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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Who May I Ask Is Calling? Part II

So as I was saying, the voicemail system asked me

Who may I ask is calling?

a question that is syntactically ill-formed, and impossible to assemble a coherent meaning for if you’re going just by the ordinary rules of English syntax and semantics. My two hypotheses for the origin of this phrasing were:

1. It’s a blending of Who may I say is calling? and May I ask who is calling? I’ll refer to this structure as the embedded structure, since we have one clause (who is calling) embedded inside the main one (may I ask/say).
2. It’s Who, may I ask, is calling? with the parenthetical intonation worn down. I’ll refer to this structure as the parenthetical structure.

If only there were some way of knowing for a sentence like this whether the who at the front is the subject of an embedded verb or the main verb.

In fact, some speakers do make such a distinction.

Who May I Ask Is Calling?

Enough of our light switches were making crackly noises when we flipped them that I decided it was time to call an electrician last Friday. I got their answering system, pressed 1 to make an appointment. I was then asked to press 1 for “Brian” if I was a residential customer, or 2 for someone else if I was a business customer. For a moment thought I was going to get to talk to someone in person, someone named Brian, when I pressed 1. It rang twice, and then went to more voice mail: “The person you are trying to reach is unavailable.” Well, shoot. And then, instead of asking me to press a button if I wanted to leave a message, the recorded voice asked:

Who may I ask is calling?

I had to hang up fast, to avoid leaving a recorded hangup as a message. I hate when I get those.

Once that moment of panic was past, I thought about the recorded voice’s question: Who may I ask is calling? Something about it wasn’t right. It was like a cross between two versions of the same basic question:

1. Who may I say is calling?
2. May I ask who’s calling?

Was Who may I ask is calling? a blend of the two? Then another possibility occurred to me. Maybe what I’d heard was this:

Who, may I ask, is calling?

In other words, just plain old Who is calling? with a parenthetical may I ask inserted, the same way as it’s been inserted in What, may I ask, is the meaning of this? and When, may I ask, do you intend to do your homework? I hadn’t heard intonational breaks before and after the may I ask, but maybe it’s such a common phrase that the distinctive intonation has been leveled.

Maybe I should back up. Why am I trying to find an explanation for this question? What is there to explain, anyway? What is so unusual about Who may I ask is calling??

Question formation turns out to be one of the trickier aspects of syntax, especially in languages that place their question words (commonly known as wh-words in English) in places other than where they’d go if they weren’t question words. For English, you need to make sure the rules can generate not just sentences like What did you buy?, but also What does he think you bought?, What do we want him to think you bought?, etc.

The rule is not as simple as saying the wh-word has to go at the beginning of the sentence. For instance, if there is more than one wh-word, it has to be determined which one goes to the front and which one stays in place. And when we say the wh-word is placed at the beginning of “the sentence,” what sentence do we mean? There’s no confusion when there’s only one subject and predicate we’re dealing with, in a sentence like What are you doing?. But in the sentence Tom wondered what I was doing, the what isn’t at the front of the sentence; it’s in the middle. The wh-word has to be at the front of the clause whose main verb is the one being asked about. In our last example, the speaker is not asking what Tom wondered. The speaker is telling what Tom wondered, and what follows wondered is the question. If we were to move the wh-word all the way to the front of this sentence, it would be nonsense: *What did Tom wonder I was doing.

If *What did Tom wonder I was doing is nonsense because the wh-word has been put in a clause where it doesn’t belong, then why isn’t Who may I ask is calling? nonsense, too? The who belongs to the clause headed by is calling, since that’s what is being asked about. Actually, maybe Who may I ask is calling? is nonsense to you. It’s nonsense to me if I try to parse it like an ordinary question. It makes sense only if I forget my usual rules of question syntax and jump straight to the pragmatics of the situation: The gatekeeper wants me to identify myself.

However, maybe this really is a new kind of question syntax in English for some speakers. It would be unlike any question syntax I know of from any other language, but it might be possible. To test out the possibility, I searched for syntactically similar constructions with other modals than may, and other pronouns than I, to get away from the may I ask idiom chunk. Searching for Who did he ask was calling and a few similar strings, I got absolutely zero hits with Google, and zero hits in the CoCA. So as I thought, this is most likely not some radical new English syntax. That leaves my original two hypotheses of syntactic blending, and intonational leveling of Who, may I ask, is calling? So what kind of evidence would favor one of these hypotheses over the other?

I’ll take a crack another crack at it in my next post, but in the meantime, here is a comparison of hits for Who may I say is calling?, May I ask who is calling?, and Who may I ask is calling? that I got when I searched Google Books. May I ask who is calling? also includes May I ask who’s calling?, and is by far the most popular, if what turns up in Google Books is representative of how people talk. Who may I say is calling? appeared in the 1940s, followed in the next decade by a single token of Who may I ask is calling?, and both phrasings have continued to grow, but run a distant second and third to May I ask who is calling? It’s suggestive that the possibly blended form Who may I ask is calling? only appeared after the putative source phrasings were in existence.

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Who Put the Inch in Peninsula?

Which one doesn't belong?

One of my readers asked me about the pronunciation of peninsula, wondering if “peninchula” (or “penintula”) was a proper pronunciation. I looked it up in our Random House unabridged dictionary, and found two pronunciations listed, each with the S pronounced [s]. (Two pronunciations? Yes, I’ll come back to that.) So the simple answer is: This pronunciation is not accepted as standard, at least not yet. Corroborating the fact that the “peninchula” pronunciation hasn’t made it into our dictionary are the comments I found via a search for “peninchula”. For example:

• What the heck is a “peninchula”??? (link)
• I wish the narrator would stop saying “peninchula” instead of “peninsula.” (link)
• Can America follow a man who says, peninchula? (link)

But of course, I couldn’t just leave the issue there. I wanted to know why there would be a “peninchula” pronunciation to begin with. I have a phonetically based origin and a morphologically based one. No matter which one is true (if either), I’m sure many of the people who say peninchula do it just because it’s the way they heard others saying it.

Here’s the phonetically based explanation. First of all, notice that peninsula has an [n] immediately followed by [s]. The [n] is a nasal consonant made with the tongue tip touching the alveolar ridge. The [s] is a non-nasal consonant made with the tongue tip almost, but not quite, touching the alveolar ridge. To transition from [n] to the [s], two things must occur simultaneously. One is that the nasal passage must be blocked off to end the [n]. The other is that the tongue tip must lower enough for air to escape over the top of it for the [s]. If the nasal passage is blocked off before this happens, what you’re going to end up with is a non-nasal alveolar stop [t] in the brief interval before once your tongue lowers and you make the [s]. This is how you get the “penintsula” pronunciation (as well as prints for prince and antser for answer).

But penintsula is not peninchula. To rest of the story has to do with the second pronunciation listed in my dictionary. It has a [y] glide between the [s] and the following vowel: “peninsyula”. This [sy] combination is well known to evolve into a [ʃ] sound (for example, in social). While making the [s], the part of the tongue behind the tip starts rising up to the palate in preparation for the [y], and the [s] ends up as its palatal analog [ʃ]. This pronunciation might be written as “peninshula”. At this point, we have the same situation as with the [n] followed by [s]. Unless the blocking of the nasal passage and the lowering of the tongue tip occur simultaneously, you’re going to end up with a [t] in between the [n] and the [ʃ], and as you may recall, [t]+[ʃ] = [tʃ] (sometimes written as [č]). And there it is: “peninchula”.

However, this analysis does not explain why there aren’t speakers out there pronouncing insulate as “inchulate”, consume as “conchume”, or insurance as “inchurance”. That’s why I’m now more inclined to go with a morphological analysis, like the ones proposed for nucular and defibulator. Just as nuclear gets reshaped to end with what looks like a suffix in words like molecular and particular; and defibrillate gets reshaped to end with the pseudo-suffix of words like tabulate, discombobulate, and perambulate; peninsula gets reshaped to end with the perceived -tula suffix of words like spatula or tarantula. In fact, if you follow the link after the “What the heck is a peninchula?” comment above, you’ll find my favorite etymology for the word in one of the responses: Penis+Tarantula=Penintula.

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White Elephants in the Room

When I moved to central Ohio, a three-story downtown mall called City Center was the place to go. Across the street from it was an old-school five-story department store, a locally famous business named Lazarus. Connecting the two was an enclosed overhead walkway. I heard so many people say they’d done something or other or gotten such-and-such from City Center that I went to see the place myself. It was pleasant enough, although I didn’t appreciate having to pay to park there. Sixteen years later, City Center is an empty hulk, though it’s still open for people to walk through on their way to the Capital Theatre or the Hyatt on Capital Square after parking in the now-free garage. The Lazarus store across the street is closed, too. (Another Lazarus store has survived, at one of the suburban retail centers that helped kill City Center, but after a merger with Macy’s, it underwent a Cougar-to-Mellencamp-style name change, from Lazarus to Lazarus Macy’s to just Macy’s.) And as for the walkway between the old Lazarus and City Center, I have learned that it has long been considered an eyesore and a scary, gloomy barrier separating the Capital district from the southern part of downtown. I learned that from a newspaper story last week, which said that the walkway is scheduled to be demolished. In announcing the demolition of the walkway, Columbus mayor Michael Coleman also offered some comments about what should become of City Center, which the newspaper reported:

Acknowledging the mall as “the big white elephant in the room,” the mayor said its rebirth is a “marathon and not a sprint.” (Robert Vitale, “Walkway over High Street to bite dust,” The Columbus Dispatch, Oct. 23, 2008, p. B3)

“Big white elephant in the room”?

Engma Enigma

You may remember that a few weeks ago, I was sorting through Adam’s spelling worksheets from the past school year, looking at how they handled teaching [ə], and the cot/caught vowel merger. I was also interested to see what they did with another question about vowels:

What vowel is in the word sing, and what vowel in the word sang?

I’d never really given it much thought until I got to college and took my first linguistics class, but up until then if you had asked me, I would have said the vowel in sing was long E, and the vowel in sang was long A. Transcribing them phonetically, I’d have written them as [siŋ] and [seŋ]. (There’s a whole introduction to engma, aka the ng sound, the one written [ŋ] in IPA, in this post from the Linguistic Mystic.) In class, though, I was surprised to learn that the expected transcriptions were [sIŋ] and [sæŋ] — in other words, with short I and short A, respectively.

Pranks and Cranks

Doug, Adam, and I went to the science and technology museum in downtown Columbus earlier this week, and Adam wanted to go through the Progress exhibit again. The first part of the exhibit is a mock streetscape from 1898, with storefronts for an inn, a pharmacy, a hardware store, and other businesses. Some you can walk into, such as the telegraph office (where you can send a message in Morse code) or the livery. One that Adam and Doug like is the telephone office, where you can pretend to be an operator at the switchboard, and hear funny recordings of people who answer their phones when you connect them. While they were doing that, I read the bulletins on the wall. One of them announced that the phone company would no longer be hiring men to be operators; henceforth, it would only be single women between the ages of 18 and 26. In the announcement was an apology for some mischief caused by some of the male operators’ “prank calls”.

Prank calls immediately struck me as an anachronism for 1898. When I was a kid, my mom used the term crank call, and I only started hearing prank call when I was at least a teenager. Truthfully, I didn’t really like the term crank call because I didn’t understand it. What did crank mean? Was it related to cranky? I felt uncomfortable using the term crank call, and avoided doing so. When I started hearing prank call, I wondered if there were others out there like me, who didn’t understand the crank, figured they must have misheard it, and silently corrected it to prank, which made much more sense.

In other words, though I didn’t have the linguistic term for it at the time, I believed that prank call was a case of folk etymology applied to the original crank call. It wasn’t just that crank call was the version I heard first; it was that prank call made more sense, and a change from less sense to more sense is more plausible than a change from more sense to less sense. But now I want to find out for sure.

My unabridged Webster’s dictionary doesn’t have an entry for prank call at all (though it of course has prank). It does, however, have this definition of crank:

21. of, pertaining to, or by an unbalanced or overzealous person: a crank phone call, crank mail

It also has these related definitions:

crank: 2. an ill-tempered, grouchy person
crank letter: hostile or fanatical letter, often sent anonymously

So far, this is consistent with my speculation: the older form, crank (phone) call, has been around long enough to make it in, while prank call hasn’t. (Although still, I’ve been hearing it for long enough that I’m surprised it’s not in there yet.) The online OED does not have entries for either crank call or prank call, so no help there. As for the present day, it looks like prank call is winning: It gets 1,870K Google hits, compared to 113K hits for crank call.

I’ll put out a call to the American Dialect Society on this, but in the meantime, what term do you use, and where did you grow up? Did you switch from one to the other, and if so, why?

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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.