to which his old age was leading him.

"Hold on, dad," I said, "you can't be right there."

On the AAAS Facebook page, this announcement from:

Alison Chandler McNew June 18 at 10:35am

Dear science enthusiasts,The 2010 Dance Your Ph.D. Contest is underway, and we'd LOVE to have even more entries this year than last. You can help us surpass 100 entries by telling anyone you know who has a Ph.D or is pursing a Ph.D. in a science-related field about the contest.

Who knows, maybe it will be one of YOUR friends who will entertain us all by being gutsy enough to tromp around on stage in only a loin cloth! Of course, if your friend wants points for originality, he or she will have to think up something else equally as riveting. Yup, all KINDS of crazy stuff has been done in years past. Check out these videos from 2009: (link)

Here is our official announcement:

We are proud to announce this year’s "Dance Your Ph.D." video competition. We invite anyone who has a Ph.D. or is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in a science-related field to transform their research into an interpretive dance and submit it for a chance to win up to $1,000 and receive recognition from Science magazine. Submitting your entry is easy! Please become a fan of our Facebook page, here, to get more information, receive updates, and help spread the word! This is your chance to prove to the world that scientists CAN dance! Best wishes,

Alison Chandler
Marketing Manager
AAAS

I'm imagining a dance on Sanskrit sandhi, with words combining with words, or morphemes with morphemes, and one or both participants being altered in the process…

Following up on yesterday's Snuck-gate post — and on "Snuckward Ho!", 11/29/2009 — I thought I'd take advantage of Mark Davies' new Corpus of Historical American English to provide a graphical summary of the origin and progress of the strong past tense of sneak.

Stan Carey at Sentence First links to an unusually campy usage fight between The Awl and The Paris Review, and offers a thorough survey of snuckological scholarship. Read, as they say, the whole thing.

RESPA overcharges dead in the Ninth Circuit, says the headline of the brief news item at this page on Lexology, a news site for business lawyers.

But don't worry about the fleecing of the deceased; it was just a crash blossom, sent in by Edward M. "Ted" McClure, the Faculty Services Law Librarian at the Phoenix School of Law.

Several readers have drawn my attention to the domain and web site "loginisnotaverb.com", and the on-going discussion of this question at Hacker News.

I don't really have much to add to all the fuss. The origin of "log in" as an idiomatic combination of a verb and an intransitive preposition is obvious. There's nothing unusual in the transformation of this V+P combination into a noun, or in the tendency to write the noun (and sometimes the verb) without an internal space. The list of analogous cases is a long one: "strike out", "show off", "make up" — or "strike-out", "show-off", "make-up" — or "strikeout", "showoff", "makeup". Etc.  Nothing to see here, move along please.

[Update 6/20/2010 — The linked CNN story has been extensively modified, for the better. The headline is now "Language mavens exchange words over Obama's Oval Office speech," and the article now highlights Ron Yaros along with Payack, and incorporates some information from this post. Fev at headsuptheblog has some before-and-after analysis.]

It's amazing what a grip Received Perceptions have on what passes for journalism these days.  Today, CNN enlisted Paul Payack to lead us through an unusually contentless version of one of the standard categories of Obama  criticism  ("Language guru: Obama speech too 'professorial' for his target audience", 6/17/2010):

President Obama's speech on the gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.

How can we tell? Well, for a start,

Tuesday night's speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. The Austin, Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture.

Wait, what? Text at a ninth-grade reading level is too professorial for the American people to understand? When it's read out loud to them? Color me skeptical. But wait, there's more…

When Carl-Henric Svanberg raised such a fuss yesterday by explaining that at BP "we care about the small people", my first reaction was that he should have known better than to bring up the whole size thing, or for that matter the whole caring thing. But my second reaction was to wonder about contemporary American expressions for ordinary people.

The most obvious phrase, I think, is "ordinary people". It's roughly 25 times more common than "small people" in terms of raw frequency (1475 hits vs. 60 hits in the COCA corpus), and a majority of the instances of "small people" are literal references to people's height, or other irrelevant categories: "Small people can bend easier, with less low-back pain"; "I had a little Lilliputian hallucination. I saw very small people, pink people, before a migraine"; "Ellen, as a petite person herself, felt strongly that small people should avoid perkiness at all costs".

Of course, the phrase "small people" can be used in American Englsih to mean "ordinary people". But to a surprising extent, it seems to be used to refer to such people in other countries, often in quotations from people in other countries. The first five COCA hits (in the relevant meaning) are:

Brecht argues in the play that "everybody is responsible, even the small people."
"…so many of his donors are these small people who are sending checks for $50, $100" [from a story about Obama's 2008 campaign]
"… when you have the government and you have the multinational, it's very hard for small people like us to win." [from a story about farmers in rural Ireland]
"Some of us small people were always tired of the war, " says Bompa-Turay. [from a story about Sierra Leone]
"… involving the masses, the workers, the small people, but the movement was led by the middle class sons and daughters." [from a story about Indonesia]