Semantic Compositions

Soft & Dry

It's not just about deodorant, anymore; now it's economics, too.

On the front page of the Wall Street Journal Online today (subscriber-only) appears a bizarre mixed metaphor:

Steve Liesman says the "soft patch" may be drying up, but stays wary as economists cut forecasts again.

So according to the caption writer, when things stop being soft, they become dry instead of hard. Compare this with a line not far into the story, penned by Mr. Liesman instead of the WSJ's caption writers:

Report after report suggested the soft patch of economic growth we experienced this summer was yielding to the firmer ground of growth.

Here, "soft" is contrasted with "firm", which is a considerably more likely antonym given that they both describe hardness. Of course, there's also something a bit odd about suggesting that one piece of ground, which is presumably stationary, is yielding to another one, especially when the metaphor in question doesn't suggest that there's a landslide going on.

Are you ready for some football?

SC sure is. Another note about names courtesy of ABC's "Thursday Night Football".

For the last 2-3 years (your host doesn't remember exactly when they started it), ABC has had a gimmick on football broadcasts, of getting the starting players to say their names and universities, which are then played when their units come on the field for the first time. Thus, when the Indianapolis Colts finally got their first offensive possession of the game 5 minutes in, ABC showed Peyton Manning, Edgerrin James, and the other players on the Indianapolis offense (having done the same with their defense at the beginning of the game).

What was interesting about this is the behavior of the players from the University of Miami. While Peyton Manning just said "Tennessee", and Marcus Pollard said "Bradley", Edgerrin James and Reggie Wayne announced that they were from "The U". "The" U? Surely there are plenty of universities. But that's the wrong way to interpret this statement, which makes sense when you take a good look at their logo.

Be careful what you name your children

A few days ago, your host saw a claim in George Will's column to the effect that there have been at least 10 children named for ESPN, the sports channel, since it began broadcasting 25 glorious years ago. And that's hardly the only recent story on naming children according to sports themes; Atlanta Braves outfielder Chipper Jones named his newborn son for the Mets' Shea Stadium. But for right now, let's stick to the ESPN story.

SC was intrigued by this factoid because he had previously planned to go about naming his future children in a somewhat more conventional way: Dan Patrick Compositions, Chris Berman Compositions, etc. But this led to another question: are there really 10 children named for ESPN? Any word with so few tokens in a particular corpus (presumably, all the children were registered for social security numbers) ought to possible to count exactly. It turns out that getting a definitive answer isn't so easy.

Will identifies four variants of the name: "ESPN, Espn, Espin or Espyn". With this in hand, it was off to a couple of favorite research tools. Since, as noted above, this sounded to your host more like a factoid than an actual fact, he first went off to snopes.com, an excellent reference for debunking urban legends (and sometimes verifying them). The Snopes message boards don't match up to the reliability standards of their regular material, but this thread led your host to a BBC story indicating that there are two boys carrying the name ESPN. Both links provide interesting anecdotes about what appears to be a trend towards naming children for the material goods that parents hope they'll be able to acquire; witness names like Courvoisier and Armani (not to be confused with New York Giants receiver Amani Toomer). Better than naming them Curtis Mathes or Wal-Mart.

But so far we've only got confirmation of two children named ESPN, which is short of 10, and without any spelling variations. Another story suggests there are just 2 ESPN children in total, named ESPN and Espen, and quotes the same source as the BBC story (where he supposedly said two named "ESPN"). Attributional abduction, anyone? A Sports Illustrated writer, criticizing the practice, turns up a third attested ESPN-based name, the more typically mixed-case Espn. Despit George Will's column, your host can't find any attested examples of "Espin" with this Google search. SC also had a hard time finding a genuinely attested example of "Espyn" as a given name; this message board thread features a second-hand claim for it, and this Philadelphia Inquirer piece from just last weekend pegs Espyn as the name of at least one of 20 boys and girls named for the network.

20? At this point, it's hard not to conclude that nobody knows how many children have really been named for ESPN. One accounting of the first "ESPN baby" gives the current count recognized by ESPN as 11, which is considerably more than the 2 cited by the BBC's source, more than the 10 cited by George Will, and fewer than the 20 cited by the Inquirer. These counts all come from purportedly serious news organizations, and are all supposedly current as of this year. Confounding things slightly, Espen is also apparently a real Danish name meaning "god-bear", again according to one of the newspaper stories linked above. It's possible that someone tried to dig up statistics on the various spellings, and a few Danes got thrown into the mix, but this theory strikes your host as: 1) more complicated than necessary, and 2) giving too much credit to journalists for research. More likely, at least one of these estimates was simply guesstimated at press time or a rumor repeated as though it was taken from a real source (that Inquirer number doesn't seem to match what ESPN sources have said elsewhere, even though much of the rest of the story looks like someone at ESPN, however anonymous, was actually contacted). Actually, the low-end numbers are quite possibly based on incomplete data; both the BBC and ABC stories can be interpreted as meaning that two children were named for ESPN in the year 2000, but they're ambiguous on that point.

While it might be too hard to definitively answer the question of "how many children are named for ESPN?", researching this post reminded your host of another dilemma of his. It seems that at least one father has taken the sensible step of modernizing the "Jr., III, IV" paradigm by sticking 2.0 at the end of his son's name. Since your host is Jewish, and the practice of naming children for the still-living is discouraged among most branches of Judaism, he has no intentions of naming any son of his "SC 2.0" (sorely tempted though he is). He feels no similar compunction about doing so in the blog context, however, which allows him to raise two questions of less than earth-shattering importance:

1) Assume Mrs. SC bears a child (this is strictly hypothetical, and not an announcement of real news). The appropriate sobriquet is: a) SC 2.0, b) SC Reloaded, or 3) Mini-SC?
2) Does this still apply if the child is a girl?

Correcting other people's e-mail

Dan Moore has a delightful post up on one of the guilty pleasures of e-mail: correcting other people's mistakes.

Your host never goes as far as Mr. Moore is willing to: no matter how egregious grammatical errors are in e-mail he receives, he doesn't correct them. But sometimes, he can't help fixing a "too" that ended up "to", or other sorts of minor errors.

Also of relevance to the linguistic blogosphere are his comments on how hard it is to find things to blog about. SC has no idea how Languagehat and Language Log do it (although with a half-dozen reasonably regular posters, the Language Log burden is more easily carried). Longtime watchers of the Language Log blogroll know that it's at least doubled in size since the beginning of 2004, but many of the newer entrants are only sporadically active, and even your host is often less active than he'd like. This isn't because the bloggers in question aren't devoted; it's just that it's sometimes incredibly difficult to pull linguistically relevant material out of daily experience. Which makes the achievements of the Libermans, Pullums and Languagehats of the the world even more impressive.

Plastic, a semantic feature

Longtime readers know that Mrs. SC is a medical student, and that this fact is frequently salient to postings here. Currently relevant is the procedure for applying to residency programs (itself a Byzantine and incomprehensible process worthy of a post or two). The application process requires students to fill out applications through this web service (registration required, and if you're looking at it for the first time, you don't have the credentials, either).

Part of the process requires that students release their scores on the licensing board examinations, a reasonable enough requirement. A warning notice on the website informs students: "Releasing your scores to your selected programs does not send them anywhere" (emphasis in original). Your host saw this statement, and immediately remarked: "The difference between release and send is a credit card, isn't it?".

Turns out the answer is yes.

The revenge of Dan Quayle

A few months ago, your host had occasion to post on the proper spelling of a variety of avocado. At the time, it drew a comment or two, and then nobody thought any more of it.

Until last week, when SC received an e-mail from a reader who had Googled the word "avocados", specifically for the purpose of examining its usage as contrasted with the incorrect spelling "avocadoes". Specifically, the reader wished to know what led your host to use the correct spelling, instead of the one which happens to look analogous to other plurals of words ending in "o", like "tomatoes" and "potatoes" ([this is making me hungry -- ed.]). This intrigued your host a bit, and so he did some checking into word frequencies. Here's what he found:

-s -es Totals avocado 181,000 (95.0%) 9,600 (5.0%) 190,600 tomato 40,000 (0.9%) 4,300,000 (99.1%) 4,340,000 potato 60,000 (2.0%) 3,000,000 (98.0%) 3,060,000 Clearly, the proper spelling predominates in all cases, but it's also clear that there's a paradigm for pluralizing things that end in "o", and "avocados" violates it. So we might ask why. Fortunately, your host's correspondent anticipated that question and supplied an answer for it: in May of 1915, California growers met to form an association to market their crop, and decided both to coin the name to replace the then-common "ahuacate", and to standardize the plural of the new word "avocado" to not include an "e". Of course, usage has a habit of trumping the rules laid down by would-be grammarians, and so we find Merriam-Webster sanctioning both forms. Interestingly, however, American Heritage does not. SC doesn't have any sort of reference handy that indicates whether or not the decision to inflect a noun ending in "-o" with "-s" or "-es" is algorithmic. This list suggests there is no reliable rule. Which doesn't mean that there aren't prissy language mavens out there going around telling people that they must always use one or the other. Perhaps Dan Quayle was victimized by such a person, and if not for trying to fit "potato" into a non-existent paradigm, we might now be debating who would succeed him as president. September 08, 2004 in Pop Linguistics | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) September 07, 2004 Spelling reform Languagehat links to an interesting post at Far Outliers on spelling reform in Yapese (part of a series; he's also got one on Marshallese). This served to remind your host of one language he has long considered desperately in need of spelling reform -- Palauan (the language of a gorgeous island that SC hopes to visit someday). Linguists acquainted with the language are undoubtedly snickering already, but not for the reasons that those who have no experience of Palauan would think. The language's inventory of sounds is only slightly larger than Hawaiian (which is the gold standard for doing a natural language on just a few sounds). The alphabet is not complicated, having been provided by missionaries who worked from the Latin alphabet. It can be learned in 10 minutes by any English speaker. So this is very much more a personal matter than anything really wrong with the Palauan writing system. Nevertheless, the missionaries made a choice which SC swears at every time he tries to read a paper on the language (or write one; he addressed it twice as a graduate student, although not for publication). Kie Zuraw wrote a good paper on reduplication, itself a phenomenon worth a few posts, which lays out the necessary facts of Palauan nicely (see page 2). The language has only 6 distinct vowels and 10 consonants (with a few extras in the list that occur only due to allophonic variation). It's not hard to have a rule of one symbol per phoneme with a language like this; Languagehat correctly criticizes this goal as unwieldy for too many languages, but you can do Palauan on a standard 101-key keyboard with 26 letters and have plenty of letters leftover. In spite of this utter and total simplicity, Palauan spells glottal stops not only with two characters, but with a pair that normally implies very different sounds to speakers of languages using the same alphabet. That is to say, Palauan uses "ch" to indicate a glottal stop. For a few examples, here's a list of common phrases in Palauan. Note that the transliterations for English speakers deal with the matter of glottal stops by simply putting in syllable breaks where the stops occur. This works, sort of, but it's awfully easy to interpret that "ch" as though it rhymes with the same string in "inch" or even "orchestra". Despite having read both Lewis Josephs' indispensable Palauan Reference Grammar and Marie Flora's "Phonology and Morphology of Palauan" (the latter a hard-to-find doctoral dissertation), SC can't keep himself from pronouncing that "ch" as anything but a glottal stop, and wishes fervently that a different character would be used. Hawaiian uses an apostrophe to represent a glottal stop; why, oh why, can't Palauan? September 07, 2004 in Pop Linguistics | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) Walk, drive, call or click This morning, your host received e-mail from a reader with an interesting usage that he hasn't seen anywhere yet, but it sounds too good not to catch on. We all know that on the windows of barber shops and salons across the U.S., there are signs saying "walk-ins welcome". They're not really that popular anymore (which isn't to say they're gone), but back in the '50s and '60s, "drive-in" theaters were the rage. And when you want to get pizza delivered to your house, you don't have to go to the pizzeria; you just place a "call-in" order. But now, courtesy of a sign posted on a floral shop: Walk-in, phone-in, click-in orders accepted Your host spent a few minutes to try to find an example or two of this one on Google, but there are some 890,000 hits for "click in" (Google ignores hyphens), and all of the ones SC managed to read through are different constructions (i.e. "Will Dell Click in Asia?", "Unable to Right-Click in Windows", "When the plot finally does click in"). Of course, your host also tried restricting the search to pages with information about flowers, and more specifically, ordering flowers, but this failed to produce any results. Of course, every usage has to happen first somewhere, and so perhaps we'll be crediting this florist in a few years. September 07, 2004 in Pop Linguistics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) Visit My Company Step 3 Systems Best of SC Andrew Sullivan does infixation Holiday Posts Valentine's Day, April Fool's, Tax Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Thanksgiving Lime mondegreen Reach for Rokeach SC's Defense of Camille Paglia Paglia and standardized tests, The devaluation of reading skills SC's Review of George Lakoff Prologue, Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Postscript SC's Review of Samuel Huntington Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Postscript The Totemic Power of Names Why SC likes fictional languages now Recent Posts Cheers to the Chief Write or Die Paging "Ironhead" What a...great idea! 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Languagehat links to an interesting post at Far Outliers on spelling reform in Yapese (part of a series; he's also got one on Marshallese).

This served to remind your host of one language he has long considered desperately in need of spelling reform -- Palauan (the language of a gorgeous island that SC hopes to visit someday). Linguists acquainted with the language are undoubtedly snickering already, but not for the reasons that those who have no experience of Palauan would think. The language's inventory of sounds is only slightly larger than Hawaiian (which is the gold standard for doing a natural language on just a few sounds). The alphabet is not complicated, having been provided by missionaries who worked from the Latin alphabet. It can be learned in 10 minutes by any English speaker. So this is very much more a personal matter than anything really wrong with the Palauan writing system. Nevertheless, the missionaries made a choice which SC swears at every time he tries to read a paper on the language (or write one; he addressed it twice as a graduate student, although not for publication).

Kie Zuraw wrote a good paper on reduplication, itself a phenomenon worth a few posts, which lays out the necessary facts of Palauan nicely (see page 2). The language has only 6 distinct vowels and 10 consonants (with a few extras in the list that occur only due to allophonic variation). It's not hard to have a rule of one symbol per phoneme with a language like this; Languagehat correctly criticizes this goal as unwieldy for too many languages, but you can do Palauan on a standard 101-key keyboard with 26 letters and have plenty of letters leftover.

In spite of this utter and total simplicity, Palauan spells glottal stops not only with two characters, but with a pair that normally implies very different sounds to speakers of languages using the same alphabet. That is to say, Palauan uses "ch" to indicate a glottal stop. For a few examples, here's a list of common phrases in Palauan. Note that the transliterations for English speakers deal with the matter of glottal stops by simply putting in syllable breaks where the stops occur. This works, sort of, but it's awfully easy to interpret that "ch" as though it rhymes with the same string in "inch" or even "orchestra". Despite having read both Lewis Josephs' indispensable Palauan Reference Grammar and Marie Flora's "Phonology and Morphology of Palauan" (the latter a hard-to-find doctoral dissertation), SC can't keep himself from pronouncing that "ch" as anything but a glottal stop, and wishes fervently that a different character would be used. Hawaiian uses an apostrophe to represent a glottal stop; why, oh why, can't Palauan?

This morning, your host received e-mail from a reader with an interesting usage that he hasn't seen anywhere yet, but it sounds too good not to catch on.

We all know that on the windows of barber shops and salons across the U.S., there are signs saying "walk-ins welcome". They're not really that popular anymore (which isn't to say they're gone), but back in the '50s and '60s, "drive-in" theaters were the rage. And when you want to get pizza delivered to your house, you don't have to go to the pizzeria; you just place a "call-in" order.

But now, courtesy of a sign posted on a floral shop:

Walk-in, phone-in, click-in orders accepted

Your host spent a few minutes to try to find an example or two of this one on Google, but there are some 890,000 hits for "click in" (Google ignores hyphens), and all of the ones SC managed to read through are different constructions (i.e. "Will Dell Click in Asia?", "Unable to Right-Click in Windows", "When the plot finally does click in"). Of course, your host also tried restricting the search to pages with information about flowers, and more specifically, ordering flowers, but this failed to produce any results. Of course, every usage has to happen first somewhere, and so perhaps we'll be crediting this florist in a few years.

Spelling reform

Languagehat links to an interesting post at Far Outliers on spelling reform in Yapese (part of a series; he's also got one on Marshallese).

This served to remind your host of one language he has long considered desperately in need of spelling reform -- Palauan (the language of a gorgeous island that SC hopes to visit someday). Linguists acquainted with the language are undoubtedly snickering already, but not for the reasons that those who have no experience of Palauan would think. The language's inventory of sounds is only slightly larger than Hawaiian (which is the gold standard for doing a natural language on just a few sounds). The alphabet is not complicated, having been provided by missionaries who worked from the Latin alphabet. It can be learned in 10 minutes by any English speaker. So this is very much more a personal matter than anything really wrong with the Palauan writing system. Nevertheless, the missionaries made a choice which SC swears at every time he tries to read a paper on the language (or write one; he addressed it twice as a graduate student, although not for publication).

Kie Zuraw wrote a good paper on reduplication, itself a phenomenon worth a few posts, which lays out the necessary facts of Palauan nicely (see page 2). The language has only 6 distinct vowels and 10 consonants (with a few extras in the list that occur only due to allophonic variation). It's not hard to have a rule of one symbol per phoneme with a language like this; Languagehat correctly criticizes this goal as unwieldy for too many languages, but you can do Palauan on a standard 101-key keyboard with 26 letters and have plenty of letters leftover.

In spite of this utter and total simplicity, Palauan spells glottal stops not only with two characters, but with a pair that normally implies very different sounds to speakers of languages using the same alphabet. That is to say, Palauan uses "ch" to indicate a glottal stop. For a few examples, here's a list of common phrases in Palauan. Note that the transliterations for English speakers deal with the matter of glottal stops by simply putting in syllable breaks where the stops occur. This works, sort of, but it's awfully easy to interpret that "ch" as though it rhymes with the same string in "inch" or even "orchestra". Despite having read both Lewis Josephs' indispensable Palauan Reference Grammar and Marie Flora's "Phonology and Morphology of Palauan" (the latter a hard-to-find doctoral dissertation), SC can't keep himself from pronouncing that "ch" as anything but a glottal stop, and wishes fervently that a different character would be used. Hawaiian uses an apostrophe to represent a glottal stop; why, oh why, can't Palauan?

Walk, drive, call or click

This morning, your host received e-mail from a reader with an interesting usage that he hasn't seen anywhere yet, but it sounds too good not to catch on.

We all know that on the windows of barber shops and salons across the U.S., there are signs saying "walk-ins welcome". They're not really that popular anymore (which isn't to say they're gone), but back in the '50s and '60s, "drive-in" theaters were the rage. And when you want to get pizza delivered to your house, you don't have to go to the pizzeria; you just place a "call-in" order.

But now, courtesy of a sign posted on a floral shop:

Walk-in, phone-in, click-in orders accepted

Your host spent a few minutes to try to find an example or two of this one on Google, but there are some 890,000 hits for "click in" (Google ignores hyphens), and all of the ones SC managed to read through are different constructions (i.e. "Will Dell Click in Asia?", "Unable to Right-Click in Windows", "When the plot finally does click in"). Of course, your host also tried restricting the search to pages with information about flowers, and more specifically, ordering flowers, but this failed to produce any results. Of course, every usage has to happen first somewhere, and so perhaps we'll be crediting this florist in a few years.