White Elephants in the Room

When I moved to central Ohio, a three-story downtown mall called City Center was the place to go. Across the street from it was an old-school five-story department store, a locally famous business named Lazarus. Connecting the two was an enclosed overhead walkway. I heard so many people say they’d done something or other or gotten such-and-such from City Center that I went to see the place myself. It was pleasant enough, although I didn’t appreciate having to pay to park there. Sixteen years later, City Center is an empty hulk, though it’s still open for people to walk through on their way to the Capital Theatre or the Hyatt on Capital Square after parking in the now-free garage. The Lazarus store across the street is closed, too. (Another Lazarus store has survived, at one of the suburban retail centers that helped kill City Center, but after a merger with Macy’s, it underwent a Cougar-to-Mellencamp-style name change, from Lazarus to Lazarus Macy’s to just Macy’s.) And as for the walkway between the old Lazarus and City Center, I have learned that it has long been considered an eyesore and a scary, gloomy barrier separating the Capital district from the southern part of downtown. I learned that from a newspaper story last week, which said that the walkway is scheduled to be demolished. In announcing the demolition of the walkway, Columbus mayor Michael Coleman also offered some comments about what should become of City Center, which the newspaper reported:

Acknowledging the mall as “the big white elephant in the room,” the mayor said its rebirth is a “marathon and not a sprint.” (Robert Vitale, “Walkway over High Street to bite dust,” The Columbus Dispatch, Oct. 23, 2008, p. B3)

“Big white elephant in the room”?

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.

Post-Election Post

Here are a few election-related bits I accumulated during the weeks before the election, on election day, and today.

Ohio’s Democratic governor-elect, Ted Strickland, started off his acceptance speech last night by saying, “I am proud and humbled…” Seems like there should have been a yet in there.

As for statewide issues, if you don’t live in Ohio you might think that two issues, publicized as “Smoke Less Ohio” and “Smoke Free Ohio,” would be redundant. They’re not, though. Smoke Free Ohio is a ban on smoking in indoor public places, meant to level the inconsistencies among cities on smoking policies. Smoke Less called itself a ban, too, but with a few exceptions, such as, oh, restaurants and bars. By smoke less, they mean less smoking in public indoors than there would be without a ban — though in places that already have a ban, such as Columbus, smoke less is a lie, since such bans would be for the most part lifted. Beyond that deception, I wondered if the namers of the issue also were hoping some people would hear it as smokeless instead of smoke less. What a difference a space or a stress makes! And on the website for the issue, there is no space between smoke and less. Luckily, this issue failed, and Smoke Free passed. But hey, now I wonder: Did anyone who voted for Smoke Free think they were voting for free cigarettes for everyone?

And on the national level, I was watching the news this morning talking about the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. They played a week-old clip of George W. Bush talking about soon-to-be Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. He said:

They asked the lady who thinks she’s gonna be Speaker but she’s not, about tax cuts.

Put in strictly parallel syntax, this would have been one of the following:

…the lady who thinks she’s gonna be Speaker but isn’t…
..the lady who thinks she’s gonna be speaker but who isn’t

That is, you can coordinate VPs (thinks she’s gonna be Speaker and isn’t) or entire relative clauses (who thinks… and who isn’t). But Bush coordinated a VP (thinks…) with a clause (she’s not). Don’t you dare call it a Bushism, though! This kind of coordination is everywhere. Look, here’s one from the movie Cars that I never got around to writing about:

You know, the twins who used to be your fans but now they’re my fans?

Even Geoff Pullum does it:

[H]e brings up points that he thinks are new but they’re not.

And last, here’s an issue that was on the ballot for the Columbus suburb of Gahanna: Gender Neutralization. I don’t live in Gahanna, so I’m not familiar with the details of that one, but I really hope it was a language-related issue.

Don’t Waste Disgraces

Local columnist Joe Blundo had an article today about the lack of participation in recycling programs in central Ohio. The headline read:

What we waste is a disgrace

Hmm, that headline looks like a pseudo-cleft, I thought to myself. If it really were a pseudo-cleft, it would mean the same thing as We waste a disgrace, just like What I want is a chocolate chip cookie means the same thing as I want a chocolate chip cookie. Ha, that’s funny!

Coordinated Questions at the Memorial Tournament

Adam and his friend G. were going to get together this afternoon and ride bikes, now that they both know how, but the rain which suddenly sprang up yesterday just got worse today. So instead the friend’s mom and I took the two of them to McDonald’s to have lunch and play in the indoor playset there.

“Man,” I said to G’s mom, “Where is all this rain coming from? It was so nice a few days ago!”

“Of course it’s raining!” she told me. “The Memorial Tournament is going on.“

Who Wants to Be Named After a Prehistoric Fish?

Earlier this week, the newspaper had a story about a construction worker named Jeff Partin, who found a fossil of an armored fish at a work site. He’s hoping he can make some money off of it. The last paragraph of the article reads:

Partin’s fish, [John Maisey of the American Museum of Natural History] said, likely has more scientific value than commercial.

Partin isn’t so sure, especially if it proves to be a new species.

“I’d sell the naming rights,” he said.

“I’m sure there’s someone out there who would like to be named for a prehistoric fish.”
“A mystery wrapped in a fossil,” Mike Lafferty, The Columbus Dispatch, May 9, 2006. D6-7.)

There are two problems Partin faces.

Remembering Igor Iskhakov

Almost a year ago, I wrote in one of my posts,

And just to reiterate that asshole is not “just an insult,” the expression tear [someone] a new asshole is proof that the literal meaning is still there, to be enjoyed by those who take the time to experience the word as if for the first time. I’ll never forget hearing Igor Iskhakov burst out laughing when he first heard this strange new English word and parsed it out.

I met Igor Iskhakov in 1993, when I was an instructor at a ballroom dance studio here in central Ohio. He and his family had just emigrated from Russia; he had done ballroom dancing for most of his life; and he was looking for a job. The studio owner hired him right away, and put him to work coaching the advanced students.

It was fun to work with Igor; he taught me and the other instructors a lot on the finer points of posture and movement. From him I also learned that the name Igor is not just for hunchbacked minions of mad scientists (an association he was astonished to learn about), but in fact is a rather common Russian name. Pronounced by a Russian, it sounds more like eager, which he proudly pointed out to me when he learned the word.

I remember another time when a few of the instructors were having lunch at a restaurant across the street from the studio, and Igor was quite keen to order a cocktail. They served cocktails at the newly opened McDonald’s in Moscow, he told us, and they were great. He wanted a cocktail here, now. We told him they didn’t serve cocktails here; it was just an ordinary family restaurant without a bar. He couldn’t believe it. Cocktails were about as American as you could get–after all, hadn’t Russian borrowed the word from American English just to refer to this American kind of drink? And now, sitting in an American restaurant, he couldn’t have a simple cocktail? We asked him to describe these cocktails, and pretty soon we realized that what he was describing was a milkshake! Armed with the proper vocabulary, he asked for and got his first milkshake made in America. (I don’t know when he had his first American-made cocktail.)

I also remember trying to find out from Igor the Russian word for ‘flirt.’ Maybe I was asking him how he and his recently-arrived dance partner and fiancee had begun their relationship; I’m not sure. Anyway, Igor didn’t recognize the word, so another instructor and I were describing situations of flirting, until Igor finally realized what we meant. “Oh!” he said. “Fleertavat’!” What? All that work, only to find out the Russian word was just another borrowing from English? Sheesh.

I talked with Igor enough about Russian and language in general that at one point he asked me why I wasn’t studying linguistics anymore. Clearly, I was interested enough in it that I should consider going back to school and finishing my degree. I realized he was right, and took his advice. And when I applied to be a teaching assistant in the department of English as a Second Language in order to cover my tuition, Igor was kind enough to write me a letter of reference.

In subsequent years, after I left the dance studio, I occasionally ran into Igor on the OSU campus, where he was finishing his PhD in math. Yes, a PhD in math, even while he continued to teach dance, compete and win in major competitions, and appear in a movie. And a few years ago, I saw him and his wife at the public library, where he told me they were doing some business research in preparation for opening their own studio. Which they did. I was really happy for them. They were living out the American Dream more than I or most people I know have done.

Yesterday I was taking Doug to a karate lesson right across the hall from my old dance studio, and I saw my old boss. I was shocked to learn from him that Igor had died on Sunday. I couldn’t believe it, but in today’s newspaper, there it was. He will be missed, not just by his family and others who saw him regularly, but also by people like me, who might have fallen out of touch with him, but still remember how he changed their life for the better.

What and When?

The latest story about an ongoing political scandal here in Ohio led off with this sentence in today’s paper:

For the second time in two weeks, a memo has surfaced that contradicts [claims of] what and when Gov. Bob Taft’s office learned about investment losses at the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation.
(“Staff: Taft wasn’t told of losses,” Mark Niquette and Joe Hallett, The Columbus Dispatch, 9 Jun 2005, A1.)

To explain why this sentence caught my eye, I need to back up a bit. It has to do with the fact that the verb learn can be used it several different ways, two of which are relevant here. First, learn can take a direct object followed by an about prepositional phrase, as in:

I learned [something] [about the investigation].

If you wanted to make the direct object the topic of a question, you could say:

[What] did you learn [about the investigation]?

Even though learn isn’t followed by its direct object anymore, the what still fills that position, and learn is still being used with its “learn X about Y” frame. It’s as if there is something missing between learn and about, which shows up as the what at the front of the sentence.

Next, learn can be followed by just an about prepositional phrase, without a direct object, as in:

I learned [about the investigation].

If you wanted to, you could modify this sentence with adverbs:

I learned [about the investigation] {today, from the newspaper, …}

These adverbs could also show up as wh-words, like this:

{When, How, …} did you learn [about the investigation]?

So now, even though learn is next to about, like before, there is no missing direct object we need to imagine there. Learn is still being used with its “learn about Y” frame.

These two versions of learn have slightly different meanings. Both involve new knowledge entering someone’s mind, but the first learn refers to both the general field and the specific thing learned, while the second one refers only to the general field and lets the context provide the specific thing learned. Now we can go back to the opening quotation. Expanded out, the coordinated what and when question would be:

1. [what] Taft’s office learned [about investment losses], and

2. when Taft’s office learned [about investment losses]

What I find interesting, then, is that when the what and the when are coordinated in the newspaper quotation, the word learn is uttered only once, and is therefore used with both its “learn X about Y” and its “learn about Y” frames, with their different meanings, at the same time. You can’t decide (in a non-arbitrary way) whether to color the sentence green or blue. Isn’t that weird?

And it’s not just that there’s some rule saying that “Any wh words can be coordinated”; it has to be with a verb that can go with or without a direct object, such as learn. Put in a strictly transitive verb or a strictly intransitive one, or a transitive verb along with its direct object, and the coordination doesn’t work. Even if you didn’t like the what and when coordination with learn, you probably like these even less:

*What and when did get?

*What and when did you sleep?

*What and when did you get the assignment?

It doesn’t work with just any transitive/intransitive verb, either. No matter how hard I’ve tried, I just can’t make Who and when did you shave? mean, “Who did you shave, and when did you shave yourself?”

He Protests Corners

Columbus Dispatch columnist Mike Harden writes about Jim Tennyson, a guy who’s been protesting the war in Iraq several times a week since October 6, 2002. This is what Tennyson had to say about the corner where he usually does his protesting on the weekends:

“This is a good corner to protest,” Tennyson said of 3rd and Perry. “Major east-west thoroughfare….”

Hey, where’s the on? This guy doesn’t protest corners, he protests the war in Iraq, and he does so on corners! So what he really meant was that 3rd and Perry was a good corner to protest on, right?

Well, maybe not. A small number of nouns denoting place, time, direction, manner, or reason can go without prepositions in this kind of relative clause. In fact, sometimes they have to:

• a place to sleep
  ?/*a place to sleep at
• a good day to die
  ?/*a good day to die on
• the way we did it
  *the way we did it in
• one good reason to stay
  *one good reason to stay for

Usually, the nouns that can do this can also (sometimes) act as adverbs themselves:

• a place to sleep / he slept the same place I did
• *a hotel to sleep / *he slept the same hotel I did
• the year we met / we met that year
• *the era the dinosaurs lived / *the dinosaurs lived that era
• the way you walk / walk this way
• *the manner you walk / *walk this manner

But every now and then, I’ll find a noun that can be modified by one of these adverbial relative clauses but cannot be used as an adverb itself. For example, you can say I just need a spot to sit down, but not *I sat down that spot. And now, with corner, we have another possible addition to the list: a good corner to protest, but not *I protest this corner every weekend. For even more additions to the list, see this post from Mark Liberman at Language Log. This post from Rachel Shallit talks about adverbial nouns, too.

And finally, my favorite story about adverbial nouns. [Cue music and wavy screen] Sometime in the mid-90s, I saw a list tacked to a bulletin board in the OSU Linguistics Department, titled “Healthy Places to Eat.” Being the way I am, I got out my pen and changed the title to “Healthy Places to Eat At.” A day or two later, my at had been scratched out, and the title had been further emended to read, “Healthy Places At Which to Eat,” with a little note added to those who didn’t get it, “Don’t end sentence with preposition.” Of course, that couldn’t stand unchallenged in a linguistics department, and a day later someone had written in response to that message, “Don’t be prescriptive!” That was actually one of two responses. The other one said, “Ha! What a shmoo-brain!”

20 Pounds of Lego

I’ve always liked playing with Legos (which, by the way, I pronounce /lεgoz/, not /legoz/), so I was naturally drawn to this article in one of the alternative newspapers last week. It’s about professor Paul Janssen of Ohio State University, who has on the order of 2 million Legos, and has used them to create scale models of buildings in downtown Columbus. What’s the linguistic point of all this? This paragraph, where Janssen talks about his childhood:

“By myself, in my room, with my 20 pounds of Lego, I would build until I used every single brick I had,” said Janssen, who cringes when he hears people casually refer to the pieces as “Legos.”

Well, first things first: I like Legos. Legos are fun. Doug and Adam like playing with Legos, too. Legos, Legos, Legos!

OK, now that I’ve had my fun, I’ll stipulate that Lego is a brand name, and that not just anything should be referred to as Legos. I myself don’t like hearing Tyco blocks or MegaBlocks called Legos. They’re imitators, not bad to play with, but definitely not the real thing. But why is it bad to use Lego as a count noun? Is it because Lego is supposed to be used only as a brand name, as in Lego building bricks? If that’s what’s going on, then Janssen should get off his high horse, because turning Lego into a mass noun, as in 20 pounds of Lego, is a violation, too. And I bet I cringed more when I read 20 pounds of Lego than Janssen does when he hears two million Legos. He made it sound as if there’d been a fire and all his Legos had melted into one big goopy mass.

So what is the Lego company’s official policy on the word? From their website:

Please help us to protect our brand name:

• The word LEGO must not be used generically–nor should it be used in the plural form or the possessive, e.g. “LEGO’s.”
• When the LEGO brand name is used as a noun, it must never stand alone. It must always be accompanied by another noun. For example: LEGO set, LEGO products, LEGO company, LEGO play materials, LEGO bricks, LEGO universe, etc.

Just as I thought. Not that I’m going to follow any of it. They also want me to write Lego in all caps, but offer no reason for doing so. Lego isn’t an acronym (as they admit in their company history), so it just seems to be their personal preference. And as for forbidding any building bricks, even their own, to be called Legos, that just seems to be overkill. I wonder if they’re asking this knowing that nobody will do it, but hoping that they will at least keep Lego identified with their own product–kind of like asking your chronically late lunch date to meet you 20 minutes earlier than you actually plan on eating (see Glen’s post for more on that). But in any case, if you actually want to follow this corporate line, Lego as a mass noun and Lego as a count noun are equally bad.

UPDATE: Perhaps I have been too harsh on Prof. Janssen. His use of Lego as a mass noun sounded so bad to me that I assumed it must be the affectation of a Lego-elitist who was (first of all) taking the whole brand-name protection policy much too seriously and (second) not even understanding how the Lego corporation actually wanted the word to be used. “The Lego corporation says I mustn’t call these things Legos,” I imagined him thinking. “I hear and obey. I will refer to them only as Lego!” But to my surprise, it turns out that there are at least two speakers (commentators ACW and Rachel) for whom Lego is just as natural as a mass noun as it is for me as a count noun. So maybe Janssen is just one of these speakers, and his adverse reaction to hearing Lego as a count noun is comparable to the reaction of someone who doesn’t like hearing this data is instead of these data are. Even if that’s the case, the writer of the article implies that the complaint goes deeper than that. Earlier, the article talks about Janssen’s views on the “ethics” of building with Legos (no glueing allowed, no filing down pieces to fit where they’re not designed to fit), and the paragraph I quoted seems to be in the same vein.