Onion Makes Strong Verb Joke!

We at Mr. Verb particularly like verb jokes, so it's nice to see the Onion (American's Finest News Source) make one.  This was in the National News Highlights section, January 10, 2013:

Adrian, MI - After a week of precipitation, Kelly Knoke has started using "snew" as the past tense of "snow," just to mix it up a little.

 know:knew::snow:snew!  Go Onion!

(By the way, if you don't know what the picture is of, you must not have grown up with snow...)

Tense, moody AND irregular ...

Look, I know that the Log has cornered the market on these images, but we GOTTA cover this one.

Out sound bitten

Wow. On Olbermann's Countdown just now, I came into the room to hear E.J. Dionne (I think it was him anyway) say that the Democrats got "out sound bitten" in the recent elections.

My brain is spinning. Even new formations on strong verbs are normally weak -- you flew to Denver but flied out to right field. But 'soundbite' is so firmly established that I couldn't imagine that it'd yield a strong verb.

I feel pretty bitten, but maybe not so sound out bitten. Wait ...

My story: Mr. Verb

People keep asking who I am, and what I look like. OK, here's the story. And here's my pic:


When we started this blog, none of us, I think, had any idea that parts of speech are so often personified by teachers.

Verb forms: seent, spunt, skinded

Sometimes people start off with a linguistic peeve and piece together a better picture of things. That looks like what Betty Winston Bayé of the Lousiville Courier-Journal did in this article, called

Speakers haven't 'seent' the harm of casual language

(It's short … it's better for you to read it than for me to summarize it.)

The piece caught my eye mostly because it deals with a common linguistic phenomenon that's not so common as a peeve: Many speakers simplify final consonant clusters, so that -nt is pronounced as -n, for example. So, dent gets pronounced as den. (Let's just leave aside for the moment the huge number of speakers who pronounce it with a glottal stop — that's relevant to the broader structural picture but not of immediately concern to my point.) A lot of research by sociolinguists has shown that people do this more often in words like dent that happen to end in the pattern and less often when the -t or -d is marks past tense, like in went, sent, and so on. For non-linguist readers, Winston Bayé is observing a hypercorrection, that is, where speakers who do this simplification are aware that they do it. They try to avoid it, but ending up adding a final consonant where it wouldn't normally appear, like seent for seen or spunt for spun. This bothered her enough to write a piece about it, so she talked to some linguists who make the usual points about informal speech and so on. (It's interesting that hypercorrection is really not about casual speech in some sense.)

The piece starts out feeling like it's going to be a rant about a peeve, but it seems like over the course of the article you can feel how Winston Bayé is actually wrestling with the notion of socially charged linguistic variation: We have good reasons for using distinct and distinctly non-standard varieties, but we can pay a price for it. She remains really concerned about the latter point but seems to get the former point. I don't know how journalists think about such a tone, but I find it kind of refreshing to see what's in some ways an opinion piece that lays it out that way.

I Fan Chai

Woke up way too early but found two things that made it all worthwhile:

1. On my box of Tazo decaf chai it says: "DID YOU KNOW? The word 'chai' means both 'tea' in Hindi and 'living' in Hebrew. Mere coincidence or evidence of inscrutable grand design?" Oh, clearly the latter!

2. Everybody knows you can friend somebody on Facebook. But tonight I learned that you can also "fan" someone - i.e. become a fan. Specifically, there's a blurb that says "World's Favorite Novelist - Let us know what you think. Fan his page and post on his wall." (It took me a while to figure it out but the world's favorite novelist is John Grisham. I like his stuff, but not enough to fan him.)

Durst on verbs

“Drill here. Drill now.” Four syllables. Repeating the verb.

That's Will Durst's take on McCain, from Durst's cool little Daily Dose. Sounds like the latest version of 'a noun, a verb and 9-11'.

HT to Mr. P.

The Verb in the news

Well, this blog has been silent for quite a while. If you read the papers, you'll know Mr. Verb's is surfacing here and there as a possible running mate for John McCain. I imagine they won't let him use his laptop or something. It's August and the collaborators are scattered far and wide — a couple on the East Coast and three in the UK alone, including yours truly.

But while he's being vetted for veep, I can at least take on one of his normal duties and call your attention to the latest Speculative Grammarian, here. (You probably read LINGUIST and know about this, but The Verb still does it every issue, it seems.) This line on the cover gets your attention:

Less data than Linguistic Inquiry,
Less analysis than Studies in Language

Ouch. But I'd expect Mr. Verb, even from some secure undisclosed location for some security check / enhanced interrogation, would take a moment to note this article, by John Miau:

"The Life And Death Of An Anonymous Verb"

Probably a cousin or something. As a more phonologically-inclined member of Team Verb, I'm puzzling a little over "Cartoon Theories of Linguistics—Part 12—Syllables" by Phineas Q. Phlogiston, Ph.D. I mean, do we cry at a good challenge?

Anyway, let's see when The Verb returns.

Escarverbing

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.

The strongification movement

A set of Wisconsin students have announced to me and probably others that they're starting a movement to make English weak verbs strong. They're calling this strongification (a word which shows up on google once for verbs) or, alternatively, verbal fortition.

Now, I'm not hearing them change their actual usage yet, but on Wednesday, one of them said basically this before class started:

I heard somebody say fitted for the past tense of fit. I was thinking, you know, fat would sound so much better.

That actually does kind of work.

Image of Charles Atlas from here.

Strong/weak verbs and meaning in English …

In a comment on a recent post, hh raises an excellent question:

there's an interesting directionality to the irregularity. I wonder whether, in causative/inchoative pairs where only one is irregular, it's always the inchoative?

Now, I'm not worthy to answer any questions about word forms, especially not those raised by someone who understands morphology, but out here in the blogosphere, qualifications apparently play no role in letting loose. So, despite my complete ignorance of the vast literature on this general area, where all relevant data have surely been fully analyzed, here goes …

In looking at causative/inchoative pairs, I wasn't seeing any variation in inflection that I could spot, so I tried from the other direction: Below is a list of English verbs where regular/irregular inflection is said to correlate with some difference in meaning.* I'll just list the strong forms, since the weak forms are pretty clear, unless there are two distinct forms beyond -ed.

• bid, bade, bidden (vs. bid, bid, bid)
  
• blow, blew, blown
• cost, cost, cost
• get, got, gotten (vs. got)
• hang, hung, hung
• heave hove, hove
• knit, knit, knit
• shine, shone, shone
• slay, slew, slain
• speed, sped, sped
• stave, stove, stove
• work, wrought, wrought (archaic, of course, as they note)
  

The Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (see Jan's comment on the earlier post**) treats virtually all of these. Bid, bid, bid is said to be preferred for 'to make a bid', but "in other senses" bade is "most common". Regular staved seems restricted to 'to stave off', and they have slayed primarily in the theatrical sense of 'to be a great hit with'. I had to look up blowed to be sure that it was in the fixed phrases like 'I'll be blowed' (in addition to dialect), but even that sounds pretty marginal to me.

Beyond that, this list has some oddities, at least for my intuitions.

• First, going back to the original example that triggered this, while shined/shone is in there, outshine is listed only as strong.
  
• Second, I have no intuition at all about most of these, or didn't immediate consider them the same verb — hove is simply a nautical term or really archaic.
  
• For some others they don't count, I do have a clear sense: lit works for various figurative uses where lighted just doesn't — like 'to spin the tires on a car' ("Earnhardt really lit'em up coming out of the pits"). The strong form seems like it might be better generally for causative uses.

The hanged/hung distinction is maybe the best known of these pairs. It's historically driven: English used to have a transitive/intransitive pair here, parallel to lay/lie, set/sit, that collapsed for this verb, as they have for many people in those other two examples. But MWDEU comes to the right conclusion:

The distinction between hanged and hung is not an especially useful one … . It is, however, a simple one and certainly easy to remember. Therein lies its popularity. If you make a point of observing the distinction in your writing, you will not thereby become a better writer, but you will spare yourself the annoyance of being corrected for having done something that is not wrong.

Beautiful! And right! There's the case for following lots of prescriptions. But in the end, I'm not seeing a clear correlation in this little dataset. But surely there's more data and this question has been answered somewhere that I just don't know about.

*Data from the English strong verb appendix to the Oxford Duden German Dictionary — the first place I found such a list.

**Don't miss Jan's column today on language and politics, here.

NYT shining a shade less gray this morning?

I always assume pretty conservative usage from the NYT. More precisely, if dictionaries list two options, I expect to see the old-fashioned one in their page. So, I was a little surprised by this headline:

Clinton’s Fund-Raising Success Is Outshined by Obama’s

They used the verb form I would have, but I probably would have avoided a past participle in a prominent place, like a headline, because neither option — outshone or outshined — sounds completely comfortable.

"The Verbs"

Now, a band with our family name … here. I think we are related, but don't remember how.

Hat tip to Mark Mandel, who noted the band on ads-l.

The semantic derogation of verbing?

The recent post on Buckminster Fuller declaring himself to be a verb has drawn a classic set of witty comments, the kind of thing that keeps me posting. A lot of the commentary consists of additional examples of personal names being verbed. While Fuller surely had a positive meaning in mind (and the Ridger's note on him saying "God is a verb" supports that), all these examples are bad, including Oscar's witty interpretation of the original example. Or more precisely, all the ones I understand are negative … I'm not quite clear on how to read "you really speared last night, dude", but I'm flat out assuming it can't be good. (More concretely, I'm thinking multiple police cars, court dates and expensive detox time.) Even the iPhone interface was announced to be verb-free.

The oddity here is that it looks like we see a change over time: Once upon a time, being a verb was cool, it was about action and doing. Sure, there were always truly rotten verbs in the barrel, like Judge Lynch, but there was good verbing too. Today it's all about verbing as crashing and burning. Fuller would do it, but what fool would declare himself a verb today? Sigh.

Buckminster Fuller was a verb?

I think I am a verb.
— R. Buckminster Fuller

Just happened across this by accident, here. Nobody identifies more closely with verbs than me, but what the hell does this actually mean?

Various people seem to have become verbs in recent years in ways they probably didn't want, like Robert Bork and Larry "Wide Stance" Craig.

Grammar Rock does Verbs

Somebody just sent me a link to the Grammar Rock postings on YouTube, including the one on verbs, here. They even touch on verbing, kinda.

"Mitt Romney's ominous verb"

The most reliable person in the lingua-blogging world, Ben Zimmer, passed along this link when it was fresh, but I'm only now getting around to it. (I'm still not quite making enough money blogging to give up the old day job ... maybe soon.)

It's Walter Shapiro's fine piece in Slate on Romney's religion speech and here's the opening:

Reading the advance text of Mitt Romney's speech this morning on "Faith in America," I came upon a very un-American verb. (No, it is not the transitive use of "torture" or "waterboard.") The verb in question -- which is normally innocuous, but in this context is ominous -- is "require."

Here is the passage that troubles me: "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."

Now, I'm hard pressed to figure out why transitive torture and waterboard are more ominous than intransitive ones — the intransitive "the U.S. tortures" seems at least as bad as a version with a direct object, maybe more threatening. Beyond that, though, Shapiro is dead on the money, that the core statement ("freedom requires religion") "is historically ludicrous". And he decodes the real message, the dog whistle if we can nod toward Ben Zimmer: What Romney might have said is the far more truthful: "Republican politics and religion prosper together, or they lose elections alone."

Verbing in the news: "to fyi"

You've probably been following the story of Chris Comer, who was just fired as Director of Science Curriculum for the Texas Education Agency. Her crime was forwarding an email to a list about a lecture by a leading critic of Intelligent Design, which was counted as an endorsement of evolution. It's hard to even comment on the facts here.

At the Log, Bill Poser has just posted a note on the linguistics of this outrage, noting that interpreting the forwarding of an email as an endorsement of what's in the email is, well, wrong.

But there's a little tiny linguistic point in yesterday's NYT piece, here:

“I don’t see how I took a position by F.Y.I.-ing on a lecture like I F.Y.I. on global warming or stem-cell research,” Ms. Comer said.

To fyi, or to F.Y.I. as the Times copy editors prefer, just had to be out there … it sounds like perfect bureaucratic talk ... but I don't think I'd ever heard it and I'm pretty sure I'd never seen it in print.

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.