Silver Jacket

Category: Language

  • iChat Zen: Of Presidents and Hackers.

    This IM chat just happened.

    friend: woo hoo only 4 more days
    me: YES
    friend: do you have plans?
    me: actually, now that i know what you’re talking about, replace that YES with a meh [definition]
    friend: you do not know what i’m talking about
    friend: whatever you think i’m talking about, this is more important
    me: presidents day
    friend: oh wow, i didn’t even realize they coincided
    me: yes all the presidents coincide on that one special day
    me: it makes the tides extra high
    friend: even president neap?
    me: is that real?
    friend: since you asked…
    friend: only four days
    friend: until
    friend: the dvd
    friend: release of
    friend: RENT
    friend: we can watch it whenever!
    me: replace my meh with a feh [definition]
    friend: how do you spell that?
    friend: with an "eh"?
    me: yes
    me: both etymologically distinct from teh [definition]
    friend: indo european roots
    friend: ?
    me: teh has haxor rOOts
    friend: you do
    me: nah

  • Have you hugged a colon today?

    HealthycolonNatalie Angier had a great article in the Times yesterday about cuteness. But pay close attention to the following sentence. Don’t worry, the first read-through is just a dry run.

    The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession.

    First, I’m all, "My detector isn’t set THAT low."

    And then, I’m all, "Oh, I get it."

    Remember, people, unambiguous punctuation is your friend. (By detailing panda feeding habits later in the article, Angier also comes dangerously close to reënacting the "eats, shoots, and leaves" offense that sparked a book of that name.)

    But wait, you know what? Colons, the squishy kind, CAN be cute. The deuce says one thing, but the Dooce says another.

  • Turning in Her Grave

    MissgouldThe letters page (20) of the Nov 28 New Yorker contains an odd use of the phrase "survival of the fittest":

    "Idealists may be shocked, but pragmatists know that Harvard and Yale are wise in admitting future survivors of the fittest."

    (more…)

  • Embedded Music Journalism

    FistYesterday I was reading interviews with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and I came across what I think is the most tricky and yet correct and clear sentence by a rockstar in an interview that I have ever seen, containing about four levels of embedded clauses:

    "When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I’d love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie."

    And it’s finished with a flourish of "like."

    I emailed the linguist Mark Liberman at Language Log about it, and he promptly established "the Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding, to be awarded intermittently." As a sidenote, Mark also commented that "Reznor seems to be a bit confused about where footnotes go." But then, Trent didn’t get where he is today by properly formatting term papers.

    I also read an interview where Trent discusses his participation in Hurricane Katrina benefit concerts this past weekend, and it closes with the understatement of the week:

    "I don’t know that we’re the ultimate feel-good, everything-is-going-to-be-OK band. But hey, we’re doing what we can."

    I wonder if they played Fistfuck.

  • He Said, She Said

    BombNice to see the boys and girls playing together.

    In a fancy bit of service journalism, Maxim has offered a translation segment intending to broaden the horizons of horny dudes too insecure to open the pages of Cosmo. It goes as such:

    "DIRTY TALK
    BODY LANGUAGE
    Match the correct sexual term to its classy gal mag euphemism. (We can read!)"

    I'll stop there, but suffice it to say I've never heard "internal bliss bomb" around the locker room.

    Ah, what the hell, here they all are, correctly matched:

    (more…)

  • Bombs Away

    FbombMy latest contribution to Language Log: an email to Arnold Zwicky instigating the post "No fuckin’ winking at the Times."

    Basically I found it absurd that the prudish Gray Lady had written an entire article about the word fuck without even going so far as to call it "the f-bomb." Instead, the author called it "a word-bomb." He explains:

    …very rarely does the paper print those obvious, winking, letter-word stand-ins. As The Times’s two-page stylebook entry on obscenity says, "An article should not seem to be saying, ‘Look, I want to use this word but they won’t let me.’ "

    Looks like he failed on that one.

    [The funniest part of the article is the correction: 

    An article last Sunday about shifting standards for the use of profanity misspelled the surname of the bartender in the television series "The Simpsons." He is Moe Szyslak, not Syzlak."

    Reminds me of a correction I cut out of the Brown Daily Herald once. It said that they had misspelled the name of Xena the Warrior Princess as Zena, tacking on, solemnly: "We regret the error."]

  • When is a cliché not a cliché?

    CatsuitSo yesterday I’m reading an article in Slate itemizing government idiocy, and I come across the following sentence:

    We are witnessing that rare occasion when the phrase "I don’t know whether to laugh or cry" can be uttered without lapsing into cliché.

    Really? We are?

    Has the writer successfully avoided cliché by couching a cliché as he did? (My vote: No. The sentence is clumsy and hackish.)

    On a deeper note, can a cliché ever not be a cliché?

    (Actually, I do recall one other rare occasion when the phrase "I don’t know whether to laugh or cry" could possibly have been uttered without lapsing into cliché. Years ago, in an attempt to manifest a version of the Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment for a school science fair project, I locked a clown in a large wooden box. I arranged the triggering device so that it had a 50% chance of launching a cream pie at Hobo Jim’s face, and a 50% chance of hitting him with an exploding baby. [Not everyone is familiar with quantum mechanics, so here is some background: Pies in the face are funny. Gruesome infant fatality is horrendous.] Until I opened that box to witness the results, I truly did not know whether to laugh or cry. So I did both.)

  • Grammar By Numbers

    I love it when language wonks crunch numbers.

    Last week I was describing to my sister a job offer. She replied, via IM: "It doesn’t seem like that painful of work for $50/hour." The sentence caught my ear, and I wondered whether it would be acceptable outside of casual conversation. My curiosity compelled me to email linguist Mark Liberman about it. He also found it interesting and wrote a post about it on Language Log.

    Highlights:

    Matt’s sister is blazing new linguistic trails here.

    It’s not surprising that the sentence triggered enough of a WTF reaction in Matt to motivate him to ask about it.

    Conclusion:

    I’m happy to be able to tell Matt that I estimate his sister’s sentence to be 424.7 times less grammatically correct than "It doesn’t seem like that painful of a job for $50/hour" is.

    Emily, don’t take this the wrong way. Everyone else, Emily is a great writer, and no I’m not a prick who enforces correct grammar in IM. I am merely a dork amused by anomalous usage wherever it pops up.

    Yet I still feel like a cruel hidden camera TV show host preying on private behavior. "Surprise, Emily! You’ve been Language Logged!"

  • Full Circle

    OnomatopoeiaMonday night I was on the phone with my friend Jamie. At the end of the conversation he told me to brush my teeth. I instinctively quoted Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (the movie I have, due to youthful indiscretion, seen more than any other movie ever) by singing "brush brush brush, brush brush brush." Jamie told me that the way I said it I sounded like I was brushing my teeth. I said, "Like an onomatopoeia, but different. Wait, there’s a word for this, and I read about this word THIS VERY DAY." Fucking incredible. Here is what I read. The word is phonestheme and it describes a type of sound-meaning association.

    To top it off, Jamie, under the moniker Jonny 5, has an album called Onomatopoeia!

    To top it off EVEN MORE, I googled the "brush brush brush" quote and immediately found a blog comment on this page. The VERY NEXT comment (also quoting Pee-wee) goes:

    I often say to people who are whispering behind my back "Is this something you can share with the rest of us, Amazing Larry?"

    What’s the significance? My conversation with Jamie BEGAN WITH A DISCUSSION OF THE YING YANG TWINS’ WHISPER SONG. What is the world coming to? [Now checking outside for locusts.]

  • The Language Police Wonder

    Question_marksMark at Language Log made a post on Friday that touched a nerve and brought up something I’ve been pondering recently: the acceptability of using a question mark with a wonder statement. Specifically, he said:

    "I wonder how many such templatic clichés we have in English?"

    Is he asking the readers whether he wonders this?

    Heck no. BUT maybe he’s soliciting responses from readers, in which case the sentence literally means: "How many such templatic clichés do we have in English?" In that case, his declarative sentence punctuated by a question mark would be idiomatic usage (if it has indeed achieved the rank of idiom.) The words are arranged like a declaration, but are meant to act as a question.

    I’m debating whether to make such usage acceptable in my own personal stylebook. You see, I’m very touchy on the use of question marks with wonder statements because I have emotions at stake. Frequently when people write "I wonder if X is Y?", they are using a sloppy formation of "I wonder: Is X Y?" Irrefutable cases of this terrible mistake (Mark’s is ambiguous) have become a pet peeve–here’s where the emotions come in–because of an experience in 5th grade.

    One day, my English teacher read us sentences and we had to name them fact or opinion. I received a sentence along the lines of "My favorite color is blue." This is a fact, albeit a fact about someone’s opinion. The teacher insisted the sentence was an opinion. As if it were: "Blue is the best color." My stubborn resolution halted class and resulted in raised voices and hurt feelings. Sixteen years later, I still feel the sting of anger.

    Facts about opinions are still facts. And declarations about questions are still declarations.