Very Frightening

Life, as we know, is full of tough decisions.

Participles are often described as “verbal adjectives,” but recently I was called on to be more specific with a participle: was it a verb, or an adjective? (Sorry, I can’t tell you why I had to do that; it’s TOP SECRET.)

In high school, I was unconflicted: Participles were a kind of adjective, end of story. Even in a sentence like The kids are frightening the cats, I considered frightening to be an adjective, and frightening the cats to be an adjective phrase, just as proud of themselves is an adjective phrase in The kids are proud of themselves. I was annoyed to lose a couple of points over it in a quiz. However, I wasn’t looking at the bigger picture. I wasn’t considering the other properties of adjective phrases that frightening the cats didn’t have, such as these that I read about in CGEL.

First of all, you can’t make the head participle comparative or superlative, the way you can with typical adjectives. You can’t modify it with very, either:

• The kids are prouder/proudest of themselves.
• *The kids are more/most frightening the cats.
• The kids are very proud of themselves.
• *The kids are very frightening the cats.

It’s for reasons like these that frightening the cats is considered to be a participial phrase — i.e., more verby than adjectivey.

On the other hand, with frightening by itself, you can make comparatives and superlatives and use very:

• The kids are more/most frightening.
• The kids are very frightening.

So by itself, frightening can be considered simply an adjective.

In fact, frightening can even be an adjective inside an adjective phrase. The key is that you can’t just go putting a noun phrase complement (such as the cats) after it, the way you’d do with a verb. Instead, you give it a complement more suitable for an adjective; namely, a prepositional phrase. Here’s how it shakes out with the PP to the cats:

• The kids are more/most frightening to the cats.
• The kids are very frightening to the cats.

Frightening is actually an unusual case: It’s a participle that in one guise has completely crossed over to become an adjective, but in another still works as a verby participle in progressive tenses. Other participles like this are loving, (for)giving, disturbing, and amazing. In contrast, participles such as running never pass the comparative/superlative/very adjective tests: Sam is more/most/very running.

So with all that said, now we can talk about what the fictional kindergartner Junie B. Jones has in common with the glam rock group Queen. From Junie B. Jones and the Yucky Blucky Fruitcake, by Barbara Park:

The creamy filling was very squishing between my toes. (p. 25)

From Queen, of course, we have this line from “Bohemian Rhapsody”, with our much-discussed participle frightening:

Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening me! (~3:18 in the video)

In both examples, the very tells us to take the participle as an adjective, but other factors force us to take it as a non-adjectival participle. In the Junie B. Jones example, it’s the context of a progressive tense that does it; in the Queen example, the NP complement me.

I wonder why I’ve never heard anyone complain about this aspect of Junie B. Jones’s grammar, when these books have certainly been criticized for daring to have a six-year-old over-regularize her past tenses and use accusative pronouns where nominatives are called for. Probably it’s because the other grammar complaints are so easy to make, while this one requires some analysis in order to put your finger on the problem. (JBJ uses very with other non-adjectival participles, too, such as watering and practicing, also from JBJ:YBF.) As for “Bohemian Rhapsody,” that song is weird in too many other ways, I think, for people to have focused on the grammar of that one line that comes just between the “Scaramouche” and “Galileo” bits.

There’s more to come about participles, adjectives, and even gerunds, in my next post!

New Development for Backformed Kudo

A couple of years ago, in a post about the backformation of the Boy Scouting-related singular noun Webelo from Webelos, I mentioned the similar backformation of kudo from the Greek borrowing kudos. Here are a couple of examples from COCA (the source of all the other examples in this post, except as noted):

• And there was a little kudo called the Award of Merit
• One even resulted in the ultimate scientific kudo.

The OED has kudo from as far back as 1941, though I’m not so sure about that citation. But their 1950 citation is a clear example:

A man sitting on a toilet bowl swung open the men’s room door and added his kudo to the acclaim.

This backformation is the most obvious sign that someone thinks of kudos as a plural, but other clues can be detected even in the absence of the giveaway form kudo:

1. Pronunciation of the s in kudos as [z], as if it were the plural marker
2. Lengthening of the /o/ before this [z] — the same difference you hear in the pronunciation of gross [groʊs] and grows [groʊːz]
3. Plural verb agreement when kudos is the subject of a clause:
   • Kudos go to San Diegobased Qualcomm Corporate Foundation.
   • Critical kudos acknowledge the success of her approach.
4. Use of count-noun determiners with kudos:
   • Many kudos for the essay by guest host Sharon Paul
   • A few kudos to get you started

Three months ago, I saw another step in the development of backformed kudo: its use as the modifying part of a compound noun. Compound nouns usually, but not always, have a singular as their first element — the noun that modifies the head noun. For example, we have gumball machines, not gumballs machines. So even someone who might never have occasion to reveal a backformation by talking about “one rabie” might well talk about attaching rabie tags to their pets’ collars. Similarly, in the October 5, 2012 issue of Entertainment Weekly, there was this sentence about TV’s Emmy awards:

The last time nipple covers, shrimp truckers, and demented garden gnomes were mentioned during an Emmy telecast was the year 19 hundred and … never. But that’s what made the 64th annual kudofest on Sept. 23 so engrossing–if a tad bewildering. (“Best and Worst of the Awards,” Lynette Rice, p. 21)

COCA provides two more such examples, also from EW, and also about award shows:

• He predicts a shiny night for four-Buckle nominee Brad Paisley, forecasts Sugarland to win Video of the Year for ” All I Want to Do, ” and believes that this kudocast will appeal to those beyond the country-fried set. (2009)
• If you loved seeing Jack Black … rock the children silly on the big screen, you might contract a case of the giggles watching him host this kiddie kudocast (say that 10 times fast). (2006)

However, I’ve discovered that kudo isn’t always a backformation. If you’re talking about mixed martial arts, it’s a portmanteau of karate and judo!

Overpowered!

It’s been more than four years since Doug and Adam got the game Hyper Crush Bros. Knockdown-Dragout for the GameCube. (The GameCube!) But they still play it, as well as the sequel game that came out for the Wii a couple of years later. For all the first-person shooters that Doug plays (which he calls FPSs), with realistic weapons like submachine guns (SMGs), he has said more than once that the best party videogame is this one. Adam agrees. And just tonight, they were down in the basement playing Hyper Crush on the GameCube, because of a glitch that Adam read about today.

The most formidable opponent in the game, the final boss at the end of some mode of play or another, is nothing but a giant hand that can pound you, smack you, drill you into the fighting platform, or just flick you away into the vast reaches of space. Adam found out about a glitch that would let you actually play as this Master Hand, not just face it as a boss.

I hadn’t remembered that Master Hand was a non-playable character, so I asked, “Oh, you couldn’t play as Master Hand before?”

“Oh, no,” Doug answered;

Think about it; he’d be overpowered.

With the meaning of overpowered that I’ve used most of my life, this sentence is completely contrary to what I know Master Hand. It means that playing as Master Hand, you’d be quickly and easily defeated. But with the meaning that Doug standardly uses when talking about characters in his FPSs that have too many weapons and abilities, it means that nothing could defeat you.

The ambiguity comes down to the ambiguity of the -ed suffix. Its the past participle suffix, of course, so for a verb like overpower, the -ed suffix gives us the overpowered that means (in the words of the OED) “Subdued or overcome by a superior force or influence; overwhelmed.”

But -ed can also attach to nouns, to give us adjectives that mean “having [NOUN],” as in a one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people eater. Attach it to the noun power, and you get powered with the meaning “having power”. Of course, power is also a verb, so you can get the homonym powered “having been supplied with power”, which means pretty much the same thing as noun-derived powered. But here’s where things get different. When you attach over to the noun-derived powered, you get Doug’s meaning of overpowered. As it turns out, this definition is in the OED, too: “Having a greater than usual or excessive degree of (mechanical) power.” They have attestations going back to 1971:

• 1971 A. Diment Think Inc. iv. 56 Fast acceleration because Corvairs are overpowered if anything which is definitely the right way to be.
• 1990 Good Housek. May 7/2 (advt.) And because it powers a more efficient vacuum cleaner, it doesn’t need to be overpowered.
• 2000 J. Doyle Taken for Ride xxii. 440 The industry moved from four- to six-cylinder engines in the 1930s..to the overpowered Pontiac GTO and Dodge Charger muscle cars of the 1960s and 1970s.

The OED even agrees with my morphological analysis. Look at its etymology for my meaning of overpowered and for Doug’s:

• [verb-derived] Etymology: < overpower v. + -ed suffix1.
• [noun-derived] Etymology: < over- prefix + powered adj.

Or in the presentation style that I prefer, here is the latest in a list of English contronyms, joining cleave, sanction, and all the rest:

To Kill a Mockingbird RNW

I found this hastily scribbled line in my linguistics spiral notebook recently:

They chewed up and spat out the bark of a tree into a communal pot and then got drunk on it.

I had written it down as soon as I heard it sometime in the past few months, but I couldn’t remember where. I’d forgotten I’d even heard it until I saw that page in my notebook again, but it was clear enough why I’d written it down. It was another right-node wrapping. The transitive phrasal verb chewed up is coordinated with the transitive phrasal verb spat out, with the shared direct the bark of a tree. But after that shared direct object, there’s one more phrase in this sentence’s predicate, and it belongs just to spat out. It’s the prepositional phrase into a communal pot.

Googling the phrase, I see that it’s from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which I listened to in the car during the summer. Mystery solved!

Negative Polarity and Dr. No

When I was a kid, I gradually became aware of a book and movie character named James Bond. There were no VCRs or movie rental places then, so my first opportunity to see a Bond movie was when Moonraker came out. I was eager to go, and thought the movie was kind of cool when I saw it, even though I couldn’t follow the plot very well. I attributed that to being young. A couple of years later, I saw For Your Eyes Only and still couldn’t follow the plot. After a couple more Bond movies in the theaters, and a few on TV, I concluded that the problem wasn’t me; it was the movies. More recent entries have been boring as well as hard to follow. But now, Doug and Adam are old enough to want to be interested in James Bond. They haven’t seen enough of them yet to realize that most of them are boring and overlong, with plots that don’t make sense. Unfortunately, their mother hasn’t realized this yet, either, even after Goldeneye and the new Casino Royale, so I’ve had to sit through a few of them on family movie night. The earlier ones haven’t been too bad; I liked Goldfinger. The problem is that if the boys like these movies, they’re gaining an inaccurate impression of the true nature of Bond movies, and as a result will probably want to see Skyfall when it comes out.

Anyway, the latest Bond movie we saw was one of the ones with Sean Connery: Dr. No. In this one, Bond meets a woman on a secluded beach, collecting shells. Bond fans will know that her name is Honey, and she’s played by Ursula Andress. She’s apprehensive as Bond approaches, and this dialogue ensues:

Bond: I promise I won’t steal your shells.
Honey: I promise you you won’t, either.

Did you hear what went wrong there? When it’s used as an adverb, either is a negative polarity item (NPI), occurring only in sentences involving a negation, questions, or contexts focusing on a limitation. If you want to say either in an ordinary affirmative sentence, you have to use too instead, as in these examples:

I don’t like the Bond movies with Pierce Brosnan. I don’t like the ones with Daniel Craig, either.
My wife likes Sean Connery. She likes Roger Moore, {too, *either}.

Sometimes you can get away with using a too in a negative context, where you’d expect either. John Lennon pulled it off in “Imagine”, when he sang

Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion, too.

I also remember an old Justin Wilson bit, in which a recurring line is

I don’t know. And that ain’t all, I don’t give a damn, too!

But either needs two things in order to be grammatical, at least in my idiolect: a negation, and a proposition that is semantically similar to one that has already been uttered (or otherwise understood by the speakers). When both of these occur in one clause, everything’s fine, as in I don’t like the ones with Daniel Craig, either. We have the negation don’t, and the whole proposition is semantically similar to the one that came before it: I don’t like the Bond movies with Pierce Brosnan.

What about in the sentence from Dr. No? The negation is in the embedded clause: you won’t [steal my seashells]. But there is no semantically similar proposition in that embedded clause. Honey didn’t say something like I promise you you won’t seduce me, or steal my seashells, either. Where we do get the similar propositions is at the upper clause level: Bond promises X, and Honey promises X, too.

It reminds me of sentences I’ve actually uttered myself, involving tag questions. But when I said these, I noticed, and identified them as things I didn’t mean to say. The Dr. No sentence was presumably part of a written script. What do you think? Is I promise you you won’t, either an error, or something that’s a part of other people’s grammar but not mine?

Lay Down and Throw Up Your Arms

In my last post (so very long ago!), I said that the song “Twenty One Guns” by Green Day was linguistically interesting to me for two reasons, one of them being the pronunciation of twenty one guns. The other was that it reminded me of writing chapter 2 of my dissertation. Now, over a month later, I’ve finally pulled myself out from under a pile of teaching and grading obligations and am here to finish what I had to say about “Twenty One Guns”.

So as you’ll recall, the refrain went like this:

One
Twenty-one guns
Lay down your arms
Give up the fight.

One
Twenty-one guns
Throw up your arms
Into the sky.

First of all, a correction: The chapter I was remembering was chapter 1, not chapter 2. In chapter 1 of my dissertation, I was writing about diagnostic tests for whether you have a pair of homonyms or a single word whose meaning is vague enough that it can cover the meanings you’re interested in. I summarized some of these tests from a classic work by Arnold Zwicky and Jerry Sadock (which itself was a summarization of various ambiguity tests they had seen in the literature), and one of them they called the crossed-senses test. Take a sentence like

Doug and Adam both like rock.

This could mean that my sons both like rock music, or that they are both geology enthusiasts. But how about this: Could it mean that Doug likes rock music, while Adam likes igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary pieces of the Earth’s crust? If it can, then rock passes the crossed-senses test for these two meanings, indicating (according to the theory) that musical rock and geological rock are not homonyms, but a single word with a meaning vague enough that it encompasses both meanings of rock.

As it happens, I can’t get this crossed-senses reading, except as a joke. For comparison, if I said Doug and Adam both read a book, it could certainly be true if one read a hardback and the other a paperback. If you can’t crossed senses for both like rock, then for us at least, musical and geological rock are homonyms: separate words that happen to sound the same (and be spelled the same too). Since they’re separate words, you see, the single utterance of rock can only be one or the other.

Years after Zwicky & Sadock, a paper by Alex Lascarides, Ann Copestake, and Ted Briscoe observed that failing the crossed-senses test wasn’t enough to conclude that you had a pair of homonyms. Why? Because you get the same kind of goofiness even when you repeat that word with the two meanings. Using the rock example again:

Doug likes rock, and Adam likes rock.

Can you get the crossed senses now? I can’t. So at this point, whatever is blocking the availability of both meanings of rock, it’s not that they are homonyms instead of a single, vague word. If they’re homonyms, there should be no problem with having the geological one in the part of the sentence about Doug, and the musical one in the part about Adam. There must be something else going on, and whatever it is can also explain why Doug and Adam both like rock fails the crossed-senses test, too. For what it’s worth, LC&B argue for a pragmatics-based explanation.

Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about recently when I listened to the chorus of “Twenty-One Guns”. The plural noun arms has two meanings. In the phrase lay down your arms, it refers to weapons. In the phrase throw up your arms, it refers to the body parts between your shoulders and your hands. Now suppose we had a sentence with just one token of the word arms, but with both meanings needed; something like…

Lay down and throw up your arms.

Does it pass the crossed-senses test? No way. For me, it cannot mean to surrender your weapons and then quickly raise your arms above your head. It could mean to lie down (with the nonstandard usage of lay) and then quickly raise your arms above your head. Or it could mean to place your body-part arms on a table in front of you before raising them in the air. Or it could mean doing the same thing with your weapons. Of course, throwing up your arms could also mean vomiting them up, whether you’re regurgitating weapons that you’ve eaten, or your own arms that you previously chewed off in an act of autoanthropophagy. So the three meanings multiply out to six, but in no case can I get arms referring first to weapons and then to one’s upper limbs (or vice versa).

But unlike the example with rock, which fails the test whether you say Doug and Adam like rock or Doug likes rock and Adam likes rock, this one improves greatly when you say the word arms twice. I’d been listening to the song for a couple of years before I ever took note of the two meanings of arms coexisting in the same refrain. How does that happen?

Actually, arms doesn’t pass the crossed-senses test so easily in a sentence like this:

Lay down your arms, and throw up your arms.

I can get the crossed senses, but not as easily as I do when listening to the song. The context helps: The idiom lay down your arms always refers to surrendering your weapons, and more figuratively to “giv[ing] up the fight”. The phrase throw up your arms doesn’t have an idiomatic meaning that I’m aware of (beyond that of vomiting, as noted earlier), so that would nudge listeners toward the more literal body-part meaning. Maybe the typical hip-hop exhortation to “throw your hands in the air” (usually in a manner so as to suggest that you just don’t care) helps a bit, too. Even so, the meanings rub against each other enough to make me think about the other possible interpretations, and smile to myself.

So once again, how did the song lyrics manage to slip these two meanings of arms past the crossed-senses barrier without my noticing for all that time? My only guess at this point is that in addition to the context cues, you have those extra words in between, giving more space for the first arms activation in your brain to die down before the second one comes along. That, and the fact that Green Day sing this chorus so very slowly!

Twenty Wung Guns

Glen once noted that the trouble with being able to put all your favorite songs on one convenient device is that you have to consciously decide to listen to new music. Motivation to listen to the radio plummets: “Why listen to someone else’s lousy mix plus advertisements, when you can listen to the best mix ever without advertisements?”

So true, so true, as I concurred once before in this space. These days I get exposed to unfamiliar music only when something unusual is going on. As I noted in that earlier blog post, in 2010 I heard a few new songs I liked only because I made a point of listening to the pop station every day for two weeks while I was writing a column on the use of the word <I>Im(m)a</i> in popular songs. I’ve heard a new song here and there in the bowling alley with Doug and Adam, or in the movie theatre while I’m waiting for the previews to begin.

And, as it happens, in the roller skating rink, too. That’s where, at Doug’s birthday party later in 2010, I heard a song that I identified with my song-identifying phone app as “21 Guns” by Green Day. I added it to my iPod, and now, two years later, “21 Guns” has become just one more piece of music that I listen to to the exclusion of new stuff.

After a couple of years of listening to it, I’ve gradually become interested in the chorus:

One
Twenty-one guns
Lay down your arms
Give up the fight.

One
Twenty-one guns
Throw up your arms
Into the sky.

Two things are interesting about the chorus, one of them because of the way Green Day sing it, and the other because it brought back memories of writing Chapter 1 of my dissertation.

In English, the phoneme /n/ might be pronounced not only as [n], as in Neal, but also as [ɲ], as in In your face!, or as [ŋ], as in drink. That last assimilation is consciously known to most literate English speakers, some of whom had to be taught that ng was actually pronounced [ŋ], and not [ng] “nuh-guh”, as it was spelled.

In fast, or even normally paced speech, these assimilations can cross word boundaries, as happens in my example of In your face! Speaking carefully, I would pronounce 21 guns as “twenty [wʌ̃n] guns”. But speaking freely and easily, I would (and do) pronounce it as “twenty [wʌ̃ŋ] guns”. (The ~ is supposed to go over the ʌ in those transcriptions

In fact, Green Day sing it this way, too, as you can hear in the video. What I find unusual, though, is that they do this even though the song is somewhat slow (about 80BPM, the low end of “andante”, according to my metronome). Nevertheless, every time they sing that chorus, it’s a very carefully enunciated “twenty wung guns”. Why?

Linguistically Lost Again

For the past couple of months, the Netflix traffic in our house has ground to a halt, with The Bourne Supremacy and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog languishing on our mantel. During that time, our family movie nights have been spent pushing our way through seasons 1 and 2 of Lost on DVD, now that Doug and Adam are old enough to follow it. I wonder if we’re engaging in binge-viewing, a term I just heard in the past couple of weeks, but which seems to have been around since at least 2001. Maybe not; maybe you have to watch all the episodes without stopping to do other things like work or go to school before you can claim to have binge-viewed a set of episodes. (Did you catch my backformed compound verb there?)

I blogged about Lost a couple of times back in 2006. Now, during a second viewing, I’m catching not only foreshadowing and character connections that I missed the first time; I’m picking up linguistically interesting utterances that I missed, too.

First is essentially the same phrase, spoken by two characters in two episodes:

The button we have to push every 108 minutes or the island’s gonna explode [Charlie]

The button you gotta push every 108 minutes or the world ends. [Dave]

This is one of those coordinated relative clauses in which one of the clauses contains a gap and the other doesn’t. The one with the gap is we gotta push __ every 108 minutes; the one without the gap is the island’s gonna explode. Together, they sound fine, but try to make the one without a gap stand alone, and it’s no good:

[*]The button the island’s gonna explode. (only grammatical if the island will cause the button to explode)

[*]The button the world ends. (only grammatical if the world will end the button)

More specifically, it’s one of these asymmetric coordinations in which the conjunction is or instead of and. Those are a bit rarer, and tend to be overlooked in the literature on the subject (at least, in the papers I’ve read). I’ve blogged about them most recently in this post, about “the pot we have to shit or get off of”.

The other phrase I noted during these second viewings was one from Hurley, who was asked if he knew were Ana Lucia had gone, and answered sardonically:

That would assume that anyone actually tells me anything.

Anyone and anything are negative polarity items (click on the category label for all the relevant posts, or here for a short one that will give you the idea). They are most at home in negated sentences (I don’t want anything), questions (Do you want anything?), or sentences that express some kind of limitation (Only a few people know anything about this). But none of those is the case in Hurley’s sentence. The only negation there is an implied one, the unspoken proposition, “No one tells me anything.” I asked negation expert Larry Horn what he thought about NPIs in this sentence, and he observed that NPIs like the ones in Hurley’s sentence sound bad again when you specifically say that the assumption could actually be correct. He offered this comparison:

on the unlikely assumption that anyone would ever touch a drop of that punch (here’s some guacamole that would go nicely on the side)

#on the plausible assumption that anyone would ever touch a drop of that punch,…

So tell me, how does this sound?

That would assume, correctly, that anyone tells me anything.

Little Women: Gapping and Wrapping

Two posts ago, I wrote about a right-node wrapping that I found in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. It was this:

At the door her sisters seized and bore her to the parlor in a triumphal procession.

An ordinary transitive verb (seized) and a transitive followed by a directional prepositional phrase (bore … to the parlor) are coordinated, and share a single direct object, her. The V+PP bore … to the parlor wraps around this direct object, giving rise to a syntactically non-parallel coordination that, if phrased in a parallel manner, would probably be written

…her sisters [seized her] and [bore her to the parlor in a triumphal procession].

Tonight I was reading aloud some more of Little Women, and it occurred to me that Alcott really seemed to like using another kind of non-parallel coordination that I’ve blogged about a few times: gapping. This is a coordination of two or more clauses that have the same verb, but different subjects, and different content following the verb. In this kind of coordination, some or all of the verb is simply left out, just like a shared subject or shared direct object might be omitted from a more typical coordination. You can find other examples in the other posts in the Gapping category; here’s what I was noticing in Chapter 8 of Little Women:

• Sitting on the floor with one boot on, Amy began to cry and Meg [began] to reason with her, when Laurie called from below, and the two girls hurried down, leaving their sister wailing.
• Meg flew to rescue Amy, and Beth [flew] to pacify Jo, but Jo was quite beside herself….
• Laurie had vanished round the bend, Jo was just at the turn, and Amy [was] far behind, striking out toward the smoother ice in the middle of the river.

Then, only a page or so after that last example (it’s hard to tell with the Kindle), I came to this sentence:

“She is not hurt, and won’t even take cold, I think, you were so sensible in covering and getting her home quickly,” replied her mother cheerfully.

I had to read that one twice. They covered her, and got her home. They didn’t cover her home and get her home. Wow — in one chapter, three cases of gapping, capped off with a right-node wrapping!

Little Women Right-Node Wrapping

Doug has been dragging his feet on his school reading list this year. He’s been coasting, taking advantage of the fact that he’s already read Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and The Call of the Wild. He made it through the copy of The Hunt for Red October that he got for Christmas (not on the list) in less than a week, and I figured the book would be done so soon that it wasn’t necessary to remind him of his reading list. He’d be back to it soon enough. But when I saw Patriot Games appear on his nightstand the day after Red October was done, I insisted that he get back to the list.

To help, I even downloaded free copies of the public domain novels on the list onto our family Christmas present, a Kindle. After that he read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but has now found himself slowed to a creep, as he agonizes his way through The Scarlet Letter, recently arriving at 5% of the way through. I keep telling him that the story has got to be really good, in order for the book to have obtained status as a classic despite passages like this:

In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf–but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood–at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass–here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick.

So while Doug continues to chip away at the hard crust of The Scarlet Letter to get to the good stuff that must be inside, I’ve taken another step to move him along his list, and have made Little Women our latest read-aloud book. It moves a little slowly, too, and despite what you may have heard, it’s not about SW fetishes at all, but you don’t get as lost in its syntax as you do in Hawthorne’s stuff. And some passages are funny, like this rant from Jo, when Meg reminds her that she is a young lady:

I’m not! And if turning up my hair makes me one, I’ll wear it in two tails till I’m twenty…. I hate to think I’ve got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China aster! It’s bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boy’s games and work and manners! I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy. How I wish that I had a penis! And it’s worse than ever now, for I’m dying to go and fight with Papa. And I can only stay home and knit, like a poky old woman!

Doug and Adam refused to believe the line about the penis was really in the book. Their mother didn’t believe it, either. “I would have remembered that!” she said. Meanwhile, sometimes I’ll speculate with the boys about what’s going to happen later in the book, and wonder if Jo will ever get her “special operation.”

Anyway, now we’re at Chapter 7, 12% of the way through the book. (It’s amazing how reading on a Kindle gets you used to thinking about being 5% or 12% through a book, and not about what page you’re on.) A couple of nights ago, I was pleasantly surprised to read this passage:

Beth hurried on in a flutter of suspense. At the door her sisters seized and bore her to the parlor in a triumphal procession.

This may be my earliest right-node wrapping yet. For those who are just joining us, or for those who need a refresher, the main thing is that if you read the parts that are joined by and as a strictly parallel coordination, it means that Beth’s sisters (1) seized her to the parlor, and (2) bore her to the parlor. Even if it were idiomatic English to “seize someone to someplace” (which it isn’t; I checked the Corpora of both Contemporary and Historical American English), it wouldn’t make sense to seize Beth to the parlor, and then to bear her there again. What Louisa Alcott clearly meant was that the sisters (1) seized Beth, and (2) bore her to the parlor.

Now that I’ve been reminded of RNWs again, I’m interested to hear if they turn up in other texts from the 1800s or earlier. If you find one, leave a comment.