Malnegation in This American Life

Don’t read this post unless you’ve already listened to this week’s episode of This American Life, or you don’t care about hearing it. For a few more days, it can still be downloaded for free here; after that, it’ll cost a couple of dollars.

Buckets, Boxes, and Bags

A recent discussion on the American Dialect Society email list concerned the conversion of fail from a verb to a noun. Grant Barrett mentioned that he had included it in a December 2008 article that he and Mark Leibovich wrote for the New York Times Week in Review. They had said:

Largely used online, this is a verb turned into a mass noun, as in “A bucket of fail.” Common forms include epic fail, meaning a huge overall tendency toward failure or a great example of failure, and FAIL! as an interjection or derogation. Often an antonym of win, seen online in forms like “Full of win!” which means, “It’s good!” (Mark Leibovich and Grant Barrett, Dec. 21, 2008, “The Buzzwords of 2008″, NYT Week in Review

Arnold Zwicky wrote about the topic on his blog a little later, noting that in addition to the usage of fail as a mass noun, there were also some uses as a count noun (as in an epic fail). It’s the conversion of fail (and also win) to a mass noun that I’m interested in.

June Links

Michael Erard writes about linguists’ efforts to document previously unknown (to linguists) Chinese languages. For years, all the Chinese languages have been conveniently but inaccurately referred to as one language. Although they’re mutually unintelligible when spoken, they use the same written characters and are mutually intelligible in written form. Linguists knew this, but what apparently was not fully appreciated until now was many different languages there really are, hiding underneath this confusing naming tradition.

The first time I heard the expression fish or cut bait, I judged from the context that it was more or less equivalent to shit or get off the pot, and from there forced cut bait to be the functional equivalent of get off the pot. To do that, I supposed that in fishing jargon, cut bait meant to snip a piece of fishing line that was hopelessly caught on something underwater, thereby giving up hope of catching a fish with it. Wrong! Jan Freeman shows the history of this phrase, including the fact that earlier versions were in three parts: fish, cut bait, or go home, with cut bait apparently having a literal meaning of cutting bait in preparation for use in fishing. The original figurative meaning, then, was not so much “Do your business or quit” as “Do your business, help me do my business or quit.”

You may have read about this on Languagehat or Language Log, but it’s worth a mention here in case you haven’t. Erin McKean’s new online dictionary project, called Wordnik, and its purpose is to try to give not only a definition for every word, but also how they’re used in collocations and contexts. In an ordinary dictionary, you can read definitions of cake and pie, but not know why many English speakers would consider it an error to tell someone, “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have baked a pie.” With Wordnik, you’d know that cake, not pie, was the actual usage in this idiom. I burned up about ten minutes on there trying to find a word that no one had looked up before, finally succeeding with echinoderm. Erin informs me that this is called “scoring a wordnik”.

David Crystal’s Just a Phrase I’m Going Through

In Just a Phrase I’m Going Through: My Life in Language, David Crystal recounts his development as a linguist, starting with his childhood in a mixed Welsh, English, and Irish community, and ending with his current status as an independent linguistic consultant, public speaker, entrepreneur, and author. In between, he tells about his teen years in Liverpool, his college years at University College in London, his time in the faculty of the University of Reading, his various endeavors in fields of applied linguistics (including teaching English as a foreign language, speech therapy, and helping with the English translations of the Catholic Mass following the Second Vatican Council), his retirement from academe, and his experiences with radio and television.

They Swim As Good As They Look

While I was out and about today, I saw a girl wearing a T-shirt promoting her high school swim team. On the front, it said:

If only we swam as good as we look!

Mouth Function!

This is Doug and Adam’s last week of school, so they’ve been bringing home folders stuffed with papers they never got around to bringing home before, and things that only come home at the end of the year, like their workbooks and journals. I was flipping through a journal-like booklet that Adam brought home, which turned out to be what he’d used every week for an assignment that consisted of copying several words in cursive three times each, then copying a sentence, and then copying the beginning of another sentence and making up an ending for it. The sentence start for one week in April involved a robot:

I bought a robot that was supposed to clean my room, but it mouth functioned, made a mess in my room, and blew up.

Adam’s teacher had simply put a line through mouth and written mal in red pen, probably the work of two seconds as she made her way through a pile of 25 booklets that day. I, on the other hand, stared at mouth functioned for a good minute, going through what must have happened to result in Adam’s creation of this new compound verb…

First of all, the /l/ in malfunction, coming as it does after a vowel, is pronounced as dark /l/, otherwise known as velarized /l/, written [ɫ]. That is, the back of the tongue is raised toward the soft palate (aka velum) as if it were on its way toward making a velar sound like [k] or [g].

Velarized /l/ is often perceived as another velar consonant in English, namely [w]. (Although the main thing you do to make a [w] is to round your lips, it’s a fact that the back of the tongue also rises toward the velum.) In fact, speakers of some dialects consistently produce [w] where others would have [ɫ]. So do some children who may eventually grow up to pronounce good velar /l/s. I still remember visiting my cousin Greg when we were four years old and him calling me Neo, i.e. [niw]. In the case at hand, [mæɫfʌ̃ŋkʧə̃n] is liable to be perceived as [mæwfʌ̃ŋkʧə̃n], and perhaps even spoken that way by Adam’s peers.

So Adam has in his vocabulary the word [mæwfʌ̃ŋkʧə̃n], and now he has to write it to finish his sentence. How does he spell it? Mowfunctioned? Maufunctioned? Maybe. But he can tell that this word consists of function and some kind of prefix or independent word: [mæw]. What the heck does that mean? It’s certainly not a prefix he’s heard on any other words, or standing on its own (unless he’s caught me singing “Elvira”, going “Giddy Up A-Oom Poppa Oom Poppa Mow Mow”, but I try not to let that happen).

But wait, he reasons, maybe what he’s been hearing as [f] is really two consonants: [θf]. That’s reasonable: it would be easy to hear two voiceless fricatives next to one another as a single phoneme if you weren’t expecting them, or if the speaker wasn’t clearly enunciating. In that case, the word at the beginning is not [mæw], but [mæwθ] — mouth! This is a compound verb: mouth function. Of course, mouth function doesn’t make much more sense than malfunction if you don’t know the prefix mal-. But as with most cases of folk etymology, a little bit of sense is better than no sense; a word with a meaning (mouth) beats what is to him a nonsense syllable (mal).

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That’s So Disabled!

The good news: Adam has picked up some more of the language of his peers. The bad news: It’s the adjective retarded. The good news: He’s not using the word to insult people. The bad news: He’s using it to describe things that only someone with mental retardation could appreciate, as in That’s retarded! This usage makes sense only with the support of a presupposition that mentally retarded people like things that other people find stupid, but that kind of argument is going to be hard to explain to a kid. This is the same kind of semantic shift as happened with gay — from describing a person to describing something that only that kind of person would like, with the hearer implicitly asked to agree that gay people like things that other people find stupid. There are kids for whom this connection is so attenuated that they refuse to believe it, saying, “It’s not insulting to say something is gay! You’re not insulting a person, you’re just saying the thing is stupid”, and I’m sure I’ll hear the same kind of defense of retarded as a thing-describing adjective.

Hards On

After washing my hands in the grocery store restroom today, I was glad to see that their electric hand dryer had a feature I really liked: It had a paper towel dispenser next to it. (Glen likes this kind of hand dryer, too.) As I pulled out paper towels, I noticed that the hand dryer was the kind that you activate by pushing a button, not the kind that starts automatically when you put your hands under it. Even so, there were no instructions on the machine starting with “1. Push button” for someone to turn into “Push butt“. But as if to show that when one door closes another one opens, the brand name on the dryer was Hands On, and someone had invested some time and energy in gouging away part of the n with a sharp object, turning Hands On into … well, let me show you:

Ho ho! Very witty: Hands On is now Hard Ons! Wait, no — it’s now … Hards On?

May Links

Years ago, my wife was doing some computer training in England. Every time she would say a path name, like “c colon slash project slash…”, people in her audience would snicker (wait, no, snigger). She finally stopped the presentation to find out what was so funny. David Vinson of Confederacy of a Dunce explains it to the rest of us.

Football and linguistics, an awesome April 1 post on Sport Is a TV Show. (Hat tip to Michael Covarrubias at Wishydig.)

Ed Yong summarizes a study by Agnes Melinda Kovacs and Jacques Mehler, who find that babies in bilingual households are better at some mental tasks than those in monolingual households. (Hat tip to Adrian Morgan at the Outer Hoard)

To finish, a few from Language Log. Mark Liberman expands on a brief post on Headsup, regarding sentences like, “A 30-year-old Pontiac man is in the Oakland County Jail and facing felony charges after authorities said he rammed a man’s car after finding his wife in the backseat with him.” Take it literally, and it means that the man was in jail only after the authorities made their statement about him ramming a car. Liberman takes the authorities said as parenthetical; the commenters have an interesting discussions about this kind of thing as the closest English has to evidentials in the grammar.

Next, if you liked this post from a few years ago about [Verb] one’s first [Noun], check out this one from David Beaver on Language Log. He’s found the same kind of ambiguity in first [Noun] [Verbs], specifically in “First American dies of swine flu”.

And finally, not one, but two Language Log posts from Ben Zimmer. I wondered a while back if anyone had written anything on quasi-acronymous cute names like HoJo and MoDo. In fact, Ben had, back in 2005, and I somehow missed it. I learned about it from this follow-up post on syllabic acronymy.

Even More Wide-Scoping Operators

One of my regular readers is Deborah Lipp, who blogs at Property of a Lady, and has written several books on Wicca and paganism in addition to The Ultimate James Bond Fan Book (”One of these things is not like the others,” as she admits in Sesame Streetwise fashion). She also, as it turns out, is a big fan of AMC’s series Mad Men. I learned this when she wrote to me asking a language-related question about the show and mentioning her and her sister’s MM fan blog, A Basket of Kisses. That reminded me that I’ve had a Mad Men-related post sitting in my pile of drafts, so it seemed like a good time to pull it out and consolidate it with a number of other draft posts on the same topic.

The topic is “Wide-scoping operators”, and here’s the example, from the October 18, 2008 episode of Mad Men:

Jane Siegel (Peyton List)

How do I know I’m not just going to eat another mushroom and this room will disappear and I’ll be back on the train to Trenton?