Morphology enhances a joke

On The Simpsons tonight Principal Skinner told Lisa to enhance a computer image of an empty school desk. When the image showed "Skinner Stinks" scratched into the top he quickly ordered "Dehance! Dehance!"

This is not quite a back formation. With a back formation we would expect to find the word hance used as a root of the word enhance. Back formation is conspicuous when the morphology is not productive or assumed root is not the actual root. But it doesn't have to be a false assumption to be a back formation. Even though George Bush (elder) might not have heard "recreate" as the verb root of "recreation" he was using a form descended from the Latin recreāre.

But this Simpsonian derivational morphology does assume (ironically) that enhance en- is the productive opposite of de-. While en- does etymologically correspond to a sense of towards, at, for or in the direction of it's not working morphologically anymore. The morpheme was once part of a productive form but no more. The joke comes from the implication that it's still a productive morphology. It's not much of a leap. We do find a somewhat productive en- in a lot of words. (Note: the OED treats en- and in- as practically identical forms. em-/im- could be included in that form as conditioned variants.)
impassion
entrust
empower
enclose
embody

There's just no productive antithetical substitutional de- form that I can think of. In some cases dis- can be an agglutinated prefix as in disembody. But disbody is as odd as dehance.

This joke works partly because after hearing the word and thinking Haha that's not a real word. You can't "hance" something a little voice starts to whisper hey...why not?

What is expected

I was surprised to read that when one does not hear a word or phrase the proper response is "What?" and not "Pardon?" This is according to the Los Angeles Times. Staff writer Kim Murphy explains that "'What?' is more posh." If posh is defined as conforming to the standards of royal etiquette.

I remember when my grade school classmate was reprimanded by a substitute teacher for asking "what?" when he didn't understand her. The substitute told him the proper response is "pardon?" or "excuse me?" At the time I thought "what?" made more sense. Why should the student ask forgiveness or excusing? He wanted to know what she said. So "what" made sense to me.

When his name was called and he responded with "what?" he was again lectured. "The proper response is "yes?" I could see "yes" making sense there. It's affirmation that you have heard the call. But I already had the impression that this substitute was too interested in silly manners. She said "about" with the Canadian [ʌʊ] (or perhaps [əʊ]) diphthong ("aboot" in most orthographic representations) so to my 8 year old ears the exotic difference meant that perhaps she belonged to a stodgy and inflexible class. She was after all trusted with the distinctive honour of driving the school bus too. Anyone who could teach and chauffeur the youth of America must be of exalted lineage.

About 'in about in'

The many tongues at Language Log have found a new issue to drive their wagging. (That sounds derogatory and I don't intend any derogation. It is an excellent web log.) There's some preposition doubling going on. Some of their examples:

• A thing of which I'm afraid of


• A phenomenon in which I'm starting to believe in


• the streets in which he lives in


• making sense of the world in which he lives in.


• something to which Traore grew accustomed to

Theories abound. I remember in the summer of 94 once saying "that's the professor about which I was talking about." Why did I say it? It was a combination of trying to be "grammatically correct" by not stranding the preposition, but not being used to that construction. So that heavy transitive accretion persisted. A syntactic blend.

A few months ago now I first noticed the "in about in" phrase. Consider the combination of the following two forms: In about two hours and In two hours. Searching for this construction is tricky. A web search of {in about in} brings just short of 10,000 results. But a lot of those are clear typos. This leads me to exclude a few repetition typo markers such as "in about in about" or non-credible forms as in the following passage:

I have visited same SWSS that you talk in about in Thailand farms shrimps. But, I have seen it in P.indicus in Iranian farm shrimps in ago year. That shrimps had sign SUBCARAPACE WATERY SAC with white muscle in abdominal together. Outbreak been limited some farms but in ponds been height and... . If you have propensity, I have excess data in about to accompanying pictures.
Best regards!
~Armin

Odd as that is I don't think it has much to say about English forms that are becoming standardized or normalised.

I hate jumping on bandwagons. Just ask mxrk. He'll tell you that I mentioned this in about in construction to him at least a month ago.

But I don't think this is fruitful as an emerging syntactical form. Mark Liberman has suggested that some preposition doubling might hail a future of case marked prepositions. He makes the claim lightly. With more chuckle than anticipation. In the case of in about in I'm not holding out for much more for more than a simple syntactic blend analysis could provide.

The passive should not be used

I can't remember what led me to this site expressing opinions about grammar and writing. In one post the writer takes up arms against the evil passive. Here are some snippets to give a sense of the argument:

• Passive voice and passive writing doesn’t accomplish anything – nor does it seek or have the goal of accomplishing anything.


• lack of emphasis on anything in particular happening


• It just doesn’t make sense to beat around the bush in a business because nothing is going to get done.


• passive voice seems not only natural but in an over-abundance.


• I find passive voice distracting.


• it can be eliminated just about every time.

So one would expect him to avoid the passive in his post. He certainly should if he believes his own argument that the passive voice lacks urgency and accomplishes nothing.

Let me make it clear that I am not simply trying to highlight someone else's grammar mistakes. I'm not a high school English teacher (anymore). The passive voice is not a mistake. I don't even consider it poor writing. There are times when the passive voice makes for the clearest and most direct expression. There are also writers who abuse the passive voice. But when a self-proclaimed "grammarian" takes the stand against a form we have a right to evaluate the testimony. What we find is that the form of grammatical apologetics will either support the content or refute it. Very often we see that the argument relies on those very forms it tries to subjugate.

Here's what we find in the piece:

• "Being that I haven’t been inspired as of late"


• "Her thoughts were well spoken"
: Okay these might be attributive and earn a pass. But then would a hyphen in "well-spoken" help to eliminate some of the ambiguity? As he has written this it could be an inversion of the passive "spoken well."

Continuing...

• "In the way that those stories are told"


• "it can be eliminated just about every time"


• "there is a sincere lack of attention paid to how things get written when something more formal is required."


• "What’s worse is that when I am asked to write something for someone in my office, it gets rewritten with passive voice"
: Wow a "two-fer"...

He offers the following illustration of a sentence that he thinks is worse when a manager rewrites it in the passive.

I wrote: I need these forms to be signed by the end of the week, or Mr. X will not be able to get you your money.

Manager rewrote: These forms will need your signature sometime this week, so that your money may be sent out in a timely fashion.

We got our signed papers three days late. It's not straight-forward, and there's no sense of urgency.

The rewrite is an improvement. The tone is less patronising and more focused on a desirable outcome with positive claims instead of negation. Instead of ominously warning the client you might not get the money the rewrite offers a plan by which the money will be sent quickly. And one passive was simply traded for another.

He plays around with the passive voice in his last sentence (follow the link above to read it). It's a nice try. The joke falls flat after so many unwitting slips into the very mire he says all good writing avoids. It's like a tiny pie in the face of someone who's slopping around in a vat of banana cream. Too little to be funny.

What's next, octupies?

I'm not judging. I'm just curious about anomalous or not-fully-developed forms. And listening to sports broadcasters nee athletes is a good way to find odd constructions. Just before overtime in game 2 of the NHL western conference final Brian Engblom recapped the events of the game so far, explaining that at one point a fan "threw an octupi on the ice."

I've mentioned the plural of -us words before. In that post I said

Octopus comes from Greek so the plural would be either octopuses or octopodes. Octopi has wriggled its way into common usage and its tentacles are holding firm.

But I was only thinking about the plural form when I wrote that. I had no idea the reach had extended even onto the singular.

Jaded on Safire

Barry Popik has an unapologetic agenda against William Safire. It's only partly personal. It's mostly decent scholarship. On the ADS-L he has identified the amateur linguist's most recent lapse.

Safire in his "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine this week makes the following observation:

The warm old phrase you’re welcome is rapidly disappearing from the language of civility. Though the word welcome first appeared in “Beowulf,” the O.E.D. notes that the whole phrase surfaced in print in 1907. We have now come to the 100th anniversary of the birth of our acknowledgment of someone’s expression of gratitude.

I was driven to send the following message to him. He'll ignore it I'm sure.

...Beowulf may be the first documentation of the word. To argue otherwise would take more time and effort than a simple missive should require.

But I must take issue with your claim that 1907 was the earliest that the entire phrase "you're welcome" was cited. The OED does cite the line "You're quite welcome" in W W Jacobs work, Short Cruises. And that phrase does include the entire lexical bank of "you're welcome" though the extra quite interrupts the continuity of the phrase. No matter. We will accept this as an example of the entire phrase plus one word. This does however move us to acknowledge those citations (in the same OED entry) that predate the 1907 example. 300 years before Jacobs, Shakespeare wrote "O Apermantus, you are welcome" in Timon of Athens. About 600 years before that Caedmon's Satan contained the line you "sind wilcuman" which is perhaps too early to be easily recognizable. But clearly the phrase was around well before 1907.

I do understand that you then intend to identify the phrase as a salient (if waning) response to that most common expression of gratitude: "thank you." In that case a quick look at only the OED supports your claim. But you should not be so hasty to trust even such a lofty tome to be your only source. It is not a regularly updated work. You need not lower your sights to find an example that predates the OED's 1907 citation. Look to the Bard good sir. In Othello you will find the following exchange between Lodovico and Desdemona:

Lod. Madam, good night; I humbly thank your ladyship.
Des. Your honour is most welcome.

Use this information as you wish.

I'll let Mr Popik's comments sum up the judgment.

So what Safire is really saying here is that this is not the "100th anniversary of 'you're welcome,'" but that this is a poor researcher relaying obviously outdated information to an uninformed general public. This is a joke.
...
Doesn't The New York Times have any journalistic standards?

[Update:
Mr. Verb is also fed up. Read some of his thoughts on Safire over at his space.
]

Summer of corruption

[Read more about the blogging syllabus here.]

I have been teaching for the last 10 years. In all that time I still haven't learned to value of daily lesson plans and or units or syllabuses. Some students respond well to this and stick around asking questions because they get the impression that I'm willing to answer/guide/research or otherwise accompany them on the path of learning (you can roll your eyes).

This also means that several students are ignored and learn very little.

So we got our evaluations back the other day and they're about what I expected. The online format yielded more honest results than the evaluations of past semesters. What interests me are the comments.

Here are three of them:

• While the instructor was friendly and laid back, there was no clear syllabus to follow. I feel that I didn't expand any of my reading or writing skills in this class.


• He is one of the best professors I have had. He really cares about us students. He wants us to really learn and do good in the class.


• I could only hope that Purdue University is lucky enough to have individuals as exceptional as Michael Covarrubias for teachers or professors for the rest of the University's existence.

Sounds about right.

Next term I get to teach a 108 (Advanced Composition) instead of a 106 (Intro Composition). Some friends and I will be joining forces and using contributor blogs as a composition forum. I'd like to take some credit for coming up with the idea. I don't know if I'll get any.

But more importantly I've been given a 327: History of the English Language. This is what I've been hoping for. I have some planning to do over the summer. This will be alongside the sound change research I have to continue as I prepare for my prelim papers.

My reading for the summer will be focused on Labov. Specifically the first two volumes (Internal Factors and Social Factors) of his Patterns of Linguistic Change series. James Milroy will also get my attention. The ELL prelim examinations allow me to write 4 papers, each focusing on a different area. The 3 required areas are Syntax Phonology and Semantics. I'll try to get Historical in there for the 4th. My hub topic is going to be prescriptivism and its ability to sublimate or change the UR of a phonetic form. My main question will investigage the evidence of URs that have disappeared in some dialects and the possibility of either resurfacing or being spontaneously introduced into other (sometimes later) dialects.

Initial impressions

The following initialisms/acronyms should be familiar to most. I don't need to spell out the meaning of these. You astute readers know them all.

aka
FYI
SOL
AWOL
ASAP

The list can be divided in two. The first three which are pure initialisms in which each letter is pronounced, [ejkejej, ɛffwajaj, ɛsowɛl] and the last two which are acronymic and pronounced as traditionally spelled words, [ejwɔl, ejsæp]. I know I've 4 of these in writing. I don't know that I've encountered SOL in print. I've only encountered it in spoken language. I'm not sure how to categorize DIY. I've only seen it in writing and usually as a book title or a section of a bookstore. And of course there's the channel...

The list is growing. The following list was gathered from a quick run through some recent email messages posted onto the ADS listserve.

IOW
WRT
IIRC
IMHO
FWIW
OTOH

Probably the most common of these is FWIW. I have never heard any of these pronounced. They are probably pure abbrevatory spellings that would always be read as the intended phrase. Some of them are pretty clear.

Which ones do you already know?

How many can you figure out?

Have you run across any others?

[update:
In the comments section Jaŋari mentions another class of initialisms that everyone has seen: that of abbreviated information without a typical conversational role. The most well known examples are lol rofl roflmmfao. These don't usually fit into the syntax of the speech surrounding them. They're little snippets of information that no one would ever say out loud -- they were created specifically for a medium of distanced communication. I think of them in some ways as cousins to the orthographic sound representations so common in cartoons that I mentioned here. While the onomatopoetic spellings are now divorced from the originally intended sound these initialisms are divorcing from their originally intended phrase or strict semantic content and may be closer to a representation of simple laughter like Haha. Is roflmmfao HAHAHAHAHA?

Update 2:
For those curious few who are still wondering about a couple of them:
SOL = Shit Outta Luck
IOW = In Other Words
WRT = With Regard/Respect To (I recently saw IRT)
IIRC = If I Recall Correctly
IMHO = In My Humble Opinion (Sometimes just IMO)
FWIW = For What It's Worth
OTOH = On The Other Hand

]

No more not on negative concord

An earlier post made reference to the following lines spoken by Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice:

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;

Note the negative concord. To rewrite it as Ms B my junior high grammar teacher would suggest we then have to choose which negative to change. Which is better?

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is movd...
or
The man that hath no music in himself and is not mov'd...?

Of course the rhythm requirements would only allow the second version -- which still isn't as good as Shakespeare's.

The use of nor to as a negative on the verb phrase is a stretch of the common rule for a coordinated negative that does not change (ie reverse) the semantics of a previous negative. Think of the neither...nor rule. As that rule is usually applied the two negated words/phrases function as the same part of speech.

NOMINAL
Neither borrower nor lender be.
Neither snow nor rain nor heat...

VERBAL
I can neither read nor write.
I neither agree nor disagree.
We will neither retreat nor surrender.

ADJECTIVAL
He is neither kind nor honest.
That's neither here nor there.

PREPOSITIONAL
I work neither for them nor with them.

etc

Occasionally this coordination jumps categories. Sometimes it's a very awkward union as in I have neither friends nor have enemies. That sentence sounds weird partly because the first "neither" negates the noun "friends" and the corresponding "nor" applies to the verb "have". But it's probably mostly because the second "have" sounds repetitive. Consider the following that has a similar non-parallel structure but avoids the repetition: I have neither friends nor do I want any. Not a great sentence but it's okay.

Correlating an adjective with a verb sounds fine too: She was neither present nor did we expect her.

And without the "neither" (which does have the power of suggesting a parallel structure) A sentence like No one called nor did they write is barely noticeable in its non-parallel form. The "nor" coordinates a negated verb with a negative quantifier, not with another verb. But it sounds fine to me.

As we pick up this argument that negative concord has not lost its place in the underlying form of English, support comes from some situations in which two negatives are not proscribed by even the most staunch advocate of mathematical logic. Consider the following exchanges.

Speaker A: You don't think Carrot Top is funny?!
Speaker 2: No.

Speaker 3: Are you going to the game?
Speaker D: No, I don't think I'll make it.

Let's play with the second example.

Speaker 3: Are you going to the game?
Speaker D: Yes, I don't think I'll make it.

Here we see that the opening is probably a single word response to the question. And to the question "are you going" (derived from the statement you are going) the proper response in this case is a simple "No." We could even argue that what follows is a separate sentence not commanded by the single word response. Maybe.

In the first exchange the speaker wants to affirm the statement that she doesn't like the prop-comic. Consider how this would sound:

Speaker A: You don't think Carrot Top is funny?!
Speaker 2: Yes.

The intention of the yes/no response is to paraphrase one of two answers. Either "Your statement is true" or "your statement is false." Although the response is to an interrogative, not a declarative, so it gets muddy. But whether the question is a surprised "You think he's funny" or "You don't think he's funny" the answer is the same: "No" (for anyone with integrity).

Finally let's turn to an example from a horrible show that was not put down soon enough. Heard on The Class during the obligatory hook-up scene between two main characters:

He: "This means nothing."

She: "It better not!"

I will rest on this simple claim. The intention of the second speaker is ambiguous. In Standard English she could be hoping that it means either 'something' or 'nothing.' Agreeing with him or correcting him. For this ambiguity to exist there must be an underlying form that is sometimes realized in the phonetic form and sometimes is not.

Rearranging links [updated (thrice)]

In just the last week I've learned of four more blogs being written by the friendly folk of Heavilon Hall. Casey restarted his posting and now Jon, Dave, and Anna have plugged into the current. I've reorganized my links to provide a sanctuary of all blogs Purdue. The foci vary as all well-nourished academic discourses should.

Buffy (PhD Comparative and Renaissance Literature) likes to make fun of herself as an academic (and no-one deserves the ridicule less).

Casey (PhD American Literature) tries to focus on existential truths while lamenting that they have no easily discernible edges that assure us of their place.

Brian (MFA Poetry) looks at poetry and art while making fun of Casey and dreaming of Wallace Stevens.

Marc (PhD Rhetoric and Composition) focuses on technology and rhetoric (or is that rhetoric and technology? Which one "works" better Marc?).

Anna (MFA Poetry) has just started blogging and she promises to write about more than celebrities (should she have to?).

Dave (MFA Poetry) paints the life of a poet who does much more than just talk about and write poetry.

Jon (MFA Fiction) proves that he loves reading contemporary fiction and is able to contribute. Read him to keep up with what's out there now.

Sycamore Review is Purdue's literary journal.

Mark (PhD American Literature? nee MFA Fiction) has his blog set up and will start posting soon. I'm only assuming he'll make it interesting. He can be a jerk.

My name is Michael.

[Update:
Two more blogs to add to the list.
Monica (PhD Jewish Literature and Philosophy) tackles and considers the philosophies and words and people and actions that seek everything spanning the power and grace between Good and Evil. (look for her contributions over at Jewcy too.)

Rebekah (MFA Poetry) gathers all sorts of materials and constructs all sorts of things. She kindly provides lots of pictures (when you're talking about a poet "images" can mean too many things) to document her work.

[Update2:
We're like a flock of Hitchockian birds. We just keep comin' atcha.

Monica (MA Comparative Literature) provides an alternative to Garp's world view. West Lafayette will soon be in her rearview mirror.

Dave (MA English Language and Linguistics) and his fellow contributors offer stories and theories on grilling fuel, audiology experiments, graduate school, movie wizards, political conservatism and marathon walks. And sometimes they branch out.

Eric (MFA Poetry) is using a new blog to take us along as he uses Markov chains to create poetry. His old blog is still going along, becoming a "more of a personal type blog."

Theresa/Tess (MFA Poetry) provides her own introduction. Of one blog she says "[it] is extremely poetry-ish (I post a fabulous, my-choice-but-not-my-work poem a day on it, plus extras)." She picks good poems so go read them. Of the other she says "[it] will only interest you if you happen to know and like me." Hers are young blogs. Give them some nurturing attention.
[Update3:
Everytime I think I'm out...
Chad (MFA Poetry) plans to post a new poem regularly and he invites all "to read along."
]
]
]