Pears and Pineapple

“Best by May 2008,” I read on the bottom of the can of pears. Did that mean best by May 1, I wondered, or best by May 31? Probably May 31, I decided. In any case, even if it meant by May 1, that didn’t mean the pears were actually bad, did it? Just not at their peak of flavor, right? After all, best by wasn’t the same as use by, or even sell by. All the same, I knew if my wife saw that label, she’d throw the pears out. So I did what needed to be done: I opened the can and served those pears to Doug and Adam for breakfast.

Every Monster’s Mouth

A friend of mine recently wrote, asking:

I have a question regarding grammar. We have a book called “One Hungry Monster” and throughout the story, you get to count monsters from 1 to 10 as they beg to be fed. Finally, the little boy decides to feed them, and then you get to count from 1 to 10 the different types of food he brings (2 loaves of bread etc.) The 10th thing is “10 jars of peanut butter”, but the boy adds “and not a speck of jam, because I want every monster mouth shut tighter than a clam. Should it be “monster mouth” or “monster’s mouth”? I think they both sound correct, so I have no idea.

I was a little surprised by this question, since this book didn’t seem at all like my friend’s typical taste in leisure reading, and I’m almost certain she can count much higher than 10. Anyway, I’ll share what I wrote back:

Every monster mouth and every monster’s mouth are both correct. The first is just the compound noun monster mouth (it doesn’t matter that it’s written as two words) just like peanut butter or oven cleaner, put together with the determiner every to make a noun phrase. (A noun phrase is a noun plus any adjectives you care to add [in this case, none] and a
determiner if needed. Determiners include a, the, some, every, no, etc., as well as possessive forms: my, your, Neal’s, every monster’s.) Every monster’s mouth is a noun phrase, too, consisting of the plain old non-compound noun mouth and a determiner: every monster’s. (Inside that determiner lurks another noun phrase: every monster. But that’s another story.) In short:

Other grammar questions? Send them here!

More on Whomever

If you found this post on whoever vs. whomever interesting, you can find further discussion of whomever in this post from Arnold Zwicky at the new and improved Language Log site. He identifies the origin of the confusion over whomever as “an unexamined theoretical assumption about syntax” that is still taught in schools (at least, in those that actually teach grammar).

Like It Or Not

I’m sure all my grammar-conscious readers have laughed over sentences like this one:

I wish I had a house like you.

Ha, ha! Funny, right? The speaker wishes he had a house that resembles you! Or maybe he means a house that is as friendly, supportive, and nonjudgmental as you are. Or maybe it’s just a mistake, and the speaker meant to say

I wish I had a house like yours.

And then there’s George Michael, who sings,

I know not everybody
has a body like you.

This one could pass, depending on your philosophical stance on whether one consists only of one’s body or if there’s a soul that persists after the body is gone. So I won’t pick on that one.

But even though careful writers will avoid errors like the above, there’s a whole class of widespread similar mistakes that I’ve never heard a complaint about. Get a load of these:

• In a clublike atmosphere, Jackson’s Steakhouse satisfies.
  No: The atmosphere is not like a club; it’s like a club’s atmosphere
• Or the apes with human-like feet, adapted for bipedal movement?
  No: Their feet are not like humans; their feet are like humans’ feet.
• The animal also had a parrotlike beak and a large horn over its nose.
  No: Its beak was not like a parrot; its beak was like a parrot’s beak.
• I had a parrotlike tendency to repeat things.
  No: Your tendency to repeat things was not like a parrot; it was like a parrot’s tendency to repeat things.
• Some of these fireworks are not just loud pops but some make cannonlike sounds.
  No: The sounds are not like a cannon; they are like a cannon’s sounds.
• Triceratops possessed a strong, turtlelike beak.
  No: Its beak was not like a turtle; it was like a turtle’s beak.
• Tirelessly touring, the band has a cult-like status to their die-hard army of fans.
  No: The band’s status is not like a cult; it is like the status of a cult.
• News organisations should not go into ostrich-like denial but open themselves up.
  No: Their denial is not like an ostrich; it is like an ostrich’s denial.
• An octopus-like obsession with loyalty
  No: their obsession is not like an octopus; it is like an octopus’s obsession.
• Momus continues his stalker-like obsession with Marxy.
  No: his obsession is not like a stalker; it is like a stalker’s obsession.
• Its primary tenet seems to be the lemming-like tendency to mob attack anyone who doesn’t bow before it.
  No: its tendency is not like a lemming; it is like a lemming’s tendency.

Now for some good examples:

• Ankylosaurus protected itself with spikes, bony plates of armor, and a long clublike tail.
  Yes: Its tail was like a club.
• Discusses the selection and care of the parrotlike bird known as the cockatiel.
  Yes: The cockatiel is like a parrot.
• He aims the cannonlike weapon.
  Yes: The weapon is like a cannon.
• The turtlelike device is the sibling to Roomba, which had already won our hearts for its automated vacuuming.
  Yes: The device is like a turtle.
• Leica has a cult-like following among classic camera aficionados.
  Yes: Its following is like a cult.
• The earliest fossil of ostrich-like birds is the Central European Palaeotis.
  Yes: The birds are like ostriches.

As for the bad examples, they should of course be corrected to human’s-like feet, parrot’s-like beak/tendency, cannon’s-like sound, turtle’s-like beak, cult’s-like status, etc. It’s a disgrace how even the best writers are oblivious to this lapse in logic. To those of you with sufficient regard for proper grammar and attention to detail to have already been taking care to write ostrich’s-like denial, stalker’s-like obsession, and lemming’s-like tendency, I salute you! You have the souls of grammarians! Or should I say, grammarian’s-like souls!

Even More Contamination

I told Doug the joke that ends with the punchline, “There’s gotta be a pony in here somewhere!” He loved it, and told it to his mom that night. He started out:

Some psychiatrists did an experiment on two kids. One was an optimist, and the other was a pestimist….

Getting Testy

I was flipping through the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly today, and came across an ad for a show on the Travel Channel called Bizarre Foods. I’d paste it in here if I could find it online, but the best I can get is this page on the Travel Channel website. In the middle (at least as of this writing) there is a looping video that begins with the caption “What is Andrew putting in his mouth?” A couple of pictures later you’ll see the ad that I saw in the magazine. The host of the show, Andrew Zimmern, is standing in front of a vending machine stocked with:

• Lamb’s Head
• Heart, All Beef
• Fish Head, Complete With Eyeballs
• Tarantula
• Baby Mice
• Curried Cockroaches
• Bull Teste
• Scorpion
• Sour Cream and Onion flavored crickets
• Cheddar Cheese flavored mealworms
• Mexican Spice flavored mealworms
• Bugs N Things
• Worms & Flies
• Eye Balls
• Crispy Fish Head
• Grubs
• Mealworms

Did you spot the backformation in the list? Yes, that’s right, it was teste, formed by naively removing the -s from the plural testes to get the putative singular.

Often I have to remind myself that just because I can understand how some piece of the language has changed, it doesn’t mean I have to like it. The singular of testes is not teste. It’s testis, just like the singulars of crises, hypotheses, parentheses, and feces are crisis, hypothesis, parenthesis, and fecis.

Whoops. Scratch that last one. Back when the plural was still faeces in Latin, the singular was faex, but that form didn’t make it into English. If you just have to have a singular form of feces and don’t want to resort to suppletion by saying turd, backformation is your best bet: fece. According to Urban Dictionary, this singular form already exists.

Anyway, back to the Latin third-declension nouns ending in -is. I never hear people talking about one crise(e), or one hypothese(e), but I have heard some people refer to one parenthese(e), and now of course, one teste. I guess it’s to be expected, since parentheses, like testes, tend to come in twos, so that speakers are less likely to have heard the singular form and stored it in their memory when they need to use it.

Jump-Roping

There was an eye-catching action shot on the front page of a community newspaper this week. It was taken in an elementary school gym, and showed a first-grade girl jumping rope. (It seems all the local elementary schools do a unit on jumping rope around this time of year.) The photographer had caught her in mid-air, legs bent, arms out, red hair flying out horizontally, and a grin on her face (the usual place for grins to appear, I believe). It was such a neat shot that I showed it to Doug and Adam.

“What’s she doing?” asked Doug as he took the paper. “Oh, she’s jump-roping.”

“Jump-roping, huh?” I said. “Is that how you say it?” I handed the paper to Adam. “What would you say she’s doing, Adam? Jumping rope, or jump-roping?”

Adam thought for a second, then said, “Jumping rope.”

“Well, jump-roping is what all my friends say,” Doug told us.

I get 418K Google hits for “jumping rope”, and 127K for “jumproping”, “jump roping”, and “jump ropeing” combined. There were enough hits for jump-roping compared to jumping rope that my suspicion is that jump-roping has been around for quite a while. I don’t have any data correlating these forms with age, so I can’t say if jump-roping is something that’s only recently caught on. However, if Doug’s friends are representative of the general population of American English-speaking kids, I’m getting a feeling of deja vu.

Implicit Backformation?

I think it was the E-E-A sequence that caught my eye. I was sitting at a cafeteria table, looking at the stand-up card with a picture of a slice of pie on it. I’d pushed it out of the way with my tray when I sat down, but now that I’d been eating for a few minutes, my eye was drawn back to the card. Paying closer attention now, I saw that it wasn’t just an advertisement for the place’s desserts; it was an encouragement to get their desserts to go. It said:

Homeeat a homemade dessert.

Homeeat? There is no entry for homeeat or home eat in my Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, and I have yet to find any attestations of it online. The meaning was clear enough: to eat at home. But how had they formed the word?

If He and She Is Right, Why Does It Sound So Weird?

When Doug’s teacher returns a graded paper to him, he rolls it up into a tight cylinder. He does this so that he can poke it into his almost-but-not-quite zipped up backpack without having to take the backpack off its hook. After lunch he unzips the backpack enough to stuff his lunchbox into it. He leaves the backpack half unzipped after this, which allows him to shove in any later-arriving papers without having to roll them up. I have assembled this picture from regularly emptying his backpack of one or two randomly wrinkled papers, then his lunchbox, and finally, one by one, any rolled-then-flattened papers hiding underneath it. Once I’ve thown the lunchbox back on top of the fridge, it’s time to unfurl the papers and look at them. The last one I looked at yesterday was a language arts paper. Doug had had to identify a few sentences as declarative, interrogative, etc., label nouns as singular or plural, and correct some sentences. One of the sentences to be corrected was:

him and her take ice skating lessons on wednesday

Doug’s answer:

Congestion Question

Saturday morning: As I scrubbed the dried-up remains of last night’s cat food out of the bowls, Doug entered the kitchen. He sniffed. “Blueberry muffins!” he exclaimed. His favorite. He looked around to see where they were. None were in sight. “Oh,” he said. “I forgot. I always smell blueberry muffins when my nose is stoffed up.”

How unusual, I thought. This calls for some investigation.