Language Log

Etymology is not destiny, as we keep pointing out here. Thinking that it is is subscribing to the Etymological Fallacy (see here, among many other places). But even synchronically, you can't always trust what you see: derived lexical items are often specialized semantically (as are noun-noun compounds and also combinations of non-predicating adjective plus noun). This is especially true of technical terms; as I am fond of saying: labels are not definitions.

Which brings us to financial derivatives. Derivative here is derived from derive, right? So we can tell what it means in this expression from its morphological composition, right? Well, no. But people want that to be true.

I agree with Mark that James Wood's condescending comments about Palin's use of verbage are pure de-haut-en-bushwa. On the other hand, let's not delude ourselves about this item. Palin's verbage is not simply a term for "language" or "wording" that has been happily circulating in vernacular speech since it was first attested 200 years ago, in defiance of the assaults of prescriptivists. Verbage is not colloquial English — I mean, people don't go around saying, "Hey, Sparky — watch your goddamn verbage!" It arises as an approximation of a fancy-pants word that people have seen in print: it's a lot more plausible to assume that people would misread verbiage as verbage than that they would mishear it that way, particularly since this is a re-analysis favored by analogy. The fact is that in both its form and its meaning, verbiage is a weirder word than most people — including the editors of the OED — realize.

In the Oct. 13 New Yorker, James Wood commented at length on Sarah Palin's pronunciation of verbiage in her interview with Sean Hannity ("Verbage: The Republican War on Words"), closing with this paragraph:

Hearing her being interviewed by Sean Hannity, on Fox News, almost made one wish for a Republican victory in November, so that her bizarre locutions might be available a bit longer to delve into. At times, even Hannity looked taken aback; his eyes, slightly too close to each other, like the headlamps on an Army jeep, went blank, as if registering the abyss we are teetering above. Or perhaps he just couldn’t follow. The most revealing moment happened earlier, when she was asked about Obama’s attack on McCain’s claim that the fundamentals of the economy are sound. “Well,” Palin said, “it was an unfair attack on the verbage that Senator McCain chose to use, because the fundamentals, as he was having to explain afterwards, he means our workforce, he means the ingenuity of the American people. And of course that is strong, and that is the foundation of our economy. So that was an unfair attack there, again, based on verbage that John McCain used.” This is certainly doing rather than mere talking, and what is being done is the coinage of “verbage.” It would be hard to find a better example of the Republican disdain for words than that remarkable term, so close to garbage, so far from language.

As a parody of a highbrow sneer, this is brilliant work.

Another in our series of occasional postings on Noam Chomsky in cartoonland.

At some time in the middle 1970s, Deirdre Wilson and I noticed that we had never seen the past participle of the verb stride anywhere. In fact we didn't even know what it was. When you stride off, what is it that you've done? How would it be described? Have you strided? Have you strode? Have you stroded? Have you stridden? Have you strodden? We realized that we hadn't a clue. None of them sounded familiar or even mildly acceptable to us as native speakers. And this odd gap had some potential for theoretical significance. Let me explain why. And then I'll tell you how the world's most distinguished English grammarian stumbled across a real-life sentence that seemed to clear up the mystery. And I'll fill in a bit of subsequently discovered history as well. But first, before you read on, write down what you think is the correct form for the past participle of stride in English as spoken by you.

Peter Ringeisen writes to ask "why it is that educated people use ungrammatical obsolete verb endings?" — a question inspired by this passage in Thomas L. Friedman's New York Times op-ed column today:

Globalization giveth — it was this democratization of finance that helped to power the global growth that lifted so many in India, China and Brazil out of poverty in recent decades. Globalization now taketh away — it was this democratization of finance that enabled the U.S. to infect the rest of the world with its toxic mortgages. And now, we have to hope, that globalization will saveth.

Three things to comment on here. The use of obsolete verb endings in the first place. Then the extension of them to contexts where they're historically incorrect, as in will saveth (and by Friedman, an accomplished writer). Finally, the snowclone (actually, snowclone family) GivethTaketh ("X giveth and X taketh away"), which we haven't looked at here on Language Log and doesn't seem to be anywhere in the Snowclone Database.

Two more takes on teenage communication. First, a Bizarro playing on the widespread idea that teenagers' texting is packed with non-standard spelling and punctuation. Then a Zits on communicative multitasking. (Click on an image to get a larger version.)

[This is really a comment on a comment on one of our recent posts about the sociopolitics of g-dropping — I've set it up as a separate post because it's too long to fit gracefully in the comments section.]

I really like Mark's "empathetic -in'" in place of "g-dropping," though it may require a public campaign to make the substitution. Just by way of a footnote to that post, I did a "Fresh Air" piece on accent and authenticity last week which ended with some comments on the development of Palin's g-dropping (with video clips) and concluded she has learned over the years to do it in roughly the same sorts of contexts that Obama does. Here's the last part of that piece:

In a recent exchange ("Pinker on Palin's 'nucular'", 10/5/2008; "Pinker contra Nunberg re nuclear/nucular", 10/17/2008; "Nucular riposte", 10/18/2008), Steven Pinker and Geoffrey Nunberg disagreed, among other things, about whether President George W. Bush is engaging in "conscious linguistic slumming" when he uses the pronunciation commonly written as "nucular". Geoff argued that

George Bush … can't be exculpated for saying "nucular." After all, it isn't likely that that version was frequently heard at Andover, Yale, or the Kennebunkport dinner table. In his mouth, it's what I've described as a "faux-bubba" pronunciation. … And … deliberately down-shifting to a misanalyzed pronuncation of nuclear is a lot more culpable as linguistic slumming goes than merely dropping a g now and again.

But Steve countered that

People generally end up with the accents of their late childhood and early adolescent peers, so Midland and Houston were the formative influences on Bush's accent, rather than Kennebunkport and Andover.

I have no instinct about the relative culpability of "going nucular" and "g-dropping". But I do feel that the pronunciation of -ing is much more useful as a sociopolitical variable than the pronunciation of nuclear is — it's much commoner, in the first place, and it's also much more likely to vary. Furthermore, it allows us to balance our discussion in partisan terms, because the current candidate who deploys this variable in the most politically interesting way is Barack Obama.

Steve Pinker understates the case when he says that there's a master's thesis in "nucular" studies: I envision dissertations, conferences, endowed chairs, journals, broken marriages…

[This is a guest post by Steven Pinker of Harvard University. —GKP]

I agree with Geoff Nunberg that the nucular pronunciation is not the result of a phonetic process that applies across the board in these dialects. It's a lexical phenomenon, though one with a phonetic motivation, and I didn't distinguish the two in my Times Op-Ed piece. In this regard I think it's related to Febuary, jewlery, iurn, purty, and Kirsten (from Christine). I also agree that there is an analogical attraction to words like binoculars, particular, circular, vascular, and muscular, but it is one that may have prevailed because the weak perception of the order of the adjacent sonorants in nuclear failed to resist the tug.

But I don't agree with other aspects of the analysis.

Last night, I got back from England in time to be faced with a dilemma: the third presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, starting at 9:00 p.m., conflicted with the fifth game of the National League championship series between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Los Angeles Dodgers, starting around 8:30.

Based on past performances, I expected the NLCS to be more exciting than the debate. And there's this nifty method for summarizing debates: for each participant P, rank the words that P uses more than 10 times according to the ratio of P's count to the opponent's count. And CNN publishes an instant debate transcript…

Still, I felt that I should pay at least some attention to what was going on at Hofstra University. So my solution involved a couple of radios, a TV with picture-in-picture, and several sites that were live-blogging one or the other event. In the end, the Phillies won the game 5-1, and will be going to the World Series. What about the debate?