Language Log

Dipping randomly into another one of Roy Peter Clark's Glamour of Grammar essays ("What the Big Bopper Taught Me About Grammar", 5/8/2008), I found this curious piece of revisionist intellectual history:

In our common culture, grammar has taken on at least three sets of meanings and associations. It still refers to the etiquette of writing and reading, the conventions that allow us to create a standard written English, the technical term for which, according to critic John Simon, is "grapholect."

This view of grammar is sometimes called "prescriptive," which is how I came to understand in 1959 (at the age of 11) that, when the Big Bopper sang "… but baby I ain't go no money, honey," he was using language in a way that would have gotten his ass kicked by Sister Catherine William. […]

Then, of course, along came "descriptive grammar," a movement that had the unmitigated gall (why is gall always unmitigated?) to sneak "ain't" in the dictionary, a discipline of language that could take into account the Big Bopper's nonstandard usage, including that surely double negative.

Underpinning this rebellion against Emily Post conformity was something called "transformational" or "generative" grammar, described by scholars such as Noam Chomsky, before he became a political critic and darling of the left.

This explanation evokes another common collocate for unmitigated, namely nonsense.

Roy Peter Clark is composing a new grammar book, to be called "The Glamour of Grammar". For the past couple of months, he's been posting selections on the web site of the Poynter Institute, where he's "director of the writing center, dean of the faculty, senior scholar and vice president". Each post has an email link asking readers to "Help Roy write his next book".

Yesterday, Linda Seebach sent me a link to one of these posts, "Why the Littlest Words Can Mean a Lot" (5/28/2008), drawing attention to a passage where Prof. Clark's call for help was well advised:

Articles are slippery. You might be fooled into thinking that a can only be used in the singular and that the carries the plural until you read "A million dollars will get you the rarest baseball card in the world."

Here on Language Log we have recently been twitted by readers who believe we have been insufficiently attentive to celebrity linguists, in particular Noam Chomsky (I find the idea that we should choose topics for our postings using personal fame as a guiding metric bizarre, but there it is). Mark Liberman has now responded, linking to a frivolous Facebook group pitting Chomsky against Labov. We've been frivolous about Chomsky before, in a posting about Ali G's interview of him; in two postings about Chomsky as the object of sexual arousal; and in a posting quoting Woody Allen's "The Whore of Mensa".

But (as Bruce Webster suggested to me) we seem not to have discussed the famous Chomskybot, which has been around in one version or another for about twenty years.

I suppose sometimes it's only natural for us to use words or phrases even when we're not quite sure what they mean. Or maybe we have our own individual notion of their meanings. But one might expect law enforcement to use words that have some clearly agreed upon meaning when they talk openly in criminal investigations about the people who are their suspects, targets or even possible witnesses. In recent years, person of interest seems to have been added to this list of descriptors. But what, you may ask, is a person of interest?

Google provides 412,000 hits, so the phrase is not exactly a new kid on the street. We don't know exactly when person of interest elbowed its way into use by law enforcement but it's likely to have shown up sometime in the 1970s, and then it really got noticed about the time of the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta. You may recall that at that time the FBI leaked the name of Richard A. Jewell as a person of interest. Jewel was  eventually exonerated, sued the media rather successfully for tainting his reputation, and got a public apology from the then Attorney General, Janet Reno. 

The latest issue of the New Yorker (July 7 & 14) has a Roz Chast cartoon (p. 75), "seven words you can't say in a cartoon", that's a tribute to the late George Carlin and his famous "Filthy Words" routine, "seven words you can't say on television". All the "words" are strings of obscenicons (credit to Ben Zimmer for the coinage, an alternative to the blander cursing characters), those punctuation marks, stars, spirals, and the like that are used to compose representations of cursewords in cartoons. (We've posted here many times on obscenicons.)

The United States Mint has announced the release of its first coin with readable Braille on it, a commemorative silver dollar in honor of Louis Braille, the creator of Braille, to be released next year. The Braille is on the reverse.

Yesterday evening, I watched the TF1 reality show (or émission, as the French so appropriately say) Secret Story. My purpose was to revive my knowledge of French, and perhaps to learn a few new words. I was pleased that I could understand most of the dialogue, if not the decor; but one thing that I didn't understand was why a French reality show has an English name.

On my recent trip to Paris, I took time out Wednesday evening to go to the Louvre, which is open until 10 (that's 22h for those unambiguous Europeans) on Wednesdays. My eyes happened to encounter Un jeune homme présenté par Venus (?) aux sept Arts libéraux, which reminded me that one of these lovely young ladies would represent Grammar. Here they are, with Venus (whose question mark is in the Louvre label — that's not my editorial addition¹); I've omitted to photograph the young man.


Since it's clear that the top middle one is Logic (aka Dialectic), with her scorpion, and since Logic is one of the three liberal arts in the Trivium, I assume that one of the women on either side of her is Grammar — let's say the lady to her left holding a scroll.² Here she is in close-up (you can click on this or the above image for a bigger version):


Quite a charming-looking person, perhaps a little shy and young, but not at all offensive, right?

A headline from today's cnn.com entertainment page:

(1) Brinkley spouse slept with, gave teen $300K

This is a lovely example of FLoP coordination, what would be a routine Right Node Raising (with the NP teen shared between the two conjuncts), except that something extra, $300K, follows teen in the second conjunct, so that the two conjuncts are not parallel.

There are several extra twists in this one.

From a reader in China:

This is screamingly funny.

Less funny is that that link seems to be blocked in China. I had to use a proxy server to read it. Why in the world would they block Language Log???

Well, we were once blocked by Websense (one of those "internet filtering" systems used by libraries and schools and such), but it turned out to be a mistake. In this case, I'm tempted to think that one of Bill's posts on Tibetan might be to blame, but maybe it's just another case of bycatch.

In the (figurative) pages of Slate, Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon have begun a six-part series on "The Sex Difference Evangelists", with four parts so far:

Meet the Believers (1 July)

Pick a Little, Talk a Little (1 July)

Empathy Queens (2 July)

Mars, Venus, Babies, and Hormones (3 July)

The series focuses on two books, our old acquaintance The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine and a new entry, Susan Pinker's The Sexual Paradox, which we haven't discussed here on Language Log (and which I haven't seen). They summarize Brizendine and Pinker's claims, and, in examining the evidence for these claims, review lots of literature (including some Language Log postings). Their bottom line on Brizendine and Pinker: "They're peddling one-sidedness, sprinkled with scientific hyperbole."

Twice a day, walking between my hotel and Acoustics 2008 at the Palais des Congrès, I pass by the Place des États-Unis, which is four street-segments surrounding a block-long median strip, between Avenue Kléber and Avenue d'Iéna. At one end, appropriately enough, there's a statue of Lafayette shaking hands with Washington. At the other end, also appropriately, there's a memorial to the American volunteers who died while serving in the Légion Étrangère during the first world war. The base of the memorial is inscribed with verses from Alan Seeger's "Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France", as translated into French by Alain Rivoire. For example:

Salut frères, adieu grands morts, deux fois merci. Double à jamais est votre gloire d'être morts pour la France et d'être morts aussi pour l'honneur de notre mémoire.

In the original high-Romantic English this was:

Hail, brothers, and farewell; you are twice blest, brave hearts.
Double your glory is who perished thus,
For you have died for France and vindicated us.

In between, less obviously, there's a ten-foot-high plinth surmounted with a bust of Myron T. Herrick.

That's what they call it, over at the Palais des Congrès in Paris:

Do you suppose that the Académie Française made them stick in the extra c? Anyhow, there are quite a few of these signs — I think I saw four, and probably there are more.