Language Log

A headline in today's Metro (a UK free newspaper) looks like this:

I was taken aback: it looked decidedly ungrammatical for quite a few seconds. And another reader, from Glasgow, has already mailed me to say the same thing. What is wrong with the headline? Or can it be parsed as grammatical?

Those seriously interested in the meaning and the politics of racial epithets (as some of the commenters on Pakigate, Sootygate, Gollygate seem to be) should take a look at a paper called "The semantics of racial epithets", published by Christopher Hom in The Journal of Philosophy CV [= 105], no. 8 (August 2008), pp. 416-440. This is a technical paper in philosophical semantics (it's philosophy, not linguistics; and let me say that I do not necessarily endorse the view that it defends). Hom outlines its aim on his website thus:

Racial epithets are derogatory expressions, understood to convey contempt toward their targets. But what do they actually mean, if anything? While the prevailing view is that epithets are to be explained pragmatically, I argue that a careful consideration of the data strongly supports a particular semantic theory. I call this view Combinatorial Externalism (CE). CE holds that epithets express complex properties that are determined by the discriminatory practices and stereotypes of their corresponding racist institutions. Depending on the character of the institution, the complex semantic value can be composed of a variety of components. The account has significant implications on theoretical, as well as, practical dimensions, providing new arguments against radical contextualism, and for the exclusion of certain epithets from First Amendment speech protection.

Thus Hom is offering a reasoned case that it is best to see the denigratory character of racial epithets as built into their actual conventional meanings, and not just as a possible concomitant of some of their occasional uses. (Many of commenters seem to align with this view, though they tend to just assert it and call any other views absurd, rather than present arguments.)

We are still encountering cases of people who leap to attack uses of particular word-senses without carefully checking the dictionaries and usage books first. Several emailers and commenters (some comments are now deleted) saw that I had repeated the BBC's claims that it had sought a "sincere and fulsome" apology from Carol Thatcher, and instantly wrote comments insisting that this was a gross mistake (on my part, some thought; I have now put in the quotation marks that I should not have risked leaving out), since fulsome doesn't mean anything like "full" but is in fact close to being an antonym of sincere.

People don't seem to look anything up before they leap to the comments box. (See Mark Liberman's documentations of astonishing earlier cases of ill-informed objections here and here, and similar remarks of mine on grammatical usage here and here.) The original senses of fulsome are, according to Webster (which is a constantly updated and extremely reliable dictionary of American English available online):

1 a copious or abundant;
1 b generous in amount or spirit;
1 c full and well developed.

Clearly the BBC intended one or more of these senses.

I've recently read David W. Anthony's book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, and I especially appreciated his clear explanation of the complex world of Eastern European and Central Asian archaeology. There's a lot of new and relevant information, but you really do need a good guide — the facts and conjectures are complex enough, but the difficulty is multiplied many fold by the evolved disciplinary nomenclature, which is sometimes so baroque as to defy parody.

I've been reading Stanley Fish's 1989 collection of essays, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. It's not yet clear to me what he's for, exactly — I'm reminded of the old joke about the post-modern gang leader who makes you an offer that you can't understand — but it's clear what he's against, namely the idea that texts have meanings:

The objective facts and rules of calculation that are to ground interpretation and render it principled are themselves interpretive products: they are, therefore, always and already contaminated by the interested judgments they claim to transcend. [Consequences]

This is not a small point, in his view:

It might seem that the thesis that there is no such thing as literal meaning is a limited one, of interest mainly to linguists and philosophers of language; but in fact it is thesis whose implications are almost boundless, for they extend to the very underpinnings of the universe as it is understood by persons of a certain cast of mind. [Introduction: Going Down The Anti-Formalist Road]

The "cast of mind" in question is, roughly, science and the idea that rational inquiry can lead towards truth — the whole Enlightenment project. But in the passage just quoted, he's discussing a much more specific argument, made by Ruth Kempson in her 1975 book Presupposition and the delimitation of semantics.

Fish uses an argument from this book as the rhetorical backbone of his 33-page lead-off essay "Introduction: Going Down the Anti-Formalist Road". And it's therefore embarrassing (for him) that he's misunderstood the context (and thus the content) of her work, in a way that makes her argument at best irrelevant to the point that he wants to use it to make.

Michael Quinion's latest World Wide Words newsletter (#625, 2/7/09) has an informative follow-up on the Birmingham apostrophe flap (discussed on Language Log here), which I'm reproducing below.

There's a usage manual for comic book lettering: "Comics Grammar and Tradition", by Nate Piekos, on the Blambot: Comic Fonts and Lettering site. Note that Piekos talks about these bits of advice as, in part, a matter of grammar, using "grammar" to refer to any system of conventions regulating form. In the introduction to the manual, Piekos describes it as a mixture of "established tradition" (as he perceives it; it's unlikely that he did any actual research) and personal aesthetic preferences — not unlike usage manuals for English and other languages:

Yesterday, in explaining why he didn't open his post "Half golliwogs and other UK linguistic news" to comments, Geoff Pullum wrote:

"I'd rather eat a live Madagascan hissing cockroach than see a hundred comments on the above."

My reaction was to wonder "Madagascan?" I always thought it was "Madagascar hissing cockroach", with the simple place name used as a modifier. A quick check verified that Geoff's version is indeed in the minority, 3,180 to 24,200, though not nearly by a large enough factor to explain my confusion. (It also turned up the image reproduced on the right, which suggests that there are some people out there who might actually enjoy eating Madagascar hissing cockroaches.)

It has now become clearer that Carol Thatcher, the broadcasting personality at the center of the Gollygate scandal, was indeed talking in racist terms. It seems (see this story in The Guardian) that she not only called Congolese-French tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga a golliwog (Americans often don't know this word, but it refers to a traditional style of stereotyped black-faced rag doll), and did so more than once, but also called him a "half-golliwog" and a "golliwog frog". These previously unreported details are crucial. They make it clear that it was not some innocent comment regarding visual resemblance to a children's toy. "Half-golliwog" makes it clear that she really was using "golliwog" for "person of (predominantly) negroid racial type". That's the only plausible way to make "half-golliwog" interpretable. She was referring to his mixed race, and defining him by it. That truly is racist talk. She'd call my son Calvin a half-golliwog given one more half glass of white wine.

Two items on the pop-cultural neologism front. First, the Cleveland Cavaliers are pretty upset that point guard Mo Williams hasn't been selected for the NBA All-Star game. Teammate Ben Wallace sounded off to the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

"It's a tragedy," Ben Wallace said. "I think it's an injustice. It's a fraud. We've got the best record in the league, and we've only got one guy going. You always make it the next year, after the year you were supposed to make it. It's a travesty and a sham and a mockery. It's a shamockery."

And when Williams wasn't even selected to be an All-Star reserve, team owner Dan Gilbert continued the neologistic assault in an email to the AP:

"Ben Wallace was right when he called Mo originally being passed over for the All-Star game a shamockery," Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert said in a tongue-in-cheek e-mail to The Associated Press. "But not naming him as the natural and obvious replacement for the unfortunately injured Jameer Nelson is stupidiculous, idillogical and preposterageous."

Shamockery, or more fully traveshamockery (also spelled travishamockery), goes back to a 2004 ad campaign for Miller Lite, specifically this campaign-themed "President of Beers" spot featuring comedian Bob Odenkirk:

The opening of John McPhee's article on fact-checking in the current New Yorker (Checkpoints, Feb 9 & 16, 2009) suggests that checking the facts means checking each word for its factuality. Quoting a legendary fact-checker there, he writes:

Each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checker's imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick.

This is revealed later on to be a metaphor and/or a record-keeping device; I think all involved know that literally checking at the word-level would be mostly pretty vacuous, and would miss a lot of assertions. My favorite non-word-level anecdote in the article:

Penn's daughter Margaret fished in the Delaware, and wrote home to a brother asking him to "buy for me a four joynted, strong fishing Rod and Real with strong good Lines …"

The problem was not with the rod or the real but with William Penn's offspring. Should there be commas around Margaret or no commas around Margaret? The presence of absence of commas would, in effect, say whether Penn had one daughter or more than one. The commas—there or missing there—were not just commas; they were facts, neither more nor less factual than the kegs of Bud or the colors of Santa's suit.

I bring American readers news, not previously discussed on Language Log, of not just one or two but three scandals concerning public use of allegedly racist language in Britain that have been thought serious enough to merit the post-Nixonian word-formation suffix -gate. All three have been big stories for the newspapers and other media. They are known as Pakigate, Sootygate, and most recently Gollygate.

1. Prince Harry (one of the Queen's grandsons) was recently in deep trouble for uttering the word Paki on the soundtrack of a cell phone video of some of his army buddies.

2. Prince Charles (the Queen's son) was the subject of another newspaper outcry when it was learned that he followed others in addressing a long-time polo-playing Indian friend of his by the nickname Sooty.

3. Carol Thatcher (daughter of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher) used the word "gollywog" in conversation and has now been removed from her role on The One Show, a BBC program she regularly contributed to.

Today's Grand Avenue: