Our first QueryGoogle results

So, to try out QueryGoogle, I ran this morning's relevant data on the Stans: Safire's Trashcanistan against Dumbfuckistan and then the generic (and possibly ambiguous, certainly) the Stans. The results are striking:

dumbfuckistan 9160
trashcanistan 2330
the stans 1280000

The Stans are, it seems, a very well-established phrase in English, even assuming lots of these hits mean something else as looks to be the case. You could probably still get a chuckle at a party tonight with a bunch of rubes (if that's where you're headed) by using Dumbfuckistan, but it looks like people know it pretty.

QueryGoogle is a step longer than a raw google search, since you have to create a text file to run, and the numbers don't differ from a 'raw' count of g-hits, but you get all the data in one fell swoop. I've done a number of searches where this would have saved real time. Good work, UCLA people.

QueryGoogle

Just learned from the good folks over at Phonoloblog (in a post by Kie Zuraw) about QueryGoogle, developed by Tim Ma and Bruce Hayes "to permit the linguist to obtain the corpus frequencies of a chosen set of items from the World Wide Web, using the well-known Google search engine. The linguist prepares a list of forms for which (s)he wants to know the frequencies, and the program rapidly queries Google, obtaining the frequencies of each form."

Haven't played with it yet, but looks promising.

Safire, bubble boy, on the Year of the Stans

Safire's still in fact-free mode, so there's not too much to report. He dwells on the use of surge with regard to troop increases in Iraq (yawn -- subscribe to ads-l if you want better treatment of that and every other topic he touches on), and along the way, Safire gives his stamp of approval to Bush's grammar when Bush promised …

to report back to you as to whether or not I support a surge or not.

Maybe that's not ungrammatical, from prescriptivist or other perspectives, but I suspect Barbara Wallraff would agree with me that it's not a well-crafted piece of prose. The endorsement was probably Safire's effort at payback for the Big Award from Bush. (But you ain't got no Loggy, now do you, big fellow?)

The column is titled "Year of the Stans" and almost half the column is devoted to this 'neologistic suffix', apparently his way of saying 'productive'. (Reminder, Bill: linguists have worked out pretty good ways of talking about language structure -- just ask one of them instead of making stuff up. LINGUIST has Ask a Linguist, where you can get help. Just please get help.) He gives examples like Trashcanistan, but for several obvious reasons has to skip the far more sharp-edged Dumbfuckistan, a label for the parts of the US that voted for Bush last time around. That term gets almost 1,000 g-hits at this point; see here for a map.

The interesting point is less that it's productive (how many productive suffixes does English have?), than that it's pretty fully degrammaticalized: A common placename element has not only been sliced off to form a productive suffix but also an independent word, one which Safire accepts. (I'm speaking from the synchronic point of view of English -- the suffix has a clear Indo-European history, *steH2- 'place', meaning 'country' in the examples at hand. It shows up in enough place names that people basically recapitulate the history and break it off into a word again.)

But Bubble Bill is a few years behind in several respects. Crucially, this has hardly been the Year of the Stans. They got a lot of attention with the break-up of the Soviet Union, and I recall the term being used then. But he also dates the free lexeme (that basically means 'word', Bill) only back to 1982 (taking the suffix back to the 1940s). The OED Online has it from 1932 (Times 7 Sept. 13/6: When all the land in the Stans is collectivized in cotton plantations, say the Soviet governors, then the wheat, meat and vegetables are to come over from the Ukraine, Siberia, and the Caucasus. ). Even the Onion ran a piece a few years on the Stans, though I can't find it on their website.

Why be so intellectually isolated, Bill? Get out a little -- talk to some linguists, read a little more broadly, even check the OED Online, google a little more energetically. It'd be good for you.

The skinny on Sconnie

After Troy's comment today on the early 'Sconnie' post, I leaned on my operative to deliver the goods on his research. (What do you profs do when you're not teaching anyhow?) Here, at last, is the result:

Mr. Verb,
I have to first thank you for the privilege of being the first guest to post on this blog.

You asked me to investigate the use and history of sconnie with a variety of folks. As I think you’ve said (here or elsewhere), it looks like we might be catching the key moments in the history of this word: It’s gone from unknown to heavily commercialized in a few years. The comments below are informal and surely lacking on various counts – maybe they will inspire more discussion of the topic here or elsewhere.

I’ve gotten feedback from over a dozen natives of Wisconsin, from the whole state (Milwaukee area to Madison, Green Bay to Eau Claire to Rice Lake and beyond), and covering a good range demographically except for race (all white, but they who grew up upper middle class to working class, in cities, suburbs, rural areas, etc.), and ranging in age from 20s to 50s. In addition to good upstanding citizens, I talked to a couple of folklorists and lexicographers from here.

Basic meaning. The recent stuff has been about this as a label for people from here, but several people report it (and some google hits show it) used for the place, so ‘I’m a Sconnie’ and ‘I’m from Sconnie’ both seem to be widespread.

Usage. Many people don’t report using it at all, but everyone knows it, and all knew it before Sconnie Nation, I think. It sounds like it was tied to college life for many. A surprising number of folks say that they’ve heard it when they were out of state – in the west mostly – among college students, typically from here originally.

Almost all see it as a clearly positive term, but see below, and none of my unscientific sample has any really negative reaction to it – unlike your commenter. People mostly seem to regard it as preferable to cheesehead, which sounds ‘goofy’ to some, for unsurprising reasons. (I still wear my ‘Cheesehead by Marriage’ t-shirt with pride.) A number of people noted the commercialization issue, with a wide range of attitudes toward that. Beyond the ale and the clothing, someone from Madison’s East Side reports that Glass Nickel Pizza there now has a “Sconnie Pizza”, containing bratwurst, mustard, cheddar cheese and sauerkraut. As my correspondent said “I think I'll pass...”. (I can’t find it on their on-line menu.)

Luanne von Schneidemesser from the Dictionary of American Regional English has some great quotes from student papers and such, again tending to be positive, of the “I’m pure Sconnie, born and bred” type. I’d be happy to follow up on the topic when I get the hard copies of stuff she’s sending.

History. Nobody seems to report knowing or hearing it more than a few years back. A couple of folks (northern Wisconsin and Madison) report using Wisco before that, again for the place and people. A local watering hole (often described as a ‘biker bar’ – though I’ve been there and hardly consider it a particularly rough joint, but then I'm from down South) was apparently known in some circles as the Wisco Disco in the 80s. The term was commercialized first, as far as I can tell, with Sconnie Ale a few years back, but Sconnie Nation not only owns the rights to the name, but has gotten the term a much higher profile.

Insider/outsider. As you noted earlier, terms for any social group often show great differences in meaning/affect depending on whether they’re used by insiders or outsiders, so I asked about this.

Again, a lot of insiders don’t use the term but for those who do, Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures associate director Ruth Olson, folklorist originally from northern ‘Wisco’ or ‘Wisco-land’, reports:

I mostly hear it from my college students, and they use it in a very positive, celebratory way.

Here’s a typical view on outsider usage, by someone from the suburbs west of Milwaukee who doesn’t use the term himself:

As far as I can tell, it is usually in situations where the 'wisconsin way' of doing something is 'cute' or 'silly'. So they would say "You 'Sconnies and your cheese curds" or "You 'Sconnies sure love Favre." I only hear it in this cutesy/teasing way, never in neutral situations (like "4 million 'Sconnies live in the state"), and usually not in really negative ways.

So, maybe there’s still some semantic settling going on here. (Did I learn that term/notion from you?).

Repeatedly, as in the newspaper article about Sconnie Nation, it’s contrasted with Coastie, which folks report as a negative term. I suspect it may be even as negative as Illie, ‘person from Illinois’ (= the Land of Flat). But I don’t find any hint anywhere of the truly negative meaning that is associated with Hoosier by non-Indianans, where it means ‘ignorant hick’ and the milder meanings listed in dictionaries (see the various news stories about the old Dan Quayle effort to get it redefined). And no need to comment on FIB, ‘effin’ Illinois bastard’, a term widespread here and one I heard in Indiana too.

By the way, I wonder if you shouldn’t consider making this into a group blog – give a few folks access to posting here. In the past, you’ve posted stuff others have passed along, me included, and this might make it a little easier. Mrs. Verb could have her own posts – I'd pay for a subscription to hear her views on some issues. What do you say, Mr. Verb?

This ends up looking more like a conference paper than a blog post, but that’s a risk you take when you ask an active academic this kind of favor!

–Joe
jsalmons@wisc.edu

Nyah-nyah

When I started this little blog, I didn't anticipate many readers and certainly didn't expect comments. Now, comments are trickling in pretty steadily and it occurred to me to look back through old posts for comments. Struck gold here, with Anonymous bemoaning the status of the palatal nasal in English. For non-linguists, that's the sound at the beginning of both syllables of nyah-nyah, at least for many speakers of English. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, it's [ɲ] and it's found in tons of languages, for example Romance ones like French (agneau 'lamb') or Spanish words with ñ, and Slavic ones like Czech (něco 'something'). In English, as the commenter notes, it's found in words like onion, and a common way to explain how to produce it is trying to combine an n sound and a y sound. (The commenter clearly pronounces it with tongue firmly in cheek.)

Its occurrence in nyah-nyah prompts this question:

how many g-hits one needs for nyah-nyah to be listed in the IPA as a legitimate phoneme of American English

Well, first off, I see ca. 224,000 g-hits for that one. That's a ton. And let's leave aside the fact that lots of people don't buy that even the hallowed velar nasal – [ŋ], as in sing and about a million other English words and forms – is a distinctive sound. (We get obvious contrasts in dam, dan, dang, but folks inclined toward abstract understandings of sounds argue that the last one is really a combination of [ng] where most of us delete the g after assimilating the n to its place of articulation.)

But here's the kicker: Some speakers – me among them – don't actually have the word nyah-nyah in speech. Just had to ask Mrs. Verb (not her real name) how to pronounce it, in fact, even though I quoted Safire using it without giving a thought to the question.

More generally, I'm always surprised at how little attention goes to the range of sounds we regularly produce in 'affective' vocabulary, discourse markers and other 'marginal' areas of the lexicon. Lots of people prenasalize bye [mbai] or produce OK [ŋkei]. (I'd superscript those nasals, but don't have time right now.) Cool has a pretty much back unrounded vowel in a certain use for a lot of people, dude a clearly front-rounded vowel in similar circumstances. We could vastly expand the phonemic inventory of English!

And I'll keep track of comments from now on ... may have to quit my job to get this thing rolling.

that/which

Barbara Wallraff's Word Court new column is dedicated to a reader's query about when to use that versus which, prompted by warning from Word's grammar checker. Her advice is interesting on a few counts, starting with the comments about how grossly unreliable that grammar checker is. (It's not good enough to be worth an undergrad paper figuring out what mistakes it's making, as far as I can tell.)

But she goes on to write that:

Because the rule can be tricky to apply, it's hard to fault people who choose not even to try. Well, if the rule doesn't come naturally to us native English-speaking people, asking a grammar checker to follow it is asking a lot.

Well, it's an artificial rule for lots of us -- without any real connection to how we learned to speak and write, certainly in the classic 'restrictive' versus 'non-restrictve' clause cases. She then tries to thread the real usage versus prescriptivist needle:

I hope you will keep making the distinction between "which" and "that" -- partly for the sake of paying attention to what you write and say, partly for the sake of your audience, and partly for the sake of the language itself.

We're all with her on the first point, and you could argue the second, but the third point could lead me to campaign for bringing back the dative case, maybe the instrumental.

The Verbing Man!

Benjamin Zimmer at Language Log has uncovered a fine piece of Verbal family history, an ancient piece of poetry. See his fine commentary here, but I just have to reproduce the poem itself:

The Verbing Man

"Oh, yes I Christmased," says the man,
Who skips from verb to noun;
I dined and turkeyed à la mode,
And curry sauced in town.

I restauranted everywhere,
I whiskyed, beered and aled;
Cigared I on Havanas rare,
And on Regalias galed.

I New Yeared, too, on viands rich
And I champagned myself;
Or Tomed and Jerryed — can't tell which,
Expenditured my pelf.

I resolutioned on that day,
As spirits throbbed my head;
But when the pangs next panged away,
I just cocktailed instead.

—Texas Siftings.
[reprinted in the Los Angeles Times, Feb. 3, 1887, p. 9]

Could easily be one of my ancestors, from the sound of it. Lots of stuff with a nice archaic ring to it too. (Sheesh, I guess I don't even use pelf much anymore come to think about it.)

Thank you, Benjamin Zimmer, oh thank you so very much, on behalf of all Verbs and Verbers everywhere. May you have an especially verby 2007.

Also, the Language Log crew has picked up on the story behind Jon Stewart's gerund comments, here, a topic recently treated in passing at the time in our little web log, here.

Verbily,
Mr. Verb

A Northern City Shift ...

Been meaning to report back on the CD "A Northern City Shift" by the band The Danger. Most readers of this blog know that there's believed to be a big change, called the Northern Cities Shift, in the pronuncation of vowels underway from Buffalo, New York, to about Madison, Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Englishes Project has lots of descriptions of it, but think about people saying can like it was spelled with an 'e' (Ken) and hockey like it was hackey.

These guys, from Chicago and Milwaukee, it looks like, should show it massively and I figured the album name might tie in to that somehow. Of course 'a shift' has lots of angles to it that make it work well here -- there's the industrial work angle, the movement from one place to another (working bands like this tend to be on the road a lot, especially regionally), and so on. An operative contacted them asking about the CD name, but never heard back. Now, if Stephen Colbert had contacted them ... .

Well, the CD is a nice piece of work and it'll be played around the Verb household pretty regularly. But there's little audible evidence here that these young folks show NCS (as it's often called). It's mostly that hip singing accent, though a few distinct regional traits show through. So there.

Hmmmm, maybe it's getting to be time for a little non-linguistic content, even non-Upper Midwest content ... Maybe a little favorite CDs of 2006 retrospective? I'm listening to Yo la tengo's new one, "I am not afraid of you and I will kick your ass", and it'd have to be in there ... Stay tuned.

That time of year

Well, the Solstice has come and gone, and Kwanzaa's not here yet. The gifts for the little Verbs are all wrapped and carefully hidden. (I won't give anything away, but let's just say that somebody special is getting a new dental preterit to replace a worn-out ablaut pattern and we've all had our eye on a new prefix.) You know what that means ...

Word of the Year time! The mania has started. Let's cross Safire off the 'naughty and nice' list first, with today's column:

By far the hottest word of 2006: the noun realism, with its brother noun, realist, as a label for its practitioners.

You already know, if that was my game, I'd have a lump of coal for him. There's no factual or scientific outrage here -- it's pure opinion. But even if you survive the lexical category labeling (These are nouns!?!?!? Whoa, get me Chomsky on the phone, quick.), it's just lame ... a flimsy language-related hook for a ramble through policy labels and images.

The NYT's Week in Review has a big piece on "A Buzz Saw of Buzzwords: In 2006, language cut deeply ...". Both they and NPR's Weekend Edition bizarrely declare decider to be a new noun. You guessed it: OED Online has it from 1592 in the same meaning -- just used about Irish bishops rather than the self-declared one of our day. Grant Barrett has a "Glossary" column inside, a sidebar to a page of buzzwords. Nothing in there moves me to speak of. ("Fox lips" for overly made up lips, based on female anchors on the Fox network may be the best of the lot.)

When we think about the topic, fans of the Colbert Report (me included) tend to focus on last year's truthiness, but it's worth noting that some other recent choices have more day-to-day punch in our lives -- like Oxford's 2005 choice of podcast (thus the image above). Wikiality is under discussion, but that's too much like Time's Person of the Year decision, a dead horse I've already beaten too long.

What does move me is the knowledge that in less than two weeks, I'll be at the American Dialect Society meeting (in Anaheim, of all places -- long story) where the real Word of the Year will be decided. Nominations are open!

So, folks, especially fellow members of the Colbert Nation, how should I vote at the ADS?

You (pl), update

In a recent post, I noted that Stephen Colbert had joked about the ambiguity of Time magazine's decision to make you their Person of the Year. Now, Dennis Baron of the Web of Language has a fairly detailed post on second person plural pronouns in American English, including a little historical and comparative background, here.

What's hilarious is that he links to a blogger who berates Time for Colbert's point, apparently not tongue in cheek:

I am doubtful that such a subtle distinction of grammar held very much interest for the editors of that september publication.

It seems far more likely that they simply "copped out" and decided that, like the Democratic Party, they would refuse to be held accountable for having any particular position on any particular subject.

That seems highly unlikely to me, given the amount of hype that Time puts into this matter every year. Besides the points Baron makes, I hinted earlier that they could easily have made it People of the Year this time around. (Hey, it used to be Man of the Year.)

PS: If you read that full blog post, note the low quality of the argument -- pretty ironic for something posted on a site labeled "A sinister cabal of superior writers".

Update, Dec. 24, 10:16: What the heck does the adjective 'september' mean there? Doesn't appear in OED Online or other paper or online sources.

"Word Referees"

Today's NYT Arts (!) section has a piece by Andrew Adam Newman called "Wordsmiths: They also serve who only vote on 'ain't". (It's available free on-line.)

The piece covers the usage panel that the American Heritage Dictionary regularly surveys for input on usage, chaired by Geoff Nunberg and including a real range of folks, from a set of famous intellectuals and writers like Henry Louis Gates and Sherman Alexie, to folks like Anne Curzan, a very good linguist specializing in the history of English, to Word Court's Barbara Wallraff to sportswriter Frank Deford (a guy so literary in his style that it's hard to use that title for him) on down to a scumbag from the U.S. Supreme Court. Yes, I mean you, Scalia. If I can choke back the bile at the notion of Scalia being taken seriously beyond rightwing extremist circles and thwarting the will of the people in national elections, I think it's a good piece -- nice little window into the process.

They highlight three questions: How to pronounce 'niche', whether you'd use 'prioritize' and how you judge the sentence "Members of the League of Women Voters will be manning the registration desk." It's worth looking at the answers to all three in their graphic. But the first one is particularly interesting in a way. In an article published last year in the Journal of English Linguistics (edited by Anne Curzan, as it happens) called "Filling the Gap: English tense vowel plus final /š/" (33:3.207-221), Greg Iverson & Joe Salmons laid out the history of words like niche. These words are surprisingly restricted in number and they don't just come from French, but Arabic and other languages. The patterns of coinages in affective vocabulary (swoosh, etc.) are pretty striking. I&S note that tense vowel plus 'sh' retains a sense of "oddity or foreignness ... for some speakers". I think I normally say [nɪtš] unless I'm in Europe wearing a beret and smoking Galloises or something, which makes me one of those people. You might expect this panel to lean toward the French form, but only 30% did, while 28% went my way. In fact, the graphic includes toward comments calling 'neesh' "pretentious" and "affected". Their third option 'neetch' only worked for 2% and they left out a clearly viable form, [nɪš], which a lot of us surely use occasionally. My sense is that the usage panel's gives a pretty good result here.

PS: Note that this is a positive post about the treatment of language in the NYT ... beyond what's in Science Times.

Update, Dec. 24, 12:00: Geoff Nunberg, "Chair" of the panel, has an update here. Mostly minor clarifications.

The ups and downs of Sconnie ...

Noticed recently that there was a new comment on an old Sconnie post, here. I had sort of expected something like that earlier, given how insiders and outsiders view names for social groups.

I've got a Mr. Verb operative working on the case -- when you start a blog on blogger, you get a couple of part-time, quasi-official operatives thrown in the deal for free, like a start-up package for an academic superstar hire, more or less. Anyhow, he's gathering some data from a variety of natives of the state.

In the meantime, I'd be curious about how readers -- from Wisconsin and not from here -- view the term. (Seems like this is a blog that a fair number of people read but few ever post comments. Of course, that's fine, but I am curious ... .)

Stay tuned ...

Cheese

I don't mean to gloat about living in Wisconsin, but up here, we have whole blogs dedicated to cheese, or at least one of them, and lots of websites like this. I love this place.

Excrescent final t

Local community radio station is doing a whole set of holiday-themed 'don't drink and drive' tunes. (Yah hey, it's Wisconsin.) They just played Asleep at the Wheels' deeply moving "Christmas in Jail" and as they sang "I wished I was dead", I realized that the context didn't allow a past reading, and things like 'makes me wished I was dead' are thoroughly possible for many speakers. So, this is another one of those excrescent final -t cases, like once, twice, else, across which are realized [wʊnst], [twa:st], [ɛwst], [əkrawst], all from the Dictionary of American Regional English.

This is the counterpoint to a current discussion over on ads-l about use to and suppose to.

Verbs in the news ... What a day

Ben Stiller on the Daily Show, just asked Jon Stewart, "what's a gerund?'. Stewart responded with a nice degrammaticalization: 'It's an ing.'

But then, on to Colbert and the long-awaited Shred Off with the Decembrists. Guitarmageddon. And such. Hell, it's probably already on YouTube now.

Sometimes it's almost worth having a TV for something more than Packers games. Oh wait, we can't get freakin' key Packer games -- like tomorrow night's big game against the Vikings -- without some satellite pay-per-view crapola deal.

You (pl)

Surely Time magazine will suffer ongoing embarrassment for its stupid Person of the Year decision: You, of course. (Not me.) But Colbert again brings a little language angle to this deal: He started with a bit about how English lacks a sg-pl distinction in second person pronouns, so that he could have known that it wasn't him particularly who won, but all of us. (Well, everybody but me ... I really don't want to be PotY.) Of course, even a high class Charleston guy like Colbert surely grew up with y'all for the plural.

Something good in the press about language!

Chicago Tribune actually has a very nice list of books on language -- many by actual linguists -- published today and available here. I mean, here's a major newspaper praising works by the Language Log crew (of course) but also Sali Tagliamonte, John Algeo and Thomas Murray. Tagliamonte is one of the best socio-historical folks around and the other two are very solid dialectologists/sociolinguists, in case you don't know their stuff.

Now, I've got no problem with the cool words genre (ably represented, I'm sure, by Erin McKean's book in this list) and the general non-technical linguistics books (Crystal's in here, natch) are good to have around. But people without much background can appreciate a lot of what many linguists have to say ... .

Maybe I should cancel my sub to the NYT ... until they fire Safire.

*and since we've no place to go

... let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. I wish that was the local weather report, but it's been all but tropical here in Wisconsin of late. A few daring souls are still ice fishing and playing pond hockey on the shallow lakes that have a little ice, but almost all the lakes are, well, water.

Instead, the lyric provides what looks like an example of degrammaticalization. Grammaticalization is the process whereby words and forms take on more grammatical functions, like going to becoming a future tense form gonna. (Wikipedia has a reasonable summary here.)

Crucial to many views of how this process works is the claim that it's unidirectional -- things move only from less grammatical to more grammatical, like free word to clitic (words that reduce phonetically and lean on 'host' words, basically, like I am to I'm) to prefix or suffix, but never in the reverse direction. The literature on language change contains a growing set of counterexamples to this -- enough that unidirectionality is pretty much dead for a lot of us.

I wonder what the details of the history are, but it sure looks like the above sentence is another one: Main verb have could apparently once reduce and become a clitic in a lot of varieties of American English. Today, that sounds grossly ungrammatical to me and other speakers from various parts of the country.

Maybe we can all just get along (sometimes)

Barbara Wallraff's Word Court responds this week to a query about the (now firmly established) verb to text. The issue is the connection to text message, in part, as a redundancy. The query ends with this question and her answer begins this way:

Q: Who makes the rules for a new use of words?
A: We all, collectively, make the rules about new ways to use words.

Wallraff goes on to put this verb into the context of 'retronyms' where formerly unmarked words become (at least somewhat) marked through cultural change -- acoustic guitar after the rise of the electric guitar, etc. I applaud this piece of reasonable advice. Some eggnog for the Judge and drinks all around, put'em on the Verb account.

Interestingly, the last question she takes this week involves another topic of interest here in the Upper Midwest: Someone writes in saying that they're noticing to lose being pronounced like to loose, and loosing for losing. It's not quite clear to what extent this is written versus spoken usage, but Wallraff treats it as a spelling problem, comparing the voiced sibilant to booze, clues, twos:

It's obvious what the problem is, but anyone who can spell most of these other words ought to be able to get "lose" right.

I'd love to know where the query comes from. I've noticed this lose > loose thing too, and have wondered whether it might reflect more than a mere spelling problem: As Tom Purnell of the Wisconsin Englishes Project (along with a growing team around the state) has shown, Wisconsin English speakers do a fair bit of what looks like final devoicing, and similar patterns certainly exist well beyond this one state.

The pattern is famous for the Upper Midwest mostly from Saturday Night Live's old Da Bears (that phrase with an emphatically fortis [s] at the end, not a z sound). For the phonetically inclined, Tom and his folks have reported on this in a couple of recent articles in American Speech and the Journal of English Linguistics. Another member of that project, Joe Salmons, reports that he hears this especially often in certain regionally-marked words and constructions, like in the phrases let's have some beers and I'm going to cut my hairs. (Both instances of mass noun to count noun have been suggested to come ultimately from German and other immigrant languages. The latter is pretty salient and rare here, but lots of people regard the former as normal usage, as I guess do people from some other parts of the country.) That regional pronounciations would surface especially in such stereotypes is no surprise.

But if the WEP guys are finding patterns that sound and look acoustically like this in laboratory conditions, you gotta wonder how it'll make itself felt in regional grammar beyond the low-level phonetics. Two closely related verbs (yup, it always comes back around to the verbs, doesn't it?) might be a good place for the confusion to start spreading.

This has ramifications for the study of sound change: What Tom et al. are finding looks like utterly regular sound change as far as I can tell, yet we're getting it bubbling up to public consciousness in ways that some would instantly identify as 'lexical diffusion'.

Just some ramblings during a mid-morning break ...

Verbing in the news: The dark side

Pinochet finally died -- without ever facing any semblance of justice. 'Another grave for me to piss on', as someone I know says at times like these. But language plays a role in the coverage. Language Log has already picked up on the pronounciation issue with a good post by Eric Bakovic. (Update, 1:45 a.m.: Slate now has a detailed 'Explainer' post on this, here.)

But something else has struck me in several reports: People keep saying that he was responsible for a change in English, here from MacroHistory: "the word disappear became a verb - as in 'they disappeared him.'" There are lots of hits like that out there -- surprising since every reasonably fluent speaker of English surely has a verb to disappear, a French loan common in English for centuries. What folks mean, I suspect, is that it became a transitive verb. In fact, OED has that meaning 'to cause to disappear', back to the late 19th c.:

1897 Chem. News 19 Mar. 143 We progressively disappear the faces of the dodecahedron. 1949 Amer. Speech XXIV. 41 The magician may speak of disappearing or vanishing a card.

You're thinking, OK, but the euphemism is much more specific, about people being abducted under suspicious circumstances. OED has THAT going back to 1941, intransitively:

There have been arrests recently and there are rumors that some people have disappeared ...

The story that sounds right to me is the one at the end of the OED online, marked as a draft entry from March 2003: The relevant sense here reflects American Spanish desaparecido, as in the disappeared:

American Spanish desaparecido DESAPARECIDO n. (lit. ‘those who have been disappeared’), which posits a passive transitive use of the usually intransitive Spanish verb desaparecer, evoking an action performed on another but disguised as autonomous.

Interesting little derivational wrinkle there between noun and verb. Still wish he hadn't gotten away without facing a court.

The Danger: A Northern City Shift

What better to get you snapped out of a Safire-induced funk than some new tunes! Mrs. Verb passed on this link to the band The Danger, and their new CD, "A Northern City Shift". They're from Milwaukee and Chicago and maybe points inbetween. Nice sounds. More on them later, I think ... gotta order the CD.

Awards

The last few days have been a little stressful here in the Verb household. As the world now knows, William Safire is going to receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Since I heard the news, my inflections have been inside my derivations half the time and I'm getting ablaut when I should have dental preterits.

I've been trying not to respond, all the while doing some serious damage to a major active articulator with my few remaining teeth -- another day of this and 'apical' anything will be history for old Mr. Verb. I was trying to remain silent because, well, what can you say? Earlier awards have gone to members of the criminal crew who created the nightmare that is the war in Iraq. So why not Safire?*

But now the word is out on the story behind the story: Language Log's Mark Liberman has revealed, ever so truthily, what really happened. We're frankly proud to have helped defeat the ill-conceived campaign to give Safire a Loggy. Until there's a Nobel for linguistics, everyone knows that a Loggy is the highest honor there is for languagey stuff. I'm all for reconciliation and am glad to see them awarded to those on both sides of the Linguistics Wars. but Safire's a bridge too far.

Thank god I have a press pass -- I will be there with catcalls about nominative suffixes when Safire gets the award.

*The alert reader will note that this syntax is a little homage: Safire's On Language today uses an apparently-verboten sentence-initial so, in one of his obligatory "I can break the rules" moments.

Green onions and scallions?

Just heard a radio report about the food poisoning from Taco Bell. Unless I grossly misheard, they reported that it wasn't only green onions that were a problem, but also scallions. Aren't these two names for the same food in this context?

Ice, ice, baby

In the old days, the shallow lakes around here froze around Thanksgiving -- you could play a little pond hockey before having turkey. The average freeze date of Lake Wingra, in the city of Madison, for example, was November 27. The typical freeze dates have really skewed pretty dramatically in recent years, though, so it's a pleasure to seee the first ice fishers of the season this morning.

The Safire questions ...

By special request (see comments on the last post), here's the list of questions that Safire had his assistant post to ads-l by way of a senior lexicographer:

1. What is the meaning of the word "one-off"?
2. What is its etymology? Is it an import from Britain?
3. When was it first used?
4. When was it first used in the United States?
5. Why do you think its becoming popular?
6. Have you noticed any interesting citations of its usage?

Can I add some questions?

• How sleazy is this?
• Is this a case of 'hey, can anybody do my homework for me?' And 'Please type it neatly and print it on good quality paper.'
• Can we make up stuff and figure you won't check the facts?
• Do I at least get a little free mention in the NYT while you freakin' get paid for my work if I do answer?
  
• At what point do we start a public campaign to shame the NYT into firing your sorry butt?
  

Safire, burned

William Safire is surely paid more than anybody else alive to spread misinformation about language and how it works (see various posts below or ask any linguist for examples), while sniping at those who disagree with him (the 'gotcha! gang's pajama-top patrol', etc.) As I've mentioned before, he doesn't actually look up stuff in the dictionary before publishing, even though he has an editorial assistant who could do that for him. Occasionally over the years, his assistants have, instead of looking something up, posted queries to the American Dialect Society's ads-l, an open email list anyone can join.

When this happens, I wonder why anyone would possibly respond -- he doesn't typically credit people for their expertise (though sometimes he does) and as I've documented here, he basically can't get anything right. (The archives of ads-l contains examples of him citing something posted there with credit to the source, but creating the impression Safire had talked to the person when he hadn't.) People gripe about this occasionally, but only in a mild-mannered way as far as I recall offhand.

Well, today his poor editorial assistant (can you imagine that job?) asked a very prominent member of the ADS to post a query on his behalf. Now, it wasn't a simple question like 'anybody happen to know the origin of this word?' No, it was a freaking list of six questions, including why the item in question was becoming popular. But today, one of the most famous and I suspect one of the best lexicographers working today (you can find the person's identity in the ads-l archives) had this response:

Y'know, there was a time when Safire or his assistants would look
at the OED before writing about a word ... .

Hear, hear! Hurrah! Again, does the New York Times tolerate such consistently sloppy, inaccurate and downright lazy products in any other realm?

PS: The editorial assistant needed the response a few hours after the query was posted. Hey, do my job for me, and be quick about it!

Technical problems, and Safire returns (kinda)

This blog is on blogger.com, which is in a beta phase and folks are reporting having trouble posting comments. (Had trouble myself last week posting a comment to another blog, in fact, on blogger.com, and some of the formatting functions have been weird lately.) This trouble prompted Rosina Lippi to make some comments in response to the last post here on her amazing blog. (Thanks for the tip about bloglines.) It's been a busy day here in Verbtown, with everybody a little down after the Packers got pounded in Lambeau today, and I'm only now getting a chance to kick back, check out the Simpsons (with Metallica as guest tonight), and write a quick post.

Rosina says that she doesn't have the patience to read Safire. I know the feeling: Mrs. Verb won't let me watch Bush on TV (well, I do tend to scream at the TV), and I can't even watch rightwing talk TV. But progressive radio host Stephanie Miller says about Fox "I watch Bill O'Reilly so you don't have to." I guess, Rosina, I read Bill Safire so you don't have to. Not much to report today, though: It's a set of books reviews, including a plug for forthcoming volumes of Jonathan Lighter's Historical Dictionary of American Slang, a serious work for sure.

But Safire can't even get through a few comments on books without missing the boat on something ... in discussing a new book by Steinmetz & Kipfer, he writes that …

They reveal the source of the "schm-/shm- reduplication" from Yiddish ... .

Now, one of the few facts about English I can usually assume people interested in language but lacking any background in linguistics will know is this one -- that fancy, shmancy forms come from a similar Yiddish pattern. It can't be a revelation to Safire, surely, and it won't be a revelation to most people interested in reading a popular book on language. Who would they be revealing this to, exactly?

More soon from the land of French Roquefort dressing (it's old fashioned 'French' with lots of chunks of blue cheese) ...

Blogging and googling

I started this blog at the peak of summer's heat and humidity pretty much against my better judgment, figuring it was a kind of private monologue, mostly to think out loud about a few issues that are of more than passing interest to me: regional and social variation and public debates about language in this country. I only told a handful of people about it, ensuring that it would generate few (or maybe no) readers.

Now, as the first thin crust of ice shows up on the shallowest of the local lakes, and to my utter surprise, a small but growing set of people seem to be reading regularly. And recently, some are starting to post comments. A couple of those are local folks, people I know (like Mrs. Verb -- hey, get me a cup of coffee, would'ya?). But now comments are coming in from people I would have never dreamed might visit this little blog: Rosina Lippi, author of maybe the best and most accessible book ever written about language and society in the US (just read it, you'll understand) and one of the founders of Sconnie Nation. The long comment from Barbara Wallraff fits here too -- I have my disagreements with how she thinks about language, but there's basically nothing like dialogue between such writers and those of us who work to understand how language works.

I woulda kept this modest abode tidier and brushed my hair if I'd known such folks were coming to visit. Surely a lot of this traffic is driven by googling ... there's virtually no other way these folks could know about the blog. Sheesh, maybe it's time to get my act together and think a little more about content and writing.