Language Log

Having commented in an idle moment on what and/or means and why we have it, I started to receive email from people solemnly informing me that they were native speakers but in their variety of English or had only the exclusive meaning, where the disjuncts can't both be true. In other words, these are people who think that in their variety of English, if I say If Gordon Brown or the Pope is in the USA today I'll eat a copy of Strunk and White, I do not have to eat a copy of that disgusting little book The Elements of Style: I luck out on the grounds that (as it happens) both of them are in the USA today.

I hate to sound dogmatic, but my correspondents are actually wrong about their own native language.

A couple of days ago, Andrew Mueller at the Guardian tossed some bleeding gobbets into the crowd of ravening peevologists ("Linguistic pedants of the world unite", 4/14/2008). His point of departure:

For centuries, travellers have crossed America to explore it, conquer it, settle it, exploit it and study it. Now, a small but righteous crew are traversing America in order to edit it. Jeff Deck, and his friends at the Typo Eradication Advancement League (Teal), are spending three months driving from San Francisco, California, to Somerville, Massachusetts, on a mission to correct every misspelled, poorly punctuated, sloppily phrased item of signage they encounter en route. Equipped with marker pens, stickers and white-out, they are seeking to scourge America's landscape of floating apostrophes, logic-defying syntax and other manifestations of laziness and/or illiteracy.

Certain people apparently find it fascinating to read speculations about the possibility that cellphones and texting and wireless devices might be completely altering our language, and through that (in accordance with the usual vulgar Whorfianism) our thought. They will enjoy the special report on mobility in The Economist, and particularly the article entitled Homo mobilis. Naomi Baron, a linguist at American University, detects worrying trends that relate to what the culture of cellphones, pagers, laptops, and wireless has done to the minds of the young:

Society's attitude towards language has changed, she thinks. For about 250 years, the consensus in Western societies has been that grammar, syntax and spelling matter, and that rules have to be observed. That consensus now appears to be at risk.

The consensus that supports syntax itself is at risk! People who like to read this sort of alarmist stuff will find that here they have exactly the sort of alarmist stuff they like to read. But me? I'm a skeptic. I think it's a load of nonsense.

One form of American Exceptionalism — resistance to texting — is definitely gone:

(1) Michael Erard, "A 10,000-year-old word puzzle", Globe and Mail, 4/14/2008: an excellent account of recent work on the relationship between the Na-Dene languages of western North America and the Yeniseic languages of Siberia, briefly described in a post last month by Heidi Harley ("Big news from the Arctic Circle", 3/15/2008).

The article's sub-head ("A linguistic 'long ranger' chases down an ancient language in Siberia and discovers a surprising connection to modern languages in North America") is a bit misleading, as Michael Erard has pointed out to me in email, since "long ranger" is a term that has come to refer to a particular group of historical linguists that Edward Vajda definitely does not belong to. Newspaper headlines, main and sub-, are not provided by the writers of the articles that they introduce, but rather by editors who typically know little or nothing about the subject under discussion. (A cross-reference to the standards of intellectual sausage-making is appropriate at this point.)

(2) "Mark Peters on Eggcorns", Good Magazine, 4/12/2008:

So next time you see an eggcorn, don’t curse the heavens. Refrain from removing your eyeballs with a spork. Please don’t start a blog about kids these days and how they’re spilling Red Bull all over our nice dictionaries. These mind-bottling, jar-dropping mistakes show people are smart—not stupid—and this process of the masses’ getting it wrong until it becomes right is common, ongoing, and unstoppable.

[Update — Mark Young writes:

The Globe and Mail article you mentioned in this morning's LL has had its sub-head changed. Someone at the G&M reads LL? Or maybe someone else noticed the same thing you did….

]

From John McIntyre at the Baltimore Sun ("With friends like this", 4/14/2008):

Editors are inherently prescriptivist, because we’re employed to make judgments about what is most appropriate for publication, audience and context — and to get out of the way of elegance. Descriptivists, like the doughty linguists at Language Log, range over all written and spoken language, formal and informal, standard and nonstandard, to turn their findings into scholarship. (That’s the grand thing about an academic discipline: Once you own a grinder, you can turn anything into sausage.)

Thanks, John… I think.

Shortly before the Great Language Log Server Meltdown, there was a reader-inspired post on the conversational sequence "yeah no" (4/3/2008), which in turn inspired a lot of interesting reader reaction ("'Yeah no' mailbag", 4/3/2008; "Yet another 'yeah no' note", 4/4/2008).

And just as I was distracted by the old server's death on 4/6/2008 (R.I.P.), other readers sent in a number of fascinating examples of "yeah, no" in TV shows, movies, advertisements, and books.

So a week or ten days late, here they are.

We discovered in the Linguistics and English Language department at the University of Edinburgh today that the draft handbook for our honours students was stuffed with occurrences of the nonexistent words programmeme and programmemes. The secretarial staff were baffled. Can you figure out the origin of this strange and unwelcome neologism? (A hint: Dawkins's invented term meme appears to have no relevance whatsoever.)

Does and/or mean "and and or", or "and or or"? That is, if I say I am interested in A and/or B, do I mean I'm interested in A and B and I'm interested in A or B, or do I mean that I'm interested in A and B or I'm interested in A or B? (You may want to say that it means I'm interested in A and B and/or I'm interested in A or B; but in that case I repeat my question.)

Alex Boulton writes to draw our attention to a curious case of misplaced bowdlerization on the French-language web page of the English Writing Lab of the Hanyang University Center for Teaching and Learning:

The text on the Writing Lab's web page remains in English, regardless of which of the 10 language options the viewer chooses. But the navigational text changes — and apparently something else changes as well.

My post "The discovery of Dr. Syntax" (4/11/2008) ended like this:

No one today would think of calling a schoolteacher “Dr. Syntax”, even in areas where primary schools are still called “grammar schools”. I’m inclined to see this as a loss, though an ambiguous one. The image of Syntax in the 18th century may have been largely a negative one, but at least the name recognition was high.

Several readers wrote to set me straight: "grammar schools", they explained, are secondary schools, not primary schools.

But the school where I started first grade, one of two public elementary schools in the town of Mansfield, Connecticut, was called "Storrs Grammar School"!

Recently the news has been full of horrible and terrible things — or, to be more precise, horribles and terribles. In last week's Senate hearings on Iraq, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker outlined what might happen following a hasty withdrawal of U.S. forces, testimony that Barack Obama described as a "parade of horribles." Meanwhile, the actor Rob Lowe went public with an extortion attempt from a former nanny who he said was threatening to accuse him and his wife of "a vicious laundry list of false terribles." The entertainment blog Defamer sarcastically applauded Lowe's "keen ability to turn an adjective into a noun." Neither horrible or terrible are particularly new as nouns, but their latest appearances still merit a closer look.

Our new content-management software, WordPress 2.5, has generally been a pleasure to install, administer and use. But I have a complaint. The solution is probably covered somewhere on the helpful WordPress forums, but the problem is annoying enough to document here.