Language Log

Gene Buckley wrote a little while back about the wording of of the proposed amendment in California's Proposition 8:

Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

Gene pointed out that there are two possible scopings for only in this sentence: over marriage between a man and a woman ("wide" scope) — 'the only thing (specifically, institution) that is valid or recognized in California is marriage between a man and a woman' — or just over marriage ("narrow scope") — 'the only marriage that is valid or recognized in California is marriage between a man and a woman'. The intended scoping is the narrow one, and everyone recognizes that (because the wide-scope reading is ridiculous in the real world), but Gene had to go through a very brief process of rejecting the wide-scope reading, which is the one he entertained first.

And he notes that in other cases the wide-scope reading is almost surely the intended one.

Out of context, many interjections merely express strong emotion, which could be either positive or negative, and intonation won't clarify things. And sometimes, even the context doesn't make the interpretation clear, as in this Zits cartoon:

In a recent posting mostly on parts on speech, in particular the category of wise in "The wise talk because they have something to say", I quoted a book of advice for writers in which this example is attributed to Plato. I didn't pursue the attribution, but now Rochelle Edinburg, a philosophy grad student at Princeton, writes to ask about it:

… the quote in question is attributed to Plato. However, I have been searching for any hint of the original in Plato's works, and have yet to find one. Do you know where this quote originally appears? Or, for that matter, why someone would use such a poorly attributed quote in a textbook on writing style?

Although I posted on this on ADS-L earlier today, I thought that maybe in honor of the U.S. elections on Tuesday it would be entertaining to post a version of it here. The usage in question is the verbs early/absentee vote (not vote early/absentee).

As preface to today's taboo-language story, an Ariel Molvig cartoon from the latest New Yorker:

The story is a column by Adam Liptak in the Week in Review section of today's New York Times: "Must It Always Be About Sex?", about the word fuck, which the Times is committed to avoiding — so that if Liptak is going to report on a current U.S. Supreme Court case about this word, he has to do some deft side-stepping.

A couple of days ago, in response to John Gonzalez's question "Where does this unit rank among the most beloved Philly sports teams of all time?", Phil Sheridan answered:

For me, this team has to rank up there with the Flyers' Stanley Cup-winning teams for sheer beloved-osity.

This reminded me of a question from a reader that arrived in my inbox the same day:

I wonder if you know of any explanation for why the final -ed is made into a syllable in some words used as adjectives, such as blessed, beloved, learned, and dogged, though when these words are used as verbs, the final -ed is not pronounced as a syllable.

The short answer: liturgical habit protected a few words from a sound change, half a millennium ago (and also, "dogged" is not derived from the verb dog). A longer answer is after the jump.

At a rally a few weeks ago in Newport News, Obama criticized McCain's economic program, claiming that the average CEO would get a $700,000 tax break, and then added: "Not only is it not right, it ain't right." Apart from the obvious "just folks" implications of the register shift, the line exploits a subtle distinction in evidentiality that Tom Wasow pointed out to me some years ago, which I worked into a "Fresh Air" piece back in 2002:

A while ago my Stanford colleague Tom Wasow sent me an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education that quoted a dean at a prestigious Eastern university: "Any junior scholar who pays attention to teaching at the expense of research ain't going to get tenure." That ain't was a nice touch: it made it clear that the dean's conclusion wasn't based on expert knowledge or some recent committee report — it was something that should be clear to anyone with an ounce of sense.

That's the message that ain't conveys in all those common expressions like "It ain't over till the fat lady sings" or "If it ain't broke don't fix it" —ain't tells you that you're dealing with a nitty-gritty verity that you don't need a college education to understand.

I was interested in this comment by BeachSaint on Matt Yglesias' post "Duberstein for Obama":

Someone should check the seismic activity in the Simi Valley between now and election day because Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his grave over the antics of the McCain Campaign.

I am a registered Republican who has received extensive campaign training from the national committee. I am ProObama, ProLife. I’m not sure how much longer I can remain registered in a party run amok by the likes of Sarah Palin, Joe-the-Plumber and the other uneducated members of the radical right.

At first, I thought that the phrase "a party run amok by the likes of Sarah Palin [and] Joe-the-Plumber" was a passive of a causative: Sarah and Joe ran the party amok, i.e. caused the party to run amok, and so the party was run amok by them. (N.B. No political commentary is intended here — this is linguistics.)

But … Well, before going further into this analysis, let's back up on amok.

We haven't had anything recently about how clever starlings are, but what with all the discussion about parrot lips, I thought that some of you might enjoy this:

There are no associated news stories, so far, about vocal organs or communication skills, though commenters on several web forums have made suggestions about demonic possession and (from those who listen more carefully) the possible dangers of keeping vocal mimics as house pets.

My latest email from johnmccain.com, sent at 10:18 this evening, starts with four typos in two lines:

(Click on the image for a larger version)

Linguists occasionally encounter examples parallel to mistranslated signs like the one Mark wrote about. The situation arises when someone with little or no knowledge of the native language, typically an anthropologist, elicits information such as place names and writes down whatever the response is. When a linguist familiar with the language later reviews these records, some place name will prove to be uninterpretable until the linguist realizes that what has been recorded, usually in a garbled form, is the response "I don't know". There are various stories of this type in linguistic folklore, and I have encountered this myself.

I came across a variant of this in the census of a Carrier village carried out by Oblate priests, none of whom had much command of the language, in the 1870s. Several women are recorded as having been named tsandelh. What the priests didn't know is that tsandelh is not a name: it means "widow".

According to the BBC, the Swansea council should have gotten a second opinion on this road sign:

The most recent guide to "punctuation, grammar, and style" (quotation from the subtitle) to come across my desk is Jan Venolia's Write Right! (4th edition, 2001). "Over 500,000 copies sold", the cover exclaims — but still I'd overlooked it until Wednesday (when I found it for sale at my local carwash, of all places, along with books about cooking, pets, parenting, travel, and advice for businesspeople — a category I'm still trying to wrap my mind around).

The field of books offering to help people improve their writing on the job or at school is crowded, and some of them seem to sell well. But their treatments of English grammar are almost all seriously flawed and not especially helpful. Write Right! is better than some of its competitors, but it really starts out on the wrong foot, in its discussion of what nouns are and how you can tell which words are nouns. (Like most of these advice books, Write Right! begins with the parts of speech, nouns first.)

As a bonus, I'll tack on a wonderful bit about English "subjunctives" that readers couldn't possibly understand unless they already knew what the passage was talking about.