I like the part where it goes

There's a Simpsons episode where Marge is 'admiring' a sculpture made by Groundskeeper Willie out of kids' braces. It's hideous, obviously, and she is trying to be nice, so she says "I like this part in here, the way it, um, it goes".

She's struggling to find a word, and none seems right. She can't find anything positive to say. So she reaches for a completely neutral word, one that doesn't mean anything, one that has basically no meaning at all. We see this again when we use go in phrases like How's it going, It goes well with that outfit, It's all going well, and so on. None of these has any sense of go in its full lexical sense, of movement away, as in I'm going to Italy on Monday. It's almost being used as a 'light' verb. These are verbs that are bleached of their meaning and just have a linking function, just making the sentence hold together. Chinese uses hit to make a noun work as a verb - where in English you can say I telephoned him, in Chinese you have to say I hit the telephone to him, or effectively I used the telephone to him. In some languages throw is used a lot - in Georgian you say that you throw a gun at someone rather than shooting them, and in Spanish I think (I overheard this so may be wrong) you'd more likely say that you throw juice at someone rather than squirt juice at them.

Worst. Blog. Post. Ever.

The snowclone 'Worst. X. Ever' (from the Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons) is easy enough: just substitute X with whatever it is you're commenting on, and you're done.

The full stops represent the way Comic Book Guy says the phrase, with a distinct pause between each word. It distinguishes this quotation use from just any old utterance of 'worst X ever'.

What do you do with them when the X is more than one word? These two tweets illustrate the difference. This one gets it wrong:

Worst. Perfume. Name. Ever. pic.twitter.com/9dSIMx3MWf

— Joe Harland (@TheJoeHarland) October 8, 2016

While this one gets it right:

Worst. Tinder bio. Ever. pic.twitter.com/70NPFlzlO4

— Sam Parker (@samparkercouk) July 1, 2016

If your X is more than one word, you can't put full stops after every word. The full stops represent pauses, and you don't pause in the middle of perfume name and Tinder bio. They're intonational phrases, spoken with a single intonational contour.

I slightly suspect it might be different with a phrase where the stress falls on the second word, though. For example, Worst. Jacket. Potato. Ever. seems to work a bit better (though Worst. Jacket potato. Ever is still best in my view).

Trompe l'oeiling

There's an episode of The Simpsons (Flaming Moe, s22ep11 - a reference to the episode Flaming Moe's) in which Moe, for reasons, reinvents his bar as a gay bar for average-looking men.

It's tremendously successful, and he says this:

Now we can afford real bowls of pretzels instead of trompe l'oeiling them on the bar.

This is a fantastic bit of morphology. It's yer bog-standard noun-to-verb conversion (verbification, if you like), transforming the noun trompe l'oeil to a verb to trompe l'oeil (and notice, of course, that the noun is itself a translation of a French verb-plus-object: 'to fool the eye'). Then we are free to stick the verb suffix -ing on the end, because we can do that with verbs in English.

But it's so cool. For one thing, it means that the normally unpronounced final 'l' gets pronounced (he says it like trompe-loyling) and for another, it reveals how when we borrow a phrase wholesale with an idiomatic meaning like this we can put a verb suffix on a noun no problem at all.

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.

Pub crawling

There's a game for various iDevices called The Simpsons: Tapped Out, in which you have to rebuild Springfield. It's good; I'm obsessed. 

Every now and then it gets seasonal updates, and today it got an update for St Patrick's Day, which seems to be a bigger thing in the US than it is in England, where no one particularly cares about it. (I expect they do in Ireland.) Anyway, in the game, to introduce the new storyline, Homer says this: 

Notice that he says 'The day we all pub crawl to celebrate St Patrick', using 'pub crawl' as a verb. This strikes me as ungrammatical. I'm quite fascinated by this because 'pub crawl' must certainly be a British expression, borrowed into US English for the purposes of British-style (or perhaps Irish-style, in this case) pub crawling. It's my impression that in US English, the usual term for a drinking place is a 'bar'. We do use this word in UK English too, but it's not used for the more traditional pub-type places, only for the trendier type of establishment. And of course it is the place in a pub where one is served.

So what of this 'pub crawl' verb then? Well, the origin of the expression is clear: a compound noun was formed from a zero-derivation of the verb 'crawl' plus the thing that is crawled, to indicate an occasion of 'crawling' pubs. Zero-derivation is when you change the category of a word without changing its form, and is fairly common in English for the purpose of verbing nouns and nouning verbs. This noun 'pub crawl', however, seems to have been zero-derived back again into a verb in Homer's idiolect. I don't think compound nouns are very commonly turned into verbs at all in English: we have lots of compound nouns from verbs, like tin-opener, but hardly any verbs ('babysit' is an example, backformed from 'babysitter'). In fact, Homer seems to be particularly fond of them. In my morphology class, I use an example from the Simpsons of a very rare instance of a process called 'noun incorporation', and this is an exactly comparable example, also spoken by Homer:

Did I ever tell you about the time I babyshot my boss?

Here, the instrumental noun 'baby' is incorporated into the verb, giving a complex verb 'babyshoot', meaning 'to shoot someone via one's baby'. What I want to know is who in the Simpsons writing team is putting these verbs into Homer's language? I'm a big fan of their work, whoever they are.