Language Log

Over the years we've written many times about the disparagement of adjectives and adverbs by writers and usage advisers, most prominently in Strunk and White's "Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs" (The Elements of Style, p. 71). Now Jef Mallett has taken the matter up in his comic strip Frazz:

(Hat tip to Andrew Hatchell.)

I have some things to say about markedness, variation, and the role of habits in creating meaning. And I was planning to say them this morning, taking as a starting point the US/UK difference in verb agreement with collective nouns like government and committee that Geoff Pullum cited in his recent post "More on verb agreement as a judgment call":

It is a curious fact that American English strongly favors the use of the singular with subject nouns like committee (likewise nouns denoting companies, teams, departments, governments, etc.), while British English clearly prefers the plural.

But then I made the mistake of checking into the facts. This was not because I doubted Geoff — on the contrary, my impression of the situation agreed with his — but because I wanted to provide not only some examples but also some numbers, in my usual humorless hyper-empirical style.

It all started with an entry in the "Sic!" section of Michael Quinion's World Wide Words newsletter #614, on 11/22/08 (boldface added):

Rachael Weiss found an item on a menu in Turkey: "Aubergine Kebap. Ground veal patties with aborigine arranged on a layer of sauteed pita bread, topped with tomatoes and spices." She observed, "We white Australians haven't treated the original owners of our land very well, but this seems to go too far."

This is not just a simple substitution of aborigine (in the sense 'aboriginal inhabitant of Australia') for aubergine (a mostly British variant referring to the egg-shaped fruit of a plant in the genus Solanum, eaten as a vegetable, and otherwise known in English as eggplant), since the two versions occur together in this very short text. The menu writer seems to be treating the two as alternative versions of "the same word", referring to a foodstuff, perhaps along the lines of aluminium and aluminum; aboriginal inhabitants of Australia probably don't come into it at all.

The variant aborigine 'eggplant' is widespread in food writing (especially in menu items and recipes). Literally widespread, in writing about food from places from Greece and Turkey through China and Japan (these from the first hundred Google webhits on {aborigine aubergine} on 11/25/08; no doubt I've missed some cuisines in this search).  I'll give a sampling of these occurrences, and then talk about what we might make of them.

According to Praveen Swami , "Terror mail analysis supports claim of Lashkar authorship", The Hindu, 12/1/2008:

Close textual analysis of a document issued by an until-now unknown terrorist group just after the recent massacre in Mumbai appears to vindicate claims by Indian intelligence experts that the document was generated by a non-Hindi speaker, using voice-recognition software.

For one, a series of spelling errors mar the Hindi-language text, typed in the Devnagari script, which was issued by a group calling itself the Mujahideen Hyderabad Deccan — a fictitious group, investigators now say, invented to distance the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba from the attacks.

Hindi-language voice-recognition software, though commercially available, is at a development stage and often registers incorrect spellings. In the document, the word silsila, or incidents, is spelled with the wrong matras, or vowel markings. The word chetaavani, or warnings, and zindagi, or life, are again spelt with incorrect matras.

Moreover, the name of the organisation Mujahideen Hyderabad Deccan. The phrase “Hyderabad Deccan” is frequently used in Pakistani comment to identify India’s southern plateau. It is, however, rarely used in this country.

Another case of agreement being a judgment call: which of the following (note the agreement forms of the underlined verbs) is correct?

We can't leave the garden unwatered during what is usually the hottest sixty days of the year.

We can't leave the garden unwatered during what are usually the hottest sixty days of the year.

In previous posts on "uptalk" in America, I've noted that there there are many conflicting assertions about its phonetic shape as well as its social distribution and its contextual function, but surprisingly few published examples that we can use to evaluate these claims. So from time to time, I've documented real-world examples on this blog. Such anecdotes are not a substitute for a systematic and demographically balanced study, but they're better than nothing.

However, you could argue that my posts on the subject have been, so to speak, demographically anti-balanced. In order to debunk stereotypes about the distribution of this intonation, I've often chosen strikingly counter-stereotypical uptalkers, like President Bush. So in the interest of equal time for stereotypes, this post documents some examples from the stereotypical sweet spot of the uptalk demographic — prepubescent girls.

Today's Doonesbury celebrates Sarah Palin's way with function words and inflectional affixes:

As the Wikipedia article for the British newspaper The Guardian explains,

The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad. The domain grauniad.co.uk is registered to the paper, and redirects to its website at guardian.co.uk.

The reputation for typographical laxity is apparently undeserved:

In fact, the paper was not more prone than other papers to misprints but because the paper was printed in Manchester, Londoners saw the first edition printed each night. National papers in Britain at this time contained large numbers of "typos" which they removed progressively as the night wore on and they were noticed. Thus a paper like The Times would have as many mistakes in the North of England as The Guardian did in London. However, because media opinion was set in London, only The Guardian got a bad reputation.

So it must have been a special treat for the Guardian's Media Monkey blog to post "Heff in a huff over Telegraph gaffes":

"Mnokey" is delighted to treat you to one of Daily Telegraph associate editor Simon Heffer's regular email missives berating journalists at the title for their spelling, style and grammatical errors.

Maybe I'm dense, but I don't see the problem with keeping the term pentathlon for the modified competition in which shooting and running are combined into a single contest. While the modifications result in a reduction from five to four events, five sports continue to be involved. Nor is counting sports rather than events an innovation. The biathlon, which combines shooting and skiing, is a single event in which skiers stop at intervals and shoot. The term biathlon, to which, as far as I know, nobody objects, provides precedent for the interpretation of the names of such competitions as denoting the number of sports which they combine rather than the number of distinct events. There is no reason to treat this as a case in which a word's meaning has ceased to correspond to its etymology.

Today's NYT brings us sports news with a linguistic touch. On the front page, no less, in "Modern Pentathlon Gets a Little Less Penta" by John Branch:

Shooting and running will be combined into a single event, a new final exam of intermittent focus and endurance. But modern pentathlon — derived from Greek, combining five (penta) and contest (athlon) — has no plans to change its name to tetrathlon. There has not been such a blatant mismatch between a title and its meaning in sports since 1993, when Penn State’s athletics program became the 11th member of the Big Ten Conference. In a nod to the faulty math, the Big Ten, which still has no plans to change its name, placed a subtle but distinctive “11” into its logo.

“The classicist in me says: ‘Wait a minute. This is crazy,’ ” said Brian Joseph, a linguistics professor at Ohio State — referring to pentathlon, not his university’s membership in the 11-member Big Ten. “But the linguist in me realizes that words change their meaning.”

Nice to see a linguist (and colleague and friend of mine) quoted on the front page of the Times.

Just out, from the LSA website:

Linguistics, Language and the Public Award

The Linguistic Society of America announces the 2009 recipient of the Linguistics, Language and the Public Award, given for a body of work that has had a demonstrable impact on the public awareness of language and/or linguistics.

The award will be given to Language Log, a collaborative science blog devoted to linguistics and written by a team of more than a dozen prominent linguists, almost all members of the Linguistic Society of America (their names are listed on the front page at http://www.languagelog.com).

Language Log will be recognized at the LSA's business meeting on January 10, 2009, in San Francisco, California. The award will be accepted on behalf of the Language Log team by two of its members: University of Pennsylvania professor of phonetics Mark Y. Liberman (who founded Language Log in 2003 along with Geoffrey K. Pullum, who is now at the University of Edinburgh) and Stanford professor of linguistics Arnold M. Zwicky (who has been a prolific and prominent contributor since shortly after the blog was started).

A tricky agreement situation arose for "Bagehot" while writing his eponymous column in The Economist last week. The topic was the "furious festival of blame in Britain recently". Among other scandals, two crude radio shock comics recently called a much-loved aging actor's answering machine and told him that one of them had fucked his granddaughter, and the call was recorded, and editorially approved, and actually broadcast. Bagehot wrote:

Two comedians make cruel jokes on BBC radio: heads must roll! (They did—one of the comedians, plus two executives, were forced out.)

My interest is in the agreement form chosen for the verb I have underlined. People like Stephen Fry in prescriptivist mood would say that the subject is the noun phrase one of the comedians, which is singular, so it should be was forced out. However, I'm not dinging Bagehot on the plural agreement form. I believe it's not just a simple binary decision in this case. Things are much more subtle and interesting.

It's Word of the Year season again, and a dark-horse candidate is surging on the inside turn to the home stretch: malus.  (OK, well, it appeals to me at least — my poor past record in predicting WOTY choices suggests that my lexical tastes are in the minority.) A press release from the Union Bank of Switzerland, dated 11/17/2008,  explained that "[b]eginning in 2009, UBS will adopt a new compensation model for the Board of Directors and the Group Executive Board", according to which

Variable cash compensation for the Group Executive Board is based on a bonus / malus system.