Language Log

In Thursday's Washington Post, Richard Leiby digs into the background of a political cliche: "measuring (for) drapes." In his stump speech, John McCain says that "Senator Obama is measuring the drapes," meaning that he is already presumptuously planning how to decorate the White House. President Bush used the line about Congressional Democrats before the 2006 midterm elections, and Bush the elder applied it to Bill Clinton in the 1992 campaign. Leiby took the drape expression back to a 1980 reference in the New York Times on John Anderson ("Obviously, it's much too soon for Mr. Anderson to start measuring for drapes at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue"), but its roots actually go back for several decades before that, as befits such a sturdy cliche.

… with profanity as its pinnacle:

Well, maybe we could treat profanity as a sub-area of pragmatics.

(Hat tip to Christine Wilcox.)

Arnold's discussion of the use and misuse of the archaic English verbal endings -est and -eth calls to mind an earlier and perhaps more significant case, namely the misuse of these endings in the original text of the Book of Mormon, the fundamental sacred text of the Church of Latter Day Saints.

James Fallows has posted this subway ad, at the Dongsishitiao station of Beijing's Line 2, on the Atlantic website and raises a lot of interesting questions about it:

I recently objected to Louis Menand's assertion that "[P]rofessional linguists almost universally, do not believe that any naturally occurring changes in the language can be bad" ("Menand on linguistic morality", 10/22/2008).  And I was quickly taken to task in the comments by Steve Dodson, who is the erudite and broad-minded author of the Language Hat blog. Hat (as he's called in the blogosphere) asserted that

I personally am happy to sign on to the Descriptivist position as "caricatured" and state that there is no such thing as bad language change. […] To say any form of language change is "bad" is to be ipso facto unscientific.

He also suggested that my acquaintances and I belong to "a small sample of linguists who have … weirdly quasi-prescriptivist views about language".

On a recycling dumpster outside an office building in Edinburgh: MIXED CARDBOARD ONLY. That, although it's subtle, is a case of the phenomenon for which I have been using the (not exactly ideal) term nerdview. It is an example of a linguistically misleading communication in which the failure is not of grammar or meaning but of failing to keep in mind the viewpoint of the reader rather than the specialist (possibly nerdy) view of the writer. Do you see why?

No, not about whether "professional linguists, almost universally, do not believe that any naturally occurring changes in the language can be bad". More on that later. Nor was I wrong about James Wood's sneer at Sarah Palin's "verbage". No more on that is needed.

It is only natural that just months before the current administration packs up to leave the White House, various branches of government would be scurrying to set their favorite programs in concrete for the incoming president and his staff to have to address as best they can. The Department of Education is no different from the others. Since numerous self-inflicted setbacks have left the No Child Left Behind effort with a less than positive heritage, today the Secretary released a report that includes dire warnings of impending doom.

In response to this morning's discussion of 'scriptivism, John Lawler wrote to remind me of a 2001 sci.lang posting by Arnold Zwicky, which John describes as "the best and most judiciously parsed short statement of the problem that I know of".

The Tesco supermarket company defines its values by a slogan that, as my American undergraduate student Denise Wood pointed out to me yesterday, simply doesn't seem (to her or to me) grammatical:

British students seem inclined to accept this phrase — possibly because they've been seeing it on bags and till slips for years (Tesco is still a mostly UK company). But there seems to be an isogloss here (a boundary between dialects determined by the use of some particular word or phrase), with me and Denise on one side and possibly (we don't know yet) most British speakers on the other. What does seem clear is that this is not a productive or extensible pattern. You just can't get away with other noun phrases formed, like every little, from a determinative and an adjective. You really can't say *Every big is desirable, or *Each generous gets us closer to the goal. The phrase every little, considered as a noun phrase, has to be some kind of special sui generis construction. It's not just a regular normal deployment of determinative and adjective.

Louis Menand ("Thumbspeak", The New Yorker, 10/20/2008) aims a gibe at my profession:

[P]rofessional linguists, almost universally, do not believe that any naturally occurring changes in the language can be bad.

As a representative of the species, I can testify that this is false. Rather, we believe that moral and aesthetic judgments about language should be based on facts, not on ignorant and solipsistic gut reactions.

Three weeks ago I wrote about the state of Kentucky's attempt to seize the domain names of internet gambling sites using a statute that authorizes the seizure of "gambling devices', pointing out that the belief that domain names are gambling devices is bizarre. The court has now held an adversarial hearing on the matter and has issued a decision confirming its ex parte order. Most of the opinion is devoted to other issues, such as the question of whether domain names are property and whether the Kentucky court has jurisdiction, but the question of whether domain names are "gambling devices" as defined in the statute is briefly addressed at pp. 22-25.

People here in Philadelphia are excited about the fact that our baseball team, the Phillies, will be in the World Series for the first time since 1993. And one outlet for the high spirits is a really interesting slogan.

It all started last Thursday, with a caller from Delaware on the XM Radio show Baseball This Morning, who seems to have intended to borrow a slogan from the Red Sox, but added his own morphosyntactic twist (as documented on The 700 Level blog):

Boston did it. The White Sox did it. Why can't us? Why can't us!

The rest, as they say, is history, including a line of T-shirts and other merchandise, a Facebook page,  numerous blog posts ("Overexcited Phils Fan Creates Grammatically Challenged Rally Cry", 10/16/2008; "Why Can't Us Movement is Spreading", 10/17/2008; etc.), and more.