You blame Chomsky for WHAT?!?!?!?

OK, this is a pretty weird piece. It starts with this title + comment:

It's time to challenge the notion that there is only one way to speak English. Why do we persist in thinking that standard English is right, when it is spoken by only 15% of the British population? Linguistics-loving Harry Ritchie blames Noam Chomsky.

Wait, what? It's Chomsky's fault that there's linguistic bias? Here's the start of the article:

Did you see that great documentary on linguistics the other night? What about that terrific series on Radio 4 about the Indo-European language family tree? Or that news report on language extinction? It is strange that none of those programmes happened, or has ever happened: it's not as if language is an arcane subject. Just as puzzling is the conspicuous lack of a properly informed book about language – either our own or language in general.

Oh.  So, who gets the blame? After some meandering commentary on Pinker's Language Instinct, among other things, we eventually learn:

I put it down to the strange way that the discipline developed under the aegis of the man who has dominated and defined it since the late 50s, the father of modern linguistics, Chomsky.

And this is no vague blame, just about the popular impact or perception of linguistics:

the wholesale acceptance of Chomsky's rationalist assumptions has meant that the discipline has been hunting for unicorns while neglecting many key areas of language. There is still little research being carried out on, for example, environmental influences on children's language acquisition. 

Most pressingly of all, too little work is being done to record the languages currently facing extinction. By one estimate, 95% of the 7,000 languages now spoken in the world are in danger of dying out. Recording these should have been a priority.

I just googled 'endangered languages' and got over 2,000,000 hits. Google 'generative grammar' and you get over 500,000. That probably roughly reflects the current levels of activity on those two fronts. I would add something on 'environmental influences on children's language acquisition', but I'm not entirely sure what it means.

Ultimately, Chomsky "turned grammar into a technical subject full of jargon and algebra studied on whiteboards by men with beards". Yeah, that's certainly killed physics and cognitive science and whatnot. 

I eventually realized I was reading science fiction. 

Image from here.

Animal communication, hockey player edition

In case you missed the biggest language or communication news of the week, here it is:

Scientists Believe Hockey Players May Communicate By Banging Sticks Against Boards

At least one contributor to this blog plays hockey (and the image here may be the stick he uses, in fact); it's good to know that he's capable of some form of communication beyond snarky blog posts.

Here's a key piece of the story, from biologists at Stanford:

“We found that hockey players can use stick-banging to indicate anything from disagreement with a referee to encouragement of their teammates,” said lead researcher Dr. Margaret Cundiff, who explained that players typically strike the boards a single time with force when they want to display anger, or use multiple softer taps in order to display approval. “Sometimes, an entire bench full of players will begin banging the boards in unison—either signaling that a goal has occurred, or that the players want a goal to occur. This actually lets hockey players ‘speak’ to each other, if you will, in surprisingly complex ways far beyond what was previously anticipated. They are truly magnificent creatures.”

Wow, magnificent indeed. 

Thank you, The Onion, for continuing top-shelf science journalism.

"linguistics sleight of hand"

Another example of using 'linguistics' in a particular negative context, with a whiff of something ominous about 'linguistics'. Charles Krauthammer accuses Obama of that here:

Look, it's another linguistics sleight of hand here. The backend sounds like some, you know, obscure, curlicue in the process. It's the cash register! It's the point at which you make the purchase. And if you don't have correct information or any information you don't have a purchase, you don't have enrollment, you don't have a plan, you have a catastrophe. And everybody understands that. 

Sounds like he's accusing Obama of deception because he (or his people?) talked about the 'backend' of healthcare.gov in a misleading way. But isn't the use here consistent with what 'backend' normally means in this context? Is there some insidious word game here that I'm missing? He was using language, so it was 'linguistic' in some sense, but I'm not getting the 'sleight of hand'.

And yes, I suppose Obama can "issue all the words he wants". Much like Krauthammer. And Team Verb.

Weird assertions about Sarah Palin and language in the news

Yes, it's still happening. People won't stop talking about how Sarah Palin talks. And as far as I can see, they can't stop getting it wrong. This one isn't exactly wrong about how she talks but …

A couple of our contributors apparently watch Chris Matthews on Hardball. Doesn't strike me as healthy, but two of them discovered a little oddity last night in a discussion of Sarah Palin's English. In this video, check out the discussion around 5:00 or so to get the context, with the key part beginning at 5:30:


Alex Wagner says that we should be glad that Palin uses subject-verb agreement. Fair enough. But Chris Matthews responds with this: "Predication, you mean, yeah". 'Predication' has a set of different meanings in linguistics, from pretty non-technical (where a 'predicate' is everything but the subject in a clause) to pretty technical (various syntactic and semantic issues connected with the philosophical sense of 'predication'), some of the latter pretty well explored back in the Government and Binding days (where 'government' had nothing to do with politics). But does anybody know of a usage that would make sense here?

Back in 2008 when Palin's speech — mostly her accent but sometimes her syntax — was all the rage, we blogged that stuff to hell and back. One of the big points was that people were getting it mostly wrong about how she talks. Didn't particulary expect to see it come back around like this. God help us all if she actually acts like she'll run next time around.

Weird. Just plain weird.

As a linguist who works on Menominee, this stopped me in my tracks:  "It may be semantics, but linguistics can be a team event."  Um, how did the author (Jewel Topsfield!) come up with Menominee as the language she gave an example of right off the bat?  And did she know anything about it, or was it just random?  Oh - there's a clew, Miss Marple, a clew!  The examples she gives would just not be that interesting in an Algonquian language:  "I begin to eat"; "He digs a hole"; "He walks out".  At least not as interesting as "She sees him" and "She sees it" would be...  Well, I guess they'd have to have a preverb for "begin", and they'd have to know that "dig a hole" is a single verb.  And then, they'd have to avoid trying to find a word for "out" that would come after "walk".  So I guess it's an okay test.

But now my question is, where would the students find this information?  Bloomfield's Lexicon would give some help, but it's notoriously user-unfriendly (and the fact that it is only Menominee-English might be a deal-breaker).  His grammar is, well, "user-unfriendly" doesn't begin to describe it.  So...  I am just so totally baffled by this.

Not to mention the headline.  Oh, not to mention the fact that the article is in the "Stock and Land" section of the Australian farmonline website!  Wow.  I am truly confused.

Vindicating Greenberg. NOT. On the peopling of the Americas

The New York Times this morning has a piece on genetic evidence that the Americas were populated by a set of three migrations from Asia, an early one and two later ones. The first peopled most of the Americas and the others became the groups of people who speak Na-Dene and the Eskimo-Aleut languages. The evidence looks interesting but it's really incomplete — not much from most of North America, which is a serious gap.

Then, linguistics comes in:

The finding vindicates a proposal first made on linguistic grounds by Joseph Greenberg, the great classifier of the world’s languages. He asserted in 1987 that most languages spoken in North and South America were derived from the single mother tongue of the first settlers from Siberia, which he called Amerind. Two later waves, he surmised, brought speakers of Eskimo-Aleut and of Na-Dene, the language family spoken by the Apache and Navajo.

But many linguists who specialize in American languages derided Dr. Greenberg’s proposal, saying they saw no evidence for any single ancestral language like Amerind.

Well, not just specialists in American languages but historical and comparative linguists around the world.

The piece then concludes with this, a quote from Andres Ruiz-Linares of University College London, one of the investigators:

“Many linguists put down Greenberg as rubbish and don’t believe his publications,” Dr.  Ruiz-Linares said. But he considers his study a substantial vindication of Dr. Greenberg. “It’s striking that we have this correspondence between the genetics and the linguistics,” he said.

So, actually, Joseph Greenberg — who was an important linguist, somebody who was a founder of the modern field of linguistic typology (image from here) — claimed that almost all languages of the Americas are genetically related, save for the Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut families. He proposed this using tragically, horribly flawed data and using methods that can most gently be described as extremely controversial and not accepted by any serious historical linguist that I know or know of. The basic method is 'Mass Comparison', where you just eyeball lots of data. You can get a sense of some of the discussion in the journal Language 64.591-615 in 1988, where Lyle Campbell wrote a review article on Greenberg's book Language in the Americas. But there's a huge literature dedicated simply to cataloging the vast numbers of errors in Greenberg's data and some work showing that the errors consistently skew things in favor of his views.

As far as I know — and I don't have all the stuff at hand, but I know the work pretty well — linguists didn't particularly challenge claims about three waves of migration. If we think about basic geography, you might posit parts of this based on just distribution of languages – Eskimo-Aleut languages are pretty close to Siberia and a lot of Na-Dene ones are not much farther away. Then there's the rest of the hemisphere and it's hundreds of languages which look like they belong to many different families. Don't really need linguistics or detailed linguistic evidence for that.

Linguists really focused on the supposed evidence for 'Amerind' as a so-called super-family including hundreds of languages that cannot be shown to be related using the classic tools of comparative linguistics, like the comparative method. Most of us who talked about this in public and in print specifically said that we weren't claiming that the languages weren't related, just that we don't have evidence showing it or methods that allow us to show it.  There IS evidence emerging for connections between some languages of Siberia and the Na-Dene family (search this blog for Ed Vajda's name), and that could easily correlate with them having come in a distinct migration. But that's as much as we've got right now.

I can build a theory about how dry weather leads to plants dying that rests on gremlins killing plants because they're angry about the absence of rain, because they like to dance in the rain.  Whether gremlins play a role is independent of whether dry weather correlates with plants dying. (Watching things here, though, I'm pretty confident about the correlation.) Greenberg's observation about the distinctiveness of Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene vis-à-vis other languages of the western hemisphere is an interesting one, as is the claim of three waves of migration which he connected to that. And the claim of waves and these particular waves might be right — the genetic evidence sounds like it's consistent with it and the geography would fit neatly — but the purported linguistic arguments are all about gremlins.

My point is that it's best to see Greenberg's views about waves of migration as a CLAIM that may or may not be right. You really cannot say that it's supported by linguistic evidence nor that 'Amerind' is supported by linguistic evidence.

Quick update, 12:30: After posting this, I checked facebook and saw some similar points made by notable linguists (you know who you are) and I take that as suggesting that the basic outline here is pretty clear for those of us in the field. Less happily, this story is up, claiming that the genetic evidence "comes close to settling an old question in linguistics". The above post gives arguments against that view, I hope.

"Texting Can Have A Negative Effect On Linguistics"

The article is here, but this one's all about the headline.

"Korean language scientifically superior"

The press seems to endlessly repeat stuff people believe about language. The Google news feed for 'linguistics' just handed over a big forkful of this:

Korean language scientifically superior
Dec 16, 2011 (The Korea Herald - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- SEOUL (THE KOREA HERALD/ANN) -- As a scholar who has spent the past four decades studying his mother-tongue and language in general, professor Sohn Ho-min should know what he's talking about when he says Korean is the world's most superior language.

"When we say Korean is superior, we are basing this on scientific examination. The Korean language's method of making sound through a combination of vowels and consonants is very scientific and economical, even," professor Sohn of the University of Hawaii told a news conference in Seoul, Thursday.

Sohn just received the Korean Foundation Award for promoting Korean in the United States. Looks like he deserves it. Not sure, though, exactly how the combination of vowels and consonants in Korean is unique or superior.

There is a major meme about how Korean is a structurally unique and even 'superior' language, and it's not hard to get into conversations about why it is or isn't. Just search a string like "Korean language superior" and you'll get a sense of how widespread it is.

I suppose, given the subject line, that this post is one that will get hits from Google from people actually seeking an evaluation of the claim of Korean as "the world's most superior language". Here's an answer: No language is structurally superior to others in any scientific sense. Evidence to the contrary most welcome!

That said, the Korean alphabet is a thing of wonder and beauty. Celebrated, rightly, with a national holiday.

Proto-Human and Yodic syntax

I first read earlier this week about new work on the word order of the earliest human speech (first in a footnote to a post on the Log on an entirely different subject, see here). The work is by Murray Gell-Mann and Merritt Ruhlen, two proponents of the notion that many characteristics of the earliest human patterns of speech are well within our reach, and it was published in — wait for it — the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. The abstract opens with this:

Recent work in comparative linguistics suggests that all, or almost all, attested human languages may derive from a single earlier language.

The blood pressure of almost every trained, working historical linguist in North America skyrockets on reading that. Just ask one. But here's the big take-home from the story:

The word order in the ancestral language was SOV.  Except for cases of diffusion, the direction of syntactic change, when it occurs, has been for the most part SOV > SVO and, beyond that, SVO > VSO/VOS with a subsequent reversion to SVO occurring occasionally. Reversion to SOV occurs only through diffusion.

I had been pondering whether it was worthwhile to write about the story. The evidence for Proto-Human, as it's often called, is insanely controversial, to give it the most positive spin, and whether syntax can be reconstructed in a significant way is also still controversial. (There's reasonable evidence that some elements of it can be, but that gets us as far off the ground as a good high-jumper, while Proto-Human word order is a trip to Mars.) I had decided that it wasn't worth it. But then …

Alert Linguistics major Carla Oppenheimer passed on word of a couple of news stories on this to a member of Team Verb:

• Life's Little Mysteries (again, under the rubric 'Weird'): "The Original Human Language Like Yoda Sounded"
• HuffPost Weird News: "Yoda Language Study: New Research Shows Human Ancestors Spoke Like Star Wars Character"

YES!!!! Finally, a level of seriousness that Proto-Human so richly deserves!

So, I'm thinking, is this how Yoda speaks? I tried entering some simple English SVO sentences into the Yoda-Speak Generator (yup, it's real: here). A bunch came out SVO with 'yes, hmmm' added at the end. But in many cases the object was topicalized: 'Yoda has odd syntax' came out as 'Odd syntax, Yoda has. Yes, hmmm.' That's actually OSV, one of the rarest word order patterns known.

But that's not the key pattern if you put in more complex sentences. Try this:

I will tell you about the earliest human language.

and you get this:

Tell you about the earliest human language, I will.  Yeesssssss.

So, the Yoda generalization here is that he topicalizes like mad, a generalization among many explored years ago on Language Log, like here, in the aptly titled "Unclear of Yoda's syntax the principles are, if any". Certainly, whatever generalizations are possible, Yodic is not SOV.

At the same time, comparing Proto-Human word order to the speech of a Star Wars character seems just right.

I(mage from the Life's Little Mysteries story.)

Lingodroid

With that title, does the post even need content? This is all over a bunch of tech blogs, but I haven't seen it among the linguabloggers. Amar Toor probably gets it right (here) with:

Lingodroid robots develop their own language, quietly begin plotting against mankind

Hey, I live in Wisconsin. That's less scary than most state elected officials. And no, I'm not bothered in the least by whether or not this could reasonably be considered 'language'. I might have been until I read the word robotapocalypse. Game over.

Image from übergizmo.

What (some) journalists think of linguists: McCrum

Imagine a journalistic piece about a linguist that starts by describing them as "that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field." Sadly, you don't need to imagine it.

Robert McCrum has published it in the Observer, here. If you've forgotten, McCrum is the author of Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language. I would note that many people actually trained in linguistics are far from convinced that McCrum knows enough about linguistics to talk good sense about it. (For one example, see here.)

The piece is headlined "Language alters how we think" and it's about Guy Deutscher. The opening continues:

In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the fashionable consensus, espoused by the likes of Steven Pinker, that language is wholly a product of nature, that it does not take colour and value from culture and society.

I have no comment at this time.

Chomsky's acclaim

I guess even the National Review makes a plausible statement occasionally, even if it's vacuous. They are running a review of Thomas Sowell's new book, Intellectuals and Society, called "The Divine Right of Intellectuals: Too many intellectuals believe they have a duty to make decisions for the rest of us" by David Hogberg. In it, Hogberg writes:

Chances are slim that Noam Chomsky would ever have achieved the acclaim that he did if he had stayed in the field of linguistics instead of venturing into U.S. foreign policy.

I think we can agree on this. If he had stuck to linguistics, he would by definition not be famous as a media critic, critic of US foreign policy, etc. But there's something really wrong about this perspective. First, Chomsky the Public Intellectual, unless I'm seriously missing something, specifically urges people to think for themselves, examine evidence, etc. Definitely has strong opinions, but I wonder how you figure that he wants to make decisions for us. (Seems like the claim is from Hogberg, but maybe Sowell argues this — I've read some of his earlier work, but not this.) Second, there's this odd hint in here that Chomsky's acclaim as a linguist is something less than remarkable. And his influence in a variety of other fields.

By the way, Sowell concludes with a warning that "the intellectuals’ vision is still dominant": “Not since the days of the divine right of kings has there been such a presumption of a right to direct others and constrain their decisions, largely through expanded powers of government.” Really? In fact, this piece suggests once more how deep anti-intellectualism runs in this country.

Free-floating neurons: Linguistics professors and philologists say the darnedest things

It's sometimes humorous and often alarming to see how information about language and linguistics gets presented in the media — a familiar fact and one that drives much linguistic blogging, here and elsewhere.

In a piece called "We've entered linguistic tangle" for the Amarillo Globe-News, John Freivalds runs through a set of cliches, starting with good old "Press '1' for English; press '2' for Spanish" to rail against the use of languages other than English in education and the public sphere, etc. Conclusion: It's all about 'liberal guilt'.

But he actually quotes a linguist, or tries to, or claims to:

A linguistics professor once explained to me that before puberty children have "free floating neurons" in the brain. This enables them to learn numerous languages and to do so without an accent. If someone learns another language after puberty, they will always have an accent.

I'm not sure what free-floating neurons are. I checked with a cognitive science-oriented colleague who had the same reaction I did, namely that this was a mangled reference to the critical period hypothesis, with 'free-floating' referring to plasticity. In checking around, I found that Freivalds had published a similar version of this point earlier (in TranslationDirectory.com but yet earlier in a Roanoke, Va. newspaper):

Philologists tell us that we have “free-floating neurons” in our brain before puberty that enable us to learn an "infinite" number of languages.

Wow, what a tangle we've entered. Philology, in Merriam-Webster's 11th, is:

1: the study of literature and of disciplines relevant to literature or to language as used in literature
2 a: LINGUISTICS; especially: historical and comparative linguistics b: the study of human speech especially as the vehicle of literature and as a field of study that sheds light on cultural history.

It is occasionally used as a synonym for 'linguistics' and that's what we have here, the broadest of M-W's set. But please don't trust any self-identified philologist to explain cognitive science. Then we've got the free-floating neurons again. And this time it's an infinite number of languages we can learn. (I assume the quotation marks around 'infinite' are for emphasis.) Wow, a world with an infinite number of languages. Linguistics would be a serious challenge then.

It's that last point that caught my attention: What's the actual limit on how many languages a kid could acquire? Is the boundary set by how much input the little bugger could get? Even assuming poverty of stimulus, you have to have a lot of exposure to a language to learn it, at any age.

Image from here.

Aha ... what linguists do in their free time

In Madison, Wisconsin, they apparently play shuffleboard. Check out this story. (For more photos of Woody & Anne's, see here.)

I wonder if the Bilabial Fricatives have any openings on the team.

Unreconstructed beatniks, and un-

Deborah Solomon's "Questions for [famous name here]" piece in the NYT Sunday Magazine is something I always look forward to: It's normally a tasty little nugget of who knows what.

But today, I was already plenty happy to open the Magazine and see that Ben Zimmer is doing "On Language" this week. And it's on language, too: About the winding path of the prefix un- in English, with ample quotes from Lawrence Horn. Zimmer closes with this line: "Like it or un-." There's a set of degrammaticalizing prefixes in English these days, that is, formerly securely attached word-parts that are coming unglued. (See here for background.) Nice column.




Back to Solomon: Like everybody else, she's interviewing Deborah Tannen, about Tannen's new book on sisterhood. Tannen got established as a noted discourse analysis specialist and then went on to become an author of big time popular books, starting from discoursey stuff and moving out from there. I've long wondered whether she still thinks of herself primarily as a linguist, in fact, given how little most of her work really deals with language these days. We get the answer:

Do you live grandly?
No. I still live like an academic. I don’t wear makeup. I probably still dress like an unreconstructed beatnik. I think of myself as a writer as much as I think of myself as a linguist and an academic. I really enjoy writing — playing with language and getting just the right metaphor.

My guess is that if you're really a linguist and academic, you're all but automatically doomed to not being a fashion plate. (I personally wear a lot of makeup, but that's another matter.) Still, the interview really gives the impression of somebody who's probably more a writer these days. I'm glad she's kept to our sartorial code.

It's interesting how many linguists have made the transition to writing, in a whole range of ways. Steven Pinker has become a superstar writer, but staying with the science thing, and like Tannen keeping an academic position. Rosina Lippi, a formidable sociolinguist, has turned into a really cool fiction writer. Suzette Haden Elgin likewise is a linguist turned fiction writer.

By the way, one note: There was a little dust-up over at the Log about Joe Wilson's "you lie!", where it quickly was established that this is simply idiomatic Southern English. Tannen rounds out the interview nicely but overreaches on the interpretation, I think:

As a linguist, what can you tell us about [Wilson's] statement “You lie”?
It’s a way to be maximally agonistic and get the most attention with the fewest words. It’s the kind of thing some sisters might yell at each other, especially when they’re teenagers.

"The best linguists I've ever seen"

Who said that? And who were they talking about? Was it someone who sat at the elbows of Chomsky and Halle during the writing of Sound Pattern of English? Or a discussion of Ken Hale or Kenneth Pike as field linguists? A fan of the Neogrammarians, or maybe the University of Wisconsin's great structuralists back in the day? Nope:

Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant who wrote a treatise on political linguistics called “Words That Work,” told Politico: “Obama's team are the best linguists I've ever seen. Republicans aren't in his league right now."

Of course this is another meaning of 'linguist' than the most of the ones we've talked about here — people engaged in the scientific study of language, military language experts, people concerned about usage, etc. Luntz is praising the name that Obama and his team are giving to their economic plan: “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.” I guess this gets close to the 'framing' stuff that George Lakoff has been doing in recent years.*

*If you have access to the Chronicle of Higher Education, check out the piece by Evan Goldstein in August, called "Who Framed George Lakoff? A noted linguist reflects on his tumultuous foray into politics."

Democrats: Linguistics a priority

Actual quote from a WBBH news story, here:

Top Democrats say they want to get started on linguistics right after the election.

Is this some odd example of the Zimmerian Cupertino effect? I could imagine that 'logistics' would fit the full context, which is this:

When Congress does head back to work, there will be a new topic of conversation. The Democratic are reviving efforts to get another stimulus check out to the public.

Top Democrats say they want to get started on linguistics right after the election.

Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who heads the House Financial Services Committee, says it would give the middle-class and the average citizen the same kind of relief Congress has been trying to give the financial sector.

Whatevs, I've got dibs on syntax. Or … wait for it … maybe that should be sin tax.

Obama-Veneman

Well, I wasn't under consideration for McCain's VP, despite what some contributors may have claimed., but I was otherwise occupied for a few weeks, unfortunately, with pressing stuff that didn't allow me to blog or even read much. But things are back to normal now.

I just saw this 'photo' over at FiveThirtyEight.com and had to laugh, despite the spelling mismatch. There have been rumors about Obama choosing Ann Veneman as veep. From a linguistic point of view, though, it calls to mind the linguist Theo Vennemann. He's got broad experience — phonology, morphology, syntax, historical, and other areas of linguistics — and I think he's retired from Munich now, so he should be available. He's German born, though, so that presumably rules him out.

New Chomsky interview

I finally read Richard Klin's interview with Noam Chomsky in January Magazine, available here. It's about the man and politics, not linguistics. If you read about Chomsky regularly, a lot is familiar, but there are always little tidbits. Nonetheless, it's worth a read. Check out this:

There has not been much examination of Chomsky’s actual writing style. One could argue that much of its effectiveness is owed to a welcome lack of jargon or windy polemic. There is a sort of just-the-facts approach that not only isn’t dry but veers toward the colloquial.

Among linguists, his style is constantly discussed, precisely for its dense and difficult character. And Chomsky is well aware of the contrast:

The eschewal of rubric is a conscious effort to eliminate “complexity and obscurity .... If I’m writing about, say, technical linguistics, it’s not easy reading ... the clinical articles are going to be for people who know about them. When you’re writing about human affairs, there’s no technical knowledge.”

Self-awareness is good. I'm not convinced that any writing in linguistics needs to be as tough to read as his work, but ...

Lexical category confusion: Verbs and nouns

This just in from a reader, with the scan labeled 'lexical category confusion'.
I think the character here is 'Billy', judging from here. Of course, it's anything but weird: we all know that verb is a verb and, yeah OK, also a noun. Is it a prescriptivist jab at verbing? Another strip, Calvin & Hobbes, is where verbal verb is usually seen as having taken off, and that's no longer being written/drawn. It surely can't be a jab at them, can it? Maybe verbing is acquired after age 7, apparently Billy's age. Whatevs.

Hat tip to P.R.