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.

Most Creative Word of the Year

A tenured professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of Utah School of Medicine. A frequently sought-after speaker in medical schools and teaching hospitals. Author of many journals articles, book chapters, and books, including There Is No Gene for Good Teaching: A Handbook on Lecturing for Medical Teachers and Creative Medical Teaching. Coauthor of many more, including Physician As Teacher and Preceptors as Teachers: A Guide to Clinical Teaching, with Thomas L. Schwenk; and Executive Skills for Medical Faculty and The Chief Resident as Manager, with Elaine Weiss. Literal-Minded readers, it is my great pleasure to introduce to you… Neal Whitman!

Neal Whitman comes to you tonight courtesy of the American Dialect Society’s winner of the Most Creative category for the 2007 Word of the Year. It’s not the word you’ll be reading about in the newspapers today, the overall Word of the Year winner; that honor belongs to subprime. Yes, I’m here in Chicago at the 2008 Linguistic Society of America conference. The ADS always has its annual conference concurrently, and makes annual news with its selection of Word of the Year. This year for the first time, I attended the voting, so I got to hear firsthand the votes for all the categories: Most Useful, Most Euphemistic, Most and Least Likely to Succeed, and others.

The winner for Most Creative Word of the Year is a portmanteau of Google and the German loan-word Doppelgänger, which means a lookalike (literally “double-goer”). It’s the person (other than yourself) that comes up when you Google yourself. You might not have one; the Tensor has just informed me that he doesn’t. Or you might be like the gentleman who spoke in favor of this word before the voting, a person who never even appears in the top 100 Google hits for his own name: one David Bowie. Or you might be like me, with exactly one Googlegänger.

Frings Redux

As I was going through my old postings imported from Blogger and tagging them with categories, I came across about the word frings that I decided they deserved their own category. Longtime readers may recall that for many years I have objected to this word on the grounds that it is clearly a plural word, but its singular form has no meaning. Or at least, none that you can formulate without resorting to an or: “a french fry or an onion ring.” And why is it so bad to have an or in the definition? Well, my problem with it has been that it paves the way toward making up words for any set of objects that don’t form any kind of a class. You could create a word, say gritch, and define it as “a toothbrush or a sea cucumber.”

First Vog, Now Vlog

I’ve learned that there is such a thing as a video web log, or video blog, and that they are also known as vlogs. I wish this word all the worst in gaining currency in the language. First of all, it blatantly disregards a phonotactic rule of English: Syllables don’t begin with the cluster [vl] (except in borrowings such as Vlad(imir) and, uh, I guess that’s all)

And second, you can’t just go chopping off the b- in blog–that’s the only thing that distinguishes web logs from any other kind of logs. Now what am I going to call it if I decide to do a daily video journal that isn’t posted on the web? No, I’m not going to do one, but it’s the principle of the thing, man! It’d've been nice if the coiners of vlog had had a little more consideration for potential keepers of non-web-based video journals.

Incidentally, if all this is sounding a bit familiar, you may be remembering my complaint about another blended word that started with v-, ended with -og, and obliterated essential information inherited from one of the source words. That would be vog.

Beanie Weenies with a Side of Frings

As if from the depths of a deep-fryer, the issue of frings has resurfaced. In a series of posts last year, I explained why my brother and my dad were totally off-base in according legitimacy to frings, a portmanteau word referring to a mixture of french fries and onion rings. In short, it was because frings was “a plural noun which could denote a mass of stuff, but whose singular form didn’t denote anything.” Pick up any item from a pile of frings, and you won’t have a fring. It will be either a fry or a ring.

In subsequent comments and discussions, similar cases were brought up as possible precedents for this word:

1. Words such as scissors, pants, politics. Unlike frings, however, these words can refer to single items. That is, though these words are all morphologically plural, only frings must be semantically plural, referring as it does to a collection of items.
2. Words such as rapids. These are morphologically and semantically plural, but unlike with frings, it is still possible to imagine a meaning for the singular noun rapid if a speaker were to use such a form. Again, there is no such thing as a single fring. It’s either a fry or a ring.
3. Words such as clothes. This is morphologically and semantically plural, but unlike with frings, the singular form doesn’t even exist. Even though you can readily conceive a meaning for the nonexistent singular noun *clothe, you have to say it as article of clothing. In contrast, fring sounds just fine, but doesn’t have a meaning.

Finally, though, I accidentally found another frings-type word myself: stoplight peppers. Choose any bell pepper out of a package labeled “stoplight peppers,” and it will be either a red, yellow, or green bell pepper. Only when the three come together can they be referred to in the plural as stoplight peppers. Naturally, once I identified this example, I withdrew my long-standing objection to frings.

Now I thought we had all moved past this issue, but it seems that Glen was not entirely satisfied. In this post, my gracious concession is deemed “grudging,” and my deciding example is “questionable,” while his own naive examples have become “excellent.” What prompts such an attack? Let’s see:

But now I see the opportunity to convert my TKO into a KO. You see, while DGM refers to the delicacy in question as ‘beanie-weenie,’ in Neal’s and my home–and I suspect in many parts of the country–the dish is called ‘beanie-weenies.’ It’s morphologically plural (’beanie-weenies’ has a standard plural ending), it’s syntactically plural (you would say, “My beanie-weenies are getting cold”), and there’s no such thing as a lone ‘beanie-weenie’ (it’s always a bean or a weenie).

Yes, it’s true. There’s no such thing as one beanie-weenie. And furthermore, I’m pretty sure the term predates frings. So yes, beanie-weenies and stoplight peppers can both join frings to populate the class of morphologically and semantically plural words with no meaning for the singular.

Still and all, I have to say that I’m very disappointed in Glen’s attitude. He even concluded his argument with, “Take that, Neal!” Glen, Glen, Glen, it’s not about who’s right or wrong here. You and I are working together in our search for the truth!

Which reminds me: Glen states that this picture was taken on Christmas Day. Well, it wasn’t taken on Christmas day! It was taken on December 28th.

Misunderguesstimation

In my last post, I mentioned that Tom W. Bell at Agoraphilia wrote about the verb misunderestimate, famously used by George W. Bush, and took it to be a portmanteau word (i.e. a blend) combining misunderstand and underestimate. I then referred to Glen’s comment in response; his basic objection is that misunderestimate doesn’t look like a portmanteau in the same way that brunch or motel does. It just looks like underestimate with the prefix mis- attached to it, which he would then expect to have the meaning, “to incorrectly underestimate”. Now you may be asking, “When would I ever have need of a verb with that meaning?” Well, Glen constructs a rather complicated situation in which such a verb would be appropriate:

[T]here are times when you really *want* to underestimate something — such as, for instance, when you’re guessing the age of someone you want to flatter. Example: Suppose you wish to flatter a woman who appears to be 30. So you say she looks 27 — but it turns out she’s 23. In that case, I would say you misunderestimated her age.

I agree with Glen in theory. However, this scenario is so unusual that I think speakers would be more likely to just use several sentences to convey it, rather than use the single verb misunderestimate, which I think would not help hearers understand the situation. If this situation occurred so commonly and were discussed often enough, then I could see misunderestimate coming to be used to refer to it, but I don’t think that’s happened yet.

Tom, in a later comment, defends misunderestimate as an ordinary blend, pointing out that George W. Bush really does seem to mean “to misunderstand and underestimate”. But then he gets to wondering if there could be other blends like this one, saying:

Just think of all the new words we could create using the “AB + BC = ABC” template that I used in interpreting “misunderestimate”!
bankrupt + rupture = bankrupture (explosively destructive financial insolvency)
welfare + farewell = welfarewell (social service reform)

I’ll bet that your brother has a name for that sort of neologism.

The only name I have is portmanteau or blend. For the more specific version, such that AB+BC is blended into ABC, I don’t have a name. I can’t think of too many words that follow the pattern. In fact, even misunderestimate doesn’t follow it, since A = mis-, C = estimate, but B is either understand or just plain under. The only word I can think of that fits is guesstimate, where A = [g], B = [εs], and C = [tImet]. It’s not one of my favorite blends. Anyone I’ve heard use it could just as easily have used plain estimate; I’ve never heard it used such that it definitely means “to arrive at a number by a combination of guessing and estimating”. Interesting, though, that it also involves the word estimate. I wonder if there’s such a thing as underguesstimate out there. Let’s see… What do you know, there is!

You could also order a big salad for lunch too if you are really worried about it. better to overguesstimate points then underguesstimate.(link)

And how about misunderguesstimate? One guy’s done it:

If we blame everything since Lockerbie on Osama, I’d misunderguesstimate about 4,000 murdered by Al Qaida.(link)

I found a few misoverestimate, too, but used mostly for humorous effect, in talking about President Bush. And for misoverguesstimate? Nothing at all yet.

Double Portmanteaus and Stacked Acronyms

Justin Busch at Semantic Compositions discusses the newly coined word vog, which refers to a kind of smog currently being pumped out by Mt. Saint Helens. Vog is an example of what’s sometimes called a portmanteau word, in which parts of two words, in this case volcano and smog, are blended to create a new one. But wait a minute! Busch quite reasonably objects. Smog itself is a portmanteau word, formed from smoke and fog. When you amputate the sm-, you’re not just shortening the word, you’re losing essential information about its meaning! Or, as he puts it,

[It] raises the question of how many times you can iterate this sort of process before the derivation becomes hopelessly opaque.

His friend Radagast, however, makes a good point in a comment:

[C]oining the … word vog allows residents/ volcanologists of the region to specifically describe a condition familiar to them in a single, short word that they can all understand.
And does it really matter if the derivation is “hopelessly opaque,” as long as people know what you mean when you say the word?

In other words, who ever said that the derivation of a word had to be transparent? That smog can be truncated this way and become part of a double portmanteau (as one commentator was inspired to call it) just goes to show that smog has been around long enough to be accepted as an ordinary word without any special status attached to its internal structure.

I guess Busch’s and my problem (if I may presume to read his mind) is that we can’t let go of the past. For us, sm- still stands for smoke, -og still stands for fog, and smog can only retain its meaning when both those elements are present. In other words, smog is more like a phrase than a word: Just as I like traffic cannot mean the same thing as I like traffic lights, so -og cannot mean the same thing as smog.

This is reminding me of something. Oh, yes! Those stacked acronyms I talked about a while back, the main example being ACT-UP, where the A stands for AIDS. Here’s a more recently collected example:

LIGO = Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory

But laser is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, so what does the L in LIGO really stand for? (And incidentally, why does wave get left out in the cold?) Another example:

DELPH-IN = Deep Linguistic Processing with HPSG Initiative

But HPSG is an acronym for Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. So does the H stand for HPSG, or for head-driven-phrase-structure-grammar?

The problem again is that I’m thinking of acronyms as more like phrases than words. Take away part of a phrase and you have a different meaning; therefore, I want to say, take away part of an acronym, and you have a different meaning. Take -aser away from laser, or PSG from HPSG, and the remaining l- and H- don’t mean “laser” and “HPSG,” but just “light” and “head.” And come to think of it, I am getting a little light-headed from thinking about all this. I’ve just gotta let go of the past, and set the acronyms free, free to achieve their destiny as words.

Frings and Other Things

Glen has taken up my challenge to find another word that behaves semantically like frings. What are the stakes here? If he succeeds, he will have robbed my indignation of its righteousness. That is, if my complaint is that this word’s behavior is totally unnatural, unlike anything else in the language, then Glen’s finding another word is enough to establish at least a little bit of a pattern, and trash my argument. If I still don’t love frings, it’s just due to my own cussedness. Therefore, it behooves me to spotlight the differences between his examples and my frings. Luckily, the differences are there.

First, I’ll address the easy ones. Glen writes:

Politics. Most people use it with a singular verb, but a respectable minority use it with a plural verb…. One eminent example: Winston Churchill said, “Politics are almost as exciting as war and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.”

Like frings, words such as politics, economics, and linguistics have what looks like a plural ending, and are often used with plural verbs. (In other words, they are or can be morphologically plural.) And like frings, these words have no meaning in the singular: *politic, *economic, and *linguistic do not exist as nouns (only as adjectives). But unlike frings, these nouns are not semantically plural: They are abstract nouns referring to fields of study. By contrast, when someone talks about frings, they are definitely talking about more than one object, just as they are when they talk about cars or telephones. In addition to abstract nouns like politics, there are the concrete nouns scissors, pants, and shorts. These, too, are morphologically plural, and can be semantically singular: These pants can refer to one object. They can also be semantically plural, as in “All my pants are torn,” but they’re still different from frings in that frings has to be semantically plural.

Now how about this example, which Glen has the audacity to throw back in my face?

Neal, back on Agoraphilia, you made a post about troops. It’s a plural noun that (at least for you and many other English speakers) has no singular, because you can’t have “a troop of one.”

This one is closer. It’s morphologically plural, has no singular meaning (for many speakers, under the non-collective meaning), and furthermore is semantically plural: troops is definitely referring to some number of soldiers higher than one. Glen goes on:

Some other possible examples: Rapids, as in the fast section of a river. For the definition of rapid that relates to rivers, my dictionary says the word is “usually pl.” You don’t often hear about someone who “shot a rapid.” Falls, as in a cascade of water. For the definition of fall that relates to water cascades, my dictionary says the word is “usually pl., often with sing. v.” You don’t often hear someone say, “Look at the beautiful fall.”

Again, he’s chosen telling examples: morphologically plural, no meaning for the singular, and semantically plural. Here is what I think the crucial difference between these words and frings is: Even though we don’t use the singular troop, rapid, and fall, there is an obvious meaning for these forms if they were to be used: one soldier, one hump of water passing over a rock, one waterfall. (In fact, I even found an attestation of one troop.) But what, as I have pointedly asked Glen and Dad, what would one fring be?

Now there is one answer they could give, one that’s so simple I was surprised I never thought of it in all these years: A fring is either a french fry or an onion ring. Wasn’t that easy? Any member of the union of the set of french fries and the set of onion rings is a fring! Just like you could define mammal as “squirrel or bat or horse or elephant or human or gorilla….” But wait. For fring, the only definition that you can use to link these two different items is the disjunctive one. Fries and onion rings by themselves are not a natural class. You could put them in the larger category of “appetizers,” or “fried side items,” but then you’d have to let in stuffed mushrooms, fried okra, and potato skins, too. Mammals, on the other hand, are a natural class, and can be defined without disjunctions, like this: “vertebrate animals that have fur and a four-chambered heart, nurse their young, and are endothermic”. (Thanks to David Dowty for some thought-provoking discussion on these disjunctive definitions.)

At this point, frings still behaves differently semantically from the other examples, specifically in having an irreducibly disjunctive definition. The only problem now is what to do with some other pesky long-existing words with irreducibly disjunctive definitions: brother/sister-in-law, aunt, uncle. All I can offer here is that whereas separate terms exist for the two components of frings (i.e., fries and onion rings), such terms don’t exist for the two different kinds of brother- or sister-in-law, or aunts, or uncles. A member of the set of frings will be a fry or a ring, but a member from the set of uncles will be an uncle or … an uncle.

I think I dodged that last bullet. But too bad, when I was writing my post about bell peppers the other night, I suddenly realized that I had found another example of a frings-type word: morphologically and semantically plural, no meaning for the singular. I was thinking about the way a grocery store here sells packages containing one red, one yellow, and one green bell pepper, and labels them “Stoplight Peppers.” Pick out any pepper from one of these packages, and it won’t be a stoplight pepper. It’ll be a red, yellow, or green pepper. And I can’t just define stoplight pepper as bell pepper, since that definition would include orange and purple bell peppers, too. So why did I chuckle at this term, while I still grit my teeth at frings? I guess the answer must just be that I’ve mellowed out between the time I first heard fring and when I ran across stoplight peppers.

Curses, Glen wins! But let the record show: It wasn’t his arguments that closed the case–it was my example, mine! I could have kept it quiet, but no, that would have been incompatible with my deep respect for good sportsmanship and unflinching intellectual honesty.

Frings Is Tasty!

Aha! I’ve now figured out what I should have said during my discussion of frings with Glen and Dad some eight years ago. All that stuff about telic and atelic verbs was tangential–I should have stuck to nouns, and said something like this…

OK, Glen, I’m not against having a word that refers to a heterogeneous mixture of things. I’m happy with mass nouns like salad, succotash,¹ beef stew, fruitcake, and trail mix. Even though a lone vegetable or fruit chunk qualifies doesn’t count as salad, I’m OK using salad to refer to a whole bowl of different kinds of vegetable or fruit pieces. But when you use a word with what is obviously a plural-noun ending (to wit, frings), you are asking me to believe that there is a meaning for the singular (fring), and there isn’t one! I’ll accept the word frings if you can convince me that it’s not really a plural count noun–that the -s on the end isn’t really the plural marker, and the word just happens to end with a [z] sound, like quiz does. You can do that by convincing me that you can say all of the following without having to stop and think about your word choice:

1. Frings is tasty!
2. I ate too much frings last night.
3. Why do I eat frings? It tastes good!

Heh, heh. They’re using frings as a plural and they know it. Faced with this argument, they’ll have to concede!

Well, unless they can find some other example of a plural noun whose singular has no meaning, and cite it as a precedent. They might bring up odds and ends, and the joke about “If you only have one left, how do you know if it’s an odd or an end?” But they can’t make a case here. Even if you can never know whether one out of many odds and ends is an odd or an end, presumably it is one of the two. On the other hand, pick up one item from a plate of frings, and it’ll be either a french fry or an onion ring. It won’t be a fring.

¹Thanks to both Dad and the professor for that semantics course for independently bringing up this long-suffering example.

No Such Thing as a Fring

Since beginning his occupational therapy more than a year ago, Adam has made great strides in being willing to try new foods. The range of foods that he will eat has expanded so much that we can actually take him to a restaurant every now and then without having to bring along one of his preferred foods as a failsafe. I took him to a burger place for lunch today, and one of the sides listed on the menu was “Frings.” Ah, frings. That word brings back memories. Here comes one now…

Glen: You know, Dad, I’d like to get some fries, but a basket of onion rings sure sounds good, too.
Dad: Funny you should say that, Glen. I was just thinking about getting an order of onion rings, but I could really go for some fries. I don’t want to order both, though…
Glen: Hey, I have an idea! Maybe I could order some fries, and you could order some onion rings, and we could, you know, share them!
Dad: That’s a great idea, Glen! We could put them all in one big pile between us.
Glen: Yeah, let’s do that! This is such a great idea, we ought to have a name for it. Like… like, onion fries, or…
Dad: Nah, I don’t like that name. What about… fry rings?
Glen: Or just, frings?
Dad: Hey! I like that! Frings!

Later, when the food arrived:

Glen: OK, Dad, here are the fries.
Dad: All right, I’ll just put the onion rings here… mix them up a little bit…
Glen: Mmm, frings!
Dad: Frings!

They would just keep going like this until I said something, so I did what I had to do.

Neal: Frings, huh? Can you show me a fring?
Dad: Well, Neal, look, there’s a whole pile of them right there!
Neal: OK, so pick up one.
Glen: (holding up a french fry threaded through an onion ring) OK, here’s a fring!

Overall, a typical episode of Glen and Dad’s fring-baiting. But this time, the whole business of there being a plural noun which could denote a mass of stuff, but whose singular form didn’t denote anything, was reminding me of something I’d been reading about recently. What was it?

Ah, I remembered! It was reminding me about the different classes of verbs we’d been discussing in my semantics class. One class is the atelic (”without end”) verbs, which denote actions that don’t have a definite endpoint (as opposed to telic verbs, which denote actions that do have a definite endpoint). One way of identifying these verbs is checking to see if they can be modified by an adverb showing duration, such as for two hours. Sleep is an atelic verb: I slept for two hours sounds fine. Wake up is telic: *I woke up for two hours sounds weird. You can say, “It took me two hours to wake up,” or “I kept waking up (and falling back asleep) for two hours,” but not simply, “I woke up for two hours.”

As the details came back to me, I was relaying them to Glen. There was a further distinction among atelic verbs, I told him: simple ones and complex ones. For simple atelics, such as sleep, if it is true that someone was sleeping for some interval (say from 4:00 to 6:00), then it is also true for any subinterval: from 4:10 to 5:00, from 4:30 to 4:31, from 5:55:55 to 5:55:56, etc. But for complex atelics, such as walk, this isn’t true for every possible subinterval. If someone was walking from 4:00 to 6:00, it may be true that they were walking between 4:10 to 5:00, but as you slice the intervals more and more finely, you get to a point where the action no longer qualifies as walking. It will be a foot-lifting action, or a foot-placing action, or a leg-swinging action, but those actions individually do not qualify as walking.

“So,” I concluded, “What we have is a walking event composed of lots of little subevents, none of which itself counts as walking, but which, taken together, uh…” My brilliant analogy wasn’t going in the direction I’d planned. In fact, it looked like I hadn’t had much of a plan for it at all, and now I was kind of sorry I’d brought it up. But it was too late. Glen was saying, “That’s a great example, Neal! Thanks!”

D’oh!