November Links

Joel Stickley’s blog How to Write Badly Well. Each entry is in the form of a paragraph or verse illustrating that kind of bad writing. As you laugh over entries like “Change sentence structure for the benefit of your rhyme scheme” and “Describe every character in minute detail, taking no account of narrative pacing”, you can also think about how this blog’s title shows once more that adverbs don’t just modify individual words; they can modify phrases. If they could only modify words, then write badly well would just be nonsense, but when you take well to modify the phrase write badly, the resulting semantics perfectly matches what Stickley does in this blog. (Hat tip to Laurie Abkemeier.)

Ben H. Winters, the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies writes at Visual Thesaurus about how he learned the plural of octopus was not what he thought it was. My favorite line: “I could not have been more surprised if my inbox had contained an actual octopus.”

Hey, I know that linguist! An article at PhysOrg.com tells about how fellow Ohio State alum Amanda Miller figured out a better way to measure and describe the phonetics of clicks. Hey, did you notice how I cleverly used alum? I couldn’t call her a fellow alumnus, or a fellow alumna, and certainly not a fellow alumni or alumnae, but the clipped form alum is vague enough to cover us both. And I know nobody will think I’m talking about KAl(SO₄)₂.12H₂O, since I used an indefinite article before the word. (Hat tip to Adrian Morgan, the Flesh-Eating Dragon at The Outer Hoard.)

And now, the funniest introduction to Indo-European and Proto-Germanic sound changes you’re ever likely to watch, in three parts. (Hat tip to Mr. Verb, via Bradshaw of the Future.)

October Links

A couple of posts on baby names. First, here are David Crystal’s thoughts on on when and why books about babies (and, I might add, advertising copy and articles in some magazines) refer to your baby as Baby, as if it were a proper name.

The other post on baby names is actually three posts, but it’s well worth reading them all. Laura Wattenberg of The Baby Name Wizard starts with a tiresome email I’ve received a few times, about a child supposedly named Le-a. It’s pronounced Ledasha, because “the dash don’t be silent.” From there she gives a really enlightening and well-researched argument on how this and other urban-legend names (you know them: Orangello and Lemonjelo, Eczema, etc.) are a covert, or sometimes not so covert, way of talking about race.

Hat tip to Ben Zimmer for the Wattenberg pieces. Ben himself authored this next article: A Word Routes post on the expanding set of un-verbs. Follow link there to the related article he wrote while subbing for William Safire. Below that article is a note saying that Safire would be away “for a few weeks.” Little did I know…

September Links

It’s just about time for Talk Like a Pirate day again, so with that in mind, here is a useful resource on how to speak pirates’ language.

Seriously, though, I wonder how much play TLAP Day will get this year, now that piracy off the Horn of Africa has been making pirates much less entertaining. Just the other day, I saw an announcement that the Wiggles were going to be in town soon, and it mentioned Sam, Murray, Jeff, Anthony, and the characters of Dorothy the Dinosaur, Wags the Dog, and Henry the Octopus. I immediately noticed the absence of their fourth extra character, Captain Feathersword, the friendly pirate. Anyway, about this time last year I wrote about arrr-colored vowels; now, here’s a very informative Wikipedia page on how the vowels before /r/ used to sound in English.

Next, here’s Arnold Zwicky writing about one of my favorite topics, non-parallel coordination. This time we’re dealing with the correlative conjunctions not … but.

Michael Erard writes in Search magazine about the uneasy, increasing reliance of linguists on Christian missionaries to do most of the linguistic fieldwork since the 1960s.

The origin of the word hut in football contexts gets the full Ben Zimmer treatment in his latest Word Routes column.

If you like that, then you’ll love this week’s episode of This American Life: “Frenemies” (#389). In Act Two (about 22 minutes in), Rich Juzwiak traces the history of the phrase I’m not here to make friends. Can you guess where you hear this phrase before you click over and read the summary? The fun doesn’t end with Act Two; immediately following is a history of the word frenemy, as told to Ira Glass by none other than Erin McKean.

August Links

Last month, I wrote about fail and other words becoming mass nouns, as in bucket of fail or made of awesome. If you found that interesting, be sure to read a couple of items from Ben Zimmer. First is his fuller discussion of fail in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, as he subs for William Safire. The other is his latest Word Routes column, where he gives some details that didn’t make it into the NYTM article. Also, he makes a simple yet insightful observation that ties together the various verbs, adjectives, or interjections that are doing duty as mass nouns: They all were interjections before making the shift to mass noun. And finally, Zimmer clears up something I’d been wondering about: In my post on the topic (which he kindly links to), I mentioned a line from the movie Juno: “That’s a big, fat bag of no!” I tried to find the line in the script to make sure I had it right, but “bag of no” didn’t get me any hits. Zimmer was smart enough to try the phrase “sack of no”, and found that the actual line was indeed “That’s a big, fat sack of no!”

Next, Dr. Goodword asks, “Why is a person who is half white and half black, black? Why is Halle Berry the first ‘African American’ female actor to receive an Academy Award? Why is President Obama a black president? Where is the logic here?” I’ve wondered about this, too.

My brother Glen, who is busy writing for the second season of Fringe, went to a seminar held by the FBI for the benefit of screenwriters. He now reports a semantic shift in the verb forfeit in FBI jargon. Specifically, the subject of forfeit gains something rather than lose it. Don’t believe me? Read his post at Agoraphilia and find out how it happened.

You’ve probably wondered on occasion why the inverted-question contraction of am not is aren’t, as in Aren’t I? If so, read David Crystal’s sketch of the development of aren’t I.

And for a limited time only, you can listen to Stephen Fry’s BBC Radio miniseries “English Delight”. This week’s episode, the first of three, is “So Wrong It’s Right”. (Hat tip to Damien Hall on the American Dialect Society email list.)

July Links

The website Google has given us the verb Google. Now, Microsoft has rolled out its competing search engine, Bing, and apparently its creators are happily anticipating the verbing of this proper noun. But have they considered the morphological ramifications? The Name Inspector explains. Hat tip to Lexiophiles’ list of candidates for the Top 100 Language Blogs of 2009. Speaking of which…

This blog has been nominated for the Top 100 Language Blogs of 2009, so thank you to whichever of you nominated it. The voting is going on even now, until July 27, and the button near the top right of the header will take you there. The voting is a bit more rigorous than you’d expect from a deal like this: They only let you vote once, and only for one blog, as I discovered. I visited the list of nominations, selected a half-dozen of my favorite language blogs, and clicked Vote. Then I visited a few more language blogs I liked, and went back to cast some votes for them, too. Only then did I notice only one button would stay marked at a time, and I wasn’t allowed to cast a vote for that entry because I’d already voted. So who knows which blog my successful vote went to? Whichever one it was, it was worthy, so I’m not too distressed. But the moral is: If you’re going to vote for this blog, do it first! (Or find yourself a fresh IP address.)

OK, so back to the links. A couple of posts ago, I wrote about fail and win as mass nouns. Now, Karl Hagen of Polysyllabic reports on newer developments: fail as an adjective. Also, in an email to the American Dialect Society mailing list, Kari Castor says, “Win is commonly used the same way, especially among us wacky internet geeks and gamers.”

Hey, want to learn how to produce a sound that’s not in English, but which isn’t too hard to learn? Read John Wells’s instructions on how to make a voiceless lateral fricative, the sound represented by the double L in Welsh, in words like Lloyd. I never knew how to make this sound, but thanks to his instructions, I think I do now. I hope he does a walk-through like this for Mandarin Chinese /r/.

For non-linguists, the word Aryan probably has strong associations with Nazis and neo-Nazis. Actually, it does for linguists, too. But linguists are accustomed to seeing Aryan in the term Indo-Aryan, an out-of-date term for the Indo-European languages, or for the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. So how did it get its racially charged meaning? Goofy at Bradshaw of the Future explains it, along with the connection to Iran. This post is one of a series of posts there, each of which takes a pair of phonetically and semantically very different words, and traces each of them back to their common Proto-Indo-European root. Another in this series that I particularly liked is on opulent and manure.

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”.

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.

April Links

There’s been a fair bit of discussion on the American Dialect Society mailing list about the past tense of text. I was surprised there was even a question about it: Assuming you are OK with text as a verb in the first place, wouldn’t the past tense naturally be texted? Ben Zimmer’s Word Routes column on texted shows that it’s not that simple, and that some people who don’t complain about clearly verbal uses such as texting have a problem with texted.

Even knowing a foreign language fluently isn’t always enough to understand what its speakers are saying to you. For some good illustrations involving Mandarin Chinese, read this post from Syz on Beijing Sounds, and follow the other Beijing Sounds posts he links to.

If you’ve been reading this blog since before it spun off from Agoraphilia, you might remember a post I wrote on the metaphor of carrots and sticks. For a fresher, and more researched look at this topic, check out Jan Freeman’s column from March 8.

And lastly for this installment, I recommend Beatrice Santorini’s collection of linguistics humor.

March Links

I’ll start with a couple of links on linguistic research that you can participate in. First, there is the page of online experiments at Cognition and Language Laboratory. One that is still going on is the “Gorp Test”, which takes about five minutes. I participated in this one, and was so interested in the debriefing that I made Doug and Adam take the test, too. There are several other ongoing experiments in addition to the Gorp Test, which I haven’t taken yet, and also a page of experiments they’re not running anymore but which you can put yourself through anyway.

Probably any of my readers could participate in the above research. This next research is only for “hyperpolyglots” — people, like the late linguist Ken Hale or the fictional scoundrel Harry Flashman, who can speak six or more languages. This considerably narrows down the field, but I’m putting the link in anyway because I’d like to see this research get some informative results. Michael Erard, the guy who brought you Um: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, is working on his next book Babel No More. Part of his research consists of this survey for any hyperpolyglots out there, so if you are or know one, respectively follow or forward the link.

Last month I noted Jan Freeman’s absence from her column at The Boston Globe, and pointed to a guest column written by Erin McKean. McKean has continued to fill in for Freeman, and wrote this fun piece about how she accidentally invented a word. She observes that there was “no cheerleading” or “PR campaign” for her word; “I just used it myself, in context, and other people picked it up naturally.” I had the distinct feeling that she was refraining from saying, “Santorum, I’m looking at you.”

In my last post, one of the attestations of sanc as the past tense of sync comes from “the Buck Family Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language”. This would be the family of Jamis and Tarasine Buck (Jamis is the husband, Tarasine the wife), whose blog Catching Glimpses is almost entirely devoted to funny things their kids say. I don’t like to give away entire blog posts, but these posts are so short that I’m going to break my rule and give a couple of highlights from it. There’s the instant classic “Mom! Nathaniel just called me a tattle-tale!” And this one:

Kaitrin: I picked these dandelions to give to Dad and Nathaniel when they come home on Saturday!
Tarasine: Oh, that’s so nice! It’s just that Saturday is in three days — they’ll be dead by then.
Kaitrin: (wide-eyed) Dad and Nathaniel will be DEAD on Saturday?!?

Furthermore, this is no ordinary blog with parents telling about funny things their kids say. The mother is a linguist, who is attuned to and suitably appreciative of moments like this one:

When recently asking how to spell the word “tree”, Kaitrin said, “When you put an ‘r’ after a ‘t’, it makes it sound like a ‘ch’!” Not many adults notice that, I’ve found.

If you like the posts in the “Darndest things” category here, you’ll want to browse through the Buck family’s archived posts.

Lastly, here’s another funny story from Greg Larson, this one on how he got into trouble in second grade. But what’s the linguistic angle, you ask? Well, let’s see, it’s … taboo language. Or at least, what a second grader thinks is taboo language.

February Links

A bit late, but funny enough to include — fun with French accents and and holiday greeting cards:

(Hat tip to my Uncle Ricky.)

Have you ever heard someone say, “What are you, crazy?” and wondered if they were actually saying, “What, are you crazy?” So has Michael Covarrubias.

I wondered why I hadn’t seen any new columns from Jan Freeman recently. Now I know: Erin McKean is filling in for her for a few weeks. Check out this column on the proper circumstances in which to correct someone’s grammar. She finishes with a recent example of her own McKean’s Law in action:

And don’t forget that, due to the capricious nature of the universe, corrections of someone else’s speech or writing are more than likely to contain errors themselves — and set you up for others’ glee the next time you make a mistake. Chief Justice John Roberts is known as a stickler for the “rules” of English – and guess who mangled the oath of office with the whole world watching?

Lynne Murphy at Separated by a Common Language discusses some differences between British and American obituary writing styles.

Arnold Zwicky takes up the issue, discussed here on occasion, of constructions involving coordinated verb phrases and quoted material. He gives a neat overview of the factors that come together in various combinations to yield the syntactic variations that are out there.