Language Log

Amy Ostrander is an undergraduate student from Brandeis University who has taken the very sensible step of broadening her horizons beyond that excellent institution and is visiting Edinburgh for a year to take linguistics courses here. She just pointed out to me something very cute about prescriptivism, Latinophilia, and the so-called "split infinitive".

The familiar practice of putting modifier constituents between to and a plain form verb in the infinitive clause construction (as in to really love someone) is calling "splitting the infinitive" because it is thought that to love is a word. People apparently see the modifier as separating the two parts of what would be in Latin a single word: amare ("to love") is one word in Latin, and certainly no adverb is permitted to occur inside it. That suggests a principle saying, when something is expressed by a single word in Latin but by two in English, it is bad grammar to separate those two English words with a modifier. What Amy pointed out was this. Suppose we accepted the principle (absurd and perhaps unchampioned though it is). We would face a problem. It cannot be maintained, even by prescriptivists whose pronouncements imply that they might defend it. The reason is that (among thousands of other examples) a word like amo in Latin also translates as two words in English: I love. Everyone, prescriptivists included, agrees that it is grammatical to split them, as in I really love you. So under that principle, what makes it OK to split the two parts of amo in an English sentence (I really love) but not OK to split the two parts of amare (to really love)? Nothing. The putative prescriptivists are being inconsistent. So never mind the fact that the principle is absurd; things are worse than that, because no one can really believe it or obey it. Thanks to Amy, I now see that it is an even more utterly stupid idea than I thought it was before.

Virtually zero linguistic content in this story (unless you count the tie between language and other aspects of presentation of self), though it's an ACADEMIC story, and the Language Loggers all have academic associations (we're in the academy or in associated technological fields or participate in the Industry of the Intellect in some other way).

(If you feel cheated by this failure to follow the Language Log charter, as you understand it, then apply for a refund of your fees — we guarantee full money back — by submitting the relevant forms to our local planning department, on Alpha Centauri.)

On to the story, from the NYT Magazine of Sunday 21 September, where the Style section (pp. 88-91) is a fashion spread ("Class Acts") featuring professors. On-line slide show here.

A bit of frivolity…

As the spam queue on New Language Log approaches 9,000 items (rapidly), I offer four comments from my favorite spammer, which combine the congratulatory content of so much spam commentary with astonishing syntax:

I is pleasantly amazd! Thank!!!

This simply prodigy!

There was merrily!

The Good lad an author! I much like site!

There's more, of course. This particular spammer hasn't been around for a while, so that the minute or so I take each day to mark items as spam and to de-spam misclassified items  is more boring than it was for a while.

Note to commenters: if you put a URI "in the clear" (printed out, rather than inserted into an "a" tag) in your comment, Akismet is likely to mark your comment as spam (because one variety of spam comments consists almost entirely of lists of such URIs). I sometimes do that myself, when the URI is the main content of my comment; but then I expect to have to de-spam my own comment.

The general reaction to Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric has been a sort of displaced embarrassment.  I thought that Timothy Burke expressed it well ("Trade Secret of Teachers", 9/25/2008):

Bluffing at knowledge is kind of like a bad pick-up line in a bar: it may be amusing, it’s usually off-putting, and most importantly, it’s almost always ineffective.

Watching Palin’s interview with Katie Couric felt like being in a classroom with a bad bluffer. In fact, a bad bluffer at their worst moment, which is about five minutes before a final examination is about to begin. […]

My first reaction to watching the video wasn’t political, it was much more like how I feel seeing this as a teacher: a sympathetic wince.

Rhymes With Orange plays with the snowclone of linguification "not know the meaning of X":

Here we get the figurative sense of the expression (in the snowclone) confronting its literal sense.

A recent xkcd cartoon looked back to the time when Pluto was demoted from being called a planet to being called a dwarf planet (where dwarf planets don't count as planets):

We posted extensively here on various aspects of the story. Today I'm going to return to the status of the expression dwarf planet.

Email from Amanda Adams asks "Can you make anything of this?", where "this" is a line from Anders Nelson, "Universal Blocks Spielberg/Jackson Pic", 9/20/2008:

I would feel more bucolic for liking my adventure stories to have at least a modicum of violence in them …

Amanda implies that bucolic might be some sort of malapropism.

Clark Hoyt's "Public Editor" column in the NYT on Sunday 14 September ("Getting Past the Formalities") responds to reader queries about Times practices in referring to people by name:

(1) Why "Ms. Palin" but "Mrs. Clinton"?

(2) Why "Barack Hussein Obama" three times on the front page on 28 August?

Some readers saw dark political motives at work.

Hoyt replied that (1) resulted from the application of a consistent policy on the use of courtesy titles (Miss, Mrs., Ms., Mr., and official titles like Gov.) and that (2) resulted from another set of Times newsroom policies on the use of full names, which, however, have sometimes been applied inconsistently. (Hoyt apologized.)

Today is National Punctuation Day and once again the poor little virgule/slash gets short shrift. Let us celebrate/honor the comma, the full stop/period, the exclamation mark/point, the question mark, and even the semi-colon (which I’ve been learning to use correctly ever since a surgeon removed half on my colon a couple years ago).

But who will celebrate/honor the lowly virgule? Not the good folks from Pinole, California, who seem to be in charge/run/oversee National Punctuation Day ®.

A little while back, I noted that postcards with FUCK on them were coming to me through the mail with no interference. I added that

for some time now I've been noticing bumper stickers (locally) with FUCK and SHIT on them (FUCK BUSH, rather than the Spoonerized BUCK FUSH, for example), so apparently you can display taboo vocabulary in public (in certain places) without getting in trouble with the law.

That was badly phrased; something like "without getting in trouble with authorities" would have been better.

A couple of days ago, Jim Bisso sent me a question:

I've been embattled by a bunch of peevologists over the grammaticality of sentences of the sort: "my mother(,) she is a good person". I have pointed out that many kinds of apposition are not only acceptable but flow from the pens of some of our finest writers, but they are having none of that. Somehow a construction like "we the people of the United States etc." is okay, but reverse the order of Pron + NP to NP + Pron and sparks start to fly. I say it's simply a stylistic matter and not a syntactic one, but who am I? What say you? (Do you know any monographs that I might delve into to fuel my argument?)

Executive summary: This construction goes back to Old English, and is still widely used in spoken English and in some regional varieties ; but its use in formal written English has been decreasing since about 1500, and is now either informal or archaic.

Today saw the release of the anxiously awaited T-Mobile G1, the first phone to use Google's Android software. On T-Mobile's website, the first ad for the phone was unveiled, and it's packed with jocular comparative adjectives: smarterer, connecteder, funnerer.

This isn't just an homage to Dumb and Dumberer, the even more dim-witted sequel to Dumb and Dumber. Rather, it's being recognized by many in the techie community as a pointed jab at Apple honcho Steve Jobs, who recently enthused about "the funnest iPod ever." (That's still the tagline on the website for the iPod Touch.)

A brief note on the intrusion of the word uppity into the U.S. presidential election. It came a while back, from congressman Lynn Westmoreland. Here's one (of a great many) reports on the event, from The Hill on 4 September:

Georgia Republican Rep. Lynn Westmoreland used the racially-tinged term "uppity" to describe Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama Thursday.

Westmoreland was discussing vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's speech with reporters outside the House chamber and was asked to compare her with Michelle Obama.

"Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they're a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they're uppity," Westmoreland said.

Uproar ensued.