Archive for November, 2010

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Data points: malapropisms 11/19/10

November 19, 2010

The Eggcorn Database already has skew for skewer, and the Eggcorn Forum has the reverse substitution, beginning with Ken Lakritz’s contribution from 2005, with the text:

Ben Zimmer contributed the eggcorn ‘skew’ for ‘skewer’ to the database. This converse eggcorn is also fairly common. To skewer is to attack or mock, so when an opinion or a mathematical distribution is ‘skewered’ rather than skewed, the asymmetry or partiality of the opinion or distribution is being held up as evidence of attack or tampering. Examples:…

From my own files:

As a high school teacher, I’ve seen the same glazed looks on my students during these tests. They understand that they are tools for adults, not them, and so they don’t try. The few that do on the first day of testing are burned out by the third. Any basic statistic class — or even just common sense — would tell you that this skewers the data. (Shumit DasGupta, “Perspective” on KQED’s Morning Edition, 8/27/10 (link))

This creates some problems in comparison since in some countries, housing costs are calculated in the basic unemployment benefit (e.g. France), but the explanatory tables to the OECD data don’t suggest this skewers the data by a significant amount. (Michael Taft, “Open Letter to Sarah Carey”, Irish Left Review 3/23/09 (link))

Plus a few dozen more.

I’m not at all sure that eggcorn is the right category here. To me, it looks a lot like flounder for founder and similar substitutions: some kind of malapropism, probably a classical malapropism, based on similarity in sound and overlap in meaning.

Footnote: there are literal uses of “skewer the data”, as in:

Ms. [Susan] Faludi is at her best in debunking the studies, experts and trend stories that made their way into our collection of “common wisdom” in the last decade. She skewers the data, the data collectors and the data purveyors. (Ellen Goodman, “The ‘Man Shortage’ and Other Big Lies”, NYT, 10/27/91 (link))

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Quotation and chastisement

November 19, 2010

From an e-mail comment on my death notice for James J. Kilpatrick on Language Log, in which I quoted Shakespeare’s “All that glisters is not gold” in connection with what we came to call Kilpatrick’s Rule for scoping in combinations of negation and quantification:

I’m not sure that gold actually “glisters”.

I replied:

That’s what’s in the original Shakespeare, as annoying pedants never weary of telling us (they similarly mock “once more into the breach” as a vulgar inaccuracy). Yes, the original has been reshaped (as the Henry V quote has been reshaped from “once more unto the breach”) so as to fit the more modern language; there’s a LLog posting on these reshapings (AZ, 8/1/07, “Cousin of eggcorn”, here).

“Glisters” is textually accurate; but “glitters” is entirely correct.

If I’d quoted it as “glitters”, I’d be getting mail crowing about how the learned professor doesn’t even know how to quote Shakespeare correctly.

That is, you can’t win here. Whichever version of the Merchant of Venice quote you use, someone will write to complain about it. (Note that the choice of “glisters” vs. “glitters” is entirely beside the point in the context, which is about Kilpatrick’s Rule.)

Then from my correspondent, this extraordinarily nice (and entertaining) response:

Well, it’s from Merchant of Venice, so I feel a little better; had it been The Tempest or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I’d *really* be embarrassed… At least I begin the day slightly more knowledgeable than I was.

Thank you for the extremely gentle chastisement -professorial chastisement being some of the best, superior to bookstore-clerk and just below librarian.

Ah, professorial chastisement. Maybe I could put that on my vita as one of my special skills.

 

Posted in This blogging life | Leave a Comment »

Means of communication

November 19, 2010

From recent e-mail:

I’ve been a long time reader of LL and have never been able to figure out how to email any of you, but I just found your Stanford site linked on your LL page. I hope it’s okay that I’m emailing you here.

And from e-mail back in August (to my Stanford e-address):

You had comments turned off, sorry to bug you at work.

(Relevant passages bold-faced.)

(more…)

Posted in This blogging life | 2 Comments »

Data points: zeugma 11/19/10

November 19, 2010

Not just zeugmoid, but actual zeugma (in the sentence I’ve bold-faced):

“Are you going to do it?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Don’t ‘maybe’ me, baby. It’s written all over you. I’d almost be willing to go along, you know. Of all my relations, I like sex the best and Eric the least.”

(Roger Zelazny, The Great Book of Amber: The Complete Amber Chronicles, 1-10. HarperCollins, 1999.  (p. 28) [ten novels collected under one cover]; orig. in Nine Princes in Amber (1970))

So the figure turns on the ambiguity of relations — ‘relationships’ or ‘family members’ — with the word taken in the first sense with reference to sex and in the second with reference to the speaker’s brother Eric. But there’s only one token of relations, which has to be taken in both senses at once.

Posted in Language play, Zeugma | 1 Comment »

Data points: distant compounds 11/19/10

November 19, 2010

Headline in the November 18 (S.F. peninsula) Daily Post (p. 11):

Vitamin sale rapist guilty

Vitamin sale rapist resists interpretation as an ordinary (Type O) N+N compound, in which the semantic relationship between the head N rapist and the modifier N vitamin sale (itself a N+N compound) is drawn from a small set of relationships: a rapist of vitamin sales, someone who rapes vitamin sales? a rapist composed of vitamin sales? etc. No way.

So it’s a distant compound, a kind of Type X compound, like canoe wife, dentist fear girl, hurricane money, and many others discussed on Language Log and this blog. You have to know the story. Which is told, briefly, in the first paragraph of the story, in case the reader hasn’t been following the case:

A 61-year-old Redwood City man has been found guilty of raping a 19-year-old woman who was trying to sell him vitamins.

My first guess was that the man had gained entry to a home (where he then raped a woman) by posing as a vitamin salesman. But no, the other way around: he invited the woman, who sells Herbalife vitamins, to his home to discuss a purchase (and then raped her there). So there was a rape that was in some way connected to a vitamin sale, but you have to know the story to know what the connection was.

 

Posted in Compounds | 1 Comment »

Taste Y

November 18, 2010

[This is an edited version of postings to the newsgroup soc.motss in December 2005. The original context was a discussion of aspects of the Ang Lee film Brokeback Mountain and the Annie Proulx story it was based on, particularly on the question of whether the label gay could be applied to the central characters Jack and Ennis. That’s a question about categorization and a question about about labeling, but as so often in discussions of social categories, the two questions got confounded — and, worse, the discussion ranged over the many different uses of gay, slipping back and forth from one to another.

So I embarked on an attempt to clarify things more or less from the ground up, which involved using entirely fresh terminology for the concepts involved.

In the current version I’ve eliminated references to much of the 2005 discussion, but the focus on Brokeback Mountain surfaces later in this piece.]

(more…)

Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Gender and sexuality | 5 Comments »

Data points: playful libfixes 11/18/10

November 18, 2010

Paul Frank to ADS-L today:

Dramarama: not the alternative rock band or the British TV series but the word used to describe the dramatizing of events that are either trivial or ought to be considered trivial. I don’t see it in the OED. The word is good enough for the Washington Post:

Over the past two decades, the reputation of the entire royal family has steadily declined from regal to rancid. There was the divorce of Charles’s brother, Andrew, not to mention further dramarama earlier this year when his former wife, the Duchess of York (“Fergie”), was caught on video arranging payment for access to her ex.

I pointed to earlier postings (with comments) on this blog, here and here, noting the profusion of attested -((o)r)ama words, beyond anything the OED could cope with, though a surprising (to my mind) number have been included.

 

Posted in Language play, Morphology, Playful morphology | 2 Comments »

Zeugmoids

November 17, 2010

Not long before the use of pal in Tom Corbett, Space Cadet that I reported on here came another notable utterance:

If you could shoot off a warhead the way you shoot off your mouth, maybe you’d have a chance.

This has two structurally parallel occurrences of shoot off, but in two different senses — the first involving literal shooting, the second in an idiom:

slang (orig. U.S.). to shoot off one’s mouth: to talk indiscreetly or abusively; to talk unrestrainedly or at length, to assert one’s opinions; to boast or brag. (OED2)

This isn’t exactly zeugma, since no expression-token is being used in more than one sense, as put out is used in Flanders and Swann’s celebrated:

… he hastened to put out the cat, the wine, his cigar, and the lamps

Instead, we have two identical expression-tokens, each representing a different expression-type. It might easily take a moment for the hearer to cope with the switch from one meaning to another. The effect comes about through the phonological identity of the two expression-token — “If you could shoot off a warhead the way you talk a good game,…” conveys roughly the same content, with the parallelism, but without the phonological identity or the momentary processing difficulty — so it’s reminiscent of zeugma.

I offer the term zeugmoid for such examples. Zeugmas in coordination can generally be converted to zeugmoids by repeating the relevant expression-token:

… he hastened to put out the cat, put out the wine, put out his cigar, and put out the lamps

It would be nice to have more real (rather than invented) examples of zeugmoids.

(Thanks to Steven Levine for suggesting a connection between the Tom Corbett example and zeugma.)

Posted in Zeugma | 12 Comments »

Data points: address terms 11/17/10

November 17, 2010

Two address terms that caught my ear recently because they struck me as no longer widely in use:

(1) pal: in an episode of the 50s tv serial Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (Youtube for this episode here, Tom Corbett website here), one of the crew members to another, on the radio: “Ok, pal, she’s all yours” (referring to the next rocket firing).

(2) sport: in one episode of the gay porn film Arcade on Route 9 (Joe Gage for Titan Media) an older trucker (Ken Mack) hooks up with a young farmboy (Cole Ryan) and introduces him to the ways of gay sex, addressing him as “sport” throughout the encounter, as in a reference to “your big stiff dirty-boy boner; I’m here for you, sport”. (The farmboy mostly addresses the trucker as “sir”, leading to this weird bit of sex talk: “Suck my fuckin’ hard boner, sir”.)

(more…)

Posted in Address terms, Language and society, Pragmatics | 3 Comments »

blindie

November 16, 2010

From Scenes From a Multiverse:

This first caught my eye because of the slur blindie ‘blind person’ (here used as an address term), suggesting blondie ‘blond(e) person’, which was new to me (though it’s in Urban Dictionary). Obviously pronounced with /aj/, though UD also lists blindie as a portmanteau of black and indie, in which use it’s presumably pronounced with /ɪ/.

UD also has deafie ‘deaf person’, said to be acceptable in the deaf community. Unsurprisingly, neither blindie nor deafie is in the OED, though of course dummy (in a variety of spellings), based on dumb, is in OED2, in several senses, from 1598 on; OED2 compares dummy to blacky and darky.

Then there’s the main point of the cartoon, the main character’s rage at (what he perceives to be) being looked at. As I said about a porn model,

He’s giving observers the Gaze Direct, looking straight in their eyes — a gesture that’s famously open to interpretation as challenge, bid for dominance, friendly bonding, honest and open dealing, invitation, or imploring (a multiplicity of understandings that in real life can lead to all sorts of trouble).

And just staring at someone, even if not gazing into their eyes, is similarly open to multiple interpretations, but is likely to be seen as an invasion of privacy.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »