From various sources, this pangram in action:
Yes, the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
Archive for July, 2011
Pangram in action
July 21, 2011On my website
July 20, 2011Some links recently added on my website, in three sets: early papers on mathematical and computational linguistics; two papers on sentences with “empty” arguments; and two others, on language in use.
(Most of this material originally appeared in obscure and/or hard-to-obtain publications.)
Today’s delicious ambiguity
July 19, 2011Alluded to by a friend (recipient of a Gay Lives postcard with a portrait of W. Somerset Maugham), this story from The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes (general ed., Clifton Fadiman, 1985):
Somerset Maugham believed that early nights would keep him young, a habit his friend, the society hostess Emerald Cunard, found irritating. As he was preparing as usual to leave soon after dinner one night, Lady Cunard pressed him to stay. Maugham demurred: “I can’t stay, Emerald. I have to keep my youth.”
“Then why didn’t you bring him with you?” Lady Cunard asked. “I should be delighted to meet him.”
Ah, youth.
Underlaying
July 19, 2011Wilson Gray wrote (disapprovingly) on ADS-L this morning about someone who wrote “underlaying definitions in your assumptions” — with underlaying for standard underlying. This moderately common usage isn’t in Brians’s Common Errors (although Brians does have an entry for underlining instead of underlying). It goes beyond the usual lie – lay issues (intransitive lie vs. transitive-causative lay) in that it involves two semantically similar transitive verbs, underlie and underlay.
Annals of ISOC
July 19, 2011… and writing and editing copy. Ben Zimmer points me to “Editor Mark”‘s Google+ page, with an entry that begins:
My Editor Mark page on Facebook saw some use today when Janice Harayda asked me a kind of “you make the call” copy editing question. Here is what she posted:
“The British Home Secretary Theresa May said that ‘it is natural to ask whom polices the police’ [link]. If you had been editing her comments, would you have let that stand?
There’s the linguistic issue — May’s quote is an instance of ISOC (In-situ Subject of an Object Clause) case marking for WHO, with a non-standard (but fairly common) subject whom — and then there’s the question of what a writer or editor should have done with the sentence.
More -((m)a)geddon
July 19, 2011Spotted by Ben Zimmer on Twitter, the hashtag #debtageddon, specifically for the approaching consequences of the U.S. failing to increase its debt ceiling. There’s the portmanteau element -((m)a)geddon, from Armageddon, which is rapidly working its way to libfix status.
Weaseling and wheedling
July 19, 2011
Prefix foolishness
July 19, 2011Cartoon #2 for today: a Bizarro:
Recutting (or metanalysis — see here) at work, with the pro of provolone and the anti of antipasto treated as derivational prefixes. Historically, the provol- part of provolone represents provola, a type of Italian cheese (made with cow or buffalo milk), and the anti- part of antipasto is ante- ‘before’.
