Literal-Minded

Linguistic commentary from a guy who takes things too literally

Archive for the ‘Morphology’ Category

A Troop Is Two Boots on the Ground

Posted by Neal on November 11, 2009

Back in 2004, I blogged about noncollective troops — you know, 10,000 troops amounting to 10,000 people, not 10,000 groups of people. For Veteran’s Day I have revisited the subject over at Visual Thesaurus. It turns out quite a few writers on language have had something to say about troops, and I have to say that of all the pieces written on this subject, my VT column is one. Over there you’ll find a synthesis of what’s been said about troops in the 21st century … at least on the issue of what numbers can be used with troops, and whether one troop can legitimately refer to one person now. However, there was one kind of complaint about troops that was a bit different, different enough for me to cut it out of an article that was already running longer than I wanted it to. I’ll talk about that one here.

As I wrote in the VT column, “Some reject [noncollective troops] with any number; some allow it only with large numbers; some allow it with any number greater than one.” It turns out that there are some speakers who rail against noncollective troops when it’s not accompanied by any number at all. Why? I believe it has to do with another way of looking at noncollective troops: as a pluralia tantum noun, or in plain English, a plural-only noun. According to the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, some nouns are plural-only because they denote substances made of particles that are of themselves insignificant; for example, grits. The insignificance of the particles in nouns like grits taints some speakers’ feelings toward troops with the idea that it trivializes the individual soldiers. In a 2007 piece on NPR (also mentioned in the VT column) John McWhorter makes this complaint. It is echoed in Susan Jacoby’s 2008 book The Age of American Unreason, when she writes that the use of noncollective troops “is more than a grammatical error; turning a soldier — an individual with whom one may identify — into an anonymous-sounding troop encourages the public to think about war and its casualties in a more abstract way.” (p. 6)

Of course, I can’t argue with McWhorter’s and Jacoby’s feelings. If troops strikes them as trivializing individual members of the armed services, that’s how the word is for them. Nevertheless, I don’t think noncollective troops arose as a plural-only noun. To say that it did is to call the existence of the singular, semantically similar troop a coincidence. I think that what happened is the reverse of how my son and his peers (and others before them) decided that cleat was another name for a soccer shoe. Their shoes have projections on the bottom called cleats. Someone wearing the shoes is said to be wearing cleats. Someone who doesn’t know the word has to decide whether this plural refers to the two shoes (i.e. the two SETS of cleats), or to the projections on the bottoms of the shoes (i.e. the twenty or so INDIVIDUAL cleats). My son and his peers decided the former, and now talk about putting on one or both cleats. Thus, cleat has gone from being an individual noun to a collective noun. Troops, I maintain, went in the opposite direction. For someone unfamiliar with the word, does troops refer to the GROUPS of soldiers within a large number of soldiers, or does it refer to the INDIVIDUAL soldiers? If you choose the latter, troop has now become a noncollective noun.

Pictorially, troops was used as in the first picture below, then reinterpreted as in the second picture. Cleats went in the opposite direction.

Collective and noncollective noun

On top: collective noun. On bottom: noncollective noun.

Another thought that occurred to me while I was writing the VT column was how troops is being subjected now to the same kind of disapproval as another collective noun that turned noncollective: people. It began as a collective noun meaning a group of human beings, but somewhere along the way was interpreted as a plural (an irregular plural but still a plural) referring to the members of the group. And, as with troops vs. soldiers, there were until quite recently complaints about the use of people instead of persons with specific numbers. For a more detailed discussion, see this post on Language Log. I’d guess there are several reasons we don’t (as far as I know) have one people meaning one person. First of all, people doesn’t have an obviously plural -s suffix on it that could be removed to make a singular. Second, people is generally taken to be not only an irregular plural, but in fact the suppletive plural of the singular person. In other words, we don’t need to make people singular; person is already its singular form. Neither of those conditions holds for troops; it has an -s suffix, and there isn’t already good singular form for what troops refers to: soldier (for some reason) is taken to refer exclusively to members of the Army, and member of the armed forces is too long.

However, now that I’ve become comfortable with the polysemy of troop, what do I do with a sentence like We put 5,000 boots on the ground? I no longer try to multiply 5,000 troops by some number of people in a troop, but I do still divide 5,000 boots on the ground by the number of boots per soldier. But I find I still don’t know how many members of the armed services we’re talking about when a newscaster says something like

We put about 5,000 boots on the ground.

So is that 2,500 soldiers? I know for some people, two boots on the ground are two (noncollective) troops; for example, a soldier in Iraq who wrote an open letter with the title “A grievance from a ‘boot on the ground’”.

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Posted in Diachronic, Morphology | 8 Comments »

Hate to Poop the Party…

Posted by Neal on October 12, 2009

Every party has a pooper; that's why we invited you.Regular reader and Beatles fan Gordon P. Hemsley had a question:

I just came across the phrase “poop the party” (as in, “sorry to poop the party”). I’ve never heard this phrase before, but it appears to be a back-formation (of sorts) from “partypooper”. Google gives me ~55,000 hits, but many of them appear to include punctuation like colons and hyphens within the phrase.

Perhaps you could do better research?

There would seem to be a need for a verb denoting what a party pooper does. As I’ve written before, compound nouns of the form [Noun]+[Verb]+er/ing often give rise to backformed verbs, such as rollercoast, sightsee, arm flap, problem solve, serial kill, fence sit, and peoplewatch and underage drink.

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Posted in Compound words, Diachronic, Potty on, dudes! | 4 Comments »

High-Frying Ambiguity

Posted by Neal on September 23, 2009

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

McDonald's fries holy grail

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.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Food-related, Morphology | 6 Comments »

The Nouning of Back to School

Posted by Neal on September 3, 2009

I wrote about this a few years ago; here’s my updated report at Visual Thesaurus, using corpus resources that weren’t available back then.

Posted in Compound words, Diachronic | 3 Comments »

Family Owned and Imitated

Posted by Neal on July 21, 2009

A tire shop that opened a year or two ago puts funny messages on its marquee. They’re so funny that I can’t seem to recall any of them right now, except of course for the one I’m going to tell you about now. It said:

Family Owned and Imitated

Family owned: So a family, let’s call them the Smiths, owns this business. Family imitated: A family (presumably the Smiths again) also imitates this business. The Smiths imitate their own business? How is that possible? Maybe it’s like that that Greek family I read about. They ran a chocolate shop in nearby Granville for years, but then had a falling out, so that there are now two chocolate shops, run by two branches of the same family, located within two blocks of each other in downtown Granville, each claiming to possess the truest version of the family’s recipes for chocolate confections.

Family-owned, and competitors imitate us!A family owns and imitates this business...?But never mind that. I’m pretty sure all they’re saying is that this business is family-owned, and that it’s imitated. This reading makes sense: Lots of businesses say that they’re imitated, usually before a warning that they’re never equalled or duplicated. In this reading, the coordinated elements are family-owned and imitated, as illustrated on the left.

To get the reading that leads you to imagine a rift in the family, you have to parse it with just owned and imitated as the coordinated elements, with family applying to both, as illustrated on the right. So why did I want to parse it this way, anyway, since it gives the weird and unlikely reading?

It’s at least partly because of the common collocation that the sign is harking to: Family Owned and Operated (or sometimes, family owned and run). In those phrases, family is clearly intended to form a compound with both owned and operated, as in the diagram. After all, who’d want to say that a family owns some particular place of business, and that (get this) someone operates it? If it’s open at all, the latter claim is obvious, and stating it violates the principle of Relevance. Only if it’s taken to mean “family-operated” does the statement say something useful: The fact that some place is run by the family that owns it might not be obvious to the casual observer. A family owns and operates this business.

By using this recognizable phrase as their point of departure, they primed me to parse Family Owned and Imitated in the stupid way. Now that I think about it, though, family owned and operated could be useful as a deceptively ambiguous phrase, for a family that has recently contracted out the operation of its family business but doesn’t want to change the wording in their advertisements. I wonder if that’s been done. Do any of you know of businesses that advertise that they’re “family owned and operated”, and are operated by someone other than the family?

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Posted in Attachment ambiguity, Compound words, Coordination | 4 Comments »

Odd Ones Out Are Not Like the Others

Posted by Neal on July 8, 2009

I see an odd one out!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.”

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Posted in Food-related, Morphology | 11 Comments »

Buckets, Boxes, and Bags

Posted by Neal on July 1, 2009

Not a bucket of failure. That would be ridiculous!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.

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Posted in Diachronic, Mass and Count Nouns | 18 Comments »

Hards On

Posted by Neal on May 20, 2009

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:

What was I doing in the men's room with a digital camera? Well, naturally, I went home and got it and came back so I could get this picture, what did you think?

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

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Posted in Diachronic, Morphology, Potty on, dudes! | 10 Comments »

Rollercoasting

Posted by Neal on April 13, 2009

I like to rollercoast!One book that we recently finished reading aloud was Nim’s Island, by Wendy Orr (now a minor motion picture from Walden Media). Doug and Adam had to stand by for a minute while I made a note of this passage near the end of the book:

…thought Alex as she roller-coasted from one [wave] to the next.

Something sounded funny about rollercoasted. I would have said rollercoastered, converting the noun rollercoaster into a verb (“verbing a noun”, as it’s sometimes known). Why didn’t Wendy Orr take that option?

Then I realized: It was another backformation. The steps in the history:

  1. Long before rollercoasters existed, the nouns roller and coaster were formed by suffixing the agentive suffix -er to the verbs roll and coast.
  2. When the devices now known as rollercoasters were invented, the noun rollercoaster was created via compounding: roller + coaster, meaning something that coasted on rollers. The OED’s earliest known attestation is from 1888.
  3. Next, the reanalysis, illustrated with the original structure on the left, and the reanalyzed structure on the right:
    Original structure

    Original structure


    The reanalyzed structure

    The reanalyzed structure

  4. This is where the actual backformation occurs, but you can’t tell, because [roller][coaster] sounds just like [rollercoast] [er].

  5. The backformation comes to light when a speaker retrieves the verb form that logically must exist, given the noun consisting of Verb+-er. In this case, it’s rollercoast. The OED’s earliest attestation is from 1973, and others from the past few years can be found in reference to markets, emotions, hypermiling, and moving time slots for troubled TV shows.

So if rollercoast is such a typical backformation, like a lot of the ones I’ve written about before, why did it stop me in mid-page and send me looking for a napkin to write it down on? My guess is that it’s because the noun rollercoaster is not an animate agent. A bartender is a person who bartends; a babysitter is a person who babysits; a rollercoaster is an object. To falsify this hypothesis, I now open the floor for other Noun+Verber compounds that denote objects, and that have yielded Noun+Verb backformations, and which sound as normal as peoplewatch or speed-read to me.

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Posted in Backformation, Kids' entertainment | 7 Comments »

Sinking Your iPod

Posted by Neal on March 6, 2009

Sync, sank, sunk
Doug wanted me to sync his iPod yesterday so he could get some of the Monty Python sketches on there that I’ve been ripping from old records and downloading from iTunes. (At least, the Monty Python sketches that his mother is OK with him listening to.)

“OK, all synced,” I said as I handed it to him. It occurred to me that Doug and probably thousands of other kids had no idea that sync was a clipped form of synchronize, generalized from its meaning of coordinating actions to occur simultaneously to a meaning of making sure two items carry the same information. As far as he knew, the verb might just be sink, with past tense sank and past participle sunk. He’s only recently gotten much use out of the iPod he got a year or so ago, so I haven’t had the opportunity to hear how he forms the past forms, but I was curious enough that I did some Googling when I got back to the computer, and sure enough…

Some speakers out there aren’t sure what the past tense should be:

  • Against my will (my friend didn’t like MY music..grr) my friend sunk (?) my iPod with her iTunes.
  • So whenever I synced (sunk?) my iPod I’d have all my random musical shittings to listen to without really having to think about it much.

Others know that an irregular past tense for sync is a bit iffy, and explain it or highlight it as unusual:

  • But the program wouldn’t transfer every song, so I was waiting until I could figure out how to get the rest of my songs on my new computer before I sunc (past tense of sync) the ipod.
  • Another entry in the Buck Family Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language: sanc (verb, past tense), “to sync”, as in, “You sanc my iPod!”

Still others, as I suspected, use the irregular forms apparently with no idea that anything is amiss:

  • last night when i sank my ipod i got the message to update the ipod software
  • I did correct the album artist fields and deleted those comments and re-sunk my iPod and still those double albums appear.
  • I made my own account and transferred all of my songs on it, it worked great but when i sunk my ipod it deleted all of my songs that i previously bought.
  • Mel is gonna get Rose cuz she sunk my IPOD!
  • i haven’t sunk my ipod for a long time for this very reason.

This innovation seems to be pretty new, since I only get a handful of pages, and most of the hits are from 2008 and 2009. However, it probably predates the iPod, since the iPod is not the first device to require syncing. The earliest hit I got was from June 2007, when I did a search for “past tense of sync” without including the word iPod, and found this mini-rant on a thread in a grammar forum:

Incredibly, people in my office use “sunk” as the past-tense of “synch” or “sync”. All day long, they tell each other (and our software users) that they “sunk” the data. “The data is sunk!”
Can they not hear how ridiculous that sounds? Because these of course are all computer scientists, engineers and database analysts, the question of how to offer an alternative or delicately point out that it’s bad P.R. to go around saying the system is “sunk” is a good one.

This irregularization of sync is a good example of folk etymology, or (because it hasn’t become fully established yet) an eggcorn: People misunderstand the verb sync, but you don’t realize it until they use it in the past tense. Of those who use sank and sunk as past tenses, probably at least some have created some abstract meaning for sink that makes sense, like thinking of the songs as being sunk into, embedded, in their iPods. I don’t see it in the Eggcorn Database yet; the closest is lip-sing for lip-sync(h). Remind me to submit it later today.

Of course, when I said that kids probably had sank as the past tense of sync and sunk as the past participle, I was being hopelessly unrealistic. What they probably have (and the examples above bear witness to this) is sank for both forms , or sunk for both forms , or sank and sunk in free variation. What I’d love to hear is a parent correcting their child: “You ’sunk’ your iPod? I think you mean you sank your iPod. Today I sync it, yesterday I sank it, I have just now sunk it.” Actually, it would drive me nuts to hear that, but it’s fun to imagine it.

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Posted in Folk etymology, Irregular verbs | 6 Comments »