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! 

Bears, hamsters, coffee and hashtags

All hipster bars and coffee shops these days have signs with quirky slogans or jokes on them. They come with a punchline that undercuts the set-up, and the first time you see them they are genuinely really funny. For instance, this classic 'bears' sign:

Dunno, maybe bears... 

And this one self-referencing hipsters:

Hipsters... no wait, hamsters

But after the first time, the joke is no longer funny because it has to be original. That doesn't actually matter, because it will be new to most of the people that see it for quite some time, so it's OK that some people are bored of it (it probably won't put them off going to their regular place or a cafe that looks nice).

There's something more to the joke format that I'm beginning to find wearing, though, and I think it's the Conventional Set-up --> Twist format. Even though this is essentially how jokes work, it has somehow become a cliche on blackboard coffee shop signs.

I was at the annual meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain last week. I go every year, as I'm on the committee, and it's held in a university somewhere in the UK. They had this sign:

Drink responsibly!
#DontSpillIt

If this had been a normal blackboard sign, I'd have found it twee and predictable, even though I haven't seen this exact joke anywhere. The format has become wearing. But somehow, putting the punchline in a hashtag was enough for my jaded joke palate to accept this as a witty sign. A normal blackboard says "We're cleverer than you: we made you think one thing and then turned it round on you". The hashtag somehow says "The sign is real; we mean the main message literally and aren't trying to subvert it. However, look at this funny interpretation too".

Antidisestablishmentarianism is a very long word

There's a really great post at Merriam-Webster about why the word antidisestablishmentarianism isn't in the dictionary. Basically, it's because it isn't a word in common usage. This raises interesting questions about the nature of lexicography, what 'in common usage' means, meta-linguistic mention vs. use, and compositionality of meaning.

The word clearly does have a meaning. Merriam-Webster say it's this:

opposition to depriving a legally established state church of its status

I thought it was something like the movement against the separation of church and state, but maybe that's the same thing - I'm not at all clear about what that actually means. But the point is that the meaning arises directly as a sum of its parts: it's compositional. Well, this isn't strictly true: there is some idiomatic meaning to do with the church and the law as well. But the length of it comes from attaching affixes with strictly compositional meanings. When you have compositionality, you can theoretically create longer and longer words, up to the limit of your cognitive capacity. I could add a morpheme and create antidisestablishmentarianismation, for instance. Some long words in quite common use aren't in the dictionary simply because they're made by standard suffixation processes, and that suffix is in the dictionary so you can work out the meaning for yourself.

So antidisestablishmentariansim is a real word, in the sense that people recognise it and can understand its meaning and it's made with proper word-formation processes. But for M-W, it's not a word in common usage. They have only three quotations for this word which use the meaning they give above, and dictionaries rely on written uses of words. This is why they can seem slow: words only get in when they've achieved plenty of use in print materials.

They do have plenty of quotations of the word with reference to it being a long word, however. It is in the OED, and their quotations refer to this:

1984   T. Augarde Oxf. Guide Word Games xxvi. 216   The longest words that most people know are antidisestablishmentarianism..and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

This is metalinguistic mention of the word, not an actual use of the word. We're stepping outside language and talking about the word itself, not using the word to say something. This is sort of difficult to get your head round because we have to use language to talk about language, a long-recognised philosophical problem in linguistics.

Interestingly, M-W say at the end of their piece that it might be considered a viable entry 'simply because it's a well-known word'. The meaning is not well-known, however, so it would be an entry whose definition read something like 'famous long word', and the definition as a secondary bit of information. That would be quite cool and very meta.

Irrelevant postscript: There's a really stupid joke that goes like this: 'Antidisestablishmentarianism is a very long word. How do you spell it?' and the answer is, of course, 'I, T'. I sometimes try that out on my students and some of them groan but a lot of them simply don't understand the joke. Maybe it's the way I tell 'em. 

Dogs shall be carried

I was in London recently, and while I was at King's Cross station I noticed that the escalators, which bear the usual safety warnings, now say among other things that 'Dogs shall be carried'. Maybe they've always said that, but it's more common to see the warning as 'Dogs must be carried'. This has given rise to the well-known joke, also seen in the recent Paddington film, in which a child is late for school and when asked why, he says that the sign said dogs must be carried and it took him ages to find a dog.

So my question is, does using 'shall' instead of 'must' remove this comedy interpretation or improve the sign in any way? No one really uses 'shall' any more, but it indicates future and apparently has some sense of being a command. 'Must' also expresses a command ('deontic necessity' - it can also express 'epistemic necessity' as in 'It must be cold outside'). Does 'shall' seem politer? Does a warning sign need to be polite? Unknown. Some more good suggestions here.

(photo credit not known; it's all over the internet)

Fox gloves and puns

I've got a pair of gloves (those fingerless ones with mittens that flip off so that you can work your phone) that have a fox design, from Primark:

Fox gloves from Primark [photo source]

I've been wearing them for some time, and refer to them as my 'fox gloves'. I shift the primary stress to the first syllable (FOXgloves), indicating that I consider this to be a compound. During the time I've owned these gloves I've said the word 'foxglove', referring to the flower. And yet I've never, not once, realised that it would be hilariously witty to refer to them as foxgloves until this morning, when I wasn't even wearing them (it's proper winter glove weather now).

This is testament to the power of our language faculty to keep homophones apart. Puns wouldn't work, for instance, if we were constantly aware of similar-sounding strings. There's a joke which goes like this:

Two cats, one called OneTwoThree and one called UnDeuxTrois, were having a swimming race. Why did OneTwoThree win?

Because UnDeuxTrois cat sank! 

This joke works because UnDeuxTrois cat sank is exactly homophonous with un deux trois quatre cinq (the numbers from one to five in French) for many English speakers, not to mention this set of numbers being learnt pretty much as a 'chunk' or formulaic utterance by the 8-year-olds telling this joke, and so we are presented with a situation in which our brain is temporarily confused by the words, finds the humour and then has a good old chuckle.

Not all puns are exact homophones, and one of my favourite jokes is this one:

Why are there no aspirins in the jungle?

The parrots eat 'em all!

This pun relies on parrots eat 'em all sounding like paracetamol, but in fact I pronounce paracetamol  the other way, with an e as in bed (something like /ˌpæɹəˈsɛtəmɒl/ for the linguists), and my all is not like the ol syllable. Nevertheless, there are many puns that work because a string of sounds is precisely identical with two different meanings, and yet our brains don't ever confuse them until we are made to by the complicated joke set-up. Similarly, we don't ever seem to get homophonous words mixed up (pen, bank etc., where the words have two or more totally separate meanings). We even manage to think of different lexical categories from the same root as different (analyses is one I use in teaching: it can be the plural of the noun analysis or the 3rd person singular present tense form of the verb analyse). How we store and retrieve these is a question I'm going to let the brain scientists work on.