Archive for the ‘Peeving’ Category

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Desert Island spelling

October 15, 2021

A wrenchingly funny E. S. Glenn cartoon in the latest (10/18/21) issue of the New Yorker:


(#1) The usual tiny cartoon Desert Island now has two neighborhoods: the customary grassy tropical island, plus a small beach zone, suitable for message-bearing  bottles to wash up on

Side notes: the castaway is shoeless, shirtless, and gaunt, his  makeshift cutoffs worn and patched — clearly, in a bad way. Meanwhile, Glenn has contrived to identify the castaway as Black (without shading his skin, as he did for the castaways in an earlier DI cartoon, reproduced below). Further, the cartoon imagines messages in bottles to be a kind of marine postal service, in which specific senders and receivers exchange messages in slow motion over great distances.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Errors, Linguistics in the comics, Peeving, Spelling | 4 Comments »

This week’s diathesis alternation

June 1, 2015

From the NYT yesterday, in “Who Will Watch the Charities?” by David Callahan:

Last week federal authorities disclosed that four cancer charities had bilked tens of millions of dollars from donors.

The subordinate clause here has a VP of the form:

(1) bilk MONEY from VICTIM

where I might have used one of the form:

(2) bilk VICTIM of MONEY

i.e., four cancer charities had bilked donors of tens of millions of dollars. Same verb, same participants in the event (a victim, some money), but different syntax: different argument structures, that is, different associations of the syntactic arguments (direct object DO and oblique object OO) with the participants. In more detail:

(1) V: bilk DO:MONEY P: from + OO:VICTIM

(2) V: bilk DO:VICTIM P: of + OO:MONEY

There is some tradition for referring to such a variation between argument structures as a diathesis alternation. In this case, both alternants are standard, and, so far as I can tell, are treated as such in the usage literature.

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Posted in Argument structure, Peeving, Syntax, Usage advice, Variation | Leave a Comment »

Annals of idiomaticity

May 2, 2015

In putting together material on one and only earlier today, I stumbled on another well-known target of peevers, one of the only. One and only is accused of being evilly pleonastic, one of the only of being “illogical”, indeed incomprehensible; its purported offense involves an instance of the Etymological Fallacy — only historically derives from one, so it cannot be used in reference to groups (as in one of the only people to object) — compounded by a willful refusal to recognize idiomaticity (while idioms, not being fully compositional semantically, are, essentially by definition, not fully “logical”).

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Posted in Etymological Fallacy, Idioms, Peeving | Leave a Comment »

Political cartoons

April 21, 2015

Three more cartoons from the May issue of Funny Times, cartoons that are in some way “political”: from Ted Rall, Tom Tomorrow, and Ruben Bolling:

(#1)

(#2)

(#3)

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Posted in Language in politics, Linguistics in the comics, Peeving, Science | 1 Comment »

McCosh on NomPred

February 5, 2015

From the Princeton Alumni Weekly on 2/4, an entertaining note from the 1/25/46 PAW:

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Posted in Peeving, Pronoun case | 1 Comment »

Monday quartet

November 10, 2014

Four varied cartoons in this morning’s crop: a Zits on address terms; a Scenes From a Multiverse on symbols; a Rhymes With Orange on case-marking of pronouns with than; and a Zippy reviving Doggie Diner.

(#1)

(#2)

(#3)

(#4)

One by one …

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Posted in Address terms, Diners, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Peeving, Phallicity, Pronoun case, Usage advice | 1 Comment »

Quarantine

October 19, 2014

As the dreadful story of the Ebola virus in Africa unfolds, and with it the parallel story of the panicked response to Ebola in the U.S., the word quarantine is much in the news. The stories explain that the quarantine for Ebola is 21 days. But now look at NOAD2 on the word:

quarantine noun  a state, period, or place of isolation in which people or animals that have arrived from elsewhere or been exposed to infectious or contagious disease are placed: many animals die in quarantine.

verb [with obj.] impose such isolation on (a person, animal, or place); put in quarantine.

ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from Italian quarantina ‘forty days,’ from quaranta ‘forty.’

and note the origin, involving the Italian word for ‘forty’. We have here a straightforward case in which morphological material from the etymological source is still visible in the word, yet its current use no longer respects the semantics of the source. I’ll call such words decimators, after one famous English example that has led peevers to seethe in word rage at an offense to etymology.

If you take etymology dead seriously, then referring to a 21-day isolation period as a quarantine is just wrong.

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Posted in Etymological Fallacy, Etymology, Peeving | 5 Comments »

last/past

December 31, 2013

On the Baltimore Sun blog on the 4th, a piece by John McIntyre on last and past, “Not, unfortunately, the last word”, beginning:

No sooner do I put up a post about copy editors’ preoccupation with dog-whistle distinctions than someone turns up commenting on a post from 2011 on the newspaper last/past crotchet

What’s at issue is the ambiguity of last.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Peeving, Pragmatics, Usage advice | Leave a Comment »

English teachers

October 14, 2013

A Carla Ventresca cartoon that came to me via Mar Rojo on Facebook:

(#1)

It turns out that Mark Liberman posted this one on Language Log back on 3/18/07, with a nice discussion of the teacher’s incorrection (of fast to quickly) in the last panel. There’s another incorrection in the first panel, of shrimps to shrimp; as Mark noted, both forms are standard plurals for shrimp. (The remaining three corrections concern spelling and punctuation and are appropriate.)

Searching for this posting of Mark’s led me to more cartoons with English teachers in them.

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Posted in Agreement, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Peeving | Leave a Comment »

Grammar mugs

September 29, 2013

From Chris Ambidge on Facebook, an ad for the Literary Gift Company offering grammar mugs:

The full set of all six Grammar Grumbles mugs. An original design by The Literary Gift Company, this series is inspired by the 2013 publication A Mug’s Guide to Grammar.

 

Well, four spelling mugs and two on word use. Garmmra.

Posted in Peeving | 2 Comments »

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