(Warning: This posting will wander some.)
It started with a story in New Scientist (online 11/17/11, in print 11/19/11): Chelsea Whyte’s:
Cannibal shrimp shows its romantic side
In order: (1) the interpretation and accenting of cannibal shrimp; (2) the tale of the cannibal shrimp (no linguistics to speak of here); (3) cleaner shrimp; (4) CRSs and their potential for cannibalism; (5) CRS shrimp and other instances of RAS syndrome; (6) orphan initialisms.
Posted in Abbreviation, Compounds, Initialisms, Morphology, Peeving, Phonology, Pleonasm | 4 Comments »
Letter in the March 2011 Instinct magazine expressing inflection rage:
WE’RE SUNK
As a retired professor of English, I must call attention to the grammatical error in the latest issue: The past tense of the verb sink is sank, not sunk (that’s the past participle, as in, “The Nazis had sunk many war vessels” [“Editor’s Letter,” Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011]. In the future, I would be happy to copy-edit any editorials, since whoever does your copy editing has obviously fallen down on the job. A concerned but very avid reader…
Ben A. in Los Angeles, CA
A snappy, jokey reply from the editors accepts the criticism, but attributes the error to the editor Mike Wood, rather than the proofreaders:
Mike’s just rambling on and on in those “Editor’s Letters” moments before we have to pry the copy from his clammy hands to deliver the magazine to the presses!
All the parties in this exchange seem to believe that there is One Right Way to form the past tense of a verb, and for SINK this way is sank.
Both beliefs are flawed, the second dramatically so, though I have a speculation about the source of the professor’s rage.
Posted in Inflection, Morphology, Peeving, Variation | 5 Comments »
Jeremy in Zits is literally surrounded by intensives:
Intensive literally is high on the list of language peeves, eliciting venom from all sides, on the grounds that it makes literally ambiguous — ambiguous in a way that results in confusion. Not that Jeremy was actually confused about what his friends were saying; he was just, in the manner of word ragers, pig-headedly refusing to accept the evidence (all around him) of how people are using the word (and flagrantly indulging in the Etymological Fallacy).
Posted in Lexical semantics, Peeving, Usage attitudes | 1 Comment »
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