Grammar

Sometimes I’ll spot a name in the wild and it’ll make me smile all day. Trader Joe’s House Whip is one of those names.   “Whippee!” “Whip-itty-doo-dah!”   Makes me feel like dancing.

You can’t buy Kim Kardashian’s shower invitation at a stationary store (which most stores are) — or even a stationery store. At least that’s the message I got from this photo caption on Yahoo! Shine: Filed under: Confused Words, stationary/stationery Tagged: Commonly confused words, editing, funny writing errors, funny writing mistakes, homophone, homophones, proofreading, Shine, stationary, stationery, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Shine

Q: Is a group of people a ”which” or a “who”? Here’s the sentence I have in mind:  “It has only been studied in chronic alcoholics, which [or who] have reduced rates of muscle protein synthesis.” Please help! A: In modern English the relative pronoun “which” isn’t generally used in reference to people. This wasn’t always so, however. Depending on when you lived, the use of “which” has been relative. Until the 19th century, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, “which” was used in relative constructions to refer to a person or people already mentioned. (A relative pronoun introduces a subordinate clause: “I finally found my keys, which I’m always losing,” or “He’s the man that got away.”) Here are two 19th-century examples from the OED: “Dugald Stewart, one of the greatest men which Scotland has produced”—1836, from James Grant’s Random Recollections of the House of Lords. (Today, “that” or “whom” would be used instead.)  “The wounded, which were carried past, … never failed to salute the Emperor”—1841, from Archibald Alison’s History of Europe, From 1789 to 1815. (Today, “who” would be used.) But here’s a much older and more familiar example. In the original 1549 edition of the Book of Common Prayer, the Lord’s Prayer begins, “Our father, whyche art in heauen ….” In the 1928 edition of the Book of Common Prayer, however, “who” was substituted for “which” to reflect modern usage. Contrary to popular opinion, the relative pronoun “that” can often be used in place of “who.” As we wrote on the blog in 2007 and 2006, “that” can properly refer to either a person or a thing, despite a common misconception that it’s only for things. We could stop here, but your question touches on another problem: “that” versus “which,” and the kinds of relative clauses they introduce. We’ve discussed this subject on the blog too, in 2010 and 2008. In modern American usage, the preference is to use “which” and “that” to introduce different kinds of relative clauses—“which” for inessential information (set off within commas), and “that” for essential information. This means that in general, American writers use “which” for clauses whose information could be plucked out and still leave behind a sensible sentence (they’re called nonrestrictive or nondefining clauses). And “that” is generally used for clauses whose information is essential and can’t be dropped (these are restrictive or defining clauses). Many British writers use “which” for both kinds of clauses. In the example you mention, the clause is nonrestrictive and would call for “which” if it didn’t refer to people: “It has only been studied in computer simulations, which [not that] show reduced rates of muscle protein synthesis.” But since it does refer to people, you’ll want to use “who” instead: “It has only been studied in chronic alcoholics, who [not which] have reduced rates of muscle protein synthesis.” In a restrictive clause, you could use either “that” or “who,” as in this sentence: “It has only been studied in patients who [or that] have reduced rates of muscle protein synthesis.” By the way, we’re not saying “which” can never used to refer to humans—just not, for the most part, as a relative pronoun. As The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) says, “which” can be used an as ordinary pronoun in place of “any of the things, events, or people designated or implied.” Examples would be “Which of you is going?” … “Even after viewing the lineup, he couldn’t say which was the perpetrator.” … “Which is the better candidate, John or Mary?” “Which” can also be used as an adjective in reference to people: “Which guy did she end up marrying?” Finally, in case you’d like to brush up on “who” versus “whom,” we recently ran a roundup on how to use the two pronouns. Check out our books about the English language

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article by Barry Newman titled Theres a Question Mark Hanging Over the Apostrophes Future. My aunt sent me an email copy of the article as she knew I would enjoy it. And I did enjoy the article; however, my favorite part of the email was her subject line which read: Apostroph'. Thanks for creatively amusing me. I am also still chuckling over the intentionally humorous aspect of the title.* * In case anyone didn't notice, there are missing apostrophes. Comic via Funny-Fun-Fun by Scott Hilburn.

There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet. ? Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot Geoffery Pullum posted a third lament about the current state of NLP: Speech Recognition vs. Language Processing. Here are his first two: One: Why Are We Still Waiting for Natural Language Processing? Two: Keyword Search, Plus a Little Magic. I have responded twice. One: Pullum thinks there are no NLP products??? Two: Pullum’s NLP Lament: More Sleight of Hand Than Fact. My Third ResponseThe more I read Pullum’s three laments, the more I keep asking myself, “exactly what is Pullum complaining about and who is he aiming his complaints at?” As far as I can tell, Pullum is complaining that commercial forces have lured researchers away from creating his dream of a human-mimicking android like 2001’s Hal 9000 or Star Trek’s Data. This is like saying we’re still “waiting for NASA” because they failed to give us moon houses and jet packs! Is Pullum similarly unmoved by the Mars Curiosity rover? C’mon Geoff, it’s got a frikkin laser on its head! He’s aiming his complaints at people who know nothing about linguistics or NLP (an easy audience to convince with straw men and misrepresentation). ...we are still waiting for natural language processing (NLP).Who? Who is still waiting? I’m not waiting. I’m jumping head first into the ocean of NLP tools available right now. Who’s waiting? ...some companies run systems that enable you to hold a conversation with a machine. But that doesn’t involve NLP, i.e. syntactic and semantic analysis of sentences.This is a rhetorical slight of hand because he is about to stack the deck and compare one petite tool to his grand Platonic ideal. Pullum continues to utilize a straw man definition of NLP that 99% of people who use the term do NOT agree with. He is wrong to insinuate that contemporary NLP cannot perform “syntactic and semantic analysis of sentences.” Of course it can. In the very least it exists in the form of POS taggers, chunkers, semantic role labeling, dependency parsers, etc. The fact that most VUI tools do not employ these extra processing components is mostly a function of optimization, not ontological failure. He dismisses this as merely "dialog design", but it's what gets products working for real consumers in the here and now. Pullum also unreasonably demotes phonetics as if it is not part of linguistics. There are many NLP tools related to speech recognition, which is where his third post goes. His punching bag for this argument is Automatic Speech Recognition. By doing this, he creates a new straw man. What he actually describes is closer to what industry calls Voice User Interface (VUI). The distinction is non-trivial because VUI is a limited special case of ASR, not the whole kit and kaboodle. Yes, there are VUI systems which are designed to nudge users to provide responses within a limited predictable range, but there are also far more sophisticated ASR systems (like Nuance’s Dragon). These systems can produce text transcripts of voice that can then easily be ingested into any number of syntactic and semantic NLP processing tools. Ignoring them is journalistic malfeasance. Pretending they don’t exist is bonkers. Labeling noise bursts is the goal [of VUIs], not linguistically based understanding.This is true, but it’s not the whole picture. It’s true that VUIs are primarily trying to categorize noise bursts, but that’s the first step in the human language comprehension system too. It’s true that humans use some top-down context for predicting the likelihood of words in a continuous speech stream, but there’s plenty of bottom-up processing that is little more than “labeling noise bursts” (one of my favorite examples of this is Voice Onset Time for classifying speech segments). In focusing on this, VUIs are simply choosing one small part of the great human language puzzle to address. Current ASR systems cannot reliably identify arbitrary sentences from continuous speech inpu

An impressively silly debate resumed this week over the “correct” pronunciation of GIF. Steve Wilhite, who invented the format, prefers “jif”, and at the recent Webby Awards he shared this opinion (tongue presumably in cheek) through a projected GIF set to Richard Strauss.* Mr Wilhite knows the OED accepts both common pronunciations, hard-g /g?f/ as in gift and soft-g /d??f/ as in gist. (As do other dictionaries and all right-thinking people.) But the lexicographers, he told the New York Times, “are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.” End of story? Well, no. This is English: it’s messy. It misbehaves. I’ve written about the pronunciation of GIF before, but a lot of people are still confused about it. There’s no need to be. Wilhite may have invented the GIF but he can’t decide its pronunciation for everyone. Each of us gets to choose how we say a new word, and most people say GIF with a hard g – unsurprisingly, given the sound’s dominance in English words containing the letter. Language being democratic, hard-g /g?f/ is therefore the dominant usage. But “jif” is a significant variant, equally standard and clearly preferred by some communities. A few people say the letters “gee eye eff” (5.4% in my poll), and there’s no one to stop you saying it “geef”, “cif”, “jife”, even (ermahgerd) “gerf”, or “Gruffalo” or “Gorgonzola” if the mood takes you. Some of these might raise eyebrows, or hinder comprehensibility, but they won’t get you arrested. As I said on Twitter, the fuss over GIF’s “correct” pronunciation is partly a result of people thinking there can or should be just one right way. This may be a legacy of standardisation, which privileged certain usages over others, often for wholly arbitrary reasons. The prestige and propriety associated with Usage 1 can give rise to the impression that Usage 2 is necessarily inferior. Not so. If you’ve been universalising your biases, you can stop now. Despite the wishes and fiats of self-appointed regulators, linguistic variation is perfectly fine. Language is big and stretchy; it contains multitudes and embraces variety, even if some of its users don’t. What little confusion might arise over the pronunciation of GIF will not hurt anyone or bring civilisation to its knees. More to the point, a preference for “gif” or “jif” does not imply someone’s wrongness, stupidity, or moral deficiency. Is this the last word on GIF? Hardly. As long as a language is alive, there is no last word. Maybe GIF in the future will rhyme with ref. In the meantime, you don’t have to adopt the inventor’s preference. He did us a great technical service, but he’s not the boss of English. You’re the boss of your own English. GIF is in the public domain: say it any way you want. * * Have you heard the Portsmouth Sinfonia’s rendition? My favourite. Filed under: language, phonetics, speech, usage, words Tagged: abbreviations, acronyms, GIF, language, linguistics, phonetics, politics of language, pronunciation, speech, Steve Wilhite, usage, words

This type of debunking is badly needed, although I don’t know how good the research team at Mental Floss is. They do get the Neil Armstrong explanation wrong. (He did indeed intend to say “a small step for a man,” but he actually said, “a small step for man.” It wasn’t a transmission problem that masked the “a.” So all those people who have been “misquoting” him have actually been correct. Armstrong claimed that it was a transmission problem for a while, but eventually admitted he screwed up the statement. Not that anyone blames him. It’s amazing that in all the excitement he didn’t make any bigger mistakes. Here’s The Onion’s take on the historic moment (NSFW).) But this earlier video from Mental Floss on grammar and usage mistakes is horrible. It’s just unsupported peevery: [Discuss this post]

From a book about space travel:"...the Mojave Dessert facility..."This sounds awesome! Chocolate at Mojave?Oops! I guess this is a fun typo! "The Mojave Desert facility" (which refers to the Mojave Air & Space Port) sounds a little less sweet but more accurate.

I read this on Yahoo! Sports‘ “Prep Rally” and almost threw up. Instead, I just threw up my hands in frustration: Filed under: Confused Words, threw/through Tagged: Cameron Smith, Commonly confused words, editing, funny writing errors, funny writing mistakes, homophone, homophones, Prep Rally, proofreading, threw, through, Yahoo!

I thought I’d seen every homophonic error possible on Yahoo!, but I was wrong. The “journalist” for Yahoo! News‘ “The Ticket” came up with a new, creative, and totally hilarious way to spell leis: Oh, that Hawaii School for Girls? It’s not in La Pietra, which is also not in Hawaii. It’s La Pietra Hawaii School for Girls. Filed under: Confused Words, lay/lei Tagged: Commonly confused words, editing, factual error, factual errors, funny writing errors, funny writing mistakes, homophone, homophones, lay, lei, proofreading, The Ticket, Yahoo!, Yahoo! News