A conservative criticism commonly levelled at new words is that they are “unnecessary” – that we already have a perfectly good and proper word for whatever it is, so why introduce this needless alternative, this objectionable offshoot, this linguistic weed? Because god forbid there should be an overabundance of words. Think of the mess.

Traditionalists decry or resist neologisms they find redundant, those that overlap with existing words rather than fill an obvious gap in the language. There’s simply no need for it, goes the argument. And it’s not just words. New grammatical patterns get the same treatment: after writing about the innovative because X construction, I was told it was ugly and unnecessary.

An aside: Sometimes neologisms are distinguished from nonce-words, words invented for a single occasion or situation. Critics spare these because they’re disposable coinages and not seriously intended as additions to the language. Though sometimes a useful distinction, it’s not always a clear one; in the rapid everyday exchange of language, no one knows what will catch on.

[Cartoon by Tom Gauld for the Guardian]

And so to this idea of necessity. Eric Partridge, in Usage and Abusage, after noting that neologisms “should be formed with some regard to etymological decency” (lest they be monstrous hybrids), says new words adopted directly from other languages are less objectionable “provided always that the new words fill a gap” (emphasis mine).

William Zinsser, in his classic On Writing Well, puts his foot down firmly on upstarts and colloquialisms he dislikes: “I won’t accept ‘notables’ and ‘greats’ and ‘upcoming’ and countless other newcomers. They are cheap words and we don’t need them.” No amazeroonie for him, I bet.

Bryan Garner, in A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, says neologisms usually:

demand an explanation or justification, since the English language is already well stocked. New words must fill demonstrable voids to survive . . .

And so on. I just don’t get this parsimonious fixation on sufficiency. Avoiding new and “needless” words in formal contexts is all well and good, but what’s wrong with a grand superfluity elsewhere? Will the language look untidy if words float around not filling vital gaps? Will they gum up the works? Arthur Quiller-Couch, in The Art of Writing, found it better:

to err on the side of liberty than on the side of the censor: since by the manumitting of new words we infuse new blood into a tongue of which (or we have learnt nothing from Shakespeare’s audacity) our first pride should be that it is flexible, alive . . .

Similarly, G. H. Vallins declares in Better English that there is “no more fatuous and harmful activity of the pedant than resisting new inventions” and that “the ultimate question is, Is it necessary?” To answer that properly we must consider carefully the word necessary.

When we talk about whether there’s a need for some grammatical or lexical innovation, we shouldn’t limit our interpretation to semantics. Language is more than the transmission of lexical meaning, and words meet other kinds of need: social, pragmatic, stylistic, aesthetic.

And creative. We may enjoy the fun of new words, what I’ve described as an “instinctive inclination to play with words and letters as though they were an abstract kind of toy”. One of the main arenas for this kind of language play and experimentation is slang, and one of the most interesting books on slang I’ve read in a while is Michael Adams’ Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon.

Slayer Slang offers a robust defence of new, “unnecessary” usages. Discussing the –age suffix popularised by Buffy, Adams says the resulting forms (slayage, sliceage, punnage, etc.) are:

semantically less important than in English generally, that is, the words thus supplied usually do not fill gaps in current vocabulary; instead, they perform an important social function within the speech community that uses slayer slang. . . . Necessity is always accompanied by assumptions, however, and to call a redundant form “unnecessary” or “needless” is to presume that one can accurately gauge “the need.” The need for -age in slayer slang is social, not lexical, and a matter of style, though admittedly not the style one reads about in style guides.

One can read into this the traditional conflation of informal English with inferior English – an unfortunate idea with no linguistic basis but great social weight. Later, writing about the speed of language change and the use of what he calls ephemeral language, Adams admits to a “bias about the desirability of flux”:

It seems to me that any change is desirable if it serves a purpose. If a word fills a lexical gap, it serves a purpose; if a word or syntactic pattern expresses a particular speaker’s sense of verbal style, it serves a purpose, too. Such ephemeral purposes, along with their ephemeral effects, are completely justified. . . .

The very idea of “lexical gap” is notoriously problematic: ostensibly, there is a difference between being happy and getting a happy . . .

This refers to a usage in Buffy, and more broadly in slayer slang (which extends into the wider Buffyverse), where happy functions as a noun: It gives me a happy; Hence the happy; I’m going to have a happy. It has to do with a happy moment rather than a general state of happiness. Adams continues, persuasively:

If study of slayer slang exposes anything, it’s the potency of style, relative to lexical gaps, in the creation of new words, new senses of words, and new syntactic patterns. . . . The fetish of suffixation, while it sometimes produces forms whose meanings are as subtly distinct from such established alternatives as happy n from happy adj, just as often yields forms without a fillip of lexical meaning different from standard alternatives—drinkage, in terms of lexical semantics, does not mean anything other than drinking. Yet not all meaning is lexical, and the style expressed in drinkage, even though it might not appeal to a language maven any more than a particular cuff or neckline would appeal to Joan Rivers, is style nonetheless.

Amen to that. Now go forth and ephemerise.

Filed under: language, slang, usage, wordplay, words Tagged: affixation, Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffyverse, grammar, language, language change, linguistics, Michael Adams, morphology, neologisms, politics of language, prescriptivism, slang, slayer slang, usage, wordplay, words

From ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’ by Eavan Boland (full poem on my Tumblr):

let the world I knew become the space
between the words that I had by heart
and all the other speech that always was
becoming the language of the country that
I came to in nineteen fifty-one:
barely-gelled, a freckled six-year-old,
overdressed and sick on the plane,
when all of England to an Irish child

was nothing more than what you’d lost and how:
was the teacher in the London convent who,
when I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom
turned and said—“You’re not in Ireland now.”

I grew up in Ireland using expressions and grammatical constructions that I took to be normal English, only to discover years later that what counts as normal in language usage can be highly dependent on geography and dialect. I amn’t sure when I realised it, but amn’t is an example of this.

Standard English has an array of forms of the verb be for various persons and tenses with a negative particle (n’t) affixed: isn’t, wasn’t, aren’t, weren’t. But there’s a curious gap. In the tag question I’m next, ___ I?, the usual form is the unsystematic am I not or the irregular aren’t I (irregular because we don’t say *I are). Why not amn’t?

Amn’t I talking to you? (Anne Emery, Death at Christy Burke’s, 2011)

Amn’t I after telling you that, said Donal. (Sean O’Casey, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, 1949)

Amn’t /’æmənt/, though centuries old, is not part of standard English. But it is common in Ireland, used especially in colloquial speech though not limited to informal registers. It’s also used in Scotland (alongside amnae and other variants) and parts of England – the OED says the north, and west midlands – and occasionally elsewhere, such as Wales.

How amn’t came to be so geographically limited is not fully clear. Another variant, an’t, probably supplanted it in general usage because speakers wanted to avoid sounding /n/ immediately after /m/; see Michael Quinion and Robert Beard for brief commentary on this. David Crystal says it was therefore:

a natural development to simplify the consonant cluster. The final /t/ made it more likely that the simplification would go to /ant/ rather than /amt/, and this is what we find in 18th century texts, where it appears as an’t.

An’t, also spelt a’n’t, is the “phonetically natural and the philologically logical shortening”, writes Eric Partridge in Usage and Abusage. It too fell from favour, but not before morphing in two significant ways. It gave rise to ain’t, which has its own lively history, and it also began being spelt aren’t (by “orthographic analogy”, in Crystal’s phrase), which is pronounced the same as an’t in non-rhotic accents.

This explains aren’t I, which would otherwise seem a grammatical anomaly. Indeed, Gabe Doyle notes that its irregularity “earns the ire of the accountants” of English. But it has steadily gained acceptability in major English-speaking regions. Irish and Scottish dialects are the exception in retaining and favouring its ancestor, amn’t I.

[image source]

Despite its vintage, its logic and its convenience, not everyone likes amn’t. It’s dismissed as “ugly” by Eric Partridge and as “substandard” by Bryan Garner in his Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman describe amn’t I as “clunky” in Origins of the Specious.

Garner is incorrect, and the other pronouncements are subjective or prejudicial. Amn’t is not part of standard English, but it is standard and thoroughly normal in Hiberno-English. There’s nothing intrinsically unsound or deficient about it unless you prize minimal syllabicity, or prestige. It’s often called awkward, but it doesn’t feel awkward if you grow up with it. Even aesthetically amn’t has unique appeal.

Amn’t I with you? Amn’t I your girl? (James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922)

Ye don’t want me, don’t ye? And amn’t I as good as the best of them? Amn’t I? (Patrick MacGill, The Rat-pit, 1915)

So how is amn’t used? Commonly in questions: straightforward interrogative (Joyce, above), tag (MacGill), and rhetorical (see post title). These are the structures typically noted by lexicographers: Robert Burchfield’s revision of Fowler says it’s “used as part of the tag question amn’t I?”, while Terence Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English (2nd ed.) associates it with “negative first-person questions”.

Neither Burchfield nor Dolan mentions other uses, but amn’t is not so confined. It’s used, for example, in declarative statements of the form I amn’t. Though even Irish people, in my experience, usually say I’m not in such cases, some of them also say I amn’t.

I amn’t sure I should go on at all or if you’d like a line or two from your bad old penny. (Joseph O’Connor, Ghost Light, 2010)

And you, my poor changling, have to go to Birmingham next week, and I, poor divil, amn’t well enough to go out to far-away places for even solitary walks. (J.M. Synge, Letters to Molly, 1971)

A bit odder is the double negative question amn’t I not, which I’ve come across in both tags (I’m not drunk neither, amn’t I not) and more centrally (amn’t I not turble [terrible] altogether). A straw poll I held on Twitter suggests, unsurprisingly, that it’s a good deal rarer than other uses of amn’t, but several people still confirm using it.

My Twitter query also showed that amn’t occurs in more than just tag questions in Scotland, disproving a claim I’d encountered earlier. It prompted lots of anecdata and discussion on the word’s contemporary use in Ireland and elsewhere, and is available on Storify for interested readers.

If I amn’t mistaken, the pinch is here. (Athenian Gazette, May 1691)

Oh, Peader, but amn’t I Dublin born and bred? (Katie Flynn, Strawberry Fields, 1994)

Amn’t may grow in frequency and stature or it might, like ain’t, remain quite stigmatised in formal English. At the moment it’s undoubtedly a minority usage, with just four hits in the vast COHA corpus, five in COCA, and one in the BNC. Even GloWbE, with its 1.9 billion words from informal sources, offers a mere thirty-one hits.

Last year I retweeted a comment from @Ann_imal, a US speaker who said she had “started saying ‘amn’t I’ instead of ‘aren’t I,’ and no one (except AutoCorrect) has questioned me”. A search on Twitter suggests she’s not alone: amn’t has modest but undeniable currency in Englishes and idiolects around the world.

Social attitudes are decisive. Language Hat has noted that children acquiring language sometimes use amn’t – it is, after all, an intuitive construction – only to lose it along the way; a search on Google Books returns similar reports. LH used the word himself, and says, “I don’t remember when or why I stopped. The pressures of ‘proper English’ are insidious.”

In a neat inversion of the usual pattern, a commenter at Language Log recalls using aren’t I as a child and being corrected to amn’t I. More of this kind of parental guidance, or at least less proscriptive regulation in the other direction, may help amn’t gain more of a foothold outside Ireland and Scotland.

Not that I’ve anything against aren’t I, or ain’t for that matter. But if anyone felt they wanted to adopt amn’t and got past the social barrier, they would likely find it a handy, pleasing contraction. And that counts for a lot these days, amirite amn’t I right?

*

Today, by the way, is (US) National Grammar Day, which by semantic sorcery I’m interpreting as International Grammar Day to highlight a characteristic feature of grammar in Ireland. The Sentence first archives have lots more Irish English grammar and vocabulary.

I’m part of a tribe that thinks of grammar mainly as morphology and syntax, not spelling and style. But for more of both, visit the official website or browse the #grammarday tag on Twitter. Don’t miss John E. McIntyre’s wonderful pulp pastiche Grammarnoir.

Updates:

At her blog The Other Side of Sixty, Corkonian wisewebwoman says: “you wouldn’t believe the shellacking I took for brazenly using ‘amn’t’ when I moved to Canada. Laughter, disbelief and mockery ensued.”

I like a good coincidence. While editing this post I listened to the Mogwai song ‘Wizard Motor‘ on repeat, unaware, before a tweet from Helen McClory, that Mogwai also have a song called ‘Moses? I Amn’t':

Earlier this year Ragan.com published an article titled “15 signs you’re a word nerd”. Alongside a couple of unobjectionable items (You love to read; You know the difference between “e.g.” and “i.e.”) and some that didn’t apply to me (You have at least three word games on your phone) were several that I got stuck on:

Typos and abbreviations in texts drive you a little crazy.

No, not even a little. There are more than enough things in the world to be bothered by without getting worked up over trivial mistakes and conventional shortcuts in phone messages. (I assume texts here is short for text messages: obviously the “good” kind of abbreviation…)

It’s a question of register. How formally correct our language is, or needs to be, depends on context. Text messages seldom require standard English to be fully observed, and most people who text me have no difficulty code-switching appropriately. Nor do I have any difficulty coping with this informal variety of the language. Next!

You can’t look past spelling and punctuation errors on signs and restaurant menus.

As a word nerd I find it very easy. I’m not editing these signs, or correcting them for an exam. Sure, some mistakes are glaring. But maybe the person responsible for them wasn’t blessed with as much education or training as the peever, or isn’t a native English speaker.

Even without such an excuse, it’s no big deal so long as the intended message is clear. Obviously businesses should have their printed material proofread – I do this professionally, after all. But when I’m out buying fruit and veg and see grocer’s apostrophes, I may notice but I really could(n’t) care less. There’s no confusion, and I’m off-duty.

cartoon via whattheduck.net

Other “signs you’re a word nerd” include the following:

If you don’t already own these grammar correction stickers [commercial link], you just added them to your wish list.

You may or may not carry a red pen to correct egregious errors on the fly.

“May or may not carry a red pen” covers all possible scenarios, so it’s not a sign of anything. Disregarding the hedge: Some people add apostrophes to official signs. Others diligently amend handwritten notices. I think doing this without invitation, whether with red pen or stickers, is presumptuous at best, and quite possibly rude.

Making a song and dance about minor errors in unedited and informal writing seems to serve the self-righteousness of the complainer more than the edification of the writer or the good of the language. English needs no protecting, and can be celebrated without fussy judgement of trivial mistakes. (When I tweeted this, an editor in the US told me erroneously that I’d misspelt judgment. Read into that what you will.)

Sticklers are precious about correctness, often seeking to impose a narrow conception of it universally. They see nothing wrong with casually disparaging anyone who makes a mistake (i.e., everyone) or who doesn’t meet their exacting standards. I don’t claim to understand the motivations for this severity, though I have some ideas.

A library book in Galway (Alan Watts’s “What is Zen?”) defaced by a misguided stickler-turned-vandal

It’s a popular stereotype, the language lover or word nerd or grammar geek who is comfortably contemptuous of error and even of legitimate variation. A more recent article on Ragan.com, “12 most unforgivable writing mistakes”, peeves about singular they and misspellings like affect/effect. To call these unforgivable is preposterous and cheap.

This is one reason people are nervous and diffident about grey areas in language and “grammar mistakes”: they associate them with petty pedantry over obscure distinctions and derision over trifling slips. Copy editors, as John E. McIntyre remarked today, are familiar with the unfortunate “I’d better watch my language” reaction to our tribe.

Language learners and less educated native speakers especially can feel anxious and self-conscious about usage, and this is made worse by the antisocial intolerance and condescension that pass for mainstream sociolinguistic attitudes.

Linguistic mistakes are not shameful. Quite the opposite: they may shed light on the physical or cognitive machinery of language production, or broaden our understanding of non-standard usage (and, indirectly, of cultural etiquette). So why be a grouch?

[via: Introducing Indo-European Jones]

In his excellent natural history of language, The Power of Babel, linguist John McWhorter describes dialects – and it’s all dialects – as “developed far beyond the call of duty”. He’s referring to the way languages tend to become structurally and idiosyncratically baroque:

Left to its own devices, a human language will tend to elaborate into overt expression of subdivisions of semantic space that would not even occur to many humans as requiring attention in speech and become riddled with exceptions and rules of thumb and things only learnable by rote. This process tends to achieve its most extreme expression among groups long isolated, but any language that has been spoken for tens of thousands of years exhibits some considerable degree of “developmental overkill.” It is this feature of human language that contributes to why learning other languages as an adult is such a challenge. No language has been goodly enough to remain completely tidy and predictable, no language has not stuck its nose somewhere where it didn’t really need to go, no language classifies objects and concepts according to principles so universally intuitive that any human could pick them up in an afternoon, and in none of them are there classifications indexed to currently perceptible cultural concepts in anything better than a highly approximate manner.

This tendency towards complex over-elaboration manifests inevitably in any language that has been around long enough. The converse is that new languages have relatively little such ornamentation, which emerges only through centuries or millennia of “sound erosions and changes, grammaticalizations, rebracketings, and semantic change”.

Pidgins are simplified languages, largely stripped of unnecessary complication, that arise for utilitarian reasons between groups who lack a common tongue. So when these are “born again” as full-fledged languages, in the form of creoles, the results are comparatively free of overdevelopment – before the engine of encrustation gets going again for subsequent generations.

Yesterday evening I watched a seminar from the British Council on language learning, which took place in Cardiff and was broadcast live on YouTube (video below). There were two talks, each followed by brief Q&As, and both are well worth watching if the topics interest you.

First, Miguel Angel Muñoz explored whether learning a foreign language makes you smarter – and if so, how. He reports on research into the cognitive benefits of bi- and multilingualism, and clears up some of the uncertainty in this area. Miguel wrote a post for the British Council blog which will give you an idea of the content of his talk.

Next, Michael Rundell of Macmillan Dictionary spoke about the difference between real rules and mere usage peeves, and how we should therefore teach grammar. For a flavour, see his excellent related post where, referring to Nevile Gwynne’s championing of pre-modern grammar books, he writes:

It is hard to imagine any other field of study in which a source is recommended precisely because it is out of date.

Here’s a slide from Michael’s presentation. The reference to “Heffer 2014″ will be familiar to anyone who has read my recent posts at Macmillan Dictionary Blog.

The video is 2½ hours long. If you want to skip around, introductions begin at 3:20, Miguel starts at 7:45, and there’s an interval from 1:02:45 to 1:13:18. Michael’s talk starts (after a technical hitch) at 1:16:15 and ends at 2:20:00, at which point there’s a few minutes of closing remarks.*

It’s almost like being there, except you have to make your own tea.

*

Other British Council seminars and videos are available here.

* Or there are, if you’re twitchy about it.

Over at Macmillan Dictionary Blog I have a couple of new posts on language matters. You’re the one for me, phatic offers an overview of phatic communion, a useful term from anthropology that refers to speech intended to establish or maintain social relations (as opposed to simply exchanging information):

A familiar example (and subset) is small talk, where people exchange greetings, good wishes, congratulations, and trivialities about the weather, recent sporting events, the state of the world, and so on.

Everyday greetings, such as How’s it going? and How are you doing?, are more about presenting a friendly attitude to someone than extracting answers from them, just as the replies – Fine, thanks, etc. – are usually stereotyped and automatic rather than necessarily being accurate indications of a person’s state. Though disliked by some people, small talk is a valuable social signalling system, as is phatic communion more generally.

The article also notes the origin of the term phatic and describes manifestations of the phenomenon in Ireland.

*

Laying down the lie of the land addresses a knotty issue in English usage: the difference – and overlap – between lay and lie:

In standard English lay is transitive; that is, it takes a direct object (certain idioms excepted). You don’t just lay – you lay something. But this is a relatively recent rule, and it is very often ignored, especially in speech and informal use, where people frequently talk about laying down, laying on the floor, and so on. . . .

For many people lay meaning ‘lie’ isn’t wrong at all – it’s what comes naturally. But its use in edited prose invites criticism from those who learned the rule and want to see it observed as a mark of proper English. Like many contentious usage issues, it boils down to context and personal preference.

I look briefly at the history of this pair, noting that intransitive lay is over seven centuries old and only relatively recently became a usage to be avoided in careful prose.

Comments are welcome in either location, and older posts are available in the archive.

I’m late to the story of Weird Al and his word crimes, and I’m too busy to do it justice, but luckily there has been a glut of good commentary already, some of it linked below.

First, the song, in case you’re catching up. ‘Word Crimes’ is a new release from American comedian ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic, a novelty number about grammar, spelling and usage that borrows the template of a hit song from last year called ‘Blurred Lines’. You might want to watch or listen first, if you haven’t heard it, and you can read the lyrics here.

The video can legitimately be called a viral sensation, having quickly hurtled past 10 million views on YouTube. I’d love to tell you I enjoyed it, but mostly I winced. The wordplay is ingenious, and the production is slick, but the message – and there is a message, parody or not – spoils it: it’s a hotchpotch of ill-informed prescriptivism, a mean-spirited rant about trivial linguistic errors, non-errors, and non-standard usages traditionally decried by hobbyist peevers.

For example. Could care less isn’t wrong – it’s an idiomatic variant. Whom is on the way out in most contexts. Dangling participles aren’t so bad. The Oxford comma is just a style preference. Abbreviating words as single letters is fine in texting or very informal writing. Less for fewer isn’t wrong. Non-literal literally isn’t either (and has been used even in classic literature for literally centuries).

Anyone transgressing these constraints is denounced in the song as stupid and incoherent, a moron, a clown, a dumb mouthbreather, told they were raised in a sewer and should get back to preschool and out of the gene pool. Spastic used as an insult is less problematic in the US, and Yankovic has graciously apologised for including it. But the song’s hostility, ironic or not, is unpleasant and will give licence to grammar cranks and bullies for years to come.

There is a popular ideology that upholds standard English as a superior form of the language. This view comes from unacknowledged privilege, it is historically and linguistically naive, and it can be socially toxic. I’ve written about privilege and the language police before:

Making a song and dance about minor errors in unedited and informal writing seems to serve the self-righteousness of the complainer more than the edification of the writer or the good of the language. . . .

Language learners and less educated native speakers especially can feel anxious and self-conscious about usage, and this is made worse by the antisocial intolerance and condescension that pass for mainstream sociolinguistic attitudes. Linguistic mistakes are not shameful.

And about ‘bad grammar’ in song lyrics and other informal registers:

informal ≠ incorrect, and non-standard ≠ sub-standard. A particular kind of English – formal written style – is socially privileged, and sometimes it’s exalted at the expense of common sense or courtesy. Ignorance of these nuances means irrational peeves thrive, and people make a habit of collecting and hating everyday usages that don’t fit their narrow sense of what’s acceptable. English is replete with styles, dialects and sublanguages that are fully context-appropriate, and grammatical in their own right.

*

When I linked to criticism of ‘Word Crimes’ on Twitter, I was told he was mocking the language police. I wish he were. But Weird Al is the language police: “it was obviously a real joy to be able to vent about some of my pet peeves”; “I’m always correcting peoples’ [sic] grammar.” Nor am I persuaded by the educational argument. If you’re correcting someone’s language use (e.g., in teaching, editing), it helps to not abuse people, and to know what you’re talking about.

A desire to repeatedly ridicule misspellings, typos, learner errors and non-standard dialects does not equate to an interest in grammar.—
Stan Carey (@StanCarey) November 30, 2012

You can probably tell I don’t like language policing. Partly because it’s rude and misconceived, but also because it often serves not to inform but to scorn people who may be less socially or intellectually favoured or who have language difficulties. If you’re in a position of power and influence, why would you punch down? The song’s parodic and absurdist elements, to the extent that they’re detectable, are lost in the barrage of misguided decrees and aggressive slurs.

Weird Al seems like a good sort, and he obviously brings a lot of joy into people’s lives. Most people who have heard it seem to love ‘Word Crimes’. On one level it’s a fun, playful tune. But beneath that it’s a disheartening example of just how routine and acceptable language shaming is in mainstream culture. The following links will give an idea of the strong (if minority) backlash from other language lovers.

Lauren Squires’ 25 questions post at Language Log turns Weird Al’s pedantry into a proper teaching opportunity, and provides insightful and constructive commentary:

many linguists are having a hard time laughing with Word Crimes: to do so feels like complicity in an ongoing project of linguistic discrimination that intersects with class, race, and other kinds of discrimination. . . .

There are certainly valuable linguistic lessons that can be taken from Word Crimes, but not without a teacher encouraging students to think beyond the video itself, to ask questions about the rules Weird Al wants us to abide by.

She also has a good comment in response to arguments that it’s ‘just a parody’ and she should ‘lighten up’.

Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org finds that:

Weird Al is exposing himself as a peever, someone who doesn’t understand that: language changes; there is no single “correct” style that works in all cases; different contexts call for different styles and diction; use determines what is “correct,” not arbitrary rules or logic.

Hannah Leach at so long as it’s words has a thoughtful and spirited post that takes Weird Al to task for “hurling wildly hyperbolic insults at people for daring to deviate from a standard”:

The only reason to gloat and sneer when people deviate from a rule (that is often not relevant any more) is to get some kind of moral superiority and dismiss them as inferior. It’s founded in classism (and often these days, racism, as a lot of this bile is targeted towards non-native English speakers who, let us not forget, are fluent in at least one whole other language too and that’s pretty damn impressive doncha think?) and it’s gross. Particularly considering – in this example – the rules being upheld are ones which are fading away for the most part because they don’t serve a communicative purpose any more.

Mignon Fogarty has a heartfelt post at Grammar Girl lamenting the song’s “screwed up message”, and is especially bothered that teachers intend using the song to help children “care about grammar”. In contrast, she considers it a “grammar snob anthem” and finds that Yankovic is:

appealing to the base instincts that I’m tired to the bone of seeing: The call to feel superior and to put other people down for writing errors. Prescriptivism sells. Encouraging people to rant against the “morons who can’t spell” sells.

Jane Solomon at Dictionary.com takes the opportunity to summarise descriptivism and prescriptivism, and suggests: “next time you hear one of Weird Al’s many language peeves in the wild, sit back and reflect upon the wonder of the ever-evolving English language”.

Language change, I heart you so hard.—
Stan Carey (@StanCarey) June 27, 2014

Elsewhere, Garrett Ford Morrison at The Seminar Table finds that the song “adopts a view of language that has done, and continues to do, a great deal of harm”. Bradshaw of the future thinks it’s “insulting”. Language Hat “enjoyed the parody but deplored the prescriptivism”. Dawn McIlvain Stahl at Copyediting.com “[cringed] at the insults it throws around” and is concerned about how it reflects on editors.

I know what Dawn means. The woman I bought a phone from lately asked me what I did for a living, and upon learning that I write about language she asked if grammatical mistakes drive me crazy (she assumed they did). This happens regularly, and it shows how thoroughly love of language and linguistic intolerance are united in the public imagination. It shouldn’t be like this.

Also at Copyediting.com, Mark Allen offers a considered defence of the song. He finds that Weird Al’s motivation in writing it “is really less important than what we take away from it”. Indeed, and that’s what troubles me. The song doesn’t ask to be taken seriously, but it will be. Its misinformation will add to the background noise of prescriptivist dogma.

‘Word Crimes’ is not a harmless novelty song. It is loaded, however inadvertently, with ideologies of privilege, prestige, and status. People get their confirmation bias where they can, and anyone for whom an interest in language means ridiculing others for linguistic innovation, non-standard grammar and stale old peeves has a new theme song.

Updates:

I’ll use this space to add links and notes as they arise.

The Baltimore Sun‘s John McIntyre took a break from climbing ladders and painting to agree with my take on this and to supply a few related links.

At the Daily Beast, John McWhorter observes: “The Word Crimes video, skewering people who neglect the ‘Sunday best’ grammar as degenerates, is one of an endless stream of indications that linguists are fighting a losing battle.”

Nina G, a self-described stuttering dyslexic blogger who’s also a stand-up comedian, has a good post on the grammar shaming of ‘Word Crimes’ that aims to “educate others about a perspective that may not be seen in the mainstream”.

Dan H, a teacher who has made some insightful comments below, has a well-written post at Ferretbrain on why “the song fails as a learning tool (not that it is intended as one…)”, and why “insulting people who don’t speak standard English makes me extremely uncomfortable”.

Edit (28 July 2014):

Thanks to all who have engaged civilly with what I’ve written. Some readers, in rushing to tell me I’ve missed the point of ‘Word Crimes’ – It’s Weird Al! It’s satire! – have missed the point of my post. Quite a few comments were ad hominem (directed either at me or at anyone who misspells a word) and have not been published.

Just because you don’t see a problem doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, so to use Weird Al’s phrase: Listen up.

That it’s satire doesn’t make it harmless. Some find the video funny; not everyone has to. Weird Al’s intent is not the issue, which is that his song helps legitimise the kind of misinformed linguistic intolerance that can hurt, mislead and discourage language learners, people with learning difficulties or language disorders, people using non-standard dialects, and anyone not blessed with the same access to formal education. I’m not OK with that.

Link love is back! I took a break from this regular feature a year ago, for reasons, but never intended that break to be permanent. So here’s a selection of language-related articles and other material that caught my eye over the last while. It’s a bumper crop.

10 words that are badly broken.

How do you rhyme in a sign language?

What to say to peevers.

Podcast on accent diversity and prejudice (22 min.).

How do our brains treat metaphors and idioms?

Sending text messages in calligraphy.

When nouns verb oddly.

Ammosexual.

The defensive/impatient use of Look.

What were medieval scriptoria really like?

Timeline of 870 madness-related slang terms.

De-extinction: when words come back from the dead.

Who can save Ayapaneco?

The fevered art of book blurbing.

Google’s global ‘font family‘.

On loanwords and the Dictionary of Untranslatables.

The strange hidden logic (not hidden strange logic) of adjective order.

For a president today, talkin’ down is speaking American.

Unpacking America and Americans.

The origins of bum’s rush.

The problem of socialised male speech dominance.

Graphing the frequency of English letters and their position in words.

A good podcast on linguistic relativity.

On the birth of italics.

Crowdsourcing linguistic explanations.

Stand-up comedy in a second language.

Samuel Beckett and the voices in our minds.

Comparing the language of climate change in Germany and the US.

10 ‘grammar rules’ it’s OK to break.

The bodacious language of Bill & Ted.

Microaggressions in metacommunication.

Lovecraft and the art of describing the indescribable.

Why a painting in the White House has a deliberate spelling error.

How slang wilding was used to uphold a narrative of race and crime.

:) vs. :-) – Stylistic variation in Twitter emoticons (PDF).

Is erk related to oik?

Learning the language of love, 1777.

Interesting interview with Games of Thrones’ resident conlanger.

Also, GoT is more linguistically sophisticated than you might think.

Against editors? Make that For writers.

What goes in a dictionary when the dictionary is online?

A list of words coined (or notably used) by Edgar Allan Poe.

Recreating silent-film typography.

How to market a dictionary, 1970s-style.

That will do for now. If you’ve the appetite and time for more, you can browse the language links archive, or visit some blogs and sites linked in the sidebar – they’re all good. You can also follow me on Twitter – on the days I’m there I usually post a few links, among other things.

One last thing, lest it get lost in a list of ling-lust: the Speculative Grammarian book, which I reviewed positively last year as a feast of satirical linguistics, is now available as a PDF for $5.95 – or $4.95 for Sentence first readers.

Bookmashing, for the uninitiated, is when you stack books so the titles on their spines form a poem, or a mini-story, etc. It also has the more transparent name book spine poetry. It’s a fun game – and challenge – for word lovers, and a great excuse to browse your bookshelves. You’ll see them in a new light.

I’ve made many bookmashes over the years, and would do them oftener if most of my books weren’t in storage. Usually there’s no special theme, but some have been explicitly linguistic, e.g. Evolution: the difference engine, Forest of symbols, The web of words, Ambient gestures, and Cat and Mouse Semantics. So today I imposed the restriction of only using books from the ‘language’ shelf:

[click to embiggen]

Unlocking the language

The professor
And the madman
Defining the world,
Shady characters
Unlocking the English language –
Is that a fish
In your ear?

*

Thanks to the authors Simon Winchester, Henry Hitchings, Keith Houston, Robert Burchfield, and David Bellos. (I’ll try to be less gender-skewed next time.)

I got the idea originally from artist Nina Katchadourian, and it has spread to public radio and around the web. Last year a British drama group ran a bookmash competition, and now Jump! Mag (an educational magazine for children) is holding one for young readers.

Millie Slavidou, who set up the contest, has put several bookmashes on her Glossologics blog, which I wrote about last year. Seeing the idea featured in Jump! Mag prompted today’s simple effort, and I look forward to seeing any competition entries they make public. New players are always welcome.

Non-apologies are a curious beast. I mean the kind of statement that purports to be an apology – e.g. for bad behaviour or hurtful remarks – but isn’t a sincere apology at all.

Linguistically and psychologically they fascinate me, even as they exasperate. So I wrote about this for Slate’s Lexicon Valley blog:

When guilty people aren’t really sorry (or are worried about the legal implications), they don’t want to make a direct, unqualified admission. This is not a definitive science: Someone might say “I’m very sorry for what I did” and not mean it, or apologize tortuously but with heartfelt intent. Nevertheless, non-apologies tend to ring conspicuously false, being variously couched in ifs, buts, hedges, deflection, qualification, self-absorption, euphemism, defensiveness, obfuscation, and the agentless passive voice (“Mistakes were made”). I’m just sorry I got called out is a common subtext.

Non-apologies also have a lot of names. I tend to use non-apology; it’s concise, transparent, well-formed and cadenced. But I’ve also used nonpology, unapology, fauxpology, pseudo-apology, and sorry not sorry. And there are others: I’ve seen about 20 so far. This is partly because there’s no standard term for them yet, and also because their content and structure vary so much.

You can pop over to Lexicon Valley to see a list, to read more about the nature of non-apologies (and gasp in horror at real-life examples), and to find out what constitutes a genuine apology. The Lexicon Valley blog is excellent, by the way. So is the podcast, but you knew that.

*

[F Minus comic by Tony Carillo, via Language Log]

It’s been almost three months since the last collection of language links: definitely time for another. There are lots, so get comfy and don’t read them all at once.

The Historical Thesaurus of English is now online. Bookmark this one.

A lovely language family tree.

The outstanding Psycho Babble blog winds down.

How to draw syntax trees.

16thC manuscript of very ornamental calligraphy.

Family communication.

Bats jam each other’s sonar.

The improbable muses of 18thC poets.

To Siri, with love. From the mother of an autistic boy.

Ireland’s Book Show meets Clive James.

The rapid evolution of emoji.

Begging the question of acceptability.

Language features that English could do with.

The role of language in the Hong Kong protest movement.

Korean is diverging into two languages.

Get one’s goat is an etymological mystery.

Linguists’ thoughts on vape.

The purposes of language.

An antidote to terrible grammar quizzes.

A comparative library of Beowulf translations.

Search word use and trends in thousands of films and TV shows.

What happens in the brains of simultaneous interpreters.

Why we have so many terms for ‘people of colour.’

Inversion and fronting in English syntax.

Nigga? Please.

The history of the chapter.

In praise of mechanical pencils.

Notes on translation.

US/UK English ‘untranslatables’.

The dangerously dull language of TTIP.

On accent diversity in the UK, and the status of RP.

How prehistory  – the idea and the word – developed.

Swedish Sans, a new national typeface.

The history of football’s rabona.

11 facts about the umlaut.

An interview with Steven Pinker on style.

The art of theatre captioning.

The internet is no barometer of illiteracy.

Words for book around the world.

Chirping, popping, humming, blaring. The sounds fish make.

A linguist decodes restaurant menus.

Affirming the origins of yes.

A brief history of typeface naming.

Language is fundamentally communal.

The languages shaping the world’s economy.

A new database of Saints in Scottish Place-Names.

Language use is gloriously complex, not gloriously simple.

The acronyms that aren’t.

How -isms became -phobias. On the framing of oppression.

A history of women changing their names, or not, in marriage.

What’s wrong with ‘America’s Ugliest Accent’.

The secret life of passwords.

The etymology of allergy and related words.

Research suggests the sleeping brain can understand words.

A brief bibliography of -ass as a colloquial intensifier.

Slang often has old and venerable roots.

How English became the language of science.

A new living dictionary for British Sign Language (BSL).

Finally, a short animated video on language evolution:

Want more? I’ll try not to wait so long till the next batch. In the meantime, you can always browse the language links archive at Sentence first.

I went on a binge of Ed McBain’s crime fiction recently, enjoying his keen ear for language and tight storytelling style. Below are three language-themed excerpts from Axe, written in 1964, which features detectives Steve Carella and Cotton Hawes investigating a grisly murder.

First, to continue the theme of whom usage, is a doorstep encounter the detectives have with an old woman of unsound mind:

‘We’re detectives,’ Carella said. He showed her his shield and his identification card. He paused a moment, and then said, ‘May I ask who I’m talking to, ma’am?’

‘Whom, and you may not,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Whom,’ she said.

‘Ma’am, I . . .’

‘Your grammar is bad, and your granpa is worse,’ the woman said, and began laughing.

The ellipsis in Carella’s last line, which shows he’s being interrupted, is a stylistic device known technically as aposiopesis. An em dash is also commonly used in this context.

Carella later meets his wife, Teddy:

Teddy Carella watched his lips as he spoke because she was deaf and could hear only by watching a person’s lips or hands. Then, because she was mute as well, she raised her right hand and quickly told him in the universal language of deaf mutes that the twins had already been fed and that Fanny, their housekeeper, was at this moment putting them to bed. Carella watched her moving hand, missing a word every now and then, but understanding the sense and meaning, and then smiled as she went on to outline her plans for the evening, as if her plans needed outlining after the kiss she had given him at the front door.

‘You can get arrested for using that kind of language,’ Carella said, grinning. ‘It’s a good thing everybody can’t read it.’

Leaving aside the naive reference to the “universal language of deaf mutes” (signing, far from being singular, comprises many languages and dialects), it struck me as a laudable description, presenting signing as a normal activity and showing its potential for humour and seduction. I don’t read enough such accounts in fiction.

The final excerpt has Detective Hawes visiting an accountancy firm where he talks to Mr Cavanaugh, a portly businessman “born in Philadelphia and raised on that city’s brotherly South Side”, about someone previously employed by the firm:

‘We’re investigating a murder,’ Hawes said flatly.

‘You think Siggie killed somebody?’

‘No, that’s not what we think. But certain aspects of our information don’t seem to jibe, Mr Cavanaugh. We have reason to believe Mr Reuhr is lying to us, which is why we felt we should look into his background somewhat more extensively.’

‘You talk nice,’ Cavanaugh said appreciatively.

Hawes, embarrassed, said, ‘Thank you.’

‘No, I mean it. Where I was raised, if you talked that way you got your head busted. So I talk this way. I got one of the biggest accounting firms in this city, and I sound like a bum, don’t I?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then what do I sound like?’

‘Well, I don’t know.’

‘A bum, right?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Okay, we won’t argue. Anyway, you talk nice.’

I liked this exchange a lot too. That McBain, he writes nice.

‘Banning’ words is not an impulse I can relate to. My recent post at Macmillan Dictionary Blog, The vogue for banning words, takes issue with this popular practice:

Lists of words to ban make effective clickbait, because people are very conscious of language usage and can be wary of having their own usage policed. So they want to find out what words and phrases they should be avoiding and collectively hating. Many will join in, sounding off about words they’d like to see banned. The logic seems to be that because they simply don’t like a word or phrase, no one should ever, ever use it.

It was once customary for language critics such as Fowler, Partridge, and Gowers to warn writers about ‘vogue words’ which had become too fashionable for their own good. Nowadays the convention – even at Time magazine – is for ‘banning’ them, whatever that might mean. I find it reactionary and unhelpful.

*

My next post at Macmillan, Flat adverbs are exceeding fine, considers the status of adverbs like slow, far, wrong and bright, which lack the -ly we might expect from adverbs and which are unfairly condemned for that reason. The censure directed at them owes to the usual suspects:

[P]rescriptive grammarians in the 18th century, being overly attached to Latin grammar, thought flat adverbs were really adjectives being used incorrectly, and warned against their use. Before this, flat adverbs were more common and varied than they are now. Exceeding is a good example. If we browse Daniel Defoe’s writing we find such phrases as: weak and exceeding thirsty; it rained exceeding hard. Today this usage has an archaic feel.

Those early grammarians’ misguided judgements were passed down for generations. Their influence is felt today not only in the absence of many flat adverbs that were formerly routine, but also in the uncertainty and intolerance towards surviving ones…

What I mean by intolerance is, for example, people ‘fixing’ street signs that read Drive Slow, under the mistaken impression that it’s ungrammatical. In the post I also look briefly at whether and how some pairs of adverbs (one flat, one not) have diverged in usage, such as hard/hardly and safe/safely.

To browse my older Macmillan posts, you can visit the full archive here.

(Image from video: ‘Weird Al Yankovic fixes a road sign’)

I rarely post here twice in one day, but I have some news to share: Strong Language is a new group blog about swearing set up by sesquiotic linguist James Harbeck and me. This is how it started.

As James puts it, the blog:

gives a place for professional language geeks to talk about things they can’t talk about in more polite contexts. It’s a sweary blog about swearing.

At the bottom of the new blog you’ll see some familiar names among the contributors. More will be signing up, and we’re very open to ideas for new material. The associated Twitter account is @stronglang.

Some of you may find the idea unappealing, and will not wish to read further. I won’t hold it against you.

It’s early days, and we’re still figuring out the details, but there are several posts up already on a range of topics, including the phonology of cusswords, whether shit is a contronym, and one from me today on great moments of swearing in the horror film The Thing.

If swearing gives you lalochezia or interests you linguistically, culturally or ineffably, then bookmark, subscribe and follow at will, and spread the word if the notion takes you.

Updates:

My first Strong Language post is featured on the Paris Review blog:

Great moments in swearing: an utterance in John Carpenter’s The Thing helped define our sense of a treasured obscenity.

Ben Zimmer introduces Strong Language to Language Log readers:

There’s a new linguablog that’s definitely worth your time if you’re not put off by vulgarities. And if you revel in vulgarities, well, you’re in luck. . . . James and Stan have enlisted a great lineup of contributors (I’m happy to be one of them).

Eugene Volokh gives Strong Language his nod of approval at the Washington Post.

Remember the transformation of fail and win 5–6 years ago? Fleeting online slang phrases like bucket of fail and made of win may sound dated now, but terms like epic fail/win and FTW (“for the win”) and the words’ use as tags and hashtags remain popular. Fail and win have firmly, if informally, extended their grammatical domains, having been converted from verb to noun, interjection, and other categories.

A word undergoing comparable change is nope. Its metamorphosis over the last few years has in some ways been more impressive, but it seems less remarked on than fail and win – maybe because of its more limited distribution. For instance, this cartoon on Imgur (pronunciation note here), which shows Spider-Man shooting spiders from his hands, drew comments that use nope as a verb, adjective, and noun – mass and count – as well as duplicating, lengthening, and adverbifying it.

Some of the comments are listed below. A couple have swear words, so you might prefer to skip ahead if you’re likely to be offended by those:

Nopeman
NOPE. ONE BIG NOPE.
Just would be a whole lot of nope.
ive never seen this much nope in one gif
Nope train to fuckthatville
Spider Nope, Spider Nope, Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope.
Oh look, it’s Nope O’clock
NOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPE ABANDON THREAD
scientifically those are not “spiders”… nopefically those are “nopenopenopenopenopes”
well he noped the fuck out and I don’t blame him
NOPE NOOpEo eopeOepeoopepeooepoepoe.

The last string, with its deliberately warped duplication, can be seen as an expression of repudiation from someone so bothered by what they see that they pretend they can no longer control themselves enough to calmly spell nope. It’s analogous to the can’t even constructions popular in communicating stupefaction or powerful emotion online.

The verb phrase nope out, seen in the second-last item above with an intensifying swear, is a spin-off of the new nope. It can mean wimp out, especially in a gaming context, or just flee or get the hell away without implying cowardice or timidity. Lucy Ferriss at Lingua Franca sees noping out as “a front-runner for slang ubiquity in the next two years or so”. But plain nope is already at that stage in some quarters.

These newish uses of nope typically appear in replies or comments to distressing material (e.g., images and gifs of spiders, insects, snakes, or other dread-inducing creatures), often as variations on memes and catchphrases, playful noun phrases, or other innovative expressions.

Nope is also common in “reaction gifs” that show an animal, actor, or animated character making a dramatic or amusing escape from a bad situation:

*

*

*

Other nope-based reaction gifs feature a rabbit, dog, bearded dragon, badger, spider, gorilla, Muppets, llama, Anna Paquin, SpongeBob SquarePants, and other animated figures. There’s a lot of them.

To return to the text-only types, below are some further examples categorised by grammatical class, along with brief observations. All were found on Imgur; swear warning re-applies.

Verb:

The firefighter just calmly noped away.
Noping all the way home.
I noped so much that I quickly tried to change to the next page
I’d nope the F out of there, if I were you
Did not take me long to nope it the fuck off this page.
I NOPED myself.
That'[s] exactly where I noped away from that movie.
The nopes just keep noping out of the nope hole…

Note the synonymous use of nope [out of there] and nope it [off this page], and the recurrence of nope away (cf. nope out). Different senses of the verb nope, including the reflexive form nope oneself, are described further down.

Adjective:

I can’t even express how nope this is
It’s like a puppy stampede except noper.
What is so nope about snakes?
The nopest book art that exists.
Very poisonous. Very beautiful. Very nope.

Sometimes so nope, very nope, much nope and the like are examples of doge, but the last item above seems a straightforward adjectival use, given the pattern that precedes it.

Interjection:

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Noooooopppppee.
“nope” – Everyone ever
oh ha ha i see he’s playing with iOHFUCKNONOPENOPENOPE
Nope freaking nopity nope nope!
ahem *clears throat* NOOOOOPE! Nopedy nope nope!
NOOOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NUUUUUPE

Some of these interjectional uses show how nope is often repeated or lengthened to intensify the effect of rejection that it conveys.

Proper noun:

This should be retitled “The Nope Album”
Straight from the country of Nope.
Also know[n] as the Nopen Nope Noper nope, genus Nopeila
why aren’t you on the fuckthat train to nopesville?!
HOLY FUCKING MOTHER OF NOPE!
Loch Nope Monster
Yup, that’s definitely Lake Nope in the Holy Shit province of Fuck-that-istan

Noun:

So much nope
so many nopes
My god, look at all that nope!
For the sea is dark and full of nopes.
and here we have a nest of Nopes in their natural environment of the Fuckthat tree
The level of nope is too damn high!
You have a nope as a pet??!
That’s a giant cup of NOPE right there.
You may have all of my nope.
That’s eleven gallons of NOPE in a ten gallon hat.
Favorited for future nope.
And here you will see the 8 limbed NOPE
Honestly the water color is enough NOPE for me.
It should be A Game Of Nope And Fire.

The first two show succinctly how nope has become both a mass noun (so much nope) and a count noun (so many nopes). The Game of Nope and Fire quip, as well as combining Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire with the “game of nope” in the thread title, also alludes to the Kill it with fire! response common with this kind of material. You can also see the recurrence of playful combinations with fuckthat.

Compounds:

As some[o]ne who can science, i can positively identify this as a nopefish
That is a nopesnake.
that’s not morning, it’s nopetime.
Ah, the infamous Nopetree, growing in certain parts of Nope-istan.
NopeCreature in Nopehouse in Nopeland.
Oh, that’s the nopespider. It lives in noperica.

Assorted affixation and wordplay:

The nopification process.
allmynopes.jpg
Nopely nopent noping spider
It’s moving because NOPE
abso-fucking-nopely
The morning dew really accents the nopeness on this Nope Bush.

Because NOPE is an example of the because X construction I looked at last year.

This exuberant extension of nope is not limited to Imgur (though it’s a good place to browse examples: some pages have 100+); it’s also popular on Tumblr, Reddit, 4chan, and other image-heavy forums.

Some nope memes have been around a few years, and the word features in all sorts of image macros, often mixed with other fads and in-jokes. Archer’s use of nope is more like normal no, but the particular intonation there may have influenced some of the spellings elsewhere.

Given its frequency, some people are understandably tired of nope. One Imgurian protests, “Can we stop using the phrase ‘nope’ to refer to bugs and shit? It was funny in 2011, now it’s just annoying.” While it may be a subcultural cliché, nope is a rich source of both lexical and grammatical experimentation, which makes it pretty interesting linguistically.

As well as its morphological and syntactic versatility, the semantics of nope have also spread to encompass a range of referents. As a noun, it can refer to the object of dread (“baby nopes are kinda cute”; “much nope is contained in these books”), and to a person’s negative reaction to that object (“You may have all of my nope”; “it took ignoring the majority of my nopes to put my finger there for scale”).

In one example of the latter sense, a creepy lock of hair prompted a remark about Asian horror films (probably The Ring), to which a commenter replied: *NOPE INTENSIFIES*. This throwaway remark inadvertently sums up an aspect of the nope phenomenon; the ambiguity of my post title might make more sense now. I’ve also seen similar phrases such as noping intensifies and nopes intensify.

As a verb, nope can refer to getting quickly away (“He noped so hard, he was never heard from again”), scaring other people with a “nope” (“DON’T NOPE ME THEN TRY TO EARN MY TRUST WITH YOUR PET!!!!!”), soiling oneself with fright (“I think I just noped myself”), declining something nopeworthy (“I’m just gonna nope the link and believe you, and move on”), to something a “nope” does (“a giant herd of nopes noping at my heels”), and so on.

In his 2009 Word Routes post about the transformation of awesome, fail, win and co., Ben Zimmer noted a common thread in these “mass-nounified words”: that they “can have the force of an interjection”. Nope wasn’t a verb to begin with, and it already had interjectional qualities, but its use has broadened similarly and its sound and structure make it very open to inflection, affixation, and other kinds of creative mutation.

Used to reject utterly and forcefully an upsetting image, scenario, or idea, nope has manoeuvred itself into an endless array of grammatical and lexical forms. No category leap seems beyond it, no catchphrase safe from potential nope-jacking. In the infectious, rapid-fire wordplay of web forums like Imgur, nope has quickly established itself as a signature term and one spawning constant novelty and repetition.

Whether it declines like an old grey spider, or spreads further like a brood of baby ones in the wind, remains to be seen.

It’s a couple of months since I did a language linkfest, so before it gets out of hand again here’s a selection of linguistic and word-related items I’ve enjoyed over the last while.

A dictionary of hip-hop slang.

On the history and pragmatics of ping.

The future will see fewer, and simpler, languages. (Or will it?)

The global language network.

Spelling reformers get the wrong end of the stick.

Geniorum octopodes? A pedantic guide to borrowed inflections.

The Ling Space: videos introducing linguistic topics.

How old is the nickname Mike?

Using strikethrough for communication.

Celebrating the survival of aboriginal languages.

26 language writers on their favourite portmanteau words.

What are the best things to use as a bookmark?

Bae is an adjective and a verb now.

Did Celtic languages influence English grammar?

How the language of TV shows sheds light on their structure.

If you need another reason not to listen to Nevile Gwynne.

How and why does the English language change?

The language of convenience stores.

Not all likes are alike.

A short history of the pilcrow (¶).

A short history of the octothorpe (#).

Feminism and the language of football.

13 words of the year from other countries.

Research suggests bilingualism reduces essentialist beliefs.

Authors protest the omission of nature words from the Oxford Junior Dictionary.

Signalling the intent to signal.

For crying in the sink, let’s euphemize!

Hawaiian pidgin word hapa (half-white, half-Asian) has ameliorated.

Why did people start peeving about “book entitled”?

Behind the scenes at Merriam-Webster.

Bringing Webster’s unabridged dictionary to market in 1864.

Wine words and their history in Australian English.

The case for dropping the term pathogen.

The hidden language of ~the tilde~.

Eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious.

Hashtagification.

Men, women, and language:

*

Want more? See the language links archive for 60 prior installments.

She be’s out on that bike every Sunday

They do be up late chatting

Everyone knows about grammatical tense – it involves placing a situation in time, using inflections and auxiliaries to mark temporal location in the past, present, future, etc. Aspect, though less familiar, also concerns time: specifically, how a speaker views the temporal structure or properties of an action or situation, such as whether it’s complete, habitual, or still in progress.

So for example, in the progressive aspect an action is, was, or will be in progress: am walking, was writing, will be singing. It pairs auxiliary be with a gerund-participle complement (__ing). The terminology can be forbidding, but the structure is familiar.

Then there’s habitual aspect for habitual or repeated events or states. In the past tense, English can use would (She would make tea when we called) or used to (We used to meet daily). In English present tense, habitual aspect is not marked, and is often indicated with adverbs or adverbials: We go there [regularly / all the time].

Irish English, also called Hiberno-English, can express habitual aspect in present tense by enlisting Irish (Gaelic) grammar. In Irish, tá mé (which can contract to táim) means ‘I am’, literally ‘is me’. But bíonn mé (→ bím) means ‘I (habitually) am’ – a different sense of be. The distinction is so intrinsic to Irish that our ancestors refashioned English to incorporate it.

We did this in several ways. Sometimes do is used:

I’m not so old as you do hear them say. (J.M. Synge, The Well of the Saints)

Sometimes be is inflected:

To be going to the place in which there be’s no welcome (Anthony Raftery, ‘The History of the Bush’, tr. Douglas Hyde)

And sometimes be is paired with auxiliary do:

And who is the gentleman does be visiting there? (James Joyce, Ulysses)

Synge’s line shows the do construction, which looks like an emphatic or contrastive do but is spoken unstressed. Hyde’s translation shows the be’s form, also spelt bes, bees or biz. Joyce’s line shows the do be form (No Sinatra jokes, please), as well as a subject contact clause. Do be and be’s are also used for questions and negatives: Does she be tired after work?; Be’s he always like that?

Different scholars use different terms for this grammatical feature, including habitual, durative habitual, iterative, consuetudinal and generic aspect, ‘often with very subtle subdistinctions’ according to Markku Filppula. Regardless of what term is used, habituality is their chief constituent. P.W. Joyce elaborates in English As We Speak It In Ireland:

In the Irish language (but not in English) there is what is called the consuetudinal tense, i.e. denoting habitual action or existence. It is a very convenient tense, so much so that the Irish, feeling the want of it in their English, have created one by the use of the word do with be: ‘I do be at my lessons every evening from 8 to 9 o’clock.’ ‘There does be a meeting of the company every Tuesday.’ ‘’Tis humbuggin’ me they do be.’ (‘Knocknagow.’)

Sometimes this is expressed by be alone without the do; but here the be is also often used in the ordinary sense of is without any consuetudinal meaning. ‘My father bees always at home in the morning’: ‘At night while I bees reading my wife bees knitting.’ (Consuetudinal.) ‘You had better not wait till it bees night.’ (Indicative.)

Though be’s can be heard in pockets around the island, I associate it with speakers from northern counties. My roommate in college had a strong and distinctive Donegal dialect, and when I knew him (he’s no longer with us) I heard be’s very regularly. I use it myself infrequently, not having grown up with it but liking it enough to adopt it. Do and do be are my usual choices for habitual aspect.

Lady Gregory (1852–1932)

Here’s an example of be’s from Patrick McCabe’s novel Winterwood:

It be’s hard for strangers trying to do that – tell us menfolk one from the other, with our great big beards and red curly heads.

And one from Robert Bernen’s story ‘Brock’:

‘But sure plenty dogs be’s that way,’ Mary interposed.
‘Aye,’ Paddy answered. ‘Some does.’

An example of do be, from Joyce’s Exiles:

Up half the night he does be.

One from Lady Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland:

The people do be full of stories of all the cures she did.

This line from J.M. Synge’s The Well of the Saints has both do be and do forms:

They are, holy father; they do be always sitting here at the crossing of the roads, asking a bit of copper from them that do pass…

While the next (also from Synge) offers both, plus a couple of do be negatives. Though these latter resemble imperatives (don’t be looking on people), they are describing something habitually not done:

For it’s a raw, beastly day we do have each day, till I do be thinking it’s well for the blind don’t be seeing them gray clouds driving on the hill, and don’t be looking on people with their noses red, the like of your nose, and their eyes weeping and watering, the like of your eyes, God help you, Timmy the smith.

Loreto Todd, in Green English, breaks down the distinction thus: Mary {goes | is going | biz/bees going | does be going} to school, noting that biz/bees ‘suggests regularity’ and does be ‘both regularity and habitualness’. She offers an example from live speech to highlight the difference:

Female A was house proud and liked her drying cloth to be on its peg when not in use. Female B often left the drying cloth on the draining board and was told: ‘That cloth biz on the peg when it doesn’t be drying dishes!’

When the main verb in a clause is also do, it can lead to reduplicative strings which, though unremarked by Irish people, might raise an eyebrow in others. The prologue to Edna O’Brien’s Tales for the Telling refers to ‘the deeds they do be doing’, while Ulysses has a woman who ‘hid herself in a clock to find out what they do be doing’. Séamas Moylan’s Southern Irish English offers ‘I do do it myself an odd time.’ The do do utterance is something I do do myself; again, the first do is unstressed, unlike in contrastive or emphatic uses.

Moylan reports that this ‘very typical feature of Rural SIE was already a shibboleth of the educational establishment’ in the late 19thC, quoting Peadar Ó Laoghaire’s My Story in which the priest recalls an inspector insulting a child and his family ‘before the entire school!’ for using do be. A reader of Sentence first reported their teacher forcing students to cut out and bury text with do be in it. The persistence of the usage despite such vicious opposition ‘is probably an index of the need felt for the aspectual distinction it makes’, Moylan writes.

The origin of these habitual-aspect forms in Irish English is not entirely clear but seems to point to Irish in contact with English. Dialectologist Joseph Wright in 1898 reported several examples of ‘to do be’ from Ireland and southern England. Hickey 2007 (PDF) summarises it as ‘convergence with English input in south, possibly with influence from Scots via Ulster; otherwise transfer of category from Irish’.*

Hickey 2005 (PDF) elaborates:

In syntax, there are many features which either have a single source in Irish or at least converged with English regional input to produce stable structures in later Irish English. To begin with, one must bear in mind that adult speakers learning a second language, especially in an unguided situation, search for equivalents to the grammatical categories they know from their native language. The less they know and use the second language, the more obvious this search is. A case in point would involve the habitual in Irish. […] There is no one-to-one formal or semantic correspondence to this in English, so what appears to have happened is that the Irish availed of the afunctional do of declarative sentence, which was still present in English at the time of renewed plantation in the early seventeenth century…

Lastly, Jeffrey L. Kallen 2012 (PDF) has some detail on usage, semantic differentiation and geographical distribution. He says the be form (what I’ve styled be’s) ‘is relatively invariant, almost always occurring as bes (sometimes spelled as be’s or bees) and never using regular morphology as in *I am.’ He presents the following illustrative set:

(10) a. Did you never read in the papers the way murdered men do bleed and drip? (Synge [1907] 1941: 129)
b. If I go in to meet a spark [‘electrician’], I do find a carpenter (Kallen 1989: 6)
c. He bes always joking (O’Neill 1947: 264)
d. She does be sitting there at nights watching Seven Days (Kallen 1989: 7)

One unsettled question on generic/habitual verb forms concerns the differentiations which can be made within sets such as (10). Semantic differences can be suggested – as between the recurrence of discrete events seen in (10b) versus more extended states of affairs as in (10d) – but existing evidence does not give us a clear pattern.

Kallen says that despite intimations that be forms are ‘more specifically associated with the Ulster dialect area’, it is attested in southern Irish counties including Dublin and neighbouring Meath in the east, Galway and Roscommon in the west, and Wexford in the southeast (albeit recessive). So the two forms’ relative geographical distribution is not as clear-cut as some sources say.

Moylan suggests that the usage is on the way out. I hope not.

*

* It’s also worth noting the parallels with African-American Vernacular English; see for example Collins 2006 and Rickford 1999. AAVE do she be equates, I think, to HibE does she be. Both offer be’s/bees. Do be is definitely not available in standard English: Pollock 1989 (PDF), discussing so-called ‘do support’, explicitly contrasts John is not happy with *John does not be happy – but the Asterisk of Incorrectness would not apply in Ireland.

Back in December I introduced Strong Language, a new group blog about the use, culture, and linguistics of profanity cooked up by James Harbeck and me. While some of you are now regular readers, others may be unaware of it or glad of a reminder or an update, so this post can address that. The language below may offend, so caveat lector.

Strong Language started well and this year has gone from strength to sweary strength. We’ve redesigned its appearance, partnered with Slate’s Lexicon Valley, and added more writers to the team of regular contributors. The @stronglang Twitter account ties in with the blog but does its own stuff too, such as film stills and swearwords of the day.

I’ve written ten posts for Strong Language and have as many more in various stages of completion or planning. Published posts look at filthy old songs, Irish English shite, multilingual swearing, and Rob Chirico’s book Damn!, among other things. I also compile ‘Sweary links’ – like the ‘Link love’ posts here on Sentence first, but swearing-related.

Other SLers have written about how many swears we have not given (Stephen Chrisomalis), the trouble with retard(ed) (Iva Cheung), rude phrases for cold weather (Karen Conlin), masturbatory slang (Jonathon Green), the intensifying affixal -shit, (Kory Stamper), a sweary primer on pragmatics (James Harbeck), DIY oathmaking (Daniel Sosnoski), mother _uckers in branding (Nancy Friedman), the culture of swear jars (John Kelly), St Patrick’s bad language (Terry O’Hagan), and when shit hits the newspapers (Ben Zimmer).

That’s just a flavour – there are over 80 posts so far, and new ones appear regularly, if unpredictably. That of course is part of the fun: it’s a constant pleasure to see what people come up with next and the enthusiasm and flair with which they pull it off. So if you’re interested in language that is rude, vulgar, taboo, and profane, go forth and visit, subscribe, bookmark, blog-roll (is that a verb yet?), and spread the bad word about Strong Language.

A houseboat is a type of boat; a boathouse is a type of house.

This illustrates a common pattern in English morphology: the rightmost part of a compound (houseboat) is usually the ‘head’. In other words it’s the centre or larger category, functionally equivalent to the overall compound, and what precedes it (houseboat) modifies or specifies it. So we say English is ‘right-headed’.

But the semantic relationship between the parts can’t be inferred automatically from their arrangement, as this charming/disarming Bizarro cartoon by Dan Piraro shows:

Right-headedness is a feature of Germanic languages. Romance languages tend to reverse the order: chaise longue is a type of chaise, lingua franca a type of lingua. Either way, when a compound includes the head it is called endocentric – the centre is internal. In exocentric compounds the head is missing or external: a bigmouth is not a type of mouth and an egghead is not a type of head – both refer to people.

Editor and historical linguist Brianne Hughes studies a remarkable subset of exocentric compounds called agentive and instrumental exocentric verb-noun (V-N) compounds. Mercifully, and memorably, she calls them cutthroat compounds, or cutthroats for short. These are rare in English word-formation but have a long, colourful history and constitute a very interesting category.

Cutthroat compounds name things or people by describing what they do. A cutthroat cuts throats, a telltale tells tales, a wagtail wags its tail, a killjoy kills joy, a scarecrow scares crows, a turncoat turns their coat, rotgut rots the gut, a pickpocket picks pockets, a sawbones saws bones (one of the few plural by default), and breakfast – lest you miss its etymology, hidden in plain sight – breaks a fast. The verb is always transitive, the noun its direct object.

[poster of Robert Bresson’s classic film Pickpocket (1959) via this collection]

Despite the familiarity of these examples, only a few dozen are current in modern English. It’s because they conflict with the right-headedness of English, Brianne writes in her master’s thesis (‘From Turncoats To Backstabbers: How Headedness and Word Order Determine the Productivity of Agentive and Instrumental Compounding in English’), that cutthroats’ productivity will never surpass that of ‘backstabber’ compounds, which use the far more usual N-V-er pattern. We’re ‘book readers’, not ‘readbooks’; ‘word lovers’, not ‘lovewords’.

Cutthroats largely constitute ‘a treasury of nonce words’, having peaked centuries ago. Survivors tend to be peripheral, found in slang, regional dialects, and children’s short-lived innovations. But Brianne is on a mission to catalogue them and has recorded several hundred, including such malicious archaic marvels as want-wit (stupid person), spoil-paper (bad writer), whiparse (abusive teacher), eat-bee (bird), lacklooks (unattractive person), stretchgut (glutton), clutchfist (miser), and catch-fart (servant who walks behind their master).

One I’ve always liked is smell-feast, meaning someone who sniffs out a feast and comes uninvited to share in it. The OED’s first citation for this word, from 1519, refers to ‘smellefyestes, lycke dysshes, and franchars [who] come vncalled’. Franchars derives from franch, an obsolete word meaning ‘feed greedily’, while the more transparent ‘lycke dysshes’ counts as another cutthroat. Here is Brianne on their general status:

Cutthroats are freely productive in Romance languages, which have a V.O. (verb-object) structure and are left-headed. English, which is V.O. and right-headed, has slight native productivity (Clark et al, 1986) that has been amplified and augmented by French borrowings (e.g., coupe-gorge [cutthroat] and wardecorps [bodyguard]). English has been slowly producing new cutthroats since the 1200s up through 2015, mainly in the form of nonce personal insults. Most cutthroats are obsolete slang, but about 40, including ​pickpocket​, pinchpenny, rotgut​ and​ spitfire, are commonly known in Modern English.

Hunting them down and determining their cutthroat status can be tricky, since there’s no formula to determine how a compound’s parts relate to each other. This is the subject of a presentation Brianne will give at the SHEL/DSNA conference in Vancouver in June (‘Does a Slingshot Sling Shots? Difficulties in Identifying English Cutthroat Compounds’), from whose Abstract the quotation above is taken. For more on this see Laurie Bauer, ‘English Exocentric Compounds’ (PDF).

Finding them is aggravated by the fact that they tend not to appear in standard dictionaries or well-documented areas. But they do clump semantically: mainly as insults, occupational names, and provincial nature-words. Brianne divides them into six categories: people (insults, occupations, insulted occupations – sometimes as surnames); games; tools; food and drink; plants and animals (including twitchbell, which James Joyce incorporated into Finnegans Wake); and adjectives such as lacklustre, breakneck, and breakteeth (= ‘difficult to pronounce’).

So far she has identified 846 cutthroats, and maybe more by the time you read this. Finding one can lead to another, thus kill-priest (port wine) → strangle-priest → strangle-goose​ →​ saddle-goose →​ saddle-nag. Some verbs recur: break, turn, lack and pick all appear in over a dozen, choke in at least five: chokepriest (thick Italian soup), choke-sparrow (bearded wheat), choke-dog (hard cheese), choke-children (bony fish), and choke-jade (a place in England).

The pattern, though rare nowadays, is not completely unproductive in English. Children go through a phase of compound acquisition in which they invent cutthroats spontaneously before dropping the habit again. By email Brianne shared a few modern ones she has spotted in comics and other pop cultural domains, such as Princess Tinglepants, Professor Stealwater, and pesterchum (a messaging app). Among her vintage favourites, complete with her glosses, are:

Kick-shins: a children’s game

Swingebreech: a haughty swaggerer (who swings their hips while walking); related: shit-breech, quakebreech, shuffle-breeches

Fuckbottere: occupational last name where fuck means ‘strike’ and bottere is butter – an agrarian worker. (I believe one of the earliest instances of fuck.)

The insulting kinds, Brianne says, ‘cut right to what makes people unlikeable’. She loves their brutal honesty and finds that they tend to stand out and endure despite their low productivity. She feels cutthroats of all kinds have been unjustly overlooked, only ever ‘briefly mentioned in English compounding chapters, with the same examples over and over. Why aren’t there more? Why do they exist at all?’ These questions she addressed in some detail in her thesis.

I salute her quest to shine a light on what she calls a shadowy footnote of English morphology, and I highly recommend this short talk she gave in 2013, which offers more examples of cutthroats both contemporary and archaic, celebrates their curious nature, and briefly documents their shifting popularity over the centuries:

*

*

You can download the slides here. For a historical overview of exocentric V-N compounds in English and German, see Volker Gast 2008 (PDF):

There was (probably) a certain inventory of relevant items even before the Norman conquest, esp. in proper names and epithets. Under French influence, the pattern was ‘upgraded’, i.e. it became more productive and frequent and was used in more (esp. higher) registers. The productivity of exocentric V-N compounds increased steadily in the 14th and 15th centuries and reached a peak in the 16th century (e.g. kill-courtesy, lack-brain, lack-beard in Shakespeare). From the 17th century onwards, its productivity decreased considerably, resulting in the status quo of the contemporary language, where an inventory of relevant forms is still preserved, but hardly any new words are created.

The decline of exocentric V-N compounds was accompanied, and perhaps partly also caused, by a strong increase of ‘synthetic compounds’ of the form N-V-er. The two types have existed side by side for many centuries, sometimes providing alternative terms for one meaning (e.g. breakstone [1688] and stone-breaker [1827]). However, at the time of the Industrial Revolution synthetic compounds gained ground and took over great parts of the denotational domain previously covered by exocentric V-N compounds.

Gast looks at other European languages in a subsequent paper (PDF), which includes this graph showing the diverging fates of V-N and N-V-er compounds in English:

(Synthetic is explained here.)

Finally, if you want yet more exocentric pleasure, watch Chris Magyar’s half-hour comic talk where he riffs on why exocentric compounds appeal to him and why twinkletoes most of all:

*

Deborah Tannen, in her 1991 book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation,* describes how easy it is for a speaker to get the wrong idea about a listener’s behaviour if the listener is of the opposite gender.

Referring to ‘A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication’ (PDF), a 1982 paper by anthropologists Daniel Maltz and Ruth Borker, Tannen notes that women are more likely to ask questions and give more listening responses: using ‘little words like mhm, uh-uh, and yeah’ throughout someone else’s conversational turn to provide ‘a running feedback loop’.

The cybernetic analogy is apt, since Tannen adopts the terms messages and metamessages from the great Gregory Bateson, describing metamessages as ‘information about the relations among the people involved, and their attitudes toward what they are saying or doing and the people they are saying or doing it to’. Thus:

Not only do women give more listening signals, according to Maltz and Borker, but the signals they give have different meanings for men and women, consistent with the speaker/audience alignment. Women use ‘yeah’ to mean ‘I’m with you, I follow,’ whereas men tend to say ‘yeah’ only when they agree. The opportunity for misunderstanding is clear. When a man is confronted with a woman who has been saying ‘yeah,’ ‘yeah,’ ‘yeah,’ and then turns out not to agree, he may conclude that she has been insincere, or that she was agreeing without really listening. When a woman is confronted with a man who does not say ‘yeah’ – or much of anything else – she may conclude that he hasn’t been listening. The men’s style is more literally focused on the message level of the talk, while the women’s is focused on the relationship or metamessage level.

Tannen’s useful and admirably clear book shows that women’s and men’s communicative styles aren’t just different but are often actively at cross purposes. And because most people assume a great deal and tend to extrapolate others’ inner states and attitudes based on their own behavioural patterns, including linguistic ones, misjudgements are extremely common.

Conversely, if we are more aware of different styles of communication, not least the significant differences between the major ‘genderlects’, we can foster better conversations and mutual understanding, and suffer less unnecessary confusion, hurt, and dissatisfaction. Tannen continues:

To a man who expects a listener to be quietly attentive, a woman giving a stream of feedback and support will seem to be talking too much for a listener. To a woman who expects a listener to be active and enthusiastic in showing interest, attention, and support, a man who listens silently will not seem to be listening at all, but rather to have checked out of the conversation . . .

You Just Don’t Understand gave me the insider-outsider feeling I sometimes get when reading works of primatology. Men typically are concerned with status, specifically their position in the hierarchy of a given set of humans. I’ve known men who were endlessly preoccupied with being perceived as the alpha male in a group, or resentful that they weren’t, while it seems I’m anomalous in not giving two hoots about status or hierarchy.

Tannen concedes that her book’s generalisations risk reductionism and obscuration of differences (as does my simplification of gender as binary here), but she succeeds in reaching conclusions that are by and large fair, insightful, thought-provoking, and helpful. She also uses anecdotal evidence to telling effect.

*

* First published by Virago Press, whose name I discussed briefly in a recent post about slur reappropriation.