E-mail today from Luis Casillas to me and Luc Baronian (it’s a Stanford connection), with his header:
Apparently English “n’t” is trulyn’t an inflectional affix after all
(intending to convey ‘truly not an inflectional affix after all’) and then the comment:
Seen on Twitter:
(#1) deranged grammar advice on-line
A midweek quickie. Yesterday on Facebook, a posting from Thorstein Fretheim (Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, specializing in pragmatics and semantics: intonation, discourse markers, prosody, context), as it came to me in English translation:
‘Trondheim’s Own Chocolate Factory’ (Address Newspaper) or ‘Trondheim’s Own Chocolate Factory?’
(Address is the regional newspaper in Trondheim)
Now this was utterly baffling, so I asked for the Norwegian original:
‘Trondheims egne sjokoladefabrikk’ (Adresseavisa) eller ‘Trondheims egen sjokoladefabrikk’?
The cartoonist is bob, whose full name is Bob Eckstein, and the one-panel gag cartoon in question is a very recent one (from the May 2025 issue of Funny Times) and a pointedly topical one — and I greatly admire it:
bob’s lunch money cartoon; the cartoon — showing a middle-aged businessman who’s been somehow, absurdly, extorted for his lunch money online (just the idea of such a person having lunch money is funny) — would be entertaining in any circumstance, but in a world in which the US president is attempting to use online declarations to extort services and actions from various institutions (universities, law firms, media outlets, businesses), it’s painfully relevant
(For information about everything bob, see his official website)
The flip side of extortion is appeasement. So we are to assume that the businessman somehow appeased that bully by giving up his lunch money. Rather than fighting back — though it’s not clear to me what the online equivalent of punching the bully in the nose would be (but maybe Harvard is showing us the way). In any case, he probably believes be has gained, as Neville Chamberlain once thought, peace for his time. If so, he is doomed; today the lunch money, tomorrow the check at République. It never ends, it just gets worse, he’s on the hook, the poor sap.
So, to come: the English verbs extort and appease, with some lining-out of their meanings in detail, plus an excursus on Peace for / in our time.
(I know, I know, you let a linguist in the house, and suddenly you’re getting Little Lectures on Language. Life is perilous. Just be thankful I’m sparing you a gender and sexuality take on bob’s cartoon. There’s always a language point, in whatever, and there’s always a gender and sexuality take too, you just have to know how to look.)
A report from yesterday (2/13), a day that began with painfully low barometric pressure and included deluges of cold rain, but brought two occasions for real joy: brilliant hearing and the magic clock.
Yesterday, Laura Michaelis (Univ. of Colorado-Boulder co-author of, among other things, the 2020 Cambridge book Syntactic Constructions in English) alerted me to an article by Philip Miller (Université Paris Cité) & Peter W. Culicover (Ohio State Univ. & Univ. of Washington), “Lexical be“, Journal of Linguistics (2025), 1-24 — truly, hot off the press — which argues, in elegant detail, for a constructional approach to syntactic description, involving the positive licensing of constructions (rather than (negative) constraints on syntactic structures), and also honors Geoffrey K. Pullum (Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh).
So, yes, a fair amount of technical stuff, showing a bit of how (some) linguists approach the description of the syntax of one language and how they dispute with one another over the form of such descriptions. (I’m mostly just an observer here, but you should know that everyone I just mentioned — Michaelis, Miller, Culicover, Pullum — has been a departmental colleague or co-author of mine, so I have to be seen as a participant-observer, as we say in sociolinguistics.)
There was this paper of mine (“Jottings on Adpositions, Case Inflections, Government, and Agreement”), originally from 1988 but not properly published until 1992 (in The Joy of Grammar: A festschrift in Honor of James D. McCawley), that I wanted to quote from in an on-line discussion a week ago, only to discover that after the great dispersal of almost all my books and files some years back, I had no trace left of the thing, no copy of any kind (this sort of thing keeps happening to me). I couldn’t find a way to get a copy on-line, but in a stroke of luck it turned that Benjamins was selling off its remaining stock of the paperback edition of Joy at a price I could actually afford, so I bought their last copy and had it mailed to me next day delivery. This morning I created jpegs of all 15 pages (369 through 384); the quotation I need is on the first page, but now I can add this posting of all 15 pages to the little set of publications of mine available on-line.
🎁 Boxing Day 🎁 — also St. Stephen, with his feets uneven — coming a day late, because life has been very difficult for me, and postings have piled up so high I’m not sure I can ever get to them, so I’ve picked something I know I can get done, so that this dark, rainy, and excruciatingly painful low-air-pressure day will not be a total loss
I bring you an e-mail message from Victor Steinbok on 12/25, about this ad for Spice Tribe (website here), a San Francisco-based on-line spice store dedicated to mindful cooking:
(#1) VS wrote: Facebook has offered another example of what I used to refer to as parenthetical ambiguity. Is it [aged anchovy] [salt] or [aged] [anchovy salt]. From a culinary perspective, the latter makes no sense (aging salt doesn’t change it). But that doesn’t mean there’s no built-in ambiguity.
The boneless bananas came to me on Facebook on 12/15 through Ruth Lawrence, who passed on this photo from the Give Me A Sign site on FB:
(#1) [RL’s comment:] I feel so reassured now
More remembrance of times past, recollections triggered by e-mail exchanges between Waynes Browne (at Cornell) and me (at Stanford). The story comes in three parts:
— my 10/12/24 posting “Namesakes and surnamesakes”, which reported on e-mail from WB, the first half of which I riffed on in that posting
— the second half of that e-mail, all about Welsh (recalling our Welsh days at MIT 64 years ago)
— the product of years of my work on the description of Welsh syntax and morphophonology, from only 40 years ago (in a 1984 Chicago Linguistic Society paper)
