Language Log

The misnamed "split infinitive" construction, where a modifier is placed immediately before the verb of an infinitival complement, has never been ungrammatical at any stage in the history of English, and no confident writer of English prose has any problems with it at all. (As the grammarian George O. Curme pointed out in 1930, it's actually the minor writers and nervous nellies, the easily intimidated, who seem to worry about it.) Quite often, placing a modifier just after to and just before the verb is exactly the right thing to do with a modifier in an infinitival complement clause (see the discussion on this page). However, that is not the same thing as saying it is always the right thing to do. Sometimes it's an absolute disaster. My colleague Bob Ladd was preparing to fly back to Edinburgh (EDI) from Munich in Germany when his airline, easyJet, sent him the following email (bafflingly, they sent it after he was in the departure lounge):

Dear DWIGHT ROBERT LADD

We are really sorry to inform you that your easyJet flight, 6914 to EDI on 24/09/2010 has been cancelled. We understand that cancelling your flight will cause you inconvenience and we are very sorry when things don't run as scheduled.

We always aim to provide the best possible experience when flying with easyJet, however from time to time situations arise which are out of our control. On this occasion we've been forced to take the decision to regrettably cancel your flight.

You can see that this is by an inexperienced writer just from penultimate sentence, with its the dangling participle (who is flying?) and classic "comma-splice" run-on sentence and mispunctuated connective adjunct however. But the placement of the adverb regrettably is a much worse mistake. It is a horrible, disastrous writing choice, genuinely leading to syntactic ill-formedness. But why, exactly?

One of the secrets of Language Log is that because of its lack of any arrangement for revenue (aaaaggghh! how could we have forgotten something as vital as income?) its writers have to moonlight doing other jobs, just to make the rent or mortgage payments. We all have jobs that we do in the odd non-Language-Log moments of the day. Mark Liberman, in addition to being head honcho and contributing writer at Language Log, is a professor of phonetics, a computational linguists researcher, a cognitive scientist, a residential house master, the director of a consortium providing large text and speech corpora for industrial and academic use, and (since five or six jobs is hardly enough) dad to a teenager as well. He tends to blog just about every day, but right now he is en route to Japan for a conference, after which he will go on to Hong Kong to be an external examiner at a PhD defense.

I too (this is my home page) have a day job at a university, as the head of a large department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland (for a long time I taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and thus had an American home base like the other Language Log staff, but I moved to Edinburgh in 2007).

You might be interested in the lives in some of the other Language Log personnel too.

A new Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market opened up in my corner of Language Log Plaza this week, and as I walked through the aisles on the day of the grand opening, I noticed signs that read "look up for savings". This company is apparently committed to green building, so they have a bunch of skylights on the ceiling that let in the abundant natural light that we have here in San Diego. The signs pointing this out continue: "our skylights save energy and you money". Others will no doubt disagree, but that conjunction between the direct object energy and the benefactive + direct object combination you money strikes me as very unnatural. I can't think of a single constituency test that establishes something like you money as a constituent to be coordinated, but then again I've been wrong about this sort of thing before.

"Once so ever" for whatsoever is a surprisingly common eggcorn that hasn't yet been catalogued in the Eggcorn Database. Some examples:

He has no experience once so ever.
Those people make no sense once so ever and I think I'll just stay over here at /film.
I tried to cut gluten out for several weeks that made no change once so ever.
So we all finally get on and to my amazement there is absolutely no instruction once so ever!
Love when Bush was president, he had no problems once so ever.
i doubt one person moderating is going to make any difference once so ever.
Sigourney Weaver is very good in this five minute opening scene that throws us directly into the fire without any set up once so ever.
Apparently, they agreed as I was hired rather quikly, "just as everyone else was with no experience in sales once so ever.

The Belgian political (and linguistic) structure explained:

Do you want to know more about Belgium? from Jerome de Gerlache on Vimeo.

[Hat tip: Utsav Schurmans.]

The granddaddy of all snowclones has often been expressed here at Language Log Plaza as a formula with variables:

If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z.

So it's pleasing to see this iteration of the ur-snowclone, from Jeff Potter's new book, Cooking for Geeks (p. 258):

If Eskimos have N words for describing snow, the French and
Italians have N+1 words for describing dishes involving egg yolks.

We've often seen how pop-Whorfian depictions of linguistic difference rely on the facile "no word for X" trope — see our long list of examples here. Frequently the trope imagines a vast cultural gap between Western modernity and various exotic Others. The latest entry comes via Ron Stack, who points us to this television commercial from the Aruba Tourism Authority (reported by MediaPost). In the commercial, Ian Wright, the British host of the adventure tourism show "Globe Trekker," learns from an Aruban fisherman that the local creole language, Papiamento, has no word for "work-related stress."

I'm not sure whether this is a joke or a genuine example of problematic machine translation, but either way, it's funny.

The department that it is my privilege to lead runs a colloquium series that begins this year on Thursday 30 September with a myth-busting talk by our own Professor John Joseph, about what he calls "the least understood book in the entire history of linguistics". I'll be there, and on the edge of my seat. Because I've never seen anyone try to link Indo-European comparative phonological reconstruction to bisexuality before.

Recent mixtures of English into everyday use in other languages evoke mixed reactions, from amusement through annoyance to alarm.  It's important to recognize that this sort of thing has been going on for a long time — probably just as about as long as there have been languages to mix. And it's likely that reactions towards the negative end of the spectrum have also been around for many thousands of years.

Over the next few weeks, I'll post a few older examples. But I'll start with a relatively recent instance: the role of French in the speech of educated Russians of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Chinglish that I write about regularly is only one member of a burgeoning brood of English hybrid languages.  Other well-known congeners of Chinglish are Franglais and Spanglish.  Perhaps less well known, but equally colorful, is Denglish, that variety of German (Deutsch) that has absorbed a conspicuous amount of poorly assimilated English elements.  In a discussion of "word rage" entitled "Shooting too Good" (November 05, 2005), Mark Liberman mentioned Denglish, but it seems to me that this quirky brand of Englishy German deserves greater exposure.  To that end, I present here a hitherto unpublished text entitled "Wok and Roll" (real name of a restaurant in Munich) by (Professor) Antony Tatlow of  Hong Kong University / Trinity College Dublin, now retired.

From the first comment on Paul Krugman's blog post "Rat Race America", 9/19/2010, a rare first-person singular their:

I'm a tech entrepreneur who works their brains out and has had some success for myself and my investors. I live among hedge fund guys and VC's who take home $1m/year +.

An adventure in layered possessives, courtesy of Christopher Buckley, "No One Likes a Deficit Bore", The Atlantic, 9/20/2010:

Michael and our fellow commentators seem to go back and forth on the matter of whose deficit is it, anyway? Good arguments are made on both sides. But they're beside the point. The more pressing question is: Whose cliff is it we're driving off? And the answer to that is: ours. All ours.