On or By Accident

In my last post, I mentioned an episode of Grammar Girl’s podcast that I had found particularly interesting, about by accident and on accident. In case you haven’t listened to that episode or read the transcript, here it is again. (Also interesting: this post at Mother Tongue Annoyances on the same topic.) In this episode, Grammar Girl summarizes the findings of Leslie Barratt of Indiana State University, which can be found here (watch out, one of the tables is messed up, and doesn’t match the graph it goes with). In short, Barratt finds that:

1. speakers born before about 1970 hardly use on accident at all;
2. speakers born between 1970 and 1995 use on accident and by accident (sometimes even an individual speaker will use both);
3. speakers born after 1995 use on accident to the near exclusion of by accident.

This is not just speakers in one region; she surveyed speakers in Indiana, Michigan, California, and Georgia, from different socioeconomic classes.

What could have caused such a sudden shift to the almost complete displacement of by accident in speakers born after 1995? Barratt doesn’t know, but she does know one thing:

It’s a Word! It’s a Phrase! It’s Grammar Girl!

For a while I’d been noticing a podcast called Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Clean Up Your Writing when I browsed through the podcasts at iTunes. I never subscribed to it because first of all, I’m pretty comfortable with my grammar, and second, I figured it would be the same old things grammar and writing guides are always telling you: don’t use the passive voice; don’t use hopefully as a sentential adverb; in fact, avoid adverbs wherever possible. But I finally got curious enough to check out a few episodes, and what a surprise! The podcasts present traditional grammar rules, provide nonjudgmental observations of what’s actually happening in the language when the rules don’t reflect common usage, and give practical advice on what to do when faced with these mismatches. Even better, Grammar Girl will get into linguistic topics when doing so will help explain a grammar point. And just a couple of episodes ago, she talked about a linguistic topic apparently just because it was interesting all by itself.

Candy Canes

Potential conflicts for recently married couples, as they determine how Christmas will be celebrated in their new household:

Gifts: Do you open some on Christmas Eve, or do you save them all for Christmas Day?

Christmas Eve: Do you go to a midnight service, or an afternoon one? (Or neither?)

The word candy cane: Do you pronounce it with the stress on candy, or on cane?

My wife and I still have not reached a reconciliation on the last item. My pronunciation: candy cane, with stress on the first word. It’s the same stress pattern you get with compound nouns like Christmas tree and Nativity scene. Her pronunciation: candy cane, with stress on the second word, like what you’d do with pumpkin pie or Christmas Day.

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.

Tuh-Duh!

Over at Language Log, Arnold Zwicky commented on a recent Zits cartoon regarding some outdated diction from Jeremy. In the relevant panel, Jeremy says:

Somebody would go, “Got your keys?” and I’d be all, “Tuh! Whadda ya think?” and they’d be all, “Dude!” and…

Zwicky focuses on the quotatives be all (which I indeed haven’t heard since the mid-90s) and go (which I haven’t heard since elementary school). Now to some extent, we’d expect Jeremy’s language to be somewhat outdated, since he ages so very slowly. But what I noticed more than the quotatives was something that may be right on the cutting edge: the tuh!.

This is the second time I’ve noticed Jeremy saying “Tuh!”, and the last time was less than a month ago. Why not duh? I think it has to do with the fact that for American and British English speakers, word-initial /d/ is (usually) realized as [t]. (Phonology note: characters in slashes are how the sound is perceived in the relevant language; characters in square brackets are how the sound is actually pronounced.) Not aspirated [tʰ], which is what you get in words that are spelled beginning with a ‘t’, but unaspirated [t]. When English speakers hear a word beginning with an unaspirated [t], they tend to hear it as a /d/. Duh, for example, is typically pronounced as [tʌ], though you’ll also hear [dʌ], especially if it’s preceded by a voiced sound, for example a vowel, as in No duh!. In Spanish, though, /t/ at the beginning of a word is pronounced as [t]. I remember a Mexican-American kid in my kindergarten class that I thought was named Dino, until one day when we were going through the alphabet and identifying classmates whose names began with each letter. I volunteered Dino’s name for D, only to find out that his name was actually Tino. Now I realize that it was because I was hearing [tino] as /dino/. Of course, once I learned his name was Tino, I started pronouncing it as [tʰinow].

However, if you pronounce a word with a word-initial /d/ emphatically enough, that [t] can start to sound a bit more like a /t/. That seems to be the case with tuh! According to one definition on Urban Dictionary, tuh is:

The written equivalent of a short burst of laughter, usually in response to someone or something

which describes an emphatic kind of pronunciation.

More Harry Potter Grammar

There! I’ve finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, including the epilogue. You won’t get any spoilers from me, unless you wanted to find out for yourself that J.K. Rowling still makes all her interactions of coordination with quotative inversion strictly parallel (not that there’s anything wrong with that). In the whole book, I don’t remember coming across any sentences like, “It’s me,” said Harry, and walked in, and I’m pretty aware of them now. She always diligently puts in the subject of the second verb phrase — “It’s me,” said Harry, and he walked in — so that it becomes a parallel coordination of two entire clauses.

On a matter of morphology, who notices the nonstandard(?) grammar in Harry must defeat He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named? Q-Pheevr does!

As for dialectal variation between British and American English, I remember that the first Harry Potter book referred to “boogers” twice: once regarding Bertie Bott’s Every-Flavor Beans, and another time regarding the end of a wand that had been jammed up a troll’s nose. In the movie version, it was “bogies,” which was my first clue that this lexical variation existed. In Deathly Hallows, though, the American publishers don’t bother changing it anymore: It’s bogies. I wonder if the British also use this term to refer to over-par golfing, or suspicious items on a radar screen.

And now here’s a bit that fits right in with my last few posts, where a coordination of dissimilar things forces a word to be parsed in two ways. This is a spoiler only if you haven’t read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.