Language Log

On a recycling dumpster outside an office building in Edinburgh: MIXED CARDBOARD ONLY. That, although it's subtle, is a case of the phenomenon for which I have been using the (not exactly ideal) term nerdview. It is an example of a linguistically misleading communication in which the failure is not of grammar or meaning but of failing to keep in mind the viewpoint of the reader rather than the specialist (possibly nerdy) view of the writer. Do you see why?

No, not about whether "professional linguists, almost universally, do not believe that any naturally occurring changes in the language can be bad". More on that later. Nor was I wrong about James Wood's sneer at Sarah Palin's "verbage". No more on that is needed.

It is only natural that just months before the current administration packs up to leave the White House, various branches of government would be scurrying to set their favorite programs in concrete for the incoming president and his staff to have to address as best they can. The Department of Education is no different from the others. Since numerous self-inflicted setbacks have left the No Child Left Behind effort with a less than positive heritage, today the Secretary released a report that includes dire warnings of impending doom.

In response to this morning's discussion of 'scriptivism, John Lawler wrote to remind me of a 2001 sci.lang posting by Arnold Zwicky, which John describes as "the best and most judiciously parsed short statement of the problem that I know of".

The Tesco supermarket company defines its values by a slogan that, as my American undergraduate student Denise Wood pointed out to me yesterday, simply doesn't seem (to her or to me) grammatical:

British students seem inclined to accept this phrase — possibly because they've been seeing it on bags and till slips for years (Tesco is still a mostly UK company). But there seems to be an isogloss here (a boundary between dialects determined by the use of some particular word or phrase), with me and Denise on one side and possibly (we don't know yet) most British speakers on the other. What does seem clear is that this is not a productive or extensible pattern. You just can't get away with other noun phrases formed, like every little, from a determinative and an adjective. You really can't say *Every big is desirable, or *Each generous gets us closer to the goal. The phrase every little, considered as a noun phrase, has to be some kind of special sui generis construction. It's not just a regular normal deployment of determinative and adjective.

Louis Menand ("Thumbspeak", The New Yorker, 10/20/2008) aims a gibe at my profession:

[P]rofessional linguists, almost universally, do not believe that any naturally occurring changes in the language can be bad.

As a representative of the species, I can testify that this is false. Rather, we believe that moral and aesthetic judgments about language should be based on facts, not on ignorant and solipsistic gut reactions.

Three weeks ago I wrote about the state of Kentucky's attempt to seize the domain names of internet gambling sites using a statute that authorizes the seizure of "gambling devices', pointing out that the belief that domain names are gambling devices is bizarre. The court has now held an adversarial hearing on the matter and has issued a decision confirming its ex parte order. Most of the opinion is devoted to other issues, such as the question of whether domain names are property and whether the Kentucky court has jurisdiction, but the question of whether domain names are "gambling devices" as defined in the statute is briefly addressed at pp. 22-25.

People here in Philadelphia are excited about the fact that our baseball team, the Phillies, will be in the World Series for the first time since 1993. And one outlet for the high spirits is a really interesting slogan.

It all started last Thursday, with a caller from Delaware on the XM Radio show Baseball This Morning, who seems to have intended to borrow a slogan from the Red Sox, but added his own morphosyntactic twist (as documented on The 700 Level blog):

Boston did it. The White Sox did it. Why can't us? Why can't us!

The rest, as they say, is history, including a line of T-shirts and other merchandise, a Facebook page,  numerous blog posts ("Overexcited Phils Fan Creates Grammatically Challenged Rally Cry", 10/16/2008; "Why Can't Us Movement is Spreading", 10/17/2008; etc.), and more.

I know that many of you will be wondering whether Language Log has been keeping up with the spread of linguification. We have, of course. Teams of interns are combing the periodicals and amassing huge quantities of data that we do not really know what to do with (the data may all be eventually turned over to Melvyn Quince in the Surveys department). But just to assure you that we are keeping up with developments, let me show you the beginning of an article that recently appeared in an important UK magazine (and I should note that the article was actually written by a senior lecturer in creative writing — whom I will not embarrass by naming):

Among the dirty words in arts and humanities departments these days, "progress" is one of the dirtiest. No one would dream of using it without irony or the qualifying phrase "myth of" as a prefix.

To check this, our in-house textual scientists did a Google search on progress and myth of progress limited to UK academic sites (.ac.uk), and these were the results:

Any questions about that?

Several readers have pointed me to Anu Garg's  A.Word.A.Day entry for yesterday, obambulate:

MEANING:
verb tr.: To walk about.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin ob- (towards, against) + ambulare (to walk). Ultimately from the Indo-European root ambhi- (around) that is also the source of ambulance, alley, preamble, and bivouac. The first print citation of the word is from 1614.

USAGE:
"We have often seen noble statesmen obambulating (as Dr. Johnson would say) the silent engraving-room, obviously rehearsing their orations."
The Year's Art; J.S. Virtue & Co.; 1917.

Etymology is not destiny, as we keep pointing out here. Thinking that it is is subscribing to the Etymological Fallacy (see here, among many other places). But even synchronically, you can't always trust what you see: derived lexical items are often specialized semantically (as are noun-noun compounds and also combinations of non-predicating adjective plus noun). This is especially true of technical terms; as I am fond of saying: labels are not definitions.

Which brings us to financial derivatives. Derivative here is derived from derive, right? So we can tell what it means in this expression from its morphological composition, right? Well, no. But people want that to be true.

I agree with Mark that James Wood's condescending comments about Palin's use of verbage are pure de-haut-en-bushwa. On the other hand, let's not delude ourselves about this item. Palin's verbage is not simply a term for "language" or "wording" that has been happily circulating in vernacular speech since it was first attested 200 years ago, in defiance of the assaults of prescriptivists. Verbage is not colloquial English — I mean, people don't go around saying, "Hey, Sparky — watch your goddamn verbage!" It arises as an approximation of a fancy-pants word that people have seen in print: it's a lot more plausible to assume that people would misread verbiage as verbage than that they would mishear it that way, particularly since this is a re-analysis favored by analogy. The fact is that in both its form and its meaning, verbiage is a weirder word than most people — including the editors of the OED — realize.

In the Oct. 13 New Yorker, James Wood commented at length on Sarah Palin's pronunciation of verbiage in her interview with Sean Hannity ("Verbage: The Republican War on Words"), closing with this paragraph:

Hearing her being interviewed by Sean Hannity, on Fox News, almost made one wish for a Republican victory in November, so that her bizarre locutions might be available a bit longer to delve into. At times, even Hannity looked taken aback; his eyes, slightly too close to each other, like the headlamps on an Army jeep, went blank, as if registering the abyss we are teetering above. Or perhaps he just couldn’t follow. The most revealing moment happened earlier, when she was asked about Obama’s attack on McCain’s claim that the fundamentals of the economy are sound. “Well,” Palin said, “it was an unfair attack on the verbage that Senator McCain chose to use, because the fundamentals, as he was having to explain afterwards, he means our workforce, he means the ingenuity of the American people. And of course that is strong, and that is the foundation of our economy. So that was an unfair attack there, again, based on verbage that John McCain used.” This is certainly doing rather than mere talking, and what is being done is the coinage of “verbage.” It would be hard to find a better example of the Republican disdain for words than that remarkable term, so close to garbage, so far from language.

As a parody of a highbrow sneer, this is brilliant work.