Language Log

Email from Amanda Adams asks "Can you make anything of this?", where "this" is a line from Anders Nelson, "Universal Blocks Spielberg/Jackson Pic", 9/20/2008:

I would feel more bucolic for liking my adventure stories to have at least a modicum of violence in them …

Amanda implies that bucolic might be some sort of malapropism.

Clark Hoyt's "Public Editor" column in the NYT on Sunday 14 September ("Getting Past the Formalities") responds to reader queries about Times practices in referring to people by name:

(1) Why "Ms. Palin" but "Mrs. Clinton"?

(2) Why "Barack Hussein Obama" three times on the front page on 28 August?

Some readers saw dark political motives at work.

Hoyt replied that (1) resulted from the application of a consistent policy on the use of courtesy titles (Miss, Mrs., Ms., Mr., and official titles like Gov.) and that (2) resulted from another set of Times newsroom policies on the use of full names, which, however, have sometimes been applied inconsistently. (Hoyt apologized.)

Today is National Punctuation Day and once again the poor little virgule/slash gets short shrift. Let us celebrate/honor the comma, the full stop/period, the exclamation mark/point, the question mark, and even the semi-colon (which I’ve been learning to use correctly ever since a surgeon removed half on my colon a couple years ago).

But who will celebrate/honor the lowly virgule? Not the good folks from Pinole, California, who seem to be in charge/run/oversee National Punctuation Day ®.

A little while back, I noted that postcards with FUCK on them were coming to me through the mail with no interference. I added that

for some time now I've been noticing bumper stickers (locally) with FUCK and SHIT on them (FUCK BUSH, rather than the Spoonerized BUCK FUSH, for example), so apparently you can display taboo vocabulary in public (in certain places) without getting in trouble with the law.

That was badly phrased; something like "without getting in trouble with authorities" would have been better.

A couple of days ago, Jim Bisso sent me a question:

I've been embattled by a bunch of peevologists over the grammaticality of sentences of the sort: "my mother(,) she is a good person". I have pointed out that many kinds of apposition are not only acceptable but flow from the pens of some of our finest writers, but they are having none of that. Somehow a construction like "we the people of the United States etc." is okay, but reverse the order of Pron + NP to NP + Pron and sparks start to fly. I say it's simply a stylistic matter and not a syntactic one, but who am I? What say you? (Do you know any monographs that I might delve into to fuel my argument?)

Executive summary: This construction goes back to Old English, and is still widely used in spoken English and in some regional varieties ; but its use in formal written English has been decreasing since about 1500, and is now either informal or archaic.

Today saw the release of the anxiously awaited T-Mobile G1, the first phone to use Google's Android software. On T-Mobile's website, the first ad for the phone was unveiled, and it's packed with jocular comparative adjectives: smarterer, connecteder, funnerer.

This isn't just an homage to Dumb and Dumberer, the even more dim-witted sequel to Dumb and Dumber. Rather, it's being recognized by many in the techie community as a pointed jab at Apple honcho Steve Jobs, who recently enthused about "the funnest iPod ever." (That's still the tagline on the website for the iPod Touch.)

A brief note on the intrusion of the word uppity into the U.S. presidential election. It came a while back, from congressman Lynn Westmoreland. Here's one (of a great many) reports on the event, from The Hill on 4 September:

Georgia Republican Rep. Lynn Westmoreland used the racially-tinged term "uppity" to describe Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama Thursday.

Westmoreland was discussing vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's speech with reporters outside the House chamber and was asked to compare her with Michelle Obama.

"Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they're a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they're uppity," Westmoreland said.

Uproar ensued.

Zippy's talking in catch-phrases again:

We haven't posted on Eskimo words for snow in a while, but here's a sighting from the lolcat universe:

This from Karen Baumer, who has a collection of linguistic lolcats on her Facebook page.

Despite the FUWA ("good-luck dolls," "friendlies") mascot-goddesses in the "niches" below the sign, the translation is most inauspicious.

Now that the Large Hadron Collider is stumbling towards full operation, perhaps it's time to clarify how to parse (and interpret, and pronounce) its name. Is it the [large [hadron collider]] or the [[large hadron] collider]? Is it a device for colliding hadrons (in the way that a particle accelerator accelerates particles, and an atom smasher smashes atoms) or just a collider whose operation depends essentially on hadrons (in the way that a hydrogen bomb depends on hydrogen, and a lithium-ion battery depends on lithium ions)?) And is the main phrase stress on the last word ("collider") or on the middle word ("hadron")?

In a post last February I wrote about Yale professor of language and literature Thomas R. Lounsbury (1838-1915), whose 1908 book The Standard of Usage in English bucked the priggish prescriptivism of the era. More recently, Arnold Zwicky hailed his English Spelling and Spelling Reform as "a bracing, sharp-tongued book" full of "elegant rants." Lounsbury also played a major role in the history of language study at Yale, along with his more famous colleague William Dwight Whitney. In my February post I wrote that Thomas Lounsbury was not (as far as I knew) related to the anthropological linguist Floyd Lounsbury (1914-1998), an expert on North American and Mesoamerican indigenous languages who taught at Yale several decades later. It turns out the two language-loving Lounsburys were indeed related, but rather distantly: they were third cousins thrice removed.

Arnold Zwicky recently wrote about the word once in an important post on what he calls "temporary potential ambiguity" (a very useful concept indeed). His target was the strange practice among prescriptivists of deprecating what he calls the "subordinator" use of once, by which he means the use where it is immediately followed by a clause complement, as in Once you've finished the report, bring it to me immediately. The prescriptivists object to that, but don't seem to mind the others at all. I want to refine Arnold's analysis a bit — in a way that only strengthens his general point. He says there are three main uses of once. I put the number at five well-established different uses. And interestingly, if I'm right about them, this word has been completely misanalyzed by all grammarians so far.

The simple version of the traditional position is that once is an adverb, and in the objectionable use it's a subordinating conjunction. I claim all of this is wrong. Neither the traditional grammarians nor the usage purists have managed to get anything right about this multi-talented word.