Noun phrase juxtaposition confusion

Associated Press caused a twitter hoo-ha when they mistakenly led a lot of their followers to think that there had been yet another air crash, this time involving the plane carrying the bodies of people who were killed in the recent Malaysia Airlines crash. They phrased it like this:

Breaking: Dutch military plane carrying bodies from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash lands in Eindhoven.

Lots of people reasonably thought that this meant that this plane had crash landed in Eindhoven. It didn't; it meant that the bodies from that crash have been taken to Eindhoven, where the plane has landed safely. You can read the Gawker article linked above for all the responses (my favourites are those who say 'well, AP style is 'crash-land' so it clearly didn't mean that').

One of the tweets, about halfway down the Gawker article, says that 'AP should have thrown some tactical commas/hyphens/apostrophes in that one'. Bear with me while I derail my linguistics blog into the realm of punctuation for today's post.

Apostrophe is a letter and a sound, sometimes

I've just discovered a note to myself to blog about something that bugged me on Only Connect a while back. Only Connect is a BBC4 quiz programme (now moving to BBC2, which seems a shame for BBC4, but I'm not in charge of the schedules) which asks a variety of questions which all have something to do with making connections. The final round is the 'missing vowels' round, in which the answer is a word or phrase with all the vowels removed and the consonants respaced. To make it possible to answer, the contestants are told what connects the answers.

In the episode I'm thinking of, the connections was 'words that end in ii'. There was a Latin plural in there somewhere, I expect, and also 'Hawaii'. Now, the thing is, there is some controversy over this. When the islands became a state, they were the State of Hawaii in official documentation, and some people still do it this way. Others, however, now spell it with the extra symbol, and this seems (as far as I can tell) to be the way we ought to do it.

The symbol, which looks like a single inverted comma, stands for the glottal stop. We use it in English sometimes, when we write in 'eye-dialect': the word water with a glottal stop rather than /t/ is written as wa'er in lots of texts. In English, we usually don't count the glottal stop as a letter. In phonology it is a sound, so it's given much the same status as the other consonants, but replacing another consonant with it doesn't change the meaning. Wa'er and water mean the same thing. This is not to say that we only have letters for sounds that change the meaning, of course, but it means that it's kind of gone unnoticed for a long time and I suppose we just never got round to representing it, or felt the need to.

In the Hawai'ian language, on the other hand, the glottal stop is really considered to be a consonant in the language, and the letter is part of the alphabet. I realise that it's quite hard to find four words that end in ii, and Hawaii at least used to, but it seems like a programme that prides itself on being intelligent and pedantic ought to get things right.

A strange case of misattributed prescriptivism

I recently treated myself to this book for the princely sum of 5p (plus £2.80 delivery from America - really,  you can't say fairer than that). It's called Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, though unless you have been through the US education system you might not be able to tell that from the cover:

It's about sentence diagramming, which, when I first heard the term, I thought was the same thing as what we do in syntax, representing the structure of sentences as tree diagrams. Apparently not: it's a different way of doing a similar thing, and US kids were taught it in school until quite recently (I think around the same time they stopped teaching grammar in UK schools). It's a nice little book, and I'll review it at some point, because I did find it quite interesting. 

But today's post is about a passing mention on page 116-7. In a chapter in which the author, a copy editor named Kitty Burns Florey, ponders incorrect usage and whether diagramming sentences could help to eliminate it, she says this of Lynne Truss's punctuation book Eats, Shoots & Leaves:

...as exemplified in Truss's ridiculing of what she considers bad English - including the attempts of immigrants to use it (resulting in such less-than-hilarious errors as "Plum's 49c a pound"...

Florey then devotes a paragraph to her admiration for people whose first language is not English, and the cuteness of their errors. I think this is a fairly uncontroversial stance; in this largely monolingual country, I at least (a monolingual speaker surrounded by amazingly competent non-native speakers and polyglots) share this admiration. And Lynne Truss is ridiculing foreign greengrocers? Not fair.

Now I do happen to have my copy of Eats, Shoots & Leaves to hand. Lynne Truss is a massive prescriptivist, at least in the realm of punctuation, by anyone's standards (and actually, if you are going to be a prescriptivist, you might as well be a punctuation prescriptivist because at least it is a contrived system with entirely invented rules and no natural existence other than its sometimes arbitrary relation to prosody). She says things like this:

Someone wrote to say that my use of "one's" was wrong...and that it should be 'ones'. This is such rubbish that I refuse to argue about it.

Well, OK, fine, but she has just spent several pages arguing about other incorrect apostrophisation, so this seems a bit like sticking your head in the sand. Anyway. Not the point. The point is, I'm not saying she isn't a prescriptivist; that's the whole point of the book. But does she really go so far as to ridicule immigrants' attempts to use English? My memory of the book told me no. And anyway, it's entirely written in British English, even as far as the lack of a serial ('Oxford') comma in the title, which in most US publishing house styles would be Eats, Shoots, & Leaves, so why would she refer to the price of anything in cents?

So obviously I checked. There is a long chapter on the apostrophe, and in that chapter she does refer to greengrocers' famous misuse of it (which the "plum's 49c" example must surely be an example of). However, at no point does she even mention immigrants, or the price of plums, and she also writes this:

The only illiteracy with apostrophes that stirs any sympathy in me is the greengrocer's variety. 

So not only does she not mention immigrants and not use the quoted example, she excuses errors such as the one she supposedly ridicules.

I did consider, of course, that the US version of the book might be different. It seemed unlikely that it would have been completely rewritten, but perhaps a word changed here or there for US readers might give an unintended interpretation. These days, we can check this kind of thing because Amazon allows you to search inside a book. I did, and at no point in either edition does the word plums come up, however you punctuate it. In fact, the editions appear to be exactly the same, even down to the same pagesetting.

Did Florey read the book wrong? Did she misunderstand something that was never there? I can't see how she possibly could. Are greengrocers mostly immigrants where she comes from? Round my way they're exclusively English. Just a case of misremembering? Maybe, but I can't help thinking that if you're accusing someone of something, you should double-check they do actually do it.

(By the way, Florey is just as big a prescriptivist as Truss. I think you have to be, to be a copy editor. She spends the next few pages after this comment railing against ain't, youse and double negatives as 'seriously low class'.)

Grammar... sort of.

Ok, so like, I am not a prescriptivist, blah blah blah, but I do tell people how to use apostrophes for a living, so I found this momentarily funny. 

But then I found it annoying because that ain't grammar. It's punctuation, and perhaps also spelling. If it was grammar, people who make this mistake would be genuinely mixing up

CP[2.sg BE.pres.sg shit[ADJ]] (a clause with a second person subject, the copula and an adjectival complement)

and

NP[2sg.poss shit[NOUN]] (a noun phrase consisting of a possessive second person determiner and a noun).

Methinks they are not. They just don't know how to spell the right version of two homophonous but otherwise distinct forms.

That's how to kill a joke.

Peeving in Bath

Some people feel very strongly about the use of the phrase train station. They say that it ought to be railway station. No doubt they're right, as it's a station on the railway. But since when did logic dictate usage? We all have our peeves, and there's not a damn thing we can do about the way other people speak. Anyway, someone has got cross enough about signs pointing people to the 'train station' in Bath that they have done something about it:

People modifying signs in that neighbourhood has a good pedigree though. My grandparents live in one of a row very old Georgian houses, built around 1740. They're known as Ralph Allen's Cottages, because a chap called Ralph Allen built them for his workers to live in. Unfortunately, the sign at the end of the street says Ralph Allens' Cottages. The man was not called Ralph Allens. No one is called Allens. His name was Allen. This made my granddad so cross that he crept out one night with a paintbrush loaded with a bit of white paint (he's an artist) and very neatly painted the apostrophe into the right place. 

What's even worse is that the sign next to it, which is the same design and looks like it was made at the same time, denotes the first house in the row as Ralph Allens Cottage. They can't even be consistent in being wrong.