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?

Stuffing, Dressing, and Sweet Mashed Potatoes

I made my lunch today out of Thanksgiving leftovers. It’s the first time in at least a decade that I’ve done that, because it’s the first time our family has had Thanksgiving dinner here instead of at my wife’s uncle’s house. I loaded the plate with the good, juicy dark meat that there was plenty of, not the dry white meat that everyone else so strangely prefers. Then some of the stuffing — oh, wait, I can just hear my dad saying that it’s not stuffing unless you’ve actually stuffed the turkey with it. It’s dressing. If you go calling the mixture of breadcrumbs, eggs, turkey stock, and herbs that my mom would cook in a baking dish stuffing, people will get it confused with that portion of the same mixture of breadcrumbs, eggs, turkey stock, and herbs that actually got cooked inside the bird. Maybe the distinction is worth making, since the inside-the-bird stuffing has soaked up some of the juices from the turkey and tastes somewhat different from the baking-dish-stuffing. But on the other hand, if I call it dressing, people could confuse it with what you put on your salad.

Another dish that my wife had picked up for the meal, she referred to as sweet mashed potatoes. That sounded like an interesting recipe. Not good, necessarily, but interesting. I like my mashed potatoes buttery and salty, not sweet. As it turned out, however, what was in the container was not mashed potatoes that had been sweetened, but mashed sweet potatoes. Mashed sweet, or sweet mashed? If an adjective and a noun have fused into a compound noun, then other adjectives can’t go putting them asunder: spoiled hot dogs is grammatical, but hot spoiled dogs isn’t — at least, not with the same meaning as you get with spoiled hot dogs. So in my grammar, it has to be mashed sweet potatoes, since sweet potato is a compound noun (as evidenced by the stress on sweet), and mashed potatoes is not (with its stress on potatoes). It looks like most other speakers agree, since I got 200K Google hits for mashed sweet potatoes and less than 1000 for sweet mashed potatoes. Even among those hits, though, I didn’t find any that referred to mashed white potatoes that had been sweetened; mostly they referred to what I would call mashed sweet potatoes, though a few were talking about a dish containing potatoes and sweet potatoes. Maybe for those few people for whom mashed sweet potatoes and sweet mashed potatoes mean the same thing, mashed potatoes is as much a compound as sweet potato is, leading to variation in naming something that qualifies as both. One website even used both phrasings to refer to the same item.

BTW, for a fascinating investigation of when and why Thanksgiving came to be (for many, but not all people) pronounced with stress on the giv-, see this post from Mark Liberman at Language Log.

You Know Why…

…they call them s’mores, don’t you? Because after you have one, you want s’more!

Get it? Some more?

Make Like a Chicken and Split

The newest (as far as I know) addition to the linguistiblogosphere is Heidi Harley’s HeiDeas (thanks to Semantic Compositions for quickly noticing and announcing it). In her second post she asks: Why is it grand theft auto, instead of grand auto theft, or auto grand theft? She has a reasonable story for why it’s not auto grand theft (modifiers in compound nouns, such as auto in auto theft, occur closer to the noun than other adjectives), but that still leaves auto grand theft a theoretical possibility. My first guess was that it was useful to have grand theft at the front for easier listing in law references, but the trouble with this explanation is that it’s dangerously ad hoc. That is, if it’s true, why don’t we have lots of other compounds that get lexicalized head-first this way? Thyroid cancer may appear in a medical book’s index as cancer, thyroid, people still refer to it as thyroid cancer and not cancer thyroid. (Comments along these lines from several linguabloggers appear after Harley’s post.) But despite the shakiness of this kind of explanation, I still favor it for another strangely ordered compound noun I’ve seen…

In the meat section at the grocery store, I see packages of split chicken breasts, labeled

Chicken Split Breasts

That sounds so klunky it brings me up short every time. Even a little kid would know to put the adjective split first, leaving the compound chicken breasts intact. Chicken split breasts sounds like breasts that have been split by a chicken (or chickens). Chicken split breasts causes one to wonder what kind of thing a “chicken split” might be. Would it be anything like a banana split? I don’t think I’d want to eat a chicken split. And where would the breasts on a chicken split or banana split be located? Would they be the three scoops of ice cream? And wouldn’t that be really strange, referring to something that comes in threes as a breast?

After those thoughts have run their course, I just figure that the packagers didn’t like having the word split breaking up the chicken-first pattern on the rest of the shelf: chicken thighs, chicken drumsticks, chicken wings, split chicken breasts. Swap split and chicken and conformity is achieved.

But what about pick of the chick?

The Tortilla Man’s Mission Statement

I tell you, the only reason I go to Don Pablo’s anymore is their tortillas. When I moved here in 1992, you couldn’t get good Tex-Mex food, but that gap was filled the following year when Don Pablo’s came to town. I went there on a regular basis for almost ten years. But then the corporation started fooling around with the recipes. One by one, my favorite items were banished to the list of things I couldn’t eat if I was going to kiss my wife in the next 24 hours. Or they disappeared from the menu. So now I’m back to where I was 12 years ago: Waiting until I visit my family in Texas, where I can get my annual Taco Cabana fix.

Yep, if not for their tortillas, I’d have given up on Don Pablo’s two years ago. They haven’t changed the recipe for those (as far as I can tell), and still make them on the premises: warm, chewy, and just a little bit salty–not with that disappointing sweet aftertaste that comes with every store-bought tortilla I’ve eaten. And guess what? The person who makes the tortillas now has a mission statement!

Yes, it’s true. See, we went to Don Pablo’s last week. I was hoping the fajitas might have recovered, but even if they hadn’t, I figured I could at least could eat some tortillas and drink some iced tea. When we got there, Doug and Adam went up to watch the tortilla maker, as usual. They watched the guy putting the balls of dough on the giant griddle, squishing them flat with the lid, and laying the resulting tortillas on the warming slab. They waited to see which of the tortillas would stay flat, and which would blow up like whoopie cushions, and while they were doing that, I noticed a paper on the wall behind the tortilla-making apparatus. It said:

Tortilla maker: My objective is to return each guest by providing hot, fresh tortillas as quickly as possible.

Now that was strange. This tortilla guy aimed to return me? Return me to where? Return me like an unwanted Christmas gift? Then I realized I needed to use return in its “come back” sense rather than its “go back” sense. Applying the caused-motion lexical rule to that sense gets us the “cause to come back” meaning intended here, instead of the more common “cause to go back” sense appropriate for Christmas gifts, hostages, and illegal aliens.

But can return actually mean “cause to come back”? It sure can’t in my dialect, and it’s not in my dictionary, either. (Next time I’m near an OED I’ll check it, too.) My suspicion is that return each guest is, like the rest of the whole klunky, pompous message, the end result of hours of corporate wordsmithing, and not representative of how people actually talk. But even if I’m right, I wonder why the caused-motion alternation doesn’t hold for the “come” sense of return.

Half Less!

Also during our Thanksgiving visit, I noticed that Grandma drinks different orange juice than Doug and Adam do. It’s Tropicana Light and Healthy, and it proudly states on the carton:

1/2 less calories and sugar than orange juice!

Now I’m not going to comment on the implication that this Light and Healthy stuff is not really orange juice (they said, “than orange juice,” not “than other orange juice”). Nor am I going to comment on the use of less instead of fewer with the count noun calories–although the interesting question arises of whether less or fewer is more appropriate when you’re coordinating a count noun and a mass noun, as occurs in calories and sugar.

What caught my attention on this label was just the fact that half less doesn’t make any sense! Well, it does, but it shouldn’t. Two factors are causing me trouble. First, suppose we were dealing with a whole number instead of a fraction, say three. Three times more than is OK; three times as much as is OK; but three times less than isn’t OK in my dialect, on semantic grounds. However, I know that for some speakers, three times less than is meaningful, having the same meaning as 1/3 as much as, so let’s suppose that’s the dialect used on the juice carton.

But now, applying the same reasoning to 1/2 less than as we did for three times less than, it should mean “two times more than”! Whoa–this Light and Healthy OJ has twice the calories and sugar of regular! Clearly, that’s not what they mean; we need some clear rules for interpreting comparative phrases like these, that will get us logically to the intended reading.

The easy cases are the ones constructed as many/much as. If you have “X (times) as much as” some amount Y, you have X*Y units. This is true whether X is a natural number (as in three times as much) or a fraction (as in two-thirds as much).

More complicated are the phrases with more than. If you have a natural number X, and say, “X times more than” some amount Y, you mean X*Y units. Thus, three times more than Bob has means 3*Y, where Y = the amount Bob has. But if X is a fraction, and you say, “X more than” an amount Y, then you mean (1+X)*Y; thus, two-thirds more than Bob has means (1+ 2/3)*Y, where Y = the amount Bob has.

Now we come to the phrases with less than. If you have a natural number X and say, “X times less than” an amount Y (assuming you speak the dialect in which this is grammatical), then you mean Y/X units. Thus, three times less than Bob has means Y/3 units, where Y = the usual. And what if X is a fraction? The rule seems to be that if you say, “X less than” an amount Y, you mean (1-X)*Y. Thus, two-thirds less than Bob has means (1 - 2/3)*Y, or just (1/3)*Y.

So now, returning to 1/2 less calories and sugar, if we take the above rules to be part of the grammar, the phrase should be OK, right? Well, the semantics works out now, I guess, but it still sounds bad. I think at this point it’s just a prosodic problem: half more and half less just don’t sound right, even though two-thirds more and two-thirds less sound OK. If we pronounced 1/2 as one second, I think it might work, except of course for that pesky unit-of-time meaning for second that would confuse things.

So why did the copywriters, so conscious of how words sound, use this phrasing that’s ungrammatical on semantic grounds for many speakers, and prosodically bad for (I’d say) almost all of them? Why, when the impeccable 1/2 as many is available? I’m guessing they didn’t want to risk a passing shopper catching just a glimpse of the message, missing the fraction, and reading, “as many calories and sugar as orange juice!”

Pepper Rally

Semantic Compositions’ (Compositions’s?) remarks on British and American English with regard to pasta and sauce remind me of some recent troubles I’ve had ordering Italian food in Ohio English. I’ve written before about central Ohio dialectal variation with respect to items of food, including the use of the term green pepper to refer not to any old pepper that is green, but specifically to what I call a bell pepper, and have heard others call a sweet pepper (pictured here, just to make sure we’re on the same page). To top it off, I said, the term was applied not just to green bell peppers, but to red, yellow, or other colors of bell pepper. I know that it applies to other colors because I’ve ordered pizza with “green peppers” in a local pizza joint, and gotten a pizza with plenty of red bell pepper on it, and not a single strip of green.

That’s confusing, but not so bad once you get used to it: In central Ohio, green pepper = bell pepper. But as it turns out, there’s another layer of variation within this usage of green pepper that is confusing even when you’re aware of it. Consider the conversation I had when I took Doug to his favorite restaurant, a pizza chain whose name I’ll omit, but whose initials are CPK, and which uses only the red and yellow varieties of bell pepper:

Server: And what can I get for you?
Neal: I’d like the pepperoni pizza, and I’d also like to have some green peppers on it.
Server: I’m sorry, we don’t have any green peppers.
Neal: You don’t? But… OK, do you have any red or yellow peppers?
Server: Oh, yes! We can put some of those on for you.

Evidently, for some speakers, green pepper refers to any color of bell pepper, but for others, like this server, it refers only to green bell peppers. If you want red or yellow ones, you have to ask for red or yellow ones. And if you don’t care what color you get, there’s apparently no simple way to express that.

The next time Doug and I were at a CPK, I tried to go back to the nice, convenient cover term of bell pepper, and was misunderstood the same way I was during my first week in Ohio:

Neal: I’d like the pepperoni pizza, and I’d also like to have some bell peppers on it.
Server: With what on it? Banana peppers?
Neal: No, uh, bell peppers. Well, you know, green peppers.
Server: Oh, we don’t have green peppers.

So now I have to say, “green peppers, whatever color you happen to have them in, red, yellow, whatever.”

Fast-Food Polysemy

The various postings at Semantic Compositions about fast food (most recently here, but also here and here) remind me of something I’ve noticed about the semantics of the names of fast-food joints. I’ll call it fast-food polysemy. Polysemous (”many meanings”) is how linguists describe a word that has more than one meaning, but whose meanings are so close and clearly related that using the more powerful word ambiguous just seems silly. For example, slug can be a noun denoting a bullet or a disgusting shell-less gastropod, and also a verb meaning to hit. This word is clearly ambiguous. But the word bears can refer to flesh-and-blood mammals, or the cuddly bear-likenesses that tend to accumulate at sites where children have died, or pictures of either of the above. These meanings are so similar that you can argue that they’re not even separate meanings at all. It’s for this kind of almost-ambiguity that the word polysemy is used.

Fast-food polysemy turns up when people say something like, “I ate McDonald’s for lunch,” or “We had Arby’s last night.” When that happens, I always think, “Wow! When this person talks about a good place to eat, she really means it!” But of course they never mean anything as interesting as that; they just mean that they got their food there. So each name for a fast-food place can be seen as having two meanings: the place itself, and the food that is made there.

I’m guessing that fast-food polysemy is more common when the food is taken to go than when it’s eaten on site. After all, it’s about as easy to say, “We ate at Burger King” as it is to say, “We had Burger King.” But when it comes to “We had Burger King” vs. “We got some food from Burger King,” fast-food polysemy definitely simplifies things.

This polysemy doesn’t work with just any verb. Have or get works, but with eat, you have to be more careful. If someone says, “I ate McDonald’s for lunch,” it makes me pause, but if they left out the for lunch and just said, “I ate McDonald’s,” I might seriously wonder if they meant something other than eating McDonald’s food. And “He threw up his Taco Bell” just doesn’t work for me at all!