Mathepragmatics

We hear a lot about partisan gridlock in Congress these days, so it’s nice to hear about times when Congress (or at least the House of Representatives) can lay politics aside and just get the job done, as they did in 2009 when they declared March 14 National Pi Day. Adam’s math teacher has taken the resolution to heart, and spent a couple of weeks in March teaching his class lots of formulas involving π, including both surface area and volume of spheres, cones, and cylinders. Adam asked for some help on that cylinder worksheet, and I found that the poor guy had actually been doing the multiplication of π by hand, instead of just doing like you get to do once you hit pre-calculus and leaving all the answers in terms of π. Furthermore, he was doing them by hand, and worst of all, he was doing it twice in the formula (πdh)+(2πr²). The first thing I did was convince him that (πdh)+(2πr²) was equal to 2πr(h+r), so at least he’d only have to multiply by π once.

He did the first six problems, which all had labeled diagrams of cylinders to go by, but got confused when he got to the last three problems, which moved from diagrams to verbal descriptions of various cylinders. In particular, he was uneasy about #8, which asked for

the surface area of the outside of a cylindrical barrel with a diameter of 10 inches and a height of 12 inches.

Just looking at the words, I figured Adam would have to start by finding the surface area of the side: 120π square inches. Then there would be the ends to consider. Assuming the thickness of the side was negligible, the surface area on the inside would be the same as on the outside. So two ends, each with a surface area of 25π square inches. In other words, the exact same procedure as finding the surface area of any cylinder.

So why did the worksheet creators go to the trouble of asking about the outside of a barrel, when the outside and inside surface area were going to be the same anyway? That seemed like a pretty clear violation of the Maxim of Relevance.

Or was it? As seeming violations of rules of conversation will do, this one made me look a little closer at the situation. I looked at problem #7, and found that it was asking for the

surface area of a can with a radius 4cm and a height of 11cm.

I looked at #9, and found that it was asking for the

curved surface of a D battery with a diameter of 3.2cm, and a height of 5.6cm.

And with that, the task in problem #8 became clearer. In #7, you had to find the complete surface area of a cylinder; in #9, the surface area of a cylinder without its top or bottom. If #8 were about a cylinder with a bottom but without a top, that would make a nice progression, and I was convinced that that was what the worksheet creators had been after.

Why To Bother?

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

Why to clean your roof

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

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

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

*why to bother / why bother

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

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

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

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

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

I even found an embedded why to question:

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

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

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

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

It Could Be Months

I was reading about the temporary funding deal for the FAA this morning, and was confused by this paragraph:

“This issue is still unresolved as far as I’m concerned,” said Dan Stefko, an engineer with the FAA who has been out of work for nearly two weeks. “It could be 1 1/2 months before we could be right back in the exact same spot.”

The first time I read it, I was imagining a job that required an FAA engineer to visit different airports on a schedule. The temporary fix was no good because … he had been unable to do his job in the place he had visited most recently, and by the time his route took him there again, it would be 1 1/2 months later, and by then problems that he could have fixed now would have gotten worse. Was that it?

I read it again, and this time took the exact same spot metaphorically, referring to a sudden lack of funding. I finally began to get Stefko’s point: The temporary fix was no good because in six weeks the problem would have to be addressed again. Well, that’s always an obvious objection to a temporary fix, so why was it so hard for me to get that meaning?

I blame the It could be before syntax. If he had said,

We could be right back in the exact same spot in 1 1/2 months

I would have had no problem. By putting the time period up front, Stefko was putting the focus on it, and the usual reason for that is to emphasize how long something is going to take. That is, unless you do something to cancel that assumption, like

It could be as little as 1 1/2 months before we could be right back in the exact same spot.

I did some Google searching for “It could be * months|years before”, and just skimming through the first few pages of results, didn’t find any that were emphasizing how little time might pass before something happened. What about you? Can you get the “as little as” reading with It could be ___ before constructions?

Unspoken Messages

In my last post, I talked about going out for dinner and a movie with the family. The movie was X-Men: First Class, and it was really good! Doug and I both liked how the plot mixed historical events with the fictional — and not just ordinary fictional events, but supernatural ones. Like reading the most satisfying books by Michael Crichton or Tim Powers, there are things you know are fact, and things you know are fiction, but some things straddle the line between plausibility and fantasy so well that you don’t know quite where the seam is. I learned somewhere that the literary name for this genre is low fantasy (as opposed to high fantasy, where the entire setting is made up). On a language-related note, you get to hear German, French, Spanish, and Russian spoken in the movie, in addition to English of course. But I’m pretty sure (as sure as I can be without actually fact-checking) that the adjective bad-ass didn’t exist in 1962.

Anyway, the way we happened to be on this night out is that last Thursday night, my wife was browsing the web while sipping her favorite after-work drink: club soda with cranberry juice and a big wedge of lime. As I was loading the dishwasher, she said, “Hey, they liked X-Men.”

“Who? EW?” I asked. I came over to the couch to look over her shoulder.

“‘James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender are–’” she began, handing me her empty tumbler. As I took it back to the dishwasher, she continued reading the review.

“So are you saying,” I asked, “that instead of Sunday night videos and homemade pizza, we should go have supper at Boston’s and then see X-Men at the Arena Grand? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?” (Friday night was out of the question, since Adam and I would be at the Cub Scout campout. More on that in the next post.)

“Wow, that’s quite a detailed message you’re getting there,” she said.

“Well, we’ve been married going on 15 years, so I’m pretty good at picking up on this stuff, you know.”

“Really?”

“Yep!”

“Well, there’s one unspoken message that you didn’t pick up on.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“I wasn’t giving you my glass to put in the dishwasher.”

I was confused. “Huh?”

She pointed toward the dishwasher where I had just loaded her glass with all the dirty dishes. “I wanted a refill.”

Sorry, Eliot!

As the wife and kids and I took our seats in Boston’s Pizza, I caught sight of a guy sitting one booth forward of us. It looked like one of those linguists on Twitter I met at LSA 2011 in Pittsburgh back in January. What was his name? I knew his Twitter handle was jeliot, but didn’t remember what the J stood for. In fact, I couldn’t remember much about him at all, other than that we’d met briefly a couple of times during informal linguist tweetups. Didn’t remember what he studied, or where — though apparently he was one of the Ohio State University linguists, enjoying a Sunday evening in the Columbus Arena District, just a mile or so south of the OSU campus. I graduated in 2002, so there are a lot of grad students there now that I haven’t met, or know only on Twitter (for example, KatCarmOSU). Or in this case, met in a tweetup and didn’t remember that they were studying at OSU.

All this was assuming I had the right guy, of course. As soon as we’d ordered drinks, I took out my smartphone and brought up my Twitter app to look for this jeliot and see if the profile photo matched the face that my wife’s face was intermittently obscuring. If it did, I could check the profile for his full name. I did my search and brought up the jeliot page, and found I didn’t even need to check the profile. His latest tweet said:

I'm at Boston's Pizza (199 W. Nationwide Blvd., at West Street, Columbus) w/ 2 others http://4sq.com/jkcoLe—
J. Eliot DeGolia (@jeliot) June 05, 2011

It was him! I got up, walked over, and said, “I thought that looked like you,” showing him his tweet that I’d just read.

“Wow! What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Having dinner with my family.” I pointed out the wife and kids, who were turning around to see who I was talking to. I introduced myself to his dining partner as Neal.

“I’m sorry,” I confessed. “I don’t remember your real name; I just remembered that you were jeliot on Twitter. Is it Jim, or Jacob … ?”

“It’s Eliot,” he said. “I go by my middle name.”

Oh, one of those weirdos, I thought. Like E. Gordon Gee, or John Calvin Coolidge, or M. Lynne Murphy. “Hey,” I said, “I go by my middle name, too! My first name’s Philip.” Well, that explained why I’d had trouble getting his name straight with the brief words we’d had at LSA.

“So do you live here?” Eliot asked.

“Yeah!” I replied. “Well, in __________,” the nearby city I actually live in. “Anyway, nice to see you. I’ll let you get back to your dinner.” I went back to our booth, where Doug and Adam were asking, “Who was that?”

“He’s an OSU linguist that I met at LSA,” I told them. Then it was time to order our pizza. Half an hour later, we got up to walk around the block to the Arena Grand theater to see the X-Men movie. Eliot and I waved goodbye to each other as I left.

In the theatre, I brought up the Twitter app again to look at Eliot’s Twitter profile again, but first saw that someone had mentioned me in a tweet. I clicked over to check it out, and saw that it was Eliot tweeting about me:

Just ran into @LiteralMinded in the arena district of Columbus. It's a small world! —
J. Eliot DeGolia (@jeliot) June 05, 2011

A small world? Oh-kay. Not that that wasn’t true, but the situation didn’t seem to meet the felicity conditions for uttering that it’s a small world. You’re only supposed to say that when you meet someone that in ordinary circumstances you wouldn’t expect to meet, because you live so far apart and haven’t seen each other in so long. It wasn’t that much more unusual for him to run into a fellow Buckeye linguist while out and about in Columbus than it was for me to occasionally see Brian Joseph at the airport, or Bob Levine at a recital for the violin school that his son and Adam go to. Was it?

Clicking over to Eliot’s timeline, I saw that his other recent tweets were a little odd, too. Two hours before our conversation, he’d tweeted:

Wait, what? How and when did Columbus become kinda awesome? #fb—
J. Eliot DeGolia (@jeliot) June 05, 2011

That’s something I’d expect from someone who hadn’t lived here very long. Or … from someone who’d come to take his town for granted, and had suddenly had his eyes opened by something like the slide I’ve seen in the Arena Grand Theater’s pre-shows, which touts Columbus as the home of the nation’s best zoo, best library, best cancer hospital, etc. Maybe that was it.

Then I finally clicked over to Eliot’s profile page. He had listed himself as J. Eliot DeGolia, of Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh! That’s right! He was one of the local linguists who’d shown us out-of-towners some of the locally popular places to eat. Now those tweets made sense, as well as his surprised question, “You live here?” And right within his hearing, I’d been telling me family, as if I’d known him a lot better than I actually did, “He’s an OSU linguist!” I hope he didn’t take offense.

Wait! Why should he? Isn’t it a compliment to be mistaken for an OSU linguist? In any case, sorry for my conclusion-jumping, Eliot, and treating our encounter as offhandedly as something that might happen any old time I visited the OSU library or linguistics department. If I’d remembered you were from Pittsburgh, I’d have asked what brought you to Columbus. I hope you had a good time while you were here. It looks like you did.

Talks at Appropriate Times

Doug’s report card came home last week, and on the list of nonacademic, behavioral characteristics, he had a minus for “Talks at appropriate time.” I knew from the conference with his teacher last month that Doug had no problem speaking up at appropriate times. What he does have a problem with is not talking at inappropriate times. I tweeted about the grade:

On son's report card: minus for "Talks at approp. time". Son, u gotta learn to speak up when u need to! Oh, wait, that's not the problem…—
Neal Whitman (@LiteralMinded) April 04, 2011

Glen tweeted in response:

@LiteralMinded Dude, someone needs to tell that teacher that a statement does not imply its logical inverse. I nominate Doug.—
Glen Whitman (@glenwhitman) April 04, 2011

Good point!

Adam’s Free Time

Every summer when Doug and Adam take swim lessons (at the pool I’ve talked about before), I put up with the instructors calling the crawl “freestyle,” bringing up yet another generation of kids to think that freestyle means crawl. I can understand this usage in the Olympics, because there, freestyle really does mean you can choose your stroke, and it’s just that for most swimmers, you’d be a fool to choose anything but the crawl. And as a linguist, I can understand the process by which freestyle undergoes this semantic narrowing. But as always, I don’t have to like it, and what the swim teachers call freestyle, I continue to call the crawl.

So what got me thinking about swimming, here in the middle of winter? Conversations I have with Adam, which go something like this one:

Me: OK, time to do your homework.
Adam: But I haven’t had any free time today!
Me: Sure you did! You slept until almost noon this morning.
Adam: I mean I haven’t had any video game time!

Or this one:

Me: All right, let’s do some violin practice.
Adam: So you’re saying I get no free time at all? Because after this it’ll be time for showers and get ready for bed!
Me: You had an more than an hour of free time between when you got home from school and supper.
Adam: But Doug was on the P[lay]S[tation]3 almost that whole time!

No. No R-based narrowing of free time on my watch. In my house, it will continue to refer to time you can spend as you wish, regardless of whether you spend it playing video games.

No One Would Be Better

Of course you’ve read, at some point, lists of sentences taken (supposedly) from letters of recommendation whose authors were unable to gracefully refuse to write them. Instead, the letter-writers damn with faint praise, with sentences like, “John always came to class on time.” Or they offer carefully ambiguous phrasings like, “I can’t recommend him highly enough.” The ambiguity there is easily enough pinned down: Is it impossible to recommend him highly enough because he is so good that no recommendation can do him full justice, or because of ethical considerations (you cannot do it because you know he’s not suited for the job).”

How about this one? “No one would be better for this position than Jen Smith.” Yeah, I get it: The hidden meaning is that Jen Smith is so incompetent that having no one at all take the job would be preferable to hiring Ms. Smith. But where does that ambiguity come from? It’s not one of the kinds I’ve written about enough to have created a category of posts for it: attachment ambiguity, scope ambiguity, de dicto/de re. There is something to say about it pragmatically: If the author had wanted to unambiguously convey that Jane Smith was the best candidate, they could have done so by writing, “Jane Smith is without question the best candidate for this job.” The fact that they wrote something that could be interpreted two ways indicates that they didn’t wish to send that message. Still, we’re left with the question of how this sentence is able to encode both these messages.

The same kind of ambiguity comes up in proverbs such as No news is good news and Half a loaf is better than no loaf, and unremarkable sentences like Well, a peanut butter sandwich ‘s better than nothing, or I suggest no liquids after 11:00 PM. Under ordinary quantifier semantics, these sentences would mean that there is no such thing as good news; that there exists no loaf that half a loaf is better than; that a peanut butter sandwich is the worst thing that exists; and that there are no liquids that I suggest after 11:00 PM.

I’ve wondered for years how this ambiguity is represented in formal semantics, and have figured that it’s so pervasive that someone must have covered it somewhere. It doesn’t happen just with no. It also happens with quantifiers such as too many, as in Too many cooks spoil the broth. That sentence doesn’t mean that there are too many broth-spoiling cooks in town (though it could); it means that when you have too many cooks, you end up with spoiled broth. But after studying semantics for years and still never coming across anything on this kind of ambiguity, I figure it’s time to offer my own analysis, and that’s what I’ll be doing in Pittsburgh this Saturday, at the Linguistic Society of America’s annual conference. My poster is titled “‘No news is good news’: The quantifier/SOA ambiguity in English”.

SOA stands for “state of affairs”, which is what I take the meanings of the above examples to involve: the state of affairs in which there is no one hired, there is no news, there is half a loaf or a peanut butter sandwich, there are no liquids after 11:00 PM, or there are too many cooks. All these SOAs are SOAs in which something or other exists (instead of, say, SOAs in which something happens or someone does something), and in fact, this kind of ambiguity only occurs with noun phrases that fit comfortably in sentences fitting the template There+be — in other words, with indefinite or existential NPs. For example, you can’t say, “There are most women in this class.” And when you replace no or too many with most —

Most news is good news.
Most cooks spoil the broth.

– you don’t have an SOA reading anymore. These sentences mean that most of the news in the world is good, and that more than half of all the cooks out there spoil broth.

If you’re attending the conference, stop by and check out the poster. If you’re not, or if you’re just impatient, you can click on the poster below to see it now.

Click to access full poster

It took me a long time to buckle down and do the poster, though, because there was one piece of data that I kept trying to cover, but could only do so at the cost of letting this quant/SOA ambiguity occur with all NPs, not just indefinites. Can you think of the common saying that caused me so much grief? No fair if you’ve already examined the poster! Stay tuned for the answer in the next post.

Doug Visits the Lost and Found

Last year, Doug started to get a reputation among his friends as a guy who will do crazy things. At the end-of-school pool party, his friend Ken dared him, for $5, to eat a slice of pizza that someone had dropped on the ground. Doug ate it and collected an easy $5. (When my wife found out, she was so horrified that she told him, “The next time that happens, come to me! I’ll give you $5 for not eating it!” Doug and I agreed that if that policy had been in place, he would have tried to get an offer of $20 from Ken before refusing.)

At the end of a course of eight weekly lectures on drug abuse and how to resist peer pressure, he resisted the peer pressure (and teacher pressure) to write an essay that concluded with his pledge not to abuse drugs. He wrote that the program had provided some good information, but could be improved by not glossing over issues like medicinal marijuana, and that although he didn’t plan to abuse drugs, it wouldn’t be because of a pledge that was involuntary and therefore meaningless. According to Doug, it was the only essay to get a round of applause from the students.

Last Friday, Doug came into the lunchroom carrying a green glove that his friends didn’t recognize. As he sat down to eat, Ken asked, “Where’d the glove come from?”

Doug said, “I picked it up at the Lost and Found.”

“You just took it from the Lost and Found?”

“Yeah.”

Ken began to laugh. This was crazy! He turned to the others at the table. “Hey, guys, Doug just took this glove from the Lost and Found!”

They laughed in disbelief. You just never knew what kind of random stunt Doug would pull. But after a minute or so their amusement turned to concern.

“Doug, you can’t just go taking stuff from the Lost and Found!”

“Doug, why would you want that glove?”

“Doug, this is not cool, man!”

“Well,” Doug said, “it is mine….”

I had been less than happy when Doug came home with only one of his new green gloves on the very first day he wore them. Good for him for taking the initiative to look for it at the Lost and Found. And way to violate the Maxim of Quantity for fun and laughs!

Senators, Representatives, and Congressmen

Over at Visual Thesaurus, I have a column about how and when congressman, which on its face would seem to be synonymous with member of Congress, came to refer to members of the House of Representatives to the near-exclusion of senators. I was reminded of it a few weeks ago when I heard someone on NPR talk about a low-population Western state’s “lone congressman“. Wait — the fewest congressmen (or congresswomen) any state should have is three, right? Two senators and one representative. As is often the case, it turns out that this usage been going on for a long time, in this case maybe even for as long as there has been a U.S. Congress, since the word congressman predates it.

But these days, congressman is even less appropriate than it was a hundred years ago, since now there are women in the House (not to mention the Senate). So the feminine equivalent congresswoman has been created, and to refer to either congressmen and congresswomen, the supremely awkward congressperson (first citation in OED, 1972). This word should never have been created. (Note: I’m not taking the untenable position that it’s not a word. But I still say it was stupid to create it.) If you want to talk about a representative, why not just say “representative”? Or, if you want a word that can refer to either a senator or a representative, member of Congress will do the job less awkwardly, and without the confusion that’s bound to occur when people interpret congressperson to mean “representative”. And what about more than one congressperson? Congresspersons? Congresspeople?

In the VT column, I attributed the constrained meaning to Q-based narrowing, which I’ve also talked about in these posts. However, representative also has semantic and phonetic factors working against it. On the semantic side, congressman/-woman does have an advantage over representative: It refers to a member of Congress, as opposed to some other kind of representative. Anyone who represents someone is a representative, but only a representative in Congress is a congressman/-woman.

Phonetically, representative is a troublesome word because it has an [r] in a consonant cluster beginning with a bilabial stop, i.e. [p]. Furthermore, this [pr] cluster is at the beginning of an unstressed syllable, and these circumstances almost guarantee difficulty in pronunciation. Look at what’s happened to Feb(r)uary, p(r)erogative, and lib(r)ary. (Nancy Hall at California State University at Long Beach has done some research on this “short-distance r-dissimilation,” but it’s not published yet. But if you’re curious, you could take a look at some of her other work in progress, on long-distance R-dissimilation, in words like pa(r)ticular and gove(r)nor.) There’s also the fact that representative has five syllables to congressman‘s three, or congresswoman/-person‘s four. Finally, there’s the decision you have to make when pronouncing the nt in the middle. Do you do a nasalized flap (scroll down), or carefully pronounce the [nt]?

In the course of my research for the VT column, I also found that usage of congressman/-woman and representative varies by region. In one post to the alt.usage.english newsgroup, Ed Williams wrote:

I’ve found that the term “congressman” can refer to either a Representative or a Senator depending on the local parlance of different areas in the US. Back in New England where I grew up, for some reason we always talked about “congressmen and senators.” When I lived near Wasington, DC, you tended to hear people refer to the Representatives as just that. Out here in the western US, everyone seems to speak just of “congressmen” in the broad term. What’s odd around here, however, is that when you hear people addressing the politicians directly, you hear “Mr or Ms So and So” for Representatives and “Senator” for Senators. Different traditions, I suppose. Personally, I find using the term “Representative” all the time to be a little too officious and that “congressman” (or “-woman”) just feels a little more neighborly.

There were two threads on this topic on alt.usage.english. The Williams post was in the earlier, shorter, and more even-toned thread. The later, much, much longer, and at times rather heated thread was entertaining because of the strident posts by a guy named Bob Lieblich, who insisted that not only was congressman/-woman used exclusively to refer to members of the House, but that even the plural congressmen/-women only referred to representatives, never to a mixed crowd from both houses, no exceptions. Here’s a sampling:

i don’t know what to say. Where I am (see below), “Congressman/woman/person” means someone in the House — period. It does not mean or include “senator” — ever. I live three miles or so from where these people hang out (when they’re not fund-raising), and maybe out there in Podunk or Peoria there is someone who, hearing the word “Congressmen” or the phrase “Members of Congress,” allows for the possibility that some senators are meant, but that’s not what the words mean where the people described by those words assemble.

Interesting: For Lieblich, even members of Congress doesn’t cover both houses. But continuing, when one participant wrote, “Neither Congressman nor Congressperson should be used as a title, Lieblich showed little patience:

Sorry, both are, by the very people to whom the title applies.

Can’t argue with the content. Upping the stakes, Lieblich wrote:

And here’s a dare: Find anything in the Congressional record that clearly uses “congressman” or “congressperson” to mean or include senators.

Okay, senators and congressfolk are not the final word on English usage. (Thank God.) But they use the labels for their positions the way I use those words, and until I am shown something (other than unsupported opinion) that indicates I am wrong, I’m going to keep insisting that I’m right.
–
Bob Lieblich
I am, you know

When one participant told Lieblich, “I can say: Senator Boxer is a congressperson,” Lieblich responded with this howler:

Well, of course you can. And any knowledgeable American speaker of English will wonder what you are trying to convey. Forgive my asking, but are you a knowledgeable American speaker of English? If so, what has led you to think that you can call a Senator a congressperson and have anyone understand what you are saying?

I guess it just goes to show that word meanings, like Constitutional rights, fade when they’re not exercised.