schnaufblog

"No strollers!"

2012-01-16T20:43:00.000-06:00

What is your first reaction to this sign?

Your answer may depend on your family status -- and also on the dialect that you speak. From the Metropolitan Diary section in the NY Times:

Sometimes New York City signs are less than helpful. At a bus stop on Second Avenue, I saw two ladies perusing a sign. They looked confused, and they were speaking a language that sounded like Swedish. Wanting to help foreign visitors, I explained: “I know it’s a crazy sign — it really is O.K. to stand here! ‘No standing’ really means ‘No parking.' The following week, at the same bus stop, I passed the time by relating the anecdote to a woman waiting beside me. In her British accent, she told me her own sign story: “When I saw a sign that said ‘No strollers,’ I thought it meant ‘Walk in a brisk manner.’

(In British English, a stroller is referred to as a 'push chair' or a 'buggy'.)

"He’s a Quarterback, He’s a Winner, He’s a TV Draw, He's a Verb"

2012-01-15T21:19:00.000-06:00

One of the words in the running for "word of the year," was the verb "to tebow" (posing praying on one knee, after Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow.) It did collect a number of votes in one of the WOTY categories of the American Dialect Society vote, but, alas, it was the category "least likely to succeed." Should the linguists have gotten it wrong?

Around the world, people are “tebowing” — kneeling in prayer, with head resting on one hand, oblivious to surroundings, just as Tebow does after victories. Still, when a wedding party tebows in Las Vegas, or a couple tebows on Abbey Road in London, or two scuba divers tebow underwater in Belize, it can be hard to tell whether they are celebrating or mocking him for his virtuous ways. What, exactly, is it about Tim Tebow that so fascinates and provokes us? Why do some people project onto him the best of this country (humility, tenacity, plain old decency) — and the worst (sanctimoniousness, overexposure, political intolerance)?

Being profiled on ESPN and spoofed in SNL is one thing, but, as I said before: You've really made it when you've become a verb. (It certainly does not do any harm if your name sounds like a prefixed verb to begin with.)

"Reading body language, dogs are like infants"

2012-01-10T19:07:00.000-06:00

The NYT reports:

They presented dogs with two videos. In the first, a woman says, “Hi, dog,” while looking straight at the camera. The woman then turns her head toward a container. The dog follows her gaze.However, when the woman is looking down, rather than at the camera, as she says, “Hi, dog,” the dog does not follow her subsequent gaze.

Really, how can anyone be surprised by that? Dogs don't speak English, they don't care about the language that we use with them. They care about tone and stance and body language. Gary Larson captured this beautifully in his Ginger cartoon:

WOTY 2011: Occupy, followed by FOMO

2012-01-08T20:21:00.000-06:00

No big surprises. The American Dialect Society's choice for Word of the Year (WOTY) is "occupy." (It received 82 out of 174 votes.) More interesting, in my opinion, is the runner-up, the acronym "FOMO" (fear of missing out), "describing anxiety over being inundated by information on social media," and another word among the runner-ups, "humblebrag," the "expression of false humility, especially by celebrities on Twitter," which also won in the category "most useful" new word (it can be used as a noun or a verb). Looking at the processes used to create these words, there's a nice mix of semantic extension ('occupy'), an acronym ('FOMO'), and compounding ('humblebrag').

Winner in the category "most creative" was "Mellencamp," "a woman who has aged out of being a 'cougar,'" after the singer John Cougar Mellencamp. Let's just say the word won't win any political correctness prizes any time soon. An honorable mention goes to "bunga bunga," the word for sex parties that allegedly involved Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. This adds an eponym and reduplication to our mix of processes involved to create new words.

Access all previous winners here.

Thou shalt not condemn passives (especially if you don't even know what they are)

2012-01-03T21:19:00.001-06:00

Exercising more? Eating less? Those are popular, but very boring New Year's resolutions. Here's a better one, at least for linguists or really for anyone who cares about the structure of language: Join George Pullum in his campaign to get journalists (and, may I add, style manual writers) to stop using them grammatical term "passive" when they have no idea what it means.

Many have begged me to give up on my campaign to get journalists to stop using the term "passive" in its grammatical sense when they have no idea what it means. Some warn me that the quest is hopeless and no one will ever listen; some say I have failed to see that some sort of metaphorical passivity is being alluded to and I should get with the lexicographical program; and some just find the experience of me pointing these cases out is like being repeatedly hit over the head with The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. But I will not give up. I will never surrender. [...] Today we have a good example of Matt Taibbi making the usual blunder:
Obama is simply not telling the truth about the supposedly insufficient penalties available to regulators. Employing the famous "mistakes were made" use of the passive tense, Obama copped out in his December 6 speech by saying that "penalties are too weak."
Penalties are too weakis an active simple intransitive clause, with the copular verb>Why should this be thought important? Because there are technical terms in this world, and serious journalism should be using them in roughly the standard way. In economics, inflation has a technical sense that it doesn't have in ballooning. Inflation of a balloon means pumping gas into it, but inflation of a currency means a general rise in the average cost of goods and services (hence a concomitant decrease in the purchasing power of the currency). You don't have to use economic technical terms if you don't want to, but you really shouldn't write newspaper columns on politics and business using the word inflation to mean something else, like "growth of the economy", or "hot air pumped into the political climate by spin doctors".The difference is that any newspaper editor would know enough economics to stop you if you used the word inflation in such a totally ignorant way, whereas, it seems, no newspaper editor knows enough elementary grammar to stop you using the word passive in a totally ignorant way.

You want to use the term "passive" correctly? Read this.

Happy holidays with the first dog

2011-12-25T21:16:00.000-06:00

People Magazine has put together a holiday-themed slideshow featuring Bo Obama. Here's a rendition of the first dog made of marshmallows and licorice:

Happy holidays!

A note on the White House holiday card:

It's an image of Bo the first dog lying in front of a fireplace decorated with garland and a few presents and a poinsettia sitting on a table. Inside, it reads, "From our family to yours, may your holidays shine with the light of the season." To our eyes, it's pretty innocuous stuff. To Fox News and other conservative pundits, it's another front in the alleged "war on Christmas." The news channel made a ruckus this week about the card not being Christmas-y enough. But [...] the card follows a template used by most of the president's predecessors in office. George W. Bush's 2005 card featured snowy White House exterior -- with both of the Bush family's dogs in the foreground -- and the message "With best wishes for a holiday season of hope and happiness." (All of Bush's cards, however, did feature an insert with a Bible verse.) Cards from the Reagan and Clinton eras featured similar artwork. We get that the week before Christmas is usually a little slow for news. But this feels like much ado about nothing.

WOTY: Oxford's choice

2011-12-21T00:33:00.000-06:00

And one more: Of all the "buzzwords" of 2011, among them "occupy," "Arab Spring," and the infamous "bunga bunga," the Oxford English Dictionary chose "squeezed middle," as its word of the year -- even though this expression is a phrase rather than a word and not all that catchy.

For more fun, I think we will once again have to wait for the list of WOTY nominations published by the American Dialect Society, especially in the category "most unnecessary" (such as "refudiate") or "most euphemistic" (such as "corn sugar" or "enhanced patdown"). The ADS will hold its annual meeting in Portland Jan. 5-7.

WOTY: Merriam-Webster

2011-12-17T19:05:00.000-06:00

As always, Merriam-Webster uses the label "word of the year" for the word that was looked up most often on its online dictionary site. This year, the word in question was "pragmatic." Unexpected, no? It doesn't seem to be related to any specific event in politics or culture that would prompt people to look it up, nor is it particularly difficult to spell.

In any case, "pragmatic" wasn't a choice or "pick" made by M-W (as claimed, for example, by the Huffington Post), it was simply the word that had the most look-ups. A pragmatic approach, indeed, but not one that tells us a lot about dominant topics and themes in 2011.

Users can now provide feedback on why they looked up a particular word and in the case of "pragmatic," it seems that some users wanted to verify that the word has positive connotations. (The word is of Greek origin, related to the Greek word for "deed".)

It's that time of the year: WOTY

2011-12-17T00:05:00.001-06:00

WOTY nominations are rolling in. Here's Ben Zimmer's take. He has selected five words or phrases in the categories "domestic affairs," "foreign affairs," pop culture," and "tech." Among them are the following:

occupy (described -- by Geoffrey Nunberg -- as "that rare linguistic phenomenon, a word that....helps to create the very thing it names.")
downgrade (related to the reevaluation of the U.S. debt ranking)
Arab Spring (not a dance piece)
bunga bunga (sex parties hosted by the Italian prime minister)
deather (people who do not believe in the official story of the killing of Osama Bin Laden)
tiger mom (related to the controversial book by Amy Chua)
humblebrag (faux humility, I suppose it can also be used as a verb)
FOMO ("fear of missing out" -- leading to people being glued to their Facebook screens)

There's more at the link.

(For those who care about these things: For a brief time, Ben Zimmer was the successor of William Safire as the author of "On Language," the weekly column published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine for over 30 years. As expected, Zimmer did a splendid job, acting less like a maven and more like a linguist, and yet the column was ousted from the magazine, as were other columns that made the Sunday Magazine an interesting read. Go figure. Anyway, Zimmer has found a new home as a columnist (he also still occasionally writes for the Times, though not the Magazine) at the Boston Globe. His first column will run this weekend. Hallelujah.)

Edited to add: First column here.

Flying with a pug

2011-10-08T09:04:00.001-05:00

The Times reports today that more and more Airlines put restrictions on transporting trachycephalic, or short-faced, breeds (from the Greek words for 'head'), such as pugs or bulldogs.

According to the federal Agriculture Department, 189 animals died on commercial flights from June 2005 to June 2011; of those animals, 98 — more than half — were brachycephalic breeds. The breeds, which also include Persian and Himalayan cats, have smaller openings to their noses and elongated soft palates on the roofs of their mouths, which make breathing more difficult for them, veterinarians said. Those breathing problems can be magnified in stressful situations like air travel, and further exacerbated in extreme heat.

Some veterinarians will not allow those dogs to fly at all, others may perform surgery to elongate the dog's nasal passages. What's a dog owner to do? Either you accept these restrictions and just don't fly with your dog (according to the Times article, the Bulldog Club of America recommends that its members travel by car) or you use an airline that allows dogs to travel in the cabin, such as Pet Airways or Pet Jet (a domestic one-way flight is around $850). Option #3: If your pet is really famous (like the Target mascot dog, Bullseye), you can get him or her classified as a “high-profile animal,” and then he or she can fly in the cabin -- first class only. You always knew that there's a price to fame.

On Language

2011-09-27T21:49:00.000-05:00

Sadly, Ben Zimmer's column "On Language" has disappeared from the NYT Magazine, but this week, something very much like it was published in the magazine, albeit under the label "essay." Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg reminiscences over the uproar caused by the decidely descriptive approach of Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary, which came out 50 years ago and which, according to Nunberg, "signaled a turning point in Ameri can attitudes about language."

...it was widely denounced for what critics viewed as a lax admissions policy: it opened its columns to parvenus like “litterbug” and “wise up,” declined to condemn “ain’t,” and illustrated its definitions with quotations from down-market sources like Ethel Merman and Betty Grable. That was reason enough for The Times to charge that Merriam had “surrendered to the permissive school” and that the dictionary’s “say as you go” approach would surely accelerate the deterioration already apparent in the language.

Today, there's enthusiasm rather than outrage when a dictionary goes "permissive" and, for example, includes acronyms like "OMG," thereby elevating them to the status of real words (whatever that may be) in the eye of the public. Merriam-Webster even included "staycation," which I still have to hear a real person use in a real conversation. Nunberg drily puts it this way "A lot of these items will expire before your hamster does." But while they live, a dictionary is their display case.

Grammar? There's an app for that!

2011-09-02T00:48:00.000-05:00

For those who like to carry around a grammar book all the time:

The Survey of English Usage at UCL is very pleased to announce the publication of a new App for Apple hand-held devices such as the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The interactive Grammar of English (iGE) is a complete course in English grammar written for first year undergraduates, students at high schools and teachers of the English language. For more information see: www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/apps/ige

"You can whip our cream..."

2011-08-22T16:41:00.001-05:00

If you live in the Dairy State, you can't escape advertisements for milk and cheese. Sometimes they're very....well, see for yourself.

("You can whip our cream, but you can't beat our milk")

Where would you expect this slogan -- which is not unique to Wisconsin -- to show up?

What about: In an anaconda terrarium?

Preposition stranding, yet again

2011-08-22T01:01:00.004-05:00

Ending one's sentences on a preposition (also known as 'preposition stranding') is about as cool as paying one's utility bill on time. What's really, really uncool is commenting on how ending a sentence on a preposition demonstrates one's streak of irreverence. Yes, I'm talking to you, NYT writer Neil Genzlinger (and to you, unknown copy writer for Trader Joe's).

They give us time to get ready for the transaction ahead. Ms. Clueless shirked her preparatory responsibilities and instead made me late for work, bursting the pleasant Cookies and Kreme bubble I had surrounded myself with. Yes, that’s another sentence that ends in a preposition. So fine me.

Don't worry, buddy, nobody's going to fine you for using Standard English. Ending a sentence on a preposition is not worth commenting on.

World-wide database of dog poop

2011-07-05T20:42:00.000-05:00

How far do property managers go to ensure that their tenants pick up after their dogs? The New York Times describes a new method:

Canine DNA is now being used to identify the culprits who fail to clean up after their pets, an offense that Deborah Violette, for one, is committed to eradicating at the apartment complex she manages. Everyone who owns a dog in her complex Timberwood Commons in Lebanon, N.H., must submit a sample of its DNA, taken by rubbing a cotton swab around inside the animal’s mouth. The swab is sent to BioPet Vet Lab, a Knoxville, Tenn., company that enters it into a worldwide database. If Ms. Violette finds an unscooped pile, she can take a sample, mail it to Knoxville and use a DNA match to identify the offending owner.

The swabbing kit costs about $40 and each test is about $50. Results are entered into a worldwide database of dog offenders.

Worth the effort?

Karen Harvey of Forest Property Management in McCall, Idaho, said her company was not prepared to collect canine samples along with the rent checks. “If you allow pets, that sort of comes with it,” Ms. Harvey said. “I guess I would never take the issue of dog poop that far.”

Meet Mrs. John Knightley

2011-06-24T16:20:00.001-05:00

The New York Times reports:

The nostalgia wave among girls’ names appears to be over. About two decades ago, an entire generation of girls’ names — those from the late 19th and early 20th centuries — started coming back into fashion: Grace and Emma, Julia and Anna, Ella and Hannah. Nothing like it had ever happened before. Individual names obviously came back into style. But an entire era’s never had. Now the nostalgia wave, which peaked in 2004, is ending. Emily fell 41 percent between 2004 and 2010, Sarah tumbled 49 percent and Hannah 54 percent. The lack of recent Jane Austen movies has probably played a role.

Well, of the names listed above, only one (EMMA) belongs to a popular Jane Austen heroine (yes, there's a JULIA in Mansfield Park, but, seriously, who knows that?). There are no Graces and Annas and Ellas and Hannahs in Jane Austen's novels.

So what was the most popular name for girls in 2010? Did it represent the current trend towards short names, modern names, names beginning with an A? Not at all. The most popular name for girls in 2010 was ISABELLA -- which, as serious Jane Austen lovers know, is the give name of Mrs. John Knightley, otherwise known as EMMA Woodhouse's sister. #45: Charlotte, as in Mrs. William Collins, up from #289 just ten years ago. #12: ELIZABETH, as in Mrs. Fitzwilliam Darcy. Jane Austen adaption or not, I'll predict that the name FITZWILLIAM is not going to make it on the top 100 list for boys any time soon.

(Other popular names in 2010 were Sophia, Olivia, Ava, Abigail, Madison, Chloe, and Mia)

“I think that it’s probably wrong, in almost all situations, to use a dictionary in the courtroom"

2011-06-19T22:32:00.000-05:00

The New York Times recently reported that the use of dictionaries in Supreme Court decisions is "booming." Justices do not just cite definitions of law-related terms like "license," but also quite ordinary words like "now," "also," "delay," "if," and even "of" (which, most of the time, really only has the function to introduce a prepositional phrase after a noun, as in "the translation of the novel"). Lexicographers find this use of dictionaries in the courtroom strage:

“I think that it’s probably wrong, in almost all situations, to use a dictionary in the courtroom,” said Jesse Sheidlower, the editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary. “Dictionary definitions are written with a lot of things in mind, but rigorously circumscribing the exact meanings and connotations of terms is not usually one of them.”

However, a study published in the Marquette Law Review, found that over the last decade almost 300 word or phrase definitions coming from more than 100 dictionaries were used. Alas, there is no official dictionary of the Supreme Court, judges seem to be happy to quote from any dictionary that supports their opinion. Sheidlower points out the obvious problem:

“It’s easy to stack the deck by finding a definition that does or does not highlight a nuance that you’re interested in,” said Mr. Sheidlower, the O.E.D. editor.

Well, if any decisions need to be written on gender reassignment or cyronauts in the near future, the judges are lucky: These words have just been included in the OED.

Down there

2011-06-18T19:48:00.000-05:00

So men sweat. In the groin area, too. You know, down there, "south-of-border" (Patricia Finn from the cosmetics company Jack Black), resulting in "batwings" (helpfully defined on urbandictionary.com as "The excess of your ballbag when it sticks to your inner leg on a hot day.")

What's new?

What's new is, according the the NYT, that there's now a slew of products that promise to take care of that specific condition, albeit in a coy and eupemistic way, all that at a time when makers of hygiene products for women are considering using the word "vagina" in their commercials.

Those new products for men have names like "Balla Powder" ("guaranteed to leave both your 'boyz' and body dry," according to their website), "Dry Down Friction Free Powder," "Man Powder" ("what baby powder wants to be when it grows up"), "Dry Goods" ("for those hard to reach places" -- eh?), or "Powder My Equipment," which sounds more like something a gymnast would use on the bars or rings.

There seems to be a market for these products (as well as for articles about them), but a dermatologist interviewed by the Times considers them quite superflous:

A dusting of plain old baking soda also combats both wetness and odor, said Dr. Altchek, who recommended that men who experience regular discomfort switch to more breathable all-cotton boxer shorts, take frequent but short showers and dry off thoroughly afterward. He cautioned against the overuse of powders, which may cause excessive dryness and also lead to skin irritation.

Dry goods? Dry damaged goods, more likely.

With compliments from Starbucks

2011-06-13T17:31:00.000-05:00

It's one of those things: You see a word misspelled in a public place and it makes you wonder about the etymology of the word. And you ask yourself: Where does "caramel" come from? Has it got anything to do with "Carmel"?

The answer is 'no.'

Carmel-by-the-Sea is a lovely little town in California, founded as a mission. (It's also rather touristy, not least because it used to have a famous mayor, Clint Eastwood, in the 1980s.) Its name is related to the order of the Carmelites, who define "Carmel" as a way of life in which we try to be aware of the Presence of God in the most ordinary, every day things." They trace their name to Mount Carmel in Palestine. It has got nothing to do with three-syllable "caramel," the substance created by heating sugar, for which the OED has no definite origin. There is speculation that the word is related to the Latin word for sugar-cane, cannamella.

Alas, "carmelized" is only part of the problem here. Let's skip the grammatical mistake ("It has a sweet ... notes") and let's get to the issue of "compliment" vs. "complement." The verb "to compliment" means "to pay a compliment to" or "to flatter with praise," while "to complement" means "to complete" or "to make perfect". The spelling distinction is quite arbitrary, the words are homophonous (i.e. they are pronounced identically) and there was a time when the spelling "complement" was used for both senses of the verb, which makes sense, since they are both related to the Latin verb "complere" ('to fill up'). Alas, nowadays, different spellings are associated with different meanings and different syntactic behavior and speakers are supposed to know the difference. "Compliment" is often used with a nominal and a prepositional object (one compliments someone on something), while "complement" basically is a monotransitive verb (one thing complements another).

Complementary colors are spelled with an "e," because they 'complete' or cancel out each other. When mixed in the right proportions, they produce a neutral color (like gray), not a third hue (like orange).

In linguistics, two items are said to be in "complementary distribution" if they never occur together in the same environment. For example, the indefinite determiner "a" and the definite determiner "the" are in complementary distribution. One can say "the house" or "a house," but not "the a house.".

On the other hand, guest soaps in a hotel are "complimentary," because they are offered with compliments from the host.

Now back to our coffee with its sweet and slightly smokey (or smoky) notes. Those notes complete or perfect the taste of chocolate and caramel, an accomplishment on which you may compliment the coffee roaster.

State Dog of New York: The Rescue Dog (?)

2011-06-09T12:08:00.000-05:00

Legislation to create an official State Dog is being introduced at City Hall in New York today. If approved, the State Dog of New York will not be a specific breed, but "a rescue dog — dogs that are rescued, rather than do the rescuing— for the honor to symbolize the need for people to adopt pets from animal shelters and animal protection groups."

While this may not be the most pressing political issue in New York, it at least brings to the forefront dogs that are not generally despised, unlike Trouble, the Maltese that was the heir to part of the Helmsley fortune in 2008. Trouble died at the age of 12 and what is left of Ms. Helmsley bequest to him is reverted to the Helmsley charitable trust.

What is the best way to get a dog's attention?

2011-06-07T11:36:00.000-05:00

According to animal behaviorist John Bradshaw, author of "Dog Sense,"

The best way to get a dog's attention is to give it three treats and then refuse to give it the fourth. And you can calm and get the attention of all sorts of unruly dogs by doing that very, very quickly, and then once you've got their attention, half the battle is won.

Bradshaw does not subscribe to the Cesar Millan approach to dog training, which is based on the concept of the alpha-wolf. Like all the dog trainers I ever worked with, he is firmly in support of using positive reinforcement (and the withdrawal thereof) as the most important training tool.

In place of the rigid, often violent, alpha-led wolf societies we once believed produced the modern dog were actually cooperative, familial groups. And in place of the choke-chain school of negative reinforcement should be a training program based primarily on the positive....To say that you don't use punishment when you're using these positive reinforcement techniques is nonsense. You inevitably do. What you don't do is hurt the dog. There doesn't seem to me to be any need for it. Dogs can understand all sorts of things without having to be hurt to make them understand.

So, go ahead, let your dog run in front of you while you're going for a walk, let him squeeze himself through the door before you open it. Let him be playful and enthusiastic. But don't forget those treats, at least four of them -- because number four is the one that will make your dog learn.

sorites -- periscii -- cymotrichous

2011-06-03T14:45:00.000-05:00

Those words sound familiar? Then you must have been following the 2011 Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Ben Zimmer gives an account of the final words on his blog at visualthesaurus.com.

This year's champion is 14-year old an 3rd-time participant Sukanya Roy, who said she went through the dictionary twice "and I guess some of the words really stuck." Compare this approach to 2001 champion George Thampy, who, in the documentary Spellbound, unforgettably recommended the following strategy: 1. Trust in Jesus, 2. Honor your parents, and 3. Work hard. (You can read more about Georgy in my post Spellbound -- Where are they now?)

What's wrong..

2011-06-01T20:53:00.001-05:00

...with the police kicking of an apartment after they smell marijuana drifting from it, if they knock hard, announce whom they are and then hear what sounds like evidence being destroyed?

Apart from the legal consequences, quite simply the "M" is wrong. I'm not sure how this could have escaped the Times's copy editors, it almost looks like a case of hypercorrection ("after a verb the pronoun form should be 'whom', not 'who'"). The rule is that the pronoun can (but by no means must) be whom if the pronoun is in the position of an object. In this case, whom is located in the position of the subject in the embedded object clause after announce, hence only the subject form, who, is correct.

It seems that someone figured this out after May 24. If you look up the editorial today, you will see that the error has been corrected.

Why bilingualism is good for you

2011-05-31T15:18:00.001-05:00

One cannot say it often enough: Bilingualism is good for you. And that's not just because it's fun to be able to talk to the French in French. From a NYT-interview with psycholinguist Ellen Bialystok:

One of your most startling recent findings is that bilingualism helps forestall the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. How did you come to learn this?

Read the answer here.

But be aware that while Bialystok uses a wide definition of bilingualism (encompassing speakers who did not grow up bilingual), using a little high school French now and again doesn't give you the same benefits: "You have to use both languages all the time. You won’t get the bilingual benefit from occasional use."

Bialystok concludes:

There are two major reasons people should pass their heritage language onto children. First, it connects children to their ancestors. The second is my research: Bilingualism is good for you. It makes brains stronger. It is brain exercise.

The most complex word in the English language

2011-05-30T09:41:00.000-05:00

What is the word with the most meanings in the English language? Surely it must be a verb, nouns tend to have not more than a handful of meanings, if you don't count metaphorical uses. Surely it must be a one-syllable verb, because these are the words that get used most often, taking on new meanings, combining easily with different noun and adjective phrases. Could it be a semantically bleached verb like get or put, verbs that need to be followed by something to take on a concrete sense of meaning?

Well, according to the O.E.D.’s chief editor, John Simpson, we now have a winner — and a winner that may well say something about the current state of English-speaking humankind. For while in the first edition of the O.E.D., in 1928, that richest-of-all-words was “set” (75 columns of type, some 200 senses), the victor in today’s rather more frantic and uncongenial world is, without a doubt, the three-letter word “run.”

It took Peter Gilliver, the O.E.D. lexicographer working on the letter R, more than nine months harnessed to the duties of what Samuel Johnson once called “a harmless drudge” (plus many more months of preparatory research) to work out what he believes are all the meanings of “run.” And though some of the senses and their derivations try him — Why does a dressmaker run up a frock? Why run through a varlet with a sword? How come you run a fence around a field? Why, indeed, run this essay? — Mr. Gilliver has finally calculated that there are for the verb-form alone of “run” no fewer than 645 meanings. A record.

Does this run counter to your expectations?

What happened on 5/20?

2011-05-28T10:06:00.011-05:00

Schnaufblog is a quiet little blog. I don't advertise this blog anywhere. I keep it quite anonymous. It doesn't have many (or any?) comments. I mainly get hits for my postings on "Spellbound -- Where are they now?" and "Where do peanuts come from?" But something happened last week that sent many people to this post ("That's Chevrolet to you"), illustrated with a picture of The Village People, mostly visitors from the UK.
433 visitors in one hour, to be precise.

Still can't figure it out.

Sophie, Solomon, Layla, Luke, Gracie, Sadie and Ivan, Sunny and Lauren

2011-05-25T15:58:00.001-05:00

Let's give a shout out to a powerful dog lover, who, after 25 years of a history-making TV, will host her final talk show today.

Hardcore Oprah fans will recognize the names listed above as the names of the star's dogs (four of them cocker spaniels, three of them golden retrievers, and two springer spaniels, the most recent addition to the Winfrey household, adopted from a Chicago shelter).

Does anyone have any doubts that one of her dogs will make an appearance at her final show today?

How not to become President, 4 years later

2011-05-21T23:15:00.002-05:00

4 years ago, I wrote about the story told by Mitt Romney's son, Tagg, about the day the family strapped their Irish setter, Seamus, to the roof of their station wagon when they went on vacation. I said that Americans like their presidents to have dogs and to treat their dogs well. And I predicted that this story would come to haunt Mitt Romney.

I was right. In particular, NYT op-ed columnist Gail Collins seems to have made it her mission to mention Seamus-the-dog-on-the-roof every time she writes about Mitt Romney. She wrote about it in 2007 ("every time I see him, all I can think about is Seamus the dog"), in 2008 ("I’m going to have to get through the rest of the year without ever again referring to the fact that Romney once drove to Canada with the family dog, Seamus, strapped to the roof of the car."), in April of 2011 ("there is not a single mention in [Romney's book] 'No Apology' of the fact that Romney once drove to Canada with the family Irish setter strapped to the roof of the car"), and in her most recent quiz she brings up that fact
again.

Alas, she is not the only one who thinks that proudly announcing that one strapped the family dog to the roof of one's car on the way to Canada does not really demonstrate presidential qualities. There's even a blog called "Dogs against Romney." (Seamus himself is not one of them, he passed away.)

Edited to add: She has done it again! In her op-ed on 5/28/11, Gail Collins compares two potential GOP candidates, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas.

Who is this man called Rick? He is, in his own words, “the kind of guy who goes jogging in the morning packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights and loaded with hollow point bullets, and shoots a coyote that is threatening his daughter’s dog.” That really happened. In fact, it was possibly the high point of Perry’s political career. You can see the attraction. Try to imagine the Republican convention being asked to choose between Mitt Romney, who once drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of his car, and the guy who shot a puppy-eating coyote. With a Ruger .380 with laser sights!

In the end, however, she doesn't think too highly of the puppy-saving candidate either:

If Perry were elected president, perhaps he would do for the entire United States what he’s done for Texas, which ranks first in the nation in the percentage of the population without health insurance, and 45th in high school completion. We could return to grass-roots, state-driven environmental regulations, the kind that have made Texas the nation’s leader in clean-water permit violations, hazardous waste spills and toxic emissions from manufacturing facilities. But the coyotes would really have to watch out.

Dear Trader Joe's

2011-05-21T22:07:00.000-05:00

Your newsletter is called "The Fearless Flyer," but when it comes to grammar judgments, you're everything but.

Your promise that you know that "it is wrong to end a sentence with a preposition" is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which linguists will not put. (This -- purposefully ungrammatical -- phrase is famously attributed to Winston Churchill, but according to Ben Zimmer it may very well just be an anecdote.) It is perfectly fine in English to prepose a noun phrase and end a sentence on a preposition (the construction is called "preposition stranding"). Think about it: Would you rather say "What are you looking at?" or "At what are you looking?" The second sentence sounds much more formal and also a bit clumsy, the first one is much more natural.

(Read more about preposition stranding vs. pied piping on Language Log.)

It cannot be said often enough: There is no rule against ending a sentence on a preposition in English. That's where it's at. Just ask Sam Cooke.

Fascinating fascinators, not all from Milan

2011-04-29T23:00:00.002-05:00

Today is the day of the big Royal Wedding. Some people will remember it for Kate Middleton's elegant dress (a comeback for sleeves?), some will remember it for little Grace van Cutsem, who wasn't too impressed with the royal kiss, and some will remember it for the crazy hats, many of them created by milliner Philip Treacy (the occupation -- first listed in the 16th century -- was named after the city of Milan -- a place where fashionable wares for women were sold).

More precisely, decorative objects atop of ladies' heads made with feathers or beads are referred to as "fascinators" (from the Latin verb for "to enchant") or "cocktail hats." According to the OED, a fascinator was originally (in the 18th century) "a head shawl worn by women," and if we look at the creation worn by Princess Beatrice today, the word has come a long way.

(As of tonight, the Facebook group "In loving memory of the deer that gave its life for Princess Beatrice's hat" has more than 4500 fans.)

Fewer phonemes -- newer language

2011-04-15T08:29:00.000-05:00

It is not often that linguistic news that involve counting phonemes make the front page of The New York Times:

Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it. Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has about 45 phonemes. This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.

You can listen to click sounds here (at about 0:58 in).

An unlikely hero

2011-04-09T20:57:00.001-05:00

Animal abuse is everywhere. Sometimes, it helps to put a face on it -- and on the many people who care for its victims. Read about "Braveheart" and his journey from a dumpster in Kentucky to the critical care unit at the University of Wisconsin-Madison veterinary hospital here.

i [heart] oed

2011-04-04T11:14:00.000-05:00

The Oxford English Dictionary has posted a list of the newest words added to its electronic version. Among them are initialisms like "OMG" (classified as interjection and adjective) and "LOL" (classified as interjection and noun), both "strongly associated with the language of electronic communications" (note the plural). The really interesting entry, however, is a symbol ♥, as in "I ♥ NY." I was delighted to see that the earliest quote that is given involves a dog!

The new sense added to heart v. in this update may be the first English usage to develop via the medium of T-shirts and bumper-stickers. It originated as a humorous reference to logos featuring a picture of a heart as a symbol for the verb love, like that of the famous ‘I ♥ NY’ tourism campaign. Our earliest quote for this use, from 1984, uses the verb in ‘I heart my dog’s head’, a jokey play on bumper stickers featuring a heart and a picture of the face of a particular breed of dog (expressing a person’s enthusiasm for, say, shih-tzus) which itself became a popular bumper sticker. From these beginnings, heart v. has gone on to live an existence in more traditional genres of literature as a colloquial synonym for ‘to love’.

"Publish or Perish: The Budget Bill is not Law"

2011-03-29T23:11:00.007-05:00

In Wisconsin, a law can only take effect once it has been published. State law requires the secretary of state to designate a date to publish laws within 10 business days of the governor signing it. Makes sense? What, then, can be done if a judge has barred the secretary of state from publishing the law in the state's official newspaper (so that the law cannot take effect just yet)? Is it enough if the law is published by a state agentcy on a website, in this case that of the "Legislative Reference Bureau?" Is this to be counted as "publishing" in the relevant sense? The Walker administration says 'yes,' but Edward Fallone, a constitutional law professor at Marquette University, says 'no.'

At the moment, the law provides for one method of satisfying the constitutional requirement of publication: designation of a date by the Secretary of State and public dissemination via publication in the newspaper of record. So long as this is the only method provided under the statutes, this is how publication must occur. Any attempt to give legislation the force of “law” without following the statutory provisions already in place is an attempt to bypass the publication requirement of the Wisconsin Constitution.

Today, judge Maryann Sumi, made it clear, make that "crystal clear," that she sides with Fallone. The purpose of her earlier restraining order was to prevent any steps that would result in implementing the law.

"Apparently that language was either misunderstood or ignored, but what I said was the further implementation of Act 10 was enjoined. That is what I now want to make crystal clear." (WSJ)

Assistant Attorney General Steven Means does not agree with the judge and said the legislation was "absolutely" still in effect. It's legislation by loophole in Wisconsin.

Update 3/31: Judge Sumi ordered today that the law "has not been published within the meaning" of state statutes and is "therefore not in effect" (WSJ)." State Department of Administration Secretary Mike Huebsch still thinks the law was "legally published and is indeed law," but he has now agreed to stop implementing it "to abide by the court orders."

Sailing under a "false flag" may get you sunk

2011-03-25T15:14:00.000-05:00

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism reports that Carlos Lam, a deputy prosecutor in Johnson County (IN), resigned after he could not deny any longer that he had sent an e-mail to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker suggesting that Walker "employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions' cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you)" so that the pro-union movement in Wisconsin could be discredited (this was after he professed to be "flabbergasted" that such an e-mail could have been sent from his account). Lam's e-mail to Gov. Walker became known after an open-records settlement between the Walker administration and the local media.

Employing a false flag operation would assist in undercutting any support that the media may be creating in favor of the unions. God bless, Carlos. F. Lam.

The expression is derived from the naval concept of flying a flag of a friendly country (rather than one's own) to deceive the enemy. Wikipedia reports that according to a 1977 addendum to the Geneva Conventions "it is prohibited to make use in an armed conflict of the flags.... of neutral or other States not Parties to the conflict."

Lam wasn't very good about sailing under his own flag. Before he resigned, he denied that he had sent the incriminating e-mail and professed to be "flabbergasted"(a word of unknown origin and first used in the late 18th century) that such an e-mail could have been sent from his account. On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

Maggie the Cat was a dog lover

2011-03-24T21:48:00.001-05:00

One of her most famous roles was "Maggie the Cat," but she was known as an ardent dog lover. One of her early film roles was in the first "Lassie" movie, but later in life, she preferred white lap dogs.

She was often photographed with a white ball of fur on her lap or in her arms -- a Pekingese dog, Lhasa Apso, or Maltese. Her dogs had names like Sugar (whom she brought to an interview on Larry King Live), Honey, and Daisy. She took her dogs everywhere and is said to almost not have accepted the title "Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire" because she couldn't take her dog due to the strict quarantine laws in the UK. After she had had brain surgery in the late nineties, she did not hesitate to have her picture taken in the hospital, head shaved and all, right after the operation. She held a dog in her arm.

R.I.P., Elizabeth Taylor.

Dogs with a call number

2011-03-22T09:25:00.001-05:00

Yale Law School is one of the most prestigious law schools in the country. And now they're getting even better: Students can check out Monty, a therapy dog, for a 30-min stress-relieving cuddle session.

Law School, renowned for competitiveness and its Supreme Court justices, is embarking on a pilot program next week in which students can check out a “therapy dog” named Monty along with the library’s collection of more than one million books. While the law school is saying little so far about its dog-lending program, it has distributed a memo to students with the basics: that Monty will be available at the circulation desk to stressed-out students for 30 minutes at a time beginning Monday, for a three-day trial run. “It is well documented that visits from therapy dogs have resulted in increased happiness, calmness and overall emotional well-being,” Blair Kauffman, the law librarian, wrote in an e-mail to students.

I think it's safe to bet that this is going to be a successful program, even if some faculty members are skeptical:

“I’m surprised to hear of it,” said John Witt, a professor who was awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship last year for a project on the laws of war through American history. “I’ve always found library books to be therapeutic. But maybe that’s just me.”

Perhaps he should talk to students in Wisconsin, who had visits from therapy dogs during exam week two years ago.

"Dogs for Wisconsin"

2011-03-11T00:51:00.001-06:00

Wisconsin is seeing red.

Ever since Gov. Scott Walker (R) introduced his "Budget Repair Bill," which takes away most collective bargaining rights from public employees, people in Wisconsin have been rallying around the State Capitol in Madison. Many bring their children, some bring their dogs and make them wear protest signs.

This one reads: "The only good walker is a dog walker."

People around the country (and their dogs) show solidarity.

They organize rallies and send pizza donations.

After almost a month of peaceful, yet forceful demonstrations, the bill was passed yesterday.

ETA (after big tractorcade rally on 3/13):

Keep "On Language" in the New York Times

2011-03-06T23:39:00.001-06:00

Randy Cohen's Ethicist column gone, Frank Rich's column gone (almost), Ben Zimmer's weekly column On Language gone (after only one year).

On Language is finally coming to a close, at least in its current incarnation. For more than 30 of those years, it was the domain of the Language Maven (as Safire jauntily called himself), until his passing in September 2009. I’ve had the privilege of carrying on that legacy for the past year, but now it is time to bid adieu, after some 1,500 dispatches from the frontiers of language.

The first two decisions are head-scratchers, the third is just short-sighted and wrong. What's up with the New York Times? Do we really need more recipes for soup and less discussion of etymology, linguistic bias, language change?

If you'd like to see On Language kept in the NYT, you might want to join this group on Facebook and write the NYT editors in charge:

NYT Magazine letters to the editor: magazine@nytimes.com
NYT Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren: hugo.lindgren@nytimes.com
NYT public editor Arthur Brisbane: public@nytimes.com

Let's hear it for the Scots

2011-02-17T20:54:00.000-06:00

Shaggy gal Hickory, a Scottish deerhound, wins the coveted "Best in Show" title at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Afterwards, she feasts on filet mignon (medium rare).

Take that, all of you overcoiffed lap dogs. Pictures of all of the champions can be found here. Too bad there's no slideshow of the handlers and their clothes (after all, it's fashion week in NY). They're always so.... extraordinary.

Dogs have 100 words for 'ball'...

2011-01-19T22:06:00.000-06:00

First, there was Rico. Now, there is Chaser. The NY Times reports that Chaser knows the name of more than 1000 toys ("800 cloth animals, 116 balls, 26 Frisbees and a medley of plastic items").

The 1,022 words in Chaser’s vocabulary are all proper nouns. Dr. Pilley also found that Chaser could be trained to recognize categories, in other words common nouns. She correctly follows the command “Fetch a Frisbee” or “Fetch a ball.” She can also learn by exclusion, as children do. If she is asked to fetch a new toy with a word she does not know, she will pick it out from ones that are familiar.

However, there's a difference between Chaser's vocabulary and a child's vocabulary right there: Chaser's words are all proper nouns. She knows the name of 1000 individual objects, but does she know what a 'toy' is? And does being able to understand the meaning of a verb-noun combination like 'fetch a ball' mean that a dog knows syntax? Would the dog care at all if you switched the words around?

A Nova episode on animal intelligence, in which Chaser stars, will be broadcast on Feb. 9.

nommmmm!

2011-01-11T23:39:00.000-06:00

Nom was the runner-up in this year's WOTY contest. I was skeptical at first, but it seems to be quite well integrated already. For example, it readily forms the deverbal adjective nommable:

The pudding was unbelievably light, silky and creamy with a wobbly texture. The creme brulee was super milky, fragrant of cocoa, with very nommable crunchy sugar crystals. [Eating in Madison A to Z]

I'm less sure about nommer, though.

WOTY 2010

2011-01-07T19:51:00.000-06:00

And the winner is .... app*. (Yawn). The runner-up? Nom (onomatopoetic form connoting eating, as in "nom-nom." Can also be used as a noun. Really? That's a word of the year? Hm.

*Congrats to my student C., who picked "app" as her choice in a homework assignment.

Second chance

2011-01-05T15:15:00.000-06:00

Come and meet Sadie.

There are many dogs in shelters that are considered non-adoptable -- perhaps they are too shy or not house-trained or they bark to much. And there are many prison inmates with a lot of time on their hands -- and no companion at their side. Put the two together and you have the Second Chances program, a cooperation between the Dane County Humane Society and the Thompson Correctional Center (a low-security facility) in Wisconsin.

Selected inmates are given a dog to train over a period of 12 weeks. Each week, a trainer from the Humane Society visits them and teaches them training techniques. The dogs stay with the inmates 24/7 and live in their cells.

Everybody wins. The dogs learn new social behaviors and may find a new permanent home, the inmates can take responsibility for a pet and can take pride in contributing to giving a dog a new home.

And it doesn't cost the tax payer a dollar. The program is sponsored by donation and a grant from Petco.

More at this link and here.

Twiblings

2011-01-03T17:01:00.002-06:00

The word "twiblings" has been around for a while. It used to signify siblings close enough in age to seem twins. The cover story in this week's New York Times Sunday Magazine, however, is bound to popularize a sense of the word that ties it to modern reproductive terminology:

We scrapped the idea of trying to have twins and decided we would have a baby with an egg donor and a gestational carrier and then try to have another the following year, with as small an interval as possible between the two births. “If we really want our children to be the same age, we can try to find two carriers now and do the pregnancies in parallel,” Michael said.

And so the twiblings, Violet and Kieran, were born, and a "futuristic insta family" (NYT) was created.

There is also no word to describe our children’s relationship with each other. Our children were born five days apart — a fact that cannot be easily explained. When people press me about their status (“But are they really twins?”), the answer gets long. The word “twins” usually refers to siblings who shared a womb. But to call them just “siblings” instead of “twins” also raises questions because full genetic siblings are ordinarily at least nine months apart. And our children could be considered the same age because they were conceived at the same time (in the lab) and the embryos were transferred at the same time. If the person continues to quibble about whether they really qualify as twins (as, surprisingly, people often do), instead of asking why it matters, I announce airily that they are “twiblings.”

The picture shows the children with their parents and the two gestational carriers (the term "birth mother,"appropriate in the context of adoption, does not apply here because the carriers are not genetically related to the children). The person missing from the picture is the egg donor.

Happy New Year!

2011-01-01T14:20:00.005-06:00

We have now moved into serious Word of the Year territory. The American Dialect Society has presented some of its WOTY candidates (the vote will take place on Jan. 7). A Word of The Year should be

new or newly popular in 2010
widely or prominently used in 2010
indicative or reflective of the popular discourse

Usually, the most entertaining words or expressions are nominated in the subcategories "most unnecessary," "most outrageous" (think 'death panel'), "most euphemistic" word of the year.

So what are some of the words that linguists have nominated?

Update Jan. 7, 2011: You can now see a list of the words nominated in the "minor categories"here.

Ben Zimmer, producer of The Visual Thesaurus and columnist for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, lists the following words (among others): mama grizzly, to man up, shellacking, gleek, vuvuzela, static kill, hacktivism, belieber (fanatic fan of Justin Bieber, in case you're wondering), thumbo (a typo caused by thumbs-only text messaging), enhanced pat down, junk (euphemism for a man's private parts, think 'don't touch my junk'), and opt out.

Edited to add: Zimmer's final choice is "junk."

Grant Barrett, board member of the ADS and cohost of the radio show "A Way With Words," published these words in the New York Times: belieber, coffice (a coffee shop used as an office -- though I must say, I get more of a "coffin decorated with office paraphernalia" vibe), the Justin Bieber (an unflattering haircut), halfalogue (the part of a conversation one can't help overhearing when someone makes a cell phone call in public), mamma grizzly, refudiate (the -- by now -- well-known Palinism), shellacking, poutrage (pretense outrage).

It seems that my students were doing really well! They also picked Gleek, vuvuzela, static kill and other words relating to the oil spill disaster, words relating to the pop-phenomenon Justin Bieber and to communication via cell phones. Looking at these lists, can I change my mind? I am still pretty sure that a word from politics will win in the overall category (while a word like "halfalogue" might win in the category "most creative word") , but my money is now on the more dynamic to man up or, alternatively, on getting shellacked. Both capture the machismo turn in politics that characterized this year very well, both are more versatile than, say, Tea Party, which is really just a proper name, and, last but not least, both are verbs (or rather verb forms) -- not stiff nouns or sissy adjectives.

Happy Holidays!

2010-12-24T22:58:00.003-06:00

If you had 40,000 pipe cleaners, what would you do with them? Why, invite over some 80 friends and build a 4-foot holiday sculpture of First Dog Bo, of course.

Hallelujah!

2010-12-21T23:04:00.001-06:00

You've probably seen this video (recorded in a Canadian mall on Nov. 13, 2010). More than 26 million people have by now (assuming that each view corresponds to an individual viewer).

My first thought was that all the singers were members of a choir engaged in some sort of social experiment, but no, it was a so-called "flash-mob concert," "when groups of people - often strangers - conspire on social networking websites to turn up at the same place at the same time and start singing". That's an established activity? With a name? (I'm so behind!)

In any case, not all flash-mob concerts have joyful endings. This one didn't: 5000 people had turned up to sing, which caused the building to creak. Everybody had to be evacuated. The "mob" continued the performance outside.

WOTY: There's a word for that

2010-12-16T21:15:00.002-06:00

What do these two pictures have in common? They illustrate two potential "Words of the Year."

Soon the American Dialect Society will pick its words of the year. I asked some of my students what their choices would be. Here are some of their answers from technology, pop culture, and technology:

Tea Party (the only word picked by more than one student)
app ("There's an app for that", now a trademarked slogan)
Facebook official
bro
dubstep
tweep
spillcam
vuvuzela
Obamacare
textative
Bieber fever
Gleek (a fan -- in a geeky way -- of the TV show "Glee")

Do you still remember? Last year's choice was "tweet" and the year before it was "bailout." If there is an established pattern to pick terms from technology in uneven years and terms from politics in even years, my money is on Tea Party. Appy Holidays! (No, not a holiday wish spoken with a charming French accent, rather an advertisement for apps that run on Android phones.)

"Gifts for she"

2010-12-14T19:00:00.000-06:00

I can't really make sense of this. Is there something I'm missing, or is this just a blatantly ungrammatical slogan? Is this what the company means by "do something creative every day?"

What's on your Kindle?

2010-12-14T18:54:00.000-06:00

When a friend recently asked me about the advantages of reading books on a Kindle, I jokingly said that you could read trashy novels in public (think 'subway') and nobody would know about it. Turns out that that is exactly what people are doing:

If the e-reader is the digital equivalent of the brown-paper wrapper, the romance reader is a little like the Asian carp: insatiable and unstoppable. Together, it turns out, they are a perfect couple. Romance is now the fastest-growing segment of the e-reading market, ahead of general fiction, mystery and science fiction, according to data from Bowker, a research organization for the publishing industry.

Some people, apparently, enjoy hiding their books from a rather specific audience:

“We’ve had lots of customers write to us and say, ‘Now I don’t always have to show my husband what I’m reading.’ ”

Bye-bye, Fabio.

Everything sells better with a dog

2010-12-07T09:44:00.001-06:00

...and with free shipping

Syntax beating Prosody

2010-12-05T23:52:00.000-06:00

In a recent article on the use of corpus linguistic methods in literary studies, the Times reported on the exhilaration and also anxiety about the potential of "electronic tools" and the application of statistical analysis to literary texts. Being able to count things often may lead to a shift towards research questions that rely on quantifiable data. Linguists will mostly take a "been there, done that" position -- after all, corpus linguistics is not exactly a new field or methodology.

Yet large searches can also challenge some pet theories of close reading, he said: for example, that the Victorians were obsessed with the nature and origins of evil. As it turns out, books with the word “evil” in the title bumped along near the bottom of the graph, accounting for less than 0.1 percent — a thousandth — of those published during the Victorian era. As Mr. Cohen is quick to acknowledge, the meaning of those numbers is anything but clear. Perhaps authors didn’t like to use the word “evil” in the title; perhaps there were other, more common synonyms; perhaps the context points to another subject altogether.

Precisely. Sometimes the things one looks for are not encoded in particular words. And words can be misleading:

Ms. Martin at Princeton knows firsthand how electronic searches can unearth both obscure texts and dead ends. She has spent the last 10 years compiling a list of books, newspaper and journal articles about the technical aspects of poetry. She recalled finding a sudden explosion of the words “syntax” and “prosody” in 1832, suggesting a spirited debate about poetic structure. But it turned out that Dr. Syntax and Prosody were the names of two racehorses. “You find 200 titles with ‘Syntax,’ and you think there must be a big grammar debate that year,” Ms. Martin said, “but it was just that Syntax was winning.”

No grammar debate, perhaps, but you gotta love a period in history when racehorses were called Dr. Syntax and Prosody!

Michebrot

2010-12-01T22:28:00.001-06:00

A local bakery and pastry shop offers "organic miche" -- no, this is not a recipe from Michigan, it's their spelling of the German root misch- (to mix). The bread in question, Mischbrot, is made with a "mix" of grains, most likely wheat and rye.

fashism: "ironic and playful"

2010-11-29T20:26:00.002-06:00

How far would you go to draw attention to your little fashion website? Would you mind being associated with Hitler and the Holocaust? You think that's a crazy question? Apparently not:

“We didn’t want the site to be TellMeHowThisLooks.com,” she [Brooke Moreland, one of the co-founders of the site] said. “We wanted something a little cooler and edgier.”

Moreland also professes to be surprised by the public's reaction.

“I never thought anyone would be offended because we’re not doing anything offensive,” she said. “Frankly, it’s a very different word.”

Frankly, that's a very poor excuse. Yes, the neologism fashism derives from fashion (a word borrowed that ultimately goes back to the Latin verb 'facere,' to make), while Fascism derives from the Latin word 'fascis', bundle). On the other hand, it is quite clear that the name of the website was picked precisely because of its homophonous cousin.

Personally, I'd rather get my daily dose of fashion advice from a website with better taste.

Please get your dog microchipped!

2010-11-19T13:04:00.000-06:00

Have you heard of Target, an Afghan stray dog that prevented a bomb attach on American military barracks in Feburary? He was flown to the USA, adopted by a military family, taught to live in a house and be well-fed, and even had an appearance on Oprah.

Last Friday, Target was killed. At a dog shelter in Arizona. Not really accustomed to the life of a city dog, Target had escaped through her doggie door. She reported to Animal Control, was picked up and sent to a local shelter. Because Target had no microchip, she could not be identified, so her picture was put on the shelter's website, and her owner immediately registered and paid the fee to pick her up. When he arrived at the shelter, Target had already been put to sleep. A mistake, sure enough, but it would not have happened, if the dog had been microchipped.

'refudiate' revisited

2010-11-16T23:41:00.000-06:00

What a lame choice for Word of the Year, Oxford! Yes, it was an "unquestionable buzzword in 2010," but that doesn't make it a word, just like "misunderestimate" is not a word. "Refudiate" was a mistake, not a thought-through coinage (which is why it's so preposterous to point out that Shakespeare also coined new words.) Let's have a look at the other contenders:

bankster noun (informal) a member of the banking industry perceived as a predator that grows rich at the expense of those suffering in a crumbling economy: trillions of dollars are flowing to the banksters in the form of near-zero interest loans.
crowdsourcing noun the practice whereby an organization enlists a variety of freelancers, paid or unpaid, to work on a specific task or problem: Kodak used social media crowdsourcing to engage its customers in their naming contest.
double-dip adjective denoting or relating to a recession during which a period of economic decline is followed by a brief period of growth, followed by a further period of decline: higher food and energy prices could increase the risk of a double-dip recession.
gleek noun (informal) a fan of the television series Glee.
nom nom (informal) exclamation an expression of delight when eating.
retweet verb (on the social networking service Twitter) repost or forward (a message posted by another user): people love to retweet job ads.
Tea Party a US political party that emerged from a movement of conservatives protesting the federal government in 2009.
top kill noun a procedure designed to seal a leaking oil well, whereby large amounts of a material heavier than the oil—e.g., mud—are pumped into the affected well.
vuvuzela noun (also called vuvu) a long horn blown by fans at soccer matches.
webisode noun 1. an original episode derived from a television series, made for online viewing. 2. an online video that presents an original short film or promotes a product, movie, or television series.

Can there be any doubt that "Tea Party" will emerge as the 'true' WOTY? Let's wait for the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society in January.

“Naming your kid Hunter or Breaker is like saying f--k you to the world that invented feminism”

2010-11-11T22:00:00.003-06:00

The 10 most popular names for boys in the US last year were Jacob, Ethan, Michael, Alexander, William, Joshua, Daniel, Jayden, Noah, and Anthony. No great surprises here. If one is interested in trends, it may be useful to look for the fastest-rising names instead. Last year, they were Cullen, King, Emmett, Colt, Braylen, Jett, Kason, Jasper, and Brooks -- many of them short names with a /k/-sound, evoking a new, macho form of masculinity, very different from names like 'John' and 'Mike,' which people associate "with a nice house in Westchester and two cars and a dad who goes to work and a mom who doesn't."

If the names seem a little un-namish to you (King? Colt?), there's this to consider:

And yet, said Tom Recht, an engineer who lives in a Chicago suburb and is father to teenage sons Linus and Kilmer, “Around here, all the kids’ names are weird, but aside from the names, the kids themselves are very similar to the kids I went to school with. More parents than not are into the traditional male-female thing, they’re not a rebellious free-thinking crowd, except in their choice of names.”

Little Colt may have a "rebellious" name, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he won't end up in a nice house in Westchester. Who knows, perhaps he's going to be truly rebellious and major in Women's Studies?

Like a good neigh-bear

2010-11-04T09:13:00.000-05:00

What exactly is 'neigh' in 'good neigh bear'? An adjective?

And what does it mean?

A memoir by the owner of the former First Dog

2010-11-03T13:43:00.001-05:00

Former president Bush has written a memoir called "Decision Points," a "dogged work of reminiscence by an author not naturally given to introspection" (Michiko Kakutani, NY Times). As one would expect, much of the memoir deals with portraying Bush as a decisive leader, and there will be as much disagreement on his reflections on the decision-making process as on the decisions themselves. However, there is one point on which there never was any disagreement: George W. Bush loves his dog Barney, and that's a good thing. And so his memoir ends with a note on Barney and being an ordinary citizen again.

Mr. Bush says he left office satisfied that “I had always done what I believed was right.” Since then, he says, he’s comfortably settled back into ordinary life. Shortly after moving to Dallas, he writes, he took his dog Barney for an early morning walk: “Barney spotted our neighbor’s lawn, where he promptly took care of his business. There I was, the former president of the United States, with a plastic bag on my hand, picking up that which I had been dodging for the past eight years.”

not your typical farm dog

2010-10-31T05:28:00.000-05:00

We met this little guy when we went out to a farm to pick our pumpkins.

He joined us for our hayride to the pumpkin patch.

Where he then disappeared.

We picked our pumpkins and carved them today.

Happy Halloween!

"I want to see you wear that polka dot dress, Klum!"

2010-10-28T22:49:00.003-05:00

Whoa, Garcia and Klum are on last-name basis in this season's finale of Project Runway. They talk about what's wearable and what's sellable and it all ends with the sentence nobody wanted to hear: "Sorry, Mondo, that means you're out." Guest judge Jessica Simpson liked Mondo's collection best, especially the infamous polka dot dress, but she kindly assures winner Gretchen Jones that her sister (Ashlee Simpson) will "rock [Jones's clothes] impeccably."

What to say? Tim Gunn, not known for being stumped for words (see my ABC of Tim Gunn-isms for details), said this: "Wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow."

Rock on. Impeccably.

Edited to add: Heidi Klum was true to her word. She wore a modified (but still recognizable) version of Mondo's polka dot dress at a red-carpet event. Pictures here. Take that, NinaGarciaFormerFashionEditorForElleMagazine!

Who's this Miriam Webster?

2010-10-26T21:20:00.003-05:00

I'm a fan of the HBO show "In Treatment." In today's episode, Jesse, a 17-year old with, let's say, identity issues (he wore a T-shirt with the slogan "Hurt me, I'm a virgin"), tries to impress his therapist with a new word he has learned (bifurcated). To no effect. Later, the therapist mentions Merriam-Webster, which Jesse, in a perfect eggcorn, constructs as "Miriam Webster." He asks the therapist who this Miriam woman is. Off the cuff, Weston gives a brief account of Noah Webster and the Merriam brothers, Charles and George (he even knows their given names).

George and Charles Merriam founded a publishing house in Massachusetts in 1831. In 1843 they bought the rights to the current edition of Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language as well as the right to publish future editions. They published the dictionary at a lower price and made it a financial success. The company was later renamed Merriam Webster Inc.

Perhaps this is common knowledge among psychotherapists?

Meet the MAMILS

2010-10-24T19:18:00.001-05:00

It seems that the older I get the more people I know who compete in marathons and triathlons. And while that might just mean that I now associate more with athletes than in my twenties (which I doubt), there is also a general trend of forty-something men (and women) turning towards triathlons as their preferred sport. The New York Times reports today that

The sport has exploded by 51 percent since 2007, according to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, and men in their 40s are one of the fastest growing segments in the sport, accounting for one-third of the 1.2 million triathletes.

The phenomenon is so popular that there's even a word for these "generation of athletic, type-A men who are entering middle age and trying to hold on to their youth through triathlons": They're mamils ('middle-age men in Lycra'). According to Urban Dictionary, the term was created by Michael Oliver, a senior analyst for the British market research company Mintel, and it caught on right away. Mintel's report describes mamils as "the noughties version of the mid-life crisis." Well, I guess an expensive bike and high-end spandex gear are still a lot cheaper than a Porsche convertible. Just make sure that you won't get chicked at the next race (beaten by a woman), it might take away some of the type-A fun.

fun-funner-funnest

2010-10-19T20:15:00.001-05:00

A student asked me today why the form funner is considered incorrect -- wouldn't one expect a one-syllable adjective to form its comparative and superlative on -er/-est rather than synthetically, with more and most?

Absolutely. At least that's Steve Jobs's point of view.

The thing about fun, however, is that for many people it is not really an adjective yet. And in predicative uses like The concert was fun, it's hard to say if fun is an adjective or a noun, since both can be used predicatively (John is foolish/a fool). The situation becomes clearer once one includes elements that uniquely specify either nouns or adjectives, such as quantifiers. In The concert was a lot of fun, fun can only be a noun. You can only quantify nouns, but not adjectives. In The concert was very fun, on the other hand, fun clearly is an adjective, since nouns cannot be specified by degree adverbs (You can be very foolish, but you can't be very fool). So, while there may be situations where it's hard to say if fun is used as an adjective or a noun, it is very clear that it can be used as an adjective. And as an adjective, it would form the comparative with -er. The OED doesn't give the adjective its own entry yet, but recognizes in the entry for the noun that it can be used attributively (as in a fun game) and is "passing into [an] adj[ective] with the sense 'amusing, entertaining, enjoyable'."

Want more? The Boston Globe also has a column on the subject (including data from the OED), and LanguageLog has a posting that discusses the use of double comparatives like funnerer ("Clever quasi-grammatical stake-raising or pathetic attempt at hipness? You decide.")

btdubs

2010-10-15T23:16:00.002-05:00

You don't really expect an acronym to be longer (in terms of syllables) than the phrase it replaces. Unless your acronym includes the letter 'w,' or three of them, as in 'www,' the 9-syllable acronym that replaces "world-wide web." One way to get around this is to clip the pronunciation of 'w' (double-you) to 'dub,' which looks longer in writing than 'w,' but consists of only one syllable. Applying that method, you arrive at "btdubs" ('bee-tee-dubs') for BTW ('by the way') or at "j-dubs" for 'just wondering,' which I overheard someone say in the elevator today. Of course, if you regularly visit urbandictionary.com, you already know that. Jay ess.

"I like it on..."

2010-10-07T00:12:00.000-05:00

My friend Gen likes it on the barstool. My friend Jasmine likes it in the car.

Have you seen status updates like these on facebook today? Have they made you scratch your head? All those women who normally just post about their children's sandbox activities are now talking about - OMG!- sex? For an explanation, go to this link.

Titillating the Facebook newsfeeds today, women are posting where they like to keep their purses when they come home, but they conveniently leave out the word "purse." [...] The trend follows the January Internet meme in which women posted the color of their bra as their Facebook status. Both are to raise awareness of breast cancer.

O.k., I'm now even more baffled than before. Juvenile jokes about liking it on the barstool help raise the awareness of breast cancer exactly how? Let me be an old bore and just link to the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month website.

Dog Jog 2010

2010-09-29T21:05:00.000-05:00

The annual DogJog in the city where I live always marks the day of the first entry in this blog for me. That was 5 years ago. We're still here, just a little busier than five years ago, due to a non-canine addition to our family. My dog is now an experienced dog jogger now, politely greeting other dogs at the event.

The motto this year? Fly like a beagle!

It was a bit of a rainy day, but a good time was had by all.

bacha posh

2010-09-22T23:21:00.000-05:00

In a society that values boys much higher than girls, families with no male offspring may decide to raise a girl as a boy, a "bacha posh" (dressed up as a boy), at least until puberty. It gives the family recognition and makes it possible for the little girl to play outside, run errands, etc.

For most such girls, boyhood has an inevitable end. After being raised as a boy, with whatever privileges or burdens it may entail, they switch back once they become teenagers. When their bodies begin to change and they approach marrying age, parents consider it too risky for them to be around boys anymore.

eggcorn

2010-09-22T23:12:00.000-05:00

Eggcorn made it to the OED -- and LanguageLog justly celebrates the occasion. And here's the posting on LanguageLog that put eggcorns on the linguistic map.

It's not a folk etymology, because this is the usage of one person rather than an entire speech community.

It's not a malapropism, because "egg corn" and "acorn" are really homonyms (at least in casual pronunciation), while pairs like "allegory" for "alligator," "oracular" for "vernacular" and "fortuitous" for "fortunate" are merely similar in sound (and may also share some aspects of spelling and morphemic content).

It's not a mondegreen because the mis-construal is not part of a song or poem or similar performance.

Note, by the way, that the author of this mis-hearing may be a speaker of the dialect in which "beg" has the same vowel as the first syllable of "bagel". For these folks, "egg corn" and "acorn" are really homonyms, if the first is not spoken so as to artificially separate the words.

[update (9/30/2003): Geoff Pullum suggests that if no suitable term already exists for cases like this, we should call them "egg corns", in the metonymic tradition of "mondegreen", since the eponymous solution of "malapropism" and "spoonerism" is not appropriate.]

“We feel so strongly that our daughter hear another language.”

2010-08-24T10:52:00.004-05:00

The NY Times reports that "a noticeable number of New York City parents are looking for baby sitters and nannies to help their children learn a second language, one they may not speak themselves."

And indeed, bilingualism comes with a lot of benefits, social (being able to communicate with more people) and cognitive (for example, an advantage at tasks that involve disentangling the shape or look of a word and its meaning):

[B]ilingual children do better at complex tasks like isolating information presented in confusing ways. In one test researchers frequently use, words like “red” and “green” flash across a screen, but the words actually appear in purple and yellow. Bilingual children are faster at identifying what color the word is written in, a fact researchers attribute to a more developed prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for executive decision-making, like which language to use with certain people).

But it also comes with a price: Bilingual children have to learn more words and they have to keep two linguistic systems apart. Hence, access to the right words is a bit slower (we're talking about milliseconds here). Parents who hope that knowledge of a second language will give their kids a leg up in the admission to prestigious preschools will therefore be disappointed. At the age of 2 or 3, kids that are growing up bilingual may actually seem linguistically less adept than their monolingual peers. And how to keep up the second language once the child goes to school? According to the article, some parents decide to keep the nanny, even though this has "financial implications." Interesting that it doesn't occur to them to find Spanish-speaking friends for their kids. What's the point of knowing a language if you don't associate and communicate with the people that speak it?

Learn more about cognitive aspects of bilingualism here (scroll down to Podcast #9 on "Growing up Bilingual").

That's Chevrolet to you!

2010-07-20T11:21:00.006-05:00

So let's say you run an American company that makes cars. Your company name has three syllables and is actually French. However, millions of customers love your products and have come up with a short version of your brand name, which is even immortalized in an iconic 1970s song. Would you think it a good idea to get rid of that short name and to advise employees to use the long name?

I thought so.

However, General Motors thinks otherwise, as recently reported in the Times:

On Tuesday, G.M. sent a memo to Chevrolet employees at its Detroit headquarters, promoting the importance of ''consistency'' for the brand, which was the nation's best-selling line of cars and trucks for more than half a century after World War II. And one way to present a consistent brand message, the memo suggested, is to stop saying ''Chevy,'' though the word is one of the world's best-known, longest-lived product nicknames. ''We'd ask that whether you're talking to a dealer, reviewing dealer advertising, or speaking with friends and family, that you communicate our brand as Chevrolet moving forward,'' said the memo, which was signed by Alan Batey, vice president for Chevrolet sales and service, and Jim Campbell, the G.M. division's vice president for marketing.

In other news: The organization previously known as the Y.M.C.A. is henceforth to be called “the Y.” Another strategy, more in tune with what people are actually saying, but with the same result: another iconic 1970s song becoming untethered.

0 is for Octopus

2010-07-08T10:41:00.003-05:00

...or for zero goals scored in a soccer game.

German octopus Paul correctly picks the winner of German soccer matches at the World Cup in South Africa. Yesterday, he correctly picked out Spain. And so Spain won and moves on to the final, while Germany will play Uruguay for place 3.

Now German fans are clamoring for a "revenge grilling of oracle octopus." Turns out we're not a superstitious nation after all.

"singular they is just not that big of a deal"

2010-07-08T10:14:00.004-05:00

Like Eric Baković, a linguist who writes for LanguageLog, I'm a fan of David Pogue's tech reviews in the Times. And like him, I'm thinking that it's perhaps a good thing that Pogue is not writing the "On Language" column. Here's a quote from his recent review of a book on the Facebook phenomenon.

Kirkpatrick’s writing is low-key but also workmanlike, and punctuated by jarring grammatical constructions (“Everybody carried their stuff themselves”; “every Thefacebook user had their own public bulletin board”). Ouch.

Who in this day and age gets thrown off by singular they? Or at any time, really? But, to adapt a quote from the novel Vanity Fair (1848), linked on Wikipedia, a person can't help their tastes. (Or can they?)

spellbound -- where are they now?

2010-07-01T15:01:00.003-05:00

If you are a fan of the movie Spellbound, you have probably asked yourself what has become of its protagonists. The Oscar-nominated documentary, loved by critics and audience alike, followed 8 children competing in the National Spelling Bee finals in 1999. Spellbound kids, where are you now?

Spelling Bee winner Nupur Lala graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in Brain, Behavior, and Cognitive Science and is now a grad student at MIT, where she does research on memory formation and language processing. Go, Nupur!

Angela Arenivar, whose parents immigrated from Mexico, is now a Spanish teacher. She graduated from Texas A&M University with a B.A. in Spanish and received an M.A. in Spanish from the University of New Mexico.

She keeps a blog called "Okay, so it's heleoplankton. Bee happy." In her most recent entry, she writes:

I am not ashamed that I come from a low-income background. Because of my dedication and intelligence, I was able to literally GO places. I was able to go to our nation's capital and capitol. I stayed in the Grand Hyatt, not in the Motel 8s my family and I did on our way to and from Mexico in the summers. I realized I was not forever destined to be poor. Why did I spend so much time studying words? Spelling made me happy, and spelling allowed me many adventures. Following my passion was my ticket out of poverty.

Neil Kadakia, whose father stressed that nothing that matters in life can be gotten without hardship , graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007. He still lives in Orange County and is working in real estate.

April DeGideo, the serious girl from Pennsylvania who owned up to being a pessimist and who only very rarely allowed herself to imagine she'd be the winner of the National Spelling Bee, graduated from NYU in 2007 with a degree in journalism. She's now working in journalism/public relations.

Emily Stagg, who attended the spelling bee without her au pair, is currently a grad student at Yale (psychiatry/mental health). In 2006, she wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, in which she argued that it is more important to know the meaning of a word than its spelling:

If education is really what we are after, can we change the bee to make it more useful for teaching real-world skills to some of the nation's brightest students? For example, the question has been raised, why don't we make the National Spelling Bee a "definitions bee," where competitors need to know primarily what words mean rather than simply how to spell them? After all, memorization of $5 words can't be the most useful skill for these driven and capable students to develop.

Ashley White, the "angel" child (her teacher's words) from Washington, D.C., has a very poignant story, as told by the Washington Post:

Among the roughly 2,000 students who will graduate from Howard University on Saturday, one -- Ashley White -- has come a long, long way. From homelessness and teenage motherhood, she will graduate magna cum laude with a degree in television production and plans for graduate school. [...] A District spelling bee champ, she had been featured in a documentary, "Spellbound," about the 1999 Scripps National Spelling Bee. In the movie, the ambitious middle-schooler with a photographic memory had dreams of being an obstetrician. But, as the Post story recounted, White fell far and hard by the time the movie was released, in 2002. At age 18, she became a mother. And after bouncing among temporary homes, she landed in a homeless shelter. Despite the hardships, the young woman's dreams were unsquelched. Determined to get a college education, she was helped through Howard University by Washington Post readers, who offered her jobs, furniture and mentoring and contributed thousands of dollars to her education.

Funny man Harry Altman graduated from the University of Chicago and is now a graduate student in math at the University of Michigan.

According to various sources on the Internet, the saddest of the Spellbound stories is that of Ted Brigham, a Missouri native. He died in 2007. He was pursuing medical school at the time. The cause of his death was not released to the public.

Finally, George Thampy ("Trust in Jesus, honor your parents, work hard") went on to win the Spelling Bee in 2000. He graduated from Harvard University (with a degree in Chemistry, Health Studies, and Russian), where he also served as the director of a homeless shelter, and is now working in Investment Banking.

between you and I and Larry King

2010-06-29T20:37:00.005-05:00

“I talked to the guys here at CNN and I told them I would like to end ‘Larry King Live,’ the nightly show, this fall and CNN has graciously accepted, giving me more time for my wife and I to get to the kids’ little league games,” Mr. King wrote in the blog post.

What's stunning about this statement is not so much that Larry King will not renew his contract for his daily talk show on CNN, nor that he and his wife are bent on spending time together after filing for divorce earlier this year, rather, it is the fact that after several decades as a journalist (Wikipedia talks about more than 40,000 interviews) he still falls into the coordination trap.

Mr. King, between you and I: Prepositions are not followed by nominative case, period. It's "more time for my wife and me," not "my wife and I." Rule of thumb: For the second coordinate, use the same case as for the first. You wouldn't say "more time for I," and "for my wife and I" is not any different.

repeat with me: the ghoti-joke is a myth

2010-06-27T22:33:00.007-05:00

There is no evidence that the playwright George Bernard Shaw ever said that English spelling was so little systematic, the word "fish" might as well be spelled as "ghoti" ("gh" as in "laugh", "o" as in "women," and "ti" as in "nation," in case you were wondering). And yet, the lame ghoti-joke is attributed to GBS over and over again. One cannot set the record straight often enough. Here's a recent attempt by Ben Zimmer:

English spelling does not actually work by stitching together parts of words in Frankensteinian fashion. Ghoti falls down for the same reason, if you stop to think about it. Do we ever represent the “f” sound as gh at the beginning of a word or the “sh” sound as ti at the end of a word? And for that matter, is the vowel of fish ever spelled with an “o” in any word other than women? English spelling might be messy, but it does follow some rules.

[...] Victorians often amused themselves with genteel language games, so why not one involving the rejiggering of common words? Into the 20th century, other jokey respellings made the rounds, such as ghoughphtheightteeau for potato (that’s gh as in hiccough, ough as in though, phth as in phthisis, eigh as in neigh,tte as in gazette and eau as in beau).
Ghoti was elevated above these other spelling gags when it became attached to the illustrious name of Shaw — who, like Churchill and Twain, seems to attract free-floating anecdotes. If Shaw never said it, who was responsible for the attribution? I blame the philologist Mario Pei, who spread the tale in The Los Angeles Times in 1946 and then again in his widely read 1949 book, “The Story of Language.” Pei could have been confusing Shaw with another prominent British spelling reformer, the phonetician Daniel Jones (said to be one of the models for Shaw’s Henry Higgins in “Pygmalion” ), since Jones really did make use of the ghoti joke in a 1943 speech.
With Shaw’s supposed imprimatur, ghoti lingers with us. Jack Bovill, chairman of the Spelling Society, told me that despite its jocularity, ghoti is nonetheless “useful as an example of how illogical English spelling can be.” I beg to differ: if presented with ghoti, most people would simply pronounce it as goaty. You don’t have to be a spelling-bee champ to know that written English isn’t entirely a free-for-all.

travels to germany

2010-06-25T21:20:00.004-05:00

Some impressions from recent travels to Germany.

aloha from harlem

2010-06-25T21:11:00.003-05:00

Harlem is about to get its first new hotel in decades, and 75 or so applicants hoping to land a job there mingled on a soundstage at the Apollo Theater wearing brightly colored leis, sang along to Michael Jackson videos and introduced themselves with nicknames like Amazing Ashton and Phenomenal Patti. [...] The hotel — part of a fast-growing, youth-oriented chain run by the people behind the W hotels — has a sassy attitude, said Aleks Truglio, the hotel’s sales and marketing director. It also has its own lingo, referring to its employees as “talent." [...] We’re looking for people who are sassy, savvy, outgoing — the people who love working with other people and who embrace human contact,” Ms. Truglio said, adding that the hotel’s check-in desk, where guests will be greeted with “aloha” rather than “hello,” was round, so as to feel welcoming from all angles.

Ridiculous, but easily trumped by the lingo used at the Amalfi hotel in Chicago, where memebers of the housekeeping staff are referred to as "comfort stylists."

comfort at leash's end

2010-05-09T23:04:00.002-05:00

WASHINGTON — Just weeks after Chris Goehner, 25, an Iraq war veteran, got a dog, he was able to cut in half the dose of anxiety and sleep medications he took for post-traumatic stress disorder. The night terrors and suicidal thoughts that kept him awake for days on end ceased.

Aaron Ellis, 29, another Iraq veteran with the stress disorder, scrapped his medications entirely soon after getting a dog — and set foot in a grocery store for the first time in three years.
The dogs to whom they credit their improved health are not just pets. Rather, they are psychiatric service dogs specially trained to help traumatized veterans leave the battlefield behind as they reintegrate into society.

And the best thing? Some of these dogs are trained through the "Puppies behind Bars" program, which lets prisoners raise and train service dogs. Everybody wins.

revisiting selective aphasia on LOST

2010-05-07T22:29:00.005-05:00

Recently, I discussed Sun Kwon's selective aphasia on LOST. It was caused by an encounter with Fake Locke, and it disappeared when she was reunited with her husband Jin. So far, so good. I remarked, though, that it seemed rather awkward that everybody's favorite Korean couple should be talking to each other in English at such an emotional point. One week later, let me put my doubts into perspective: If you talk to each other in your second language, while you're dying, it's not completely unreasoable that you talk to each other in your second language while you're experiencing a great moment of joy. (Which is to say, both scenes didn't make sense, just as the whole selective aphasia theme didn't make sense.)

R.I.P., Mr. and Ms. Kwon. And you too, Mr. Not-a-zombie-after-all, Sayid Jarrah.

chinglish: everybody likes a little language mish-mash

2010-05-06T13:57:00.004-05:00

You may have seen this already.

For the last two years, the Shanghai Commission for the Management of Language Use has been trying to clean up English-language signs and menus to rid them of their malapropisms, like these examples. Fortified by an army of 600 volunteers and a politburo of adroit English speakers, the commission has fixed more than 10,000 public signs ... rewritten English-language historical placards and helped hundreds of restaurants recast offerings.

Commission for the Management of Language Use?

a day at the race

2010-05-01T23:22:00.007-05:00

It was a beautiful day for a race around the lake today. Dogs were not allowed on the course, but they patiently waited for their owners to return and stood in line with them for snacks and goodies. Enjoy!

Or begged for treats.

This little guy was a main attraction for children.

"the future of the French language is now in Africa"

2010-04-25T13:08:00.002-05:00

French is now spoken mostly by people who aren’t French. More than 50 percent of them are African. French speakers are more likely to be Haitians and Canadians, Algerians and Senegalese, immigrants from Africa and Southeast Asia and the Caribbean who have settled in France, bringing their native cultures with them.

How to interpret these facts? Some think that the rescue of French is called for (think: eliminating words borrowed from English, like "weekend"), others point out that the language is thriving like never before, reflecting the reality of diversity and globalization.

This is how Nancy Huston, a Canadian-born novelist here, puts it:

The world has changed....The French literary establishment, which still thinks of itself as more important than it is, complains about the decline of its prestige but treats francophone literature as second class, [while] ... laying claim to the likes of Kundera, Beckett and Ionesco, who were all born outside France. That is because, like Makine, they made the necessary declaration of love for France. But if the French bothered actually to read what came out of Martinique or North Africa, they would see that their language is in fact not suffering.

Compounded, clipped, and blended: The Smoke Monster in LOST

2010-04-21T10:42:00.012-05:00

FIRST, THERE WAS A CLOUD OF BLACK SMOKE RAGING THROUGH THE RAIN FOREST.

We used to know him as "Smoke Monster," or "Smokey." When Smokey gets furious, he/it turns into a force of destruction, killing everything in its way (such as the crew of the Black Rock). Unless it's hidden behind a sonar fence or inside a tree. Or unless one is John Locke, who survived an encounter with Smokey in Season 1.

THEN, THERE WAS A MAN IN BLACK CLOTHING SITTING OPPOSITE A GUY IN WHITE.

Then Smokey became "Man in Black" or "MIB" (because he's always dressed in black) or even "Esau" (because he's playing opposite of "Jacob," who may or may not be his brother), or rather, it became obvious that Man in Black was a shape-shifter and could turn himself into the Smoke Monster. We learned that Man in Black wants to get off the Island, but this won't happen as long as Jacob is around. MIB cannot kill Jacob himself, so he must find someone else to do it. (That someone else turned out to be good old Benjamin Linus.)

FINALLY, THERE WAS JOHN LOCKE. OR WAS HE?

For some reason, Man in Black took on the persona of John Locke (he previously also took on the persona of dead people, for example Christian Shepherd, but this time, he is "locked" into it. Ah, the irony!), to whom he refers as "a sucker" and "loser." Thist added a level of complexity to the question of how people should refer to the new John Locke on the show. He looked just like the old John Lock, but he was someone entirely different. Mostly, fan websites chose blended forms to indicate the double identity: Some call him "Smockey" or "Smocke" (Smokey + Locke), others refer to him as Faucke (faux/fake Locke), others use "Un-Locke."

There's bound to be an episode that gives us the back story on Jacob and Man in Black. Let's see which effect it will have on our naming the latter. Will we ever know his name?

“They call it light bladder leakage, but I call it the spritz"

2010-04-02T08:34:00.003-05:00

Commercials for feminine hygiene products are known for their abundant use of euphemisms, such as "feminine hygiene" (and of blue liquids). Brands like Poise and are now trying to change this, but how far can you go? Poise itself avoids the term "incontinence" and has coined the term “light bladder leakage" instead (what about "bladder dysfunction"?).

“Women want clarity in their communication and for us to be open and honest,” Ms. Jones said. “But they also want to identify with a term that doesn’t make them feel like they’re incontinent, a term that is attached to their fear of aging. That’s why we felt it was important to position this category out of incontinence and relabel it light bladder leakage.”

While Poise is only poised to go as far as "light bladder leakage," it picked a spokesperson who is not known for discreet language: Whoopi Goldberg.

The first day of shooting, we said the brand talks about light bladder leakage, and she said, ‘It’s not a leak, it’s a spritz. I talked to my mom the other night and she said it’s a spritz. We both think it’s a spritz.’ The spritz language is all Whoopi.

Meanwhile, Tena, a competitor, refers vaguely to "bladder protection" and has created a silly advertisement, in which Tena pads are likened to fashion accessories:

In a current commercial for Tena, by Zig, Toronto, part of MDC Partners, an actress in Victorian garb steps out a bedroom as she pulls off her powdered wig and dress, revealing her own hair in a bun and slightly more modern ball gown. As she walks through the house, she keeps pulling off outfits to reveal more modern ones, from a flapper style dress to a poodle skirt until she finally is wearing a contemporary satin dress. As the camera zooms to her abdomen, which shows no outline of any product, screen text declares, “Fashion has evolved. Shouldn’t bladder protection?” A voiceover says Tena represents “the evolution of bladder protection.”

The same problem -- overuse of euphemisms -- also occurs in commercials for menstrual products, which usually involve pictures of serene women dressed in white clothes on white horses or beaches.

“Fem-care advertising is so sterilized and so removed from what a period is,” said Elissa Stein, co-author (with Susan Kim) of the book “Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation.” “You never see a bathroom, you never see a woman using a product. They never show someone having cramps or her face breaking out or tearful — it’s always happy, playful, sporty women.”

The brand Kotex is now trying to change this and to introduce more direct language in its "U by Kotex" commercials (a line that caters to young women). However, it turned out that the networks weren't quite ready to go there. According to an article in the NYT, the word "vagina" was not considered acceptable, nor was the euphemism "down there." Perhaps they should turn to Ms. Goldberg for inspiration.

Oreo Speedwagon

2010-04-01T18:55:00.001-05:00

Wish they could have fought that feeling...

"She hits her head and she can only speak Korean? Are we supposed to buy this?"

2010-03-30T22:47:00.005-05:00

That's one of the questions raised by tonight's episode of LOST (it was raised by Miles). What's the context? Sun is chased by fake Locke and hits her head against a tree. When she recovers from her fall, she can't speak English anymore, but she can still understand it and she can also still write in English. Jack explains that this is a case of aphasia, and he is right: Aphasia is a broad term that covers the loss or impairment of language comprehension or production. The impairment can be quite specific. In bilinguals, this can mean that only one of the two languages they speak is impaired. You can read about a specific case and its implications here:

The study, by Raphiq Ibrahim, a neurologist at the University of Haifa, describes a bilingual Arabic-Hebrew speaker who incurred brain damage following a viral infection. Consequently, the patient experienced severe deficits in one language but not the other. The findings support the view that specific components of a first and second language are represented by different substrates in the brain.[...] The results support a neurolinguistic model in which the brain of bilinguals contains a semantic system (which represents word meanings) which is common to both languages and which is connected to independent lexical systems (which encode the vocabulary of each language). The findings further suggest that the second language (in this case, Hebrew) is represented by an independent subsystem which does not represent the first language (Arabic) and is more susceptible to brain damage.

So, yes, we might be inclined to "buy" Sun's selective aphasia. But how is this relevant for the overall plot? Only 6 episodes left before the finale.

Edited to add:

3 weeks later, Sun and Jin reunite on LOST. And, lo and behold, her selective aphasia disappears. Which is rather awkward considering that there is no reason Jin and Sun should be talking to each other in English at such an emotional point.

pun & punishment

2010-03-30T19:53:00.005-05:00

Makes you wonder who would ever refer to a beer as a "Weiss" in Munich.

some nouns make better verbs than others

2010-03-16T11:59:00.010-05:00

The investment company Vanguard is trying to make itself into a verb -- because, you know, the benchmark for a successful brand name is how long it takes for the name to become a verb.
Any bets on how successful this particular effort is going to be? For starters, where's the demand for such a verb?

COMPUTER users searching online for information say they are “Googling.” Commercials running in states like Michigan and Ohio suggest that shoppers go “Krogering.” But what will investors make of a campaign that proposes they start “Vanguarding”? The campaign, scheduled to begin this week, turns the Vanguard brand name into a verb, the better to help potential customers remember the company’s mutual funds and other investment products.
“Reacting to the stock market is just investing,” a print advertisement asserts. “Taking stock in the long term is Vanguarding.”
Banner ads on Web sites will declare, “Vanguarding is getting the financial picture you want with less distraction.” To dramatize that, some ads will be virtually blank; the white space is meant to symbolize how Vanguard can reduce the “distractions” that confront investors.
In short, the campaign seeks “to verb up” the Vanguard name, to borrow a phrase from Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft. He used those words in an interview with The New York Times in discussing the new Microsoft search engine, Bing. Someday, he said, he hoped people would “Bing” a restaurant to find its address.

I'm sure the name Bing was picked because it makes a good English verb (better than "to yahoo" or "to altavista," for sure). However, there's already "to google" and I don't see any linguistic competetion from Bing any time soon. A campaign can't just make a noun a verb. Only people can.

dog fountain

2010-03-13T23:11:00.003-06:00

Seen in Atlanta, GA:

I'm not sure how exactly it works, but it seems like a good idea.

universally spoken -- or not

2010-03-07T22:43:00.002-06:00

McDonald's ran this ad during the Oscars.

Too bad it perpetuates the myth that there is just one universal sign language, spoken all over the world.

"And the winner is..."

2010-03-07T21:46:00.003-06:00

If you're watching the Oscars tonight, you will notice something. No, I'm not talking about Charlize Theron's breast shields (although they are kind of hard not to notice). What is noticeable in terms of linguistics is that after many years of non-competitive language, the Oscars have winners again, they don't just "go to" someone anymore. I'm not sure if this switch is supposed to tell us something deep about the movie industry. It definitely leads to some awkward grammar moments: "And the winner is .... Paul Ottoson and Ray Beckett."

where do the ducks go in winter?

2010-01-29T00:16:00.006-06:00

J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died on Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91. (more here and here)

You can trace the footsteps of Holden Caulfield, his most famous creation, here. And perhaps you, like him, wonder where the ducks go in winter.

I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go? I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away.

R.I.P., JDS. You gave the world an unforgettable voice "that skeptically appraised the world and denounced its phonies and hypocrites and bores" and that was a perfect expression of "feelings of teenage angst and vulnerability and anger" (Michiko Kakutani).

What really knocks me out is a book, when you're all done reading it, you wished the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.

E.T.A: So where do the ducks go in winter? Mostly, they migrate south, but just south enough so that they can find food (they can withstand very cold temperatures, but they need to find food).

it's hard to be cool with an uncool name

2010-01-28T13:22:00.003-06:00

It's not hard to figure out why Apple's latest temptation is called the "iPad." Or is it?

When Apple announced the name of its tablet computer today — the iPad — my mind immediately went to the feminine hygiene aisle of the drugstore. It turns out I wasn’t alone. The term “iTampon” quickly became a trending topic on Twitter because of Tweets like this one: “Heavy flow? There’s an app for that!” A CNBC anchor, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, said the iPad was a “terrible name” for the tablet. “It reminds me of feminine products,” she said. “Are there any women in Apple marketing?” asked Brooke Hammerling, founder of Brew Media Relations, a technology public relations firm. “The first impression of every single woman I’ve spoken to is that it’s cringe-inducing. It indicates to me that there wasn’t a lot of testing or feedback.”

Female dog lovers, let's all focus very had and think of another kind of pad:

don't leave it to beaver

2010-01-25T20:53:00.004-06:00

A Canadian History Magazine changed its name. Too bad that students won't find out about this change through this blog. Why? Because the word "beaver" is blacklisted on school computers.

More here:

OTTAWA — In 1920 when the Hudson's Bay Company began publishing a magazine for its 250th anniversary, The Beaver: A Journal of Progress probably seemed to be a good title. The company, which controlled much of the landmass that is now Western and Northern Canada, owed much of its early fortune to the trade in beaver pelts. The Beaver... evolved into a respected magazine about Canadian history. The Bay, as the company is commonly known, shifted from fur trading to department stores. And last week Canada's National History Society, the nonprofit group that now publishes The Beaver, decided that the Internet required the magazine to undergo a name change. To be more precise, the title was doomed by a vulgar alternative meaning that causes Web filters at schools and junk mail filters in e-mail programs to block access to material containing the magazine’s name..." ‘Beaver’ is one of those key words students are denied access to on the Internet.”

Is it better to walk a human or to walk a dog?

2010-01-15T10:00:00.003-06:00

Well, it depends on your goals. If you want to increase your fitness, go walk a dog. That seems kind of obvious, but what I find remarkable about the study linked above is that it was based on people who had to take a bus to a shelter to take a dog for a walk.

New research from the University of Missouri has found that people who walk dogs are more consistent about regular exercise and show more improvement in fitness than people who walk with a human companion. In a 12-week study of 54 older adults at an assisted living home, 35 people were assigned to a walking program for five days a week, while the remaining 19 served as a control group. Among the walkers, 23 selected a friend or spouse to serve as a regular walking partner along a trail laid out near the home. Another 12 participants took a bus daily to a local animal shelter where they were assigned a dog to walk.
To the surprise of the researchers, the dog walkers showed a big improvement in fitness, while the human walkers began making excuses to skip the workout. Walking speed among the dog walkers increased by 28 percent, compared with just a 4 percent increase among the human walkers.

word of the year: "tweet"

2010-01-10T21:47:00.006-06:00

The American Dialect Society voted to tweet as word of the year 2009 and its cousin to google as word of the decade. (The only thing noteworthy about these choices is that they are both verbs. As is yawn.)

“Both words are, in the end, products of the Information Age, where every person has the ability to satisfy curiosity and to broadcast to a select following, both via the Internet.” [ADS member] Barrett said. “I really thought blog would take the honors in the word of the decade category, but more people google than blog, don’t they? Plus, many people think ‘blog’ just sounds ugly. Maybe Google’s trademark lawyers would have preferred it, anyway.”

state of the union avoids collision with hydrogen bomb

2010-01-09T22:12:00.006-06:00

The premiere of the final season of LOST is near (Feb. 2, 2010). And the show's ratings won't be spoiled by some guy giving some political speech at the same time on some other channel. Or, wait, was it the other way round?

The White House will not say when President Obama's State of the Union Address will be delivered. They did say, however, when it will not be: During the three-hour season premier [sic] of the final season of “Lost” on ABC, which airs on Feb. 2

Polar bears, hatches, hydrogen bombs, room 23, Locke 1 and Locke 2, white flashes, nose bleedings, Jacob and the man in black... in case you need a quick reminder of what happened previously, on Lost:

"The screen goes to white instead of black. Cool!"

braille vs. mp3

2010-01-07T23:15:00.003-06:00

On the one hand, Braille is hip. There are hundreds of websites, for example, that sell "Braille jewelry", and judging from their appearance, they don't seem to be geared to blind customers only. On the other hand, the iPod is also hip. Fewer and fewer blind people learn to read and write in Braille. Instead, they listen to text recordings on mp3 players and use dictating software.

For much of the past century, blind children attended residential institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today, visually impaired children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read; computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and read the individual letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for educators. “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind Access Journal, told me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.”

Shandrow's words can be taken quite literally. Reading Braille is one way for the brain to develop the visual cortex. Listening to recordings cannot have the same effect.

In the 1990s, a series of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the blind are not rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation in the parts of the brain that typically process visual input. These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as the visual cortex takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity, it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading — whether the information is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture of the brain is not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can reorganize for new functions. ... The activity of reading itself alters the anatomy of the brain.

As a result of the development towards the use of recordings instead of Braille, blind schoolchildren in the US now have lower Braille literacy than schoolchildren in less developed countries, such as Botswana.