Language Log

Bloggingheads, home of the "diavlog," is now featuring a discussion that I had with fellow Language Logger John McWhorter about a whole range of linguistic issues, from lexical chunking to pop-Whorfianism to Obama's Indonesian skills to the language of Mad Men. Something for everyone!

I can understand why Margalit Fox would want to give such prominence to Edwin Newman's two books on usage in her New York Times obituary for for the journalist, who died recently at 91. Newman retired from NBC more than 25 years ago, and people who remember him are likely to be hazier on his journalism than on his 1970's bestsellers Strictly Speaking and A Civil Tongue, which are still in print (though only in large type and audio editions appropriate to a public of advancing diopter). But I wish they had left me out of it.

This is an auspicious moment: a Language Log-ism has been entered into the Oxford English Dictionary. The latest quarterly update for the online revision of the OED includes this note:

eggcorn n.

As early as 1844, people were reinterpreting the word “acorn” as “eggcorn”, either deliberately, for humorous purposes, or in all innocence, in a struggle to analyse, in a way that made sense to them, what the word’s spelling must be: acorns are, after all, seeds which are somewhat egg-shaped, and in many dialects the formations acorn and eggcorn sound very similar. Since 2003, it has become a widely accepted term for this category of words as a whole, appearing in books and journals, and on the internet, often alongside its musical sibling, the mondegreen or misheard lyric (which first appeared in the OED in 2002). As such, it has now become an autological word: one which belongs to the category it describes.

The Business Diary of a UK newspaper, The Independent (see it here) complains:

Taking liberties with language

Debenhams is a much-loved high-street institution, but surely it can't just reinvent the English language? The retailer seems to think it is acceptable to use the word "anniversary" as a verb. "This will anniversary as we move into the first quarter of 2011," its market update says of one of its businesses. Worse, the idea is catching on. Here's Investec on Marks & Spencer's progress: "Better-balanced autumn ranges should allow M&S to anniversary tougher comparisons". Stop it please.

If you know Language Log, you are probably thinking that I will point out that anniversary has often been used as a verb and the writer is a dope with no sense of how to check an empirical claim, and that in the comments after I have said what I think Mark Liberman will chime in with several examples from 18th century poetry. Isn't that right?

Jason Eisner just forwarded to me this note from Nick Jones, the dean of the Engineering School at Johns Hopkins:

It is with great sadness that I am writing to share with you the news that a member of the Whiting School community, Fred Jelinek, passed away last night.

Commenting on the fact that the overall speaking rate in JFK's inaugural address was 96.5 words per minute, the second slowest in the past 60 years ("Inaugural Speed", 9/14/2010), Terry Collmann noted that that Kennedy had the reputation of being a fast talker, with his inaugural address specifically cited by one authority:

Certainly his Inauguration Speech was powerful in content but Kennedy also delivered it with a rapid rate of speech.

What's going on here?

Yesterday, prompted by a note from Geoff Nunberg, I cited a passage from Heejin Lee and Jonathan Liebenau's essay "Time and the internet" (published in Hassan and Thomas, Eds., The New Media Theory Reader). Their idea seems to be that "speed is contagious", and so the increased speed of modern life — faster cars, planes, computers, and so on — makes people do everything else faster. Their evidence for this included allegedly faster modern tempos for a Beethoven symphony, and a claimed 50% increase between 1945 and 1995 in the speaking rate of Norwegian parliamentarians.

Some helpful commenters pointed to evidence that symphonic tempos have not, in fact, increased in any sort of reliable way over the past century, and that Beethoven's own metronome-markings are very fast by modern standards. Other helpful commenters located the source of the claims about Norwegian parliamentary speeches, which seems to have been based on an analysis of stenotypists' tapes. I thought I'd bring a little English-language data to the table by looking at the inaugural addresses of U.S. presidents from Truman in 1949 to Obama in 2009.

According to Heejin Lee and Jonathan Liebenau, "Time and the internet", in Hassan and Thomas, Eds., The New Media Theory Reader, "speed is contagious", and so everything is faster today, from plays and musical performances to Norwegian politicians:

Yesterday we discussed this puzzling passage from Ange Mlinko's 9/7/2010 review in The Nation of Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass:

Edward Sapir, Whorf's teacher, was an armchair linguist influenced by Bertrand Russell and Ludvig [sic] Wittgenstein's work on the limits of language.

Where in the world, I wondered, did Ms. Mlinko get the bizarre idea that Edward Sapir was an "armchair linguist"? Well, now we know.

Mandarin nǎlǐ 哪里 "surely not" or "make no mention of it," "not at all," etc. goes back to at least the Qing period (1644-1912), where we find it in novels. I usually explain it thus: "where?" –> "in what way?" –> "no way, not at all," etc.  Thus, there is a natural progression from informational "where?" to rhetorical "how (in the world)?" and from rhetorical "how (in the world)?" to polite negative.  Furthermore, this progression is not that unusual. For example we see at least the first part of it in the classical Chinese interrogative word ān 安 ("where？"). Compare:

Zi jiāng ān zhī 子將安之  ("Where will you go?")

Zǐ ān zhī zhī 子安知之  ("How [the devil] do you know it?") — expressing disbelief and contrasting with Zi hé zhī zhī 子何知之 ("How do you know it?") — which really asks for information about the listener's source of his knowledge.  This question (Zǐ ān zhī zhī 子安知之  ("How [the devil] do you know it?" i.e., "whence / from what vantage point do you know it?") comes from a famous passage in chapter 17 of the Zhuang Zi (Master Zhuang; Wandering on the Way) about the happiness of fish.

Geoff Pullum was rightly baffled by Simon Heffer's recent pronouncement that sentences like The Prime Minister has warned that spending cuts are necessary are ungrammatical, since the verb warn, Heffer imagines, must always be transitive. But the objection doesn't come completely out of nowhere. As commenter iching noted, there's an entry on warn in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, which suggests that the intransitive use "seems to have originated in American English in the early 20th century."

The perceived American-ness of intransitive warn may explain lingering resentment in British quarters (despite the much older precedent of Spenser cited by Geoff). Another commenter, Terry Collmann, says that the style guide of the Times of London maintained a proscription against intransitive warn until a recent revision, belatedly catching up with what has now been recognized as accepted usage on both sides of the Atlantic. MWDEU points out that the 1965 edition of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, edited by Sir Ernest Gowers, already viewed intransitive warn as "common in journalism."

Geoff Pullum's musings on Simon Heffer's aprioristic prescriptivism ("English Grammar: Not for debate") were based on a report by the BBC, which is a reliably unreliable witness.  So I  wondered whether Mr. Heffer's usage advice was equally empty when taken straight from the source. The first sample that I found was "Strictly English: Part one", The Telegraph, 8/20/2010, which is "The first of four exclusive extracts from ‘Strictly English: the Correct Way to Write… and Why It Matters’". And it starts like this:

Even when armed with fine intentions, one can still fall into traps: for many words do not mean what one thinks they mean. In the interests of accuracy and precision, what follows is a reminder of the true meaning of some commonly misused words.

One occasionally reads in newspapers about people who have died or been injured in a car that has collided with a tree. This is remarkable, because a collision requires both parties to it to be in motion. The Latin verb collidere means to strike or clash together, and the etymology is strict. So two moving vehicles may collide, as may a car and a cyclist or even a car and a pedestrian, but not a car and a tree. Like so much of our language this is a question of logic based on the etymology; there is no perversity about it.

Various Language Log readers have been sending me to this BBC report about a British columnist called Simon Heffer, who has a book about the decline of proper language use coming out, and in order to promote it recently visited a school and talked to the children about his prescriptive notions. The BBC used this sentence as a hook, claiming that it is ungrammatical and Mr Heffer can tell you exactly why:

[1]   The Prime Minister has warned that spending cuts are necessary.

Now, set on one side the issue of whether this truly exemplifies a grammatical mistake: of course it doesn't. What interests me here is the psychological question of what could possibly, even in principle, convince someone like Simon Heffer that he was wrong.