Language Log

Random House recently cancelled publication of Sherry Jones' novel The Jewel of Medina, about Muhammad's child bride Aisha, for fear of violent reaction by Muslims like that engendered by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. In a whine entitled Crying Censor in the New York Times, Stanley Fish takes Rushdie to task for describing this as "censorship" on the grounds that it is only censorship when governments forbid absolutely the publication of a work.

Here we go again. Reporters and Republicans have been making a big deal out of two slips of the tongue that occurred in quick succession during yesterday's rally introducing Joe Biden as Barack Obama's running mate. The ABC News version, for example, is Obama Misspeaks, Calls Biden 'The Next President'; Biden Calls Obama 'Barack America':

When introducing his running mate, Obama said, "So let me introduce to you the next president – the next vice president of the US of America, Joe Biden."

And then when it was Biden's turn to speak, the Delaware senator called the presumptive Democratic nominee "Barack America" instead of Barack Obama.

"My friends, I don't have to tell you, this election year the choice is clear. One man stands ready to deliver change we desperately need. A man I’m proud to call my friend. A man who will be the next president of the United States, Barack America,” Biden said, per ABC News' Sunlen Miller.

As a result of an exchange (1, 2 ,3 ,4, 5) with Alan Gunn in the comments yesterday, I was reminded that for many years, legal scholars throughout the U.S. were subjected to a peculiar form of stylistic tyranny, imposed by a curious work known as The Texas Manual on Style. According to James Lindgren ("Fear of Writing", California Law Review 78(6):1677-1702, 1990):

Unquestionably, the most dangerous advice in the old fifth edition of the Texas Manual was its disapproval of split verbs: "Avoid splitting verb phrases with adverbs. . . ." In other words, don't place an adverb between the parts of a compound verb. Yet Fowler and Follett (both praised in the Foreword to the Texas Manual) argued that the normal place for an adverb is in the midst of a multiple word verb. Thus the fifth edition of the Texas Manual seemed to have gotten the rule backwards. It prohibited what the experts recommend.

Specifically, this means that choices like "has always been" are to be suppressed, in favor of "always has been" or "has been always".

This is not the only bad advice in the book — Lindgren makes a strong case on other grounds for his view that "The Texas Manual on Style is one of the most pernicious collections of superstitions that has ever been taken seriously by educated people". But "avoid split verbs" is certainly the most eccentric piece of voodoo syntax since the prohibition of clause-final prepositions.

Along with "I like the crotch on the idea…" on composer Nico Muhly's blog (commented on here) comes a use of the verb gay marry, in

I did an interview with a guy in Seattle – totally random, I had never met him before – who had such a smart, interesting read on the piece [Muhly's most recent album, Mothertongue], I wanted to gay marry him right there on the phone.

The moderately common gay marry is undoubtedly a back-formation from gay marriage (with its non-predicating modification), the result being a compound verb of a pattern (Adj + V) that's not at all productive in English. Meanwhile, some people have asked me why anyone would use gay marry at all; why not just use marry?

According to Dennis Wagner, "Typo vigilantes answer to letter of the law", The Arizona Republic, 8/22/2008:

Two self-anointed "grammar vigilantes" who toured the nation removing typos from public signs have been banned from national parks after vandalizing a historic marker at the Grand Canyon.

Jeff Michael Deck, 28, of Somerville, Mass., and Benjamin Douglas Herson, 28, of Virginia Beach, Va., pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Flagstaff after damaging a rare, hand-painted sign in Grand Canyon National Park. They were sentenced to a year's probation, during which they cannot enter any national park, and were ordered to pay restitution.

We discussed Deck and friends in "Angry linguistic mobs with torches", 4/16/2008.

Is it Indian English? Perhaps, but Chinglish is a close second, and may already have overtaken the language of the angrejiwallahs (which actually consists of several dialects).

In this case, we're not talking about translation errors such as this colossal blunder, but about the unique pronunciation style of some Chinglish speakers. I'm happy to report that Randy Alexander, who has been teaching English for years in Jilin, China, tackles Chinglish pronunciation head-on in a lovely two-part essay posted at Beijing Sounds (Part 1 and Part 2). Randy's essay comes complete with sound files and pictures.

There's a fact-and-graph-packed post over at Pinyin News on "US post-secondary enrollments in foreign languages and the position of Mandarin". The post's "basic points up front":

• Spanish has more enrollments than all other foreign languages put together.
• By far the biggest enrollment boom since 1990 has not been for Mandarin but for American Sign Language.
• The boom in enrollments in Arabic also surpasses that for Mandarin.
• Mandarin is indeed growing in popularity — but in recent years only at the undergraduate level.
• Japanese continues to be more popular than Mandarin, though by an ever-smaller margin.
• Mandarin is the seventh most studied foreign language in U.S. post-secondary schools, behind Spanish (which leads Mandarin by a ratio of 16:1), French, German, American Sign Language, Italian, and Japanese.
• Relatively speaking, enrollments in foreign languages are much lower than they were 30 years ago.

From composer Nico Muhly's blog, about responses to his music:

Anyway, I like the crotch on the idea that people I don’t know are behaving in a non-cynical, almost linear way with music (“I saw this thing that I liked, I want to go see more of that thing that I liked, even though I don’t know much about what-all is going to happen”) rather than in a jaded, non-exploratory way (“new music is bullshit, whatever”). If you like something, find a path through it and then follow the path outwards, to other pieces, other composers, other musics. If you don’t like it, close your eyes and think about Brahms; it soothes the mind and calms the bowels.

The source of the expression is R. Kelly's song "I Like the Crotch on You", from the album 12 Play, where it's pretty much literal. Maybe Muhly's extension takes the crotch to be the central or essential aspect of something, in particular of the woman the song is addressed to. (Googling doesn't seem to pull up any other such extensions; it looks like all R. Kelly and various literal senses of crotch, mostly having with the crotches of pieces of clothing.)

(Hat tip: Ned Deily)

This is a brief follow-up to what Mark just said to "Robert", one of our commenters who thinks there is "massive literary authority" for the avoidance of split infinitives. Robert is going to be really disappointed by this. The eminent (and fairly conservative) early 20th-century American grammarian George O. Curme made a detailed study of the literary history of the split infinitive, and amassed a collection of hundreds and hundreds of examples. Some of his findings (and many though not all of his examples) are set forth in his book Syntax (1931), which forms Part III of his 3-volume work A Grammar of the English Language. Look at what he says on page 461:

[The split infinitive] has long been used in literary and colloquial language. In general, it is more characteristic of our more prominent authors than of the minor writers, who avoid it as they fear criticism.

Poor Robert. And poor Deb at Punctuality Rules, and poor Karen Elizabeth Gordon (see the book pictured there). They have all been suckered by a piece of fake-rule invention out of the late 19th century, and have joined the ranks of the "minor writers, who avoid [the split infinitive] as they fear criticism." While "prominent authors" have the courage and judgment to place their adjuncts just where those adjuncts work best syntactically and semantically, whether just after infinitival to or elsewhere in the clause, the timid little minor writers daren't follow them. Isn't that sad? A nation's minor writers in thrall to a rule that doesn't have any justification or factual basis and never did have any. Break out, minor writers! Revolt! You have nothing to lose, and an extra possibility of stylistically appropriate adjunct positioning to gain!

This morning, "Robert" added a comment to a Language Log post from April 30, "Books more loved than looked in". He began:

Just found your website, after hearing one of you discuss it on BBC Radio 4. I'm very glad to have discovered it, because it looks like good fun.

I tend to avoid split infinitives in formal prose, because most, if not all, of my models from the last 200 years avoid them. It's a stylistic preference, based on good authority; but I was happy to find on your site confirmation of my suspicion that there wasn't an actual *rule* against the split infinitive.

We're glad to be of service. Perhaps I can help even more, by raising some doubts in your mind about the quality of the "authority" behind your stylistic preference.

While we're on the subject of English spelling: the 25 August New Yorker has a cartoon by Ariel Molvig on the subject:

And here's a related Rhymes With Orange cartoon from a while back:

From Andy Bull's interview with Acer Nethercott, cox for Britain's Olympic eight ("The little guy with big brains and Olympic ambition", The Guardian, 8/7/2008):

Likeable, and clearly happy to be in Beijing, Nethercott is indecently intelligent. Two months ago he completed a DPhil in the Philosophy of Language. "What exactly?" I ask with all the confidence of a man who has a 2:1 in English Lit.

"Linguistics. The semantics of complex demonstratives."

"Uh-huh".

In between qualifications (he has a BA in Physics and Philosophy and a Masters as well), Acer says he "fell into" international rowing.

A very tiny thing, but I was entertained by Natalie Angier's morphological inventiveness in a piece "Life Is Short…" (NYT Science Times 8/19/08, front page) about the Furcifer labordi chameleon of Madagascar:

… the chameleon spends some two-thirds of its abbreviated existence as an egg buried in sand, with a mere 16 to 20 weeks allocated to all post-shellular affairs.

Post-shellular is a morphological hybrid, built on the native English shell, with the Latin-derived prefix post- and suffix -ul-ar.

English has many hybrid words that combine Greek and Latin elements (automobile, homosexual, television); though these are sometimes objected to by sticklers who insist on etymological purity, they can be seen simply as combinations of English elements from the learnèd portion of the lexicon, and most people find them unremarkable.

Combinations of native English bases with learnèd affixes, however, usually stand out, and often have a playful character (playful morphology is a topic we've returned to a number of times on Language Log, for instance here). Angier could have said "allocated to all affairs outside the shell" or "for life after hatching" or something similar, but "allocated to all post-shellular affairs" is more fun. And science writers are always looking for ways to lighten up their material.