piloklok

orbis pro vox doesn't mean anything

2008-11-27T12:20:00.000-08:00

The plot of last night's episode of Pushing Daisies featured a secret society of bellmen dedicated to helping the poor. Their motto, "Ring for Right", is their rallying call; they ring their bells in fundraising campaigns, to do the right thing.

The motto also appears in the story in a supposedly Latin form, Orbis pro vox. This makes for a great story, since secret societies are always more nefarious when they have mottos in ancient languages. Of course, this is a brutal mistranslation ... I was tipped off by the appearance of nominative vox instead of ablative voce, which would be required by the pronoun pro.

Probably the show's writers tried online translators to get a Latin rendition of "ring for right". These translators give only orbis for "ring", without explaining that this is limited to the notion of a physical circle. orbis means globe, sphere, circle, or ring.

"for" is well translated: pro means for. It is a preposition in Latin, as for is in English.

"Right" is mistranslated, as vox means "voice" or "cry". There apparently is also a phrase vox vocis which has more to do with right as in "power" or "authority" rather than the "right" (i.e. correct or appropriate) thing to do.
Given a list of translations of different senses of the word, they probably settled on vox vocis, thinking vox would be sufficient, and that of the Latin words meant the same kind of "right". A better word for the "right" they wanted in the episode would be iustus "justice" or rectum - literal "right" as in straight.

In short, this is sheer laziness. Does the world suffer because of this corner-cutting? No. But this show has a decent production budget - could they not put a little more effort into this, like call someone who took Latin in school? It's just indicative of the profoundly ungrounded confidence we sometimes have in linguistic matters.

english with an accent

2008-07-14T11:14:00.000-07:00

Recently announced on Linguist List is a companion website for English with an Accent by Rosina Lippi-Green. I use this text as primary reading in a class I teach called Language and Society, whose focus is on addressing issues of folk linguistics.

welsh dictionary

2008-03-27T23:27:00.000-07:00

Q: What do you call a Welsh dictionary?
A: a LLexicon.

dropping by

2008-01-06T12:17:00.000-08:00

Wow, it's been quite a while since I posted anything here - for a variety of reasons no doubt. Though I can update that an unintended consequence of piloklok is near fruition - the recurring topic of language and sports, that basically got rolling for me here, is now about to emerge as a full-blown undergrad class at UCSB. This quarter it's listed as a special topics course, so enrollment is low, but we'll have it on the books for future years as well. I'll update on its progress whenever I can.

I'll be here all week

2007-03-15T17:22:00.000-07:00

Just a few linguisticky jokes to pass the time...

Knock Knock!
Who's there?
Recursivity!
Recursivity Who?
Knock Knock!
Who's there?
Recursivity!
Recursivity Who?
...

*****

What did the causative say to the reflexive?
Go verb yourself!

first voice to break the sound barrier

2007-03-15T08:37:00.000-07:00

Not sure how long this link will stay up but; it's to a press release about research on airflow vortices generated in/above the larynx during speech. And for the coarse analogy, we get the title "Human Voice Works Like a Jet Engine." Well, not quite. The larynx isn't a turbine, and can't generate very much thrust - the analogy is just that vocal airflow and jet engine wash both involve turbulence marked by vortices. I'm fairly certain the research itself is serious, but also difficult to engage casual readers without this kind of teaser.

Maybe this is precisely the kind of catchy analogy I need for my own research. Athletes Get Nicknames Like Comic Book Heroes. Prefixes Regenerate Like Rabbits.

sports linguistics

2007-01-23T10:49:00.000-08:00

Several recent Language Log posts have channeled a series of Tank MacNamara strips poking fun at the language of sports personalities. It's not clear whether the posters (Thomason and Liberman) subscribe to the tongue-in-cheek treatment in the comics, but my guess is that both would actually find broadcast discourse to be a worthwhile subject of analytical study rather than an object of ridicule.

I think there's some interesting observations to be made in this domain. On piloklok we occasionally track lexical-level phenomena in sports language, but I'd argue that the structure of the language of sports broadcasts differs in principled ways from other domains of language usage in every level of analysis - the discourse structure is pretty tightly constrained to begin with, but the syntactic, prosodic, and phonological structure could, I think with serious research, be shown to have properties adapted to the circumstances. Ferguson's work on sports announcer talk (Language in Society 12, 1983) suggests exactly this.

As for the apparent inanity that arises in on-air analysis (e.g., the stating of the obvious), it is essentially true that the parties involved are "paid to talk". Another way of framing it is that it's just in everyone's best interest to talk: this applies to the play-by-play and the colour analysts in broadcasts, whose goal is to entertain the viewer (try watching baseball with no sound to see what I mean), and to the coach and players in interviews and press conferences, which gives their organization good PR and the appearance of accountability. These reasons may provide enough motivation for the speakers to have a fairly high ratio of words to new bits of information. I don't know if there's an objective way to measure this, but I remain curious.

random data point: double object + particle verb

2007-01-11T13:13:00.000-08:00

Overheard not 5 minutes ago:

"...and I wanted to know if I could pick you up something for the ..."

This combines a double object verb construction (V NP NP, where the first NP is essentially a recipient, as in [give][me][a book] or [make][her][lunch]) with a particle verb construction (V + Part, where the verb and particle semantically form a unit but are necessary separated if the direct object is a preposition, as in look me up or track him down. I don't recall ever hearing a construction in which the verb is both a double object and a particle verb (and hence V NP Part NP, as in pick you up something).

more linguistics fun from Alanis

2006-12-07T11:16:00.000-08:00

I notice that piloklok still gets visitors through search-engine queries on the use of the word ironic, especially with respect to the scenarios outlined in the 1996 Alanis Morissette single of the same name. Ms. Morissette, if anything, gave us an opportunity to discuss the intricacies of the semantics of irony. So from a pedagogical point of view, it was a chance to illustrate a few things linguistic, like how the truth of a statement can hinge on the interpretation of a word within it (e.g., the crash of a jetliner carrying a passenger with a fear of flying may be considered ironic, depending on your interpretation of irony, which has a lot to do with the degree of expectation of the outcome).

Morissette has another song from the same record, "Head over Feet", that provides a few more tidbits for those interested in using pop culture to illustrate linguistic points. (Though I'm afraid it's more like pop culture history than pop culture by now).

First, as a tongue-in-cheek teaser, we have the structural ambiguity found in the lyric your my best friend with benefits. Is this guy the best of all the narrator's friends with benefits, or is he the narrator's best friend, who happens to come with benefits?

Second, and worth more text, we have the lyric you held your breath, and the door for me. This at the very least is a talking point for constituency tests and syntactic structure. I can think of two parses here: held [[your breath] and [the door for me]] or held [[your breath] and [the door]] for me; in the latter case me is a beneficiary of both verbs. Probably you would balk at the notion of [the door for me] being a constituent, although the meter of the song (with a half-measure pause before and) suggests just such a structure.

Regardless, both parses look like what's been called a wtf construction, a label I draw from Language Log posts by Mark Liberman and Eric Bakovic. Neal at Literal Minded has devoted special attention to tracking funny coordinations, especially the special case of FLoPs - newest theories available here.

In a wtf construction, a conjunction appears in which the two conjuncts aren't of the same syntactic category. A FLoP conjunction is one in which some element necessarily is structurally parsed as a complemement inside one conjunct, but thematically is a complement of both. The eponymous case is also a song lyric: the whiskey drowns and the beer chases my blues away. Structurally, the element my blues can only parse within the second conjunct, as a complement of chase X away, yet thematically is also interpreted as a complement of drowns.

Here's what's curious about Morissette's wtf lyric: it combines an idiomatic use of hold with a literal one. That is, simply structurally it's not a wtf construction: [your breath] and [the door] are both noun phrases. But held your breath here is idiomatic (I presume), referring to showing patience, and so its meaning is not compositional. As a result, one conjunct, [your breath], contributes no meaning by itself, while the other, [the door], contributes meaning compositionally. It's equivalent to saying "you kicked the bucket and a field goal today".

For fans of symmetry, it could be that this is an inverse of the FLoP: canonical FLoPs restrict a constituent structurally but not thematically, while this one restricts a constituent thematically but not structurally.

I would even go so far as to say this is still a wtf construction even if the fella involved was literally holding his breath - simply because the holding in this case is a different type of action. In this case a parallel would be you held a party and the door for me. Likewise, if holding the door is itself also idiomatic (plausibly it may have been), it's still an odd coordination, since both complements still go with different holdings. For comparison, imagine you wrote your own destiny and a check your ass can't cash, or you let the cat out of the bag, your hair down, the wind out of my sails, and bygones be bygones. Head scratchers all around.

You can argue all day about whether these issues, along with Morissette's broad interpretation of irony, illustrate flexibility and innovativeness of language or haste and sloppiness of lyrical composition. I'm not interested in either praise or criticism of her work, though I would be curious about a theory of what precipitates wtf constructions.

oh, the profanity!

2006-11-13T14:49:00.000-08:00

This tidbit should not count as news, but regardless, illustrates taboo word avoidance at a near extreme. (Recent LL taboo avoidance posts here, here, here,or just search for "Zwicky" ...)

The headline: Lohan tosses four letter insult at Paris Hilton.

In a video posted Thursday on YouTube.com, Lohan was captured leaving a Los Angeles hotel inside which Hilton had reportedly been partying. The 20-year-old actress ... used the profanity to describe Hilton after an observer asked if they’d fought earlier.

The article makes clear that the word was vulgar - referring to it as "an expletive" and "the profanity", but we don't get to find out what profanity Lohan used. (It turns out that the expletive was the C-word, which you can easily discover by finding the YouTube post.) But the article goes so out of the way to avoid being specific about the word that it's completely ambiguous what the expletive could be.

There's no direct quotation to help out, like "she's a ****" (which would probably rule out fuck as the culprit, and perhaps shit too). There's also no partial masking like c*** or c---, which would be fairly unambiguous. The editors may have assumed that simply referring to the word as "an expletive" would be clear enough, but without any context, the reader might assume she called her "a little shit" or "a stupid fuck". As I said before, the world does not turn on which insult the one used for the other, but if AP is going to bother running the story at all, why not finish it?

and what about gyros?

2006-11-13T09:09:00.000-08:00

Last week a court case turned on the definition of a word - sandwich, to be exact. I find it interesting, yet a little disturbing, that a legal proceeding should rely on the normally arbitrary association between sound and meaning, as if it is a rock-solid and undisputable certainty, when instead we know that this association is not stable.

Here's the back story: Panera Bread Company has hundreds of sandwich shops, including one in a mall in Massachusetts. In this mall (as, no doubt, in others), Panera has an exclusive contract, preventing the mall from leasing to any other sandwich shop. The mall decided to lease to a burrito shop, Qdoba, and Panera objected on the grounds that a burrito is a sandwich. In court, the judge ruled in favour of Qdoba, saying that it indeed is not a sandwich.

Aside, I'd be happy with the decision myself, but for different reasons. I find it irksome to be in some enclosure (e.g. a mall or airline terminal) and have little or no choice of what to eat - expecially if the one choice is overpriced and of low quality. But the idea of ruling a burrito as "not a sandwich" is not such an simple task. Here's what the ruling looks to for its definition of sandwich:

The difference, the judge ruled, comes down to two slices of bread versus one tortilla. "A sandwich is not commonly understood to include burritos, tacos and quesadillas, which are typically made with a single tortilla and stuffed with a choice filling of meat, rice, and beans."

OK, using "not commonly understood" seems to rely on usage as a criterion - but this is empirically testable yet seems to have gone untested. Qdoba did call expert chefs as witnesses to agree that burritos aren't sandwiches, but I wouldn't generalize what elite chefs have to say about food to "a common understanding".

But two slices of bread vs. one tortilla? I guess subs, cheese steaks, and gyros aren't sandwiches. Nor are shawarmas, kebabs, or donairs/doners, because they all use one piece of bread. And I shouldn't have to point out that tortillas are bread - so if you end up allowing one-piece-of-bread as a criterion, you fail to exclude burritos.

The article does not reprint the entire ruling, so perhaps the judge in the case was more thorough than the article presents. But it seems that as soon as you introduce a set of criteria to distinguish sandwiches from other forms of food, one of two results follows: either the criteria exclude other more obviously sandwichy items along with burritos, or they fail to exclude burritos.

I'm not sure what the moral of the story is ... perhaps it's just a mildly amusing reminder that contract law depends so much on lexical semantics (in addition to scope no doubt), and is thus clearly vulnerable to mis- or re-interpretation.

quiz show linguistics

2006-10-30T16:06:00.000-08:00

There I was, lamenting the lack of languagey things to blog about, when someone sent me a link to a contestant missing the very first question (which is usually very very easy) during a run of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.

If you're familiar with this show, skip the next two paragraphs; otherwise, here's how it works: the contestant needs to answer a series of 4-option multiple choice questions, and with each correct answer, they increase their take-home amount. If the contestant encounters a question they do not want to answer, they can choose to walk away, with their take-home amount as their winnings. If the contestant answers incorrectly, the take-home amount drops to a minimum threshold: $0 through the first five or so questions, $1000 for the next, with $25,000 as the highest threshold. (So answering the $500,000 question incorrectly puts you back down to $25K as your winnings).

Multiple-choice makes this easier than the open-ended questions of other trivia shows (like Jeopardy), but several components to the format make it even easier. First, the first five questions are merely filler, and designed to be can't-miss, apparently just to get the contestant to settle down. Second, the contestant gets 4 "lifelines" to help if they're stuck on a particular question. They can phone a friend (who is allowed to use the internet) and talk for 30 seconds. They can ask the audience, which is polled and the results displayed graphically, and they can "do 50-50", in which two of the incorrect answers are removed, leaving the correct answer and one distractor. After reaching the $25K mark, another lifeline is added: switch the question. Each lifeline may be used no more than once.

OK, people occasionally get tripped up on the easy questions. They're nervous, or the writers inadvertently make a question harder than they meant to. It happens. The clip below illustrates just such a scenario, with a grammar question as the stumbling block. And not a question that relies on any shady misunderstanding of the rules of language; no, it's just a simple question about grammatical terminology.

By the way, please don't think I'm just trying to deride the contestant - my point is something else, although he does show a few lapses in judgement. As an additional note, the quality of the video is poor - recorded with a handheld camcorder pointed at a TV screen. As bonus, we get to hear the snide commentary of the viewer holding the camcorder.

Sigh. If you didn't feel like watch, I'll summarize; otherwise, let's recap. This question is in the easy sequence - you can tell by the amount at stake and by the music (it slows down and becomes more ambient when the contestant reaches $1000).

The question is as follows:

What parts of speech are usually classified as being in the 'active voice' or 'passive voice'?
A - adverbs
B - verbs
C - nouns
D - adjectives

If you have been to piloklok before, you probably know the answer. But you can also imagine that maybe some people don't. In this case, the contestant asked the audience (75% said B, verbs), and admitted he had been leaning towards A, adverbs (most folks would follow the audience at this point). But the contestant used his 50-50 lifeline (hoping A or B would be one of the two dropped answers) and was left, sadly, with A and B. Then he called a friend who, sadly, was no help. So the contestant chose A.

There's a bit of hope emergent in all of this: the producers believed this question was easy, and the audience concurred. I've consciously known about voice since high school Latin class, but til now I have not known whether such knowledge is "easy-question" fodder.

And let the fate of this contestant not shatter that hope - it's some comfort that the choice of incorrect answer was a consequence not just of poor knowledge but also of stubbornness and poor judgement: not following the audience's rec from the lifeline). I guess the real moral is, people who don't know about voice, don't listen.

shovel pass II

2006-09-10T14:18:00.000-07:00

Every now and then I get a surge of visitors looking for information on a particular topic, usually driven by something in the media. So it is with shovel pass, a kind of play in North American football. A lot of visitors the past few weeks or so have come here presumably trying to figure out what a shovel pass is. No doubt the onset of the NFL season has something to do with this.

Searching Google for shovel pass brings users to a piloklok post from last year, where I riffed on the phrase only because of its potential confusion with shuttle pass. At the time I was only interested in the usage of the phrase, and not its specific meaning. Looking back, I realize nobody would be able to figure out what a shovel pass is from that post. Hey, I didn't know either; I thought it referred to the way the quarterback tosses the ball -- I envisioned a two-handed underhand pass.

Turning to Wikipedia, though, seems to show otherwise: evidently a shovel pass is a kind of screen pass. Next obvious question is, what's a screen pass? Again, Wikipedia offers more knowledge, but it's a little cryptic. It seems to be a trick play that draws the defensive line toward the passer while the receivers draw the defensive backs downfield. This leaves the intended receiver fairly open, protected by a screen of offensive linemen.

The upshot is that the "screen" in screen play has nothing to do with obstructing the vision of any member of the opposing team, which it does in ice hockey, where screens are clusters of players stationed in front of a goaltender, intending to block his vision and thus hamper his ability to stop the puck.

the vice president, if you will

2006-08-25T14:18:00.000-07:00

I saw yesterday I've been quoted in the Chicago Tribune by culture and feature writer Julia Keller. Keller emailed me last week with a question about the construction if you will, which she had noticed occurs frequently in the speech of Vice President Cheney. She wanted to know what linguists call such phrases and where this one in particular comes from. She also sought my feedback on her interpretation that Cheney uses this to dress up his speech and make it sound more refined.

I did what I could to help, labelling the phrase a hedge and pointing her to this exchange from Language Log a few years ago, in which Pullum likens if you will to the discourse-marking/hedge like. (I added a quick definition of hedge, calling it "a phrase that slightly alters (possibly softens) the impact of a factual claim"). Keller said she'd seen the posts already, but thanked me for clarifying what we mean by hedge - I guess it's a term that linguists take for granted.

I also tried to dissuade her of being too interpretive of Cheney's usage, as my own opinion is simply that he uses the hedge that's appropriate to his age and the typical formality of his settings. I also tried to emphasize that it is indeed functional and not "basically pointless". Nevertheless, I agree with her that it's odd for Cheney, a blunt man for whom everything is either right or wrong, to use any hedges at all. (Although it's not so weird for him to use it as a discourse marker to highlight a particular component of his statements - indeed, in his case it may make a falsehood appear closer to the truth).

I say Keller deserves credit for seeking the input of linguists for this question rather than, say, literature critics or critical theorists. My only quibble is the indirect quotation which has me saying that English has a notorious grab bag of hedges to choose from, when I had been far less dramatic in saying English has a variety of such structures, but is not unique among languages in this respect. But hey, Keller has Pulitzer Prize on her shelf, so she can write as she wishes.

cosmic objects and linguistic objects

2006-08-25T14:01:00.000-07:00

Well, I've been scooped on this whole current "definition of planet" issue and its linguistic interest, which is a shame given that I'd intended to post about it last February but was too unmoved to do so at the time. But piloklok is not about scoops, so I'll still add my thoughts.

Notably, two things written recently by Geoff Pullum make it clear how this debate is relevant to linguistics: first, indeed, this issue is not a matter of changing the universe; instead it's simply a matter of lexicography. It's a question of using definitions that provide a set of criteria to determine whether a particular entity (e.g., an individual heavenly object) fits into a larger category (e.g., planet).

Second, Pullum agrees with a correspondent that the general public's likely dissatisfaction with a definition that denies "planethood" to Pluto is similar to a prescriptive and by-rote approach to grammar instruction. In short, people do not want to admit that what they learned in school, such as the planetary status of Pluto, is no longer current (and perhaps never should have been). Likewise, the same people do not want to admit that what they learned regarding grammar (take your pick - singular-referring they/their, stranded prepositions, whatever) never should have been current.

Here's another parallel to consider: this is not only a discussion of definition and lexicography; it closely mirrors the linguist's choice of how to define linguistic categories. For example, here are some possible criteria that could be used to distinguish planets from other big things in outer space: (a) Made of rocks not ice; (b)spherical by virtue of its own mass; (c), in the same plane and solidified from the same nebulous stuff as other planets in the same system (and the central object). The first two criteria focus only on properties of the object itself, while the third relies on how that object behaves in relation to other big things in space.

Likewise, in linguistics we are confronted with how to develop suitable sets of criteria to define categories as varied as gesture, feature, phoneme, word, stem, noun, verb, utterance, message, and so on. Take noun: we have the elementary school definition, "a person, place or thing", and the syntactic definition, "word that can occupy subject or object position in a sentence". The first definition looks desperately to properties of the word itself (in this case, what can it refer to?), while the other relies on how this category behaves in relation to other linguistic objects. That this more suitable definition relies on close analysis of the structure of a sentence, rather than a handy memnonic, makes it less likely to be a widely-accepted means of defining nouns.

On "need to"

2006-08-14T14:29:00.000-07:00

My brother recently pointed out this article in Slate to me and wanted to know what I thought; unfortunately, I had to take issue with nearly everything in it. Happily, my brother enjoyed my response more than the article itself. The Slate article is by Ben Yagoda, a professor of English and Journalism at the University of Delaware. Yagoda has guest posted on Language Log but has also been taken to task in the same venue. As Yagoda is a professional writer and scholar of English, his take on the usage of a particular word – in this case, need – is decidedly unlike what a linguist would argue.

Since I have been so late in posting this discussion, there has been time for others in the linguablogosphere to have commented upon it, but I have seen little discussion elsewhere. I have only found it discussed in this entry on Translate This, and only for Yagoda’s apparent use of the term tense instead of mood (see also a comment by Polyglot Conspiracy on the same post).

Yagoda starts with a convenient observation that President Bush uses need to apparently as a tool of political innuendo, but offers no comparison about whether other leaders use it more or less. He then tries to argue that need to has effectively replaced all other verbs and modals of necessity:

In the battle for pre-eminence among verbs of compulsion or requirement, need to has won a bloodless and overwhelming victory over must, ought to, should, and the former and longtime champion, have to, which yields only about a billion Google hits compared to two billion for need to.

Like Bull Run, this may have been a battle that many of us civilians regrettably believed we could watch in safety as we sipped sweet tea while reclined on a picnic blanket. But I didn't witness it; although Yagoda cites Google counts for need to vs. other expressions of "requirement", he offers no time comparison, and thus has no way of showing that need to is indeed gaining on other constructions. Yagoda then claims that need to is more versatile than other expressions of requirement, citing its ability to work in the passive:

Its popularity is partly explained by its versatility. Passive constructions in the form of "the floor needs to be washed" or "the video needs to be returned" deftly finesse the question of just who will be doing the washing or returning.

But in "The floor needs to be washed", wash is the passive verb; meanwhile, "The floor has to be washed" shows that need to is not uniquely versatile in this respect. As does "The floor must be washed", "the floor ought to be washed", and "the floor should be washed".

Yagoda then claims that the "ascendance" of need to "dovetails perfectly with the long and sad decline of the traditional imperative mood." As with the absence of evidence regarding the increasing frequency of need to, there is no evidence for the decline in the usage of the imperative. Yet he goes on: "Without it, the Ten Commandments would be the Ten Suggestions." The Ten Commandments, in their English translation, are not imperative. If they were, they would read "Don't kill; Don't lie," and so on. "Instead of the pleasingly direct 'No Smoking,' we have the presumptuous 'Thank You for Not Smoking'." Likewise, No Smoking is not imperative (Don't Smoke is). Sure, there might be a difference between this and other ways of forbidding smoking, but they all forbid smoking.

Yagoda then implies that need to softens a command more than any other construction that expresses an order. Again, this is both unsupported and probably false: by this reasoning, "You ought to do the dishes" is not as "soft" as "You need to do the dishes". To me, ought is softer.

Up to this point, Yagoda has been discussing need to as a verbal construction, but here he switches to the noun, need. He manipulates the Oxford entry for nominal need, which offers a quoted example of its usage (in 1929) as a technical term in psychology, citing it instead as "the first use of need in an emotional context". This leads him to conclude that the author of the quotation coined the use of need to refer to emotional needs, which nevertheless has little to do with the modal need to.

He then moves on to attribute current usage of need to the theories of 1940’s era psychologist Abraham Maslow and his Hierarchy of Human Needs. Indeed, the intended implication seems to be that Maslow's theories are somehow relevant to (and even influential on) the use of need to as a modal verb: "It led to a new and now-dominant meaning for the adjective 'needy' — more or less the antonym of 'emotionally self-sufficient'." Here is another empirical problem – there is no evidence that this the "now dominant meaning" in place of, say, "poor".

The ultimate upshot is that Yagoda claims that since Maslow and his students discussed "needs" of children, that anyone who uses need as a verb is using it in an infantilizing way. "The Bushian "Anyone who harbors terrorists needs to fear the U.S." certainly isn't an I message, although it does have a petulant, lecturing undertone that evokes the nursery. The president … is trading on the word's psychological connotation, with its subtle but ineluctable suggestion of strong inner forces at work." Really? The president ... subtle?

In short, Yagoda has misused a dictionary, misused Google, confused grammatical terminology, equivocated on nominal and verbal functions of need, and made unsupported claims about the frequency of various constructions. It all comes across as clever and entertaining to the casual, intellectual reader of Slate, but I have to read it as an exercise in creative writing more than an informed discussion of the meaning and function of words.

backloklok at piloklok

2006-08-14T14:28:00.000-07:00

I haven't been able to offer any new posts for a few weeks, as all my writing time has been occupied with other obligations. Don't worry, though, because I have a few meaty posts on the way.

piloklok @ weltmeisterschaft

2006-07-08T10:01:00.000-07:00

Just got back from a tour of Europe covering the FIFA world cup for piloklok. You'd figure that with such a confluence of cultures, and me wandering a foreign country, there'd be a few linguistic tidbits to share. Indeed there were.

For the phonologically minded, there is the matter of a song a heard sung on the streets of Nuremberg (in front of Pizza Hut on Königstrasse) by Ghana fans following their team's 2-1 defeat of the US. To the tune of "If you're happy and you know it":

If you're happy for Ghana, say Ghana (Ghana!)
If you're happy for Ghana, say Ghana (Ghana!)
If you're happy and you know it
and you really want to show it
If you're happy for Ghana, say Ghana (Ghana!)

Not a compelling composition, but what sticks out is how the song forces primary stress on to the final syllable in Ghana. Look at the folowing scan, where each (foot) is a trochee (i.e., strong-weak):

(if you're)(happy)(for gha)(na: )(say gha)(na: )

Assuming primary stress usually occurs on the first syllable in the name Ghana, the scansion of the song forces it to move. Now, I'm only certain of stress placement in the country's name as spoken in English, an official language of Ghana. Some other widely-spoken languages of Ghana include Akan, Ewe, and Dagbar, but I don't know whether the name of the country as spoken in those or any of the other dozens of Ghanian languages has initial or final stress. (So the story might be that final stress makes the scan available, rather than that the scan forces a movement of stress from initial to final position).

Anyway, stress movement like this does happen in song, and there may be a term for it, but I either never learned it or forgot it. Meanwhile, I doubt this song is a standard for Ghana fans. They'd later lose to Brazil in the tournament, the last of 4 consecutive undermatched opponents for the Brazilians to face.

Another example of a stress shift shows up in an apparently more standard song sung for Dutch star Ruud van Nistelrooij (or Nistelrooy), to the tune of "Yellow Sumbarine" (where Ruud van = Yellow and Nistelrooy = Submarine). As with the languages of Ghana, I'm not confident about Dutch stress, but I do presume primary stress on Nistelrooy to appear on the initial syllable. But in the song, the lyric forces a shift of primary stress to the final (parallel to submarine). The Dutch also lost in the round of 16, so the moral is, if you want to win, leave stress where it is.

grand slam

2006-07-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

Interesting discussion over at Literal Minded regarding the emergent usage of Grand Slam (in tennis journalism) to refer to a win in one leg of the four tournaments that make up the Grand Slam of tennis, instead of referring to a win in all four legs. Neal succinctly sums it up as a case of a compound losing its head.

I'd assumed the phrase Grand Slam was extended from baseball, where it refers to a home run with the bases loaded (thus scoring 4 - hence a shared notion of fourness). However, several commenters on Neal's post point to an earlier usage in bridge (taking all thirteen cards in one trick), which OED supports with citations older than the appearance of modern baseball. This means I have to add an amendment to the old post about the use of Grand Slam in different games.

Oxford's earliest baseball citation for Grand Slam is 1953, so it's a mystery where the baseball usage fits in relative to the bridge and tennis usages. Right now I have no way of determining the age of the tennis Grand Slam usage, but I suspect it may have developed by way of baseball. Here's why: in bridge, it invokes "all at once" (i.e., allness), and in tennis, it invokes "four important tournaments" (i.e., fourness). In its baseball usage, it invokes both: allness (in terms of runners on base, or highest score on one hit) and fourness (number of runs scored on a grand slam).

This is not the only example of a metaphor crossing from cards to different sports and with different usages; check out alternate usages of ace as "the best" and "score with one swing".

headless compound story

2006-06-06T14:29:00.000-07:00

Several months ago I posted a brief anecdote about a shrimp salad ... briefly, it was vaguely humourous in that the person who ordered it wanted no shrimp. In a hurry to post it at the time, I gave it the title "headless compound or what" without thinking about it.

Fast forward til last week, when glancing over my site meter stats, I noticed a surge in referrals from Google searches on "headless compounds" (that is, if 3 can be considered a surge, which I think it is in the modest readership of an off-piste linguablog like this one).

It gave me the brief hunch that a student somewhere needed an example of a headless compound for a paper; and if so, I hope they didn't use the notion of a shrimp salad with no shrimp (or at least I hope they didn't cite me). Here's why: it's not a headless compound. Headless compounds are compound structures in which the right element is not really the semantic head of the compound; at least, that's how they're discussed in Pinker's The Language Instinct.

Pinker invokes the notion of headlessness to explain the resistance to irregular pluralization in compounds like low-lifes, Maple Leafs, tenderfoots, and sabretooths. The argument is that a low-life is not a kind of life, and a tenderfoot is not a kind of foot, and so on. Since the basic meaning of each of these is hidden, so is its access to irregular plural morphology (as in lives, leaves, feet, teeth).

Under this understanding of the term, shrimp salad would be a headless compound if it referred to something like the plate one serves shrimp salad on, or if it referred to anything else, as long as it's not a kind of salad. (Wait - did just say plate of shrimp?)

Ironically, not only is shrimp salad not headless, I don't even think it's a compound - in the original anecdote, and in my mind since, it has primary stress on salad, when compounds typically have stress on their first element.

Now if only headless compound were not a kind of compound...

this ever happen to you?

2006-06-01T21:09:00.000-07:00

There I was, watching the Scripps National Spelling Bee, when one of the contestants was temporarily disqualified for apparently misspelling hechsher. She'd actually had it right, but the judges had it down as hechscher, and she was dinged. Everything turned out OK though, as they realized their error and overturned the decision before the next round.

Not normally one to blog about spelling, but I ran off to look up hechsher in OED - neither spelling is there, but {hechsher} outnumbers {hechscher} on google by 40K to 715. M-W has only hechsher. Sounds like this is not a case of competing spellings; the judges were working with a misspelling.

Then while online I passed through Yahoo and saw the following clearly absurd headline: Scientist recreates Mona Lisa's voice (it's already gone). Gee, I thought, I wonder if anyone on Language Log has picked this up yet - and when I checked, I instead found out the winner of the Spelling Bee before the west coast telecast had concluded!

Back to the spelling bee, the next contestant had to spell kamaaina, "a long time resident of Hawai'i". The pronouncer kept saying [ka.ma.ʔai.na], with a highly obvious glottal stop separating the second from third syllable. So if I was the kid, I would have spelled it k-a-m-a-apostrophe-a-i-n-a (actually, I should have said 'okina instead of apostrophe). But the target for the judges had neither apostrophe nor 'okina, and the contestant spelled the word without it, and moved on to the next round. So we don't know what would have happened had the contestant included an apostrophe.

But the commentator was moved to say "this kid put his knowledge of Hawaiian phonetics to work - that was a totally phonetic spelling as far as Hawaiian goes". I guess we have to say, not quite, but as good as you can get with no symbol for a glottal stop. In turns out the glottal stop really is there in the actual Hawaiian word (will double-check the print dictionary tomorrow), but the spelling required for the bee had no symbol for it. [Update 6/2: Pukui & Elbert's Hawaiian English dictionary has kamaʻāina]

Back to google. {kamaaina} gets 322K pages, many of which actually have kama'aina on them. {kama'aina} only gets 196K pages, and Google asks if you mean kamaaina, with no apostrophe. It looks like, in this case, we need to tell Google, no, I meant what I searched for. Meanwhile, this Wikipedia article uses kamaʻāina (with the 'okina), while Webster lists kamaaina (without any 'okina, but with kama'Aina as its etymology).

I'm not here to nitpick, but I think both cases highlight a problem with this whole scenario. The competition is so dependent on borrowings for its difficult rounds, that when the target is taken from a language with a different writing system, with competing means of transliteration into English spelling, problems like these are bound to come up. It's a good thing both kids were allowed to move on despite this.

a fpoonful of mɪ:

2006-05-25T11:18:00.000-07:00

Here's two tidbits of phonological curiosity heard recently on TV airwaves:

Wendy's has advertised its Frosty as a soquid, and one of the actors in the ad suggests it would taste better with a fpoon; i.e. "frosted spoon". Both words illustrate a love affair between would-be word coiners and blending, but fpoon is also notable for its initial [fp-] cluster, not otherwise seen in English. Google searches on "soquid and fpoon" hit about 10,000 pages; on many of them the words are already used as pseudonyms in MySpace and the like, while on others, bloggers and posters either celebrate or denounce them. Fpoon alone yields 20,000 ghits, and seems to predate the Wendy's commercial. In fact, it appears to also be a blend of fork + spoon, an inversion of the known blend spork (spoon + fork). Whatever its composition, it stands out because of its odd cluster (which you could call phonologically impossible, but given the ease with which the actor produced it, and its pre-commercial diffusion, you could also call it an accidental gap).

The second oddity is from Stephen Colbert's rendering of MI III, the abbreviated title of the recently released Mission Impossible 3. Colbert calls it [mɪ:], with a lax vowel in an open monosyllable (i.e. like mid but with no d). Like the initial [fp-] cluster, this is something English phonology doesn't normally allow, and thus stands out in a similar way. The audience laughter that followed supports this, but it's difficult to tease out whether what they found funny was (a) Colbert playing dumb and pretending not to know that MI III is an abbreviation (b) the violation of their own intuitions regarding lax vowels in open monosyllables or (c) both.

til subjunctive do them get

2006-05-20T12:30:00.000-07:00

I really don't mean for this to sound prescriptive, but I have to comment on it somehow. Flipping through a magazine, I came across a full page ad for an upcoming episode of CSI: Miami. Very dramatic, with David Caruso glaring out you out of one corner, and a blurry image of what appears to be someone important being dragged by paramedics towards the sliding side door of an ambulance. Wait, is that possible? And at the top, in intimidating sans-serif capital letters, is a nifty catch phrase: Til Death do they part. Uh, is that possible too?

OK, here's why I'm not complaining. Traditional wedding vows contain a few phrases that are archaic in various ways, like With this ring I thee wed. This one's archaic because of its use of the old second-person singular object pronoun and its placement of this object pronoun before the verb. At least as archaic is another phrase, Til death do us part. Again, there is an object pronoun before the main verb, but in this case, do shows up, in what appears to be a subjunctive. Wedding vows being as ritualistic as they are, I am not surprised that these phrases aren't parsed like non-ritualistic language. I also believe most of us know what both these phrases mean and can paraphrase them, but probably will stumble over novel productions with a parallel structure, like With this hose he it watered and Til syntax do me bore.

Again, I'm not complaining. Weird, memorized old structures. Also, subjunctives. We don't really use many subjunctives at all, probably because they look like indicatives. In the present tense, subjunctives take no overt agreement, so they only look different in 3rd person singular for all verbs except be, whose subjunctive is invariantly be and thus distinct from all its present indicatives (am, are, is). I'll bet very few people use any present subjunctives productively other than in memorized constructions. One notable example is the shed in God shed his grace on thee, discussed a while back by Geoff Pullum on Language Log. Another is the use of be in learned-sounding phrases like Be that as it may, So be it, and in listing options like I'll drink any cola, be it coke, or pepsi, or RC. Oh, and the b in goodbye (< God be with you). And the example that started this, til death do us part, where do takes no 3rd person agreement - an indicative would be death does us part.

On the other hand, some people do use past subjunctives, like invariant were, as in if I were there, I would have said something or Were I to do it again, I would have been more careful. Note the inversion in the second example, which also shows up with past subjunctive had, as in Had I known better, I wouldn't have stayed so long. But again, look how the subjunctives look like indicatives.

The functions of subjunctives are more typically carried out with auxiliaries, like May your birthday be bright, Let there be light, and Let it be known, or with conditional markers, like if or whether, as in the prescriptively frowned-upon If I was ... construction.

Anyway, we have other ways of expressing what subjunctives express, in past tense and especially in present tense. So the fact that the do in Til death do us part is subjunctive is no doubt not obvious to fluent English speakers. Neither, evidently, is the fact that the subject in this SOV phrase is death.

Add to this the fact that, though we don't know how to parse this phrase, we know vaguely what it means: "we'll be together til one of us dies". So it's really easy to think that us (despite its object form) is the subject of the sentence - and hey, it also precedes the main verb. To complete the puzzle, it's also easy to parse do as an auxiliary that agrees with us, since death do looks weird as a subject-verb combo. Just like Ray Charles parsed shed as a past indicative, and made it emphatic by embellishing it to done shed.

So ultimately, if you write ads for CBS and you love wordplay, and you want to allude to the wedding vow phrase Til death do us part, you'll switch out the us and put in some other pronoun - but a subject pronoun. Voila, Til death do they part. The rest of us recognize the phrase, and immediately think of the paraphrase, yielding "they'll be together til one of them dies". Job's done, great ad, let's go out after work. But look at the actual phrase Til death do they part - since they is clearly the subject now, til death is an adjunct, and it maps to an intepretation of "they'll be apart til one of them dies". Maybe the other's dead already, and they'll finally be together in the afterlife.

Like I said, I'm not complaining. Not complaining that basically nobody uses present subjunctives in English. But if your job as an ad writer is to manipulate language and use wordplay, maybe you should know what you're messing with. It's like a mechanic deciding it would be funny to fill your radiator with gasoline.

Coincidentally, the magazine that had this ad was Us.

super trifecta

2006-05-18T10:57:00.000-07:00

This post is brought to you by the number 4.

Here is a curious piece of cross-sport metaphor: Joel Quenneville, current coach of the Colorado Avalanche (NHL), is quoted as follows by several writers, including Jeff Gordon of the St Louis Post Dispatch, Ray Slover of the Sporting News, Johnny Rosenstein of CBS sportsline, and an AP recap:

Look at the teams that are leading and still alive in the playoffs, from top to bottom they have quickness ... You can call it the Super Trifecta: they have size, they have speed, they have skill, and they have youth.

This metaphor begins with trifecta, a type of horse-racing bet in which the bettor chooses the top three finishers in order. OED online lists quotations for trifecta, but no definition; however, its etymology (tri + perfecta) leads you to a definition for perfecta, a bet on the placement and order of the top two finishers.

Looking for more on types of horse bets, I found this resource, which adds the following info: a superfecta is a "trifecta plus one": a bet on the placement and order of the top four finishers. A twin trifecta is a pair of trifectas: if you win a trifecta for the first race, you are eligible to use your payout to place a trifecta bet on the second. A supertrifecta is similar, except that the first bet must be a trifecta (top 3) while the second is a superfecta (top 4).

Clearly this knowledge is obscure, so any use of supertrifecta instead of superfecta is excusable in any context other than the betting window. Quenneville was invoking the "fourness" component of a superfecta bet, but pulled supertrifecta out instead. (Nice to know his knowledge of gambling is not quite so sophisticated).

But note that all this metaphor needed to be understood was a shared notion of fourness: the four crucial team qualities that Quenneville acknowledges constitute a metaphorical superfecta. But whether they constitute the top (i.e. most important) four qualities is not clear - I'm sure there are at least four others just as important (and that Quenneville also knows about).

tightrope (v.)

2006-05-05T10:45:00.000-07:00

As Jay Onrait of tsn.ca reports this morning,

How about this quote from Lebron James regarding his lay-up with less than a second left in overtime to lift his Cavs over the Wizards in Game 5 of their first round NBA Playoff series on Wednesday night: "I had enough room on the baseline, if I wore an 18 or 19 size shoe I wouldn't have made it. But I wear a 16 and was able to tightrope that baseline to get a lay-up." You can now add "tightrope that baseline" to the sports lexicon.

Well, I'm in favour of adding novel items to said lexicon, but there's more to it than that. Might be time to take stock of exactly what's in the sports lexicon.

A while back I made a core/periphery distinction among sports lexemes. Core terms are those that are intrinsic to a game - this includes (a) items used only in a sport or in metaphorical reference to that sport, e.g., scrum, and (b) specialized usages, e.g. both senses of safety in North American football, and baseline in the above quote. Periphery terms are those that mark the dialogue in and around sport, but aren't intrinsic to a game's structure, e.g. get untracked to mean "end a slump", or get off the schneid to mean "end a scoreless streak".

Also in the lexicon, I think, is a host of metaphors, many of which are better known as cliches. "We've got our backs against the wall", "It's gut check time", "we just gotta play with desperation", "this building is always tough to play in", ... . I say these are lexical because they're learned and used as full units (and used repeatedly). Further, the metaphor of "walking a tightrope" fits into this group, though James used only tightrope instead of the full phrase.

But I'm not sure that the verbing of the word is what qualifies it as a sports lexicon item. Sure, other nouns get verbed in the sport context. Quarterback, when crossed over into hockey, can act as a verb. The noun slump also has a gerundive counterpart slumping. But noun-to-verb derivation is productively available in English, and right now it's hard to determine whether such derivation is more likely in sports discourse than eslewhere - but I doubt it.

Looking back on what Ondrait wrote, I don't even think the verbal usage is what he's zeroed in on - I think it's specifically the use of the metaphorical tightrope in reference to the baseline.

canes hope maurice gets shot in toronto

2006-04-24T15:27:00.000-07:00

This apparently was a headline for a brief time on the Globe and Mail website this morning, and a friend emailed me to let me know. The story was about the likelihood of former Carolina Hurricanes coach Paul Maurice being hired on to coach the Toronto Maple Leafs. By the time I got there, it had been changed to "Canes hope Maurice gets a shot in Toronto." Seems they'd had to include the indefinite article to avoid a blundered-sounding headline.

Headlines as a rule drop articles, pronouns, and forms of be as either a copula or auxiliary verb. Usually relinquishing a definite or indefinite article has no detrimental effect, unless the result is an independently occurring construction or idiom. In this case, the presence of the article in the expression get a shot (as in, be granted an opportunity to try) is all that distinguishes the structure from the expression get shot (as in suffer a bullet wound). I wonder how many other pairs of expressions or idioms differ only by the presence or absence of an article.

not afraid to back down

2006-04-22T20:58:00.000-07:00

So said Brian Campbell of the Buffalo Sabres during a live TV interview (on, um, Outdoor Life Network) in the hallway just before the first overtime period of his team's opening NHL playoff game against the Philadelphia Flyers. He had been asked about how he and his teammates were trying to handle the physical play of the (generally bigger) Flyers players. In response, Campbell overnegated (or undernegated?) - he had two equivalent expressions from the arsenal of interview phrases to choose from, "not backing down" and "standing up for yourself", and wanted to embed whatever he said in the "not afraid to X" frame. He just grabbed the wrong embeddee, and said "I think we're not afraid to back down". No biggee, probably no one else but me noticed, and I'm not trying to be critical. I just think that it's worth noting that these things can happen when a network insists on interviewing a professional athlete, before the conclusion of a game, when the athlete just wants to play.

The same telecast (along with several others this weekend) has forced me to correct a point in my previous post regarding the structure of "infraction announcements" in the NHL. I had claimed that the referee, when announcing a penalty, always refers to the team of the transgressor by the colour of their sweater, as in "6 white, two minutes for hooking". I was correct about the structure of the announcement (number, team, punishment, trangression) but not about the team reference - all the penalty calls I saw this weekend referred to the team by its city. So we saw things like "forty-four Edmonton, two minutes interference" rather than "forty-four white". I have seen the team colour used, but only by Kerry Fraser.

structure of infractions

2006-04-18T14:24:00.000-07:00

Heidi Harley's recent post links to an old post of hers about the structure of the phrase grand theft auto, a left-headed legal term. Makes me think of the structure of penalty calls in football and hockey, where the referee announces to the crowd, team, and other game officials what the infraction is. Actually, the very first thing I thought of were the ice hockey infractions "obstruction-hooking", "obstruction-interference", and "obstruction-holding the stick". Each of these is parallel to grand theft auto, since they seem to be left headed - each infraction is a type of obstruction call.

Football penalties are usually not left-headed (e.g. "pass interference", not "interference - pass" (but see below). Though, I suppose "[personal foul] - [roughing the passer]" could be analyzed as left-headed. Non-obstruction penalties in ice hockey are also usually not left-headed (e.g. "unsportsmanlike conduct", not "misconduct - unsportsmanlike").

But the next step is to look at the structure of the announcement overall - in both games there's an announcement of the trangressor, the trangression, and the punishment. These elements are also provided in standardized orders.

Football: [transgression] [trangressor] [punishment].

e.g. "offsides, number 98, defense, 5 yards, remains second down."
Hockey: [transgressor] [punishment] [trangression].

e.g. "number 6, white, 2 minutes, hooking".
Some aspects of the [trangressor] component deserve further comment. First, in both games, the [trangressor] element includes the team and (if an individual infraction) the player's number. Second, it also seems that the order within this element can vary - team first or player number first. Third, in neither game is the name of the team or its home mentioned: football infractions refer to "offense", "defense", "kicking team", and "receiving team", while hockey infractions refer to the colour of the trangressor's sweater. (Though, when the arena host officially announces the penalty over the PA, the team's name is used, and before the player's number).

Which leads to a special note about infractions in which a hockey player has been particularly naughty, racking up several penalties at once. In these cases, some of the infractions are called with [punishment] elements but no [transgression]s. In recent years the NHL has been miking referees to let them announce penalties like NFL referees, but in multiple-penalty situations he does not bother. Instead, only the arena PA announcer does so, and lists the infractions in PA structure. e.g. "Flyers penalty to number 10, Gord Smith, 2 minutes for roughing, 5 minutes for fighting, 10 minute misconduct, game misconduct" - the last two [punishment] elements have no corresponding [trangression] component (unless misconduct is the trangression).

A last quirk is that pass interference calls in football leave room to be analyzed as left-headed structures. The rules allow pass interference to be called on the defense or offense - on the defense if the defender hinders the intended receiver's movement prior to the catch, and on the offense if the intended receiver hinders a potential interception. Such infractions may be called as follows: "pass interference, offense, number N, X yards ..." or "pass interference, defense, number N, the ball will be spotted ...". Now according to my grouping above, "offense" and "defense" are grouped under the [trangressor] element, but in these examples, could plausibly be analyzed as part of the [trangression] element.

ocr

2006-04-18T14:16:00.000-07:00

Last week while looking for some other function in my version of Adobe Acrobat, I stumbled across "OCR" in one of the pull-down menus. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, an application which detects text characters from digital images. OCR has been around in some form for over a decade, with performance improving over that span. I presume some combination of scanning + OCR has already been implemented in corpus linguistics, but coupled with improvements in scanner technology, I think OCR could open up lots of new research angles.

First, about text searches in pdf files. As you probably know, much digitally-accessible academic literature is available in a particular type of portable document format (pdf) that has been directly generated from some sort of word processor or text editor. The text in these pdfs is searchable in Acrobat Reader, and depending on the author's settings, can be copied and pasted into other applications. The other type of pdf, generated from an image scan, is not inherently searchable, because each page in the file is a picture rather than an arrangement of characters. These are the pdfs we're used to seeing from course reserves posted online or articles obtained electronically via interlibrary loan. They're readable on screen and print fairly clearly, but they can have huge file sizes, and depending on your printer, they might print at a slow page-per-minute rate. They also are not searchable.

This is where OCR comes in - the pdf becomes searchable in Reader once OCR has been run, and the text can then be pasted into another application. Acrobat Pro might also let you export it to another file format as an alternative to copy-and-paste. The search and copy/paste functions aren't necessarily useful if you're just reading a scan of an old article, but suppose you have text data that's only in hard copy format - maybe a printout from an obsolete file format, or a bound grammar or dictionary. If you scan your hard copy data to pdf, OCR could enable you to make a searchable electronic copy of it. I'm thinking, whatever dictionary you have, you could even convert it to a sortable database, and better yet mark it up with xml.

OK, this has always been possible even without scanning and OCR, assuming you're willing to re-type your source from scratch. But the potential savings in time (and chiropractic care) make the task a whole lot more palatable.

The one major stumbling block is, how well does OCR work? To answer this, I've decided to put Adobe's OCR capables to a brief test, using the Woleaian-English dictionary (Sohn & Tawerilmang 1976). Using a new scanner/copier that sends a pdf to my email address, I had 8 pages scanned and OCRed in 20 minutes. As for the OCR results, there is some good and a little bad.

First, the good:

Acrobat's OCR is sophisticated enough to know which end is up in your file. So if you scan something upside-down or sideways, it figures it out, so you don't have to rotate it yourself. In fact, I had some pages that could be OCRed only in a sideways orientation - but the output was always right-side up.
It seems like character recognition is not context dependent. I was worried it would incorporate an English lexicon to help guess top-down-like at a fuzzy character image. This would be really useful if your document is unilingual, but if you're scanning a dictionary of a 1000-speaker language with a quirky orthography, fuzzy characters in non-English words would probably be rendered poorly if they were guessed at with an English lexicon.

Italic text is generally recognizable (but may induce some misreads - see below).

The error rate is surprisingly low (and regular - see below).

And the bad:

Special characters can be problematic. In the dictionary I'm using, homonymic headwords are differentiated with subscript numbers, which appear in the post-OCR pdf as commas, l, z, and non-subscript 3.

After a first OCR run-through, the program maintains a list of "suspects" - characters that it is not fully confident about and has thus not rendered into text yet. You have to go through these manually to accept the character that the application proposes for the suspect. Unfortunately, it gives you no choices.

the available characters so far seem to be limited to the ASCII set, though I may test this by scanning a printout of an IPA-ful document.

Special formats like sub/superscript are troublesome, and there are mixups among the characters 1, l, [square brackets], and (parentheses). And oddly, my entire OCR output (all 8 pages so far) is italic.

Overall, I feel like the good outweighs the bad at this point. I also believe a lot of misread characters can be cleaned out with an automated perl or java script once you've exported the pdf to some other text format. I say this only because a lot of the errors I found were regular.

I considered an error to be any substitution or deletion of a character, or coalescence of two into one. Format errors like inaccurate transfer of boldface, italicization, small-caps, and so on were not counted as errors. I checked one pdf page that comprised two dictionary pages and found 57 errors. This seems like a lot, but considering the file contained 5650 non-space characters, it makes for a character accuracy of about 99%. Waaay better than I can type.

Moreover, of those errors, 27 are the same mistake: the italic string i) is rendered z) (but in 4 cases, comes out as t)). So if I wanted, I could run a search-and-replace to remove these errors. Another 11 errors are misread subscript characters, half of which could be taken out with another search-and-replace. I should add that a lot of these errors are partially products of the structure of an entry: headword (possibly with subscript number), italic lexical representation in parentheses, followed by part-of-speech, glosses, and italic examples.

The upshot is, OCR + your own automated error-correction leaves about 0.5% of all characters misread. I think this is great, but it also means the result still needs to be checked by hand. Of course, if you would rather type the whole thing in yourself, you still need to proofread (to look for errors that are far less predictable to boot). I should add that "checking by hand" in Acrobat was actually really easy - I just alt-tabbed between the pre-OCR and post-OCR documents. (while proofreading a typed copy requires turning your head from book to screen and back every couple of words or so).

For the curious, I've posted screenshots of the sample scan before and after applying OCR; I have highlighted errors in the post-OCR document. I guess now I'm going to extend the test to the rest of the dictionary.

one year of piloklok

2006-04-12T13:57:00.000-07:00

Today marks one year of piloklok, which is a fine excuse for taking stock and reflecting upon the paths it’s taken. Piloklok is one of a roll call of language blogs, many of which are linked from this page, and many of which have started to link back. So to begin, many thanks to all my mutual linkers!

The first post on piloklok is a little brief; basically it says “this is a new language blog; what should I call it?”. A minor change of mind that occurred after I set up a blogspot account resulted in the discrepancy between the blog’s name (piloklok) and its url (biloklok.blogspot.com). So far this discrepancy has not posed a problem, and probably never will.

I became involved in linguablogging, nearly a year before starting this site, as a contributor to Eric Bakovic’s phonoloblog, a forum whose mission is to enable linguistic discussion in the blog medium, so long as the topic is phonological in nature. Generally I followed these guidelines, but I occasionally found myself wanting to post about something linguistic but not-so-phonological (or in some cases, not phonological at all). It was the growing lack of fit between some of those posts and the “all things phonology” component of phonoloblog that led to the creation of piloklok.

Several aspects of phonoloblog are notable: its contributors use no pseudonyms, and many are at a career stage of trying to build a strong CV. The same applies to the solitary contributor to piloklok. As a result, I avoid putting truly serious scholarly content on either site, because I’d rather submit it for formal blind review. This leaves less potential content to write up for either phonoloblog or piloklok, and has led me to construct posts about the speech errors produced by reality TV contestants and nativization of Russian last names by English-speaking broadcasters. Basically, phenomena that might be worth bringing to the attention of other linguists, in some cases simply for amusement, but which otherwise probably would not be worth trying to develop into a scholarly reviewed publication. Still, I believe that since piloklok started, my subsequent posts on phonoloblog have returned to more serious phonological content.

In the meantime, a lot of what grabs space on piloklok has fallen within what you might call “the linguistics of sports”. So much so that this Yahoo directory of language and linguistics blogs describes piloklok as “a Blog investigating linguistics, modern language use, and lexical oddities in sport, from a researcher in Santa Barbara, California”. This post might be my most detailed discussion of sports writing.

A particular recurring theme has been what I’ve called lexical crossover – usages like home run in football and quarterback in hockey. One spooky result of this line of research is my realization that ace (as in skilled player of any sport) and point man (as in power-play defenseman in ice hockey) have non-sport origins that both refer to the head of a cavalry or column of troops.

Nevertheless, not everything on piloklok has been about the linguistics of sports. Some other favourites of mine include a discussion of the cran-morph kini, a taxonomy of nicknames for cities and states, my tongue-in-cheek defense of the Morissette song Ironic, and my one snowclone scoop.

I also have assembled a lengthy list of posts I either failed to finish or decided not to publish, including the following:

a laudation of Douglas Coupland’s recent coffee-table book “Souvenir of Canada”, which mentions the Inuit at least three times but never ever invokes anything regarding words for snow
a diatribe about baseless prescriptivism in The Vocabula Review
a brief writeup regarding the definition of planet
an unfavourable review of the parody usage guide Eats, shites, and leaves.

I think in the future I will probably keep up with the sports linguistics, like this recent treatment, and maybe I'll post another cartoon. I may also embark upon a lengthy discussion of the parallels of linguistic analysis in the sociological and behavioral structure of certain licensed establishments, with topics like “prescriptivism in wine selection”, “cocktail morphology”, “shooters and the lexicon”, and “kitchen pidgin”. We’ll see.

headless compound or what?

2006-03-30T21:50:00.000-08:00

This has to be shared. I had lunch with a number of old linguist buddies this week in Tucson. One of them, a vegetarian, had ordered the shrimp and avocado salad, hold the shrimp. The venue was counter service: pay the cashier, then take your number and display it to ensure delivery to your table. We all pretty well went Dutch so that there was a number displayed for each of us on the table. After several minutes (during which my own comical meal arrived) the waitress sheepishly wandered by, saying to us, "did somebody here order a shrimp salad?" Nobody said anything, because nobody was expecting shrimp. As she walked away I thought of the special order (shrimp and avocado, hold the shrimp) and piped up, "is there shrimp in it?" And she said, relieved, "No", and placed it on the table.

[update, 6/6/06: despite the title of this post, shrimp salad in this story is not actually a headless compound.]

Patsy Cline before and after Idol

2006-03-21T21:51:00.000-08:00

One of the American Idol contestants, Kellie Pickler, did a Patsy Cline song last night, "Walking after midnight". Pickler is from North Carolina, and her performance included some expected and unexpected vowels. The theme for the night was "songs of the 50s", and Pickler usually chooses songs that let her infuse the country flavour she favours - hence, she went for a 50s country song. Of course, modern country music is very different from that of Cline's era, and one of the less obvious aspects is the vowel space of the vocalists.

The song begins with this:

I go out walkin
after midnight
out in the moonlight
just like we used to do
I'm always walkin
after midnight
searchin for you

Pickler's accent typifies the Southern Vowel Shift, which includes an exchange of the nuclei of the vowels /i/ and /i/, so that /i/ comes out as [ɪy], and /ɪ/ comes out as [iə] or [iyɪ]. A similar exchange occurs with /e/ and /ɛ/, which become [ɛy] and [eyɛ] respectively. Meanwhile, /ay/ becomes a monopthong except before voiceless consonants, and /u/ and /o/ are both made diphthongs with fronted nuclei. These features appear strongly even in song, to an extreme with Pickler; unfortunately I don't have a recording to exemplify it, as it's hidden behind a pay-for membership on the show's website.

Cline was born in Virginia and spent much of her adult life in Nashville, and her accent just sounds milder than Pickler's when she sings - I believe because few of the features of the Southern Vowel Shift appear in her songs. She does show the contextual monophthong for /ay/, i.e. everywhere except before voiceless consonants, like in the next few lines:

I [a:] walk for miles [ma:lz]
along the highway [ha:wei]
well that's just my [ma:] way
of sayin I [a:] love you
I'm always walkin
after midnight [nayt]
searchin for you

All these monophthongal [a]s are pretty front - almost [æ] (well, they line up with my own vowel in bad, which is retracted). Nothing else really jumps out as very Southern, except perhaps a slightly fronted vowel in love and just. There is also a bit of a front onglide in the [u] of words like do and moon, but the nuclei for these words (and in you) are really back - not the centralized [ɨw] you would hear from Pickler.

Then in the third segment, some of the rhymes involve /i:/, prime Southern Vowel shift territory:

I stop to see a weepin willow
Cryin on his pillow
Maybe he's cryin for me
And as the skies turn gloomy
Night winds whisper to me
I'm lonesome as I can be

In Cline's recording, the /i/ of maybe and be may have a very slightly laxed nucleus, just enough to notice. But in see and both examples of me, the vowel is more steadily [i:]. In Pickler's version, the /i:/ of all these rhymes was a huge diphthong, the nucleus of which was retracted beyond [ɪ], perhaps to [ə] or even [ʊ]. Again, I can't get the recording to illustrate.

That Pickler would sing a Patsy Cline with an accent unlike Cline's is no suprise, given their distance in time and space. But there's one oddity in the way Pickler produced the nucleus in the first syllable of the word searchin. The word is repeated throughout the song, and each time she produced something like [ɛʁ]: a lax front vowel followed by uvular /r/, rather than just a nucleic [ɹ] that any rhotic North American accent would use.

Where did this [ɛʁ] come from? It's not at all typical of Pickler's or any American's accent. It also doesn't sound like Cline's production of the same word. The only thing I can think of is that maybe Cline's searchin has some central vowel nucleus (say, [ɜ], the open-mid-central-unrounded vowel) followed by a rhotic offglide, rather than a steady [ɹ] nucleus. And then Pickler, trying to include some sort of emulation of Cline in her performance, tried to replicate this Cline's [ɜɹ] and ended up with [ɛʁ]. Meanwhile the uvularity of the /r/ (if that's what it was) is either a byproduct of its context (between a central vowel and a palatal consonant) or a perceptual illusion on my part.

sports headline templates

2006-03-13T13:07:00.000-08:00

I read a headline today that said Avalanche douse Flames.
I’ve seen this headline before, many times: X douse Flames, with different teams subbing in for X. For example:

CBC Sports: Oilers douse Flames in shootout. Posted Fri, 25 Nov 2005 23:48:43 EST. CBC Sports. Friday's Battle of Alberta turned into a battle of goaltenders with …

It turns out that X-douse-Flames is a basic sports-headline snowclone. It’s not immediately clear whether this is more prominent in any particular sport, or how long it’s been around, but some of what I’ve pulled together indicates (a) it can happen in other sports and (b) it’s at least as old as the NHL team, but may be more frequent in the last 15 or so years. I’d be willing to bet most fans of the Calgary Flames are tired of it.

Not every Flames loss is treated as a dousing, but a Google search on individual teams reveals that nearly every team in the NHL has doused the Flames at some point. Here are some ghit counts for each other team as X in X-douse-flames:

“Oilers douse flames” 42
“Canucks douse flames” 49
“Flyers douse flames” 22
“Wild douse flames” 13
“Red wings douse flames” 286
“wings douse flames” 296
“Blackhawks douse flames” 6
“Hawks douse flames” 25 (includes KU Jayhawks)
“Leafs douse flames” 8
“Senators douse flames” 4
“Sens douse flames” 24
“Avalanche douse flames” 1
“Avs douse flames” 29
“Canadiens douse flames” 15
“Habs douse flames” 0
“penguins douse flames” 0
“Rangers douse flames” 280 (includes Dandenong Rangers over Sydney Flames of Australia's WNBL)
“Devils douse flames” 44 (includes Duke Blue Devils)
“Caps douse flames” 1
“Capitals douse flames” 0
“Islanders douse flames” 0
“Isles douse flames” 0
“Sabres douse flames” 2
“Bruins douse flames” 5
“Kings douse flames” 1
“Ducks douse flames” 14
“Jackets douse flames” 62
“Blues douse flames” 2
“Stars douse flames” 21
“Coyotes douse flames” 7
“Sharks douse flames” 115
“Thrashers douse flames” 0
“Hurricanes douse flames” 2
“canes douse flames” 0
“lightning douse flames” 20
“bolts douse flames” 0
“predators douse flames” 8
“preds douse flames” 156

OK, the relative numbers are meaningless. It is weird that the Predators, a recent expansion team, would douse the Flames more often than long-time divisional rivals with winning traditions like the Edmonton Oilers, Vancouver Canucks, and Colorado Avalanche. These numbers just indicate how often the phrase is used, not how often the Flames lose, and for some reason Nashville writers who cover the Predators (perhaps even just one) are more open to its use than, say, Toronto writers who cover the Maple Leafs. Also, the fact that the Jayhawks, Blue Devils, and Dandenong Rangers have doused the Flames indicates that this construction is available in other sports.

Lest you think I’m dumping on the Flames here, I’m not. Other team names are subject to similar templatic headlines: for example, the Philadelphia Flyers are grounded when they lose:

rangers-ground-flyers 8
penguins-ground-flyers 2
leafs-ground-flyers 0
senators-ground-flyers 3
devils-ground-flyers 11
red-wings-ground-flyers 1
wings-ground-flyers 5
ducks-ground-flyers 2
lightning -ground-flyers 64
bolts-ground-flyers 5
caps-ground-flyers 0
capitals-ground-flyers 3

and so on.

Headline templates also appear for winners. The Anaheim Ducks, for example, have a nasty quack:

Ducks quack down on Coyotes' streak
These Ducks Quack Back at Crunch

When the Carolina Hurricanes win, they blow their opponents away. “Hurricanes-blow nhl” gets 767 hits. I think I’ve also seen them downgraded.

Hot Hurricanes Blow Past Atlanta

And the Tampa Bay Lightning strike their opponents:

Lightning strike Flyers to stay hot

In fact, “lightning-strike nhl” yields 20,200 pages – further evidence that the number of pages itself is not very meaningful; in this case, many of the pages use the independently occurring expression “lightning strike” to refer to events not involving the Tampa team.

Still, it is worth noting that the luckless Washington Capitals have had some difficulty dousing the Flames and grounding the Flyers. It is thus somewhat ironic that one of the earliest appearances of “X douse Flames” in Lexis-Nexis is from 1981, in a recap of a Capitals game:

December 3, 1981
LANDOVER, Md.
Coaches and players list various differences between winning and losing but the one about ''wanting it more'' has become a cliche. Washington Capitals right winger Mike Gartner said ''wanting it more'' accounted for his team's takeover and 9-3 rout of Calgary Wednesday night. ''I couldn't really pinpoint it but they played the first ten minutes like they really wanted it,'' said Gartner after his first hat trick of the year helped douse the Flames' hope for a win.

The Flames aren’t doused in a Lexis-Nexis headline until 1989:

Bruins douse Flames; Crowder's late goal caps comeback, 4-3. The Boston Globe, February 19, 1989

I was doubtful that the 1989 headline, and the 1981 article, were the first uses of “X-douse-Flames”, so I checked a different database (ProQuest/New York Times) and found a single Times headline from October, 1972, shortly after the then-Atlanta Flames entered the league:

Stars douse Flames, 6-0. Atlanta, Oct 18 (UPI) – Bill Goldsworthy and Dennis Hextall scored two goals each for Minnesota tonight and Cesare Maniago posted his first shutout of the season, 6-0, over the Atlanta Flames.

I’ll note that other examples of flames being doused in the sports pages include a few literal fires:

February 27, 1986
CHANDLER, Ariz. A natural gas explosion sent a big ball of flame through the Milwaukee Brewers' new spring training clubhouse Thursday, injuring 10 people including the Manager George Bamberger and General Manager Harry Dalton. Bamberger, Dalton and others were hurt trying to douse the burning clothes of third base Coach Tony Muser and Jeff Sutton, a plumber. Sutton and Muser were seriously burned.

Hornets, Panthers players douse flames on accident victim. Associated Press. All Rights Reserved, July 23, 1999.

And some doused flames are metaphorical:

January 19, 1990
HARRY ATKINS, AP Sports Writer
ANN ARBOR, Mich. There was no chance of Loy Vaught's fire contributing to the acid rain problem. Every time the Michigan senior left the game, Ohio State was able to douse the flame Thursday night.

Football: FA Cup Countdown: Casey ready to douse his old flames; A sharp Cheltenham forward has mixed feelings about blunting the Blues. Phil Shaw reports. The Independent (London), November 15, 1990.

BASEBALL; Rebounding Clemens Douses the Yankees' Flame, The New York Times, May 29, 1991

After 1990, teams with Flames as their name have been doused much more frequently, in various leagues:

Douse

Flames

Douse

douse Flames

douses Flames

douse Flames

Douse Flames

douses Flames

DOUSE

FLAMES

douse Flames

DOUSE FLAMES

douses Flames

douse Flames

douses Flames

DOUSE

FLAMES

DOUSE FLAMES

douse

Flames

DOUSE FLAMES

DOUSES FLAMES

So, X-douse-Flames appeared three times before 1990, two of them in headlines, and then exploded. Why this happened is beyond me, but several explanations are possible. Maybe Lexis-Nexis has fewer sources archived for earlier years, so the Boston Globe might be indexed for the last 150 years, but the Dayton Daily News might be indexed only back to 1992. This would leave some 1980’s examples of X-douse-Flames unrecorded.

Or, maybe there has been a shift in the way headlines are made, with wordplay-based or templatic constructions growing in popularity. I guess I could track this by looking for a similar trend for phrases like X-ground-Flyers, but I wonder if any other headline template has the salience and recurrence of X-douse Flames.

Regardless, it seems that these templates emerge when wordplay on the team’s name is available. So the Avalanche can bury their opponents, the Flames can burn, the Stars shine, and the Sharks bite whether they win or lose. Perhaps the Kings rule, but the Rangers and Senators likely don’t have any good templates. (I’ve always wanted to see “Parliament is in session” in print for a Senators win.)

[Update 3/15/06: I neglected to point out the one example above of the Flames doing the dousing, in the Feb. 1993 headline. Coincidentally, another such reverse example showed up today with an online headline in the Ottawa Sun reading "Alfie strikes Lightning". The print version reads "Alfie jolts bolts." Go figure.]

[Update 3/16/06: Another headline, from cbc.ca, with the same reversal of roles, referring to the same game: Alfredsson strikes down Lightning.]

[Then on Yahoo, 3/17/06, a preview headline reads Flyers hope to finally strike Lightning. After the game, the headline for the recap says Lightning jolt Flyers to bolster playoff hopes.]

bobsled hole-in-one?

2006-02-23T12:51:00.000-08:00

There have been plenty of observable linguistic tidbits from current coverage of the Turin/Torino games. One in particular is yet another example of sport-lexicon crossover - this time, the broadcasters covering the bobsled event have taken to referring to individual runs with golfing terminology. A good run, as in quicker than you could expect for that team, is a birdie or eagle, while a result matching expectation is par, and bad run is a bogey.

Then this showed up on Sun media:

In a TV chat with CBC about Team Canada's 3-2 win over the Czechs at the Winter Olympics, Gretzky used a football analogy in describing attempts to pass the puck out of the defensive zone. "It's like football, sometimes it's good to hand off because when you hand off, that opens up the passing line," explained Gretzky, executive director of Team Canada.

I'm having a tough time with the analogy, since handing off typically removes passing as an option. But it still counts as an attempt at using the structure (and lexicon) of one sport to discuss strategy in another.

Seeing as I've come across numerous examples of sports terminology jumping from one game to another, I believe it's almost time to develop a predictive model of when it can and can't happen. That will come soon in this space.

not a typo

2006-02-23T12:26:00.000-08:00

I just caught an error in an email I was bout to send out - I'd intended to type that an idea I was working on was based "very loosely" on an idea I'd worked on previously. Yet what I typed was "very closely" - if you check your keyboard, you'll see that's no regular typo, as the c key is far from the other keys used in the sequence eryclo. This was a full-on lexical access error (and antonymic to boot). Wondering if anyone had studied this, I looked up LLBA with search terms {lexical and {retrieval or access} and typing}, but none of the hits pertain to my question. Meanwhile, I'm wondering how much of what I've written in the last 20 years on keyboards has included similar errors.

the verbing of cran-morph

2006-01-30T09:58:00.000-08:00

On Language Log, Ben Zimmer offers a discussion of the emergence of the item dango as a cran-morph, with a concise background on what a cran-morph is. I couldn't help but notice the verbalization of cran-morph in his post's title, The cran-morphing of -dango. This appears to be the first instance of a verbally inflected form of cran-morph in all of Google's index, judging by the absence of pages containing 'cran-morphing' or 'cran-morphed'.

any measure of spin is itself spin

2006-01-23T11:50:00.000-08:00

A friend just emailed me this story, which discusses this project by David Skillicorn and Ayron Little of Queens University. Their project is also discussed here. The project in question basically is an attempt to quantify the degree of spin in the speeches of electoral candidates, in particular those of today's Canadian federal election.

The theory behind it is based on work by David Pennebaker at UT. Pennebaker claims that the language of deceivers or liars differs in measurable ways from the language of truth tellers. So, for example, liars use fewer 1st-person pronouns, more negative emotion words, and more action verbs. Note that the definition of the 1st-person pronouns is uncontroversial, but what counts as negative emotion and action is more subjective.

OK, suppose these findings about usage are empirically based (that is not something that is immediately clear to me). The questions that are still unanswered are the following:

First, are the "reasons" for each usage properly attributed? For example, do liars avoid 1st person pronouns really to avoid responsibility, or for some other reason?

Second, can you get a false positive? That is, while a liar might use relatively fewer 1st-person pronouns, does that mean that all avoiders of 1st-person pronouns are liars? Put another way, the model claims that liars underuse 1st person pronouns. To then detect underuse of such pronouns, and infer deception on the part of the speaker, amounts to begging the question.

Third, is "spin" the same as "deception"? Both are misleading - but it may be that the theory of language and lying applies to only deception in the sense of knowingly uttering something false. Spin, on the other hand, is more of a matter of framing than of outright falsehood.

Fourth, one could easily load their model of spin to fit their expected results - this is what I mean by the title of this post. I don't think that Skillicorn and Little did this, but hypothetically one could detect a greater occurrence of a particular structure in the language of a particular candidate, and design a model post-hoc that associates that structure with whatever trait the analyst wants to attribute to that candidate. Similarly, someone could come along and propose that each of these measures actually detects happiness, or existential turmoil, or whatever.

The only thing the measures show between the candidates in question is different linguistic patterns. What's unfortunate about this is that, despite the authors' own admonition that the results "be taken with a grain of salt", the algorithm ends up looking like an objective and credible measure of spin. A real test of the model would require an independent measure of the truthfulness of each candidate. I'm all for detecting spin wherever it occurs, but I'd prefer not to see someone falsely portrayed as a spinner with an unproven methodology.

a little problem with scope

2005-12-13T13:42:00.000-08:00

Last night I saw a low-budget commercial for a product that renders license plates unviewable from red-light cameras, despite being invisible to the eye. I thought this was somewhat morally questionable, though it helps protect against false accusations (mind you, that's something that a court appearance could help).

But the linguistic content of the commercial was compelling. For just 39.95, said the voiceover, you can protect yourself from tens of millions of dollars in unjust fines. It sounds like an exaggeration, since no individual presumably will ever receive that much in fines. I think there must have been a script-editing issue, and that the original message must have been to the effect that you need not be one of those unlucky people who receive a combined total of tens of millions of dollars.

But it's not really a false claim: hypothetically you could run 100,000 red lights (or be falsely accused of doing so), which at $100 a pop gets you $10M. You would just have to run every red light you encounter for 16.7 years (assuming 1 traffic light every mile, half of which are red when you reach them, and driving 12,000 miles a year). Spray your plate, save millions.

OK, so it still sounds exaggerated, but if it's not false, there's no need to change it.

schneid

2005-11-14T22:23:00.000-08:00

Came across a rarity of a lexical item today, in a summary of Edmonton beating Colorado in NHL action:

"Yeah, absolutely," Pronger said when asked if it felt good to finally get off the schneid.

The context is that Chris Pronger socred his first goal of the hockey season in his team's 20th game. Schneid?

I ran a Google search just on that item and found an archive of "word-detective.com". There's no anchors on the page, so I'll summarize that people write to the Detective to ask about obscure words, and it turns out somebody wanted to know about schneid. The word detective's answer:

To be "on the schneid" means to be on a losing streak, racking up a series of losing, and especially scoreless, games.

This suggests a property of teams rather than of players, but it makes sense to apply to an individual's scoring slump. What's neater, if true, is the source of the expression: the detective says it's from the card came Gin:

Apparently the original sense was that if you were "schneidered" in gin you were "cut" (as if by a tailor) from contention in the game. "Schneider" first appeared in the literature of card-playing about 1886, but the shortened form "schneid" used in other sports is probably of fairly recent vintage.

This amounts to another example of a card-playing lexical item passing into sports.

Meanwhile, for the sake of curiosity, the detective adds "shut out" as another crossover item. This one (s)he attributes to horse racing, as a term applicable to a potential bettor arriving too late to bet, but it's also used in baseball and hockey to refer to a game in which one team is scoreless.

I'll check on schneid and shut-out in the office in the morning.

aloha, joe

2005-11-06T19:07:00.000-08:00

Joe Paopao won't be coaching next year, which means he won't be providing data for the linguistics-of-sports theme that has risen to prominence on Piloklok (as he did, for example, here. We can't let him go without an acknowledgement of one of the best names (Paopao = Pow-pow) in professional contact sports (perhaps only Tedy Bruschi, i.e. Brewski, has an edge), and one of the best nicknames to boot, the Throwin Samoan (from his days as a CFL quarterback with the BC Lions, Saskatchewan Roughriders, Ottawa Rough Riders, and Winnipeg Blue Bombers). I'm sure there are other Throwin Samoans out there, but given Paopao's vintage (played in the 70s) and position (QB) I suppose he may have been the first.

When I saw the headline, Aloha Joe, I thought it might not have been entirely appropriate, given he's of Samoan descent. Of course, Alofa Joe would be a pretty cryptic headline for most people, and regardless, Paopao was born in Honolulu, so it's all good.

what can brown make you blog about?

2005-11-04T14:49:00.000-08:00

This morning on the way to work there was a preponderance of UPS trucks, enough to make me remark, How can Brown get in YOUR way? (A play on the UPS slogan, What can Brown do for you?) Immediately I was reminded of two things. One is a claim somewhere in the syntax literature that idioms allow the subject to be switched out (e.g. Ed/Sheila kicked the bucket to mean “die”) but do not pivot around the subject (e.g., there is no idiom like The bucket got Ed/Sheila.) Not up on my syntax reading, and I can’t think of it offhand.

The other thing was this apparently Russian phenomenon of making ironic comments orienting to the 2nd person. Things like, “in Russia, you don’t get a job, your job gets YOU”. This was blogged about recently (but I can’t remember which site), possibly as a snowclone, with the structure You don’t X_v Y_n, Y_n X_v YOU. It’s also an example of a more general rhetorical device (whose name also escapes me) with the structure [not] X_v [predicate [Y_n]], Y_n [predicate[X_v]]. JFK used it in “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” (Notably un-Russian, since the YOU is a subject, not an object, in the second clause).

Nevertheless I was curious if anyone else had played on the UPS slogan. The answer is yes, but very rarely: almost all of them are of the structure [question word] [aux] Brown [predicate] YOU, obtainable with Google searches like “how can Brown” + “ups”. So far, who does not seem to have been used as the question word, but I have found lots of hows and one why. Looking for variations using “what” is tricky because of the occurrence of the actual slogan – it appears that many other instances just repeat the slogan ironically. Also, can is typical as the auxiliary, but do can substitute as well.

Here are some examples. Many (but not all) use YOU in the verbal complement, and many also use "scare quotes" to mark their statement as a faux slogan. (With apologies to UPS; satisfied customers don't go online to vent...)

“So, how can Brown screw your delivery up, today? When it absolutely, positively, has to be somewhere else, use UPS”

could handle the idiots, but not the shitty management. the’re on the way out…i hope fedex takes most of the market share. “How can brown shit on you”

BUT WAIT, if I let them direct bill my account all will be OK >>>>NOT IN MY LIFETIME >> HOW CAN BROWN FK U? real easy

Friday, January 14 How can Brown poop on you? OK, it's time for a rant I figure. ... However, it's coming by UPS again, so cross your fingers. Logically. ...

Interests, Quads. Occupation, UPS how can brown bring you down

I used to work as tech support for UPS (Motto: "How can Brown fuck with YOU?")

I hesitate to ask this -- but how can brown put "a few small dents in the tip of the headstock"?

How can brown screw you?! Long...

like i said in the contract there's no language that we can find to support that statement.my question is can we win a grevince that could get us extra work.How can BROWN get away with this??? 'Cuz they can. Most Locals won't fight for these issues. These have been issues for many contracts and language that would address this has been left out

And why would the fedex guy get more than the ups man???? That's wrong. What did brown ever do to you ...

And as for Teamster 251..."What Did Brown Do To Him".

Thus, some intermodals run hard, very hard, because Brown says so. Why does Brown say so? Because FEDEX is mostly running by truck and these schedules must be competitive for market share.

I'm getting sick of paying UPS. "Why does Brown keep DOing me?"

comment filter

2005-10-28T10:27:00.000-07:00

I'm going with Blogger's word-verification for comments. I'm not exactly inundated with it, but comment spam seems to target the content of individual posts. I receive email notification of comments already, but it doesn't tell me which post was commented upon, so sometimes I have to dig through my archives to find and delete the intruder. This is annoying. I just got a comment on a post that included the word g-o-l-f, and the comment includes a link to some b-e-t-t-i-n-g site. We'll see how this word verification works.

up the middle (and shovel passes)

2005-10-12T16:39:00.000-07:00

Cris Carter on Yahoo sports, discussing the fortunes of the New England Patriots, discusses strength (actually, weakness) up the middle, and attributes it to baseball.

Do they still have a great team on paper? Of course, they do. But just like in baseball, a team becomes vulnerable when it gets weak up the middle – in the NFL that means interior linemen, linebackers and safeties. It will be very tough for New England to win it all again without linebackers Teddy Bruschi and Ted Johnson and maybe Harrison, who suffered a serious leg injury in Sunday's win at Pittsburgh.

In the sporting world's lexicon, baseball seems to be the most typical source of terminology that jumps from one sport to another, although it would take some archival research to confirm this trajectory for "up the middle". Still, we can add this to the list of phrases that pass from baseball elsewhere, such as the batting terminology and untracked.

Regardless, this makes three sports that use it: baseball, football, and hockey, fundamentally different games in which the phrase refers to very different positions. In baseball, "up the middle" refers to the pitching and catching staff; in hockey, to the center and goaltender. It's odd that the phrase would diffuse in this way with such divergent reference.

I think that it has done so because it sounds like a really technical but simple way of evaluating a team. When you say "You've got to have strength up the middle" it sounds like you know what you're talking about. In reality, to win a championship, a team needs to be strong at every position, regardless of the sport. But "You've got to have strength everywhere" sounds less informed, or perhaps just more obvious.

Another noteworthy football tidbit is the lexicon of passing. A while back we were watching Oakland vs Philadelphia, in which Donavan McNabb issued a scoring pass to Brian Westbrook. I exclaimed, ooh! fleaflicker! But the commentator described it as a shovel pass, which Robin heard as "shuttle pass". The game summary settles on shovel: A 62-yard pass to Westbrook set up Westbrook's 5-yard TD catch on a shovel pass that made it 20-10 late in the third period. Both "shuttle pass" and "shovel pass" show up online, but I can't tell if they refer to different types of passes. I still think the pass I saw was a fleaflicker, because it was with one arm, and would have guessed a shovel pass takes two. While I'm on it, maybe I should start watching for shuttles and shovels in other sports.

[update 9/10/06: more on shovel passes here]

go nmsu aggies

2005-09-23T10:39:00.000-07:00

Some note of the broadcasting of NMSU football games in Navajo has been making the rounds, first at Semantic Compositions, and now Eric at Language Log.

Naturally it's tempting for the media to frame this as a "(no) word for X" story. Which is too bad given that there's so much meatier stuff to play with: like, is the 4th person (i.e. obviative) structure useful at all in play-by-play? (my guess is yes.) And, do linebackers get the big-blobby classifier, and do the wide receivers get the long-skinny classifier?

SC also links to this article about the baseball lexicon of French, developed for broadcasts of Expos games. Seems like the intent was to rely on native vocabulary rather than borrowing - e.g. balle papillon "butterfly ball" rather than le knuckleball.

(Knuckleball and papillon both appear in hockey; one as an airborne puck spinning edge-over-edge rather than sailing like a disk, the other as a goaltending style).

Much literature on borrowing sports lexical items tracks the intrusion of English items into other languages, like le goal. But French coverage of football in Quebec, like baseball, has an adapted lexicon (e.g., a field goal is un placement). I even found an article suggesting this could be used as a tool for American English speakers to learn French:

Berwald, Jean-Pierre; Berwald, Peter. 1974. Teaching French via American football. American Foreign Language Teacher 4, 4. 17-19

Part of its abstract from LLBA:
Fortunately for foreign language teachers, American football (and closely related Canadian football) is widely covered by French-Canadian print and broadcast media. Using a French vocabulary of players, positions, rules and verbs, teachers can present a number of concepts at various levels of instruction. Some ideas include numbers, colors, verbs, geography, etc.

to clone or not to clone

2005-09-21T10:56:00.000-07:00

In my continuing search for lexical items crossing over sports, I come across this headline:

QB or not QB.

The to X or not to X structure is pretty clearly a snowclone, of the type frequently tracked on Language Log. This one's also pretty easy to date; it's at least as old as Shakespeare's Hamlet, but I suppose it's possible that the Bard may have lifted it from one of his contemporaries' work.

A google search of to * or not to * gets the following phrases on page 1:

to be or not to be
to Lariam or not to Lariam
to spank or not to spank
to pee or not to pee
to MBA or not to MBA
to hack or not to hack
to blog or not to blog
to breed or not to breed

And none of these actually discusses the play.

Regardless, the structure is so utterly common that its absence from the Google Meme Observatory is, IMHO, forgiveable. More curiously, the search term "to * or not *" snowclone has odd results: it gets lots of accidental hits with phrases like to whether or not *, alongside discussions of other snowclones.

Only one page actually has the snowclone, viewable only in its Google cache form. The structure is in a message board post by a user named Snowclone, whose post signature includes the phrase "'To act, or not to act' is not the question for at some point in our lives we all act." It's not clear whether user Snowclone knows his/her sig has a snowclone in it.

hurricane names

2005-09-20T15:29:00.000-07:00

[Update 9/22/05: more about this subject appears in this AP article.]

This post is about hurricane names -- by now some of this is old news, and I meant to post this a few weeks ago, but haven't polished it til now. The system of naming weather systems is kind of an artificial lexicon, with interesting linguistic, sociological, and cultural aspects.

Within days (perhaps hours) of Katrina's hit, it was decided that the name would be retired as a storm name. My first thought was, aren't all names retired? The answer, actually, is no.

The basic algorithm - determined by the World Meteorological Organization - is that storms are named upon achieving Tropical Storm, the step below Category 1. Storms are given common European first names, assigned in ascending alphabetical order, using the first letter of the spelled name.

The concept of using names is apparently psycholinguistic in origin and started in the 1953. The presumption was that it would be easier to remember "Andrew" than "Hurricane Number 1 of 1992". Names are drawn from a pool of languages, to reflect the multilingual range of nations in the Carribean and Gulf that Atlantic storms effect.

In 1979, the use of male names was introduced; prior to that all storm names were female (uh, I guess they used to think it was cute, but it was also sexist). Now they alternate between girls names and boys names; the first name each season also alternates, so that one year, A, C, E, G and so on are girls names, but are boys names the next. Names beginning with Q, U, X, Y, and Z are not used.

I hadn't ever thought deeply enough about this other than to think, surely there are enough names in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and so on not to have to recycle. But they do recycle them every six years: this is the mandated list of storm names from 1996 through 2001, and this is the list of names for 2005 through 2010. The 1999 list is (almost) the same as 2005, 2000 = 2006, 2001 = 2007, 1996 = 2008, 1997 = 2009, and 1998 = 2010. I'm missing the names for 2002-2004, but presumably 2002 = 1996 = 1998, 2003 = 1997 = 2009, and 2004 = 1998 = 2010.

Names are retired or taken off the lists if they become associated with a particularly heinous storm. Katrina easily qualifies. There will also never be another Hurricane Camille, Andrew, or Charley. (Whether heinous hurricane names have an effect on baby naming practices is a different question, but shares a shade of taboo). And will they still serve hurricanes at Pat Obrien's?

OK, so psycholinguistics, gender and language, and taboo so far. Now that Rita (the 17th storm) is on her way, and it's still only September, a new aspect is appearing: what if the hurricane name lexicon is too small? Every year's list of names has 21 items, leaving four more for 2005 (Stan, Tammy, Vince, and Wilma). I wonder if it goes beyond that, will the WMO employ Xavier, Yvette, and Zachary? Then what?

Ace

2005-08-30T12:39:00.000-07:00

In a continuing quest for lexical items that cross over sports, I have resorted to reading summaries of tennis matches, which has me slapping my forehead for not having noticed the use of ace: tennis, cards, dice, golf, and beyond. But this one's trajectory is not at all obvious, since it's associated with games whose origins are far more ancient than those that give us home runs and touchdowns.

OED puts the earliest use of ace as the side of a die with one point value, and tracing the word from Old French as, from Latin as, meaning unity or unit. The earliest citation is from c. 1300: Harrowing of Hell 21 Stille be thou, Sathanas! The ys fallen ambes aas. (ambes aas = two aces, a.k.a. snake eyes). The earliest citation in a card-playing context is from 1533.

The tennis use of ace means "unreturnable serve", and its notion of one-ness seemingly relates to the earning of a point with one stroke. OED has 19th-century citations to this effect, with earlier uses referring more generally to any point in any volleying game. Also notably, Oxford has a 1920 citation of ace used for a hole-in-one in golf.

Outside sports and games, it can mean "one who is good at what they do". OED's earliest reference is to skilled fighter pilots in WW1, noted cryptically "after F. as". Its extension outside military usage is "chiefly US". Other chiefly US usages of ace are a slang term for dollar, and a verbal usage, meaning to earn an excellent score on a test or exam.

Here's what's not immediately clear: (1) is the "unreturnable serve" usage extended from the dice/cards usage, and if so, in French or English? (2) how did the "expert" usage come about? Reading the OED entry, I got the faintest hint that the "unreturnable serve" is an English innovation, but the "skilled one" is a second borrowing from French. Intrigued, I took a walk to the library, looking for French resources. (If you read French you'll see my interpretations below are a bit loose).

I consulted numerous dictionnaires etymologiques, the least helpful of which said the following:

As, du L. as (meme sens). (As, from Latin as, same sense).

The others seemed to agree that as took on a dice role first, jumping to cards, but differ in their stories of how the "expert" usage came along. Caillon (1962) mentions it, but makes no explicit connection:

AS [ass] (du l. as unité de monnaie, de poids), carte a jouer qui n'est marquée qu'un point. Fig. pop.: le premier dans son genre. (From Latin as, a unit of money or weight; playing card worth one point. Slang: the best in one's field.)

Bloch & von Wartburg (1932/1968) assert that the "expert" usage extends the winning position of the ace in a deck of playing cards:

As. Lat. as «unité de monnaie, de mésure»; a dû être employé de bonne heure pour le jeu de dés, d'où postérieurement pour le jeu des cartes. As «homme de valeur» partic. dans les sports, d'après la valeur de l'as dans les jeux de cartes, est du XXe s. (Lat, unit of money or measure, soon to be used in dice, and later for playing cards. As "one who is strong", particularly in sports, after the value of the ace in cards, is of the 20th C.)

However, Dauzat (1938) traces the "expert" usage through a military application (as hinted at by OED):

as (XIIe s., var asse, XVIe s.). empr. au. lat. as, unité de monnaie, de poids; en fr. terme de jeu de dés, puis de cartes; au fig. «cavalier du premier péloton», argot milit. (début du XXe s.), puis «soldat de valeur» (sens développé par la guerre) et, par ext., «homme de valeur»; le sens pop. as, plur., «argent», vient d'as, carte maîtresse. (from Latin as, unit of money or weight; in French, term of dice, then of cards; figuratively to "rider at head of column", military usage, then "skilled soldier" (developed during the war), and by extension "skilled person". Slang as, plural, "money", comes from ace as a winning card).

So, several neat outcomes:

(1) As in French and ace in English reacquired a meaning of money that as once had in Latin.

(2) The "unreturnable serve" is an English extension of ace. Except for very recent borrowing back to French from English, French as in a tennis context refers to a good player rather than a good serve. (I found a French tennis lexicon online with the search term marquer un ace, in which ace is listed as follows: balle de service que le relanceur peut toucher, mais ne peut relancer dans les limites du court. Réussir un ace permet de gagner un point avec une balle de service (service ball that the receiver can touch, but cannot return in bounds. Getting an ace scores a point with the serve). But ace is not in any print French dictionary I consulted, and no entry for as mentions this usage.

(3) As, as "head of column", is French for point man.

sign and trade X for Y

2005-08-24T13:08:00.000-07:00

Just a little gapped coordination I noticed today in a headline on TSN.ca:

Senators sign and trade Hossa for Heatley

I know exatcly what it's supposed to mean: the Senators sign Hossa, and then trade him to another team, receiving Heatley in exchange.

I guess I wouldn't have noticed if both verbs had single complements, as in Senators sign and trade Hossa. The actual coordination is a so-called WTF construction, in which the two halves of a coordination are of unlike categories. In this case, one's a single-complement verb and the other is a double-complement verb.

Now, I'm not complaining, but my expectation from the actual coordination is that the complement of the second verb is also understood as the gapped complement of the first verb. This led me to the two following parses:

a. [ [ [sign ____i] and [trade Hossa_i] ] for Heatley ]

b. [ [sign ____i] and [trade [Hossa for Heatley]_i ] ]

In (a), the structure implies that the signing and trading of Hossa were both done for Heatley's benefit (which is not inaccurate). But the placement of for Heatley outside the VP headed by trade suggests that Heatley wanted both actions done, and not necessarily that he was one of the traded parties. (Based on the assumption that if you are "trading X for Y", X and Y are both VP-internal arguments).

In (b), there is this phrase Hossa for Heatley which is understood as the complement of both verbs. But for Heatley seems to be weird as an internal argument for sign.

I can think of four ways of reacting to this:

(1) Dismiss it as ungrammatical or errorful.
(2) Leave it as a product of the special grammar of sports reporting.
(3) Attribute it to headline space restrictions, which preclude Senators sign Hossa and trade him for Heatley.
(4) Adhere to a theory of grammar that allows gapped configurations in which the gapped complement can co-refer with an overt element embedded within the coordinated complement. Thus the following structure:

c. [ [sign ____i] and [trade [Hossa_i] [for Heatley] ] ]

I'm inclined towards (4). It's not up to me to decide which data is usable and which isn't, which rules out (1). If it were just an aspect of sports reporting, it's still left unexplained. If it's a headline issue, other headlines are clearly longer, as in Champions: Liverpool advances despite loss and Theissen not concerned about Williams in 2006.

(Final possibility: headlines seem to avoid pronouns. In a sample of 44 headlines all clustered together, I found only one with a pronoun: Pistons add Davis to their frontcourt. It's hard to determine how many could have had pronouns but didn't. Looks like the theory implied in (4) needs to let avoid-pronouns-in-headlines trump avoid-wtf-coordinations)

Yes, your mate-liness

2005-08-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

OK, can't let this pass uncommented upon. If you just want the headline, Uproar forces Australian parliament to lift ban on saying "mate". Officials had issued a directive to forbid security guards from calling people "mate", which Prime Minister Howard's government had to rescind in embarrassment.

I suppose it's equivalent to a guard calling you "man", "buddy", or "dude", but clearly more culturally charged. I can imagine a similar uproar if the state legislature in California tried to forbid the use of "dude", but only on the basis of the absurdity in the decree, and not on the basis of its cultural relevance in the California vernacular.

Optometrist

2005-08-07T01:51:00.000-07:00

This post has several functions. One, just testing Blogger's image hosting. Two, testing how images look in the layout. Three, sharing some PartiallyClips inspired linguistic "humour".

football slugger

2005-07-24T10:11:00.000-07:00

In today's Ottawa Sun was this story, with an extended sport-to-sport crossover metaphor. It begins: For all those fans who fancied receiver Pat Woodcock being a home run hitter, Renegades coach/GM Joe Paopao has some news for you [emphasis added]. If you haven't heard of the Renegades, the word receiver should tip you off that they're a football team. But here is a clear baseball usage in a football text. It goes on:

Woodcock, a much-heralded free-agent signing before last season, is a singles and doubles guy. "You have six receivers and it's like a batting order," Paopao said yesterday. "Your top three guys are your core guys and you expect them to have 1-to-4 catches a game." So where does Woodcock fit into the picture? "He's in the middle of the batting order," said Paopao. After being pretty much ignored in the previous two games, Woodcock came close to hitting for what amounted to the cycle Thursday against the Edmonton Eskimos.

Paopao really rings up the baseball metaphor in this one. Now, a while a back I tried to draw a line between core lexical items of a sport and peripheral ones, and have written more about it. Core items are intrinsic to the discourse surrounding a sport, referring to instruments, positions, infractions, and so on. Peripheral ones are not, but still mark the discourse as sport-oriented. "Get untracked" was one. Peripheral vocabulary blurs into the interview cliche of giving it your all and playing with desperation.

I think some of the baseball terms above are probably core for the sport - singles and doubles - and others might be more peripheral. What matters is the wholesale importation of a baseball lexicon into a discussion about football.

I'm assuming a "home run" in football is a long pass that the receiver can take into the end zone. You can have home runs in hockey, too. I saw Brendan Shanahan quoted this week that removing the center red line from the rink would enable a "home run pass". I haven't been able to dig it up, but I've found the usage elsewhere:

We'd see more players "cherry pick" and hang out down the ice in anticipation of the home run pass instead of consistently backchecking.

So to sum up, observationally, some baseball terminology can be used metaphorically in discussions of other sports. The same goes for some football terminology. Is it possible to have a theory of what sporting lexical items are allowed to do this? My hunch is yes - my hypothesis is that a sport can take a lexical item from another sport only if that lexical item can apply, metaphorically, in a non-sport context. I'll keep my eyes open for more data.

bloggage

2005-07-17T17:51:00.000-07:00

While spending some time updating my blog roll, I came across this article linked from EFL geek. It's a little ominous - actually, enough to give me pause about blogging. It's a basic truth that publishing a blog is very easy, and a writer therefore has a huge risk of appearing uninformed in a very public venue. In contrast, the review process is a safety net that prevents you from looking so bad to anyone but the reviewers.

I call it "blogger's remorse", the feeling you get when you post something and immediately begin to think of reasons why you shouldn't have. It might be why so many write with noms du plume. If there's an upside, I think that while the above article is fair warning, the linguistics blogs I read and write all rely on some degree of self-review. I don't think I've seen any academic linguistic post where I thought, wow, I can't believe they said that.

graveside

2005-07-16T08:51:00.000-07:00

Not sure if this link will work, but it's to an article I found on Yahoo by AP Sports Writer Jerome Pugmire. The article describes memorials to Fabio Casartelli, a cyclist who died 10 years ago in a crash during the Tour de France and who was a teammate of Lance Armstrong at the time.

Not that I wasn't struck by the sadness of it all, but I also noted a little linguistic quibble towards the end:

When Armstrong visits Casartelli's grave, he does so alone, shielding and preserving the intimacy.

"I tend to not be public about it. When I go to Italy and visit the graveside, I don't have a press conference," Armstrong said. "It's a private, personal visit between me and him."

Graveside was news to me; I'd always thought gravesite was the word. Three possibilities: (a) Armstrong has used some sort of eggcorn, (b) Armstrong was misquoted, (c) I'm wrong about the word.

The misquoting option is highly likely; in Armstrong's accent, graveside and gravesite are likely to be near homonyms, with the vowels in the second syllable being identical for both quality and length.

My wrongness is also highly possible. Google returns the following numbers of pages:
grave_side, 465K
graveside, 435 K
grave_site, 745K (Curiously, Number 2 is Diefenbaker's)
gravesite, 256 K

Grave_site also registers "did you mean: gravesite". And graveside gets a link to "definition: graveside". Turns out Google uses Answers.com as its dictionary, which in turn uses Houghton-Mifflin as its source. Gravesite and graveside are both there (adjacently), but only the -side form nets a definition link from a Google search. I don't have access to OED from here, so can't use it to corroborate.

For the curious, gravesight appears 933 times, sometimes apparently intentionally.

yawwwn vs. yaaawn

2005-07-13T11:05:00.000-07:00

Here's another sports & media & language bit.

This morning the NHL announced a deal has been reached "in principle" to end the 10 month labour dispute. I checked the Yahoo sports page and encountered the following poll:

Poll: are you excited?
[ ] Definitely! [ ] Yaw-w-w-n

These polls are annoying because of their false-alternative setup. Nevertheless I picked "excited", because I lean more that way than "yawn". But I also thought, in writing, is that really how you express an exaggeratedly long vowel?

The issue for me is not the hyphens, but the choice of using multiple w's instead of multiple a's. Just the kind of thing to investigate with some GoogleCorpusSearching.

Not expecting much luck with "yawn" extensions, I first tested aaah vs ahhh, with repetitions up to 10. This is kind of a replication of a Language Log study. Here are the results:

string	Gh(K)	string	Gh(K)
ahh	1,910	aah	838
ahhh	1,240	aaah	748
ahhhh	659	aaaah	321
ahhhhh	562	aaaaah	147
ahhhhhh	245	aaaaaah	88.6
ahhhhhhh	155	aaaaaaah	47.2
ahhhhhhhh	115	aaaaaaaah	49.2
ahhhhhhhhh	89.1	aaaaaaaaah	33.7
ahhhhhhhhhh	65.1	aaaaaaaaaah	26.4

I think the appropriate test is a paired-subjects t-test; MeanA-MeanB=319.011, t = 2.8, df = 9, p = 0.023198. It looks like repeating the second chacracter of a digraph is the preferred way to express exaggerated length.

[Incidentally, the high number of [ahh] actually lowers the p-value. I reran the analysis lowering it to 1,410, based on the assumption that lots of [ahh]'s refer to various associations, and p drops quite a bit.]

Intrigued, I decided to go after yaawn vs yawwn anyway. Results are below:

string	Gh(K)	string	Gh(K)
yawwn	2.02	yaawn	6.95
yawwwn	0.770	yaaawn	5.06
yawwwwn	0.674	yaaaawn	3.57
yawwwwwn	2.250	yaaaaawn	0.742
yawwwwwwn	1.280	yaaaaaawn	1.83
yawwwwwwwn	0.720	yaaaaaaawn	2.03
yawwwwwwwwn	0.446	yaaaaaaaawn	1.21
yawwwwwwwwwn	0.301	yaaaaaaaaawn	0.834
yawwwwwwwwwwn	0.302	yaaaaaaaaaawn	0.568

Why these have second peaks at around 6 repetitions is kind of interesting. I think the extra-extra repetition (i.e., 6 rather than 2) makes the string look less like a typo, a problem that ahh and ahhh don't seem do have. (This might also explain the appearance of the dashes in Yahoo's yaw-w-w-n.

But also interesting is how there's more repetition of the first letter in the digraph. This is nearly significant on a paired-subjects t-test: MeanA-MeanB = -1.559, t = - 2.25, df = 8, p = .0545. Who knew?

hat trick or triple crown?

2005-07-07T14:26:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I posted about the lexicon of pro sports, especially with respect to terms crossing from one sport to another. Coverage of Roger Federer's recent win at Wimbledon (his third straight victory in that tournament) illustrates two such crossovers:

From CBC.ca: FEDERER NETS WIMBLEDON HAT TRICK
From the Toronto Sun: Triple Crown Federer

First, I was surprised to see both outfits using some sort of metaphorical crossover. Curious, I checked around some more, and could not find another example (for the same event, the Wimbledon final) in a brief but geographically dispersed sample:

From AP via Yahoo: Federer makes it three in a row at Wimbledon. The story mentions "three straight" and "three consecutive," but no tricks or crowns.
NY Times: Federer (Yawn) Wins at Wimbledon Again (uh, unpatriotic my ass ... see if they suggest yawning when Roddick gets three in a row)
LA Times: Federer Shows He's Unmatched
Boston Globe: Federer ably protects his Wimbledon turf
Globe and Mail: Federer wins third straight Wimbledon title

Second, I'm struck at the usages. "Hat trick" seems to be widely known enough that it can apply in any setting, sports or otherwise, to refer to three-at-once. You could have a hat trick of exams, or of hamburgers, or of Survivor challenges. Regardless, it seems to refer to three of the same thing. In this light, its usage by CBC to refer to a third consecutive title in the same tournament is highly compliant with this sense of the phrase (especially in light of the "team hat trick").

In contrast (and maybe I'm thinking too much about it here) the phrase "triple crown" does not seem appropriate. Every usage I've seen so far suggests its use refers to a collocation of three different things - three different horse races, or three different tournaments. Not the same tournament three times. So I guess I need to file this away as an expansion of the phrase's possible reference, or as a reminder not to take anything in any Toronto and/or Sun paper too seriously.

I'm kind of leaning to the latter, imagining a situation in which either a writer, editor, or layout guy is aware of the threeness of the feat, and that it's Wimbledon, and English, so royal, and crown-worthy, so let's call it a Triple Crown. (Even though there's no crown involved - I think they win a plate).

But to be fair, I think the "three-of-same" vs. "three-of-different" contrast for hat trick vs triple crown is not so clear. In the post I link to above, I mention how "hat trick" has been used to refer to a collocation of three different tournament championships. Another such example is the "Gordie Howe hat trick", an event in which a player is credited with a goal, an assist, and a fight in the same hockey game. And I doubt Howe was the first player to acquire such a distinction.

ironic

2005-06-13T18:03:00.000-07:00

One of the ironic things about this post is that by publishing it, I may be exposing my own misunderstanding of the term irony. Indeed, it has sat unpublished for six weeks partly because of this fear (and it was a propos of nothing until today). My interest is rekindled by this story on CBC.ca by Andre Mayer, about the 10-year anniversary of Alanis Morissette's CD Jagged Little Pill and her decision to release a new acoustic version of the entire album to mark this event. I have no objection to Mayer's claim that the new release, in essence, is yet another public exercise in narcissism on Ms. Morissette's part. However, Mayer includes a sideways jab that the lyrics in the song "Ironic" are actually devoid of irony:

For all its bluster, Jagged Little Pill’s best song was also its meekest; despite its basic misreading of irony.

I have seen this claim regarding Morissette's grasp of irony made before in stronger terms, in Jorge Cham's PhD. Comics:

1995. Alanis Morissette releases the hit single, "Ironic". Ironically, none of the song lyrics actually describe an ironic situation.

OK - looks like we're getting into lexical semantics here. I think what both Mayer and Cham are referring to is a distinction between literary or dramatic irony and a lay sense of the word. Ironic, in the lay sense, refers to a more general notion of unfortunate timing. I sometimes (ironically) refer to the lay usage as "Alanis Morissette irony". But I actually think that some of Ms. Morissette's vignettes are ironic in the literary sense.

Here's the relevant part of the Merriam-Webster definition of irony, which Mayer's article also links to:

3 a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play -- called also dramatic irony, tragic irony.

And here's what Oxford has to say:

2. fig. A condition of affairs or events of a character opposite to what was, or might naturally be, expected; a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things. (In F. ironie du sort.)

These definitions seem fairly consistent. Now, a logician will tell you that all you need to prove a universally quantified statement to be false is to provide a single counterexample. "None of the song lyrics actually describe an ironic situation" is a universally quantified statement, so I only need to show that at least one situation in the song is indeed ironic. For the sake of completeness, I will evaluate all the situations below.

An old man turned ninety-eight.
He won the lottery and died the next day.

Expected result: old man gets to enjoy riches of lottery.
Actual result: old man dies before he can do so, despite his longevity.
Evaluation: ironic. This would be more ironic if the knowledge of owning a winning ticket is what caused the old man's death, but even without it, there's an incongruity here.

It's a black fly in your Chardonnay.

Expected result: The chardonnay is for you to drink.
Actual result: The chardonnay is for the fly to drink.
Evaluation: ironic. Presumably the black fly would also find this ironic, since it would rather be consuming you.

It's a death row pardon two minutes too late.

Expected result: the pardon will come in time to save the inmate.
Actual result: two minutes is long enough for the injection to take permanent effect.
Evaluation: somewhat ironic. More like plain bad timing.

It's like rain on your wedding day.

Expected result: nice weather on your wedding day.
Actual result: it rained on your wedding day.
Evaluation: ironic in the drought-prone summers of the Ontario of Alanis's (and my) salad days, where wedding days between May and September are very reliably sunny.

It's a free ride when you've already paid.

Expected result: had you known, you could have got a free ride.
Actual result: you didn't know, so you bought a non-refundable ticket.
Evaluation: somewhat ironic.

It's the good advice that you just didn't take.

Expected result: knowing how good the advice was, you take it.
Actual result: your narcissism leads you to ignore the advice.
Evaluation: This seems to be more indicative of stubborness than irony. It might be more ironic if the same advice had been given and followed in the reciprocal direction in the past.

Mr. Play-It-Safe was afraid to fly
He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye
He waited his whole damn life to take that flight
And as the plane crashed down he thought
"Well isn't this nice..."
And isn't it ironic...dontcha think

Expected result: Mr. Play-it-Safe arrives at his destination using the "safest form of travel".
Actual result: Mr Play-it-Safe dies the horrible violent death he always feared.
Evaluation: ironic. I think Mr Play-it-safe has a reasonable expectation of a safe arrival.

A traffic jam when you're already late.
Evaluation: This seems to be an example of poor planning rather than irony, especially if the traffic jam is a recurring one.

A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break.
Evaluation: Maybe this sign is a "sign".

It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.

Evaluation: Assuming an even distribution of knives, forks, and spoons in the world, the chances that a sample of cutlery with 10,000 pieces would not contain a knife are too small for my calculator to render, but are something like (2/3)^10000. In this case there is a reasonable expectation that the set of cutlery would contain at least one knife. Unless, of course, it's a shipment of spoons. Otherwise, this is a bit ironic.

It's meeting the man of my dreams
And then meeting his beautiful wife

Evaluation: Maybe she shouldn't have written that other song about Mr. Duplicity, or spent all that time with him.

Overall, it seems like the situations do become less ironic over the course of the song, but, as I've argued, some of them illustrate an incongruity between an expected outcome and an actual one. I think what might have happened is that some sort of meme to the effect that "'Ironic' isn't ironic" got started and continues to get repeated, without deep analysis of the claim.

Again, I'm perfectly open to poking fun at Morissette's lyrics, but I think the Ironic thing is off the mark. Will I get Jagged Little Pill Unplugged? Probably not. I only own the original because a friend passed off an extra copy to me after her mother, ironically, gave it to her for Christmas two years in a row.

coding for lexical neighbors

2005-06-11T16:02:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago on phonoloblog, I posted some thoughts on lexical neighborhoods for languages with contrastive segment length. The issue is that calculating the number of neighbors for a given item presumably would net different results based on how you conceive a geminate: is it a pair of segments, or is it a single segment?

The clarifying example I used is from Italian: if geminates are considered two segments for neighborhood purposes, then occo and osso are not neighbors, but inna [6/25/05 - I meant inno] and anno are. But if geminates are considered one segment, occo and osso are neighbors.

The basic intuition for the two-segment procedure is like this: your comparison procedure takes two words and decides if they're neighbors. A separate procedure keeps a tally of neighbors for each word in your list. If the words are not identical, and have a difference in length of no more than one segment, then the procedure knows they may be neighbors.

So then you need some contingencies. If the target word is shorter by one segment, then the program needs to watch for a segment addition in the compared item. If the target is longer by one, the procedure needs to watch for a deletion in the compared item . If they are the same length, there may be a substitutiuon. So the procedure checks equivalently positioned segments, looking for mismatches. If it finds more than one, the words are not neighbors.

In a basic measure of computational complexity, this requires 50 lines of code in Java, 9 ifs, 13 pairs of curly brackets, and three while clauses. I have placed the procedure into a larger program that asks for a source data file to read and writes to a different output file.

But adhering to the concept of a geminate as a single segment becomes much more computationally cumbersome. The identical-length comparison still just needs to check for substitutions, but must be updated to tolerate an instance of one geminate subbing for another (e.g., occo otto). It also needs to avoid being tricked by forms like a hypothetical pair occo ooco, which are orthographic neighbors, but not phonological ones (because they differ in the length of two segments).

When words differ in length, you need more contingencies of situations to watch for... a difference in overall length could foretell an addition, or a length contrast. Imagine your pair is (pak, paak). When you reach the third-segment comparison, there is a mismatch. The program needs to know that the a in the second item is the second half of a geminate, and that really the comparison should now be between the 3rd segment of pak and the 4th segment of paak - so tally up a score of one mismatch so far. Simple enough, but then what if you're comparing pak and pook? You already have a mismatch in second position; when you see another in third position, you need to know this time not to make the mismatch score 2.

Now my coding skills are not supreme, and I'm further thrown by the index of the first segment in a string being 0. The code I have for this type of neighbor detection is much more complicated ... 139 lines (including comments), 43 curly brackets, 40 ifs, and 3 whiles. There may be some ways of making it neater, but this works, which I've determined by using a small artificial lexicon. As I show on phonoloblog, my original intuition seems to be confirmed: most words have more neighbors when you allow geminate substitutions.

The last time I blogged about my coding exploits, it was about an alphabetizing script I'd written that was taking several hours to sort about 360,000 words. A commenter kindly pointed me toward a sort command that would automatically alphabetize elements in an array, changing the hours to milliseconds. I'm dreading finding out the same is true for neighbor detection, like the following imaginary script.

public String[] neighbors(String [a]) {
String b[] = new String[2];
b = a.getNeighbors(b);
return b
}

I bet it couldn't handle the geminates the way mine does, though.

take {the} 101

2005-06-07T18:50:00.000-07:00

A fun little shibboleth that marks an LA resident or native is the use of a definite article before a highway number. E.g., in the Bay Area you might take 101 or 880, but in LA, you take the 101 or the 405. Only having been in California for a year, I wasn't aware of how salient this was until this quarter, when my students all vehemently agreed that it's a pretty blatant SoCal marker.

A crude Google search backs it up. Search terms like [take-101] and [take-the-101] register lots of "directions" web pages. (6 of the first 50 for [take-101] do not).

Only 3 of the first 50 hits for [take-the-101] involve Bay-Area pages, with perhaps 6 Phoenix sites - not the same 101, clearly - and the rest in the LA area including Santa Barbara. [take-101] nets 37 or so pages from the Bay Area, along with 7 for the LA region (and some of these sites seem to be tersely stripped of definite articles in general).

At this point I can't remember clearly what we did with Ontario highways. Limited-access highways in Ontario are numbered with 3 digits, the first of which is 4, like 417 and 401. I can't reliably say whether I used "417" or "the 417". I do recall referring to other (non 400-level) highways as "Highway N" (e.g., "take Highway 7 through Peterborough"). Perhaps another google project will help clear it up.

[Update: a similar search with "417" reveals astonishing results. Of the first 50 ghits for [Take-417], 25 refer to a highway in Florida near UCF, and 25 refer to the higway from Ottawa to Montreal. Meanwhile, of the first 50 ghits for [take-the-417], 5 refer to the Florida highway and 45 refer to the Ottawa highway. This might be why "the 101" never sounded odd to me.]

you take point

2005-06-04T12:00:00.000-07:00

Several months ago I was playing Medal of Honor, a first-person shooter game set in WW2 Europe. I was on a mission through the Ardennes, and found myself on a snowy country road lined with steep hedges when an artificial-intelligence controlled colleague turned to me and said, "You take point". And my first thought was, what, we're on a power play?

A little digging revealed that taking the point (and thus being the point man) has several distinct meanings, one of which is military (derived from ranching/herding), and one of which is sporting. It's also not clear that the sporting use is directly applied from the military (or ranching) one.

Here's the military usage of point man from OED: The soldier who walks at the head of a patrol. With apologies for the epithet, the earliest citation is this: 1944 Yank 4 Feb. 9/1 The Jap point man was on the scene before any camouflaging could be done.

Oxford also cites point as the region on a hockey rink just inside the attacking zone and close to the boards:

An area just in front of the opposing team's blue line close to each edge of the rink, where players on offence are often positioned, esp. during power plays. 1953 Globe & Mail (Toronto) 27 Nov. 24/3 He missed a pass-out from Gord Howe and the puck went to Pronovost on the blue-line point.

I once heard the reason was that the blue line and boards form a right-angle, i.e. a point.

The point man is the player on the attacking team who holds this region during a power play (a man advantage, with an opponent serving a penalty). The point man intercepts clearing attempts made along the boards, ensuring the puck stays in the attacking zone, and time permitting, will also take shots and pray for a lucky bounce through the throng of players crowding the goalie. It's a position of trust and responsibility, but not leadership.

It would be easy, but perhaps inaccurate, to cite hockey's point man as a metaphorical extension of the military point man. The first 100 or so web sites that come up for {point-man} as a google search term all refer either to the military use of it, a metaphorical extention of the military use (e.g., leading a trade delegation), or to a religious movement. Only one mentions the hockey use ... of all places, the Mavens' word of the day, in a discussion of "point man":

Point in the sense 'the leading party of a military advance guard' is first recorded at the beginning of the 20th century. The point is also the position at the head of a column or V-shaped wedge of troops. Point man meaning 'the lead soldier of a patrol' dates from the mid-1940s; like the cowboy, he is said to "ride, walk, or take (the) point." (Actually he is sometimes positioned at the back of the rear guard, also a dangerous position.)

Later in the same discussion we see this:

In ice hockey, the point man is the player in the offensive position inside the attacking zone.

This is not quite precise enough. Despite the qualifier in the Mavens' entry, it seems like the dominant (non-hockey) use of point man is the lead position of an attack. However, in a power play situation, as I describe above, the point man is inside the zone, but trails the lead attacking group. And this is not quite bringing up the rear, in the sense of watching for counter-attack from behind.

I propose the trajectory of point man in hockey to be like this: sometime after the introduction of blue lines to manage offsides, the area of the rink came to be called the point. The player working this area became the point man. This may have happened independently, or it may have been encouraged by the frequency of point man in news media during the war. If that is the case, the metaphorical extension brought the phrase and its sense of a responsible member of an attacking group, but not its sense of leader of an attacking group.

Oddly enough, I have seen the leadership role in power-plays referred to as the quarterback. Another example of terminology crossing over sports.

language and star wars

2005-05-18T13:24:00.000-07:00

The impending release of Episode 3 has generated some amount of talk over the use of language varieties throughout the two Star Wars trilogies: notably with respect to Yoda's syntax and to the use of varieties for non-humans. Funnily enough I used Star Wars as an example of the manipulation of language in film several weeks ago in class (but I left Yoda out of it).

Serious research in language in these films is hard to find. "Star wars" registers some hits in LLBA, with respect to argumentation surrounding Reagan's SDI, and to a so-called whale call. No film-related work appears. Likewise, "Yoda" only shows up as an author's name. I know only of this unpublished syntactic analysis:

Botma, E., E.J. van der Torre, and M. Zimmerman. 2000. With You the Force May Be: Explorations into the Syntax of a Jedi Master. Paper presented at TiN-Dag 2000, Utrecht.

They cite David Crystal's take on the matter:

"The rarity of OSV constructions and languages perhaps explains the impact of this strange speech style used by the Jedi Master, Yoda, in the film Return of the Jedi (1983)." (Crystal 1987:98)

Botma et al's basic findings were that in addition to huge amounts of topicalization, Yoda uses a fair amount of V2 structures and lacks do-support, features found in Old English among other languages. (So a possible interpretation of Yoda's speech is that it reflects his age - he's so old he speaks an earlier version of the language).

I think one thing to keep in mind with Yoda is that his newer scripts may differ somewhat in structure from his older ones. (This is also true of his recent Diet Coke commercial - Yoda has sold out! - in which he topicalizes an imperative: "That Diet Coke, give Yoda").

As for other varieties, Eric Bakovic discusses human/alien interactions in the original trilogy. I spent some time searching blogs and messageboards about the representation of alien speech in these films, and a contrast between the two trilogies emerges. In episodes IV-VI, aliens speak other languages, usually understand humans, but are understood only by some humans. Eric shows this to be true of the droid R2D2 as well. In Episode I, aliens speak foreign-accented English. For example, the crafty Neimodians speak with Japanese accents, while a shady alien merchant has a Jewish accent. Meanwhile, the faithful but dumb Jar-jar speaks with a poor rendition of some kind of islander creole. Likewise, Queen Amidala's body double speaks stiffly British, while Padme (the Queen undercover), keepin it real, has an American accent.

Much online discussion revolves around whether these manipulations are racist. It's not hard to argue that the linguistic stereotypes invoke unfair cultural stereotypes. Skeptics, however, claim that George Lucas shouldn't be labeled racist, since he has an ethnically diverse cast of humans. I think it's reasonable say that the casting is not racist but the linguistic manipulation is.

a host of shifting sports metaphors

2005-05-16T16:54:00.000-07:00

I recently discussed the "get untracked" construction, noting its use by King Clancy and speculating about when the phrase may have been adopted from the baseball subculture by the hockey subculture. I also labeled it as a peripheral construction that marks the discourse of sports media.

A bunch of examples have popped up in the last 24 hours of similar constructions passing in and out of sport, as well as across sports, and I outline them here.

Final Four/Drop the gloves: The winner of Survivor Palau mentioned in one of the final tribal councils that his plan for the game had been to help a select few teammates along to the final four, at which point they would drop the gloves and duke it out. "Drop the gloves" is a hockey-specific phrase that refers to part of the ritual that precedes an on-ice fight. Of course it was not meant literally in Survivor's context, but the example indicates a metaphorical non-sport non-fighting usage for the construction. Meanwhile, "Final four" (apparently of a March Madness origin) seems to be a pervasive way of saying almost-last-man-standing, even in a format (like Survivor) that does not use a 2 by 2 semifinal elimination.

Hat Trick/Triple Crown: The Czech win in the ice hockey world championships has given several players a world championship to add to their Olympic gold and Stanley Cup victories. This story uses both "Triple Crown" and "Hat Trick" to describe this rare collocation.

"Hat Trick" evidently has its origins in cricket, and in its extention to soccer and hockey, it has come to mean an achievement in which a player scores 3 goals in one game. Hockey also has the rare "natural hat trick" (three unanswered goals) and the even rarer "team hat trick", a series of three consecutive championships. Such a string of wins is known elsewhere as a three-peat; I have been able to locate lots of discussions of -peats up to nine-peat. Above that, the search gets side tracked with discussions of "ten peat samples", but I found a seventeen-peat:

Repeat is no problem here; three-peat certainly makes sense; four-peat begins pushing it; seventeen-peat begins to knock on absurdity's door.

As for "triple crown" in hockey, I'm not sure if I've heard it applied this way before, but I know the list of people with those three pieces of hardware is very short. (I also find it absurd that Jagr would be called the 15th player to achieve it while Slegr would be 16th!)

Unlike the newish application of "Triple Crown" to hockey, other uses of it require the wins to occur in the same season. A same-year triple-crown in hockey is logically impossible, given that the IHWC normally coincides with the first several rounds of the Stanley Cup playoffs. (and if the scheduling were different, it's still physiologically highly unlikely, given the combined grueling effects of a regular season, 2 international tournaments, and 4 best-of-7 playoff rounds that a player would need to complete a same-year triple crown).

I'm guessing "Triple Crown" started with a combination of wins at the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont. I've also heard it applied (oddly) to golf, in reference to a win in the US Open, British Open, and Canadian Open.

The multiple-winner phrase more familiar in golf is the Grand Slam, a combination of the US Open, Masters, British Open, and (ack, I forget ... PGA championship?). The same phrase applies in tennis, as a combination of wins at the US Open, French Open, Australian Open, and Wimbledon. Both extend the "four-at-once" notion of a baseball grand slam (home run with the bases loaded; so 1 h and 4 rbi), and both require the same-year restriction for their use. [Update July 8 2006: Little did I know that Grand Slam has older roots in bridge. See here for speculation that its trajectory took it from bridge through baseball to golf and tennis.]

A same-year championship in English soccer is a league double: a team needs to win both the Premiership and the FA Cup. Manchester United once won a triple: a double plus a victory in the pan-European Champion's league. We'll see if either usage makes it into another sport.

public embarassment

2005-05-12T15:41:00.000-07:00

In the midst of a momentary conniption, I bungled my last post enough to disable its comment function and render the whole thing uneditable, permanently. [and in the meantime, this post seems to have overwritten it!]

A potential commenter alerted me to this fact, while pointing out the apparent oddity that it would take hours to alphabetize less than a million lines. I described my code to this person, who kindly replied:

[acw]: Sorting is so universally useful that there is a sorting utility built into Java. Create an array of strings and pass it to java.util.Arrays.sort(array, 0, length). It returns void, and side-effects the array to put the elements into alphabetical order.

In short, this means I didn't need to write the code to the extent that I did. I'm blushing at the prospect of all the java-savvy blog browsers witnessing my clunky coding skills in such a public venue. And I can't even delete the post! (although, I wouldn't if I could).

I took acw's advice and wrote a new program that sorted my test file in 5 seconds rather than 5 hours. I emailed to thank acw, adding the following observation:

mind you, my old code lets you decide your own alphabetic ordering, and probably could be tweaked to alphabetize from word-ends rather than word beginnings. By the way, I had looked in vain for a sorting utility on the java website, which is why I embarked on making my own bubble-sorter in the first place.

Not that either of those applications is necessarily useful, but they could be if you're working with a language in which characters have a different alphabetic precedence.

I broke my Word

2005-05-11T15:57:00.000-07:00

MS Word that is.

Actually, I didn't break it, but I pushed it very very far, enough to put its word-count function off by 70,000. I've got this project that requires alphabetizing huge lists of words, and I challenged myself to write a Java program to do it for me (and it works).

Before I knew the actual word count of the test file, I opened it with Word, which told me there were 251,092 words in it. I ran the alphabetizer, which ran (hours) long enough for me to get frustrated enough to stop it. To be sure it wasn't simply seizing up, I added a feature that prints onscreen the number of words that have been alphabetized. Indeed, it took several hours before the number approached 250K. The rate of successful alphabetization slows down as the list of items to compare increases.

But then it kept going, far beyond 250K, and finally stopped at 319,604 words. I briefly entertained the notion that I had reached the upper limit of Word's word-counting capacity. Maybe, but Word correctly counted the number of pages - 5608, which it took several minutes to tally. At 57 lines per page and 1 word per line, this page count seems to be pretty accurate.

In fact, the counting tool is pretty precise. I added two words to the file, and the word count reflectd that. The issue is what counts as a word - a single apostrophe does, but anything in all caps does not. I therefore presume my file has around 70K such words.

Just out of curiosity, I decided to see how long it would take Word to alphabetize the lines in the same file. But Word says "The document is too big for word to handle".

the king gets untracked

2005-05-11T13:33:00.000-07:00

A bit of a hub-bub today at Language Log regarding one of my pet interests, the linguistics of sports. Much of the discussion revolves around the usage of "getting untracked" to indicate ending a slump or spell of poor play.

Lila Gleitman mentions it in a hockey context, possibly involving the Flyers in the 60s. Mark Liberman uncovers quite a few baseball usages. I know I've heard it myself quite a bit - I googled {untracked hockey} and got about 4400 hits. Most of it is not that interesting, but shows a consistent usage of "get untracked" meaning "pull out of a slump" (Except one or two mentions of untracked snow).

Google is not a good place to look for historical data, but I found an overview of the career of King Clancy, a Senators phenom in the 20s who later would help Toronto to its first Stanley Cup. After retiring, Clancy became a coach; in this passage he describes one of his first coaching jobs:

Clancy was hired to coach the Montreal Maroons in 1937-38. "The team never got untracked in the one month I was there, and before I knew it, I was out of a job," King shrugged. The Maroons won six, lost eleven and tied one in the 18 games Clancy was employed by the Maroons.

It's not clear when this passage (part of an interview) was written, so it's not really evidence of anything other than "untracked" being used before 1986 (when Clancy died). But it does make me wonder whether he'd have used the phrase in 1937, or whether it entered his lexicon decades later.

I actually think a model of the sporting world's lexicon is in some sense warranted, but it's got to include a distinction between core concepts and peripheral constructions. The core concepts include the names of positions, equipment, and elements of rules, while the peripheral constructions mark the discourse surrounding a game or sport. "Get untracked" is one of these - if you see it or hear it, you can be fairly sure the topic is a team or player in a slump. The interest here is lexicographic - where the terminology or phrase comes from, whether it applies metaphorically outside the sport, and whether it transfers across sports (as "get untracked" probably did, from baseball to hockey, sometime before the 1960's). Whether a model of this kind of lexicon enriches our knowledge of linguistics is another thing, but it seems like a unique way of tracking the diffusion of sound/meaning/function triplets across time and (social) space.

I know, eh?

2005-05-02T16:07:00.000-07:00

So there's been all kinds of talk at Language Log regarding the Canadian tag particle eh?. It begins with Mark Liberman discussing a query he received from a reader regarding the particle in relation to modal and affective tags. In trying to find an answer he found a paper by Elaine Gold documenting sociolinguistic attitudes and native-speaker judgements about different functions of the particle.

For the record, tag eh can have both modal and affective readings. That's all I can offer for this issue -- whether they have slightly different intonational contours would require lots more data than I have access to.

Mark suggests that it may not be appropriate to rely on native speaker judgements for this kind of discourse element, at least for anything but the documentation of sociolinguistic attitudes about it. Surveys, though very useful, are not by themselves an adequate way to study such patterns of usage. Instead, actual discourse is a better place to look for data on these patterns.

I have to agree with this point, because of the risk that speakers would under- or over-report how much they've heard it and used it in various functions. (Gold acknowledges this issue in her paper). One issue I would have brought up had I attended that CLA was the interrogative usage, in which the particle is added to a sentence which is already a question with auxiliaries inverted. Gold's example is What are they trying to do, eh? Ignoring for a moment Mark's advice about native speaker judgements, I say this is an impossible usage of the word, unless the question is rhetorical.

Mark follows up, posting about electronically available transcripts of discussions from the Ontario provincial parliament, including instantiations of eh. Then, in Part 3, he comments upon an apparent "filled pause" from one of these transcripts, in which the particle seems to function like "um":

Mr Murdoch: [...] A couple of other ones: the stockyards, the money you talk about, is that the province's money? It is, eh, the money that you're -- who owns them?

I just find it hard to believe that the eh in this utterance is [both a pause-filler and] the same discourse item as the tag and narrative eh. There are at least two alternatives: it could be that the addressee nodded in response to the first question. Murdoch acknowledges the nod by saying "It is, eh?" and continues to the next sentence (starting at The money). In that scenario, it's a tag [and not a filler]. Or, it could be that the filled pause is actually a lax [ɛ], which is difficult to spell any other way, but which is distinct from the tense vowel of the tag (it would also have different intonation). Really, the only way to be sure is to have an audio recording (or very narrow transcription) of the exchange.

Part 4 discusses a parallel with Japanese ne, which has many similar functions, including a stigmatized narrative use. The narrative usage for eh is an interesting one, and I have read in other sources besides Gold's paper that it is one of the innovative Canadian functions of the marker. I haven't thought much about its relationship with discourse structure, but I'm going to hypothesize that it acts as a focuser, but with post-focus position. That is, while focuser-like sets off and highlights the following phrase, focuser-eh sets off the preceding phrase. E.g.: "Not an easy thing to talk about, eh, but you might get the drift". ( = "Not an easy thing to like, talk about, but you might get the drift").

I'm interested now in the intonational contours of eh, especially regarding (probably minute) differences across functions. There is always a drop in tone on the word before eh, and eh then has a rising contour - but the degree of the drop or the end point of the rising contour might differ slightly across modal, affective, imperative, and narrative functions.

Unlike ne (or huh), eh cannot ever have falling intonation, even in its narrative use. Again, I say this with the caveat that I'm weighing in with native speaker judgements rather than with data from recorded discourse. Which I can't get right now, as my usage drops to near zero when I'm not in the company of Canadians or close friends. (Simply because using it triggers an amused response that distracts from the intended conversation).

[Update (15 minutes later): Heidi Harley has already posted some similar thoughts on the eh tokens from the Hansard transcripts.]

toponyms and nicknames

2005-04-29T13:22:00.000-07:00

A while back I stumbled across an old book called Speaking Canadian English, a semi-descriptive piece written by one Mark M. Orkin, Q.C. (i.e. a lawyer), and published by General Publishing Co. Ltd., Toronto, in 1970. I checked it out just for curiosity.

Some of the material is not terribly insightful; for example, in the chapter on phonology, we read that Canadian English has flat American [a] (presumably, [æ]) rather than broad British [a]. A bit short on detail, there, considering the actual range of variation in the low-vowel continuum.

But there's a really interesting discussion of placename nicknames and perjoratives. I repeat some of it here, while noting that the observations are (mostly) not unique to Canadian English. Overall, there seems to be a phenomenon of cities receiving phrasal nicknames, and of cities receiving truncated nicknames.

Many Canadian cities have achieved, or had thrust upon them, what G.P. Krapp once called "poetic and oratorical second designations." Such appellations are often unflattering, in spite of which they acquire acceptance and may even be worn with civic pride. Thus Toronto has for a long time been widely know by some as Toronto the Good, and by others as Hogtown, the latter name indicating not a meat-packing industry--as Cincinnati was once called Porkopolis--but an alleged greed for influence and material wealth.

I have heard that Toronto the Good is also perjorative, referring to its clean-cut and square image (in contrast with the racier Montreal). Orkin continues:

In the same way, Ottawa is sometimes referred to as Bytown to imply not merely a link with the past, recalling the original name of that city and its founder, Colonel By, but also a small-town, nay, parochial outlook--qualities by no means confined to capital cities.

Some well-known civic nicknames in the U.S. include The Windy City (Chicago), The Big Apple (New York), Beantown (Boston), and the City of Brotherly Love (Philadelphia). Probably there's a great many more (The Old Pueblo for Tucson comes to mind). These phrasal nicknames resemble license-plate monikers - I can imagine if license plates were municipal, they'd carry exactly these slogans. I might be driving around with "Home of Ranch Dressing" involuntarily stamped on my bumper.

If you collect enough of them, you'd probably start to think that such a nickname is something a city is "supposed" to have. Thus Edmonton, in the 1980s, dubbed itself the City of Champions, in pride of the coincident glory days of the Oilers and Eskimos. Orkin includes the self-dubbed category cryptically as the "panegyrical"; many other phrasal names are derived from geographical, cultural, or industrial features of the city's region.

Nestled in Orkin's list, completely out of order, is a list of truncated forms. These are fundamentally different beasts: people actually use them in spoken discourse. As I recall, nobody in Tucson ever uses the phrase "The Old Pueblo" except local news anchors (and painfully at that). But people do say things like "I'm going to Philly next week".

Among American toponyms, a fair number are truncated and diminutized: Minneapolis > Minny, Philadelphia > Philly, Indianapolis > Indy, and California > Cally. In same cases, this structure refers only to the inhabitant, as in Zonie or Okie. In others, the truncatum is to the right: Zona and Bama. I'm aware of at least one non-diminutive, Mass for Massachusetts.

Obviously, then, trucated civic nicknames are not restricted to Canadian toponyms. But there might be one unique feature, which Orkin notes:

When the name consists of two or more words, one word is often used, usually preceded by the definite article. This practice is evident in Ontario where Arnprior is familiarly known as The Prior, North Bay as The Bay, Port Credit as The Port or The Credit, and Sault Ste. Marie as The Soo. Similarly Portage la Prairie is abbreviated to Portage and Medicine Hat to The Hat.

Add to that The Peg for Winnipeg. The use of the article combined with a truncation is what seems to be unique here. And these are constructions that are (or were) used in actual speech. The only person I've known to have noticed this as a pattern is my sister, who gleefully extended it to Halifax (The Fax) and even back to Ottawa (The Twa).

Not every truncation gets an article, though:

Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, however, is known as P.A. When the city name consists of only one word, the first syllable may be chosen for the colloquial desgination; thus Gananoque has become Gan, Kapuskasing is known locally as Kap.

Add to that Sask for Saskatchewan. (Aside, it seems that initials are rare in spoken truncation - LA, DC, BC, PA (evidently), and TO, for Toronto).

Anyway, I'm having trouble thinking of American examples of an article + truncation. Except maybe The Vineyard or The Cape - neither seems much different from "the island" or "the coast". I'm also having trouble think of diminutized Canadian truncations, like *Saskie or *Winnie.

the bi in bikini

2005-04-23T16:57:00.000-07:00

Several months ago a query from Boyan Nikolaev appeared on linguistlist regarding the etymology of the word bikini. The query was cross-posted to the ADS-L mailing list, and is repeated below:

The word BIKINI, I think, was misinterpreted in 1946 as being Latin and consisting of bi- (=two) + something unclear. So, in time it dropped its bi- and became MONOKINI, even TANKKINI.

Could anyone tell me what the real Polynesian (Marshallese) word means and help me explain it not considering the Latin bi-

A gentle correction - Marshallese is Micronesian not Polynesian (which are related Remote Oceanic Austronesian subfamilies).

Anyway, the story for the word in its modern English use is that the two-piece bathing suit was introduced in 1946, and in search of a name for it, the designer chose Bikini, in reference to an (inhabited but evacuated) atoll in the Marshall Islands which had just been used for testing the atomic bomb. (The joke was, this bathing suit is as hot as a recently irradiated tropical island - ha ha ha).

It's observable that "kini" has become a cran-morpheme, appearing in forms like monokini (a one piece, or maybe topless form) and tankini (whose top is like a tank top). The brief ADS discussion suggested the backformation [bi+kini] was purposeful. Regardless, Nikolaev was unable to find help regarding the origin of the place name, as his summary several weeks later indicates:

I thank all who got in touch with me and who shared their know-how on the subject. However, no Marshallese connection was established and I still do not know for certain whether the bi- in bikini, by any off chance, came from the Latin bin, bis. While at this point we do not have the Marshallese etymology of the word bikini, I suggest that we do not close the current discussion.

The original query seemed innocent enough, but the sum kind of lets on speculation that the bi portion of the word bikini was always the latinate bi. (I think. Nobody (hopefully) would suggest the Romans made it that far east, or west, so I assume the null hypothesis is that there is a place called Kini to which a creative designer attached bi-.)

When I first saw the post I meant to write to Nikolaev after simply reaching behind me to crack open Abo, Bender, Capelle, and Debrum's Marshallese English Dictionary. But it was not behind me; instead, it was tucked away in the stacks on the 7th floor of Davidson Library. But the other day I was reminded of the issue when browsing the news and finding this story and photo.

So I went to get the dictionary, which I knew has a helpful section just on Marshallese place names. However, Marshallese orthography is opaque. The letter [b] is used, but stands for a velarized labial stop, which other Micronesian spelling systems express with [pw]. Also, the vowels are unusual: symbols like a, e, i, o, and u are all used, but are distributed over a four-height series in which each vowel has 3 (or so) allophones in the backness dimension.

What this means is that in looking for the Marshallese word bikini, you need to cast a wide net, especially since there is no such representation using that exact string of letters. Instead, it seems that the spelling of bikini is probably an English transliteration of a Japanese or German rendition. So I had to check b-words spelled with any vowel.

I scanned through the b-words in the place-name list and regular Marshallese-English section, with little luck. There were some leads, including bokwan [beqan], a recurring place-name formative, būkien [bikiyen] "its cape", būkōn [biken] "cape", bukun [biqin] "grove", and bok [beq] "sand" -- nothing quite close enough.

Frustrated, I wondered if the transliteration is actually a p-initial word. That is, perhaps the place name actually begins with a non-velarized labial stop, which Marshallese spells [p]. Then I found a place name Pikinni [pikinniy], which evidently is composed of pik "surface" and ni "coconut". It's listed in the place-name section of Abo et al, but it's not clear there whether the word applies specifically to the Bikini atoll.

I found confirmation, though, by looking up some official resources on the Marshall Islands. First I found their US Embassy, which links to a visitor's site, which links to an online library, with this entry on the Bikini atoll. In short, its name in Marshallese really is Pikinni. The probable trajectory is that the real place name was transliterated as Bikini, whose spelling precipitated the backformational removal of bi-.

reality-based semantics

2005-04-22T16:22:00.000-07:00

Reality TV (and its viewers) have been a casual source of language data for me for some time now. I have attributed this to the fact that the participants are not actors and the actual dialogue is (usually) not rehearsed script. (An exception is beginning to recur in the Apprentice, where Donald Trump often has "a meeting" with associates prior to catching up with the candidates in the show). Note that "script" is used here to be distinct from "push-producing", which is a non-linguistic manipulation of the outcomes of a competitive reality series.

Last night's Survivor contained an example of the middle ground, in that there was a linguistic quibble that ultimately changed the outcome of the episode. The background is that the (weak) Janu was a drain on the merged tribe, and clearly not winning material, and also clearly was excited at the idea of going home. Meanwhile, the highly competent and fiercely competitive Stephenie was in danger of being voted out - there is a culture of tolerating mediocrity in Survivor, and eliminating strong competitors, to strengthen one's chances down the road. It can make it frustrating to watch, honestly.

So aware of this particular situation (and of the phenomenon in general) was host Jeff Probst that he initiated the topic at tribal council (the voting-out venue). Steph's emotions indicated she knew she was headed out and was angry that her drive was also her demise. Janu, meanwhile, expressed satisfaction and a sense of completeness at having made it this far. By the way, Jeff likes competition. So Jeff says, "Janu, how different is laying down your torch from asking your teammates to vote you out?"

Now, this is basically a semantic question: is the one act equivalent to the other? Jeff managed to convince Janu that it was the same thing. I say they are different - quitting entails removing the tribe's power in deciding who goes. Had Janu asked to be voted out, they may have chosen Stephenie anyway. Instead, Janu leaves with the satisfaction of preventing a tribe (she disliked) from getting its way.

In Survivors past, people have quit and have asked to be voted out, and Jeff has reacted to both situations with disgust. This time, he seemed to be asking for it (Janu had not apparently considered either approach yet). So there you have it: push-producing, with linguistic manipulation.

[The last time I discussed reality TV, I characterized it as un-reshot and unscripted. Some correspondence on this point ensued, in which a reader suggested that some amount of re-shooting and scripting does transpire. Scripting, it could be argued, appears in the form of push-producing, in which the outcome of events is partially and subtly manipulated by the producers.

Push-producing does happen, but I have tried to maintain that it's not the same as scripting. So I updated the post on phonoloblog to clarify the distinction between scriptedness and contrivance. In a scripted show, the actor is given sentences to perform, but in a merely contrived (and unscripted) show, all the actor (or participant) has is a topic. Push-producing doesn't change this.]

[update: this item suggests that "quitting" (on the part of the participant) and "coercion" (on the part of the producers) are both too strong as terms to apply to the exchange.

If memory serves me, of the three previous participants who left voluntarily, two were players who quit the all-star series under stressful circumstances (Jenna M and Sue). The other (Osten) is the only cast member to have left vountarily by giving up. (one other player, Mike from season 2, was injured and evacuated).]

the ideology of whatever

2005-04-22T13:15:00.000-07:00

One of the themes I'm trying to incorporate into my current class ("Language in Society") is an attempt to have the students think critically about the portrayal of language, dialect, and accent in popular enterntainment media.

I have ranted about such things in the past, notably about the inability or unwillingness of those in the industry to get it right. After additional reflection, I have identified 4 different ways in which actors and scriptwriters misrepresent speech varieties:

1 - through blatant disregard. In other words, don't even bother trying.
2 - through poor execution. Make an honest attempt at an accent, but fail to get it.
3 - through purposeful stereotypical exaggeration. Highlight linguistic stereotypes for the sake of comedy.
4 - through more subtle manipulation. Use identifiable linguistic traits and associated stereotypes to develop or frame characters.

This might represent the full scope of the ideology behind dialect misrepresentation; I think any portrayal that is not spot-on will fit into one of the above 4 categories.

The subtle-manipulation group is the most interesting to me. It's easy to get sucked into message board threads about movies and accents, and many of them focus on this aspect of it, notably in the Star Wars trilogies and in WWII-era film.

Poor execution is another locus of grievance. The example I used in class was an episode of Alias in which a guest star is supposed to be from Belfast but speaks with a perfect urban Scottish accent. I was really impressed with her portrayal of Scottish English, until I realized she was not meant to be Scottish. I then went to look her up, and the actress is Scottish. (A complication is that the character does have an under-cover Scotland connection). The producers probably cast her as a Northern Irish character because her Scottish accent was close enough.

Anyway, I was glad to see how quickly the class got it - they all detected the character-accent mismatch. For the class, I called this "the ideology of whatever", a phrase they seemed to enjoy. According to the ideology of whatever, in dramatic portrayals of dialect, close enough is good enough. But I expect more.

biloklok

2005-04-12T11:10:00.000-07:00

This is the first post on biloklok, a site I plan to devote to writings about linguistic quirks, descriptively and occasionally theoretically. I have been a regular contributor to phonoloblog, but occasionally the content of my posts there steps outside of the domain of 'all things phonological'. So, the linguistic-but-not-quite-phonological will go here. Phonological things will continue to go in phonoloblog.

I was curious to see how long it would take to set up - it has now been 5 minutes.

piloklok

orbis pro vox doesn't mean anything

english with an accent

welsh dictionary

dropping by

I'll be here all week

first voice to break the sound barrier

sports linguistics

random data point: double object + particle verb

more linguistics fun from Alanis

oh, the profanity!

and what about gyros?

quiz show linguistics

shovel pass II

the vice president, if you will

cosmic objects and linguistic objects

On "need to"

backloklok at piloklok

piloklok @ weltmeisterschaft

grand slam

Blogroll update

headless compound story

this ever happen to you?

a fpoonful of mɪ:

til subjunctive do them get

super trifecta

tightrope (v.)

canes hope maurice gets shot in toronto

not afraid to back down

structure of infractions

ocr

one year of piloklok

headless compound or what?

Patsy Cline before and after Idol

sports headline templates

bobsled hole-in-one?

not a typo

the verbing of cran-morph

any measure of spin is itself spin

a little problem with scope

schneid

aloha, joe

what can brown make you blog about?

comment filter

up the middle (and shovel passes)

go nmsu aggies

to clone or not to clone

hurricane names

Ace

sign and trade X for Y

Yes, your mate-liness

Optometrist

football slugger

bloggage

graveside

yawwwn vs. yaaawn

hat trick or triple crown?

ironic

coding for lexical neighbors

take {the} 101

you take point

language and star wars

a host of shifting sports metaphors

public embarassment

I broke my Word

the king gets untracked

I know, eh?

toponyms and nicknames

the bi in bikini

reality-based semantics

the ideology of whatever

biloklok