A lesser known cliché in journalism, especially science reporting, is the construction than previously thought. It doesn’t always take that precise form – sometimes it’s than originally thought, or than previously believed, or than scientists/anyone previously thought, or just than thought – but that’s the general structure, and it. is. ubiquitous.

Search for site:sciencedaily.com “previously thought” on Google, or try other news websites in the site: slot, and you’ll see what a journalistic crutch it is. I remember grumbling about it on Twitter once and then seeing it in the next two articles I read.

I’ve also mentioned it on this blog, in a comment a few years ago, where I described it as a meaningless and hackneyed device that may be meant to add novelty and excitement to a story, but doesn’t; instead, it implies that no scientist has any imagination whatsoever.

The number of times I’ve read than previously thought and thought, Actually, that’s not a surprise at all, or No, I’ve had that very thought before – well, it’s probably even more than previously thought.

But there is an upside. In its most elliptical form, than thought, it can generate amusing semantic ambiguities, as in this recent example from Discovery News (via @brandalisms): “Death Happens More Slowly Than Thought”, to which one might reasonably reply: It depends on the thought. (Cf. “Human genome far more active than thought”.)

Yes, it’s a crash blossom (i.e., a headline with garden-path ambiguity), a mild one, but the first I’ve written about in a while. I guess the lesson is: When life hands you clichés, make crash blossoms (or other linguistic fun). Not always possible, of course, but maybe more often than prev—

It’s been a month, more or less, since my last set of language links. Here’s the latest batch of articles and videos I’ve enjoyed in recent weeks, or unearthed from further back:

*

Glossologics, a very interesting blog on languages and word history.

Auden and the OED.

Phonetic pitfalls of shm- reduplication.

Yola and Fingalian – the forgotten ancient English dialects of Ireland.

Editing The Witches for Roald Dahl.

Journalism is home to this cliché.

Test basic spelling and apostrophe use at high speed.

The world’s most beautiful miniature books.

Rachel Jeantel’s language in the Zimmerman trial.

A brief history of yippee-ki-yay.

Familects: the secret language of families.

Europe’s new vocabulary of economic pain.

Your more/less ethnic-sounding name.

Speaking of which: Padraig versus Starbucks.

How technology threatens sign languages.

Huh? Ahh!

What to do about impactful?

While bending over backwards with idioms, don’t put your foot in it.

Why do we have both a and an?

Fascinating discussion on quotation mark history.

Forensic stylometry; or, how Robert Galbraith was revealed as J.K. Rowling.

Begging the question – why all the fuss?

Confessions of a recovering pedant.

Perthshire Cant – a secret Scottish language heading for extinction.

Digitising Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary.

7 theories on the origin of dongle.

Musical training and second language acquisition (podcast).

Joseph O’Connor, like, likes like:

US accents: where and why?

[archived language links]

A few tweets from earlier today, to introduce and summarise the topic:

Critics of quotative "like" ("I was like" ≈ "I said") aren't looking closely enough at the phenomenon. It's not a lazy or trivial usage.—
Stan Carey (@StanCarey) August 01, 2013

Often, "I'm like" isn't followed by a quotation at all, but sets up a miniature performance of facial expression, body language, attitude.—
Stan Carey (@StanCarey) August 01, 2013

A striking use of quotative "like" – people following "[And] I'm like" with an image or image macro. Look at these: twitter.com/search?q=%22an…—
Stan Carey (@StanCarey) August 01, 2013

[An interesting discussion ensued that I'll assemble on Storify later. Update: Here's the Storify chat.]

One of the most noticeable changes in modern everyday English usage is the ascent of like in its various guises. Last week Michael Rundell at Macmillan Dictionary Blog briefly surveyed the development, noting that the word’s relatively recent use in reporting direct speech – known as quotative like – is “widely disliked by traditionalists”.

There are various reasons for the aversion. Any usage that becomes suddenly popular will attract criticism. Frequent use of like is also perceived as lazy, or associated with triviality. Facebook likes, filler likes (So, like, OK), and hedging or approximating likes (He was like six feet) serve only to underline how ubiquitous the word has become.

Some, like the Acadamy of Linguistic Awarness [sic], revile this state of affairs:

Others take pride in it:

Like is like soooo divisive, and quotative like is often misunderstood. If you search online for hate the word like or some such string, you’ll find plenty of knee-jerk antipathy to it that largely assumes its synonymity with said. That is, there’s a common misconception that I was like, [X] = I said, [X]. But often this is not the case, about which more shortly.

First, it’s worth noting that those of us who use quotative like use it in a range of tenses, for example past (She was like, “Let me know”), historical present (So last week he’s like, “Are we ready yet?” and we’re all like, “Yes!”), and future (If that happens I’ll be like, “Uh-oh.”).

This use of like, reporting direct speech more or less, became very popular in recent times with young people especially, though far from exclusively, establishing itself as a normal usage – even a dominant one in some groups. But with quotative like we can do more than simply report speech: we may convey an interaction with expansive social and performative detail.

As Jessica Love observed in the American Scholar a couple of years ago, quotative like

encourages a speaker to embody the participants in a conversation. Thus, the speaker vocalizes the contents of participants’ utterances, but also her attitudes toward those utterances. She can dramatize multiple viewpoints, one after another, making it perfectly clear all the while which views she sympathizes with and which she does not.

Quotative like has also undergone striking developments on the internet, as tweet no. 3 above revealed. Some users of social media are typing I’m like (or I’m all like, etc.) and following it with an image or image macro. It’s a meme-friendly playground of creativity in which the images themselves are being embedded in the syntax.

Here are some examples with text:

And some without text:

Offline we might say I’m like and make a caricatured facial expression; online, we use images instead to communicate those staged reactions. These funny, often self-deprecating tweets use instantly interpretable images to substitute for (and expand upon) those physical gestures, expressions, and body language that accompany ordinary speech but are difficult or impossible to replicate online.

Last month the NY Times quoted Robin Kelsey, a professor of photography at Harvard, who believes

This is a watershed time where we are moving away from photography as a way of recording and storing a past moment . . . [and] turning photography into a communication medium.

And not just photography but image macros, TV and film stills, comics, animated gifs, the whole gamut of shortform visual data we’ve been incorporating into online discourse. (Jessica Love has also pondered the possibilities of a language based on real-time images.) Who’s to say what will emerge from this hybrid domain?

Quotative like can set up a whole miniature drama, with visual content contributing to a richer vocabulary than words alone could license. Online and off, used with images or micro-performances, quotative like is not a lazy crutch of semi-literate teens but a handy and highly functional addition to our lexicon – and to our paralinguistic repertoire. No wonder it has caught on.

And I’m all like

Updates:

From an excellent post by Arnold Zwicky on Language Log, December 2006:

[T]eenagers have been fond of discourse-particle uses of like for quite some time, at least 50 years; some people now in their 50s and 60s still use like this way. Meanwhile, quotative like has risen in 25 or 30 years to become the dominant quotative in the speech of young people (and some older speakers use it too). The result is that some young people are indeed heavy users of like in functions that some of their elders do not use it in. And many of these older speakers are annoyed as hell about that.

Zwicky further explores the sociolinguistic aspects of like, confirming its usefulness and examining why exactly some people dislike it so much. He finds that:

discourse-particle and quotative like have both linguistic value (they can be used to convey nuances of meaning) and social value (they’re part of the way personas and social-group memberships are projected).

Steven Poole reminded me of his post at Unspeak a few years ago taking Christopher Hitchens to task for a shallow denigration of quotative like:

he was like and he said do not actually mean the same thing; and Hitchens is like, I do not approve of this youthspeak that I have not made sufficient efforts to understand?

Mercedes Durham informed me of research she and colleagues did on the “Constant linguistic effects in the diffusion of ‘be like’” (PDF).

They report on two studies of “change in social and linguistic effects on be like usage and acceptability”, and find “no evidence of change in linguistic constraints on be like [e.g., speaker age, tense, quote content] as it has diffused into U.K. and U.S. Englishes”.

In Barry Blaustein’s wrestling documentary Beyond the Mat, then-WWF supremo Vince McMahon has just given Darren Drozdov his new character name, Puke, and is explaining how he’ll be introduced to the audience. You might want to skip the quotation if you’re eating:

So, after you’ve regurgitated on one of your opponents, or on the referee itself, then of course the ring announcer would, y’know, then say your name.

You can watch it here – go to 06.23:

The phrase the referee itself is grammatically interesting. Wrestling referees are adult people, and when it or itself is used to refer to a person, it’s usually a very young person or a part of a person – not an adult of unknown or unspecified gender.

But none of the alternative pronouns is perfect in that position. The referee himself is the most obvious (the job is male-dominated), but it is sexist; himself or herself (or similar) would be pedantic; themselves strikes me as awkward here, though I like singular they; and themself is rare, and does not occur to most speakers.

So the choice of itself, made on the spur of the moment, lets McMahon avoid constructions that are problematic for various reasons – but in doing so objectifies the referee in an unusual way. (Compare with the use of whom to refer to houses, which I heard in a documentary on The Truman Show.)

Omitting the intensive pronoun entirely would be the simplest solution, since it’s not essential here. But in casual speech we don’t normally get a chance to weigh up options like this. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

Today I want to briefly mention* four language/linguistics blogs that deserve your attention and might not have broached your radar.

Actually I linked to Glossologics lately, but there’s lots of new posts since. Its emphasis is on etymology – origins of words and phrases – but there’s plenty of other stuff too: on foreign grammar, writing systems, language learning and more. Writer Alex Tigers updates it regularly with tasty linguistic morsels – and apparently she makes the best chocolate cake, though regrettably I can’t confirm this.

Word Jazz is “a celebration of linguistic creativity” from Matt Davis, a linguistics postgrad in London who is fascinated by all things language. The blog debuted at the start of this year and so far has looked at several aspects of linguistic creativity, such as vowels in pop music, lexical combinations, and the colourful life of adverbs (“the garden glittered greenly in the sun”).

the mashed radish will also be of interest to etymology fans. It’s written by language hobbyist John Kelly, who by his own admission is obsessed with English etymologies and the “stories our words tell about us”. Over the last few weeks he has delved into the histories of bask, self and other, and various citrus fruits: all sorts of everything etymological.

Finally, …And Read All Over is the brainchild of linguistics major Joe McVeigh, champion of free-form grammar and Robert Burchfield, Original Gangster. Notwithstanding its satirical tendencies, the blog has a serious side; recent posts have discussed the language instinct debate, and academic and marketing applications of corpus linguistics. He reviews books too.

All four are well worth visiting, and perhaps bookmarking or subscribing if their subject matter and style appeal.

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* Not I want briefly to mention, which would mean something quite different, split infinitive watchers.

I’ll assume readers know that the “Eskimos have X words for snow” idea is essentially a myth and a hackneyed journalistic trope. So I won’t elaborate on it here, except to note that the claim is so notorious in linguistic circles that it gave rise to snowclone, a handy term for this kind of clichéd phrasal template.

It turns out, though, that there are quite a few words for snow (and, OK, ice) in Scotland.* Ian Preston sent me a recent photo he took of an art installation in the lobby of the Cairngorm Funicular Railway, republished here with his permission:

[click to enlarge]

The piece is by Scottish artist Arthur Watson and colleagues and is part of the public art project Cairngorm – Reading a Landscape. At its centre is a woodcut of Coire an t-Sneachda (corrie of the snow), a glacial landform in the Cairngorms mountain range.

The 31 words and phrases that surround the image come from a glossary of “conditions of snow and ice in Scots, Gaelic, and travellers’ cant”, according to the Scottish Arts Council; artist Janet McKenzie says Watson is “particularly interested in the oral traditions of the fisher and traveller communities”.

Each term spoken aloud is a delight in itself, and taken together they constitute a poetic set:

Irish speakers will recognise sneachda as cognate with Irish sneachta “snow”, while liathreodhadh matches Irish liathróid(í) “ball(s)”, though I don’t know what this signifies in the context of Scottish snow – hailstones, or snowballs? Clach-mheallain means hailstones anyway.

Other terms appear in the online Dictionary of the Scots Language, for example feuchter “a slight fall of snow”, owerblaw “to cover over or be covered with snow”, skiff “to rain or snow very slightly”, and yird drift “snow blown from the surface of the ground, drifting snow”.

McBain’s Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language says eigh is ice, “hence eighre, oighre, Irish oidhir, Early Irish aigred, Welsh eiry, snow”. It refers to deigh “ice” (cf. Icelandic jökull), and says its initial d is prothetic – the sound was added to the start of the original word.

Your ideas are welcome, be they etymological, emotional, or otherwise.

*

* This is probably true of any language in any area where snow falls, so long as you cast the lexical net wide enough both dialectically and meteorologically.

Every serious field of study deserves a satirical wing, and linguistics is blessed in this regard with Speculative Grammarian, a journal some say is now centuries old. SpecGram, as it’s known to fan and foe alike (and they often are alike), lately drew on its formidable archives to produce The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics, a copy of which I received for review.

Before we proceed, I should mention that after I wrote about the Irish word cnáimhseáil and its Hiberno-English variations, SpecGram published a brief note on the “cult of Macintosh” by a Dr. Knauv Shauling, Assistant Chief Hibernolinguistic Paleocurmudgeon. These are the sort of people we’re dealing with here.

Despite the near-Dadaist style of some of SpecGram’s output, the Essential Guide is sensibly arranged into major categories of linguistics, e.g. syntax, morphology, phonology, phonetics,* fieldwork, sociolinguistics, and love poetry. Every article and chapter is introduced briefly, and this running commentary ties the book together very well.

There is a Monty Python flavour to SpecGram’s material. Normality might be given only a single decisive twist, but the results are then examined and pursued with the solemn enthusiasm that good satire requires. For example, an interview at the Phonetics Roadshow refers tantalisingly to an antique dialect whose owner found it in an attic; apparently it belonged to family ancestors who brought it from “somewhere back east”:

Guest: It’s been in the family forever. My Dad used it once in a while, mostly when he was drunk. I don’t really use it myself. I basically just keep it on the mantelpiece. . . . I had a great aunt who was supposedly interested in diction classes back in the day, but I don’t think she ever actually did anything about it.

Appraiser: That’s very fortunate. Speech training would certainly have lowered the value.

There is a personal essay on the sociolinguistic impact of hippie linguist child-naming habits, written by /ɹɒbɪn/ O’Jonesson, whose first name is spelt using the IPA. She or he usually drops the slashes, but still has trouble booking dinner over the phone because of the complications of explaining this notation to non-specialists. This trouble is described in poignant detail, while the essay also shines a light on hippie linguists

who advocated for free morphemes in the 60s and gave their children names such as Monophthongbreathstream, Pronouncopula, Rezonator, Asteriskchild, Redponymy, and Noam.

SpecGram’s is a parallel world where improbable scenarios are assumed as a given, presented with a straight(ish) face, and used as the basis for academic-theoretic fun and games, flights of furious fancy, and devilish derangement. The prodigious footnoting style out-DFWs DFW, while research insights are gleaned from such questionable sources as “posthumous personal communication”.

Though no one is likely to read this book with the expectation of learning anything, except that linguistics offers abundant stimuli for spoofery, they might be educated by stealth anyway – even if it’s only on things like how many is “umpteen”, or how to do fieldwork on Proto-Indo-European. (“Step one: Find a native speaker.” Er, that’s it.)

Your brain will also encounter disinfo on comestible morphosyntax (the effects of food intake on grammar); the laziest language on earth (its only phoneme is the schwa, but vowel length and tone are distinctive); the sentence molecules believed to be the biological basis for universal grammar; and the morphology of penguin (a language possibly descended from Proto-Dodo, unless the ingestion of krill explains its grammatical similarity to the cetacean language family).

Yet there are also passages of surprisingly straight-faced sense, such as this comment on the state of natural language processing (“the kind of ‘NLP’ that isn’t a total embarrassment to linguists”):

The trouble with NLP, as it were, is that humans have an amazing facility with language that is largely unconscious. Common sense, context, and shared experience reduce exponential ambiguity to a manageable murmur of alternate possibilities for us, but leave a computer gagging on the teeming mass of potentiality.

Special features recur throughout the book, including logical fallacies, the wisdom of linguists (“You can’t teach an old professor new theories”), Murphy’s Law for linguists, spaghetti or lasagne, language-themed quotations and proverbs from around the world, and a merrily cynical “Choose your own career in linguistics” game.

You’ll also find field trips, cartoons, songs and poems, a clever self-defining glossary, some helpful suggestions for would-be PhD students (“Do not choose a science, such as physics. These fields have objective standards by which your lack of contribution can be measured”), and an honest-to-god interrobang in a footnote on page 267. Should more books use this mark‽

I was glad to see some old favourites reappear, like the mytholingual encyclopedia boasting such fantastic beasts as Fryggyn’, the Norse goddess of minced oaths; Quetzlnhlxtzlchctlcoātl, the Mesoamerican god of difficult-to-pronounce consonant clusters; and the Abominable Synonym, a creature from Nepal and Tibet which makes people “pathologically doubt their ability to choose the right word”.

A word of warning: much of the book is very technical, with articles and references that few but a trained linguist will twig. A lot of it went over my head, and if you’re not into linguistics your mileage will vary. But some sections are generally accessible, and the motley mischief is unified by the trademark SpecGram voice – if such a thing can be said to exist – which combines condescension with flattery and arch irony with sincere delight.

If you’re a SpecGram fan, you may already have this book or have added it to a wishlist. If you’re a foe, you know what they say about keeping your enemies close. If you’re undecided, you can browse the archives or download a preview (PDF, 3 MB), or for the full experience order the book here at a reasonable price.

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* “Phonetics is concerned with all the hairy particulars, while phonology operates at a more rarified level where all of the messy details of flapping hunks of mouth meat have been abstracted away.”

Here’s my pick of language links from the past few weeks. I’m overdue, so this is a bigger batch than usual. Some I’ve already tweeted. Enjoy!

A silent alphabet.

When books were shelved backwards.

Synaesthetic map of London Underground.

Poetry is not a hiding place.

Dictionaries are not gatekeepers.

The evolution of English spelling (audio).

Practical uses for books.

Jonathon Green’s slang timelines.

The dame of dictionaries.

Lesser-known back-formations.

Test your ear for foreign languages.

On the lexicon of Irish begrudgery.

Blatant and flagrant converge in meaning.

Good sense on grammar and grading.

Kevin Rudd’s hand gestures.

Is that a mild hybrid or a hybrid hybrid?

See the wood/woods/forest for the trees.

What makes English (or any language) hard to learn?

How to be a reasonable prescriptivist.

A basic emotional lexicon of Yolŋu-matha.

How would you kill the n-word?

Spurious correlations between language and culture.

So you know a linguist…

Celebrity non-English tattoos.

The obscure etymology of askance.

Did Burroughs and Kerouac really fight over the Oxford comma?

Surnames of occupation.

Using full stops (or not) on Twitter.

Benjamin Franklin sanctioned spelling wife as yf.

How do youse spell it?

The Lexicon Valley podcast is now a blog.

Where does warm the cockles of your heart come from?

A field guide to uncommon punctuation.

Language can affect the sensitivity of visual perception.

So we use sentence-initial So as a tool for managing conversation.

The typewriters authors used.

Figurative is my middle name.

Animated history of typography:

[archive of language links]

Someone once told me it was harder to make a book spine poem, aka bookmash, from non-fiction titles. I don’t know; I hadn’t really thought about it before, and I’m never conscious of it when constructing them.

But it led me to look at my earlier book spine poems and see what pattern emerged. Fiction/non-fiction ratios (in reverse chronological order) are as follows: 5:5, 7:2, 8:2, 4:4, 2:5, 6:2, 2:4, 4:4, 2:4, 2:4, 2:5, 3:2, 3:4, 4:3, 2:1, 0:4, 1:4, 0:3, 2:2, 4:2, 1:2, 4:4, 7:9.

That’s 75 fiction vs. 81 non-fiction. I was surprised that there were more non-fiction, and that the totals ended up so close. Two are exclusively non-fiction but none contain only fiction. (New challenge!)

I don’t usually set out with a theme in mind, but this time I wanted to make one about language/linguistics, which was always going to skew heavily towards non-fiction: 2:7. Non-fiction surges ahead – for now.

[click to enlarge]

Evolution: the difference engine

Words words words ad infinitum –
The power of Babel,
The languages of the world.
Human speech: the articulate mammal enigma,
Evolution: the difference engine.

*

Thanks to the authors: Diarmaid Ó Muirithe, Nicholas Ostler, John McWhorter, Kenneth Katzner, Richard Paget, Jean Aitchison, Robet Harris, Carl Zimmer, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling; and to artist Nina Katchadourian.

More in the bookmash archive.

Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) devised a model of linguistic meaning involving what he called the signifier (a symbolic or phonological form) and what it signifies. Their association is a basic unit of communication he referred to as a linguistic sign, and it is fundamentally arbitrary.

For example, rose signifies a flower with a pleasant smell, but by any other name it would, per Romeo, smell as sweet. Generally speaking, the meaning of a word cannot be predicted from its form, nor its form from its meaning.

Saussure also drew a useful distinction between two approaches to linguistic study, which he called diachronic and synchronic – essentially historical and ahistorical. How he knitted these concepts together may be seen in this passage by Jonathan Culler in his book Saussure (Fontana Modern Masters, 1976):

What is the connection between the arbitrary nature of the sign and the profoundly historical nature of language? We can put it this way: if there were some essential or natural connection between signifier and signified, then the sign would have an essential core which would be unaffected by time or which at least would resist change. This unchanging essence could be opposed to those ‘accidental’ features which did alter from one period to another. But in fact, as we have seen, there is no aspect of the sign which is a necessary property and which therefore lies outside time. Any aspect of sound or meaning can alter; the history of languages is full of radical evolutionary alterations of both sound and meaning. . . . In short, neither signifier nor signified contains any essential core which time cannot touch. Because it is arbitrary, the sign is totally subject to history, and the combination at a particular moment of a given signifier and signified is a contingent result of the historical process.

The fact that the sign is arbitrary or wholly contingent makes it subject to history but also means that signs require an ahistorical analysis. This is not as paradoxical as it might seem. Since the sign has no necessary core which must persist, it must be defined as a relational entity, in its relations to other signs. And the relevant relations are those which obtain at a particular time.

There are exceptions to the arbitrary nature of the sign, such as onomatopoeia or sound symbolism, but even these may have aspects that are arbitrary or informed by the cultures in which they exist. And they are greatly outnumbered by the arbitrary signs.

John Lyons notes in Language and Linguistics that this arbitrary quality makes languages more difficult to learn, but it also gives them great flexibility and adaptability.

Warren Maguire, a linguist lecturing at the University of Edinburgh, has told me about a survey he’s conducting into accents of English in Britain and Ireland. It’s been running for a few years, and you can see some preliminary results mapped here.

Maguire is looking for more respondents, especially from Ireland, but you don’t have to be from Ireland or Britain to take part: though other varieties of English aren’t the main research focus, all information will be gratefully received. The more data, the better.

So if you have time, do answer the survey here. It’s not a test, and there are no wrong answers (so long as you’re honest!). It took me about 10 minutes, and it was fun. You’ll be given pairs or sets of words and asked if you pronounce them the same, or if they rhyme to you.

The survey is expected to be completed next year, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for the results.

Wikitongues has been on the go since 2012, but I heard about it just recently. It’s a project aimed at documenting linguistic diversity and exploring identity, in the form of short videos of people speaking different languages and dialects – about 50 at the time of writing.

Based in New York, the project is spread across social media websites: Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and YouTube, the last of which may be the easiest place to browse the videos. Speakers talk about themselves and their languages for 30 seconds to 18 minutes, though most videos are around 1–4 minutes long. A few have transcripts.

Sites like Ethnologue, Omniglot and WALS offer detailed information on many of the world’s several thousand languages, but there’s always room for a project like Wikitongues, whose participants are engaging and interesting to listen to. Complete multilingual transcripts (or subtitles) would be a welcome addition.

If you’re interested in taking part, or know someone who might be, this Facebook update invites new participants:

Want to be a part of Wikitongues? Send us a message and we’ll arrange a recording session. Not in NYC? No problem! Find Wikitongues on Skype and we’ll interview you online.

Here are four videos, chosen more or less at random from the full set:

Stella speaking Russian, English, and Armenian:

Stephen speaking Gikuyu:

Lolly speaking Zulu:

Mark speaking Luxembourgish:

Hat tip to Omniglot.

Update:

In a follow-up post, Lauren at Superlinguo assesses Wikitongues’ merits and compares it with similar sites, some of which (Glottolog, Language Landscape, Endangered Languages Project) I’d neglected to mention. She questions the “gatekeeper bottleneck” of a site named Wikitongues, but says it wins points “for its focus on speakers of languages and the rich intersection of language, identity and personal history”. Be sure to read her full post.

This should have gone out at Halloween, but anyway. Based on my regard for Daniel Woodrell I was given a copy of The Cove by Ron Rash, and the recommendation was fully justified: the story is engrossing and poetic, lingering in memory. Set in rural North Carolina, it’s also rich in local dialect, and contains an unusual sense of the word fetch:

There were stories of hunters who’d come into the cove and never been seen again, a place where ghosts and fetches wandered.

I had to look it up to remember it. The American Heritage Dictionary says it’s a ghost, apparition, or doppelgänger, calling it chiefly British, while the OED defines it more narrowly as “the apparition, double, or wraith of a living person”. Its etymology is uncertain, though it may derive from the older compound fetch-life, which referred to a messenger that came to fetch a dying person’s soul.

The first cited appearance of this fetch is in Francis Grose’s Provincial Glossary of 1787, wherein he assigns the word to northern England, but the OED finds no evidence that it was ever in popular use outside Ireland. John and Michael Banim’s later Tales, by the O’Hara Family (1825) is more precise about what the appearance of such an apparition meant:

In Ireland, a Fetch is the supernatural fac-simile of some individual, which comes to insure to its original, a happy longevity, or immediate dissolution: if seen in the morning the one event is predicted; if, in the evening, the other.

The W. B. Yeats–edited Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) puts it thus: “As in Scotland, the fetch is commonly believed in. If you see the double, or fetch, of a friend in the morning, no ill follows; if at night, he is about to die.” P.W. Joyce may have drawn on these glosses for his entry in English As We Speak It In Ireland (1910):

what the English call a double, a preternatural apparition of a living person, seen usually by some relative or friend. If seen in the morning the person whose fetch it is will have a long and prosperous life: if in the evening the person will soon die.

Other citations in the OED show how the entity manifested: “She believed she had seen his fetch as a forerunner of his death”; “The Earl of Cornwall met the fetch of his friend William Rufus”. The Mask of Reason blog says fetches were common in 18th–19th century folklore, and says one has a central role in The Stray Sod Country, a Patrick McCabe novel I haven’t read.

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The Cove also has examples of comma splices and the modal+of construction (“might not of”), so I’ve updated my giant collection of comma splices in literature and my post on would of, could of and co. to include these.

For your further linguistic enjoyment, here are lines of dialogue from Ron Rash’s novel that include choice verbings, double modals, multiple negation, and other grammatical delights:

(1) “I don’t notion I’d ever forget hearing that match strike neither.”

(2) “I confidenced them of that,” Slidell said, smiling. “They’ve been of a wary nature since their scare last week.”

(3) “Damn if he don’t look like a bobcat for the spots on him,” Hank said when she finished.

(4) “You might could get that well done before the snow flies.”

(5) “I misdoubt there’s a man alive who’d not have wished for it sometime in his life…”

(6) “The telegram said his lungs is scorched. Hurt his eyes too but he ain’t blinded, and that’s a blessing for there’s many what have been. But he won’t never be the man he was.”

(7) “They’s folks will pay cash money for music handsome as that.”

If the title of this post made perfect sense to you, then you’re way ahead of me. But just in case, we’d best recap. Neal Whitman wrote a good article at Grammar Girl recently on the possible origins of because as a standalone preposition. This helpful passage from Whitman sets out the context:

In Standard English, the word “because” can be used two ways. One of them is to introduce a clause, as in “Aardvark was late because he was waiting for the repairman to show up.” Used this way, “because” is a subordinating conjunction. The other is to team up with “of” to form what’s called a compound preposition. For example, “Aardvark was late because of heavy traffic.” In the past three or four years, though, a new usage for “because” has been developing.

The new usage – older than 3–4 years, mind – is what Laura Bailey and Mark Liberman, respectively, have referred to as “because+noun” and “because NOUN”. Liberman says the idiom usually seems to imply “that the referenced line of reasoning is weak”. Sometimes, yes, but it’s also commonly used just for convenience, or effect: No work tomorrow because holidays!; Of course evolution is true, because science.

Because X is fashionably slangy at the moment, diffusing rapidly across communities. It has a snappy, jocular feel, with a syntactic jolt that allows long explanations to be forgone. Because time-strapped. Maybe the causal factor is so obvious as to need no elaboration, or the speaker is distracted or giddy, or online and eager to save effort and move on, or maybe the construction appeals for undefined aesthetic or social reasons.

Gretchen McCulloch, at All Things Linguistic, points out that there seem to be restrictions on what kind of noun phrases can occur here. Providing examples of what works and doesn’t work for her (e.g., Yes to: I can’t come out tonight because homework/essays; No to: I can’t come out tonight because lots of homework/this essay), she concludes:

it seems like the because+noun construction really must consist of a bare noun, not a noun with a determiner or an adjective. However, I think I might be able to be okay with:

? I can never get to bed at a reasonable hour because interesting people on the internet!

With new usages, as with old ones, what works or doesn’t varies from person to person. Bare nouns certainly seem more common in the X slot, and tend to carry more emphasis, but I’ve seen longer noun phrases, and other classes of words, used too; there are examples below.

The construction is more versatile than “because+noun” suggests. Prepositional because can be yoked to verbs (Can’t talk now because cooking), adjectives (making up examples because lazy), interjections (Because yay!), and maybe adverbs too, though in strings like Because honestly., the adverb is functioning more as an exclamation. The resulting phrases are all similarly succinct and expressive.

Here are some examples from Twitter, categorised by grammatical class:

Nouns, noun phrases, proper nouns:

Dow closes at record high for 35th time this year because Obama http://t.co/XKDwq67K5D—
The Daily Edge (@TheDailyEdge) November 11, 2013

Swear I can't be the only one who really doesn't give a shit about the color of m&m's and just eats them by the mouthful because chocolate.—
nate (@Nate_Fair) November 12, 2013

School because studying. Studying because school.—
Andre Perrard (@AndreTAMU15) November 12, 2013

What if Chris is trolling again and actually is going to be the doctor but has to say he isn't because secret reasons?—
Bad Wolf (@_colour_bandit) March 24, 2013

rewatching teen wolf because feels—
lauren (@krejface) November 11, 2013

(Feels in the last tweet is a popular slang abbreviation of feelings, especially in the sense of strong or overwhelming emotion.)

Verbs:

Bye going to study for English because didn't finish this morning because fell asleep—
~ 19 days / tired (@charminrauhl) November 10, 2013

stomach ache because laughing lol—
StyPayHorLikSon♥ (@reverd1d) November 12, 2013

Hot cocoa because need.—
Johanna (@JoWesterhof) November 12, 2013

Would a perfume ban violate the First Amendment? Is that expression? Because want.—
Jillian C. York (@jilliancyork) November 07, 2013

Those moments when you choose to eat a salad not because you want salad… but because want croutons.—
Rebekah Loper (@RebekahLoper) November 07, 2013

Adjectives:

Going to bed way early because exhausted:/—
Morgan♡ (@_mo_mo37) November 07, 2013

PREDICTION: Zach Edwards will be ESPN's impact player against Rutgers next week because random.—
Cincy on the Prowl (@CincyOTProwl) November 09, 2013

{Falls on her bed and cuddles pillows because tired}—
Devanhi Evergrace (@MirkwoodsMuse) November 13, 2013

A lot of people should really start thinking before they talk because stupid.—
Clayton Collins (@ClaytonJCollins) August 16, 2013

Interjections:

I need to talk to my cousin too. because oooh !—
Kimani✌ ♥ (@CaylaKx3) November 12, 2013

That feeling you get when you finish an essay and you just want to cry because yay—
Alexis Isaacson (@AlexisIsaacson) November 12, 2013

I might suggest taking @KameronHurley's suggestion and talking about stuff you like today using the hashtag #thingsilike. Because YAY THINGS—
Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) September 10, 2013

Admittedly, not in the UK yet, because aargh.—
Richard Cobbett (@richardcobbett) June 10, 2013

Uhmmm I wish my friend would of told me about windows down sooner because #woohoo—
I Love you Connor (@JessupFan) August 26, 2012

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On Language Log I left a comment (before I’d checked) suggesting the usage could’ve come from the “because race car” meme of 2011. But corpus searches show examples from years before that. GloWbE has loads, with many of the noun phrases recurring – science, math, people, art, reasons, comedy, bacon, ineptitude, fun, patriarchy, politics, school, intersectionality, and winner all show up at least twice in the X slot.

Scanning COHA and COCA for similar constructions, I found examples from ABC’s This Week, 2012: “I’m supporting the Patriots because Patriots.”; CNN’s Larry King Show, 2001: “And of course, that was last thing in the world she would do because publicity.” (though the omission of a definite article makes me wonder if it was poorly transcribed); and NBC’s Dateline, 2005:

I definitely kind of viewed him as a suspect.

Why?

Well, because motive.

Fox News Sunday, 15 years ago, has: “And Primary Colors I think has hit the country like a dud, because behavior. It’s not inspiring.” But I’m not sure: it may be more like “because behaviour, it’s not inspiring”, where the noun is fronted and the grammar, though loose, doesn’t use the prepositional because we’re looking at. Ditto this from Ebony, 2007: “People die of heart attacks and strokes because diabetes. It is one of the more underlisted causes of death…”

Written examples of prepositional because aren’t rare, but they’re pretty much unheard of in edited text, except where it’s reported speech. COCA offers the following, from the Roeper Review, 1996: “But motivation alone does not assure success: ‘Because circumstances. I was just lucky, really…’”

There’s also an old and standard construction that’s superficially very similar to prepositional because. The last time I remember seeing it was in Final Cut, Steven Bach’s book on the making of Heaven’s Gate:

It was pointed out that there seemed to be plenty of time for endless reexamination of footage or for monomaniacal reworking of technical processes, but those all were justified in the name of Art, while seeing how the picture played before an audience was both pointless, because Cimino knew how it would play, and ignoble because a question of mere Commerce.

It’s different, though, because elliptical. Bach’s “ignoble because a question…” is a grammatical elision of “ignoble because it was a question…”. Our non-standard idiom, by contrast, isn’t eliding particular words – it’s substituting for a whole, possibly vague, train of thought, and could take the form “because Commerce(!)”. Bach’s couldn’t.

[Analogous examples, from Time magazine, 1929: “Professor Einstein holds that perception is generally false because relative.”; and Michele Vialet, 2002: “The price for failing to heed this warning and do justice to the fundamental polyphony of any society is a second outburst of violence, more extreme than the first occurrence because self-annihilating.”]

But back to prepositional because. Where did it come from? No one is quite sure. Neal Whitman agrees with Language Log commenters who think it could be from “Because hey”–type sentences (If life gives you lemons, keep them, because, hey, free lemons), where hey functions “like an adaptor, letting you shift from the ordinary speech register to this casual and condensed register”. And then people started dropping the hey.

It’s not always hey, either: take this line from the linguistically trend-setting Buffy, season 5 (January 2001): “I don’t even get how we made that guy, because, wow, advanced!” There may also be forerunners in child–parent exchanges like “Why? That’s the why” and “Why? Because.”; and in the popular insults “Because shut up” and “Because fuck you, that’s why.”

However it arose, it seems to be spreading. Language loves economy, and the sheer efficiency of this use of because is likely boosting its popularity. Similar constructions are occurring with but, also, so, thus and similar words – see the frame from xkcd, above. And in the Language Log thread (which is worth reading in full), Rod Johnson says a friend “ended a litany of miscellaneous complaints with ‘In conclusion, STUFF.’” All these syntactic compressions may be reinforcing each other.

I’ve used the construction myself, though not often. On Twitter a year ago I was asked if there’s a “male equivalent of feminist”, and because of the medium’s spatial limitations (and because I was impulsively drawn to the unorthodox syntax) I said: “No precise equivalent, because patriarchy, but ‘masculist’/'masculinist’ is closest. Interpretations of it vary a lot.”

Is prepositional-because grammatical? Sure. Not in Standard English, of course. But lots of people are using it in a systematic and semantically transparent way. It has obvious appeal in a range of informal contexts, though whether it manages ultimately to insinuate itself into more formally acceptable usage remains to be seen.

You needn’t use or like this usage of because, and you might even find it annoying, but there’s nothing linguistically problematic about it. Because grammar weirds, because language.

The oddly named letter H is usually pronounced “aitch” /eɪtʃ/ in British English, but in Ireland we tend to aspirate it as “haitch” /heɪtʃ/. In my biology years I would always have said “a HLA marker”, never “an HLA marker”. This haitching is a distinctive feature of Hiberno-English, one that may have originated as an a hypercorrection but is now the norm in most Irish dialects.

A search on IrishTimes.com returned 1,946 hits for “a HSE” and 92 for “an HSE” (HSE = Health Service Executive), excluding readers’ letters and three false positives of Irish-language an HSE “the HSE”. Even allowing for duplications, this shows the emphatic preference for aspirating H in standard Hiberno-English. Haitchers gonna haitch.

Pronunciation comes bundled with a lot of cultural baggage, and whether one aspirates H or not can provoke strong reaction. Online you’ll find articles, blog posts, videos, forum comments and Facebook groups insisting on “aitch” and deploring “haitch”, while in Northern Ireland it’s a social/religious shibboleth of violent significance, as I’ve noted elsewhere: Catholics haitch, while Protestants aitch.

Haitching and aitching vary both regionally and socially, then, and sometimes this variation manifests in strikingly contradictory fashion. Last week’s edition of the local freesheet Galway Advertiser appears to have hedged its bets in choosing between an aitch and a haitch in the headline of a story spread across pages 1 and 2:

Newspapers should strive for consistent style, but I’m not aiming to poke fun here. These things happen, and the consequences are negligible to nil. Regardless of how it came about, it’s an interesting discrepancy.

The history of h-dropping and h-adding at the start of various words is quite a tangle, made worse by the fact that people often feel their own version must be correct and others’ therefore can’t be. I’ve seen real fury directed at the American practice of muting the H in herb, from listeners probably unaware that sounding the H was a later convention. But that’s another can of worms-from-haitch-ee-double-hockey-sticks, to use a euphemism I heard lately.

The history of H itself is also quite complex. From the OED:

When the Roman alphabet was applied to the Germanic languages, H was used initially for the simple aspirate or breath-sound, which had arisen out of a pre-Germanic or Aryan k, through the stages of guttural aspirate /kh/, and guttural spirant /x/ . . . .
The name aitch, which is now so remote from any connection with the sound, goes back through Middle English ache to Old French ache = Spanish ache, Italian acca, pointing to a late Latin *accha, *ahha, or *aha, exemplifying the sound; cf. Italian effe, elle, emme, etc. (The earlier Latin name was ha.)

In Australia some see the spread of haitch (through the efforts of “linguistically subversive Irish nuns”) as a measure of society’s “linguistic, even moral, disintegration”. Lynne Murphy has read in several places that haitch marks the Catholic-educated in Australia, though Adrian Morgan in a comment says “there is definitely no widespread perception in Australia that such a correlation exists.”

Throughout the UK there appears to be a drift towards haitching the letter’s name. Jo Kim of the BBC Pronunciation Unit – which despite enduring protest considers “haitch” (or “haytch”) to be a legitimate variant – says the pronunciation:

is increasingly being used by native English-speaking people all across the country [i.e., the UK], irrespective of geographical provenance or social standing. Polls have shown that the uptake of haytch by younger native speakers is on the rise.

This observation is informed by research from John Wells, who in his Longman Pronunciation Dictionary presented the following trend:

Visiting universities around Ireland, Wells was “particularly struck by the expression piː heɪtʃ diː PhD” (“pee haitch dee”) – a pronunciation that would be customary for me and most people I know.

I wonder whether aitching H correlates at all with the wine–whine merger – or, phrased another way, whether haitching H correlates with pronouncing wine and whine differently. I’d be interested to hear your preference, “aitch” or “haitch”, and what your dialect is.

I’ve a couple of new posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. First, ’Scuse me, squire – ’tis just aphaeresis gives a brief account of the linguistic phenomenon known as aphaeresis or apheresis, which involves:

the dropping of an initial sound or sounds of a word. Despite its uncommon name, the process is familiar. It’s what lies behind the shortening of especially to ’specially, because to ’cause (also spelt cos), espy to spy, esquire to squire, and alone to lone. As you can see, what’s lost is often an unstressed initial vowel – this is a particular type of aphaeresis known also as aphesis.

Though it’s essentially a phonetic shortcut, what happens in speech tends to manifest in writing. Poets are fond of aphaeresis because it lets them manipulate prosody better. This is why in many poems you’ll see upon appear as aphaeretic ’pon, amid as ’mid and it was as ’twas.

Aphaeresis also explains the silent ‘k’ in knife and knee, and why drawing rooms aren’t for drawing in, and it lies behind pairs of now-semantically-distinct words such as amend and mend, and etiquette and ticket. Read the rest for more.

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Is banning slang counterproductive? follows up on a recent news story in the UK where secondary school students were given a list of words and phrases to avoid. I am of course sceptical (and skeptical) about this measure:

That those responsible have implemented the ban only in certain ‘formal language zones’ – not the canteen, for instance – suggests they know how futile a whole-school ban would be. It also suggests they trust that their students know how to switch from formal to informal registers – so why introduce the ban at all? Couldn’t awareness be raised through classroom discussion?

Complaining about young people’s slang is a popular pastime among older generations. Even celebrities get stuck in. Actor Emma Thompson lambasted what she deemed improper language: ‘It makes you sound stupid, and you’re not stupid.’ Compare her criticism with linguist William Dwight Whitney’s remark that slang combines ‘exuberance of mental activity’ with the ‘natural delight of language-making’.

The post also considers what the students themselves think of the ban, and shows how it might backfire on them socially.

Comments on either post are welcome here or at Macmillan Dictionary Blog, and my archive is here if you want to browse older articles.

Over at Macmillan Dictionary Blog I have a couple of new posts to share. First up, The grumbling heart of ‘curmudgeon’ looks at a much-loved and quite mysterious word:

It’s a fine word, curmudgeon, a pleasing way to say we are not pleased. It’s often associated with middle-aged or older men – Waldorf and Statler are classic examples – but this is not a prerequisite. For editorial and pedantic types of all ages, curmudgeonry can be a badge of pride – a righteous grumpiness marking the pursuit of perfection, or as close to it as possible in the circumstances.

The word is also something of a mystery. Despite its colourful past, we don’t know where it came from, and an array of early spellings – including curmudgin, cormogeon, cormoggian, and curre-megient – merely invites further speculation.

Curmudgeon also plays a memorable part in lexicographical lore, owing to certain consequences of Samuel Johnson’s dubious etymology.

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What is metonymy? Enquiring minds want to know offers a short account of the figure of speech known as metonymy, with lots of examples (some of them debatable):

In the familiar saying the pen is mightier than the sword, neither noun is meant literally – rather, they refer by metonymy to the acts of writing and warfare, respectively. . .

Centres of power are often metonymized. Journalists talk about Washington or the White House when they mean the president or presidency of the USA, they use Downing Street as shorthand for the office of the UK prime minister, the crown for the queen, king, or monarchy, and Brussels for institutions of the European Union. In common parlance the law often substitutes for the police, while Hollywood can mean that area’s film industry and Silicon Valley the tech industry.

The post continues along those lines, and the comments provide further examples and some constructive criticism.

Sometime Christmas week I’ll have a new post at Macmillan on words and phrases of the year, so take a look if you’re online then. Archived posts are here, if you want to browse older discussions.

Here’s a fun bit of news. In Minneapolis last night the American Dialect Society (ADS) declared because its Word of the Year 2013. Going up against topical heavyweights like selfie, Bitcoin, Obamacare, and twerk, the humble conjunction-turned-maybe-preposition proved a surprising and emphatic winner with 127 votes.

Well, surprising to some – in a post I wrote for Macmillan Dictionary Blog before Christmas, I named because X my word/phrase of the year. I didn’t dwell on it because I’ve already written about it at length, in ‘Because’ has become a preposition, because grammar, where I described it as a “succinct and expressive” innovation.

That post on because X (the title of which I regret) ended up getting quite a lot of attention, thanks in part to Megan Garber’s follow-up for the Atlantic, which spread to various other news and aggregator sites. It also stoked considerable debate because even linguists disagree about because‘s grammatical identity in the construction.

It’s sometimes called because NOUN, but I avoid this because it also licenses verbs, adjectives, and interjections; see my earlier post for examples. As Ben Zimmer put it, 2013 saw because “[explode] with new grammatical possibilities in informal online use”, while his Word Routes report says it’s “fitting that a bunch of language scholars would celebrate such a linguistically innovative form”.

The American Dialect Society’s WOTY event is the biggie for language nerds, not least because it has a range of interesting categories. A couple of days ago I emailed the ADS with my nominations, which I then posted on Twitter:

Sent my nominations for word of the year to @americandialect: –splain (most useful), doge (creative), Sharknado (unnecessary). [1/2] #woty13—
Stan Carey (@StanCarey) January 02, 2014

…selfie (most likely to succeed), catfish (least likely to succeed), least untruthful (euphemistic), because X (overall WOTY) [2/2] #woty13—
Stan Carey (@StanCarey) January 02, 2014

A new category this year was Most Productive, which was dominated by affixes and libfixes like –splaining and –shaming. I was glad least untruthful won Most Euphemistic, and disappointed that catfish trumped doge for Most Creative. See the ADS press release for all the nominations and vote counts, and Ben Zimmer’s post for commentary.

Because also won Most Useful, closely beating slash in the latter’s new guise as a coordinating conjunction. I wrote briefly and approvingly about this use of slash last year, and I’d like to have seen the honours shared. But impossible, because temporal asymmetry, so whatever. If this slash keeps spreading, though, its day slash night will come.

I’ll be returning to the subject of ungrammatical wordplay memes – why they appeal, what motivates them, and so on – in a later post. Because such fascinate, and very language.

Update: 

I’ve been waiting for someone to analyse the grammar of because X, because there’s a lot of uncertainty over whether it’s acting as a preposition, and I’m not qualified to adjudicate. Also, in my earlier post on because X I noted that it wasn’t just because behaving this way: so, also, but, thus et al. were doing so too.

Now, at All Things Linguistic, Gretchen McCulloch has posted a very helpful deconstruction of the construction [and see the comments on her post for discussion]: Why the new “because” isn’t a preposition (but is actually cooler):

It’s not that because is newly a preposition: depending on your definition, it’s either still not a preposition or it always has been. Instead, it’s that subordinating conjunctions as a class are appearing in a new type of construction, that is, with interjectional complements in addition to the prepositional phrases and clauses that we’ve seen for a long time. Harder to explain maybe, but the data’s very robust and the results are pretty cool.

Interjectional complements doesn’t make for snappy headlines like new preposition does, but that’s immaterial. I find Gretchen’s analysis persuasive, and the discussions she’s had with other linguists (some are linked from her post) suggest a degree of consensus. Competing hypotheses might emerge, but I’m gravitating around this one for now.

More discussion and links at Language Log’s ‘ADS WOTY: “Because”‘; and Language Hat’s ‘Because (Prep).’

Photo of Kabosu by Atsuko Sato, modified because doge.

It started on Twitter, as these things often do. I read a comment about linguists and lexicographers being to language “what grave robbers are to archeology” (the context: hatred of the newly popular because X phrase), and I tweeted it with a raised eyebrow.

Jonathon Owen replied that he wished he’d been given a “leather jacket, bullwhip, and fedora” upon graduation, James Callan said he wanted to see an “Indiana Jones pastiche focused on a linguist”, and I felt it was a meme waiting to happen. So without further ado, let me introduce Indo-European Jones (or Indy for short).

James got the giant boulder ball rolling (click on images to enlarge):

I jumped on the mine cart meme-wagon:

James added another:

Jonathon joined in:

And more of mine follow, for silliness’ sake. Apologies to Jonathon for this next one – I think vowels works better as an echo of powers:

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These all refashion lines from the films, but if you take a notion to modify the meme some other way, please do. Here’s the blank image I used. (Font style: Calibri, white, engraved.)

Updates:

Via Twitter, @ecormany offers: “we named the dog Indo-European…”; and @TSchnoebelen suggests: “I think it’s time to ask yourself…does your predicate presuppose the proposition it introduces is true?”

From (and made by) @OisinCarey:

I’ve written before about the reflexive pronoun themself, showing its history in English and potential to fill a semantic gap in the language. Once a normal, unremarkable word, themself became less preferred over time, and its use today is low: Oxford Dictionaries says it’s “not widely accepted in standard English”, while Macmillan Dictionary says “most people consider this use incorrect”. Many dictionaries omit it.

This is a pity, but these are not permanent prescriptions – they’re observations about the usage’s current state of acceptability. And they are subject to change, because language is, because we are.

Themself is no mere quirky substitute for the more familiar pronoun themselves: it enables us to make subtle anaphoric distinctions. As my earlier post shows, there are situations where the use of themselves in place of themself would be misleading. By avoiding and stigmatising themself we miss a useful linguistic trick.

Though non-standard, or at best less than fully standard, themself is slowly growing in popularity and status; it is used, for example, in Canadian law. There’s no overriding reason to reject it; it’s just a convention we’ve lost, and could regain. Grammatically, themself is no worse than singular they, which is no worse than singular you, which is now (but was not always) judged beyond reproach.

I’ve developed a soft spot for themself, and like seeing it in the wild.* A contemporary example comes courtesy of @jprmercado on Twitter, who shared an image from the new Marvel comic Young Avengers #15. The line: “Now, the one of us who sacrifices themself… the one who stops being human for a good cause… it’s me.” (Writer: Kieron Gillen; comic artists: Joe Quinones, Jamie McKelvie, Becky Cloonan.)

It also occurs in China Miéville’s Kraken (a novel I described in a recent post about gender-neutral henchpersons as a darkly comic cephalopod-cult apocalypse romp). Here’s the relevant passage:

The women behind the reception desk stared at her in alarm. “You have to help me,” Marge said. She made herself gabble. “No, listen. Someone here calls themself floodbrother, yeah online. Listen, you have to get them a message.”

It’s an interesting decision. The customary choice would be themselves, or himself because it’s reasonable to provisionally infer male gender from floodbrother (cf. singular they in reference to the Buddha). But Miéville used themself, and why not. It’s easier to say than themselves, especially before another ‘f’; it’s in keeping with Kraken’s shifting selves operating in multiple planes; and its progressiveness fits the writer’s ambition and invention.

Outside fiction themself is creeping up too. A search on Guardian.co.uk returns quite a few hits – several in the ‘Soulmates’ dating section, owing to the frequency of reflexive reference (I’m someone who…; looking for someone who…). It pops up less often in the NYT and BBC, and about once a year on IrishTimes.com, but one of these is from someone who pays close attention to language usage: Lucy Kellaway.

In her original FT article, Kellaway says an authority on elevator etiquette deems it rude to press the call button if someone is already waiting: “To do so shows either that you don’t understand how lifts work, or that you consider the other person too dumb to have pressed the button themself.” Themselves would be the default here, but I’m glad Kellaway went with the unfashionable word. It could do with high-profile adopters.

Be they fictional, factual, or self-narrated, the worlds we deal with are packed with uncertain reference and identities that are complex, mutable, and ultimately self-defined. Peeves be damned: generic themself, with its contained multitudes, can only rise in value.

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* My fondness for it increased when a commenter on my earlier post called it “stupid, wrong, ungraceful, and unnecessary” and said it would “mutilate the language”. No kidding.