Category Archives: language and linguistics

This statement is false

Posted on September 22, 2011 | 6 comments

Last weekend my brother and I were discussing the statement “This statement is false.” Today a colleague mentioned a similar statement, “The following statement is true. The previous statement is false.” Another colleague likened this kind of pure self-contradiction to the Cretan paradox, also known as the Epimenidean paradox: the statement “All Cretans are liars” said by a Cretan, which would seem to be a false if it’s true and true if it’s false.

But the difference between the Cretan paradox and pure self-contradiction is that the Cretan paradox has a real-world referent. It makes a statement about something external to the assertion. Pure self-contradiction has no real-world referent. It makes an assertion about nothing other than itself and thus has no truth value ascertainable.

As it happens, the source of the Cretan paradox is something Epimenides wrote in support of the immortality of Zeus:

They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high one
The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies!
But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever,
For in thee we live and move and have our being.

Epimenides was himself a Cretan. Thus we know through simple pragmatics that he must have been excluding himself without saying so. To treat it as a paradox is to be disingenuous. It’s fun sport, but in the end it just shows one of the things you can’t do in logical reasoning.

Statements such as the Cretan paradox are an illusion caused by conflation of one level of analysis with a higher level of analysis: an evaluation of the members of a set cannot itself be a member of the set evaluated; evaluation is a comparison of something against one or more criteria from an external perspective – what is being analysed is subsumed within its perspective. Once we acknowledge that the statement “All Cretans are liars” cannot be part of the set of statements evaluated (making it thus a simple problem in pragmatics rather than a trick of logic), we identify an unstated assumption that makes it function, without which we get a sort of Escher staircase illusion, something that can’t exist in the real world.

But with mutually evaluative statements such as the pure self-contradictions, each must be on an evaluative level above the other – each must subsume the other within its perspective. And at the same time each has no further reference; it has no claim to truth or falsehood as the set of all other statements by Cretans does (and as that set’s members individually do).

Analyzing an utterance or set of utterances is like weighing an object. In order to weigh an object, you have to lift it (or anyway support it) and you have to be resting on something that is not part of what you are weighing. In the Cretan paradox, we see that the statement that pretends to be part of the set of Cretan statements is actually weighing them and so cannot be part of them; it is evaluating them against their real-world references – that’s what it’s resting on. In the mutual contradiction case we’re looking at, each is weighing the other, and neither rests on anything else, because neither is being evaluated against anything external to itself. It’s like two dudes trying to lift each other simultaneously. In empty space.

Meaning in human communication, ultimately, is not a question first of all of logic; it is a question first of all of pragmatics. All communication is behaviour; when you utter something, you are doing something with the aim of producing a certain effect. The person hearing you will be conjecturing what effect you are trying to produce and responding accordingly. Logic helps serve this function, but pragmatics is the true basis. And the pragmatic value of things such as paradoxes is sport – mental play, fun. And a demonstration of the invalidity of certain kinds of reasoning.

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beg the question, ad hominem

Posted on September 6, 2011 | 6 comments

My annual spree of masochism – setting up a table for the Order of Logogustation at the Frosh Week of my local university – rolled around again this week. I always try to maintain a game face, and I usually get some nibbles, but more often I just gather anecdotes for telling later over alcohol.

Today I was at the table and there was a lean, angular young man standing in front of it, looking over the printed material a bit cagily. A young woman with a certain feline grace strolled up. “Logogustation,” she said, pronouncing it correctly the first time. She looked further at the sign. “Word tasting.”

“Words are delicious,” I offered.

“That kind of begs the question,” she said, “of whether words can be said to have taste at all.”

The young man slapped down the brochure and exclaimed, “No it does not!” I jumped slightly; cat girl just raised an eyebrow. He continued. “It does not beg the question! That’s not what begging the question means!”

“I know a lot of people who use it to mean exactly that,” cat girl said.

“Well, they’re wrong,” he said. “It means assuming the point that’s at issue. Trying to prove X with an argument that only works if X is true. Get it right.”

The young woman drew back slightly and gave him an elevator look (top to toe and back). “You’re using language as a weapon,” she said. “You’re deeply insecure and you feel that you can improve your self-image by belittling others. Actually it just makes you look worse.”

“Oh, great,” said angle boy. “You lose. The best you can muster is an ad hominem. That’s pathetic.”

“That’s not an ad hominem,” I said, doing what I could to suppress a smile at his error.

“She’s attacking my character!” he said. “You’re an idiot! Of course it’s an ad hominem!”

“Argumentum ad hominem is the logical fallacy of asserting that a person’s argument is flawed because of a flaw in a person’s character,” I said. “Or, conversely, asserting that a person’s argument is good because of the person’s good character. But she’s not saying you’re wrong because you’re an unpleasant person. Her assertion regarding your character is a different level of analysis. She’s not saying you’re wrong at all. She’s just saying that the way you’re presenting your point reveals something important about your character. And that, pragmatically, your entry into the discourse may be serving a primary goal other than the ostensible one.”

Cat girl considered this momentarily and smiled. “OK.”

“I speak frankly,” angle boy said overtop of her. “I’m just bluntly honest. And –” he turned to cat girl –”you’re just standing there smiling, assassinating my character instead of answering my argument.”

“Actually,” she said, “it was meant as a helpful observation. And your statements about my character – and his –” she nodded in my direction –”are not germane to the argument. In fact, they would meet your definition of ad hominems.”

“You see,” angle boy said to me, “she looks like she’s right because she’s calm. And because I get worked up because it’s important, I look like I’m wrong.”

“It does make people less receptive,” I said. “Of course it would be fallacious to say you’re wrong because you’re upset. Just as it’s fallacious to use righteous indignation as proof of the validity of one’s argument. I’m not sure if there’s a proper name for that fallacy, but I’m inclined to call it argumentum ad passionem. Or argumentum ad affectum. It’s all too common in political discourse.”

“Just by the by,” cat girl said to me, “what do you say about begging the question?”

“We-ell,” I said, “the original meaning is indeed ‘assuming the conclusion’. It’s a bit of a dodgy translation of petitio principii. I prefer to avoid it because those people who are familiar with the original meaning tend to take exception to the more recent use.”

Angle boy made a “you see” gesture with his hands. Cat girl cocked her head. “You taste words,” she said. “So what does begging the question taste like?”

Ah, back on safer ground. “Everyone can taste words. Say it slowly: begging the question. What does it feel like?”

She ran it through her mouth a couple of times. “Blunt and withdrawn at the start. Then dry and thirsty on question.”

“And what other words does it make you think of?”

Cat girl smiled a little. “Big bad bugger bogeyman bagboy… quick quiz quirky quiet quest.”

Angle boy interjected with some asperity, “Petitio principii. Stupidity.”

“Ad hominem,” I said.

“It is not!” he said.

“No,” I said, “I mean taste it.”

“Taste this,” angle boy said and made a rude gesture. He added “What a bunch of bullshit” and walked away.

“Hmmm,” cat girl said, apparently in response to my suggestion of ad hominem. “A dominant, domineering, abominable… humbug.”

I smiled and extended my hand. “James. Pleased to meet you.”

She shook my hand. “Arlene.” Then she picked up a membership brochure, made a little gesture of salutation with it and, putting it in her bag, said “See you later” and moved on.

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apostrophe

Posted on August 18, 2011 | 5 comments

Apparently it is Apostrophe Day. Who knew? Aside from half of Twitter, I mean. Well, obviously, that means one thing to me: Healey Willan.

Oh, is there something missing there? I mean his luminous choral piece, written originally for the Toronto Mendlessohn Choir (with whom I have – more recently – sung it), “An Apostrophe to the Heavenly Hosts.” (Listen to a performance of it at www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RCNyXDsEFE.)

No, he doesnt mean that hes going to write it “Heavenly Host’s” – its not a greengrocers apostrophe (indeed, the entire text of the piece does not contain a single apostrophe of the punctuation kind!). Its that other kind of apostrophe: a rhetorical device wherein one turns away from the flow of what one is saying to make a direct address to some person(s) present or absent. (Good grief, I thought they knew this. What is this world coming to?)

So, in the middle of whatever service or occasion the piece is sung in, the choir declares, “Invoking the thrice threefold company of the Heavenly Hosts, sing we:” and then it addresses a whole bunch of them by group and by name. And of course after that everyone turns back to the regularly scheduled ritual and on we go. So its just a little extra something stuffed in: a brief turning away. Thats Greek ἀπό apo “away” and στροϕή strophé “turning”.

But lets turn away from that to what Apostrophe Day is really about: those little jots that bedevil many Anglophones world wide. It seems more people get them wrong than get them right. This is because their “proper” uses in English are no longer confined to the necessary or even the consistent. An apostrophe, the mark, originally existed just to mark an apostrophe in the now-disused sense of “elision” – dropping something out rather than adding something in. We do use it a lot that way still, in contractions. But we also use it in places that are not and never have been contractions.

The big point of confusion is plurals versus possessives. It just happens that in Modern English we use an s ending for both (as well as for third-person singular conjugations), but we use an apostrophe only for possessives, not including possessive pronouns. It was not always so. In Old English, the forms differed quite a bit. Often there would be vowel changes rather than a suffix to signify possessive, plural, or both for a word; sometimes the suffix would have an n rather than an s; in words that had an s on both, the singular possessive ended in es, the plural in as, and the plural possessive in a, typically. But English inflections collapsed together and simplified quite a bit over time. And at a certain point some people incorrectly decided that the s in the possessive was short for his and so added an apostrophe to indicate the deletion of hi from his.

But speakers of Modern English certainly dont think of it that way. More to the point, we dont speak it that way. When we speak, in fact, we dont say apostrophes at all. Theyre silent! Where theres any possible ambiguity (as there seldom is), context nearly always clarifies it. So, lacking a natural, consistent, intuitive, inevitable basis for the apostrophe, people get confused.

Could we just do away with the apostrophe? I often remark provocatively that Id like to do just that. After all, George Bernard Shaw showed how easily they may be dispensed with without affecting clarity, just as Im doing here. But of course I know that thats actually a non-starter – it would never really happen. And, in truth, there are places in writing where an apostrophe adds clarity (partly because writing doesnt have the added cues intonation gives, and partly because we often phrase things differently in writing).

Still, Id rather lose the apostrophe altogether than put up with those apostles of the apostrophe, out on their Mission: Apostrophe with their pens correcting grocery signs and monument plaques, stroking away where they should be turned away. I think its quite apposite how apostrophe splutters like impossible and preposterous (though, amusingly, Oxford points out that the derivation of the word for the punctuation mark, coming by way of French, ought to have only three syllables, but “has been ignorantly confused with” the other apostrophe). It sure is a much longer word than the little mark would suggest. Might we make it more poetic and a bit briefer if we turned away some of the crowd and set it as ’postr’phe or ’postroph’?

Oh, yes, theres that other value of the apostrophe – because poetry often uses elisions to make the metre (Ive always looked on that as cheating, but there it is), nonce apostrophes have become a mark of poetic gravitas. My friend and colleague Carolyn Bishop suggested a special punctuation mark for this purpose a few years ago, and I wrote a poem on it, which will be in my book of salacious verse on English usage, Songs of Love and Grammar:

The gravitastrophe

Had I it in my pow’r
e’en for a wond’rous hour
to let words solemn hark’d
in print be plainly mark’d,
the mark I’d use would be
the gravitastrophe!

Momentous situations
oft call for syncopations;
howe’er, a plain contraction
is plebeian detraction.
To keep solemnity,
use gravitastrophe!

Take ink plash’d from a fount
on ’Lympus’ heavn’ly mount;
’scribe it with quill-pen gain’d
from phoenix wing detain’d;
’gainst alabaster be
writ gravitastrophe!

Like cherub’s down, the curl
shall clockwise-turn’d unfurl
’til, widdershins returning
(profan’d convention spurning),
with circlet tipp’d shall be
the gravitastrophe!

This stroke shall through the ages
be ’grav’d on scepter’d pages
so humbl’d reader knows
that whilom mundane prose
is rebirth’d poesy
with gravitastrophe!

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It is not I, it’s me

Posted on August 18, 2011 | 10 comments

There’s an old joke: St. Peter hears a knock at the Pearly Gates. He says, “Who goes there?” A voice replies, “It is I.” St. Peter says, “Go away! We don’t need any more English teachers.”

For who other than a hard-core grammatical prescriptivist would say “It is I?” And would even the driest English teacher (not that that many are that dry anymore), arriving with others (I was about to type “friends,” but it’s hard to think that such a person could have any left), say “It is we”? Or, on the other side, answering the door, say “It is they”? I have seen “It is he,” it’s true, but…

But no one in normal English speaks that way. Not even the well-respected, highly educated people. So we’re all wrong, then? What’s with this, anyway?

This “rule” is obviously not organic to English, since it seems so awkward to pretty much every native English speaker (except the ones who have had “It is I” drummed into them and so accept it – a linguistic perversion that can be accomplished with any irregular usage if you can get people to think it’s more formal, polite, and correct, since English is capricious that way; see An historic(al) usage trend: a historical usage trend (part 1)). The idea behind it is that the is there is a copula: it equates two things. A=B. Identity means identity, so both must be the subjects: “I am he.” (If you recognize that as the first three words of “I Am the Walrus,” remember that the next four are “as you are me.” It’s not a grammar lesson from The Beatles.)

There are some problems with this reasoning. First of all, when you draw up the rules for a language, it helps if they actually describe what the language actually does, as opposed to enforcing practices that are quite different from what established usage is. If you get an idea about language and make a theory and it turns out not to be an accurate description, you shouldn’t bend the subject, you should change the theory. Otherwise you have linguistic phlogiston, a mumpsimus. And something unfortunately all too common.

Second, language is not math. Or, more precisely (since one may construct a mathematical language), English is not math. Why this isn’t incredibly obvious I don’t even know. Try performing a mathematical operation on a sentence. Give me the square root of “To be or not to be.” Language is waaaaay less tidy than math, but it’s a lot of fun. You don’t get to derive new equations and results, but linguists are discovering a lot of really fascinating weirdness. Grammatical prescriptivists, on the other hand, if they applied their thinking to the realm of math, would insist on only using certain equations in certain ways and would argue that some solutions are unacceptable because they involved, for instance, irrational numbers. They would be like the lawmakers who legislated the value of pi to be exactly 3.

And incidentally, even in math, if you establish that in this instance of an equation a=3 and b=3, you don’t necessarily change all b to a. But anyway, syntax is sequence and form; identity is semantics. Two different areas of grammar.

Third, English is not Latin. Many of prescriptivists’ ideas, such as this one, are derived from and/or supported by appeals to Latin grammar. You might as well use a barbecue to bake a cake, or dress patterns to make shoes. Each language has its own set of rules, its own parameters, its own ways of handling this and that. French is descended from Latin but you could never say “C’est je” in French, so why would we insist that English use “It is I” just because Latin, which English is not based on, does similarly?

The real ace in all of this is that “It is I” is supposedly equating “It” and “I”. OK, what’s the “It” here? If I say “I am he,” then there’s a “he” we were talking about who turns out to be me. But where’s this “it”? There’s no object I’m claiming is me. The it is actually empty. The only reason it’s there is because in English we require every finite verb to have something in the subject position. Not every language does. In Chinese you can say you shu, “have book”, to mean “There’s a book”; you can say shi wo, “is I/me”, to mean “It’s me” (or “It is I” if you’re one of those people). But we have to put in these empty its and theres in English for it to be a complete sentence. (We may say, casually, Got it, but even casually we don’t say Is me instead of It’s me.)

So it’s is really an existential predicate. But it’s bootless to argue that since there’s only one real thing there (me), it must be the subject. The point is precisely that it’s not the subject because that’s not how English syntax works. A thing can’t be both subject and predicate. We can’t say I am to mean It’s me, because it means something else, so we have an existential verb and an empty subject, and make me the predicate.

Which leads us to another fact of English syntax: the case filter. Put simply, English nouns and pronouns are by default in the objective (accusative). For each finite (conjugated) verb, there has to be one subject, which means one noun phrase in the subject (nominative) case, and that noun phrase is the one that is specifying the verb – it’s in the “subject” position. We don’t do this with non-finite verbs: I want him to go, I want to see him going. Those hims are the subjects of an infinitive and a participle, but they’re still objective. But if the verb is finite, one noun phrase and one only is treated as its subject: I desire that he go. The one you want is him. (Note that there can be inversions: What fools are we! Sam I am!)

And that is a real rule of English. One that we all use all the time without having someone tell us, one that guides our comprehension and usage. Not phlogiston. There is no cake batter dripping from the grill. So if someone at your door says “It is I,” you’re fully enfranchised to say “Go to hell!” (You probably don’t want them at your party anyway.)

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cepstrum, quefrency, rahmonic

Posted on August 16, 2011 | 5 comments

“By applying a low-pass lifter to the cepstrum in Figure 2 to extract the low quefrency components below the first rahmonic peak, the slowly varying curve (in red, upper graph) results.”

I read that to my wife and her eyes turned into a pair of shirred eggs. She was, for a time, speechless – a condition that, incidentally, the process described in the quotation would have been helpless in the face of.

Make no mistake: what Al Oppenheim and Ron Schafer are describing in their article (From frequency to quefrency: a history of the cepstrum, Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE (September 2004), 21 (5), 95–106) is freakin’ hard for most people to wrap their minds around. But while it might seem as dry as dust to you, that passage actually evinces a fundamental fact of true nerds: a sense of humour and playfulness.

There are four words in there that you need to look at: lifter, cepstrum, quefrency, and rahmonic. They are terms that apply to this specific mathematical process. The process itself is a little quirky, and applies to things that themselves require a bit of explanation to have real meaning – a bit more than I have space for here. But here’s a very short run-down – if your eyes start to glaze, skip to the paragraph that starts “So anyways.”

Sounds such as human speech are actually very complex, made up of a lot of different harmonic resonances on top of a basic sound frequency. It’s these resonances that allow people to discern the difference between different speech sounds: the position of your tongue in your mouth (among other things) changes the shape of resonating chambers and makes certain bunches of harmonics, called formants, stronger – you might say the formants are the informants of what speech sound you’re hearing.

When linguists – acoustic phoneticians in particular – and engineers and physicists analyze sound waves, they use a wonderful mathematical function called a Fourier transform to identify the different resonance frequencies in the sound waves, what is called the spectrum, a perfectly appropriate term since the spectrum of light is also the different frequencies. (Think about if someone were tapping 9 beats a second and someone else 12 beats a second and someone else 36 beats a second. If you graphed the sound waves, you would have something looking like :,..;..,:.,.:,..;..,:.,.:,.. and on and on. A Fourier transform would just show a graph plotting frequencies with one mark at 9 per second, one at 12 per second, and one at 36 per second.)

Well, if you treat the Fourier transform graph as though it were a graph of sound waves and perform a Fourier transform on it (it’s just slightly twickier than that, but that’s the general concept), you are performing a curious but useful inversion. You can identify how close together the harmonics are, and how close together the formants are; it tells you how frequent the strong frequencies are on the graph, so to speak. Believe me when I say this is useful, and not just in speech analysis: it makes cleaning up the sound on old recordings a lot easier, for instance – you can filter out unwanted resonances from the original sound-capture device.

So anyways, when you do this process, you get something that looks like a spectrum but is really a spectrum looked at the other way around, and you get what looks like frequency but is really frequency looked at the other way, and harmonics that aren’t actually harmonics, and you can apply filtering processes on the data that aren’t filters like the normal data filters are. You’re treating frequency as though it were time and time as though it were frequency.

So what do you do? You come up with new words for what you’re talking about. And if you’re a nerd, you may take this opportunity to be a little playful. (Businessmen would use wanton sesquipedalianisms and initialisms to try to sound impressive. Nerds don’t feel a need to try to sound impressive because they actually know what they’re talking about.)

That playfulness actually tells us some interesting things about language, too: not the way we perceive sounds (which is what the data that all this analyzes help us to understand), but the way we think of and group sounds and how we perceive the structure of words. You see, the guys who came up with this – Bogert, Healy, and Tukey, three engineers back in the early 1960s – wanted to signify the inversion by inverting the words. But you will notice they only inverted parts of the words, in order to maintain comprehension I suppose – in the process producing pseudomorphemes (I’ll explain, hold on) – and they did it in some particular ways:

spectrum –> cepstrum
frequency –> quefrency
filter –> lifter
harmonic –> rahmonic

In all of the words, they only inverted the first part of the word, thereby treating the front end of the word as the significant part and the remainder as a sort of tail (a common enough things for people to do – go to SoHo and ask JLo), and also treating them as separate bits of the word, like tweet plus ed in tweeted – meaning-bearing building-blocks called morphemes. Except that trum, ency, ter, and monic actually are not morphemes; they have no meanings of their own – they’re just phonological divisions.

And the way they inverted the first half is notable: in three of the four, they just reversed the letters in the first syllable, which in all cases also reversed the sounds (you should know from this that the original pronunciation of cepstrum is with a /k/ at the start). It was always the syllable, not any other division: not rtcepsum or nomrahic, which would be morphologically appropriate but phonologically and orthographically problematic. As usual, the sound patterns of the words guide how they’re treated – when you turn it around, it’s the sound you’re turning around (this is standard in most playful things we do with words, and it’s how we treat helicopter as heli plus copter rather than the original helico plus pter, and why we say a whole nother thing, and also why people asked to say my backwards will probably say “I’m” – reversing the phonemes – rather than like “yam” – reversing the actual sounds).

In the other word, that wasn’t possible – /rf/ and /wk/ aren’t acceptable syllable onsets. So the syllable onsets, /fr/ and /kw/, were simply swapped to make quefrency. The vowel sounds were not swapped: it’s just not comfortable in English to say /’kwε frin si/. But when you look at that word on paper, do you want to pronounce it with a “long e” on the first syllable? To me, thanks to other words starting with que, it looks first like the que is said like the one in question, making both vowels /ε/ and conforming the word to expected sound patterns rather than to the original sounds.

But at least quefrency looks like a swapping-up of frequency. When I first saw cepstrum, I didn’t see spectrum in it at all (obviously I wasn’t swirling and sniffing it at that point). It looked more like it was just some other Latin word I hadn’t seen, joining the long list of neuter nouns like rostrum and plectrum. And rahmonic, aside from making me think of Rahm Emanuel (and maybe rah-rah-rah), had a taste of rampike and mnemonic but took a moment to show its harmonic resonance. (Lifter happens to be an English word in its own right, and thereby carries unbidden resonances. Ironically.)

However, the resemblance of cepstrum to spectrum is not lost on those who are expecting to see spectrum. And the hazards of such wordplay showed up in an early publication by Oppenheim and Schafer on the topic – and make for a cautionary tale for editors and authors alike. I’ll quote directly from the same article I started with:

throughout the various stages of proofreading of this book, we constantly had to maintain vigilance to be certain that this “strange” term cepstrum wasn’t inadvertently “corrected” to what seemed to be more appropriate. . . . We breathed a sigh of relief when the last page proofs were returned to the publisher. When the first printing of the book appeared, it was clear that a particularly diligent proofreader at the publisher had caught the “error” at the last instant and cepstrum had been reversed to spectrum throughout.

Well, not entirely reversed – but run through a transformation aimed at making the strange look normal again. Ah, but too late – and sometimes you want to see things strangely.

Thanks to Colleen Kavanagh (@CanuckWordNerd) for drawing my attention to this whole sandbox of words.

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Grammar Matters book review

Posted on June 23, 2011 | 1 comment

Grammar Matters: The social significance of how we use language
Jila Ghomeshi
Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2010

A more incendiary writer – or a more sensationalist publisher – might have titled this book Grammar Gurus Are Bigots. But Jila Ghomeshi is not an attack dog; she is a moderate-toned professor of linguistics.

Nonetheless, her main theme is clear: abhorrence of non-standard grammar is a form of prejudice with no basis in reason, experience, or fact – no more intelligent than racial bigotry, but somehow presented as a sign of superior intelligence rather than as the expression of tribalism, intolerance, privilege, and hierarchy that it is.

Ghomeshi lays out some straightforward facts about what things in language matter to people, why they matter, and how they really work. Then she gets into the really good part. There are three fallacies, she explains, that prescriptivists use in touting the superiority of “proper” English: logic, precision, and authority. With clear examples and reasoning, she shows that “proper” English is not more logical than various “non-standard” varieties – in fact, it’s not especially logical or consistent at all; that English can be stunningly imprecise and even contradictory in its variations, idioms, and economies; and that we managed to get along quite well with language for about 100 times as long as we have had prescriptive grammars, which anyway were written by self-appointed “authorities” who were really inexpert dilettantes serving social climbers.

So is Ghomeshi waging war against standards? Does she think everything is relative, and we can just chuck standards out the window? Of course not. She has her brain fully in gear. She recognizes the value of having a standard version of a language: it maintains a common reference version of the language to facilitate communication. The point, as she says, is that “it is good to have a standard, but the standard is not ‘good’” – that is, it is not inherently superior. “Non-standard” varieties have their value, and “recognizing and celebrating a non-standard dialect is of no threat to the existence of a standard if speakers know and use both appropriately.”

For Ghomeshi, then, standards don’t go out the window, bigotry about them does – so that we can enjoy “a far greater range of expression than the narrow channel we think of as ‘correct.’” And of course I agree.

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Such cases as these

Posted on April 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

A colleague had been discussing the difference between such as X and such X as with some friends, and asked for further insight from the rest of us. I gladly weighed in:

The first thing to note is that it’s actually a choice between X such as Y and such X as Y. But those two constructions are not the same thing, though they can mean similar things. Continue reading →

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Blarney, baloney, and etymology

Posted on March 18, 2011 | 9 comments

I’m about to tear a strip off a guy who died in 2008. That may not seem fair, but what he did lives on, in his work and in the work of countless others who do the same damn thing. He presented his work as etymology, but it’s just plain baloney – or, as Daniel Cassidy would have said, béal ónna.

Daniel Cassidy would have said that because he was in the habit of saying that all sorts of American slang came from Irish. Slang can be very hard to etymologize, because it tends to originate in oral tradition, and so to show up rather late in print. But Cassidy was sure he had the skeleton key. He wrote a book: How the Irish Invented Slang. In it he looked at a variety of American slang terms, and explained how every last one of them really came from this or that Irish phrase. Stool pigeon was from steallaire béideánach (steall béideán being the related verb phrase), but stoolie was from steall éithigh, jazz was from teas, eighty-six from éiteachas aíochta, bunkum from buanchumadh, spiel from spéal… yes, really.

Cassidy’s method was fairly straightforward. He would seize on some slang expression and toss around for an Irish Gaelic phrase that sounded something like it (as the above do; teas is said rather like our chass, for instance) and had a meaning that could be tortured into supporting the connection – teas means “heat”, steall éithigh means “spout a false oath” – and then he would note that there were Irish immigrants in the area during the time that the phrase seems to have arisen, so it must be true. Never mind if the Irish source was never known to have existed as a stock phrase or cliché; never mind if it includes a rare word or an uncommon usage of the word; never mind if there was no reference made anywhere in history to an Irish origin; never mind if the phonological transformations he posited go beyond the expectable; never mind if there is a persuasive etymology pointing to a different source (as with bunkum, baloney and spiel). It makes a good story, it fits together, so it must be true.

Does this seem like shoddy methodology, nothing but hooey and blarney? Well, it is. A saying among linguists is “Etymology by sound is not sound etymology.” Think of the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding coming up with an etymology for Japanese kimono from Greek kheimon. Pure “below knee”—oops, baloney. Give us a smoking gun: citations. A clear connection.

But why should it matter, if it’s a good story? Well, for one thing, it’s bad history. For another, the real stories are often more interesting. For a third, if you want facts, don’t you want facts? And fourth, sometimes it’s needlessly provocative, as with the claim that picnic and nitty-gritty are racist terms, in spite of more-than-ample evidence to the contrary. (Meanwhile, no one seems bothered by bulldoze…)

So enough with the blarney and baloney. Sound coincidences can be the spark of an investigation, but never more than that.

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Unpacking the Grey Owl

Posted on March 3, 2011 | 1 comment

A colleague – Adrienne Montgomerie – was recently reading to her child from a story by Grey Owl when she came across this rather large sentence (From the second-last paragraph of “How the Queen and I spent the Winter” as published in the collection Great Canadian Animal Stories,
Whitaker, 1978):

This creature comported itself as a person, of a kind, and she busied herself at tasks that I could, without loss of dignity, have occupied myself at; she made camp, procured and carried in supplies, could lay plans and carry them out and stood robustly and resolutely on her own hind legs, metaphorically and actually, and had an independence of spirit that measured up well with my own, seeming to look on me as a contemporary, accepting me as an equal and no more.

We certainly don’t write like that so much anymore. I must say that I enjoyed reading that sentence, but some people may wonder whether all those commas are necessary and whether the whole thing is even grammatical.

So let’s have some fun and take it apart. Continue reading →

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A variety of ways of using a variety

Posted on February 27, 2011 | Leave a comment

A colleague asked, “What verb would you use with ‘a variety of terms…’: is or are?”

The answer is that if you’re referring to what the various terms are doing, it’s are; if you’re referring to the variety qua variety, it’s is. Probably you want are:

A variety of terms are used. (Meaning several diverse terms are used.)

A variety of terms is used. (Meaning a specific variety is used – e.g., they’re all vulgar.)

A variety of flowers were on the table. (Assorted flowers were on the table.)

A variety of flowers was on the table. (One specific variety was on the table – presumably I don’t know what it’s called, or I would have said so.)

Generally, you’ll use the is when discussing the variety more in the abstract:

The board was discussing what herbaceous emblem to use for the society. A variety of flowers was on the table, as was a variety of grass, as well as the larch.

But very often a variety of is used as an indefinite plural quantifier, and so takes the plural, just like a lot in A lot of people are coming and a bunch in There are a bunch of questions I want to ask (as opposed to discrete singular entities, as in A lot of land was the subject of the dispute and There is a bunch of flowers on the table).

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