Quirky Goldblum Linguification

Jeff Goldblum

I was reading the entertainment section of the newspaper yesterday, and came across an article about Law & Order. A few paragraphs in, it said:

…Law & Order: Criminal Intent, which has added to its cast an actor about whom it is apparently impossible to write a sentence that excludes quirky. (Ginia Bellafante, New York Times News Service)

Ah, I get it, I thought. Bellafanted doesn’t intend for me to take this literally. I’ve learned from Geoff Pullum’s occasional criticisms of linguification that all she means is that this is an actor who’s widely regarded as quirky, enough so that writers often mention this trait when they write about him. Or her. So anyway, who is this actor? Johnny Depp? Jodie Foster? John Malkovich?

The article went on: “Needless to say, it’s Jeff Goldblum.” Oh, Jeff Goldblum. OK, he’s quirky, too. Now I can see that it was needless to say. At this point, though, Bellafante was not content to let the linguification lie; she seemed to want to say, “No, really! I’m serious! It’s actually impossible!” because the next sentence was:

A Google search of his name along with the adjective to which he is involuntarily hinged [NW: hitched?] results in about 18,700 entries.

Now that called for some investigation. I looked first at Bellafante’s own article, which contained seven sentences referring to Goldblum, only one of which contained the work quirky. That, of course, was the one I quoted, and even there it’s a mention of the word, rather than a use. Oh, well, I’ll count it. And to be charitable, maybe Bellafante meant you couldn’t write an article about Jeff Goldlum without using or mentioning quirky — that would explain why her Google search only looked for whole pages, not individual sentences, that met the criteria.

Which brings me to the Google search. Probably for reasons of space, Bellafante’s search for pages containing Jeff Goldblum that didn’t contain quirky got left out of the article, which is a pity, since that’s what really would have helped prove her point. Here’s what I found on Google:

Search	Google hits
+”Jeff Goldblum” +quirky	20,100
+”Jeff Goldblum” -quirky	1,020,000

I notice first of all that the search with quirky returns 20,100 hits, more than the 18,700 Bellafante got. This is understandable because first of all, counting Google hits is a slippery business, and second, now there are lots of hits for news sources that include Bellafante’s article. But the search without quirky returns 1,020,000 hits. So about 1 in 51 webpages with Jeff Goldblum also contains quirky.

Well, I guess I’ve been too literal once again. Now I know: Journalists are getting smarter about using linguification. Smart enough to find some numbers to add punch to a trope that’s become trite, but not enough to find numbers that actually mean anything. That makes sense: If they tried to get meaningful numbers, they’d end up having to leave out the linguification, and how plain and boring the articles would be if that happened.

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Did I Join a Good Gym?

Not a picture of me

In December, I wrote about my confusion at an ad for a weight-loss system that had a satisfied customer saying, “I lost fifteen pounds! And kept it off for three years!” A commenter (regular reader Viola) wrote, “And for goodness sakes, Neal, I thought you’d literally lost 15 pounds!” Actually, I have lost about 15 pounds in the past year, and lowered my body fat by about eight percentage points. My wife made me go and buy new pants because my belt wasn’t holding up my old ones well enough. Unfortunately, I lost the weight by going to a gym, which puts you in a dangerous cycle. OK, not dangerous, but troublesome. As with narcotics, it takes more and more exercise to get the same effect, as your body gets more efficient at lifting the weights or running on the treadmill. And when Doug and Adam are sick and home from school, like they are today, I can’t go to the gym. The gym has a nice kids’ area (that is, a nice area for kids; mean kids aren’t excluded), but if I were to park Doug and Adam there on a school day, the attendant would probably ask me inconvenient questions, whose answer would be “Because they’re sick and can’t go to school.” So I stay at home, and that body fat percentage starts creeping right back up. Isn’t there some point at which I can ease off without the weight and fat coming back? Oh, I forgot: Fitness is a journey, not a destination. But like, journeys have ends, don’t they?

Anyway, about a month ago, I was at the gym, on my way to the bank of treadmills, when I noticed a woman sitting with one of the membership sales reps at a desk in the sales-closing area. I always have sympathy for the sales people there — I remember being in their situation many times when I worked at a ballroom dance studio. “Looks like he’s presented her the three membership plans,” I thought as I approached. “And now he’s probably asked her which one she wants, not whether she wants one, and he’s silently waiting for her answer.” As I passed, I thought, “I wonder if — hey, that’s Doug and Adam’s orthodontist!”

OK, she’s my orthodontist, too. I was not diligent in wearing my retainer back in high school, if you must know.

“Hi, Dr. Higginbotham!” I said. She looked up and waved, I continued to the treadmills, and she turned her attention back to the membership information. I wondered if she would sign up, or say she needed to go home and think about it.

A couple of weeks later, I was lying in the chair at the orthodontist’s office. As Dr. Higginbotham put on her rubber gloves, she asked,

So, did I join a good gym?

Had she joined a good gym? Well, for the answer to be yes, two things would have to be true. One, she would have to have joined a gym. Two, that gym would have to be a good one. I guess my gym’s OK, but that still left the first requirement.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Did you join?”

She affirmed that she had. As she poked around the wires and brackets, telling the technician to put a Class 2 box here and a chain there, I thought about how stupid my response had been. She wouldn’t have expected me to know whether she’d joined my gym. Heck, she wouldn’t have expected me to know whether she’d joined any gym. Furthermore, she already knew whether she’d joined or not. Clearly, she wasn’t asking for an answer to whether she had joined a gym. She expected me just to accommodate an addition to our common knowledge, to the effect that she had joined a gym, and not just any gym, but the gym where I had seen her. And that left the only part of the question I was competent to answer anyway: Was the gym a good one?

For that matter, she probably wasn’t truly interested in even that answer. If I thought the gym was a bad one, why had I been working out there? No, all she’d been doing was making conversation, and acknowledging the unusual circumstances in which we’d last seen each other. And in fact, I knew this as soon as she asked the question. But still I’d been sidetracked by the literal semantics of it. It’s part of my charm, I suppose.

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Pragmatics Practice

“Are you getting something to drink?” my wife asked me.

OK, that’s it. I need a pseudonym for my wife, like Better Half or Mrs. Semantic Compositions or something. I’d ask … my wife for a suggestion, but I don’t think she’d be too enthusiastic about helping, since she’s still waiting for me to come up with a pet name for her. In all the time we dated, all the time we were engaged, and all the time we’ve been married, I’ve never had a pet name for my wife. Not as a matter of policy; I just never happened to start calling her by a pet name. Maybe it’s part of my language acquisition that never fully took. (Yes, I admit it: Part of the last line in this story is a lie, a lie! )

Anyway, so where was I? We were getting ready to watch the third episode of the show my brother’s writing for, and my wife asked if I was getting something to drink. I said yes.

“If you decide to open a bottle of wine and wanted to pour me a glass, I wouldn’t say no,” she told me.

“Okay,” I said, and headed off to the kitchen.

I don’t think I want a glass of wine, I thought. I’m going to get me a tall glass of iced tea. Woohoo! I was off the hook for getting my wife a glass of wine!

On the other hand, I thought, as I cut the lemon … my wife didn’t say not to bring her a glass of wine if I was getting something else for myself. She probably wouldn’t mind if I brought her a glass of wine regardless of what I was having.

In fact, I reasoned further, she probably wants me to bring her a glass of wine. She was probably just trying to frame the request in a playful, not quite so demanding way. Maybe I ought to bring her a glass of wine.

So I did, and she called me honey and thanked me. Actually, she said, “You’re so sweet,” but since I’m pretty savvy with these indirect speech acts, I could tell it was an expression of thanks.

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Help the Genocide

“How’s your headache?”

I always wanted to hear someone answer, “It’s great. It’s stronger than ever, and killing me.” It went against my natural tendencies to accept that “Better” meant that the headache’s owner, not the headache, was better. I had similar trouble with hearing about medicine that would “help your cold”, or your infection. But learn those idioms I did, and I’m fine with them now.

Or I thought I was, until Lynneguist of Separated by a Common Language reported this sighting to the American Dialect Society mailing list:

Children are being hurt and killed in Darfur. Donate money to help the genocide.

She wondered if it was a mistake, and found some websites that had the same phrasing. One of them said, “If you want to lend a hand with the conflict in Darfur, these organizations may be a place to start.” As Lynneguist wrote, better than which I could not have put it myself, “I half-expected some of the organizations listed to be arms dealers.”

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There They Go Again –

– people saying that Amelia Bedelia always takes things literally! Didn’t we cover this already? Given an utterance with more than one meaning, Amelia Bedelia always chooses the interpretation of maximum funniness, one which disregards contextual or social clues, and which may or may not be a literal interpretation. Just because an interpretation is funny doesn’t mean it’s literal. And as my wife and sons can attest, just because it’s literal doesn’t mean it’s funny.

This business of literal meanings reminds me of something I heard on an episode of NPR’s Science Friday from September. I wasn’t going to say anything, I was just going to let it go, but since I’m on the subject…

Please Stand By

A humorous anecdote involving someone else’s literal thinking.

20 Questions, and Irreflexive In

Doug and Adam and I were playing 20 Questions while we waited for our food to arrive one night. The domain was places; the game went down something like this… [cue harp music]

Fully Frontally Nude

We went to see The Simpsons Movie (shouldn’t it be The The Simpsons Movie) last week. Of course, since it was a PG-13 movie, we checked the parent-oriented reviews. It seemed like the main thing that bumped it from PG to PG-13 scene was some full frontal nudity, so I figured it was OK. The author of the review had an annoying habit of referring to the relevant scene as the “full-frontal scene.” Is nudity the only thing that can be fully frontal? What about assaults, lobotomies, and snogging?

One spoiler follows.

Don’t Do Me Any Favorites

Hey, if you think I take things literally, check out this post from Bill Walsh.

OK, I have to come clean. Although I didn’t actually say in that last sentence that Bill Walsh takes things more literally than I do, I am aware that it’s just possible that readers might get that idea from my use of the “If you think X has property Y, you should see Z” frame. So in the interest of full disclosure: I’m just as literal-minded as Walsh is on this one. I agree with everything in the post, and with the comments people had made by the time I read it.

Fossil Foolish

The boys and I were watching a 3-D movie about dinosaurs on the giant screen at the local science museum today, when all of a sudden I got that kind of uncomfortable feeling, a sense that something wasn’t quite right. What was it? Part of a popcorn kernel stuck in my teeth? Were my 3-D glasses sliding down? No, I realized, it was something the narrator had said. He had been telling how the best fossils formed when animals (or plants) were quickly buried, so that their remains would be

…undiscovered by predators or damaged by erosion.