Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

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.

Grammatical Terminology

Q: So, what exactly is a noun?

A: Noun comes from the Latin word for “name.” Nouns name what you’re talking about. For example, if I had to name what you’re doing, I’d say you’re interviewing me. So to interview is a noun.

It goes on from there, and gets sillier.

Hat tip to the incredibly-niftily-named Hapax Legomena

I tried to talk him out of his Strunk and White idolatry in the comments section…at least it’s not one of the more objectionable of S&W’s diktats.

From the back cover:

Most of us have firm convictions about our language, as to what constitutes proper use and what is unacceptable abuse. As children we are taught a great deal about good and bad grammar, correct pronunciation and spelling, and the proper use of words. As adults we constantly encounter books, articles, and letters to newspapers opining about “proper English” and the sorry state of our language. Yet many statements we believe to be true about language are likely as not false. Much of what we have learnt about language is misdirected; little of it is useful and some may be harmful. Myths and misunderstandings are plentiful. Much that passes for insight and informed comment is palpably wrong. This books explores why it is we believe what we believe about language, and why we persist in handing down from generation to generation a rag bag collection of fact and fantasy about language. It offers a corrective to many of the unsupportable beliefs we hold about language in general and English in particular. It shows how these beliefs originated and offers suggestions for a more enlightened approach.

I picked this up based on a recommendation by Geoffery Pullum, over on Language Log. So far I’m only about one chapter in, but it’s holding my attention. If it can actually shed some useful light on the questions it raises, it should be quite good indeed.

Randy Milholland, of Something Positive fame (if fame is the right word), has a new comic:Midnight Macabre - Updating Monday Through Friday. It’s set in 1981 and it’a about a young guy taking over a local TV station’s late night hosted horror movie show (think Elvira, or SCTV’s Count Floyd) when the old host dies on air. So far it’s mostly set-up, but the real reason I bring it up is today’s blog comment by Randy, apropos of publicists:

I want a publicist so I’ll have someone to make things up for me. “Mr. Milholland was, of course, only kidding when he punched the reporter’s child in the forehead and then had sexual relations with that piano. And, of course, it was completely an inside joke when my client hamstringed Noam Chomsky and pulled him into an alley way to feast upon the good professor’s leathery flesh.”

No idea what brought Chomsky to his mind in this context, but I bet that’s a rarer¹ sentence than “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

Blinger left this in a comment, but I thought it deserved an entry. He has changed his blog and is now EFL Geek: ESL & EFL in Korea. I’ve updated the blogroll appropriately.

The English-to-American Dictionary

Somebody with some time on their¹ hands and access to the online OED could probably have some fun sorting out the folk etymology from the real here, since the authors usual reference is “somebody wrote in and told me this.”

hat-tip: Oxblog

*A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar*, by Huddleston and Pullum, arrived from amazon yesterday, and I’ve been immersed in it ever since. This is the introductory textbook based on the material in their massive *Cambridge Grammar of the English Language* that I was wrestling with a few months ago. More on it later, but what a great book… I know some people who are getting this as a present, oh, yes…

John & Belle Have A Blog: Begging the Question

but here’s a language nit: “The denser linking pattern of conservatives begged the question of whether the conservative bloggers had a more uniform voice than the liberal ones did.” Philosophers are always bothered by this usage. We prefer to reserve ‘beg the question’ for venerable ‘presuppose your conclusion’.

From there follows an interesting discussion of the relatively recent (apparently, I haven’t researched this myself) trend in using “begging the question” to mean x demands that we ask y, as in the example Holbo cited.

“Please, sir, might I have some more gruel?” is a begging question.

“The Bible is the word of God, because it says it is and we know that God wouldn’t lie,” is begging the question.

Personally, I favor the philosopher’s version. Linguistically, there’s no doubt that the new version is entrenched and good descriptivists will just have to deal with it. Anthropologically, though, I don’t see any reason not to try to encourage or discourage particular usage. Or, to put it another way, there are other reasons than whether something is correct in English to favor certain phrases and avoid others, and in particular to object to the hijacking of technical terms, particularly when the reason for doing so seems to be to borrow the cachet of the original context. (Or maybe I’m being uncharitable, and nobody who does this really intends to sound like they’re making an erudite point about logic.) Since it seems to me that “raises the question” could be used wherever “begs the question” is used in the x demands we ask y sense, I say let the philosophers hang on to it…or else they might have to revert to calling it petitio principii And we can’t have that, can we?

Language Log: Agreement with nearest always bad?

So all would seem (relatively) clear, until I came across item (8), which happens to have the subject , in this case a coordinate subject, after the verb:

(8) Going to his house was what I lived for. There were liquor, music, and a strong desire for my body. (J. L. King, On the Down Low (Broadway Books, 2004), p. 33)

As I pointed out on the American Dialect Society mailing list on 12/28/04, (8) has the “correct” (plural) agreement with expletive there, but it still sounds weird to me; I’d much prefer (8′).

(8′) Going to his house was what I lived for. There was liquor, music, and a strong desire for my body.

A few respondents stuck with the technically “correct” (8) — and I am not denying their judgments — but many agreed with me that (8) was awful, (8′) much better (maybe even simply the “correct” version), and (8″) straightforwardly acceptable:

(8″) Going to his house was what I lived for. There were drinks, music, and a strong desire for my body.

8 sounds fine to me, but only if there is the locative. Reading it as the existential there sounds really odd to my ear, and I would go with 8′ in that case. I don’t know if that’s strange or not.