Angal fixation

My friend Rick used to laugh every time he saw a commercial for Black Angus burgers. And at our local steakhouse he'd always flip through the menu looking for the Angus beef picture and smack his lips saying "Mmmm...I sure could use some tasty black anus!" Now Carl's Jr. is suing Jack in the Box for making a similar joke. The lawsuit claims that Jack in the Box misleads viewers by implying that Angus beef comes "from the rear-end and/or anus of beef cattle by creating phonetic and aural confusion between the words 'Angus' and 'anus."

Are viewers really going to get confused if they get the joke?

The lawsuit also claims that one Jack in the Box ad is comparing "apples to oranges" (or making that type of comparison) when it compares Sirloin to Angus. Sirloin is a specific cut of meat and Angus is a breed. Watch the ads. Weakening the suit is the fact that the ad ultimately compares, or contrasts, the hamburgers not the type of beef. And they're obviously meant to be funny. That's quite a task -- arguing that a joke is intended to be taken seriously. (Sorry about the double passive. Read what Neal says about them here here and here.)

How breaking is it?

I saw the following over at Johnny's Cache. These Google current_ videos are hit and miss. And foul sometimes. Sometimes easy pop-up. To extend the metaphor poorly -- this one reaches base...um...on an error. It should be an out but one good joke saves it.


The use of "breakinger" (around 1:45) is a lovely reanalysis of "breaking" as an adjective rather than a progressive participle. The two categories are close for it to make a good joke. It's related to the "hey...why not" question I mentioned in an recent post.

It's a clear difference between participles and adjectives when you focus on one as a verb and the other as a quality. But consider that both describe define or modify a noun, and in some phrases a substitution test shows they're interchangeable.

And as the structure of "a breaking story" shows, we can use a participle in an attributive position, but how similar are participles and adjectives?

1. He was tired.
2. He was walking.

Throw in an adverb and they both seem fine still.

3. He was clearly tired.
4. He was clearly walking.

But that's too simple an analysis of the adverb's function in the phrases. If we flip the order of the participle/adjective and the adverb in each of these sentences a not yet obvious meaning pops up. (I've left out the commas as per my usual habit. A comma in sentence 6 would resolve the possible ambiguity)

5. He was tired clearly.
6. ?He was walking clearly.

Sentence 5 doesn't make sense if we parse clearly as a modifier on "tired." In sentence 6 the new meaning is more salient and the ambiguity is between the scope of "clearly" in the sentence. It could be modifying the walking (which would be odd) or it could be modifying the apparency of the entire proposition that he was walking.

Let's consider another adverb to highlight the ambiguity.

7. He was quickly tired.
8. He was tired quickly.
9. He was quickly walking.
10. He was walking quickly.

The adverb as event modifier is the only possible reading of 7 and 8. That helps avoid the ambiguity. In sentences 9 and 10 the ambiguity is still there. Was he walking at a quick pace or did he start walking right away?

Some adverbs won't work at all with the participle.

11. He was very tired.
12. *He was very walking

This is because very cannot modify a non-gradable adjective or a verb, and it cannot be an event modifier. So the limits of a participle as a modifier become utterly apparent here. The Oxford Companion to the English Language identifies the importance of a "permanent characteristic" for a participle in attributive use. Such permanence loosely defined, but it does help with some analyses. Consider the difference between "the running man" and "the man who is running." We might easily assume that the former is always running or at least has a habit of running. The man who is running could stop and never run again and we would not need to correct ourselves. We would simply reassess the situation. He's not running now. But if the running man stops being a runner "he's not running now" doesn't quite address the change. The correction would have to address the characteristic. He's not the running man anymore or he no longer runs

Newscasts trust that a word like "breaking" is practically (albeit not syntactically) interchangeable with adjectives like important or interesting. Anyone who has been watching Game 7 of the finals when a breaking story interrupted knows very well that's not true.

The the question

Recently Buffy and I were planning for a 3 hour drive on which I would not be allowed to listen to the radio. Buffy was going to be reading her Donne and the raucous music I listen to would distract her. You know how crazy that NPR interlude music can get. So I went online to search through the NPR podcasts and I came across KPBS radio's A Way With Words hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett. It's an hour a week of the usual language issues that you'd expect to hear on NPR: mostly discussion of etymologies and pet peeves. The episode I downloaded aired 5 May 2007. In this episode Ms Barnette shares a vocabulary tidbit (the synonym of synonym) a guest shares a puzzle, and several callers ask questions. The answers are occasionally confused and even misleading*. One of the lower points comes when a NASA engineer calls to ask about acronyms. His question is fine.

While setting up the problem the caller notes that some acronyms such as FBI CIA IRS and NTSB are always preceded by the definite article while NASA is not. Nor does the article precede UCLA FSU UGA CNN or ABC.

He makes an important observation in noting that NASA, Laser and Radar are "pronounced like words." He looks up the words and at this point, I'm not sure why, he throws up his hands and accepts that the language has stumped him. He says "guess what. They're not even capitalized anymore. But they are acronyms. So that's how I feel. I can't figure it out. The language has conquered me."

Oooh he's so close.

Mr Barrett then rightly makes the distinction between initialisms and acronyms, which the caller has used indiscriminately. And though this distinction could give him a very important half of the solution he makes an odd turn into a terribly clumsy answer. Here I'll provide a snipped transcript:

Barrett: "It didn't sound like you looked at the long form that the short forms came from. I think you'll generally find the rule is is that if the long form of an initialism takes an article (that is the...) as part of its formal name then so does the short form. And that's where you get the distinction between universities. UCLA is not The UCLA, because we don't say...we...we may say the University of California Los Angeles in the long form but it's not The Official formal name of it, not like the...

Barnette (talking over him): "...and it's not 'the Uklah'...'the Uklah'...

Barrett: "Right and it's also not...it's also not an acronym. So that's the general rule. it doesn't always hold but it's...it's gonna get you there most of the time. ...Acronyms however don't...they almost never take the article even if the longform does."

Mr Barrett's focus on the long form as the determining factor is misguided. It's not just incomplete. It's easily disproved. He appears to catch this himself when he starts using UCLA to support his point. He resorts to making a distinction between "official" definite articles and apparently 'unofficial' ones. (Language Log has dealt with this issue regarding The buckeye school.)

His analysis cannot explain the definite article before FBI even though the official name does not include the definite article. The official name is Federal Bureau of Investigation. The article when used is not capitalized. I'm guessing this is what Barrett meant by a not "official" article. The same is true of the Central Intelligence Agency.

We will grant Mr Barrett's claim that true acronyms typically do not take an article regardless of the official name. We are then left with the question of why some initialisms take an article and some do not. Why do FBI CIA and UN regularly take an article when UCLA UGA and FSU do not? I suggest that the nature of the organization is more important than the name. The initialisms for civic or administrative organizations will take an article regardless of official name. Commercial or private organizations (or organizations that are commonly perceived as such) will not take an article.

Forget about "official" names. For the long form of NBC most people would likely say "The National Broadcasting Company" and for PBS most would say "The Public Broadcasting Service." But no-one says the NBC or the PBS because they are not administrative. They are companies. They are not governmental. They are run by citizens and they control only themselves: they have no jurisdiction outside themselves. The same is true of colleges and universities. I believe this holds even if we consider the PGA the NBA the NFL and the NHL, which are not companies but administrative bodies that have jurisdiction over various corporations and individuals that are not owned by them and do not work for them. (Note that Major League Baseball is not tagged with the initialism and NASCAR is an acronym.)

Now I'm making a connection to the power of "the" in another case. Is this related to the difference between "man" and "THE man"?

---

*_{It's unfair to make a claim like this without qualifying or explaining it. The show is not an embarrassing display nor do the hosts lose credibility. As Mr Barrett reminds us in his comment, it is difficult to consider these questions on the fly without overstating or stumbling on a claim. One answer I had in mind (regarding the word "integrous") was logical and accurate. A relevant tangent during the discussion was hard to follow, and I had to listen again before I understood what the claim was, but that could be my fault. I'm kinda...slow.}

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.