To the kitchen!

I walked past a board advertising a new housing development and it boasted that the new flats would have integrated appliances to kitchen. This, I felt, is a nice example of Estate Agentese, a minority variety of English with a few unusual distinctive features. This variety seems to be acquired in adulthood, rather than as a native variety, when one becomes an estate agent and acquires the norms of the community. As such, it's likely to exhibit a lot of variation.

It's characterised by unnecessary verbosity, but at the same time greater levels of omission than are usual in standard English. So here, we have a redundant specification that the appliances are in the kitchen (where else would they be in a small flat without a utility room?), and a bare definite noun with no determiner (to kitchen rather than to the kitchen), which is also a feature of headlinese and other reduced written registers. We might also find high register vocabulary: they talk of aspect and premises and being well-appointed.

It was the choice of preposition that caught my eye here, though. This is a curious feature of this variety. Which preposition you use in any given sentence is notoriously difficult. You can rationalise all you like about the meaning of the word, but it is still a bit random at times. It's totally normal, for instance, to mention the dangerous creature either to your left or on your left. However, in standard English, you would expect a description of where the appliances are to be in the kitchen, not to the kitchen, which we would associate more with direction of movement. This might be a generalisation of its use in phrases like to the rear of the house. Or maybe it's an extension of the verb form of integrate, where you might integrate the appliances into the kitchen.

If you're a speaker of this variety of English, do chip in with your thoughts!

We're all laypeople sometimes

The word layperson meant, originally, a non-ordained member of the church. Well, actually maybe it didn't since it's apparently pretty a recent (1970s) version of layman, but you know what I mean. It also means, in a more general sense, not a member of a specialist community or not having specialist subject knowledge. So I might use it when I'm talking to students like this: 

Linguists tend to have different judgements than laypeople do.

And then I mean, of course, non-linguists. It's a term that gets its meaning from being in opposition to something else. If I said Laypeople find this sentence ambiguous, you might infer that I meant non-linguists because I'm talking about linguists, but you might not. And if I was just out and about and I said What do laypeople have for breakfast?, the most plausible interpretation would probably have to be the 'not a member of the clergy' one. Which would be weird, but it's the only meaning of the word that is sort of independent of context. 

I was thinking about this because I always use it kind of jokingly in this way, in much the same way as I refer to non-linguists as 'normal people', but I was reading a recent paper by Lelia Glass where she uses it totally non-ironically (as far as I can tell, anyway) to refer to people who aren't strength-training enthusiasts. I'd thought the more generalised 'non-specialist' meaning was fairly recent and not as well-established as the 'non-clergy' one, but a check on Etymonline tells me that I'm wrong, and both are pretty much as old as each other. While lay does come from a French word meaning 'secular', ever since we've used it in English, more or less, it's had the general meaning of 'non-expert' too. 

Perhaps I'm asking a question?

I've just finished reading a book called 'Statistics without tears' by Derek Rowntree. It's a basic tutorial on statistical concepts focussing on the ideas and principles, rather than walking through actual calculations in any detail. I found it useful and would recommend. But I'm here to talk about language, not statistics! 

The book is written in what I would describe as a very 'careful' style. You know it - the way older academic writers tend to, with quite precise attention to punctuation. Even though the tone of this book was very informal, friendly and not at all stuffy, I felt that every colon and dash was considered. 

So it was interesting to me that both times Rowntree used a sentence in the form Perhaps you recall..., he ended it with a question mark: Perhaps you recall the idea of a confidence interval? (p.183). I've had a quick look around the internet and can't find much on this topic other than a few sites peeving about the use of a question mark with perhaps, saying that it is not necessary and therefore wrong. There are people asking about it in English forums, indicating that it's something that might feel natural. 

It seems likely, then, that it's a 'declarative question' - the same as if he'd written You recall the idea of a confidence interval?. These are common enough, though definitely I would say a feature of less formal writing, just as contractions like I'll or don't are, which Rowntree also uses throughout. But it is interesting that he doesn't use this form - he uses perhaps. The question mark itself is enough to allow the reader to see that it's a question, and to therefore know that they are not being told that they do recall the idea, but rather prompted to agree that yes, they do recall that idea. So perhaps adds a bit more prompting, a bit more questioning, a bit more possibility of you not in fact recalling the idea of a confidence interval but that's absolutely fine because it was a few chapters ago and it's complicated stuff so don't worry. 

How (not) to do academic surveys

As you know, me and my co-author were running a survey recently that lots of you took part in (thanks!). We had 959 responses by the time it closed. Most of the data is numerical so I'll be working on the analysis for a while yet, relearning how to do all that stuff, but from a first eyeball it looks like we've got some really clear results. Turns out people's judgements on most of these things is very clear! I thought I'd reflect a little bit on the specific way we set up this survey and the methodological lessons we learnt.

We had a few questions at the end to find out a bit more about the respondents. We asked what their language background was, whether they considered themself to be a native English speaker, how much they socialise online, and whether there was anything else that they felt was relevant. We asked these questions - and these questions only - for reasons. 

The 'native speaker' question was because in our corpus study, we'd found lots of examples of the construction that we'd have considered ungrammatical, and that seemed to be written by non-native speakers. However, if this is an 'internet language' phenomenon, and internet language is global, we need to consider those varieties too. Some people were surprised that we had 'other' as an option alongside yes and no. This is because people's language situations are complicated! It's not always easy to define what counts as a native speaker. We wanted people to be able to say 'well technically no, not on the narrow definition, but I think of myself as such' or whatever. And some people did. 

We also asked about language background. This was because we thought it might make a difference for the reasons above, and also because we found a lot of examples of some specific types that, again, we found ungrammatical, in tweets written in Indian English, so we wanted to try to capture some of this information. I also wanted to allow people to state this in their own words. 

One person (and I hope they don't mind me talking about it here) mentioned in their comment that the survey didn't take into account other varieties such as AAVE (their example). AAVE is also known as African American English or African American Language, so-called because its speakers are mostly Black Americans. It's true, we didn't explicitly ask about this, just as we didn't explicitly ask about Indian English (which we knew might behave differently) or Multicultural London English (the rough equivalent of AAL relevant to our UK context) or French (which we know also has a because-X construction). The 'language background' and 'any other information' boxes were there for people to provide any information that might be relevant there, such as 'I'm bilingual in Mainstream American English and AAL and here are the differences in my judgements' or 'This is exactly the same in French by the way'. No one did this, but they could have done. I kind of wished they would, though, and maybe I should have explicitly asked about it. I'd be interested to know if this person knows that the because-X construction is similar or different in AAL, and I would very much like to read that study, but this survey wasn't about comparing those two varieties so it was beyond our scope. We were happy to accept responses from any variety of English because we want to know how because-X works in general, and we know that it spans a number of varieties. 

We asked about how much people socialise online because we think this phenomenon is more widespread, or at least familiar, to people who are more used to 'internet English'. Lots of the comments we got confirmed that other people also think this. This was a vague nod to Gretchen McCulloch's 'internet age', and in fact many people used her scale to give their answer here. This is about not how old you are in years, but in how immersed in the internet you are. It's a complex scale because there are the kiddos who've never known anything but the internet as it is now, late adopters, early adopters... age doesn't match how long you've been online. It's an interesting typology and you should read her book 'Because Internet' to find out more about it. 

We didn't ask about people's age - for exactly the same reasons. Some people were surprised we didn't ask this, and gave their age in the 'any other information' question. But also I had asked about age in the survey I did in 2014, and I had no reason to ask for this information again. You should only ask about the personal information that you actually need. For those who are interested, here's the data from that survey, which was a bit sloppy so don't judge me. I hope that if you click this image you can expand it so that it's readable. It shows the acceptability ratings for 22 sentences for each of three age groups (I didn't include the oldest and youngest because there weren't many respondents in those groups), arranged by the overall rating of the youngest age group (blue bar on the left of each group) from lowest to highest. 

On the right hand side are the sentences that should be fully acceptable for everyone, like I was late because I forgot to set my alarm. Not much difference in the age groups here. On the left are the ones that everyone hates, like I was late because that I got lost. Here the millennials seem most accepting, with unusually high ratings for verb phrases and full noun phrases with articles. Gen X were particularly happy with I'm edgy because if I left the oven on and with the ones with prepositional phrases like I'll be late because at the doctor's. These are ones that could be elliptical: short for I'll be late because I'm at the doctor's. This is a much, much, older and more established construction than because-X, so it makes sense they'd interpret the sentences that way and be happier with them (still not that happy, mind). 

From about halfway along the graph until the highest rated ones, there's a clear set where the youngest respondents, aged 18-25, were the most accepting of the sentences. These are the ones that are characteristic of because-X, so they can't really be ellipsis like the prepositional phrases above, and they have a noun or an exclamation after the because, like I'm here because the internet, Studying because school or I can't believe she did that because honestly. So yes, we think age does make a difference, but now we know this we didn't need to ask it again. We also only need to know that if a whole group of people simply doesn't accept this construction at all, maybe we need to factor that into the analysis; we're not interested in tracking the change in the construction via an apparent time study, for instance, which is one good reason for asking about age. This is not a sociolinguistic study, so sociolinguistic variables are only relevant to the extent they'll affect our results. 

Another thing we didn't ask about was gender. I didn't ask about that last time, either, because I had no reason to think it would make any difference. Even more so than with age, we have no reason to believe that a whole gender of people simply don't use this construction. If there is a bit of difference among genders, that's fine - our analysis can cope with that. We want to know, for the people who use the construction, how does it behave syntactically? The gender of the language users, as long as there's not a total categorical difference, therefore isn't that informative here. Again, we aren't trying to find out who the speakers are; that's a study for another linguist. In terms of sampling it might be a problem if, for instance, we only had men taking our study. That would mean we couldn't generalise to all language users, and if we didn't know who the participants were we wouldn't know that and might generalise wrongly. We took the view that this was very unlikely to be the case with nearly a thousand responses. We know that at least some people of various genders took part because they told us in the comments. 

So those are the things that I think we're happy with in terms of how we set up the survey. We got a lot of data that will be pretty hard to work with, because it's all free text, but it's also very rich so we'll see what we can do with it. 

(cw: discussion of fatphobia)

But we also did some things that weren't quite right. The biggest one of these was one of our examples, which several people pointed out was fatphobic. The way we created our sentences was to take them from our corpus if a sentence of the right form existed, and then modify them (replacing words) to prevent them being searchable and therefore identifiable (thanks to Mercedes Durham for this tip). For ones that didn't exist, we took similar constructions that did, and modified them to be the right syntactic form. This meant, we hoped, that they were all realistic examples. In doing this, we also thought we had avoided using any that were potentially offensive or harmful (obvious examples being offensive language). Clearly, we messed this one up. I can't speak for my co-author on this but I come from a position of my personal relationship with weight being basically the default/stereotypical societal one, and therefore I have to work harder to remember not everyone's experience is the same - just like as a white person I have to remember that I might miss instances of racism and be more aware. I'm aware of campaigns like Health At Every Size, but I just wasn't aware enough here to catch this. Sorry to anyone who we triggered or upset with that sentence; lesson learnt and thanks for pointing it out to us in the survey comments. 

Less harmfully, but annoyingly, we ended up using some wording that didn't chime with everyone. I thought again I'd removed anything that was region-specific (like I asked people about the verbs call vs ring), but some people mentioned that 'club together' is a British phrase (at least, they thought so). So that might affect that particular item, which is not what we wanted. Similarly, on mobile was a bit unidiomatic for some respondents. 

One type of comment that really interested me was the ones that took issue with the wording of the survey. Some were just along the lines of 'None of these sentences make any sense to me', which is fine, we knew for some people that would be the case. But some said things like 'These are not sentences', and they didn't mean exactly that they're not grammatical, but that they don't meet the definition of a sentences and they're something else. We used the word 'sentence' in the survey because that's what normally seems familiar to people. Linguists typically don't use it in any technical sense, precisely because it doesn't have a good definition. We might use 'utterance' instead, which would have probably been more accurate for these commenters as it doesn't imply a certain form, but that's not a familiar term for everyone. I'm guessing these commenters feel that a sentence must be grammatical, and otherwise it's not a sentence, which is a position similar to the people who say that something is or is not a real word. It's a perfectly acceptable definition of a sentence for someone whose goal is grammatical writing, but it's a circular definition for a linguist so it's no good if you're studying utterances that are grammatical for some people and not others, as we were here. I'm not sure what we should have done here instead; you can make explicit that some of them might not be full grammatical sentences but we really wanted to get away from priming people to give the 'right' answer. 

One last thing that I hope doesn't affect our results too much is that some people missed a part of the instructions. We had a 'fill in the blank' question. We wanted to allow for people to say nothing was missing, but we didn't want to make the questions optional as that wouldn't tell us if they thought the sentence was fine as it was or if they'd just skipped it. So we made the questions required, but said 'put an x in the box if you think it's fine as it is'. Quite a few people didn't see that part of the instructions, which we could tell because they wrote something else like 'This is fine'. So I hope that not too many people wanted to leave it blank but felt obliged to fill it in. If they did, it's OK, because we really just wanted to know what people filled in there, but still, it makes the survey annoying for them to do. 

Long post, sorry! But reflecting on this was a really useful experience for me and I hope that it's interesting to you as well. You didn't have to read this far, so thanks for doing so! 

Let's lead led away

All the way back in 2013, I declared the spelling of the past tense of the verb lead, which is standardly spelt led, dead. Or ded. I'd noticed it being misspelt as lead so many times, including on the BBC news website, that I thought it was probably simply prolonging its agony to try to preserve led. Of course it's still around, because inexplicably I'm not in charge, and written language doesn't change that fast. But I was reminded about it the other day and was frustrated all over again by the fact that this one is actually one that has sensible spelling and pronunciation, unlike most of our irregular past tenses. 

Lead is pronounced with an 'ee' sound, like read, and led is pronounced like red, so it really ought to be totally transparent and memorable and unproblematic. The problem with lead/led is, though, that we also have read/read, which is not spelt red, though we have another word that is. Oh and we also have the word lead, for the metal, which is pronounced like led. All of which obscures the fact that lead and led are pronounced more or less as they're spelt, unlike read (past tense) and lead (the metal). 

I feel bad for it, I really do, but I also think it would just be simpler to let it slip quietly away. 

Because linguistics, again: your help needed!

Have you ever used ‘because’ like this: Yeah, no, because reasons? You aren’t giving a proper reason at all, you’re making a metalinguistic comment about something. Together with Ellie Cook, one of our graduates from 2020, I’m investigating this phenomenon, which you might remember is known to linguists as ‘because X’.  

You might remember it because I first wrote about ‘because X’ all the way back in 2012. It was just a quick blog post noting it as an interesting construction. A couple of people talked about because becoming a preposition during 2013, notably Neal Whitman and Stan Carey. This Atlantic article appeared, quoting me and attributing it to Gretchen McCulloch (to be fair, she got it from a post where Gretchen was quoting me - though with attribution). Then it was voted as 2013's ‘Word of the Year’ by the American Dialect Society, and I did a quick study on it as a holiday project in early 2014. Well, it sort of snowballed since then, and it became obvious that this seemingly unimportant point of usage variation can tell us something about how language works. 

I don't talk about it much on here, but behind the scenes I've been working on this off and on for a few years, picking away at little bits of it to find out what's going on. I've given a few conference papers and talks on the topic, including this one and this one (let me know if you want the version for college students, which is very accessible and has bonus #CheekyNandos content). 

From that first survey, put together as a quick and fun project with no real aims in mind beyond finding out what the heck was happening, I discovered that although bare nouns like because reasons are frequent, it also shows up with lots of other parts of speech: because fake news is a common one (with a modified noun), and because just in case is the slogan of a well known holiday company in the UK. It also tends to be something that is a complete concept in itself with specific connotations (so because reasons means ‘because of some vague and probably not very well-thought-out unspecified reasons’). We probably share some knowledge (e.g. ‘people do things for stupid reasons or no reason at all’), and it might have a slightly tongue-in-cheek usage (e.g. ‘You and I both know that I have no good reason for this but let's pretend I do’). 

Lots of careful research later, and we’ve been able to describe ‘because X’ quite precisely, as involving ‘sentence fragments’ – that is, incomplete sentences that express a whole thought. It’s like when you say Going out! in answer to the question What are you doing?. This is really unexpected because these sentence fragments, by definition, shouldn’t show up within sentences! But this is what gives them their quirky sound: doing something unexpected gives a slightly jarring pragmatic effect to make the listener realise this isn’t normal ‘because’, giving a reason, but new ‘because X’.

So what now? Well, before we can write up this research properly, we need to test a few specific things about this analysis. We've set up another survey. Where the last one necessarily took a scattergun approach, because we didn't know what was acceptable and what was not beyond just what seemed right to us, this one is more careful. Based on the predictions of a number of hypotheses, we've created another list of sentences that might sound more or less natural, and I need people's opinions on this. We need lots of people, because the more people who give their opinion, the more reliable the results are. 

If you want to take part in this research, you can! You can fill in the survey here, which will take no more than ten minutes, giving your own opinion on how different sentences work with 'because X'. We really need a lot of participants to get good results, so share it with anyone you think might be interested! 

Would the heckers like

I'm not sure if this counts as an eggcorn, which is a phrase that is reinterpreted based on some apparent meaning. It can often reveal some aspect of a speaker's accent or grammar that can be interesting to a linguist. One I like is 'taken for granite', an eggcorn for 'taken for granted', partly because for me this is nowhere near phonetically similar. This one is famous enough that people use it to make jokes, like the cartoon Rick and Morty, and I've written about it before. 

The reinterpretation makes sense, because it could be something like 'set in stone' (hence granite), and it shows that some varieties have several phonological things that I don't, such as the quality of the first vowel being identical in those words, and the reduction of /nt/ to /n/, and something about the final sound as well. 

So I don't know if this is an eggcorn or just a more general kind of reinterpretation. This image of a wind turbine with wilting sails comes with a caption saying,

I told em, you gotta water these things every day, would they listen? would the heckers like. 

The phrase, as I understand it, is Would they heck as like. Therefore, the reanalysis here is from something that means 'They would be as likely as heck to do that' to something like 'The heckers wouldn't do that'. 

A bit more formally, the original is Would they [heck as like] where [heck as like] is an expletive replacing the verb listen - compare Would they fuck, or Would they my arse. The reanalysis (assuming this is the right way round!) is Would [the heckers] like, where heck is part of the subject the heckers (compare the fuckers), the verb is just elided (not pronounced because it's understandable from the previous phrase) and like is a final particle giving something like emphasis. 

This only works if you typically reduce they quite a bit, and also if you have a non-rhotic accent (don't pronounce the 'r' in heckers). I suspect the former is more likely if you also drop the h so you get a glide between the and 'eck(ers), but that is just my speculation. Oh and also it relies on the extreme flexibility of expletives and their ability to work as any part of speech! 

I extremely like this

Just a quick one this week to point out a nice non-standard usage of the word extremely. The context was as follows: 

I extremely need a break from those things. 

Extremely can normally only modify adjectives, so extremely cold, extremely unlucky, extremely happy, and so on. Here it's modifying a verb, need, which is extremely unusual and not at all like its normal behaviour. This was on twitter where one can do such things to signify metalinguistic information like hyperbole or being a bit extra. 

And it works ok with extremely because even though it doesn't normally modify verbs, we do have other adverbs (which is what extremely is) which do this job: I really need a break, I desperately need a break, I so need a break. So it's not that much of a leap to bring extremely into service in this way with its usual meaning of 'to the greatest degree possible'. 

Please use four 15p coins

Two examples of confusing signage brought to you by pragmatics and lexical connotations this week. 

First, I was waiting outside a bakery for my lunch, and there was a phone box (I know! a real one!) with a sign saying this: 

Please be prepared to use four coins to pay the initial minimum fee of 60p. 

I was very puzzled as to why you should have to use four coins to pay this, especially as 60p doesn't even divide evenly into four coins (i.e. there's no 15p coin), so you'd be using a mix of 20p and 10p coins. I thought that probably it meant that you could use more than four, as long as you met the basic criterion of at least four, but wondered why this should be how the phone worked. Does it need four to activate some mechanism? 

I'm sure you're well ahead of me and worked out that it meant at most four coins - so you can use 50p and 10p, three 20p coins, whatever you like, but you can't be there putting in twelve five pences or sixty pennies, which makes much more sense. But the wording 'be prepared' primed me to think it was a minimum requirement that you had to meet, rather than a warning not to exceed a limit. 

Next, my own employer tweeted about the coronavirus restrictions a couple of days before they were relaxed a bit in May. The weekend before the rules changed from no meeting inside at all and maximum six outside to six inside and 30 outside, they shared this image: 

Please remember the 'rule of 6' applies outdoors only until Monday.

You can be fined for not following Government guidelines. Learn more at https://t.co/N0pivTe65t pic.twitter.com/ePjsQDarac

— University of Kent (@UniKent) May 15, 2021

It includes this wording: 

Please remember the 'rule of 6' applies outdoors only until Monday.

I knew what the rules were so I wasn't confused this time. But the placement of only is, as so often, confusing. Does this rule apply 'only until Monday'? Well, yes. Does it apply 'outdoors only'? Well, again, yes. Maybe it's doing double duty and meant 'only outdoors and only until Monday'. But either way, this is still a bit weird to me. 

If a rule only applies in Context A, then the implication is that outside of that context, the rule doesn't apply, and no further action is needed. In other words, there is a restriction outdoors, or until Monday, or both, and anywhere else the restriction doesn't apply. If only is meant to mean 'only until Monday', then it reads like some kind of encouragement, like 'Come on, it's only till Monday, we can do this, one more weekend before we can meet more people!'. But if it applies to 'outdoors', the implication is that this is the stronger restriction, when in fact there was at the time no meeting allowed indoors at all. So you have to interpret it as 'you are allowed to meet up with six people outdoors but not indoors', but a 'rule of 6' sounds like a restriction, not an allowance, because it's called a rule. 

I doubt anyone was ever seriously inconvenienced by either of these things and probably no one else even noticed them, but they both made me stop and think. 

An interesting of an observation

A recent language column in the Boston Globe rehashed the same tired linguistic peeves: irregardless, fulsome, incorrect apostrophes, and so on. With an interesting exception: in the discussion of the phrase '[adjective] of a [noun]', itself not uncommon, the author gave an example that I thought just couldn't possibly be a real usage. 

We're talking here about when people say things like It's not that big of a deal or He's not that good of a singer. The standard version omits of in this type of sentence. I had thought that this version, with of, only occurred in the form I've given here (not that X of a Y); with as, as in He's not as good of a singer as he thinks he is; or with how: the column gives the example People are finally figuring out how great of a place Boise is to live. In other words, they have to be comparative or degree adjectives. The example the columnist gave was this: He was a good of a farmer, or This is a hard of a class. 

This sounds to me just ungrammatical (in the sense that it doesn't sound like a sentence of any type of English, not that I think it sounds prescriptively wrong). But then I don't use the other kind either, so perhaps other people do say it. I tried to google some examples. I put in double quotation marks the string "a good of a" and "a big of a". For the first one, I got a lot of hits where it was a typo for "a good or a" or "as good of a", both of which are usages I've heard plenty. With the second, I mostly got hits for language learning forums where people were asking if it was grammatical, and the kind of people that answer on there tend to be a bit unreliable - either very prescriptive or like the person who said "a big of a deal" is fine, but then when asked about it was unclear about if it was that exact phrase or something more like "not that big of a deal". So, still unsure. Let me know if you've ever heard this for real. 

How many Millennials

Our topic today is the response to this tweet: 

Millennials! I have a question for you specifically!

How many of you have any sense or memory of the concept of a "rerun"? Do you have any meaningful recollection of an episode of TV you watched being such a thing?

— Daniel Summers, MD (@WFKARS) February 17, 2021

He clarified in the rest of his tweet thread what he meant by 'rerun' (tuning in to a weekly slot to find that the episode was one from a previous series), and that he was interested to know when exactly this ceased to be meaningful. He thought Gen Z probably don't really have much memory of this, but thought younger Millennials might, and so he asked 'how many of you [Millennials]'. 

The answer to a 'how many' question is a number or proportion (in this case, people reply 'me' or 'not me' and he gets a sense of the numbers), like '50%' or 'all of them'. There is definitely a presupposition that at least some Millennials will remember this concept. Exactly how many is mostly defined by pragmatics and shared context, I think. 

Compare asking a group of your friends the following: 

How many of you are coming to my comic book launch on Friday?

You would expect a fairly high number of them to come, because it's important and they're your friends. You could also ask your colleagues this question: 

How many of you are going to the meeting this afternoon?

That might be fairly neutral and you just want to know how many of them will be there, or not available at the alternative event at the same time, or whatever. You definitely imply that you think at least some of them will be going to the meeting. You could also ask a question like this:

How many of you learnt about grammar in English lessons at school?

Now, the answer is expected to be pretty low, and is a rhetorical device to lead into your lecture on the importance of grammar or the fact that they have tacit knowledge of grammar despite the lack of formal teaching, or whatever. If more than about one person answers 'me' now, it actually spoils your flow. 

So we can ask a 'how many' question with an expected answer of everyone, no one, or anything in between, or a neutral non-expectation. 

I now present you with a lesson in asking about Millennials on twitter: this tweet got 2,700 responses and a fair number of those were people who were pretty cross about this man supposedly thinking that Millennials are kids who don't remember this stuff when in fact they're in their 30s and maybe even 40 years old now, and of course they remember it. I've tried to think of any possible syntactic or semantic reason for the question being interpreted this way, and I can't. It's purely a result of the frequent co-occurrence of the term 'Millennial' with 'kids these days' messages and the resulting knee-jerk reaction to this that you get after the billionth time of seeing it. In this case, I think it was misplaced, but you can understand it. 

Buckells and his bumbling Brummie burr

Apologies to everyone who's sick of everyone banging on about Line Of Duty. But I like it, so. 

Much has been said about the mis-spelling of the word definitely as definately, which kept all of us wondering if it was in fact Hastings who was 'H' (the bent copper) last series, and this series ended up being helpful in identifying the actual baddie. Spoilers, by the way. I was as much here for it as any other linguist, as it's not often you get to hear the word 'syntax' in the most-watched telly series of the year. I'd have been even more up for an extended glass-box scene where they went through every syntactic characteristic one by one, showing how they led to Buckells being found out. 

I hope they did find more than just that spelling, because it's so common I don't think you could hang anything on it. After all, we saw Hastings doing it too and don't try and tell me that was him being clever and aping the error. At a conservative estimate, about 85% of people spell it that way. (No, of course it's not that high, but I don't know how many it is, so it's a lot.) I assume they had more stuff because they literally mentioned syntax, so they must have had some. What were the patterns?? Linguists need to know, Jed Mercurio. 

I was also wondering, though, in related linguistics thoughts, about Buckells' accent. The plot twist is that he's basically an incompetent ninny, pootling through life, not caring much about policing, and so no one really suspected him of anything, but it turns out he's the linchpin, a kind of middle man on the take. He uses what I assume is his own accent, or an exaggeration of it, in the series - he's from Birmingham and he speaks with a Brummie accent. Brummie is unfairly maligned as a UK accent, and its speakers regularly derided as stupid in polls about attitudes to accents. So how much did his non-threatening, bumbling, not-very-clever accent cause the AC-12 team to overlook his role? Should they all go on a course of linguistic anti-bias training? Should I set up this service as a business model for the police? 

(Moderate) Spelling reform

Advice about keeping a blog always says not to apologise for not writing for a while, because no one will really notice, so just write whatever it is without mentioning it. But I'm not apologising; I'm noting the fact that this term was so bloody ridiculous that I didn't have one single bit of head space to knock out a blog post now and again, a task that I know from experience only takes me about half an hour while I'm watching telly (yes, sorry, I don't give you, my adoring public, my best time, or in fact much time... you deserve more, but I'm not paid for this). 

So hey, welcome back. It's been a few months. I have a few things I saved for later, so I'll go through them and see if any of them at all are still relevant. For now, let's talk about this spelling reform that got voted in by the English Spelling Society last week. It's actually surprisingly sensible, though of course totally unnecessary. It doesn't change much, and they suggest that the minimal changes are just sort of floated in as legitimate alternatives and that they'll hopefully catch on as standard. Seems fair enough. There's a screenshot of the Times article about it below, which I'm not linking to as it's paywalled but you can find if you want. 

It's just things like having double consonants mean something consistent, I think syllable stress, and removing Es that don't change pronunciation. So you get surender but edducate. I can't tell what the logic is behind changing fields to feelds but not beaches to beeches; they say that it's ok to have one sound be spelt in different ways but each spelling should make one sound, so maybe it's because <ie> is taken for the /ai/ ('eye') sound. 

It overlooks that there are some things that won't make any more sense to people who don't speak Standard Southern British English, of course, as they always do. So they say good will be guud, and foot will be fuut, and blue will be bloo. Totally fine for me, as good and foot do have the same vowel, while blue has a different one. But there are some speakers who have more or less the same vowel in all three of those words and others who have a different vowel in the first two. So I'm not sure it will achieve its aim of making spelling more logical for everyone. 

I wonder whether people who are planning to adopt it will need to write a little note to say so until it catches on. So if someone wants to submit their essay with this spelling, will they put a note at the top to say that's what they've done? 

This is reminiscent of the howling of the papers recently, including the Times I might add, about universities being advised not to deduct marks for bad spelling. When I mark essays I already don't take marks off for incorrect spelling or non-standard English. We haven't 'taken marks off' for anything for years, in fact, as we award marks for what is done well against a set of marking criteria, which include 'clarity of expression' and 'accuracy'. This is likely to include a lack of spelling errors, but doesn't absolutely require it as you can be clear and still spell things differently. The Times article itself says:

[Hull] university said that it would instead “encourage students to develop a more authentic academic voice, a voice that can communicate complex ideas with rigour and integrity — that celebrates, rather than obscures their particular background or characteristics”.

But they then quote Frank Furedi (lamentably from my own institution) saying that inclusive assessment 'violates the norms of academic education', so I'll have to check with them whether it would be OK to use these new spellings or not. I don't know why they went to Furedi, a retired sociology professor, rather than one of the many linguists or pedagogy experts, no, I can't imagine the reason. 

Anyway, spelling reform, sure, whatever, it's not really needed but go ahead, but encouraging students to find an authentic academic voice seems a good thing to me, and I secretly hope that one day someone will submit an essay written entirely in their own non-standard variety as a conscious act of linguistic politics. 

So few female cellists

I like a quiz programme, as I'm sure you know, more or less regardless of what the theme is. So I listen to Counterpoint despite never being able to answer any questions. In a recent one, there was an example of gender-neutral they, still relatively unusual on a mainstream media source like the BBC. The question began like this: 

Which cellist made their debut...

Of course, they is intended to obscure the gender of the cellist so as not to give us any clues. But then it interacted with centuries of gender inequality (meaning that classical composers and musicians are nearly all men) and the Gricean pragmatic principles that say you should be appropriately specific, and resulted in me getting an answer right for once, because it implied that the cellist was not a man, and I know precisely one not-male cellist, Jacqueline du Pré, and she was the right answer. 

Why did it imply it wasn't a man? Well, if the gender would have been a clue, then that more or less tells us that the gender was not male, because maleness doesn't narrow the field much. If you google 'famous cellists', the pictures are all men apart from du Pré. Even this article from Classic FM, where they probably tried to include a couple of women, has 13 men and 3 women. So the gender being a giveaway meant it had to be a distinctive feature of the person, so it had to be not male. 

Here is a really interesting article by Kirby Conrod on how this same principle works to sometimes implicitly misgender people, if you use they inconsistently or when you could or should have been more specific. And here is an old post about the contrast that becomes implied when Mrs and Ms are the only two options to choose from on a drop-down menu, because Mrs ought to be a subset of Ms, but has to be interpreted as distinctive if they're the two available options. 

There is no doubt in my mind

Today, most schools in England (and I think maybe other parts of the UK, but I'm less sure about that) were due to go back. Some are closed, like in our area, because of high rates of the coronavirus. Others are supposed to be open but the teaching unions are advising teachers that they should not go in, and that schools should not open, because it's not safe. This is going to be an interesting day because the Conservative government *hates* unions - they consistently work to disempower them, and pursue a rhetoric of unions as troublemakers and working against the interests of the public, which I suppose plays well with their voters, who are less likely to be in unions themselves. So we'll see how it plays out when those schools don't open today despite the Prime Minister saying on television yesterday that parents should send their children to school. 

He said 'There is no doubt in my mind that schools are safe'. I would say that this is untrue, but actually I can't say that: what is untrue is the embedded proposition Schools are safe. His utterance, There is no doubt in my mind that schools are safe is an assertion about his belief, and it may well be true. Maybe he has convinced himself that schools actually have loads of space for social distancing and children are capable of not being tiny infection-spreaders, in the context of a new variant that spreads especially well among children. If pressed, I'm sure he would utter the statement that Schools are safe, and then the truth of that utterance would be a matter of fact, not his belief, and it would be true if schools did not present an increased risk (or any risk? what does 'safe' really mean?) of contracting the virus, which at present is not the case. Teachers have been saying all through the holiday that there is not enough space to provide enough distance, and in any case it's not at all clear that such distancing measures are effective. Scientists are also advising that schools don't open. 

It puts the statements from my own employer into perspective, anyway. The message from them is that 'Campus is 100% safe' and 'Campus is covid-secure'. This is also not strictly true: there is no way at all to ensure that it's covid-secure, as you can't control what people do, and it's totally possible that someone could catch the virus and then come to campus and run up and cough in people's faces, or that people might not follow the rules and then come and sit in a classroom for two hours the next day. What they mean is that they've put processes in place to make it *as safe as possible*. Nothing is 100% safe, of course. '100% safe' in this context means something like 'We have done 100% of the things in our power to make the campus comply with government advice'. And for us, that does mean that we can use bigger rooms to teach, and we can open windows and doors in many of those rooms, and we are able to teach remotely if need be. Schools don't have any of those things (many can teach remotely but they point is they're not being allowed to), so if it doesn't seem quite true that my campus is safe, then it's definitely not true that schools are safe. But the fact remains that Johnson's statement, There is no doubt in my mind that schools are safe, may well be true, because he is capable of believing (or convincing himself he believes) utterly outlandish nonsense.