Semantic Compositions

Some SC lexicography

So where has SC been for the last week? With an assist from Webster's, here goes:

in·flu·en·za, /in-(")flü-'en-z&/, a : an acute highly contagious virus disease that is caused by any of three orthomyxoviruses (Influenzavirus A, Influenzavirus B, and Influenzavirus C) and that is characterized by sudden onset, fever, prostration, severe aches and pains, and progressive inflammation of the respiratory mucous membrance -- often used with letter A, B, or C to denote disease caused by a specific one of the three genera b : any of various human respiratory infections of undetermined cause -- not used technically
flu·shot, /flü-'shät/,a medicine given to prevent getting the flu
im·be·cile, /'im-b&-s&l/,a person who receives repeated warnings from family members and coworkers to get himself a flu shot, based on years of observation, and declines to heed both advice and experience
mo·ron, /'mor-"än/, an individual who passes up free flu shots at work

Usage: During flu season, SC demonstrated that he was both an imbecile and a moron by not getting a flu shot.

OK, these things aren't 100% effective. But you get the point. SC is feeling much better now, though, and blogging will resume shortly.

Inching forward

This morning, your host received an e-mail with a back-formation he hadn't heard before. Specifically, the message said:

"We'll be reviewing the inchstone transition plan."

Inchstone was new to SC, but it was immediately recognizable as a derivation from milestone. In the context of a series of small steps to be taken, it makes sense. Not having heard it before, your host wondered if there's evidence that it's catching on, or if it's just an obvious derivation that might have been independently coined by a variety of different people (including the individual quoted above). For the sake of completeness, we'll look at the whole spectrum of possible English-system length measurements:

inchstone: 965 hits
footstone: 108,000 hits -- but a preexisting word meaning "grave marker"
yardstone: 871 hits
furlongstone: 5 hits, with 3 unique ones
milestone: 29,000,000+ hits (some of which are just names)
leaguestone: 7 hits, 3 of which are genuine

At least anecdotally, it appears that the milestone derivatives are used in a very self-conscious fashion to indicate that the user is trying to calibrate the degree of what they're discussing. Some examples, with emphasis added by SC in all cases:

The recovery team will create detailed miniature milestones known as “inchstones.” (link)

"Resist overkill," Humphreys said. "If you can measure the status of a project at the milestone level, don't go to the 'yardstone' level. If you can do it at the 'yardstone' level, don't go to the 'footstone.'" (link)

And Easter Weekend siguals [sic] a milestone--leaguestone?--of sorts for Isenfir: The Shire will be old enough to drink. Not many of its constituent members, but the Shire. (link)

Small milestone? Not a very elegant or satisfying description. It seems like there should be another term - a furlongstone, or its equivalent - for the marking of this small unit of progress. (link)

Although the metaphor of calibration along a scale is the same, metric uses appear to be more uniformly ironic:

[Blog Post Title] Another Milestone Reached...well, this is more like a centimeterstone. (link)

[Blog Post Title: Meterstone] I'd call it a mile stone, but it is closer to 1000 which is more the metric thing. (link)

today is the thirteen month mark for my boyfriend and i...
its not usually considered a huge milestone (if i'm canadian shouldn't it be kilometerstone?) (link)

There are actually 479 hits for kilometerstone (versus just the one above for centimeterstone, and less than 100 for meterstone). Perhaps this is due to the fact that kilometers are the closest metric unit of measure to a mile, or perhaps there's merely some principle of self-restraint where one pun in a novel coinage is enough. Inches or centimeters, many of these groaners are just begging to be...stoned.

Is it a typo if you didn't know it was a word?

SC was IM chatting with a coworker today when he (the coworker) suddenly let it be known that a certain situation had him so frustrated that "I could screak". Since the coworker in question usually follows typos with the intended word shortly thereafter, when no correction followed, your host assumed there must be some new word in play. So he looked it up:

Pronunciation: 'skrEk
Function: intransitive verb
Etymology: of Scandinavian origin; akin to Old Norse skrækja to screech
: to make a harsh shrill noise  : SCREECH (from Merriam-Webster)

After finding this, your host mentioned that it was a new word to him, and was told that, from his coworker's perspective, it was a typo. In this case, though, it's a typo that may have actually been a step up in communicating the intended thought.

 

I'm bringin' syntax back

On the occasion of this evening's Grammy awards, SC is reminded of a topic he's been meaning to address for a while, specifically a song by Justin Timberlake. It should be noted that your host never listens to Mr. Timberlake's ouevre, and is familiar with his "music" entirely and exclusively through exposure to it at the gym. Aside from the boy-band taint, SC despises Mr. Timberlake for the associations he's created in the public mind with the name "Justin", formerly a sign of discriminating good taste among those parents sophisticated enough to use it.

But back to the subject at hand, a ditty of Mr. Timberlake's titled "SexyBack". This artless title manages to combine one of the most annoying typographical conceits of our time -- the gratuitous elimination of spaces between words -- with an ugly grammatical choice. One might think from the juxtaposition of these words that the song would be about someone having a particularly sexy back, and that the title would reflect a construction like NP-[Adj N]. And one would be wrong. The first line of the song goes, "I'm bringin' sexy back", a construction which requires the title to be extracted across phrase boundaries; i.e. VP-[V-bringin' NP-[N-sexy] PP-[P-back]]. If you're finding this page through Google, and don't understand extraction, think of it this way: You can say "What's J.T. bringin' back?" or "Where is J.T. bringing' sexy (to)?" (that latter one is awkward to your host's ear, though), but "What where is J.T. bringin'?" is just wrong.

If those representations are still a little too abstract in making the point, see if you can recognize the classic songs that would be mangled by the application of the operation we'll call Timberlake extraction:

• ItOnHomeToMe
• HerInSomeDay
• YourFriendsBehind (thanks to Neal Whitman for reminding SC of this one)

Get this man a copy of Barriers. Or maybe a copy of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

A la modal

SC has been watching with amusement the outpouring of interest at Language Log over Dick Cavett's thoughts on language. Aside from Mr. Cavett's status as a usage crank, there is an important presupposition in need of explicit cancelling, but your host will get there in a roundabout way.

When SC first started working for his present employer, in 1999, he was a mere 23 years old. The unspeakable horror known as Episode I had just recently been released, and so Star Wars nostalgia was a popular topic of conversation. At the start of a meeting where SC was the youngest person in the room by a good 20 years, several people expressed their memories of standing in line to go to the original movie. Mistaking an excellent opportunity to keep his mouth shut for a chance to perform some good-natured needling, your host promptly spoke up with, "I wish I remembered Star Wars coming out, but I was pushing 1 at the time".

It is in that spirit that SC gets to his point: who is Dick Cavett, and why should we care about his particular brand of usage crankiness? A cursory review of his biography on Wikipedia suggests that he formerly made a living as a comedian, a fact not at all evinced by his not-at-all funny debut column (there were some recognizable attempts at humor, but SC declined to laugh in order that the bar should be set at least high enough to limbo under). Rather like Star Wars, you seem to have needed to live through the '70s for Dick Cavett to have any sort of visceral appeal. Your host will at least credit him with having been funny at some time in the past, as Wikipedia also quotes him having said:

I went to a Chinese-German restaurant. The food is great, but an hour later you're hungry for power.

That actually did get a chuckle from SC, but then, he also likes the section on Hitler jokes from the Big Book of Jewish Humor. Not so good for Mr. Cavett's contemporary relevance.

But now to Mr. Cavett's work as a usage crank. Prof. Liberman remarks of him:

He does threaten that "if I ever find myself once again with the senator who spoke of his 'incredulous' experiences, I shall pop him one" -- but has anyone who said "I shall pop him one" ever actually done so?

The answer to the rhetorical question is obviously no, but not necessarily for the obvious reason. SC was actually...popped...more by the modal verb preceding that phrase than by the blustery use of the phrase itself. A Google search for "pop him one" turns up 507 hits; adding that "shall" in front drops it to 0, as does "must". "Might", "could", "would" and "should" all fared similarly, varying between 4 and 40 hits. Lesson: if you're trying to affect rough speech, using constructs that mark you as educated is a Bad Idea.

But then it occurred to SC that maybe Cavett's problem wasn't the "shall", but the "pop him one". Maybe he's stuck in a 1970s time warp where he's considered funny, and hasn't caught up with the more recent usage "tear X a new one" (where "one" is synonymous with a bit of posterior anatomy). With 718 hits, the usage rate on the web is pretty much comparable to "pop him one", so that's out (and oddly, the polite form of the new phrase gets 3x as many hits as the unexpurgated version). One thing that doesn't change, though, is the near-total absence of hits following modals -- 0 for "shall" before both forms, and just one for "must" before the aforementioned vulgarism. "Would" is the only modal to break 40 hits before "tear him a new one". So we can only conclude that despite Dick Cavett's declinist views about usage -- "I see it as a glass half empty — and evaporating quickly" -- some things haven't changed.

[A methodological note: Obviously, most (if not all) of the usages of both "pop him one" and "tear him a new one" that Google has catalogued couldn't predate the Web. A cursory inspection of the results from both searches suggests that the users are by and large different groups of people, but it's practically impossible to tell if the users of "pop" are uniformly significantly older than the users of "tear" from the web alone. I can't find a dictionary citation of "tear him a new one", and the earliest OED citation of "pop him one", with the dummy ditransitive object, is 1958. They're both contemporary enough that Google's corpus is probably not very different from what might be gotten from browsing popular literature of the '60s-'80s as far as "pop" goes, although strictly speaking, it's possible that people's knowledge of the newer form might influence how they use modals with the older one.]

Junior league

While your host has no credibility making this statement, he really isn't at all interested in college football. By "not at all interested", he means "does not read about recruiting classes except on the days they're finally announced". Thus, two names of apparently prestigious recruits jumped out at him while perusing ESPN's list of the top classes.

First up, LSU has landed an offensive tackle named T-Bob Hebert, the son of former NFL player Bobby Hebert. At first, SC thought this was evidence of some kind of screwball humor on the elder Hebert's part, but it turns out that this is actually a productive naming process in Louisiana:

Moments after his birth, Bobby Joseph Hebert III got the distinctive name he still goes by in everyday life.
His great grandmother, a true Cajun, made the call. Birdie Hebert, a fur trapper and a shrimp fisherman in her time, decided the family’s newest offspring would have a very fitting name for Louisiana natives who follow the Acadian culture.
So she dubbed him T-Bob, a shortening of the Cajun French word, petite, which translates to tiny or little. The name didn’t sound so unusual to T-Bob’s father, NFL quarterback Bobby Hebert, a Cut Off, La. native who had friends growing up named T-Mel, T-Doug and T-John, usually sons who took their father’s names.

Now, SC was a little suspicious that there might be a put-up job going on here, since the story was told to an out-of-state paper, so he went looking for more confirming evidence, preferably from a Louisiana source. And he found some (from a New Orleans sportscaster's blog):

T-Bob (which for those of you who don't know is the cajun way to say Bobby Jr.)  is rated as the #2 center is America.

Then came evidence of a T-Doug. SC tried looking for T-Mel and T-John, but Google thinks every instance of "isn't Mel" or "wasn't John" is a valid hit, and there's only so much sifting that your host is prepared to do. Suffice it to say that, invoking SC's favorite phonological principle (once is an exception, twice is a rule), he'll consider this sufficient evidence of a real phenomenon.

Incidentally, "petite" Bob is about 5 inches taller and 80 pounds heavier than SC, benches twice as much, squats three times as much, and yet runs the 40-yard dash a half-second faster (T-Bob's stats available at the link; you'll have to take SC's word about himself by comparison). So in case you're reading this, T-Bob: Best. Name. Ever.

A more familiar pattern of nicknaming due to being #2 to carry a name comes from Michigan recruit Junior Hemingway. With a name like that, SC couldn't help but scan the list of Michigan recruits to see if Hemingway might not line up next to a Scotty Fitzgerald. Don't look at me like that -- there's precedent.

SC's Super Wrong Pick

The track record here is right at 50% (on a whopping 2 picks in as many years), so your host's reputation is on the line with this one. There's no great language hook with this Super Bowl, aside from perhaps noting Gregg Easterbrook's sardonic names for both teams:

TMQ [Easterbrook's column] has long called the Chicago team the Ming Ding Xiong, "Bears whose outcomes are decided by fate" in Chinese. I've long called the Indianapolis team the Lucky Charms, owing to their horseshoes.

Having missed the column where Mr. E. coined that nickname for the Bears, SC isn't sure why Chinese was the obvious language to reach for. Other cheap language gags just don't seem to do it, either -- a column on how Chicago's "Tank" Johnson got his nickname would be full of lame jokes about his multiple arrests for illegal gun possession, and how if he had gone to the English Premier League to play soccer, he'd be nicknamed Arsenal. Or maybe just Arse.

It's been a long time since SC has had so little rooting interest in a Super Bowl. Leaving Tank Johnson aside, everything balances out perfectly. SC dislikes both quarterbacks -- Perfect Peyton for being related to Satan Eli Manning (and for reminding him of The Worst Draft Pick in History every time he takes the field), and Rex Grossman for being able to put up a perfect 0 in an objective, zero-based measurement of his job performance and still get paid millions. If most people flamed out as badly in their work as Rex Grossman has in his, they'd be fired. To put the horror of being Rex Grossman into proper context, understand that someone who threw the ball off the field on every play would earn a 36.9 quarterback rating (you can check SC's math here). Mr. Grossman failed to clear that low hurdle five times this season (in 16 tries). On the flip side, both coaches are men of exemplary personal conduct (SC didn't know much about Lovie Smith; read this article and know he's a good man). Your host therefore declines to root against either, although he hopes that if the Colts win, Perfect Peyton nonetheless is remembered for nearly blowing it himself.

While there's no partisan interest here in the end, a pick still needs to be made. SC is struck by the fact that the worse the Bears play, the better they seem to do, as noted by former Cardinals coach Dennis Green immediately following the prototypical example of this claim.  So in the spirit of Gregg Easterbrook's haiku-based approach to football analysis, and since Mr. Easterbrook failed to write a haiku of his own to make a prediction, your host offers the first -- and probably last -- haiku to appear in these pages:

Super Bowl upset.
Bears win though Rex is gross man,
Grosser quarterback.

Yes, it's syllabically correct. And no, don't take the points.