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Archive for March, 2012

Our fastidious authors

March 25, 2012

A letter to the editor in the NYT on 3/22/12:

Jhumpa Lahiri’s lovely article about how she crafts luminous stories sentence by sentence made my blood boil (“My Life’s Sentences,” Sunday Review, March 18). As I read it, I felt a rising sense of frustration for all the writers who aren’t she.

The letter-writer, Lisa Cron of Santa Monica CA, is the author of the forthcoming “Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers From the Very First Sentence”. Her complaint is that Lahiri is a genius at crafting sentences but entirely disregards what is really important about writing, which is telling a gripping story. Cron’s own writing brought me up short when I came to the nominative predicative she, which struck me as awkwardly hyper-formal; I would have gone for her, or better, Jhumpa Lahiri, which not only avoids the pronoun-case issue but is also more emphatic and provides a better sentence rhythm.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

to oxter

March 24, 2012

A very small thing, but entertaining (to me at any rate): the verb to oxter, in this passage from Bernie McGill’s The Butterfly Cabinet (2011), p. 201:

Then you came back, the pair of you, dripping with seawater, and lay down on the grass to dry. And you said, ‘When was the last time you felt the sea on you, Nanny Madd?’ and your gray eyes twinkled, and I smiled back, and you jumped up and shouted to Conor, and the two of you took me by the hands, laughing, down to the shore. You slipped off my shoes, peeled down my stockings. At the water’s edge you took me by one elbow, Conor took me by the other, and between the two of you, you oxtered me in over the rippled sand until the water licked my ankles…

(Hat tip to Eve Clark, who noticed the passage because I mentioned the noun oxter in my SemFest talk last Friday.)

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Posted in Language and the body, Variation, Verbing, Words | 2 Comments »

The perils of advice

March 23, 2012

Blogger Brian Risk puzzled on 11/23/09 about pronoun case with including:

When you determine if you are to use “me” or “I” isn’t it the rule that you are supposed to ignore the words relating to other people? For example “John and me went swimming” is wrong because “me went swimming” isn’t how ya say it.

Here I am now really confused when it comes to sentences that have “everyone including”. To illustrate: “Everyone including me went to the show” is the way I’ve been saying it my whole life, but it just dawned on me how asinine it would be to say just “me went to the show.” However, “everyone including I went to the show” sounds equally asinine, but can this be right?

Risk has dimly remembered some (rather confused) advice about the case of conjoined pronouns and then extended that to examples with the preposition including (instead of the conjunction and); since it’s I went to the show and not me went to the show, he concludes that it should be everyone including I went to the show, despite the fact that this runs counter to his intuitions and his actual practice. Garbled theory trumps facts.

It appears that many others have gone down this path to everyone including I.

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Posted in Pronoun case, Usage advice | 8 Comments »

man-bro-guy-

March 22, 2012

A piece of fluff from Maureen Dowd in the NYT on the 11th, with man-, bro-, and guy- portmanteaus:

Manlashes, Manscara and Mantyhose

Manskirts, manscara, guyliner and guylashes have all had their spurts, especially in Britain. (Yes, that’s you, Russell Brand and Capt. Jack Sparrow.) A British brand called Eylure started selling false eyelashes for men last fall, promising to create a “Hollywood gaze.” Next up: eyelash extensions, already a trend for Japanese men, who tend to have short lashes.

… Franceso Cavallini, the vice president of the Florence-based upscale legwear company Emilio Cavallini, told Women’s Wear Daily last week that there is “a cult following for mantyhose,” also known as “brosiery” and “guylons.”

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Posted in Language and gender, Portmanteaus | Leave a Comment »

Horror movies

March 21, 2012

(Not about language.)

Sunday’s diversion while working at my computer was two Dr. Moreau movies: the 1933 Island of Lost Souls and the 1977 Island of Dr. Moreau. Both based on H. G. Wells’s 1896 novel. Watching the 1933 movie with commentary on reminded me of three other early-30s horror movies, all from 1931 and all (like the Moreau movie) based on literary sources: Dracula, Frankenstein, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Plus the 1932 Tod Browning film Freaks, which I blogged about here. All concerned with transformation, the boundaries of humanity, and the perils of science and medicine.

Dracula initiated the pop-culture fascination with vampires. Werewolves came along in 1941 (in The Wolf Man), and zombies in 1968 (in Night of the Living Dead), completing the current reigning triumvirate of monstrous creatures.

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Posted in Art/lit/music/film, Not about language, Pop culture | 7 Comments »

language ‘bad language’

March 21, 2012

Back on the 16th on ADS-L, Joel Berson noted this attachment to a review of the movie 21 Jump Street by Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe:

Rated: R (crude and sexual content, pervasive language, drug material, teen drinking, and some violence)

Berson puzzled over pervasive language, but noted that the phrase seemed to go back to about 1994 in movie reviews on Google Books. Neal Whitman immediately nailed the expression’s natural habitat, in the U.S. at least: in movie ratings, where language is used to mean ‘offensive, obscene, bad language’ (either by semantic narrowing or by truncation of the longer expression); see Whitman’s posting on mild language ‘mildly offensive language’ with respect to movies rated PG, here.

Then I noted the OED3 subentry for language ‘bad language’ more generally — for which this dictionary provides only British cites. (NOAD2 does have a subentry for language ‘coarse, crude, or offensive language’ in AmE, but marks it as usually occurring in bad/strong language rather than on its own.)

Outside the MPAA ratings scheme, the narrow sense of language seems to be rare in AmE, though it’s not unknown. But Language! as an interjection does seem to be specifically BrE.

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Posted in Euphemism, Lexical semantics, Taboo language and slurs, Truncation | 3 Comments »

Morphology

March 20, 2012

In the mail today, an ad for the game Morphology:

Morphology, the hilarious guessing game where CREATIVITY WINS!

Morphology is a fun, creative and challenging party board game combining simple shapes, your imagination and creativity. Using wooden sticks, glass beads and colored cubes how would you create a “butterfly”? …or “airplane”? Now try doing it with your eyes closed or using only the string! Morphology takes unique twists and turns, and has everyone laughing out loud. For ages 13 and up.

The name of the game turns on the Greek root morph- ‘form’. Morphology is a much-used term, though the different senses are very unlikely to interfere with one another in actual practice.

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Posted in Terminology | 1 Comment »

A double-barreled summative

March 20, 2012

From the lead story in the NYT on the 16th, “Karzai Insisting on U.S. Pullback to Bases by 2013”:

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai insisted Thursday that the United States confine its troops to major bases in Afghanistan by next year as the Taliban announced that they were suspending peace talks with the Americans, both of which served to complicate the Obama administration’s plans for an orderly exit from the country.

The grammatical point here has to do with the non-restrictive relative clause beginning with both of which (boldfaced above). The intended reference is to two situations, Karzai’s insistence and the Taliban’s announcement, the combination of which complicates the Obama administration’s plans. Neither of these situations is expressed in the sentence by a NP; instead, reference to the situations is via the VPs insisted … and announced … For many usage authorities, this sort of summative reference is unacceptable, because the pronoun which has no NP antecedent and is therefore declared to be unacceptably vague.

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Posted in Modification, Usage advice | 1 Comment »

Phonological resolution

March 20, 2012

From Bill Keller’s op-ed piece “Falling In and Out of War” in the NYT on 3/19/12:

(1) Policy makers should – and President Obama mostly has – put a premium on appraising alternatives to war.

A real-life example of a phenomenon discussed by Geoff Pullum and me in a 1986 article “Phonological resolution of syntactic feature conflict” (Language 62, on-line here): the verb form put (boldfaced above) serves simultaneously as two different inflectional forms of the lexeme PUT — as the BSE complement of the modal auxiliary should and as the PSP complement of the perfect auxiliary has. For almost all verb lexemes in English, these two forms are distinct (compare PLACE, with BSE place and PSP placed), so that the sort of reduced coordination in the Keller example apparently wouldn’t be possible, since there’s no available form that’s both BSE and PSP. For a fully parallel coordination, the distinct verb forms would have to be supplied:

(2) Policy makers should place – and President Obama mostly has placed – a premium on appraising alternatives to war.

But for about two dozen verb lexemes, of which PUT is one, the BSE and PSP happen to be phonologically identical, so that the conflict between the two feature values can be “phonologically resolved”, and the reduced coordination is (exceptionally) possible.

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Posted in Coordination, Government, Morphology, Syntax | 1 Comment »