Language Log

I did a double-take at a photo caption in yesterday's NY Times: "Zara Phillips, a granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II’s, was part of the team that won a silver medal in eventing on Tuesday."

"A granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II's"—why the unusual double genitive (was the term originally Jespersen's)? Despite all the attention given to Zara Phillips, that phrase appears only twice in Google, excluding duplicates, and "a granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth's" appears not at all—this against more than 600 hits returned for "a granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II" and "a granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth." (Google actually estimates 230,000, but you know how much that means.) The double genitive seems to be very rare when speaking of family members, even those of whom one can have an indefinite number, unless the genitive itself is realized as a pronoun ("a granddaughter of yours," "no son of mine"). But of course the construction is fine when one is speaking of friends, colleagues or other alienable relationships. Search me. There's an extensive literature on this construction, from several schools, including contributions by Ray Jackendoff, John Taylor, Barbara Partee, Chris Barker, Gianluca Storto, and a number of others (see the bibliography in Chris's 2008 paper), and no doubt this point is covered somewhere — but where?

Today, the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution held a hearing on H.R. 997, the "English Language Unity Act of 2011" sponsored by Rep. Steve King [R-IA]. The House bill and its Senate counterpart (S. 503, sponsored by Sen. James Inhofe [R-OK]) have been introduced in the last several sessions of Congress, and there's no indication that this attempt to "declare English as the official language of the United States" will be any more successful than the previous iterations. But at the very least the hearings provide some moments of politico-linguistic theater. At the hearing today, Rep. John Conyers [D-MI] delivered his opening statement in halting Spanish, after which Rep. Trent Franks [R-AZ] requested, "would you repeat that in Yiddish and Vietnamese and French?" Franks and King both argued that Conyers' use of Spanish was itself a compelling argument in favor of the bill (with King making a Tower of Babel reference). Here's the video, from TPM.

There's a special place in purgatory reserved for scientists who make bold claims based on tiny effects of uncertain origin; and an extra-long sentence is imposed on those who also keep their data secret, publishing only hard-to-interpret summaries of statistical modeling. The flames that purify their scientific souls will rise from the lake of lava that eternally consumes the journalists who further exaggerate their dubious claims. Those fires, alas, await Drew P. Cingel and S. Shyam Sundar, the authors of "Texting, techspeak, and tweens: The relationship between text messaging and English grammar skills", New Media & Society 5/11/2012:

The perpetual use of mobile devices by adolescents has fueled a culture of text messaging,   with abbreviations and grammatical shortcuts, thus raising the following question in the   minds of parents and teachers: Does increased use of text messaging engender greater   reliance on such ‘textual adaptations’ to the point of altering one’s sense of written grammar?   A survey (N = 228) was conducted to test the association between text message usage of   sixth, seventh and eighth grade students and their scores on an offline, age-appropriate   grammar assessment test. Results show broad support for a general negative relationship between the use of techspeak in text messages and scores on a grammar assessment.

It is well known within organic chemistry circles that there is a very strong bias toward L rather than D homochirality in the structure of earth's organic compounds. A recent paper offered a speculation about a possible explanation of the bias:

If there was … right circularly polarized light with energy in the uv or higher irradiating the asteroid belt when the amino acids were present on a particle that later came to Earth, this could account for the small excesses of the L anantiomers seen in the &#x03B1-methyl amino acids.

And what did the PR/media machine do to make news out of this finding? The headlines ultimately mutated as far as this:

Claim: Advanced dinosaurs may rule other planets

Sharon Jayson, "What's on Americans' mind? Increasingly, 'me'", USA Today 7/10/2012:

An analysis of words and phrases in more than 750,000 American books published in the past 50 years finds an emphasis on "I" before "we" — showing growing attention to the individual over the group.

This is actually true as stated. If we take the counts from the "American English" unigram dataset in the Google Books ngram collection, and extract the year-by-year counts for the letter strings in question, the frequency of "I" has increased relative to the frequency of "we" over the period since 1960 — to the point where the ratio of frequencies is almost as high as it was in 1900:

(This posting started from an attempt to replace all the links to James Thurber cartoons in Mark's "He bold as a hawk, she soft as a dawn" posting of 9/14/06, here, after the initial Dilbert cartoon, which is still available. All the links are broken, and Mark and I can't figure out which cartoons are supposed to go in which slots. So here's a big compendium of Thurber cartoons on the relations beween the sexes.)

Today's Doonesbury Flashbacks, 35 years ago (July 30, 1977): Trudeau here has made clever use of the fact that normally, with VP-ellipsis, the presuppositions of the antecedent VP are preserved …

Yesterday's Missoulian, reporting on a non-shy mountain lion that was hanging around a campground in western Montana, had the following memorable sentence: `The kids were playing and Gerhard was stashing something in the minivan when her cousin hollered, "Holy (appropriate word under the circumstances), that's a mountain lion!"'  So the newspaper's editors don't want to print a classic four-letter cuss word, but surely there's a way to keep the sentence from sounding quite so silly?  Even "s***" wouldn't look as ridiculous as "(appropriate word under the circumstances)".  Better yet, they could just give up their aversion to including vulgarities in direct quotations.

Dilbert from yesterday:

And today:

The late-night shows on Comedy Central both took a linguistic turn last night. First, on "The Daily Show," Jon Stewart managed to give himself a "grammar wedgie" trying to explain how President Obama's now-infamous line "You didn't build that" has been willfully misconstrued by his critics. Then, on "The Colbert Report," Stephen Colbert crafted an Old English riff off of the recent comment by one of Mitt Romney's advisors that Romney is somehow more appreciative than Obama of the "Anglo-Saxon heritage" shared by the US and the UK.

Helen Sword, "Zombie Nouns", The New York Times 7/23/2012:

Take an adjective (implacable) or a verb (calibrate) or even another noun (crony) and add a suffix like ity, tion or ism. You’ve created a new noun: implacability, calibration, cronyism. Sounds impressive, right?

Nouns formed from other parts of speech are called nominalizations. Academics love them; so do lawyers, bureaucrats and business writers. I call them “zombie nouns” because they cannibalize active verbs, suck the lifeblood from adjectives and substitute abstract entities for human beings.

Indeed, strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto an approved part-of-speech mixture. Having learned from Strunk & White to "write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs", the apprentice writer is now confronted with a new dogma damning many nouns, along with a reminder that only "active verbs" are free of sinful taint.

Reader CM writes:

Last Sunday I went to a cafe in central Wiesbaden. In Germany, some ingredients have to be declared on restaurant menus. This is usually done via footnotes, with a key on the last page. That's what was done on this cafe's menu, and the footnotes in German were completely unremarkable:

But the English version of the footnotes delivered a wonderfully weird little surprise:

As I write these words, the number of comments posted below Kyle Wiens's strangely contentless piece in Harvard Business Review, "I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here's Why", is just coasting up toward 1200 (yes, one thousand two hundred; that's not a typo). This cannot be out of any enthusiasm for grammar: the number of grammar issues mentioned in the piece is zero. Wiens says or implies that he wants employees who know the difference between apostrophes and apostles; between semicolons and colons; between to and too; between its and it's; and between their, there, and they're. But this isn't about grammar; these are just elementary vocabulary and spelling distinctions. How could it possibly be of interest to Harvard Business Review readers that the CEO of a technical documentation company expects his employees to be able to spell different words differently? I like literacy too, but why this fiddling with spelling shibboleths while the economy burns?