Mayonnaise and Margarine

It happened again. My wife asked me to hand her the mayonnaise, and I did. As soon as I did, I sensed her exasperation, and realized I’d messed up again.

“I mean, Miracle Whip,” she said, handing back the mayo. I handed her the Miracle Whip, and as she spooned it into the bowl of tuna, I knew she was wondering how, after thirteen years of marriage, I could still be thinking she wanted mayonnaise when she asked for mayonnaise.

Well, I’m sorry! Just because it’s white and you spread it on bread for your sandwiches doesn’t make it mayonnaise. I know from unpleasant personal experience that mayonnaise and Miracle Whip are quite different things.

Still and all, I guess my wife figures I can learn to accommodate this feature of her vocabulary. After all, she learned long ago that I want margarine when I ask for the butter.

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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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?

More Beatles Ambiguity

All the talk about Beatles lyrics a few posts ago reminded me of an ambiguity in one of their songs that I’ve wondered about for years. For my twelfth birthday, Mom and Dad gave me an LP of the anthology The Beatles: 1962-1966. I remember sitting in the easy chair in the den, reading the liner notes while I listened to the record. One of the tracks on disc 2 is “Michelle”, in which Paul McCartney addresses the exclusively Francophone object of his affection. The trouble is that McCartney doesn’t speak French, or at least not enough to have mastered the complicated syntax of je t’aime. Instead, he has to make do with the simple sentence “Michelle, ma belle” sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble, which means “Michelle, ma belle [my pretty] are words that go together well”. Here, you can listen for yourself:

The French wasn’t a problem. I didn’t know it anyway, so I just went with it (although once I took French in high school I realized that where the liner notes had les mots it should be des mots). The line that stopped me was this one:

I will say the only words I know that you’ll understand.

More Christmas Song Confusion

Doug and Adam participated in our church’s Christmas play last Sunday (uh, the Sunday before last? two Sundays ago?), and as I listened, I noticed a couple of changes the Sunday school teachers had put in the lyrics of the carols they sang. First of all, they’d changed traverse to travel in “We Three Kings”. Second, they had the kids singing “Joy to the world! The Lord has come!” Not the Lord is come, but the Lord has come. I think the motive for both changes was the same: Too many kids would mess up the unfamiliar words and forms and say them this way anyway, so they might as well get everyone “singing from the same hymnbook” (Ha! Get it?). And if you’re wondering why it should ever have been the Lord is come in the first place, Grammar Girl explains it in one of her more linguisticky episodes. I’ve linked to it before, but I’m doing it again here for convenience.

A few days later, Doug and Adam and I were wrapping presents in the living room while I had the iPod shuffling through the Christmas music. As it played “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” I found myself wondering once again about the line

Oh come, let us adore him.

Wasn’t it strange to be suggesting that we should do something that usually you don’t have conscious control over? It’s like saying, “Hey, let’s be surprised!”, or “Let’s love to go to the movies!”, or “I know, let’s hate runny scrambled eggs!” I wasn’t wondering as much as I did when I was a kid, because when I took high school Latin, one of the first things we did was learn to recite the Latin version, “Adeste Fideles”. I saw that the line Oh come, let us adore him corresponded to the Latin Venite adoremus — so adore was clearly a pretty direct borrowing from Latin. Later in the class I learned that orare meant “to pray”, and ad was a prefix that could go with a lot of verbs. So I figured that adore must have originally meant something like “pray to”, and then undergone a semantic shift. Nevertheless, I still wondered about it somewhat, because during all these years, I’d never actually gotten around to looking it up.

As I was thinking all this, Doug said, “Why do they say, ‘Oh come, let us adore him’?”

“You know, Doug, I’ve wondered about that for years,” I said. I told him my suspicion, and then hit on a radical idea. I could turn around, and without even standing up, reach the dictionary in the bookshelf behind me, and find out once and for all what was going on with adore. In short, I was right. The earliest definition was to revere or worship, and the “really like” meaning came later. Now that I’ve looked at the online OED, too, I see that the word entered the language in the early 1300s, and the “highly regard” meaning that has eroded to “really like” first appeared in the 1500s.

Continuing on the subject of confusing words or phrases in Christmas songs, I heard “Frosty the Snowman” playing, and it occurred to me that the line

With corncob pipe and a button nose and two eyes made out of coal

was just asking to be mondegreened. I checked it out, and sure enough, at least one person mis-heard the line in the way that I was thinking.

And last, here’s another line from “The Night Before Christmas” (or if you really want to be pedantic about it, “A Visit from St. Nick”), which I’ve written about before:

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle, and away they all flew like the down of a thistle.

What do you know? It’s another multiple-level coordination, one that I never noticed until this year. We have a verb phrase (sprang to his sleigh), another verb phrase (to his team gave a whistle), and an entire clause (away they all flew like the down of a thistle) joined by a single and.

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More Zeugma with Make and Get

If you browse the zeugma tab (under Syntax|Coordination), you’ll find several posts talking about the verb make, as used in sentences such as:

• It makes my hair big and my pits sweat.
• The jigging made Tabby nervous and Zeke itch.
• They helped him forget what had made his father sad and his mother cry.
• It would just make everyone in back of you angry and want to pulverize ya!
• The sun makes you hot and sneeze.

As I noted in one of the posts, every example has a single token of make used in two ways, in the same order. First is the make that is followed by a noun phrase (or pronoun) and an adjective phrase: makes my hair big, made Tabby nervous, made his father sad, make everyone angry, makes you. Second is the make that is followed by a noun phrase (or pronoun) and a verb phrase: makes my pits sweat, made Zeke itch, made his mother cry, make everyone want to pulverize ya, makes you sneeze. The last two examples even have the same NP, everyone in back of you and just plain you, going with both the adjective (angry, hot) and the VP (want to pulverize ya, sneeze), but still, we have the adjective complement first, and then the VP complement.

Continuing the pattern is this example, taken from the newspaper several months ago, quoting one Andrew Stove on what makes a fast Pinewood Derby car:

It has to be aerodynamic. Make it small and come to a point.
(Amanda Dolasinski, “Like boy, like grown man,” The Columbus Dispatch, June 27, 2008, p. B2)

A single make, a single direct object (it), and both an adjective and a VP complement, in that order (small, come to a point). I’m still waiting to hear an example like Make it come to a point, and small.

It sounds a bit weirder (to my ear) when the meanings of make are a little farther apart, with one of the “cause something to be in a certain state” meanings of the above examples paired with the meaning of “create”, as in this example from the zeugma files:

Is that what made the blender noise and the sky turn purple?

Browsing through the zeugma posts, you may also notice that get is a popular verb for them. We’ve noted:

• …after you’ve gotten dressed, your bed made, and your teeth brushed.
• [The karate lessons] make it tough for him to get his things done and to bed on time.

Often now, I’ll even be tempted to say things like, “OK, Doug and Adam, get your jackets and into the car,” but I can’t trust that that’s part of my grammar: I’ve been contaminated by too much thinking about the kind of sentences I listed above. Anyway, these get examples use get in the same two ways. One is get meaning “become” or “be”, as in gotten dressed and get to bed on time. The other is the causative version of the “become” meaning: “cause [something] to become or be”, which takes a direct object before the adjective that says how the direct object ends up: get your teeth brushed, get your bed made, get your stuff done. But unlike with the make sentences, these sentences have both possible orders for the two meanings: The first sentence has the causative meaning coming second (and third), while the second sentence has the causative meaning coming first.

We’ve also had a case of a single get used with farther apart meanings, putting the “become” meaning with the “acquire” or “receive” meaning:

A 17-year-old gets arrested and a $1,000 bond for failing to show at a court appearance for … a seatbelt violation.

Now, writing about country music for the first time in quite a while, I have another “become/acquire” usage of get from a song I heard on the radio:

These days there’s dudes gettin’ facials, manicured, waxed, and botoxed.
(“I’m Still a Guy,” by John Kelley Lovelace, Lee Thomas Miller, and Brad Douglas Paisley)

Here we have dudes acquirin’ facials, and becomin’ manicured, waxed, and botoxed.

As always, I welcome your grammar judgments on any of these examples, and other examples you’ve heard or seen.

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Cat Sniffers

Doug’s friend Grant likes petting our cats, and is especially pleased when one of the shy ones lets him pet him. I remember his excitement when he was finally able to pet our cat Barney. Barney, you may recall, we put to sleep last year, but now we have a new addition, a white, blue-eyed, polydactyl cat named Sinatra, whose owner was no longer able to take care of him. He spent the first couple of days hiding in our closet, but is now completely at home, tussling with the other cats and chasing them through the kitchen and into the basement. But he’s not quite comfortable enough to let just any kids pet him. Grant tried without success when he came over last week.

“Hey, Doug,” Grant asked, “Did Sinatra let you pet him when you first got him?”

“No,” Doug said, “but he did let me sniff him.”

“Oh! He let me sniff him, too, just now!” Grant said.

Nonplussed, I asked, “You guys sniff cats?”

Doug tried to put together a correction. “He let us… He let… We held out our hands and he sniffed them.”

Ah, now that was a much more typical cat-human scenario. But why had the sniffer become the sniffed in the earlier statements Doug and Grant had made?

Maybe it was just that Grant had asked the question Did Sinatra let you pet him?, and primed with this template, Doug replied by taking out the pet and putting in something that Sinatra did let him do, and forgot to adjust the semantic roles of who did what. The trouble with that hypothesis is that we’d also predict the same kind of mistake might happen if Grant had instead asked, “Did you pet Sinatra?” If he’d said that, I doubt Doug would have slipped up and said, “No, but I sniffed him.” Doug didn’t think so either. Well, he might say such a thing, he admitted, but only if he really meant that he had put his nose up to Sinatra and sniffed him.

I think the mistake had a lot to do with the fact that Grant and Doug were each talking about two events: an event of Sinatra permitting some action to occur, and an event of Grant or Doug performing that action. In many (maybe even most) cases, the direct object of let has two roles to fill. [1] First, there’s the role of the affected participant in the letting event. In all the sentences listed below, the direct object of let refers to the person who receives the permission, the person for whose benefit some obstacle was removed, the person who undergoes a change of state from inability to do something to ability to do it, or at least from uncertainty to certainty about being able to do it:

Sinatra let me approach him.
Sinatra let me touch him.
Sinatra let me pet him.
Sinatra let me pick him up.

Second, there’s the role of the agent of the other event. In all the sentences listed above, the direct object of let also refers to the approacher, the toucher, the petter, or the picker-upper.

So now when it comes to extending your hand for a cat to sniff it and rub his cheek on it if you’re worthy, what goes in the direct object slot of let? Well, in the subject slot it definitely has to be Sinatra, since he’s the one deciding what Doug will be able to do. There are two remaining participants in the event: Doug, the sniffed party; and Sinatra again, this time in the role of the sniffer. Doug fits into the direct object slot by virtue of being the one affected by the letting. Sinatra fits into the direct object slot by virtue of being the performer of the permitted action. Which one wins?

We know the outcome: Doug won. And how could the sentence have been accurately rephrased while retaining the let? Something like this:

Sinatra let himself sniff my hand.

That comes closer to the truth than Sinatra let me sniff him, but it still sounds weird, as if it’s Sinatra receiving permission and not Doug. Doug could also have said,

Sinatra let me get near enough for him to sniff my hand

and then left it up to the hearer to use R-inference to conclude that Sinatra then actually did sniff the hand.

Or he could have used other wordy options, all of which would have required more thinking than it took to take Sinatra let you pet him as a template and swap out pet for sniff. These considerations make Doug and Grant’s mistake understandable, though still a mistake, of course.

One more factor that may have let the mistake go undetected long enough to escape Doug’s and Grant’s lips is the fact that in a sniffing event, the thing that gets sniffed is physically affected a lot less than the affected item for other actions. I don’t think Doug would have said

Sinatra let me lick him!

unless, of course, he had actually been talking about getting a tongueful of all that white fur.

1. For hardcore syntacticians: Yes, sentences like He let the room get trashed (alongside He let the partiers trash the room) and You mustn’t let there be a riot on your watch point to let as an object-raising verb, with a non-thematic direct object. I think let also works as a control verb, though, with a thematic direct object.

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Soccer Cleats and the Dual Number

After I got a D in tennis during my freshman year in high school, I decided I’d take the opportunity to switch to the track team for the second semester. About the only thing I was good at in tennis was running the warm-up lap at the beginning of the class. I’d usually come in first or second, so I figured maybe track would be a better fit. Unfortunately, I found myself several levels above my level of incompetence after making the switch. Thank goodness for Billy Neimeier — if it hadn’t been for him, I’d have always been last.

One thing I learned during my time on the track team was what a cleat was, when I’d see the sprinters screwing them onto the bottoms of their special shoes. Somewhere along the way I learned that various other kinds of athletic shoes could also have cleats, and that, in a good example of metonymy (more specifically, synecdoche), these shoes are typically referred to simply as cleats. This synecdoche is the first step in a dangerous direction, and by dangerous, I mean “personally annoying”.

First, you’ll agree that cleats denotes some number of cleats other than one. Second, note that when an athlete puts on their cleats, they’re putting on two objects. Finally, let us reaffirm that two is a number other than one. Can you see where this is going?

Doug has been playing soccer for more than four years now during the spring and fall, and I have to listen to him say things like…

I can’t find one of my soccer cleats!
When I dove for the ball, he accidentally kicked me with his cleat.
Dad, could you help me untie this cleat?

He’s not the only one. I hear his soccer-playing friends saying the same kind of thing, and every time, I want to blurt out, “A cleat is not a shoe! A cleat is one of those pointy things on the bottom of the shoe!” I don’t, though. By now I know that when I hear developments like this, they’ve probably been going on for years already, and it’s too late to do anything. And sure enough, although I don’t see this particular meaning for cleat in the OED, it’s evidently common enough to have made it into my Random House Webster’s unabridged dictionary (published in 2001), as the fifth definition. It’s also pretty much standard in most of the online catalog descriptions I see. Still, it’s hard to accept that for some people, the earlier meaning of cleat is so far from their experience that they’ll write slap-yourself-on-the-forehead ignorant stuff like this:

A cleat is a type of shoe designed especially for sports played on grass or dirt, such as soccer. …[T]he shoes generally have large studs on the bottom to assist in gripping the surface, preventing sliding and assisting in rapid changes of direction. The stud itself is often called a cleat. (link)

“The stud itself is often called a cleat”? Yes, that’s because cleat is the name for those stud thingies!

You know, all of this confusion could have been avoided, if only English had a dual number. We have the singular cleat, and we have the plural cleats for numbers other than one, but some languages have a form just for pairs of things. For example, Sanskrit had a dual number. Let me just flip to the back of my copy of Teach Yourself Sanskrit … OK, here we go. The singular form suhrdam (accusative case) means “friend”. The plural form suhrdas means “friends”, provided you’re talking about more than two of them. The dual form suhrdau means “(two) friends”. If we had a dual number in English, then speakers would know that the plural form cleats was referring to more than two of something, and therefore could not be referring to the two shoes themselves.

Unless we’re talking about a player with three legs or something, but that’s rare enough that I don’t think people would be confused.

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Waxing On

In a post from 2006, I quoted a local columnist as writing:

The joke is that bloggers are youngish, live in their mothers’ basements, work in their pajamas and have nothing better to do than wax away on any number of topics.

From the context, it seems that wax away means to write or talk about something in an overly serious or dramatic tone. As I wrote then, I imagine the sequence of events that got us to a state where wax could have this meaning. To recap:

1. Usage of wax with its meaning “to grow or increase” (in size or some other quality) becomes rarer and rarer.
2. Speakers without this meaning for wax in their vocabulary hear expressions like wax eloquent (meaning “grow or become eloquent”).
3. They know from context that wax eloquent means to speak eloquently.
4. They conclude that wax means to speak (and also miscorrect the adjective eloquent to the adverb eloquently).
5. They also note that when wax means to speak, it’s usually describing some kind of highly emotional or excited speech (wax bold, wax indignant, wax nostalgic, etc.), and accordingly use it that way themselves.

Earlier this week, the columnist did it again, writing: