Babbling with L

I loved this punning tweet from @ScottishScouse that ties together the Oscar-nominated movie La La Land, the Teletubbies, and Eastern Europe. It has inspired me to post another installment of Babbler’s Lexicon, featuring the /l/ series: /lala, lele, lili, lolo, lulu/.

/lala/

So first off, the La La of La La Land (both the movie and the nickname for its setting) is a play on the initialism LA for Los Angeles, since la la land is also, in the OED’s words, a “state of being out of touch with reality.” Both those senses emerged at the same time: The OED’s earliest attestation for both is 1979. In fact, the Los Angeles Times is the
source of that first non-Los-Angeles-related attestation: “Heather was in la-la land after…drinking the LSD-spiked iced tea intended for Diana.” It’s also the source of an even earlier attestation, from 1925, referring not to Los Angeles, but to France; the lexicographers surmise that there’s an ooh-la-la connection in there.

In the movie scene that @ScottishScouse used, Emma Stone’s character is wearing a bright yellow dress, just about the same color as that of the Teletubby Laa-Laa. The others, of course, are the purple one (Tinky Winky), the green one (Dipsy), and the red one (Po…get it?).

I’m actually making an exception by including Laa-Laa in this list, because these days I’m leaning toward excluding people’s names. I’m discovering that almost every sequence of two identical consonant-vowel (CV) syllables that I’m looking at has been used somewhere, at some time, as someone’s name. If I think there’s something otherwise noteworthy about a person’s name that turns up in my searches, I’ll include it, but otherwise I won’t.

/lele/

After excluding several people’s names, I didn’t really find much here. A search for “lay lay” turned up an Urban Dictionary definition for a lazy person, but I haven’t found the expression used in the wild, so I’m suspicious about this one.

/lili/

Not much here, either, but as for people named /lili/, there’s the actor Leelee Sobieski. Onward!

/lolo/

Mostly proper nouns here, too. Briefly, Lolo is the stage name for the singer Lauren Pritchard, a character in a video game, and a nickname for the founder of a chain of chicken-and-waffles restaurants. It’s also a method of birth control also known as Lo Loestrin Fe. As a common noun, LoLo refers to a kind of cargo ship that uses on-board cranes to load (“lift on”) and unload (“lift off”) the containers.

Moving on to low low is another name for a low-rider, according to a convincingly consistent collection of definitions in the the not-always-trustworthy Urban Dictionary, as well as in . Finally, on the low low is a more reduplicate-y version of on the downlow; at least it is in this video:

 

/lulu/

Lulu is a fairly common nickname (also spelled LooLoo, Loo Loo, and Lou Lou), as well as the name of a self-publishing website. According to the OED, a lulu is “A remarkable or wonderful person or thing; freq. used ironically;” a citation from 1972 goes like this: “I do hope you’re not scared of earth tremors… This one was a real lulu.”
Looloo is a travel app for the Philippines.

All in all, my /l/ series is pretty short, but not as short as my /θ/ and /ð/ series. Maybe I should get those out of the way next!

Peanut Eyes

In a social-media gimmick to promote the the new Peanuts movie, a web page is being shared that invites you to “get Peanutized!” I went there, expecting to upload a headshot and be amused at what came back once the secret Peanutizing software had done its thing. I was disappointed to find that it was really more of a character creator with fewer options than Doug and Adam had on their Nintendo Wii. I did it anyway, though, picking what I thought matched me best from the available options. No choice on the face shape; boys automatically get the Charlie Brown moon face, no lumpy face shapes like Linus’s, or other face shapes like maybe Schroeder’s. Here it is:

Aside from the less-than-impressive technology of the Peanutizer, I have a linguistic problem with it. How do you pronounce Peanutize?

Just sound it out, you say? Just say peanut and then add the suffix -ize? That’s all well and good if your base word is something like skolem or tender or Simpson. The trouble with having peanut as a base word is how to pronounce the /t/. Do I pronounce it like a typical, word-initial, aspirated [tʰ]? Or do I pronounce it as a tap [ɾ], the way I do with the /t/ in meter?

If, like my wife, I pronounced peanut to rhyme with seen it, with an unstressed second syllable, then Peanutize is no more a pronunciation problem than digitize. The final /t/ of peanut would be free to break loose from the end of the nut syllable, and attach itself to the ize. The ize become tize, and the /t/ at the onset would be pronounced [tʰ]: “ties.”

But as you’ll no doubt recall, I don’t pronounce peanut to rhyme with seen it. I pronounce it as a compound word, with primary stress on pea, and secondary stress on nut. So for me, the vowel in nut doesn’t get reduced to a schwa; it remains the “uh” sound [ʌ]. And since [ʌ] is a lax vowel, it generally needs to have a consonant close off the syllable. (Exceptions are interjections, such as duh and meh.) This brings up a new issue: Since I now have a /t/ at the end of a syllable (what phoneticians call coda position), and because I speak American English, I have the option of pronouncing the /t/ as a tap [ɾ].

However, this option has a problem. Typically, [ɾ] occurs in English between a stressed and an unstressed syllable (e.g. MET-er), or between two unstressed syllables (e.g. VOM-it-ed). Sometimes it can occur before a stressed syllable (e.g. what-EV-er), but I believe when that happens, that stressed syllable has to have the primary stress in the word. But in Peanutize, the ize doesn’t have primary stress. That honor goes to Pea. If I go ahead and tap that /t/ anyway, I end up with something that sounds to my ear like two words: peanut eyes (which I just discovered is actually an idiom in Thai).

There’s only one solution: Ask myself what Taylor Swift would do. She’d turn that /t/ into a glottal stop [ʔ], that’s what she’d do! So everybody, let’s get peanuh’ized!

Sleep Like Death, Death Like Sleep

The boys, the wife and I watched the latest episode of the rebooted Cosmos last night. About 10 minutes in, Neil deGrasse Tyson began talking about the idea that life on Earth may have begun by arriving on meteorites. It’s known that rocks from Mars, for example, have ended up on Earth this way. It’s also known that some bacteria are able to survive in space, as proven by bacteria that survived a stint traveling on the outside of the International Space Station. Finally, it’s known that some bacteria can survive for a long time without a food source. On this point, Tyson talks about some recently revived bacteria found in Antarctic ice:

Even more amazing are these creatures, awakened from a death-like sleep of eight million years…

I was interested to hear Tyson put it that way, because I’ve also been hearing another person talking about death-like sleeps recently, but she phrases it differently:

Did you hear that? She said:

Before the sun sets on her sixteenth birthday, she will fall into a sleep like death!

Both phrases are talking about a sleep, not about death. We know this from the context, and from the fact that the verbs fall and awaken collocate more strongly with sleep than with death. But they’re phrased in completely opposite orders from each other! Furthermore, it’s syntactically possible for each phrase to be referring to death, not to a sleep. No, I haven’t actually found any examples of this, but it could happen, OK?

Here are the structural differences all sorted out. The diagrams on the left refer first to a death that is like sleep, and then to a sleep that is like death. In these parses, the adjective like is looking for a noun-phrase complement on its right to form an adjective phrase. The diagrams on the right refer to a sleep that is death-like, then to a death that is sleep-like. Here, the adjective like forms a compound adjective with the noun phrase on its left.

The situation reminds me of Shel Silverstein’s “snake eating cake”.

What She Cooks Like

One day last month, Doug and his classmates watched part of a Disney movie during one of the many wasted class periods he’s had this year (thanks to the busiest, most pointless, and most disruptive standardized-test schedule I’ve ever seen). He liked it, he said, and he’d figured out that the person who voiced a dragon in the movie was that guy who had done Donkey in Shrek.

“Oh! Mulan!” I said. “That’s one of the last movies your mom and I saw before you were born.” I also clued him in on the name of “that guy who did the voice of Donkey,” as he and his classmates think of Eddie Murphy. He wanted to put it on our Netflix queue so he could see the rest, so we did.

I didn’t tell Doug my secret reason for putting Mulan in the queue: a line in one of the songs that I’ve occasionally considered blogging about, but hadn’t wanted to go to the trouble of watching the movie again so I could get the exact wording. But if Doug wanted to watch the movie anyway, I could conveniently accomplish the goal.

So last weekend, I saw Mulan for the second time. Adam pointed out that the voice of Mulan herself was done by one of the stars of Agents of SHIELD. Doug noticed that the enemies that were clearly supposed to be Mongols were actually referred to as Huns, probably because Huns was easier to rhyme in a song than Mongols. (They rhymed it with sons.) The wife noticed an “American Gothic” reference she hadn’t remembered. And I got to hear the line in the song I’d been trying to remember. I had to pause and rewind a couple of times before I could write it all down, but luckily, nobody minded.

It comes in the song “A Girl Worth Fighting For,” as the members of the Chinese army who are prominent enough to have names sing about their dream women. About 40 seconds into the song, the baby-faced big fat one, named Chien Po, sings

I couldn’t care less what she’ll wear or what she looks like.
It all depends on what she cooks like.

Hah! Looks like … cooks like! Oh, and notice the standardly negated couldn’t care less, too. But still: You can say someone looks like a god, or cooks like a chef, so why is looks like … cooks like so funny?

In the question what she looks like, the what corresponds to the missing object of like. But the key, I think, is that what she looks like has essentially the same meaning as how she looks, where how could be standing in for an adjective (she looks good) or a prepositional phrase (she looks like a statue). With these two equivalent sentences available, we can set up an analogy:

how she looks : what she looks like :: how she cooks : X

What does X equal? what she cooks like, naturally! But why is it so funny?

How is the question word we use in order to ask about a predicate adjective. Questions like How do you feel?, How does it taste?, How did they sound?, and How does she look? are typically answered with adjectives: great, good, bad, swell, or maybe prepositional phrases such as like a million bucks. But how is also the question word we use to ask about the manner in which something was done. Questions like How did he do it? and How does she cook? are typically answered with an adverb, like well or poorly, or some other kind of phrase that tells how something was done: with a ball-peen hammer, for example. Only the how corresponding to an adjective means the same thing as what … like, and the analogy that gets us what she cooks like totally ignores this fact.

Stop Creating!

You know, I really liked the first film I saw Shia LaBeouf in, and the second one wasn’t too bad. I was always a bit bugged by the clear misspelling of his last name, which I knew from high school French II should have been LaBoeuf, but I wouldn’t let a petty thing like that cause me to boycott a movie. But I’ve been increasingly incredulous of the unfolding story about LaBeouf and a graphic novelist named Daniel Clowes, and I’m inclined to boycott LaBeouf now. Here’s the recap for those who haven’t been following it:

1. LaBeouf produced a movie titled Howard Cantour.com.
2. Daniel Clowes observed that large portions of the dialogue were plagiarized from his book Justin B. Damiano.
3. LaBeouf apologized on Twitter.
4. LaBeouf apologized numerous other times on Twitter, plagiarizing other notable apologies.
5. LaBeouf apologized via a message in skywriting over LA.
6. LaBeouf then tweeted a storyboard, supposedly for his next movie project, which clearly plagiarized from another of Daniel Clowes’s works.
7. Clowes’s lawyer sent LaBeouf a cease-and-desist letter demanding that “he must stop all efforts to create and produce another short film that misappropriates Mr. Clowes’ work….”

You can read more about this here, here, and here, but here’s where the story takes a linguistic turn, so this is our stop.

Ben Zimmer emailed me to tell me about how LaBeouf was deliberately misreading the cease-and-desist letter. He sent along a few links that I’ll share. First, here’s an image of the original letter, along with LaBeouf’s edited version:

"@nycsouthpaw: Shia Lebeouf makes a lawyer's letter into twitter background art. pic.twitter.com/m4H3mNscFQ"

— J.R. McGrail (@JRMcGrail) January 11, 2014

And here’s another message he delivered via skywriting:

#stopcreating pic.twitter.com/G1F3G9EITH

— Shia LaBeouf (@thecampaignbook) January 10, 2014

In addition to copping out with the bullshit claim that all authorship is plagiarism, LaBeouf’s carryings-on exemplify two argument techniques that really get under my skin. One is the deliberate cutoff, exemplified in the classic dialogue:

A: Why did you do this?
B: Well, I didn’t think I–
A: That’s right! You didn’t think!

The other is the straw-man technique, which I often get from my sons. Take a demand from your opponent, amp it up to its most extreme, idiotic version, then belittle your opponent for being so naive as to make such an extreme, idiotic demand. In this case, “stop creating a particular kind of thing” becomes “stop creating (anything)”.

Thinking about the syntax of the butchered sentence, though, I wonder if LaBeouf has realized that he can carry his half-ass mis-parsing even further, to arrive at a completely grammatical parse that’s even more to his liking. Here’s the structure of the intended parse:

The and is joining the smallest constituents it can join: the verbs create and produce. The shared direct object is another short film that misappropriates the word of Daniel Clowes. But LaBeouf wants to break the connection between create and produce, and have create its own verb phrase, meaning “engage in any kind of creation.” Well, in that case, what do we do with the and? Instead of hooking up the two single verbs, it will have to hook up the next larger constituents: the verb phrases stop all efforts to create and produce another short film…. So the parse would be like this:

So if he wanted to, LaBeouf could argue that this letter actually requires him to produce another short film that misappropriates the work of Daniel Clowes. Syntactically, it’s impeccable. Semantically, there’s the problem that the verb produce in the movie-making sense entails creating, so he couldn’t satisfy both requirements. Pragmatically, there’s the oddity of requiring that someone do something that involves lawbreaking (i.e. misappropriation). But hey, it’s about as logical as what he’s been doing already, so what the heck?

Gerund Movie Titles Revisited

We had a few friends over near the beginning of Doug and Adam’s winter break. The conversation turned to movies, and my wife said that two movies she really hoped to see over the holidays were American Hustle and Saving Mr. Banks.

“I don’t want to see that,” I said. “It’s already got a couple of strikes against it because of the title. It’s another gerund-plus-proper-noun cliche.”

“What, is that ungrammatical?” asked our guest Brian.

“No, it’s grammatical, just lazy and overdone,” I answered, and listed a few of the examples I’ve written about before.

“But it’s been getting good reviews!” my wife said. “Can you just ignore the title?”

“Here’s the thing,” I said, moving aside to let Adam get to the fridge. “Clearly, the producers’taste is not good enough for them to avoid this lame title. So I have to question their artistic judgment in other aspects of the movie.”

“Is this about Saving Mr. Banks again?” asked Adam.

Well, I couldn’t help it. This title is particularly annoying because the gerund is saving. Along with being and finding, that’s the most overdone gerund in this worn-out title template. Worse, Tom Hanks seemed to be making a habit out of starring in movies titled Saving someone, what with Saving Private Ryan from 1998.

Later on, I checked Tom Hanks’s acting credits on IMDB, and found to my surprise that in the 71 entries, Saving Private Ryan and Saving Mr. Banks were the only movies with GPN titles. So the good news is that Tom Hanks usually isn’t associated with gerundially-titled movies. Even so, he’s still in these two, both of them with saving…

In a guest script for Grammar Girl a couple of years ago, I talked about two kinds of gerunds, one that behaved more like a verb, and one that behaved more like a noun. I illustrated with this example:

• the quick defusing of the bomb
• quickly defusing the bomb

The first kind is the more nounlike gerund. It can take an article (in this example, the); it is modified by an adjective instead of an adverb (quick), and the complement NP the bomb is introduced by an of. This kind of gerund is sometimes called a nominalization.

The second kind is the more verblike gerund. It does not take an article; *the quickly defusing the bomb is ungrammatical. It is modified by an adverb instead of an adjective (quickly); and its complement NP the bomb comes directly afterward, just as it would if we were dealing with a plain form (defuse the bomb) or a tensed form (defuses the bomb).

I hadn’t really thought about this difference when I was thinking about movie titles, but I notice now that the movie titles that drew my attention all involve the verby kind of gerunds. That is, we have Saving Mr. Banks and not The Saving of Mr. Banks. I did a search on IMDB for “the *ing of”, and found only one result, The Rican-ing of the White Boy (2012). An anonymous plot summary explains what Rican-ing is:

What happens when a paternally adopted forty seven year old schmuck from Queens, New York, sets out for the first time to meet his long lost Puerto Rican family, after being raised by a tribe of white people?

However, I know there are at least two more nominalization-style movie title from recent years: The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009), and The Haunting of Hill House (1999) (though this title came from Shirley Jackson’s 1959 story). I don’t know why it didn’t show up in the search results. If you have some other examples that the search didn’t find, leave a comment.

I wondered what the GPN movie titles would sound like with nominalizations, and started going through the list I’d put in my earlier blog post: The Finding of Nemo, The Chasing of Amy, The Driving of Miss Daisy… Then I realized that some of these titles couldn’t be rephrased as a nominalization:

• *The Becoming of Colette (1991)
• *The Becoming of Mozart (1998)
• *The Being of John Malkovich (1999)
• *The Being of Julia (2004)
• *The Being of Flynn (2012) [a new one!]

It seems that linking verbs that take an NP complement don’t work as nominalizations. This is probably something that syntacticians have known about for a long time, but I haven’t found it in CGEL, or in a classic paper by Noam Chomsky, “Remarks on Nominalization“. If anyone knows of research that has been done on this, I’d love to hear about it.

Anyway, since I’ve moved beyond gerund+proper noun titles and into nominalizations, I might as well finish with a nod to nominalizations without an of phrase following them. These are the mark of a horror movie: The Shining, The Haunting, The Howling, The Fruiting, and others.

It’s late now, though, so as I told Doug and Adam earlier tonight, it’s time for the going-to of bed.

Interdental L for Emphasis

“Who put Blackfish on our Netflix queue?” my wife asked.

“Oh, that was me. Entertainment Weekly recommended it.”

She didn’t want to watch it, though, so I ended up watching the documentary on killer whales in captivity myself, while I wrapped Christmas presents last week. It was a well-done film, and it was short enough that I even watched the DVD extras while I finished wrapping. They included an interview with marine biologist Dr. Naomi Rose, in a segment called “The Truth About Wild Whales.”

At the end of the interview, Rose was asked whether she thought Sea World should be shut down. She finessed the answer by saying that as a business, Sea World would do what its customers demanded, and offered this advice about how customers could make their wishes known:

They have to [pause] write a letter. [pause] Change their vacation plans. [pause] Let Sea World know they changed their vacation plans.

Dr. Rose as she begins to say “letter”.

Dr. Rose as she begins to say “Let”.

I had to put down the scissors and the wrapping paper and rewind the video to the beginning of that statement to watch and listen to it more closely. There it was! In the first sentence, Rose pronounced the /l/ at the beginning of the word letter in the way it’s described in texts on English phonetics: with the tip of her tongue behind her front teeth. But in the third sentence, she pronounced the /l/ at the beginning of let with the tip of her tongue between her top and bottom front teeth, in the same position as it would be if she were pronouncing /θ/ (as in thick) or /ð/ (as in this). In other words, she was pronouncing it as an interdental sound rather than an alveolar one.

This is a pronunciation that I learned about about 10 years ago from some college students in southern central Ohio. Now that I think more about it, I imagine that probably most English speakers pronounce /l/ this way when it comes right before /θ/ or /ð/, as in healthy or all this. I blogged about this pronunciation back in 2005, and linked to a post on the Linguist List on the subject. Since that link no longer works, here’s a fresh one. In the post, Mark Jones sums up responses from other list members, some of whom note that the interdental pronunciation seems to be used for emphasis, or when a speaker is hyperarticulating. That, I think, is what’s going on in Rose’s interview. Before she says let Sea World know, she pauses slightly and leans forward; and as she says it, she speaks at a higher volume.

Whether or not you’re interested in Dr. Rose’s interdental and alveolar /l/s, I recommend watching Blackfish. I wish I’d seen it before taking Adam to Sea World in San Antonio when we went down for my sister’s wedding in May.

What’s Happening with Because?

My brother Glen send me a link to this article on the best Disney Pixar movies as rated by children. He’d noticed something about the kids’language, and was wondering if I would notice it, too. I did. It had to do with their use of because. Here are all the children’s comments that used because:

1. “Because there’s bad guys, and Mater, and Lightning McQueen, and SPIES!” (Max, 5)
2. Elliot, 4, disagreed, saying, “I didn’t like it, because it has rats, and I don’t like rats.”
3. Max, 5, said it was one of his favorites, “Because Evil Emperor Zurg!”
4. [T]hey liked it “because there’s a turtle that’s so funny, it swims away” (Lily, 6)
5. Some younger viewers took the opposite view, giving high ratings because “race cars are funny” (Wilson, 4), and “because they race” (Gideon, 4).
6. Gideon, age 4, gave it his highest rating “because I like Mike Wazowski,” while Franny, age 8, did the same “because I like Sully.”
7. Others, like Madison, 4, liked it for different reasons: “Because the day care. I like the day care parts.”
8. Alex, 5, listed Up as his favorite, “Because Russell throws his GPS out the window and he’s so funny and he can make birds with his hands.”
9. Reasons included “Because Sully can really roar” (Max, 5), “Because Mike has braces in his teeth” (Alex, 5), and “Because it was funny and a monster fell off a bed” (Harry, 4).
10. Liam, 6, agreed about the roaring, listing Monsters U as his favorite “because the part where Sully has the big roar and scares all the policemen.”
11. Franny, 6, gave it a high rating “because I like the dad.”
12. Elliot, 4, said, “I didn’t like it, because Sid is mean and he smashes all the toys.”

Did you notice it? Items 3, 7, and 10 had because followed by a noun phrase, and nothing else; in other words, used in the same way that Glen, I, and most other English speakers would use because of. Although I can use because to introduce just a noun phrase, for me it’s a metalinguistic use. For example, if I were fumbling for words, I might say something like

…because, you know, the thing you were talking about.

It seems to me that somewhere a few years ago, when a long-awaited new release of the video game Skyrim had just come out, I saw an xkcd comic, or a tweet from Ed Cormany, saying something about not doing what they should have been doing, “because Skyrim.” I was unable to find the comic or tweet or whatever it was, but again, the impression I got was that the speaker didn’t have available the working memory needed in order to construct a full clause to explain, because they are so engrossed in thinking about or playing their new game, and they figure that’s all the explanation their audience really needs anyway.

Glen brought up some other metalinguistic examples in which because introduces a single-word or single-phrase exclamation. He quoted one from a reviewer’s synopsis of the TV show he used to write for:

The Fringies arrive at a giant hanger on a military base where they are waved in by some soldiers after a meandering exchange between Bishop and one of the soldiers regarding grape bubble gum because MAD SCIENTIST!

Simply saying “Mad scientist!” all by itself is an acceptable utterance. Although it’s not a complete sentence, it tells the listener, “Look, a mad scientist!” As a complement to because, it seems to say, “…Bishop is a mad scientist, as we regular viewers well know, and has a powerful sweet tooth, for milkshakes, red licorice, and other hip and quirky candy, and by now I shouldn’t even have to tell you this.” The because plus just the noun phrase, uttered with excitement, conveys sarcasm or disdain, too, it seems. Glen says that this particular reviewer uses this particular phrasing a lot. From the same review:

Bishop just goes ahead and snorts one of the serums without knowing which it is, because MAD SCIENTIST! … There is also some chimpanzee-related wackiness on Bishop’s part. Because MAD SCIENTIST!

Here are a couple of examples with NPs other than mad scientist; namely, cocaine and science, both from the same blog post, and both conveying sarcasm or disdain:

He makes her nervous. But then he offers her cocaine, and hey, cocaine! She sets aside all her misgivings, and gets in the car with a guy she doesn’t know, who makes her nervous and who is “disconnected”.

Because cocaine? [NW: notice the parallel with the earlier hey, cocaine! standing in for an entire clause.]

Women don’t lie about rape because SCIENCE!

Glen speculated that the children in the article heard metalinguistic usages of because, and learned the syntax without the sarcasm. I don’t have enough data to know, but I wouldn’t be surprised. It reminds me a lot of how duh started out as an imitation of stereotyped inarticulate phonation from a mentally handicapped person, and didn’t really sound like a word, but now is uttered with the same intonation as any old interjection: Duh! It also parallels other, well-known linguistic processes: Stronger and more specific meanings become weaker and more general over time; and words that express content get “grammaticalized” until they have only functional meanings. The metalinguistic-to-ordinary progression is something that I haven’t read about in textbooks or the literature–though relevant sources are welcome in the comments! So are your own encounters with because+NP.

Only One Cause

“Whoa, Dad,” Doug said, turning away from his online summer English class. “Ambiguity strikes!” Of course, I couldn’t ignore that. I went over to check out his computer monitor. As it turned out, he was right. Here was the question from the quiz in the unit on “Plot”:

“Effects do not occur within a bubble”? What kind of bubble? I thought there was a lot of science about the kind of things that went on in soap bubbles. Yeah, that one was probably false.

Oh, wait, they meant figuratively. Effects have other effects, or something like that. Well, in that case, it would be true. However, that wasn’t the ambiguity Doug was talking about. He’s got no problem with the literal-figurative thing. He was looking at item D.

“An effect can … have only one cause,” he explained, “or it can have … only one cause.”

I rephrased in linguist-talk: “It’s possible that an effect has only one cause, or there is only one cause that any event can have. Wow, that’s a nice scope ambiguity.”

I remembered the scope ambiguity I encountered in a biology test when I was about Doug’s age–another one involving can, but interacting with a negation instead of only. Anyway, the ambiguity in this question turned out not to pose much of a problem. With wide-scoping can, i.e.

It is possible that an effect has only one cause.

Well, that’s probably true. And so are items B and C, which would mean that all four items are true, leaving Doug with no false statement to choose. Unless item A was talking about actual bubbles after all, in which case we should really look into the physics of bubbles… On the other hand, with wide-scoping only, i.e.

There is only one cause that any event can have.

the answer is clearly false. Bingo!

What a difference context can make, though. When my college friend Cali made me go and see Highlander with him, there was never a question whether can or only was supposed to take wide scope in the tagline “There can be only one.” Wide-scoping can would have really deflated the conflict, which Doug’s English course has taught him is an essential for any plot.

At the Movies

Over the weekend, Doug, Adam, the wife, and I went to see Now You See Me, and it was really good! It was so good that I let my wife go and get the family’s large bucket of popcorn refilled in the middle of the movie instead of doing it myself. I also never bothered going out to refill my large pop. I don’t have much to say regarding linguistics about the movie, except that I wonder how much of the overseas audience will know that they’re supposed to mentally supply “…now you don’t” to the title. (Does that catchphrase exist in other languages?) But there were two things to comment on before the movie.

As the wife was getting our tickets at the automated kiosk, she said, “Wow, there are only seven seats left!” Really? We were 20 minutes early! All the same, we hustled toward the ticket-taker, who said as he handed us our stubs, “That’ll be house seven, on your left.”

That misunderstanding was so funny I had to make a note of it on my phone once we took our seats in house 7. But after standing in line to buy that big tub of popcorn and the refillable drinks to which I have alluded, I had to hurry up with the memo, because the part of the trailer saying how it was time to silence and put away all cell phones and mobile devices was coming on.

Then the previews began, and the first one had a mysterious hooded figure telling someone about her destiny. Doug leaned over me to whisper to Adam, “It’s Assassin’s Creed!” But a minute later, his hopes disintegrated when the preview turned out to be for something called The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. However, I heard a sentence in the preview that I wanted to write down–but I’d silenced and put away my cell phone! So instead, I took my pen and wrote as best I could in the dark:

See that? There’s only so long you can hide from the truth. It’s another one like There’s only so small I can cut it and There’s only so memorized the thing can get. An existential There is that introduces not a noun phrase, but an adjective or adverb. (Adverb, in this case.) Nice!

Then we finally got to the feature itself, and I saw a production logo that I wasn’t familiar with. It turned out to be for “K/O Paper Products.” Bob Orci’s company! I hadn’t known they were producing this movie! All I knew about was that big sci-fi epic that had their name all over it this summer, and their Ender’s Game movie coming out this fall. But being as how Bob regaled Doug and Adam with magic tricks at the rehearsal dinner for their Uncle Glen’s wedding last fall, seeing an Orci-produced movie about magicians was even more fun.