Language Log

Yesterday's post on analogical substitution of names has brought in quite a bit of email, but no information about an existing term for this phenomenon, and so I'm beginning to think that there isn't one. At least not a scientific name, and not a common name in English either. This is yet another demonstration that people can have thoughts for which they don't have (single) words. However, it's inconvenient to have conversations about things that you don't have terms for. Therefore, pending a better suggestion, I'll call these things "name chains".

The morning's email did bring several variations on the phenomenological theme.

It wasn't very long ago that an important part of a field linguist's armamentarium was his or her stock of cassette tapes. One didn't want to run out, so one was always trying to find good quality tapes at a good price and kept stashes of them in cool, dry places.

Barbara Phillips Long writes:

I am on vacation with all but one of my siblings, some of their children and both of mine, my parents and some other relatives in a beach house in North Carolina.

I've already called my sister by my daughter's name and my daughter by my sister's name. Other people at the house have had similar problems. We were talking about it today and I suggested it was a problem based on categories — perhaps we think "nearest female relative" and the name of sister comes out instead of daughter.

Then my brother pointed out that there have been times he's gone to yell at his son for making mischief, only to hear the dog's name come out instead. That made me wonder if recently used names are in some sort of buffer that is more muscle memory than brain memory — something like playing piano or typing. In our family, at least, the name confusion happens when both names have been used recently — if I haven't talked to my sister for two months, I don't use her name accidentally when I refer to my daughter.

So I ran a couple of searches on Language Log and the archive to see if there was a term for this particular confusion and if there is a simple explanation, but I didn't find an answer.

I imagine that everyone has had this experience. Certainly, at least, it rings a bell with me.

Overheard on Locust Walk: "What you need to do is call him up and be like, 'why are you doing this to me?'"

Something about this struck me — maybe it's because I'm old enough that I still think of be like as a description of behavior associated with speaking, rather than a simple synonym for say. But I should have know better — {"call him up and be like"} gets 7,590 web hits on Google, which is a lot for a six-word sequence.

A few weeks ago, Seth Roberts visited Penn to give a talk about self-experimentation, and I took advantage of the opportunity to invite him to dinner with 15 or 20 students in Ware College House, where I'm Faculty Master. There was a lively discussion, mostly about Seth's "Shangri-La Diet" ideas.

Seth turned the tables before dinner by interviewing me about blogging. He took notes on his laptop, and sent me a draft the next day, and I promised to look at it and get back to him with corrections — and then I forgot about it until he reminded me yesterday. As it turned out, it didn't really need any changes, but I adjusted a few words here and there, and he's published it on his blog: "Interview with Mark Liberman about Blogging", 4/16/2008.

The late David Mellinkoff, in his much venerated The Language of the Law (Little Brown1963), traces and/or back to scholarly concerns about the correct translation of some famous words in the Magna Carta:

…nisi per legale judicium parium suorum vel per legem terrae.

"Except by lawful judgment of his peers vel by the law of the land."

The debate over the meaning of vel raged. Does it mean and or or?

Having commented in an idle moment on what and/or means and why we have it, I started to receive email from people solemnly informing me that they were native speakers but in their variety of English or had only the exclusive meaning, where the disjuncts can't both be true. In other words, these are people who think that in their variety of English, if I say If Gordon Brown or the Pope is in the USA today I'll eat a copy of Strunk and White, I do not have to eat a copy of that disgusting little book The Elements of Style: I luck out on the grounds that (as it happens) both of them are in the USA today.

I hate to sound dogmatic, but my correspondents are actually wrong about their own native language.

A couple of days ago, Andrew Mueller at the Guardian tossed some bleeding gobbets into the crowd of ravening peevologists ("Linguistic pedants of the world unite", 4/14/2008). His point of departure:

For centuries, travellers have crossed America to explore it, conquer it, settle it, exploit it and study it. Now, a small but righteous crew are traversing America in order to edit it. Jeff Deck, and his friends at the Typo Eradication Advancement League (Teal), are spending three months driving from San Francisco, California, to Somerville, Massachusetts, on a mission to correct every misspelled, poorly punctuated, sloppily phrased item of signage they encounter en route. Equipped with marker pens, stickers and white-out, they are seeking to scourge America's landscape of floating apostrophes, logic-defying syntax and other manifestations of laziness and/or illiteracy.

Certain people apparently find it fascinating to read speculations about the possibility that cellphones and texting and wireless devices might be completely altering our language, and through that (in accordance with the usual vulgar Whorfianism) our thought. They will enjoy the special report on mobility in The Economist, and particularly the article entitled Homo mobilis. Naomi Baron, a linguist at American University, detects worrying trends that relate to what the culture of cellphones, pagers, laptops, and wireless has done to the minds of the young:

Society's attitude towards language has changed, she thinks. For about 250 years, the consensus in Western societies has been that grammar, syntax and spelling matter, and that rules have to be observed. That consensus now appears to be at risk.

The consensus that supports syntax itself is at risk! People who like to read this sort of alarmist stuff will find that here they have exactly the sort of alarmist stuff they like to read. But me? I'm a skeptic. I think it's a load of nonsense.

One form of American Exceptionalism — resistance to texting — is definitely gone:

(1) Michael Erard, "A 10,000-year-old word puzzle", Globe and Mail, 4/14/2008: an excellent account of recent work on the relationship between the Na-Dene languages of western North America and the Yeniseic languages of Siberia, briefly described in a post last month by Heidi Harley ("Big news from the Arctic Circle", 3/15/2008).

The article's sub-head ("A linguistic 'long ranger' chases down an ancient language in Siberia and discovers a surprising connection to modern languages in North America") is a bit misleading, as Michael Erard has pointed out to me in email, since "long ranger" is a term that has come to refer to a particular group of historical linguists that Edward Vajda definitely does not belong to. Newspaper headlines, main and sub-, are not provided by the writers of the articles that they introduce, but rather by editors who typically know little or nothing about the subject under discussion. (A cross-reference to the standards of intellectual sausage-making is appropriate at this point.)

(2) "Mark Peters on Eggcorns", Good Magazine, 4/12/2008:

So next time you see an eggcorn, don’t curse the heavens. Refrain from removing your eyeballs with a spork. Please don’t start a blog about kids these days and how they’re spilling Red Bull all over our nice dictionaries. These mind-bottling, jar-dropping mistakes show people are smart—not stupid—and this process of the masses’ getting it wrong until it becomes right is common, ongoing, and unstoppable.

[Update — Mark Young writes:

The Globe and Mail article you mentioned in this morning's LL has had its sub-head changed. Someone at the G&M reads LL? Or maybe someone else noticed the same thing you did….

]

From John McIntyre at the Baltimore Sun ("With friends like this", 4/14/2008):

Editors are inherently prescriptivist, because we’re employed to make judgments about what is most appropriate for publication, audience and context — and to get out of the way of elegance. Descriptivists, like the doughty linguists at Language Log, range over all written and spoken language, formal and informal, standard and nonstandard, to turn their findings into scholarship. (That’s the grand thing about an academic discipline: Once you own a grinder, you can turn anything into sausage.)

Thanks, John… I think.