Past tense is not past

It was the final of the Great British Bake Off last week. Now that it's been long enough for everyone to catch up, I can post this with no spoilers.

One of the contestants was Ruby, a very young baker (just 20) who divided opinion: many were annoyed by her apparent lack of confidence, thinking that it seemed fake. This seemed a bit harsh to me, but then as a university lecturer I'm well placed to see the lack of confidence that many young women have in their own abilities. Ruby has won over a lot of people with this article about the way she and the other female contestants were treated.

But lots of people loved Ruby and were rooting for her to win. She didn't, losing out to the contestant who was better in the final, as is right and proper. On twitter, The Invisible Woman tweeted her thoughts in the moments before the announcement was made:

Tweet: "'We will always remember Ruby for her perfect picnic pie...' I think that past tense is a clue."

The Invisible Woman is an intelligent woman and we all tweet things without thinking about them properly, so I just want to be clear that I'm not picking on her or making fun of her for making a mistake. Nevertheless, it is a mistake, and it's interesting to see why it might have been made.

We can distinguish between 'tense' and 'time' - we might talk about past, present, future, and so on, but we might not always talk about past time with past tense, for instance. Just imagine someone telling a story and saying 'So I start walking away, and he says...'. If we talk about tense, we mean something that is a grammatical feature of the language - an ending on a verb, or a word that functions to make the sentence past.

English has two tenses that are indicated with inflection on the verb: present (with either no ending or -s) and past (with -ed or an irregular ending):

walk - walks - walked

To indicate other tenses, other methods are used. We might discuss the future and use be going to, or just a present tense verb: The party starts at 8 tonight. Future tense can also be marked 'periphrastically' - that means with another word, will. That's what we've got in the tweet above: We will always remember. Future tense is about is non-past as tenses get. But not only that, it's not even referring to past time. It's referring to some time in the future, using future will, describing the action at that future time. The only past-ness about it is the fact that the meaning of remember refers to the past - if you remember something, you necessarily remember a past event.

Yeah and yes

I had this text conversation:

The response (the white bubble on the bottom left) consists of two ways of pronouncing the affirmative answer word 'yes': 'yes' and 'yeah'. We all use both of these, and I would have said pretty interchangeably, but here it does look like there's some functional difference between them.

It appears that 'yeah' has been used to agree with a statement and 'yes' to answer a question. This isn't a rule, by any means: you can certainly answer a question with 'yeah' or agree to a statement with 'yes'. But it's interesting that the distinction was made here.

Ket... carrion or sweeties?

On Twitter today, Richard Osman bemoaned the fact that British English lacks a word that covers both 'chocolate' and 'sweets'. I remembered this northeast word that I think has that meaning: ket. It's not in my personal vocabulary, and possibly not so common these days, but it does seem to mean this, according to Wiktionary:

But just look at the etymology! It's from the word meaning 'flesh' in Icelandic/Swedish/Danish, and in other parts of northern England it means 'carrion'. Eew, and also how? 

Wiktionary has two theories: either it comes via the term 'sweetmeats' (I don't know if they mean in the sense 'sweet treats' or 'testicles') or it could be that the word was used to put kids off eating too many sweets! 

Onomatopoeia from my students

In my first-year introductory seminar, I had the students coming up with new onomatopoeic words, which we then tried to guess the meaning of (spoilers: you usually can't guess, despite the supposed relation of the sound of the word to the sound it describes). Some of the words seemed quite useful, so here they are:

frip: the sound of flicking or rifling through a sheet or sheets of paper.
shplup: the sound of dropping something damp onto a hard surface.
zhoom: the sound of a car going by at high speed.
ouge (pronounced like 'rouge'): the noise of a washing machine.
mmm: the noise a fridge makes.
shlup: the noise it makes when you drink from a bottle with a 'sports cap'.
twing: the melodious jingling of windchimes or bracelets. 

I thought there were some very nice creative ones, and some interesting similarities in words or definitions.

Yes or no what?

I was sort of half-heartedly watching ITV's 'This Morning' programme while I was working yesterday (honest) and they were talking about vigilantes. They had one of those viewer polls, where viewers have to text or tweet their opinion about an issue and either the result is an equal split or it confirms what we already knew. 

This was the question put to viewers about this 'issue': 

Perfectly reasonable question. Two opposing points of view to choose between: either vigilantes have a valid role (in the process of catching criminals) or the job of catching criminals is one that should be left to the police alone. Choose the position you agree with and tell ITV. 

But here's how the results were presented: 

Well, yes or no what? Yes, either vigilantes have a valid role or catching criminals should be left to the police? And no, neither of the above apply? 

Clearly not. Obviously, what they meant was yes or no to the first part of the question (do vigilantes have a valid role), as this clearer presentation shows:

Probably no one except me was confused by the wording. I've spent more time than most people thinking about questions over the last few years, though, so I noticed this strange construction. 

The question was presented as if it was an 'alternative question': one where the answer is one of the alternatives that are mentioned in the question. More everyday examples tend to have smaller parts of the sentence given as alternatives, as in Are you coming for lunch or tea? The answer is either 'lunch' or 'tea'. The question from ITV had two whole questions as the options: Do vigilantes have a valid role? and should catching criminals be left to the police?. 

This kind of alternative question, as far as I can tell, is hardly ever used as a real alternative question (as the lunch or tea example is). More often, the second part isn't a real alternative, and you aren't meant to pick one of them as the answer. Instead, the question is really a 'yes/no' question, or one where the answer is either yes or no. You can't answer yes or no to a real alternative question (where # means that the utterance is strange in some way): 

Did you buy that suit or hire it? #Yes.

But in the poll above, and in most cases of apparently alternative questions with two entire questions as the 'alternatives', the answer can be yes or no, showing that they must really be yes/no questions. But! You can also answer by providing one of the alternatives. This is sort of the case for yes/no questions as well, in a trivial sense which I won't go into here, but it's different with these strange halfway things.

This was actually pointed out to me pretty early on in my PhD (by Sten Vikner), who gave an example like Have you done the washing up or have you just been sitting in front of the TV all day?. The question provides two alternatives, and you can answer it by providing one of them as the answer, but it's really just asking Have you done the washing up? and it's more natural to answer with yes or no. I didn't really address this problem then, but perhaps I ought to now.

Tobaccos

I snapped this photo while I was in London recently, at the annual LAGB meeting. It's a newsagent just next to Russell Square tube station, and it offers, among other things, 'tobaccos'. 

'Tobaccos' is a word you won't hear much. You're far more likely to hear the singular, 'tobacco'. In fact, it's not quite right to call it the singular, because 'tobacco' doesn't usually refer to a single tobacco. It's a mass noun, and what that means is that it's a substance rather than individual things that can be counted (those things are called count nouns!). Water is a mass noun, as is rice, bread, tea, juice, gravel, and so on. Some mass nouns are physically uncountable, like water - it's one continuous thing, unseparable unless you're looking at the molecules. Others, like gravel, are composed of little bits you could count, but we don't refer to each one as 'a gravel' or 'a rice' (for rice, we have a separate word 'grain'). As I've mentioned before, 'pea' is now a count noun, but used to be a mass noun 'pease' before it was reanalysed as a plural, with each individual bit of pease being a pea.

So normally, you can't pluralise a mass noun because it's uncountable. You don't order some rices in a restaurant, for instance. However, there is one time when you can, and that's when it refers to types or instances of a thing. Let's take rice. I wouldn't ask for rices in a restaurant, but I might if I was a rice salesman wanting a wide selection of rices to sell - basmati, long grain, brown, etc. Then I could ask 'What rices do you have?'. Or beer: I might ask for 'two beers, please', and I mean two instances or servings of beer.

This makes me think that this shop might have a wide variety of tobaccos, from all over the tobacco-growing world. Alternatively, it might have been written by someone who didn't know that tobacco is a mass noun and pluralised it to mean 'tobacco products'. This would actually be a perfectly legitimate use of the plural, but we just happen not to use it to mean 'different types of tobacco products'.

Sensible advice from Morrison's

Morrison's offers this advice to shoppers at its Margate branch: 

I intend to accept no responsibility for any of the above, even if I cause the damage myself. Thanks, Morrison's!

(We can talk about why it's 'on' this car park rather than 'in' another time.)