The latest issue of the Economist is a special holiday double issue (covering December 19 through January 1), with a large number of feature stories: among them, “Socrates in America: Arguing to Death”, “Filth: The Joy of Dirt”, and at least two pieces straightforwardly about language. The first of these is “Politeness: Hi there” (beginning on p. 104). I’ll post later about the other.
Archive for 2009
Holiday Economist 1: politeness
December 20, 2009Porn hypallage?
December 18, 2009Noticed on a piece of porn spam just before I deleted it: a reference to amateur tits. You can find many hits for the expression, and also for amateur knockers and amateur boobs. There are a fair number for professional tits (but many fewer for professional knockers and professional boobs, because these expressions have other uses not referring to breasts — referring instead to people who habitually “knock” other people and their work and to people who habitually behave like idiots).
The first analytic question here is whether amateur and professional in these expressions are adjectives or nouns (or, possibly, adjectives in some uses and nouns in others). In either case, the expressions are composites of the form
modifier M + head noun N
and their semantic interpretation isn’t the default.
For composites in general, the default is (letting X‘ stand for the denotation of the expression X) for (M + N)’ to be a subset of N‘, that is, for the composite to be subsective, or hyponymic (a Christmas cookie is a cookie, a big cookie is a cookie). But non-subsective composites, of several types, abound. (For instance, I’ve posted on Language Log a couple of times about one type, resembloid composites, in which (M + N)’ merely resembles N‘ in some relevant way; see here and here.)
For Adj + N composites, the default relationship R between Adj and N is predication: a big dog is a dog that is big. Such cases involve predicating adjectives. But there are several types of non-predicating adjectives, some of which I’ve posted about — for instance, contiguous country, here, and regional country, here.
For N1 + N2 composites, there is also a question about the relationship R between N1‘ and N2‘. The default is for R to be one of a small set of relations (predication, possession, location, containment, material, etc.). But new composites can be created on the spot, in which R can be exquisitely specific or can have additional content beyond the default R. Language Log has had a series of postings on non-default Rs, starting with Geoff Pullum’s entertaining canoe wife posting.
Back to amateur tits and the like (from here on I’ll let this one example stand for the set). There is a noun amateur (as in “They are amateurs”) and an adjective amateur (as in “This is all so amateur”), so in the composite amateur tits it could go either way. However, both sorts of composites would be subsective: amateur tits, on either understanding, are tits.
So the complexity of amateur tits lies in the relationship R between M and N.
When M is N, R is default relationship of possession: ‘tits of, belonging to, an amateur’ (where the noun refers to ‘a person who engages in a pursuit … on an unpaid basis’ (NOAD2)),
When M is Adj, R is certainly non-default, non-predicating: amateur tits are not tits that are amateur (where the adjective refers to ‘engaging in or engaged in without payment; nonprofessional’ (NOAD2)). Instead, the amateur participant in the scene is not the tits, but the woman who bears them. That is, the property of amateurishness has been transferred, or displaced, from the woman to her breasts. This is an instance of the figure of speech known as hypallage, which I’ve posted on several times, in particular here (with, among other examples, free-range mayonnaise) and here (focusing on distracted driving).
My first instinct was to treat amateur tits as having the adjective tits in a hypallage. But the noun analysis (with amateur related to tits by the possession relationship) is also possible. In fact, it’s very hard to find evidence that clearly bears on the choice between these analyses, so for the moment I’m leaving the question open.
Experience and evidence
December 17, 2009From Janet Maslin’s review of Michael Specter’s Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Lives, in the NYT of November 5:
What bothered [Specter] more than Dr. [Andrew] Weil’s advice [about taking an assortment of pills for various conditions] was Dr. Weil’s philosophy. “The idea that accruing data is simply one way to think about science has become a governing tenet of the alternative belief system,” Mr. Specter writes. And the additional idea that the evidence of experience is as important as the results of meticulous scientific testing is, in Mr. Specter’s view, one of the most dangerous forms of denialism, especially when it comes from a figure of Dr. Weil’s stature.
Advice literature of all kinds suffers from this inclination to fall back on personal experience rather than seeking evidence about the matters in question. This is an all-too-human tendency, with a variety of sources; in particular, our own experiences (and impressions, associations, etc.) and those of our acquaintances and people we’ve heard about are much more easily accessible than accurate assessments of the facts, which can take an awful lot to investigate. Worse, even our recollections of of our own experiences are colored by interfering effects of many kinds, including several kinds of selective attention and reshapings of memory. And our reasoning about events in our own experience is often flawed in many ways: we take post hoc to mean propter hoc, we affirm the consequent, we take an individual to represent some group they’re a member of, we suffer from confirmation bias, we search for single causes, we generalize from a few anecdotal examples, and so on.
So ordinary people will fall back on personal experience, impressions, anecdates, and speculation. People who set themselves up as givers of reliable advice should do better than that, especially if they display professional credentials. (Andrew Weil does both, which is why Michael Specter is so enraged by what Weil writes.)
These issues come up repeatedly in discussions of language, notably when someone asks, in a serious forum, about language, about the use or history of some expression or construction. Often these requests explicitly ask for an authoritative answer, but what they mostly elicit is a kind of extended bull session of opinions, beliefs, personal anecdotes, and guesses — plus reports of what the responders had been told by someone (a friend, a teacher, or, alas, an advice writer).
(Such responses are themselves worthy of study, as data of folk linguistics. But as they stand, they aren’t data about language use or history. They’re metadata.)
Sometimes I can respond to such queries quickly, because I’ve studied the phenomenon in question or have easy access to research on it, (Even so, my responses are sometimes rejected outright, because the earlier writer says that’s not their experience — they know what they know — in which case I just have to give up.) More often, the questioner is asking about something whose details are largely, or even entirely, unknown, and the query serves as a request to start a study. Unfortunately, research on such questions is enormously complex.
Short shot #30: up and Adam
December 17, 2009Over on his blog, John McIntye posted a little while back (December 6) on editing slip-ups in various newspapers, including this one from the NYT:
It is the breakfast hour, the day before Thanksgiving and the lobby is busy with clean-looking families who are up and Adam, ready to set off in their varsity-letter jackets and Rockports for some holiday shopping, maybe a show. (link)
Eggcorn Forum contributor Jill caught this one too. And it turned out that there already was a thread there on up and Adam for up and at ’em, focusing on whether the expression was an eggcorn. Certainly, you can google up lots of hits for it, and some of them look like intentional puns, but many do not. For the latter, the question is whether up and Adam is just a demi-eggorn (in which an opaque expression is interpreted as containing some familiar material, even if that doesn’t make full sense) or a straightforward eggcorn (with Adam contributing meaning to the whole).
It’s probably a demi-eggcorn for many people who use it, but some of the forum contributors reported having rationalized it as involving a reference to be biblical Adam, as in this commen from charsnyder:
There was imagery for me. I didn’t know much about Adam and Eve but I’d seen the Michelangelo painting segment where God’s finger is sort of commanding Adam to “get up”. I wasn’t sure about Adam and didn’t think “up and Adam” meant it was an exhortation to DO anything, but just to sort of “spring forth” into the world. So that made some sense in terms of my Mom wanting me to get out of bed.
The impulse is fairly strong not only to see meaningful elements in partially opaque expressions, but also to make the whole expression meaningful. So one person’s demi-eggcorn can be another person’s full eggcorn. Chris Waigl reported on ADS-L on August 16 about another case:
I was mentioning B-line [for bee-line] as a very questionable eggcorn to an interested friend a while ago, and she surprisingly said she used to think it came from the letter B, thinking of the vertical line in it as the very image of a straight line. So this is just to show (once more, after many times) the subjective nature of making sense of some lexical item.
(There are also hits for up and atom, not all of them plays on words. I am of course reminded of the 1960s television cartoon The Atom Ant Show, the motto for which was “up and at ’em, Atom Ant”. There was also a later computer game Up and Atom, Atom Ant.)
Aero-tactile integration in speech perception
December 15, 2009That’s the title of a recent article (November 26) in Nature by Bryan Gick and Donald Derrick (Linguistics, Univ. of British Columbia), reported by science journalists around that time: for example, on National Public Radio; in New Scientist; in the New York Times; and in Scientific American.
The main result is that the perception of initial voiceless stops p and t (which in English are aspirated) is improved when a slight puff of air on a listener’s skin accompanies the production (and the perception of the voiced stops b and d is confounded by such an accompanying puff of air). That is, tactile information is integrated with auditory information in speech perception.
There are long-known parallels having to do with integrating visual information with auditory information in speech perception: being able to see articulations improves speech perception in noisy environments, and if the two sorts of information are at odds, perception is confounded (in the McGurk Effect).
These cross-modal interactions are consistent with some form of the motor theory of speech perception, which holds that speech perception is guided by identifying the vocal tract gestures involved in speech production — a hypothesis that gets some support from the discovery of mirror neurons, which respond both to performing an action and to observing the action being performed by others.
(Comments are off on this one because it’s significantly out of my field of expertise, so I’m mostly just providing links.)
Short shot #29: a big give
December 14, 2009More on the nouning front, continuing the theme from recent postings on the nouns open (as in “a cold open”, here) and quit (as in “your next quit”, here) and harking back to a Language Log posting from last year on the noun ask (as in “a big ask”): the noun give, which got some press last year thanks to Oprah Winfrey’s (short-lived) reality series Big Give, in which contestants (supplied with a considerable amount of money) vied for the title of America’s greatest unknown philanthropist.
There are quite a few sites devoted to giving challenges and reports of gifts and using expressions like “a big give” and “a huge give”, as in these comments here:
Giving gifts instead of receiving gifts for your birthday … someone else on here said they started doing that, and I think it is an awesome idea.
It’s cool that you got a huge give from a stranger …simply wonderful!!! what a good man and a loving give to a stranger.
super birthday present and give!
Some of these sites use all three of the nouns gift, give, and giving, and sometimes present or contribution as well. These might be subtly different in meaning.
(OED2 has a noun give, but in the sense ‘a yielding, giving way’, a nouning of the verb give ‘yield, give way’.)
Short shot #28: your next quit
December 13, 2009Caught in an television commercial this morning, the expression “your next quit”, referring to your next attempt to quit smoking. Fair number of occurrences of this expression on the web, for example:
To make your next quit the last, learn everything you can about the process — yes, quitting is a process — before you take your last puff. (link)
The same site also has “My Quit Place” and “every quit attempt”.
The nouning quit isn’t new — the OED (draft revision of December 2007) has cites from 1918 on — but this use seems like a specialization of the sense given by the OED (where it’s marked as U.S.):
The action or an instance of quitting, spec. of leaving a job or of departing a place. Also a person who quits.
Initialistic avoidance
December 13, 2009Reported by Eric Kleefeld on TPM LiveWire on December 9:
Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) appeared on Hardball this evening, and dispensed some of his signature wit against the Republicans: Telling former Vice President Dick Cheney to “STFU,” …
Here’s an exchange between Grayson and Hardball‘s Chris Matthews:
Grayson: I don’t know. You know, on the Internet there’s an acronym that’s used to apply to situations like this. It’s called “STFU.” I don’t think I can say that on the air, but I think you know what that means.
Matthews: Well, give me the first part.
Grayson: “Shut.”
Matthews: Oh! I got you. Stop talking, in crude language. Well, I don’t think you’re gonna get him to do that.
The initialism “STFU” here avoids saying fuck on the air. But the initialism gets by.
(The third edition of Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word has an entry for STFU, with cites from 1991 on.)
(Hat tip to Victor Steinbok.)
Annals of salty terms
December 13, 2009Christopher Buckley in an op-ed piece (“Catch-2009”, an appreciation of Joseph Heller on the 10th anniversary of his death) in the New York Times on December 12:
… behind the warm smile, he had a switchblade-sharp mind, and his fraud-detector (what Hemingway called, in somewhat saltier terms, the writer’s most indispensable tool) was as fine-tuned as a Predator drone. He could spot phoniness at a thousand yards and destroy it with a single Hellfire-missile glance.
Hemingway’s advice to writers was apparently “Develop a built-in bullshit detector”, but the Times has an aversion to printing the word bullshit — I posted on Language Log some time ago about their attempts to cope with Harry Frank’s book On Bullshit and Nick Flynn’s book Another Bullshit Night in Suck City — as well as other instances of shit, though on occasion they’ve let such things pass in quotations.
The Times prefers not to use avoidance characters, euphemisms, or ostentatious avoidance devices like “[expletive deleted]”, so writers for the paper are inclined to fall back on a paraphrase (like “fraud-detector”) plus a flag that the material alluded to involves a taboo item or a slur (as with “in somewhat saltier terms”).
A search on {“bullshit detector”} pulls up a bunch of references to Hemingway, plus some other entertaining material, like a reference to Bullshit Detector recordings by the punk band Crass (who got the expression from a Clash song, and the Clash got it from Hemingway) and assorted gadgets with that name.
deprecate
December 12, 2009Overheard at a local restaurant, young man to young woman:
If you do that, then you’ve deprecated yourself from being a consultant; you’re just an order-taker.
Unfortunately, I missed the preceding context, so I don’t know what “do that” referred to, but deprecate oneself from struck me as odd (I entertained the possibility that deprecated was an error for demoted). I can, however, interpret the expression if the action in question involved self-deprecation, so that the expression conveyed something like ‘ceased to be a consultant as a result of self-deprecation’.