A little google update

So, I wonder every now and again how we'll get past the issue of using to google as a generic.

Google monkey is just a great term -- the gopher of the modern-day office, where fetching coffee has been replaced by tracking down info on the internet. In some sense, it sounds like a step forward, since it requires more skill and is more engaging than running mindless errands. And you doubtless know about google bombs (or google bombing).

Maybe these are harder to make into legal issues? I mean, google monkey is virtually a direct advertisement and the company is more or less a victim in the case of google bombs (since they aim to manipulate the rankings of 'normal' usage.)

Of course, George W. Bush, already known for his use of the internets, announced on TV recently that he uses the google (video here). Maybe he's just trying to dodge legal problems if he's using ask.com or dogpile or something?

Uberpower

I was pretty surprised to learn the other day that Josef Joffe's new book on America is called Uberpower: The imperial temptation of America. Joffe is a leading public intellectual in Germany and Europe -- his work for Die Zeit alone cements that, I suppose -- in a sense in which we don't really have leading intellectuals. I can only imagine that the book, which I probably won't get around to reading, is a serious and sober assessment, and from the sketches I've read, it sounds like he's probably right about a ton of stuff.

What's striking is the use of uber in the title, of course: The German prefix über is wildly productive and Übermacht [over+power] 'superiority, superior strength' is bound to be in any reasonably good German dictionary. And uber has been famously loaned into English, according to some originally from the Dead Kennedy's very fine "California über alles".

What's jarring here is that the American term is more or less exclusively youth language, emphatically informal. It's a tad too much like Kant having written a book called Yo, Critique of Pure Reason, Man. In German, Power (feminine, like essentially all German nouns meaning 'power') is an established loanword (with some difference in meaning), and Überpower shows up on various German websites, including ueberpower.de, an automative performance parts dealer.

In fact, the German translation (it looks like he wrote it into English, then had it translated into German, but that's a guess), is called Hypermacht. A review by Friedrich Mielke in the Süddeutsche Zeitung has high praise for the book, but says:

Die Titel der englischen und deutschen Ausgabe sind unglücklich gewählt. Das Wort „Überpower” gibt es im Englischen nicht. Und „Denglish” oder „Germlish” passt nicht zu Joffe. (rough and dirty translation: The titles of the English and German editions are ill-chosen. Uberpower doesn't exist in English. And Germlish isn't Joffe's style.)

The point is hardly about language mixing -- uber and power are both securely established morphemes in both languages by now -- but at the least about what Germans call Stilbruch, 'stylistic incongruity' and ultimately about accuracy of meaning.

Wisconsin grocery store clerk held in NFL stadium threats

Yah, so, wanna beg for that?

Scandal names: Wishing the gate was closed

I keep waiting and hoping for -gate to lose its punch ... sure we heard Plamegate a lot, but when Libby got indicted, it was (beginning to look a lot like) Fitzmas. And there have been various other clever scandal names. So, when the Foley thing broke, I was hoping for something better than Foleygate, but that gets over over a million g-hits already. Wonkette's brilliant Cocktober Surprise hasn't broken into the headlines for obvious reasons, but surely there's some creativity left out there. Mastergate (I think Jon Stewart uses it and I know Stephanie Miller does) keeps the gate, but at least goes beyond the name + gate pattern that I've grown so tired of.

I was inspired to ponder this after seeing the lamest possible option in something about current polling on congress races, where the journalist used Foley's folly. My initial reaction was that this was parallel to Tony Snow's comments about 'naughty e-mails', but then Merriam-Webster does give this second definition of folly: "criminally or tragically foolish actions or conduct". There's also the obsolete related meaning "lewd behavior".

Update Oct. 17: Forgot to list Stephanie Miller's "Cage aux Foley".

The Verb family

When you create a blog on blogger.com (previously blogspot.com), you have a 'profile' you can fill out, of course, including one for your 'interests'. Like most people, I have an interest in my kin, close and not so close, so I listed 'verbs' in that slot, along with a set of other things (nouns, some adjectives, etc.). Turns out, a whole set of bloggers on blogger.com list 'verbs' ... there's a network of us out there! Who knew.

Safire update

... in which the protagonist shows us how not to admit to a mistake. Safire writes: "Only last month, in a fit of lexical triumphalism, I gleefully claimed to have minted e-maestrom to mean "a storm of e-mails" — only to be brought low by the Gotcha! Gang's pajama-top patrol citing five previous usages and going nyah-nyah."

It's good that Safire realizes that his columns are about 'fits' and characterized by 'triumphalism' — although he doesn't acknowledge how seldom they get above or beyond that level. But five previous usages? In my September 3 post on the topic, I reported ca. 1,450 g-hits, including on-line dictionaries which reflect usage and don't to my knowledge coin things themselves. (Google now yields about 1,760, including of course this blog.)

And going nyah-nyah? The point, William Safire, is that people need to get things right. We all make mistakes, but this was simply irresponsible. It took me a few seconds to show that you were wrong. I simply do not understand how someone who is so ignorant of his subject and who so often fails to check basic facts continues to write about language for one of the highest profile outlets in the English-speaking world.

Just for the record, and to reassure the handful of people who know my real-world identity, I don't own any pajama tops and blog fully clothed.

Zero past tense verbs in -st?

A regular reader of this blog at the University of Wisconsin, one of the Wisconsin Englishes Project folks, passed along this chunk of an email from a student (with the student's permission, and shortened here):

I have had several people tell me that I say "taste" for the past tense of "to taste." So if someone asked me "How was breakfast this morning?" I might reply, "It taste really good." Today I noticed, for the first time, that I did the exact same thing with "to last." I said a sentence like, "It last about thirty minutes."

Some thoughts about what is going on:

1) On analogy to verbs ending in a "t" such as hit, shit, pet, let, I am simply using the infinitive form for present, past and participle.
2) I am losing the schwa part of the -ed past tense marker, and the cluster reduces to "taste."
3) Everyone in my dialect says this? I don't think I would even blink an eye if a professor said "it taste really good." Maybe I have been hearing this my whole life?

Now, the person who passed this on mentioned that he talked about the point briefly before class started and that other Wisconsin speakers reported that it didn't sound odd at all. I've asked a couple of folks from there who say it sounds pretty weird to them. So, (3) is probably right -- it's a dialect feature, albeit probably a variable one. (1) might play some role in promoting this -- though the past tense of to pet is petted .... beautiful evidence that this speaker truly has these zero past tense forms!), and on (2) the cluster reduction thing probably plays a role too, at least in getting this going, but it's apparently not limited to -st+ed forms, given that he treats to pet the way he does.

One interesting angle here is that for many dialects of English, coda cluster reduction appears less frequently when the cluster is carrying morphological information. So, I think Labov, Wolfram and others have reported that final clusters are more often simplified when they are monomorphemic (like find) rather than bimorphemic (like killed). The process for this speaker clearly doesn't show that kind of morphological sensitivity.

But we get more: this person and presumably others seem to have a verb system where at least some t/d-final verbs (pet) have moved into the class of verbs like not only hit, set, let, but also a set with -st: burst, cast, thrust. (I'd say thrusted, but I think thrust is the standard past form.) But note that this class appears to be expanding in the standard too: broadcast, telecast and forecast, narrowcast, simulcast and I assume to podcast. For these verbs the past is reported to vary between Ø and -ed. I would have figured that such new forms would inevitably be 'regular' (i.e., with -ed), like Marcus et al. argued in their classic 1995 piece in Cognitive Psychology – the way that we get flied out to center field, saber-tooths, Toronto Maple Leafs, etc. Looking back now at that article, though, I don't see that they particularly predict that new derivations in -cast would become regular. If that's right, it's really cool: This little opening for new (and pretty high-frequency) -st verbs with zero past forms might prime the pump for this extension of the pattern.

I know this little blog doesn't have many readers (yet?), but does anybody know more about this? Regional patterns in the Upper Midwest or elsewhere with this particular pattern of reduction? Ideas for how this fits into the bigger picture of English verb inflection?

Phonetics in the news, but ...

I've been wondering about the new claims about Neil Armstrong having had an 'a' in his famous moon statement ("step for A man"), with recent confirmation by acoustic analysis. Leave it to Language Log to provide the goods ... in the form of pretty decent quality spectrograms of the recording in question. Mark Liberman is surely right that there's no schwa visible or audible in there (besides, who is Mr. Verb to contest such a point), although I can still easily imagine that Armstrong was producing a very reduced form, even if we can't see it on the screen.

Mis-mocking dialects: Denny Hastert

Was just poking around, looking through various political blogs, mostly ones I hadn't ever looked at, and discovered that the blog DCeiver has the same Blogspot/Blogger layout template as this blog. (Limited choices ... somebody had to!) It's pretty, hmmmm, earthy political commentary, mostly about the Foley scandal at the moment. Check out this snippet:

What did Hastert know and when did he know about it? Specifically, did he know enough about Foley's proclivities to be able to say, "Ergh. Foley's talking. ... Will I have time to run and get a cruller? Damn. I love me some crullers."

Now, mocking Denny Hastert's dialect is a fine sport -- Jim Ward, "Voice Guy Extraordinaire" on the Stephanie Miller Show, does a pretty good Hastert with a big Chicago-area accent: He gets big raising of [æ] before nasals and fronting of the back low vowel (especially in the constantly repeated 'oh god!'), although it's not very distinct from his James Sensenbrenner imitation.

But DCeiver -- who's perhaps never been to the Midwest? -- blows it big-time here. Cruller as a kind of doughnut seems likely to be intended to give some regional flavor but it's not a particularly good dialect feature: according to the Dictionary of American Regional English, it can be found esp. in the northeast, but covers most of the country, including lots of the Upper Midwest. But only a few dots are there in Illinois, and just one lonely one in the greater Chicago area. The word DCeiver wanted here was bismark -- named after a Chicago hotel (if memory serves) and really characteristic of the region.

And on that reflexive ... "I love me some X" has spread like wildfire (most likely connected to Toni Braxton hit "I love me some him"), but it's really hard to imagine Hastert using it, though a southerner of his age might well.

Come on, folks ... let's do a better job of mocking morally bankrupt politicians!

The illogic of "English: The vanishing language"

The current wave of anti-immigrant hatred is filled with images of violent threats to our society -- Pat Buchanan's State of Emergency argues literally that Spanish-speaking immigrants are out to "conquer" large parts of the US. Of course the 'threat' to English in the US plays a central role in this. Michael Reagan not long ago published a piece in Human Events railing about this threat to English, with the title given in the subject line. (I cannot bring myself to link to that journal, but you can find it easily enough.)

Let's leave aside the truly bizarre conclusion Reagan reaches, that "the English language is on its death bed", due to immigrants and their "enablers", and leave aside his propagandistic use of language ("hordes" who "chatter" in their languages, and so on). And when he writes about the "age-old custom of immigrants to our shores who made it one of their first priorities to learn to speak English and to teach their offspring to do likewise", he could be ignorant of the broad and consistent patterns of evidence showing that earlier immigrants learned English much slower than today's -- in the Upper Midwest, some third generation Germans remained German monolingual; are there today many young people in this country whose grandparents came from Mexico who can't speak English?

But only someone who is consciously engaging in misleading people would draw his many alarming conclusions from raw numbers of immigrants (why should we be alarmed that one in five people in the DC area is an immigrant?) and of people who use a language other than English at home. He leaps from Census numbers on this to declare that people "refuse" to learn English, feel that they don't need to, and "don't intend to". Nothing in the numbers he cites could possibly provide evidence on those points.