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!

Candy Canes

Potential conflicts for recently married couples, as they determine how Christmas will be celebrated in their new household:

Gifts: Do you open some on Christmas Eve, or do you save them all for Christmas Day?

Christmas Eve: Do you go to a midnight service, or an afternoon one? (Or neither?)

The word candy cane: Do you pronounce it with the stress on candy, or on cane?

My wife and I still have not reached a reconciliation on the last item. My pronunciation: candy cane, with stress on the first word. It’s the same stress pattern you get with compound nouns like Christmas tree and Nativity scene. Her pronunciation: candy cane, with stress on the second word, like what you’d do with pumpkin pie or Christmas Day.

Stuffing, Dressing, and Sweet Mashed Potatoes

I made my lunch today out of Thanksgiving leftovers. It’s the first time in at least a decade that I’ve done that, because it’s the first time our family has had Thanksgiving dinner here instead of at my wife’s uncle’s house. I loaded the plate with the good, juicy dark meat that there was plenty of, not the dry white meat that everyone else so strangely prefers. Then some of the stuffing — oh, wait, I can just hear my dad saying that it’s not stuffing unless you’ve actually stuffed the turkey with it. It’s dressing. If you go calling the mixture of breadcrumbs, eggs, turkey stock, and herbs that my mom would cook in a baking dish stuffing, people will get it confused with that portion of the same mixture of breadcrumbs, eggs, turkey stock, and herbs that actually got cooked inside the bird. Maybe the distinction is worth making, since the inside-the-bird stuffing has soaked up some of the juices from the turkey and tastes somewhat different from the baking-dish-stuffing. But on the other hand, if I call it dressing, people could confuse it with what you put on your salad.

Another dish that my wife had picked up for the meal, she referred to as sweet mashed potatoes. That sounded like an interesting recipe. Not good, necessarily, but interesting. I like my mashed potatoes buttery and salty, not sweet. As it turned out, however, what was in the container was not mashed potatoes that had been sweetened, but mashed sweet potatoes. Mashed sweet, or sweet mashed? If an adjective and a noun have fused into a compound noun, then other adjectives can’t go putting them asunder: spoiled hot dogs is grammatical, but hot spoiled dogs isn’t — at least, not with the same meaning as you get with spoiled hot dogs. So in my grammar, it has to be mashed sweet potatoes, since sweet potato is a compound noun (as evidenced by the stress on sweet), and mashed potatoes is not (with its stress on potatoes). It looks like most other speakers agree, since I got 200K Google hits for mashed sweet potatoes and less than 1000 for sweet mashed potatoes. Even among those hits, though, I didn’t find any that referred to mashed white potatoes that had been sweetened; mostly they referred to what I would call mashed sweet potatoes, though a few were talking about a dish containing potatoes and sweet potatoes. Maybe for those few people for whom mashed sweet potatoes and sweet mashed potatoes mean the same thing, mashed potatoes is as much a compound as sweet potato is, leading to variation in naming something that qualifies as both. One website even used both phrasings to refer to the same item.

BTW, for a fascinating investigation of when and why Thanksgiving came to be (for many, but not all people) pronounced with stress on the giv-, see this post from Mark Liberman at Language Log.

Pierced Earrings

“These are nice,” my wife said, clicking on the thumbnail image. Up came the larger image of a pair of earrings. My wife had come over when she saw that I was online, had had me navigate to the webpages for a couple of online stores, and was now pointing out stuff like this. She does that every now and then at this time of year, though you’d think after more than a decade of marriage, she’d know that I’m not going to wear earrings or necklaces. This pair of earrings was interesting, though. The caption called them pierced earrings.

“Oh, I know what’s next,” you’re saying. “He probably thought the earrings were supposed to be pierced, instead of making the obvious connection that they were for pierced ears, as opposed to being clip-on earrings.”

From Happy Meals to Root Canals

Back in 2005, I admitted that, “I used to ask the order-takers to leave the toys out of Doug and Adam’s Happy Meals, but my wife made me stop.” So I did, and I hope she’s happy now. Adam now has at least 3 bins in his room just for his Happy Meal toys, none of which he is willing to part with yet. The toy is such a central part of the Happy Meal to Adam that sometimes when we’ve gotten one at the drive-through, Adam will ask, “Can I have my Happy Meal now?”, and only after I’ve told him we’ll have to wait until we get to where we’re going will he realize my misunderstanding and say, “Can I have my Happy Meal toy?” Then once he has it, he might show it to Doug: “Doug, look at my Happy Meal!”

A Right-Node Wrapping; a Backformation; and a Double Passive Gone Wrong

Here are a few recently observed examples of things that I’ve talked about on numerous other occasions.

First, here’s one more right-node wrapping (aka “Friends in Low Places” coordination), from Monday’s episode of Fresh Air, in which Terry Gross interviews Dr. Melinda Merck, author of book on forensic veterinary medicine. Terry asks about one case:

What was her story, like why was she collecting so many cats and then either killing or allowing them to die? (13.23-13.30)

And also on the subject of veterinary medicine, here’s a backformation I heard at the vet’s office earlier today:

…and here’s his rabie tag; you’ll need to put that on him…

Rabies is a borrowing from Latin; in Latin, it’s a fifth declension noun, and -es is the nominative singular ending, not a plural marker. But in English, rabies has occasionally been interpreted as a plural noun. If it’s a plural noun in your lexicon, then you’ll need to strip off the -s to make it singular in order to form compounds such as rabie tag and rabie shot.

Lastly, here’s an attempt at a double passive that Glen noticed and brought to my attention. It may be that sentences such as The marshmallows were forgotten to be brought (meaning, “Someone forgot to bring the marshmallows”) are ungrammatical in your English. They’re not grammatical in mine, though it would be convenient if they were. But even though they’re not grammatical for me, they don’t quite sound like errors, either. This, though, sounds like an error:

“A lot of guys I know, actually, have become radicalized, or initially took the first steps towards learning more about Islam and their way of life as a result of them being tried to being forced to marry someone they don’t want to marry,” Butt tells Simon. (link)

It would have been better (though still not quite grammatical for me) if he’d said being tried to be forced. As for tried to being, not only is it not in my grammar, I’d bet it’s not in Butt’s grammar either.

Go… Bucks?

When I first moved to Ohio, I’d thought they were crazy about football at the University of Texas, but I soon revised my estimation. I went to some campus-area bars with some guys I’d met in my dorm and in each one they were playing the Ohio State fight song, and, for some reason they also were very fond of some song from the 60s called “Hang On, Sloopy.” My roommate had to educate me about OSU football, telling me about some guy that used to coach here named Woody Hayes (ah, he must be who they named Woody Hayes Drive after), about the fans (including my roommate) in Block O, and all about some big rivalry that OSU had with the University of Michigan.

Growing up here, Doug is getting a thorough Ohio acculturation, including OSU football appreciation. He and his mom sometimes watch the OSU game on TV, and I’ve even heard him say things like, “Third and TWELVE?! Oh, man!” He and she were watching the game one Saturday last month, while I looked on from the kitchen, where I was peeling apples for a pie. “Hey! What’s wrong with this picture?” my wife said at one point. Hey, that was nothing. Doug even went to a Buckeye football game a few weeks ago, not with me, who graduated from OSU, but with his mom! And his acculturation continues at school, where he’s soaking up the anti-Michigan spirit. Yesterday, the dress-code restriction on anything written on shirts was temporarily lifted, so that on the last day of “Michigan week,” kids could wear their Buckeye gear… or Michigan stuff, to be fair. A few kids did, but other, less confident ones (including at least one friend of Doug’s) pretend to be OSU fans among their classmates and root for Michigan in the privacy of their homes.

So here it is the day of the OSU-Michigan game, with the undefeated #1 and undefeated #2 teams in the nation (see, I know these things now!) facing each other in a few hours, and all week, I’ve been hearing “Go, Bucks!” even more than usual in Ohio in the fall. I was aware that Ohio was known as the Buckeye State before moving here, and I think I even knew that the OSU team was known as the Buckeyes. But even after living through 15 football seasons, the phrase Go, Bucks! is a little strange to me.

I learned that the buckeye was the nut from a tree that was common in Ohio, so named because it resembled the eye of a buck.

OK, so buckeye was created by compounding. So far, so good. And the football team (and other teams) from Ohio State University were called buckeyes because Ohio was the buckeye state. Fine. But when I take a compound word apart, it doesn’t have the meaning of the whole compound. I can’t call a doghouse a dog, or an apple pie an apple, or a TV dinner a TV. So when people refer to the Buckeye football team as the Bucks, I wonder why it doesn’t bother them that they’re making it sound like OSU’s mascot is a male deer instead of a nut that resembles the eye of a male deer.

On the other hand, State of the Union can be synonymous with State of the Union address; Grand Slam with Grand Slam tournament; and molest with sexually molest, so why am I complaining? Actually, though, I don’t think this is a case of one word in a compound absorbing the meaning of the entire compound. If it were, I think buck would refer to actual buckeye nuts, but I’ve never heard anyone call a buckeye nuts a buck. People make necklaces out of buckeyes to wear to the games and tailgate parties, but they’re called buckeye necklaces, not buck necklaces. I think buck meaning “member of an OSU sports team” is a case of the word being shortened (linguists refer to it as clipping) without regard to whether it’s a compound, acronym, or anything else. In other words, buckeye went on referring to buckeye nuts, while Buckeye formed its semi-independent meaning solidly associated with OSU sports teams before getting shortened to Buck. Etymology is not destiny, as they say.

How Many Grand Slams in a Grand Slam?

This was the headline in the sports section of the New York Times a few days ago, before Roger Federer lost the French Open to Rafael Nadal:

Federer, Eyeing 4th Grand Slam, Faces Nadal in Final

I could just imagine Dad reading the headline, and then saying to Mom, “No, Federer is not ‘eyeing a fourth Grand Slam’! To get a fourth Grand Slam, he’d have to have three Grand Slams already, and he doesn’t. He doesn’t even have one Grand Slam. The only tennis players ever to win even one Grand Slam were Don Budge, Maureen Connolly, Rod Laver, Margaret Smith Court, and Steffi Graf.”

Have No Fear, Baby Buttlegs Is Here!

I first had angel food cake when I was three or four years old, and for years pronounced angel food cake the way I had heard it back then. Whoever had introduced me to it had pronounced it as angel FOOD cake, with the primary stress on food, the same intonation pattern you’d have in, say, dormroom KEG party. As a teenager, I became aware that some, perhaps even many, people pronounced angel food cake differently, putting the primary stress on angel, like this: ANGEL food cake.

Finally, one day I’d heard enough tokens of ANGEL food cake that I stopped to think about that pronunciation compared with my own, and I realized that it was my pronunciation that was strange. Angel FOOD cake sounds like it means “foodcake, of the angel variety.” Foodcake? What’s foodcake? In contrast, ANGEL food cake sounds like it means “a kind of cake so delicious that it is like unto the food of the very angels.” (As for why it’s not pronounced ANGEL food CAKE, analogous to chocolate CAKE or blueberry PIE, with stress on the final word, I don’t know.)

Anyway, one day after I’d gotten the whole foodcake issue settled, I was sitting reading the newspaper when my wife came into the room…

Her: I have baby BUTT legs!
Me: Huh?
Her: Look, I have baby BUTT legs.
Me: What’s a butt leg?
Her: No, I shaved my legs, see? Now they’re like a baby’s butt.
Me: Oh! BABY butt legs!

I felt them. Her story checked out. Why she pronounced it baby BUTT legs instead of BABY butt legs is a mystery, especially since she doesn’t do the “foodcake” pronunciation of angel food cake. But for years after that exchange, my wife made a point of mentioning her “buttlegs” whenever she’d shaved her legs. Sometimes I try to picture what a buttleg really would look like, but without much success. And never mind figuring out what a baby one would look like. Or maybe baby BUTT legs would more likely be a proper name: Baby Buttlegs. Sounds like some kind of a goofball superhero’s name, kind of like Super Diaper Baby.

Knowing One’s Place

Fellow OSU grad Liz Strand had a question that she posed to the OSU Linguistic Department’s Phonies a few months ago. She wrote:

I have a question that I was hoping to get your expert Phonies input on. We listen to a lot of calls at [my workplace] and transcribe a good share of the utterances that come into our telephone-based applications…. [C]all-listening helps us diagnose design and performance issues, and transcriptions are used to tune application behavior and enhance our recognition performance.

We listen to tons of addresses, and someone recently noted an interesting pattern of stress on the street name segment of addresses, but none of us is sure how to explain it:

1. when the word “Street” is part of the street name, it’s UNSTRESSED in relation to the descriptive portion of the street name (controlling for the influence of contrastive stress, etc.)
2. when the structurally-similar (single closed syllable) “Court” or “Road” or “Lane” are part of the street name, they’re STRESSED in relation to the descriptive portion of the street name

e.g.:

• “I live at 469 ELM Street.”
• “I live at 469 Elm COURT.”
• “I live at 469 Elm ROAD.”
• “I live at 469 Elm LANE.”

The pattern of word-level stress seems to hold for longer descriptive names (”Market,” “Mississippi,” etc.) and street types (”Avenue,” “Boulevard,” “Expressway,” etc.), as well.

Any inklings as to what’s going on here?

One respondent suggested that this happened because in a phrase such as Elm Street, street is the less informative word–street is the default name suffix for a street, and naturally receives less stress than the word that carries more information, Elm.

This explanation sounds reasonable enough, but I have two problems with it. First, I’d say road and street are close to synonymy as terms denoting paths for vehicles to travel on. Granted, they’re not entirely synonymous: for me, street implies paving, whereas a road could be paved or of dirt. And I hardly ever hear about country streets. Even so, in a city, I could use either term to refer to any given paved pathway for vehicles. So I’d predict that both Elm Street and Elm Road would be stressed on Elm, but instead we get the contrast that Liz mentions.

The second problem is one I noticed in the mid-90s, during the heyday of a popular evening soap opera. On the radio they’d play ads for the latest steamy episode, introducing it with, “Tonight, on Melrose PLACE…” Every time they’d say it, I’d shake my head and silently ask myself, “What is with you people? Why do you keep saying Melrose PLACE instead of MELROSE Place?” I brought it up in Arnold Zwicky’s morphology class when we talked about compound words, and was surprised to find Arnold and everyone else claiming that they accented place the same as court, avenue, road, or lane. But when I played Monopoly as a kid, I don’t remember anyone ever putting a hotel on Park PLACE. And it so happens that I live on a street with place for its suffix, and my wife and neighbors always deaccent it, just as we do for street.

So at least for speakers of my street-naming dialect, the answer to Liz’s question isn’t so simple. I think it would be neat if there were an explanation more interesting than just saying it’s an idiosyncratic fact about the word street (and for some people, place) that it is deaccented as part of a street name, while all other streetname suffixes (with the possible exception of place) are accented. But I don’t know of such an explanation. If any of you out there do, I’d be interested in hearing it, as would Liz and her colleagues.