Crack the Door

Sometimes at night, my wife will want to make sure that Doug and Adam aren’t woken up by the noise coming from our bedroom, so she’ll have me shut the door. We don’t want one of the boys walking in on us when we’re busy watching a movie or some of those TV shows I mentioned in my last post.

Still, she doesn’t want the door completely shut: She wants to be able to hear if Doug or Adam has any trouble, and of course the cats need to be able to wander in and out. Here’s where it gets strange. When she makes her request, she asks me to “crack the door” — when the door is already wide open.

I long ago got used to the idiom crack the door/window meaning “open it just a crack”, and not “damage it by putting a crack in it”. The OED has this as chiefly a US usage, with the earliest attestation from 1899. But in my English, you can only crack doors and windows that are shut, not ones that are open. The crack has to be the appearance of a gap, not the narrowing of an existing one. So who else out there can crack doors and windows that are already open?

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High-Frying Ambiguity

Larry Horn sent a message to the American Dialect Society’s mailing list this morning, with the following headline that a colleague had brought to his attention:

McDonald’s fries holy grail for potato farmers

I showed it to Doug, who was home with a fever, and he and I laughed and laughed over McDonald’s having found, and fried, this holiest of artifacts.

Not too long afterward, Ben Zimmer posted a message thanking Larry and noted the headline over at Language Log, where several of the comments have brought out exactly what properties of English, and in particular headline-ese, made this ambiguity possible. If you want, you can read through the (at time of this writing) 20 comments there and get the same information as you’re going to get here, but I’m going to write it up anyway, with all the contributing properties discussed in a single place.

You Lie!

While watching President Obama’s address to Congress two nights ago, I heard someone off screen interrupt when Obama said the healthcare plan he envisioned would not provide health insurance to illegal aliens immigrants. I couldn’t hear everything the unseen speaker said; all I heard was, “Lie!” For all I knew, that might have been the entire utterance, in which case it could mean several things. One possibility was that the speaker was commanding the president to knowingly state falsehoods. Not very likely. Or he could have been telling Obama to pronate or supinate himself on the House floor, but that’s even less likely, since the more idiomatic way of saying that would be “Lie down.” So going back to the realm of false statements, “Lie!” could also have been just a noun, thrown out as a tag for the hearers to tie to Obama’s claim. That, I decided, was the most likely interpretation if all the speaker had said was “Lie!”, and it had probably been the end of a longer statement like “That’s a lie!”

The next day, of course, I learned that the speaker was a representative from South Carolina, who offered an actual apology (not a non-apology) for this breach of respect, only to say later that he’d done it because his party leadership made him, and is now winning big political points from his constituency and others.

I also learned that the full utterance was not “Lie!”, or even “That’s a lie!”, but in fact, “You lie!” So lie was a verb after all. In between wondering why exactly people think the statement that Obama’s hoped-for healthcare system won’t cover illegal aliens is a lie, I’ve wondered why this representative chose this particular wording.

You lie is in the simple present tense, which in modern English is used to represent habitual action. (At least, it does for verbs that denote actions, such as hurl, disrupt, and lie. For verbs that denote states, like know or seem, the simple present tense is the normal choice.) For action that’s happening at the time of the utterance, what you want is the present progressive tense. So instead of “You lie!”, why didn’t this representative yell out “You’re lying!” to the president?

It’s true that You lie is shorter than You’re lying by one syllable, but I’d hesitate to conclude that’s a strong enough reason. It also seems to me that You lie somehow carries more vehemence, maybe because it sounds like archaic language, from a time when the progressive tenses weren’t as developed, language that’s only pulled out now for special and serious occasions. Not too archaic — Thou liest! would just sound like a joke — but just archaic enough. Or maybe You lie is stronger because even though it’s not saying that you’re lying right now, it carries that implication — in addition to the actual assertion that you habitually lie. “You lie a lot,” the utterer claims, leaving it to the hearer to fill in the rest: “And you’re lying right now!”

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Lollipops, Suckers, and Maggots in the Trash

While eating breakfast yesterday, Adam was somehow reminded of the time I videotaped maggots in the garbage can.

It happened when Adam was in kindergarten. One Thursday afternoon I set about taking the emptied garbage cans back into the garage, and as I pulled one of them upright, I saw some stuff in the bottom. It turned out to be maggots, eating what appeared to be pieces of chicken from a fast-food sandwich. I figured my wife must have gotten the sandwich on her way home from work earlier in the week, and tossed the bag with the leftovers directly into the garbage can in the garage on her way into the house. The food had spilled out of the bag sometime after that, to become accessible to the flies. I hosed out the can, but not before I’d fetched our videocamera and taken a couple of minutes of footage to show Doug and Adam later on. Apparently it made quite an impression on Adam.

I think Doug remembered it, too, not because he said, “Yeah, that was cool!”, but because he told Adam, “It wasn’t a garbage can, it was a trash can.”

“Garbage cans and trash cans are the same thing,” I said.

“Oh? Well, I say garbage can for the small ones in the house, and trash can for the big ones in the garage.”

“You’re free to do that,” I told him, “but don’t expect everyone else to know about or respect this distinction you’re making.”

I looked it up just now, and my Random House Unabridged Dictionary has garbage for the wetter, slimier stuff, typically from the kitchen; trash for dry refuse. I’d never known about that difference. Doug never did, either, and instead created his own distinction, at least between garbage can and trash can.

It reminded me of an idiolectal distinction of my own that I had from toddlerhood to my junior year in high school.I had two words for two similar kinds of candy: A lollipop was a sphere of hard candy on a stick, while a sucker was a disk of hard candy on a stick. This distinction was reinforced by the existence of Tootsie Pops and Blow Pops, two kinds of spheres of hard candy on sticks (with the added attraction of Tootsie Roll stuff or bubble gum in the center), with names that obviously contained a clipped form of lollipop. As I grew up, on occasion I’d hear people get it wrong, calling a lollipop a sucker. I was finally moved to comment on it one year in high school, when the band was selling Blow Pops to raise funds (or should I say, to fundraise?). Every day for several weeks I’d see classmates buying or (in the case of band members) selling these lollipops, but not once did I hear anyone call one a lollipop. They might refer to them by the brand name of Blow Pops, but otherwise, they called them suckers. I finally complained to a friend about it one day, wondering if people just didn’t like the word lollipop because it sounded childish or something. I was puzzled when I learned that the meaning difference between lollipop and sucker didn’t exist for her.

I tried to remember how I’d learned the distinction, but couldn’t. All I can guess now is that the first time I saw a globe of hard candy on a stick, it was just chance that whoever told me the name called it a lollipop instead of a sucker; and vice versa for the first time I saw a disk of hard candy on a stick. Then, finding myself with two words for a similar kind of object, I looked for the difference that would explain why one object was called a lollipop, and the other a sucker. The difference I seized upon was the difference in shape. Carving the distinction in this way made it hard for me to know what to call squares or cubes of hard candy on sticks.

What Doug and I did is a manifestation of a tendency that linguists call “One Form, One Meaning.” The idea is that there are no perfect synonyms, and that even if two words start out as synonyms, over time speakers will create a distinction between them, even if it’s just a distinction in degree of formality. Arnold Zwicky has blogged a lot on OFOM as it relates to prescriptive rules on grammar and usage. For example, when some English speaker decided there must be some meaning difference to account for the different forms of healthy and healthful, it was the same kind of reasoning I used when I beheld the maggots in the garbage can and decided that the longer, fatter, slightly yellow ones and the shorter, whiter ones must be different species of flies.

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At the Zoo

Doug has been spending his days this week in a day camp at the Columbus Zoological Garden, and while he’s been there, Adam and I have been entertaining ourselves at the zoo and its adjacent waterpark. Here are some linguistic items that have caught my attention in the course of doing that.

First, here’s something Adam and I heard while we were waiting in line for the Cyclone, a waterslide that uses inner tubes that will seat four people. (Digression: Funny we still call them inner tubes. Of course, water parks have never used actual inner tubes for their slides, but when the tube is like two or four inner tubes fused together, the name seems especially inapt.) In front of us were four girls in their early teens. As they contemplated the 55-foot drop in the slide, and wondered which of them would end up sliding down backwards, one girl said that she thought she might “hurl.” They discussed how this might bear on where she sat in the tube; Hurl Girl asked one of the others:

Do you want hurl on you?

Well, why not? The verbs vomit, throw(-)up, and barf all work as nouns, so why shouldn’t the more recent verb of regurgitation hurl be allowed to do it, too? All the same, it was new to me, and sounded funny. Are there other synonyms for the verbs vomit that can’t be used as nouns? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say that there was a puddle of ralph on the floor. And of course, verb phrase idioms don’t lend themselves well to turning into nouns — I don’t think English speakers would say He got {toss-his-cookies, worship-the-porcelain-urn, lose-his-lunch} all over his shirt. Do you?

A while back, I wrote about how as a child I was confused by my mom’s two-syllable pronunciation of striped, and one day decided I would henceforth use the one-syllable pronunciation /straIpt/ (to rhyme with griped and sniped) because I just couldn’t see any reason why striped shouldn’t pattern with other words that added an -ed suffix to a word. I never made similar adjustments for words like wicked, naked, or crooked, maybe because I didn’t perceive wick, nake, or crook as words unto themselves. (Or maybe not, since I certainly knew the word rag, but still pronounce the adjective ragged with two syllables.) I was suddenly reminded of these words as Adam and I attended “Raptorama,” a lecture on various birds of prey. As the docent pointed out the red-tailed hawk’s hunting adaptations, he referred several times to its “crooked beak”, pronouncing crooked as /krʊkt/, to rhyme with booked and cooked. Or, now that I think about it, hooked. It could be that he was saying hooked beak, which would make more sense, but it sure sounded like crooked. I pronounce the past tense of the verb crook that way, as in “He crooked a finger at me,” but not the adjective crooked. What about you?

I also noticed that he consistently pronounced talon as /’tælɘn/ to rhyme with gallon, with the second syllable unstressed and the vowel accordingly reduced to schwa. So did Adam, when the docent called on him. I, however, pronounce talon with two stressed syllables, so that the second vowel is not reduced: /’tælɐn/. Who’s with me?

In the Asia Quest section of the zoo, Adam and I saw langurs. A sign said that langur was Hindi for “sacred monkey”. “I’ll bet it’s not,” I thought. “I’ll bet that langur is Hindi for langur, and that it so happens that langurs are considered sacred in India.” I was right. The Hindi word for sacred is dharmika or any of several other words, none of them forming any part of langur. Monkey in Hindi is kapi or bandara. Meanwhile, as far as I’ve been able to tell, langur in Hindi just means “langur”, and that the word is related to the Sanskrit word for “tailed”.

Their etymology for panda is a bit more accurate: The sign said it came from a Tibetan word meaning “bamboo eater”. The OED backs this up, saying it’s “probably an alteration of the second element of nigálya-pónya“. However, it’s the nigálya part that means “cane-eating” (in Nepali, actually); the Tibetan word pónya, which actually evolved into the current name, just means “animal”. But it’s still true that panda came from a word meaning “bamboo eater”.

In the Australia section, the koala exhibit had a sign saying that koala meant “no water” in the Aborigine language. Their reference to “the” Aborigine language didn’t inspire confidence. Which one did they mean? Aside from that, though, I haven’t found anything to contradict this claim. Do you know anything about it, Claire?

Unless with Implied Negation

The management of the local swimming pool sometimes don’t say what they mean. They say they’re open at noon every day from Memorial Day to Labor Day, but I learned different one day near the end of Adam’s kindergarten year. He got out of school just before noon, while Doug didn’t get out until a few hours later. I decided I’d take Adam swimming that day, since the pool had opened up a couple of days earlier, on Memorial Day. I packed our lunches and we went to the pool, only to find out that it was closed!

“We don’t open until 4:00 on school days,” the manager told me.

Family Owned and Imitated

A tire shop that opened a year or two ago puts funny messages on its marquee. They’re so funny that I can’t seem to recall any of them right now, except of course for the one I’m going to tell you about now. It said:

Family Owned and Imitated

Family owned: So a family, let’s call them the Smiths, owns this business. Family imitated: A family (presumably the Smiths again) also imitates this business. The Smiths imitate their own business? How is that possible? Maybe it’s like that that Greek family I read about. They ran a chocolate shop in nearby Granville for years, but then had a falling out, so that there are now two chocolate shops, run by two branches of the same family, located within two blocks of each other in downtown Granville, each claiming to possess the truest version of the family’s recipes for chocolate confections.

But never mind that. I’m pretty sure all they’re saying is that this business is family-owned, and that it’s imitated. This reading makes sense: Lots of businesses say that they’re imitated, usually before a warning that they’re never equalled or duplicated. In this reading, the coordinated elements are family-owned and imitated, as illustrated on the left.

To get the reading that leads you to imagine a rift in the family, you have to parse it with just owned and imitated as the coordinated elements, with family applying to both, as illustrated on the right. So why did I want to parse it this way, anyway, since it gives the weird and unlikely reading?

It’s at least partly because of the common collocation that the sign is harking to: Family Owned and Operated (or sometimes, family owned and run). In those phrases, family is clearly intended to form a compound with both owned and operated, as in the diagram. After all, who’d want to say that a family owns some particular place of business, and that (get this) someone operates it? If it’s open at all, the latter claim is obvious, and stating it violates the principle of Relevance. Only if it’s taken to mean “family-operated” does the statement say something useful: The fact that some place is run by the family that owns it might not be obvious to the casual observer.

By using this recognizable phrase as their point of departure, they primed me to parse Family Owned and Imitated in the stupid way. Now that I think about it, though, family owned and operated could be useful as a deceptively ambiguous phrase, for a family that has recently contracted out the operation of its family business but doesn’t want to change the wording in their advertisements. I wonder if that’s been done. Do any of you know of businesses that advertise that they’re “family owned and operated”, and are operated by someone other than the family?

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Malnegation in This American Life

Don’t read this post unless you’ve already listened to this week’s episode of This American Life, or you don’t care about hearing it. For a few more days, it can still be downloaded for free here; after that, it’ll cost a couple of dollars.

They Swim As Good As They Look

While I was out and about today, I saw a girl wearing a T-shirt promoting her high school swim team. On the front, it said:

If only we swam as good as we look!

Even More Wide-Scoping Operators

One of my regular readers is Deborah Lipp, who blogs at Property of a Lady, and has written several books on Wicca and paganism in addition to The Ultimate James Bond Fan Book (“One of these things is not like the others,” as she admits in Sesame Streetwise fashion). She also, as it turns out, is a big fan of AMC’s series Mad Men. I learned this when she wrote to me asking a language-related question about the show and mentioning her and her sister’s MM fan blog, A Basket of Kisses. That reminded me that I’ve had a Mad Men-related post sitting in my pile of drafts, so it seemed like a good time to pull it out and consolidate it with a number of other draft posts on the same topic.

The topic is “Wide-scoping operators”, and here’s the example, from the October 18, 2008 episode of Mad Men:

Jane Siegel (Peyton List)

How do I know I’m not just going to eat another mushroom and this room will disappear and I’ll be back on the train to Trenton?