Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

The Morning News - Camille Paglia, by Robert Birnbaum

Interesting interview, well worth the time to read, even if Birnbaum comes across as a bit of a twit. I might have to pick up her new book, Break, Blow, Burn.

hat tip: Tightly Wound

Poet: Ogden Nash - All poems of Ogden Nash

Sweet. I have a whacking great book with 650 of Ogden Nash’s poems, so it’s not that so much as poemhunter.com itself. I love sites like this. Ooooh, and you can comment on the poems if you wish.

Tip of the hat to languagehat

and writes a long, but interesting and amusing piece on it in Poetry, but misses the perfect chance to use the word materteral.

Ah, hell, I’m getting tired of coming up with new ways of mocking the NYT’s arrogance.

languagehat is tearing his hair out over the paper of record’s refusal to consult a dictionary before offering its pronunciation advice:

I had just started the article “Those Ancient Incan Knots? Tax Accounting, Researchers Suggest” by Nicholas Wade in today’s NY Times when I had occasion to grind my teeth: “They believe they may have decoded the first word - a place name - to be found in a quipu (pronounced KWEE-poo)…” What the hell? Is the Times too proud to actually consult a dictionary? Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, for instance, which says “Pronunciation: ‘kE-(”)p{u”}” …

In Dynamist Blog: Incomprehensible Headline, Virginia Postrel writes:

Bush’s Aid Cuts on Court Issue Roil Neighbors

Unless you click to the story, you’ll never figure out what it means. Or at least I couldn’t.

Well, it is headline-ese ( Aid Cuts instead of Cuts in Aid) does have an unusual number of words that can be either a noun or a verb ( Aid, Cuts, Court, Issue, and Roil ) , but it seems to me that there’s only one valid way to parse it:

[Bush's [[Aid Cuts] [on Court Issue]]] [Roil [Neighbors]]

I’m still working my way through Huddleston’s and Pullum’s A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar, but I believe this should be analyzed as:

This is a simple Subject-Predicate construction

Cuts is the head noun of a NP that forms the subject, and is modified by both Bush’s and Aid, and complemented by the PP on Court Issue

Roil is the head verb of a VP that forms the predicate, with the complement NP Neighbors as the direct object.

So basically it boils down to: Cuts Roil Neighbors.

And following the link, that appears to be the case. Cuts in aid that the US has made to countries over a dispute about the International Criminal Court have upset those neighboring countries.

update: Thinking about it some more, what’s probably confusing about this is that it’s a “garden path” sentence: it starts out with a plausible parse that suddenly hits a word that can’t fit and forces you to backtrack. Bush’s Aid looks completely natural as an NP with Aid as the head, then Cuts heads a VP…On Court Issue starts to stretch it as a complement. Cuts doesn’t seem to license on, but maybe it means something like cuts class. Then you hit Roil and the whole thing falls apart.