Grammar

Via Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org, an interesting project, VerbCorner:Dictionaries have existed for centuries, but scientists still haven't worked out the exact meanings for most words. At VerbCorner, we are trying to work out what verbs mean. Rather than try to work out the definition of a word all at once, we have broken the problem into a series of tasks. Each task has a fanciful backstory -- which we hope you enjoy! -- but at its heart, each task is asking about a specific component of meaning that scientists suspect makes up one of the building blocks of verb meaning. Ultimately, we hope to probe dozens of aspects of the meaning of thousands of verbs. This is a massive project, which is why we need your help! We will be sharing the results of this project freely with scientists and the public alike, and we expect it to make a valuable contribution to linguistics, psychology, and computer science.Give it a try!

What do you do when you’re unsure of the use of the hyphen? Should you hyphenate two words or leave them open? Just do what the editors at the Yahoo! front page do: You’re sure to be right — once. Filed under: Hyphens, Punctuation Tagged: consistency, editing, hyphen, inconsistency, proofreading, Punctuation, Yahoo!, Yahoo! front page

Q: In texting me, my daughter used the phrase “of course” (spelling it “of coarse, naturally”), which got me to thinking. How is it that we use “course” to refer to something in a positive manner (as in “of course”) as well as to a path, a route, or a plan—from a “concourse” to an “obstacle course” to a “course of study”? A: The phrase “of course” means something akin to “naturally” or “it goes without saying.” When we say something occurred “of course,” we mean it was only to be expected, or that it was in the normal course of events. And that last phrase, “in the normal course of events,” is a clue to the etymology of the phrase “of course.” Our word “course” came into English in the late 13th century, and for several hundred years it was spelled without an “e” at the end, like the French word it came from (cours). The French got it from Latin, in which cursus means a race, a journey, a march, or a direction. The Latin noun comes from the verb currere, to run. John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins notes that a wide range of English words are derived from currere, including “current,” “courier,” and “occur.” In English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun “course” originally meant an onward movement in a particular path, or the action of running or moving onward. Consequently, “course” has long been used to mean a customary or habitual succession of things, or a part of such a series. It has also been used for hundreds of years to mean the place or time where the series has its “run,” as well as the natural order or the ordinary manner of proceeding. This notion—of a habitual path or a prescribed series of things—explains a great many uses of “course” in English. To mention a few, it explains why the parts of a meal are “courses,” why a flowing stream is a “watercourse,” why a normal event happens “in due course,” why an orderly ship maintains a certain “course,” why we let nature or the law “take its course,” and why colleges offer “courses” of study and doctors prescribe “courses” or treatment. It also explains how “racecourse” and “golf course” got their names. And it explains why women in the 16th through the 19th centuries called their menstrual periods their “courses.” The phrase we’re getting to, “of course,” came along in the mid-16th century, according to citations in the OED. In the early 1540s it was used both as an adjective to mean “natural” or  “to be expected” (as in the phrase “a matter of course”) and as an adverb to mean “ordinarily” or “as an everyday occurrence” (as in “the cake was of course homemade”). By the early 19th century, “of course” was being used to qualify entire sentences or clauses, the OED says.  And that’s how we generally use it today. Oxford’s earliest example of this usage is from John Dunn Hunter’s Memoirs of a Captivity Among the Indians of North America (1823): “She made some very particular inquiries about my people, which, of course, I was unable to answer.” This later example is from a bit of dialogue in Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist (1838): “ ‘You will tell her I am here?’ … ‘Of course.’ ” We now take the phrase “of course” for granted, but it had some competition over the centuries. It’s proved more durable than several variants with the same meaning—“upon course,” which was first recorded in this sense in 1619, “on course” (1677), and “in course” (1722). In other words, its survival was not necessarily a matter of course. Check out our books about the English language

The phrase Netflix adultery popped out at me when I read this Maureen O’Connor column in New York magazine. Netflix adultery is when you secretly watch a show that you had promised to watch with your partner. A quick Googling shows that O’Connor didn’t coin the term, but it is quite recent. There are numerous hits from various sites, all within the last two weeks. I immediately thought of the construction _____ porn, as in food porn or war porn, and wondered if there were other similar _____ adultery terms. Sure enough, Urban Dictionary has movie adultery going back to 2004. Urban Dictionary also records soapdultery from 2008, although that is slightly different in that entails watching a different soap opera. Is Netflix adultery going to catch on? (As a term, that is; as a phenomenon it’s inevitable.) Or is it just a flash in the pan, a flurry of articles about a topic the media is temporarily interested in? [Discuss this post]

In the comments to "Shanghainese", a lively discussion on the relationship between the Wu branch of Sinitic languages and early Mandarin has ensued.  Quoting South Coblin, ===== This reminds me … of something Jerry Norman was wont to say, i.e., that there were three good criteria for identifying Mandarin and deciding how old the family is. These are the concurrent presence of the third person pronoun t?, the negative bù, and the subordinative particle de/di. Jerry called languages of this type “Tabudish”, and he sometimes used this name for them in correspondence with me. ===== South was referring to the late specialist on Manchu and the Min branch of Sinitic who studied at Berkeley under Y. R. Chao and taught at the University of Washington from 1972-1998. Other commenters on the Shanghainese post, especially Tsu-Lin Mei, gave additional, precise criteria for distinguishing Mandarin from Wu, which led them to conclude that the roots of Mandarin go back before the Tang Dynasty (618-907) to the Six Dynasties period (220/222-589).  I should note that both Tsu-Lin and South were close associates of Jerry Norman, and the three of them together have made remarkable contributions to the understanding of the early rise of Mandarin. As for how much further the beginnings of Mandarin per se might be pushed, I wouldn't care to venture, but I have little doubt that the split between Literary / Classical and Vernacular Sinitic goes back to B.C. times.  Although three millennia of literary redaction have left precious little evidence of the vernacular before the Tang period when Buddhism began to legitimize its written form (see Victor H. Mair, "Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular: The Making of National Languages,” Journal of Asian Studies, 53.3 [August, 1994], 707-751), we do find occasional bits and pieces of the vernacular that have managed to slip through the grasp of the literary editors of the textual tradition.  Even more exciting is the discovery of archeologically recovered texts which help to document the existence of the vernacular during the B.C. era. One of the clearest indications of Vernacular Sinitic is the use of shì ? as the copulative rather than as the demonstrative pronoun as in Literary / Classical.  Rare examples of this usage have been showing up in recently unearthed texts.  About six or seven years ago, Jeff Rice wrote a brilliant paper in which he showed how shì ? evolved from being used for the Literary / Classical demonstrative into the copulative verb in Vernacular.  At the same time, he documented the shift from the Classical form X Y y? ? to Vernacular X shì ? Y for equational sentences ("X is Y").  Unfortunately, although from time to time I've nudged Jeff to publish that paper, it's still moldering is some drawer.  Maybe now that he's finished his dissertation on medieval historiography, perhaps I'll be able to persuade him to publish the paper on shì ? and y? ? before another six or seven years pass.

David Brooks waxes poetic about word frequencies and the good old days in today's NYT: What Our Words Tell Us. Brooks cherry picks three recent Google Ngram analyses (by non linguists) and provides paper thin summaries of their findings, then concludes that America has lost is moral core. These analyses all depend crucially on the creation of word categories like “individualistic words” and “moral terms”. These are not quite synonyms, but they require that the words in each class bear some semantic link between them. This begs the question: Are these groupings natural? Is there something psychologically real about them? Linguists care about word classes quite a bit (computational linguists even more so). There are ways of constructing naturalistic sets of words. However, Brooks says nothing about how these studies performed their categorizations, so I thought I post a quick review as it's important in judging the validity of the results. Twenge et alThe first study by Twenge et al (which he doesn’t link to, but I do below) followed a scientifically reasonable path to create their word sets. They asked 53 Mechanical Turk participants to “generated words characteristic of individualism and communalism.” Then, they had a different set of 55 Mechanical Turk participants rate those words on a 7-point Likert scale. The top 20 words were then used as their search set. FYI, here are their two sets: Individualisticindependent, individual, individually, unique, uniqueness, self, independence, oneself, soloist, identity, personalized, solo, solitary, personalize, loner, standout, single, personal, sole, and singularityCommunalcommunal, community, commune, unity, communitarian, united, teamwork, team, collective, village, tribe, collectivization, group, collectivism, everyone, family, share, socialism, tribal, and unionKesibir and KesebirKesibir and Kesebir did 2 studies. In study one, they took ten words they found as synonyms of “virtue” in an unnamed thesaurus and searched Google’s Ngram for those words. Here are the ten: character, conscience, decency, dignity, ethics, morality, rectitude, righteousness, uprightness, and virtue. In their second study, they constructed a set of 80 virtue words taken from websites about virtue in literature (e.g., honesty, patience, honor) then asked participants to rate each one as No = -1, Perhaps = 0, and Yes = 1. Then they took the 50 words with the highest averaged rating and search Ngrams for frequency. Klein Klein unapologetically gives no motivation for his word sets whatsoever. A “very casual paper” indeed. The ProblemWhile I respect the attempt of the first two sets of authors to add some psychological reality to their linguistic categories, they fall for the same naïve assumption that plagued linguistics for hundred of years: that people's conscious judgement of meta-linguistics is valid. Syntacticians discovered the folly of grammaticality judgments. I have been involved recently in a number of Mechanical Turk ratings tasks and we're finding that it very difficult to get consistent ratings. I believe the same issue is at play here. Plus, ratings can easily be affected by context like surrounding text, yet none is given in these tasks. It's not clear what it means to rate isolated words. Word semantics by their very nature are contextual. Words are not thought. These studies seem to be a variation on the “No word for X” syndrome (see here for a recent rant). Certain types of words may be used more or less frequently over some time-scale (like one century), but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we are thinking differently over that time-scale. Unlike Brooks, I’ll link to the actual papers (all free, but the second two require email registration): Increases in Individualistic Words and Phrases in American Books, 1960–2008. Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell and Brittany Gentile The Cultural Salience of Moral Character and Virtue Declined in Twentieth Century America. Kesebir and Kesebir Ngra

Do you spell-check everything you write? If so, you’re doing better than the editors at Yahoo! Shine, who don’t bother checking photo captions: Filed under: Misspellings Tagged: editing, misspelling, proofreading, Shine, typo, typos, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Shine

The last time I saw this spelling of Skechers, it was on Yahoo! Shopping. This time it’s on Yahoo! Shine: Filed under: Misspellings Tagged: bad spelling, editing, incorrect spelling, misspelling, proofreading, Shine, Skechers, spelling, spelling mistake

Just what kind of engagement ring was it? What made the genius writer at the Yahoo! front page think that it might float away? This is the only kind of ring I can think of that might float: But it’s a really cheesy engagement ring. Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: editing, funny writing errors, funny writing mistakes, proofreading, Yahoo!, Yahoo! front page

These Bay Area restaurants don’t just take orders: If their names are any indication, they give them, too. Melt! (San Francisco) The exclamation point is part of the name, and melting is the raison d’être, of this fondue café in San Francisco’s North Beach.   Build (Berkeley) One Yelper called it “the Subway of pizzas. You enter a line and the employees make the pizza as you like.” The slogan is “Find Your Inner Pizza,” which does not sound appetizing at all.   Toss (Berkeley, just a few doors away from Build) I love the wordmark, but every time I see the name I want to finish the sentence: “… your cookies.” Maybe this is where all those inner pizzas end up.   Gather (Berkeley) Hip, centrally located – in the greenest building in Berkeley –and designed to please demanding foodies of every persuasion, from gluten-free vegans to whole-animal carnivores. (Are you surprised to learn the idea for restaurant came out of a “vision” during “a retreat in the California desert”? Neither am I.) The name suggests hunter-gatherers as well as gathering around the table.   Assemble (Richmond) Yes, it’s another way to say “gather,” but in this case there’s a historical resonance to the name that makes it a perfect fit for the location, in a former Ford Motor Company assembly plant on the bay in Richmond.