Archive for April, 2011

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Unfortunate P-drop

April 9, 2011

From the “Sic!” section of World Wide Words #731 (5/9/11):

Aoife Bairead saw a headline in the Sunday Business Post of Ireland dated 3 April: “Bishops agree sex abuse rules”.

The crucial bit of syntax — “transitivizing P-drop” (see here) for ‘agree on/to’ — is widespread in British and Irish English, but it can result in risible ambiguities, specifically when what follows agree can be understood as an object clause, as it can here, thanks to the existence of both a noun rule (what was intended in the headline) and a verb rule and to the existence of both a transitive and an intransitive verb rule. All these factors combine to yield a possible, but unwanted, interpretation ‘agree that sex abuse rules’: a fine crash blossom (see here).

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Posted in Ambiguity, Argument structure, Headline trouble, Syntax | 1 Comment »

OMG

April 8, 2011

On April 5 the NYT editorialized about new entries in the OED:

OMG !!!!!  OED  ♥  LOL !!!!!

It’s wonderful to experience the ongoing corruption and evolution of the English language. Last month, OMG and LOL were inducted into the Oxford English Dictionary, along with the heart symbol — the first time a meaning enters our most exalted linguistic inventory via the T-shirt and bumper sticker.

Several things to be dismayed about here, but I’ll move quickly on to OMG and its history.

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Posted in Lexicography | 2 Comments »

Paper preservation

April 8, 2011

In today’s Zippy, Dingburgers resist the shift to digital media:

 

Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Technology | Leave a Comment »

No more cookery

April 8, 2011

Taxonomy and taxonomic labeling can be a minefield. Just tagging your blog postings turns out to be a wretchedly complex task, since the categories are always evolving and you invent new labels as you go; it can then be hard to find your own postings on various topics, if those postings come from before the categories had evolved and the labels were assigned. Similar problems in organizing the files on your computer: what folders, with what labels?

But for library people it’s a monstrous problem. As I discovered yesterday, during cocktail hour with four Stanford colleagues who work in various parts of the library system. They reported on the long task of revising catalogue entries to conform to a Library of Congress decision last year to replace the older COOKERY category by one labeled COOKING.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling | 1 Comment »

Data points: portmanteaus 4/8/11

April 8, 2011

Reported by Don Steiny a little while ago from his days in Santa Cruz: the portmanteau  hippiecrite. Lots of hits, including this one, with commentary (and photos):

MONDAY, JUNE 7, 2010
Hippie VS. HippieCrite

OK folks, welcome to the first showdown between the real peace lovers and the trendy tree huggers. By analyzing these images for hours on end, you’ll be able to quickly and accurately decipher an honest hippie from a hippiecrite when you encounter them in the wild…such as a Ben Harper concert or the local mall. (Trick number one: Hardcore hippies don’t shop at malls. They only buy their sandals and ponchos from free-trade, hemp-spun online companies based out of Nepal and distributed in California. Take notes.)

What is a hippiecrite, you ask? Have you ever gotten a bitchy stare from a girl wearing a peace sign T-shirt from Diesel? Did you suddenly realize the biggest douchebag at work has a Coexist bumper sticker on the back of his Land Rover? Do you know the girl at the bar who talks about eating organic produce while she downs a vodka soda? These are hippiecrites. And I am actually the last one, among many other hippiecritical activities.

And an Urban Dictionary entry, with (among others) this pointed definition:

A portmanteau of the words hippie and hypocrite, used to point out typically wealthy liberal elitist persons who preach traditional hippie values such as tolerance, environmental awareness, socialism/liberalism, personal freedom, pacifism, well-being and human empathy, but in practice do the opposite.

 

Posted in Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

Creating a buzz

April 7, 2011

In writing on most commented NP (here), I came across the Social Savvy Geek website, which offers advice on how to draw people to your messages in social media: use words that will cause people to comment on your stuff and to read it in the first place.

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Posted in Language in advertising, This blogging life, Words | 2 Comments »

most commented

April 7, 2011

It’s all over the net: references to most commented articles, stories, posts, videos, photos, and the like — meaning (roughly) ‘most-commented-on’. A truncation not quite like the other examples of P absorption and P drop that have been discussed on Language Log, this blog, and elsewhere (notably here), although it shares with these examples that the missing P “is in some sense predictable from the immediately preceding context”.

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Posted in Argument structure, Modification, Syntax, Truncation | 1 Comment »

Underwear models and superheroes

April 7, 2011

[Not about language, as you might have guessed from the title.]

From the San Francisco Chronicle‘s SFGate site (via Ned Deily), a report on Men’s Fashion Week:

Underwear models, superheroes at Men’s Fashion Week
Thursday, April 7, 2011

After years of dominance by Paris and Milan, Singapore became the first Asian city to host Men’s Fashion Week, showcasing top international and local designers such as Alexander McQueen, DKNY, Armani, Canali and Songzio.

There’s a slideshow with 32 photos from the show.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

Manning Marable

April 6, 2011

On Saturday in the NYT, a notice (“Manning Marable, 60, Historian and Social Critic” by William Grimes) of the untimely death of

Manning Marable, a leading scholar of black history and a leftist critic of American social institutions and race relations, whose long-awaited biography of Malcolm X, more than a decade in the writing, is scheduled to be published on Monday [that is, yesterday]

A front-page story examines “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention”, a big book that, among other things, takes on “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (1965, written with Alex Haley), which Marable argues was significantly shaped by Haley into a “fictive” life story.

Marable was an accomplished polemicist, advancing a “transformationist” political philosophy, according to which

he urged black Americans to transform existing social structures and bring about a more egalitarian society by making common cause with other minorities and change-minded groups like environmentalists.

(He truly believed that an affront to one was an affront to all — as a moral position, not just a piece of political strategy.)

I got to know him when he served as chair of the black studies department at Ohio State in the 1980s and we served on committees together. In 1993 he went to Columbia, where he served as professor of public affairs, political science, history, and African-American studies.

An admirable public figure and significant scholar, taken from us cruelly early.

 

Posted in Death notices | 2 Comments »

Undoing morphophonology

April 6, 2011

Ian Preston commenting on my “attriting” posting yesterday:

I have come across “attrit” quite often in statistical contexts, usually spelt without a final “e”, where it is used intransitively to denote what a respondent does who drops out of a longitudinal sample.

Ah, another back-formation from attrition, with the ‘drop out’ meaning of the first sense of back-formed attrite. The second, accented, syllable of attrite has the vowel /aj/, indicating an analysis in which the accented /ɪ/ of attrition is treated as a lax version of the vowel of the base verb (as in ignition, based on ignite); this bit of morphophonology is “undone” in the process of back-formation. However, the spelling ATTRIT strongly suggests a pronunciation with /ɪ/, taken directly from attrition (as in exhibition, based on exhibit).

The evidence of the dictionaries is not entirely clear, however.

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Posted in Back formation, Morphophonology | Leave a Comment »

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