The maddening pace of blogging

At least two items from today's NYT were widely discussed yesterday on the Log and/or ads-l. The stories are old before they're printed! Literally.

And the really odd thing is that both were from p. 1 of "Sunday Styles" … "She's Famous (and So Can You)" is rightly discussed as a very quick snowcloning. And "What Did You Call It?" treats the new (?) word vajayjay. (I trust it doesn't need a gloss for our sophisticated readership.)

Best line in all the coverage? My vote's for this:

There have been at least 1,200 terms for the vagina in the history of the English language, according to Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard … .

Who knew?

At all … a new wrinkle

Our contributor Monica has long pointed out that at all has gone from being something that clearly points to a certain quantity in questions — Did the Rockies score any runs at all? — to something constantly used in service encounters as part of what can only be a yes/no question:

Would you like a bag for that at all?

It seems to be one of those über-polite cashier usages, and to mean something like 'Would you have any interest at all in a bag?' I don't know about nationally, but around here that's just pervasive usage, and it's spread well beyond the service encounters were she, I think, first noticed it.

Last night at dinner, someone was talking about her new book (not in linguistics, sadly) and said:

I hope it sells at all.

My immediate reaction was that it was like positive anymore ('gas is expensive anymore', etc.'): What used to be used only in negative contexts has broadened to include a positive reading. (I'm pretty sure this person has positive anymore.) But I chanced to talk to Monica about it this morning and she reminded me of the 'service at all'.

Maybe two pressures pushing in the same direction?

Miscellanea

Wisconsin has a state budget. Woo hoo. It contains money for the university, and even for the Law School. Still trying to get some clarity on what this means for the UW, but it's not terrible.

A while back the Log had a piece on a SoCal hip-hop group called the Linguistics. Now there's a member of a hip-hop band named Linguistics. See here.

Completely missed it but the Sunday paper had a set of Wisconsin tourist slogans, including a couple on language: "Wisconsin: Hey there once then!", etc. Sadly, the most accurate ones were different, like "Wisconsin: We used to be progressive." But then, "Wisconsin: At least we still have cheese." A lot were familiar, like the one in the image (from here, but other versions of the slogan on t-shirts are out there.)

Read something yesterday talking about the impopularity of an idea. I thought it was a Spanishism (Hispanicism? That doesn't sound right either.) since the adjective would have that form in Spanish, but it actually gets some hits. I notice lots of variability on these and have a lot myself, but this one sounds utterly impossible to me. It's maybe an inevitable, irresistible analogy.

And hat tips all around … I'm being flooded with ideas, it seems like.

No verbs in the campaign slogans?

The latest post over at "the Log" (as the hip kids are calling it) is on the slogans of the presidential candidates in the two major parties. Not all have clear, established slogans, but Mark Liberman observes:

Among the 9 slogans in both parties, there is not a single verb (leaving out the quasi-adjectival participle forms proven and experienced).

Ouch. Verbs out? Just no longer needed, except quasi-adjectival participle forms?

Update: 7:15 am: Utterly true, verbs are out, passée, done, over. An ad for the new Palm Centro (A30 of today's NYT) has this headline:

Quadruplify yourself.

Nothing is more 10 minutes ago than a PDA. (One of our contributors used to use one, but gave it up and now writes stuff directly on his 'palm', as in the inner part of the hand.) And -ify? To amplify and diversify and exemplify all had their day, but puh-lease. (Quadruplify does get a few g-hits.) Oh yeah, the four features? E-mail, chat, text and google maps? Be still my heart.

Why, world, why? A verbier world is a better world.

Image from here, and that cover really deserved an award. And another one now for being so tragically right.

No verbs in the interface?

From here (but the quote is out there in other places and this looks to come originally from an NYT piece by John Markoff), a Steve Jobs quote:

There are no “verbs” in the iPhone interface, he said, alluding to the way a standard mouse or stylus system works. In those systems, users select an object, like a photo, and then separately select an action, or “verb,” to do something to it.

The thought of any interface without verbs pains me, but this sounds like a potential advance in how we control electronic devices, a "multitouch" interface. We'll see ...

Budget update

I've been just dying since Friday night/Saturday morning to write something about the new Wisconsin state budget, but I'm still waiting for information that's clear enough, if not for the budget to actually pass the scheduled vote.

My take at this point is that we've gotten 21 million less than 'cost to continue' for the whole University of Wisconsin System. That is, while the press is talking about significant increases in UW funding, they have given us absolute increases in dollars, but not enough to keep up with the increased costs of doing the same amount of work we're now doing. I assume, despite this, that the guv, both parties and UW officials will all try to make it sound like things are fine. Things are, just for the record, anything but fine. Cost to continue would be at the level of a starvation diet and we're below it.

There is actual new money for the UW System in the budget — the so-called Growth Agenda — said to be funded at $159 million. Catastrophically for Madison, though, our campus leaders apparently simply did not submit anything under this. As I understand things, we are the only campus in the System that did not.

I can't swear in a court of law that this is so, but if it is, why? Hell if I know.

More on plural diseases and such

Thanks to a set of insightful comments (as always, feel free to skip this blog, but you want to read the comments), I'm still chewing on words like heebie-jeebies, shakes and such. One of the intriguing questions about a little pattern (frame, construction, ...) like this is where it comes from: How and where did it start, how and why did it spread as it has?

Take the plural angle. Measles and mumps are both reasonably old words, Middle English in one case and Early Modern in the other. More interestingly, both were plurals with s-less singulars. The vapors of course goes back to vapor, with its quaint-sound medical underpinnings. So, the older ones settled out as plurals, new ones have been created as plurals.

I wrote the above yesterday morning and dashed off to a monstrously long day at work, only to later find an email from a man who's always a couple of steps ahead, Ben Zimmer,* passing on a pile of excellent OED data. I've appended his whole email below. (I often cite Merriam-Webster when I'm in a hurry because I've got quicker access to it.) And while we're on comments: hh has an excellent comment calling attention to a 2001 squib in Linguistic Inquiry by Norvin Richards on "An idiomatic argument for lexical decomposition." I had entirely missed this little bit of data in that big discussion.

Semantically, note that we're not looking at the most serious diseases in the early set — plague, black death, the big C are singular, and diabetes ends in an s but it's definitely singular for me. Some of the old quotes on the vapors or on vapor do sound pretty bleak — Shakespeare uses it to good effect. Maybe that made it easier to build these humorous idioms?

The heebie-jeebies (I'm starting to like how it sounds, long about now) has a tangle of connections that is even denser: Phonoloblog's Eric Baković had this on partial labial reduplication, building on a LINGUIST query and summary, here. Heebie-jeebies doesn't show up, but look at some of the many h- + b- pairs discussed in one or both places:

• hubble bubble (>hubbub?)
• honey bunny
• hurly burly
• hillbilly

Thinking of the Simpsons' Heebie-Jeebie Hullabaloo makes you think about adding hullabaloo to the set. Sure enough, earliest OED citation:

1762 SMOLLETT Sir L. Greaves vii, I would there was a blister on this plaguy tongue of mine for making such a hollo-ballo.

Metrically, we've had a few interesting reductions, of course, but that's another topic. And look at a few of the h- + p- cases:

• higgledy piggledy
• hodge podge
• hocus pocus
• hanky panky

Not to get all philosophical, but like the bumper sticker says: What if the hokey pokey is what it's all about?

*If you haven't read Ben's piece on National Dictionary Day, you're the last person who can read English with an internet connection … click here and get that off your record.


Appendix: The Zimmer Report

This is a little hard to search for in the full-text OED, but one way to find examples is to search on "fit of the", which turns up:

fit of the blues 1807
fit of the glooms c1808
fit of the sulks 1824
fit of the 'clevers' 1826
fit of the shakes 1837
fit of the giggles 1881
fit of the shakes 1884
fit of the dismals 1893
fit of the slows 1927
fit of the uglies 1939

Those last two also go back to the 19th cent. outside of the "fit" frame: "the slows" ("an imaginary disease or ailment accounting for slowness") from 1843 and "the uglies" ("depression, bad temper") from 1846.

Still looking for more 18th cent. examples other than "the blues/blue devils". There's "the horrors" ("a fit of horror or extreme depression; spec. such as occurs in delirium tremens") from 1768, but that originally appeared as "in the horrors". Cites with "have/get/give the horrors" don't show up until the 19th cent. Similar story with "the mournfuls" (1794). Here's the earliest "get the Xs" I've found so far:

c1750 M. PALMER Dialogue in Devonshire Dial. (1837) 5 A call'd her a purting glum-pot, zed her'd got the mulligrubs.

"Mulligrubs" ("a state or fit of depression; low spirits; also: a bad temper or mood"), like "mubble-fubbles", goes back to the late 16th cent., but chiefly in the construction "in one's Xs".

One last example to brighten your day:

collywobbles
colloq.
[Fantastic formation on COLIC n. and WOBBLE n.] A disordered state of the stomach characterized by rumbling in the intestines; diarrhoea with stomach-ache; hence gen. indisposition, 'butterflies in the stomach', a state of nervous fear. (In quot. 1853 used nonsensically.) 1823 EGAN Grose's Dict. Vulgar T., Collywobbles, the gripes. 1841 Punch 9 Oct. 154/1 To..keep him from getting the collywobbles in his pandenoodles. 1853 'C. BEDE' Verdant Green I. viii, A touch of the mulligrubs in your collywobbles? 1901 F. T. BULLEN Sack of Shakings 308 He laughingly excused himself on the ground that his songs were calculated to give a white man collywobbles. 1959 I. & P. OPIE Lore & Lang. Schoolch. x. 185 He is a 'funk'..or has 'got the collywobbles'.

Image from here.

Neanderthal language gene?

News flash ... from here:

Neanderthals, an archaic human species that dominated Europe until the arrival of modern humans some 45,000 years ago, possessed a critical gene known to underlie speech, according to DNA evidence retrieved from two individuals excavated from El Sidron, a cave in northern Spain.

The new evidence stems from analysis of a gene called FOXP2 which is associated with language. The human version of the gene differs at two critical points from the chimpanzee version, suggesting that these two changes have something to do with the fact that people can speak and chimps cannot.

I'll try to follow up on this later ... .

Palenquero in the NYT

Here the NYT does another piece on the language of a "small community, which is now struggling to keep it from perishing". This time, it's Palenquero, a creole spoken by a small community in Colombia. The article, by Simon Romero, puts the size of the ethnic community at 3,000, with fewer than half 'active speakers'. (SIL has much lower numbers: 500 of 2,500.) I'm starting to wonder how many articles there can be about language endangerment using this same formula. But what caught my eye was something different: "Theories about its origins vary".

Really? The piece makes a big deal about possible 'closest relatives', etc., but the basic origin seems pretty clear — it's a creole developed and used in an old maroon community, lexified by Spanish. In the scholarly literature, especially work by the creolist/Romanist Armin Schwegler (see here, for instance), there has been a move toward seeing more African, specifically Kikongo, input than in many creoles. In the piece linked just above (abstract only, article's behind a pay wall), Schwegler argues for an African origin of most of the pronouns in the language, and more generally that "speakers of Kikongo must have played a dominant role in the formation of Palenquero".

Map from here, but I won't vouch for the text … is it really "el criollo más antiguo del Caribe"?

Chinese lacking "a proper alphabet"?

NBC just ran a news story on how the Chinese government is promoting learning of the Chinese language around the world, including in exotic Lawton, Oklahoma. (My guess at the subtext: If people in some town in Oklahoma most of you have never heard of are learning Chinese, it must be everywhere.)

It was by and large the usual stuff of such stories, but it closed with a guy saying that the Chinese language lacks "a proper alphabet" (I think the quote is right — don't see the video up yet). Gee, I guess that's true in some sense, given that Chinese is not usually written in what we normally call 'an alphabet'. What's 'improper' about the writing system they do use is profoundly unclear. Can't we at least get the 'written for thousands of years' shtick instead of this?

Media people: Please, I beg you, please check your stories. There are many thousands of linguists, language teachers and language specialists in this country. Talk to one before you publish. Please. Trust me, it'll make your life easier too.

Image from here.

To get the Xs

In talking to somebody about this tonight, there are plenty of parallel constructions in English to the heebie-jeebies discussed below, where you have or give somebody the shivers, the giggles, etc.

So, you should be able to talk about a single heebie-jeebie. But some don't work that way for me -- the jitters, where a jitter works in a technical sense, but not in this sense. The creeps is only plural as far as I can figure, though Merriam-Webster says "usually in the plural".

So, now, I just gotta know: Is there a willy behind the willies? M-W lists it as 1896, origin unknown.

heebie-jeebie (adj.)

So, here's a tiny lexical question I've noticed for the longest time: (to have/get/give smbdy) the heebie-jeebies is solidly established in American English, probably beyond. The origin is widely traced to the Barney Google comic, e.g. by Michael Quinlon here (also the source of the image) and by some dictionaries. (Sorry for the offensive image, but it was the oldest one I found and the usage warrants illustration.)

Here's the more interesting point: For a while, I've heard people use heebie-jeebie (no -s) as an adjective. A friend of mine refers to academic work he really regards as downright disreputable as "heebie-jeebie shit". I've found enough attestations of it to make clear that it's no fluke ... the usage is out there. Derivationally, it's not hard to understand, I suppose: What looks like a plural noun could easily lose the -s and get zero-derived to an adjective. But I'd completely forgotten but it's actually famously attested (see second picture).

Colbert update

I've been thinking about Colbert's new 'book', I am America (and so can you!) for a while. He joked long ago about it being a unique title, which was pretty cute — I think it does work as a kind of non sequitur / classical ungrammatical string. Even "colorless green ideas" took quite a while to become widely used. (Google it … poems, songs, op-ed columns.)

Then there was the thing about it not actually being a book, since books are for 'pantywaists'. (Maybe a gentle jab at the redefinition of 'torture' by our government?)

Today, he's taken over (most of) Maureen Dowd's space in the NYT. Nice job, even if some of the reviews of the book are right that his stuff works better live than in print given his delivery.

What really caught my eye, though, was his quip (If you can use that comfortably for a written text — I keep hearing his voice when I read the column.) about Fred Thompson:

In my opinion, "Law & Order" never sufficiently explained why the Manhattan D.A. had an accent like an Appalachian catfish wrestler.

Is this Low Country southern broadbrush stereotyping of their western cousins? First, Thompson was born in north central Alabama and raised in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, southwest of Nashville. Hardly the mountains. Second, by catfish wrestling he presumably means noodling. Catfish wrestling is surely associated with the South generally, like here, and I gather that it's known in the southern highlands, but it's pretty famously associated with areas farther west, like Arkansas and Oklahoma. Is the deal that he's simply trying to label Thompson an über-redneck? I guess bootleggers are not hip and current enough and NASCAR drivers are too upscale.

Verb regularization

Well, I wasn't going to write a word about the set of new Nature articles on language change, given the coverage on Language Log and the nice overview here, where the journalists talked to two linguists about verbs — Brian Joseph and Steven Pinker, pretty much the people you'd want to talk to about this. But Erez Lieberman and co-authors make some very interesting claims in their piece "Quantifying the Evolutionary Dynamics of Language". Amazing piece and very interesting, but take a look at the data, here. They list verbs like hurt as regular ('weak') in Old English. But as far as I know, it's not attested until the 12th c. Any idea what's going on there?

Happy Frederic Cassidy Day!

Wisconsin linguistic hero and founder of the Dictionary of American Regional English Frederic G. Cassidy would have been 100 years old today. Our state is celebrating. See here for some of the reasons he's being so honored.

"Mistaken consensus"

Today's NYT has this piece on Gary Taubes' new book Good Calories, Bad Calories. He's the guy who wrote the big NYT Magazine piece two years ago that started (so it seemed to me, anyhow) a huge wave of media on the Atkins Diet. That piece struck many as giving credence to the view that carbs are dangerous, and that fat isn't all that bad for you.

The book pursues what sounds like it might be a shaky view thesis on biology and diet, but Tierney's piece today is about the sociology of the anti-fat consensus … about how little good, rigorous evidence there was for the anti-fat thesis from early on. Tierney (an editorial writer, if you don't know him) lays out familiar points about 'informational cascades' (hey, if all those guys believe this is right ....) and then a 'reputational cascade' (hey, if I disagree with the dominant position, I'll be crushed). Popular opinion has certainly reversed course here — I don't eat out that much, but 'low-carb' options seem to abound suddenly — and the science sounds pretty unsettled to me. At best, it sounds like we just don't know for sure how bad fat or what the really healthiest diet is. Considering the resources we've poured into diet, obesity, cardiac health, diabetes over recent decades, this may surprise you, but only if you expect the world to be pretty simple. It's not.

Now, if that's where we're at on one of the biggest health questions, where do we stand in linguistic theorizing? A couple of aggressive and smart career-builders could potentially sell the field on about any old snake oil, I figure.

Image indirectly from despair.com, one of the coolest outfits around.

Phonotactic phunnies

OK, we all know the unpronounceable foreign name shtick. No big surprise that Doonesbury plays the game. The pronunciation of Berzerkistan's leader may well look like a Tashlhiyt Berber word — ‘tgzmt’ and things like that are fine in the language. But if you look at the strings Trudeau uses, the spellings aren't that bad — there are enough sonorant consonants in there so that you could make them work, even as an English speaker. But what struck me was the initial [ptk] in the pronunciation. He just happened (I imagine) to pick the three lowest sonority sounds for which we have good symbols, and put them in order from front to back.

UW's losses

Not that Steve Nass would care, but one of the winners for this year's Nobel in medicine was on the faculty at Wisconsin for many years, before going to the University of North Carolina. He left before the current mass exodus, but is a reminder that, as one of our most famous faculty members of all times puts it, we have long been a farm team for places that reward great faculty. Oliver Smithies taught here from 1960 until 1988, I just read, the bulk of a long career.

By the way, read that article about Nass and try to tell me you aren't utterly creeped out.

Update, Tues. morning: Read this to see that Smithies did the key work that got him the Nobel while he was here. We're not just the farm team, we're where people do the heavy lifting before they get rewarded elsewhere.

The death of cropping?

Back on the job, finally and been, well, kinda tied up ...

Seems like when cool linguistic innovations reach a certain level of popularity, they die -- no longer markers of cool, inside status. There's a long set of croppings in American youth language that leave the final syllable of a word:

• parents > rents
• pizza > za

The first one has long been familiar to me but never pushed much past its original audience. Za turns up in broader circles, it seems like, and often a little tongue in cheek. It's striking in part because so much stuff in English starts from left edges, not right ones -- we're deleting stressed syllables and keeping unstressed ones.

Just heard a Coke ad on the radio pushing the notion of venience, from convenience, and doing it in a very self-conscious, heavy-handed way. It's not disyllabic like most of the example I know, and it's not deleting a stressed syllable. And it doesn't work all that well. Is this an unraveling of that cropping pattern?

Is there more going on here than I see?