Language Log

Absence from the Water Cooler

Eric hasn't quite figured out the way things work here at Language Log. He was wondering why he couldn't find any of the senior staff around the water cooler. The answer is, we only go there to gossip. Unlike the junior staff, who actually use it to get a drink, our spacious offices are equipped with bars. Who needs a water cooler when you've got spring water and single malt scotch?

The Origin of Speeches: Wrathful Dispersion for real?

Following up on "The comparative theology of linguistic diversity" (12/31/2007), Tracy Walsh has written to draw my attention to Isaac E. Mozeson, "The Origin of Speeches: Intelligent Design in Language". This book is apparently not a joke. The description on amazon.com's web site reads:

The Origin of Speeches begins by recapping the history of our views about the source of language. It then debunks the errors that infuse your dictionary, like those about how words in "unrelated" languages could only have identical sound and sense by "coincidence." It does so with both quality and quantity of data. The next chapters give anyone the skills to sleuth out the Edenic origin of any human word. One learns about letters that shift in sound and location, and letters that drop in and drop out. We discover how Edenics works much like other natural sciences, such as chemistry and physics. Like-sounding opposite words were certainly programmed, not pragmatically evolved.

According to the review by Richard D. Wilkins, "Examples are provided here in copious detail; many hundreds more English words and foreign cognates can be explored in the companion E-Word CD Dictionary." There's an Edenics website:

Here you will discover that ALL human words contain forms of the Edenic roots within them. These proto-Semitic or early Biblical Hebrew words were programmed into our common ancestors, Adam and Eve, before the language dispersion, or babble at the Tower of Babel -- which kickstarted multi-national human history.

In the Edenics FAQ, Mozeson claims (improbably) that "Since the 1990s M.I.T. Professor Noam Chomsky was behind attacks on The Word in academic journals, and even forced the editor of a chain of Midwest Jewish newspapers, The National Jewish Post & Opinion, to drop an Edenics column. Amazingly, this world-class linguist and anarchist had to write a negative review for Amazon.com where he put absurd words in my mouth."

Mozeson is also the author of "The Word: The Dictionary that Reveals the Hebrew Sources of English".

His theory seems to be that God was a sort of weak cryptographer, who didn't actually create any new languages after Babel, but simply mixed up the old ones ("letters that shift in sound and location, and letters that drop in and out") in ways that Mozeson has figured out how to decrypt.

This strikes me as crank etymology with a religious overlay, rather than a serious attempt at rationalizing the linguistic aspects of Genesis.

[Update -- Rosie Redfield writes:

The biological equivalent of Edenics is Baraminology - phylogenetic analysis of the evolution that's assumed to have happened since Noah's Ark. Wikipedia has the details.

It seems to me that Baraminology is closer to this. ]

[Update #2 -- John Brewer writes:

no discussion of the intersection between historical linguistics and Biblical study should be considered complete without a mention of the legendary 17th century or thereabouts scholar who determined that Eden was at least tri-lingual, with God speaking Swedish, Adam speaking Danish, and the serpent speaking French. Googling seems to attribute this to someone named Andreas Kemke. (I remember the theory, but not the name of the theorist, from my undergraduate days in the pre-Google 80's.) LL seems not to have referred to it previously (assuming I'm working the search feature correctly), but Sally Thomason discussed the Kemke Hypothesis in a 1994 post to something called Darwin-L.

I am particularly intrigued by the Wrathful Dispersion Theory because the scriptural account of Babel seems to be pretty much the only thing in Genesis prior to the birth of Abraham which does not appear to be in irreconcilable tension with the consensus of modern secular science (at least if you don't get hung up on the dating of the event, which of course may vary depending on which textual tradition for Genesis you think is authoritative). Not that the plain-of-Shinar account has been confirmed; rather the ultimate relationship, if any, between Proto-Indo-European and, say, Proto-Na-Dene remains at least as unexplained as the origin of language in the first place. It's not clear whether this is because historical linguistics hasn't achieved very much compared to geology, biology, astronomy etc etc etc or because its practitioners are more modest and thus more willing to 'fess up that they don't have sufficient data to answer certain very interesting questions and may never get to the point of being able to answer them.

By the way, there is a certain Christian tradition of understanding the gift of tongues recorded in Acts as a specific reversal of the unfortunate results of Wrathful Dispersion, which can be seen in some of the Eastern Orthodox hymns used on Pentecost Sunday, such as the konkation which begins (in one English translation) "When the Most High came down and confused the tongues, He divided the nations, but when He distributed the tongues of fire, He called all to unity."

Happy New Year!

And Faith Jones writes:

Isaac Mozeson reminds me of Izzy Cohen. This guy shows up on all kinds of listservs promoting the idea that idioms are based on mis-hearings of the Hebrew Bible, a string of Hebrew words, or in a pinch Aramaic ones. Who exactly is supposed to have mis-heard someone speaking Biblical Hebrew and assimilated these expressions into modern English--presumably a time-traveller of some kind--is not explained.

Here are some places where he expounds his theory. Google "Izzy Cohen idioms" to get lots more. Very good for a laugh.
http://www.musicalenglishlessons.org/contributors/izzycohen-idioms.htm
http://anned.tblog.com/post/24511

I worked for a number of years as a Judaica librarian, and it was my observation that many people felt the need to promote Hebrew and/or Aramaic as a source for pretty much any language. This mania was certainly found among the highly religious, but many moderately observant Jews latched on to the language issue as well. It seemed to me at times the religious fervour they couldn't work up for the theology they invested instead in linguistics. This perhaps made them feel that the basis of their belief was scientific rather than superstitious. In the event it seems to amount to the same thing.

]

Another Perspective on English-Only

Over the past fifteen years there has been a large influx of Chinese immigrants into the Vancouver area, so large that the impact is quite noticeable. People comment that half the students at the University of British Columbia seem to be oriental. The most common family name in the Vancouver area is now Lee 李 (also Korean), followed by Wong 王, with Smith in third place. Chan 陳 is fourth. Chinese are now the largest ethnic group in a number of areas, and in many areas most of the stores have signs in Chinese. One such area is Richmond, the suburb near the airport, where over 30% of the population is Chinese-speaking. In Richmond, all of the top ten family names are Chinese.

Not surprisingly this has caused grousing by some of the Euro-Canadian population, especially Anglo-Canadians. The biggest complaint seems to be signage in Chinese, which they can't read and which gives the area a saliently East Asian character.

A while back I was visiting a Native (that is "American Indian") friend and we went to a computer and electronics shop in Richmond. Like other stores in the area, most of the signs were in Chinese and the staff were Chinese. We got to talking about the increased Chinese presence and the unhappiness it had caused in some quarters. He said:

I don't know who these white people are to be complaining. As far as I'm concerned, they're all illegal immigrants. But if I have to choose, I prefer the Chinese.

Camp language

A few days ago, I described some of the linguistic and ethnic background of the current situation in Pakistan ("Language in Pakistan", 12/28/2007). The key point: the national language of Pakistan, Urdu, is now the native language of only about 7% of the population. It was imposed at the time of the 1947 partition of British India, by the leaders of the All-India Muslim League who established the new country of Pakistan. At the time, Urdu was mainly spoken by Muslims living in what is now India, several million of whom moved to Pakistan during the upheavals that displayed some 20 million people in both directions across the new borders. The decision to impose Urdu led directly to the secession of East Pakistan (as Bangladesh) in 1971, and caused almost as much unrest in Sindh.

This post gives some historical background on the development of Urdu during the previous four centuries.

The OED on Urdu:

A. n. Formerly, = HINDUSTANI n. 2; in recent use distinguished from Hindustani (the lingua franca) and designated as the official language of Pakistan.

1813 J. SHAKESPEAR Gram. Hindustani Lang. 1 The dialect most generally used in India, especially among the Muhammadan inhabitants,..is called Urdū (camp) or Urdū zabān (camp-language). 1847 W. YATES Hindustani Dict. Pref., The Hindustaní or Urdú is peculiarly the language of the Muhammadan population of Hindústán. 1872 BEAMES Comp. Gram. Aryan Lang. I. 39 By a curious caprice, Hindi, when it uses Arabic words, is assumed to become a new language, and is called by a new name -- Urdu.

The entry for Hindustani:

2. The language of the Muslim conquerors of Hindustan, being a form of Hindi with a large admixture of Arabic, Persian, and other foreign elements; also called Urdū , i.e. zabān-i-urdū language of the camp, sc. of the Mogul conquerors. It later became a kind of lingua franca over all India, varying greatly in its vocabulary according to the locality and local language.
Formerly called Indostan, Indostans (cf. Scots). By earlier writers sometimes applied to Hindi itself.

Under whatever name, Urdu came into existence in the 16th and 17th centuries, as a lingua franca spoken in the polyglot armies, courts and administrations of the Mughal conquerors, who (though nominally derived from earlier Mongol invaders) were basically persianized turks from Central Asia. The name Urdu comes from a turkic word meaning "tent" or "army", which is also the source of English horde. The OED's etymology for horde:

[Ultimately ad. Turkī ordā, also ordī, ordū, urdū camp (see URDU), whence Russ. ordá horde, clan, crowd, troop, Pol. horda, Ger., Da. horde, Sw. hord, It. orda, Sp., Pr. horda, F. horde (1559 in Hatz.-Darm.). The initial h appears in Polish, and thence in the Western European languages. The various forms horda, horde, hord were due to the various channels through which the word came into Eng.]

And for Urdu:

[a. Hindustani (Pers.) urdū camp (ad. Turkī ordu, etc.: see HORDE n.), ellipt. for zabān-i-urdū ‘language of the camp’.]

The official language of the Mughal court and administration was Persian, with Arabic as the language of the conquerors' religion. However, the native language of the region was a dialect whose standard forms came to be known as Urdu or Hindi, depending on whether it was written with characters derived from Arabic or Sanskritic models. As Bob King puts it ("The poisonous potency of script: Hindi and Urdu", International Journal of the Sociology of Language 150:43-49, 2001):

Sanskrit diversified regionally into the languages known as the Prakrits, from which the major languages of northern and central India derive: Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, and Oriya, as well as Hindi and Urdu. Both Hindi and Urdu evolved from Khari Boli, a branch of Western Hindi (Madhyadeshi) spoken in the region of northern India known as Haryana, which includes the present-day capital of India, Delhi.

King describes the early historical and social context of Urdu:

Arab traders began traveling to India as early as the seventh century C.E. The riches and stories they returned with whetted the appetites of the more adventurous of their coreligionists, and by the tenth century Turko-Afghan Muslims were regularly invading northwest India in search of plunder and converts. By the thirteenth century Muslims were in control of most of northern India, and three centuries later the (Muslim) Mughal dynasty ruled with an iron hand all of north India down well into the Deccan (the Deccan plateau cuts a swath from west to east through central India). The impact of Mughal rule, its greatest emperor Akbar (1542-1605) in particular, on the course of Indian history and on all aspects of Indian culture was enormous -- and fateful.

Part of the historic legacy of that impact was linguistic and graphemic. Urdu arose as the everyday language of the Mughal Empire, whose official and administrative language was Persian. Urdu was the language of the princely courts such as Delhi and Lucknow. The designation "Urdu'' is not found until 1752, when the poet Mir gave it the name Urdu-e-Mu'alla 'courtly language' (Dittmer 1972: 48). The word "Urdu'' is of Turkish origin (ordu) and originally meant 'camp'. Thus Urdu arose essentially as "the language of the (army) camp.'' Because of its Mughal and therefore Islamic provenance Urdu had by 1600 C.E. diverged from its Hindi origins through extensive absorption of Persian and Arabic linguistic material: loan words, syntactic turns of phrase, a handful of phonemes borrowed from Persian, a certain precious "courtly style,'' a Persian cast to poetry and song. The ghazal, for example, a genre of song much admired in India by Hindus and Muslims alike, is Persian in origin.

It must be remembered that from roughly 1400 C.E. onward Persia was to those countries in its cultural orbit what France was to Europe during the reign of Louis XIV, and for a long time afterward. Persian ways set the tone in the ruling courts of Turkey, Afghanistan, and northern India. Persian culture and cuisine were highly valued. The Persian language was the language of diplomacy, of treaties, of art and beauty, of song, of love. Even after the British had assumed control of most of India, moving into a political vacuum created by the shrinking of the Mughal dynasty, they continued the use of Persian as the language of administrative records until the 1830s, when English became the official language of the Raj. The Persian language maintained a "high'' function in Indian Muslim life long after it had ceased to be anybody's first spoken language there. A favorite diversion -- opium was another -- of the last Nizam of Hyderabad, a Muslim-ruled enclave in the Deccan, whose reign was ended in 1948, was composing quatrains in the Persian language. His native language was of course Urdu.

In this context, an important Urdu literary tradition, based on Persian and Arabic models, developed in the 18th and 19th centuries. This took place at the same time as the British take-over of the subcontinent, and there came to be a significant connection between the British administration and the cultural development and spread of Urdu. King explains that

The British had introduced Urdu in the Perso-Arabic script as the language of the courts and administration in the Northwestern Provinces after the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, and Urdu was mandated as the language of the Indian army in 1864. British officials were in agreement that Urdu or, as they had begun to call it, Hindustani should become the lingua franca of all India, at least of north India.

This seems to have led to a paradoxical situation, in which the Muslim elites were simultaneously more pro-British and more anti-English (language) than their Hindu counterparts. According to R. Powell, "Language Planning and the British Empire"

In the early 19th century the Hindu elites, who had been something of an under-class in the Mughal Empire, favoured English more than the Muslims, but wanted Hindi recognised to the extent that Urdu was. While Shah Abdul Aziz was describing English education as something 'abhorrent’ and 'improper’ for Muslims, the Calcutta bourgeoisie were organising the Hindu College (opened 1816) so that their own elite could acquire English language and literature and European science.

Later in the 19th century, Syed Ahmed Khan founded the Muhammedan Anglo-Oriental College, which became Aligarh Muslim University. According to his wikipedia entry,

... Sir Syed was suspicious of the Indian independence movement and called upon Muslims to loyally serve the British Raj. He denounced nationalist organisations such as the Indian National Congress, instead forming organisations to promote Muslim unity and pro-British attitudes and activities. Sir Syed promoted the adoption of Urdu as the lingua franca of all Indian Muslims, and mentored a rising generation of Muslim politicians and intellectuals.

One of his protégés was Maulvi Abdul Haq, known as Baba-i-Urdu ("father of Urdu"). From wikipedia:

Following the establishment of the Osmania University by the Nizam Osman Ali Khan, Asif Jah VII of the Hyderabad State in 1917, Haq moved to Hyderabad to teach and help build the university. All subjects at the university were taught in Urdu, and under Haq's influence the institution became a patron of Urdu and Persian literature and linguistic heritage. ... in 1930 Haq led the group in protest against a campaign by Indian nationalists to promote the use of Hindi as the national language of India. Haq became a fierce critic of Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, the largest political party in the nation. Suspicious and averse to the Congress and the Indian independence movement, in which Hindus composed a majority of leaders and participants, Haq joined the All India Muslim League led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

After partition in 1947, Haq moved to Karachi as one of the millions of Urdu-speaking muhajirs ("settlers"), and

... re-organised the Anjuman Taraqqi-e-Urdu ..., launching journals, establishing libraries and schools, publishing a large number of books and promoting Urdu education and linguistic research. ... Haq also used his organisation for political activism, promoting the adoption of Urdu as the lingua franca and sole official language of Pakistan. He criticised the popular movement that had arisen in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to demand the recognition of Bengali, stressing his belief that only Urdu represented Muslim heritage and should be promoted exclusively in national life. Condemning the 1952 Language movement agitations in East Pakistan, Haq was infuriated by the decision of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan to make Bengali a second official language.

More later, on the differences between Hindi and Urdu, and on the problems that Urdu apparently poses for literacy in Pakistan.

[For an interesting analysis of the political background,(before Benazir Bhutto's assassination) from the perspective of one of "the Urdu-speaking descendents of immigrants from India", see Salim Chauhan, "With or Without Musharraf -- A Mohajir's Perspective", 4/11/2007. His bitter comments about the "sons of the soil" are (I guess) directed at the feudal landowners who are still a dominant power in Pakistan -- as William Dalrymple wrote recently ("Pakistan's flawed and feudal princess", 12/30/2007):

Real democracy has never thrived in Pakistan, in part because landowning remains the principal social base from which politicians emerge.

The educated middle class is in Pakistan still largely excluded from the political process. As a result, in many of the more backward parts of Pakistan, the feudal landowner expects his people to vote for his chosen candidate. As writer Ahmed Rashid put it: 'In some constituencies, if the feudals put up their dog as a candidate, that dog would get elected with 99 per cent of the vote.'

And Chahan's mention of "[t]he Urdu-speaking collaborators, left at the mercy of the victorious Mukhti Bahini, ... 'stranded' in a hostile country and shamelessly abandoned by the very country which they supported" is a reference to the 600,000 or so Urdu-speaking ethnic Biharis who have been stranded as officially stateless refugees in Bangladesh since 1971, one of the many deeply depressing aspects of this region's recent history.]

Bab-El in the Book of Mormon

To follow up on Mark's discussion of the story of the tower of Bab-El, I had a look at the Book of Mormon, which turns out to mention the story in passing in several places.

Omni 1:22

It also spake a few words concerning his fathers. And his first parents came out from the tower, at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people; and the severity of the Lord fell upon them according to his judgments, which are just; and their bones lay scattered in the land northward.

Mosiah 28:17

Now after Mosiah had finished translating these records, behold, it gave an account of the people who were destroyed, from the time that they were destroyed back to the building of the great tower, at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people and they were scattered abroad upon the face of all the earth, yea, and even from that time back until the creation of Adam.

Perhaps the most interesting part is the bit in the Book of Ether which mentions that the language of certain people was not "confounded", which presumably means that these people were allowed to retain the language that they had hitherto spoken.

Ether 1:33-37

Which Jared came forth with his brother and their families, with some others and their families, from the great tower, at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people, and swore in his wrath that they should be scattered upon all the face of the earth; and according to the word of the Lord the people were scattered.

And the brother of Jared being a large and mighty man, and a man highly favored of the Lord, Jared, his brother, said unto him: Cry unto the Lord, that he will not confound us that we may not understand our words.

And it came to pass that the brother of Jared did cry unto the Lord, and the Lord had compassion upon Jared; therefore he did not confound the language of Jared; and Jared and his brother were not confounded.

Then Jared said unto his brother: Cry again unto the Lord, and it may be that he will turn away his anger from them who are our friends, that he confound not their language.

And it came to pass that the brother of Jared did cry unto the Lord, and the Lord had compassion upon their friends and their families also, that they were not confounded.

There is also a reference to a language having become "corrupted", which presumably describes language change:

Omni 1:17

And at the time that Mosiah discovered them, they had become exceedingly numerous. Nevertheless, they had had many wars and serious contentions, and had fallen by the sword from time to time; and their language had become corrupted; and they had brought no records with them; and they denied the being of their Creator; and Mosiah, nor the people of Mosiah, could understand them.

Proxy debates

Speaking (a tad belatedly) of English-only insanity (of the non-parodic kind), y'all might want to take a look at the mass of comments on my "Speak xkcd or die" from earlier this month (Dec. 6). I believe this is the most commentary I've ever gotten on a post (35 so far, several in just the past week or so). Almost certainly, many of these comments are the longest ever for one of my posts. And no doubt, several of these comments contain some very virulent vitriol (sorry, couldn't resist the alliteration). People really seem to care about this national language business, and folks like Fred Thompson are speaking right to them.

I haven't censored any of the comments, and so far I have also resisted any temptation to jump in and respond to any of them. Like the comic that was the subject of the post, I think each comment speaks for itself. But I will add here one overall response, a quote from Sally Johnson's excellent 2001 Journal of Sociolinguistics article ("Who's misunderstanding whom? Sociolinguistics, public debate and the media"), which I found via American English: Dialects and Variation (by Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes; see p. 212).

"It is not language per se, but its power to function as a 'proxy' for wider social issues which fans the flames of public disputes over language." (Johnson 2001, p. 599)

[ Comments? ]

Mailbag: the comparative theology of linguistic diversity

Following up on yesterday's post "The science and theology of global language change", Cosma Shalizi writes:

I cannot, to my shame, recall whether the Qu'ran includes a version of the Babel story, but there is a famous passage where it seems to look favorably on this sort of diversity (49:13, Pickthall trans.):

O mankind! Lo! We have created you male and female, and have made you nations and tribes that ye may know one another. Lo! the noblest of you, in the sight of Allah, is the best in conduct. Lo! Allah is Knower, Aware.

Similar 30:22,

And of His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the difference of your languages and colours. Lo! herein indeed are portents for men of knowledge.

Arguably 11:118 is to a similar vein,

And if thy Lord had willed, He verily would have made mankind one nation, yet they cease not differing.

(Pickthall was an English convert, and self-consciously tried to make his translation sound like the King James Bible, which I find dubious but it's public domain now.)
See http://bostonreview.net/BR28.2/abou.html more generally.

I wonder, have these verses ever been used as the basis for language documentation, preservation or revival?

With respect to the Babel story, a bit of web searching turns up two koranic references to an unnamed impious tower, involving Pharaoh and Haman but not linguistic diversity. Sticking with the Pickthall translation:

28:38 And Pharaoh said: O chiefs! I know not that ye have a god other than me, so kindle for me (a fire), O Haman, to bake the mud; and set up for me a lofty tower in order that I may survey the god of Moses; and lo! I deem him of the liars.

40:36 And Pharaoh said: O Haman! Build for me a tower that haply I may reach the roads,
40:37: The roads of the heavens, and may look upon the god of Moses, though verily I think him a liar. Thus was the evil that he did made fairseeming unto Pharaoh, and he was debarred from the (right) way. The plot of Pharaoh ended but in ruin.

Marc van Oostendorp writes:

Obviously, the most famous story about linguistic diversity in the Bible is Genesis 11. But there was linguistic diversity even before they built the tower. Genesis 10 lists the children of Noah after the flood, and where they went to live. Gen 10:5 then says that they went there 'each with their own tongue, according to their clans in their nations'. I once read about a theological debate about this apparent inconsistency, but I don't remember what the outcome of this debate was.

For those people who believe in the New Testament, there obviously also is the story of Pentacost, when Jesus' disciples start speaking in tongues, and this is considered to be a gift of God.

David Eddyshaw writes:

I'm probably one of a rather small proportion of LL readers who actually *is* a Biblical inerrantist.

I can't see myself why believing the Babel story would entail denying subsequent changes in language. I haven't ever heard of anybody who did make this deduction, though I don't doubt there are some out there. (I know a really excellent surgeon, who is highly intelligent and incidentally one of the nicest people I've ever worked with, who believes that Heaven is a cube, based on a totally literal interpretation of the book of Revelation which I would have thought would have astonished the author of the book).

Come to that, as a Brit, I may well not be very like a typical American inerrantist. When I lived in Nigeria I used to know quite a lot of missionaries from the US, and found that in their terms I often counted as a dodgy liberal theologically (I appreciated the thrill).

FWIW there are quite a number of different attitudes to the Bible held by people all of whom would sincerely describe themselves as inerrantists. It's not always clear a priori what "counts" as an error, so denying their presence can amount to rather different things in practice. Evidently- parallel passages in Kings and Chronicles, for example, have (very) different numbers for sizes of armies; unless you magic away all such instances as convenient textual corruption, you have to accept that there are errors ("errors"?) which don't matter. In the UK at any rate, I've yet to meet anybody who truly maintained the contrary.

In practice, I've found that most people happily apply labels like "inerrantist" to themselves and blithely leave worrying about the details to theological geeks. It's a pretty standard trope in sermons that pretty few of us who claim to believe in Biblical inerrancy are all that familiar with the actual book in any detail. But mutatis mutandis, that applies to pretty much everybody outside their own areas of geekitude, I suppose.

Well, there's the same Occam's Razor argument as in the case of biological evolution -- some may find it odd to suppose that diversity (of languages or of species) is of two kinds, one natural and the other miraculous. If natural processes can create some languages and species, why not all? I guess that there's no problem here for those who think that the world mostly runs on naturalistic principles, with occasional divine interventions ad libitum.

Bill Poser writes:

M____ R_________ [someone who was in grad school with Bill] experienced a problem with the story of Bab-el when we were students. The orthodox believe that Hebrew was the first language. (God knows all languages, but the angels know only Hebrew, which puts paid to that Joan of Arc nonsense...) It seemed to her that the arguments for a relationship between Hebrew and Arabic were sound, but she wasn't sure that this view was consistent with the Torah: if Hebrew is the first language and existed prior to the sundering of languages at Bab-el, and if Arabic is one of the many languages resulting from the sundering, could there be a relationship between them? She was going to ask her tzadek. I don't know what answer he gave.

George Corley writes:

Reading your post Science and Theology of Language, I was reminded of a passing mention of linguistics buried in the Creation Museum -- which was recently built by Answers in Genesis to present archaeological evidence in the framework of the Biblical creation myth. The museum itself includes pseudoscientific explanations for everything from carnivorous animals to the disappearance of the dinosaurs and in the framework of that mythos while explicitly rejecting "Human Reason" (actually stating such in several displays) in favor of "God's Word".

The relevant panel is here:

The section includes a radial diagram of language families with Babel at the center, with the text:

The Bible claims that God created a number of human languages at the Tower of Babel "according to their families." Nineteenth-century linguists argued that languages evolved slowly, one by one. Today linguists recognize languages fall into distinct "families" of recent origin.

I'm sure you can see the fallacies of the statement rather quickly. Notably, the phrase "according to their families" does not appear in the Babel myth, but rather comes from the wrap up to the Flood story, describing the origins of different peoples and languages as originating from Noah's three sons.

The Creation Museum is, of course, among the most extreme creationist organizations there are. I don't think there's any mention of the Babel theory among more moderate Christians.

Sally Thomason discussed the Creation Museum's linguistic theories last summer -- see "Creationist Linguistics", 8/1/2007. As she suggests, the panel's theory seems to be that all the distinct language families -- between whom no relationship can be proved, due to the inevitable decay of evidence with time -- originated at the babelian dispersion, with further subdivision by natural evolutionary processes since then. This seems analogous to the view that some taxonomic level of plants and animals (genera? famlies? kingdoms?) was created by the intelligent designer, with finer distinctions evolving by darwinian means. I guess that creationists do believe something of the sort, though perhaps it's that the species level was created, with subspecific variation evolving by natural processes.

[Update: Matthew Watson has drawn my attention to this discussion, which basically confirms in a more detailed way the theory that "each distinct language family is the offshoot of an original Babel 'stem language' which did not arise by change from a previous ancestral language".]

Blameless

Mark Liberman and I have gone one round on blame Y on X, thanks to the 1915 Funk & Wagnalls Faulty Diction booklet, which categorically rejects the usage.  Through the mediation of MWDEU we were led to the apparent source of the peeve, Alfred Ayres's 1881 book The Verbalist, and now we're into meta-matters -- not so much about the syntax of blame, but about the advice literature on it.


1. Why this antipathy to innovation?  I'm only going to scratch the surface here (see note below on the placement of only), and very briefly, but at least eight attitudes and beliefs might contribute to this antipathy.

[Note: please don't write me about how only is "misplaced" here, because it should be right next to the thing it modifies, scratch the surface.  I mean, think about it: putting only right next to scratch the surface gives you going to only scratch the surface, which is a split infinitive even I am uncomfortable with, and locating the only before to scratch the surface interrupts the very tight idiom of prospective be going to -- going only to scratch the surface, ugh -- so only going to scratch the surface is by far the best version.  In any case, I'm not at all set against "high" placement of only and even (preceding a VP that contains the modified constituent), as in I only saw one dog 'I saw only one dog'.]


[Note: "Alfred Ayres" is a pseudonym used by Thomas Embly Osmun, described in his 1902 NYT obituary as an "elocutionist and critic of dramatic expression".   With Richard Grant White, one of the great American grammar/usage ranters of the 19th century.]

2. Why innovate?  And why tolerate alternatives?  There's something a bit off-center in all of the attitudes and beliefs above, but here I'll look at just a few, beginning with the question of why people don't just leave the language alone, why people innovate.  Why don't they just preserve older forms, as in (5) above?

One part of the answer is that people are always trying to find ways to express what they want, and they're willing to stretch things a bit for their purposes.  Everyday conversation is full of language play of all kinds, novel figures of speech (metaphors and metonymies), other extensions of meaning, extensions of syntactic patterns, exploitations of implicature, intrusions from other varieties, and more more.  So is more elevated speech and writing.  Everybody innovates, all the time.  And that's a good thing.  (Of course, people also use a lot of expressions as wholes, formulas, and prepackaged routines.)

Another part of the answer is that people can't possibly know what the language as a whole is like, so that in an important sense much of the time they won't know whether they're innovating or just using existing patterns.  After all, people say lots of things they've never heard before, or don't recall having heard before.  If there's some backing for a usage, then go for it!

But on to specifics: diathesis alternations in English involving direct objects (DOs) and another complement.  Diathesis alternations are alternative distributions of syntactic arguments of heads (I'll stick to verbs here), where arguably the "same" head -- that is, a head with the same semantics, phonology, and morphology -- occurs with different sets of syntactic arguments:

Standard English has many patterns of diathesis alternations for verbs (Beth Levin's English Verb Classes and Alternations is a significant beginning of an inventory of them), including a number in which SU remains constant but DO can be switched with PO (prepositional object), among them:


(Please don't write me to tell me about more types -- these are merely illustrative -- or about further details of these types.  The literature on diathesis alternations is staggeringly huge, even just for English, even just for some of the types, like the dative alternations.)

I have to stress here that these alternations are entirely standard in modern English and have been so for some time.  The point is that speakers of English have every right to assume that there can be different ways of "saying the same thing" via different deployments of DO and PO.

But of course -- contra (2) -- these are not quite ways of saying the same thing.  The truth conditions for the alternatives might (or might not -- there are disputes about particular cases) be the same, but the alternatives are not otherwise equivalent; in particular, they do different things in discourses.  This is not just pointless elaboration (cf. (1)).  In contrast to the assumption in (2) that variation is (except perhaps for style) free, I've repeatedly argued that variation is typically unfree: there are contexts in which the alternatives do different things (even if they're mostly interchangeable) -- a moderated version of Dwight Bolinger's position that there is no formal difference without a semantic difference.  (Some discussion here, here, here, here.)

In all of the DO alternations, including the blame case, there's a difference in the status of the DO, versus PO or 2O: it's closely associated syntactically with the V, leading to the expectation that its referent is in some way "focussed on" or foregrounded; and it precedes the other (PO or 2O) argument, leading to the expectation that its referent is a given rather than a new item in the discourse (old before new).  In addition, the linear order favors short NPs (especially pronouns) as DO, as againt longer NPs, which are preferable in later constituents (shorter before longer): Blame it on Canada works better than Blame Canada for it, for instance.

All of these effects, and others I haven't mentioned here, are familiar from the literature on diathesis alternations involving DOs and other non-subject arguments of a V.  Put them together with the existence of blame X for Y, and you have a formula for the innovation of blame Y P X, for some preposition P.  It would be a way of promoting the resultant/caused situation NP to the position of prominence/givenness immediately after the V, and postponing the source/cause NP (usually, but not necessarily, referring to a human being) until later in the VP:

The only question is what P to choose.  Here, Faulty Diction alludes to a possible source for the P:


That is, the idiom family


supplies a model with a candidate P, namely on (earlier upon).

And so it was.  The innovative construction blame Y on X supplies a result/caused situation DO to go along with a source/cause PO, and another construction with similar meaning provides the P on.  It's hard to believe that speakers at the time batted an eyelash over the innovation -- it would have been easily comprehensible, and in fact most people probably wouldn't have recognized it as something they hadn't heard before -- which means that it was able to spread quickly, simply because it was a Good Thing, because it does useful work communicatively. 

(Why it didn't arise earlier is a knotty question, the answer to which is likely to be: sunspots.  Lots of changes are likely to happen, for language-internal reasons, and they do happen, with modest frequency here and there, but only a few catch on -- because the planets are properly aligned, or whatever.)

More generally: most innovations have a communicative rationale -- not necessarily the same one as in the blame example -- and are not just pointless elaborations. 

Yes, I know, some lexical innovations have primarily a social rationale, as when new items mark off the social groups that use them or establish personas for particular speakers in context.  And I know that the spread of variants runs significantly along social lines (I am, after all, some kind of sociolinguist), but I'd also like to point out that a great many variants are out there just because they're good to go.

3. A few brief remarks, on things I'm flagging for possible posting on a later occasion.

3.1. Innovations as threat.  Although neither Ayres nor Faulty Diction makes this explicit for blame on, innovations are routinely seen as threatening to the older variants ((6) above).  If you see alternants as free variants ((2) above), then they're in competition, and the newcomer is a threat to the oldtimer.  (Indeed, there are a fair number of well-known cases where innovative variants have in fact supplanted older ones.)

But when the alternants are differentiated in use, stable variation can result.  This seems to be the situation for blame on, which has co-existed with blame for for at least 125 years.

3.2. The class issue.  Ayres on blame on: "a gross vulgarism, which we sometimes hear from persons of considerable culture".  Faulty Diction: "indefensible slang".  There are several things to unpack here, starting with the assumption that blame on originated "from below" ((7) above), in the vulgar mob, the users of slang, and therefore is to be rejected on that basis alone ((3) above).  No source I've seen provides evidence for this claim -- I assume that it's the result not of observation, but of reasoning from first principles, in particular from the assumption that innovations GENERALLY originate from below -- and I suspect that it might be false.  Innovations that provide communicatively useful variants, as blame on does, could in principle originate with speakers of any sort.  The fact that Ayres in 1881 was already hearing the innovative variant in "persons of considerable culture" suggests that it might have originated among such speakers (and, quite likely, independently among speakers of other sorts as well).

3.3. The education/culture issue.  Why should usage advisers assume that innovations generally originate from below?  Probably because they take innovation to be the result of ignorance ((8) above); the innovators don't know better (they should look it up!).  Educated and cultured people, on the other hand, are assumed to be able to differentiate novelties from established forms, and to know the norms that are recommended in the advice literature.  That is, the assumption is that education and cultural refinement provide a kind of synoptic knowledge of linguistic variants and their social values.  This is, on the face of it, a preposterous idea -- not even scholars of variation have such comprehensive knowledge -- but there it is.

3.4. Fashions in peeves.  The peeves that make their way into the advice literature are not an even sampling of (what are judged to be) "lower" variants (non-standard, informal, primarily spoken, geographically or socially restricted) -- I am constantly coming across such variants that get no, or very little, press from usage advisers -- nor are the variants that get the most press and excite the most passionate criticism necessarily of much, or even any, significance on rational grounds.  There are fashions in peeves, some of which persist more than a century.  (Some are extraordinary.  I have a posting in preparation about one of them, which I'm nominating for a Peevy Award for Lifetime Achievement.  But blame on is certainly a contender for the award.)  As Mark noted in his posting,

and concludes with a wonderfully pointed critique, worth repeating here:

What in the fudge?

It's Bring a Friend to Work Weekend (BaFtWWe) here at Language Log Plaza, and I decided to bring two friends, my UCSD colleagues Andy Kehler and Roger Levy. They've both been dying to meet some of the senior writing staff, but nobody seems to be around. (Funny, since it was a couple of members of the senior staff who told me about BaFtWWe in the first place. Hmm.) Anyway, while I was running around trying to find Mark, Arnold, either of the Geoffs, Bill, Sally, Roger, or anyone at all really, I left Andy and Roger by the water cooler, which we've recently equipped with a recording device in order to capture the unique conversations that so often take place there. Here's an expurgated transcript of Andy and Roger's conversation which I thought Language Log readers might enjoy.

Andy:	I just saw this headline on the FoxNews website. Woman whose diamond ring vanished while she made fudge for bake sale turns up inside piece of the candy she sold This can only mean that the woman showed up inside the candy, and not the ring, right? Yeesh.
Roger:	According to Whitney Tabor it can also mean the bake sale turned up inside the candy...
Andy:	That's pretty funny. Somehow that parse didn't jump out at me as much as it does in the "the coach smiled at the player tossed the frisbee" cases. (notices the recording device; leans in) (Background if this is opaque to any of you: people read the above sentence more slowly than one in which "tossed" is replaced with "thrown", which, according to Whit Tabor, is because "the player tossed the frisbee" is an allowable sentence, even though an incremental parser should know it can't be one in this particular syntactic context.)

The relevant FoxNews story is here; the headline was on the FoxNews homepage at one point, as shown here.

[ Comments? ]

The science and theology of global language change

Some of our satirists need to go back to Sunday school. Dennis Baron writes ("U.N. proclaims 2008 the International Year of Language", 12/30/2007):

While the rest of the world lines up to support the U.N.’s International Languages Year, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Dr. Zalmay Khalilzad has announced that America’s participation remains problematic.  The Bush administration is claiming that languages were theories, not scientifically-proven facts, and the president himself recently affirmed his belief that God created English in just six days and promised to veto the use of federal funds to teach language evolution to impressionable children.

But surely those who believe in biblical inerrancy accept that the bible treats linguistic differences as facts, e.g.

Neh.13:24 And their children spake half in the speech of Ashdod, and could not speak in the Jews' language, but according to the language of each people.
Esth.1:22 For he sent letters into all the king's provinces, into every province according to the writing thereof, and to every people after their language, that every man should bear rule in his own house, and that it should be published according to the language of every people.
Pss.81:5 This he ordained in Joseph for a testimony, when he went out through the land of Egypt: where I heard a language that I understood not.
Isa.36:11 Then said Eliakim and Shebna and Joah unto Rabshakeh, Speak, I pray thee, unto thy servants in the Syrian language; for we understand it: and speak not to us in the Jews' language, in the ears of the people that are on the wall.
Jer.5:15 Lo, I will bring a nation upon you from far, O house of Israel, saith the LORD: it is a mighty nation, it is an ancient nation, a nation whose language thou knowest not, neither understandest what they say.
Ezek.3:6 Not to many people of a strange speech and of an hard language, whose words thou canst not understand. Surely, had I sent thee to them, they would have hearkened unto thee.

And most important, the world's different languages (presumably including English) were not part of the original six days of creation, but were ginned up much later, in Genesis 11:

[1] And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
[2] And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
[3] And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
[4] And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
[5] And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
[6] And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
[7] Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

The international movement to teach this history in the public schools is known as "Wrathful Dispersion Theory". Or, rather, it might be know by that name, if it existed -- the status of linguistic instruction in our schools is so anomalously low that no one has felt the need to create such a movement

This all leaves me uncertain what the theology of linguistic diversity might be, for those people to whom such things matter. On one hand, the creation of diverse languages was a punishment, not a reward or an example of divine bounty, so eliminating all the world's languages in favor of English might be seen as a good thing, restoring the world to a state closer to the creator's original plan. On the other hand, linguistic diversity is a divine punishment for human technological presumption, and who are we to interfere?

While we're on the subject, I've often wondered whether it's consistent with biblical inerrancy to believe that new languages (such as English) have continued to evolve after the Babelian dispersion? And if so...

In any case, it's lame to mock the fundamentalists without maintaining a modicum of biblical consistency.

One of Baron's digs at our current president did make me laugh, though I've never been a fan of the Bushisms industry in general:

Reacting to a New York Times report that Marvel Comics has just released a bilingual Fantastic Four comic book, the president also told reporters in a Rose Garden press briefing that the United States would not be a signatory to any multinational treaties attempting to reverse global language change. He urged everyone living in the United States to speak English, not Spanish, and, demonstrating his commitment to make English America’s official language, he resolved to begin learning English right away.

During George W. Bush's first term, I wrote to the folks at MoveOn.org to suggest that their name, coined in response to Republican exploitation of Bill Clinton's extramarital peccadillos, ought also to be applied to W's linguistic practices. But there are a few good Bush language jokes, just as there were a certain number of good Clinton sex jokes, and this is one of them.

You know

Matt Hutson writes:

My older sister used to be chastised by my parents for, like, saying "like" too much, when she was younger. Over Christmas, I realized how much she, you know, says "you know." I wonder if she simply replaced "like" with "you know" at some point many years ago. (She is an extrovert, by the way, perhaps hence not saying "I mean.")

Matt is following up on an earlier on-line conversation about personality, gender and filler phrases ("News flash: the biggest users of 'like totally' are middle-aged men", 8/18/2007; "I mean, you know", 8/19/2007 ).

I still don't know anything about possible correlations between personality types and choice of fillers; and I don't have anything helpful to say about possible trade-offs among fillers, though there's an interesting literature on functional similarities and differences in such phrases. But I can contribute a quick Breakfast Experiment™, based on LDC Online's collection of English Conversations, to show that there's general tendency for people to use "you know" somewhat more often in their middle years:

	Total conversational sides	Total uses of "you know"	Uses per side
20-39	5,356	58,364	10.9
40-59	19,920	278,099	14.0
60+	2,908	33,477	11.5

The age categories are pretty crude, and not optimized to find differences in any particular variable, so a 28% increase between the "20-39" and "40-59" categories is striking. If we took the time to break out the age effect without grouping into pre-defined bins, the magnitude would probably be even greater.

Of course, Matt is talking about perception of individual differences, which might be very far from the group norms. But what he perceives as his sister's filler-phase trajectory is qualitatively congruent with the overall generational pattern, at least as shown in this apparent-time snapshot.

Interestingly, the general tendency of older women to talk more like younger men (see "Young men talk like old women", 11/6/2005; "Busy tongues", 12/31/2006; "What men and women blog about", 7/8/2007) is confirmed again in this case:

Here are the counts in tabular form:

	Female			Male
	Total conversational sides	Total uses of "you know"	Uses per side	Total conversational sides	Total uses of "you know"	Uses per side
20-39	2,318	22,675	9.8	3,038	35,689	11.75
40-59	11,546	154,191	13.3	8,374	123,908	14.8
60-69	1,759	20,354	11.6	1,149	13,123	11.4

It seems to me that there's something going on here, in the effects of age and sex on linguistic variables, that's worth following up further. We've seen a similar general pattern in use of uh and um, where men use uh more than women, and older people use uh more than younger people, while men use um less than women, and older people use um less than younger people; in amount of talk, where males talk more than females, and older people talk more than younger people; in web-log vocabulary choice, where Schler et al. 2006 found that

Regardless of gender, writing style grows increasingly "male" with age ...

and now in the conversational frequency of you know.

This is reminiscent of the general tendency of the male/female opposition to line up sociolinguistically with informal/formal and lower-class/higher-class oppositions. For linguistic variables that are changing rapidly, we also expect to see male/female lining up with older/younger because women tend to lead most changes. However, it seems very unlikely that any of the variables discussed here are involved in such secular trends.

We might also connect this pattern with the general tendency in our culture, where feminine identity tends to be culturally marked (though biologically the default), and the degree of marking stereotypically decreases with age. But in the case of uh and um, the degree of gender differentiation seems to stay the same across age, although its effects change systematically in ways that see older women and younger men behaving similarly.

[Caveats: Other demographic variables (like education, and geographical region) are not necessarily balanced across sex and age classes in the data given above. And the differences by sex in number of you knows may be partly attributed to the small sex differences in word count per conversation -- see "Gabby guys: the effect size", 9/23/2006.

And as always, we're talking about modest group differences in overlapping distributions of individual characteristics, not qualitative differences in platonic archtypes -- though it remains difficult to find ways to talk and write that aren't misleading in this respect, and (perhaps therefore) deeply problematic for most of us to avoid sliding into conceptual confusion.]

Grape genetics versus ground characteristics

The Christmas double issue of my favorite magazine, The Economist, has enough bad puns in the headlines and subheads for the various features to fill a box of British traditional Christmas crackers. (They always contain a little slip of paper with a bad pun to read out to the assembled Yuletide company. "How does Santa Claus like his pizza? Deep pan, crisp and even!". And everyone groans to show that they know the words to "Good King Wenceslas".) The baddest subhead in the whole issue? A matter of taste; I'm sure "From mutiny to bounty" (over a story about ending staff discord and acquiring new resources at the World Bank) will appeal to some. But my vote goes to the translinguistic punning contents-page subhead for an article about the genetics of wine grapes. There is a dispute among theoretically-inclined wine experts, you see, somewhat akin to the division between nativists and empiricists in the matter of language acquisition. French winemakers tend to think that the special mix of soil and climate found in the particular territory where the vineyard is located — an environmental factor — is the key determinant of wine quality. But some heretics are saying that the innate characteristics of the grapes are overwhelmingly more important. Already they have mapped the genome of pinot noir. The Economist subhead: "The war on terroir." Everyone groan to show that you know French.

More on Malaysian Censorship

The Malaysian government has not backed down on its attempt to restrict the use of the term Allah to the Muslim god, so the Roman Catholic newspaper The Herald has filed suit against the government. The Sabah Evangelical Church of Borneo has filed its own suit against the government, which has blocked the importation of religious children's books containing the word.

English-Only Insanity on the Campaign Trail

Republican Presidential hopeful Fred Thompson provided a stunning example of the stupidity of the English-only movement during a campaign stop in Iowa a few days ago, noted by Ed Brayton over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. He assigned partial blame for the mortgage crisis to illegal immigrants, who, he alleges, get themselves into mortgages that they cannot afford because they lack sufficient knowledge of English to understand the terms, saying "A lot of them couldn't communicate with the people they were getting the mortgage from". He cited no evidence for this claim; to my knowledge there isn't any. Indeed, I wonder how many illegal immigrants are in a position to buy a home.

In the same exchange he agreed with a questioner that "it's sickening" that "everything is in Spanish" and said that English should be made the national language. That makes a lot of sense: if immigrants are causing problems through their lack of knowledge of English, make sure that they have even less opportunity to communicate by reducing the use of other languages. I like him better on Law and Order.

Update: Reader Nancy Jane Moore points to this report on how illegal immigrants are often good risks for mortgages.

The hectic pace of modern life

... and the resistance of some poets to writing hastily for a mass audience, as described in this passage:


When was this written?  And who are these poets?


The passage is from Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia of 1922, and the poets are Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, and Amy Lowell.  It's not clear to me what such a list would look like today, when there's a lot of poetry being written but not a very large audience for it.

Catherine Tate to bovver America

The American Dialect Society's vote for Word of the Year is fast approaching, bringing an end to the WOTY season here in the States. In the UK, a Word of the Year is selected annually by Susie Dent, word expert on the popular game show Countdown and author of The Language Report. This year her choice was footprint, as in carbon footprint. That's an eco-friendly word with international appeal, but last year's choice was a head-scratcher for most people outside of Britain: bovvered. Now LeftPondians will finally be enlightened about the source of this puzzling word, with the US premiere of "The Catherine Tate Show" on BBC America tonight. In the show's comedy sketches, Tate skillfully inhabits various personae, including the teenager Lauren Cooper, who responds to any inconvenience with her now-famous catchphrase, "Am I bovvered?"

As the New York Times review explains, fully appreciating the show often depends on "a nuanced sense of cultural distinctions, familiarity with the latest British slang, and the ability to understand it when it is uttered rapid-fire in Ms. Tate’s signature singsong style." Still, that shouldn't scare off American viewers, especially those curious about the state of British English today. As an appetizer, here are some video excerpts from the show that are particularly rich from a linguistic perspective.

Though Lauren is an expert at slinging her own idiosyncratic slang, she can get tripped up by a trendy Americanism:

In a reversal of expected conversational roles, Tony Blair turns the tables on Lauren:

Lauren ain't bovvered in French either:

And finally here's another of Tate's regular characters, eager office worker Helen Marsh, showing off her (faux-)translating skills:

Una victoria de mierda

Sim Aberson wrote (from Miami) a couple of days ago to report that


The problem is that the paper translated Chávez's Spanish profanities into (roughly) corresponding English profanities.  The story:



As we've pointed out many times on Language Log, some publications that would generally not print taboo vocabulary from its writers will allow it in quotations when it seems to reveal something about the speaker's character or style.   This is just the bilingual version of that policy.  Chávez's wording is first characterized as "profanity" and "a harsh expletive", and then the mierda hits the fan, as English shit.  ("A shitty victory" is the paper's translation of "una victoria de mierda", which is translated as "a victory of shit" in most English sources.)

The BBC News version is similar:
   

First, the characterization as "offensive language", then a translation of "una victoria de mierda" as "a shit victory".

No doubt some other publications quoted Chávez as having said "shit".  But most seem to have avoided the taboo word.  Of these, perhaps the oddest version is the Washington Post's, where "mierda" is alluded to as "a four-letter expletive" (not actually quoted in the report, in either Spanish or English):


You can catch various recordings of the speech on YouTube, for instance here.  Meanwhile, the New York Times blogsite reported on the Chávez expletive's YouTube career, without (of course) mentioning the word:


A final note: several commentators have pointed out that Venezuelan Spanish mierda is more offensive than English shit.  Here's what Daniel -- clearly no fan of Chávez -- on his Venezuela News and Views blog has to say (after quoting yet another expression alluding to, but avoiding, shit):

Language in Pakistan

In the recent coverage of Pakistani political strife, I haven't seen much about the troubled linguistic and ethnic situation there. This is probably because the official ideology is to deny its existence. Thus according to Tariq Rahman ("Language and Politics in a Pakistan Province: The Sindhi Language Movement", Asian Survey, 35(11) 1105-1016, 1995):

Pakistan is a multilingual country with a population in 1994 of about 128 million. While multilingualism is not denied -- though the 1981 census contained no question on language -- the state denies the multinationality thesis endorsed by ethnonationalist leaders. The classical form of this thesis, argued by Gankovsky, is that there are four major nationalities in Pakistan: the Punjabi, Sindhi, Pakhtun, and Baluchi (Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan, has been left out here). To this list, the Siraiki was added in the 1960s and an effort to make Muhajir a nationality began in the 1980s. The official point of view is that there is one Pakistani nation united by the bonds of Islam and the national language, Urdu.

But Urdu is the native language of only about 7% of the country's population. Its imposition has caused "language riots" since the country's foundation, and language-focused unrest was at the center of the struggle that resulted in the former East Pakistan breaking away as Bangladesh in 1971. Other struggles about language policy have continued since that time, especially with respect to the role of Sindhi, the language of the region where Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party has its central power base.

Tariq Rahman ("Language policy, multilingualism and language vitality in Pakistan", Trends in Linguistics, 175:7 3-106, 2006) gives this language distribution in Pakistan as of the 2001 census:

Language	Percentage of speakers
Punjabi	44.15
Pashto	15.42
Sindhi	14.10
Siraiki	10.53
Urdu	7.57
Balochi	3.57
Other	4.66

As Alyssa Ayres points out ("The Politics of Language Policy in Pakistan", in Brown and Ganguly, eds., Fighting Words: Language Policy and Ethnic Relations in Asia, MIT Press):

Conflicts over language identity are not merely about language: They are intertwined with struggles over power and access to it. The vast majority of Pakistan's rulers and policymakers have been Punjabi and mohajirs (settlers), while the military has been ruled by a Punjabi-Mohajir-Pathan nexus.

This leaves out about a third of the population in the remaining western half of the country, with the inhabitants of Sind at the head of the list. Ayres again:

The story of Pakistan's Sindhi language movement (and language riots) parallels that of the Bengali language movement from partition in 1947 through Benazir Bhutto's first regime (1988-90). During Bhutto's first term in office, tensions between Karachi's numerous ethnic groups exploded. ...

Sindhi, like Bengali, enjoyed regional hegemony throughout the time of the British Raj. It has long had a literature and a widespread presence both colloquially and administratively. ... Sind had been a separate province during the Raj. This was due in part to the Sindhi language movement of the 1930s, which had resulted in Sind separating from the Bombay presidency in 1936. This institutionalization of a Sindhi ethnic identity linked directly to language was therefore in place even before partition. Partition would trigger Sindhi ethnic mobilization for two reasons: cultural insensitivity and economic subjugation.

Partition brought massive demographic changes to the subcontinent. Karachi in particular saw an enormous influx of migrants from Uttar Pradesh -- the Urdu-speaking Mohajirs -- as well as from Punjab, Baluchistan, and the NWFP. At the same time, Hindus, who had comprised 64 percent of the population of Sind prior to partition, fled to India. Homes and possessions left behind in Karachi and other urban centers (as well as agrarian lands in the Sindhi interior) were claimed by Mohajirs. The results were striking: In Karachi, Mohajirs comprised 57.55 percent of the population in 1951; in Hyderabad, 66.08 percent. These cities were effectively cleaved in half and then populated by strangers.

When Pakistan came into being, Sindhis, like Bengalis, were surprised to find their language would be subservient to Urdu in the national order. This lower status offended Sindhi cultural pride. The problem was exacerbated by the inherent advantage afforded the newcomer Mohajirs, whose mother tongue was the national language; this gave Mohajirs a considerable advantage in seeking government employment.

A crucial event early in Pakistan's history helped to precipitate Sindhi-Urdu tensions: On July 23, 1948, the provincial government of Sind offered the city of Karachi to the federal government for use as the new capital of Pakistan. The federal government, headed by Jinnah, accepted the offer and then decided to reconstitute the city as a federal territory. When M.A. Khuhro, then chief minister of Sind, objected, he was dismissed by Jinnah on grounds of being both a poor administrator and a corrupt government official. Karachi thus became a federal territory with a heavy Urdu presence. Most important, however, the economic and cultural capital of Sind was perceived as having been hijacked by the Pakistani state. From the Sindhi point of view, these developments created a painful inequality: To obtain government jobs, Sindhis would have to learn a "foreign" language. At the same time, the newly arrived "foreigners" (i.e., Mohajirs) did not have to learn Sindhi to go about their daily lives in urban Sind, where most of them lived. There was no compelling reason for Mohajirs to integrate with Sindhis -- a situation that struck the latter as highly discriminatory.

There's a lot more to the story, but this should be enough to give you the general idea. And it's not only in Sind that language policy is a social and political issue, according to Rahman (see the original text for references):

[T]he privileging of Urdu by the state has created ethnic opposition to it. However, as people learn languages for pragmatic reasons, they are giving less importance to their heritage languages and are learning Urdu. This phenomenon, sometimes called ‘voluntary shift’, is not really ‘voluntary’ as the case of the native Hawaiians, narrated by Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, illustrates. What happens is that market conditions are such that one’s language becomes a deficit in relation to what Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, would call ‘cultural capital’. Instead of being an asset it becomes a liability. It prevents one from rising in society. In short, it is ghettoizing. Then, people become ashamed of their language as the Punjabis, otherwise a powerful majority in Pakistan, are observed to be by the present author and others ... Or, even if language movements and ethnic pride does not make them ashamed of their languages, they do not want to teach the language to their children because they think that would be overburdening the children with far too many languages. For instance, Sahibzada Abdul Qayyum Khan reported in 1932 that the Pashtuns wanted their children to be instructed in Urdu rather than Pashto. And even this year (2003), the MMA government has chosen Urdu, not Pashto, as the language of the domains of power, including education, in the N.W.F.P. The same phenomenon was noticed in Baluchistan. Balochi, Brahvi and Pashto were introduced as the compulsory medium of instruction in government schools in 1990. Language activists enthusiastically prepared instructional material but on 8 November 1992, these languages were made optional and parents switched back to Urdu. Such decisions amount to endangering the survival of minor languages and they devalue even major ones but they are precisely the kind of policies that have created what is often called ‘Urdu imperialism’ in Pakistan.

In short, the state’s use of Urdu as a symbol of national integration has had two consequences. First, it has made Urdu the obvious force to be resisted by ethnic groups. This resistance makes them strengthen their languages by corpus planning (writing books, dictionaries, grammars, orthographies etc) and acquisition planning (teaching the languages, using them in the media, pressurizing the state to use them ...). Secondly, it has jeopardized additive multilingualism as recommended by UNESCO ... As Urdu spreads through schooling, media and urbanization, pragmatic pressures make the other Pakistani languages retreat. In short, the consequence of privileging Urdu strengthens ethnicity while, at the same time and paradoxically, threatens linguistic and cultural diversity in the country.

Perhaps the most important result of resistance to Urdu is increase the importance of English, as discussed by Ehsan Masood ("Urdu's last stand", 9/1/2007). Benazir Bhutto's Urdu was notoriously poor ("Benazir's poor Urdu inspires many a joke", ExpressIndia, 12/4/2007), and Pervez Musharraf's Urdu is apparently also often criticized, though Urdu is his native tongue.

[After writing this post, I saw that Tristan Mabry has an excellent Op-Ed in this morning's Philadelphia Inquirer, "In divided Pakistan, not all are mourning Bhutto". Tristan (a friend from his time as a grad student at Penn) knows these issues well. The quality of the information in his article is a striking contrast to the (complete?) omission of these matters from the rest of the media coverage of the situation in Pakistan, both before and after Bhutto's assassination. It would be nice to see his expertise published in more prominent newspapers, and mixed in with the usual talking heads on the national broadcast media.]

The unkindness of strangers

Several readers have taken me to task for being too hard on the journalists who filed serious stories about spoof articles from the British Medical Journal's Christmas issue ("'Tis the season", 12/21/2007). For example, Ray Girvan, a frequent correspondent and long-time foe of bad science journalism, wrote:

Re the unicycler, it's by no means clear whether it's a spoof or not.

The Christmas BMJ does include many, but it's not solely "a spoof issue". As the editorial for Christmas 2000 says: "The essence of the Christmas BMJ is strangeness. It's our left brain issue. We want everything to be not as it seems".

This includes some spoofs, but also many genuine but quirky topics such as last year's "Sword swallowing and its side effects", the 2003 "How long did their hearts go on?" (an actuarial study to see if the lives of Titanic survivors were shortened by the trauma); or in 2000, "Civilisation and the colon: constipation as the "disease of diseases" (an erudite history of constipation and its treatment).

In this case, Ray is off the mark. The unicycler story was not "genuine but quirky", it was "quirky and presposterous". Let me explain.

The "unicycler", in case you've forgotten, was Sam Shuster, a retired dermatologist who took up riding a unicycle around Newcastle upon Tyne. Finding himself the object of unkind comments (and sometimes more direct interventions) from strangers, he "realised that this indicated an underlying biological phenomenon and set about its study".

True enough, this is probably not the kind of spoof article that is a complete fiction from beginning to end. Let's grant that Dr. Sam Shuster exists, that he did ride a unicycle in Newcastle upon Tyne, that he did record 400 instances of comments from strangers. Let's even grant that the paper ("Sex, aggression, and humour: responses to unicycling", BMJ 335:1320-1322, 22 December 2007) was not meant (entirely) as a parody of articles about the biological determination of social facts, but rather represents Shuster's sincere belief about the causes of his experiences.

Why is this article still essentially a joke, which should never have been presented in the mass media as a serious contribution to the biology of humor? Well, let's say that it would never have been published in a serious scientific journal, if not as a joke; and that its key conclusions are entirely unconnected to its evidence, other than via the logic of jokes.

There are several superficial things that should have signaled to any intelligent reader that something odd is going on. There's the author's apparent lack of expertise -- he's a retired dermatologist writing about a linguistic topic at the intersection of anthropology, sociology, social psychology and physiology. There's the lack of serious footnotes or references -- there are three references, one to Darwin's Descent of Man and two to recent popular-science books on sexual selection. There's the personal and informal presentation ("My wife said 'buy the bloody thing', which I did on the whim of the moment").

None of this necessarily undermines his work, or seriously influences my own evaluation of it -- there's plenty of nonsense produced by credentialed experts, in the standard impersonal style of scientific rhetoric, with a conventional battery of footnotes and references. But you don't normally get past the editors of major scientific journals unless these superficial characteristics are in order -- except as a joke.

A slightly more important set of problems was raised by Dr. Shuster himself. He points out that "because responses were not from a consecutive cohort or sample, the findings are only semi-quantitative", and that "confirmation by another rider, with a different style, appearance, dress, age, sex, and location is desirable".

These problems don't entirely invalidate the research itself, but outside of the Christmas spoof context, they would surely have led the referees and editors to force Dr. Shuster to be more precise in describing its limitations. They might even have made him run a control or two. But the real problem, the thing that could never have gotten past an editor who was not looking mainly for light-hearted quirkiness, is the generality of the conclusions that Dr. Shuster wants us to draw.

Let's review: An elderly upper-middle-class man rides a unicycle through streets frequented mainly by people from lower socio-economic strata, in a culture with a long tradition of class antagonism. The strangers he meets respond with ridicule and even some "attempts to topple the unicycle", as well as expressions of praise and concern. The physical attacks are generally from adolescent males, while ridicule is most salient from adult but not elderly males.

His diary confirms his initital impression, which is that "almost 50% of those encountered ... responded verbally"; that 95% of the responses from post-pubescent females "praised, encouraged, or showed concern", vs. only 25% of the responses from post-pubescent males. These are essentially the only numbers in the articles, whose observations are mainly qualitative.

His first-level conclusion is that the "waxing and waning of the male response" suggests sexual competitiveness due to "androgen induced virility". In other words, the male denizens of Newscastle upon Tyne are concerned to prevent Dr. Shuster from riding in on his unicycle and impregnating their women. The youth express this concern by swooping at him with bicycles and kicking soccer balls at him; more mature men do it by making stupid jokes at his expense ("Couldn't you afford the other wheel?").

This all may very well be true, though other hypotheses do come to mind -- for example, in some cultures, rough teasing is a way to make friends. And, as Dr. Shuster points out, the study was not very well controlled. But let's stipulate that he's right about all of this, and go on, because we've reached the real crux of the problem: what in the world does any of this have to do with humor?

On the face of it, his observations are about responses to a stranger doing unexpected things in a public place. It's one particular stranger (Dr. Shuster), one particular kind of odd behavior (an elderly man riding a unicycle), and one particular public place (the streets of Newscastle upon Tyne). Adolescent boys sometimes respond with what might be called aggressive threat displays, like kicking balls at him; mature men often (about .75*.45 = 33% of the time) make teasing remarks, like "I didn't know the circus was in town" or "And what were your other birthday presents?".

But Dr. Shuster generalizes beyond the public teasing of oddly-behaving strangers in British cities: "These findings suggest that humour develops from aggression in response to male hormones". A logically parallel argument would be "I've observed on many occasions that drinking red wine leads gives me a headache. These findings suggest that all illnesses develop from the physiological response to metabolites of ethanol." Shuster's conclusion is frankly presposterous, and surely would never have been allowed to stand in an article published in a serious scientific journal, other than as a joke.

Now, this is not just a matter of faulty logic -- Dr. Shuster's generalization is obviously false to fact, as any man or woman with a normal experience of life can testify. Women make jokes of all sorts, nice ones and mean ones and neutral ones, at roughly the same overall rate as men. Even in the line of teasing comments that Dr. Shuster focused on, there's a stereotypically female kind of remark described as "catty".

But we don't need to look out the window, because there's a fairly large experimental literature on the subject.

For example, there's DT Robinson & L Smith-Lovin, "Getting A Laugh: Gender, Status, and Humor in Task Discussions", Social Forces, 80(1) 2001, which used "event history techniques to analyze humor attempts and successes in six-person groups", collected "in the early 1980s at the University of South Carolina". There were "approximately four groups in each of seven gender-compositions conditions (all female, one to six men)", in which "the participants were Anglo undergraduates between the ages of 17 and 25 enrolled in introductory sociology". Among the conclusions: "Groups consisting entirely of women have a significantly higher rate of humor [than mixed-sex groups]... Compared to mixed gender groups, all male groups did not joke more frequently ... Likewise, the rates of successful humor [i.e. where others laughed] are higher among all female groups, but not all male groups". However, within mixed-sex groups, "men engage in humor at higher rates than women".

Another relevant study was done in New Zealand by Jennifer Hay. Though there were a number of later publications in refereed journals (e.g. "Functions of Humor in the Conversations of Men and Women", J. of Pragmatics 32 (6) 2000, pg 709-742), an especially accessible source is her 1995 University of Canturbury MA thesis "Gender and humour: beyond a joke". Her data came from 18 hour-long recordings: six involving four males, six involving four females, and six involving two participants of each sex. (Hay took recordings from existing collections where she could, and recorded others to fill in the gaps in the table. She says that "There will no doubt be variation in the intimacy of the speakers across my tapes, but all of the conversations can be described as discourse between good friends.")

Hay divided jokes into 12 categories, one of which was "insult":

An insult is a remark that puts someone down, or ascribes a negative characteristic to them. ... The insult here is likely to be genuine, and the humour stems from the unexpectedness of the statements, which isn most circumstances would be unacceptable.

Here's her transcription of one example:

 DF: i usually just um turn off the electric blanket
 BF: yeah well i did
 CF: i don't i roll over alex onto the cold side
     (//so [ho]\
 AF: /[oh ha]\\
 DF: well chris that //just shows that\ you're a=
 BF:                  /good on you\\
 DF: =wanton //woman\                                 [insult]

This category would include the teasing jokes make about Dr. Shuster on his unicycle. Hay observes that

The odds of a speaker using a jocular insult in single sex interaction are more than twice the odds than in mixed interaction, and in both types of interaction, women are slightly more likely than men to use insults.

Specifically, in mixed-sex groups, a female's probability of producing an insulting joke was about a third greater than a male's; in same-sex groups, females were 50% more likely to produce insulting jokes than males were.

There are plenty of other studies out there. The details vary: the locations, ages, ethnicities and social roles of the participants; whether they were friends or strangers; the size of the groups; the goals if any of the conversations; and so on. There are plenty of gender differences, and there are sometimes circumstances like Dr. Shuster's, where jokes are more likely to come from men than from women. But as often as not, women make more jokes than men do, including insulting or aggressive jokes.

Now take a look at Shuster's paper again -- or more to the point, take a look at how it was presented in the mass media: "Humour 'comes from testosterone'", BBC News; "Scientist claims men are funnier than women", The Telegraph; "Aggression 'makes men more humorous than women'", The Independent; "Humor Develops From Aggression Caused By Male Hormones, Professor Says", ScienceDaily; "Is humor tied to male aggression?", World Science; "Quand les testicule régissent l'humour", TF1; "Das Geheimnis des männlichen Witzes", Spiegel; "Humor entsteht aus Aggression", Die Welt; "L'umorismo è maschile perchè legato a testosterone", AGI; "'L'umorismo è maschio', sostiene una ricerca", ANSA; "El humor 'está en la testosterona'", BBC Mundo; "Bewijs: mannen hebben inderdaad meer humor", Elsevier; "Testosteron ger män aggressiv humor", Svenska Dagbladet; "Estudo diz que senso de humor está ligado à testosterona", BBC Brasil; "Smysl pro humor je prý výhradně mužská záležitost", České noviny.

Can you tell me with a straight face that you think this was a serious science story, presented in a responsible way by intelligent reporters and editors?

[An irrelevant note on Ray's quotation from the BMJ Christmas issue for 2000: "The essence of the Christmas BMJ is strangeness. It's our left brain issue." The editors certainly pegged the quirkometer on that one, unless "left" is just a slip of the pen for "right", perhaps due to an overdose of eggnog.]

[Update -- Carl Zimmer writes:

This may be more information than you want about the unicycle story, but I thought I'd pass it on. Eurekalert.org is a press release service for science stories. It hosts a number of prominent journals, such as PLOS and PNAS and Science and BMJ. Press releases are made available to registered journalists under embargo before papers are published, and then become accessible to the public. BMJ posted a press release on the unicycle paper before it came out, and you can still find it there:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-12/bmj-hdf121907.php

As you can see, it's a fairly detailed, straight-faced press release. I'd be surprised that a Christmas joke would extend as far as an embargoed press release, which is designed to draw attention to research in a journal.

If it wasn't a joke, which is what I suspect, then this appears to be a case of reporters uncritically writing about a paper that has the imprimatur of a peer-reviewed scientific journal. If we're apportioning blame, science writers deserve some for their laziness, but so do science journals that accept deeply flawed research and eagerly draw attention to it with press releases.

When the world's press features a really bad piece of scientific work, or a really bad misrepresentation of good work, the symbiosis of flacks and hacks is usually part of the background, as I've often observed.

But there's something else as well going on in this case.

I can see two possibilities.

One is that the PR folk at BMJ themselves missed the joke, and put out a straight-faced press release on automatic pilot.

Another is that the press release itself was another example of "lighthearted" (if deadpan) Christmas cheer.

But I can't believe that BMJ accepted and printed that paper as the result of their normal review process. ]

[Update #2 -- another Zimmer heard from, Benjamin this time:

See this piece for more on Sam Shuster of unicycling fame:

http://www.bigi.org.uk/2007/12/21/sam-shusters-hormonal-unicycling-hack/

"It seems likely that Shuster is a wind-up merchant. Maybe he just enjoys getting into the papers by publishing wacky stuff in journals that ought to know better."

See discussion therein on his paper about the psychological effects of Karl Marx's boils and carbuncles. (At least that touches on Shuster's area of expertise, dermatology.)

]

Blame it on Kipling

Faulty Diction, featured in Arnold's post on "Be that as it will", is a hoot. Here's the entry for blame on:

It's true that the OED's earliest citation for blame (something) on (someone) is only dated 1903 -- and what's more, it's from the pen of that notorious radical Rudyard Kipling:

1903 KIPLING Five Nations 22 We will blame it on the deep. 1910 —— Rewards & Fairies 175 If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.

Earlier examples are easy to find, though their contexts do seem somewhat informal. The earliest example of "blame it on ..." in the New York Times archive seems to be  in a quotation from a baseball player -- "Captain" Anson, player-manager of the Chicago White Stockings -- in a story from August 7, 1885 that starts like this:

and ends this way:

As the Chicagos left the field they presented a pitiful spectacle. They strolled along dragging their bats behind them, and looked like mourners returning from a funeral. Capt. Anson was the saddest man in the party. Visions of the championship began to fade from his gaze, and as he journeyed toward his carriage he was evidently in an unhappy mood.

"Tough luck," Abner Dalrymple ventured to remark.

"Yes," was the answer.

"Those fellows played good ball," interpolated right-fielder Kelly.

"But they had the umpire with them," said the copulent Williamson.

"Let's blame it on the umpire," was Anson's rejoinder.

'That's so," echoed his colleagues.

They seemed to derive a little consolation from this, and all agreed that the umpire lost the game.

A search in APS yields an article from the Saturday Evening Post of June 2, 1849, "Letters to Country Girls", by Mrs. Swisshelm, which starts in a distinctly informal style

Well positively, girls, you are too much trouble. I do believe girls were created on purpose to annoy susceptible young gentlemen and nervous old ladies! Here, Meg has gone off a visiting, and left me to keep house a whole week, with nobody but Mary for help; she would rather make a "play house" than wash dishes. Well, I have been very industrious, and yesterday was office day! When I went there, what was waiting for me amongst the rest of my troubles but the longest, sauciest letter "from a Country girl!" It is too bad; and if the world continues getting worse at this rate, the people must all move out of it. - Just to think the way girls will talk to old folks! It was not so in my young days!

After some further ritual recitation from the liturgy of Young People Today, Mrs. Swisshelm takes up her main theme, which is that poor health, bad complexions and premature aging are all caused by eating too much ("The Irish famine never killed half as many people as the American surplus has done"). In the middle of this, she deploys a nice example of "blame it on":

Did you never observe the brilliant complexions, beautiful teeth and full forms of Irishwomen when they first come to this country? But they are not long here until they look like the rest of us, and people blame it on the climate; but it is not half so much that as the diet.

Whatever the historical details turn out to have been, the blame it on battle has been over for a long time: Mrs. Swisshelm and Rudyard Kipling won, and Faulty Diction lost. In fact, this is one of those usage battles that has been so thoroughly lost that few people today are even aware that there was ever a battle at all. Even in 1915, I suspect that the objection to blame on was an isolated curmudgeonly prejudice, rather than a spirited defense of formal norms against the colloquial hordes.

Prescriptive strictures against the use of specific complement structures with specific verbs often seem to be of this especially pathetic kind, where the general educated public is not so much disobedient as simply unaware. Thus Edwin Newman, Strictly Speaking, 1974: "You may convince that. You may convince of. You may not convince to.".

Nor, when it comes to verbal complements, can you convince not to. But they never learn.

[Arnold Zwicky writes:

OED has

1835 Fraser's Mag. XI. 617, I call this bad management, and I blame it upon you.

which MWDEU takes to be the first attestation of "blame on".

Clearly there were many attestations before the 1903 Kipling, since (according to MWDEU) by 1881 Ayres was ranting that "blame on" "is a gross vulgarism, which we sometimes hear from persons of considerable culture".

I hope to write a note on the topic -- as far as I can tell, the antipathy towards "blame on" was entirely a consequence of its being a 19th-century innovation. (but Ayres's opinion was echoed by a pile of usage writers from 1906 through 1983 (MWDEU lists 16 of these).

I left out the 1835 citation, since it was "blame it upon" rather than "blame it on". But I should have checked MWDEU, which as usual has an insightful and informative entry, observing that "Ayres does not stop to explain why it is a vulgarism or how such cultured persons are capable of using such a vulgarism". (Ayres' 1881 work was The Verbalist, "A Manual Devoted To Brief Discussion Of The Right And The Wrong Use of Words, And To Some Other Matters of Interest To Those Who Would Speak And Write With Propriety").

Ayres' perspective in this case is an inspired one, precisely by virtue of lacking any pretense of logical or empirical support. There are no grounds for refutation -- grammatical logic is irrelevant, and if many excellent writers often use the construction, that simply shows that their culture, although perhaps "considerable", is in fact inadequate.

Still, it's shocking to find that OUP and Bryan Garner have retained, in the 2000 edition of The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style, this entry for blame:

In the best usage, one blames a person; one does not, properly, blame a thing on a person. E.g.: "I blame the fires on him." (Read: I blame him for the fires .)

Bryan Garner is not a snob, but "in the best usage" is an empty gesture in the direction of elite culture -- just as irrefutably empty as Ayres' phrase "a gross vulgarism, which we sometimes hear from persons of considerable culture".

On this view, Robert Louis Stevenson demonstrated his imperfect cultural background when he wrote in his Vailima Letters, published in 1896: "I, for one, blame it on Madam Saumai-afe without hesitation". The Wall Street Journal revealed its essential underlying vulgarity when in 1909, it used the following, apparently with editorial approval, as a filler: "President Roosevelt has two convenient formulas for dealing with trouble. One is to blame it on Loeb and the other is to send Taft to straighten it out."

No one ever invited I.F. Stone to a debutante ball, and so it's perhaps no surprise to that Stone's 1937 The Court Disposes had a chapter entitled "Can we blame it on the fathers?" It may be slightly more surprising, to some, that in 1937 the New Yorker's Talk of the Town headlined a piece on the World's Fair "Blame it on Jacqueline" -- but Harold Ross was "the son of an Irish immigrant and a schoolteacher", and sooner or later, class will tell.

In a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia framed a sentiment not without relevance to the present case:

Deferring to our colleagues' own error is bad enough; but enshrining the error that we ourselves have improvidently suggested and blaming it on the near-unanimous judgment of our colleagues would surely be unworthy.

But Justice Scalia fell short of the "best usage", and should instead have expressed himself like this:

Deferring to our colleagues' own error is bad enough; but enshrining the error that we ourselves have improvidently suggested and blaming the near-unanimous judgment of our colleagues for it would surely be unworthy.

John Updike's short story "My father's tears", published in the New Yorker in 2006, starts this way:

Come to think of it, I saw my father cry only once. It was at the Alton train station, back when the trains still ran. I was on my way to Philadelphia to catch the train that would return me to Boston and college. I was eager to go, for already my home and my parents had become somewhat unreal to me, and college, with its courses and the hopes for my future they inspired and the girlfriend I had acquired in my sophomore year, had become more real every semester; it shocked me—threw me off track, as it were—to see that my father's eyes, as he shook my hand goodbye, glittered with tears.

I blamed it on our shaking hands: for eighteen years, we had never had occasion for this ritual, this manly contact, and we had groped our way into it only in the past few years.

Updike's fans will be disappointed to learn that his usage is not "the best" -- Shillington, PA was apparently not entirely corrected by Harvard -- so that the last sentence ought to be rewritten as:

I blamed our shaking hands for it: for eighteen years, we had never had occasion for this ritual, this manly contact, and we had groped our way into it only in the past few years.

Abandoning irony for a moment, let's observe that both Scalia and Updike's sentences were better as they were written, not as Garner would have them re-written to conform to "the best usage". But I doubt that there is any constellation of facts or opinions that could prevent Ayres' little off-hand expression of prejudice from echoing down the centuries in the unconsidered repetitions of his cultural copyists.

From a functional perspective, this is an ideal sort of prescriptive norm. Since it's an entirely artificial policy, with no basis in the past century of speaking and writing, there's no way to learn it simply from attending to even the "best" speakers and writers. The only possible source is works on usage. This adds essential value to such works, by giving those who read them carefully and credulously a reason to feel superior to everyone else. ]

Christmas and "politically correct(ed)ness"

As in past years, this holiday season has featured numerous gripes about the "politically correct" avoidance of the word Christmas. I noticed an interesting formulation of the complaint in a New York Post review of the television special "Elmo's Christmas Countdown":

And contrary to popular politically correctness, this Christmas special actually mentions "Christmas." (NY Post, Dec. 22, 2007)

Here are a few other recent Yuletide complaints using similar wording:

Unfortunately Christmas is not only in danger of falling victim to the politically correctness zealots, but it has been hijacked by commercial interests. (Northern Life, Sudbury, Ontario, column by Lionel Rudd, Nov. 30, 2007)

"Wouldn't it be nice if we could avoid placing Politically Correctness, including sizes on people other than ourselves. Perhaps setting an example is better than pointing out changes we would rather see in others. Keep Santa Fat, I'm fat and I'm ok with that too." -Tom, Northview (KSPR News, Springfield, MO, "Talk Backs: Slim Santa," Dec. 13, 2007)

I am disappointed with all the people who are trying to do away with Christmas. I am not talking about the religious aspects or the politically correctness or incorrectness. I am talking about the very word Christmas that brings to hearts and minds magical moments. (Evening Sun, Hanover, PA, letter to the editor, Dec. 13, 2007)

"Politically correctness" (as opposed to the more common "political correctness") treats the adverb-adjective combination "politically correct" as a single unit, tacking on the -ness suffix despite the resulting grammatical peculiarity. A Google search reports nearly 5,000 examples, and Google Book Search turns up more than 50 attestations in print. While searching I also noticed another variant, "politically correctedness" (~250 Googlehits). Here are a few in the usual Christmas context:

and yes. I said Christmas. Not Happy Holidays. Not politically correctedness here. Christmas. (link)

Reading the local paper this morning I see that some people in Medway were upset with the school system for succumbing to the PC, politically correctedness, that seems to have warped the minds of the younger than me generation. When did Christmas become a four-letter word? (link)

happy holidays to everyone!...actually....screw politically correctedness and have a Merry Fu@#ing Christmas Season! (link)

Since "politically correct" (or, for some, "politically corrected") has become such a fixed expression, it's not too surprising to see it nominalized by the simple addition of -ness. The rationale behind this formation is more visually apparent when a hyphen is inserted between "politically correct" and the nominalizing suffix:

Anyway, at one point I got fed up with all the 'politically correct-ness' of the holiday season - you couldn't say 'Merry Christmas' to people, because what if they celebrated Hanukkah? (link)

Most "Politically Correct-ness" is just words being replaced so that the person using them will not hurt a single person who might ever overhear. (link)

I wouldn't consider this a case of an adverb modifying a noun, since the ADV+ADJ combo of "politically correct" is still lurking, despite the nominalization. The modification of a noun with an adverb is of course a grammatical no-no, but in my post "Love, adverbially" I considered some apparent exceptions. For most of those exceptions, the adverb turns out to be a "sentence adverb" modifying an entire sentence or independent clause, even if the target of the modification is obscured by an elliptical construction. (For instance, the movie title Love Actually is actually an elliptical form of a line in the movie, "...love actually is all around.")

I went hunting for more examples of ADV+ADJ-ness, careful to avoid collocations that merely consist of a sentence adverb preceding a noun with -ness, e.g., "There is clearly nervousness over the issue," or "Eventually sadness sets in." Here are some that I found (with the aid of a corpus that has part-of-speech tagging and regular-expression searching):

Tomorrow is my last day of absolutely madness. (link)

The shouty voice from downstairs dimly nagged at my barely awakeness. (link)

Postpartum depression does exist, but for many it results in minor symptoms such as not wanting to be near your child, constantly sleepiness or having trouble focusing. (link)

And the strange darkly wonderfulness of A Touch of Daniel. (link)

As he says himself, there is a distinctly uniqueness to Cork people. (link)

These large panels of processing figures are spectacular, but they have that curiously flatness of fascimile that is impossible to overcome. (link)

My flirt is a front for the emotionally emptiness I experience. (link)

But then… we are also capable of incredibly kindness, and creativity. (link)

Silly boys with their toys and their overly drunkenness. (link)

I see Hip-Hop finally being awoken from it's roots in the pursuit of Truth, with Mos Def leading in bringing his socially and politically awareness to the forefront. (link)

Some of the above might simply be cases of poor self-editing, where the writer starts with an ADV+ADJ construction and then adds -ness to the adjective without adjusting the adverb by removing -ly. But note that in some examples such editing wouldn't actually work: you can't change "barely awakeness" to "bare awakeness," or "overly drunkenness" to "over drunkenness."

As with "politically correct-ness" the underlying parsing is sometimes signaled by hyphenization:

Requests always come in just about the time I start getting swamped with pre-term-insanely-busy-ness. (link)

A modifier stack-up like "pre-term-insanely-busy-ness" starts looking like the "extended adjectives" that Mark Liberman has recently considered, as in Dolly Parton's "I got those can't stop crying, dishes flying, PMS blues." So we could think of ADV+ADJ-ness (or a longer version with more modifiers) as a nominalization of an extended adjective, with the addition of -ness rather than a full noun like blues. To some observers these constructions surely seem like nothing more than grammatically incorrectness, but to others they might have a certain distinctively stylishness.

Be that as it may have been

Today is a day for enjoying presents, and so I was happy to put a few minutes into helping Arnold Zwicky enjoy his 1915 Funk & Wagnalls Faulty Diction. (Unexpectedly, there seems to be no rock band named "Faulty Diction".)

Commenting on that work's proscription of be that as it will -- said to be "Erroneously substituted for be that as it may" -- Arnold observed that both variants seem to be just about equally represented on the web, and that Fielding, Defoe and Locke are among the authors who used the version with will. Arnold speculated that "[i]t might be that the will variant was current in the 18th century but dipped in use by good authors in the 19th".

As my contribution to Arnold's Christmas cheer, here's a graph of the counts of "be that as I will" vs. "be that as it may", in the prose section of the LION index, in 20-year segments from 1700 to 1900:

This certainly tends to confirm Arnold's notion that "be that as it will" declined after 1800; it indicates that "be that as it may" was a mid-19th-century fasion; and it suggests that both versions of the expression were past their sell-by date in 1915.

If you'd like your very own copy of Faulty Diction ("A Brief Statement of the General Principles Determining Correctness in English Speech and Writing, With Their Application to Some of the More Common Instances of Violation and to Some of the Mooted Questions Regarding Usage"), a .pdf is available from Google Books here.

[Based on this case, some might wonder whether this book's questions regarding usage were really mooted in 1915 ("proposed or brought forward for discussion; talked of, discussed, debated."), or moot ("having no practical significance or relevance; abstract, academic").]

[Note: the counts in the graph are incomplete, because pages 3, 6 and 10 of LION's prose-index results for be that as it may turned up an error message rather than a list of citations, so the dates on those pages were left out. Since the results are in alphabetical order, I doubt that this changed the historical facts very much.]

One Christmas too long

Happy Christmas from Language Log to all our readers. I'm spending the time with family in southern England, where I was planning to look up an old friend (who had been my very first PhD student, though he was many years my senior): the distinguished scholar of Cariban languages Desmond Derbyshire. I hadn't seen him for a long time. He hadn't been answering email messages, but he always traveled a lot, and I just thought he was away from his Hampshire home, perhaps in Brazil (he still visited sometimes, despite being retired from his work there). But I had waited one Christmas too long. Des died quietly in his sleep in a hospital a few days ago, before I could track him down.

The people who worked with him on language analysis and bible translation in the Summer Institute of Linguistics have sent me many consoling messages about Des having gone to a better place. These didn't actually console me much; but that's not the point, is it? Uttering those words consoled them. I do not share their religion, but I do like them — I think the many SIL members I have met over the years are some of the nicest and kindest human beings I have ever interacted with — and I do share their respect and love for Des.

He was a wonderful human being as well as a superb linguist. And his work was very important — more important than most linguists will ever do in their lives; he documented a whole endangered language that otherwise might have gone into history unrecorded, and worked effectively for the welfare of the Amazonian tribe who speak it. They are now flourishing, as they were not when he first arrived in the 1950s. He translated the entire New Testament for them: they can read the Christmas story in their own language this Christmas time if they wish. If they have heard of his passing, I know they will be thinking about him, as I will, because he was their friend, and often a resident of their village, for over fifty years. I wish I had been able to see him one more time.

[See now the obituary for Derbyshire posted on the LINGUIST List.]

Be that as it will

My friend Steven Levine collects stuff from garage sales, estate sales, and the like, and passes them along to his friends.  My most recent gift  from Steven is a 1915 Funk & Wagnalls booklet (only 80 small pages) Faulty Diction, which I expect to be mining for material for some time.  Here's an entry for a proscription that was new to me (p. 18):



Consonant with this judgment is the fact  that both the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms (1998) and the Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms (2003) list be that as it may but not be that as it will (or the other variants be this as it may/will).

Meanwhile, hoi polloi on the web use all four variants with very similar frequencies:


These numbers are not gigantic, which is not surprising, since be that as it may is formal in style, and Google web searches turn up a lot of (very) informal writing.  So I suppose it could be claimed that what the web searches show is that ordinary people have an imperfect command of formal idioms.  Against this is the fact that a lot of the be that as it will cites are from thoroughly respectable sources:


Now I see that be that as it might gets 250,000 hits and be this as it might 128,000, with many from reputable sources.

So what's the source of the judgment that there is only one correct variant?  (Plenty of idioms have variant forms, after all: be/lie at the bottom of something, time hangs/lies heavy (on someone's hands), lay/put your cards on the table, have/hold all the cards, etc.)  And that this is the variant with may rather than will or might (not to mention that rather than this)?  (I find all of the variants unremarkable.)  These are serious questions for the F&W booklet, since it claims to be based on "scientific principles", in particular the principle that


What's more, the offenses in the booklet are supposed to be serious ones:


(It should be obvious that the Faulty Diction people were not proponents of Avoid Passive, or of avoiding "passive style", and indeed the booklet -- published three years before Strunk's Elements of Style, with its famous antipathy towards the passive voice and passive style -- doesn't warn against either.)

Now I very much doubt that in this case (and in many others) the compilers of the booklet actually consulted the practice of good authors.  The judgment looks to me like an expression of personal taste, a quirk even.  Not that there's anything wrong with expressing personal tastes in print -- but this sort of booklet is not the place to display them.

At the moment, I have no idea what the practice of good authors was then or is now, and I'm not prepared to do the necessary searches with the resources available to me and in the time available to me.  It might be that the will variant was current in the 18th century but dipped in use by good authors in the 19th, though for the entry to occur in Faulty Diction it must have been fairly frequent a hundred years ago.   But I'm inclined to think that the compilers of the booklet just pulled the proscription out of the air.

Another reversal

Following up on my posting about problems with converses and directionality, Chris Lance wrote this morning to ask about substitute 'replace', as in this Bizarro cartoon from a couple of years ago:

I've written about this case at some length on the American Dialect Society mailing list, over several years, but now see that it hasn't turned up on Language Log.  So here's a very brief account of the phenomenon.


For details of the various uses of substitute and their history, I refer you to a paper by David Denison, still in press but available in .pdf format on his website.

According to Denison, the development comes in three stages.  In a nutshell:



Plenty of detail, documentation, and discussion in Denison's paper. 

mo' juiced

I wouldn't dispute Geoff's assertion that claims about the expressive superiority of French words over their English synonyms are usually pure humbug. Still, there are times when a French word undeniably adds a soupçon of meaning that eludes its English equivalent. As in the banner headline that appeared over the lead story in the New York Times Week in Review in January, 1998, just after the Lewinsky story blew open: SCANDALE! Why do you think they felt they needed a final e on the word?, I asked my friend Rachel. Oh, she said, that's so you can tell it's about sex and not money.

More on the early days of "eggnog"

Just in time for the holiday season, Heidi Harley wrote here on the discovery of an early citation for eggnog, apparently antedating the first OED cite of 1825 by about fifty years. On the American Dialect Society mailing list, independent scholar Joel S. Berson posted some follow-up findings based on a search of historical databases. Below is an edited version of Joel's post with additional material.

---

Yes, that must have been a pleasant discovery while reading before the fire, but (as Margot Charlton wrote) the databases are the Scrooges. In the "bah humbug" tone so appropriate to the day, I note that the OED is unlikely to be able to use a c1774 date for Heidi Harley's student's find, since Boucher only reports orally for that date. The OED can use the 1806 date (I think actually 1807, as I'm told by Harvard's on-line catalogue for the Houghton Library copy, and by WorldCat), which is still an antedating of the OED's 1825, but —

E.A.N. Scrooge (more fully known as the Early American Newspapers database) tells me the two earliest occurrences of "egg-nog" (with or without hyphen) locatable in 18th century colonial American papers are:

(1) The Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia), 1788 Oct. 16, page 3, col. 1 (within an essay whose discourse is somewhat mysterious to me):

Rummaging now the brain, many conceits may be found, much truth of all kinds, whole store rooms of curses and unmentionable damns, with devils of all shapes and colours, thousands of encomiums on oysters, hot suppers, and devilish fine wines; and there are so many different qualities and dispositions that intestine wars are never over; when wine and beer, punch and eggnog meet, instantly ensues a quarrel, and it is raised so high, that the brains boil like mush in a pot with heat, and was it not for the holes I before mentioned, which let out the steam, the skull must be cracked.

(2) A few years later, in the Virginia Chronicle (Norfolk) of 1793 Jan. 26, p. 3, col. 2, it appears seasonably:

Messrs. Baxter & Wilson,
     On last Christmas Eve several gentlemen met at Northampton court-house, and spent the evening in mirth and festivity, when EGG-NOG was the principal Liquor used by the company. After they had indulged pretty freely in this beverage, a gentleman in company offered a bet that not one of the party could write four verses, extempore, which should be rhyme and sense; and when it was taken up by a gentleman present, who wrote the first five [sic; I count six] verses following; to which the subjoined answer was immediately given. As I think them applicable to the occasion, you will oblige me by inserting them in your next week's paper.
     January 14, 1793.                S———————

The trembling Muse with anxious care to please,
May wish, perhaps, to appear with grace and ease;
But vain, alas! are all the powers of art,
When awful Dullness hangs upon the heart.
Each brisk emotion which the soul receives,
And quickens fancy with the wit it gives,
Must cease to flow, when leaden slumbers bind,
And quell the transports of the glowing mind.
For strength or splendor never yet arose,
From foggy brains which languish'd for a dose.
In pity then permit the strain to end,
In kind compassion to your drowsy friend.
      The ANSWER.
Let Wine, alas! resign its boasted praise
To rouse the Muse, and prompt the Poet's lays,
Since rival worth now boasts superior art,
To infuse the transports of the glowing heart.
'Tis Egg-Nog now whose golden streams dispense
Far richer treasures to the ravish'd sense.
The Muse from Wine derives a transient glare,
But Egg-Nog's draughts afford her solid fare.
The first escapes by exhalation's power,
And leaves the Muse more languid than before.
The latter, firm, remains her steady friend,
Sustains her talk, nor quits her to the end.
On old prescription one relies for fame,
While solid merit props the others claim.

Of course, we have only the submitter's claim, a full month later, that the two poems were actually written on the occasion, and by two separate persons (or is that personae?). Colonial poets and wits, such as Mather Byles, or Honest Ben, were not above dissembling.

In its issue of 1793 April 6, page 3, col. 2, the Virginia Chronicle printed a response "To the Northampton Poets, on their Poetry". It begins:

ILLUSTRIOUS bards! what pen can write your praise

and, comparing them to Homer and Virgil, praises the paper for publishing

                                 each sublime matter,
Who drinks egg-nog, who mixes wine with water,
Who died last, as also who was married,
Whose wench brought forth a son, and whose miscarried.
These are fit subjects for poetic brains.
...
Great WASHINGTON, his country'd [sic] pride and boast,
Will never in your poetry be lost.
Even TOMMY PAINE will live to future ages,
And be the Hero of poetic pages.
...
And be assur'd, of this there is no telling:
Which is the best your diction, or your—spelling."
                      OCCIDENTALIS
April 1, 1793.

I wonder about the above reference to George Washington, considering Heidi's discussion of his recipe.

---

[Guest post by Joel S. Berson]

[Update #1: And if you're curious what went into eggnog at the turn of the 19th century, Joel Berson posted to ADS-L a citation with "perhaps the earliest list of ingredients":

The American travellers, before they pursued their journey, took a hearty draught each, according to custom, of egg-nog, a mixture composed of new milk, eggs, rum, and sugar, beat up together.

Travels through the States of North America, and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, During the years 1795, 1796, and 1797. By Isaac Weld, Junior. Fourth Edition. London: Printed for John Stockdale, Piccadilly. 1800. Page 81. [Google Books, title page viewed. ESTC lists a 1799 edition; Houghton has a copy of that.]

Joel adds, "This is at an inn near Baltimore, on the road to Philadelphia. Perhaps another hint of a Middle Atlantic origin."]

[Update #2: Also on ADS-L, Joanne Despres of Merriam-Webster points out that Mitford Mathews' Dictionary of Americanisms and William Craigie's Dictionary of American English both quote the Boucher passage, dating it ca. 1775. Merriam-Webster uses that date for its eggnog entry, though as Joel Berson notes above it might not pass muster as an OED first citation date.]

[Update #3: Fred Shapiro supplies two more early citations:

1788 New-Jersey Journal 26 Mar. 2 (America's Historical Newspapers)
A young man with a cormerant appetite , voraciously devoured, last week, at Connecticut farms, thirty raw eggs, a glass of egg nog, and another of brandy sling.

1795 Freneau, Philip Morin. Poems written between the years 1768 & 1794 (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) 345
To the sign of the Anchor we then were directed,
Where captain O'Keef a fine turkey dissected;
And Bryan O'Bluster made love to egg-nog.

The 1788 cite would appear to be the earliest known example from a primary source.

[Update #3: Fred Shapiro supplies two more early citations:

1788 New-Jersey Journal 26 Mar. 2 (America's Historical Newspapers)
A young man with a cormerant appetite , voraciously devoured, last week, at Connecticut farms, thirty raw eggs, a glass of egg nog, and another of brandy sling.

1795 Freneau, Philip Morin. Poems written between the years 1768 & 1794 (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) 345
To the sign of the Anchor we then were directed,
Where captain O'Keef a fine turkey dissected;
And Bryan O'Bluster made love to egg-nog.

The March 1788 cite would appear to be the earliest example from a primary source found thus far, just beating out Joel Berson's October 1788 cite above.]

Pseudo-intellectual francophilic nonsense

James Kirkup, in his obituary for the French novelist Julien Gracq in today's Independent, refers to Spengler's view of the future (in Decline of the West) as

"a soulless expansionist Caesarism — a vision strikingly realised today in our all-enveloping nationalist, commercial and industrial "mondialisation"

and adds a baffling parenthetical remark about the latter word:

(the French term is so much more expressive than our banal "globalisation").

What could possibly be the justification for this supposed contrast?

French mond-ial-is-at-ion and English glob-al-iz-at-ion are not just synonymous but morpheme-by-morpheme equivalent, and etymologically cognate except for the roots: the French uses Latin mundus "world" and the English uses Latin globus "globe", probably via Old French. We now use "the globe" to refer to the world. But the former word is "so much more expressive", and the latter is "banal"?

I'll tell you what I think (have I ever let you down?): I think this is pseudo-intellectual francophilic nonsense. I think that if anyone in a literary context asserts that some French word has some property like expressiveness or poeticness that its English counterpart does not have, and/or that some English word is not as good as some French word of the same meaning, they are simply assumed to be saying something justifiable and probably true, because nobody dares to call them on it. I say there is absolutely no objective sense of "expressive" under which French mondialisation and English globalization could be determined to be non-equivalent.

I'm not saying you can't find contexts in which one is used and the other is not; indeed, that is true roughly 100 percent of the time, since virtually all the contexts for mondialisation are French contexts. I'm saying the claim of a difference in expressiveness is unsubstantiatable nonsense, designed mainly to cow you into thinking you are not intellectual enough to see the difference. Do not be cowed. You are just fine as you are. You cannot see the difference in expressiveness between these two words, and Language Log is here to give you the comforting news that there isn't one.

Talking of the Independent, I did write them a letter pointing out that their Health Editor had fallen for a hoax. I wrote:

It was good fun to see health editor Jeremy Laurance taken in by one of the British Medical Journal's famous Christmas jokes (22 December, page 19). Did no one on the editorial desk feel the slightest qualm of suspicion about a dermatologist correlating testosterone levels with unicycle jokes? And has Jeremy Laurance been tipped off yet, or is it going to be done at the Independent's Christmas party?

And did they print my letter? Why don't you try to guess.

Proceed with caution

A long-standing topic on the American Dialect Society mailing list is the use of ancestor to mean 'descendant'.   Recently, our attention has expanded to include successor 'predecessor'.  Which reminded me of precede/proceed as used by some students in intro linguistics courses.  And then of problems with the technical terms progressive and regressive assimilation.

Directionality is hell.


I briefly mentioned ancestor/descendant, along with yesterday/tomorrow and subsequent/prior, back in 2005.  And then, last July, I commented on forward-looking, backward-looking, and double-sided lexical items, taking off from temporal since and before in a case where the former seems to have been used for the latter:


One way to view apparent switches of directionality is to see them as a reflection of a desire for double-sided lexical items.  One item in a pair (A and B) is chosen (on the basis of frequency or salience) to serve for both, giving the effect of a switch, though in fact the chosen item now serves in both its original use and the reversed use: ancestor 'ancestor, descendant', yesterday 'yesterday, tomorrow'.  Typically, most people "switch" in one direction, using A for B, though some people will go in the other direction, using B for A.  So far as I know, you don't find people with a true reversal, A for B AND B for A.

1. Ancestor.  A couple of examples from ADS-L discussions.  From David Bergdahl on 12 June, citing an MSNBC.com article on tracing descendants of the Lost Colony in Virgina:


And from Bonnie Taylor-Blake on 24 June, citing a front-page story in the Atlanta Journal Consitution that day:


I'm assuming that these writers would also use ancestor for actual ancestors.  That is, for them ancestor means 'lineal kin'.

Finally, from Brians's Common Errors under ancestor:


2. Successor.  On 17 December, Charlie Doyle posted:


It's not clear that most speakers appreciate that successor and predecessor have the same root, but no doubt they do appreciate the phonological similarity, and phonological similarity is a strong contributor to word confusions.

3. Proceed.  This one's in Brians and in MWDEU, but in short entries that treat the issue as mostly a matter of spelling.  But the situation is more interesting than that.

My experience in intro linguistics classes is that when we're talking about phenomena that have to do with the context in which some element occurs and with the influences of surrounding elements in such contexts, and I use the terms precede (as in "X has the variant Y when it precedes Z" -- i.e., Y for X in the configuration XZ) or is preceded by (as in "X has the variant Y when it is preceded by Z" -- i.e., Y for X in the configuration ZX), some students press the verb proceed into service as the converse of precede.  So: "word-final vowels are voiceless when proceeding a voiceless consonant; vowels are nasalized when proceeded by a nasal consonant."  (I THINK the passive version is more common than the active, but I haven't collected real data.)  The usage appears especially in phonology, but sometimes in morphology and syntax as well.

Now, the converse of precede that I myself use is follow.  The students aren't getting proceed from me (or any other linguistics instructor, I'd wager).  What they're doing, I think, is "fixing" the non-parallelism of precede (Latinate) and follow (Anglo-Saxon) by extending the 'next' sense of Latinate proceed (We proceeded to the ballroom 'We went next to the ballroom', I'll proceed to the conclusion 'I'll go next to the conclusion').  (In my experience it's hopeless to ask these people where they got their use of proceed -- as, in fact, it's usually pointless to ask people where they got ANY usage.  Both the innovation and spread of variants are largely below the level of consciousness of ordinary speakers.)

Some contribution to the development of proceed 'follow' probably comes from the burden of technical terminology that attends learning linguistics.  Some of it -- reduplication, rhotic, morpheme, clitic, anarthrous -- is obviously special to linguistics, but most of it -- onset, liquid, constituent, definite, subject -- is ordinary English vocabulary used in very special ways, and some of it is not really technical terminology, but "terms of art", conventions within the field that prefer certain usages over other, equally available, ones.  Like precede and follow rather than come before and come after.  (Further complexity: in linguistics, precede and follow by default mean not merely 'come before' and 'come after' but 'come immediately before' and 'come immediately after',  This is so in ordinary language as well, but the convention in linguistics is so strong that linguists ordinarily have to mark the non-default case: "if followed anywhere within the word by a voiceless consonant" and the like.)

Not only do my (mostly American) students spell precede and proceed 'follow' differently, they usually pronounce them differently as well: for them, both verbs usually have a weak accent on their first syllable, so that vowel reduction is blocked, with the result that the verbs have something close to tense [i] and something close to tense [o], respectively, in their first syllables.  So, for the most part, my students are not "confusing" words at all; they're differentiating them scrupulously, but in a way that conforms neither to the conventions of ordinary English nor to the conventions of the guild of linguists.

I wish I could say that this was the end of it, but of course Brians and MWDEU wouldn't have the entries they do if it were: there's a complex pattern of proceed/precede "confusion" (in pronunciation or spelling or both) that linguists can't be held responsible for, and that I don't know the details of.

You can get some appreciation of the complexities from John Wells's blog entry of 23 May 2006, where he reports student misunderstandings going in several directions at once.  Note: the distinguished phonetician Wells is British, and a professor at University College London, so his experiences are bound to be a bit different from mine.


4. Assimilation.  Assimilation is the phenomenon of (at least partial) agreement in phonological features between two segments.  Given XY, X (as target) can pick up features from Y (as trigger), or Y (as target) can pick up features from X (as trigger).  So, in many languages, vowels pick up the feature of nasality from a following nasal consonant (with different details in different languages).

Once again, there's a directionality.  How do we describe the facts?

The conventional terminology in linguistics takes the point of view of the trigger: if the trigger follows the target, it's exerting its influence BACKWARDS onto the target.  So this is called regressive assimilation.  And if the trigger precedes the target, it's exerting its influence FORWARDS onto the target.  So this is called progressive assimilation.

But suppose we look at things from the point of view of the target.  Then if the target precedes the trigger, the target is picking up its properties from what FOLLOWS -- which could reasonably be called progressive (or forward-looking) assimilation.  And if the target follows the trigger, the target is picking up its properties from what PRECEDES -- which could reasonably be called regressive (or backward-looking) assimilation.

In my experience, students have a shitload of trouble in choosing between the two viewpoints.  A lot of them just don't get the regressive/progressive terminology.

Long ago, I moved to using a clearer directional metaphor, borrowed from the analysis of speech errors: anticipation (something changes to fit what is to come) vs. perseveration (something changes to fit what has gone before).  Real-life examples, involving word choice, from the 2005 NWAV meetings:


This terminology doesn't always work, but it works better than regressive/progressive (with its unclarity about where the point of view is located).  On the other hand, anticipatory and perseveratory are six syllables each, while regressive and progressive clock in at only three syllables each.  So relentless devotees of Brevity should prefer regressive/progressive.  Hey, it's a trade.

Myth is truth (p < .05)

In this week's Tom the Dancing Bug, Ruben Bolling explains "how great journalism is done" (the full strip is here.). He's talking about political journalism, obviously. Science journalism is generally simpler, since the scientific equivalents of political parties are usually too diffuse and too weak to call a publication effectively to account for unfairness. In fact, most of the time there aren't any powerful voices at all to call you to account if you write something wrong or foolish about a scientific topic, just a lot of scientifically-educated readers cursing into their oatmeal.

So you're pretty much free to write what you want, based on a popular book, a lecture you've heard, a press release or another story in the popular press. Your editor will like it if you figure out how to add a local or topical angle. If you're at a high-end publication, you might slot in a comment from an expert source -- though in general, you don't want that source to confuse everyone by casting doubt on the main story line, or at least on your interpretation of it.

In science journalism, there are several other prominent story lines beside "Up is Down". One of them is "Up is Up, Science Shows", where some common-sense truth is demonstrated by means of expensive equipment or clever mathematical analysis. This doesn't always work, but it's pretty spectacular when it does. My current favorite example is one that was featured in Matt Hutson's NYT Year in Ideas piece on "neurorealism":

... a Boston Globe article about how high-fat foods activate reward centers in the brain. The Globe headline: "Fat Really Does Bring Pleasure." Couldn't we have proved that with a slice of pie and a piece of paper with a check box on it?

Matt's (entirely appropriate) reaction is an instance of another common story line, is "That's what I always thought", or more succinctly, "well, duh." Ironically, this one is most often deployed in reaction to claims that are not really true, at least as the "well, duh" articles present them. This happens especially often with respect to stories about sex differences, where the structure of received ideas is so extensive, complex and deeply felt.

This characterized much of the reaction last year to Louann Brizendine's claims about male-female differences (see e.g. "Bible Science stories", 12/2/2006; "David Brooks, neuroendocrinologist", 9/17/2006). The worldwide reaction to the "gender happiness gap", a few months ago, was another nice example (see "Gender-role resentment and Rorschach-blot news reporting", 9/27/2007; "The 'gender happiness gap': statistical, practical and rhetorical significance", 10/4/2007).

The current world-wide blossoming of articles about testosterone and humor, based on an article in the BMJ's Christmas spoof issue, is also mostly of this kind. Aside from the small problem that the original article was (literally) a joke, it was a great opportunity for the world's journalists, because of the complex structure of biological differences and local cultural norms for them to play with. You can see this at work in the some of the local adaptations around the world, e.g. "Men make more gags than women", Sify, 12/22/2007

Can you fathom why do we have so many male comedians in Bollywood? Well, scientists have the answer to it.

According to a recent study, male hormones such as testosterone is the reason behind a good sense of humour.

These male hormones fuel aggression which, in turn, develop humour, said the study conducted by a former consultant dermatologist Sam Shuster.

The author also offers a (rather inaccurate) neurorealist interpretation of the same study that set Christopher Hitchens off last year (see the links in "Flacks and hacks and Hitchens", 12/14/2006, for details):

About two years ago, researchers at Stanford University claimed on the basis of studies of brain patterns that a gender divide do exist while it comes to appreciating humour. Women generally place a greater emphasis on the language, and use a more analytical approach.

The first commenter, Santosh, gets right to the point:

Men always will remain one step ahead with respect to women,be it in any field of life.Women should better accept this fact.

About a century ago, Rudyard Kipling offered an explanation based on evolutionary psychology for the idea that women are humor-deficient:

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity—must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions—not in these her honour dwells—
She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else.

Kipling's verse version of this theory is out of fashion, since it was deployed in opposition to the idea of women's suffrage, now a settled issue in western countries. But it stands in a long line of more-or-less serious attempts to understand the biological and social nature of sex differences, in humor as well as in other areas. Some of the attempts have been transparent political rationalizations, like Kipling's; others have been decked out in more scientific attire, like Brizendine's, despite being equally without empirical support; others have been somewhere between spoof science (like Shuster's paper) and plain old bad science (like the recent claims about sex differences in the American electorate's reponse to the current presidential candidates, based on an fMRI study of 20 subjects recruited at Stanford: see "Flacks and hacks and brainscans", 11/23/2007.)

But there's also quite a bit of good, solid science that bears on the questions raised by Kipling, Hitchens and Shuster. Some of the results are interestingly non-obvious -- though the set of received ideas in this area is so extensive and so internally contradictory that almost any result will make someone react the way Hitchens did to his (mis) interpretation of an fMRI study of sex differences in the appreciation of cartoons:

Slower to get it, more pleased when they do, and swift to locate the unfunny—for this we need the Stanford University School of Medicine?

This post is already far too long, but some other time, I'll review some of the good work on jokes, laughter and sex.

Antedated eggnog

Like Arnold Zwicky, I'm not the kind of linguist who is heavy into antedating and sourcing, but a student and I just recently verified our very own antedation, of eggnog, and it's so seasonal I thought I should share it.

The OED's oldest quote for eggnog is from 1825:

Sara Kraft, an Arizona undergraduate taking a independent study course with me this fall, was reporting to me on a chapter in an anthology of Alan Walker Read's articles on ok.¹ Read had occasion to quote from a 'pastoral' poem written around 1774 by 18th-century clergyman and philologist Jonathan Boucher, which quote I happened to notice contained the words 'egg-nogg':

...
Fog-drams i' th' morn, or (better still) egg-nogg,
At night hot-suppings, and at mid-day, grogg,
My palate can regale:

I don't know why it occurred to me to check in the OED to see what the earliest quote they provided was, but I did, and since it was so much later, and from a British source to boot, I got interested. We requested an Inter-Library Loan of Boucher's "A Glossary of Obsolete and Provincial Words; forming a supplement to the dictionaries of the English Language."² After a false start with an incomplete microfiche from Yale, Harvard obligingly sent us the actual volume. Amazing...

The pastoral poem, quite a long one, is a footnote in the 60-page Introduction to the Glossary. The full title of the poem, in the verbose convention of the day, is "Absence: A Pastoral: drawn from the life, from the manners, customs and phraseology of planters (or, to speak more pastorally, of the rural swains) inhabiting the Banks of the Potomac, in Maryland".

In the introduction to his Glossary, (p. xlix), Boucher writes the following:

"A List of some of the most remarkable and common [words], collected during my residence in Virginia and Maryland nearly thirty years ago, is here set down at the foot of the page. To this list I will subjoin a copy of verse, which I have ventured to call a Pastoral, written during my residence in America; written solely with the view of introducing as many of such words and idioms of speech, then prevalent and common in Maryland, as I conceived to be dialectical and peculiar to those parts of America."

The italicized terms in the quoted lines above (lines 69-71) are italicized in the original, and are the 'words and idioms of speech' that Boucher considered to be "dialectal and peculiar to those parts of America", including egg-nogg. As Read notes, from Boucher's reference to 'nearly thirty years ago', we can be sure that the pastoral was written around or before 1774, since Boucher died in 1804. Read notes that he left his Maryland parish in 1775, being a loyalist.

We wrote of our finding to the OED, and received a nice note back from Margot Charlton, saying in part:

I see that the Dictionary of American Regional English has some interesting eighteenth-century evidence for EGG POP, which seems to be similar....The entry goes back to the first edition, and was originally published in 1891; as we revise the text we are finding that we can antedate most entries with the help of the large historical databases now available to us, but it is always helpful to receive such precise information.

Boucher is a fairly well-documented fellow, having been rector in George Washington's parish, tutor to Washington's stepson, and his personal friend. A bit of quick googling on eggnog revealed a startling connection between Boucher, Washington, and eggnog: apparently a recipe for eggnog was found among George Washington's "kitchen papers" at Mount Vernon. It doesn't say whether the recipe was titled with the word "egg nog(g)' or not -- the term "egg flip" and (according to DARE) "egg pop" were also in use, or maybe it wasn't titled -- but given that Boucher noticed Marylanders in Washington's parish using it, presumably it's likely that Washington called it that too. Perhaps Boucher even sampled some of Washington's concoction at a holiday party around this time of year in the early 1770s.

Update: The far more sophisticated antedaters and sourcers over at ADS-L have been hot on the trail of 'eggnog' since this post went up! You can follow the discussion by going here and entering 'eggnog' as a search term. The upshot is that a) Sara and I were far from the first to spot that Boucher used 'eggnog' very early on, and b) there are several other instances of the word in published sources from the late 1700s (i.e. whose actual date of publication is earlier than that Boucher publication date of 1807).

So, apologies for wasting everyone's time! but at least it was seasonal. And, as in my independent study, I learned a lot. Happy new year everyone --

¹Read was the kind of linguist who is heavy into a/s; I learned a lot from that independent study! If you think the recent rash of abbreviationism is purely technology-driven -- email, texting, all these newfangled electronics driving the kidz of today crrrazy -- you should check out his discussion of the mania for abbreviations in 19th-century New England. Larry Horn describes some of the amazing parallels in detail in this 2002 post to the ADS-L listsev.

²The volume we consulted was indeed titled as above, with "Obsolete" instead of "Archaic", and was from the first (1807) publication of part of Boucher's overall Glossary. It had been bound together by Widener with another dictionary, by Nares, dated 1822. The same piece of Boucher's glossary, up until 'Blade', was published again in 1832, as described in the following excerpt from the "Works of the Camden Society," published by Camden Society (Great Britain), Royal Historical Society (Great Britain) in 1868 (image below from GoogleBooks):

.

Comments?

I'll teach you to undernegate!

Caught on television yesterday:


conveying 'that'll teach you not to blow your quarters on the arcade'.  Undernegation, of a sort we haven't seen on Language Log since a brief mention in a 2004 posting by Chris Potts on "negation-indifferent items".


It's hard to get a feel for how common will teach someone to 'will teach someone not to' is, because references to literal teaching are so frequent.  Undernegative teach takes a complement VP denoting an action that the speaker views as undesirable, but there's no way to search for such VPs in general.  You can, however, search for some specific VPs of this sort, for instance talk back 'reply defiantly or insolently'; {"teach X to talk back"}, for various pronouns X, gets a modest number of hits, among them:


(The subject of teach in these examples is either that or I.)

Presumably, undernegative teach arises from "negation by association", as in the account Mark Liberman gave for undernegative could care less some time ago.  That is, teach by itself comes to be seen as a sufficient sign of negativity, and the not becomes dispensable.  There's no easy way to gauge the relative frequency of undernegative teach versus explicitly negative teach, but with the VP talk back, it looks like the undernegative is ahead.

A New Approach to Censorship

The government of Malaysia has announced what to my knowledge is a hitherto unknown form of censorship: they have prohibited the use of certain words with non-Muslim referents. The Associated Press reports that the government has informed the The Herald, a Roman Catholic newspaper, that its license to publish will not be renewed if it continues to use the word Allah in reference to God.

The Internal Security Ministry is of the view that the word Allah refers specifically to the Muslim god and may not appropriately be used in reference to the Catholic god. In addition to allah, the Malaysian government has prohibited the use of three other words by non-Muslims: solat "prayer", Kaabah "the shrine in Mecca", and baitulah "the house of god". Although the report is not entirely clear on this point, I think that what is prohibited is the application of these words to entities distinct from those to which they are applied by Muslims rather than, strictly speaking, their use by non-Muslims. That is, it is presumably acceptable for a Catholic to say that Muslims worship Allah.

As far as I know, such restrictions on the use of particular words are novel. Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews use the word Allah as their word for God. Muslim countries frequently discriminate against non-Muslims, but so far as I know, no other restricts their choice of religious terms.

The basis for this policy is also curious. If one believes in the existence of multiple deities, it make sense to distinguish one from the other. If your favorite deity is Thoth and mine is Isis, it makes sense to keep their names distinct to avoid confusion between the two. But if, as Muslims believe, you believe that there is only one god, you can believe that other people have false ideas as to what God is like and what she wants but you cannot reasonably believe that the god that someone else worships is different, for that would imply the existence of two gods. I suspect that the Internal Security Ministry has not thought this out very carefully.

'Tis the season

It's an old tradition for the British Medical Journal to publish spoof articles in its Christmas issue. This week's BMJ continues the tradition, as the cover image reprinted on the right suggests. For example, one of the featured articles is Sreeram V Ramagopalan et al., "Origins of magic: review of genetic and epigenetic effects", BMJ 335:1299-1301, 22 December 2007:

Objective To assess the evidence for a genetic basis to magic.
Design Literature review.
Setting Harry Potter novels of J K Rowling.
Participants Muggles, witches, wizards, and squibs.
Interventions Limited.
Main outcome measures Family and twin studies, magical ability, and specific magical skills.
Results Magic shows strong evidence of heritability, with familial aggregation and concordance in twins. Evidence suggests magical ability to be a quantitative trait. Specific magical skills, notably being able to speak to snakes, predict the future, and change hair colour, all seem heritable.
Conclusions A multilocus model with a dominant gene for magic might exist, controlled epistatically by one or more loci, possibly recessive in nature. Magical enhancers regulating gene expression may be involved, combined with mutations at specific genes implicated in speech and hair colour such as FOXP2 and MCR1.

I can also recommend the article by Gareth Williams and Poonam Dharmaraj, "Dissent of the testis", which complains that the redesign of certain popular British candies means that they are no longer a suitable substitute for 8 ml orchidometer beads "to gauge testicular volume" ("This is a major setback for paediatric endocrinology, and the manufacturer's decision to change the sweets' morphology without consulting the medical profession is a further kick in the Teasers.")

The practice of running spoof stories in the BMJ Christmas issue is not exactly a secret. The lead article in this year's issue includes a pie chart showing the topical distribution of spoofs over the past two decades:

Apparently, it's an equally old tradition for the reporters and editors at BBC News to swallow such jokes hook, line and sinker. A letter printed in the BMJ in 2003, from John Attia and Kichu Nair, notes:

Every year the BMJ and Medical Journal of Australia use their Christmas edition to inject some medical humour into the normally serious scientific literature.

In this spirit we put together a fictional study entitled "Evidence based physicians' dressing: a cross-over trial," in which we documented the effect of "retro" dress (flared jeans, Hawaiian shirts, moussed hair, and nose rings) on patients' confidence.

Tongue in cheek, we described the Kolmogorov-Smirnoff test as two statisticians eyeballing the data over a glass of vodka, and we created a "fashion-operator characteristic" curve which defined a zone of "fashion limbo." We also calculated a number needed to dress (NND), analogous to the number needed to treat (NNT).

Despite what we and others saw as the obvious lightheartedness of this story, it has been reported as a serious research finding by the BBC ...

This year, the BBC news team somehow missed the stories on the genetics of magic and the testicular shape of Teasers, but did cover at least two spoof stories as if they were serious. One was Lee Graves et al., "Comparison of energy expenditure in adolescents when playing new generation and sedentary computer games: cross sectional study":

Procedure Participants were fitted with a monitoring device validated to predict energy expenditure. They played four computer games for 15 minutes each. One of the games was sedentary (XBOX 360) and the other three were active (Wii Sports).
Main outcome measure Predicted energy expenditure, compared using repeated measures analysis of variance.
Results Mean (standard deviation) predicted energy expenditure when playing Wii Sports bowling (190.6 (22.2) kJ/kg/min), tennis (202.5 (31.5) kJ/kg/min), and boxing (198.1 (33.9) kJ/kg/min) was significantly greater than when playing sedentary games (125.5 (13.7) kJ/kg/min) (P<0.001). Predicted energy expenditure was at least 65.1 (95% confidence interval 47.3 to 82.9) kJ/kg/min greater when playing active rather than sedentary games.
Conclusions Playing new generation active computer games uses significantly more energy than playing sedentary computer games but not as much energy as playing the sport itself.

This was picked up as "Wii players need to exercise too" ("Playing 'active' computer games on consoles such as the Nintendo Wii is no substitute for playing real sports, warn UK experts.") Curiously, the BBC reporter was unable to transcribe the spoof article's statistics correctly -- the third sentence of the article reads:

Wii players used only 2% more energy than players of regular computer games.

which is a strange way to report the statement "Predicted energy expenditure was at least 65.1 (95% confidence interval 47.3 to 82.9) kJ/kg/min greater when playing active rather than sedentary games."

The second spoof article picked up by the BBC news hounds was from the "Retirement" section -- Sam Shuster, "Sex, aggression, and humour: responses to unicycling", BMJ 335:1420-1322, 22 December 2007. The abstract:

After retiring from a busy university department in Newcastle upon Tyne, and with the time and the need for more than the usual consultancies, I was able follow some of my more extreme inclinations. As a cyclist, I had occasionally thought of using more or fewer wheels, but it was only when choosing a grandson’s gift that I got seriously lost in contemplation of a gleaming chrome unicycle. My wife said "buy the bloody" thing, which I did on the whim of the moment. After months of practice at home, I graduated to back streets, a small paved park, and finally town roads. I couldn’t avoid being noticed; in turn, I couldn’t avoid observing the form that notice took. Because at the time there were no other unicyclists in the area, such sightings would have been exceptional, yet I soon found that the responses to them were stereotyped and predictable. I realised that this indicated an underlying biological phenomenon and set about its study.

This was rendered as "Humour 'comes from testosterone'", 12/21/2007:

Men are naturally more comedic than women because of the male hormone testosterone, an expert claims.

Men make more gags than women and their jokes tend to be more aggressive, Professor Sam Shuster, of Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, says. [...]

Professor Shuster believes humour develops from aggression caused by male hormones.

In these last two studies, it's possible (though not certain) that the reported data were not made up as a joke, even though the presentations are certainly light-hearted. And in fact, in the Australian case cited earlier, the news department of the BMJ itself was apparently fooled. The letter that I quoted before continues:

[Despite what we and others saw as the obvious lightheartedness of this story, it has been reported as a serious research finding by the BBC] and now the BMJ, both with a commentary from a medical expert.

We are both amused and alarmed by these occurrences and have been puzzling about their interpretation. Is this a sad commentary on:

* The sense of humour (or lack of it) in the medical scientific community?
* How thoroughly news media check their sources?
* The state of evidence based medicine? Does writing up something as a randomised trial give it such credence that it overrides common sense?
* How people read articles? Is an abstract sufficient to create the perception of veracity?

We wish to set the record straight that this was a fictional study and was simply intended to be, and was labelled as, medical humour. From the amount of interest it has generated it may be a fertile area for real research.

I believe that the news department at the BMJ is has now gotten the hint to consider the date and the content before accepting silly-seeming stuff.

However, the journalists and editors at the BBC seem to be quite resistant to the idea of applying any such faculty of judgment -- though I've occasionally speculated that the whole BBC News enterprise is a sort of vast Pythonic joke, a secret subtle Onion, organized entirely for the private amusement of those initiated into its mysteries.

[Hat tip: Cosma Shalizi]

[Update -- Holly at Feministing doesn't think that the BBC's journalistic incompetence is funny at all ("The BBC says: humour 'comes from testosterone.' Holly says: bad reporting 'comes from the BBC.'", 12/21/2007). She's right, of course. But the BBC is insulated from market forces, and apparently impervious to complaint, so what can reasonable people do but try ridicule?]

[Update by Geoff Pullum: Sadly, it's not just the BBC, and it's not about insulation from market forces (the World Service of the BBC was spun off into a profit-making separate entity, and a lot of the bad science reporting seems to come from there). The Independent is a profit-making (or at least, profit-attempting) newspaper, and a comparatively good one; but on page 19 of the issue for today, Saturday December 22nd, 2007, you will find an earnest report by Jeremy Laurance, the Health Editor, reporting the story about the dermatologist on a unicycle correlating male jeering with testosterone level. He swallows it hook, line and sinker. It looks to me as if people are being put into science and medicine reporting when they do not have good science degrees. Or a sense of humor.]

[Update #3 -- the "humor from testosterone" story is certainly spreading vigorously around the world, presented as a serious scientific result. And the BBC is certainly not the only credulous (or opportunistic) media outlet: "Scientist claims men are funnier than women", The Telegraph; "Aggression 'makes men more humorous than women'", The Independent; "Humor Develops From Aggression Caused By Male Hormones, Professor Says", ScienceDaily; "Is humor tied to male aggression?", World Science; "Quand les testicule régissent l'humour", TF1; "Das Geheimnis des männlichen Witzes", Spiegel; "Humor entsteht aus Aggression", Die Welt; "L'umorismo è maschile perchè legato a testosterone", AGI; "'L'umorismo è maschio', sostiene una ricerca", ANSA; "El humor 'está en la testosterona'", BBC Mundo; "Bewijs: mannen hebben inderdaad meer humor", Elsevier; "Testosteron ger män aggressiv humor", Svenska Dagbladet; "Estudo diz que senso de humor está ligado à testosterona", BBC Brasil; "Smysl pro humor je prý výhradně mužská záležitost", České noviny. ]

[Update -- more here.]

What's not the case?

Negation can be a tricky thing, as has been discussed many times here on Language Log before. Back in grad school, my first-semester semantics course was with Veneeta Dayal and our textbook was (the first edition of) Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet's Meaning and Grammar, in which "more colloquial" forms of expressing propositional negation were typically replaced with the somewhat more stilted "it is not the case that", so that a sentence like "Pavarotti is not hungry" is expressed as "It is not the case that Pavarotti is hungry" -- or, if you prefer, "That Pavarotti is hungry is not the case".

(Lots of examples in Meaning and Grammar involve Pavarotti, James Bond, and Sophia Loren, commenting on their hunger and boringness, asking whether they like each other, claiming that Sophia Loren thinks Pavarotti is French, etc. Don't ask.)

Why the stilted substitution? (I hear you ask.) Well, part of what one learns early on in Meaning and Grammar is that a sentence like "It is not the case that Pavarotti is hungry and Bond likes Pavarotti" is false true [thanks, Steve] if either or both of the conjoined clauses ("Pavarotti is hungry" and "Bond likes Pavarotti") is false. In other words, the sentence must be true whenever any of the following three more colloquially-expressed sentences is true:

1. First clause negated: "Pavarotti is not hungry and Bond likes Pavarotti."
2. Second clause negated: "Pavarotti is hungry and Bond doesn't like Pavarotti."
3. Both clauses negated: "Pavarotti is not hungry and Bond doesn't like Pavarotti."

This generally holds for conjoined clauses, but not for embedded clauses. That is, the sentence "It is not the case that Loren thinks that Pavarotti is French" must be true when "Loren doesn't think that Pavarotti is French" (first clause negated) is true, but not necessarily when "Loren thinks that Pavarotti is not French" (second, embedded clause negated) or "Loren doesn't think that Pavarotti is not French" (both clauses negated) are true. Right? Right.

Update, 12/28: Wrong! The real difference is that "It is not the case that Pavarotti is hungry and Bond likes Pavarotti" does not entail any of the three more colloquially-expressed sentences listed above, while "It is not the case that Loren thinks that Pavarotti is French" does entail (and only entails) "Loren doesn't think that Pavarotti is French". Thanks to Jonathan Weinberg for writing on 12/21 to point out my mistake here, and my apologies for taking so long to correct it -- you know, what with the holidays and all that. (Just goes to show you that a phonologist can be easily confused by semantics.) In any event, there's a difference, and what follows still holds.

OK, with that background, you'll see why it surprised me to read the following quote from the President's press conference yesterday:

"Are we satisfied with progress in Baghdad? No, but to say nothing is happening is not the case," Bush said. (link)

At first I wondered whether this might be a misquotation, so I checked the White House transcript, where it's rendered only slightly differently: "Are we satisfied with the progress in Baghdad? No. But to say nothing is happening is just simply not the case." (audio)

Of course, what Bush was trying to do was negate the second clause: "it is (just simply) not the case that nothing is happening", meaning that "something is happening" -- i.e., that there is indeed progress in Baghdad. But the problem is that he embedded the "nothing is happening" clause under the "(for someone) to say" clause, so, if anything, his statement must be true only when "(for someone) to not say that nothing is happening" (first clause negated) is true.

Of course, I'm putting aside the fact that the stilted "it is not the case that" type of negation simply doesn't work with this type of sentence in the first place, which can perhaps be better appreciated by moving the negation to the beginning: "it is not the case that to say nothing is happening" (compare the grammatical-though-stilted "it is not the case that someone said that nothing is happening"). Then again, I'm also ignoring the possibility that one might analyze Bush's statement as if it had been rendered thusly: "... to say nothing is happening, well, it's just simply not the case", where the "it" specifically refers to the clause "nothing is happening". We're not ones to simply point out Bushisms here on Language Log, but in this case, I guess I just couldn't resist.

[ Comments? ]

It all depends on what "see" means

And also what "march with" means. The Romney campaign is in the uncomfortable position of having to explain that the candidate said something that isn't literally true, without admitting that he said something false. This all works out for them if see means "be aware of", and march with means "support", or maybe "march for the same cause, but in a different day and in a different city".

According to Michael Levenson, "Romney never saw father on King march", Boston Globe, 12/21/2007

Mitt Romney acknowledged yesterday that he never saw his father march with Martin Luther King Jr. as he asserted in a nationally televised speech this month, and historical evidence shows that Michigan's Governor George Romney and the civil rights leader never did march together.

Romney said his father had told him he had marched with King and that he had been using the word "saw" in a "figurative sense."

"If you look at the literature, if you look at the dictionary, the term 'saw' includes being aware of in the sense I've described," Romney told reporters in Iowa. "It's a figure of speech and very familiar, and it's very common. And I saw my dad march with Martin Luther King. I did not see it with my own eyes, but I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great effort."

Here's the phrase from Governor Romney's 12/6/2007 "Faith Speech":

The Globe story clarifies what actually happened back in 1963:

Susan Englander, assistant editor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, who is editing the King papers from that era, told the Globe yesterday: "I researched this question, and indeed it is untrue that George Romney marched with Martin Luther King."

She said that when he was governor of Michigan, George Romney issued a proclamation in June 1963 in support of King's march in Detroit, but declined to attend, saying he did not participate in political events on Sundays. A New York Times story from the time confirms Englander's account.

A few days after that march, George Romney joined a civil rights march through the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, but King did not attend, Englander said. A report in the New York Times confirms Englander's account of that second march, mentioning George Romney's attendance but making no mention of King.

So George Romney publicly supported -- but wasn't present at -- a march in Detroit that King attended; and participated in a march a few days later in Grosse Pointe, which King wasn't present at. It's not clear from the Globe article whether Mitt participated in either of these marches; as far as I can tell from his biography, he was at boarding school at Cranbrook, an hour or so away, so it's possible.

Romney has repeated the story of his father marching with King in some of his most prominent presidential campaign appearances, including the "Tonight" show with Jay Leno in May, his address on faith and politics Dec. 6 in Texas, and on NBC's "Meet The Press" on Sunday, when he was questioned about the Mormon Church's ban on full participation by black members. He said that he had cried in his car in 1978 when he heard the ban had ended, and added, "My father marched with Martin Luther King."

Mitt Romney went a step further in a 1978 interview with the Boston Herald. Talking about the Mormon Church and racial discrimination, he said: "My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit."

I can appreciate his current frustration. It's certainly clear that his father supported the civil rights movement in 1963, which was not a position to be taken for granted for a politician at that time. And "I read about my father issuing a proclamation in support of a march that Martin Luther King participated in", or "my father (and I ?) marched in Grosse Pointe a few days after Martin Luther King marched in Detroit" are wimpy statements -- "I saw my father march with Martin Luther King" is much punchier. Its only drawback is that it's not exactly true.

[Update -- predictably, this is the presidential campaign story of the day:

David S. Bernstein, "Was it all a dream?", The Boston Phoenix

John Gibson, "Mitt Romney's Big Oops", Fox News

Michael D. Shear, " Romney the Elder and Martin Luther King Jr.", Washington Post (The Trail)

Michael Luo, "Romney Learns that 'Facts Are Stubborn Things'", NYT 12/22/2007 (original head: "Romney shows a tendency to imprecision")

Dawson Bell, "George Romney was at march, King wasn't, activist says", Detroit Free Press

etc. ...]

[Update -- Romney seems to have made things worse by claiming the expert status of a former English major, and then getting the World Series and the Super Bowl mixed up:

CBS News: "Did you actually see -- with your own eyes -- your father marching with Martin Luther King?"
Romney: "My own eyes? You know, I speak in the sense of I saw my dad become president of American Motors. I wasn't actually there when he became president of American Motors, but I saw him in the figurative sense of he marched with Martin Luther King. My brother also remembers him marching with Martin Luther King and so in that sense I saw him march with Martin Luther King."
Later he said, "I can't even give you the time frame. I just remember that we talked about it. My brother also remembers my dad having spoken about the fact that he did not do political events on Sunday but that he decided at the last minute that he was going to break that self-imposed rule and participate and I think he did so on a Sunday as I recall."
He added, "You know, I'm an English literature major as well. When we say, 'I saw the Patriots win the World Series, it doesn't necessarily mean you were there -- excuse me, the Super Bowl. I saw my dad become president of American Motors. Did that mean you were there for the ceremony? No, it's a figure of speech."

The Romney campaign has done a better job of making the case than the candidate has.]

Couric on the primaries: too close to call, tight as a tick

As the early rounds of presidential primaries and caucuses approach, CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric has been emphasizing just how close the races are. On the Dec. 18 edition of the program, Couric had this to say to chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer about the upcoming Iowa caucuses:

You and I talked a little earlier this afternoon, Bob, we were saying Iowa is really getting interesting. As they say in the business, too close to call. In fact, that phrase was invented here at CBS between 1962 and 1964. I thought you might find that interesting.

Then the next night, Couric opened the Evening News broadcast with a teaser about a close primary race in another state:

The first presidential battle in the South. A new poll shows it's tight as a tick in South Carolina between Clinton and Obama.

First, let's consider Couric's assertion that the phrase "too close to call" was a CBS newsroom invention of the early '60s. After The Hotline made this their quote of the day, Couric felt obliged to support her claim on the Couric & Co. blog:

At first it sounds like something out of a horse race – a literal one, not the political races in Iowa or New Hampshire. Curious if that was the case, I asked Couric & Co. to check it out. Sure enough, language guru William Safire had pondered the same thing in one of his “On Language” columns back in 1996. Safire writes:

Daniel Schorr of National Public Radio remembers the phrase from the early days of television, and directed me to Martin Plissner of CBS, a pioneer of electronic election coverage.
"That phrase was invented at CBS between 1962 and 1964," says Plissner with the confidence never shared by lexicographers. "During that period, instead of using the exit polling we have today, we used a model we had devised for predicting or calling elections based on certain reported-precinct results. That gave us a sample to which we could apply mathematical formulae to determine a call. When we had a situation in which all the votes were reported but there was no clear winner, we called that election too close to call."

A little poking around inside CBS News today revealed more: that Lou Harris, who worked for CBS News in the ‘60s, is said to have first uttered those words on air when reporting on a tight race for governor of Massachusetts in 1962.

So Couric wasn't pulling this factoid out of thin air: Martin Plissner told Safire that the phrase was "invented at CBS," and another unnamed newsroom source gave Lou Harris the credit for having "first uttered those words" in 1962. But if Couric's fact-checkers had dug a little deeper, they might have discovered that there was something to her initial hunch that "too close to call" might have come out of a (literal) horse race or some other similar sporting context. In fact, "too close to call" shows up in the sports pages going back to the 1930s. Of the citations below, the first three relate to boxing and the fourth to college football:

For once they admitted that there was a fight too close to call.
Zanesville (Ohio) Signal, Nov. 3, 1932, p. 2 ("Today's Sport Parade" by Henry McLemore)

Canzoneri or Ross? It's too close to call. Let the referee decide it. Or the judges.
New York Times, Sep. 12, 1933, p. 30 ("Sports of the Times" by John Kieran)

That may make a difference when they step through the ropes and start firing. It makes it too close to call with any confidence in advance.
New York Times, May 6, 1938, p. 30 ("Sports of the Times" by John Kieran)

Missouri is favored over Iowa State; Nebraska should rout Kansas; Oklahoma and Kansas State are too close to call.
Burlington (NC) Daily Times-News, Oct. 16, 1940, p. 7

So was CBS at least the first to use "too close to call" to refer to a close electoral race? Evidently not, as it appears in print well before the putative 1962 invention. The phrase was applied to various close races in 1958:

The Senate struggle [in Minnesota] between Republican Sen. Edward J. Thye and Democratic Rep. Eugene McCarthy looks too close to call.
Albuquerque (NM) Journal, Oct. 12, 1958, p. 31 (AP wire story)

Maryland: Too close to call is the current verdict on the race between Senator J. Glenn Beall, Republican, seeking a second term, and Baltimore's Maryor Thomas D'alesandro.
New York Times, Oct. 13, 1958, p. 24

Two weeks before election, its [sc. New Jersey's] race for United States Senator is considered too close to call.
New York Times, Oct. 21, 1958, p. 1

A veteran newspaper political writer said the gubernatorial fight [in Wisconsin] between incumbent Republican Vernon Thomson and [Gaylord] Nelson is "too close to call."
Daily Review (Hayward, Cal.), Oct. 24, 1958, p. 25 (UPI wire story)

So by 1962, "too close to call" had become established in political reporting for at least four years. If CBS can lay any claim to the phrase, it's possible that the network was the first to use it as a categorization of close races in election-night coverage as voting returns came trickling in. But that's a far cry from saying it was "invented" or "first uttered" by Lou Harris or another CBS correspondent.

Couric's other turn of phrase, "tight as a tick," might actually have a more distinct CBS provenance, since it's widely attributed to her predecessor Dan Rather (known for his colorful Texanisms):

The new Iowa Polls show the caucus fights are "tight as a tick," as Dan Rather might say. (Des Moines Register, Dec. 1, 2007)

The conclusion to be drawn from this mass of data is that -- in the words of Dan Rather -- it is "tight as a tick" in Iowa. (Washington Post blog, Dec. 7, 2007)

In 2000, CNN host Jeff Greenfield attributed a more elaborate version to Rather:

And yet, either because of the challenger's appeal or the insider's weakness or maybe, maybe, because of an enduring American hunger for the new, this contest remains tight as a tick in Grandma's corset. I have no idea what that means, but it works for Dan Rather. (CNN transcript, Oct. 31, 2000)

I was unable to find the "Grandma's corset" variant in any of the CBS transcripts available on LexisNexis, but I did find another version from Rather:

There are races in the presidential races in individual states that are as tight as a tick on a dog's ear here. (CBS News transcript, Nov. 5, 1996)

The political use of "tight as a tick" isn't always credited to Rather, as in this recent usage by Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons on CNN:

So, I think you can't count John Edwards out yet. It's tight as a tick, as they say. (CNN transcript, Dec. 10, 2007)

And in the last presidential election cycle Gordon Fischer, the chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, used yet another variant on the Fox News show "Big Story with John Gibson":

Well, you know, frankly from the polls, this is looking as tight as a tick on a deer. (Fox News transcript, Jan 19, 2004)

"On a deer" is an interesting variation on the theme, since a quick Google search finds the tick appearing chiefly in canine locations, in accordance with Rather's 1996 usage: on a hound, bloodhound, hound dog, coon dog, dog, dog's ear, dog's back, etc.

Though Rather tends to get the credit for "tight as a tick" with reference to close political races, it's a regional idiom with a wide array of other possible meanings. These meanings have lately been dissected on the American Dialect Society mailing list, in a discussion sparked by Couric's recent usage. Darla Wells, who first caught the broadcast, was familiar with the sense of "tight as a tick" meaning 'having had too much to drink,' and Dennis Preston collected this sense for his 1975 article, "Proverbial comparisons from southern Indiana" (Orbis 24,1:72-114). Ron Butters, meanwhile, suggested the idiom could mean 'miserly,' with tight related to tightwad. Finally, Gregory McNamee supplied some local knowledge from the region of Virginia where Couric was raised, saying that "tight/full as a tick" in that area refers to someone who has overeaten, "gorged to the point of popping, like a tick full of blood."

So Couric's Virginian understanding of the simile may have been influenced by Rather's north Texan dialect (or his own peculiar idiolect), allowing a semantic transferral to the realm of political campaigns. Considering the often contentious relationship between the current CBS anchor and the former one, it's interesting that Couric might be taking her cue from Rather when it comes to this particular idiom.

Whether either

It's been a time of puzzles about whether and either: a case where either is used in place of standard whether, and an assortment of coordinations, of varying levels of oddness, involving these two items.


1. Concessive either.  First, either for whether -- in an ADS-L posting by Phil Cleary on 9 December, intended to document a possible eggcorn (advance someone's course for advance someone's cause) but incidentally providing an instance of concessive either X or not 'whether X or not':


It looks like advance ... course is a moderately common error -- an eggcorn, perhaps, or a flounder, a word confusion based on similar pronunciation (especially, in this case, in non-rhotic varieties) and overlapping meaning.  Here are a few more examples (found on 12/9):


That day I also found plenty of hits for {"either you like it or not"} in the appropriate sense, e.g.:


(You can find more examples with {"either you like it or you don't"} and other variants.)  I hadn't noticed this before, and it seems not to have caught the attention of the usage advisers, but it's definitely out there.

Now, this is not just "confusing" either and whether.  It has a basis, I think, in one of the ways you can use "either you like it or not" (equivalent to "you either like it or not"), namely to convey indifference: 'it doesn't make any difference whether you like it or not'.  (Similarly for examples with clauses other than you like it.)  That's just what whether ... or not conveys.  So either bleeds into whether's territory.

[Long digression: This would be a good place to point out that people who revile whether ... or not in complement clauses --


because the or not is "unnecessary" (Omit Needless Words, or ONW) don't always recognize that the or not is OBLIGATORY in standard English in concessive clauses:


Scrupulous usage advice recognizes the distinction.  (And sensible usage advice doesn't insist on the omission of or not.  MWDEU: "this use of or not is more than 300 years old and is common among educated speakers and writers.  It is, in short, perfectly good, idiomatic English.")

A further wrinkle: there are plenty of occurrences of the non-standard truncated concessive (without the or not), e.g.:


That would be like the truncated as far as of


which I've mentioned a number of times on Language Log (for instance, here).  Here we have two situations where vernacular speakers omit words because's they're needless in the context, but guardians of the standard insist that you must Include All Necessary Words (IANW).  The guardians' judgment is in fact based on social criteria -- who uses the variant, an antipathy to what's perceived as innovation -- but the criticism is couched in terms of "efficiency" (ONW) or "logic" (Two Negatives Make a Positive) or some other abstract principle.  The rationale is SECONDARY, as I termed it in my discussion of at about a while back.  Omitting needless words is ok only if you do it in tune with the prescribed standard.]

2. Correlative either ... either.  A few weeks before, inspired by the data I'll talk about in section 4 below, I looked for examples of correlative either ... either.  Searching on {"either you * or either"} on 15 November got many hits, among them:


I'd noticed correlative either in student writing for years.  It's non-standard, but not (so far as I can tell) proscribed in the manuals, although it would be a natural object for ONW scorn.

It's easy to see how it would arise.  The standard disjunctive correlative either ... or has an accented word, either, marking the first disjunct, but normally unaccented or in the second.  In speech you can put an accent on the or to convey that the alternatives are of equal status, but in writing that's hard to do.  Using either on both disjuncts does the trick.  Yes, it's non-standard, but it's communicatively effective, and you can see why people might like it.  (It's also likely that correlative whether, as in the next section, promotes correlative either.)

[More digressions.

In addition to disjunction marked with either, English has (of course) unmarked disjunction, as in


Here the two disjuncts have equal status, just as conjuncts do:


Somewhat surprisingly, there is little antipathy towards marked disjunction in the advice manuals, though you'd expect ONW to be invoked against either.  To my mind, this is a good thing: relentless ONW legislates implicit (rather than explicit) marking of content, and this is just an irrational prejudice.  Saving a word means a lot when you're writing telegrams or writing to some limit on word counts, but in plenty of other contexts that extra word does some work.  Explicit marking is often just what you want.]

Notice that the problem with correlative either ... either is not a failure of parallelism.  From the point of view of standard English, it's TOO MUCH parallelism.

3. Correlative whether ... whether.  Formally similar to correlative either ... either is correlative whether ... whether, as in these examples Neal Whitman sent me last month:

 
Neal found these examples (all concessive) a bit edgy, but I find them fully grammatical, and in fact I generally prefer them to coordination of full clauses WITHOUT the repeated whether, like:


This sentence is entirely grammatical, but I prefer the explicit marking on both disjuncts, because it gives equal status to the disjuncts.

[Yet another digression.  Either and whether have a lot in common, but the details of their distribution are significantly different.  Among these differnces is that in formal standard English either marking a first disjunct is generally optional, but whether in the same context is obligatory:


But in informal English, such concessives are just fine.  This is another sort of implicit marking, a kind of parataxis -- one sentence glommed onto another.  Such implicit marking, which depends on the hearer or reader supplying the connection between the two bits of content, is a good thing when the people involved are generally on the same page about what's going on.

The really big point here is that it's loopy to legislate in general against explicit marking (ONW) OR implicit marking (IANW) when both are available.  Each has its own virtues, depending on the context.]

Neal's examples are all concessives, but correlative whether is equally at home in complements:


4. Correlative subjects.  Now we get to some possibly WTF coordinations.  It all started when I heard the following:


(This was the impetus for my investigations in section 3, which in turn took me to the stuff in section 2.)

On 14 November I googled up a few more examples, among them:


These have correlative SUBJECTS marked with whether, in a Right Node Raising (RNR) configuration that goes beyond the ordinary, since it groups together a subordinator whether with the subject of its associated complement clause, as against the VP of that clause; the disjuncts are not constituents.

There are similar examples with other introductory WH elements (some involving disjunction, some conjunction):


And with if:

And with that:


(I haven't found any examples with either or with subordinating conjunctions like although and because.)

Non-constituent disjuncts/conjuncts are just what we expect in RNR: in


the object NPs money and support are grouped together with a preposition associated with another argument of their verbs, even though the two don't make a syntactic constituent.  RNR is like that.

My first reaction to the whether examples was to shrink back, and probably many people will find them unacceptable.  But I've grown to find these RNR examples that "cut into" clauses not so bad at all.  As far as I can tell, the advice literature hasn't noticed them.  (How would the manuals label them?  They're certainly not failures of parallelism -- once again, they are in a sense more parallel than they'd have to be -- though they could of course be faulted as violations of ONW, if you care passionately about omitting every single omissible word.)

5. Bonus WTF coordination.  And now a real WTF coordination case (involving disjunction, so there's a tenuous tie to the preceding sections), from Bob Ray on 21 November:


Ray noted that there was plenty of room on the form for a more complete sentence, in particular:


That is, the have is functioning both as a main verb (have Medicare) and as an auxiliary, in the perfect construction (have applied for Medicare).

This looks like a one-off error, the result of pasting together two formulations of related ideas, with have as the hinge, much as in the Elmore Leonard quotation Mark Liberman posted about earlier today:


The other cases I looked at above are systematic -- though maybe non-standard or in the gray area between standard and non-standard -- and not inadvertent errors.

Linguists on Jeopardy

Following up on Bill's post from last night: Kevin Holbert may be the first self-identified linguistics student to be a Jeopardy! contestant, but he's certainly not the first linguistics student to be a Jeopardy! contestant tout court. Eight years ago this month, there was a 1-time Jeopardy! champ named Todd O'Bryan. Todd self-identified as "[a] graduate student originally from Louisville, Kentucky" (thus also following up on my post from yesterday), but more specifically, Todd was then a linguistics student in what became my own home department at UCSD -- as Todd's web page clarifies.

[ Comments? ]

Colloquial looseness

Breffni O'Rourke writes:

I thought either the Elmore Leonard desk or the WTF coordination department might be interested in these, from Up in Honey’s Room, 2007. Both are on p. 62 of the Weidenfeld and Nicholson edition (end of chapter 6):

(1) Joe had an airplane, a single-engine Cessna he’d fly to Detroit and take Walter for rides and show him how to work the controls.

Three coordinated VPs within a relative clause (“a single-engine Cessna [which] he’d X and Y and Z”), but only the first has the requisite NP gap.

(2) Joe Aubrey thought he knew what Walter had in mind, but no idea how he’d pull it off.

The subject of the second clause is supplied by the first, but the verb “had” has gone missing – maybe under the influence of “had” in the indirect question (“what Walter had in mind”). Which might also explain why it seems OK at first glance.

They’re both perfectly comprehensible and have that colloquial looseness that makes the dialogue vivid, but I was surprised to find it in a narrative passage.

But these two sentences occur in a passage of free indirect style, where Leonard presents his character's thoughts in a mixture of perspectives, tenses and pronouns. Here's what immediately precedes Breffni's first quotation:

Walter had better things to do, work toward becoming as well known as Himmler, perhaps even a Nazi saint. He had finally decided, yes, of course tell Otto and Jurgen what you intend to do. They were Afrika Korps officers, heroes themselves. Tell them they are the only ones in the world who will know about the event before it happens.

The only ones if he didn't count Joe Aubrey in Georgia, his friend in the restaurant business who owned a string of Mr. Joe's Rib Joints, all very popular down there. Though lately Negro soldiers from the North were "acting uppity," Joe said, coming in and demanding service, and he was thinking of selling his chain.

This passage, although not quoted, does have some of the aspects of Elmore Leonard's dialogue, in which parataxis tends to be preferred over syntaxis. So the first quote might be an indirect-style echo of something like

Joe's got this airplane, he flies [it] to Detroit and takes me for rides and shows me how to work the controls.

The object it is optional here, even in a main clause.

But parataxis doesn't seem to be involved in Breffni's second quotation. In that case, there's definitely a missing "had" or "he had"; and I agree that the immediately preceding "had in mind" helps explain why the sentence goes down so easy anyway.

However, stranded "no idea how" is fairly common out there on the internets:

The editor is in my phone but no idea how to make it work!
I've encouraged my Ajax guru cousin to investigate shimming a HTML5 Audio wrapper overtop his library to promote cross-browser programming, but no idea how feasible that is...
Have you ever known what you wanted to say, but no idea how to enunciate it?
You managed to raise the floor but no idea how to turn on the fans?
Here's a bracketless one (no screws at least) but no idea how reliable it is.
There are alot of tools and macros for Radio which I imagine would work here, but no idea how to properly implement.

Maybe for some people, "no idea how" is on the verge of becoming a construction that can introduce a clause without requiring any overt preceding subject and verb. There's a hint of this in the distribution of the initialism nfi:

i got so wasted saturday night i woke up in a red cross clothing bin nfi how i got in there.
If you havent got console (nfi how you can play without it) go to options, click the keyboard tab, advanced button and make sure "enable developer console"
its a marketing ploy of thiers to make the stores as ugly as posible during sales... nfi how that works tho
my posts are on direct anime as well nfi how it got there,
ive been having this problems for months now, nfi how to fix it.
Currently in beta, but nfi how much it'll cost.

But nfi whether this is plausible in the 1940s Detroit of Leonard's novel.

A Linguist on Jeopardy

We've chronicled the ups and downs of Jeopardy's handling of linguistic topics, which seems to have improved, and recently they've had entire categories devoted to linguistic topics, as on December 14th, when two of the categories were "Suffixes" and "Let's Learn Hebrew",but they've reached a new high: one of the contestants is a linguistics graduate student.He's Kevin Holbert, who won two games before losing today. You can check out his performance at the Jeopardy Archive. Alex Trebek chatted with him about his work on Khoi and San languages, in the course of which Holbert actually got in a good description of the production of clicks, for which Khoi and San languages are known. To my amazement, Trebek spontaneously (that is, not in imitation of Holbert) produced several clicks!

Binge, don't purge

I'm spending the holidays with my wife's family in Louisville, KY this year. At breakfast this morning I picked up yesterday's Courier-Journal and started laughing so hard I almost coughed up my oatmeal. I wasn't reading the comics -- it was the headline for the top story in the business section that had me going.

Yum executive Hearl will retire
Eaton to be new development chief

At the risk of over-explaining the joke, more context may be necessary.

"Yum" refers to Yum! Brands, Inc., based here in Louisville, spun off from PepsiCo and home to such familiar restaurants as KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut (read more about it on Wikipedia). Given that kind of business, I should think that a chief operating and development officer with a name that sounds like eatin' is an improvement over one with a name that sounds like hurl.

Speaking of Louisville: the t-shirt pictured on the right (click on the picture for a larger version) is an example of how local folks are both aware and proud of at least one particular feature of their speech: the different pronunciations of the name Louisville itself. Here's what the Wikipedia entry for Louisville, KY has to say about this variability in pronunciation:

The variability of the local pronunciation of the city's name can perhaps be laid at the feet of the city's location on the border between the Northern and Southern regions of the United States. Louisville's diverse population has traditionally represented elements of both Northern and Southern culture.

There's probably more to it than this, but this sounds about right.

Go to the pronunciation section of the Wikipedia entry to listen to examples of these pronunciations -- none of them very natural-sounding, in my view, but you get the general idea. The description of the pronunciation is, linguistically speaking, very unsophisticated ("The name is often pronounced far back in the mouth, in the top of the throat."), but of course a more sophisticated description would not really matter much to most folks visiting that page.

This section also points out that "[n]o matter how Louisville is pronounced, the 's' is always silent", which makes Louisville, KY different from other Louisvilles in the U.S. (in Colorado, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee). This is no doubt due to the fact that Louisville, KY is explicitly named after King Louis XVI of France, and of course in French the 's' is also silent.

One interesting aspect of the pronunciation of Louisville as (roughly) "Luhvul" is the quality of the vowel in the first syllable. To me, the vowel tends to sound pretty much identical to the vowel in the second syllable, right down to the l-sound at the end -- you might represent this orthographically as "Lulvul", but that doesn't quite capture it. The phonetic issue involved here happens to be discussed (with respect to something else entirely) in this post by Ben Zimmer last month.

[ Comments? ]

The meaning mining business

Says my colleague Bob Ladd in an email about prepositions (heaven knows why we email each other when we can just walk across the hall between each other's offices):

I can't resist pointing out "the best band in the world" vs. "the best band on the planet". I had noticed some time ago the extent to which "the planet" is taking over from "the world" in such superlative expressions, which I think reflects some change of perspective induced by globalization and/or the space age, but I'd never noticed the prepositions before. Does Lawler's analysis explain this?

The answer is, as far as I can see, no. Perhaps I'm doing Lawler's analysis an injustice, but I think this is the kind of case where the metaphorical meaning mine doesn't self-evidently offer up the explanatory ore that we were hoping for. (John Lawler agrees with me, by the way; this isn't a criticism of his analysis. He and I both think the metaphorical basis of preposition choice only gives you a rough rule of thumb.)

Of course, we could always post-hoc it. We could say that people who claim the Rolling Stones are the best band in the world are using an older metaphor from earlier centuries, when air travel was unknown and the world, experientially, was a 3-dimensional space we are all embedded within, the hills and trees above us and the valleys and streams below us, so in is used, locating the Stones within the container-like 3-dimensional area that is the world of our consciousness; and we could say that when we claim the Stones are the best band on the planet we are speaking like 21st-century, topologically sophisticated people who have seen satellite pictures and Google earth, so on is appropriate, locating the Stones on the 2-dimensional surface of a 3-dimensional sphere.

But I think it's post-hoc. I just don't believe it could have been predicted in advance that the words world and planet would behave exactly this way, given merely semantic information about them. Though I could be wrong: we linguists don't have any privileged access to the real and correct semantic information about a word, we have to hypothesize what it might be and then draw conclusions from our hypotheses and see if they predict incorrectly.

My hunch is that English preposition choice often comes close to being explainable in terms of semantics and metaphors, but when you get near the grammaticized edges it starts to let you down.

Why do we laugh at someone but pour scorn and ridicule on them? Are they more like a point target when we are laughing and more like a flat surface when we dole out ridicule as if it were a gooey humiliating liquid? Could you really predict, if you didn't already know, that given what a joke is, we would say The joke is on you (not at you)?

You could just say "Yes" to all this, I suppose, and I don't know what to tell you about why I don't believe you. I can only supply more examples of where I think metaphor is of doubtful predictive power.

Why do we trust, or believe, or have faith in someone but rely or count on them? Are they more like a container when trust or belief or faith is the issue and more like a surface when reliability is the issue? Don't you put your trust in the ice when you walk out on it? Aren't you relying on a plane when you get in it?

You see where I'm going with this? There is a vein of truth in the semantic/metaphorical analysis of preposition meanings and preposition choice, and it is a very useful guide. But it is important not to work that vein until it runs out (I'm deep in a mining metaphor here, you see) and then try to save its predictive power by sifting through the mine tailings looking for nodules of post-hoc explanatory gold that you can take into town and sell to some sucker who can be convinced into staking his fortune on the meaning mining business.

By the way, why do we invest in a mine but stake our fortune on it?

The biggest typo in history

At least, it's got to be the biggest one that I ever saw, in purely quantitative terms. Today's NYT Science Section has an article by Dennis Overbye ("Laws of Nature, Source Unknown") that mentions

"...string theory, the alleged theory of everything, which apparently has 10500 solutions..."

This is a reference to the so-called string theory "landscape", which is said to have about 10⁵⁰⁰ solutions. Presumably Overbye wrote the number correctly, and it was typeset wrong, at least in the online version. And 10⁵⁰⁰ is such a big number that it's hard to explain how big a typo this is.

If memory serves, the number of elementary particles in the known universe is believed to be about 10⁸⁰. So if every elementary particle contained its own individual universe of 10⁸⁰ particles, and every particle in every one of those sub-universes contained its own sub-sub-universe of the same size, there would be 10⁸⁰x10⁸⁰x10⁸⁰=10²⁴⁰ particles in this three-level hierarachy of meta-universes. If every one of the elementary particles in this baroque construction met every single one of the others, that would be 10²⁴⁰x10²⁴⁰=10⁴⁸⁰ pairings (minus 10²⁴⁰ self-pairings, but never mind). And if every one of these possible pairs of particles went out a quadrillion times, that would be 10⁴⁹⁵ interactions. And if the participants posted 10,500 pictures of each of these events on Facebook, there would be about 10⁵⁰⁰ pictures in all.

[There are, of course, much bigger numbers out there. I discussed some of them earlier this year, in a post on MIT's Independent Activities Period ("Charm School (and battling logicians)", 2/3/2007). There's a somewhat more serious discussion here.

But the current competition is for the (quantitatively) largest typographical error in a serious publication. I won't be surprised to learn that Dennis Overbye can be bested in this competition. Pending documentation of a bigger mistake, though, this is the largest goof that I know about.]

[Update -- Andrew Greene writes:

I was just reading that article in my dead-tree edition of the Times, and the 500 was properly superscripted there. I've noticed before that when they convert articles to HTML the Times often fails to convert superscripts and subscripts to the appropriate tags.

]

[Update #2 -- though I didn't notice it at the time, there's actually a typo of exactly the same sort, but much larger consequence, in a story that I linked to in my post on the Large Number Competition at MIT last January. The article in The Tech ("Professors Duke It Out in Big Number Duel", 1/31/2007) describes the winning effort as follows:

Near the end of the duel, Rayo furiously scribbled on the whiteboard: "The smallest number bigger than any number that can be named by an expression in the language of first order set-theory with less than a googol (10100) symbols."

Although this definition took a bit of tweaking, including what Rayo described as his "second order logic trick," it soon won him the duel.

In this description, the numerical representation of a googol should of course be 10¹⁰⁰ rather than 10100. No doubt the author was bitten by the same online production bug that lowered the superscript 500 in the case of Dennis Overbye's article.

The award might still be contested, since The Tech's error is in parentheses next to a written-out form of the number...]

[Update #3 -- Brett Altschul writes:

As both a theoretical particle physicist and a former news and production editor at The Tech, I thought I could provide a little more information about how typesetting errors with exponents occur on the Web.

First, when I read the Times article this morning, it was certainly not the first time I've seen the 10500 number for the number of flux compactification vacua in string theory mangled as 10500. A search of the Times archive comes up with two other articles on string theory with the same mistake. It's sufficiently common in online information about strings that I barely even notice it now.

As to how it happens, I can tell you exactly how it occurs at The Tech's Web site. The Tech uses custom-written scripts to convert the article files into HTML with as little human interaction as possible. The scripts have evolved and gotten much more sophisticated over the years, but the part that creates the HTML from the article copy was basically unchanged from 1994 (when The Tech launched the Web's very first news site) to 2005 (when I lasted checked on it), and it probably is the same to this day. The script works by extracting the meta-tags in the article file and creating the corresponding HTML tags.

There are a number of quirks to the process though. First of all, every type style that we wanted to be able to convert had to be put into the script by hand. While boldface and italic are supported, most other styles are not, because they were not deemed useful for journalistic prose. That included superscripts, which do come up occasionally (and more often in The Tech that in most papers, I would think), but not very often. The software also doesn't know how to handle odd typefaces. In my obituary for Prof. Henry Kendall, I was talking about his and other scientists' work on quarks. I mentioned the Omega^- particle, using the Symbol font and a superscript. The Web version renders this as W- (which is a different particle altogether). Another problem was that the style sheets used by the Quark Publishing System software that produced the print pages could do things with its style sheets that just couldn't be done in HTML. The title (e.g. "NEWS EDITOR") in the bylines is supposed to be all capitals and italicized. Both those functions can be implemented by the style sheets, but there's no way to specify all caps in HTML. So we were supposed to type our titles in all caps, so it would appear correctly in the online version, but not everybody did, and this is reflected in the online versions of some articles.

I assume that the problem with the Times' algorithm is exactly the same as The Tech's. While it's possible to implement superscripts in HTML, nobody bothered to do it.

]

Drawl with this

Way back on National Preposition Day, Roger Shuy wondered what things would be like if we just got rid of those pesky prepositions. In the meantime, I was corresponding with a student who wanted to enroll in a course of mine next quarter. When I granted permission, the student wrote (emphasis on the eggcorn added):

I thought I would end up going through linguistics with drawls next quarter.

I think Roger needn't worry. Even if we tried to get rid of prepositions, they'll just keep coming back.

[ Comments? ]

Languagehat revealed!

After five and a half years of prolific (yet always thoughtful) linguablogging, our esteemed colleague Languagehat has finally divulged his "real-life" identity to the world in a recent post. He's Stephen Dodson, and he's the coauthor of a new book entitled Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit: Untranslatable Insults, Put-Downs and Curses from around the World. In the past I've been skeptical of compendia collecting putatively "untranslatable" tidbits from the world's languages, since they tend to be sloppy and linguistically misinformed (see here for a takedown of a recent example, The Meaning of Tingo). But Stephen and his coauthor Robert Vanderplank (Director of the Oxford University Language Centre) are just the type of careful and well-rounded scholars that you'd want for such a task, as illustrated by the selection of entries posted on Languagehat.

pissant
This satisfying word came over from England as a mere name for an ant, but Americans made it a contemptuous epithet for an “insignificant, contemptible, or irritating person”. From H.L. Davis’s 1935 novel Honey in the Rock, about pioneer Oregon: “Anybody who called owning horses disorderly conduct was a liar and a pissant.”

Icelandic:
prumphænsn (PRUHMP-hine-s’n)
This delightful insult literally means ‘fartchicken’.

And a Slovak one they cut from the manuscript:
Pojebali kone voz! (POH-yeh-buh-lee KOH-nyeh VOHZ) (Slovak)
This lively expression, ‘May the horses fuck the carriage,’ illustrates the fact that Slovak cursing makes greater use of sexual terms than that of the Czechs.

Unfortunately the book is not yet available in the US (and the American version of Amazon doesn't seem to know about it yet), but readers in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand can already pick it up. I look forward to Stephen's introduction to the US edition, in which he quotes "Pushkin, Mark Liberman, and [his] nonagenarian mother-in-law"! A formidable lineup indeed.

From the Departmenths of Cupertino

Passed on by Victor Steinbok, from Eugene Volokh's blog of 12 December:

I have a posting coming on Scunthorping in automated taboo avoidance.  One of its points is that substring search-and-replace programs have the potential for considerable evil, as above.

[Correction, 12/18: Loads of people have written to explain that the error here was probably not in automated correction (involving search-and-replace), but in automated COMPLETION.  As Jim Gordon put it (in the anthropomorphic way we have all come to talk about programs): "the program thinks it knows what the word will be as you begin to type it. This is then compounded, perhaps because the typist is looking at either the draft text or the keyboard, rather than reading what he/she writes."  The idea is that you type "dep" and that's explanded to "Department" (complete with caps), but you press on with the rest of "depth".  This is not an entirely satisfying account, however, because it would predict "Departmentth", while automatic substution of "Department" for "dept" would (correctly) predict "Departmenth".]

It's not just to God's ear(s)

Kyle Hutchinson writes:


So it's not just to God's ear(s); for some writers, there's now an open Recipient slot as well as an open Source slot:


It's looking pretty snowclonish.


Hutchinson (who was of course primed by my posting to notice such things) continues:

The X slot seems to be mostly second-person, but here's one like the Hodgman example, with inventive items in both slots:

Getting to know jack

Recently, six of my friends and I were talking at our bi-monthly men's group meeting (so now you know how retired men spend their time) and one man, a retired Army colonel with some definite opinions about military and diplomatic misadventures overseas, told us that he was mystified when his 20 year-old son informed him, "Dad, you know jack about what's going on." My friend thought his son had misspoken by leaving out the "don't" here. But he was wrong. His son said it exactly the way he wanted to. The colonel wondered aloud, "how can you say something positive that means a negative?" It happens. Language is a forever changing, creative, dynamic thing and it surprises us all the time with what it is capable of doing. But I had to admit that the positive "know jack" was new to me too. Language Log has dealt with issues of negative polarity and negative by association several times before, especially with expressions such as "care less," "still unpacked," "knows squat," and "cannot be underestimated," for example here and here.

But, as far as I can tell, we haven't dealt with the issue of "he doesn't know jack" versus "he knows jack," which seem to mean the same thing. So I went to my handy Google and typed in "knows jack about" and got over 9,000 hits, most of them conveying a  negativity that, at least to my sheltered mind, would  seem to need a  "doesn't." For example:

So I went back to Google and tried, "doesn't know jack about" and discovered that I was right. It's more commonly used, but not by a whole lot--only by about 4,000 more hits. For example:

Concerning the way "could care less" is conveyed as "couldn't care less," Mark Liberman says that the "not" was added by means of what John Lawler calls negation by association. Similarly, "I could give a damn" becomes "I couldn't give a damn" and "he knows squat" becomes "he doesn't know squat."

So here's another one to add the collection you may or may not know jack about.

UPDATE: Boy, was I wrong here. Several readers have enlightened me about something I never knew--that "jack" stands for "jack shit." I need to get out more. What this seems to mean, as John Cowan so helpfully pointed out, is that "jack" is polysemous, with two senses that are actually very similar but have very different polarity implications: "nothing" and "almost nothing." One has a negative polarity, as in "he knew jack about it," and the other has a positive polarity, a in "he doesn't know jack about it," which means he knows very little. So "jack" can substitute for "anything" in wider scope polarity cases. Miles Townes and Josh Millard suggest that there may also be a politeness feature in the exchange between the son and his father-- a kind of parental respect. All of which goes to show that even 77 year-old fossils like me can keep on learning. Thanks, readers.

Coming to a theater near you?

Earlier this year I told you about the publication of the book When Languages Die by K. David Harrison, then I told you about some of the media coverage of the work behind the book, and then I told you about Harrison's appearance on The Colbert Report. I'm now happy to report to the Language Log readership that an NSF-supported documentary starring Harrison and his colleague Greg Anderson is scheduled to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January!

The documentary, produced by Ironbound Films, is simply called The Linguists (follow the link for a preview). Here's a brief synopsis, copied from this LINGUIST List announcement [update: modified here] from the producers:

It is estimated that of 7,000 languages in the world, half will be gone by the end of this century. THE LINGUISTS follows David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, scientists racing to document languages on the verge of extinction. In Siberia, India, and Bolivia, the linguists' resolve is tested by the very forces silencing languages: institutionalized racism and violent economic unrest. David and Greg's journey takes them deep into the heart of the cultures, knowledge, and communities at risk when a language dies.

This is the first time that an NSF-supported documentary has made it to Sundance. Congrats and kudos to David and Greg, to Ironbound Films, and to the NSF for supporting the work in the first place. Let's hope it leads at the very least to increased awareness of the dangers facing the diversity of language and culture, and to more work being done by more people to manage those dangers and that diversity wisely.

[ Comments? ]

The right to keep and bear adjuncts

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has taken on District of Columbia v. Heller, commas and clauses are in the news. Adam Freedman explains why ("Clause and effect", New York Times, 12/16/2007):

The outcome of the case is difficult to handicap, mainly because so little is known about the justices’ views on the lethal device at the center of the controversy: the comma. ... The official version of the Second Amendment has three of the little blighters:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Freedman observes that "there could scarcely be a worse place to search for the framers’ original intent than their use of commas", because "in the 18th century, punctuation marks were as common as medicinal leeches and just about as scientific". Instead, he argues,

The best way to make sense of the Second Amendment is to take away all the commas (which, I know, means that only outlaws will have commas). Without the distracting commas, one can focus on the grammar of the sentence.

Three years ago in Language Log, Geoff Pullum applied the OICTIQ principle to those same second-amendment commas, taking the distracting first and third commas out of play and leaving the second one intact, consistent with modern punctuation standards. And in passing, Geoff also offered a brief analysis of the crucial grammatical issue:

The sentence begins with what is traditionally known as an absolutive clausal adjunct — a gerund-participial clause functioning as an adjunct in clause structure. It is understood as if it began with since or because or in view of the fact that (notice that Our situation being hopeless, we surrendered means "Since our situation was hopeless, we surrendered).

Freedman suggests that the decision that the Supreme Court is reviewing is based on a different grammatical analysis:

The decision invalidating the district’s gun ban, written by Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, cites the second comma (the one after “state”) as proof that the Second Amendment does not merely protect the “collective” right of states to maintain their militias, but endows each citizen with an “individual” right to carry a gun, regardless of membership in the local militia.

How does a mere comma do that? According to the court, the second comma divides the amendment into two clauses: one “prefatory” and the other “operative.” On this reading, the bit about a well-regulated militia is just preliminary throat clearing; the framers don’t really get down to business until they start talking about “the right of the people ... shall not be infringed.”

Freedman associates this analysis with work by Nelson Lund:

Nelson Lund, a professor of law at George Mason University, argues that everything before the second comma is an “absolute phrase” and, therefore, does not modify anything in the main clause. Professor Lund states that the Second Amendment “has exactly the same meaning that it would have if the preamble had been omitted.”

And Freedman strongly disagrees:

The best way to make sense of the Second Amendment is to take away all the commas (which, I know, means that only outlaws will have commas). Without the distracting commas, one can focus on the grammar of the sentence. Professor Lund is correct that the clause about a well-regulated militia is “absolute,” but only in the sense that it is grammatically independent of the main clause, not that it is logically unrelated. To the contrary, absolute clauses typically provide a causal or temporal context for the main clause.

The founders — most of whom were classically educated — would have recognized this rhetorical device as the “ablative absolute” of Latin prose. To take an example from Horace likely to have been familiar to them: “Caesar, being in command of the earth, I fear neither civil war nor death by violence” (ego nec tumultum nec mori per vim metuam, tenente Caesare terras). The main clause flows logically from the absolute clause: “Because Caesar commands the earth, I fear neither civil war nor death by violence.”

Likewise, when the justices finish diagramming the Second Amendment, they should end up with something that expresses a causal link, like: “Because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” In other words, the amendment is really about protecting militias, notwithstanding the originalist arguments to the contrary.

Prof. Lund's analysis seems to be developed at greatest length in "A Primer on the Constitutional Right to Keep and Bear Arms", (Virginia Institute for Public Policy, 2002). But in this document, at least, Lund offers essentially the same grammatical analysis as Freedman, though with a different rhetorical emphasis:

... the grammar of the Second Amendment emphasizes the indefiniteness of the relation between the introductory participial phrase and the main clause. If you parse the Amendment, it quickly becomes obvious that the first half of the sentence is an absolute phrase (or ablative absolute) that does not modify or limit any word in the main clause. The usual function of absolute phrases is to convey information about the circumstances surrounding the statement in the main clause, such as its cause. For example: "The teacher being ill, class was cancelled."

Although Lund's grammatical analysis is the same as Freedman's, his conclusion is different:

The importance of this can be illustrated with a simple example. Suppose the Constitution provided:

A well educated Electorate, being necessary to self-governance in a free State, the right of the people to keep and read Books, shall not be infringed.

This provision, which is grammatically identical to the Second Amendment, obviously means the following: because a well educated electorate is necessary to the health of a free state, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed. The sentence does not say, imply, or even suggest that only registered voters have a right to books. Nor does the sentence say, imply, or even suggest that the right to books may be exercised only by state employees. Nor does the lack of identity between the electorate and the people create some kind of grammatical or linguistic tension within the sentence. It is perfectly reasonable for a constitution to give everyone a right to books as a means of fostering a well educated electorate. The goal might or might not be reached, and it could have been pursued by numerous other means. The creation of a general individual right, moreover, would certainly have other effects besides its impact on the electorate's educational level. And lots of legitimate questions could be raised about the scope of the right to books. But none of this offers the slightest reason to be mystified by the basic meaning of the sentence.

In fact, Lund, Pullum and Freedman are all in agreement about the grammar of the crucial sentence, and even about some aspects of its interpretation. All three see the first clause as an absolute phrase (Lund)  or an absolutive clausal adjunct (Pullum) or an absolute clause (Freedman). Both Lund and Freedman cite the relationship to the rhetorical effect of the Latin ablative absolute. All three indicate that the meaning of the participial first clause is similar to that of a tensed clause introduced by because.

Could anyone possibly disagree with this analysis? Apparently so -- Freedman suggests that "a group of anti-gun academics" once argued that the subject of the main clause is actually "a well-regulated militia":

In a 2001 Fifth Circuit case, a group of anti-gun academics submitted an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief arguing that the “unusual” commas of the Second Amendment support the collective rights interpretation. According to these amici, the founders’ use of commas reveals that what they really meant to say was “a well-regulated militia ... shall not be infringed.”

This would be an extraordinary example of analytic incompetence, if true, worthy of its own Language Log post. But given Freedman's somewhat unfair representation of Lund's argument, it needs to be checked. Unfortunately, his description of the case and the brief is too vague to allow me to find it during what little remains of my breakfast hour. If you can provide a more specific citation, please tell me.

Aside from this bizarre possibility, all parties to the argument seem to agree about the syntax and basic semantics of the amendment. Everyone agrees that the crucial sentence might as well be recast as

Because (or since, or in view of the fact that) a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The question is, to what extent does the meaning of the adjunctive clause contextually restrict the interpretation of the words right and people in the main clause? (And perhaps the meaning of the phrase bear arms as well.) The commas certainly don't decide this. And as far as I can tell, the syntax doesn't decide it either.

[Update -- a footnote in this brief does seem to make the argument that Freedman cites, more or less, via the rather vague assertion that

Under ordinary usage, the first and third commas in the Amendment are unnecessary. If these commas had not been inserted, it would be possible to understand the Well Regulated Militia Clause as simply explaining the rationale for the Bear Arms Clause (the Amendment would then read: "A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."). But the commas are in fact in the text proposed by Congress and ratified by the states, and they prevent this reading.

The author's preferred grammatical analysis is not clear to me, and I don't have time for further investigation this morning. In any case, this document is dated 1999, so presumably Freedman had something else in mind.]

[Jon Weinberg writes:

The brief you identified in your update is indeed the one; it was filed in 1999 and signed by some of the biggest names in the Con Law teaching biz, in connection with a case that the Fifth Circuit didn't end up deciding until 2001. Be aware that the footnote you found continues onto the next page, so that the rest of it reads:

The first unusual comma --between "Militia" and "being" -- forces the reader to search for a verb for which "Militia" is the subject. That verb does not appear until "shall not be infringed" near the end of the Amendment. The second unusual comma -- between "Arms" and "shall" -- sets off the verb phrase "shall not be infringed" from the preceding language; it suggests that the subject for this verb phrase is not simply "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms." The grammatical effect of these two unusual commas is to link "A well regulated Militia" to "shall not be infringed" to emphasize, in other words, that the goal of the Amendment is to protect the militia against federal interference. The Constitution was drafted with great care, and (unlike much legal writing from the Founding period) its use of punctuation generally conforms to modern conventions, suggesting that the commas in the Second Amendment are not haphazard but rather deserve scrupulous attention.

It should be clear from looking at the brief that the authors' focus wasn't grammatical (orthographical?) or linguistic analysis: the reasoning in the footnote looks like a stray thought, not necessarily well-developed, that was in a footnote precisely because the authors didn't think it was powerful enough to include in text. The main thrust of the brief is an argument from historical evidence (like the drafting history of the amendment) that the folks who drafted and enacted the second amendment didn't in fact understand it to convey a right to bear arms except for the purpose of service in state-run militias.

(Jon is certainly right that the focus of the brief is historical rather than grammatical. But the footnote is indeed making a grammatical claim along the lines that Freedman suggested, namely that "a well-regulated militia" is part of the subject of "shall not be infringed".)

Several others have sent useful information as well, which alas I won't have time to summarize until this evening.]

Victims and etymology

A side point in my posting on Daniel Cassidy and how the Irish invented (American English) slang is Cassidy's presentation of himself as a maligned victim, unrecognized and disdained by the Anglo academic linguistic establishment, especially that demon, the OED -- a stance that makes him appealing to (some) Irish-Americans and indeed to (some) Irish-in-Ireland.  After all, the Irish have legitimate historical grievances against the English, so Cassidy can tap into them in advancing his absurd etymologies.

Now that That Holiday is approaching, it's time to consider, once  again, victim-playing by fundamentalist Christians over people who avoid the word Christmas.


But first, Cassidy.

The Irish were badly treated (to put it mildly) by the English, and the Irish in the U.S. fared poorly for a long time ("No Irish Need Apply"): they didn't even count as "white" for some time, which is how we could get a book entitled How the Irish Became White (Noel Ignatiev, 1996).  There's plenty of room for grievance here.

So you can understand Cassidy's in-your-face defiance.  That doesn't, however, lend credence to his etymological fantasies.

As for Christmas, this topic has come up every December for a while now.  Two years ago on Language Log, Geoff Pullum weighed in, mocking Jerry Falwell's claim that people who said "happy holidays" instead of "merry Christmas" were "trying to steal Christmas" and treating Christians with contempt.

Last year, Geoff Nunberg added his voice (this time the complainant was Bill O'Reilly, describing the use of "happy holidays" as "insulting to Christian America"), noting how bizarre it was for some Christians to insist that everyone should be greeted in the way that they (these Christians) wanted.  Surely this is a kind of Christian triumphalism: why should store clerks be obliged to treat everyone as if they were Christians?  [Stop!  Don't write me about how Christmas, the holiday, really isn't Christian; I'll get to that.  I can't do everything at once.]  This is a religiously diverse society, so it makes sense for people who engage random members of the public to use, if they wish, neutral formulations of what they say; that's merely polite.  This is not necessarily a matter of avoiding offense.  I'm not OFFENDED by the word Christmas, or by the holiday itself, though I no longer celebrate the holiday and get mightily annoyed by people who insist that this is the most warm and wonderful time of the year and I should get with the program.

(In a previous life, I celebrated the holiday in splendor.  Why I no longer do this is a possibly interesting story, but, frankly, it's my business, and it's not relevant here.  My point is that if I now want to opt out of the Christmas scenario, that's my right.  I'm not lashing out at people who wish me "merry Christmas", nor do I view those who wish me "happy holidays" as allies of some sort.  [As for the holiday itself, my current stance is that it's best celebrated by a meal at a Jewish delicatessen or an excellent Chinese restaurant.  Since there's one of the latter a few blocks away from my house and none of the former anywhere close, my little family goes Chinese.])

Summing up, as Geoff P. pointed out two years ago, the holiday of Christmas has become, in the U.S. and U.K. at least, primarily a commercial event, with its own customs, few of which have recognizable connections to Christian beliefs or practices.  (Note: "few of which".  Nativity scenes, for example, might give anyone pause.  As would the intensely Christian content of the Christmas carols -- not "Christmas songs" -- that are everywhere in public during the month or so before Christmas.)

The War on Christmas folks object to the removal of Christ from Christmas.  (If you're going to be an etymological Feinschmecker, please note that Jesus is  a name -- cf. Jehoshua, Joshua -- while Christ is a title or epithet.  Which is to say that if you're seriously into the Etymological Fallacy, then insisting on the title Christ, and words related to it, is insisting that other people recognize Jesus as "the anointed one", the Son of God and Our Lord.)

And now we get to 2007.  Jon Lighter (on ADS-L, 12/1/07) reported the latest episode of victomology and etymology, which I repeat here with only minor editing:


I'll content myself with noting that the United States currently has ten "federal legal holidays" (when federal offces are closed, and your bank probably is too):


Exactly one of these, Christmas Day, is in any sense a "holy day", for Christians or anyone else.  Meanwhile, people in the U.K. can use holiday where people in the U.S. use vacation ("go on holiday", the old "holiday camps", etc.).  The holy in holiday is at best the whiff of a ghostly presence these days, and it can't be revived by people who stamp their feet and insist that etymology is destiny.

Getting rid prepositions

National Preposition Day is now almost over and it's  time to stop celebrating and to reflect on the many problems prepositions give us. I'm thinking maybe, just maybe, it's time to get rid of them altogether. So I'll take a crack at it here:

There have been proposals reducing and improving English years and years. One these was eliminate the past tense, example. Years failure have shown us that this is little value. It's not feasible do this. We can't neglect what's happened the past. But the use prepositions is hardly important. One thing, they're difficult children learn and non-native speakers have lots trouble them. As me, I'm all it. Dumping prepositions trash basket would shorten my emails and this would save paper that we use produce books. But you may ask what this would look like. Consider the title this important book linguistics:

Huddleston and Pullum should like this one. Okay, only one word is saved, but this book is far too expensive anyway most us purchase and every word saved will bring down the price.

Think also Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, the beginning:

Not bad, eh?

And also the way it would end:

I kinda like the repetition, don't you?

And finally, think the Lord's Prayer:

It seems okay, except maybe for the "deliver us evil" part. Hmm. Maybe this isn't such a good idea after all.

What have you done with God's ear?

Back on 23 September I surveyed some items on the fringes of Snowclonia, among them


Time for an update.


God's Ear.  What I said before:


Almost immediately, Mank Mandel supplied a lead:


(Also appearing in English as "from your mouth to God's ear".)  That is, what's conveyed is 'may God hear your words', contextualized as polite receipt of praise.  The expression has clearly been extended for some speakers of English (many of them not Jewish) to a wider set of contexts.  And at some point people varied the expression by allowing possessives other than your, to convey 'may God hear X's words'.  That would be the snowcloning moment (but see below).

Ben Sadock then supplied a Yiddish original: 


Some versions have the expanded in gots oyern arayn.  The ones I've found all have moyl 'mouth'.   Most have the plural oyern, rather than the singular oyer, and the second-person possessive, but other versions have been reported:


No doubt there are other variants in Yiddish.

In English, the raw Google webhits favor lips over mouth and show a favoring of concordance in number between the two nouns: lips ... ears (9,100) over lips ... ear (3,360), and mouth ... ear (2,330) over mouth ... ears (650).

Now, is this a snowclone -- or an idiom with an open slot in it?  In principle, a similar question arises for every putative snowclone that has only one open slot, for instance:


Most of these are full sentences, though some are NPs.  Now, most expressions traditionally labeled "idioms" are on a smaller scale, but many of them have open slots in them.  Here are a few such VP idioms with make:


(Note that the last two have a possessive open slot, just like the God's Ear formula.  There's a huge number of idioms with possessive open slots in them.  Please don't write me about further examples of open-slotted idioms; idiom dictionaries are packed with them.)

Formulaic expressions that are full sentences are traditionally labeled "proverbs" rather than idioms, and they are nearly completely fixed, with no open slots in them (though ANY formula is available for the occasional playful variation, of course):


So one way to think of God's Ear is as a cross between an idiom with an open slot in it and a proverb -- that is, as a big idiom (a sequence of two PPs conveying a proposition) or as an open-slotted proverb (of relatively recent invention).  Indeed, snowclones in general might be seen this way.

Body Snatcher.  What I said before:


In what follows, I'll refer to the literal understanding of the two questions in sequence as the "at face" interpretation and the figurative understanding as the "impostor" interpretation.

The ensuing ADS-L discussion (and e-mail following up on my September Language Log posting) went in many directions.

First, no one has found the figure, or anything like it, in any version of Invasions of the Body Snatchers.  The IDEA is there, but not any formula.

Second, lots of people suggested some influence from the famous James Thurber cartoon, with the caption "What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?":

But the question in the cartoon is entirely literal; there's no suggestion that the hippopotamus is trying to pass itself off as Dr. Millmoss (and every suggestion that the hippopotamus has eaten Dr. M.).  The Thurber cartoon, wonderful as it is, is a red herring.

Next, a similar digression that turns on mere similarity in form: Linda Wilkinson citing the 1971 movie title Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?  Though there might be the beginning of another formula here.

Meanwhile, the hounds of ADS-L were on the antedating trail, trying to find earlier and earlier instances of the impostor use of the expression.

[Side note: antedating and sourcing can be fascinating, but for a variety of reasons they're mostly not my thing.  Establishing that some usage is in fact current for some group of speakers shouldn't commit you to a study of where, when, and why it originated and how it spread.  Not that these aren't interesting questions.]

This search into the (recent) past pulled up an awful lot of examples that could be seen as at-face uses of Body Snatcher.  That's what happens when you search on strings.  But several landmarks appeared:

Chris Waigl noted that there was a small flurry of impostor cites in 1997/8, possibly based on its appearance in the the film Ever After (1998).  From the imdb:


Chris and I supposed that this was a secondary spread of an existing snowclone.  And there are earlier impostor cites.  A few, going back in time:


Somewhere along the line, I noted that there was no particular reason for the expression I started with to be the sole way of conveying the impostor idea.  Had it really become formulaic?

This turned out to be a hard question to answer.  One thing quickly became clear: other ways of expressing the impostor idea were around:


I have no easy way of determining how often one formulation is used versus others.  It might well be that the variant I started with is the most common.  But it's beginning to look like this is not so much a figure of speech, tied to particular wording, as a figure of thought -- much like systems of metaphor.

Dimensions, metaphors, and prepositions

National Preposition Day continues with a guest post by John Lawler, who gives the following brief account of how the prepositions at, on, and in work in English:

The usage of in/on/at, like that of most prepositions, is metaphorically locative and, in the case of these three, dimensional.

The basic principles are simple:

in relates to a 3-dimensional container
on relates to a 2-dimensional surface
at relates to a 1-dimensional location

Naturally, usages can get very complex, especially the idiomatic varieties. However, the metaphor theme "time is space" extends these principles pretty straightforwardly.

The experiential key here is that a day (one's current waking period) is metaphorized as a surface on which one is walking (the slogan is "ontology recapitulates physiology"). That accounts for on Thursday, on the seventh, on his birthday.

The smaller time units are then locations on that surface, whence at noon, at the moment, at 8:15:44.23, 2/17/44, while the larger ones are containers for days, whence in March, in 2007, in the twentieth century.

Similar remarks apply to non-temporal uses (see Charles Fillmore's Deixis Lectures):

on the lawn ~ in the yard
in space ~ on (the) earth,
in the air ~ on the ground
on (the) sea ~ in (the) water ~ on (the) land
in some non-Abelian cohomology group

Interesting special cases come from vehicles:

in a car/plane/bus/canoe/boat/kayak
on a raft/bicycle
but
on public transportation
on a (scheduled) boat/train/plane/bus

I suspect that the schedule metaphorizes a (2-D) passenger list, though I'm not yet convinced that this is the right analysis.

Guest post by John Lawler

In the car, on the bus

Continuing with our celebration of National Preposition Day, let me note the following judgments about prepositions with objects denoting vehicles. The preposed asterisks do not necessarily mean that the string of words is utterly ungrammatical, but just that it is grammatical only on some fairly bizarre understanding — it is not just an alternative to the other example in its pair. The degree of acceptability varies: (1b) is thoroughly strange and suggests that she was strapped to a roof rack, and (2a) is even more bizarre. The ‘?*’ in front of (5a) and (6a) indicates that (in my judgment) the status is not so clear.

(1)	a.	She left that morning in a car.	b.	*She left that morning on a car.
(2)	a.	*She left that morning in a bike.	b.	She left that morning on a bike.
(3)	a.	She left that morning in a taxi.	b.	*She left that morning on a taxi.
(4)	a.	She left that morning in a van.	b.	*She left that morning on a van.
(5)	a.	?*She left that morning in a bus.	b.	She left that morning on a bus.
(6)	a.	?*She left that morning in a train.	b.	She left that morning on a train.
(7)	a.	She left that morning in a boat.	b.	She left that morning on a boat.
(8)	a.	*She left that morning in a ship.	b.	She left that morning on a ship.
(9)	a.	She left that morning in a single-seater light plane.	b.	*She left that morning on a single-seater light plane.
(10)	a.	*She left that morning in a United Airlines 747.	b.	She left that morning on a United Airlines 747.

The point is not to get people to send me hundreds of emails about how they found a place where someone says "have you ever wanted to live in a bus" or "see a band record their album in a bus" (please, no emails). The conditions here are not absolute, and I know that. But there really are some gross differences between the ways we refer to travel in or on various modes of transportation. And it really does not look like they are fully and clearly predictable on the basis of meaning, or vehicle architecture, or a combination of both. Language is not that orderly.

One other thing. Consider (4b). Suppose there were a scheduled van service between a central location and some factory on the outskirts of the city. Now it sounds a bit better, doesn't it? My initial hunch is that (i) normal position for a person with respect to the vehicle, (ii) size of the vehicle relative to a person, and (iii) regularly scheduled nature of the transportation may all be relevant to some extent.

Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at 04:56 PM