Language Log

In the latest episode of "Sam & Cat," a teen comedy on Nickelodeon, the plot takes a lexicographical turn. As Nickelodeon describes it,

Sam and Cat make a bet with the annoying older brother of a babysitting client that "lumpatious" is a real word. When they discover it is not, they must figure out how to get it in the dictionary.

Here's a clip:

Michael Robinson recently went to an interesting Toronto restaurant called Ten Mile Aroma, whose menu can be found online here.  Micheal's attention was drawn to these two menu items:

137. Fried Spicy Chicken Framework (làchǎo jījià 辣炒鸡架)
138. Chicken Racks with Soya Sauce (jiàng jījià 酱鸡架)

According to Michael, a reviewer who visited the restaurant commented that he asked about the Chicken Framework and got the reply "Just bones, no meat".  Michael says he's sure that he saw someone order one of these, and they brought a plate of chicken bones over to him.

Neither from the Chinese term itself nor from the English translations (both on the menu and online) is it very self-evident just what is at issue here.  Why would anyone want to order a plateful of chicken bones?

Today's Dilbert:

Benjamin Wallace-Wells, "The Narcissistic Drama of Chris Christie’s Apology", NY Magazine 1/9/2014:

"What does it make me ask about me?" the governor of New Jersey said about halfway through his press conference today, paraphrasing a reporter's inquiry, and even though the event continued long afterward, this question seemed to contain its essence, and in some way the essence of Chris Christie too. 

Frank Bruni, "The ‘I’ in Christie’s Storm", NYT 1/12/2014:

POLITICS boils down to three pronouns: I, you, we. The politician who has them in balance goes a long way. […]

In his news conference on Thursday [Chris Christie] found a way to spell apology with a thousand I’s.

It's common to nominalize already-lexicalized combinations of a verb and an intransitive preposition, like push-up, push-over, hand-out, walk-on, walk-out, and so on. It's less common to see nominalization of a semantically-transparent verb and transitive preposition, but a new one has recently (?) arisen in the halls of Congress. Thus George Nelson, "Brown Touts Benefits Extension, Job Creation Aid", Business Journal 1/8/2014:

“If we’re going to do a pay-for, we ought to look at what kind of pay-for actually creates jobs,” he continued. “The best kind of pay-for is one Senate Republicans have rejected repeatedly, to eliminate tax incentives that encourage companies to close plants in the United States and relocate those jobs overseas, he said.

Six Chix for 1/10/2014:

Katia Dmitrieva, "Madonna addicted to sweat dance plugs Toronto condos: Mortgages", Bloomberg News 1/10/2014 — Reader CD, a hardened journalistic veteran, calls this "a rare American noun pile headline":

It’s a spectacular garden path which turns out to be a noun pile. I’m pretty good at parsing headlinese but I had no idea what the story was supposed to be about, or even what the syntax was supposed to be, until I clicked through. I suppose it would have helped if I’d known the name of the song beforehand. I’m quite impressed by the flimsiness of the connection between the lead and the content of the story too, but that’s another matter.  

On the nationality question, it’s a Canadian story and possibly a Canadian writer, but Bloomberg has a very strict style guide for headlines regardless of jurisdiction, so I’m comfortable calling it American.

The American Dialect Society chose because as its Word Of The Year, and thereby provoked an argument, here and elsewhere, about parts of speech. Most dictionaries and grammars see words like for, in, since, etc. as variously prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions, or particles, depending on how they're used. Geoff Pullum argues that they're all always prepositions, just used in different ways. (See "Because syntax", 1/5/2014, and "The promiscuity of prepositions", 1/8/2014, for some of Geoff's reasons.)

It's worth pointing out that the complex patterning of these words in contemporary English is the outcome of an even more complex historical process.

Arnold Zwicky kindly called the following choice Chinglish label to my attention:

Listen, I need to apologise to thirty or forty of you (I don't really know how many). I'm really sorry. I've wronged you. Mea culpa.

You remember all those great examples you sent me of people alleging use of the passive voice and getting it wrong? Well, I have now completed a paper using many of them. It's basically about the astonishing extent of the educated public's understanding of the grammatical term "passive" and the utter lack of support for the widespread prejudice against passive constructions. It's called "Fear and Loathing of the English Passive," and you can get a 23-page single-spaced typescript in PDF format if you click on that title. It will appear this year in the journal Language and Communication; the second proofs are being prepared now. But (the bad news) my acknowledgments note (at the end, just before the references) will not contain a full list of the names of all of you who helped me. You deserved better, but don't blow up at me; let me explain.

Some Language Log readers may have noticed that Gretchen McCulloch, at All Things Linguistic (see her post here), claims that certain peculiar restrictions on complements of because argue against its being a preposition even in the new use that caused it to become the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year for 2013: "the new 'because' isn't a preposition (but is actually cooler)," she claims. (As a result, Daniel Ezra Johnson even tweeted that the new use of because may be the first Word of the Year with the strange property that even the linguists who voted for it can't figure out how to analyze it.)

I have maintained, to the contrary, that because not only is a preposition now (since the rise of the because reasons construction over the past few years) but in fact always has been one, despite every dictionary on the market denying it (see my "Because syntax").

Who is right? All Things Linguistic, or Language Log? I won't toy with you; I won't leave you dangling, unable to decide. I will tell you the answer.

Wicky Tse and Cheng Fangyi both sent me this photograph taken in a bookstore located in the central business district of Xinjiekou, Nanjing, China:

There's some viral science and scholarship humor on #overlyhonestmethods (illustrated sample) and LOLmythesis.