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. 

Dictionary update ahoy!

I always think of dictionaries as like a huge, slow-moving (but graceful) sea creature, a sort of enormous beast like the avanc in Mieville's The Scar, making inexorable steady progress. Lexicographers probably feel very nimble and agile, skipping through language and keeping abreast of linguistic change as it eddies around them and I'm doing them a terrible disservice. 

Print dictionaries, of course, are hopelessly out of date before they're even published. Online dictionaries can include much more recent usage, though they still tend to be a few years behind what we think of as current, because they need to include general usage with evidence, not just Jay from down the road's definition of a word. 

Dictionary.com published an article about its latest update, with a very thorough overhaul of its entries, including adding #MeToo and af. It's also updated the language in some of its older entries too, though. For instance, it capitalises Black now when referring to Black people/culture, following style guides including AP in doing so. It has also separated out the entries for the word more generally (e.g. the colour) and when it refers to people: 

In the dictionary world, separating the people-related definitions of Black from the other definitions of black is a major—and extremely rare—move. As a rule, different senses of words that share an origin, as lowercase black and uppercase Black historically do, are included under the same entry. It’s a rule worth breaking. Dictionaries are not merely a linguistic exercise or academic enterprise. What are the effects of Black, referring to human beings, being grouped together with black, which can mean, among other things, “wicked”? The effects are social. They are psychological. They are personal. How words are entered into the dictionary—especially words concerning our personal identities—have real effects on real people in the real world.

It's also  reworded the entries referring to gay or gayness to remove the term homosexuality (they now use gay sexual orientation instead). They note that homosexuality now has connotations of 'pathology, mental illness, and criminality'. Whether it always has done, I don't know - one can check these things using concordances and corpora. But this is an interesting case of specialisation, where the term gay has become the default term, and so the use of another term carries some extra layer of meaning and now those connotations are very strong and the word is no longer (if it ever was) neutral. It's a technical-sounding, scientific word, so it makes sense that it would be used for technical things like medical or legal contexts. 

Take a look at the whole article. It's really worth reading, and it includes this list of words that they consider to be late-2010s-defining:

amirite
battle royale
contouring
dead white male
DGAF
Dunning-Kruger effect
empty suit
gender reveal
GOAT
hodophobia
ish
information bubble
jabroni
janky
MAGA
MeToo
nothingburger
swole
world-building
zhuzh

Cryptic crossword pursues rather than follows

An occasional hobby of mine is trying to get better at cryptic crosswords. I sometimes print one out from the Guardian and it takes about two weeks between two of us, but eventually we finish it and we feel like we've learnt about how the clues work.

I was stumped on one:

Party leader pursues old educational institution's growth.

Pretty quickly I spotted that 'party leader' meant 'p' – the first letter of 'party'. I also knew that 'pursues' meant that the 'p' would be chasing after the rest of the word. Already, you may notice my problem here. 

If it had said 'follows' then I'd have been looking for a pattern like ___p. The 'p' follows the rest of the word, coming at the end. No worries. But because it said 'pursues', that has a more literal or contentful meaning than 'follows' (which can be entirely metaphorical as in this case), meaning 'chase after at speed' or something. So then, somehow, my odd little mind flipped the direction from the act of writing the word (beginning at the beginning and the rest follows) to something like reading the word from left to right, where the end of the word is ahead (yet to come) and so 'pursues' means that the 'p' is behind it, at the start of the word.

So I was thinking it must be 'Palma', because of 'alma mater', but didn't see how that meant 'growth', and anyway it's clearly 'polyp' - 'poly' is an old educational institution, with 'p' following it.

Take your litter home with them

I was driven across the country on Saturday, all the way from Sidmouth in Devon to Margate in Kent. On the way I noticed two signs about litter on the roads, both of which are pleasingly ambiguous. I couldn't take a photo as I whizzed by, but the first one said this:

Take your litter home with you.
Others do. 

The ambiguity is between what linguists call a 'strict identity' and a 'sloppy identity' reading of the missing bit of the second sentence. Others do stands for either Other people take your litter home with them or Other people take their litter home with them. The first one is the strict reading because it strictly preserves the part of the original sentence that is elided, and the reference is the sloppy one because it allows the reference to shift from your litter to theirs, along with the subject.

[Aside: note that the fact that the second pronoun must be them in either case, namely the sloppy reading. I'm not sure why; something about the semantics of take and home and you, probably. But it seems to be an exception to the generalisation discussed here by Neal Whitman, referring to work by Johnson and Dahl, that you can have all the possible combinations of strict and sloppy except for the one where the first is strict and the second sloppy. Which is weird.]

Unlike with most ambiguity, where context tells you which meaning is probably meant, I don't think it's so clearcut here. Presumably they are trying to shame you by saying that other people behave properly so you ought to as well (sloppy). But it is possible, I think, that it means that if you don't take your litter home, the litter-pickers will have to pick it up and take it away (presumably not literally to their homes), namely the strict reading. (We'll leave aside the point that if you take it home it's not litter, which is what my aunt Becky always points out.)

Right, I've gone on about this for so long I'm now completely unable to English so I'll do the other sign for a new post tomorrow.

(At) home

It's a well-known fact that home has no preposition when it occurs with go:

I went (*to) home

(The asterisk inside the brackets means that it's ungrammatical if you include to.)

And it has to have one if it's an adverbial phrase (optional extra information about the event):

I worked *(at) home today

(The asterisk outside the brackets means it's ungrammatical without at.)

There are some verbs where the preposition is optional, such as stay:

I stayed (at) home.

I think there might be some regional variation on that one, though I'm not sure.

But when it's with be, omitting or including the preposition gives a meaning difference. I ran a twitter poll to make sure I wasn't alone in this, and found overwhelming agreement with my judgements. In a context in which I've been for a night out and want to tell my friend that I've arrived back at my house safely, I would say I'm home. If my friend had rung my and wanted to know where I was, I would say I'm at home. I could use either in either context, but both I and those who responded to my twitter poll felt that the distinction above was right. So that preposition at being pronounced has a kind of locative meaning - location in a place - while omitting it has some sort of directional meaning - movement to (or arrival at) a place.

Professional toilet paper

​Normally, ‘professional’ quality means better quality. Artists’ paints, for instance, come in ‘student’ and ‘professional’ grades, and the professional ones are made with real pigment instead of synthesised stuff and are correspondingly more expensive for the ones made of precious things. A professional bricklayer will do the job better than some bloke who does it in his spare time (in theory, anyway). A professional musician plays music for a living and can be assumed to be pretty good at it.

Olympic athletes are not professionals, though: they’re amateurs. It’s in the rules. If you ‘turn pro’ in boxing you can’t compete in the Olympics any more. Here, ‘professional’ means ‘does it for money’.

And the toilet paper they use in my workplace is ‘professional quality’, which in this context means ‘not the good stuff that you buy for yourself’. 

I was going to photograph the actual packaging but it's been thrown away, so here's The Professionals instead. 

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.

Simpsons and more linguistic innovation

Yet again, I find myself noticing cute linguistic constructions in the Simpsons. Take this:

Marge: What did I say about joining La Cosa Nostra?
Bart: You said to not to.

And this:

Louie: Won't it be easier if we just take care of this Simpson lady?
Fat Tony: Louie, Louie, Louie, women are for taking care of, not 'taking care' of. 

The second one involves the use of the same string of words ('take care of someone') with two very different meanings (to look after vs to kill). We obviously do this all the time, using 'pick up' to mean 'elevate using the hands', 'pay' (as in 'pick up the bill'), 'seduce' and so on. It's not a problem. Context disambiguates. (Unless it doesn't, as in the memorable 'Comic Strip Presents...' when Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmonson mistakenly believe they're supposed to murder Nicholas Parsons when they are asked to 'take him out'.)

In this example, Fat Tony uses the two in the same sentence, in a kind of metalinguistic use. It's not quite true metalinguisticity, because that's when you refer to a word rather than use it, like 'How do you spell harlequin?'. Here, Fat Tony is using the phrase both times, but he is contrasting the different meanings. To do this, he will need to show contrast somehow. I saw this written down rather than heard it said, so I don't know for sure, but I'd put money on a contrastive intonation. If you imagine that someone says to you, 'You greedy pig, you've already had pizza once today', and then you correct them by saying, 'No, I had pizza yesterday, not today', then the stress on 'yesterday' and 'today' is your contrastive intonation. That'll be what Fat Tony uses on the two instances of 'take care of'. (He may also do bunny ears: in the written form, it's with inverted commas (or 'scare quotes').)

Now let's turn to the first example. This could just be a typo, of course, for 'You said not to', which would be the standard form. But that would be boring so let's assume it's not a typo. Given the frequency of language play in the Simpsons, I don't think that it's implausible. So Bart has an extra 'to' in there. What's it doing?

Imagine that Marge had told him not to go, rather than telling him not to [join La Cosa Nostra]. Then Bart could have said either of the following:

You said to not go.
You said not to go. 

'Not' can appear either before or after the infinitive marker 'to' (though the 'rules' would have you put it before so as to not split an infinitive). That's with an infinitive form of the verb, 'to go'. You can also omit the verb itself if it's repeated from before, leaving just the infinitive marker:

You said not to.
You said to not.

(The second one here isn't as good, but it's still acceptable, I think.) This is called ellipsis.

There are two explanations that spring to mind for Bart's utterance, 'You said to not to'. One is that he is using 'to' the second time as a stand-in for the elided material, in the same way that we might use 'do':

She said she'd get even, and she did. 

'Did' isn't in the first part of the sentence but we use it to replace the 'get even' which is omitted. Is that the reason for Bart using an extra 'to'? 'You said to not [join La Cosa Nostra]'? This isn't something which I've heard before, but it's not impossible. If Bart has a tendency to place the negation after the infinitive, then he either has to say 'You said to not', which (as noted) is a bit less natural than 'You said not to', or he has to say 'You said to not join them' or similar, which is more cumbersome. For maximum ellipsis without saying the less natural sentence, you need a stand in. 'Do' doesn't work in this case, because 'do' as a verb replacement is an auxiliary verb: not a main verb, but a 'helping' verb. In 'He did do all his homework', the first 'did' is an auxiliary and the second 'do' is a main (lexical) verb. 'Do' as an auxiliary can't occur with an infinitive 'to'; only the lexical one can. So we need a different verb replacement and what more appropriate than a word that's already associated with verbs, the infinitive marker 'to'?

The other explanation is that it's a speech error, like when people who wouldn't normally say 'might could' produce it because they 'forget' that they already said 'might' and then say 'could' as well. I'm hoping for the former, but if it is, there'll be other examples to find and testing to do, so let's get cracking.

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.

Forever and for ever

There are lots of expressions, mostly with quantifiers (all, every etc.), that can be written as one word or two. Generally, it makes a difference to the meaning:

Every day: daily (it rained every day for a week)
Everyday: common, unexceptional (it was an everyday occurrence)
All right: everything correct
Alright: agreement
Any one: free choice of one out of all of these (you can choose any one ice cream)
Anyone: existential or universal pronoun (anyone could understand that)

And so on.

But I got to thinking about forever/for ever. Most of the time, it doesn't seem to make a difference which one you use:

It was taking for ever to finish the essay.
It was taking forever to chop all the potatoes for the stew. 

It's sort of surprising that, given that these other expressions have different meanings, that it would just be free variation. For isn't a quantifier, but I don't know that that should make a difference. I checked my copy of Fowler's and found the following:

1. It's two words when the meaning is 'for all future time' or 'in perpetuity' (he said he would love her for ever).
2. It's one word when the meaning is 'continually, persistently, always' (the children are forever asking about more pocket money).
3. It doesn't matter when the meaning is 'for a long time' (as above). 

I still think you could get away with forever even in the first one, though perhaps not for ever in the second. Almost free variation, then.

Linguistics in the news - really!

Normally when I write of linguistics being in the news, what I mean is that there is a news item with a linguistic angle that I can write about, or that some news item is about language and I can discuss the 'proper' linguistics behind it. This time, the BBC has attempted a genuine linguistics item.

Anonymous from Stratford

There's a new film out called Anonymous, which puts forward the well-discussed theory that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (the so-called Oxfordian theory). This is not a widely-accepted theory, by the way, and the film has caused a bit of a ruckus among people that care about this kind of thing.