Oxford Word of the Year: Unfriend.

Oxford University Press has chosen unfriend as its word of the year for 2009.

To unfriend is "To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook."

Christine Lindberg explains that unfriend assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!) Altho a search for the verb forms, friended and friending bring up a couple million hits on a major web search engine.* And the intact phrase "tried to friend" (with quotes around it) brings up almost 35 million hits.

I'd say the verb friend really is used. And it's no secret. There has been lots of discussion about the verbing of friend for quite a while now. A lot of fear regarding anthimeria. Some people think these functional shifts are a sign of language anarchy. Except of course when Shakespeare does it. Then it's a sign genius. But we have no business trying to out-Shakespeare Shakespeare.

But let's see what commentary in reaction to unfriend we can roll our eyes at. To the TV!

Keith Olbermann commented on last night's show (Nov 17):

Altho the youngsters on the staff have informed me that defriend is the more common term for that. So there might be another vote on this.

Those youngsters that are constantly telling their parents what's cool and what's not, are often… not so cool.

Perhaps Olbermann's resident Hipper Youth prefer defriend for some reason. Maybe they see de- as a prefix indicating an act of reversal, and un- as a prefix indicating the withholding of a quality or state (read tangent here). But whatever their preference or their reason for it, I'm not sure there's reason to believe them that defriend is more common.

Our (marginally) trusty search engines offer up the following numbers.**

Search engine 1

unfriend: 5,890,000

defriend: 1,070,000

Search engine 2

unfriend: 5,330,000

defriend: 218,000

Search engine 3

unfriend: 297,000

defriend: 28,200

Search engine 4 (which refused to exclude "Oxford")

unfriend: 138,000

defriend: 24,000

This is a quick and sloppy survey. But I stand by it as evidence that people who don't observe language systematically, or with the tiniest bit of investigation, are bound to throw around worthless opinions about it. 'Tis Common.

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* I'm getting tired of putting that little trademark sign in.

** The current discussion about OUP's choice is bound to inflate numbers for unfriend and not for defriend, so I've tried to correct for that but searching only for instances that don't also mention Oxford. This has played with the numbers some, actually increasing the hits when I exclude "Oxford" from some of the searches, but the relative hits are still definitely in favor of unfriend.

Maddow chooses to inexplicably apologize

The metaphor of language as music is fruitful.

When I used to perform music publicly, my teacher (Roger Jackson) gave me a bit of advice that I should follow more often. "If you make a mistake," he said, "make it proudly." His thinking was that more often than not, I knew more about that piece of music than anyone in the audience. He repeatedly assured me that the masses have no idea what note's coming next and they can't remember what note was just played. If you mess up a note (or seven) in Fernando Sor's Introduction and Variations on a Theme by Mozart from The Magic Flute, the only way the audience will know it, is if you grimace or react with shame.

My habit of wincing at a missed note had come almost certainly from an attempt to say to the audience I'm better than that mistake. If you caught that, please know that I did too. In other words: don't criticize me, because even if I didn't play it perfectly, I know this song as well as you do. Judge me not by what my fingers do. Listen not to which strings they pluck.

Makes no sense, does it.

I think of this every time I hear someone apologize for a word or a phrase they feel guilty using. But unlike a musician, who might slip from an accurate performance off a score, speakers who apologize, typically haven't missed or failed to meet anything other than an arbitrary and artificially enforced standard. I'm not speaking of errors such as spoonerisms or retrieval errors that are in fact mistakes of inaccuracy. I'm thinking of the false rules that English teachers have lobbied for and which many of the more assiduous students have accepted as proof of attention to detail. As proof of language skill. But which are little more than proof of a list memorized.

And the zeal to show that this list is mastered, can lead to this:

Maddow: …which the Democratic party inexplicably still allows him to keep. When he campaigns for Republican candidates, he is biting the hand that inexplicably feeds him. Pardon the split infinitive.

The only infinitive I can see in there is "to keep" and it's not split. What is Maddow apologizing for? Probably for the split relative pronoun/verb pair, "that feeds" interrupted by "inexplicably."

I don't have to spend much of this space shaking my head at how well-educated people know so little about the terminology of language and its structures. Labels are thrown around and terms are used without regard for their established use by people who study language for a living. Don't use the terminology of linguists just because linguists use it; use the terminology because linguists are among the only people who use it systematically.

Looking first at Maddow's confusion: a split infinitive typically refers to an adverb coming between infinitival to and a verb.

to→boldly←go

to→falsely←accuse

to→overzealously←apologize

But here it looks like Maddow thinks a split infinitive is more generally an adverb jumping between a verb and another preceding word that feels like a unit with the verb. In this case, a relative pronoun, that, introducing the relative clause that … feeds him.

If the sentence was rewritten around the phrase the hand that continues to feed him, a split infinitive—to inexplicably feed—might be a less than optimal choice (if only because of ambiguity). However the ideal place would be pretty much in the same place as the sentence Maddow apologized for: between the relative pronoun and the verb

the hand that→inexplicably←continues to feed him

Any other placement of the adverb in Maddow's sentence would be either ungrammatical or awkward or misleading or at the very least, less clear.

He is biting the hand, inexplicably, that feeds him.

This would mean either that he is biting in an inexplicable manner or that it is inexplicable that he is biting.

He is biting the hand that feeds, inexplicably, him.

If this one is even grammatical it probably means that it is inexplicable that he is the one being fed. It could possibly mean what Maddow seems to be going for, that the fact that the hand is feeding him is inexplicable, (this is all so close to that old familiar complaint about sentential modifier hopefully). But that's a horribly awkward sentence.

He is biting the hand that feeds him inexplicably.

This one is less awkward than the previous sentence but it remains ambiguous and, to my ear, leans towards the wrong meaning, sounding more like an adverb on the manner of feeding.

Altho Maddow's sentence is also ambiguous, the context is a big help in making the intention clear. It is pretty easily the best place for "inexplicably" as the sentence is constructed. And going with "inexplicably" is much better than trying to shoehorn a phrase like 'it is inexplicable that the hand feeds him.'

I assume Maddow is reading from her own script. So she has chosen, probably carefully, a structure that she feels she has to apologize for. It's likely that she chose the wording because she recognizes that it's a good way of saying what she's trying to say. In the metaphor of music, this is not a missed note. This is the chord just as she wanted. It came out just as she had hoped. So why the apology? Sometimes the self-reproach I mentioned earlier comes not because a flub, but because of an expected rebuke. In a sense, 'Leave me alone. I did that on purpose.' It's like performing your own composition and apologizing for a rasgueado because you know your audience would have preferred an arpeggio.

And my guess is that Doctor Maddow senses her fans are given to peevology. I have not enough evidence to make the same claim about Maddow's views on grammar.

Since this post has gone on long enough I'll stop before I turn to contributor Kent Jones, whose grammatical snobbery is thick and deserves a post of its own.

The English language in America is not threatened.

My addiction to C-SPAN has me thinking that Steve King (representing the poor people of Iowa's 5th district) is just talking in the hopes of stumbling across a good idea. Much of his ignorance revolves around ideas about language and the threat of multilingualism.

As Sally Thomason points out in a recent Language Log post, this is an ignorance worth countering.

Below I post in full the relevant Resolution adopted in 1987 by the Linguistic Society of America (mentioned by Thomason in her post).

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Resolution: English Only

Drafted by Geoff Nunberg

28 December 1986: Approved by members attending the 61st Annual Business Meeting, New York Hilton, New York, NY

1 July 1987: Adopted by LSA membership in a mail ballot

Whereas several states have recently passed measures making English their "official state language," and

Whereas the "English-only" movement has begun to campaign for the passage of similar measures in other states and has declared its intention to attach an official language amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and

Whereas such measures have the effect of preventing the leglislature and state agencies and officials from providing services or information in languages other than English,

Be it therefore resolved that the Society make known its opposition to such "English only" measures, on the grounds that they are based on misconceptions about the role of a common language in establishing political unity, and that they are inconsistent with basic American traditions of linguistic tolerance. As scholars with a professional interest in language, we affirm that:

The English language in America is not threatened. All evidence suggests that recent immigrants are overwhelmingly aware of the social and economic advantages of becoming proficient in English, and require no additional compulsion to learn the language.

American unity has never rested primarily on unity of language, but rather on common political and social ideals.

History shows that a common language cannot be imposed by force of law, and that attempts to do so usually create divisiveness and disunity. This has been the effect, for example, of the efforts of the English to impose the English language in Ireland, of Soviet efforts to impose the Russian language on non-Russian nationalities, and of Franco's efforts to impose Spanish on the Basques and Catalans.

It is to the economic and cultural advantage of the nation as a whole that its citizens should be proficient in more than one language, and to this end we should encourage both foreign language study for native English speakers, and programs that enable speakers with other linguistic backgrounds to maintain proficiency in those languages along with English.

Presented and approved at the LSA Business Meeting in New York City, December 1986.
Submitted to and passed by membership in a mail ballot, March 1987.

Windmill cookies, they'll give you gonorrhea

Just make sure to read more carefully than you listen.



(h/t Elizabeth)

DSM-BS

Maybe Tom and L. Ron are right about this psychiatry racket.

My favorite proposed diagnosis:

God Complex

Antecedents: Creating the known universe.

Symptoms: Thinking you own the place. Snooping on people's private conversations even when not addressed through prayer. Fickle support for Steinbrenner's Evil Empire during playoffs. Sufferers will sometimes exist just to spite Christopher Hitchens.

Notes: Those with long beards, devout followers, and immortality are often misdiagnosed. Inquire about bandmates. See: ZZ Top Complex.

Remembering and Musing: or Conan, the Barbarian

On last Thursday's Talk of the Nation Neal Conan had a conversation with Farhad Manjoo about password security.

There was some good advice on the show. For instance, don't choose <123456> as your password. No really. Don't.

The best passwords are of course also the hardest to remember. Numbers and symbols and primarily unintelligible strings of letters are the way to go. So how to remember such a random string? According to Manjoo you should use a mnemonic device. He uses a pronunciation somewhere between [nəmɑnɪk] and [nʊmɑnɪk]: between a schwa and the vowel in book. Not quite the pronunciation with first syllable rhyming with boo zoo and you (that [u] possibly from the influence of a word like pneumatic).

As I pronounce mnemonic the first vowel falls somewhere between the [i] in beet and the [ɪ] in bit. Manjoo and I pronounce the word almost identically with a slight difference in the front/back place of the first vowel. The sequence of vowels and consonants is the same: CVCVCVC.

Conan also mentioned mnemonic devices. His pronunciation is quite distinct from mine. In fact it's a pronunciation I'd never heard before [mɛmnɑɾɪk] as if the word was spelled <memnotic>.

I thought this might be a simple performance error, not a fixed pronunciation, but he uses the same pronunciation later in the segment. It appears to be his somewhat intentional pronunciation of the word.

There's an obvious effect of the initial <mn> in the spelling of the word. An onset cluster not possible in English. Of course when the [m] is the coda of one syllable and the [n] is an onset of another that's a perfectly acceptable sequence because it's no longer a true cluster. That's one possible fix for a spelling confound on phonology.

But I suspect it's more than just a fix. I wonder if it's not also the result of a couple other influences: memory and hypnotic. Memory is obviously a relevant word probably assumed to be a related form. Hypnotic isn't as direct a connection, but the relevance of psychological terms and 'mindwork' types of tricks and strategies pushes it forward as an influence. Once you've got the initial mem- and you need to put the 'mn' sequence in there and you know the word ends with [ɑCɪk], the [ɑɾɪk] of nearby hypnotic can easily push aside the [ɑnɪk] of already corrupted mnemonic. Perhaps.

I didn't find loads out there. A Google™ search for "memnotic" brings up almost 5000 items as raw hit results, not all of them relevant or even accurate. "Memnotic device" brings up only about a dozen.

It's an interesting blend.

Linkin' logs

A Daily Portmanteau gives just what the name promises: one portmanteau every day. Some of them are pretty good. I have even had the chance to use hangry in conversation with Buffy recently. Don't make Buffy hangry. You wouldn't like her when she's hangry.

My First Dictionary enjoyed a volcanic boost in popularity when Ross Horsely started it earlier this year. I laugh at some of the entries, cringe at some of them, and shake my head nervously at most of them.

The link to John Wells's Phonetic Blog has changed. He's now on blogspot at http://www.phonetic-blog.blogspot.com. Professor Wells won't be posting for about two weeks, so now is a great time to catch up on any of his posts that you've missed. His old site didn't work with my RSS reader, but the new site is ready to go. And of course, well worth your time if you're interested at all in phonetics.

Jack Windsor Lewis' Phonetiblog is another important stop for such topics. I've been reading his posts for a while.

Several of the blogs I read are collected in a folder I've labeled "Peevology". I've got a bunch of posts started in the queue, responding to the claims, complaints, premises and analyses I've found in those blogs. Some I understand. Some I don't. Who knows when I'll get around to finishing the posts.

The Grammar Vandal hasn't posted in a while, but I just have to keep checking in on a blog that says, based on a minor spelling issue "I can’t imagine how many mistakes were made at so many levels within the company for this shirt to have been put on shelves and sold." I suppose the presence of your instead of you're on a T-shirt means someone on the board of directors lost a finger, and someone in the mailroom has been widowed. Poor spelling is a scourge, people!

The Grammarphile at Red Pen, Inc. likes pointing at typos and giggling, as does the wielder of Mighty Red Pen, who likes to pick out errors with a slightly more temperate tone. All harmless fun.

And yes, I even stop by Martha Brockenbrough's SPOGG blog to see what she's up to.

After reading these and other more aggressive complaints, I turn to Gabe Doyle's Motivated Grammar for some familiar and reasonable descriptivism.* He does a fine job addressing issues of usage with evidence taken from actual language rather than the evidence created from an ideal speaker. Go read him with high expectations.

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*Not that all prescriptive views are unreasonable. I'm not being a snob here.

I talk gibe

The recent auto-industry goings-on have put my friend David Shepardson (auto-industry reporter for The Detroit News) in the spotlight in all sorts of fun and impressive venues.¹ He's a regular on the Diane Rehm show. He's almost got his own folding chair in Jim Lehrer's NewsHour studio. And until The Detroit News recently updated their photo file, his high school yearbook picture was a regular feature on Washington Journal during phone interviews with Peter Slen.

In the meantime... my Facebook page is booming!

This is one of those wonderful opportunities to tease Dave about something that I really don't think is embarrassing.

I recently received a copy of the third edition of Garner's Modern American Usage. It's a hefty text. Each entry striving to provide both informative observation, and helpful advice. A snippet of Dave's writing is included as an example of benign but better-avoided alternate usage. He used jibes when he should have used gibes.



The argument is reasonable that, for the sake of simplicity, language should adopt only one form per sense. There's no reason to strive for two spellings if nothing but variety is accomplished by the alternation. But the argument that language should only accept one form is unrealistic. Language will always have some sort of redundancy. When studying language, and defending this fact from my descriptivist stance, I'm not saying that it should be this way or that language is better this way. I'm just saying that it is this way and it seems to work fine. And in language, acceptance is determined by what happens in that language. Language is as language does²

True -- Garner's advice is more concerned with the general confusion surrounding jibe/gibe/jive. I have no problem with that concern. But I don't really see how the example from Dave's writing could be confusing.

It's hard to say how representative the OED citations are on details like spelling. In citations for the verb "gibe/jibe" 15 of 16 examples are spelled with initial <g>; for the noun 6 of 9 in <g>, 2 in <j> and 1 in <i>. Of course we can't just take those numbers as representative of current spelling conventions because the earliest is from 1567 and the most recent is from 1893. So at least historically <gibe> looks to be the clear dominant form. But now?

A Google™ search runs into problems because we want to compare relevant forms only. We have to make sure that we're not counting instances of <jibe> meaning agree: read jive.

Garners Third Edition has introduced a Language-Change Index with such issues in mind. It's a wonderful contribution to the purposes of the text. In a coming post I'll take a look at the feature as well the work's other treatments of the prescriptivist/descriptivist dialogue.

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1. Previously I've mentioned Dave's appearance in the America Heritage^® Dictionary. Tho access to the AHD is no longer offered through Bartleby.com it looks like you can get to it through Yahoo Education. The entry for Mace is there intact with the citation of Dave's use of the word as a verb.

2. The terms of this claim deserve to be revisited and clarified.

Safire remembered

The posts I've done out of frustration with William Safire were a lot of fun to write. And tho my first reaction to hearing of his death was to lament the loss of the occasional kindling for my own tiny little flame war, I'm now glad to have read some kind words about him from the linguistic community.

I'm especially happy to contrast their words with the thoughts of a friend who has sought to diminish Safire as "merely a wordsmith" who "wowed the hick hoards and the Right's craven captains of capitalism." Merely, Alex? C'mon.

On the ADS LISTSERV Gerald Cohen comments: "Safire was a very valuable link between academia and the general public on matters of lexicography, and (bless him) etymology."

Grant Barrett, who has never been afraid to point out the gaps in Safire's scholarship, has posted in memory of Safire's generosity:

He supported the Historical Dictionary of American Slang when it applied for funding during my editorship, by writing letters of support that shone with erudition and respect. He gave my book, the Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang, a much kinder review than it deserved.
…
Perhaps most importantly, he gave me credit as often as possible in his column for helping him with his research, which allowed my own star to rise in the "language dodge," which is what he called this maven-rich, grammarizing, languagey niche we both inhabited. He did this for lots of people and he did it unbegrudgingly.

Steven Dodson at languagehat posts a very fine memory of Safire's graciousness in response to Dodson's demanding editing of Safire's Political Dictionary:

He fully appreciated my pickiness about details and had no hesitation making changes I recommended, even occasionally adding chunks of text I provided; what's more, he credited me by name in those entries and added this heartwarming text to the acknowledgments: "For this fifth edition, Stephen Dodson provided the kind of creative copy-editing and a lust for historical accuracy and semantic precision that a political slanguist expects in dealing with the Oxford University Press, world’s greatest lexicographic organization."

It's nice to see that linguists know how to hold on to their standards and share a kind thought as well.

A stillborn neologism

Here's a new and not very promising vocabulary word:

The 28-minute program -- quite possibly the first ever birthermercial -- features community access production values, heavy use of foreboding strings soundtrack, and standard-issue Birther ideology.

Birthermercial fits into the X-mercial form alongside infomercial and other less successful runts of the litter, like webmercial and edumercial.

Sure it's clear. The semantics are manageable: if you know what a birther is, you can probably figure out what a birthermercial is. It'll fit into conversations that can occur with people of all regions, professions, classes, political views, and most ages. It's relatively easy to say. It doesn't sound too similar to other words. But it's not likely to catch on.

It's not applicable to something that comes up a lot. Or has ever come up. There aren't that many commercials that even mention the issue of Obama's birth certificate. And even if there were, the issue won't be relevant beyond the length of Obama's presidency. Even if the word does remain relevant to future presidents —which isn't likely— how necessary is such specificity? If the semantics of birthermercial were to widen and be applied more generally, it would have to push out the words or phrases already in use. We can use negative ad or conspiracy theory or paranoia to point to such enterprises. I'm not sure how long the verb swiftboat will last, but it's already handy as a more general term for engaging in this type of smear campaign.

A search for the term brings up about 150 results on Google™.* All of them in stories about one commercial. The article linked to above uses the word once in the headline, once in body of the story, and twice in subsequent updates. A follow-up posting uses the word three times all in the body of the story. That smacks of hope that the word will last. It won't.

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*About 1180 hits are reported as found, but as usual, those results overstate the actual number.