"The sign language of comedy"

The New York Times has a short piece on comedian Sarah Silverman, who "has earned a reputation as a sharply honed assessor of self-importance and political correctness" and who will now get her own show on Comedy Central. We are assured that she has been refining her jokes about flatulence. Glad to hear it. Perhaps she could also polish her linguistic metaphors a bit:

To those who might scoff that scatological humor should be beneath someone who aspires to poke holes in the convictions of the politically correct, she has an answer. “It’s the sign language of comedy,” she said during an interview over a lunch of poached eggs and toast at a downscale-hipster diner in Hollywood. “It’s universal.”

The sign language of comedy? What is that supposed to mean? Does she really think there's one universal sign language? Or does she just mix up gestures and sign language? In any case, I hope her jokes are better than her metaphors.

And the Democrat(ic) beat goes on ...

Our local afternoon paper ran the LA Times piece on "Democrat (adj.)" that Ben Zimmer mentioned in his comment yesterday. (The subject also came up long ago on LINGUIST, here.) That means I had the great privilege of reading twice yesterday in the 'mainstream media' about "American Speech, the quarterly journal of the American Dialect Society".

But last night, Joshua Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo reported that …

a few months back I got an email from a TPM Reader who I think was a linguist. And he explained that there is something about the concatenation of syllables, the sound or structure of the phrase 'Democrat party' that actually sounds somehow inherently grating or awkward on the ears.

It had occurred to me that this might be a kind of 'stress clash', where a phrase sounds more mellifluous with a regular alternation between stressed and unstressed syllables: crat has secondary stress, while ic is unstressed, so Democratic Party flows better than Democrat Party, thanks to the intervening unstressed syllable. That may well be but I suspect that it's only a relatively small piece of the puzzle.

The simple history of the word makes it a real dig. I mean, my god, JOE McCARTHY, R-Wisc, used it to insult Democrats. Do I have to say more? Ruth Marcus notes as a parallel of sorts the – openly offensive – adjective Jew for Jewish. (On this, see Language Log, where Mark Liberman tackles the assertion that structures like Democrat Party are 'ungrammatical' or 'illiterate'.) There too, I strongly suspect, it's social history, not linguistic structure that makes the term sting. In particular, there's nothing inherently negative about croppings of proper names or nouns generally: As Marshall notes, he's fine with Josh or Joshua. Some short forms have taken on negative connotations, due to the attitude of the person involved (see Marshall's James/Jim example, where he was presumably dealing with a pedantic jerk, who doubtless pronounces a full 't' in butter) or whatever, like the desire to put a childhood nickname behind you. But that's not about the cropping per se.

In the end, Marshall's point is precisely the right one (as his points often are):

You assert dominance over someone by mangling their name and continuing to do so even after the correct pronunciation or style is pointed out. It's right off the schoolyard and it's no surprise that it's a stock and trade of this president.

While Ruth Marcus in her Washington Post piece says that "simple politeness" is "something the Bush family is famously good at", we should recall that the first Bush regularly pronounced Saddam Hussein's name [sædəm] or something like that instead of [sədám]. I don't have time right now to track down citations, but people certainly talked at the time about this as precisely that kind of schoolyard insult/provocation.

Update, 7:33: I've been figuring that this is a case of cropping — shortening by dropping the -ic — rather than one of using the noun for the adjective. (See again Language Log.) That's an assumption, and it's easy to see it as using the noun rather than the adjective here. Not sure offhand how you'd test that, since both are possible in English.

Foreign language = secret weapon?

Dennis Baron's excellent Web of Language has a new post titled:

Pentagon declares foreign language a weapon. O.K., maggots, drop and give me 50 conjugations.

Stunning, in a sense. As argued in the post, this is mere "lip service" (but not "curled-lip service"), but even beyond that, this is a secret weapon virtually the whole world has scads of while we are lacking in resources start to finish.

'Democrat' update

AirAmerica just played a clip of Bush using the adjective 'Democrat' repeatedly.

Democrat, adj.: pejorative for 'Democratic'

Juan Williams of NPR just asked Bush about using the short form of the adjective in the State of the Union (full transcript already up here). He insisted — at unsettling length — that he wasn't trying to 'needle them' but that he misspoke. He can rehearse a speech this important that long (recall those folks who talked about this as a last chance to save his presidency?) and use a form that's so universally regarded as a jab?

Now, you listen or read on and he starts accusing Democrats of being opposed to everything he's for, etc., then this:

So the idea that somehow I was trying to needle the Democrats, it's just – gosh, it's probably Texas. Who knows what it is. But I'm not that good at pronouncing words anyway, Juan.

One of our contributors, Joe, lived in Texas for years and he says that this isn't a dialect thing but a political one. He heard the interview too and tells me he's tempted to suspect that Bush was about justify the short form as 'plain talking' or something.

But let's keep in mind the history of this (with a tip of the hat to So Far, So Left): bartleby.com includes a full entry on this little topic here. Note the key passage:

Democrat as an adjective is still sometimes used by some twentieth-century Republicans as a campaign tool but was used with particular virulence by the late senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, a Republican who sought by repeatedly calling it the Democrat party to deny it any possible benefit of the suggestion that it might also be democratic.

That's a sad Wisconsin connection, obviously, but it absolves Texas of guilt in this matter, it seems. This isn't a speech error, or dialect form, it's Bush smudging the reputation of his office one more time, in the tiniest of ways, but one more time. Reminds me of what somebody said the day of that address:

Smart-aleck interlocutor: I can tell you a way to tell precisely and accurately when Bush is lying tonight.
Sir Verb: Really, how?
Smart-aleck interlocutor: When his lips are moving.

Update 5:13: Didn't catch before how he stumbled over the answer to a question about the difference between his and Cheney's assessments of how things are going in Iraq. He describes his own view as half-glass-full. And the NPR transcript doesn't clean that up — that's how it sounds and reads.

Update Tues. 2:20: Now a list of examples of Bush using 'Democrat' is available here.

Note: The logo used here should not be interpreted to mean that I vote for this party regularly.

Simpsons

Tonight's Simpsons episode is linguistically rich, a set of shorts on the topic of 'revenge'. The Count of Monte Fatso is set in France. Two quick examples:

The kids are asking 'may we have some chocolate?' and so on. Homer pulls out wads of francs and says:

May we? May we? Mais oui!

OK, you've heard it before, but did you ever expect bilingual puns on the show? When Homer's arrested for treason, he declares:

I love the way all our words are a girl or a guy.

In other segments, there's prevenge, a character who uses lots of Batman like puns, and all kinds of other stuff in here. HeiDeas will have a field day with this episode!

Decider, revisited

The New York Times has a nice widget (anything on the origin of that word?) that allows you to search for specific words in Bush's State of the Union Addresses and that represents the numbers and hits visually. It also shows you the words in context.

It looks like this -- well, the red dots marking the search term may not be very visible in this screenshot.



For a decider, Bush surely doesn't use the verb decide very often. It occurs exactly once, and he puts the burden of the decision on the nation's shoulders: "Today, having come far in our historical journey, we must decide: Will we turn back, or finish well?" (2006, Paragraph 69/72)

Safire's tsunami of tsuris

Safire's nothing if not grossly inconsistent ... After all the hoo-ha about about the integration of the utterly normal English word kvetch last week, this week he focuses on rambling digs at the Democratic "first hundred hours", slipping in the phrase "tsunami of tsuris". (I do note that he still says Democratic, not Democrat, for the adjective. His sense of "good English" trumps his political instincts, presumably.) I'm guessing almost every native speaker of American English knows kvetch, but that large numbers don't know tsuris, another Yiddish loan and one he doesn't adorn with scare quotes or italics.

Let's just set aside any thoughts about language and linguistics and consider this as pure entertainment. Is this level of inconsistency some kind of literary game or related perversion?

I play the super-prescriptivist in my column but actually violate all my own rules by never looking stuff up, not writing clearly and failing to be consistent in ways that a wet-behind-the-ears copy-editing intern would catch. Oh what rich and subversive irony!

Seems hard to imagine — he's just not that smart or sophisticated. Or is he this bad as an entertainer? Mrs. Verb (not her real name) reads murder mysteries and I think it's safe to assume that she'd toss out an author who was this sloppy. Hmmm. maybe he IS consistent at a certain level.

Trade and betrayed

On Sunday morning, before the Mrs. gets up, I always fortify myself to read Safire and listen to NPR. That usually means hearing Will Shortz do his puzzle. The audio won't be available on the NPR site until this afternoon, but it sounded like he slipped in a tough one. The game involved filling in blanks where one word was the other word with the same sound shape plus a prefix be-, like nine and benign. So, you had to think about sounds (not spelling) and do a kind of pseudo-derivational operation, be- prefixation. Cute. One sentence was roughly:

A wife might feel _______ if her husband decided to _____ her in for a younger woman.

Now, what Mrs. Verb (not her real name) would feel in this situation, I imagine, would be the sharp kick of my .357 Colt Python as she shot me (of course she's never as much as picked up a gun), but the answer has already been given away in the subject line: Betrayed and trade. This looks somehow eerily like experiments in the psycholinguistics literature, where reaction times are measured against tasks of different levels of difficulty. This item seemed to confuse the guest. I wonder if it was the combination of this more-or-less derivational operation plus an inflectional one: Both are unrelated like most of the pairs, but these are verbs in different tenses and I wonder if folks find it hard to make that set of disconnects. Without knowing the literature on this subject, that is, I'm wondering if people focus on the be- and don't think as quickly about doing an inflectional operation; might be easier with entirely unrelated forms.

Anyway, the bigger question: I've always been struck how really good psycholinguistic experiments often look like well-designed puzzles (although the experimenters have to beat the trick to death to get adequate data). Has Will Shortz ever looked at that stuff? Does he give thought to what's going on in the brain as we solve these things? I'm thinking back to Mark Liberman's LSA talk about how linguistics doesn't have the role it should in public life. It's clear that people are wildly excited about this puzzle, but wouldn't it be better if people understood a little of what's happening under the hood?

OK, time to shovel the new snow ...

Curled-lip service

This morning's New York Times editorial page is brimming with language material. Garry Wills has a full piece on how the president of these United States is not, I repeat, not the commander in chief of the country, but only of the Army and Navy (and the National Guard, should they be federalized). He rightly calls this part of the "increasing militarization of our politics". And Maureen Dowd (aka MoDo, a pattern of cropping that other linguistics blogs have treated, I think, but one we'll get to eventually here in Verb Town) has a piece on how Dick Durbin's characterization of Dick Cheney as 'delusional' doesn't begin to describe the situation.

But the main Times editorial stopped me cold, "The Bait-and-Switch White House". They talk some about the recent Cheney interview on Iraq, where he talked about the "enormous successes" of the U.S. in Iraq (see MoDo, above). Here's what made me spill my second Saturday morning Bloody Mary (hey, it takes a while to navigate to the editorial page) all over the Mrs.'s (OK, that's *Mrs.'s, but 'the little lady's' doesn't sound quite right)) favorite lace tablecloth:

Mr. Cheney … refused to pay even curled-lip service to consulting Congress.

My immediate reaction was, 'oh, what a slick turn of phrase' (surely the reaction they wanted). But then, I realized I can't scan that. To get the meaning of 'lip service', lip has to be stressed, but if I stress the lip, then curled has to modify service, which doesn't work. I guess they're trying to decompose lip service into its components, and I don't doubt that this works for some folks, but it feels utterly ungrammatical to me. On paper, it basically works, but I can't possibly read it out loud.

A cursory google search doesn't reveal this phrase showing up elsewhere, but no time to pursue it: I've got the Sports Section to get through this morning.

The decision-maker

So, Bush has gone from 'the decider' to the 'decision-maker', reported here. I'm pondering what this means

... in terms of morphological complexity ... from a pretty uncommon derivation in -er to a compound with the same suffix. The new form gets fewer g-hits, but who knows what his use of the former term has done to those numbers.

... in terms of meaning. Does it sound more forceful? Did he need a first variant because the old one had gotten lampooned so much? If so, why stick so close to the old one? Stubbornness?

Oh yeah, I'm pretty sure about what it means in terms of policy: Nothing at all.

Update, 4:24 p.m.: Long day at the office, but finally got home and have a chance to check in as Mrs. Verb (not her real name) mixes me a martini (as they used to say, or said once some time, in the sitcoms to bartenders: How dry? Call up another bartender who works across town and ask him to open a bottle of vermouth and hold it up to the phone). Anyways (to use that adverbial -s), looks like Bush is just taking advice from Daily Kos (yeah, right), where this was posted last year, here:

OK, clearly Bush has difficulty with English and sounds like a moron when he opens his mouth, but why exactly does "Decider" sound particularly moronic?
Any educated person would say "I'm the decision maker."

Or perhaps an educated person might say "I'm the one who makes the decision."

"Decider" is probably used more commonly to describe a "factor" that tips the balance when considering a decision. "There were 3 reasons to say yes, and 3 to say no, but the decider was X." That's colloquial, but it doesn't sound egregiously bad.

And Volokh Conspiracy had a similar post back then too. The point comes up there as well that 'decider' somehow should be decision maker. (The conclusion there seems right, by the way: "So at most, it seems to me, one would say that the usage is mildly unidiomatic, not wrong, silly, or even inadvertently funny.")

Lest we forget, the famous utterance was in the context of defending Donald Rumsfeld, and the whole quote is pretty far out there:

I hear the voices. And I read the front page. And I know the speculation. But I'm the decider and I decide what is best.

Weird, I was thinking he mostly seemed bungling and dumb in those remarks, but the latest interviews have been more deeply disturbing. Now rereading that whole exchange almost a year later, it seems pretty loopy too.

Update, 9:45 p.m. (after a bad loss by the UW men's hockey team to the University of Minnesota-Manfreakinkato): Oh yeah, the decider/decision-maker thing is rippling around the old blogosphere, like in this example (and, man, in these times, "scotch-fueled humor" may be called for.)

Minnesota English: Parts 1 through uff-da

I've mentioned the work of the Wisconsin Englishes Project here a number of times, including the great stuff that Erica Benson of UW-Eau Claire has been doing. Just got word from part of the WEP crew that she's just done some media interviews, getting the word out in western Wisconsin and even Minnesota. (They're not linked yet, but I bet they'll soon be available here.)

You gotta love the reactions of Joe Fryer, who did one of the interviews for KARE in the Twin Cities. Check out his posts on the topic here. (You need to scroll down to Accents -- Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part Uff-da.) And yeah, Joe Fryer, KARE should definitely do a follow-up story on this.

Update, Friday, 4:00 a.m.: The available interviews are linked now on the WEP 'publicity/outreach' page.

Moondancing or moonwalking

Just turned on CNN – I seldom do that, but after Stumblerette's post, I somehow hoped I might strike linguistic gold – to hear James Carville interviewing people in Hollywood about what they wanted to hear in the upcoming State of the Union talk. I half heard a guy from Florida made a remark about how Bush needed to "stop moondancing" around Iraq. I've never heard to moondance, can't find it on UrbanDictionary or elsewhere, and can't quite figure out what it means in that context. It was clear that it's a bad thing.

I'm wondering if I misheard moondance for moonwalk (or if the guy misspoke), which would make good sense: That old Michael Jackson move of moving backwards while appearing to move forward fits beautifully.

CNN hearts grammar

As I was browsing the cnn.com website for Senator Brownback's prayerful bid for the presidency, I came across an article on a podcast by "Grammar Girl", which, apparently, has been as high as number 2 on iTunes.

Here's an excerpt:

Who and whom: "Whom" refers to the object in a sentence, and "who" refers to a subject in a sentence. It's correct to say "Whom does Sarah love?" ("whom" is the object of Sarah's love) and "Who loves Sarah?" ("who" is the subject of the sentence). It can help to remember that the Rolling Stone's song "Who do you love?" is wrong.

This reminds me of my budding days as a grammarian when I -- with about two years of school English -- pointed out that Mick Jagger had to be the most satisfied man in the universe, since he could not get no satisfaction. Ah, the attractions of prescriptivism! ("Grammar girl" now also has a podcast on good manners and on "Quick and Dirty Tips for a Richer Life" -- something I guess no linguist has ever been asked to contribute to.)

Language Liberal

Sometimes I walk right by stuff without seeing it. Monica Macaulay just noted that a recent Language Log post points out something relevant to Verbism. It's a quote from an article by Christopher Orlet, "Grammar for Smarties" in The American Spectator, 1/11/2005 (he's also a columnist for Vocabula Review, if you need more reason to love the guy).

Indeed, the battle cry of the language liberal might be, "Languages change. Get over it." Most linguists judge that language change is neither good nor bad, and, anyway, resistance is futile. Languages, like hemlines, will change whether we want them to or not.

Monica notes quite rightly that this is dangerously close to the motto of this blog. A little less artful, I'd argue. But do hemlines changes regardless of human intention and involvement?

Thanks, Monica.

Kringle, anyone?

As the Verbs were driving along the other day, Mr. Verb ridiculed me (ever so gently, of course) for my upper Midwest usage of the word “bakery.” I said something along the lines of “I’ll just get some bakery,” meaning (as all normal speakers of English know) that I would get some delicious items which were baked at a bakery. Mr. Verb thinks this is odd. Mr. Verb says it would be like saying I’d get some butchery at the butcher’s. But now vindication is mine – here is the sign for Barrique’s on Monroe street, offering "Coffee & Bakery fresh daily." Hah.

Kvetch as kvetch can

News flash: "kvetch … has been absorbed into the English language." Why, William Safire explained to me over coffee only two hours ago, the New York Times used the word recently …

not as part of a quotation — nor, for that matter, within quotation marks to indicate a slang or dialect expression.

More evidence, I suppose, that Old Bill needs to get out more, talk to folks occasionally, although I'm heartened to see that he does read a newspaper. Just to save you asking, OED Online gives a quote from Atlantic Monthly from 1968 without quotes or italics.

Of course he blunders around on this one as usual … Yiddish kvetshn is "from the German quetschen, literally 'to squeeze, pinch'". Actually, while it certainly looks like a part of the old Germanic vocabulary of Yiddish (I think the verb is still used in the meaning 'to press'), it's surely not from Modern German. It'd be more precise – and if Safire claims to value anything, it's surely precision with language – to say that it is related to (not from) Middle High (not Modern) German quetzen, etc.

Interesting stuff on this etymology, though: The word isn't widespread within Germanic, found, aside from Yiddish and German, only in Dutch and Low German that I know of. The history beyond that seems obscure, with (plausible, I suppose) speculation about a possible Latin source. In German, it is attested since the 13th century, well after Yiddish was presumably born. (For an overview of the history of Yiddish and virtually every other aspect of the language, see the excellent and accessible Yiddish: A linguistic introduction by Neil Jacobs, Cambridge University Press, 2005.)

But when I mention Safire, you know there's a howler coming, and this one's a maven's nightmare, namely a sentence that's at best hard to parse and probably ungrammatical:

Usage of the word in all its forms — verb, participle, now strongly noun — has been assisted by Born to Kvetch … by Michael Wex.

Just ignore that participles may be considered verbal forms or nominal forms but either way are not of a set with 'verbs' and 'nouns'. How in the world do we interpret strongly noun here? It has a 'strongly noun form', as in 'usage of the word in its strongly noun form'? Huh? Linguists will recall the old notion of nouniness from the days of Generative Semantics, where some nouns are more noun-like than others. But that can't be intended here, can it? Does he mean that it's now more widely used as a noun than as a verb (or participle!)? What does this mean? Is there a reading of this as English? And — always looking for the broader context — has the NYT abandoned any effort to even copy edit Safire's ramblings?

Surging civilians

I'm on a fact-/quote-checking tear today ... When I mentioned a quote about 'surging civilians' recently, Ben Zimmer noted in a comment that to surge is getting established now as a transitive verb, though he hadn't heard this extension. I just tracked it down. On the News Hour, former Capt. Philip Carter, U.S. Army, said:

We have to, as Secretary Rice has rightly said, surge civilians from the State Department, and the Justice Department, and the Agricultural Department into Iraq to help the government stand up and start serving the people.

Gee, haven't that heard much about actually doing what Rice suggested, though.

Colbert on accents

Only now had time to check the quote (it's quoted here), but the other night, in his pre-NFL playoff trash-talking segment, Stephen Colbert quipped:

Boston accents are weird!

Now, just get over the Truthiness Violation here — yes, I should have gone with my gut over the 'facts', but I hang out with a lot of professors and the whole 'accuracy' thing is a big deal to them. Go figure. (Maybe that's why they get the respect they do today, eh?)

Anyway, it took a minute to realize just how brilliant that line is: Colbert's from Charleston, South Carolina, a place about which people have often made the same remark. (Labov et al.'s new Atlas and related work shows that the city continues to have a unique place among southern dialects.) When I was a kid, in fact, coastal southern dialects sounded to me a lot like northern r-less dialects like Boston. But then Colbert doesn't use what I recognize as any serious Charleston characteristics on the show, whether he speaks the dialect or not.

Still, as that great SoCal punk band The Vandals said about Bozo the Clown, "That man's a frickin' genius."

Egg update

OK, here's the best discussion I've seen yet on Bush's cracked egg deal, from a blog I only recently discovered, Away with Words.

And while we're at it, Joe's right about the pictures you get for 'cracked egg'. To the left is about the least cracked one I see in looking through a couple dozen, from a PBS piece on tectonic plate movement -- I fear Iraq is moving much faster. A far more typical image is the one on the right, from the Queensland government (yup, Australia). They don't even talk about cracks as a safety issue. Probably not a big problem down there.

Cracked vs. broken eggs

I noted in a brief post what seemed to me a meltdown in Bush's interview on the News Hour earlier this week. One of the things that really disturbed me was his response to Lehrer's question about whether Iraq had become a 'broken egg'. Bush answered:

I don’t quite view it as the broken egg; I view it as the cracked egg ...

Now, I don't do metaphor, but this chunk keeps getting played on NPR, quoted in papers, etc. and none of the folks I've heard or read in the mainstream media seems to be saying what lots of political bloggers have said: This doesn't make sense. I guess the best case would be an egg with a cracked shell but the membrane still intact, so it's not leaking. Been a while since I've been around laying hens, but isn't a cracked egg a goner from the relevant bird's eye perspective? Even for cooking, the Food and Drug Administration urges us to not buy eggs with cracked shells for safety reasons, see here. Eggs aside, Merriam-Webster's entry for cracked is this:

1 a : broken (as by a sharp blow) so that the surface is fissured *cracked china* b : broken into coarse particles *cracked wheat* c : marked by harshness, dissonance, or failure to sustain a tone *a cracked voice*
2 : mentally disturbed : CRAZY

Kinda seems like we're seeing the full range of meanings in play in Iraq and that interview. Or maybe people will start to wonder if Bush is on the pipe?

But please, media people, stop quoting this bizarre phrase unless you're going to offer some insight into what it means.

LSA update: The future of linguistics

Good news from Language Log: I wasn't able to see Mark Liberman's plenary talk on "The Future of Linguistics", but he's just posted the powerpoint here.

State symbols

I've been so darned busy today that I only now am getting around to giving a link to Wisconsin's official state symbols, here. The muskie is only one of many! I've always been partial to the idea of the polka as a state dance.

What a fish ...

Welcome, on board, Stumblerette! I guess I'm not thinking of the new members of Team Verb as doing 'guest posts' but as being regular part of the team.

But to business -- your very fine post on our impressive state fish. I would have been very happy to buy the folk etymology of 'elongated mask' for this fish -- the (apparently public domain) image at the left doesn't show it that well, but I can believe somebody would see the face as stretched forward (compared to some fish, certainly). That is, it's not elongated vertically, but horizontally. I guess that's what makes good folk etymology. ('Sparrow grass' for asparagus never made much sense to me, by comparison.)

We need input from some of the Algonquian specialists on the word, surely, but as a fan of all things Wisconsin, I've always read Leonard Bloomfield's work on Algonquian. (He was born up near Sheboygan, was a grad student in German linguistics at Madison for a while, and of course did incredibly important research on Menominee.) In his famous essay "On the sound-system of Central Algonquian", he shows a regular correspondence between Proto-Central-Algonquian *l and n in most of the Central languages. He says other languages in the family typically have maintained l. So, I'm figuring this is probably a case of distinct but related words being in the mix.

Interestingly, the Oxford English Dictionary Online regards this as likely dissimilation. I suspect they are wrong on this one, and they should check with a real specialist in Algonquian historical linguistics.

A fish named muskie

Guest-blogger Stumblerette here, introducing herself.

How can one not stumble at the notion of a state fish, a fish called Muskellunge, no less? Muskellunge ("muscle lung") sounds very German to me, but it makes you wonder why a fish would be named after a body part it probably doesn't have.

Older spellings of the word (masque alonge) seem to indicate that the origin is French. But again, one would ask oneself why a fish would be named after a facial feature (an elongated mask) it doesn't have.

Well, it turns out that the name is just one of those false friends: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the name Muskellunge comes from the Algonquian language Ojibwe and is a variant of maskinonge (the "n" is still preserved in its Latin name, Esox masquinongy). Its meaning is a combination of the words for "ill-formed" and "pike".

There you go, no muscles, no lungs, no mask -- just an ill-formed pike, the state fish of Wisconsin.

So, this is for you phonologists, how/why did the "n" become an "l", leading to all this etymological stumbling?

Bush interview on PBS

Wow, was he completely incoherent or what? I was trying to track some of the syntactic oddities but that got flooded out by the whole bizarre narrative. It's hard to follow linguistic details when you're watching a meltdown of such proportions.

But whatevs

The brutally satirical website WhiteHouse.org – don't visit if you're easily offended by almost kind of language – often plays with language as part of its general spoof of George W. Bush (if you can call something that harsh a spoof). They do the expected stuff: incoherent syntax, pseudo-Texas dialect, tons of obscenity and offensive vocabulary, etc.

But they also put bits of youth language in Bush's mouth. In a January 10 post on "President's Address to Convince Flip-Flopping Nation of Urgent Need to Escalate "Operation Baghdad 911", they use whatevs, which I've never heard used, but have heard reported. The term doesn't show up in the obvious places I checked (ads-l, LanguageLog, doubletongued.org, Wordlustitude, etc.), but gets about 756,000 g-hits. The cropping seems unremarkable, but I notice that adverbial -s showing up pretty often. It's got a long history in American English (cf. anyways, somewheres, etc. – see the Dictionary of American Regional English), but seems like it's remained marginally productive, now bubbling up especially among Kids These Days (unless that's a Recency Illusion I'm suffering). In fact, that very piece at WhiteHouse.org includes this: Fer reelz, yo?

Has this one just been flying under the lexicographical radar or something?

"Voice impressions"

NPR just ran a piece on people's impressions of famous voices -- Morgan Freeman, Marilyn Monroe, Truman Capote and Patsy Clyne. Details, including an invitation to participate in the second round can be found here. What's striking to me, once I get beyond the über-poetic images people come up with, is how maddeningly difficult it is to get at voice quality, once you get beyond things like what we call creaky voice.

The phonetician John Laver and others have written about 'articulatory range' (with various names for it), as a characteristic of some languages or dialects, but it doesn't seem like that's gone very far. That is, certain varieties (and speakers) tend to have more or less jaw movement, etc. Similarly, Tom Purnell here in Madison has been looking at X-ray Microbeam data on articulation and now talks about 'tongue talkers', who use a lot of tongue movement during speech.

I'm tempted to submit some to the second round of Voice Impressions based on acoustic analysis!

Mrs. Verb signs on

My goodness! So this is what blogging is like! It bloggles the mind.

Yes, Mrs. Verb here, recently granted blogging rights (not to be confused with bragging rights) to Mr. Verb's blog. We share everything.

Mrs. Verb looks forward to discussing language, hockey, and Mr. Verb (not necessarily in that order), among other things. She will also share her favorite housecleaning tips.

Toodles!

Big changes in Verbville

For a while now, the mrs has been bugging me about getting permission to post here. I figured she was too busy with the whole home and hearth deal, but what the hey. And Joe, our first guest poster from a few weeks ago, asked about that too. So be it. Mr. Verb now has 'contributors'. Might even add a few more too, maybe another 'professional linguist' or two, to spiff the content up.

Just remember, guys, it's still my blog.

Upper Midwestern highlights from ADS/LSA

Finally stealing a minute from other obligations to note at least a couple of highlights from the American Dialect Society and Linguistic Society of America last week, things I haven't seen noted elsewhere and that relate to this region.

First off, the Upper Midwest was very well represented – even in high-profile places: ADS President Joan H. Hall, from UW-Madison's own Dictionary of American Regional English, gave a luncheon address on “Why bother studying American dialects?” Word on the street was very positive, although I haven't gotten more detail.

Marquette's Steve Hartman Keiser gave a very nice paper on "The disappearing past and futures of Pennsylvania German dialectology" with lots on that language in the Midwest. This continues work that he's been doing for a while, but it was a welcome overview for those of us who aren't up on that growing community. Rika Ito of St. Olaf gave a fine overview on Hmong in the Twins Cities with some detail on accommodation to Upper Midwestern norms in the vowel systems of a set of speakers. That seems to be a new project and I certainly look forward to seeing how it develops.

The most-discussed LSA event among folks I talked to was probably “Phonology: An Appraisal of the Field in 2007", featuring lots of big names. Phonoloblog's Eric Baković has promised some comments on that, and a few comments are already up. Of course blogging the LSA and ADS is now a highly developed sport. Tenser, said the Tensor has a few pics and lots of prose and links here.

Next year things will be in Chicago and I'm already hoping for lots on language and dialect in this region.

Droppin' some G's

If you simply google strings like droppin' g's, droppin' my g's, droppin' some g's, etc., you get lots of hip-hop lyrics from these to Eminem. Mostly it's about droppin' and 'G' of a different sort.

Linguistic g-droppin', as Language Log's Mark Liberman laid out a while back here, involves no direct 'dropping' of anything, just a difference in where you put your tongue – 'ng' like in sing has it at the back of the mouth (velar) while 'n' like in sin has it at the front (at or near the alveolar ridge).

Mrs. Verb found the cartoon here in a really old New Yorker. It has a whiff of Bush about it – as a boy with deep roots in superrich WASPy Yankeedom doing hyperdialectal Texas – but it really strikes me as getting nicely at a popular notion of styleshifting.

More evil verbs in the news

PBS's News Hour, in a truly depressing segment on the descent into utter hell in Iraq, had a guest use 'to surge' as a transitive verb, something like a need 'to surge civilians'. Surge got a lot of discussion as a possible Word of the Year at the ADS this year, and one very smart person (can't recall who) suggested that it was likely to become the word of 2007 rather than 2006.

[ɛ]llinois

Illinois is often pronounced in the Midwest as Ellinois. (You get Wesconsin for our fine state too, on occasion, and ads-l posters have reported Endiana. This lowering of [ɪ] (like bit) to [ɛ] (like bet) looks like the last stage of the Northern Cities Shift and the state name is one of a few words where this has become a stereotype -- melk for 'milk' being another notable one. A following l could be the culprit in both those words, certainly.

Word has filtered back to Verbville from the LSA that a native of what's known here as the Land of Flat reported learning songs as a kid where Illinois was written as Ellinois. Anybody know of this? In poking around for the etymology, I see that Merriam-Webster online gives French forms spelled with e, and traces it back to a Proto-Algonquian form beginning with *elli.

It would be interesting if the word has always had that variant, phonetic conditioning aside. Wonder if there's anything to this?

Awww man

Doh, as Homer would say ... the comment on last post indicates that HeiDeas Simpsons thing was NEW in March, not a mere repost. Even a blogger shouldn't post in a hurry.

Must read linguistics humor

Back in March, as I see now, HeiDeas reposted her brilliant, and I do not use that adjective loosely here, first post from a year ago: stuff from the Simpons that exemplifies linguistic principles or plays with language structure in particularly interesting ways. It's must read material.

Plutoing plutoed

Mr. Verb has a natural affinity to being plutoed – it's a nice piece of verbing, after all – and you figure something's rolling when it gets its own blog. Some of the wordinistas seemed to think that this WotY wouldn't get any national play – that to be plutoed would itself get plutoed, as it were – but I suspect that this tradition is established enough now that it's virtually automatic – see here. Over on ads-l and on Language Log, they've documented AP's bungling of the WotY, for a second year in a row.

Things may be a little quiet here in Verbville for a couple of days, but there's some interesting stuff brewing for 2007 already, including notes on a couple of papers from ADS and LSA on language in the Upper Midwest.

WotY, NotY

OK, for the the official ADS press release, follow the link here. A good time was had by all.

Some very serious political discussion came up, about both macaca and sudden jihad syndrome, as well as climate canary and carbon. But this is the rare event in American life (for me at least) where anybody can go and sit in a room and hear brilliantly funny debate by the best specialists around (for the most part) on a topic of general interest. People punned a fair bit -- like the person (John Rickford, maybe?) who spoke in favor of to be plutoed because it can allow important spin-offs, like plutonic relationship.

The American Name Society also released its third annual Name of the Year, by the way, and Pluto won there too.

Still waiting to hear some reactions from Language Log about snowclone's nomination for most creative.

Today, back to the hard business of understanding American dialects, and maybe other stuff too ...

To be plutoed

'to be demoted, lowered in status, etc.' Details to follow.

Wow, what a day.

Word of the Year ...

A lot of the obvious favorites came up yesterday – the decider, a set of macaca words, brokeback, youtube (esp. as a verb, happily for our family), waterboarding, wikiality, etc. To be plutoed (demoted) was probably the best of the words on that topic; I could imagine using it.

A few that were new to me included:

tramp stamp: tattoo at the base of a woman's spine
flog: fake blog started to promote a business
lactard: lactose intolerant person (apparently used by such people)

A number of people were into snowclones (see LanguageLog), like I'm in your X, Ying your Z – and the screen at the front of the room even had the 'verbing ur nounz' picture up for a while.

Tonight's the main event, the big vote ... and rumor has it there may be a Colbert-related motion on the floor.

Update: The Decider

Someone just called to my attention that I blew the OED deal on 'the decider': They do have it from 1592, but the quote about the Irish Bishops was from later.

Here's the full quote section on this meaning:

1592 W. WYRLEY Armorie 23 The Scriptures of God, the decider of all controuersies. 1764 FOOTE Patron I. Wks. 1799 I. 329 The paragon of poets, decider on merit, chief justice of taste. 1862 WILBERFORCE Let. in Life III. 106 The..danger of having..the Irish Bishops made the actual deciders of our doctrine.

The 1592 quote probably gets at a core point about Bush -- he's assuming the powers of the Almighty, some would argue. But the 1862 might be a little farther than from current meaning. Note, though, that both have it with a definite article. Probably not enough to derail it as a WotY candidate, but it's always worth paying attention to history.

Sorry for the screw-up ... you folks who do 'scholarship' or 'journalism' have to worry about getting stuff right, but I'm learning that bloggers (except for the superstars over at Language Log), seem to operate more like Fox News or Bill Safire or something. I promise I'll be more careful in the future, little less like Stephen Colbert.

Or maybe the world needs a Matt Drudge for language!

American Dialect Society

Well, I'm off to the ADS, so posts may be spotty for a few days -- those wordinistas and definazis keep you running hard. I'm hearing a lot of buzz about 'the decider', and I guess it works, if you can keep the article.

Man, I can hardly wait.

More on last names at NPR: Jose Padilla

A bunch of linguistics blogs -- Language Log, Phonoloblog and this little forum -- dealt with the issue of pronouncing Pinochet's name, including National Public Radio's handling of it. This morning, as part of a story on Jose Padilla, the American held as an enemy combatant, they went into a little detail about switching from Padi[l]a to Padi[j]a: He apparently earlier used the Anglicized pronounciation in court, but his lawyer has now says he prefers the latter one, more Spanish-like in that regard.

Unsurprisingly, the NPR announcer still used an aspirated p and a lax [ɪ] rather than a tense [i]. I'd figure this is a minimal reflection of Spanish. Using a tense vowel would be the next step toward Spanish and no ordinary English speaker would produce this with an unaspirated stop.

Like with that of the Chilean dictator, the story behind the point about language is a bleak one.

UPDATE: Just finally had a chance to relisten and they DID use a tense [i] -- that's what happens when you write before you've had coffee, for Mr. Verb, at least.

More Word of the Year fun

In case you don't read ads-l, there's some more WotY stuff here, some of it cute -- like googleschaden -- and the annual list of banished words here.

As a commenter on the latter notes, combined celebrity names like Brangelina are lamethetic, but blends are fun. More to the point, lamethetic is reminiscent of forms like craptastic and craptacular, which get 428,000 and 364,000 g-hits, respectively.

In fact, -tastic is always remarkably productive these days -- just google 'tastic' -- usually without the sarcasm of craptastic, so -thetic would make a nice negative counterpart. I don't know of a productive pattern like that and don't see one in a quick check, but that's hard to confirm, in part since thetic is a word already.

Update, 7:12 pm: I'm reminded now that the Daily Show had a Christmas Christacular thing recently.

Non-heavy metal umlaut

Lots has been made about 'heavy metal umlaut' -- see the wikipedia entry on the topic for a laugh, if you don't know that one already. But the Capital One Bowl, where Wisconsin is playing Arkansas right now*, the sponsor just had a medieval-themed ad where a sign shown in passing had 'bänk' on it for a financial institution. The guys in the ad mostly have UK-type accents, and this is the series where they get portrayed as being Vikings (or similar roving bands). Seems like reaching to imagine this is supposed to represent, say, Swedish orthography.

Are we seeing the rise of 'medieval umlaut'?

*Update, 3:36: Wisconsin wins, 17-14.