Back in 2004, I blogged about noncollective troops — you know, 10,000 troops amounting to 10,000 people, not 10,000 groups of people. For Veteran’s Day I have revisited the subject over at Visual Thesaurus. It turns out quite a few writers on language have had something to say about troops, and I have to say that of all the pieces written on this subject, my VT column is one. Over there you’ll find a synthesis of what’s been said about troops in the 21st century … at least on the issue of what numbers can be used with troops, and whether one troop can legitimately refer to one person now. However, there was one kind of complaint about troops that was a bit different, different enough for me to cut it out of an article that was already running longer than I wanted it to. I’ll talk about that one here.

As I wrote in the VT column, “Some reject [noncollective troops] with any number; some allow it only with large numbers; some allow it with any number greater than one.” It turns out that there are some speakers who rail against noncollective troops when it’s not accompanied by any number at all. Why? I believe it has to do with another way of looking at noncollective troops: as a pluralia tantum noun, or in plain English, a plural-only noun. According to the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, some nouns are plural-only because they denote substances made of particles that are of themselves insignificant; for example, grits. The insignificance of the particles in nouns like grits taints some speakers’ feelings toward troops with the idea that it trivializes the individual soldiers. In a 2007 piece on NPR (also mentioned in the VT column) John McWhorter makes this complaint. It is echoed in Susan Jacoby’s 2008 book The Age of American Unreason, when she writes that the use of noncollective troops “is more than a grammatical error; turning a soldier — an individual with whom one may identify — into an anonymous-sounding troop encourages the public to think about war and its casualties in a more abstract way.” (p. 6)

Of course, I can’t argue with McWhorter’s and Jacoby’s feelings. If troops strikes them as trivializing individual members of the armed services, that’s how the word is for them. Nevertheless, I don’t think noncollective troops arose as a plural-only noun. To say that it did is to call the existence of the singular, semantically similar troop a coincidence. I think that what happened is the reverse of how my son and his peers (and others before them) decided that cleat was another name for a soccer shoe. Their shoes have projections on the bottom called cleats. Someone wearing the shoes is said to be wearing cleats. Someone who doesn’t know the word has to decide whether this plural refers to the two shoes (i.e. the two SETS of cleats), or to the projections on the bottoms of the shoes (i.e. the twenty or so INDIVIDUAL cleats). My son and his peers decided the former, and now talk about putting on one or both cleats. Thus, cleat has gone from being an individual noun to a collective noun. Troops, I maintain, went in the opposite direction. For someone unfamiliar with the word, does troops refer to the GROUPS of soldiers within a large number of soldiers, or does it refer to the INDIVIDUAL soldiers? If you choose the latter, troop has now become a noncollective noun.

Pictorially, troops was used as in the first picture below, then reinterpreted as in the second picture. Cleats went in the opposite direction.

On top: collective noun. On bottom: noncollective noun.

Another thought that occurred to me while I was writing the VT column was how troops is being subjected now to the same kind of disapproval as another collective noun that turned noncollective: people. It began as a collective noun meaning a group of human beings, but somewhere along the way was interpreted as a plural (an irregular plural but still a plural) referring to the members of the group. And, as with troops vs. soldiers, there were until quite recently complaints about the use of people instead of persons with specific numbers. For a more detailed discussion, see this post on Language Log. I’d guess there are several reasons we don’t (as far as I know) have one people meaning one person. First of all, people doesn’t have an obviously plural -s suffix on it that could be removed to make a singular. Second, people is generally taken to be not only an irregular plural, but in fact the suppletive plural of the singular person. In other words, we don’t need to make people singular; person is already its singular form. Neither of those conditions holds for troops; it has an -s suffix, and there isn’t already good singular form for what troops refers to: soldier (for some reason) is taken to refer exclusively to members of the Army, and member of the armed forces is too long.

However, now that I’ve become comfortable with the polysemy of troop, what do I do with a sentence like We put 5,000 boots on the ground? I no longer try to multiply 5,000 troops by some number of people in a troop, but I do still divide 5,000 boots on the ground by the number of boots per soldier. But I find I still don’t know how many members of the armed services we’re talking about when a newscaster says something like

We put about 5,000 boots on the ground.

So is that 2,500 soldiers? I know for some people, two boots on the ground are two (noncollective) troops; for example, a soldier in Iraq who wrote an open letter with the title “A grievance from a ‘boot on the ground’”.

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It’s a bittersweet moment when you see a boxed set of DVDs for a show you liked, like Freaks and Geeks or Firefly, and the subtitle says not “Season 1″ or “Season 4″ or what have you, but “The Complete Series”. On the one hand, you get the entire series! On the other hand, bummer — they can only say “The Complete Series” when the series is over, and they can only fit it into one boxed set when it got canceled after just a season or two. That’s the feeling I’ve been getting as I read Nathan Bierma’s The Eclectic Encyclopedia of English, published just this year by the same people who brought you Far From the Madding Gerund. (Yes, it’s another piece of blog swag: Editor Tom Sumner at William, James & Co. sent it to me personally.) Nathan Bierma was The Chicago Tribune’s answer to William Safire of The New York Times Magazine and Jan Freeman of The Boston Globe. I say was not because he’s dead (at least as of this writing), but because the column ran only from 2004 to 2008. The EEE is a collection of Bierma’s columns from this time period.

Bierma’s style is more like Jan Freeman’s than William Safire’s; as the blurb on the back from Erin McKean states, he’s “interested more in the ‘why?’ of language than the ‘don’ts.’” His background is mainly in teaching English, but he has a regular set of linguists, etymologists, and lexicographers that he calls upon to offer insights on whatever question he’s writing about, among them Grant Barrett, Anatoly Liberman, Mark Liberman, Erin McKean, Geoff Nunberg, Geoff Pullum, Dave Wilton, Ben Zimmer, and Arnold Zwicky. Some of the entries that I’ve found especially informative or insightful feature:

• five changes to English that were so profound that nobody should even think about complaining about the kind of stuff that they complain about now
• how even though anxious and eager are often used as synonyms, anxiety and eagerness remain strongly differentiated
• a comparison of back in the day and back in my day
• one reason raise the question is not a good substitute for the ignorant often-frowned-upon usage of beg the question
• a smackdown between Bierma and Martha Brockenbraugh, promoter of National Grammar Day and founder of SPOGG (Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar)
• a comparison of Hispanic vs. Latino (a topic often discussed in my family when we lived in El Paso, Texas)
• the demise of I’m all and the hand of I’m like
• a history of I’m good to mean No, thank you
• the semantic shift of journey to be almost always metaphorical
• a debunking of a stupid etymology of lost
• an easy-to-follow introduction to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift
• how pay one’s respects came to so strongly connote visiting a dead person

There is an occasional misstep. For example, in his entry for lay/lie, Bierma points out why it’s so hard to maintain the semantic distinction between them, but missed an opportunity to mention that it’s no coincidence they sound so much alike (since one was a causative form of the other in Old English). At least there was no misinformation in that entry. In the entry on the omissibility of that in relative clauses, Bierma says that as far as he knows, “there’s no clear guideline. It’s a matter of feel.” Well, there are some guidelines. For instance, the that has to stay if it’s serving as the relative clause’s subject (as in the bag that leaked). Worse, Bierma says that that tomorrow things will get better is a relative clause in the sentence I’ll tell him that tomorrow things will get better.

However, such errors and missed opportunities are (mostly) outweighed by Bierma’s modus operandi of “seeking out scholars who might have the information he’s looking for and then actually listening” (as Arnold Zwicky’s blurb puts it). What I found even more distracting was the organization of the book. Unlike a DVD boxed set, the columns in EEE are not arranged in order of publication. That’s not a problem: Chronological order doesn’t suit a format like a weekly column. Instead, as the title suggests, the arrangement is alphabetical, as in an encyclopedia. Unfortunately, this arrangement doesn’t work so well, either. Even though the columns are broken up into bigger and smaller pieces depending on how much Bierma had to say on the various topics in them, many of the entries contain disparate items that (in an alphabetical arrangement) should have been separated. For example, there’s an entry on eon and dilemma. What do these words have in common? Are they part of some idiom? Are they easily confused? Either of those possibilities would have been news to me. Instead, it was just that one Greek reader had asked about them both, as loan words from Greek whose English meaning differed from the Greek. If they had to share an entry, maybe it could have been on Greek loan words. Another example is the entry February and jewelry. They’re together because one of Bierma’s readers vented two peeves in one letter: the pronunciations “Feb-yuary” and “joolery.” Thank goodness for the index.

Other peculiarities arise from the attempt to force a collection of columns into an encyclopedia format. One column was about Erin McKean and her work on the downloadable version of The New Oxford American Dictionary, but instead of just being presented as a (perhaps lightly revised) version of a column Bierma wrote, it’s shoved between entries on diagramming sentences and did you not, and labeled dictionaries, coexistence of handheld technologies. Many times a column that was clearly a book review appears under some heading like this, which can be deceptive. For example, an entry labeled pedantry, history and misguidedness of is really a review of David Crystal’s book The Fight for English: How the Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left. The label led me to expect something more general and inclusive than just what was in Crystal’s book. In fact, this is a complaint about the entire book: Encyclopedia suggests a comprehensive (or at least systematic) survey of some field of knowledge, but EEE actually just covers the topics that Nathan Bierma happened to write about in his column.

In other entries, the attempts to scrub the entries of their dates to make them more timeless seem pointless. When Bierma says, “Here in my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, I lined up along the motorcade route to pay my respects as President Gerald Ford’s funeral procession passed by,” why not just say, “In December 2006,” or just give the column’s publication date and go with the more natural “Last week”? The same goes for the book reviews that no longer coincide with the book’s publication, and have to specifically mention the date. Sometimes the scrubbing is incomplete, and deictic references like “this month” survive, hidden in the middle of the entry, as in the entry about Eskimo snow vocabulary.

To some extent, I can understand tinkering with the format of a weekly column before putting it into a book. Jan Freeman tells me that publishers tend to be wary of books that simply collect columns, because reading them one after another can get tiresome. What I think would have done is to divide the book into sections of broad topics: human interest stories about particular languages, word histories, book reviews, language myths, word usage questions. These sections could contain entire columns or just excerpts, as the entries do now; the reviews and human interest would work well as entire columns, while the word usage questions would do better as snippets of the columns that address the particular words.

All that’s not to say that EEE is a bad book. It’s fast, easy, entertaining reading, and would be a good gift for people who like reading about language but may not have heard of Nathan Bierma yet. It’s just not so much a reference book as a language lover’s bathroom reader.

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“The discussion we had yesterday,” I began, “was a reminder to me that language data is always messy. I was trying to show you a simple picture of how parts of speech worked, and you guys kept giving me words that messed up the nice picture I was trying to paint for you. Language was invented over thousands of years by millions of people, so there are going to be exceptions, and words that you can’t easily label as one part of speech. That’s just the way it is. The good news, though, is that the tests we’re doing here are tests that you can do on your own, so you can see how a particular word is behaving.”

“Yesterday was also a reminder to me,” I continued, “that you can’t rely on just one test to determine what family some word belongs to. For example, yesterday someone gave me the word cheesy to replace the in the lazy dogs. But you probably have a feeling that cheesy isn’t like the other words we called determiners. The, a, every, some, cheesy — one of these words isn’t like the others. How can we prove it’s not like the others?”

From there I pointed out that cheesy could not replace our first the for *cheesy brown fox. Well, that didn’t prove anything. The same could be said for these and those, but we still called them determiners.

However, look at what you could do with cheesy: You could say cheesier and cheesiest, and This is really cheesy! “Some of you probably have said that,” I observed. You couldn’t do any of that with words like the or every. *The-er and *The-est were just nonsense, as was *This is really the. So although cheesy was able to replace the in our first sentence, all things considered it was behaving more like an adjective.

I wasn’t done with adjectives yet. One student the day before had asked: Wasn’t any noun that described another noun really an adjective? That was another issue that deserved some attention. I pointed to a spot on the whiteboard. “Over here Mrs. _____ has written two objectives: Knowing how to use parts of speech, and knowing what a complete sentence is. She said they were key concepts, and I wrote that down right here next to them. Not because they’re key concepts — although they are — but because this is an interesting term. How many of you would say key here is a noun? Like, these concepts are like keys that will give you access to important knowledge?”

A few students raised their hands.

“How many would say key is an adjective that means ‘important’?”

A few other hands.

“How many just don’t know?” Plenty of hands now.

“A lot of people just don’t know. Either an adjective or a noun could fit there. If you decide key is an adjective, what might you be able to do with it?” We put key through its paces: keyer/more key, keyest/most key, and This is (really) key. Just about everyone hated the comparative and superlative forms of key, while most were OK with key as a predicative adjective (…is key). So key behaved in some ways like an adjective, but not all of them. Messy, yes, but that’s just the way it is. You can have it simple, with a nice short list of eight (or however many) parts of speech, and then wonder why some word was lumped in one class when it didn’t quite fit there. Or you can have a more complex picture, but with the comforting knowledge that you can investigate for yourself how a word behaves, and see which other words it behaves the most like.

With that repair work done, I moved on to the idea of certain strings of words sticking together more tightly than others, and we went through carefully selected strings of words, applying what syntacticians know as constituency tests. I started by asking for single words that could replace the quick brown fox, and got he, she, it, and a proper name. Then for the lazy dogs, we got them. Moving on to over the lazy dogs, the students gave me a variety of prepositions that could act alone as adverbs: away, down, up, etc. They weren’t what I had in mind, but I guess they still illustrated the point. What I had in mind was there (or thither if you want something specifically with a directional meaning component and don’t mind an archaism, or thataway if you consider it to be one word). Then we expanded to jumped over the lazy dogs. The word I had in mind was did, and I was able to elicit it by asking, “Who jumped over the lazy dogs?” and asking for a slightly longer answer when they said simply “The quick brown fox.”

Moving back to over the lazy dogs, I introduced the movement test: Could the cluster be placed somewhere else in the utterance? I suggested Over the lazy dogs the quick brown fox jumped and Over the lazy dogs jumped the quick brown fox. One student said that sounded like something Yoda would say, so we took a digression into Yoda-speak. The student offered Defeat Darth Vader you must, which was a nice piece of evidence that even within must defeat Darth Vader, we had the smaller, moveable cluster defeat Darth Vader. Plus, I got to impress Doug’s classmates with my Yoda voice.

The last clusters I wanted to identify were quick brown fox and lazy dogs, and for them I brought in the wh-replacement test. “If I said to you, ‘Hey, guess what! The [mumble mumble] jumped over the lazy dogs!’, what would you say to me?” After a few false starts (“I can’t hear you” and “What?”), I managed to elicit The WHAT jumped over the lazy dogs? (and shortly later, The quick brown fox jumped over the WHAT?).

With all those clusters carefully identified, I asked for strings of words that didn’t pass our tests. It was tougher than I’d figured on. They discovered you could replace The quick brown with just a determiner, and with a wh-word: Which fox jumped…? I couldn’t remember subtler tests that would put quick brown into a cluster with fox, and I didn’t have time for them anyway. I just said that maybe the quick brown was a cluster after all. For jumped over, the students realized you could put in any transitive verb. On this one, I said that there probably were speakers for whom jumped over really did form a tighter cluster than over the lazy dogs, and that the same kind of clustering probably contributed to sentences like This bed was slept in by George Washington, Elvis Presley, and Michael Jackson. “I want that bed,” one girl said. “It’s not for sale,” I told her.

Then we tried out The quick brown fox jumped. One student correctly observed that the sentence I’d used earlier, Over the lazy dogs the quick brown fox jumped, could serve as a movement test for the quick brown fox jumped as easily as it could for over the lazy dogs. I didn’t have time to probe this cluster any further, so I acknowledged the point, but stuck with the idea of over the lazy dogs as the cluster, since it also passed the one-word replacement test.

Finally, I went through the sentence and put tents and labels over all our clusters: noun phrase, prepositional phrase, verb phrase, and (for quick brown fox and lazy dogs) nominal. When we got to the verb phrase tent, I highlighted how some verbs could make a VP all by themselves, like slept or jumped, while others had to have other stuff with them to make a VP, like tried or believed. But they were still all called verbs because they all formed VPs, which behaved similarly as a family. The last cluster we labeled was the entire sentence, consisting of the noun phrase the quick brown fox and the verb phrase jumped over the lazy dogs. (I’m hoping that the kids will remember this kind of sensible and informative kind of phrase diagram when and if they ever have to do Reed-Kellogg type diagrams, and know that there’s something better out there.) And now for the payoff for the whole two lectures: What did parts of speech have to do with complete sentences? Parts of speech combined to make phrases; phrases combined to make bigger phrases; and a sentence was one particular kind of phrase. The kind we’d made was a noun phrase plus a verb phrase — a rule for making sentences that they’d probably learned with different names: Sentence = Subject + Predicate.

“That’s not the only rule for making a sentence!” I hastened to add, but it was the most common one in English. For an encore, I talked about because. “Just like over took this noun phrase and turned it into a prepositional phrase,” I said, “because takes an entire sentence and turns it into something else, a phrase that acts like an adverb. It’s not a sentence anymore, until you find another sentence to put it with.”

With that, I had to end it so the kids could get to the library on time. Their teacher made sure they had all filled out their read-along worksheet that I’d prepared for them (you can find it here, along with the script I had kind of planned to follow), and then wrote on the board an actual fragment she’d read on a student test recently:

Yes, because of how dangerous it is.

Their homework? Do the kind of phrase diagram of it that we’d done with the complete sentence in class. Yikes — a noun clause with a fronted wh-phrase consisting of a wh-degree marker and an adjective, embedded under a compound preposition! I’d have liked to hear the discussion that generated the next day.

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“Hey, Doug, listen to this,” I said. “This guy’s writing about how different English is from related languages like German and Swedish. He says:

English’s Germanic relative are like assorted varieties of deer — anteloopes, springboks, kudu, and so on — antlered, fleet-footed, big-brown-eyed variations on a theme. English is some dolphin swooping around underwater, all but hairless, echolocating and holding its breath. Dolphins are mammals like deer: they give birth to live young and are warm-blooded. But clearly the dolphin has strayed from the basic mammalian game plan to an extent that no deer has.

Doug and I were sitting in the front hallway of Adam’s school, waiting for his class to let out. While we waited, I was reading John McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. (Not to be confused with Derek Bickerton’s Bastard Tongues; see below.) Now I understand that new FCC rules require me to notify readers when I’m reviewing a piece of blog swag — i.e. free stuff that people from marketing departments send to bloggers in hopes of favorable mentions or reviews. So I’ll say right now that I got this book courtesy of the publicity department at Gotham Books. And to make the existing record clear, I also received free copies of The Unfolding of Language and Forbidden Words, as noted in the reviews I wrote. I also got Grammar Girl’s first book this way, though I didn’t mention this fact in the review. Books that I’ve bought or borrowed myself and reviewed or mentioned include:

• Bastard Tongues
• Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes
• Dreaming in Hindi
• Just a Phrase I’m Going Through
• Biting the Wax Tadpole
• Um
  
• Word Myths
• Eats, Shoots, and Leaves (children’s version)
• The Power of Babel
  

That last one was also by John McWhorter, and I liked it so much that when I was offered a review copy of his latest book, I accepted right away. But, you ask, if I was so eager to read it, why didn’t I lay hands on a copy of it myself last year, when it came out in hardback? The fact is that I just wasn’t terribly interested in reading another history of English. I watched the PBS miniseries on it in the late 1980s; I have my own copy of Baugh and Cable’s history; shoot, one of the things that really got me interested in linguistics was reading the history of English in that World Book Encyclopedia supplement back in high school (which I’ve mentioned once). And if I wanted to read another one, I could borrow my wife’s copy of Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue (though I’ve been warned that Bryson’s works tend to contain a lot of errors, and I see this one perpetuates the Eskimo snow-vocabulary fiction in its first chapter). “Untold history?” I thought. “No, it’s been told a lot.” But with a free copy, delivered to me, I figured I couldn’t go wrong.

When I read the first page of the introduction, I suddenly realized that McWhorter really did have a different plan for his story. He observes that the usual story is almost always just about the different words that English acquired during its ~1500 years: its original Anglo-Saxon lexicon, the Viking additions, the flood of French, and the classical additions from Latin and Greek, and of course all the words from languages around the world that it’s taken in. He’s right. As I thought back on the histories of English I’d read, they always focused on the words, with occasional excursuses into topics like the Great Vowel Shift or the loss of a lot of inflectional endings. McWhorter’s complaint about this story is twofold. First, lots of languages borrow vocabulary from other languages, to an extent comparable with English. Second, when you focus on just the words, you miss what really does make English unusual: the large quantify of syntax and morphology it has lost compared to other Germanic languages, and the truly rare syntax that it has picked up from some decidedly un-Germanic source. This oversight reminds McWhorter of

…someone who has fitted out their ranch house with a second floor, knocked out all the nonsustaining walls, and added on a big new wing on both sides, and yet month after month, all any of their friends mention when they come over is two new throw rugs. [NW: Hey, did you notice the wide-scoping relative pronoun in there?]

There; that makes two analogies that were so good I thought them worthy of blockquotes, and they’re both just from the introduction. McWhorter has a gift for coming up with these (or more likely, he works really hard at it, like I should do). Elsewhere in the book, he explains concepts and arguments by way of:

• the first McDonald’s
• male hair loss
• Monopoly vs. Clue
• a family that plays the piano with their feet
• autumn leaves
• a bike that falls apart under its rider
• a trashed, vandalized, and burglarized car
• Botox and liposuction

…not to mention the best mnemonic I’ve heard in a while: Volvos, Vermeers, Volkswagens, and volcanoes. I won’t explain here what any of the analogies or the mnemonic is trying to explain, because that would just spoil them for you.

So what is McWhorter’s untold story of English, then? In Chapter 1, he presents arguments that the source for two of English’s odd syntactic features — progressive tenses and do-inversion in questions and negation — are imports from the Celtic languages spoken in England before the arrival of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. This is a disputed conclusion, and McWhorter doesn’t try to hide this fact. He does, however, make his arguments passionately and persuasively. Furthermore, he gives an intelligent presentation of (as far as I know) each argument against his position, and not only rebuts it, but also offers his hypothesis as to why intelligent people would find it convincing in the first place.

In Chapter 3, he tackles the wholesale loss of inflectional endings in English, as well as a handful of other peculiarities of Germanic syntax that English alone has lost. Where other histories note that the endings were lost or reduced, McWhorter goes on to ask, why? Sure languages change, but why is it English alone among its Germanic relatives that has lost so many of them? He lays the blame on the Vikings. Their language was similar enough to Old English in vocabulary for speakers to get by, but different enough in its case- and tense-markings that when the Viking settlers spoke it, they reduced them to the lowest common denominator. Again, he presents objections, and not only rebuts them but takes his best shot at explaining why people would have these objections in the first place if they’re so wrong.

In Chapter 5, McWhorter jumps back in time to consider not English but its ancestor Proto-Germanic. Among the Indo-European languages, the Germanic branch has some peculiarities of its own that are well known, but as yet unexplained: primarily Grimm’s Law and the “strong verbs” that mark past tense by a change in vowel and nothing else (e.g. sing/sang). He argues that the same kind of thing happened here as happened with Celtic and Norse: circumstances arose such that a language (English, or in this case, Proto-Germanic) came to be spoken by a large population of adults who had grown up speaking some other language. This other language’s syntax infected the Proto-Germanic or English as spoken by these new speakers, and these new speakers were numerous enough that their “wrong” way of speaking it became the future mainstream variety. The other language suspect this time is a Semitic language, probably Phoenician. (It reminds me of what Michael Erard wrote about Chinese speakers of English.)

A fascinating story, and even if it’s speculative, it’s necessarily so, given that the action takes place either before written records existed, or among speakers who didn’t write. But for each speculation, McWhorter offers well-documented examples of similar things that are known to have happened with other languages: Xhosa, Jamaican patois, Russian, Dravidian languages, Hebrew, Manchu vs. Chinese, Mandarin vs. Altaic. I did have some minor objections, though. For one thing, McWhorter seems to say that historical linguists don’t like to use clues to piece together stories of what happened to a language (that is, they prefer playing Monopoly to playing Clue), but the entire comparative method of historical linguistics is based on doing just that. ample, McWhorter seems to claim that Russian is unusual among Indo-European languages in indicating possession by saying something is “to me” instead of saying “I have” something. But I remember learning about this “dative of posession” in high school Latin and French.

Meanwhile, what about chapters 2 and 4? These chapters strike me mainly as filler, in order to make a full book out of his Celtic/Norse/Phoenician bastardization story, albeit entertaining filler. Chapter 2 is yet another (he admits) probably doomed attempt to show why many prescriptive grammar rules have no rational basis. The connection to the rest of the story is that none of the currently popular complaints about English grammar concerns anything close to the kind of profound changes in grammar described in Chapter 1, which still resulted in a language deemed to have correct grammar. In this chapter McWhorter makes a curious observation about what he claims is a frequentative suffix: -le. Listing words such as nibble, wiggle, fiddle, and juggle, he notes that “[a]ll of them have to do with rapid, repetitive movement….” One of the words on the list is nipple. The semantic connection between nipples and rapid, repetitive movement probably says more about McWhorter than about the suffix -le.

Chapter 4 is a thorough debunking of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, with some of the material mined from his well-written rant on Language Log. The connection to the rest of the story is that … well, I can’t remember what the connection is.

Lastly I’ll note some petty annoyances with Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: There are too many repeated question marks for rhetorical questions, and McWhorter repeatedly (and almost exclusively) uses as such as a pure connective. These and my earlier complaints, however, were outweighed by the fascinating and entertainingly presented pieces of the history of English that were completely new to me.

Update, 3 Nov. 2009: One addition to the list of analogies, and the sentence discussing Clue vs. Monopoly.

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I wrote on the whiteboard the familiar sentence I alluded to at teh end of the last post:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.

“Linguists look at parts of speech a bit differently than how you’ve probably been taught,” I said. “They don’t look so much at whether a word refers to a person, place, or thing; or state or action; or what have you. They group them based on what kinds of places they can fit into.”

From there, my plan was to erase one word out of the sentence at a time, and ask for other words that could replace it, and then words that could not replace it, without using part-of-speech labels. Once we had samples of words that could and could not replace each word in the sentence, they would start to fall into families, i.e. parts of speech. However, doing this exercise with two classes of 5th and 6th graders was a reminder to me that linguistic data is always messy. Some of the highlights:

• For the second the, one student observed that you could replace it with nothing at all; that is, you could say, “…jumped over lazy dogs.” Other students said we could also do that with the first the, which led to a observation that words like fox in English need something like a or every in front of them, but others, like dogs, don’t.
• Another student offered cheesy as a replacement for the second the, and I put it on the OK list, promising to say more about it later.
• When we listed words that could not replace quick, brown, and lazy, one student suggested toilet, but I put it in the OK list. We speculated on what toilet dogs might be. Dogs that always drank out of the toilet? Dog figurines to put on the top of your toilet tank? Dogs that guarded the toilet? In any case, it didn’t matter that a toilet was a thing instead of a “describing” word: It fit in the slot, so it went in the OK list.
• Also during the investigation of quick and brown, one student suggested dead as something that couldn’t fill in the slot, since dead foxes couldn’t jump. But I pointed out that we could certainly imagine one jumping, and even say, “Last night, I dreamed that the dead fox jumped over the lazy dogs.”
• The same girl had a similar objection to shoe as a replacement for fox, and I had a similar response. And, I pointed out, it certainly wasn’t nonsense in the same way “The quick brown because jumped over the lazy dogs.”
• For over, the students suggested lots of other prepositions, and then again, one of them suggested replacing over with nothing at all. At first, I said no, on the grounds that to do that, we’d need a different jumped: a homophone that meant “attack someone.” But no: another student reminded me that jump could work just fine without the over to mean “jump over”, and I remembered elephants jumping the fence, checker players jumping their opponents, and Evel Knievel jumping canyons. So I had to leave a null symbol in the OK list for things that could replace over.

When it came time to put labels on the families of words we’d amassed, the students knew which ones would be called nouns, which ones verbs, which ones prepositions, and which ones adjectives. The category of determiner was new to them, of course. A theme I kept coming back to was that even within our families of words, there were different kinds. Some determiners, like a and that, were singular; others, like these and many were plural. So why did we call them all determiners, instead of having two parts of speech for them? Some verbs, like swam, flew, or ran, could replace jumped, but others, like tried and believed, don’t. So why do we call them all verbs, instead of having different parts of speech for the different kinds of verbs? More on that, I told them, in part two the next day.

But I never did come back to cheesy. I could just imagine Doug or one of his classmates saying months or years later, “What do you mean cheesy isn’t a determiner?! You told us cheesy was a determiner! You said any word that could replace the was a determiner!” Well, the classmate wouldn’t be saying “you”; they’d be saying “Mr. Whitman”, but you get the idea. I’d have to do a bit of repair work before I moved ahead into phrases the next day.

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About a month ago, I was reading a draft of a five-paragraph essay Doug had to write for language arts. I pointed out a couple of run-on sentences, and a minute later, he had separated them with periods. Then I moved on to the fragments. One of them was something like, “His brother, who wants the duke’s title.”

“But that’s a complete sentence!” Doug protested.

“OK, then what’s the subject?” I asked.

“His brother.”

“And the predicate?”

“Wants the duke’s title!” Doug answered.

I’ll spare you all the arguing that went on during the next half hour. Eventually, Doug grudgingly and still somewhat incredulously conceded that sentences could be packed inside larger things that weren’t sentences. The most eye-opening moment I had, though, was when I asked, “Is Nick the cat a complete sentence?”

“Yes!” Doug said. The subject was Nick. The predicate was the cat. Likewise, in the kitchen was a complete sentence, with subject in, and predicate the kitchen. “The subject comes first,” Doug told me, “and the rest is the predicate. That’s the rule they taught us.”

“I see the problem,” I said. “You’re right that every sentence has to have a subject and a predicate, but what you didn’t realize is that not everything is a sentence. Predicates have to have a verb, at least in English they do. If there’s no verb, it’s not a predicate, and you don’t have a complete sentence.”

“A predicate doesn’t have to be a verb!” Doug said. “They never told us that!”

“Well, what you probably didn’t notice on all the worksheets you did where you identified subjects and predicates was that the predicates all had verbs.”

Doug was furious with his previous teachers for having allowed him to arrive at this overgeneral definition of a sentence.

“Do you think other kids have this same misunderstanding?” I asked. “Or other misunderstandings about sentences?”

“Yes!”

“Hmmm,” I said. At the beginning of the school year, Doug’s language arts teacher had given me an invitation to come in and speak to her classes about linguistics when I had a chance. She didn’t even care about the topic; whatever it was, she’d find a way to connect it to the objectives the students were working on. She’s been doing Latin and Greek word roots with them, so I’d been thinking about bringing in an exercise in reconstructing words from proto-languages, if I could find one that didn’t require too much preparation work in phonetics. Now, though, there seemed to be a more immediate objective that I could give a linguist’s perspective on.

So it was that last Tuesday, I stood in front of Doug’s language arts class, asking how many had ever lost points on a worksheet or test because they hadn’t written an answer as a complete sentence. Just about all of them had. Only a few dropped their hands when I asked if they’d ever wondered what the big deal was, as long as the teacher had understood their answer. Then I moved to a different topic, and reminded them about learning about parts of speech in previous years. My question: Who had ever wondered what they were supposed to do with this knowledge now that they’d learned the eight or ten or however many parts of speech. They all had. My aim, I announced, was to take these two topics, parts of speech on the one hand, and sentences on the other, and fill in the missing material that connected the two. We’d start with a sentence they’d probably heard before…

To be continued

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A couple of posts on baby names. First, here are David Crystal’s thoughts on on when and why books about babies (and, I might add, advertising copy and articles in some magazines) refer to your baby as Baby, as if it were a proper name.

The other post on baby names is actually three posts, but it’s well worth reading them all. Laura Wattenberg of The Baby Name Wizard starts with a tiresome email I’ve received a few times, about a child supposedly named Le-a. It’s pronounced Ledasha, because “the dash don’t be silent.” From there she gives a really enlightening and well-researched argument on how this and other urban-legend names (you know them: Orangello and Lemonjelo, Eczema, etc.) are a covert, or sometimes not so covert, way of talking about race.

Hat tip to Ben Zimmer for the Wattenberg pieces. Ben himself authored this next article: A Word Routes post on the expanding set of un-verbs. Follow link there to the related article he wrote while subbing for William Safire. Below that article is a note saying that Safire would be away “for a few weeks.” Little did I know…

Three more for the “Friends in Low Places”/right-node wrapping files. First, something I heard on All Things Considered one day during the summer:

…attempting to recruit, train, and deploy diplomats to the world’s hot spots.
(NPR, All Things Considered, summer 2009)

You don’t recruit people to a place; you recruit them to an organization. And you don’t train them to a place, either. So the intended meaning is recruiting diplomats, training them, and deploying them to the world’s hot spots. A clear case of RNW.

Second, from my wife’s description of a dream she had one night:

We were selecting and selling wine to restaurants.

You don’t select wine to restaurants. Intended reading: selecting wine, and selling it to restaurants.

Lastly, something I read in a resume a friend asked me to read:

Cofounder and owner of a small consulting firm for 15 years

The cofounding didn’t take place over 15 years; just the owning did. Unlike most of the other RNWs I’ve collected, which involve coordinated verbs, this one has coordinated nouns. The only other one with a noun that I recall is:

Tony Nadal, the uncle and coach of Rafael Nadal since he started playing as a youngster

Presumably, Tony was Rafael’s uncle even before Rafael started playing tennis, although it’s possible that he married into the family at just that time, and really was both uncle and coach for the same period of time. Returning to the cofounder and owner example, I see that the nouns are in fact verbal nouns, which brings them closer to the more typical RNWs I’ve seen. I could even imagine it rephrased as a sentence with actual verbs: Cofounded and owned a small consulting firm for 15 years.

Regular reader and Beatles fan Gordon P. Hemsley had a question:

I just came across the phrase “poop the party” (as in, “sorry to poop the party”). I’ve never heard this phrase before, but it appears to be a back-formation (of sorts) from “partypooper”. Google gives me ~55,000 hits, but many of them appear to include punctuation like colons and hyphens within the phrase.

Perhaps you could do better research?

There would seem to be a need for a verb denoting what a party pooper does. As I’ve written before, compound nouns of the form [Noun]+[Verb]+er/ing often give rise to backformed verbs, such as rollercoast, sightsee, arm flap, problem solve, serial kill, fence sit, and peoplewatch and underage drink.

What those examples would lead us to expect for a backformed verb would be the compound verb (to) party poop, not the verb phrase (to) poop the party. And indeed, this verb is attested. The earliest I’ve found is from a 1994 Miami Herald article, courtesy of the Google News archive:

So the officials opted to party-poop again, moving the Raiders back to their 28.

And here’s another one from ESPN last year, also from Google News:

Far be it from me to party poop on Bryan Robson’s big day….

However, the mere existence of party poop as a verb does not necessarily mean it was backformed from party pooper. In a message to the American Dialect Society email list, Arnold Zwicky argues that some particular Noun+Verb compound patterns are so productive that they are most likely produced by direct compounding, rather than by Noun+Verb+er/ing and subsequent backformation. His example is the pattern Noun+shop, which is widespread enough that he stopped collecting examples; as he writes, “it’s hard for me to believe that people had to experience the noun vegetable-shopping before they could produce the verb vegetable-shop.”

Still and all, the apparent recency of the verb party poop suggests that it was, in fact, created via backformation from party pooper. The OED has its earliest citation from 1954, in an American Speech article commenting on humorous word coinages:

1954 Amer. Speech 29 293 Such comic masterpieces as lounge lizard and party pooper are of American origin.

1954 was also the publication year for the play A Hatful of Rain by Michal Gazzo, which contains the line, “Aw come on, don’t be a party pooper!” I found that attestation through Google Books, which also provided the earliest attestation I’ve found. It’s a caption on the cover of a 1926 publication by the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company, which asks:

Can you find the party-pooper who won’t make way for change?

One wrinkle in the picture so far is that party poop can be found as early as 1946 — not as a verb, but as a noun, synonymous with party pooper. The OED provides a 1959 attestation from William S. Burroughs:

1959 W. BURROUGHS Naked Lunch 131 Such people are no better than party poops.

The 1946 attestation, from Google Books, comes from what appears to be a periodical called The School Executive:

In company he is a good mixer, neither a conversation hog nor a “party poop.”

So far, then, it looks like party pooper has been around since the 1920s, followed by the clipped form party poop, with the backformed verb party poop coming several decades later. But what about poop the party?

To begin with, if the backformation associated with party pooper is (to) party poop, what would be the status of the verb phrase poop the party? On the one hand, I’m inclined to say that it’s no more a backformation than if someone were to say that they tended bar, watched people, or saw the sights. The morphological rules allow you to create compounds of the form [Noun]+[Verb]+er/ing, and the syntactic rules allow you to create verb phrases of the form [Verb]+[Noun Phrase], and that’s all there is to say. Bartender and tend bar; peoplewatcher and watch people; sightseer and see the sights: all are generated by English grammar rules, and there’s no reason to say that one member of the pair was the source of the other.

On the other hand, in order to form the compound party pooper, there first had to be the verb poop, with the meaning of taking the fun out of something. Was there? The Random House dictionary suggests that party poop(er) may be related to the “become exhausted” meaning of poop, but isn’t certain. Or as the creators of my illustration have envisioned, it could be related to the “defecate” meaning of poop. Either way, let’s see if the “spoil others’ fun” meaning shows up in the form of poop the party before party pooper does.

The earliest citation I find, in the Google News Archive, is in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of Feb. 26, 1975, in an article by Bill Christine:

The referee baiters, for fear they would poop the party, remained in their locker rooms until the give-away was completed.

So it looks like Gordon may have been onto something. Even though poop the party is not a backformation like those we’ve been seeing, it does look like the noun party pooper was created before poop had its meaning of spoiling something for everyone. Even today, though, it seems that when speakers want to talk about what party poopers do, they’re more comfortable using a workaround and leaving the noun intact. The Corpus of Contemporary American English has zero hits for any version of poop {a/the/etc.} party or party poop, but four for be a party pooper.

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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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