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! 

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. 

Practice is nicer than practise

This exchange appeared in my facebook the other day. I don't know any of the people involved, and as always, I'm just commenting interestedly, not making fun or criticising them.

The image shows a conversation in response to someone mentioning 'practicing', with that spelling. Assuming that things haven't changed since I learnt this, that's a valid spelling in American English. British English would traditionally prefer 'practice' for the noun (as in We went to practice tonight) and 'practise' for the verb (as in Are we practising tonight?). In practice (ha!) this is very variable and it's probably one of those things that's on the way out really, and both spellings can do both jobs.

What interested me about the above, though, is that even though 2 out of the 3 people having this discussion obviously care about this spelling rule (otherwise they wouldn't be discussing it), they don't seem to be very clear on which it should be.

Person 1 says 'practicing with a c, though' indicating that they know it's spelt incorrectly, and sharing a link to that effect. Person 2 doesn't really notice the spelling comment (unless I'm missing some more subtle joke?) and comments on the content of the original post, spelling it with an 's' for both the noun and the verb (Some sides don't practise [verb] wilst half drunk, so it could well be 'intoxicated dance practise [noun]' for a newbie...). Then Person 3 brings it back to spelling and quotes the rule, presumably in response to Person 2 as much as the OP, to which Person 1 replies, agreeing, and saying I think it's nicer to think of it as morris 'practice' rather than 'practise'. I realise it's incorrect :). 

But it's not incorrect! Both spellings are right depending on which 'morris practi{c/s}e' is intended (noun or verb).  And here, the commenter is probably actually correct, because with the pre-modifying 'morris', it is far more likely to be the noun, so 'practice' is the right spelling to use.

And – most baffling – why is it 'nicer to think' of it with a 'c'??

Have you eaten Grandma? (review)

Cover of 'Have you eaten Grandma?'
by Gyles Brandreth

I was considering writing a review of this book, Have you eaten Grandma? by Gyles Brandreth, but to be quite honest it's not worth bothering.
[Edit: I ended up writing a review of it anyway so here you go.]

It's neither surprisingly good nor toe-curlingly awful. I got it for professional purposes (I'm teaching a module on 'Grammar for Everyone' this term and want to look at all sorts of books that claim to be about 'grammar') and I'll get something out of it for that, I suppose, but I'm glad I didn't buy it for pleasure.

I had been ready to be cross about it after seeing this little video in which Gyles (known as being a pedant, has done truly awfully smug programmes about language in the past) talks about some of his 'bugbears' including redundant myself, can I get rather than may I get, and so on. In fact, it's exactly what you expect.

The majority of it is punctuation advice. It's fine, with only a few mistakes, but Eats, Shoots and Leaves is better if that's what you want. Then there's lists of words, either just ones he likes or ones that people often get wrong in writing (accept vs except, for instance) and mnemonics (sometimes very weird ones) to help remember them.

He has a bizarre joy in some -- but not all -- neologisms. He seems to have (like Stephen Fry) come around from pure prescriptivism to the joys of what he calls 'slang' some time in the 1990s, and so he loves things from then. He's constantly saying End of, for example, like at the end of the video above. He gives a long list of initialisms like WTF (which he loves) and describes some of them as being of 'the Whatsapp and Snapchat generation', which needless to say were totally unfamiliar to the teenager I asked. And yet he is so rigidly inflexible about some things that he was taught were correct, and so are immutable rules for him (you mustn't ever, ever say bored of, for example, despite the fact that there's no harm in it whatsoever and millions of people do say it).

There's an embarrassing section of the abbreviations part where he talks about labels for gender and sexuality that verge on poking fun at LGBTQIA-type initialisms. He shows a clear support for non-binary, non-straight identification, but still betrays an opinion of 'simply straight' being 'normal' and 'knowing where you are'. The section on American vs British English is terrible, and relies only the books of people like him, not linguists. This is not a book that seeks to promote truth.

This is very evident throughout, when he often refers to 'the Brandreth Rule' on particular points. This means that he knows that there are different ways of doing things, and his arbitrary choice is the one he likes the best. That's what this book is. It's for people aged about 50 or 60, who 'love the English language', and just want someone who agrees with them to reinforce their opinions and tell them the things they already know so that they can be smug about knowing them. I've come to realise that anyone who says they 'love the English language' doesn't really love the English language, not as it really is. They love some idealised version of it, the version they speak, the version they think is 'best', and which is being 'corrupted' by Americans, kids, foreigners, or modern education.

It's a perfectly acceptable, slightly dull book. If you want to learn some stuff about punctuation or commonly confused words, then it's one way of doing that (but not the best way). If you just want an authority to refer to on certain style points, it'll do that (but there are better authorities to refer to). It's not the best of any of the things it does, but it is by Gyles Brandreth, and that is its selling point. End of. (Sorry, that was such a lazy way to end this but I couldn't resist.)

Can you buy macarons here?

Google sometimes asks me questions, via my phone, about places I've been to so that it can improve its information about businesses when people search for them. These are very revealing about what people search for, Google's insistence on not Britishising its communication, and the way that search data translates into queries.

Let's take the straightforward non-British terminology first. Google knows that these are places in the UK, and that I am a UK user. I've been annoyed before by how my phone's autocorrect only seems to know US places and spellings, and even the grammar is American (certain contractions that are more used in the UK don't come up in the suggested words, for instance). In its common questions are the following:

Is there a restroom here?
Is this place popular with travelers?
Is there a parking lot or structure?

The last one is specially for my friend and colleague Christina, who is very interested in who uses 'structure' to refer to what we (British people, I guess there might be variation but I don't know about it) would call a multi-storey (or underground) car park. A 'parking lot' is just a 'car park'.

This is lazy. It would be the easiest thing in the world for Google to translate 'restroom' to 'toilet'. It's not like it doesn't know. I included the 'travelers' one here too because I just felt that it struck slightly the wrong note. I think the word 'travellers' is too associated with the Traveller community (Gypsy or Romany people) and I would use 'tourists' in this context.

Some of the questions reveal differences in the kinds of places people might want to go. One of the questions asked me,

Does this place offer an all-you-can-drink option?

I think the last time I was somewhere with an all-you-can-drink option, with the exception of package holiday type places, was the Tuxedo Princess, a nightclub on a boat in Newcastle, where you paid a tenner entry and could drink rubbish alcopops all night. It's not really a thing in normal places. Similarly, another common question is this:

Does this place offer musical entertainment as well as dinner?

Apart from being a difficult question to answer because of the presupposition that it does offer dinner (how do you answer this about a place that offers musical entertainment but not dinner?), I don't think that dinner-plus-music is much of a thing. I certainly have never searched for it nor seen it offered as a tempting prospect anywhere except for a hideously old-fashioned restaurant that has since closed down.

Other questions, like the one above, pose problems because of the way they're asked. Take this one:

Does this place only serve vegetarian food? 

I was asked it about a pub that doesn't do food. So technically, it doesn't only serve vegetarian food, and the answer is 'no'. But that implies that it does do non-vegetarian food, as 'only' implies a sub-set of all kinds of food.

Then, take this one:

Can you drink outside on the street here? 

Well, at this pub that doesn't do food, no, you can't drink outside on the street. But it does have a really nice, big beer garden. Are people that ask this question just interested in drinking on the street, or do they more generally want to know if they can drink outdoors? That's another question, so I've been answering this literally, but I'm not sure it's the most useful thing to ask.

My favourite kind of question is the ones about weirdly specific products at random shops. I was asked of Morrison's (a low-end supermarket):

Can you get carpets here? 

And I was asked of Aldi (a cheap European supermarket):

Can you get macarons here? 

I... don't know. I suppose sometimes people ask where they can buy macarons or carpets and that translates, via algorithm, into a question for me.

I'm literally lowkey a telly star now

I was on the telly recently! It may just have been the local station, but it's a start. Media stardom beckons! If you want to watch it, it's here.

It's a funny thing, being asked to talk about some research that's not your own and that you may not have actually read (as I hadn't, in this case). I was talking about what the papers had been calling 'gradable adverbs'. As I attempted to explain, it's the adjectives that are gradable and the adverbs that do the grading, so you can describe something as hideously old or bizarrely purple. We are apparently, says a linguist from Lancaster with a book to promote, using less of these and this shows we're becoming more confrontational. Furthermore, this is something we are learning from the Americans. Ding ding ding, all the boxes ticked for a news story: language is fundamentally changing, it reflects a deep and sweeping cultural change, American English is ruining our language.

I haven't read the original research, as I say, so I don't know how much of this Paul Baker actually says. I also couldn't really comment on the veracity of British usage following US usage by around 30 years. But I could say that we definitely are not losing all our adverbs, and it definitely can't be ascribed to us becoming more confrontational. I did agree with my interviewer that the words we are losing are the 'posh' ones (frightfully, awfully and so on), and there is, I'm sure, a link between your desire to sound posh and how direct your attitude is.

But we've got LOADS of these adverbs. We use them all the time. Kind of and sort of and a bit are pretty common, as is pretty, really, etc. They go in and out of fashion. You can check corpora, as Baker did, to find out what ones were preferred in a certain type of text at a certain point in history, and you can do other kinds of searches of online corpora to find out what's going on right now.

Two that I really wanted to mention and didn't manage to are literally and lowkey.

I can't believe that all the papers missed the chance to moan about literally as well, and can only assume that (as evidenced by them using the meaningless phrase 'gradable adverb') that they don't really know what an adverb is so didn't realise that it is one. Anyway; it is.

Literally gets a lot of column inches (or whatever the online equivalent is). People get upset because other people use it as an intensifier rather than using it to mean what they think it should mean. Other better people than me have written about why worrying about this is a fruitless activity, and why the peevers aren't using the literal meaning anyway (=to do with letters) and the slackers aren't using it figuratively (go on, try it - try replacing literally with figuratively. It won't make sense because that's not what it means) so I won't try. But what it is is an intensifier, exactly like what Baker says we are losing, although it's a bit more versatile in terms of its syntax. So there's one more new one we can all adopt.

Lowkey is not so familiar to me; I've never heard it in the wild, I don't think. I've seen it written, online, so it's obviously used by people outside my own social circle (=young people, probably). Gretchen McCulloch has written about it and gives some examples. It means kinda, so it's a 'downtoner' of the kind Baker also says we are losing. There's something more going on, I think, as one of Gretchen's examples has it combined with an intensifier af (= as fuck):

When you're lowkey sad af but trying not to care

But there's another one. We've got tons of these. Come on, people. Use your adverbs. Those adjectives need grading!

Quite Black

I've been meaning to write a post about quite for quite a while. This is as a result of Google announcing a phone. In this country it comes in just two (boring) colours, but elsewhere it comes in three: Quite Black, Very Silver, and Really Blue.

At first, I found Quite Black a funny name - I'm not sure why, but the understatement of it seemed amusing. But! Google is American and there is definitely some difference in the meaning of quite in UK vs US usage. The latter two make me think that Google intends quite in its meaning of very or completely. We can use it like that here, although it sounds a bit old-fashioned or posh:

That's quite enough of your nonsense, young lady! I'm quite sure you wouldn't speak like that to your mother! 

So it isn't an understatement; they mean that it's very black, or completely black. Disappointing.

Lynne Murphy has (of course) written about this difference, here and here. She points out that the difference is 'very much' (AmE) vs 'not so much' (BrE), or that it strengthens the force of an adjective in American English but weakens it in British English.

I don't know know quite how I would characterise it in British English. It does weaken the force, and it does mean 'not so much', but so much, as always, depends on the tone. How you say it can make It's quite black mean that it's waaaaay too black (sort of rise-fall intonation - I'm not a phonetician, sorry) or that it's really a very good level of blackness (rising intonation). Of course, this is what intonation does, and to some extent you get this without quite, but it adds this ambiguity. In both cases, it means that there is a high level of blackness. With yet another intonation (strong emphasis on quite), it can also mean that it's relatively black, but not as black as you would hope.

Either way, even though the 'high level of blackness' meanings are very accessible in British English, we interpret the phrase Quite Black as an understatement, a weakening of the force of black, and not as a strengthener.

If I was Google, I'd have released it in Purest Green:

This is likely an Americanism

One other thing I've noticed in student essays much more this time than previously is the use of likely. Here is the relevant use:

This is likely a result of X. 

I understand what this means, it's not ungrammatical, but it's not in my idiolect (=the variety of English specific to me). I'd have to write one of the following:

This is likely to be a result of X.
This is probably a result of X.

Because the first type isn't in my idiolect, I can't tell whether it's proper 'academese'. It sounded informal to me, until I asked Twitter and was directed to this blog post by Lynne Murphy. It is apparently a UK/US difference. Why my students are using it, I don't know: presumably this usage is spreading to this country.

Some cheeky findings

[This relates to my recent post about 'cheeky Nando's'. If you want to take the survey, do so here. We'd be really grateful!]

Do you call a misbehaving child a cheeky monkey? Do you ever go for a cheeky beer after work? Would you take your Significant Other out for a cheeky Valentine's Day dinner at a nice Italian restaurant? Chances are you said no to the last question, not because you wouldn't make such a romantic gesture, but because cheeky doesn't sound right in that sentence. What's more, if you're from the United States, you probably aren't as keen on the word cheeky in the first place. At least that’s what we thought when the cheeky Nando’s meme went viral a few weeks ago. 

The cheeky Nando’s meme  involved British internet users coming up with ever more incomprehensible (to Americans) explanations of what a cheeky Nando's means. But how come Americans don't know what it means? And, actually, what does it mean? We tried to find out by sciencing.

Postik notes

I was recently at the excellent Petrie museum in London. It's got loads of ancient Egyptian stuff, including a lot of beads. They also had this board:

It says 'Please write any comments on postik notes'.

Someone has rather snarkily corrected the error by putting a squiggly line under the word and writing the correct word and putting 'sp' next to it. This is overkill, but no matter.

I thought the mistake was quite charming. Post-It notes are sticky, after all, so 'postik' is kind of an eggcorn, almost (it doesn't quite fit the definition). And 'post' is used in a not-very-British way - I think you post things on walls more in American English than UK English, and Lynne Murphy confirms this at her blog Separated by a Common Language. So that makes it more likely that the person didn't realise the meaning of the name Post-It (i.e. display it on the wall).

English and American

I happened to be on a site where someone had asked what the difference is between Parmesan and Parmigiano-Reggiano (which are the same thing), and they got this answer:

Parmesan is the English and American translation of the Italian word Parmigiano-Reggiano.

This isn't the first time I've seen something like 'the English and American word for X' or similar, but it is jarring to me.

The thing that makes me have to stop and re-read it is of course that I'm interpreting English as the language, while the writer seems to be treating it as the country, and simultaneously conflating England and Britain/the UK. I know that to people in other countries, it doesn't seem very important that England and Britain are not the same thing (in Britain, we do a similar thing with Holland/the Netherlands) and furthermore, there is no adjective relating to the UK (UK-ish?), which would really be the more correct name anyway (to include Northern Ireland). But to me, England and the UK are not at all the same thing, and it is odd to say that something is English when it's clearly also British. This is a pragmatic implicature: you should give as much information as you are able, and here you're withholding some information (namely that the term is also used in other countries). And then what about Canada, Australia, Ireland and so on? Surely it's better to refer to English as a language here than to be unnecessarily specific about countries.

But I think there's more to it. Look at how it says 'English and American translation'. Most Americans are not idiots, contrary to the national stereotype that we like to believe in, and they know that they speak English rather than American. But a mixture of strong patriotism and some genuine confusion (actual people I know have been asked what language they speak when visiting America) means that it's sometimes tempting to write 'and American' to avoid people thinking you're just talking about England. I think many people probably do half-think of American as a language, even if they know that it's English really. And, of course, we might classify it as a separate language, if we so chose: language boundaries are not only determined by mutual intelligibility, as any linguistics student knows.

Why can you email an email but you can't letter a letter?

A commenter on my recent blog post suggested that I blog about the fact that you can blog a blog, and then followed it up with the question 'Why can't you letter a letter but you can email an email'? 

Blog as both noun and verb is another instance of the process I mentioned a while back, the nounification of verbs or the verbification of nouns (that's not the real name: it's called 'zero derivation' or 'conversion', but that's dull). The process goes both ways, but you get different results. If you turn a verb into a noun, it's an instance of the action: a kick is an instance of kicking. If you turn a noun into a verb, you can't always say what the meaning will be: to fish means to catch a fish, to trouser means to put something into one's trouser pocket and to book means to make a reservation or charge with an offence, and so on. Here I think we've got noun to verb, and I'm fairly certain that this is supported by the date of the earliest appearances of the noun (which derives from weblog) and the verb, though that can be tricky to verify.

Back to blogging a blog and lettering a letter. It's quite unusual that the noun can be an object of the verb derived from it. I can't really think of any examples other than the ones given above, and maybe text as in text message. Maybe message itself. I don't know if it's important that these are all communication acts... you can shout a shout, I suppose, and whisper a whisper. 

In US English, the verb is more commonly mail, whereas in British English post is used. But in the US I don't think that mail is used for one particular letter, so you can't mail a mail. When email was invented, the word email was used, probably by analogy with mail, for the general process/system. It quickly became used as the name for a particular message sent by email, as no specific word for this item existed, and for the verb, by the same process of verbification. Thus you could email an email. 

You can't letter a letter because there already exists a verb post, or mail if you prefer. We could, when email was invented, have broadened the sense of post or mail to include sending an email, but we didn't, perhaps because it seemed quite different (and in British English, the verb post is not even the same as the one used in email). Post (or mail) likewise would have blocked the use of letter as a verb - but the plausibility of all this is dependent on when each was first used. 

So in short, my answer is: because there is already the verb post but there is no equivalent verb for the use of sending an email or writing a blog other than the generic-verb+noun combination like send an email. 

Is Coldplay singular or plural?

A good example of the variation permitted between singular and plural for semantically plural but grammatically singular entities like bands in (British) English:


Here we have 'offends' with the singular agreement, and in the very same sentence the plural verb 'are' (contracted to 're).

We also have a pronoun 'they' which can be used for both singular and plural referents, at least in colloquial usage and probably in many formal registers too. However, it's prescriptively plural, and this can affect its usage in funny ways. For instance, it's unusual to hear 'themself' and spellcheckers don't allow it, even when referring to a singular antecedent in a sentence like 'a student has left their file here. They'll be kicking themselves later'.

It's impossible (for me, at least) to refer to a band as 'it'. This is a bit surprising seeing as a band can be singular, as noted above. I don't know the reason for this. But it means that we have to use 'they' and we have a singular verb 'offends' in the tweet above, followed by the frequently singular 'they', followed by the plural 'are', all of which should be one or the other. But because at no point is there a mismatch between two adjacent items, the long distance mismatch comes out just about ok. 'They' mediates between the singular and plural verbs and both are deceived into thinking they're in the right number form.

Replace all

I've just finished reading the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. It was all right, not great literature but a fun enough read. Odd typos in the last book though.

One thing was that there very often lacked a space between sentences. I have no explanation for that. Another thing was three misspellings, all related. The first was evapourate. The second was elabourate. The third was labouratory. In each case, the error is an extra u where there shouldn't be one. Can you see why?

Forensic linguistics for spam detection

We're all getting quite good at spotting email spam now. Our filters are pretty clever and get rid of all the obvious stuff anyway, so that leaves us with just the non-malicious stuff from companies we've bought things from, and the ones that the filter can't quite detect. Most of us don't fall even for these ones, but some people obviously still do, or they wouldn't still be doing the rounds. Almost all of these tell you something about your account, either the email account you're using or some other account that they purport to be from, and ask you to verify your details. By doing this, you're giving your details to some scammer who will then use them for nefarious purposes.

Now I think that this is the chance for linguistics to come into its own, and simultaneously force everyone to learn how to write properly. The plan is twofold:

SATs, grammar and British grandmothers

This question came up on Quora, which is a question-answering website along the lines of Yahoo! Answers but with good spelling and less stupidity: How do you prepare for a perfect score on the SAT? The SAT is a test that, Wikipedia tells me, is taken in the US and is 'intended to assess a student's readiness for college'. It also tells me that although SAT used to stand for Scholastic Aptitude Test or Scholastic Assessment Test, it now doesn't stand for anything, which seems odd but there you go. We have SATs in the UK too, to assess school pupils' achievement at various ages throughout their schooling, but there is no consequence to the individual: the idea is to measure the school's success, not the child's. In the US it seems to be a big important thing and it is measuring you as an individual: it's one of the things that will determine if you get into college or not, so people want to do well. It seems from what I have read that it's mostly a test of how well you take tests, but that's often the case with this sort of thing so we won't dwell on that.

This Quora question has been answered by several people, in several different ways. One stood out because of its 'holier-than-thou' attitude. This person said that he did well with no preparation because he grew up without a TV and read books all his childhood. (By the way, I too read just as much as he claims to have done, and I still managed to fit in some TV-watching and generally being a well-rounded person. But that's not relevant.) He also said this:

I had an English teacher as a mother and a proper British grandmother correcting my grammar.

The English teacher as a mother, fair enough - that might help you to do well on the written part of the test, as she presumably knows what's involved and how to do well. But the British grandmother part is just plain wrong. (Not wrong that he has a British grandmother; I'm sure he does. His assumptions are wrong.)

Firstly, there is the implicit assumption that simply because she is British, or 'proper British' as he says, her grammar will be impeccable (read: Standard English). She might well speak absolutely Standard English, with no non-standard forms whatsoever. If she does, it is not likely to be because she is British. She might just as well do that no matter where she was from. There is some idea that 'British' grammar (FYI: no such thing) is 'better' or 'more correct' than US grammar. It ain't true. The chap answering the question did mention that he reads fantasy and plays RPGs, so perhaps he's basing this on Lord of the Rings. Or perhaps his grandmother also believes this. Whatever.

Secondly, even assuming his grandmother does indeed speak Standard British English and knows all the prescriptivist grammar rules, if he follows her British conventions, some of what he writes will be marked incorrect in the US. For instance, the title of this post lacks the Oxford (or serial) comma. That's standard British English. In the US, that would get a big red mark. Using plural agreement with grammatically singular but logically plural referents is OK in the UK, but not the US ('the government have/has announced...'). I say dreamt; an American might be more likely to say dreamed. I say a bird shat on me; an American might say it shit on him. I say I have already eaten; a US speaker might say she already ate. I say that the event will take place on Monday; a US speaker might say that it will take place Monday. Hyphenation and compound words have different rules. I won't go on, but there's a list here if you're interested.

Agreement fail

In British English, at least, we can use either plural or singular for organisations like the government, the staff  or the audience. So it can be 'the government has announced...' or 'the government have announced...'. On the radio the other day, Sandi Toksvig (yes, she's been in this blog before - I just really like her, OK? Jeez.) said this about stopping terrorists from getting to the Olympics:

Transport for London are doing its bit.

This is in no way a criticism of Sandi - she can do no wrong in my eyes. It's simply an observation on the oddity of English. She's started out with plural agreement (are), because TfL are semantically plural. Like I said, this is totally OK in British English (I think there's some difference between the UK and US on this, but I'm not sure what it is). But then in the same sentence, she uses singular agreement (its) because TfL is grammatically singular.

This variation is common, and speakers are often inconsistent in their use (I know I am) but it's unusual to see it in a single sentence.

Learnt vs learned

Mr T likes to get his grammar and spelling all correct when he writes facebook posts, so he checks things he's not sure about. Last night he suddenly realised he didn't know what the difference was between learnt and learned (as the past tense form of the verb learn). He googled it, and after a few dictionary entries, one of my posts was on the first page of hits. He was quite frankly astonished: of all the blogs in all the world, he had to google across mine.

I'm really pleased about that, but surprised. Does that mean that it's only me using the word learnt? I can't believe it's just me and the dictionaries. It looks like it's used more in the UK than in the US, which would explain a big lack of it on the internet. Still, there must be other British bloggers out there. For the record, either is completely acceptable and there is no preference for either in terms of formality or 'correctness'. I use learnt mostly just because that's what's in my idiolect. But if I were to justify it, well, I like it better. I like irregular verbs, I think they're pretty. And they often have something to reveal about language.

Steven Pinker, in his Words and Rules, notes the unusual fact that the 'default' (i.e. regular) plural suffix in German is -s, despite the fact that it's nowhere near the most common plural marker. He argues this on account of the fact that it's the suffix chosen for nonce words and proper names, which aren't normally pluralised. In English, although we spell our regular past tense suffixes -ed, there are actually three: /d/, /t/ and /ɪd/. I wonder if one could argue that the default one is /t/, based on the fact that it surfaces in such forms as learnt, dreamt and sent.

Furthermore, if we stopped using these irregular past tense forms, we'd lost interesting facts like this one: dreamt is the only word in English to end in the letter combination mt (apart from derived forms like daydreamt).