Getting drank

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

Photo: @nicholasd on instagram

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

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

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

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. 

Nut nut's nut

EDIT: SO APPARENTLY 'TO NUT' MEANS SOMETHING VERY DIFFERENT IN AMERICA. SORRY. (But I'm leaving the post up. In the UK it means 'headbutt', ok? And THAT'S ALL.)

This is an advert for nuts:

The nut nut's nut

It says 'the nut nut's nut'. I took a photo because it reminded me of the buffalo sentence we sometimes use to show the flexibility of language:

Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

For this to make sense you need to know, as I didn't, that 'buffalo' is a verb meaning 'intimidate'. You also need to know that Buffalo is a place and that a buffalo is an animal and its plural form is buffalo. So it means that buffalo from Buffalo intimidate (buffalo) other buffalo from Buffalo. Buffalo is a funny word, isn't it?

So nuts. KP is apparently the nut nut's nut: the nut for those who are very keen on nuts. Fair enough. Let's imagine a situation in which some of these peanuts, anthropomorphised, headbutt other peanuts.

Nut nuts' nuts nut nut nuts' nuts.

EDIT #2: It has been pointed out to me that you could nut someone in the nuts (also won't transfer to US, I'm sure: bollocks, balls, nads, testicles...). So:

Nut nuts' nuts nut nut nuts' nuts' nuts. 

Ribenary

I saw this advert last week:

It's an advert for Ribena. It's got some wordplay around the suffixes -y (which makes nouns into adjectives) and -est (superlative) and the combination of both of these. So in the slogan at the top, we have tastiest and fruitiest, both of which are common enough words, but also blackcurrantiest. That's the kind of word that people might ask 'is that a real word?' and of course it is, because it's made with perfectly legal word-creation processes, but it sticks out because it's new. Blackcurranty isn't normally an adjective, but of course we can make it easily (I just did) by sticking the -y suffix, which turns nouns (like blackcurrant) into adjectives. And then once you've got an adjective that ends in -y, you can make the comparative blackcurrantier and the superlative blackcurrantiest. With a word this long, we'd normally use more and most instead, though, so this word is eye-catching because it sounds unusual.

At the bottom, we have one the fact of it the exact same thing: it says 'You can't get any more Ribenary'. Again, just stick a -y onto a noun (Ribena) to get the adjective. Unfortunately here there is a spelling issue. Ribena, unusually for English words, ends in an 'a'. You can't stick -y onto the end of that, because Ribenay doesn't look at all like the word it's meant to be. So they've spelt it the same way we say it: with an 'r' that wasn't there to start with. This is called 'intrusive r' and all it does is make it easier for us to say two consecutive vowels.

Intrusive 'r' is closely related to 'linking r', which is the one that is there in the spelling but that people who speak dialects like mine wouldn't normally pronounce - like at the end of computer. When that word is followed by a vowel, like in the phrase my computer is switched on, the 'r' comes back again. For me, these two types of 'r' are so similar that I usually have to look them up to check I've got the names right.

Now, I believe that rhotic speakers don't have this intrusive 'r'. Rhotic speakers are the ones who would normally pronounce the 'r' at the end of computer. For those people, linking 'r' isn't really a thing because the 'r' is always there anyway, and the problems we might solve with intrusive 'r' are solved another way. So for those people (and that's most of Scotland, Ireland and North America, for instance), is this advert just weird? Does the word Ribenary work?

So perfect they brought out a slightly different one

I received one of Apple's regular email exhortations to buy their stuff as presents, as if I spend that much on people who aren't me. It had this as its subject header:

I'm not sure that's possible. I mean, there is of course the possibility for there to be more than one perfect thing in the world, but not two such similar things, surely. It's reasonable to say that a rhubarb & custard sweet is perfect, in that it's a perfect example of its type of thing (a sweet, or a boiled sweet). It's also reasonable to say that a Moleskine notebook is perfect, and these two things don't conflict - they're different types of things. But if you say that rhubarb and custard is the perfect boiled sweet, it's impossible to improved upon it. You couldn't add a bit of vanilla flavour and say 'now it's even better!', not if it was perfect to start with. You can't improve upon perfection.

Similarly, if one of the ipads is perfect, I don't think the other one can be. The small one may be perfect for you, and the big one perfect for me, but that makes both of them slightly imperfect in some way (the small one is not perfect for me, nor the big one for you).

Or can it be? In fact, people use perfect in a somewhat looser way than I've used it here. This is a review from TripAdvisor:

Clearly, this person thinks you can improve on perfection, and there are a gazillion more examples just the same. I still think both ipads can't be perfect though.

I'll have the larger one, if anyone's thinking of getting me one for Christmas.