I stumbled across a webpage with idioms, and it made me start to question how I would define some common English idioms. The webpage is IdiomSite.com, which features a banner across the top that defines idioms as 'a natural manner of speaking to a native speaker of a language.' My first issue with the page is with that definition--I feel the definition provides some kernel of truth, but there is a lot missing from how idioms are separated from other natural manners of speaking; also, notice the definition only includes a one-way relationship (in the definition, the listener is specified as a native speaker, but not necessarily the speaker of the idiom).
After scrolling down through the page, there are several idioms defined that I would argue with. The following three are examples of these potentially arguable definitions:
'as high as a kite': anything that is high up in the sky.
'barking up the wrong tree': a mistake made in something you are trying to achieve.
'chip on his shoulder': angry today about something that occured [sic] in the past.
My own uses of these idioms don't quite match up with the above definitions; however, I don't want to bias my audience. Do you agree with these definitions? If not, how would you change them to make them more accurate?
A colleague shared a link with me this morning from The New York Times for an article on linguistic innovation: "They're Like, Way Ahead of the Linguistic Currrrve" by Douglas Quenqua. The article focuses on how many people tease young women for the way they speak--whether it's using like as a filler or using creaky voice to end a statement; and yet, many of those same things young women are teased for become linguistic markers in English at large. The following few paragraphs portray nicely what the whole article is about:
“If women do something like uptalk or vocal fry, it’s immediately interpreted as insecure, emotional or even stupid,” said Carmen Fought, a professor of linguistics at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. “The truth is this: Young women take linguistic features and use them as power tools for building relationships.”
The idea that young women serve as incubators of vocal trends for the culture at large has longstanding roots in linguistics. As Paris is to fashion, the thinking goes, so are young women to linguistic innovation.
“It’s generally pretty well known that if you identify a sound change in progress, then young people will be leading old people,” saidMark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, “and women tend to be maybe half a generation ahead of males on average.”
I urge you to read the original article, as there are other very interesting insights throughout it. While the article (and the linguists quoted in it) cite young women as linguistic innovators, what is perhaps more intriguing is that no one knows why. The article offers several theories, but I'm not sure we'll ever be able to pinpoint the exact reason why these linguistic phenomena catch on like they do and why (or how) young women start many of them in the first place.
James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher.
The first sentence relies on three different senses of the word buffalo: the city Buffalo, NY; the noun (the large mammal that once roamed the prairie freely); and the transitive verb, which according to my Mac dictionary means to "overawe or intimidate (someone)." The Wikipedia article on this sentence provides the background and some syntactic trees for the sentence, but I'll give you a shortened rundown here:
Let's start at the beginning: Buffalo buffalo work together to mean the NP "buffalo that are in Buffalo". This NP occurs three times in the sentence:
The remaining instances of buffalo in the sentence are the verb form. The first instance of buffalo as a verb is working with the NP [Buffalo buffalo] to modify the first NP [Buffalo buffalo]. You might reword the entire first part of the sentence (this will take care of the first five instances of buffalo):
The buffalo that live in Buffalo that buffalo (other) buffalo in Buffalo...
Now the sentence is finished off with the transitive verb and its object, which also happen to be the buffalo in Buffalo:
The buffalo that live in Buffalo that buffalo (other) buffalo in Buffalo buffalo the buffalo that live in Buffalo.
Is it a sentence? Sure. By loose-ish standards. Is it a good English sentence? No. Why would Buffalo buffalo be buffaloing other buffalo that live in Buffalo two times over? That just doesn't make sense. So while it is syntactically possible, it's semantically void of really meaning anything. While it may not be a sentence you'd want to use in an everyday conversation, it is a sentence you can wow your friends with at parties. Just think of all the debates you can get into once you proclaim, Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo is too a sentence in English!
The second sentence from above only works with added punctuation. In fact, its Wikipedia article states that this sentence shows why punctuation can be necessary in some sentences to understand meaning. The sentence with its appropriate punctuation looks like this:
James, while John had had "had", had had "had had"; "had had" had had a better effect on the teacher.
Obviously, there was some sort of test, in which James wrote "had had" on the paper but John wrote "had", and the teacher preferred "had had" as the correct answer. All this took place in the past in a situation that required the past perfect to show that the activity was finished, thus leaving us with the seemingly (yet not) redundant pairing had had. In everyday speech, we often put the first had into a contraction, which sounds way less odd: I'd had three bananas before I realized that two would've been enough. That sentence just as easily could have started out with I had had three bananas... and been grammatically sound. That's what happens when a verb that has been grammaticalized as an auxiliary remains a main verb--have as an auxiliary (or helping verb) no longer has anything to do with its use as a main verb that usually (and loosely) shows some sort of possession (though "possession" doesn't even come close to fully describing the use of have as a main verb).
Again, is it a sentence in English? Yes. Is it one you're likely to come across? Not unless you're a teacher that left a blank on a test that should have been filled in with had had instead of had.
Do you know of any other crazy examples of sentences like these that people use to show off the oddities of language and syntax?
Americans have long been the oddballs in the measurement world with our inability to accept the universal measurements like grams and meters, preferring instead our feet and inches and pounds. In fact, if someone tells me something in 3 centimeters, it won't mean much to me until they say it's just over an inch. You can tell me you ran 10 kilometers, but I won't really be impressed until I figure out that's just over 6 miles. We like our measuring units that we've grown to love even if we don't fully understand them (what's an acre, anyway?).
I'm rather fond of our measuring system, but I might be willing to add new units of measurement to that system, especially if they're anything like these that were posted on the Mental Floss blog. Now I can say, with pride, that I am roughly one smoot tall. That sounds so much cooler than 5'7".
The other day I stumbled across the Best of British website, which provides a rather large list of British slang words defined for us Americans who don't know how to speak British. Some of the funniest ones were blow me and blow off, but there are some other great entries. I have no idea how accurate it is, but it's great fun to go through.
The website reminds me of when Ellen Degeneres had Hugh Laurie on her show and held a contest of sorts to see who could understand more slang--Hugh gave Ellen examples of British slang, and she had to guess the words' meanings; Ellen gave Hugh examples of American slang, and he had to guess the words' meanings. You can see the video below, or you can go here and see it on YouTube.
So let's table ideas on slang words and waffle on about sweet fanny adams until we're zonked or until some bladdered tosser who's legging it brasses us off by interrupting our chin wag. It'll be awesome! (Anyone who's British can feel free to openly mock my inability to apply newly learned slang correctly.)
A poem has been floating around in cyberspace about the "Verbing of America" with examples of verbalized nouns. The point of the poem is to show how enigmatic our language is in selecting which nouns can be used as verbs, and if they are used as verbs, what their meaning will be. I highly suggest reading through the entire poem; an example stanza is below:
If when we change a noun to verb
To come up with our `verbing,'
Why can't I, when I'm using herbs,
Refer to it as herbing?
It is rather intriguing to think of what can or cannot be used as a verb. I can friend someone (i can even unfriend someone), but I don't think I can boyfriend or husband someone. I can Facebook someone, but I can't Twitter or MySpace someone. I can Google a word or topic, but I can't Yahoo or Bing anything. I can Netflix a movie, but I sure wouldn't Blockbuster a movie. I can DVR or Tivo a show, but I never VCRed anything when I recorded shows via a VHS tape (for that matter, I've never VHSed anything).
It's no wonder non-native English speakers get lost in our vocabulary. These examples (and so many more) show how arbitrary the process is in deciding which nouns can be functionally shifted to be used as verbs.
What other instances of verbed words can you think of?
I can't even say how happy the (nonstandard) interrobang makes me. Who knew punctuation could be so much fun‽
Punctuation is only peripheral to the study of linguistics--punctuation is really just a standard set of conventions for breaking up and marking written language. While punctuation may not be central to linguistic study, it is interesting to see how the conventions of punctuation change and to find possibilities for new punctuation marks.
For example, I'm not sure when the current love affair with exclamation points began, but I see more and more students thinking academic writing can be spiced up by an exclamation point or three and that question marks are frequently followed by exclamation points. I also like how things......... that have no need of ellipses........ receive more than their fair share!!!!! Punctuation appears to be one more way people are playing with trying to put more contextual (or perhaps perceptual?) meaning into written language.
I don't know if the interrobang will ever become standard, but it would be handy if it did. It makes the punctuation at the end of a surprising question much more efficient.
On the latest episode of Psych, the main characters (Shawn and Gus) have the misfortune of finding themselves in a Hangover situation--they wake up one morning and can't remember anything that happened the night before.
As
the episode unfolds (and as they figure out what happened the previous
night), Shawn and Gus start doing something that is quite linguistically
interesting. They talk about themselves in the third person and
differentiate between "last night X" and "today X", like in the
following examples:
Last night Gus had some serious game.
I just want to know what line last night Gus laid on her. I need last night Gus, Shawn.
Last night Shawn was all evolved and mature and not a commitment phobe. Today Shawn is very much a commitment phobe.
Last night Gus had it right.
Normally, when English speakers refer to something specific
about last night or yesterday or last week, we use the possessive, as in
last night’s game or last week’s show. In the examples above, though, the speakers do not use the typical X’s construction; instead, they use the bare NPs last night and today
to modify their names and to differentiate between the person they were
last night (i.e., the person they became while drugged) and the person
they are normally (i.e., the person they are back to being today). In
all of the examples above, the speaker is referring to himself;
therefore, Gus is speaking about himself when he uses the phrase last night Gus and Shawn is speaking about himself when he uses the phrases last night Shawn and today Shawn.
It is more typical to find utterances like these with a first-person pronoun, like in the future me will be happier or the old me was uptight. But it somehow makes it funnier that they use the third person to refer to themselves instead of using last night me or today me
in these utterances. Even not considering the pronoun versus third
person referent, it’s interesting that they use a specific date for the
construction, since this construction is normally found with a more
general time frame like the future you or the young me. We normally don’t attach specifics like last night and today. Then again, in this situation, it’s appropriate to attach specifics since last night Gus is not another way of saying the old Gus--Gus
recognizes that he doesn’t typically “have game.” The only version of
himself that has game is the one who was drugged the night before.
Juliet, another character, does use a first person pronoun when
referring to another version of herself and Shawn in the future:
I don't want the future us to be dictated by something that last night Shawn said.
She is the only person to use the phrases last night Shawn and today Shawn
other than Shawn himself. There is a difference in meaning by what she
says here than what she would have been saying had she said, “by
something you said last night.” She is recognizing that last night Shawn
is not who Shawn normally is; if she had used “you said last night”
instead, she would have been implying that who Shawn was last night is
the same person he is today. In most cases, that would be a perfectly
normal assumption; in very few cases do we change personalities
overnight. It’s all very metalinguistic.
In another instance, Shawn uses you in another interesting way when he tells Lassiter (another character) to:
take a swim in lake you.
This example differs from the ones above because it draws a parallel between names like Lake Erie or Lake Watonga
and replaces the end with a pronoun to refer to the metaphorical "lake
of Lassiter-ness." I can't think of many more examples like this--if you
can, please let me know.
And the following is a fun, yet unrelated, example:
...only younger and cuter and less murderer-y.
Shawn uses the above phrase to describe how a girl who grows up to be a murderer looks in an old picture.
Along with Modern Family, Psych is one of my favorite shows for language play--many episodes have Shawn making new words like murderery and shenanigan for the viewers’ entertainment.
I came across this video on Ted the other day, which I label a sort of "I have a lexicographical dream" speech:
Do I even need to say how much I adore Erin McKean after watching it? Students who've taken any of my classes know that my dream job is that of a lexicographer, and she made the job sound even more amazing than I already thought it was. She has an interesting question that doesn't quite get answered (nor could it in only 15 minutes) about what the dictionary should be in terms of format and usefulness. It sounds like she leans more towards a corpus format with the ability to search for a particular word and see examples of its uses in actual written or spoken language data. However, it would need to be more than that because dictionary users would still need a sort of summary to provide the overall theme of data examples, most common definitions, and usage notes for the words. There must be a better way to make the dictionary so it can be more useful, but, wow, that's a daunting task to compile examples, usage notes, pronunciation, and more, especially if you're trying to do that for every word in the English language.
I've seen several online and electronic dictionaries that are trying to become more than just a paper dictionary on screen, such as Wordnik, but I haven't seen one that does it all. Earlier I wrote a post about dictionary and word apps for the iPhone/iPad, and I still use all those apps because not a single one has everything I want. Each one has at least one unique feature that makes it so I have nine apps and three bookmarks for online dictionaries on my iPhone. Have you found any one website or app that is your one go-to source for your electronic dictionary needs?
On Wednesday, the Language Log had a post called "Dejobbed, bewifed, and much childrenised" that I absolutely adored. It was based on a post they had seen in the Letters of Note website--a website I hadn't heard of before reading that post.
This morning I finally had some downtime to go check out Letters of Note, and I am fascinated by what's there. The website collects and posts personal letters (from what I've seen, all written in English) that are "correspondence deserving of a wider audience." I have tried and deleted several of my attempts to describe the types of letters on the website; I'll settle for saying that the letters are too diverse to categorize and are incredibly interesting to go through. The "Dejobbed, bewifed, and much childrenised" letter is worth the perusal alone, but you should also check out "My belly is too much swelling with jackfruit" and "It's more likely that I was doing 911km/h" if you're in the mood for a light pick-me-up. Then again, if you'd like something more serious, there are letters that are sad, sweet, nostalgic, and uplifting.
I think the website (and eventual book) is a beautiful nod to the dying breed of handwritten personal letters, and it's making me want to go grab some stationery and start writing some of my own Letters of Note.
I had to read that several times before my brain made sense of it.
I don't normally think of newspaper headings as garden path sentences, but I think this might qualify as one--the problem for me is the "4 hours" bit. If it had come after "in the bank vault", some weirdness could have been avoided: "crying toddler in shut bank vault 4 hours". That kind of sounds better, but it leaves me wondering what advantage that has over putting in the preposition 'for' in front of "4 hours". And was the 'crying' necessary? Why not cut out 'crying' in favor of words that would help in understanding the heading? After all, I can't imagine a toddler being stuck in a vault for 4 hours without some crying involved.
In reading the article, though, some of the sentences inside the article were also a bit, uh, interesting in their structures:
Authorities say police and firefighters couldn't free the toddler and feverishly summoned the locksmith after the child apparently strayed into the open vault as the bank was closing Friday — before an employee shut the vault door for the day.
My issue is with the "after the child apparently strayed into the open vault as the bank was closing Friday" clause--it comes in an odd place to logically follow the flow of the story. If police and firefighters summed a locksmith, then it would have to be after the child had already gotten stuck in the vault. My thought is that the story would have been more clear if the bit about how the toddler got stuck in the vault in the first place had been placed before the police and firefighters summoning a locksmith.
Here's the real question: Am I just being picky? Or do other readers find the piece a bit jilted because it jumps back and forth in the telling?
I have mentioned the linguistic genius of the writers of Modern Family before. Well, they've done it again with creative blending.
In this week's episode, Phil couldn't figure out why Claire (his wife) is upset with him. So as she leaves the house, he shouts, "Happy Valenbirthiversary!"
Last year, several of my HEL students fell in love with the letter thorn (þ) and wanted to reinstate it in our modern English alphabet. They must not be alone because Michael Everson has recently started a blog: þorn.info.
I dare you to not love (or at least appreciate) a blog whose first post starts with these words:
For many years I have been a devotee of the noble letter þorn and its history. This blog will celebrate the letter þorn and will, from time to time, be updated with þorny þings of interest.
I must say, it's quite refreshing to know I'm not alone in feeling outright joy for (or 'obsession with'?) language. And now I have to figure out how many ways I can insert 'þorny þings' into my lexicon.
As some words are vanishing (or being banished or being threatened to be banished), new words are being created to fill their void. Some are more useful (and meaningful) than others, but all are welcome to the English language. Or are they?
Below is an apology written by Ricky Romance after threatening to shoot Chris Brown:
I would like to extend my most sincere apologies to the elderly and youth of our nation for my sudden acrasial message of violence towards other individuals of unimportance.
I must eclaircise any misunderstandings that I am a Man of irrational aggression and behavior.
In no way am I attempting to justify my actions towards persons of high immaturity levels and hypocritical methods of "becoming a better person," I was wrong.
My unexpected reaction to fallaciloquences embellished with deceitful humgruffin cover-ups and unnecessary remarks towards my younger brother enraged me.
I couldn't seem to fathom how a immature nanocephalous adult raglan tailored ex-batman and a jean maillot wearing macrotus, labrose, kazachoc like dancing, woman beater callent could make such comments and pass judgment to an abuse victim.
At the moment I was infuriated. Please let my actions be as a lesson as what not to do. You must vastate yourself to aggression and search for other solutions before reacting.
Threatening closet coward human beings only leads their tearful plea for restraining orders, desperate cries for help from "affiliating gang bangers", and countless whiney excuses -I.E. "she hit me first!!" to the media and courts, which could possibly result unwanted circumstances.
As for the once semi high powered homosexual perverts, molesters and child rapists of the Industry, I vaticinate justice will be brought to you on Judgment Day.
I leave this to God though. Please except my apology, obviously knowing the message can always be heard if ears are around . Thank you.
- Ricky Romance
The letter is reprinted on the SPOGG Blog, which is where I first read about it. My mind is still reeling as I try to figure out all the words perniciously thrown around. In fact, all I can think right now is, "Is he for real?" Oh, that and, "It's accept, not except!"
Daryl Cagle collects political cartoons from various sources and has created a list of comic strips in response to the "cleaning up" of the words in Huck Finn; you can find the cartoons here. There are quite a few in the list, and several had me snorting at my computer screen.
Anyone who has had a linguistics course with me knows that I strongly feel that we associate negative connotations with words and that the words themselves cannot be "good" or "bad." They are words. The "good" and "bad" comes in how we use them. I find it disheartening that instead of using books like Huck Finn that were written in a different era with different ideals to prompt discussions on language change, our nation is sweeping its verbal history under the rug and telling the public that some words are, indeed, bad. In fact, they are so bad that readers should not have to find such words in their books. *sigh*
What was your reaction to the changing of the words?
Lake Superior State University came up with a list of words they would like to see banished in 2011; examples include viral, epic, and a-ha moment. You can find the whole list here.
What do you think? Should certain words be banished? Or do you think the arguments against these words are only for particular uses of the words and not against the words themselves?
More importantly, are there any words you think they left off their list? I'm just sayin'...
In an attempt to keep English words from going extinct, Oxford Dictionaries is sponsoring a website where you can adopt an endangered English word; by adopting a word, you are promising to use the word in your speech and writing.
Screenshot from Save the Words website
I am having fun exploring the website--not just because it is really well made and fun to look at, but also because it is full of fabulous words. On the website, you can find words as diverse as starrify,radicarian, and antipelargy, none of which are recognized by spellcheck.
I hope you have fun exploring the website--let me know in the comments if you adopt a word (and which one you chose to adopt). I am now the proud adoptive parent of nepheliad, which is a cloud-nymph. So when I start lecturing about nepheliads next week in class, you'll know why.
Thanks to a student, I am sharing a video with you that I've now watched several times and laughed every one of them. The humor is based on misparsing words in a song--when you hear a string of sounds, you may hear something different than what was originally said. For instance, many kids grow up thinking the "Star Spangled Banner" starts out with "Jose, can you see?", and I was convinced that a donzerly was a type of light because of that song. Another famous mistaken lyric is in Creedence Clearwater Revival's song "Bad Moon on the Rise"; many people think the chorus is saying "there's a bathroom on the right." While misparsings often lead to humorous results, I don't think I've ever seen one as humorous as this.
Challenge yourself to see if you can--without looking at the lyrics to the song--figure out what English words the singer is trying to sing. Can you tell where she is misparsing the words to create nonsense words?
I was reading Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh the other day, and I came across a sentence that stopped me in the middle of my reading because it felt wrong as I read it:
Ole Golly, Harriet could tell, was deliberately making her face bright and cheery because she didn't want Harriet to ask her what the matter was. (p. 108)
(Ole Golly is the name of a character.) Everything in the sentence was fine for me until I hit the ending: "she didn't want Harriet to ask her what the matter was." On the surface, the sentence follows all the grammatical sequence of words in English nominal clauses that begin with an interrogative pronoun:
She didn't want Harriet to ask her...
what the movie was.
where the cat was.
how the book ended.
who the intruder kidnapped.
The typical word order for these is INTERROGATIVE PRONOUN - NOUN PHRASE (subject) - VERB. The original sentence followed that word order:
what (IntPro) the matter (NP) was (V)
So why does the sentence sound awkward to me?
It sounds awkward because of the noun phrase in the construction: the matter. It is part of an idiomized question we often use in English: What is the matter? And yet, I think it's awkward (if not ungrammatical) to use the matter in that idiom reading in a sentence: *The matter was that she left early.
So while it is entirely grammatical to say she didn't want Harriet to ask her what the matter was, it takes longer for my brain to process the sentence because it apparently doesn't like having the idiomatic the matter appearing before the verb. In a language that relies so heavily on word order, something so small as having what the matter was instead of what was the matter can make a sentence sound downright awkward.
We recently bought the first season of Modern Family on DVD, and as we're watching (and in some cases re-watching) the episodes, I am once again reminded why I labeled it a "treasure trove of linguistic anomalies."
In the episode "Moon Landing," Phil (one of the primary characters, who is a real estate agent) is driving by a bench that has a billboard for his realtor services; the billboard, quite naturally, has a large picture of his face. Someone had defaced his picture by giving him a mustache with a black marker, which prompted Phil to say:
I take it seriously when someone Tom Sellecks my bus bench.
I've written posts about our ability to use people's names in English to signify so much more than that person ("my Ludlums", "to pull a X"); this usage is different because it not only signifies a physical quality of Tom Selleck (his mustache) but also is coerced into being a verb meaning, in this case, "to draw a fake mustache on a picture."
The usage of a person's name as a verb reminded me of one of my favorite examples of a quoting verb, which I found in Anybody Out There? by Marian Keyes:
"Siddown," she Don Corleoned. (page 321)
In this case, the name Don Corleone represents characteristics associated with Don Corleone (specifically how he speaks and takes command of a situation) and is coerced into a verbal meaning of "to say in a manner worthy of Don Corleone."
Off the top of my head, these are the only examples I could come up with of a person's name being used as a verb. Can you think of any others?
This blog is dedicated to the linguistics program and its students at Stephen F. Austin State University; however, all followers are welcome. SFALingBlog is the place for finding updated information about the SFA linguistics program, current linguistics headlines in general, and helpful links to linguistics resources.
