This is my personal blog, not a topical blog, but I find myself unable to say anything terribly original or interesting about the election per se. Like many Californians, I am thrilled by Obama’s election, and terribly disappointed that it looks like Prop 8 may pass. However! They have not counted my ballot yet (vote-by-mail ballots submitted on Election Day have not been counted; more than 3 million ballots remain to be counted) so I will hold out a small hope yet. Other smaller happinesses (Prop 1A, Prop 2) abound. So, I resort to interesting linguistics:
“It felt very, like, moving.”
I heard this on the Caltrain shuttle tonight, and it constitutes one amusing linguistic tidbit regarding the election. No doubt I’ve said things that sounded equally empty-headed because I put ‘like’ in at an inopportune moment, but this one struck me as funny.
The other interesting linguistic bit was McCain’s use of “an historic” in his speech, and what happened to it afterwards. We were watching Fox News at the time (why? I don’t know) and they were putting pull quotes in the little “Alert” box. When they did this, they changed it to “a historic moment”. MSNBC, though, has the correct version in their story.
“An historic” is an interesting pattern. I don’t use it; it’s almost exclusively used by older people, who I think learned, or were explicitly taught, to use “an” before words starting with H (that are not stressed on the first syllable, a restriction I was not aware of explicitly until looking it up for this entry). It’s described well on this page. The origin is from British h-dropping, which later receded, leaving this little island of confusion. I was surprised to see Fox News ‘correcting’ McCain’s correct, if less common, usage. Did they do it for familiarity? Or because they really thought he misspoke?
I really enjoy being a bona fide professional linguist, with said title on my business card, but I have found a title that is, I think, even cooler, belonging to Jesse Sheidlower (whose surname I would dearly love to know how to pronounce). Jesse is, according to his byline on this Slate article about Sarah Palin’s accent, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary. Beat that for pure awesome.
I never knew there was an Alaskan accent (or even, more than one). You learn something new every day.
I don’t plan to make a habit of this, but I would like to say that I think Language Log has thoroughly worn out its/their welcome on entries that solely constitute being peeved by people being peeved about (various things) about language.
It’s still moderately interesting when they explore the history and usage of the construction that the person is peeved about, but this entry of Pullum’s (don’t go read it, I link only for the record) is content-free except for complaining (sans data) that there is no reason to be peeved about these peeves. This is almost vacuous and is certainly obvious considering the list is so long and includes so many inoffensive words and phrases.
This will be the last time that I peeveblog about peeveblogging about peeves.
I thought I might be imagining it, but I don’t think so anymore: Language Log is getting less focused and less good than it used to be.
Bill Poser today wrote an entry about how runners hear the start gun at different times because of the speed of sound in air. The ‘hook’ used to relate this to linguistics is that if people studied acoustic phonetics, they would know this was a problem.
Yes…but if they studied physics, or even general science, they would know this too. I am not impressed with this as a linguistics hook. Sorry, but Language Log is supposed to be about linguistics, not about the fairness of Olympic track racing. Read down the list of recent entries, and then browse through a segment of LL Classic and see what you think about their relative interestingness.
I don’t know if this is an affliction common to blogs, but I’ve seen it happen to several. BoingBoing, which was once what its tagline claims (a directory of wonderful things) has become highly political. I still find it interesting to check out, but the slant on the politics is also high (unclear incidents of civil liberty violations are made to sound highly inflammatory), and that makes it even less interesting than just politics (which after all is also interesting, though perhaps not always wonderful).
Both BB and LL also added comments fairly recently. The comments sections are generally better than average, but they rarely add much to the original entry. I preferred both blogs when you had to email the original poster to comment, even though your words were subject to their whims. (My comments were mentioned or published a couple of times on both BB and LL, which was neat, but that’s neither here nor there.) This has contributed to my current feelings about their decline — which is funny because I can always just skip the comments if I don’t want to read them.
Reading Barbara’s lovely discussion about “how local to go”, I was blindsided by this amazing sentence:
Cornmeal, we know from, but millet — to most Appalachians, that stuff is birdseed.
The “we know from” construction is fairly familiar to me from informal speech and writing. It’s a favorite of Sars. A few examples from her:
- The man’s baseball childhood was basically the 12 Stations of Richie Ashburn; Philly fans know from having to wait.
- I have spent time in New Jersey DMVs, so I know from annoying…
- I don’t know from ESL grammar…
- Moreover, Giuliani knows from art criticism like I know from sub-nuclear physics. [AG note: awesome]
- Say what you want about the guy off the field, dude knows from pitching.
I’ve been known to use it myself, although mostly self-consciously, to present a jokingly exaggerated portrait of my knowledge about some area. There are no uses of it in my blogging at all, so I can only suppose that I might say something like “I’m a linguist, so I know from dialects!” It’s a hard construction to search for on Google, because “know from X” is also the first part the standard structure “know from X that Y”, which is why I turned to Tomato Nation for examples.
I don’t really want to get into discussing the “properness” of this structure (some people hate it) or its origin. What really struck me about Barbara’s sentence, though, was the effect of combination with topic-fronting: Instead of saying “We know from X” (X = cornmeal), she writes “X, we know from”. This is just standard topic-fronting, which is a common discourse pattern.
But the combination of the two yields a sentence unusual enough to catch my eye, unusual enough that several people I sent it to said it seemed confusing to them, especially on first reading. Quite an interesting result.
Update:
Jesse points out in the comments that a more sophisticated Google search can find some examples, such as:
PS: Your iPod doesn’t know from romance
Barbecue? I know from barbecue…
Since Five I Know From Funny
I saw an example in the wild world of vegan blogging today of what Language Log calls WTF coordination (aka syllepsis):
With a dough hook and the mixer running, add remaining flour and knead another 5 minutes.
If this sentence doesn’t strike you as strange, note that “a dough hook” and “the mixer running” are two different types of attachments to “with”, one a straightforward noun and the other a more complex phrase. Perhaps this is another case of recipe-register creating telegraphic constructions that are easy to WTF.
The linked Language Log posts explain the complexities of grammaticality judgment in cases like these. In fact, it’s the toughness of the judgments that gave these their fond name: you’re not a prescriptivist ruling them out on some theoretical grounds. But you hear them and go “WTF, that’s not grammatical”, so you’re not being a pure descripitivist either by assuming that anything anyone produces is grammatical. And then you find it’s hard to explain why some examples sound terrible (like “The sun makes you hot and sneeze”) and others sound okay or even clever.
I rather like this grammatical WTF; it can be elegant or amusing when used well, and I think Country Living magazine (the recipe’s original source) used it well.
I think wine should always accompany weekend work. Loosens up the synapses, and makes one care less that one is not relaxing, because one is relaxed, anyway.
I enjoyed this interesting linguistic slipup:
“Pullum, however, doesn’t really take Gelernter’s argument seriously, presumably because it’s absurd and ignorant and doesn’t deserve to be.”
Parts of this entry, from Peter Seibel, were excerpted on Language Log itself, but they missed this fun little failure of parallelism, probably resulting from editing failure
Pullum doesn’t [take Gelernter’s argument seriously] because it doesn’t deserve to be [take _ seriously].
This works surprisingly well for a sentence whose elided portion is not identical to any earlier constituent. It reminds me of the LL series on cases where a pronoun is introduced that matches an earlier possessive phrase. We sort of fill in the necessary information.
I can’t resist:
Now consider again Skinner’s sentence:
Justice is not a frivolous thing, Simpson. It has little if anything to do with a disobedient whale.
This seems amenable to a quantificational analysis: the set of situations in which justice has anything to do with a disobedient whale is a subset of the set of situations in which justice has little to do with a disobedient whale. Equivalently, there are no situations in which justice has anything to do with a disobedient whale, in which justice doesn’t have little to do with a disobedient whale.
Earlier today I read one of the weekly emails from my VP and found myself thinking, there are some things that really don’t make a lot of sense without context and sound very strange and funny when presented alone. And I think justice not having anything to do with a disobedient whale is definitely one of them.