From Joelle Stepien Bailard on Facebook on 10/5, passing on material from Tony Michaels’s Facebook page (“The Tony Michaels Podcast: Considered ‘The Rush Limbaugh of the Left’”), also from 10/5:
A Tony Michaels fabrication (see below)
Archive for the ‘Usage’ Category
Revolt against the bad guys
October 15, 2025
Mango(e)s and papayas, anything your heart desires
September 18, 2024From the Economist‘s 8/24/24 issue, under the characteristically jokey head Beneath the (ap)peal, the informative subhead
South Asia’s long love affair with mangoes
(yes, about the appeal of the fruits in South Asia, incorporating –peal as a pun on peel ‘outer covering of a fruit or vegetable’)
Which stopped me in my tracks, because I would have written mangos rather than mangoes. It turns out that there’s real variation on this point; both mangos and mangoes are well attested (and have occurred in postings on this blog, though all the instances of mangoes are in quoted material, not from my hand). And, entertainingly, published lyrics for the song titled “Mangos” (made famous by Rosemary Clooney) come in two different versions, from different sources: one with mangos, one with mangoes.
Extremely famous in a very small world
May 27, 2024In my Friday (5/24) appointment with my rheumatologist, David Fischer, the doctor reported that he had found me cited as a distinguished linguist, in writing by a lexicographer whose name he couldn’t quite recall, except that it had a K in it. (It’s always a good thing when your doctors treat you as a knowledgeable person of consequence.) I allowed that I hung out with lexicographers and that I was in fact extremely famous in a very small world. We then had to press on to my arthritic gout and its treatment, in the brief time for the appointment, but afterwards I e-mailed him with two suggestions about the identity of the lexicographer:
most likely: Kory Stamper, author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries (2017), though I didn’t recall her having cited me
also possible: Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language (2009), who certainly did cite me
The answer is: KS, in Word by Word. On page 196:
jack or jerk?
August 22, 2023(It’s about vernacular masturbatory verbs, so it’s deemed not suitable for kids, and of course it’s not to the taste of the sexually modest.)
Why would anyone care whether a guy favors jack off or jerk off — or something else, like jag off or toss off or wank — as his masturbatory verb?
Street talk about sexual practices and unsavory bodily substances varies over time and place and context, differs from one speech community to another, just like all kinds of talk: wank and toss off are distinctly BrE, jag off distinctly AmE, and jack off and jerk off both seem to be originally AmE, though they’ve spread more widely; guys will have different preferences for vocabulary in this domain, mostly according to their personal experience with the verbs, and they’ll know that some guys use different verbs. Why doesn’t it stop at that?
Well, this is linguistic variation, and it pretty much never stops at that. There’s a general human inclination to believe that your own practices are the best ones, the right ones; and also a general human inclination to accept the practices of your community, which are likely to be supported by explicit teaching and advice, and even enforced with sanctions, as the best ones, the right ones.
So we find people deploring other people’s linguistic practices, often in extravagant terms (disgusting, ignorant, …), sometimes ascribing dubious or discreditable motives to other people’s choices (hypercorrection and varieties of avoidance are often cited, as are faddism, reflexive following of fashion, and misguided attempts to sound clever). Even for masturbatory verbs, where there’s no explicit teaching and no advice literature.
Now, one such example, in a recent Facebook exchange between Jeff Shaumeyer (a jerk-off user) and me (a jack-off user), which turns out to be surprisingly complex, because it involves a second-order effect, with responses to (first-order) critiques of the usage jerk off, that it’s too crude, too vivid (the imagery is of the jerking motion in masturbation, and in the jerking of the body in orgasm — jerk was used for ‘copulate with’ before it was extended to masturbation, and is still so used by some speakers). This critique has led to the idea that guys who use jack off do so (only) because they’re (fastidiously) avoiding the gutsy, authentically masculine jack off — a gratuitous attribution of motives that I stringently objected to.
Affinal equivalents
August 16, 2023In a comment on my 8/15 “niblings” posting, Aric Olnes reports having 20 niblings (sib’s kids), “27 including spouses”. Now, sib’s kid is a consanguineal relationship — of kinship “by blood” — in both of its parts, sib and kid. Including spouses introduces an affinal relationship — of kinship by marriage — into the mix.
A nibling’s spouse would be, technically, a nibling-in-law, but we don’t customarily treat such a person as an in-law; either they’re no kin at all (instead, in some Americans’ terminology, they’re a connection), or they’re treated as equivalent to a nibling (the way Aric treats them); sib’s-kid’s spouse counts as equivalent to sib’s kid.
The voice of authority
June 3, 2020Yesterday on FB a query from my friend P (exchanges edited to remove personal chitchat):
A company is creating an outgoing voice message and they have come to blows over sentence structure. My suggestion to them is to fight bigger battles — but, alas, here we are.
They are going to the mat on “how can I” vs “how I can.”
Given your expertise, which is better?
“Thanks for calling COMPANY. Please tell me, in detail, how CAN I help you?
OR
“Thanks for calling COMPANY. Please tell me, in detail, how I CAN help you.”
Happy Memorial Day
May 27, 2020From two friends on Facebook (lightly edited) on Tuesday (US Memorial Day having been on Monday):
1: What is up with “Happy Memorial Day?” It’s a day to remember the dead … I feel like people have no idea what Memorial Day is!
2: I’ve seen a lot of “happy” Memorial Day comments too. Unfathomable.
For them, such well-wishings are akin to “Happy Yom Kippur” (the Day of Atonement in Judaism) or “Merry Good Friday” (Crucifixion Day in Christianity) as expressions of goodwill — deeply at odds with the solemnity of the occasions.
Their reactions have been shared by many others. There’s a simple response, which I gave on Facebook and repeat below. Then there’s a more complex, messy response. (The topic will eventually lead, given my inclinations, to discussions of homowear and gay porn for the holiday — definitely racy, but not, I think, quite over the line into Not Safe For Minors territory.)
Title bout
May 17, 2020“Title bout”: Wayno’s title for yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro:
(#1) Irresolvable stylistic choices? You could just punt, and avoid having to make any choice (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
Actually, it’s worse that this; between panels 2 and 3, there should be 2.5:
Based off true events
Comedic NomConjObj
November 12, 2019Tell it to Kim. Tell it to me. Tell it to Kim and I.
The new paradigm for case-marking of pronouns, including the nominative conjoined object (NomConjObj) in to Kim and I — now judged to be the correct form by a large population of young, educated American speakers, as against the judgments of older speakers, who use instead accusative conjoined objects (AccConjObj), as in to Kim and me.
Entertainingly, the new paradigm is evidenced in tv comedies in which grammatically fastidious characters freely use NomConjObj and even admonish those who use AccConjObj.