They’ve Turned On Al Qaeda

I was listening to the State of the Union address this evening, or as it’s often called, just the State of the Union. It occurred to me that readers who have found this blog recently might be interested in this post from 2005.

As for this evening’s address, at one point the president mentioned Osama bin Laden’s latest videotape, in which:

…he rails against tribal leaders who have turned on al Qaeda.

Osama’s being too harsh on these guys. Can they help it that they’re so darn sexy?

Me, Take On You?! No, You Take On Me!

If you didn’t like reading my last few posts, then you certainly won’t enjoy a posting from the Tensor from last November, about the song “Take On Me.” Its chorus begins,

Take on me… (take, on, me!)
Take me on… (take, on, me!)
I’ll be gone…

Supposedly more words follow, which the Tensor read from the karaoke captioning when he heard the song again last year. All I could ever hear was an unintelligible falsetto wail. Anyway, during the summer of 1985, when I heard this song on the radio every day, I thought the reversal of on and me in the two lines was some fun word-play (or perhaps I should call it syntax-play). However, if you did read those last few posts of mine, you’ll have noticed something unusual about the first line of the chorus.

Doug Bowls Over Me

“I’m gonna bowl you over!” I announced. I crawled at top speed across the living room floor, crashed into Doug and rolled around on the floor with him.

Doug’s turn. After he sent me rolling over backwards, he crowed:

I bowled over you!

Bowled over me? Where did he get that syntax?

She Ran Him Over

Last time I wrote about the difference between prepositions and particles, noting that the phrasal verbs whack off and listen in contained particles. But those were some simple examples, where all we had was a verb and the particle. What happens when you have a verb that is followed by a preposition-or-particle and a noun phrase, like this one?

My dad can beat up your dad.

The preposition-or-particle up is followed by the your dad, so two parses are possible. One: up is a preposition, and your dad is the object of the preposition. (In other words, up your dad is a prepositional phrase, or if you’re mature enough to overlook the potty humor, a PP.) The other: up is a particle, and your dad is the object of the verb. So which parse is the right one?

Off In Which They Were Whacking (Or, Getting Particular About Prepositions)

Did you ever see Beavis and Butthead Do America? Here’s a scene from it that I liked. A disgruntled neighbor is complaining about Beavis and Butthead “whacking off” in his shed, and he says, after several self-corrections, something like:

That’s the shed … off in which … they were whacking.

The line shows the trouble you can get into if you try to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition, but don’t know the difference between a preposition and a particle. A preposition, such as in, takes an object, as in for example, in the shed. Most prepositions can also be used as particles; the difference is that particles don’t take objects. Off is a particle in whack off. It can also be a preposition, as in He fell off the bridge, and just for completeness, here’s an example of in as a particle: Let’s listen in. When you ask a question or construct a relative clause involving the object of a preposition, that’s when you can end up with the sentence-ending prepositions some people like to avoid. I’ll use our Beavis and Butthead example, but to avoid confusion, I’ll replace whacking off with a synonym that doesn’t use a particle:

…the shed (that) they were masturbating in.

The object of in is missing, but is understood as part of the meaning of the entire phrase: something like “the unique X such that: (1) X is a shed and (2) they were whacking off in X.” To get rid of the stranded preposition, of course, you can use the relative pronoun which, and phrase it like this:

…the shed in which they were masturbating.

But there’s no way to get rid of a particle at the end of a sentence, short of replacing the verb-particle combination with a single-word alternative (such as masturbate for whack off), or taking the cheater’s way out and adding something irrelevant to the end of the sentence:

…the shed in which they were whacking off yesterday.

…the same technique used in the punchline, “OK, where’s the library at, asshole?”

Sometimes, though, it’s harder to tell whether a word is a preposition or a particle. That’s actually what I wanted to write about, but the post was getting so long that I decided to put this background on particles and prepositions into a post of its own. Next time, I’ll be talking about beating people up and running over them. Or beating up people and running them over, if I can say that.