Language Log

On 30 Rock's "Christmas Special" episode this past Thursday, Tracy Morgan's character (Tracy Jordan) says to Tina Fey's character (Liz Lemon): "What's the past tense for scam? Is it scrumped? Liz Lemon, I think you just got scrumped!" See it at the end of this clip here (or better yet, watch the whole episode):

The intended joke here is that scrump (or skrump; the alternative spelling is irrelevant) is a slang term for sex, with more precise popular definitions ranging from the relatively benign "to have convenient sex; usually brief and decidedly unromantic" to the more disturbing "[t]o physically violate". (Some believe the word to be a blend of "screw" and "hump"; others assume a biblical link to the story of Adam & Eve, euphemistically speaking of stealing fruit/apples.) So, Tracy Jordan is informing Liz Lemon that she just got fucked.

Kathryn Burlingham wrote a few days ago:

I'm thinking "withe" should be a recognized contraction [of "with the"]. Happens to me all the time. 

adding, in mail yesterday:

I can tell you it isn't just a typing phenomenon. I find it in my handwritten things all the time.

This is a type of error in writing/typing known as telescoping: a sequence of two words with some common material at their juncture (TH in this case) is produced as a single word with only one instance of the shared material. (There are more complex cases of telescoping, but this type is especially easy to understand.) And the error is indeed frequent. Searching on "withe" gets over a million raw hits, but most of them are irrelevant. Still, there are plenty of telescoped examples in there.

A few days ago I posted about (among other things) the snowclonelet "X virgin", conveying (roughly) 'someone who hasn't experienced X'. I reported there on two instances with sexual content: "oral virgin" and "anal virgin". There are others, including the fuller versions "oral sex virgin" and "anal sex virgin", the variants "blowjob virgin" and "butt-sex virgin", the pair "gay-sex virgin" and "straight sex virgin", the electronic "phone sex virgin", "cyber-sex virgin", and "Skype sex virgin", plus "pornography virgin" and "porn virgin". No doubt there are more.

Then W Shore wrote to say:

I hope it won't be long before, just as the "electric guitar" created the "acoustic guitar", we begin to hear about "sex virgins." Much like, "I'm a chocoholic, but for alcohol".

The suggestion is that the widespread use of "X virgin" will incline people to create the retronym "sex virgin" (similar to "acoustic guitar" and "analog watch"). And it's happened; here's a clear example:

I'm 15 years old and i am a sex virgin. i get vaginal flatulance … (link)

There are probably more to be found, but they're very hard to search for; "sex virgin" pulls up vast amounts of irrelevant stuff (plus some of the "X virgin" examples above).

Listening to Weekend America on my way back from a holiday party on Saturday, I heard one of the best noun phrases I think I've ever heard (uttered by WA host John Moe). Coincidentally, it's in this short segment on holiday parties and cocktails, very near the beginning in fact, so take a listen if you care to. Here's the noun phrase in context:

This time of year weekends are a time for holiday parties, and all the traditions that go along with holiday parties. You know, the sweaters that you only wear just that one time of year, the conversations that you end up in with people who you're trying to remember the names of all the way through but you kinda smile and fake your way through…

For some time now I have been in syntactic pain over what appeared to be a TV show in the UK with a completely ungrammatical title. It's a competitive ballroom dancing show on BBC TV, compered by the octogenarian Bruce Forsyth (who after what must be half a century on TV is still using his catchphrase greeting "Nice to see you, to see you, nice" every single time he confronts a camera). The name of the show is Strictly Come Dancing.

I was baffled by it. It doesn't seem to have a parse at all. You simply can't use a manner adverb like strictly to modify an invitation like "Come dancing". What on earth was going on? It was many months before I realized that almost certainly Wikipedia would reveal all for me, if I just swallowed my foolish pride and looked the show up. Wikipedia — always great on showbiz topics — did not let me down. And I could have kicked myself.

Yesterday, I took a quick poll of a few small English-language texts, to see how often future-time meanings were expressed in various tensed-verb forms ("Alternative futures", 12/11/2008). My conclusion was that by far the commonest method in written American English is to use forms of the modal auxiliary will; but that in spoken American English, other alternatives are closer to even with it. However, my sample was too small to draw any very reliable quantitative conclusions.

So this morning, I'm doing another Breakfast Experiment™ to try to get better numbers, at least for some of the alternatives in the spoken language.

Renowned broadcaster (and part-time word maven) John Humphrys gives a quick summary of the weather forecast just before the 7:30 news summary on the BBC Radio 4 "Today" program in the UK each morning; and what he said this morning was a classic of the genre: "Pretty miserable by and large." A charming example, I thought, of the tradition of extremely vague weather-forecast language in the blustery British Isles.

Just in time for the holiday season: The Linguists educational DVD! According to the announcement on the LINGUIST List, it "includes 30 minutes of DVD extras profiling endangered languages around the world and efforts to archive and revive them; and a discussion guide created by Dr. K. David Harrison and the Center for Applied Linguistics."

The catch, of course, is that this DVD was produced for educational purposes, which somehow makes the price a whopping $300. But c'mon, you know you want one.

PC and Pixel for 12/11/2008 (link sent in by Michael Erlewine) :

Yesterday, 10 November, was International Human Rights Day, and for the occasion two San Franciscans spearheaded a protest and boycott (across the U.S.) on behalf of gay rights and in opposition to California's Proposition 8 (which banned same-sex marriage).  Two points of linguistic interest: the name of the event is "A Day Without a Gay" (sometimes reported as "A Day Without Gays"), and people are encouraged to "call in gay" to work.

In yesterday's post on "what's will?", I rashly asserted that "the commonest way to express a future-time meaning is indeed to use the auxiliary verb will". This provoked immediate questions and counter-claims. So I promised to devote a Breakfast Experiment™ to quantifying the choice among alternative verb forms used to express future time in English.

In its article on Google's year-end "Zeitgeist" listings of the most searched terms, BBC News reports:

The things people around the globe have in common are a strong interest in socialising and politics, according to Marissa Mayer, vice president of search at Google.

"Social networks compromised four out of the top ten global fastest-rising queries while the US election held everyone's interest around the globe," she wrote on Google's official blog.

I checked back on the Google Blog and what Mayer wrote was:

Social networks comprised four out of the top 10 global fastest-rising queries, while the U.S. election held everyone's interest around the globe.

So the BBC editors, besides changing 10 to ten and removing the comma before while, apparently also changed comprised to compromised. A fascinating miscorrection (or incorrection, if you prefer).

Linguification is still alive and well. In a Morning Edition interview on NPR today Rob Chametzky heard Condoleezza Rice saying, "To mention Robert Mugabe in the same sentence with the President of the United States is an outrage." No it isn't.