Check These Out

I’ve accumulated a number of links to linguistics posts that I’ve been meaning to recommend; now it’s time to get them all out of the docket at once.

First, here’s a guy giving a demonstration of the difference between [ʌ] and [ɘ], in a language where the schwa can be in a stressed syllable.

Folk etymology meets the acronym (OK, initialism or initialization, if you insist) in this discussion of courtesy copy from Josh Millard.

When you see a page of Old English text with stuff like Forþon him gelyfeð lyt, se þa ah lifes ƿyn on it, the first thing you notice is how different the words and letters are. And if you don’t know how to read Old English, that’s all you notice, so you never appreciate, for example, how different the syntax is. Karl Hagen of Polysyllabic meets this need by taking a piece of Modern English prose (by Dan Brown!), and putting it into Old English syntax while leaving the words and morphology unchanged. Interesting fact: Hagen was a consultant on the recent computer-animated movie version of Beowulf.

Next, Greg Larson goes on one of his celebrated rants, this time on an abuse of the adjective extreme by Pringles EXTREME Screamin’ Dill Pickle potato-chip-like salted snacks.

Finally, a couple of recent items of interest from Language Log, for any readers out there who don’t already read it. Here is Geoff Pullum on a simple argument that I’ve never heard made before that puts one more nail in the coffin of the case against singular they. And here is Arnold Zwicky on a construction that you would think just has to be — has to be — a mistake, but which seems to be produced intentionally by a number of speakers.

Greg Speaks Spanish

Here’s a funny story about my friend Greg making good use of the Spanish he remembered from high school.

Excellent Blogs

Ordinarily, I don’t do memes, but it’s hard to ignore one doesn’t merely imply but explicitly states that the meme-tagger likes your blog. That would just be rude. So I hope that the frequent reader and commenter known as The Ridger will forgive my delay in acknowledging her putting an “E” rating on this blog. Thank you, Ridger. I am flattered, and was in the process of complying with the received protocol for accepting the award — to wit, nominating ten other excellent blogs. This is where it gets embarrassing.

Now you can see that I have 18 blogs on my linguistics blogroll alone. I could be lazy and just say, “See blogroll.” But that doesn’t seem quite in the spirit of the award. Besides, even though I like all these blogs, I wouldn’t say every one of them is excellent. For that, it’s not enough for me to enjoy reading them, but there has to be a fairly regular stream of content there for me to read. (For that reason, I wouldn’t nominate my own blog even if someone else wrote it, because these days I post only about once a week.) As for the nonlinguistic ones, in trying to keep this blog linguistics-focused, I’ve put very few blogs on this list. Those that do are either the blogs of friends or family that I want to keep up with, or they’re just so darn funny and well-written that I had to blogroll them anyway, and are thus shoo-ins for the E award. And of course, there are all the blogs that are just in my bookmarks, too, but haven’t yet merited a place on the blogroll, much less an Excellent award. That means I’d better look to other blogs to fill out the list, but it’s hard to find sufficient amounts of excellence in a short amount of time. I read individual posts on other blogs when I see them mentioned somewhere, or in a list of “Latest WordPress Posts” or “Growing Blogs,” but not frequently enough for my blogroll of Excellent-candidates to have grown big enough for my ten.

While I was thinking about this problem, the problem compounded. Another of The Ridger’s ten picks was Wishydig (see blogroll), home of Michael Covarrubias. He, too, has been kind enough to put an E on Literal-Minded, with a compliment on my syntax posts. Great — now I have to find 20 excellent blogs!

However, Michael also showed me a graceful way out of my problem. He said:

I would really have trouble nominating that many blogs. Not because I can’t think of that many good blogs — I can of course; just look at my sidebar — but because the more blogs I nominate, the more reasons I need not to keep nominating. So I’ll ask your kind permission (whoever you are) to nominate fewer than the ten.

So with no further delay, here is my list of excellent blogs:

• Language Log
• Language Hat
• Wishydig (Honestly, he was on this list even before he nominated me.)
• Blog Idle
• Sunny Side Up

And lastly, while I’m in a linking mode, let me point you not to The Ridger’s blog, but to her entire website. I haven’t begun to explore all of it yet, but the layout alone (which ties in with the mysterious handle The Ridger) is unusual enough to call for further investigation. And there’s one blog that’s weird and entertaining enough that I want to mention it, but I’m not putting an E on it because I don’t want to imply that I agree with the concept of the whole blog. It’s Stuff White People Like. The topics are wide-ranging and funny, but I question whether all or even most white people like these things, and whether it is only white people who like them.

Anyway, thanks again Ridger and Michael!

A Celebration of Cross-Linguistic Hilarity

Funny story at Linguistic Mystic.

Linkfest

There have been a few particularly entertaining posts recently, enough for me to collect them in another linkfest.

Inspired by the news stories on the now-former astronaut Lisa Nowak, Ben Zimmer investigates on Language Log whether you can be “wearing diapers” if you only wear one, and reports some surprising developments in the syntax of this word. He also reveals that he has a six-month-old son, so maybe we can expect to read some fun language-acquisition posts from him in a year or so.

In another post, Zimmer links to the latest “Good Word” column in Slate, by Ben Yagoda. I meant to read it then, but didn’t get around to it until my friend Lonnie drew my attention to it as well. It’s on interjections, in particular, some that have arisen in the last few years. I’d heard of meh, but was completely clueless about awwa. Do you recognize this interjection? If you don’t, read the Slate article now, and play the audio and video clips Yagoda has included.

Also on Language Log, Heidi Harley writes about a funny headline-writing mistake in using the word spray.

At Semantic Compositions, Justin Busch complains about a current song title that commits the same sin as Tim McGraw’s “Down on the Farm” did a few years ago. Can you guess the song before you follow the link?

Linkfest

My friend Lonnie put me onto an occasional feature in Slate called “The Good Word,” which I have put on my blogroll as a linguistics blog, since its content seemed to fit there best. Some of the pieces I’ve liked have been about offensive language. The most recent of them is Seth Stevenson’s defense of suck, even though I don’t agree with him that the word has entirely lost its oral-sex-related meaning. Maybe it has for some younger speakers, but for anyone who says something “sucks dick” to indicate that it really sucks, at least some of the original meaning is there. Then there’s Jesse Sheidlower’s piece on scumbag, whose etymology surprised me. He pokes around at the question of what makes a word vulgar. Is it vulgar if it has a vulgar origin but people don’t realize it (like some users of suck)? What if people think it has a vulgar origin but it doesn’t? Finally there’s John Cook’s discussion of retarded, which includes a funny quotation from the very doctor who diagnosed Adam with PDD-NOS.

Meanwhile, on Language Log, Geoff Pullum has written about something I’ve been meaning to write about for months, but never got around to. Here is a sentence from a semantics paper by Daniel Rothschild of Princeton University:

“The F is G” is true just in case there is exactly one F and it satisfies G. (link)

If your grammar is like mine (and everyone else’s I know), you read that and said, “What? How can something be true in order to be prepared in the event that ‘there is exactly one F and it satisfies G’? That sounds like you’re choosing for it to be true, but either it’s true or it’s not, right?” But after you read a few more papers in formal linguistics that use just in case the same way, you get so you can mentally replace just in case with only in the case where and move on. Read Pullum’s thoughts on the matter here.

Here’s one more from Pullum, which I bring up because it’s on one of my favorite topics, backformation. And since we’re on the subject of backformation and it’s time for going back-to-school, here’s a link to a post of my own for those who haven’t been reading this blog since August 2004.

Two Other F-Words

Here are a couple of interesting posts that appeared in the linguablogosphere during my blogging hiatus during the last month:

In this post on Phonoloblog, Bob Kennedy tries to find a rule or rules to explain why some initials, such as JD or DJ, are popular as nicknames, while others, such as MN, are not.

Next, have you ever been reading about some group of people who, the writer tells you, speak a “guttural language,” or more likely, a “harsh, guttural language,” and wondered what the heck guttural actually means? And why do you hardly ever hear about pleasant or romantic guttural languages? Benjamin Zimmer of Language Log answers these questions.

A more recent post from Benjamin Zimmer talks about the F-word in pro football. This is a funny post, and it reminded me of a snippet of the Glenn Back radio program I heard back in January 2003, where Beck took great offense at the use of an f-word. When I turned on the radio, Beck had apparently just been up on his soapbox about some issue, on one of his more intense rants, and his producer was trying to calm him down. The producer reassured Beck that he personally agreed with him about the importance of the issue, and it needed to be talked about, but…

Producer: …you always get so flamboyant–
Beck: I can’t believe it! You just called me gay!

The producer denied making any such claim, but Beck wasn’t letting him off the hook. We all know, he said, that flamboyant was code for gay. The producer disagreed. Beck came back with an ultimatum: Apologize, or resign.

That’s about all I got to hear before I parked the car, so I never heard how it turned out. But the rest of the day I was thinking about whether flamboyant could be said to mean “gay”. Certainly, some gay people are flamboyant, but it’s neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being gay. That is, some gay people aren’t flamboyant, and some flamboyant people aren’t gay.

But what if it really were the case that all flamboyant people and only flamboyant people were gay? Could the words then be said to have the same meaning? Only if we also say that 2+3 = 5 means the same thing as Force = mass*acceleration, since both statements are true. Only if we also say that Peter Parker means the same thing as Spiderman, since the two terms refer to the same individual. As semanticists put it, if all gay people were flamboyant and vice versa, then the two terms would have the same extensional meaning–as 2+3=5 and Force=mass*acceleration, and Peter Parker and Spiderman do in our world. But to capture the idea that flamboyant describes a certain kind of personality, while gay describes a person with a particular sexual orientation, semanticists talk about the words’ intensional meaning.

Of course, the intensional meaning could change. Flamboyant could just come to have a separate meaning of “homosexual, regardless of habits of dress, speech or public behavior,” which could then drive the original meaning to extinction–the same journey that gay took. I’m curious: For how many people has flamboyant already made this transition? Doing a Google search, I find plenty of instances of flamboyant that do not refer to homosexuality, but when I told a class I was teaching about the conversation between Glenn Beck and his producer, they all immediately knew what Beck’s reaction would be to the label flamboyant.

Pragmatics Linkfest

I’ve read several interesting posts recently that had to do with pragmatics.

From the linguablogosphere, there are a couple on Russell Lee-Goldman’s Noncompositional. This one talks about speech acts, and sentences like, “Jim’s really upset now, because he’s grinding his teeth.” Wait, shouldn’t that be, “Jim’s grinding his teeth because he’s really upset now”? Not necessarily. And this one asks, how can you say you accidentally revealed a secret if you intentionally told someone something that, unbeknownst to you, was a secret? I have a feeling that the answer to this question must have to do with presuppositions that arise when you use the word secret. That is, when you say your secret, it is usually understood that you know that it is a secret. But when you say you accidentally revealed it, if the accidentally can’t apply to the actual act of uttering the words, then the hearer takes it to refer to the larger act of “uttering words with the effect of revealing a secret,” and cancels the presupposition that you knew what you told was a secret.

From the blogosphere at large, there is Greg Larson’s rant about how ads lie, or at least abuse Gricean maxims.

Another Linkfest

Here are a few of the posts on other linguistics blogs that have caught my interest lately.

In my last post, I talked about variants of gonna. It happens that this topic was on other bloggers’ minds, too. This post on Cherrier discusses it, and so does this response from Language Log’s Mark Liberman.

Also, I got to thinking about the phrase “What is this X of which you speak?” last week, to humorously indicate that you have had so little dealing with X for so long that it’s like a foreign concept to you. I figured maybe I’d Google the phrase and add it to the snowclone list. Too late, though. That’s now been done by LL’s Arnold Zwicky here, following up on a discussion on the American Dialect Society mailing list. Languagehat follows up here.

Next, if you enjoyed this guest posting I did on The Volokh Conspiracy last year, on the difference between too big a and too big of a, check out from this posting from Mark Liberman on essentially the same topic but with a different adverb: that instead of too. For example, do you say, “that big a deal” or “that big of a deal”? And as I was wondering last year, what do you do when instead of a nice, singular, count noun like deal, you have a mass noun (that painful a work) or a plural noun (that big of jobs)?

The Kini Morpheme

Check out the latest addition to the linguistic blog community: Bob Kennedy’s piloklok (thanks to HeiDeas’ Heidi Harley for the link). My favorite of his posts to date is one about kinis. What is a kini?, you ask. There are at least three kinds of kinis, and the word is an example of my favorite morphological process, backformation. It’s not one of the particular people-watch/underage-drink class of backformations that I tend to write about, but a backformation nonetheless. Read all about it here.

Kennedy also posts on Phonoloblog (”all things phonology”), where you can find a funny post about TV shows’ attempts and lack of attempts to get the characters’ accents right.