Pears and Pineapple

“Best by May 2008,” I read on the bottom of the can of pears. Did that mean best by May 1, I wondered, or best by May 31? Probably May 31, I decided. In any case, even if it meant by May 1, that didn’t mean the pears were actually bad, did it? Just not at their peak of flavor, right? After all, best by wasn’t the same as use by, or even sell by. All the same, I knew if my wife saw that label, she’d throw the pears out. So I did what needed to be done: I opened the can and served those pears to Doug and Adam for breakfast.

Consistently Behaving Beats Behaving Consistently

Not too long ago, somebody lost track of how low we were getting on cat food, and consequently somebody found themself having to buy whatever cat food they could find in an unfamiliar pet-supply store. After walking past the bins of live crickets in the “weird pets” section, I got to the dog section and saw this sign posted in the aisle:

We’ll help you train your dog to behave more consistently.

That could lead to trouble, I thought. Just imagine…

Customer: I want a refund for the money I wasted on this stupid training course!
Employee: I’m sorry you’re dissatisfied. Did the course not work for your dog?
Customer: Hell, no! Riley used to sometimes pee on the floor instead of barking to go outside, but now he always pees on the floor! He used to chew up the newspaper every now and then, but now he does it every single morning!
Employee: The training worked! Your dog is behaving in a much more consistent manner than he did before!

Have a Seat!

When we go out to eat, we usually sit at a booth instead of a table, so there’s always a question we have to settle.

“OK,” I ask, “who gets to sit with me, and who has to sit with Mommy?”

Doug answers, “Uh, Dad, I get to sit with Mommy, and Adam has to sit with you!”

Adam objects, “No, you have to sit with Dad, and I get to sit with Mom!”

“Oh, wait, I remember,” I say. “Adam sat with me last time, so Doug, you get to sit with me this time. Adam, you have to sit with Mommy.”

Failure and Neglect

Arnold Zwicky gets annoyed when readers of Language Log email him to tell him all the things he should have mentioned in a particular post. Here’s what he says about this kind of email:

There are three main variants:

NEG: You didn’t mention X.
FAIL: You failed to mention X.
NEGLECT: You neglected to mention X.

In my understanding of things, these three are on an increasing scale of implied responsibility on my part, and hence culpability on my part. … The FAIL variant conveys…, to my mind anyway, that I should have mentioned X. Not mentioning X is … a failure on my part.

Stuffing, Dressing, and Sweet Mashed Potatoes

I made my lunch today out of Thanksgiving leftovers. It’s the first time in at least a decade that I’ve done that, because it’s the first time our family has had Thanksgiving dinner here instead of at my wife’s uncle’s house. I loaded the plate with the good, juicy dark meat that there was plenty of, not the dry white meat that everyone else so strangely prefers. Then some of the stuffing — oh, wait, I can just hear my dad saying that it’s not stuffing unless you’ve actually stuffed the turkey with it. It’s dressing. If you go calling the mixture of breadcrumbs, eggs, turkey stock, and herbs that my mom would cook in a baking dish stuffing, people will get it confused with that portion of the same mixture of breadcrumbs, eggs, turkey stock, and herbs that actually got cooked inside the bird. Maybe the distinction is worth making, since the inside-the-bird stuffing has soaked up some of the juices from the turkey and tastes somewhat different from the baking-dish-stuffing. But on the other hand, if I call it dressing, people could confuse it with what you put on your salad.

Another dish that my wife had picked up for the meal, she referred to as sweet mashed potatoes. That sounded like an interesting recipe. Not good, necessarily, but interesting. I like my mashed potatoes buttery and salty, not sweet. As it turned out, however, what was in the container was not mashed potatoes that had been sweetened, but mashed sweet potatoes. Mashed sweet, or sweet mashed? If an adjective and a noun have fused into a compound noun, then other adjectives can’t go putting them asunder: spoiled hot dogs is grammatical, but hot spoiled dogs isn’t — at least, not with the same meaning as you get with spoiled hot dogs. So in my grammar, it has to be mashed sweet potatoes, since sweet potato is a compound noun (as evidenced by the stress on sweet), and mashed potatoes is not (with its stress on potatoes). It looks like most other speakers agree, since I got 200K Google hits for mashed sweet potatoes and less than 1000 for sweet mashed potatoes. Even among those hits, though, I didn’t find any that referred to mashed white potatoes that had been sweetened; mostly they referred to what I would call mashed sweet potatoes, though a few were talking about a dish containing potatoes and sweet potatoes. Maybe for those few people for whom mashed sweet potatoes and sweet mashed potatoes mean the same thing, mashed potatoes is as much a compound as sweet potato is, leading to variation in naming something that qualifies as both. One website even used both phrasings to refer to the same item.

BTW, for a fascinating investigation of when and why Thanksgiving came to be (for many, but not all people) pronounced with stress on the giv-, see this post from Mark Liberman at Language Log.

Choose to Make Good Choices

Doug and I were reading the rule book for his school earlier this month. We had to sign a form saying we’d each read and understood it, so we read every last page of it over the course of a few suppertimes. Ah, yes, I remember it like it was just a few weeks ago…

We’d reached the section on playground rules. “Hmmm…” I said. “‘Students must go up on ladders.’ So, does that mean if you want to go up, you have to do it on a ladder? Or does it mean that if you are on a ladder, you can only go up and not down?”

Make Like a Tree!

There’s a Monty Python sketch where John Cleese plays a detective with some kind of aphasia. He enters a room and tells the occupants:

I’m afraid I must not ask anyone to leave the room. No, I must ask nobody … no, I must ask everybody to… I must not ask anyone to leave the room. No one must be asked by me to leave the room.

After a few more sentences that get less and less coherent, he finally manages to produce a string that conveys the desired meaning, or at least something sufficiently close:

Everyone must leave the room… as it is… with them in it.

Go… Bucks?

When I first moved to Ohio, I’d thought they were crazy about football at the University of Texas, but I soon revised my estimation. I went to some campus-area bars with some guys I’d met in my dorm and in each one they were playing the Ohio State fight song, and, for some reason they also were very fond of some song from the 60s called “Hang On, Sloopy.” My roommate had to educate me about OSU football, telling me about some guy that used to coach here named Woody Hayes (ah, he must be who they named Woody Hayes Drive after), about the fans (including my roommate) in Block O, and all about some big rivalry that OSU had with the University of Michigan.

Growing up here, Doug is getting a thorough Ohio acculturation, including OSU football appreciation. He and his mom sometimes watch the OSU game on TV, and I’ve even heard him say things like, “Third and TWELVE?! Oh, man!” He and she were watching the game one Saturday last month, while I looked on from the kitchen, where I was peeling apples for a pie. “Hey! What’s wrong with this picture?” my wife said at one point. Hey, that was nothing. Doug even went to a Buckeye football game a few weeks ago, not with me, who graduated from OSU, but with his mom! And his acculturation continues at school, where he’s soaking up the anti-Michigan spirit. Yesterday, the dress-code restriction on anything written on shirts was temporarily lifted, so that on the last day of “Michigan week,” kids could wear their Buckeye gear… or Michigan stuff, to be fair. A few kids did, but other, less confident ones (including at least one friend of Doug’s) pretend to be OSU fans among their classmates and root for Michigan in the privacy of their homes.

So here it is the day of the OSU-Michigan game, with the undefeated #1 and undefeated #2 teams in the nation (see, I know these things now!) facing each other in a few hours, and all week, I’ve been hearing “Go, Bucks!” even more than usual in Ohio in the fall. I was aware that Ohio was known as the Buckeye State before moving here, and I think I even knew that the OSU team was known as the Buckeyes. But even after living through 15 football seasons, the phrase Go, Bucks! is a little strange to me.

I learned that the buckeye was the nut from a tree that was common in Ohio, so named because it resembled the eye of a buck.

OK, so buckeye was created by compounding. So far, so good. And the football team (and other teams) from Ohio State University were called buckeyes because Ohio was the buckeye state. Fine. But when I take a compound word apart, it doesn’t have the meaning of the whole compound. I can’t call a doghouse a dog, or an apple pie an apple, or a TV dinner a TV. So when people refer to the Buckeye football team as the Bucks, I wonder why it doesn’t bother them that they’re making it sound like OSU’s mascot is a male deer instead of a nut that resembles the eye of a male deer.

On the other hand, State of the Union can be synonymous with State of the Union address; Grand Slam with Grand Slam tournament; and molest with sexually molest, so why am I complaining? Actually, though, I don’t think this is a case of one word in a compound absorbing the meaning of the entire compound. If it were, I think buck would refer to actual buckeye nuts, but I’ve never heard anyone call a buckeye nuts a buck. People make necklaces out of buckeyes to wear to the games and tailgate parties, but they’re called buckeye necklaces, not buck necklaces. I think buck meaning “member of an OSU sports team” is a case of the word being shortened (linguists refer to it as clipping) without regard to whether it’s a compound, acronym, or anything else. In other words, buckeye went on referring to buckeye nuts, while Buckeye formed its semi-independent meaning solidly associated with OSU sports teams before getting shortened to Buck. Etymology is not destiny, as they say.

I’ll Be Nice If You Be Nice

Sometimes Doug and Adam will negotiate as they choose their characters for a two-player videogame. Doug will say, something like,

You be Luigi, and I’ll be Mario.

No problem. Other times, though, he’ll say stuff like this:

I’ll be Mario if you be Luigi.

Post-Election Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even Geoff Pullum does it:

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

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