The apostrophic War on the Holidays

I was fighting the urge to post about this piece on Slate, about how to pluralize your last name, and now officially give up. Anything that has this line is hard to resist reacting to:

It’s Christmas! Celebrate by not doing violence to the laws of pluralization.

Wow, I think, how do you do violence to the laws of pluralization? Wait ARE there laws of pluralization? Turns out there's outrage about 'stray apostrophes'. "Every year they assault me." Oh, about spelling. Got it. I won't review the green grocer's apostrophe here (but knock yourself out: here, for one.)

But plurals do get into the picture. (Say cheese.) Apparently there's deep worry about the Wolf family signing as 'The Wolves'. A card from the wolves? I'm cutting back on the eggnog at that point. They usually barely knock when they come to your house here in Wisconsin. That's what I call 'assault'.

Merry Thanksgiving and wishing you all lots of apostrophes for the holidays,
The Verb's

Found the image at a Walk in the Words. They have a nice little post on the topic.

Farfromduden: German linguistic purism

Wow, wonders really never cease, I guess. Today's NY Times has a big editorial by Anna Sauerbrey, an editor at Tagesspiegel, called "How do you say 'blog' in German?" about purism in German, especially with regard Anglicisms. (Click on the link just for the graphic.)

The immediate issue is one that's known to people who deal with the German language: Duden, the publisher whose reference works define the standard language, just published a new edition, their 26th, with lots of new English loanwords. But I never figured it'd make the OpEd page of the Times!

The small industry of protectors of the German language have reacted, as diligently as Anglo-American stereotypes of Germans would lead you to expect them to be. In particular the Verein Deutsche Sprache (VDS or German Language Society, Germany's most established club of peevologists) has given Duden its Sprachpanscher des Jahres award, 'language adulterer of the year'.* Sauerbrey argues for what we linguists see as the obvious response to borrowing: Relax, it's fine, not gonna be a problem, language will continue to work just fine. It's a nice piece and worth reading.

Just a historical footnote from me. Duden's own page says this:

Der neue Duden ist mehr als nur ein Buch: Das umfassende Paket zur deutschen Sprache besteht aus Buch,Wörterbuch App für Smartphones und Tablets sowie dem Zugang zur elektronischen Duden-Rechtschreibprüfung. 

That is, "the new Duden is more than a book: The comprehensive package for the German language consists of a book, dictionary app for smartphones and tablets as well as access to the electronic Duden spellchecker."

The VDS guys surely had minor strokes on seeing those screaming anglicisms ... app, smartphone, tablet, with English plural -s tacked on. Gah!  Horrible. Destroying the German language. But if you know German and go back and read the whole passage where that occurs, you'll see more old and mostly non-English loans than new English loans. Paket is borrowed from French paquet like a number of other words in there (aktuell, for instance). Prüfung is formed from a verb borrowed from Old French. And elektronisch (and its many derivational kin) is ultimately built from Latin, while Markt is a Late Latin loan. Rechtschreibung 'orthography' is a loan translation from Greek orthografía. And on and on.

But it's not just that borrowing itself isn't new. If you go back to the Middle Ages, you have parodies of speakers (mis-)using Romance and other loanwords. In the Early Modern period, reactions to French borrowing were as hotheaded as the VDS's crusade today. Even discussions of German's linguistic prehistory have often wrangled over Celtic loanwords and the question of whether the Celts 'dominated' the Germanic peoples. Still, German hasn't borrowed anywhere near as many words from other languages as English has from French and Latin alone.

* You may recognize that the name of their signature award is itself built on a French loanword from the 18th c.: The verb panschen 'to water down, adulterate' (often spelled pantschen) is from panacher. It usually referred historically to watering down alcoholic beverages.

"Irritating nouns-as-verbs"

Henry Hitchings has a piece in the NYT this morning called "Those Irritating Nouns-as-Verbs", here. It's about stuff of the type "do you have a solve for this problem" and "let's all focus on the build" (his examples). I was all set for a rant about peevology and how nouning is just as fun as verbing, but it's much less peevologically driven than I first assumed.

Still, the real value in the piece, I'd say, is Grant Snider's graphic, starting with the title.

Texting "might be making us less intelligent"

The NYT has a big ad this morning for paperbecause.com, about the threat that texting poses to not only language but even intelligence, laid out in detail on this page. The site is owned by Domtar, "the largest integrated manufacturer and marketer of uncoated freesheet paper in North America and the second largest in the world".

The blurb says that "The severity of the educational repercussions of texting is hotly debated among the experts", and they argue that "Reports ... suggest that the younger generation is not as smart as it used to be when it comes to basic decorum for important life skills such as applying to college or for a job." But I was wondering how far they'd have to stretch to make it an ad for paper …

Indeed, in a professional context, the “laziness of language” exhibited in texting could be considered, at best, as a level of familiarity that might not be appreciated by a recruiter. At worst, it could be viewed as reflection of a lax attitude in other areas – also something you don’t want to put forward when you’re asking for a job.

So, how can paper help with this distinctly modern conundrum? Paper is a classic, commanding its own form of respect and inherently conveying formality. To print out correspondence like a resumé or college entrance essay subtly imparts the message that a candidate has taken the time to consider their application and that they are serious about achieving their aspirations. Putting a document down on paper, sealing it in an envelope and addressing it to a key contact also demonstrates an ability to properly adapt forms of communication to the right setting so you get the optimal result.

Did pen and pencil manufacturers pursue similar strategies when computers started to build a big market? Whatever, in my world, nothing says formality like vellum (image from here).

The real complaint about language is the supposed retreat of formal language. If that's happening (and that's a plausible thing), it's an interesting question what that means culturally, but I'm pretty sure it's not causing stupidity.

Now, THAT's a split infinitive

We're gonna be seeing a lot of stuff on language and politics in the coming months, no doubt. Check out John McWhorter's new CNN piece (here) as an example of that. He argues that talking folksy is good for candidates.

It doesn't count as folksy, for most of us at least, but politicians naturally split infinitives, like the rest of us. Romney was quoted (here) as having said this:

I've been interested in seeing that the president continues to not only in speeches but in ads say things that are patently untrue.

For me, and I split infinitives happily even in formal writing and often find non-split infinitives odd or occasionally wrong, this just doesn't work. 

The decline of ain't

The Lingua Franca blog over at the Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice post from Allan Metcalf, of OK fame, on "The decline and fall of a 4-letter word". He makes a nice point:

“Ain’t” had the advantage over other four-letter words in being pure defiance or pure sincerity, not carrying any baggage of obscenity, blasphemy, or indeed any other content at all, since it is just a form of “be” or “have.”

One basic point is that it has lost its power to shock, with the key date being 1961, with the publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged.

I didn't first read "decline and fall" as being about taboo status but rather about frequency of usage. While spoken usage would be more interesting in many words, Google Ngram Viewer provides a pretty interesting data on this. Below are the images for English, American English and British English. (And, do I need to write it anymore?, click to embiggen.*)

Pretty surprising decline and fall, actually, and maybe surprisingly early, especially in American English — decades before Webster's Third, in fact. (And what the heck is going on with the late resurgence?)

But it's useful to have some kind of crude basis of comparison here, so I checked ain't versus isn't. That provides another little surprise:

The two words track very close until the beginning of the 20th century, diverge pretty sharply and then show roughly parallel paths with isn't far more common.

Anybody have a smart story for what's going on here?

* Oh yes, of course, because it's a chance to use embiggen.

Hopefully this is the end of THIS bit of peevology

Lo and be-freakin-hold, the Associated Press has flipped on hopefully. Here's the WaPo story on it, and the key quote is:

the venerated AP Stylebook publicly affirmed (via tweet, no less) what it had already told the American Copy Editors Society: It, too, had succumbed. “We now support the modern usage of hopefully,” the tweet said. “It is hoped, we hope.”

OMG, Syntactic Chaos!!!

So Science Times published an article on creaky voice in girl culture (here) last week.  I have this obsession with Science Times (okay, tangent: they're usually so wrong on language that I really shouldn't accept anything they say about other sciences, but I still hafta read it), so just now I was reading the letters to the editor in the section.  I can do nothing else than reproduce this letter in its entirety:

Re "They're, Like, Way Ahead of the Linguistic Currrve" ...: For huge pluralities of Americans under 40, English is littered with qualifiers: not just "like," but "you know," "sort of," and "I mean."  When combined with "uptalk," these phrases are effectively a social taboo against expressing certainty, commitment or confidence in anything we say.

Linguists caution against "forming negative judgments," but the rest of us are alarmed at this syntactic chaos.  English teachers, at the front lines, seem to have abandoned the teaching of the cultivation of grace and clarity in our speech, and therefore in our thoughts.

Well, thank some deity or other it's the English teachers' fault!!!

(Image from here)

more droppin of the g's

Mr. Verb has commented on so-called "g-dropping" by politicians a fair bit, e.g. here and here.  Just caught another reference (from the Isthmus) to our favorite down-home social marker, one which is striking for all the assumptions communicated in just one teensy little sentence:

Thompson was a hard worker and, perhaps because of his unpolished style of speech - dropping his g's and other lapses - people underestimated his intelligence.

The author speaks of course of none other than our former Governor-for-life, Tommy Thompson, now making a run for the Senate (-for-life?).  I think Tommy comes by his "lapses" honestly, though - he was doin' it back before it became trendy durin' the 2008 elections.  Just a hometown boy from Elroy, Wisconsin, doin' what comes nacheral.  It'll be interesting to see if the media picks up on this theme as his campaign gets into high gear.

"Tim McGraw hates [lexical] semantic change."

A very perceptive student emailed with a link to the Tim McGraw video "I miss back when", saying:

when I heard the refrain of this song,  all I thought was "wow, Tim Mcgraw really hates semantic change".

Yup.

International peevology: Spanish edition

Last month, I had a chance to go to an amazing conference in Barcelona. It was great to hear a bunch of Catalan and see a new bilingual setting. Flying over, the Iberia Airlines magazine had something remarkable ... a great piece of Spanish-language peevology. I didn't even know about the existence of Fundéu!

"Linguistically, it's stupid"

Consumerist has this piece on

English Professor: I Was Booted From Starbucks Over Bagel Linguistics

… with the brilliant line "Just venti-ing". The prof refused to say that she did not want anything on her bagel:

"I just wanted a multigrain bagel," the woman told The NY Post. "I refused to say 'without butter or cheese.' When you go to Burger King, you don't have to list the six things you don't want... Linguistically, it's stupid, and I'm a stickler for correct English."

Linguistically, this isn't so much stupid as irrelevant. But culturally, it's stupid beyond comprehension. And how does this have anything at all to do with 'correct English'? No wonder English departments are in deep trouble if they have professors like this.

It has a funny ending, though: The cops were called.

This is not linguistics

To who it may concern:
This is not linguistics:

when Justice Sonia Sotomayor was having trouble with an Italian word Monday, she turned to Scalia, the court's resident language maven.

Nor is it 'language maven' material. It's pronouncing names in a foreign language, nothing more:

Sotomayor hesitated as she was about to say the name of an Italian cruise line that figured in the opinion she was summarizing involving a woman who broke her leg on a cruise.

"Costa Cruises responded that she should have sued a related company called Costa – I'm going to ask my colleague Justice Scalia to say it right," Sotomayor said. The company's name is Costa Crociere.

"Kroo-chee-ER-ay," said Scalia, the son of a professor of Romance languages at Brooklyn College.

It's nice that he helped her out, don't get me wrong, but don't make too much of it ...


Image, and it's a brilliant and beautiful one, n'est-ce pas?, from here.

Monster of Peevology: Wolf Schneider

Since Mr. Verb posted on a German topic yesterday,* let's have a little topical continuity. The news magazine Spiegel just published this interview:

Wolf Schneider is a famous German journalist, often called, as here, the 'pope of the language' (Sprachpapst). In fact, the interview begins with a set of his nicknames, about him being exacting with language. The best, I think, is "Monster der Sprachkultur". Oxford-Duden defines Sprachkultur as "level of compliance with linguistic norms". That is, Schneider has basically been called the Monster of Peevology. His response to this was more or less: "Monster isn't a nice word, but whatever."

By the way, the title is actually shortened from "Germanistik zu studieren, halte ich für besonders töricht", "I consider it especially stupid to major in German Studies."And he rails against literary studies, along with blogs, twitter and about everything else.

If you read German, the piece might give you a chuckle ... . 

* Nope, I don't know what's going on with her accent either.

OUP blog ... what we owe prescriptivists

Lately, for whatever reason, we haven't been posting on peevology and related matters. Maybe it's the passing of William 'Bill' Safire. Or maybe the flood of serious language science and bizarre dog-bites-person language stuff that we have been posting about. Whatevs.

But this morning I happened to check in on the Oxford University Press blog and read a piece by Alexandra D'Arcy, one of the best young sociolinguists out there, which had me pondering all day. She attributes her becoming a linguist to her seriously prescriptivist grandmother, and draws a nice connection here:

Grandmother’s love for language endures. Its form is different but the substance is the same. Grandmother taught me to revere the spoken word. I do. She taught me to heed not only the content but also the form. I do. She also taught me that not everybody speaks the same way. And it is this fundamental truth that makes me excited to go to work every day.

But what kept me thinking all day was that last line, that something about language makes her excited to go to work every day. I know a lot of people who do a lot of things, but it's almost only the linguists I know who talk about how we are excited to do what we do. And by god, we are.

PS: Read the comments to that post to see a maven shoot themself in the foot.

Image from here.

Wearing your peevology on your sleeve

This t-shirt is available now from Signals (here):

I'm not exactly sure why, but this somehow looks like a shirt that women are far more likely to wear than men. (The missus confirms that.) Maybe the purported tendency of women to be more invested in Standard Language Ideology?

I'm way too old to remember the days of being single, when social settings were opportunities to meet potential romantic interests. (John Cowan makes appropriate guesses about my age in a comment here.) But this is the exceptional case where I would have taken motherly advice about such matters very seriously.

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.

Ambrose Bierce

I don't know about you, but I'm probably enjoying Safire's vacation more than he is. The set of stand-ins this week has Jan Freeman doing On Language, talking about the author of one of the first books about language and usage — maybe the first, actually — I ever owned, Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary. (Have been looking for my ancient copy, in fact, but haven't turned it up yet.)

The inventor of the term peevology (and related forms, I guess) gives pretty compelling reminder that language does change and that we have to deal with it by showing that 100 years ago, peeves were often things that make no sense to us today, like finding the word dirt "disagreeable". Bottom line:

But when did you last make a distinction between necessities and necessaries, or various and several? Half of our pet peeves could seem equally arcane by 2109 — and we don’t know which half.

Yup. You need to read the piece.

"Grammar police": law and peevology update

By this point, people regularly pass along their favorite or least favorite examples of peevology. The latest, which has been sitting untouched around the house for a week, is the University of Alabama's Law School publication, Capstone Lawyer 2009 edition. It includes some pretty interesting and very positive stuff, like Bama's programs in Ethiopia. But it also has this:

Meet the Grammar Police

It's your standard peevologist thing, about law student Sharon Eliza Nichols (I use no first name, and she needs two?) ranting about not grammar but spelling errors — misuse of apostrophes and your ≠ you're are the only two examples given. If you're bitching about grammar, you should be able to distinguish it from spelling. This problem has been endlessly pointed out here and on the Log, and elsewhere, of course ... the memo isn't getting around to some folks, I guess.

The piece points out that Nichols founded an fb group called "I judge you when you use poor grammar", which "boasts more than 350,000 members and 7,000 signs". If you search that string on Facebook, you don't get anything nearly that big (maybe my patience wore thin too fast?) but there are lots of groups with that and similar names. She is in fact listed as admin on one such group, with a mere 1,672 members and 1,226 pictures when I checked it. Here's the shpiel:

ASSIGNMENT:
If we are going to win the War on Poor Grammar, we have to seek out the infidels (grammar offenders) and hold them accountable. Under our watch, justice will indeed prevail.

Your assignment is to seek out the infidels and document their acts of terror. Take pictures and post them in this group to serve as examples to all. Our condescension and their humiliation will eventually cause them to change their wicked ways.

Good luck, and God bless you all.

Seems a little over the top to me, with the whole jihad thing. In fact, especially since the image top left above is on the site, I would think it was ironic if I hadn't read the article and some of the surrounding stuff.

More interesting is the proliferation of groups like these:

I judge you when you judge me for using poor grammar.

I will NOT judge you when you use poor grammar

Yes! Role Tied!

Update, 11 am: As was quipped this morning on this topic: This is the kind of stuff that would give grammar a bad name if it had anything to do with grammar.

Image from here.

The Peevologist Idiocracy?

One of the most stunningly stupid popular narratives about language is that it's declining steadily. You know the lines: English is being destroyed by young people not using 'whom' or by them using 'like' (as in 'she was all like ...). This clearly parallels the general Decline of Civilization narrative. xkcd has this beautiful piece playing off of that by way of Idiocracy. Just look at panels 3 and 4 and substitute 'language', 'grammar', etc. for 'religious', 'moral', 'society', etc.