Literally non-literal, when literally asked about literalness

Someone on Reddit was trying to identify the fibre their yarn was made from, and someone suggested burning a bit of it since burning hair/wool has a very distinctive smell, while acrylic yarn will melt. The following conversation ensued after this burn test was carried out. 

OP: It did in fact smell like ass. 

Commenter A: I am not being sarcastic when I ask this: do you guys mean literal ass? Or does it have a specific smell thats just bad

Commenter B: They are being quite literal. Burning wool and hair smell awful. 

As further comments noted, if your literal ass literally smells of burning hair, you have issues to deal with that are more pressing than what your yarn is made of. Commenter A is clearly asking whether the smell is the same smell as that of ass: in other words, is like ass to be taken literally as meaning the same as ass. Commenter B meant something like 'The apparently extreme description of the badness of this smell is not an over-reaction; it really is very very bad and the intensifier 'literally' is appropriate here'. In other words, they meant that like ass was to be taken literally as meaning as bad as ass. 

I suppose it's not dissimilar to the phrase He works like a dog: it could mean that he is easily distracted, highly motivated by treats and responds to whistling (=the same as a dog), but more likely means that he works hard for little reward (=as much as a dog). 

A jug of cocktail

The Archers (BBC Radio 4) is no stranger to drama. This week, Ambridge has been divided over whether this is grammatical: 

I'll make a jug of cocktail. 

Nouns come in two basic kinds: count and mass. The difference between them is whether they're individual things or substances (actual or metaphorical). Donkey is a count noun, because we can count three donkeys, whereas hay is a mass noun, because we can't identify three hays. Similarly, we can observe how many donkeys but not how much donkey there is round here but we can talk about how much hay there is. 

And because language is a flexible and helpful thing, we can force nouns to flip between the two types if we need them to. In what's evocatively called the 'universal grinder', we can talk about how much donkey there is if we think about it as a substance: perhaps there's been some kind of terrible accident in the stable. (Conversely, we can count hays if we're talking about different types, perhaps, at a hay convention of some kind.)

Bringing us back to cocktails, it's quite clear that specific, named cocktails work in this way, flipping between the two as needed: I drank four mojitos, or Oh no, I've spilt mojito everywhere or, relevant to this case, I'll make a jug of mojito. This might make us expect cocktail to also behave the same, but no one ever said language was logical. It seems that for at least some people (the majority of the Archers characters found the sentence ungrammatical), cocktail cannot be a mass noun. They didn't follow up with further grammaticality judgements, sadly, querying whether it's possible to say I'll make a jug of cocktails or whether you'd have to specify your cocktail... maybe it wouldn't have made good radio. 

Last follow up: can you say I'll make a jug of margarita? I think I'd be inclined to say I'll make a jug of margaritas. I wonder whether the acceptability of the construction hinges on how much we think of the cocktail as a discrete object in a particular glass with trimmings like salt rim, twist of peel, etc. 

Put the lottery on

As you know, I'm a big fan of just listening out for interesting linguistic usages, anything that catches the ear or eye. So recently, when I was gently ridiculed for saying I might put the lottery on, and that 'everyone' says play the lottery, I was intrigued. To me, the way I said it was entirely natural and although I could say it the other way too, I didn't think it was true that 'everyone' says it that way. 

So of course I turned to that immediate arbiter of linguistic conundra, Facebook, and asked my friends to settle the question. The first few that responded agreed that I was weird for saying it that way, which obviously wasn't the response I was hoping for, so I asked for some northerners to chip in. And there it was: an almost categorical divide between people in Northeast England, and everyone else. 

A regional difference that no one has (to my knowledge) noticed before! This is my bread and butter. You're welcome. 

Getting drank

Beavertown Brewery currently have these billboard adverts up, with the slogan Out of this world beer. Drank on Earth: 

Photo: @nicholasd on instagram

The verb drink is one of our irregular verbs, as it doesn't have a past tense of drinked, adding the regular past tense ending -ed, and instead changes its vowel, so you say I drank beer not I drinked beer. It also does this for the participle, which is what you use for various things including perfect aspect (I have drunk beer) and passive (The beer was drunk by me). This passive participle is also the one we use for things like relative clauses (The beer that is drunk on Earth). 

But there is variation! Not everyone has all three of these forms in all contexts. For a lot of people, drank is used for all the non-present forms (I drank the beer, I have drank the beer), while for others, drunk is used (I drunk the beer, I have drunk the beer). For everyone, the adjective is drunk, though (no one says I am drank!), which I think is a nice indication that it's somehow separate from the verb. 

In formal English, then, this slogan would say Out of this world beer, drunk on Earth, because it's the relative clause type: this is short for which is drunk on Earth. They've chosen instead to go with the form used in more informal contexts and said Drank on Earth. The company's image is very informal and friendly, so they presumably felt it fit more with that vibe, and it has the added benefit of not being mistaken for the adjective which might imply getting drunk, not a good look from the point of view of the advertising standards people. 

Performing a flying fuck

At our students' graduations this week, a colleague told me about a (non-canonical) ballet step which, because of the particular way that it's performed, is called the Flying Fuck. 

(As an aside, we had a conversation about how many of the names of dance steps are bodily, sexual or generally risqué, something that is also true of one of the types of dance that I do.)

So as you probably know, there is an expression, I don't give a flying fuck. It means that you don't care at all. For anyone who's using this blog to learn English (ill-advisadly, maybe), it's pretty rude so go carefully. 

In this expression, a flying fuck is what linguists would call a Negative Polarity Item or NPI. These are words that don't sound grammatical in a sentence without a 'licensor', often a negation, hence the name. So we can say (1) but not (2), where there is no negative word in the sentence to license the NPI and it sound really weird: 

(1) I don't give a flying fuck about his career prospects. 

(2) *I give a flying fuck about his career prospects. 

There are actually more licensors than just negation. Lots of NPIs can be licensed by expressions like exactly two. We can see this with another NPI, any: 

(3) *Some people have eaten any salad. 

(4) Exactly two people have eaten any salad. 

NPIs are tricksy and puzzling. There are several different theories to explain why they work the way they do, all of which are appealing in some way, and none of which quite satisfy completely. For example, some theories of how NPIs work predicted that flying fuck would not be licensed by exactly, as it's what is sometimes known as a 'minimiser', but it actually sounds ok to me: 

(5) Exactly two people give a flying fuck about his career prospects. 

I think this fact would be predicted under what seems to me to be the most widely-accepted (current) idea, however, which is known as 'non-veridicality' and is essentially about (4) being more specific than (3), though in more technical terms than that. 

But especially interesting to me is the fact that because this is the name of a ballet step, the exact same expression can completely lose its NPI status, and doesn't need licensing at all: 

(6) They performed a perfect flying fuck.

(7) The dance opens with a flying fuck. 

I like this sort of almost-literal interpretation of the expression to repurpose it for the name, at which point it becomes just a bog-standard phrase like any other. 

The literature on this is very fun to read, by the way, because it's full of phrases like I don't give a flying fuck so I recommend it. 

Despatches from Barcelona

I’m just back from Barcelona. If you haven’t been, I recommend it, it was great! Here’s a selection of linguistic observations. 

I spoke mostly (Castilian) Spanish to people I interacted with while I was there, though people who live there speak Catalan. I don’t have any great insight on Catalan other than it’s a cool language. It does have this interesting spelling thing: because <ll> is a letter, but sometimes two instances of <l> occur together, they put a dot between them to separate them. So there’s a metro station called Paral.lel, for instance. This seems very helpful, if not strictly required. 

In general, people did speak Spanish back to me as well, which is something that seems to vary in different places. I spoke French in Paris, but mostly people spoke back in English. Perhaps my French accent is bad enough that it just felt easier… and it definitely wasn’t that people didn’t speak English well in Barcelona. Pretty much everyone we talked to spoke it fluently. 

That’s partly a result of the massive levels of tourism there. Before I went I’d read that tourism is getting to be a problem there, and I wasn’t sure how that could be. In Margate we moan about the DFLs (Down From London) clogging up our local bars and making a mess on the beach in summer, but they bring in money and allow the town to thrive. But I could see what they meant when I was there. There were so many of us, and I could see how Airbnb must be causing a real housing crisis. I saw a sticker saying ‘You tourist kills my neighbourhood’. Just to bring it back round to linguistics, I wondered if this was a generic singular (like ‘the Humboldt penguin lives in South America’), or a vocative (addressing the audience) and it was directed at me. 

Lastly, a phonology one. On our last day we went to a nice ice cream place with old-fashioned decor, granizado, orxata, etc. They had a sign that said ‘More sits upstairs’. Much as I would love this to be an adorable use of the verb ‘sit’ as a noun, I suspect it’s a result of the words ‘sits’ and ‘seats’ being more or less homophonous if you have Spanish phonology. Spanish (and probably Catalan, I don’t know for sure) doesn’t have what linguists call a ‘phonemic distinction’ between the vowels in those words, which means that there isn’t an equivalent pair of words where the only difference is the vowel, like English ‘sits’ vs ‘seats’. And if your language doesn’t have a phonemic distinction, it’s really really hard to hear it and remember the difference in another language. 

Is a great deal more than a lot?

I'm sure this survey made it clear what the options meant, but to me, 'a lot' and 'a great deal' mean exactly the same thing.