Not how I expected to begin Dave Brubeck Day (in 5/4 time, as was his pleasure) / Four Dead in Ohio Day (dreadful memories from 1970, which come with a CSNY soundtrack), but there it was, listed by Google Alerts for the morning: on YouTube, on the “Today I Found Out: Feed Your Brain” channel, the segment
“In which linguist Arnold Zwicky shuts down grammar Nazis”
with Simon Whistler reading with great relish a passage from a posting of mine and savoring its vocabulary.
First, Google identifies me as a Public Figure (not just some mook off the streets, but in a class with, oh, Neil deGrasse Tyson). And now the tireless YouTuber Simon Whistler, with an audience of 2.52m subscribers to Today I Found Out, admires my word-slinging.
(I might now have a thousand subscribers to my blog, but many of them appear to be sites collecting targets for their spam. I estimate that I have maybe 40 subscribers who actually read through essentially everything I post, with a considerably larger group of readers who dip in from time to time. And that’s fine; I write crafted, usually quite idiosyncratic, often very personal, sometimes intricately silly, columns of some length and substance and try to situate them in a larger sociocultural context, with a complex system of linking to other columns of mine, from 21 years of blogging; these aren’t quick shots, so I don’t expect to have much of an audience. I’m just aiming to do this odd thing reasonably well, to bring some pleasure and some insight to a few people.)
Now, as SW read my words with such zest, I recognized them as, indeed, mine, and admired them retrospectively. But when did I say this, and why? (If you work as a columnist, and write 1 to 3 columns a day, every fucking day of the year, and you do this for decades, you eventually rack up a hell of a lot of columns. Over 10,000, in fact. As a result, my recollections of what I said when, for what purpose, are, well, hazy. And SW is, I have to say, not a scholar but an entertainer; he doesn’t cite sources. So I had to do a search to find the quote. Which turned out to be from a Language Log posting of mine from 2004 (21 years ago) — 11/17/04, to be specific — “Not a word!”, in which I excoriate someone you might justly label a vocabulary Nazi (a species of grammar Nazi, as SW has it). What I said:
We start with the admonition that people of taste and refinement should not use [word] X. This is then exaggerated, elevated to the admonition that people, in general, should not use X; what should govern the behavior of the “best” of us (those are genuine sneer quotes) in certain circumstances should govern the behavior of all of us, all of the time, in all contexts, for all purposes. (What a remarkable lack of nuance! What a divorcement from the complex textures of social life!)
As if that weren’t enough, it ratchets up, hysterically, one more notch, to the bald assertion that X simply isn’t available for use; it’s just not part of the social repertoire. My dear, it just isn’t done.
… Don’t tell me there’s “no such word”. Parade your idiosyncratic prejudices, if you wish, and if your mind is open enough we might be able to talk about the bases of your prejudices (and mine). But don’t lie to me about the state of the language.
Good for me. And at this great distance, I admire the choice of the abstraction noun divorcement over the event noun divorce.
About Simon Whistler. Someone who really knows how to hustle and how to perform. I can’t hustle worth shit, but that’s ok. From each according to his abilities, and I’m a scholar, a conceptual analyst, a teacher, and a verbal artist; that’s plenty.
From SW’s website, on the page “Who is Simon Whistler?”:
Media personality Simon Whistler was brought up in the south-east of England. After completing his university education (undergrad business BA, postgrad law diploma), he worked abroad for one year where he met his now wife and eventually ended up permanently moving to her home country, the Czech Republic.
(photo from SW’s site)After working as a freelance voice-over artist and podcast host, at the age of 28 he started working on his first YouTube channel, a collaboration with the popular website TopTenz.net.
And then from the Wikitubi fandom page on Simon Whistler:
Simon Whistler (born: May 15, 1987) is an English YouTube personality who currently resides in Prague in the Czech Republic. Simon has gained a reputation for hosting a multitude of educational YouTube channels, for example TodayIFoundOut (created in collaboration with the website of the same name), Top Tenz or Biographics, along with hosting several podcasts and having websites relating to his channels.
… Simon Whistler’s first channel was TopTenz …, in which he presents ‘top 10’ lists on a variety of topics, created on February 3, 2010, which has amassed 1.8m subscribers … Following on from this, on October 13, 2011, Simon created his second informational channel, Today I Found Out, a more laidback approach tackling individual topics in greater detail than his previous ‘top 10s’ videos. At 2.52m subscribers …, Today I Found Out is Whistler’s largest channel
May 4, 2025 at 2:20 pm |
I usually read your blog, though I don’t respond very often. I think you described it very well.
May 4, 2025 at 3:18 pm |
Thank you.
May 4, 2025 at 2:44 pm |
The original LL post sent me on a search and I found a few interesting details. I ran Ngram on “trepidatious,trepidacious”, then dove into the Google Books links, both back to the early twentieth century.
“Trepidacious” appears in The Rat-Pit by Patrick MacGill, 1915.
A rooster-a defiant Sultan-who did not share in the trepidacious exit of his wives, crowed loudly and looked valiantly at the sow, as much as to say: “I, for one, am not the least afraid of you.” (p.32)
The earliest “trepidatious” appeared in a letter to The Nautical Magazine, May 1896.
I have mentioned the need of establishing some method of calling attention twice before in “The Nautical Magazine” without eliciting any remark; and if I were not convinced that something should be done I should be slightly “trepidatious” of again proposing a whistle signal “when the vessels are abeam,” or in such a position that it would not confuse the manœuvre signals at present optional and in general use. (p. 456)
OED has it to 1904: The Sirdar’s Oath.
A Tale of the North-West Frontier
By Bertram Mitford (p. 301)
“Trepidatiously” appears later, but significantly earlier than identified by the dictionaries. The article put in the record for US House Hearings (1969) is from Railway Age, March 10, 1969. (OED & MW have 1985)
The question naturally (and a little trepidatiously) arises: What do the Japanese think of our trains? (P. 893 in the congressional publication)
The other interesting bit that came up in Ngram is the distribution. Although MW suggests “trepidacious” is “less common”, the chart only agrees over the past decade. The claim may still be accurate because GB data is fairly limited (and virtually unverifiable). But the result is still worth noting.
I will try to cut-and-paste this note into ADS-L later, but, I thought, it had a place here as well.
May 5, 2025 at 6:44 am |
I note in passing that SW and I share a birthday (give or take 41 years).
May 5, 2025 at 7:38 am |
😀 I struggle to imagine a natural category that embraces you and SW.
May 6, 2025 at 5:55 am
Well, other than “people born on May 15”, a category which I believe also includes Claudio Monteverdi.
May 6, 2025 at 6:05 am
“Well, other than “people born on May 15″” — but that was my point, this being not a category given in nature, but a cultural feature, dependent on the conventions of our calendars.
May 8, 2025 at 6:07 am
Point taken, but on the other hand I’m not sure what you mean by a “natural category”; any relevant category would surely be a “cultural feature” off some sort, no?
May 8, 2025 at 7:09 am
“I’m not sure what you mean by a “natural category”” — what philosophers call “natural kinds”, kinds of things / situations / etc. given in nature. (The notion of “natural kind” is not without its difficulties, but that’s true of any concept examined by philosophers.) “born on the same day” comes close to denoting a natural kind (the problematic edge: what does “same day” mean for someone born in the location of San Francisco and someone born in the location of Sydney?) — but “born on the same date” denotes a sociocultural kind (or at least, much more of a sociocultural kind), rather than a natural kind.
May 5, 2025 at 8:32 am |
Congrats on your ongoing fame and ever-widening audience! I always enjoy your posts and it was fun to hear SW narrating you.
You’ve outlasted poor Robert Hartwell Fiske, bless his heart, who is wherever one goes next, English-language prescriptivist heaven or failed English class hell, holding court and raving about some word or other.
May 5, 2025 at 11:01 am |
Well, it’s a giggle — but how did SW come across this LLog posting from 2004? — and SW’s narration is indeed zesty.
Well, yes, I’ve outlived Fiske. Since I have a lifetime record of nearly dying every so often, that has to be chalked down to truckloads of good luck. I have outlived most people from my generation, including two spouses, though Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, both just a bit younger than me, are still with us (Willie Nelson plugs on at 92, and I am campaigning to have him declared immortal, as a reward for his service).
I have out-aged my father and am creeping up on my grandfather (who died at 86, but with a long sad end of life in dementia). I have stopped being about to die any damn day, I have my wits about me, and for a seriously disabled, essentially housebound person in various kinds of chronic pain, I manage my (regrettably solitary) life pretty well, and I get to pursue a rewarding career, every single day; in recent days, I’ve been telling people that I feel wonderful (focused and energized), and that’s an accurate assessment of my current state, though you probably wouldn’t want to switch places with me.
Meanwhile, the world is in chaos and I have to put on the full armor of good, once again have to confront the wicked. Well, those are big noble words, real life is messy, nasty, full of hurt, I have to do what I can, I feel so puny.
Sing with me: “Hard times come again no more”
(I’m sorry; I didn’t know I was going to go to that place.)