Mayonnaise and Margarine

It happened again. My wife asked me to hand her the mayonnaise, and I did. As soon as I did, I sensed her exasperation, and realized I’d messed up again.

“I mean, Miracle Whip,” she said, handing back the mayo. I handed her the Miracle Whip, and as she spooned it into the bowl of tuna, I knew she was wondering how, after thirteen years of marriage, I could still be thinking she wanted mayonnaise when she asked for mayonnaise.

Well, I’m sorry! Just because it’s white and you spread it on bread for your sandwiches doesn’t make it mayonnaise. I know from unpleasant personal experience that mayonnaise and Miracle Whip are quite different things.

Still and all, I guess my wife figures I can learn to accommodate this feature of her vocabulary. After all, she learned long ago that I want margarine when I ask for the butter.

High-Frying Ambiguity

Larry Horn sent a message to the American Dialect Society’s mailing list this morning, with the following headline that a colleague had brought to his attention:

McDonald’s fries holy grail for potato farmers

I showed it to Doug, who was home with a fever, and he and I laughed and laughed over McDonald’s having found, and fried, this holiest of artifacts.

Not too long afterward, Ben Zimmer posted a message thanking Larry and noted the headline over at Language Log, where several of the comments have brought out exactly what properties of English, and in particular headline-ese, made this ambiguity possible. If you want, you can read through the (at time of this writing) 20 comments there and get the same information as you’re going to get here, but I’m going to write it up anyway, with all the contributing properties discussed in a single place.

Apple Juice and Double Cheeseburgers

Time to order Adam’s Happy Meal. I leaned my head out the car window and spoke:

I’d like a chicken nugget Happy Meal, with fries and apple juice.

The voice of the order taker came back:

That’s a chicken nugget Happy Meal, fries and a double cheeseburger?

Wha–? Where did the double cheeseburger come from? I responded: “No, apple juice.”

The voice: “A double cheeseburger and apple juice?”

Now Doug and Adam started cracking up in the back seat, because I was getting a taste of my own medicine.

She Can Do It; She Can Help.

Unless there’s leftover pizza, Adam’s regular breakfast these days is Cheerios, bacon, and apple juice. Morning after morning I’ve read the weaselly claims on the Cheerios box about how it will can eliminate reduce help reduce your cholesterol levels, and Doug and I have had fun pointing out all the hedges that appear in the claims. Help in particular is one that I learned to watch for, back when we did the unit on advertising back in eighth grade language arts. Cheerios uses the word help a lot, but even so, I was more annoyed than usual to read it on the back of this box, where a woman is gushing:

I can help lower my cholesterol 10% in one month?

Part of my annoyance with this ad was the fake enthusiasm on this woman’s face, all because of this awesome news about her favorite cereal. More was from how the copywriters had finally crossed the line, entering territory where help ceases to mean anything. To be sure, help hasn’t meant anything for the non-savvy ad reader for years; it’s just the obligatory verb that introduces whatever more significant verb comes next: help fight, help reduce, help control, help increase, etc. Those who have been alerted to the tricky language, though, know that help means “we’ll do some of the work, but you have to work, too.” Wait, what am I talking about — doesn’t every English speaker know that’s what help means? Sure, but it’s just so common in advertisements, it tends to pass unnoticed.

However, the writers for this ad seem to have fallen for their own trick. This woman will can help lower her cholesterol. In other words: She can do it; she can help. Cheerios, I suppose, will can help her help herself.

This failure to take a change of point of view into account reminds me of people who record a message on their voice mailbox saying,

Leave a message and I will call you back at my earliest convenience.

To them, it apparently doesn’t sound like they’re saying, “I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Maybe. If I feel like it.” All they know is that people who leave them messages say, “Please call me at your earliest convenience,” so they’ll honor that request by calling at their earliest convenience.

There’s another failure to mark a shift in point of view in an episode of The Simpsons (thanks to Heidi Harley for documenting this one):

Movie mucky-mucks: Look, we wanna buy this movie and we’re prepared to offer you anything!
Skinner: We’re prepared to accept anything!

Is there a term for this thing I’ve been calling “failure to mark a shift in point of view”? Any pragmaticists care to weigh in?

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Odd Ones Out Are Not Like the Others

One Sunday morning not long ago, I was making breakfast for everyone. The grits were almost ready to dish up, but before I did that, I had to heat up the water for Doug’s instant oatmeal, because he doesn’t like grits! And after I’d cut wedges of watermelon my wife and Doug and me, I got out a banana for Adam, because for some reason he didn’t want any watermelon that morning. Then I got juice for Doug and Adam and myself; I didn’t have to get any for my wife, because she was just going to keep drinking the Diet Coke she’d popped open. So finally all the different combinations of food and drink were on the table, and we sat down to eat. That’s when Adam observed:

“Doug’s the odd one out because he’s having oatmeal.”

Your Favorite Covered Dish or Dessert

“What do you suppose we should bring?” my wife asked me.

“I know,” I said. “We can get rid of those canisters of Cub Scout popcorn.” I couldn’t very well go around the neighborhood with Adam asking people to buy popcorn to help out his Cub Scout pack without buying some myself, but now we had two canisters of caramel popcorn sitting in our pantry. Not to mention the canister of chocolate-covered popcorn left over from the three we bought last year. I didn’t want to open them because if I did, I’d eat it all in one day, and erase days of progress from the gym. We could bring them to my sister-in-law’s party and kill two birds with one stone.

“OK, but we need to bring something else, too,” my wife said. (So much for my clever idea.) “The invitation says to bring your favorite covered dish or dessert, why don’t I make up those brownies? That’ll be easy.”

“Hey wait,” I said. “Are brownies your favorite dessert? She didn’t say to just bring any old dessert or a dessert that was easy to make; she said to bring your favorite.” My wife likes brownies, as do I, but carrot cake is a better candidate for her favorite dessert. Mine is lemon meringue pie, but danged if I wanted to spend my day making a lemon meringue pie that I’d have to share with other people! But my wife found a loophole.

Eat Your Liver!

My mom was telling me about one of my relatives who’s been having blood problems for a few years. “Now,” she said, “his red cell count is way down.”

“That’s not good,” I said. “Guess he’d better eat his liver.”

I thought for a second, then added, “Well, not his own liver…”

As I reflected on the conversation later, it occurred to me that this potentially dangerous ambiguity could have been avoided if English made a distinction between inalienable and alienable possession. To illustrate, here’s an example (from Wikipedia, but with sources cited) from the language Dholuo, spoken in Kenya, Tanzania, and Sudan. Cogo guok, literally “bone dog”, means “the dog’s bone”, and more specifically, the bone that the dog is eating — an example of alienable possession. To refer to a bone that’s part of the dog’s skeleton — inalienable possession — you’d say it differently. The Wikipedia entry doesn’t give a translation for this meaning of “the dog’s bone”, but it does give one for “the cow’s bone”: cok dhiang’. Dhiang’ means “cow”, and cok is the same word for “bone” as before, but this time in a special form for this kind of possessive.

Even the clarification I made, by saying “his own liver”, isn’t as effective as a marked alienable/inalienable distinction. If Kim and Sandy have each been served a plate of liver, and Sandy tries to steal some off Kim’s plate, Kim might well say to Sandy, “Hey! Eat your own liver!” with an inalienable possessive meaning for your.

Distinguishing between alienable and inalienable possession would also be useful if you’re trying to warn someone about the dangers of zombies. Suppose you tell them, “Zombies will eat your brains!” If the warning could be stated with an unambiguous, inalienable possessive, the gravity of the threat would be instantly clear. As things stand, though, someone could interpret your as an alienable possessive, and take these undead menaces no more seriously than they would the Hamburglar or the Trix rabbit.

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Pears and Pineapple

“Best by May 2008,” I read on the bottom of the can of pears. Did that mean best by May 1, I wondered, or best by May 31? Probably May 31, I decided. In any case, even if it meant by May 1, that didn’t mean the pears were actually bad, did it? Just not at their peak of flavor, right? After all, best by wasn’t the same as use by, or even sell by. All the same, I knew if my wife saw that label, she’d throw the pears out. So I did what needed to be done: I opened the can and served those pears to Doug and Adam for breakfast.

Getting Testy

I was flipping through the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly today, and came across an ad for a show on the Travel Channel called Bizarre Foods. I’d paste it in here if I could find it online, but the best I can get is this page on the Travel Channel website. In the middle (at least as of this writing) there is a looping video that begins with the caption “What is Andrew putting in his mouth?” A couple of pictures later you’ll see the ad that I saw in the magazine. The host of the show, Andrew Zimmern, is standing in front of a vending machine stocked with:

• Lamb’s Head
• Heart, All Beef
• Fish Head, Complete With Eyeballs
• Tarantula
• Baby Mice
• Curried Cockroaches
• Bull Teste
• Scorpion
• Sour Cream and Onion flavored crickets
• Cheddar Cheese flavored mealworms
• Mexican Spice flavored mealworms
• Bugs N Things
• Worms & Flies
• Eye Balls
• Crispy Fish Head
• Grubs
• Mealworms

Did you spot the backformation in the list? Yes, that’s right, it was teste, formed by naively removing the -s from the plural testes to get the putative singular.

Often I have to remind myself that just because I can understand how some piece of the language has changed, it doesn’t mean I have to like it. The singular of testes is not teste. It’s testis, just like the singulars of crises, hypotheses, parentheses, and feces are crisis, hypothesis, parenthesis, and fecis.

Whoops. Scratch that last one. Back when the plural was still faeces in Latin, the singular was faex, but that form didn’t make it into English. If you just have to have a singular form of feces and don’t want to resort to suppletion by saying turd, backformation is your best bet: fece. According to Urban Dictionary, this singular form already exists.

Anyway, back to the Latin third-declension nouns ending in -is. I never hear people talking about one crise(e), or one hypothese(e), but I have heard some people refer to one parenthese(e), and now of course, one teste. I guess it’s to be expected, since parentheses, like testes, tend to come in twos, so that speakers are less likely to have heard the singular form and stored it in their memory when they need to use it.

Implicit Backformation?

I think it was the E-E-A sequence that caught my eye. I was sitting at a cafeteria table, looking at the stand-up card with a picture of a slice of pie on it. I’d pushed it out of the way with my tray when I sat down, but now that I’d been eating for a few minutes, my eye was drawn back to the card. Paying closer attention now, I saw that it wasn’t just an advertisement for the place’s desserts; it was an encouragement to get their desserts to go. It said:

Homeeat a homemade dessert.

Homeeat? There is no entry for homeeat or home eat in my Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, and I have yet to find any attestations of it online. The meaning was clear enough: to eat at home. But how had they formed the word?