Semantic Compositions

Brunch at the modal buffet

Mrs. SC's birthday comes up in a few days, and tomorrow, we're going for brunch with her parents. As of this writing, though, the question of where remains outstanding. So this post is prompted by a conversation we just had about a possible destination:

Mrs. SC: I don't want to go to the Flying Feast ([not its real name, but it's by an airport -- ed.]) because I don't want an all-you-can-eat buffet. I feel like it means "eat all you can".

SC: But if you ate less, it wouldn't be an all-you-can-eat buffet. It would be an "all-you-feel-like-eating" buffet.

Mrs. SC: No, it would be an "all-you-would-eat" buffet.

So which is it? SC readily buys into the idea that it can't be an all-you-can-eat buffet if you don't eat all you can, but it might not be the case that you eat all you would if you could specify the amount of food in advance. Maybe you're on a diet, and wish there would be some externally-imposed portion control. Or maybe you go out with other people (who goes to a buffet alone?), and feel like you eat less than you otherwise would because you don't want the other people thinking you're a pig. No single modal verb seems to cover all this, though, in any tense -- not "can", not "will", not "shall". Not "could", not "would", not "should".

But somebody would have a great tag line for a competitor to Souplantation if they used the slogan "The all you should eat buffet".

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.

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.]

McDonald's, "burgerhouse"

SC is on the mailing lists of too many restaurants to count, but he always looks forward to the uniquely self-promotional gems* produced by Noel Turner, the genius behind Turner New Zealand. Readers who don't subscribe to Gourmet or Bon Appetit may not recognize the name from anywhere, since his only restaurant is in Costa Mesa, CA, but Mr. Turner has long been one of the premier suppliers of high-quality beef and fish to the restaurant industry. Since he does such a great job, SC is all too happy to plug for him. But on to the linguistic topic at hand:

For the upcoming Valentine's Day (Men: You have 28 days left to get your act together. SC warned you.), Mr. Turner sent out a missive describing his planned five-course menu, including the following line:

This time of year always brings a special feeling of love and happiness to the hearts of many, and I wanted to let you know that 'Love Is In The Air' at our Turner New Zealand Steakhouse & Seafoodhouse on Wednesday evening February 14th!

It's only mildly corny, but your host's attention was drawn to the word "seafoodhouse", which was a novel coinage to him. It makes obvious sense as a back-formation from steakhouse, but does anyone use it? Off to Google, which gives 706 hits for a search on "seafoodhouse" alone. However, this is a grossly misleading count, as the original pages end after only 94 hits, a good number of the pages in question are spam, and more than a few simply contain the URL of a defunct website for a possibly-closed restaurant called the Chatham Fish House in Massachussetts. A couple of hits also just contain the URL of Landry's Seafood House, a still-going restaurant in Texas. A few more hits are from archived versions of prior Turner e-mails (and somehow, SC missed the usages).

So the usage of "seafoodhouse" as a distinct lexical item appears to be pretty much unique to Noel Turner. But this piqued SC's curiosity further. How about other (food)-house items?

It turns out that this is a pretty sticky research problem using Google alone. "Chickenhouse" returns 33,000 results (the usual caveat about Google result sets of this size obviously applies), but most of the hits in the first 5 pages (after which your host quit looking) are actually for places named "Chicken House", and simply making use of a space-free URL, or they're spam, or Google thinks it knows what SC wants better than he does, because the page doesn't have "chickenhouse" anywhere in the source HTML, not even in a filename (see here for an example). "Pastahouse" yields just under 14,000 hits, but suffers from all the same problems as chickenhouse. It does yield an authentic example from a restaurant in Denmark, but this is vitiated somewhat by the likelihood that the restaurant owners don't speak English. "Burgerhouse" yielded the same size result set as pastahouse, and offered a genuine result from a place called Gordy's Burgerhouse in Texas. While a search for burgerhouse together with McDonald's didn't yield any actual examples of someone describing the place that way, it did turn up a second legitimate English usage -- of a Hawaiian McDonald's nestled in the former location of a restaurant called Kenny's Burgerhouse.

Having just about run out of primitive food types, your host also tried "italianhouse", "mexicanhouse", and "chinesehouse", all with apparently entirely irrelevant results. SC didn't go into this expecting a productive usage, but his working hypothesis was that there would be at least a couple of people with Noel Turner's sense of humor and playfulness with language, and that they'd run restaurants. There aren't. The man really is an original.

*Turner's signature linguistic cue is the making of every ingredient into a proper noun, specifically a Turner Noun. Here's his description of the upcoming Valentine's Day meal:

We will be celebrating Valentine's with a Five-Course Extravaganza serving the finest quality organic and all-natural food on the planet. You will begin the evening with your choice of Turner King Salmon Sushi or Turner Clams and Turner Calamari; all from the cool, clean oceans of New Zealand. Next, enjoy our 'raved-about' Turner Lobster bisque; the real thing, made 100% from Turner Lobsters. Move onto the third course, a choice of organic Caesar or Herb salad. Your fourth course, the main event of the evening, our acclaimed free-range Turner Lamb Rack or our world-famous Turner Beef Filet Mignon, 100% grass-fed and all-natural; no antibiotics and no hormones. Or if you are in the mood for the finest seafood available, then delight with our ocean-fresh Turner Orange Roughy or Turner King Salmon. Relax over your fifth course, while you enjoy our Mama Turner's Pavlova, Brandy Cherry Creme Brulee or freshly chocolate-dipped organic strawberries. At your pleasure, we have paired each course with an exquisite New Zealand wine.

He has explained this in the past by claiming that if he didn't specify that everything was "Turner (Food)", you might think he was cheating and slipping something that didn't meet his standards into his menu. Verbose? Yup. Pompous? Gloriously so. It all really is that good, though.

Syntax up with which I will not put

Today is the start of the annual Home Entertainment Show, taking place just a few short miles from Victory Mansions. While your host might write about what he sees there over the weekend, today he'll simply use it as a peg to bring up a blog post by Fred Manteghian, a contributor to the surprisingly long-lived Ultimate AV.

Mr. Manteghian's post dealt with the 5 top-selling front projectors in the U.S. today, which is quite tangential to our topic. In the course of introducing his subject, he writes:

Yup, the U.S. of A. Love it or leave it, we're the country everyone wants to break into, not out of. Although if I ever end another sentence in a preposition, I'll agree to be expelled.

Ah, the old canard about the ungrammaticality of ending sentences in prepositions. This occasioned a commenter to respond with a delightful rejoinder on the subject, and while SC can't vouch for the authenticity of what follows as an Anthony Burgess quote (the aforementioned blog post is the only such citation listed in Google), it just has to be passed on:

A preposition is a good word to end a sentence with - it's a rule of Latin, anyway, not English. As Anthony Burgess once wrote: "What do you keep bringing that book you know I don't like being read to from out of up for?."

Got argument structure?

Neal Whitman has provided an interesting piece of data that clearly demonstrates get with multiple different argument structures at once. Your host can't think of any syntactic work that accounts for a single verb being in multiple grammatical categories at once. It's sort of a reverse serial verb construction; instead of multiple verbs operating on the same object, with possibly clashing mophology (but the same intended tense/aspect/valence/etc.), it's just one verb with multiple lexical representations (or functional projections, take your pick) operating simultaneously on multiple objects. It's quite possible that your host is simply ignorant of an important piece of work on this point, but he's fairly sure he's never read any sort of syntactic analysis that doesn't assume just one allowable argument structure at a time for a given instance of a verb, however convoluted the operations that produce it might be.

Right now, the only idea SC has for a way out of the conundrum is to suppose that something is actually going on with the verbal complements in question (make and brush), and that the apparent objects of get really aren't. But Prof. Whitman's "unpacking" of the uses of get strikes him as correct, and this is causing enormous headaches for your host.

All Bally's ads changed!

Your host is presently in New Orleans (more on that shortly), but that doesn't actually explain his absence for the last week; he's simply been running low on ideas again. However, travel usually helps refill the tank, and this time is no exception. So here goes:

Gambling is legal in New Orleans, albeit apparently only in certain areas zoned for it, and so there are billboards all over the city advertising the local outposts of the Bally's and Harrah's chains. The ads for Bally's in particular have been causing SC's brain no end of syntactic distress, as they are all based around a slogan of highly questionable grammaticality (always in all-caps): "ALL SLOTS CHANGED!".

To get the semantics out of the way, further explanatory information on a number of the billboards indicates that the intended meaning is "all of our slot machines have been altered to produce payout odds more favorable to the player". (For example, some billboards include the added slogan "All slots, all loose, all the time".) But your host can't get that meaning out of the phrase as it stands. It would be better with an auxiliary, as in "All slots are changed!", or even better with a perfective, as in "All slots have been changed!". As the phrase stands, the only interpretation that SC can recover from the raw "ALL SLOTS CHANGED!" is along the lines of "all of our slot machines have been physically removed and replaced with different units".

Mrs. SC argues that it's not as categorically bad as SC claims. Syntactically, she sees no difference between it and, say, "My mind changed", for which we can construct some valid contexts (A: "What's different?" B: "My mind changed."). Perhaps so, but even in those contexts, your host would expect to hear something more like "I've changed my mind".

On taxi cabs, the phrase gets embedded in a larger noun phrase which makes it marginally more acceptable to SC: "Tell the driver, 'Take me to the place with ALL SLOTS CHANGED!". It would still sound better to your host as "Take to the place where all the slots have been changed!", but it's an improvement.

Self-eating food

SC isn't sure if this is an entirely new use of a morpheme, but if once is a novelty and twice is a trend, then our food is becoming more active. At least that's the message that some marketers seem to have latched onto these days.

The first indication of this came to SC a few months ago, when he first heard commercials for a new 7-Eleven product known as the -- go ahead and laugh -- "Southwest Jalapeno and Cheese flavored Big Eats Griller Sausage" (judging by the placement of the trademark symbol, the fact that it comes in a hot-dog bun doesn't seem to be part of the name). Even if your host was inclined to eat pork or jalapeños -- and this doesn't look likely to change him -- there's no way he'd ask for anything at a 7-Eleven by using a nine-word name. But more interesting is the "-er" morpheme; it's not a "grilled sausage", it's a "griller" sausage. What, it cooks itself?

Then, just today, SC came across "Goldfish Sandwich Snackers" (scroll down to see them), a snack consisting of two Goldfish crackers with a filling between them. Your host isn't quite sure what a "snacker" is supposed to be, aside from someone who eats a snack. So are these crackers self-eating?

Mrs. SC adds as a possible additional example of this morpheme the frozen food sold under the name "Poppers". SC is a bit unsure of whether or not it's the same usage, since he thought it was meant to be a description of the action performed in eating them (as in, you're supposed to pop them into your mouth). If that's the intent behind "snackers" -- you're supposed to snack on them -- that would make a certain amount of sense as well. But unless 7-Eleven wants customers to do the cooking, they can't mean that you're supposed to come into the store and grill their sausages yourself. (Although maybe they do; one of Southwest Airlines' rules is "Think how we can transfer the workload to the customers".)

So what's going on with "-er"? Among its various meanings are "one who does X" (i.e. "killer" is "one who kills"), or intensifying whatever it's attached to ("cold" -> "colder"). But neither of these really makes sense in the examples given above. It's actually quite hard to see what "er" adds in any of the above examples aside from some additional phonological material; would 7-Eleven's glorified hot dog make any less sense if it was called the "Big Eats Sausage" or the "Big Eats Grilled Sausage"? Would Pepperidge Farm's latest come off any worse as "Goldfish Sandwich Snacks" -- or if they have to have that "-er", as "Goldfish Sandwich Crackers"? Perhaps it's wrong to be looking for a grammatical function here, and it's really another phonestheme.

Welcome to Boston. Now go home.

While SC is home and working, Mrs. SC is on the road interviewing for possible residencies. After interviewing at a prestigious hospital affiliated with America's oldest university, she checked in this afternoon to inform your host about a very interesting billboard seen in the downtown Boston area.

It seems that a local anti-gun campaign has produced an ad that reads:

Welcome to Boston. You're more likely to live here.

Mrs. SC's first read, and that of your host's, was that it meant "you're more likely to be a resident of this city than a tourist if you're reading this sign". But of course, if it's associated with your expected lifespan, the proper reading is "if you're here, you are less likely to die over a given time period than in some other place". The difference comes down to a delightfully ambiguous attachment for "here".

Bracketing for the sentence runs roughly like so:

Tourism: [you're more likely [to live here]]
Lifespan: [you're more likely to live [here]]

Not having seen the sign, it's not clear to SC if the ambiguity is readily resolved by some other visual element. It's an odd phrasing, though, and one wonders exactly what effect they were going for that wouldn't have been captured by something like "Welcome to Boston. Our traffic will kill you before a handgun does", or maybe "Welcome to Boston. Now that the Red Sox aren't losers, our residents are less likely to blow their brains out". At least neither of those slogans are open to multiple interpretations.