Archive for November, 2009

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Cheese or font?

November 7, 2009

From Will Leben, via the Stanford linguistics department newsletter (on November 6), a pointer to the entertaining site Cheese or Font?, where you are given proper nouns and asked to decide whether they refer to cheeses or to fonts. Something of a challenge.

Lots of people have noticed that names of diseases and names of plants are often very similar, but I don’t know if anyone has put together a Plant or Disease? test.

For visual material, there are several X or Y? tests and games out there. For several years, various versions of Gay or Eurotrash? have been available on the net, often billed as a test of gaydar. The player is offered a set of photos (usually of young men) and asked to decide whether the person in the picture is gay or Eurotrash.

(In case you’re not familiar with Eurotrash, or eurotrash, according to the March 2009 draft revision of the OED‘s Euro- entry, the term is originally and chiefly U.S., is “depreciative”, and refers to “rich European socialites collectively, esp. those living or working in the U.S.” The deprecatory tone comes from a suggestion that these socialites are living an idle and dissipated life. The OED has cites from 1980 on.)

Then there’s the series of X Face or O-Face? tests in Details magazine a few years ago, reported on in a Language Log posting here. The player is given a display of faces, some of them of people in a moment of exertion or great emotion (for instance, athletes, American Idol contestants, guitarists), some of them of people at the moment of sexual climax. The player’s task is to decide which photos show X Face (Game Face, Idol Face, Guitar Face) and which O-Face.

(Why, you might be wondering, did the topic come up on Language Log? Because of the term O-face, which seems to be a relatively recently coined, or at least recently popular, alternative to the older term come face. Details on Language Log.)

Posted in Silliness, Words | 3 Comments »

When texting kills

November 5, 2009

It’s a sad story. As reported by Elisabeth Rosenthal in the New York Times (“When Texting Kills, Britain Offers Path to Prison”, November 2):

OXFORD, England — Inside the imposing British Crown Court here, Phillipa Curtis, 22, and her parents cried as she was remanded for 21 months to a high-security women’s prison, for killing someone much like herself. The victim was Victoria McBryde, an up-and-coming university-trained fashion designer.

Ms. Curtis had plowed her Peugeot into the rear end of Ms. McBride’s neon yellow Fiat, which had broken down on the A40 Motorway, killing Ms. McBryde, 24, instantly.

Curtis was driving while distracted — by the many text messages she was exchanging with friends. A 2008 British government directive treats prolonged texting as a serious aggravating factor in “death by dangerous driving”.

Rosenthal was unable to report this story without the ritual dig at texting and texters:

[The text messages Curtis exchanged] are filled with the mangled spellings and abbreviations that typify the new lingua franca of the young.

Rosenthal cites LOL and an expletive (not specified; this is the NYT, after all), but nothing more.

Language Log has reported many times on characterizations of texting (and electronic communications in general) as evil in various ways. A small sampling of postings: here, here, here. (There’s also a long series of cartoons on texting and so on, mostly about teens).

Posted in Texting | 1 Comment »

Clean your plate

November 5, 2009

This isn’t about language or linguistics, but this is my blog, not Language Log, so I feel free to stray on occasion. You’ve been warned.

A letter to the NYT (November 3) from Jeffrey H. Toney, dean of the College of Natural, Applied and Health Sciences at Kean University (in New Jersey), on an op-ed piece “The Carnivore’s Dilemma” by Nicolette Hahn Niman (October 31), concludes:

The best advice Ms. Niman gives us is to pay attention to the source of meat products and what our mothers always told us: clean your plate. Regardless of what we choose to eat, doing so will reduce our dietary carbon footprint by half because “about half of the food produced in the United States is thrown away.”

The saying in my family for such occasions is “you don’t save nothing by eating it”, so I’m baffled by the idea that cleaning your plate will reduce our dietary carbon footprint.

I wonder if anyone has compared the carbon contribution of an amount of food discarded because it wasn’t eaten with the carbon contribution of the human waste resulting from eating that food. Surely people have studied the sources of discarded food: food left on the plate versus food that never makes it to the plate.

Posted in Not about language | 4 Comments »

Short shot #17: Fanshawe the mononome

November 5, 2009

Ian Frazier’s “Fanshawe”, a humor piece in the November 2 New Yorker, begins:

Fanshawe had just the one name.

Later:

In college, Fanshawe’s social set had included an unusual number of men–Neuman,Farrel, Fogel, Harrison, Fegley, Carson, Foster, Ferguson, Sapers, Miles, Northon, Winslow–who were mononomes like himself.

Mononome is a wonderful morphological invention, immediately interpretable in context.

Fanshawe the mononome immediately reminded me of Mr. Spiggott in the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch “One Leg Too Few”, about a one-legged actor auditioning for the part of Tarzan, “a role which traditionally involves the use of a two-legged actor” and so wouldn’t normally be taken by a “unidexter”.

Posted in Language play, Morphology, Short shots | Leave a Comment »

The effects of speech rate

November 5, 2009

Zippy experiences the effects of slow speech rate:

Posted in Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

a rat’s ass

November 2, 2009

English has a collection of negative-polarity idiom frames with minimal direct objects involving an assortment of conventionalized nouns. These are often cited (in idiom and slang dictionaries, for example) with an explicit negator not:

(1a) not give a ___
(1b) not care a ___
(2) not be worth a ___

Fillers include (but are not limited to) damn, fuck, shit, crap; hang, hoot, lick, whit, rip, fig; some expanded  nominals (flying fuck, good goddamn); and some longer nominals (hill of beans, rat’s ass / arse). A few mass nouns can serve as fillers: not be worth fuck / shit / crap. There is considerable variation here, from idiom to idiom and person to person, as to which nouns can fill which slots, and the patterns are sometimes playfully or euphemistically extended to new items: not give a turd, not give a doggone.

The fillers for the slots are mostly nouns referring to ‘small, valueless, or contemptible’ things (as the relevant subentry for fig in the OED puts it), but there seem to have been plenty of accidents of history in way particular nouns were conventionalized in these slots.

Pattern (2) is straightforward syntactically; it’s just a predicative construction. But patterns (1a) and (1b) have a fairly complex external syntax, occurring with no complement (with the object of scorn supplied from context), with the object of scorn expressed by a PP (most often in about) or in a clause (a WH interrogative clause, an if clause, or a that clause):

Frankly, I don’t give a damn.
I don’t give a damn about your feelings.
I don’t give a damn who you are / what you do / when you go.
I don’t give a damn if / that you can speak Swahili.

None of these observations are especially new, certainly not original with me. My interest here is in the origin of some of the more remarkable fillers, in particular rat’s ass / arse.

(For some discussion of a tinker’s damn, or dam, see Michael Quinion’s entry here.)

Now, a rat’s ass is small, worthless, and contemptible, so rat’s ass is an eligible filler, and in fact it occurs (with considerable frequency) in all three patterns:

Some of us don’t give a rat’s ass about schools, you know. Take it to the school board! (link)

Does he really want to lose the independents over this crap, that he does not care a rat’s ass about. (link)

I got into an argument the other day, and this guy says my opinion “isn’t worth a rat’s ass.” Now, I’m no genius, but does he know the true value of a rat’s ass? (link)

Rat’s ass is not an expression that people would be likely to pull up out of the air; it looks like a playful creation on the part of some individual speaker, complete with assonance (in American English, anyway), which then spread to others. The innovator wouldn’t have had to be a public figure of any sort, though its use by such a figure would have hastened its spread.

So rat’s ass is something of a trial for lexicographers (once again, as here, I note that I’m not a lexicographer, and I appreciate how difficult lexicography is): determined digging in texts will give us a lower bound on how long it’s been around, but slang like rat’s ass takes some time to make it into print (often appearing first in reports of speech), so it might be much older than texts would suggest.

On-line resources are not very helpful, though they can be entertaining. One dictionary of intenet slang lists idgara, along with idgac (crap), idgad (damn), idgaf (fuck), idgaff (flying fuck), idgafs (fucking shit), and idgas (shit). And a (non-scholarly) dictionary of Australian slang lists rat’s ass as a piece of “Aussie lingo”.

Posted in Idioms | 4 Comments »

Finding error everywhere

November 1, 2009

While checking the source of a double-preposition example (“That’s the code in which I live by”, from a John Cena television commercial for a World Wrestling Entertainment show), I came across Bonnie Trenga’s Sentence Sleuth site, which offers a compendium of “criminal sentences” (the Cena sentence is Criminal Sentence 294, from October 27).

Many of these have routine misspellings, misuses of punctuation, and the like. Some, like the Cena sentence, are clearly syntactically problematic. But in some of them Trenga finds ambiguity, redundancy, and ungrammaticality in unremarkable examples. I suspect that she is looking too hard for error and then finding it everywhere.

For instance, in CS 293, from October 23, she objects to a CNN caption mentioning “fat CEO salaries”, on the grounds that the expression is ambiguous, and in CS 297, from October 30, she objects to “examples include a, b, and”, on the grounds that it’s redundant.

And then in CS 291, from October 21, she reported:

And now for something completely ungrammatical, from a newspaper article about how DNA in a leech helped solve a crime in Australia:

“Detectives found the leech at the crime scene and extracted blood from it that they believed was from one of the two suspects.”

Yep. The words “from it that” are not allowed in English. They just don’t make sense in that order.

Presumably she’s thinking that the relative clause “that they believed was from one of their two suspects” is a misplaced modifier, because it doesn’t immediately follow the head noun “blood”. She offers two replacements for “extracted blood from it that …”:

extracted from it blood that they believed was from one of the two suspects

extracted blood that they believed was from one of the two suspects

But there’s nothing wrong with the original, or with variants of it with a which relative or a zero relative:

extracted blood from it which they believe was from one of the two suspects

extracted blood from it they believed was from one of the two suspects

That is, the issue is not with the sequence of words from it that, but with the structures involved. Here’s a somewhat different from it that example, involving complementation rather than relativization:

Thanks for the progress report. I see from it that you’re unlikely to finish on schedule.

What’s going on in both the relative and complement clause examples is that English allows such clauses to be deferred to the end of the sentence, so as to avoid the awkward and hard-to-process sequence of a long, complex constituents followed by a short constituent, as in:

extracted blood  that they believed was from one of the two suspects from it

see  that you’re unlikely to finish on schedule from it

Indeed, Trenga’s first suggested fix has another type of deferral in it, with the whole complex NP “blood that they believed was from one of the two suspects” deferred to sentence-final position.

There’s a considerable literature on the details of these deferrals, under the names Relative Clause Extraposition, Complement Clause Extraposition, and Heavy (or Complex) NP Movement.

Posted in Syntax | 2 Comments »

Avoiding the gubernatorial taboo word

November 1, 2009

One of the side issues in the story (Language Log coverage here) about the acrostic FUCK YOU embedded in a veto statement from California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (apparently as a slap against Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, the sponsor of the bill in question) is question of how the statement has been reported.

Some sites just spell it out. Others use avoidance characters: everything from F*ck you through F*** you to F*** **u. The San Francisco Chronicle has referred several times to “the f-bomb”. But what of the New York Times, which tries so hard to avoid either of these techniques?

Here’s their treatment, typical of the elaborate indirection that the Times goes in for in these matters (“Obscenity, Governor? Oh, That.” by Jesse McKinley, October 29):

The message can be seen only by a careful reading of the printed version of the veto statement. Taking the first letter of each line, beginning with the third line, two words emerge: The first is obscene; the second is “you.”

(For discussion of the Schwarzenegger staff’s denial that there was a hidden message in the statement and their claim that the whole thing was just a coincidence, see the Ben Zimmer posting linked to above.)

 

Posted in Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »

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