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.

Ass/Fucking Intensification

Several years ago, when Randall Munroe’s xkcd web comic still consisted mostly of scanned images of doodles from his graph-paper notebooks, I got a laugh out of this one:

It’s funny because it’s true: I do the same thing.

In September 2010, Munroe revisited the topic of obscenity-based intensifiers with this diagram:

Although Munroe didn’t include ass in this survey, I’d say the same adjectives that you don’t find intensified with fucking or as shit, you also don’t find intensified with ass. A lot of the discussion on the xkcd forum focused on which adjectives could and couldn’t be intensified in these ways, but as I thought about these three obscenity-based intensifiers, it occurred to me that even one and the same adjective can’t always be intensified by all three of these intensifiers. In fact, I discovered that the rules for how to use fucking, ass, and as shit are pretty subtle.

For comparison, let’s look at the intensifier really. You can use really to intensify a predicative adjective (i.e., an adjective that comes after the linking verb be), as in

This car is really sweet.

You can also use it to intensify an attributive adjective (i.e., one that modifies a noun), as in

He has a really sweet car.

Fucking can intensify both predicative and attributive adjectives, too; you can substitute fucking for really in both of the example sentences with no problem:

This car is fucking sweet.
He has a fucking sweet car.

So can as shit, although as we see below, it starts to get a little awkward before an attributive adjective. That’s probably due to long adjective phrases in general not sounding so good before the nouns they modify.

This car is sweet as shit.
?He has a sweet-as-shit car.

Ass, however, can intensify only attributive adjectives. Put it with a predicative adjective and it’s just silly:

*This car is sweet-ass.
He has a sweet-ass car.

By the way, if someone says something is as “nasty as shit” or “disgusting as shit”, you might be able to interpret as shit is an ordinary comparative phrase. But when they say “sweet as shit”, you know as shit has now become completely grammaticalized as an intensifier. Come to think of it, the same goes for pissed as shit, something I actually heard a dormmate say in college.

So anyway, as I was saying, it looks like two of the obscenity-based intensifiers, fucking and as shit, can go with either predicative or attributive adjectives, while ass is limited to attributives. This peculiarity of ass may be a relic of its origin. Patricia O’Conner writes on her Grammarphobia blog that the original ass-suffixed adjective was big, and at first it was written big-assed, and referred to people that had big asses. She cites the Oxford English Dictionary‘s first attestation, from 1944:

The marines’ chosen name for their female aides is bams, from big-assed marines.

O’Conner continues:

An extended use of this literal meaning—applied to airplanes with big rear ends—was recorded in the military beginning in 1945. Both the OED and the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang have citations from that time, when a plane with a large tail section (especially the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress) was referred to as a “big-ass bird” or “big-assed bird.”

The phonetic simplification from big-assed to big-ass is unsurprising; it’s exactly the same change that took place in ice(d) cream and is ongoing in ice(d) tea (which with the right accent can even sound like “ass tea”). The semantic shift from something with a big ass to something that is itself big is understandable as well. The OED‘s earliest example of that is from 1945, referring to a policeman’s “big ass nightstick”.

But the complications don’t end with the limitation of ass to attributive adjective modification. With fucking and as shit both able to modify predicative adjectives, there is the possibility of using both in a single predicative adjective phrase, as in

(That’s) fucking annoying as shit.

You can get a similar doubling fucking and ass with attributive adjectives; for example,

a fucking sweet-ass car

This kind of double intensification is much less natural with other intensifiers; for instance, ?his really very expensive car is questionable. You can also pair fucking with really or very, but there’s a condition: fucking gets to be closer to the noun:

a really/very fucking expensive car
*a fucking really/very expensive car

(You might be thinking that a fucking really expensive car sounds fine, but what’s going on there is that fucking is modifying the entire nominal really expensive car, the same way as it could to with car all by itself: His fucking car is parked across the sidewalk! If you put in some other adjectives and separate fucking from the nominal, the phrase is questionable at best: ?/*a totally awesome but fucking really expensive car.)

I’ve paired fucking with as shit, and fucking with ass, but what about ass with as shit? Sorry, no can do:

*This car is sweet-ass as shit.
*He bought a sweet-ass as shit car.

It’s no surprise that predicative sweet-ass as shit is no good, given that predicative sweet-ass is no good, either. Attributive *sweet-ass as shit may be ungrammatical simply because it’s a long adjective phrase coming before the noun it modifies–the same thing that happened with ?sweet as shit car, but made worse now with the addition of ass-intensification.

Another wrinkle turns up when it comes to comparative forms of adjectives; i.e. their -er or more ___ forms. Fucking, like really and very, can’t modify comparative forms, whether they’re predicative or attributive adjective. The same goes for ass with its attributive adjectives:

*This car is really/very/fucking sweeter.
*He has a really/very/fucking sweeter car than me.
*He has a really/very sweeter car than me.
*He has a sweeter-ass car than me.

So early in 2011 when the question came up on Twitter on what the proper comparative of bad-ass should be, the answer should have been not worse-ass, bad-asser, or even badder-asser, but none of the above.

Once again, though, the obscenity-based intensifiers are different from ordinary intensifiers. They can modify comparatives after all, provided they get introduced by a lot:

This car is a lot fucking sweeter.
He has a lot fucking sweeter car.

(There’s also the question of why it’s not *an a lot fucking sweeter car, but that’s another story.)

But wait a minute! What about as shit? It has complications of its own. I said above that it has been completely grammaticalized into an intensifier, but I lied. It still has some of its original meaning–not in the shit part, but in the part that compares some property of the modified noun with that of shit. Sure, to be dumb as shit means to be really dumb, but if we’re talking even dumber than that, we don’t just say *dumber as shit; it has to be dumber than shit.

Intensification with fucking, ass, and as shit: a taste of syntactic anal-ysis.

More Agreement With Nearest in Tag Questions

For my birthday in 1980, I was given the game Black Box. It’s a fun game, and I’ve kept it all these years. The object is to figure out where in an 8×8 grid your opponent has placed five balls. You do this by sending imaginary rays into a plastic model of the grid at various locations, and learning whether they have scored a direct hit, or been deflected in a new direction. When you figure out where a ball is located, you mark its place on the model with one of the yellow balls provided, which are just the right size and color to be delicious yellow gumballs. It occurs to me now that Parker Brothers probably stopped making the game because it was a choking hazard because of the yellow-gumball factor. I still have to resist the urge to pop one of those yellow balls into my mouth when I play Black Box.

I had to resist again when I showed Adam the game a few weeks ago. Adam didn’t seem to be affected; he just kept trying to figure out where I’d hidden my balls (my five balls, that is), and eventually asked me:

This is how your balls are arranged, aren’t they?

He was right, but how about that tag question? You’d expect a tag question starting with This is to end with isn’t it?, but instead it ends with aren’t they. It’s as if the question tag were attaching to the clause your balls are arranged instead of to the larger This is how….

I did something similar during a conversation a few months earlier. I don’t remember what it was about, but I do remember saying this at one point:

You don’t think she’s been coaching him, has she?

Again, you’d think a tag question beginning with You don’t would end with do you? Instead, the tag has been attracted to the smaller clause she’s been coaching him. But it’s not simply a case of agreement with nearest, as I classified it a few years ago. I chose the tag has she instead of does she because of the she’s in that nearer clause, but there’s still a way that the tag is tied to the farther-away clause. Notice that if the tag question were just She’s been coaching him…?, the tag would be hasn’t she instead of has she? The reason I’m able to have a non-negated tag is that the first clause, You don’t think…, is still having an effect. In short, the tag has she is a hybrid: It has the positive polarity of do you but the actual word choice and subject-verb agreement of hasn’t she.

One of these days when it’s not so late at night, I’ll get on COCA and see how often this kind of quasi-agreement-with-nearest turns up. In the meantime, your own real-life examples are welcome in the comments.

UPDATE, Jan. 12, 2011: I’ve replaced the paragraph discussing the coaching question with one that has a more explicit and (I hope) clearer discussion, and deleted the paragraph that originally came after it. Now I tell myself once again: Don’t do linguistics blogging so late at night! And this time I mean it!

uttered by me; what context?

Why To Bother?

A couple of months ago, I caught a few minutes of a local morning news show. Coming up was a segment featuring a guy selling a system that would protect your gutter from leaf debris and other gunk. As a teaser for the segment, just before the commercial break, there was a message on the bottom of the screen saying

Why to clean your roof

That one phrase poked a hole in what I’d thought was an interesting case of complementary distribution, which I’d only noticed a few weeks before. I had been thinking about tenseless clauses — clauses in which the verbs don’t have tense, such as Me worry? More specifically, I’d been thinking about tenseless WH questions, such as What to do?, which you might find as rhetorical questions or in soliloquies. For most WH words, the tenseless question uses an infinitive. If you just use the plain form of the verb, it’s ungrammatical:

• what to do / *what do
• who(m) to call / *who(m) call
• where to go / *where go
• when to go / *when go
• how to do it / *how do it

For one WH word, though, the pattern is reversed. At least, that’s what I thought:

*why to bother / why bother

I wondered if semantic, pragmatic, or functional differences between tenseless why questions and other tenseless WH questions might explain the difference in syntax. One difference in pragmatics that occurred to me is that the who/what/where/when/how questions are asking the details about an action that you’ve already decided you’re going to do. The why question does not make this presupposition. If you’re asking for a reason to do something, you haven’t decided you’re going to do it yet. But I didn’t see how that would bear on the choice of an infinitive over a plain verb form.

A functional difference that I noticed is that tenseless who/what/where/when/how questions are usually asked to oneself, often in literary contexts (a fact that CGEL notes), with an intention of finding an answer. The why question, on the other hand, is often asked of someone else, with the function of advising against a course of action, the understood answer being “there’s no reason to take this action.” Again, though, I didn’t see what that would have to do with the choice of an infinitive over a plain verb.

There was also, I thought, another syntactic difference, beyond the use of an infinitive or a plain verb form. The infinitival WH questions could stand alone as questions to oneself, or as embedded questions: I know {what to do, who(m) to call, where to go, when to go, how to do it. The tenseless WH questions using the plain form of a verb do not work as embedded questions: *I don’t know why to bother. But this difference still didn’t seem to say anything about the other differences.

After seeing the teaser on TV, I wondered if the original syntactic difference I’d noticed was real at all. A look into COCA shows that it’s not. Out of 103 results for why to, here is just a handful of the relevant hits to go with why to clean your roof:

• Students will need clear and understandable (browsable) instructions for how to do this as well as why to do this.
• He said he wants to cut contracting by 10 percent a year for the next three years, which, if you do the math, is about one quarter – a little more than a quarter of all contractors. Why to do that?
• Knowing what to do, how do it, and perhaps most important, why to do it has become an integral part of teaching.
• Here are some common reasons why people write short stories… and why to ignore them.
• think of how many articles help educate readers about how and why to do something
• Within a sport applications course devoted to teaching preservice physical education majors how and why to modify outdoor sports for secondary students, a 6-day flag football season structured around the Sport Education model is included.
• I think we lack common sense at times in our judgments of why to justify something.
• Instead, money had become why to do anything and everything.
• Not just telling them to be good people, but how to do it and why to do it.
• The Navajo storyteller Yellowman was asked why to bother to tell Coyote stories to adults.

I even found an embedded why to question:

But when you can say you are a litigator specializing in construction accidents relating to asbestos removal, then people are going to know why to hire you.

That said, there are still a lot fewer COCA hits for why to questions than there are who(m)/what/where/when/how to:

• how to: 70K
• what to: 20K
• where to: 7K
• when to: 3K
• who(m) to: 1.5K
• why to: 100

Now that I’ve learned that why can indeed go with infinitives, what about the other direction, with WH words other than why going with the plain form of the verb? That’s harder to search for, but if you find one in the wild, please put it in the comments.

I’m a Believer That

In September, Benjamin Barrett posted this message to the American Dialect Society email list:

A non-native speaker of English asks me whether the following is grammatical:

“I’m a firm believer that anyone can have a breakthrough right in her own backyard.”

It’s from an essay of Oprah in the current issue of O Magazine.

It took me about five reads before I spotted anything possibly amiss, but “a firm believer that” definitely appears wrong now that I see it.

I think this must come from a cross of “I’m a firm believer in the idea that” and “I firmly believe that.”

You have to wonder how bad something actually sounds to someone if they had to read it five times before they even identified it as something possibly ungrammatical. Still, as I thought about Barrett’s message, I realized that this agent nominalization of the verb believe was different from those of (other) transitive verbs. For example, the verb find takes a noun phrase (NP) object, as in find the lost wallet. But when you use the noun finder, you can’t just put an NP after it: *finder the lost wallet. You have to use an adaptor of sorts: the preposition of: finder of the lost wallet. (This paper by Mark C. Baker and Nadya Vinokurova discusses this fact for English and Yakuts, and has references to other literature on the subject.)

Prepositional phrase (PP) complements can go with a verb or its agent nominal with no change in form at all. For example, you can regularly listen to a radio program, or you can be a regular listener to Talk of the Nation (an example I found in COCA). (PP adjuncts don’t go so well with agent nominals. I wash with soap, but I’m not a *washer with soap.) I’m not sure about infinitival complements. You can say that Evel Knievel attempted to jump the Snake River Canyon, but you wouldn’t say that Knievel was an attemptor to jump it. As for clausal complements, believer shows that they can go with at least one verb or its agent nominal with no change necessary.

Here are some of the relevant examples of believer that that I found in COCA. There were 133 results; I just looked at the first page of 20 and found 18 relevant examples:

1. I’m a believer that a president looks strongest and best in mid-November to the end of December
2. I’m a big believer that there are 8-10 teams in the Western Conference that are about equal.
3. Im a believer that both Peru and Aruba cant wait to ship him back to Birmingh
4. I’m a firm believer that as long as we have the right science and the right engineering behind it
5. I’m a firm believer that you should be your best you.
6. WHETHER you’re an unwavering carnivore or a believer that burgers are only for statin dependents,
7. I am a believer that the system has gone badly awry and needs massive reform
8. Yoo is a firm believer that it is better to let each of the departments of the government stake its
9. Here’s why I’m a Believer that Neil Diamond belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
10. So you’re a believer that your body will tell you what it needs?
11. I’m always a believer that you would do better to let Microsoft to do a first service pack
12. I’m always a believer that you would do better to let Microsoft to do a first service pack
13. I’m a strong believer that each man has a destiny.
14. I’m a firm believer that a coach is whatever his record is.
15. I am a firm believer that, if you look good, you might feel better.
16. I’ve always been a firm believer that hard work pays off
17. I’m a strong believer that if the state would take the lead, it would make a huge difference
18. Vygotsky is a firm believer that social interaction and cultural influences have a

There were only 30 results for the plural believers that, of which the following eight were relevant:

1. people who are interested in alternative medicine even though they aren’t gung-ho believers that it’s a cure-all.
2. Some bolters are perennial quitters of associations or believers that the grass is always greener elsewhere.
3. While we’re firm believers that there’s something to love about nearly every beach
4. Lew and I may be the last of the naive believers that the system works if you get folks involved in it.
5. people in the chip industry are much more believers that this strain is good
6. the majority of us who are true supporters and believers that Bob Dole is the next president to lead us into the next century
7. And I’m pretty sure that I’m turning some of you guys into believers that I can evolve into myself at any given time.
8. Keith and I are firm believers that what goes around comes around.

For comparison, I also looked for agent nominals of other verbs that take clausal complements, but they’re hard to come by. All the COCA results I got for sayer were proper names. I got a few results for claimer, but none followed by a that clause expressing the claim. Nor with thinker or announcer. I did hit pay dirt with indicator:

Larger breasts sag over time, so it was an indicator that a woman was older.

Can anyone think of others?

Coming back to believer that, I did a search for Barrett’s preferred phrasing, believer in the idea that, and got exactly two results:

1. Houston appears to be a firm believer in the idea that love can conquer all.
2. I’m a firm believer in the idea that one person can make a difference

It looks like the shorter believer that option is the clear winner. In a later message, Barrett accepted the phrasing as “idiomatic usage”, but my conclusion is that this is just an ordinary agent nominalization of a verb that takes a clausal complement.

Too Much

Back in October, I wrote about the opinion that thank you much is ungrammatical. I quoted a comment I left on one website where the issue came up:

“Thank you much” IS a complete sentence, at least if you accept “Thank you” as a complete (albeit noncanonical) sentence in the first place. If you object to “much” instead of “very much”, note that it appears alone in questions and negative sentences, e.g. “he doesn’t talk much”, “Does he talk much?” If you’re objecting to the use of plain “much” outside these “negative polarity contexts”, that’s a different matter, because that does sound odd in present-day English.

In the course of writing the thank you much post, I came across this video for learners of English as a foreign language:

In it, a teacher named Valen explains how to use much, many, and a lot of. Her explicit message is that much goes with mass nouns; many goes with count nouns; and a lot of goes with either. But in her examples, she seems to send the message that unadorned much is a no-no. Valen’s first two examples with much are:

I drank too much water.
Our teacher gave us too much homework.

Then she moves on to an example with many: Many cars are equipped with GPS systems. After that, she illustrates the mistake of putting many with a mass noun:

*I drank many coffee.

She then reiterates that since coffee is a mass noun, it can’t go with many, but can go with much. She erases many from the sentence, and replaces it not with much, as she seemed to be getting ready to do, but with too much:

I drank too much coffee.

Never a word of explanation why she’s doing this. (Also noted: She pronounces /str/ as [ʃtr], at least in the word abstract.)

Since that post last month, I’ve been thinking more about whether much is becoming (or has become) a negative polarity item (NPI). Whatever its status, it’s certainly not purely an NPI, since there are so many positive polarity contexts in which it sounds OK; for example, in the company of modifiers such as very (as in Thank you ~ much) and too (as in the video), much doesn’t sound bad at all.

As it turns out, Ji Won Lee at SUNY Buffalo has been looking into the question of NPI much, using an arsenal of corpora to find out. On her web page are handouts from several presentations on this topic. Her findings include that the development of much as an NPI was followed by the rise of a lot of/lots of, and that the shift to mostly-NPI much (and to some extent many, too) happened pretty quickly, between the late 1890s and 1940.

UPDATE, Nov. 29, 2011: Joe Kessler (in the comments) and JillianP (via Twitter) and Ji Won herself (in a polite email) have made me aware that I chose the wrong gendered pronouns to refer to Ji Won in the post. I have made the corrections, and apologize for the error. I’m also embarrassed that I didn’t remember meeting Ji Won at LSA 2011; she reminded me that she had come to look at my poster, and I see in my notes that indeed she did.

The Witch Mary

Grammar Girl is running a guest script I wrote today (that is, she’s running it today; I wrote it some time ago), on difficult syntax in Christmas carols in general, and in particular in “What Child Is This?” The script was inspired by a real-life misunderstanding that Doug had seven years ago, and which I blogged about at the time. I’ve also been thinking about that song because Adam has been practicing playing it on the piano, and he sounds really good!

As I wrote in that blog post and in today’s Grammar Girl podcast, part of the difficulty is due to the perennial confusion between lie and lay (which I also wrote about in this post about the song “If I Just Lay Here”). For a while, I considered concluding the podcast with a sentence or two about how other traditional Christmas carols can serve as good models of for using lie and lay in the way that is currently considered the standard:

• Where the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even
• the little lord Jesus laid down his sweet head
• the stars in the sky looked down where he lay
• how still we see thee lie
• …certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay

I decided against it, because I didn’t want to give the impression that the whole episode was just about lie vs. lay. But as my wife and I were thinking about other Christmas songs, she started running through “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” (which I wrote about last year). The second verse goes like this:

In Bethlehem in Israel this blessed babe was born,
And laid within a manger upon this blessed morn;
The which his mother Mary did nothing take in scorn.

This one isn’t so good for helping you remember the difference between lie and lay. Sure, you could parse it as was [born and laid], the standard way, but if you don’t already know that’s how it’s supposed to be, you could easily just parse it as [was born] and [laid], with laid used nonstandardly as an intransitive verb.

However, that wasn’t the part that grabbed my attention. Before my wife could move to the third verse, I was interrupting with, “Mary, a witch?!” Then: “Oh, which!”

Two changes in English created this misunderstanding. First is the simplification of the consonant cluster [hw] to [w] for many speakers, as highlighted in this Family Guy clip that I learned about from Language Log a few years ago.

Having the last name I do, I think I still have the [hw] cluster in my language. Sometimes when I give my name over the phone, the person on the other end will hear it as “Quitman”, because they don’t have [hw] in their speech and figure that I must have been saying [kʰw] instead of [hw]. On the other hand, other times they’ll simply not hear the [h] at all, and think my name is “Wittman”, which makes me wonder if I actually pronounce [hw] as consistently as I think I do.

The second change is the loss of the which as a relative pronoun. I never knew about it until I listened to this verse. The which is in the Oxford English Dictionary, though. It’s sure enough archaic now, but was showing up in the 1300s, as in this OED citation:

How god bigan þe law hym gyfe Þe quilk the Iuus in suld life.

Their last citation is from 1884, from Tennyson:

He holp the King to break down our castles, for the which I hate him.

There have to be kids who got all confused when they learned Jesus’s mother was a witch. Any of you know of any?

Let’s Hear Some New Grammar Songs!

“You know there’s a helping verb song, right?” Doug asked. “One of Mrs. M’s students wrote it years ago. Mrs. M. taught it to us in fifth grade, and now we all remember all the helping verbs.”

“Really?” I asked. I’m teaching a college ESL class this fall, and had noticed that choosing the right helping verb was a problem in many of the students’ written sentences. Doug had asked how the class was going, so I’d told him. Doug then obliged me by singing the song, to the tune of the chorus of “Jingle Bells”, into my phone’s microphone:

Helping verbs, helping verbs, there are 23!
Am, is, are, was and were, being, been, and be,
Have, has, had, do, does, did, will, would, shall and should.
There are five more helping verbs: may, might, must, can, could!

I figured I could play it for the class, but later, I got a better idea and looked for the song on YouTube. I found at least half a dozen versions, so I’m not sure I believe Mrs. M’s student really did write it. But it’s possible that someone right here in our town was the source of the meme, so I’ll withhold judgment. This video is the one I played for the class:

They loved it, and had me play it several times. I hope it helps them, and I’m not going to say anything to these students about how this song (and various other grammar resources) always leave out the verb having, as in Not having finished his homework, Doug wasn’t allowed to go play with his friends. It doesn’t help to form any of the verb tenses, active or passive voice, so why inflict this complication on English learners at this level? (I did tell Doug and Adam about it, though.)

My students told me I should use more music in the class, so I tried to figure out some way of putting into a song the rules about which main verb forms go with which helping verbs. I eventually settled on “Red River Valley” (or as I was introduced to it in summer camp, “When It’s Hog-Killing Time in Nebraska”). Here’s what I came up with:

Helping verbs need to go with a main verb.
But which form of the main verb is right?
Use the plain form with all of your modals:
Can, could, shall, should, will, would, must, may, and might.

Use the plain form with do, does, and did, too.
Use the past participle with have, has, had.
Use the -ing form with all of your be verbs.
When you know your verb forms you’ll be glad.

Those two verses, including that rather lame last line, were all I wanted to give my class. (If someone has a better last line, I’ll take it!) But I felt compelled to write a final verse, lest someone take the first two verses too much to heart, and be afraid to use past participles with be when they’re more advanced. So here’s verse 3:

This last verse tells about a complication.
Sometimes past participles can go with forms of be.
When they do, it’s a big change in meaning.
Who’s performing the action is key.

Helping Verbs and Main Verbs by Neal Whitman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.youtube.com.

It occurred to me that teachers could probably use some other grammar points put into popular song formats, and that’s what brings me to the latest Grammar Girl book giveaway contest that I promised in my last post. The rules:

1. Between now and 11:59PM November 14, take an existing melody and write some new lyrics for it, explaining some area of English grammar.
2. Post the lyrics in a comment, giving the title of the original song and your new title.
3. If you wish, you can make a video of the song and link to it.
4. Grammar topics can cover the same areas as existing songs about English grammar, or present topics that haven’t been put into song yet.
5. Be linguistically responsible. Prescriptive rules are OK (they’re what this contest is about), but make sure they’re in line with what good writers actually do when writing in standard English. For example, saying that the third-person singular present tense is formed with an -s or -es suffix is OK, but saying that whose is only for animate or human referents is not.
6. Don’t plagiarize!
7. Don’t give me something you already published, on the Internet or elsewhere. I want this contest to generate some new and hopefully useful teaching resources.
8. I’ll wait until it’s November 15 all over the world to make the cutoff, and the writers of the two best songs (in my judgment) will each receive a copy of Grammar Girl’s 101 Words to Sound Smart (thanks to Mignon Fogarty for providing them!).
9. As far as I’m concerned, you retain all rights to your song, but in the spirit of making new teaching resources available, I hope you’ll put them under a Creative Commons license, as I did with mine.
10. All other things equal, I will give preference to:
    • Songs whose melodies that are in the public domain.
    • Songs linked to a video.

So let’s hear your grammar songs! If you need some inspiration, allow me to suggest “The Forgotten Helping Verb”.

Between Me and the Pawn Shop, Not My Daughter and I

Doug has gotten into watching the reality TV show Pawn Stars in the past year. Yes, he and Adam are well aware of the word play in the title, which reminds me of a tweet from Bill Walsh that I retweeted a few months ago, to the effect that porn is more egalitarian than the rest of the movie industry, because every actor is a star. Anyway, I’ve gotten so I know by hear the opening monologue: “I’m Rick Harrison, and this is my pawn shop. I work here with my old man, and my son, Big Hoss. Everything in here has a story … and a price. One thing I’ve learned in twenty years: You never know what is gonna come through that door.”

Why did Snoop Dogg carry an umbrella?

Doug was watching an episode a few nights ago, and in one segment a man wanted to sell a doll-likeness of Snoop Dogg, still in the box, which his daughter had given to him. He and Chumlee settled on a price of $100. Out in the parking lot afterwards, the seller told the camera crew about what his daughter might think of selling her gift to him. He said:

That’s gonna be between me and the pawn shop, not my daughter and I.

This is an interesting new piece in the developing between you and me/I picture. There’s of course the standard rule, such that as part of the object of the preposition between, the first person singular pronoun should be in its accusative me form. Then there’s the politeness-based rule, which is by now just about standard for a big chunk of English speakers: It’s politer to use the nominative form I when it’s in a coordination. (And myself when it’s not.)

Then there’s whatever rule this guy is using. In the first coordination, he has me and the pawn shop; in the second, my daughter and I. Is his rule that in a coordination, the first person singular pronoun is me when it comes first, and I when it comes last? Me when it’s emphasized, I when it’s not? Me when it’s first and emphasized, I otherwise? Me when it’s about business, I when it’s about family? Or is it possible that he just uses me and I in free variation?

The Recency Illusion and the War on Terror

As you perhaps have heard, the tenth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, is tomorrow. I was considering writing something language-related about 9/11, but others have done a better job than I would have done, so I’ll link to them. First of all, there’s Geoff Nunberg’s piece on Fresh Air this week, noting that there actually haven’t been that many notable additions or changes, a thesis also argued by Dennis Baron on The Web of Language. Both Baron and Nunberg note that the name 9/11 itself is the most significant linguistic legacy of the events of 9/11. For more on that, read this other Fresh Air pieces by Nunberg, this one from 2003, in which he notes that Americans are unusual compared to other nationalities in not referring to historical events by their month and day. September 11, has become the one exception, and even more unusual is the reference to the events as simply 9/11.

Another change that may have run its course is the use of the term ground zero to refer to the site of the World Trade Center. It became essentially a proper noun and was often capitalized as such. But when my family visited New York City last month, we took the Port Authority subway from Jersey City to the World Trade Center stop, and that was how we heard New Yorkers refer to it. Furthermore, on a tour bus, the 29-year-old native New Yorker narrating the tour said it was insulting to call it Ground Zero. One World Trade Center was not Ground Zero; it was at ground 55 and counting. NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg said essentially the same thing earlier this week. In this Sunday’s Boston Globe Word column, Ben Zimmer talks about these developments as well as the history of the term ground zero from the beginning of the atomic age.

A change I noticed in the months and years following 9/11 was what I thought of as “hero inflation”. The concept of hero went from people performing amazing and noble acts of strength or bravery above the call of duty, to people doing those things within the call of duty (i.e. some firefighters and military servicemembers), to people whose job merely entailed the possibility of heroism (all firefighters and military), and finally to people who just do useful jobs. That was, I think, the high-water mark of hero inflation, embodied in the kids’ show Higglytown Heroes, in which the heroes are people who do useful jobs. I wasn’t the only one to notice, apparently. I did a search for “hero inflation” and found that the phrase had been independently invented by others with the same complaint I had. It’s particularly well argued in this article from 2002 from what appears to be a think tank called the New America Foundation.

What I thought was the most noticeable piece of language to emerge in the aftermath of 9/11 was the phrase war on terrorism, or its clipped form, war on terror. I know I’ve heard plenty of one-liners from people like Jon Stewart, wondering how one could declare war on a feeling. My sentiments exactly. I attributed it to a clumsy phrasing from the mouth of President George W. Bush, one that inexplicably caught on. Was I surprised when I did some Internet searches. First of all, here’s a Google Ngram comparing war on terrorism to war on terror, and it seems that it was only in 2005 or so that war on terror took the lead. But look: You can also find it in the 1970s and 1980s.

And when I did a Google News Archive search, I found attestations (albeit sparse) of war on terror regarding other events in almost every decade since the 1930s:

• SOVIET ARRESTS 71 IN WAR ON ‘TERROR’(The New York Times, Dec. 04, 1934)
• Jewry rejects request to aid in war on terror (Meriden Record Feb. 11, 1947)
• BRITAIN DEPORTS CYPRUS PRELATE IN WAR ON TERROR (New York Times, Mar. 10, 1956)
• International War On Terror (Windsor Star, Sept. 25, 1972)
• Haig vows war on terror (Chicago Tribune, Jan. 29, 1981)

Anyway, enough about the trivial effects of September 11, 2001. On Sunday, let’s reflect on the much more serious effects, and take a moment to remember the actual, non-inflated heroism of 9/11 — of the passengers and crew of United Flight 93, and of the first responders in New York City and Washington, D.C.