Language Log

Dan Scherlis has pointed me to the recent #thingsdarkiessay TwitterStorm. Khaya Dlanga described it at length in a weblog post a week ago ("Yesterday, a short-lived war broke out between the US and SA"):

A virtual war between the United States and South Africa was full-on yesterday, the weapon of choice being Twitter. Unfortunately, the weapon was an American one too. Of course in the bigger scheme of things, even in the smaller scheme, this was an insignificant spat. The war was fought at 140 characters at a time.

It was between South African blacks and African Americans.

From Joel Stickley at how to write badly well:

Thanks to Andrew Freer for pointing out to me that the BBC has published an article in connection with its Horizon documentary about "unlocking the mysteries of speech" (they have the usual tendency to confuse talk about language and talk about speech). Simon Kirby remarked to me this morning about the documentary (which I have not seen: Barbara and I do not have TV set):

Jonathan Raban, "Summer with Empson", London Review of Books, 11/5/2009:

For an English-born reader, America is written in a language deceptively similar to one’s own and full of pitfalls and ‘false friends’. The word nature, for instance, means something different here – so do community, class, friend, tradition, home (think of the implications beneath the surface of the peculiarly American phrase ‘He makes his home in …’). These I’ve learned to recognise, but the longer I stay here the more conscious I am of nuances to which I must still remain deaf. The altered meanings and associations of American English, as it has parted company from its parent language over 400 years, reflect as great a difference in experience of the world as that between, say, the Germans and the French, but in this case the words are identical in form and so the difference is largely lost to sight.

Andrew Gelman, justifiably puzzled ("Two countries separated etc etc", 11/11/2009):

I can't tell if Raban is being serious or if he is making some sort of joke. The paradox of the statement above is that very few readers will be qualified to assess it.

In any case, if someone can explain to me how nature, community, class, friend, tradition, and home have different meanings in English and American, I'd appreciate it. I've read a lot of things written by English people but I have no idea whatsoever what he's taking about.

Answering a reader's question about somebody vs. someone, Arnold Zwicky speculated yesterday that "you'd find all sorts of interesting variation according to the location / age / sex / class etc. of the speaker, genre, formality of the context, date when the corpora were collected, and so on".  In the comments, Jerry Friedman suggested that "the -one words all sound more formal to me than the -body words", and he provided some evidence in the form of the ratio of Google Books counts for the words themselves and for the words combined with albeit.

This is a great topic for a Breakfast Experiment™, and despite several overdue work-related commitments, I couldn't resist.

Reader David Landfair writes to ask about someone vs. somebody (and, by extension, other indefinite pronouns in -one vs. -body):

A friend was looking over something I'd drafted this morning and corrected "there's somebody here" to "there's someone here," citing a "rule" that someone is subjective case like he/she/who, while somebody is its objective case correlate. He couldn't cite any authority on this, not even Strunk & White, who seem to only mention someone in their verb agreement section.

I've never heard of this rule, and frankly, it seems preposterous, but I've been wrong before. Is there maybe a regional usage (or British?) that he might have grown up with or read somewhere? I had always thought that someone and somebody were universally identical in both meaning and grammar, with perhaps a preference for someone in more formal registers.

Well, yes, it is preposterous.

This story ("What's wrong with 'meep'? It's all in how you say it", 11/10/2009) comes from a real newspaper rather than from the Onion, but sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.

A few weeks ago, we featured Elevate Embuggerance and Holistic Feisty, authors (according to Google Scholar) of The Linguistics of Laughter:

Now, thanks to research by Steven Landsburg and Aaron Mandel, we're proud to introduce you to the prolific writer "Ass Meat Research Group", who is listed at amazon.com as the author of 88 books:

[Below is a guest post by Dan Everett]

On the 22nd of December, 1942, Franz Boas and Claude Lévi-Strauss were having lunch at the Faculty Club of Columbia University when Boas fell from his chair. Lévi-Strauss tried to revive him, but to no avail. The founder of American anthropology died of a heart attack, in the arms of the founder of French anthropology.  Boas was 92. Lévi-Strauss was 34. At that moment, Lévi-Strauss assumed from his fallen colleague the symbolic mantle of leadership, becoming the most important living anthropologist of the twentieth century, a distinction he maintained for another 67 years.

Once again, Zippy plays with English morphology. This time it's -ity day in Dingburg:

For Language Log readers able to get BBC television broadcasts, at this BBC page you will find details of a Horizon documentary on BBC 2 TV, scheduled for tomorrow (Tuesday) night, about why humans talk and where linguistic ability came from, with footage not only of the Grand Old Man of linguistics, Noam Chomsky, who thinks it just sort of came about by some sort of genetic miracle, but also of Edinburgh's Simon Kirby (believed to be the only Professor of Language Evolution in the world) and Hannah Cornish, who demonstrate an experiment showing that particular features of language (notably a variety of compositionality) can be experimentally induced to evolve in a single afternoon. No one here in Edinburgh has seen the program or knows whether it will sensibly convey the content of the research that Simon and Hannah have done (they are understandably nervous, knowing that by Wednesday morning their TV careers will have begun, but not knowing whether they are going to be famous for science or comedy or tragedy). All of us await with mingled anticipation and trepidation. But the only way to find out will be to watch.

In Sunday's "On Language" column in The New York Times Magazine, I use the recent discussion in Congress about "Cadillac health plans" as a news hook to consider the transferred usage of Cadillac in general. Most prominent is the phrase "the Cadillac of X" to refer to "the highest quality of (something)" (predated by the similar formation "the Rolls-Royce of X"). Around these parts, this is of course known as a snowclone, but space did not permit a discussion of the expression's snowclonosity (beyond referring to it as a "sturdy phrasal template").

In the comments on yesterday's post, Ran Ari-Gur raised the possibility that sentence-initial conjunctions are verbally and plenarily inspired of God, just as singular they is. Ran's evidence came from a sample consisting of the first 80 verses of Genesis in the original Hebrew and in the King James translation. I decided to check more systematically, and so this morning I downloaded the entire KJV and (wrote a script that) counted.