Posting on Underdog reminded me that this would be a good time to pay homage to that animated monument of language play, Matt Groening’s The Simpsons (along with his Life in Hell cartoons, many of which are linguistically interesting).
Archive for February, 2013
Matt Groening
February 21, 2013Eggcorns on the net
February 21, 2013Today’s “A.Word.A.Day” posting from Anu Garg is about the word eggcorn.
Underdog
February 21, 2013Michael Taubenheim
February 20, 2013Again, a link to an AZBlogX posting on a male photographer, in this case Michael Taubenheim. Six full-frontal nudes in several different styles.
English pronunciation
February 20, 2013Passed on by Paul Armstrong, this site (from 12/23/11), which purports to be about English pronunciation:
If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.
The poem is of course about English spelling, and the mapping from spelling to pronunciation. Corpse, corps, horse, worse; heart, beard, heard; and all that.
The poem is by Dutchman Gerald Nolst Trenité (1870-1946).
Terminological precedence
February 20, 2013In a comment on my posting on john ‘prostitute’s client’, Michael Vnuk objects to my use of narratophile in that posting:
I wondered if you had made up ‘narratophile’ (simply ‘lover of stories’), so I checked and found that ‘narratophilia’ (not in the OED) already has a more specific fetish meaning (eg see Wikipedia). Perhaps a different word is needed for the general sense you want. It is certainly a useful concept, not only for folk etymology, but also for any other time that people develop a story to explain something. Such a word may be already out there, but I couldn’t find it quickly.
The idea here is that the first use of some expression takes precedence over other uses, so that new inventions (even transparent ones) are banned. This is a very silly idea, barring ambiguity (whereas ambiguity is all over the place — it’s a central feature of language — and is managed by interpretation in context).
NomPrepObj
February 20, 2013A fresh example of a nominative object of a preposition, noticed by Wilson Gray in the NYT opinion blogs (“The Two Julias” by Candice Shy Hooper on the 14th):
Jule must have wondered at a world in which any other slave in the South but she could find freedom in General Grant’s camp.
Wilson tried to attribute this error to a computer glitch, finding it hard to credit in otherwise literate prose. But of course it’s an error of nervous cluelessness (as Mark Liberman and Geoff Pullum have labeled it on Language Log), a type of hypercorrection that depends on a confusion between grammatical categories — in this case, preposition but (which takes an accusative object) and conjunction but (which combines with a clause, with nominative subject).
john
February 20, 2013Over on ADS-L, Fred Shapiro (the Yale quotations man) forwarded a query:
I have been asked about why the word john is used to denote a prostitute’s client. It seems obvious to me that the name John, because of its commonness, became a generic term for men, perhaps with the implication that prostitute’s clients don’t give their real names.
This is undoubtedly as complete an answer as you could hope for, but many people find it unsatisfying; they’re hoping for a *story*, a story with a particular prostitute’s client named John as its central figure. People are narratophiles; they love stories.
Phony rules
February 20, 2013In the February issue of Smithsonian Magazine, a brief piece by Patricia T. O’Conner & Stewart Kellerman on phony rules of grammar:
Most of What You Think You Know About Grammar is Wrong
And ending sentences with a preposition is nothing worth worrying about
Think of the piece as a maximally condensed version of their 2009 book Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language.