Anti-Passive! It’s Like a Passive for Ergative Languages!

Over the weekend, I speculated on how English might work as an ergative language. Today, on National Grammar Day, I’m taking it a step further into the reversed grammar of ergative languages, to show what might happen if you tried to use the passive voice in ergative English. What would that even look like, when our ergative English already has its transitive verbs agreeing with their patients?

In you’ve forgotten what that looks like, here’s the suite of sample sentences we arrived at in our morphologically and syntactically ergative version of English. The pronouns in red are in the ergative case; they denote agents who do things to others. The pronouns in blue are in the absolutive case; they denote either “subjects” (in this context, someone or something that performs an action which doesn’t directly affect someone or something else), or patients who are affected by an action.

1. 1. She kiss me.
   2. I kisses her.
2. 1. Her smiles.
   2. Me smile.

Before I go further, I need to comment on the vocabulary. First of all, the terms agent and patient have to be understood as referring not only to very obviously agentlike roles such as “hitter,” “writer,” and “creator,” and very patientlike roles such as “struck,” “written,” and “created,” but also to pairs such as “seer” and “seen,” or “one who loves” and “one who is loved.” This is true for ordinary English as well as our imaginary ergative variety.

Second, we saw earlier that the term subject has a specialized meaning when we’re talking about whether a language is ergative or not (or more concisely, its morphosyntactic alignment). It’s not just any subject; it’s the subject of an intransitive verb. So what term do we use when we want to talk about the subject of a transitive verb? In the last post, we called them agents, in keeping with the subject-agent-patient terminology of morphosyntactic alignment. But now, the agents aren’t going to be the … subjects? … anymore. In Language Universals and Linguistic Typology, Bernard Comrie’s attitude is “Tough noogies, welcome to the real world!” That is, it’s no simple matter crosslinguistically to say what’s a subject. Is it the thing that the verb agrees with? Maybe, but in some languages, transitive verbs agree with both their agents and their patients. So before reading further, say goodbye to your old notions of what’s a subject. The closest we’ll come is when we note which noun(s) a verb is agreeing with.

So now, onward to passives and antipassives. Ordinary English, as well as many other so-called “nominative-accusative languages” gives you two options for expressing a transitive verb. There’s the more straightforward option of the active voice, with agent as the noun that the verb agrees with (She kisses me; I kiss her); and the more complex passive voice, in which the patient is promoted to the place where verb agreement goes on, and the agent disappears or is expressed in a by phrase (I am kissed (by her); she is kissed (by me)).

In ergative English, the more straightforward option has the patient as the noun that the verb agrees with: She kiss me; I kisses her. The more complex option, analogous to the passive in ordinary English, is the antipassive. To show antipassive, I’ll use the passive morphology from ordinary English, to give you the maximum effect of how things are turned around here. In the antipassive, the agent gets promoted to agree with the noun, and the patient gets moved to the background:

1. Me am kissed (by her). [Think of it as "I do some kissing (on her)."]
2. Her is kissed (by me). [Think of it as "She does some kissing (on me)."]

That’s crazy!

Now actually, ergative English probably wouldn’t use an antipassive to express these thoughts. Just as ordinary English tends to use passive in situations where the agent is unknown, unimportant, or just less important than the patient; ergative languages tend to use antipassive when the patient is unknown, unimportant, or less important than the agent. (This is according to Ann Cooreman in “A Functional Typology of Antipassives”, in Voice: Form and Function, 1994, edited by Barbara Fox and Paul J. Hopper.) Functionally, they’re like detransitivized English verbs, such as eat, teach, write, etc. When you say “I’m eating,” or “I’ve taught for years,” or “Write every day,” the patient is assumed to be something obvious: food, courses or students, stuff you write.

Thinking about passives and antipassives, I thought about the disapproval of passives that speakers use to avoid placing (or accepting) blame. “Don’t say ‘Mistakes were made’! Admit your responsibility and just say, I made a mistake’!” If English were an ergative language, would English teachers tell their students, “Don’t say ‘Me am eaten!’ Take responsibility for your actions and say what you ate! Don’t try to gloss over it!”

Well, no, they wouldn’t, because all that was phrased in ordinary English. They’d say … let’s see … “Let no one say ‘Me am eaten’…” Ah, forget it! It was tricky enough to get my ergative examples straight as it was. Right now I am absolutely ergatived out!

Ergative English

As National Grammar Day approaches, I’ve been thinking about one way in which the grammar of some languages can be mind-bendingly different from the grammar of English. Specifically, I’ve been wondering what it would be like if English were an ergative language.

Imagine this. Imagine that in a sentence like She kissed me or I kissed her, the agent has the nominative she/I case form, and the patient has the accusative me/her case form.

Hmm. All right, I guess, you don’t have to imagine that, because that’s how English is already. But now also imagine this. Let’s take a sentence like She smiles. The way English is now, the subject of this intransitive verb has the same form, she/I, as the agent of the transitive verb kiss, and the patient of the transitive verb kissed is the odd one out, with its her/me case forms. I’ll sum it up in a list, with the matching case forms having the same color:

1. 1. She kisses me.
   2. I kiss her.
2. 1. She smiles.
   2. I smile.

Now suppose that instead, the subject of this intransitive verb has the same form as the patient of the transitive verb kiss, and the agent of the transitive verb kissed is the odd one out. It might look something like this:

1. 1. She kisses me.
   2. I kiss her.
2. 1. Her smiles.
   2. Me smile.

In an arrangement like this, the she/I forms would be called ergative case forms, and the her/me forms would be called absolutives. So that’s how English might look if it were an ergative language.

Eh. That’s not so mind-bendingly different. But it’s also not as ergative as we can make it. So far, we’ve grouped intransitive subjects and transitive patients together in having the same case forms, but what if we also made the verbs always agree with the absolutive noun phrase? Here are our four sample sentences again, this time with the verbs agreeing with the absolutes. To bring it out more prominently to the eye, I’m underlining the verbs and what they agree with:

1. 1. She kiss me.
   2. I kisses her.
2. 1. Her smiles.
   2. Me smile.

Now this is starting to look pretty weird. But it’s still not as ergative as it could be. At this point, we’ve just made English “morphosyntactically ergative”. When we replaced the nominative/accusative case forms with ergative/absolutive ones, that was just a change in the morphology of the pronouns. When we also changed the verb agreement rules, we started to get the syntax involved, and hence the term morphosyntactic. However, we could let this ergative/absolutive way of thinking infect the syntax even more deeply, and turn English into a thoroughly “syntactically ergative” language. The main way that this shows up (at least, the way it’s demonstrated in the sources I’ve read) is in coordination.

In ordinary English, you can combine sentences with like subjects the way I’ve done with our examples below:

She kisses me; she smiles. –> She kisses me and smiles.
I kiss her; I smile. –> I kiss her and smile.

The single, factored-out subjects She and I function as both the agent of kiss and the subject of smile. In ordinary English, that’s no problem, because both those things are considered to be subjects. What you can’t do is try to factor out a noun that’s the patient of a transitive verb and the subject of an intransitive. In other words, sentences like these next ones can’t be shortened, where the person getting kissed is the one who smiles:

She kisses me; I smile. [No way to factor out the me/I]
I kiss her; she smiles. [No way to factor out the her/she]

In syntactically ergative English, what you can and can’t do get reversed. If the same person is doing the kissing and the smiling, you can’t shorten the sentence:

She kiss me; her smiles. [No way to factor out the she/her]
I kisses her; me smile. [No way to factor out the I/me]

On the other hand, if the same person is getting kissed and smiling, you can factor that patient/subject out:

She kiss me; me smile. –> She kiss me and smile. [I'm the one smiling!]
I kisses her; her smiles. –> I kisses her and smiles. [She's the one smiling!]

And these aren’t even all the possibilities. This presentation is based on information I got from Bernard Comrie’s Language Universals and Linguistic Typology, 2ed (1989), which also describes languages that are syntactically ergative while still maintaining nominative/accusative case forms, languages in which some verbs work ergatively and others don’t, and various other combinations and degrees of ergativity. But if you’re like me, just the stuff I wrote up here should have been enough to get your mind thoroughly bent out of shape.

Still, you may be wondering something. English does have a way to make patients of intransitive verbs serve as subjects: the passive voice. So do ergative languages have some analogous workaround for when you don’t want the patient of a transitive verb to serve as the thing that the verb agrees with? Tune in on National Grammar Day to learn about … the “anti-passive”!

Adjective, Participle, or Gerund?

In my last post, I talked about present participles that aren’t adjectives, in examples such as are frightening the cats or is running for his life. In this post, I’m going to follow the practice of CGEL and refer to these simply as present participles. In my last post, I also talked about present participles that are adjectives, such as frightening (without a direct object), exciting, daring, scathing, etc. Following CGEL, I am not going to call these participles anymore. I will refer to them simply as adjectives, and if I need to distinguish between these adjectives and adjectives that were not derived from verbs by adding -ing, I will speak of participial adjectives.

All the examples in my last post, whether they involved participles or adjectives, used these words in a predicative position — that is, following a linking verb. The diagnostic I used to separate the adjectives from the participles was the adverb very. Unlike most adverbs, very can modify only adjectives or other adverbs, so if you know that X is either an adjective or a verb, and very X is grammatical, then X must be an adjective. Using the very test, we know that frightening is an adjective in The kids are (very) frightening, as well as in The kids are (very) frightening to the cats. We also saw that very didn’t work in *The kids are very frightening the cats (unless you’re Freddy Mercury or Junie B. Jones). This could mean that frightening is not an adjective in this sentence, or that it is an adjective but for whatever reason can’t be modified by very. Given the results of some other diagnostics that I won’t go into right now, it’s more sensible to conclude that frightening is not an adjective, but a participle.

Now I want to use the very test on adjectives and participles in an attributive position — right next to a noun, as in the frightening kids. Here, too, frightening passes the very test, indicating that it is well and truly an adjective:

the very frightening kids

But some verbs, such as playing, fail the very test in that same position:

*the very playing kids

But wait! Both frightening and playing are modifying kids in these examples; doesn’t that mean they’re both adjectives? Not according to the very test, it doesn’t. It took me a while to get my head around this. I reminded myself: You can modify a noun with things other than an adjective phrase. You can modify it with a prepositional phrase: the kids in the pool. You can modify it with another noun: the school kids. And you can also modify it with a verb, in the form of a participle.

At this point, you might consider the possibility that playing actually is still an adjective, and that it fails the very test for some other reason. However, look what you can do with playing but can’t do with frightening: You can modify it with a just-for-verbs adverb, such as carefully:

*the carefully frightening kids
the carefully playing kids

Playing is definitely acting more like a verb than an adjective here.

Are there -ing verb-derived words that modify nouns and fail both the very and the carefully tests? Sure! Here’s one:

my jogging shorts
*my very jogging shorts
*my carefully jogging shorts [unless you have shorts than like to jog]

And with that, we’ve moved from participial adjectives to participles to gerunds. Here’s a summary of our progression, in convenient flowchart form. (In the chart, “AD-VERB” is my way of indicating an adverb that modifies only verbs, such as carefully.)

Very Frightening

Life, as we know, is full of tough decisions.

Participles are often described as “verbal adjectives,” but recently I was called on to be more specific with a participle: was it a verb, or an adjective? (Sorry, I can’t tell you why I had to do that; it’s TOP SECRET.)

In high school, I was unconflicted: Participles were a kind of adjective, end of story. Even in a sentence like The kids are frightening the cats, I considered frightening to be an adjective, and frightening the cats to be an adjective phrase, just as proud of themselves is an adjective phrase in The kids are proud of themselves. I was annoyed to lose a couple of points over it in a quiz. However, I wasn’t looking at the bigger picture. I wasn’t considering the other properties of adjective phrases that frightening the cats didn’t have, such as these that I read about in CGEL.

First of all, you can’t make the head participle comparative or superlative, the way you can with typical adjectives. You can’t modify it with very, either:

• The kids are prouder/proudest of themselves.
• *The kids are more/most frightening the cats.
• The kids are very proud of themselves.
• *The kids are very frightening the cats.

It’s for reasons like these that frightening the cats is considered to be a participial phrase — i.e., more verby than adjectivey.

On the other hand, with frightening by itself, you can make comparatives and superlatives and use very:

• The kids are more/most frightening.
• The kids are very frightening.

So by itself, frightening can be considered simply an adjective.

In fact, frightening can even be an adjective inside an adjective phrase. The key is that you can’t just go putting a noun phrase complement (such as the cats) after it, the way you’d do with a verb. Instead, you give it a complement more suitable for an adjective; namely, a prepositional phrase. Here’s how it shakes out with the PP to the cats:

• The kids are more/most frightening to the cats.
• The kids are very frightening to the cats.

Frightening is actually an unusual case: It’s a participle that in one guise has completely crossed over to become an adjective, but in another still works as a verby participle in progressive tenses. Other participles like this are loving, (for)giving, disturbing, and amazing. In contrast, participles such as running never pass the comparative/superlative/very adjective tests: Sam is more/most/very running.

So with all that said, now we can talk about what the fictional kindergartner Junie B. Jones has in common with the glam rock group Queen. From Junie B. Jones and the Yucky Blucky Fruitcake, by Barbara Park:

The creamy filling was very squishing between my toes. (p. 25)

From Queen, of course, we have this line from “Bohemian Rhapsody”, with our much-discussed participle frightening:

Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening me! (~3:18 in the video)

In both examples, the very tells us to take the participle as an adjective, but other factors force us to take it as a non-adjectival participle. In the Junie B. Jones example, it’s the context of a progressive tense that does it; in the Queen example, the NP complement me.

I wonder why I’ve never heard anyone complain about this aspect of Junie B. Jones’s grammar, when these books have certainly been criticized for daring to have a six-year-old over-regularize her past tenses and use accusative pronouns where nominatives are called for. Probably it’s because the other grammar complaints are so easy to make, while this one requires some analysis in order to put your finger on the problem. (JBJ uses very with other non-adjectival participles, too, such as watering and practicing, also from JBJ:YBF.) As for “Bohemian Rhapsody,” that song is weird in too many other ways, I think, for people to have focused on the grammar of that one line that comes just between the “Scaramouche” and “Galileo” bits.

There’s more to come about participles, adjectives, and even gerunds, in my next post!

New Development for Backformed Kudo

A couple of years ago, in a post about the backformation of the Boy Scouting-related singular noun Webelo from Webelos, I mentioned the similar backformation of kudo from the Greek borrowing kudos. Here are a couple of examples from COCA (the source of all the other examples in this post, except as noted):

• And there was a little kudo called the Award of Merit
• One even resulted in the ultimate scientific kudo.

The OED has kudo from as far back as 1941, though I’m not so sure about that citation. But their 1950 citation is a clear example:

A man sitting on a toilet bowl swung open the men’s room door and added his kudo to the acclaim.

This backformation is the most obvious sign that someone thinks of kudos as a plural, but other clues can be detected even in the absence of the giveaway form kudo:

1. Pronunciation of the s in kudos as [z], as if it were the plural marker
2. Lengthening of the /o/ before this [z] — the same difference you hear in the pronunciation of gross [groʊs] and grows [groʊːz]
3. Plural verb agreement when kudos is the subject of a clause:
   • Kudos go to San Diegobased Qualcomm Corporate Foundation.
   • Critical kudos acknowledge the success of her approach.
4. Use of count-noun determiners with kudos:
   • Many kudos for the essay by guest host Sharon Paul
   • A few kudos to get you started

Three months ago, I saw another step in the development of backformed kudo: its use as the modifying part of a compound noun. Compound nouns usually, but not always, have a singular as their first element — the noun that modifies the head noun. For example, we have gumball machines, not gumballs machines. So even someone who might never have occasion to reveal a backformation by talking about “one rabie” might well talk about attaching rabie tags to their pets’ collars. Similarly, in the October 5, 2012 issue of Entertainment Weekly, there was this sentence about TV’s Emmy awards:

The last time nipple covers, shrimp truckers, and demented garden gnomes were mentioned during an Emmy telecast was the year 19 hundred and … never. But that’s what made the 64th annual kudofest on Sept. 23 so engrossing–if a tad bewildering. (“Best and Worst of the Awards,” Lynette Rice, p. 21)

COCA provides two more such examples, also from EW, and also about award shows:

• He predicts a shiny night for four-Buckle nominee Brad Paisley, forecasts Sugarland to win Video of the Year for ” All I Want to Do, ” and believes that this kudocast will appeal to those beyond the country-fried set. (2009)
• If you loved seeing Jack Black … rock the children silly on the big screen, you might contract a case of the giggles watching him host this kiddie kudocast (say that 10 times fast). (2006)

However, I’ve discovered that kudo isn’t always a backformation. If you’re talking about mixed martial arts, it’s a portmanteau of karate and judo!

Overpowered!

It’s been more than four years since Doug and Adam got the game Hyper Crush Bros. Knockdown-Dragout for the GameCube. (The GameCube!) But they still play it, as well as the sequel game that came out for the Wii a couple of years later. For all the first-person shooters that Doug plays (which he calls FPSs), with realistic weapons like submachine guns (SMGs), he has said more than once that the best party videogame is this one. Adam agrees. And just tonight, they were down in the basement playing Hyper Crush on the GameCube, because of a glitch that Adam read about today.

The most formidable opponent in the game, the final boss at the end of some mode of play or another, is nothing but a giant hand that can pound you, smack you, drill you into the fighting platform, or just flick you away into the vast reaches of space. Adam found out about a glitch that would let you actually play as this Master Hand, not just face it as a boss.

I hadn’t remembered that Master Hand was a non-playable character, so I asked, “Oh, you couldn’t play as Master Hand before?”

“Oh, no,” Doug answered;

Think about it; he’d be overpowered.

With the meaning of overpowered that I’ve used most of my life, this sentence is completely contrary to what I know Master Hand. It means that playing as Master Hand, you’d be quickly and easily defeated. But with the meaning that Doug standardly uses when talking about characters in his FPSs that have too many weapons and abilities, it means that nothing could defeat you.

The ambiguity comes down to the ambiguity of the -ed suffix. Its the past participle suffix, of course, so for a verb like overpower, the -ed suffix gives us the overpowered that means (in the words of the OED) “Subdued or overcome by a superior force or influence; overwhelmed.”

But -ed can also attach to nouns, to give us adjectives that mean “having [NOUN],” as in a one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people eater. Attach it to the noun power, and you get powered with the meaning “having power”. Of course, power is also a verb, so you can get the homonym powered “having been supplied with power”, which means pretty much the same thing as noun-derived powered. But here’s where things get different. When you attach over to the noun-derived powered, you get Doug’s meaning of overpowered. As it turns out, this definition is in the OED, too: “Having a greater than usual or excessive degree of (mechanical) power.” They have attestations going back to 1971:

• 1971 A. Diment Think Inc. iv. 56 Fast acceleration because Corvairs are overpowered if anything which is definitely the right way to be.
• 1990 Good Housek. May 7/2 (advt.) And because it powers a more efficient vacuum cleaner, it doesn’t need to be overpowered.
• 2000 J. Doyle Taken for Ride xxii. 440 The industry moved from four- to six-cylinder engines in the 1930s..to the overpowered Pontiac GTO and Dodge Charger muscle cars of the 1960s and 1970s.

The OED even agrees with my morphological analysis. Look at its etymology for my meaning of overpowered and for Doug’s:

• [verb-derived] Etymology: < overpower v. + -ed suffix1.
• [noun-derived] Etymology: < over- prefix + powered adj.

Or in the presentation style that I prefer, here is the latest in a list of English contronyms, joining cleave, sanction, and all the rest:

Illegal Immigrants

With the recently re-ignited debate over the term illegal immigrant, I have heard all the arguments against using the term, including:

1. It is politically divisive or inflammatory.
2. It presumes guilt before due process has been done.
3. It is inaccurate in characterizing people who entered legally but overstayed their visa, or did not come here of their own accord.
4. It is nonsensical, because illegal refers to acts, not to people.

I will grant (1), and add that the same applies to the euphemistic undocumented immigrant (and the dysphemistic illegal alien). I will also grant (2), but add that this is fixable with the well-accepted use of alleged in cases where there is doubt. I will also grant (3). But as for (4), this argument is just plain silly, and grasping at straws.

I will grant that when illegal modifies a noun, that noun usually refers to an action. I will further grant that when it does modify a noun that refers to a thing, it usually means that the thing is illegal to possess, as in illegal drugs and illegal weapons. Using those collocations as analogies, we would expect illegal immigrant to mean an immigrant that it is illegal for someone to possess–in other words, a victim of human trafficking. That, of course, is not the meaning that it has.

In fact, that is a good argument (in addition to arguments about dehumanization) for abandoning the term illegal alien. However, that still doesn’t mean that illegal immigrant is nonsense. When the noun is the agentive form of a verb, and the adjective is the morphological analog of a manner adverb, there is a common, productive rule of semantic composition that gets you to the accepted meaning. Let me illustrate with an example unburdened by controversy. If I were to say, “Sandy is a deep thinker,” it would be willfully obtuse to say, “Hey, wait a minute! People can’t be deep!” If I were to tell you, “Lee is a beautiful dancer,” I could be telling the truth even if Lee’s face, when covered by a paper bag, could still make clocks lose two minutes per hour. In short,

dances beautifully : beautiful dancer :: thinks deeply : deep thinker :: immigrates illegally : illegal immigrant

Object to the term illegal immigrant on ethical, political, or legal grounds if you want to. But don’t resort to claiming the term embodies sloppy semantics, when it’s the most natural way to refer to someone who immigrated illegally. That just makes it look like you’ll accept any old argument that favors your side, and weakens the more valid ones.

Update, Oct. 16, 2012: Changed list item #2 from “were born here” (which I’ve known since elementary school automatically confers citizenship) to what I meant to say: “entered legally but overstayed their visa”.

Un-, Non- and Not

When we watched the Olympics opening ceremonies earlier this month, Adam got his first look at Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean character. He liked it enough that we watched the movie Bean with him and Doug a few days later. I have never seen Adam laugh so hard as when Mr. Bean’s attempted repair of Whistler’s painting Arrangement in Grey and Black was revealed. Some time later Adam referred to Rowan Atkinson by his character’s name, and Doug got on his case about it. Adam defended his choice by remarking:

Rowan Atkinson is an uninteresting name. Mr. Bean is.

Using my ordinary rules for expanding out VP ellipsis, I look for the thing earlier in the sentence that can appear as the complement of is, and end up with this:

Rowan Atkinson is an uninteresting name. Mr. Bean is [an uninteresting name].

Huh? That’s no good. If Adam had intended to say both names were uninteresting, I would have expected a too at the end, and maybe even an and connecting the two clauses. For me, one way of expressing Adam’s thought would be:

Rowan Atkinson is an uninteresting name. Mr. Bean isn’t [an uninteresting name].

But it’s hard to process those two negations, isn’t [uninteresting], one of which is unspoken. More likely, I would have said:

Rowan Atkinson is not an interesting name. Mr. Bean is [an interesting name].

So in Adam’s sentence, the negative prefix un-, which should be stuck tight to the adjective interesting, has wiggled loose to roam its clause at large, as if it were the free-standing negator not. How strange. Of course, we all know that Rowan Atkinson is the more interesting name, regardless of Adam’s statement.

Not long after that, I heard the same thing happen with another negative prefix. Someone on the news on the radio was talking about super PACs and the unlimited amounts of money that are flooding this year’s political campaigns, and he mentioned

groups that purport to be nonpartisan but often are

Again, going by the usual rules, we get nonsense:

groups that purport to be nonpartisan but often are [nonpartisan]

For that to make sense in isolation, the but would have to be an and, and of course even that would make no sense as a description of the current political funding scene. What the speaker meant was,

groups that purport to be nonpartisan but often aren’t [nonpartisan]

Once again, it would have been hard to process those two negatives, one of which isn’t even spoken. He could have also phrased his thought like this:

groups that claim they are not partisan but often are [partisan]

That sentence took a little more tweaking in order to turn the non into a not, and I could well imagine that the speaker began with a common-enough phrase, purport to be, and then just couldn’t find a smooth way to finish the thought in the time he had. So now I wonder: Were Adam’s and the pundit’s sentences mistakes, things they would not have said if they had had a few more seconds to plan their utterances, or are negative prefixes truly free to behave this way in their grammars? How about in yours?

Comparatively Well Done!

Here’s a question for the carnivores out there, in particular the steak-eaters. Suppose you like your steak cooked medium rare. Your father, however, likes his done medium well, and your mother likes hers well done. How would you sum up how your parents like their steak, compared to you?

The most straightforward answer seems like it ought to be My parents like their steak better done than I like mine. We’re modifying the degree of wellness, and the comparative of well is the suppletive form better; hence, better done. But that answer doesn’t sound right when I say it. The only meaning I can get for it is a steak that has been more skillfully prepared. It doesn’t get any hits on COCA, either. It does get a very, very few hits on Google, though, including:

• Works for my wife who likes her steak better done than the rest of the family.
• He could have ordered his steak better done.

If better done is excluded, then I guess the answer would be the default, analytic comparative form that you get with adjectives and adverbs that don’t have an -er comparative: My parents like their steak more well done than I like mine. This is definitely a more popular answer. When I searched for “more well done”, I got two hits on COCA, and 179 on Google for “steak more well done”. (That’s an actual 179, by the way. The first page of results said there were 9800 of them, but I paged to the end to get the real number.) Here’s an example from each:

• If you want it a little more well done, you’re going to leave it on a little bit longer.
• If you would like the steak more well done, turn the heat down on the pan and continue cooking it for a few more minutes after it has been browned.

However, neither better done nor more well done is what I’ve found myself starting to say more than once. What I’ve wanted to say has been weller done. I’m guessing that since well has a more specialized meaning here than it does in phrases like live well or speak well, or even in the British congratulation Well done!, I’m treating the two as separate but homonymous words. Those who say better done I would say still have how-do-you-want-your-steak well as the same word as the more general-purpose adverb well. Those who say more well done don’t. Instead, they consider well done something like a compound adjective, and use more to make a comparative form the same as they do with compound adjective phrases like more able to meet your needs. As for my weller done, that has something in common with each of the other solutions. Like better done, it takes well as the word to be comparativized, but like more well done, it does not consider this well and the more general-purpose well to be the same word.

One more option I thought of is doner. It seems to me that I’ve probably heard this at least once in my lifetime, but I don’t find any hits for this option, either in COCA or Google.

So I ask you again: How would you express this thought?

UPDATE, July 23, 2012: I forgot until I came across it in my Notes app on my phone that I’ve actually heard weller done in the wild. I was ordering some take-out food, including some baked-to-order cookies. I told the cashier I wanted them cooked well, not doughy in the middle, and she instructed the baker to make them “weller done”.

Podcast Linkfest

I’ve been enjoying listening to a couple of language-related podcasts recently. First is one from Slate, called Lexicon Valley, hosted by Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield. In their six episodes to date, they have talked about:

1. The history of the proscription against ending a sentence with a preposition
2. The development of faggot as a slur against male homosexuals, with commentary by Arnold Zwicky
3. Whether between you and I is a case of hypercorrection, or if another rule can describe its distribution.
4. Black English, with commentary from Walt Wolfram (which they pronounce as “Wolf-Ram”)
5. What a controversy the publication of Webster’s Third caused in 1961
6. What insights Scrabble can and cannot give into the nature of English

The episodes are all about half an hour long, and even the ones I didn’t think I’d be too interested in (the dictionary, Scrabble) have turned out to be quite interesting after all. Furthermore, they’re linguistically sound. With all the complaints at Language Log and other places about how news media just can’t be bothered to fact-check anything related to language, I have yet to hear a piece of bad information here. The only part I don’t care too much for is their “lexiconundrum” puzzlers at the end of each episode.

There are no further episodes of Lexicon Valley yet; apparently, these six episodes were a trial run. So listen to them quick, and if you like them, go say so on iTunes, as I’m about to do now.

The other podcast is Conlangery, “the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them,” hosted by George Corley, Bianca Richards, and William Anniss (sp?). In each episode, these three talk about some aspect of language — discourse particles, dialects, sound systems — ostensibly with the intent of giving conlangers (i.e. language creators) tips and ideas to use in their conlangs. However, the information and observations they bring in should be interesting to anyone interested in language, even if they have no interest whatsoever in creating one. Each episode also has a featured conlang.

Unlike Lexicon Valley, each episode of Conlangery lasts about a full hour, but unlike Lexicon Valley, Conlangery has more than 40 episodes so far, with no sign of quitting yet. The discussions are unscripted, with George loosely moderating and all three making contributions as the spirit moves them. There are sometimes strange background noises (like a recurring “clac-k-k-k-k-k-k” in one episode), and George’s hesitant speaking style takes a little getting used to, but it’s a fun podcast and I look forward to catching up on the episodes I haven’t listened to yet.

While I’m in a link-loving mood, here are a couple of non-podcast links. First, Jonathon Owen’s two most recent posts. If you thought benefactive datives such as I love me some barbecue brisket sounded strange, you’ll find this construction a little bit stranger. In the other post, he talks about a question I’ve had for a while: If plural -s is pronounced as [z] after a vowel, then why is the plural of die still dice instead of dies?

Lastly, a post from Arnold Zwicky about people who “look their nose down” (not “look down their nose”) at things they disapprove of. It reminded me of my own posts about particles, prepositions, and phrasal verbs.