Language Log

Geoff Pullum was on the NPR radio program Talk of the Nation yesterday, in a segment entitled "A Half-Century of Stupid Grammar Advice".

For those who want more, lists of past LL posts mentioning Strunk can be found here and here.

Another Zits cartoon on this topic:

I recently learned about a praiseworthy initiative, the Google Lime Scholarship for Students with Disabilities, whose eligibility requirements are expressed (in part) as follows:

Candidates must be:

• A student entering their junior or senior year of undergraduate study […]
• […]
• A person with a disability (defined as someone who has, or considers themselves to have, a long-term, or recurring, issue […]) […]

Rhymes With Orange plays with less/fewer:

This is a familiar topic here on Language Log. Some previous postings:

ML, 11/15/06: If it was good enough for King Alfred the Great… (link)

AZ, 8/10/08: 10 English majors or less (link)

AZ, 8/31/08: More on less (link)

AZ, 9/4/08: Still more on less (link)

Yesterday, an editor at Fox News seems to have been cruising on automatic pilot when adding metric equivalents to an AP story on crash test results ("Small Cars Get Poor Marks in Collision Tests", 4/14/2009):

The tests involved head-on crashes between the fortwo and a 2009 Mercedes C Class, the Fit and a 2009 Honda Accord and the Yaris and the 2009 Toyota Camry. The tests were conducted at 40 miles per hour (17 kilometers per liter), representing a severe crash.

Try making sense of this sentence, out of today's free Metro newspaper in the UK:

Having been in Australia for 17 years, a foreign national wishing to work in Australia must be of good character.

You must only be of good character after you have completed your 17 years of residence, but for the first 17 years you get a pass? Or does it mean even after you've been a foreigner in Australia for 17 years you still have to show you're of good character? Does this make any sense even in the crazy world of immigration law? Give up?

Via the Language Typology mailing list:

From: Inna Kaysina <kaysina.fds@uni-bremen.de>
Date: Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 11:26 AM
Subject: Festival of Languages

The IAAS (Institut für Allgemeine und Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Bremen) in cooperation with different other institutions is organising a FESTIVAL OF LANGUAGES which will be happening from 17 September to 7 October 2009 at various sites in the entire city-state of Bremen (Germany).

The main objectives of the FESTIVAL are to familiarise the general public with the idea of the linguistic diversity of our world and to emphasise the central role language plays in all aspects of human life.

The programme of the FESTIVAL consists of two major components, namely an academic part with a series of national and international conferences and a part which includes over 100 popular events and addresses the general public.

For more information, please, visit our website http://www.festival.uni-bremen.de/.

Stanford offices that provide services of one kind or another e-mail every so often to tell faculty what they can offer us. So a little while back I got a message from the Stanford Ombuds Office, and recognized the usage as one I'd seen before but didn't find entirely natural. Well, the world (or at least part of it) has shifted, and it turns out that the standard dictionaries haven't caught up.

Martin Filler, "Maman's Boy", New York Review of Books 56(7), 4/30/2009

[Frank Lloyd] Wright's self-portrait as a heroic individualist served as the prototype for Howard Roark, the architect-protagonist of Ayn Rand's 1943 best-seller, The Fountainhead. But the novelist transmogrified Wright's entertaining egotism into Roark's suffocating megalomania, an image closer to that of another contemporary coprofessional: Le Corbusier, the pseudonymous Swiss-French architect and urbanist born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in 1887, twenty years after Wright.

Successful architects are generally not shy, apparently, and Le Corbu was even less shy than the others. But wait:

Most architects give lectures primarily to advertise themselves, and Le Corbusier was no less shy than his colleagues in basing his talks on his own work.

So in addition to being even less shy than his colleagues, he was also no less shy than his colleagues?

A new advertising campaign by the cellphone company Boost Mobile is a real head-scratcher, in large part due to its creative (possibly too creative) experimentations in English morphology. Morphological innovation has driven some other recent ad campaigns, notably the creation of "Snacklish" by the good people at Snickers (discussed by Arnold Zwicky here, linking back to earlier morpholiciousness from Snickers here). Both the Snickers and Boost Mobile campaigns revolve around self-conscious neologisms, but the similarity ends there. Whereas Snickers introduces lexical blends fusing a variety of words and word-parts, Boost Mobile exploits one particular morphological frame: un____ed.

What do you call it when each player on a team is responsible for defending against just one specific player on the opposing team? If you're playing in such a system, what do you call the player you're responsible for guarding? OK, now what if the players are female? I asked myself such questions several times last week as I watched the final exciting games in the NCAA women's basketball tournament.

I often have to point out that English grammar is not a settled body of dull doctrine, it's a live field of scientific investigation in which new facts are emerging all the time. So how long is it since I last learned something entirely new about the grammar of English? Oh, about… two minutes. In a press report about Al Franken's win in the Minnesota recount, I read that Franken said, "It's time that Minnesota, like every other state, has two senators." [See below for Ben Zimmer's observation that the AP report in which I read this was in fact departing, outside of the direct quotation marks, from what Franken actually said! It turns out not to matter for my purposes. The discovery in what follows is not about Franken.] That present tense on has struck me as odd. I would say It's time Minnesota had two senators. The idiom demands the preterite (simple past) tense in my variety of English. So I picked the random word sequence it's time everyone and Googled it, and I found that It's time everyone flies is a corporate motto of Cebu Airlines in the Philippines. And then, although instances of the preterite vastly outnumber cases of the present among the Google hits, I soon found it's time everyone understands and it's time everyone takes a moment on the ESPN site… It's already clear to me that people are starting to say It's time X does Y instead of It's time X did Y. That's not a major discovery; it's not especially important or interesting as far as I can yet see, because it doesn't relate to some descriptive thorny point or theoretical crux; but it's a brand new fact about English syntax that I had no inkling of when I woke up this morning.

I just received an email from a total stranger that must have been inspired by
either my article in The Chronicle of Higher Education this week or the fark.com or metafilter.com discussions of it. I suppress her name, to save her embarrassment; but here, reproduced in full, is the text of her message:

Calling THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE Stupid mite display a drop of stupidity on your part or at least a lack of good manners.

Isn't that sweet? It gave me a giggle, anyway.