It's kinda like a hissy fit.

My father, a psychiatrist, puts a prudent amount of faith in how meaningful a substitution error is in speech. He doesn't believe a speech error tells us what you're thinking. But it does tell us what you're thinking about. If you slip up in your wedding vows and say "for better or for hearse" or "in sickness and in hell" there's something on your mind. Who knows why it's on your mind but it is.

I agree to an extent. But I also trust that there's a reasonable amount of linguistic gravity, even if it's largely phonological. And frozen or reinforced phrases easily add mass to these bits and pieces of linguistic matter. Such a phrase is one that everyone has heard and everyone uses as a single unit. Often idiomatic, sometimes perfectly grammatical. Think of the Match Game. I say 'Keep off' and you say 'the grass.' I say 'Buy one' you say 'get one free.'

It's also possible that the bare structure of a phrase is planned before it's spoken and some flourishes are added on the fly. So when a bare phrase is similar to a common phrase it can take the familiar form. That's probably what happened to Pat Buchanan while talking Rachel Maddow on her new MSNBC show. The topic was Sarah Palin. Isn't always these days?

Buchanan: The press threw an apocalyptic fit on this thing--an apoplectic fit if you will--when she was announced. And I think she was treated horribly.

His bare phrase is The press threw a fit. Before he says it he decides to add an adjective. What adjective would indicate a loss of composure and control. How would you indicate that the press was confused and slightly crazed? Well he can't go there of course. But it's fair to say that epileptic likely came to his mind pretty quickly. He avoids it and instead called it an apocalyptic fit. Well that one doesn't really capture it. He's going for an adjective that captures the behaviour of the press, not the historical or global implications. So he reaches into the bag again. This time he pulls out apoplectic, landing safely on a phrase that is out there. But his pronunciation of apoplectic provides a smidgen of evidence that epileptic is still rattling around his mind. The first vowel is pretty close to ɛ making apoplectic sound very close to it.

Now as I said, apoplectic fit is out there and it's attested. It even gets an early citation from 1611 in the OED. It's not as common as epileptic fit according to a quick Google™ search. 32K vs 124k. But as an object of the verb threw the numbers are much closer. Threw an epileptic fit: 90 hits. Threw an apoplectic fit 64 hits:

So what might have happened with Buchanan's statement is almost like a magnetic repellant from a dangerous phrase. He was thinking apoplectic, which is an appropriate phrase for what he's saying. But it's so close to a phrase he wants to avoid that he steps away from it and goes to apocalyptic which is fine but has an odd meaning. So he regathers and again approaches his original intention and goes juuuust a little past it to the first vowel of the word he was trying to avoid in the first place.

Now this is mapping out quite a visual path. And it would be nice if language worked so tangibly as to give our processes a reasonable space model for analysis. But I've probably already gone too far. And for too little.*

Mark Liberman has put up a few posts about such things recently.

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*How about the rest of Buchanan's points? That's where the meat is.

Most fun is less fun than funnest

Take a look at the twitter page for the search term funnest. The posts are mostly in response to Apple's ad campaign for "The funnest iPod ever." How can we not bow down to Apple's grip on our minds. Steve Jobs has to be weeping with pride right now. It's a great ad campaign.

Of course you know how I stand on the lexical issue. It's a word. Why? Because people use it and understand it. Lots of people.

Some of the comments in the against column (and my childish response following each):

marmon: Oh no. "Funnest" *is* in the dictionary?
--RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

jessedyck: Does this mean it's officially ok to use funnest as a word?
--Does this mean you've been waiting for permission?

blankbaby: Language is a living thing, it is true. But additions should look/feel right... and funnest just looks and sounds wrong to me. So there.
--Where can I submit my suggestions for your approval?

gregscott: Think different and funnest cannot be considered grammatically correct, can they? At best this is slang.
--No. At best it's grammatical. Slang isn't a grammaticality judgment. It's a style.

RyanMtz: Um, Apple. Last time I checked, "funnest" wasn't a word. ;]
--Check again. ;]

jmelloy: My English teacher mother said this once re: funnest: *rolls eyes* It's not a word, but people use it like a word. So it's a word.
--So does your English teacher mother know what she thinks?

_ds: but i do hate the word "funnest"
--At least you realize it's a word. But do you hate it as much as panties and moist?

I could go on. But I'm already bored and you're not reading anymore.

Thanks Mxrk

Political etymology

From John McCain's interview with Bob Shieffer on Face the Nation.



About 75 seconds in McCain says with some emphasis

But we need to prove to Americans that this is the party of Abraham Lincoln, [pause] Theodore Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan. We're the party of Abraham Lincoln.

Notice the stress he puts on Lincoln's name. That's where the primary stress would normally go but he definitely increases the emphasis. Notice also the stress on we're in the next sentence. That one is typical of contrastive stress. It's the type of stress that you put on a word only when you're trying to emphasize that another word is not the right one. He uses a contraction but he's certainly stressing we instead of are. If he was stressing are he wouldn't contract it. What's the word he's trying to negate? Well they of course. And who are they? I doubt he's thinking of the Green or Libertarian parties.

So he gives Lincoln a stress to indicated a semantic loading. Like the stress you give when someone asks 'Is she smart?' and you say 'She went to college' as if only one conclusion can follow. Not the stress that leaves the issue open 'Well she went to college, so...' But the stress that says 'Of course! You know what college means!' Note that the same word is stressed in both phrases. But in the emphatic stress the pitch starts higher and falls more clearly.

And he gives we're stress to indicate contrast. As if he's trying to reclaim an identity that has been denied his party. Trying to wrest it from the party that has taken it from him.

This argument is familiar. It's a lot like those arguments that use an etymology to argue the true meaning of a word. Even when all current evidence is contrary to that history. You can argue for instance that girl originally meant any child, male or female. But that history doesn't say anything meaningful about the way the word is used now.

Another type of Engrish

I've been waiting a long time to find something like this. Finally here's an example of someone performing the sound of English as he (a non-speaker I assume) hears it.

(via languagehat)


A lot of [ɹ]s and [l]s in there. And a few aspirated voiceless stops. I'm surprised to hear so many [o]s in what sound like 'word' final positions. And there's less of an off glide on some of them than I'd expect. The diphthongs stick out.

Around 10 seconds in I'd say he catches a pretty important English pattern. The segment that sounds something like 'getterow' [gɛɾəɹoʊ]. (I can't tell exactly what the coda is. It could also be [l] or just nasalization.) But that flap after a stressed syllable and the schwa as a neutralized vowel in the unstressed syllable is pretty good.

McCain: comedy killer

Grice's maxims focus on the pragmatics and semantics of an utterance. Some people believe that the potential for humor can be semantically mapped. So can we apply Grice's maxim of relation to the following exchange?

Leno: For one million dollars: how many houses do you [have]?

McCain: {laughs} You know I di… Could I just mention to you Jay that um-- at a moment of seriousness --I spent five and a half years in a prison cell without … I di… not a … I didn't have a house. I didn't have a kitchen table. I didn't have a table. I didn't have a chair. And I spent those five and a half years … uh … because … not because I wanted to get a house when I got out.

[A few readers might have access to the video on YouTube. Copyright issues have disabled embedding.]

Jay Leno has clearly established a context of facetious interaction. And there's sometimes a point in an interview where either party can introduce a change in tone. But that works best when there is a reasonable break in the topic. An elegant segue is both smooth and well-placed. The joke has to be over.

But this is of course not a true non-sequitur. McCain does laugh. And there is a conversational implicature. Leno has introduced a joke regarding McCain's inability to remember how many houses he owns. This lapse in memory has been used by some critics as evidence that McCain lives a privileged life. This then implicates the claim that he cannot understand the experience of many Americans. This is then used as a parallel contradiction of McCain's claims that he is not the type elitist he believes Barack Obama to be.

McCain's response to Leno's joke has processed that line of implicature and it introduces a new implication. He would rather talk about the time when he was a prisoner of war. During which time his concerns about a comfortable residence were irrelevant. Further implicature is hazy. Does his experience counter any claims that he is as much an elitist as Obama? Is he simply trying to remind us of his suffering because it made him the type of man that could be wealthy while staying in touch with those who are not?

Is it just an attempt to change the subject without saying something offensive to Jay Leno? Well it's not a real change of subject because he purposefully connects his new topic to the topic of houses and living quarters.

It's conversationally inelegant. And it sounds like a canned response. He was just waiting for a chance to respond to this topic wasn't he? Look at the "I di..." disfluencies. Was he was planning on the "I didn't have a___" lines early on? By the beginning of his statement it sounds like he's champing at the bit to get to his money shot. I have no political commentary because that's neither my task nor my skill. But this does remind me of a line from Seinfeld.

Priest: And this offends you as a Jewish person?

Jerry: No. It offends me as a comedian!

Voice. Over.

In a(n) X ...
The snowclone inspired by a voice. And it's one of the simplest snowclones imaginable. It's usually a bare prepositional phrase. Sometimes followed by a simple phrase like 'one man..' or 'a sole warrior...' No more. Often no complete sentence. Just enough for everyone to know you're doing your impression of the movie guy. Don LaFontaine: who died Monday. No impression was as good as the original.

He could sound young or old or fat or skinny or {come up with with your own binaries}. His voice was low but it didn't have that Barry White resonance. It was raspy. But brother it worked. Everyone loved his voice and after 3 decades of faceless work he was starting to get recognized on sight.

A lot of the people who wrote his copy trusted him to move us, just by timbre, into places times and minds that sounded like a good two-hour trip.



photo from here

What do you call it?

The old brain-bender about 'how do we know that blue looks the same to everyone' is pointless. There's no way and really no reason to find out. We have our conventional labels and when we say 'point to the red square' everyone can point to the same square each time. Well almost.

Rarely is there disagreement in identification of primary or secondary colors. And we can identify shades pretty accurately too. Once I was doing a color match with the additive RGB scale of 0-255 for each value and I matched the two areas within 3 total points difference. 3 points among 16,000,000. Our eyes can be pretty impressive.

But the linguistic task gets fuzzy quickly. What's navy blue? What's dark blue? Sky blue? Baby blue? Powder blue?

If you want to know what other people said in a study described on the Dolores Labs Blog just check the map below. Don't get mad when you disagree. Maybe you're the one that's wrong.

(click image to enlarge)

Now play with the labels. This page allows you to type in a color or a specifier and see which shades were called what. If you type orange only those shades that were called orange or have <orange> somewhere in the name will show up in the wheel.

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Several years ago a friend of mine was looking at some shirts in a nice store. The salesperson walked up and asked if he needed help.

'Yes. What is this colour?' he asked. 'It's not on the tag.'

She looked at the shirt then checked the tag. 'Sorry' she responded. 'I'm not sure exactly what it's called.' She shrugged figuring it wasn't a big deal that she didn't have such specific information. 'Is there anything else?' she asked.

'Well can you just tell me?' he asked again.

She looked confused. 'Sorry' she repeated. 'I don't have that information anywhere. It's not listed and I don't know where to find it.'

'Can't you tell just from looking?' he asked.

'Look, the names change from brand to brand. So your guess is as good as mine.'

'No it's not' he said. 'I'm colour-blind.'

She looked horrified. 'Ohh I'm so sorry. It's green.'

He laughed and told her not to worry about it. Knowing him I think he was hoping she'd misunderstand.

Is it pronounced Vuhpilf or Veepilf?

Subscribe to the ADS-L email forum.* Today there's this offering from one contributor who thinks he might have come across the Acronym (or Initialism) of the Year:

VPILF

or maybe it's VPilf

(which unpacks just as you'd expect, even if you don't know how to pronounce it).

There's even a corresponding web site: http://www.vpilf.com/

Remember, you read it here first, unless you didn't. And given where we've been the last eight years, I'm pretty sure this one didn't exist before today.

Of course he must be forgetting that hotty John C. Calhoun, who had to resign for being too damn sexy.

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* You really should if you have an extra email account that can stand to receive about 50 emails a day and you like to read ongoing and often meandering exchanges about the American language. Right now there is a thread going on (and on and on) about the pronunciation of Chinglish and the alphabetical principle.

What do you think...NOW?

Hugo: I'm with Jin. It's the monster
Sawyer: Yeah cause that makes the most sense.
Hugo: It does.

Sawyer's sarcasm comes from a rejection of evidence. Hugo's belief comes from acceptance of the same. They are both using logic. But take them out of Televisionia and Hugo is being irrational and is refusing to listen to reason.

But regular viewers of Lost accept that there are monsters on the island (at least black smoke) and Hugo's view seems well-founded and perhaps even more rational given the evidence we think he should be valuing. Ultimately that's science fiction. It's sometimes hard to hold science fiction to a standard. If anything can happen then the challenge of understanding is gone.

But I don't really believe that. Any story can give you a reference for understanding. Once you figure out the rules of the game you see how well the story plays by those rules. So we know that Superman can fly. That would ruin a lot of stories. But once we see that he has his weaknesses and we see that there are challenges that he can't meet so easily -- even with his x-ray vision and bulletproof chest -- we trust the story to give us surprising solutions.

And the available surprise is important. We suspend a lot when we appreciate a story that we know never happened. Even more when we know a story could never happen. My left brain might tell me that I can appreciate structure and technique and thematic behaviour even if I read the story from the last page to the front. But my right brain might want something more unknowable. Then again I should remember that while I have a left and right hemisphere in my brain, my mind is singular.

We love finding solutions. We also love working for solutions even if we never find them. (And by we I mean one of two things: either every single human being, or just those of us about whom these statements are true.)

But do we have to believe that a solution exists? And do we have to care how we find it and rationalize it? Is is important that I'll never prove that the writers of Lost were knowingly writing about an issue that matters to me and only to me? Do I care that some coincidences look too good to be true but they just keep showing up? This is meaningful! They have to know something about me to say these things! This is perhaps part of what Casey is getting at in his comment when he talks about knowledge. What proof do we need?

If Casey's lament is that no one appreciates or rewards right-brained thinking then I'm pretty sure he'll back down once we start looking at music and poetry and art and all the people who love it but have no idea how to produce it.

He might not back down from the statement that research and medicine and science in general value a predictable method and a conclusion that has been reached by a certain process. Actually we don't know what Science values. But we know what scientists value. Do they just value results? Well even if a result is reproducible it isn't worth much unless the method of reproducing it has been sanctioned.

A friend sent an email responding to the question of measured vs intuited knowledge. Jeff (another choral comrade) is a biologist teaching at what he calls "a smallish liberal Arts school in New York where research is viewed as an important teaching tool, but not to the exclusion of education." He focuses on ecology and entomology. He offered the following thoughts:

You need "logic" thought or "rational" thought, or however you want to label it for complex processing of multivariable information. For example, knowing that one must start storing food because last night it was light until 8:15 and tonight it was only light until 8:00.

On the other hand, instinctual or innate response is incredibly important, as without it you would be dead. In certain situations processing time is so exceedingly limited that logical thought would take too long and the consequences of inaction would be fatal.

Selection therefore favors an interplay between the two processes and how specific species, or even populations of a single species at different time points balance the two types of thought is environmentally controlled based on the predictability of the habitat and the overall contribution of long-term planning vs. quick response on survival rate.

All organisms do this. In fact, we can gain interesting insight on the matter from insects, which have a decentralized nervous system. In each body segment, there is a central processing unit of sorts which takes sensory information in and immediately responds to threats. That's why it's so hard to catch a fly in mid-air. On the other hand, the timing of reproduction and metamorphosis are exceedingly complicated and involve the integration of photo cues as well as temperature cues. These "upper level" processes are sent to the brain (yes, insects have brains, and they are even in their heads) for analysis.

The amusing uptake is that were one to decapitate a cockroach, until it starved it would remain alive and respond to threats just as quickly as when it was whole. It wouldn't be able to molt or mate, but almost everything else (well, anything it could handle with mechanoreceptors and chemoreceptors) still functions normally.

Jeff nicely establishes an important difference. Not so much between types of knowledge, but between responses to information. We see images and feel forces and develop an understanding of a situation through all of our senses. But the knowledge that comes not from our senses but from our memory and a slower analysis of data is usually considered the more rational. Not always because our senses are faulted for being incorrect but because they are considered to be incomplete.

But as Jeff reminds us we don't always have the luxury of verifying every one of our impressions. And his examples repeat the point that I have made previously: Our culture doesn't really privilege 'logic' and marginalize 'intuition'. It simply uses the analyses differently.

If we accuse Hugo of believing in a monster too quickly it is because of a skepticism that tells us not to change our assumptions too quickly. But again this skepticism is not categorical. Sometimes we change our minds very quickly on huge issues. Sometimes we change our minds based on very little evidence. Isn't this what you want Casey?

But beyond data and conclusion we have to look at analysis and explanation. If anyone thinks that linguists don't have enough faith in the unseen they haven't studied phonology. This post is long enough to end. I'll pick up the point on phonology later.

Does it rhyme with favor?

**Interlude before I release the follow-up to my logic/intuition post**

Brett Favre has left quite an impression. Not just on football. On orthographic patterns too. You might recall that Middle English det came to be spelled debt in Modern English; the <b> added because of a purposeful connection to Latin dēbitum. It's odd that spelling would move in a direction away from the most likely representation of pronunciation. But it happens. Even today.

Brett's impact is evident from a typo in an AP Yahoo! headline.



His name is Robert Marve. Evidently the Norman influence is still at work.