My 2020, all about me, and my life, by me

It's New Year's Eve, so I'm slightly breaking my rule about not working between Xmas and New Year and doing a sort of look back at the year. I don't normally, but this year has been unusual and I'm not sure how much I'll be able to post in the spring because of other work things. 

Obviously the thing that's overshadowed the whole year, and will continue to do so, is the covid-19 pandemic. It meant that we had to suddenly learn how to teach online in a matter of hours, and then lived our lives more or less entirely online for the rest of the year. We actually did a really good job. I know students aren't totally satisfied, but to be quite frank nor am I. The technology isn't perfect, it's harder to teach when you're not face-to-face, and for most students it's harder to learn that way. We aren't doing it the optimum way for either distance learning or face-to-face (as the university is determined that all students should have some face-to-face sessions), so it's necessarily a compromise. But from what I see compared to other universities, we've provided a pretty good experience, with no loss of contact or teaching hours (at least, not among the colleagues I know). And we mastered a whole lot of technology really fast! I've now got a tablet thingy to draw tree diagrams which I actually should have got years ago, as it's great. 

We've also all been pushed into incorporating a lot of pedagogically good things into our teaching by necessity, so now lots more people are using things like polls and quizzes and completion tracking and so on, and everyone is recording their lectures (I'm a fan of lecture capture for accessibility, but a lot of colleagues are absolutely dead against it for various reasons). And one thing that I think is great is that now all video content has to be captioned. This wasn't pandemic-related, and in fact it came at a bad time because we're producing a lot more video with much less time available, so in the end I think the captioning was poor quality for most content because no one had time to correct the auto-captioning. I did, just about, because of my relatively light teaching load this term and a strong interest in doing it, but even I didn't manage to get everything done. So that's something that I'm going to keep working with our accessibility people on, as it's important that we work out a way to provide this that doesn't mean academic staff have to work 60 hours a week just to get the captions corrected (which is literally what I would have to do next term). 

So that was a lot more work for everyone and caused a lot of stress, and I don't think anyone wants to carry on doing it any longer than we have to, but we'll be doing it for the next term at least, and maybe we can keep some of the things that were good (like my fun drawing tablet). 

The other thing that was massive for me this year work-wise was the Black Lives Matter protests. Of course it's not about my work, it was a huge global movement, but it was particularly relevant to me in that context because this year was the last year of my 3-year project working to close attainment gaps. Over that time it became very clear to me that we needed to have an explicit anti-racist focus, but also that to bring my almost exclusively white colleagues along with me, we felt that we needed to tread quite carefully and not necessarily be as angry or passionate as we often felt, even framing a lot of our work in euphemisms about 'improving attainment' and 'student success'. It was frustrating most of the time, talking to people who thought that we were broadly doing a good thing, but that it didn't affect them, or even that our focus was off and we should be looking at something else (like class, which the Runnymede director recently talked about very clearly and helpfully). And yes I do know that I've just recently come to understand all of this myself and that my colleagues from Black and Asian backgrounds have been toiling away at this much longer than me; I'm not claiming some special insight here! But what happened this summer was that everyone was talking about race, using the words 'Black' and 'racist' (you'd be surprised how far people will go not to say the words), doing some reading, and acknowledging that they could themselves do something about it. I'm bitterly disappointed that my division decided not to extend my project's work this year. There are long-term plans in that regard, but it has meant that in this crucial year there was no one coordinating this work and it's been down to individuals to do it or not. Happily many of them have, and I've seen some great strides in how we address injustices of race and beyond, with people thinking about their module content, where there might be biases, how they talk about race, and much more. But no one was at the helm to steer the ship and make sure that processes carried on happening, data was collected, students didn't slip through the cracks, and many things simply didn't happen. It's a pity that in this year of all years, we weren't able to do that. But still; as I say, the protests following George Floyd's murder, which was awful and should never have happened, brought home to many people that it's all our individual responsibilities and I hope that that's another thing that lasts. The UK linguistics subject association LAGB has set up (or is setting up, rather) a sub-committee for race and social justice, which I'm involved with and is something we've talked about for ages and never quite got off the ground, but this year it actually happened. I'm yet to see real understanding or change at the management-type levels where it matters, but baby steps. 

So some good things happened. The best thing I did this year was my radio show! I was contacted late last year by a production company about being the 'expert' on a television programme about language. I was initially sceptical but they had anticipated that and had all the right motives and understood the pitfalls, and in fact that was why they wanted a linguist, so I very happily agreed and spent the next few months working with them to write the questions (I'm sure none of mine made it into the final version!) and find interesting facts to add to the script. Luckily a lot of this time coincided with strike action at work so I was able to travel to London several times and spend whole days working on it. We recorded an episode for the commissioning person which was very funny, and the BBC decided that they wanted us to make a one-off radio programme for their 'Funny Fortnight' on Radio 2, which was so exciting! We recorded it at a theatre in London, and Tom Allen was the host and the panellists were comedians and it was so good. I loved it. 

I also got promoted this year, receiving the news at the end of March, and although it was slightly soured by my university not paying me the salary increase that's supposed to go with it, it was nice to get it. 

Then we were truly into lockdown and after that I really didn't expect to get much done. Like a lot of people I feel like it's harder to concentrate, as there's a constant sort of background worry and the extra work caused a lot of stress plus meant that summer research was basically gone as we had to prepare a lot more teaching for Autumn term, rewriting modules to be suitable for online learning and working out all the technology. But an unexpected thing was that I did manage to write a draft of an article this term. This is unheard of, but I don't think it's lockdown productivity - it was a combination of my lighter teaching load compared to usual, plus not knowing what I would be teaching next term till quite late. This meant that I couldn't prepare any teaching in advance (yes, January is going to be fun) so I devoted a lot of time to writing. I worked with a recent graduate whose dissertation I supervised (which also helped with accountability), and we got our draft to a basically acceptable state to send for friendly feedback. So that was a big achievement and one I don't expect to repeat! But it did show me that I can do sustained work on a big intimidating piece of writing over a term if I carve out the time, and taught me some things about my own writing habits and what works well for me. 

Non-work-wise, of course not seeing friends has been grim. I'm normally very sociable and go out a lot, and like to see lots of different people. I'm lucky in that I don't live alone but I also don't have children to home-school, and I have a house big enough to have a dedicated work space and I'm close to the sea and so on. We also got to know several of our neighbours a lot better this year, partly because people were keen to chat in the street but mostly because my partner went round doing a lot of volunteering while he was furloughed. So all of that meant that lockdown was not that bad. And I haven't lost anyone close to me (my grandma did die earlier this year but before coronavirus got here) and we haven't been ill with it, and are otherwise healthy, so all of that is stuff to be thankful for. But I do really miss going out, and I especially miss dancing. Normally it's a big part of my life: I have weekly practice with my morris side, monthly weekend practices with my rapper side, and all summer long we dance out at country pubs on weekday evenings and folks festivals all round the country at weekends, seeing all the friends we only meet up with at those events and having lots of fun. (The loss of conferences is similar in that respect, and I'm not sure that we'll get those back any time soon now that the budget-holders know we can do them via Zoom.) 

I took up or increased my other hobbies instead, so I made a billion knitted and crocheted things, and took up lino printing in the summer and made some good things including some epic Christmas cards, and did the couch to 5k (have let that slide a bit in the cold and rainy winter but will definitely start again...). And I got my old pub quiz team back together! We used to quiz weekly till I left Newcastle in 2012, but the pub we went to moved the quiz online, so we reformed. And because I couldn't go anywhere for my summer holiday this year, we took a two-week staycation at home in Margate. It was brilliant, just going out for (outdoor) amazing food and drinks, sitting in the sun reading books, going to the beach, and stuff like that. 

I'm very worried about the future, and the sky-rocketing virus rates and the government's inability to make good policies, and about Brexit which takes effect tomorrow (!), and about the coming term which is going to be very much harder than the last one for me, and the future of my job, and lots of other things, but my optimism in the face of it all is undefeated and I think that on balance, for me personally, this has not been all that bad a year. I know that for many people it's been horrific, with job losses, bereavements, homelessness, money worries, mental health concerns, and so much more. I'm not complacent. I'm very grateful for having escaped relatively unscathed so far and will hope for more of the same in 2021, and for better times for those who've had it tough. 

Untranslatable even by a universal translator

One of the most important things to the storylines of the long-running TV series Star Trek is that there's a universal translator. For those who don't know, it's a scifi series set in the future, when basically social problems are sorted on Earth and everyone has enough to live on and people can just go into space because they want to and so there are these space ships that belong to the Federation that just go around space and meet people and solve their diplomatic issues or sometimes, like, just relieve their loneliness or meddle in their affairs or whatever it might be. They get involved in fights much more often than you'd think, given their mission. So they're obviously always encountering races that they've never met before who all have their own language and culture and often disastrous/hilarious misunderstandings ensue, but they can always speak each other's language. I imagine this is because it would be dull if every week they main plot line was basically Arrival. So this thing is part of their ship, or in their kit (there are lots of series) and it means that what it sounds like is everyone speaks English most of the time. 

Sometimes there are bits of language that aren't translated. So often you hear Klingon spoken - in the current reimagining, we saw lots of scenes without humans in, on board a Klingon ship, and there it made sense to have them speaking Klingon (after all, someone's gone to the bother of inventing it) and subtitle it. 

Another episode in the current series had the people 1000 years ahead of where our main character had come from speaking 'Pidgin'. That was an instance where the translator had evidently done a partial job. Pidgins arise in contact situations and typically have a 'lexifier' language which provides the vocabulary (in the context of slavery, where many pidgins and then creoles arose, this would be the colonisers' language, such as English) and another language influences the grammar (a West African language in the slavery context). (Well, this is one way of thinking about it. Let's go with it for now and you can read about creoles yourself if you want to - you should.) The 'Pidgin' (probably actually a creole, as it seems to be stable) in the series isn't discussed but it's probably developed from some kind of lingua franca, as there seems to be a lot of trading going on. The universal translator seems to have been able to pick out some features and translate them but not all, as it doesn't translate it to English. The question of why this particular language remains untranslatable whereas all the other unfamiliar languages don't is a puzzling one - it's not because it's in the future, as it copes with all the other languages they encounter. Perhaps it really is a pidgin, and therefore doesn't yet have fully stabilised patterns and rules, and so is not reliably translatable? Or perhaps they thought we wouldn't notice this inconsistency that was convenient for the story. 

Then, recently, the main character Michael Burnham sets up some kind of formal conversation where she needs an advocate. The process is called T'Kal-in-ket, and her advocate is called a shalankhkhai, which we learn was called sha-set but they now use this Romulan term, and it has to be someone from the Qowat Milat order of warrior nuns. Now, we often encounter borrowings in the series, and they're simply absorbed into the story and we're all good - that's how it works in real life too, when we talk about eating avocado or drinking pinot noir or wearing dungarees. But the characters from 'our' gang didn't know these words and they all had to be explained to them and the explanations were things like 'a type of advocate'. In other words, these were 'untranslatable' words, the kind of word that refers to a specific concept that doesn't have an exact match in English (or whatever you're translating to), so you need to explain it. Other examples are schadenfreude, or saudade, or hygge, and so on. Similar examples in real life are job titles like Sultan or Tsar, where it doesn't quite correspond to King or Prime Minister or President or something. Others are titles like 'Mrs' - this is frequently the translation given for 'Frau' in German (on forms, for instance). This is infuriating to English-speaking customers who are not married and would use 'Ms', as 'Mrs' can only mean a married person in English, whereas Frau, Madame, Señora, etc simply mean an adult woman rather than a girl, so they are not good translations. (If Frau or Mme were the option, that would be fine!) 

I don't know what language our crew are meant to be speaking - each their own language, I suppose, as they have a universal translator. I'd like to see a bit more of the translator running into difficulties and thereby causing a linguistic subplot. 

The nonexistent national rules apply until an unspecified date

Hooray, it's been ages since I did a 'rubbish council communication' post! Here's a tweet from my own local council about last week's lockdown/tier announcement. 

❗️Thanet is in Tier 3 of the national restrictions along with the rest of Kent and Medway.

⚠️National COVID-19 rules apply in the district until this date.

➡️More information: https://t.co/B4gDCMvadI #ProtectThanet #ProtectKent pic.twitter.com/F1KyoCrs6L

— Communications Team (@ThanetCouncil) December 4, 2020

Honestly not sure how this one even happened. Did they copy and paste the information from a tweet last month saying the whole of England was in lockdown, and then not change any of it? 

They quite rightly say that we're in Tier 3. But to say that 'National COVID-19 rules apply' is non-informative, as the point of the tier system is that the rules are different in different areas. So do they just mean the rule that you have to follow the rules for your tier? Or is it more like 'the law still applies, no matter how post-apocalyptic this might seem'? Then they say that these rules apply 'until this date', which is helpful especially because there is no date mentioned anywhere in this tweet or at the page they link to. Ah well, carry on staying home and staying safe, folks. 

When who you are is relevant to what you think about accents

 A tweet from last week about London children's accents sparked a bit of twitter fuss and made me think about how the identity of the opinion-holder matters as much as the identity of the person the opinion is about. 

I think we can all agree that 'punching down' is bad, namely criticising or mocking someone in a position of less power than you. This would be like a very senior academic calling out a junior scholar in front of a room full of people at a conference, for instance - it's not cool. The opposite scenario may be confrontational, but the power dynamics mean that it probably isn't bullying in the second instance. Similarly, social groups have different levels of power or authority and so comedians' jokes can fall flat if they appear to be punching down: if you want to make jokes about poor people they'd better be couched in a lot of understanding and solidarity, whereas jokes about rich people are pretty fair game. 

The tweet was as follows: 

My sister has just started work teaching primary school kids in North London and has informed me that everybody at the school has such strong accents they don't say "Thoughtful", they just say "Fortfuw" and I don't know how she gets through the day without laughing at them.

— Matt Bevan 🎙 (@MatthewBevan) November 25, 2020

OK, so we have young children as the subject, so relative powerlessness, and working class children at that (we can tell from their accents), so a double whammy. Is this awful and mean? You'd think so, wouldn't you. Accent discrimination is a real insidious and nasty thing, a form of classism that often masks other prejudices and tends to be presented as concern or commentary on how people choose to live their lives. So this apparent mockery of these kids who do what linguists call th-fronting (pronouncing 'thought' and 'fort' the same) and l-vocalisation (pronouncing 'l' like a 'w') drew a bit of criticism from my linguist babes who are always on the lookout for injustice and sticking up for people who need a bit of help (trust me, there's a lot of Bad Opinions about language on the internet). 

The guy who tweeted it is Australian, and lives and works in Australia, and for me that puts a whole nother spin on things. Suddenly this isn't just some guy mocking the kids for speaking in an accent he thinks is 'wrong', it's delight in an utterly unfamiliar accent which probably sounds totally adorable if you don't hear it spoken around you or associate it with Eastenders. Maybe it has connotations of Victorian chimney sweeps and street urchins as in Oliver! and it seems anachronistic to find that it's just the everyday language of his sister's class. While it probably doesn't help with the overall ideal of removing the stigma of these features of London English, it also doesn't feel the same as people on the internet suggesting that the children should learn to 'speak properly' so that people take them more seriously. 

I don't want to use the word, so I'll just mention it instead

A while back I was in a meeting, and a colleague was talking about a group of people in her department. These people were troublesome, constantly pushing back against the work she was trying to do, and sort of ganging up against her. She spoke about this one particular person, and said this: 

I don't want to use the word 'ringleader'... 

This is a classic way of being rude about someone. You say you don't want to use a word X to describe them, and then there's a huge implied (or explicit) 'but', and we all know you mean X even if what you've actually said is a minimised or toned-down version of X (for example, 'I don't want to use the word 'ringleader' but they are a bit bossy'). It wouldn't stand up in court, it's so well-known a way of calling someone X. We laughed, in fact, when my colleague did this. 

A variant is 'I don't like to use the word X', which has the subtly different meaning that you regret having to use the word, but it does in fact apply to this person. You can accompany this one with a sad shake of your head, as it's such a shame that you've been forced to use such an unpleasant description of the person. 

The title of this post is a reference to the use/mention distinction, where in my example the person isn't strictly speaking using the word; they just mention it, but they still achieve some communicative effect with it. There are other ways of mentioning words that are more neutral, like if I'm blogging about a word, but... this is not one of them. 

Kerry the marry

Starbucks is featured on this blog often enough lately that I'm starting to think I should ask for a promotional fee (for the record, I drink Starbucks only when I stop at a service station and there isn't another coffee place because, for reasons explored in another post, their coffee is not catered to my tastes). 

Here's their Christmas advert: 

The slogan is 'carry the merry', meaning that you're carrying around a drink full of Christmas spirit. Someone posted on twitter the other day that they bet linguists were all excited about it and I was thinking that it's a *bit* interesting that the adjective merry is the object of the verb, but not that exciting surely? and then days later I realised that this is an example of the merry-marry-Mary merger. 

This is a sound pattern that's incredibly well described and studied so we don't need to go into it here, but suffice to say that for most North American speakers, those three words sound identical (there are regional patterns where only two of them do, or none, or it varies). In the UK, other English-speaking countries, and in the parts of the US without this merger (e.g. Philadelphia), the three words are pronounced differently, as they are for me. (I think this generalisation is true; there may be other varieties with the merger or part of it but I'm not a specialist in this area.) 

It affects words with a vowel coming before an /r/ so carry is also affected, and the slogan would rhyme for many Americans. For their customers without this particular merger, it's assonance instead. 

I think that the fact that I didn't even notice it despite someone saying it was linguistically interesting shows just how much this goes below the radar. When someone has a different accent from you, you accommodate really easily and hear vowels especially as being 'the same' as your own. It sounds a bit odd if you try to imitate their vowel sounds so we just accept that these very different sounds are 'the same' in some way and in many cases can't even hear that they're different. There was a bit in Vocal Fries last year where host Carrie Gillon describes a time when she asked her professor to say her name correctly because he was pronouncing it with a British-type vowel, and she said 'say it as if it's spelt Kerry'. This really surprised me because although I can hear how (my) Kerry vowel is closer* to (her) Carrie vowel than (my) Carrie vowel is, I distinctly hear her name as Carrie and not Kerry, probably in part because I've seen it written down. (This type of confusing sentence is also why lexical sets were invented.) 

*If you're interested, it sounds closer because it literally is closer: they're produced in a more similar area of the mouth, at the front, with the difference just in the height of the tongue, whereas the British** Carrie vowel is produced with the tongue further back in the mouth. 

**These things are different again in Scotland which has a different set of vowel rules, so some of what I say about the UK applies here but not all of it. 

I declare this blog post to be interesting

Donald Trump lost the US election last week to Joe Biden. You might have missed it, it's not like it was literally all anyone was talking about all week. We even stopped talking about coronavirus for a bit. One of the things that characterised his unhinged campaign was an insistence on the election being fraudulent, and also that he had definitely got more votes. Because of the way the system works over there, states are 'called' for one or the other candidate once it's past reasonable doubt about who will win (e.g. the number of votes still to count isn't enough to change the current outcome). This means that anyone could call a state early, and they might be right, because it's 50/50, but they might also be wrong because they're just guessing, so you want to look at the basis on which they're calling it. 

Trump tweeted this, and Twitter immediately marked it as false or misleading: 

We have claimed, for Electoral Vote purposes, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (which won’t allow legal observers) the State of Georgia, and the State of North Carolina, each one of which has a BIG Trump lead. Additionally, we hereby claim the State of Michigan if, in fact,.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 4, 2020

You can see he uses the word hereby in his claim for Michigan, which adds an air of authority and legality to the claim, although no actual legality of course. 

Hereby is a word meaning 'as a result of this utterance', so if you say I hereby declare this play park open, then you have opened the play park by uttering those words. You can also, if invested with the right authority, hereby forbid barbecues in this area before 6pm. This is what's known as a 'performative' speech act, because by uttering the thing, you are performing that act: claiming, declaring, promising, naming, and so on. Hereby is useful for legal documents, because it also means 'as a result of this document', so it means something like 'by signing this document you agree to this rule', and also that if the document is later overturned, so too is the thing that was hereby excluded/forbidden/claimed. 

In everyday speech it's actually less useful because the verb does most of the work, and the legality or validity is provided by the situation. If you don't have the right authority, you can of course still declare it, forbid it, whatever, but it doesn't have legal standing. So if you stand in your neighbour's garden and hereby declare that this is your property, it doesn't magically become your property. However, you have still declared it, and you would have even if you hadn't said hereby. There is no difference between 1 and 2 except for some posturing, and perhaps an implication that you're just now claiming it in (1), whereas in (2) perhaps there is some prior claim on it that you're bringing up now (it was promised to you by the host earlier on, perhaps). Your claim being upheld is dependent on the agreement of your friends. Similarly, there's no difference between (3) and (4), and the validity of your declaration is dependent only on you being some local dignity who's been asked to officially open the shopping centre; it isn't open if you just pass by a half-built complex and shout this at your friend. 

1. I hereby claim this last slice of pizza. 
2. I claim this last slice of pizza.
3. I hereby declare this shopping centre open. 
4. I declare this shopping centre open.

In a sentence like the one in my post's title, where I declare something subjective, then the validity is dependent on people agreeing with me. This is why statements like this are better if they declare something objective, but are also used to give additional (sometimes false) weight to opinions or baseless claims. My post might be dull as anything, or only some people might agree, but me declaring it to be interesting sounds like I have some authority to make a factual statement about it. 

So Trump claims Georgia and North Carolina just as much as he does Michigan, even though he doesn't say hereby for those ones, and the speech act is the same. The legality or validity of it is dependent not on his claiming them, but on the number of votes counted. At the time of writing, the former two are still not called by Associated Press, and of course his claim for Michigan came with a big censored 'if' clause about voter fraud, so no doubt he will be pursuing that one. 

Panic! in the pandemic

I had my first social distancing argument on Saturday. As I was queuing to pay for kippers at my local farm shop, a woman who apparently had no concept of personal space, never mind pandemic space, was right up behind me. I took a step forward, and she closed the gap again. Then I asked her to keep her distance (politely, I thought), and she sneered at me, shook her head, and told me not to panic. Panic! 

Panic, which I just now learnt is named after the god Pan, who'd shout when he woke from his naps and make the sheep scatter in fright, is a sudden fear provoking anxiety so strong it causes a fight-or-flight response. If you've ever had a panic attack, you'll know how strong a physical experience it is. Even if we're not using the medical or scientific definition, but a looser sense, it's still a pretty physical thing involving running about, not thinking straight, irrational decisions, things like that. 

Panic is not politely asking people to follow the guidelines we've been told to follow in order to stem a pandemic. (Pandemic is not named after Pan, sadly.) It's not a sustained, reasoned, relatively calm course of action. Yes, those of us keeping distance from others may be feeling anxiety, but it's not the sudden desire to flee and shortness of breath and racing heartbeat of panic. 

I've heard this word used a lot about people's rational (to me) responses to the pandemic, though, generally from right-wing or anti-lockdown or anti-mask commenters. They are the ones who think the virus isn't that bad, and that we should just go on as normal, perhaps 'protecting the vulnerable'. If you have this view, then a more appropriate word than 'panic' would be 'over-reaction'. 

Using the word 'panic' is just like when you're having an argument with someone and they say 'you're being hysterical', whereupon the correct response is to shriek 'I'm NOT being hysterical' and storm out slamming the door behind you. It makes you seem unreliable and undermines your actions, making them seem ridiculous or unreasonable. It's a dirty, underhand tactic but it works well. 

And yes, when the woman said that to me, I replied 'I'm NOT panicking' and stormed out. 

Book review: 'The language lover's puzzle book' by Alex Bellos (Guardian Faber, 2020)

Full disclosure, as I don't normally do reviews in this blog, so publishing this one might be seen to carry a certain amount of weight: the author sent me a copy of this book with a suggestion that I might possibly write about it if I liked it. I did like it, so I am. 

Alex Bellos, Guardian puzzle-setter, has compiled 100 linguistic puzzles – sets of facts about languages from all over the world, with brain-teasers for the reader to solve – with some context about the languages. All of the puzzles are fully work-out-able from the information presented, so in this sense it's a pretty good approximation of what some of our introductory courses look like. I've even used some of the very same puzzles in this book in first year seminars before. They're mostly taken from previous Linguistic Olympiads. This is why I was looking forward to reading it, because for the last few years I've organised a 'markathon' for the advanced papers for the UK Linguistics Olympiad, and so I was already well aware of the fiendishness of some of the puzzles. Happily, Bellos hasn't included the very hardest ones in the book, so they're all manageable, though some are really tricky and would take you a while to do with pencil and paper. 

The way I approached the book was not to try to solve every puzzle as I read through the book. (You could do that, and it would keep you going a really long time, so it's good value if you're looking for a Christmas stocking filler, which I assume is the intended market.) Instead, I cast an eye over a puzzle to get the idea of it, and then flipped to the answers once I'd spotted the principle (or if I couldn't work it out quickly). For me, the interest was more in the linguistic knowledge rather than in the process of solving the puzzle, although some of them were very satisfying in that regard too. For that reason, I actually found having the answers in the back of the book a bit of a nuisance and would have been happy to have at least the bones of the explanation directly following each puzzle, to provide context and grammar facts with perhaps the full walkthrough in the appendix. But that's me, a linguist, not a puzzle-solver. For the average reader it's probably helpful to have the linguistic details separated out from the cultural context. But is that playing into the unhelpful separation of grammar and its speakers, that formal linguists are sometimes charged with? I don't know. 

It's really hard to write a book like this, where you convey the delight of linguistic variation, without falling into the trap of exoticising or depersonalising the languages you're talking about, detaching them from the people who speak them every day when you talk about them as an object to marvel at. I was well aware of this myself when I was asked to be the linguistic expert on a radio comedy panel show earlier this year. Even though the whole production team was consciously committed to not being racist, and fully aware of the perils of accidentally doing so, I know we didn't fully manage it. We avoided some potential clangers, to be sure, but I know we didn't get it right. Can you ever? I'm not sure. And I also think that it's good for there to be books out there that present this delight in diversity rather than just banging on about how wonderful language is without ever going beyond English, so there must be a trade-off, I suppose. In this book, there are the inevitable untranslatable words, Chinese compound words, and other tropes. There are a few scare quotes that I wouldn't have thought necessary (enclosing 'writing system' or 'texts', when the un-scare-quoted terms would have been accurate). Alexander Graham Bell's contribution to Deaf education is also discussed in a positive light, with no acknowledgement of the eugenicist views he held regarding Deaf people and the negative legacy of the methods he used. There are no signed languages included either, with the one exception of Cistercian sign language. But in the main, the material in the book is presented in the spirit it's intended: fascination with languages and the different ways they can do things. Languages are presented from all over the world, and although Europe is over-represented (especially English, which is a conscious decision on the author's part) and Africa rather under-represented considering the linguistic diversity there, it is a world tour.  

Most of the puzzles don't require you to have any linguistic knowledge at all. Some of them need you to make an educated guess about what a language might be like, but a lot of them are simply pattern-spotting and logical deduction.  Puzzle 10 was a nice example of one where you needed to simply match up the patterns, spot the links, but then make a couple of educated guesses about things that didn't quite fit: it demonstrated very neatly the complications that natural languages can bring. And the twist in that puzzle was a joy. I learnt some language facts from the book, including about counting in Japanese and Danish, and I also learnt other non-language stuff too: things about mathematical symmetry, and botanical notation for describing petal structure, and was reminded of the bizarre language to describe coats of arms. 

There's a strong focus on writing systems, as you might expect, with chapters on alphabets and scripts and invented writing systems and codes of various kinds. There are also chapters on terms for family members, counting systems and dates, which reflect the kinds of things that Linguistic Olympiad puzzles are about (and which you can make a self-contained puzzle about). I was impressed by how coherent the themes are, though occasionally something unexpected popped up - puzzle 45 is a fun puzzle about garden path sentences, in the chapter about kinship terms, linked just by including the phrase the old man. 

I'll be adding this to my department's recommendations for prospective students. It's linguistically accurate, as far as I can tell (bar the definition of parts of speech in the 'technical' chapter on grammatical features that differ most from English), with input from linguists and native speakers. And I'll also be passing my copy on to a teenager who I think will like it, having just taught himself Esperanto. I think it would work for someone who likes logic puzzles just as well as someone who likes language-related trivia, though, and definitely for someone who likes learning languages just for the sake of it. 

Greyhound-dialect puzzles yam

Because I have two long dogs (a greyhound and a galga) I follow long dog content on instagram, and I'm always slightly intrigued by their distinctive dialect. Here's a representative example: 

The posts are always written from the dog's perspective, and the dogs have this slightly childish manner of speaking (which is fair enough, they're only young) so they use diminutives like earsies and cutesy words like sheeples in the post above. Their spellings presumably reflect their phonology, so here you can see that this dog has vewy for very, indicating a common variant of the /r/ sound, especially in children. That one isn't necessarily universal, but what is universal to greyhounds is the 'th-stopping' you can see in Dey for They, where 'th' sounds are pronounced as /d/. This dog doesn't have it in all relevant contexts, as elsewhere he says ze for the rather than de or da, which would be more usual. Some of these things are also found in other dog dialects and even beyond, in cat varieties. Others are quite specific to greyhounds. 

The thing that I spotted the other day was this yam. Yam is well-known as a feature of the Black Country dialect, around Wolverhampton and Dudley, where it's a variation of the verb be. In Standard Englishes you get am just for first person singular (I am). In many varieties you get levelling so that was or were is used for all the forms in the past tense (I were) or even is in present (you is). I think this is a form of levelling too: am is used for other persons than 1st singular, as in the message from the Black Country Ale Tairsters (tasters) below: The BATs am 'ere ter tairst yoer beer!. 

Then you get it running together with the pronoun in speech and you've got yam. I did all that from memory (sorry, lots of teaching prep to do this week) so the details might be wrong, but that's about the size of it. But what it isn't, is yam being the pronoun itself. That's what the greyhounds are doing, they're using yam in place of me in standard Englishes, not in conjunction with the verb to be. It's not a one-off from Finn the greyhound either, it's pretty standard Greyhound. So they've innovated or borrowed a new first-person pronoun. 

Get off of my timeline

Twitter is a never-ending source of language peeving. Lately, a twitter user expressed eagerness to see the 'correct' use of off of. Well, joke's on her because there is no correct use. 

Regular readers will know that this is a linguistics blog, and as such, we're not in the business of dictating correct usage, preferring instead to document and ponder upon usage such as we find it. I wouldn't normally say that there's no correct use, because normally we'd be contrasting standard and non-standard uses and I'd be pointing out that both are valid in their respective contexts. 

The standard equivalent of off of is just off, as you are surely aware. Merriam-Webster says 

The of is often criticized as superfluous, a comment that is irrelevant because off of is an idiom. 

Which is pleasingly snarky, I think. 

Our friend the twitter user responded to all the many people who helpfully gave her examples of off of used in a phrase (such as the Rolling Stones' lyric Hey, you, get off of my cloud) by asking what of is doing - what does it mean, what does it contribute? 

Answer: nothing, just like it always doesn't. Lazy of, never contributing any meaning. 

Off of is a preposition (not two prepositions, as it looks like, because it doesn't have two separate bits of prepositional meaning). Or if you like it's an adverb and a preposition - I don't really like but it works as follows. Compare it with on and on to: We drove on (=We continued on our journey) and We drove on to Peterborough (=We drove further until we reached Peterborough). Now to is linking up the verb with the object Peterborough, indicating movement towards it, and on adverbishly indicates continuation of the action. On to can be contrasted with onto like so: We drove on to Peterborough (=We drove on until we got to Peterborough) vs We drove onto the ramp for the ferry, where onto indicates movement to the top surface and doesn't at all mean the same thing as We drove on until we got to the ramp for the ferry. 

There's no comparable difference for off and off of that I can think of. Hey you, get off my cloud works just as well sentence-wise, if not scansion-wise. And helpfully we do the opposite with out/out of: in Standard British English, at least, you would say get out of the house, not get out the house, but both are used and there is literally no reason for the pattern being the opposite way round. I told you. Of is a great word but it's contrary and wilful. 

100% fake leather

One of the knitting websites I use has the parts to make handbags, including firm bases which you can crochet around to get a more sturdy design. I refuse to believe they didn't know what they were doing when they described this as 'a lovely and practical round bottom', but that's not why I'm showing it to you. 

The material is described as 100% PU leather. PU means polyurethane, which means that it's artificial leather, not made from animal skin. This also means that it's absolutely inaccurate to describe it as being 'made of 100% leather', as they do immediately above. 

Or is it? 

Adjectives can be classified as being intersective, subsective, and privative (there's a couple more too but that's all we need for now). 

Intersective ones are so-called because their meaning is the intersection of two things: the adjective and the noun they describe. So, semanticist Barbara Partee gives carnivorous as an example because a carnivorous mammal describes things that are in the intersection of the set of 'things that are carnivorous' and 'things that are mammals'. 

Subsective adjectives are a bit trickier but not much: they describe a subset of the noun. Partee's example is skillful, because a skillful violinist is a subset of violinists - the ones who are skillful. It doesn't describe someone who is both skillful (independently) and a violinist, because it doesn't describe their skillfulness in any other field (e.g. skiing), only violining. (This is also the basis of my good dalek observation, by the way.)

Then we have privative adjectives, which are neither an intersection nor a subset, but actually negate the property of the noun they describe. A fake diamond is not a diamond at all, only something pretending to be one. In our round bottom example, it's not made of leather at all - it's fake leather. 

But Partee cites the acceptability of both the following examples to show that this cannot be the whole story: 

A fake gun is not a gun. 

Is that gun real or fake? 

In the second example, the item in question is still described as a gun. And actually most of the examples that ran through my mind for a privative adjective are more like this: a fictitious detective is still a detective (unless you want to tell Poirot), and a counterfeit banknote is still a banknote, of sorts, isn't it? 

So we need to think of these kinds of adjectives as being subsectives, really. Or if you prefer, the noun encompasses all the things that are putatively or ostensibly that thing: detective includes real and fictional ones, as well as impostors who pretend to be detectives to scam you. Banknote includes not just legal tender but fake notes put into circulation by counterfeiters. And leather includes not just the kind made of animal hide, but includes imitation leathers as well. 

Perhaps more accurately, we would want to say that in different contexts leather has both a broad meaning and a narrow or strict meaning (this is why you get words like SALAD-salad, to indicate the narrow sense). Then we have to step away from semantics into the realm of pragmatics and communication, and note that the customers for whom it's most relevant to know that the item is made of PU leather are vegans, and for them it's actually not helpful to use this broad definition of leather in the description, because they would buy products made only from the subset of imitation leather. 

The grammar of Starbucks (spoiler: it's just the grammar of English with other words)

Ah, Starbucks, home of weirdly huge coffees. Fun fact: since the popularity of flat whites in the UK, it's been much easier for me to get a coffee that's the strength and quantity that I like. An Americano is too big and too weak in all but the most hipster of coffee shops, but an espresso isn't enough coffee for a social drink. A black coffee in a flat white-sized cup is just right thanks (for some reason it's called a 'short black' or a 'long black' in places that recognise that this is a good drink, I assume as a calque of the Italian caffè lungo, which contrasts with just a caffè, which is an espresso). So I ask for that and responses range from just doing what I asked for to utter bafflement from the barista and ultimately a weirdly big coffee for me. Guess which one of those is the Starbucks response. 

It's already weird that the smallest size they have on the menu is 'tall'. At some point, they introduced 'venti' as the biggest coffee - 20oz, which is a pint. A literal pint. Apparently there's now 'trenta', which I assume is 30oz, which is getting on for a litre. So those are size names which are specific to Starbucks, and you just have to know them but it's easy enough to work out that there's a scale of sorts. No big deal. 

This Economist article talks about the language of Starbucks, saying that they 'refer... to macchiatos as 'marble' and mochas as 'zebra'', and putting this down to an effort to create an in-group feeling among its customers: having a language that you and your group know, being part of the crowd, being part of a community. It also says that 

Starbucks even uses its own grammar: you say your size before your syrup, your preferred milk before your primary drink.

OK, we're in my wheelhouse now if we're talking grammar. And... I'm not sure what this is meant to mean. This really just describes the rules of English. If I wanted a large caramel soya latte then that's what I'd say. The adjectives go before the noun, in the order the author mentions with the size first, and the drink type (the 'head' of the phrase) goes at the end. I couldn't ask for a soya large caramel latte, or a latte caramel soya large, or anything else. I could ask for a large latte with soya milk, taking the milk choice out of the noun phrase stack and putting it at the end in a prepositional phrase, and I could do the same with the syrup: a large soya latte with caramel syrup. Notice that if I do this, I need to add in a new noun for soya and caramel to refer to, because I've removed them from their place in the latte noun phrase and put them in a different noun phrase in that extra prepositional phrase at the end (with syrup/milk). At a push I could even take out the size: a caramel soya latte, and make it a large one. But if I'm putting all the bits in the same phrase, modifying just one noun (latte), then they go in the order the Economist author says is special to Starbucks grammar. 

If you want to create an eye-catching linguistics gimmick, you can play with words as much as you like, because we learn new words all the time and we can learn new ones. You can't really play with sounds or structures, though. Sorry Starbucks. Your grammar is nice but it's just English. 

Plan B: Stay home instead

Sometimes, the trains are disrupted for engineering works, usually over Christmas and New Year when fewer people are travelling on expensive peak time commuter tickets that would be costly to lose out on or refund. When they announce the disruption in advance, the standard message is something like this:

There will be no trains on the following days. Please make a Plan B for your journey. 

Here's an example of exactly this:

You may need a plan B to get to London at bank holidays and some working days. More details closer to the time, but be aware of these dates pic.twitter.com/EjveOsHWjd

— Southeastern (@Se_Railway) January 31, 2017

I was thinking about this once because there was no other way for me to make my journey, so my only option was simply to not go. This doesn't count as a Plan B, though! Plan B can only be an alternative means of achieving the same ends as Plan A. 

So let's say that Plan A was to catch a High Speed Southeastern train to London on May Day bank holiday. This isn't possible because they're doing some works and there are no High Speed trains on that line that day. A suitable Plan B would be to catch a slow train to London on that day. It isn't quite as good but it achieves the end of going to London that day. Or you could get a bus, if there were no trains at all, or you could drive, if you were able to. All would get you to your chosen destination on your chosen day. 

Would getting the train to London on another day count as a Plan B? It might, but only if you could do the original thing you were going to do. Maybe you were going to meet a friend, and you decide to do it on Tuesday instead of Monday. I think that would just about count as a Plan B for your original intentions. But if you were going to an event on that Monday, then going another day doesn't allow you to do what you were going to do, so it's not a good Plan B. 

Staying at home instead, as I had to do when I first mused about this announcement, definitely doesn't count as a Plan B for your original journey - you haven't managed to make the journey at all. But it would count as a Plan B for your holiday plans, for instance. Let's say Plan A was to go and spend Christmas with your parents, but because of work and trains, you can't get there, so you decide to spend Christmas at home. That's a Plan B for the Christmas holidays, but not a Plan B for your journey. The difference is what is under discussion, and therefore what Plan B is an alternative to. 

Religion means lack of religion

We've got some new legislation to make the latest guidance on how many people can hang out together absolutely clear as mud. One of the things you're allowed to have up to 30 people in one place for is religious gatherings and their non-religious equivalents in the case of weddings and funerals and so on. It's written in a way that implies that weddings are religious ('weddings and other religious life-cycle events'; 'other' meaning 'as well as the one just mentioned'), which of course they may not be at all, or they may be a fundamentally religious thing - that's dependent on your religion and beliefs. So then they qualify this with the following wording (it's the same wording as in the EHRC, I just hadn't read it before as I don't make a habit of reading legislation): 

(1) Religion means any religion and a reference to religion includes a reference to a lack of religion. (2) Belief means any religious or philosophical belief and a reference to belief includes a reference to a lack of belief.

Pragmatically, you wouldn't normally include 'lack of X' in the meaning of X. More likely, we add a bit of meaning along the lines of 'if relevant' - the old joke about the boy who was late to school because there was a sign saying 'dogs must be carried' and it took him ages to find one relies on this, as the boy failed to infer the usual additional meaning 'if one is present'. 

When we use nouns (like 'religion') usually, we don't include the lack of that noun in their meaning. When I say that the purpose of university is to provide an education, I'm not including 'lack of education'. If I say that the role of politicians is governance, I don't normally include 'lack of governance' in that (insert your own wry comments here). 

You can sort of fiddle with this to fit in with that interpretation, if you say that 'religious' applies only where relevant, like the 'dogs must be carried' sign. But in fact it's more a reflection of the fact that rather than the default being religion and not having religion is a lack of the thing (X or not-X), we now recognise that lack of religion is an ideological stance as much as having religion. The fact that there are many religions probably makes this meaning easier to arrive at, because rather than X or not-X, we have options A, B, C, and D, where one of them is a lack of any religious belief, or 'none of the above'. 

Mishearing condemnation, literally and metaphorically

On the news last week, it was announced that Boris Johnson (UK Prime Minister) had accused Keir Starmer (leader of the opposition) of condemning the IRA (Irish Republican Army, who committed many violent acts in the Northern Ireland conflict in the second half of the 20th century, during some of which time Starmer worked there). 

The British government generally sees itself as in the right in this conflict, as neutral peacekeepers, and I'm not going to get into the politics of it because it's complicated and I don't quite see how an occupying nation can actually be neutral, but certainly the IRA in the 1980s and 90s is on the list of terrorist organisations and killed many civilians in brutal ways. I was therefore surprised to hear Johnson accusing Starmer of condemning them, not because I don't think he would condemn them, but because he accused him of it. 

To accuse someone means that you think they shouldn't have done the thing. Behold these examples of interactions between us and the dogs, in which the first two examples are bad things, and thus the kind of things you can be accused of, and the second two are good things, and so accusing someone of them is infelicitous: 

Arrow accused Blanquita of sitting on his tail.

Blanquita accused Arrow of taking up too much space. 

*Jim accused Blanquita of behaving very well. 

*Laura accused Arrow of walking nicely on his lead. 

So to accuse Starmer of condemning the IRA means that Johnson thinks (a) that Starmer has condemned the IRA and (b) that Starmer ought not to condemn the IRA. (b) is the surprising part, as noted above. It turns out that the newsreader misspoke (or I misheard) and the word was condone, which in fact means the exact opposite of condemn and is entirely consistent with the political relations and the implications of the word accuse. Starmer has asked him to retract the accusation; it rumbles on. 

From that literal misheard condemn to a condemnation of a mishearing. In a twitter thread, the conversation turned to prescriptivism and bugbears about speech, as it so often does if you talk about language on the internet. Someone I don't know complained about double superlatives like bestest and cited a song lyric that contains the double comparative more deadlier: The female of the species is more deadlier than the male. I only know of one song with that lyric and it's one I know very well because I absolutely loved the band as a teenager: it's 'The female of the species' by Space, and the lyric is The female of the species is more deadly than the male. I've double checked with google and everything. In the course of my checking I learnt that there is a Walker Brothers song called Deadlier than the male, but there's no 'more' in the lyric, so again, just a single comparative, not double. And I also learnt that the Space song is based on a Kipling line, which is, again, more deadly. So this Person on the Internet has managed to get annoyed by something that doesn't exist, which happens a lot when people get angry about so-called culture wars and also English usage (hey it's almost like in fact the language peeves are a proxy for their dislike of women, working class people and Black people), but it would really help people's blood pressure if they just didn't. 

Dictionary update ahoy!

I always think of dictionaries as like a huge, slow-moving (but graceful) sea creature, a sort of enormous beast like the avanc in Mieville's The Scar, making inexorable steady progress. Lexicographers probably feel very nimble and agile, skipping through language and keeping abreast of linguistic change as it eddies around them and I'm doing them a terrible disservice. 

Print dictionaries, of course, are hopelessly out of date before they're even published. Online dictionaries can include much more recent usage, though they still tend to be a few years behind what we think of as current, because they need to include general usage with evidence, not just Jay from down the road's definition of a word. 

Dictionary.com published an article about its latest update, with a very thorough overhaul of its entries, including adding #MeToo and af. It's also updated the language in some of its older entries too, though. For instance, it capitalises Black now when referring to Black people/culture, following style guides including AP in doing so. It has also separated out the entries for the word more generally (e.g. the colour) and when it refers to people: 

In the dictionary world, separating the people-related definitions of Black from the other definitions of black is a major—and extremely rare—move. As a rule, different senses of words that share an origin, as lowercase black and uppercase Black historically do, are included under the same entry. It’s a rule worth breaking. Dictionaries are not merely a linguistic exercise or academic enterprise. What are the effects of Black, referring to human beings, being grouped together with black, which can mean, among other things, “wicked”? The effects are social. They are psychological. They are personal. How words are entered into the dictionary—especially words concerning our personal identities—have real effects on real people in the real world.

It's also  reworded the entries referring to gay or gayness to remove the term homosexuality (they now use gay sexual orientation instead). They note that homosexuality now has connotations of 'pathology, mental illness, and criminality'. Whether it always has done, I don't know - one can check these things using concordances and corpora. But this is an interesting case of specialisation, where the term gay has become the default term, and so the use of another term carries some extra layer of meaning and now those connotations are very strong and the word is no longer (if it ever was) neutral. It's a technical-sounding, scientific word, so it makes sense that it would be used for technical things like medical or legal contexts. 

Take a look at the whole article. It's really worth reading, and it includes this list of words that they consider to be late-2010s-defining:

amirite
battle royale
contouring
dead white male
DGAF
Dunning-Kruger effect
empty suit
gender reveal
GOAT
hodophobia
ish
information bubble
jabroni
janky
MAGA
MeToo
nothingburger
swole
world-building
zhuzh

Adventures in funny old phrasebooks

Some time ago, back in March, I bought this cute little 'universal phrasebook' in the massive second hand bookshop in Rochester. 

As you can see, it covers 25 European languages (not all, and not only), and each section has the same phrase given in each language across a double page spread. So I can tell you that luggage is les bagages, il bagaglio, el equipaje, a bagagem, and bagajul in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian (Rumanian, in this book, as it's old) just by running a finger across one of the pages. 

Like me, you might have spotted the anomaly that is Esperanto (an invented language, unlike the others), and being a language nerd I immediately turned to the grammatical description of the language that's helpfully provided at the start of each section (for languages associated with a particular country, it also has useful traveller advice such as what side of the road to drive on and how to address letters). 

There, it informed me that the language has suffixation to indicate many meanings, including -ino for feminine, and -ido for juvenile - I inferred this from the examples: 

hundo - a dog

hundino - a bitch

hundido - a puppy

There's ones for big and small and many and so on:

hundeto - a little dog

hundego - a big dog

hundaro - a pack of dogs

And even one for a kennel, hundujo. Being a language nerd, I was of course immediately infuriated: nowhere does it tell me how to say 'a young female dog'. Is it hundinido or hundidino? Does one indicate gender or age closest to the noun? I just did it in English: gender was closer to the noun, which we normally attribute to it being more 'inherent' (this is a bit of a fuzzy notion sometimes), and I didn't say a female young dog. So if Esperanto follows this rule of more inherent characteristics being closer to the noun, it should be hundinido. But then I found this on a forum which seems to say the opposite: 

For instance, if we want to say "a tiny female kitten," we commence with the root kat-, giving the idea only of "cat"; then add -id- (suffix for "offspring of") kat-id- = kitten; then -in- (female suffix) kat-id-in- = kitten, female; then -et- (diminutive suffix) kat-id-in-et- = kitten female tiny; we have now got the root and all of the suffixes, and we might want a noun, so add O, kat-id-in-et-o = a tiny female kitten. If we place -et- after kat-, we commence by speaking of a "tiny cat", for kateto has that meaning, so katetidino would be the "female offspring of a tiny cat." If we reversed the three suffixes, we should get kat-in-et-id-o = offspring of a tiny female cat. This exaggerated example of building up suffixes will show the importance of placing them in their natural order. The student cannot make a mistake if he commences with the root and forms a word of each suffix in succession; for instance, hund-o = a dog, hund-id-o = a puppy, hundid-in-o = a female puppy, hundidin-eg-o = a huge female puppy.

Notice that the English word kitten has the meaning 'offspring' built into it, so there's no way to express this any other way than with that meaning closest to the noun. I think this might be a case of an English-speaking mindset obscuring the alternative options that are logically possible. 

But also, it's interesting that katetidino ('cat-small-offspring-female') doesn't apparently mean 'a small female kitten' (katidineto) and that presumably katinideto ('cat-female-offspring-small') would mean 'small offspring of a female cat', as there is no possessive marker in this word. Anyway, all this talk of 'natural order' is very reminiscent of the way that Latin grammarians would talk of the parts of the sentence being in the 'natural order' - which, of course, is only natural if that's what you're used to. 

My favourite translation of them all, though, was hundaĉo, translated as 'cur'. Clearly this is another suffix, but what does it mean? It doesn't help that I don't really know what 'cur' means. I've only ever heard it as an insult, not as its literal meaning, so the best I could infer was that it's some kind of dog-negative meaning. I looked up the suffix elsewhere and it means 'of low quality', so you find it in the words for 'scrawl' and 'shack', and now I'm very happy to learn that this useful suffix exists and that a 'cur' is a low-quality dog. 

They're really confusing as well

 I found a new thing on the internet to be annoyed by. 

On twitter, you can share links (of course) and you can write something about those links, and when you do, your comment appears first and then a preview of the link. When the link is an article, this is typically an image, the headline, and the sub-heading stuff. 

The process of you sharing this link is that you read it, you copy it into your tweet or click the share button to make it appear there, and then you write your comment about it before you tweet it. Therefore in your mind you've read the headline first and then your comment. But when someone else sees it, they see your comment first. 

This can be amusing, as in this tweet where the image (not of SpongeBob) doesn't match the comment about SpongeBob, which is just meant to give more information once you've got the main point of the headline below: 

The FUCK happened to SpongeBob?? pic.twitter.com/WrIIL7d0dA

— Zack Fox (@ZackFoxFilm) August 16, 2020

It can also lead to weird linguistic effects when the comment includes something that normally has to refer back to something else in the discourse. In this tweet, the comment refers to the discovery mentioned in the headline, and so tells us more about 'the molecule'. But because it comes first, we think 'what molecule?'. 

The molecule is based on a tiny antibody originally found in llamas, camels, and alpacas. https://t.co/YVMoc4d4PB

— VICE (@VICE) August 17, 2020

That's because the comes with a presupposition of existence and individuality; when you say the you're asking your conversation partner to accept that the thing exists, and that you both know which one you're talking about. If you've read the headline first, no problem - you've just been told it exists. If you haven't, as in the twitter format, you don't yet know it exists (you know some molecules exist, but you don't know the specific one under discussion here). 

Let's see another. This time, if you read the headline and blurb first, you can see they're asking for regular donations, and the comment tells you that you don't have to donate regularly if you can't afford it, you can also make a one-off donation. 

You can donate once too. https://t.co/3Kn4ZGTFQU

— Foolproof (Sylvia Suddes) (@bossproofreader) August 5, 2020

But if you read the comment first, you run up against two things: first it's pragmatically strange to read that you can donate once, as if there's a limit on how many donations you can make. Without the contrast with 'regular', we understand the meaning of once as 'once and once only' (that's some more pragmatics there). Then we get too and that needs to come after the first option, otherwise what's it as well as? 

Anyway, just a little quirk of the way the parts of the text are displayed, on this specific platform. 

The everyday every day

Moose Allain, the cartoonist, tweeted about the word everyday and the phrase every day, noting that the distinction between them is probably being lost:

As you know I’m against pedantry (because it’s usually wrong) and welcome the way our language changes. I don’t suppose it matters, so long as both meanings exist, if the spellings are interchangeable. However, I do think the local authority should get it right.

— Moose Allain Ꙭ (@MooseAllain) January 27, 2020

Maybe so, and if it is, we'll all get used to it and it'll be fine. In case you already don't have this distinction, everyday means 'ordinary', as in Just your everyday clothes will be fine for the event, while every day means more or less the same as each day: Parking charges apply every day. Just another bit of the internet sad about an ongoing language change, then.

I was intrigued by his follow-up tweet, which noted that pedantry is usually wrong, and this minor spelling change doesn't matter because we'll still have both possible meanings. Which is true. But he also thinks that the local authority should get it right.

On the face of it, it's totally logical. It may well be a change in progress, but while there is still a 'correct' option, official bodies should get it right, because official writing should follow formal conventions. I would tend to agree, in fact. But there is clearly a contradiction here. If it doesn't matter, then the local authority shouldn't have to get it right, no matter who they are. And if it is a change that's happening anyway, then at some point it won't be a mistake, and that line isn't a date when something is incorrect the day before but correct the day after. It's just the time when people can look back on 'the past' and note that we did things differently then.

I'm going to go ahead and know it

Today in strange agency verb use: 

Screenshot of a tweet saying "Yeah if you're standing
in front of a Bentley at a Bentley dealership,
I'm going to go ahead and know that's not your car." 

Knowing isn't something that you have much control over. You can try and know things, by learning them or finding them out or whatever, but whether you know something or not is a state of mind, literally. 

It's the phrase go ahead and that gives rise to the oddness here. Without it, I'm going to know that's not your car, is fine. It means that in the scenario described, I will know a fact based on the evidence of my eyes, and my own knowledge and judgement of the likely circumstances (i.e. the car in a dealership is not necessarily your own; you'd probably take a photo of your own car somewhere else; pretending you own a Bentley is a plausible alternative to it actually being your car). 

I hadn't realised before, but go ahead and is actually a peeve for some people. Internet people ask 'why do young people say they're going to go ahead and do something'. The answers tend to be along the lines of it meaning you have the listener's tacit approval, that no one has given you a reason not to do the thing, or that it's a more decisive, proactive action. In any case, all things that one needs to deliberately decide to do – to have agency. 

And, as previously discussed, knowing something is not something that one can do deliberately. You can go ahead and reason that it's not my Bentley, you can go ahead and say that it's not my Bentley, and you can go ahead and assume that it's not my Bentley. But knowing that it's not my Bentley is a state you arrive at, whether you mean to or not. Sometimes, there are things one would rather not know – but you can't help it. 

How much did it costed?

The Conversation tweeted about an article way back in 2018, when things like the World Cup still happened, and included the phrase could have costed (it's also in the article itself):

Watching the #WorldCup during working hours could have costed as much as US$10.4 billion in lost production time (in 2010).

But there are multiple ways employers can make up for this by embracing the tournament: https://t.co/qyewW8oxVQ pic.twitter.com/apqvOr9zgF

— The Conversation (@ConversationUK) June 12, 2018

In Standard English that would be could have cost – cost is irregular and has cost as its past participle as well as the bare form. In fact, costed isn't even the simple past tense of this version of the verb, as that's also cost:

It costs	Present
It cost	Past
It has cost	Perfect

 and so on. 

I say 'this version of the verb' because there's another version of cost that does have costed as the past tense: the one that means 'estimate the price of' rather than 'have a price of', as in We costed the new plans and decided that they were not viable. So there is this form costed that exists, and that you might have heard just as recently as the form cost, and you might reach for that when you're looking for the relevant form to follow the perfect auxiliary have. And then that makes it nice and similar to all the other regular verbs like could have washed, could have dusted, could have wasted, etc. 

I predicted that this mistake would be much less likely to occur with did instead of could have. While could have requires the past participle (actually it's have that requires it, so you'd also get it has lasted us ten years, and by extension possible it has costed us a fortune), did doesn't – it requires the bare form of the verb: Did it last long? rather than Did it lasted long? and so presumably you would expect Did it cost a lot rather than Did it costed a lot? 

Well, never make predictions about what kind of variation people will produce. I'll leave the actual numbers to someone else, but a google search for "did it costed" brings up results, and not just people asking if it's correct to say that (though they're the top hits). There are also examples where it's used as the simple past form, as in I wonder how much that upgrade costed. 

English, amirite?