Let's lead led away

All the way back in 2013, I declared the spelling of the past tense of the verb lead, which is standardly spelt led, dead. Or ded. I'd noticed it being misspelt as lead so many times, including on the BBC news website, that I thought it was probably simply prolonging its agony to try to preserve led. Of course it's still around, because inexplicably I'm not in charge, and written language doesn't change that fast. But I was reminded about it the other day and was frustrated all over again by the fact that this one is actually one that has sensible spelling and pronunciation, unlike most of our irregular past tenses. 

Lead is pronounced with an 'ee' sound, like read, and led is pronounced like red, so it really ought to be totally transparent and memorable and unproblematic. The problem with lead/led is, though, that we also have read/read, which is not spelt red, though we have another word that is. Oh and we also have the word lead, for the metal, which is pronounced like led. All of which obscures the fact that lead and led are pronounced more or less as they're spelt, unlike read (past tense) and lead (the metal). 

I feel bad for it, I really do, but I also think it would just be simpler to let it slip quietly away. 

Because linguistics, again: your help needed!

Have you ever used ‘because’ like this: Yeah, no, because reasons? You aren’t giving a proper reason at all, you’re making a metalinguistic comment about something. Together with Ellie Cook, one of our graduates from 2020, I’m investigating this phenomenon, which you might remember is known to linguists as ‘because X’.  

You might remember it because I first wrote about ‘because X’ all the way back in 2012. It was just a quick blog post noting it as an interesting construction. A couple of people talked about because becoming a preposition during 2013, notably Neal Whitman and Stan Carey. This Atlantic article appeared, quoting me and attributing it to Gretchen McCulloch (to be fair, she got it from a post where Gretchen was quoting me - though with attribution). Then it was voted as 2013's ‘Word of the Year’ by the American Dialect Society, and I did a quick study on it as a holiday project in early 2014. Well, it sort of snowballed since then, and it became obvious that this seemingly unimportant point of usage variation can tell us something about how language works. 

I don't talk about it much on here, but behind the scenes I've been working on this off and on for a few years, picking away at little bits of it to find out what's going on. I've given a few conference papers and talks on the topic, including this one and this one (let me know if you want the version for college students, which is very accessible and has bonus #CheekyNandos content). 

From that first survey, put together as a quick and fun project with no real aims in mind beyond finding out what the heck was happening, I discovered that although bare nouns like because reasons are frequent, it also shows up with lots of other parts of speech: because fake news is a common one (with a modified noun), and because just in case is the slogan of a well known holiday company in the UK. It also tends to be something that is a complete concept in itself with specific connotations (so because reasons means ‘because of some vague and probably not very well-thought-out unspecified reasons’). We probably share some knowledge (e.g. ‘people do things for stupid reasons or no reason at all’), and it might have a slightly tongue-in-cheek usage (e.g. ‘You and I both know that I have no good reason for this but let's pretend I do’). 

Lots of careful research later, and we’ve been able to describe ‘because X’ quite precisely, as involving ‘sentence fragments’ – that is, incomplete sentences that express a whole thought. It’s like when you say Going out! in answer to the question What are you doing?. This is really unexpected because these sentence fragments, by definition, shouldn’t show up within sentences! But this is what gives them their quirky sound: doing something unexpected gives a slightly jarring pragmatic effect to make the listener realise this isn’t normal ‘because’, giving a reason, but new ‘because X’.

So what now? Well, before we can write up this research properly, we need to test a few specific things about this analysis. We've set up another survey. Where the last one necessarily took a scattergun approach, because we didn't know what was acceptable and what was not beyond just what seemed right to us, this one is more careful. Based on the predictions of a number of hypotheses, we've created another list of sentences that might sound more or less natural, and I need people's opinions on this. We need lots of people, because the more people who give their opinion, the more reliable the results are. 

If you want to take part in this research, you can! You can fill in the survey here, which will take no more than ten minutes, giving your own opinion on how different sentences work with 'because X'. We really need a lot of participants to get good results, so share it with anyone you think might be interested! 

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! 

I extremely like this

Just a quick one this week to point out a nice non-standard usage of the word extremely. The context was as follows: 

I extremely need a break from those things. 

Extremely can normally only modify adjectives, so extremely cold, extremely unlucky, extremely happy, and so on. Here it's modifying a verb, need, which is extremely unusual and not at all like its normal behaviour. This was on twitter where one can do such things to signify metalinguistic information like hyperbole or being a bit extra. 

And it works ok with extremely because even though it doesn't normally modify verbs, we do have other adverbs (which is what extremely is) which do this job: I really need a break, I desperately need a break, I so need a break. So it's not that much of a leap to bring extremely into service in this way with its usual meaning of 'to the greatest degree possible'. 

Please use four 15p coins

Two examples of confusing signage brought to you by pragmatics and lexical connotations this week. 

First, I was waiting outside a bakery for my lunch, and there was a phone box (I know! a real one!) with a sign saying this: 

Please be prepared to use four coins to pay the initial minimum fee of 60p. 

I was very puzzled as to why you should have to use four coins to pay this, especially as 60p doesn't even divide evenly into four coins (i.e. there's no 15p coin), so you'd be using a mix of 20p and 10p coins. I thought that probably it meant that you could use more than four, as long as you met the basic criterion of at least four, but wondered why this should be how the phone worked. Does it need four to activate some mechanism? 

I'm sure you're well ahead of me and worked out that it meant at most four coins - so you can use 50p and 10p, three 20p coins, whatever you like, but you can't be there putting in twelve five pences or sixty pennies, which makes much more sense. But the wording 'be prepared' primed me to think it was a minimum requirement that you had to meet, rather than a warning not to exceed a limit. 

Next, my own employer tweeted about the coronavirus restrictions a couple of days before they were relaxed a bit in May. The weekend before the rules changed from no meeting inside at all and maximum six outside to six inside and 30 outside, they shared this image: 

Please remember the 'rule of 6' applies outdoors only until Monday.

You can be fined for not following Government guidelines. Learn more at https://t.co/N0pivTe65t pic.twitter.com/ePjsQDarac

— University of Kent (@UniKent) May 15, 2021

It includes this wording: 

Please remember the 'rule of 6' applies outdoors only until Monday.

I knew what the rules were so I wasn't confused this time. But the placement of only is, as so often, confusing. Does this rule apply 'only until Monday'? Well, yes. Does it apply 'outdoors only'? Well, again, yes. Maybe it's doing double duty and meant 'only outdoors and only until Monday'. But either way, this is still a bit weird to me. 

If a rule only applies in Context A, then the implication is that outside of that context, the rule doesn't apply, and no further action is needed. In other words, there is a restriction outdoors, or until Monday, or both, and anywhere else the restriction doesn't apply. If only is meant to mean 'only until Monday', then it reads like some kind of encouragement, like 'Come on, it's only till Monday, we can do this, one more weekend before we can meet more people!'. But if it applies to 'outdoors', the implication is that this is the stronger restriction, when in fact there was at the time no meeting allowed indoors at all. So you have to interpret it as 'you are allowed to meet up with six people outdoors but not indoors', but a 'rule of 6' sounds like a restriction, not an allowance, because it's called a rule. 

I doubt anyone was ever seriously inconvenienced by either of these things and probably no one else even noticed them, but they both made me stop and think. 

An interesting of an observation

A recent language column in the Boston Globe rehashed the same tired linguistic peeves: irregardless, fulsome, incorrect apostrophes, and so on. With an interesting exception: in the discussion of the phrase '[adjective] of a [noun]', itself not uncommon, the author gave an example that I thought just couldn't possibly be a real usage. 

We're talking here about when people say things like It's not that big of a deal or He's not that good of a singer. The standard version omits of in this type of sentence. I had thought that this version, with of, only occurred in the form I've given here (not that X of a Y); with as, as in He's not as good of a singer as he thinks he is; or with how: the column gives the example People are finally figuring out how great of a place Boise is to live. In other words, they have to be comparative or degree adjectives. The example the columnist gave was this: He was a good of a farmer, or This is a hard of a class. 

This sounds to me just ungrammatical (in the sense that it doesn't sound like a sentence of any type of English, not that I think it sounds prescriptively wrong). But then I don't use the other kind either, so perhaps other people do say it. I tried to google some examples. I put in double quotation marks the string "a good of a" and "a big of a". For the first one, I got a lot of hits where it was a typo for "a good or a" or "as good of a", both of which are usages I've heard plenty. With the second, I mostly got hits for language learning forums where people were asking if it was grammatical, and the kind of people that answer on there tend to be a bit unreliable - either very prescriptive or like the person who said "a big of a deal" is fine, but then when asked about it was unclear about if it was that exact phrase or something more like "not that big of a deal". So, still unsure. Let me know if you've ever heard this for real. 

How many Millennials

Our topic today is the response to this tweet: 

Millennials! I have a question for you specifically!

How many of you have any sense or memory of the concept of a "rerun"? Do you have any meaningful recollection of an episode of TV you watched being such a thing?

— Daniel Summers, MD (@WFKARS) February 17, 2021

He clarified in the rest of his tweet thread what he meant by 'rerun' (tuning in to a weekly slot to find that the episode was one from a previous series), and that he was interested to know when exactly this ceased to be meaningful. He thought Gen Z probably don't really have much memory of this, but thought younger Millennials might, and so he asked 'how many of you [Millennials]'. 

The answer to a 'how many' question is a number or proportion (in this case, people reply 'me' or 'not me' and he gets a sense of the numbers), like '50%' or 'all of them'. There is definitely a presupposition that at least some Millennials will remember this concept. Exactly how many is mostly defined by pragmatics and shared context, I think. 

Compare asking a group of your friends the following: 

How many of you are coming to my comic book launch on Friday?

You would expect a fairly high number of them to come, because it's important and they're your friends. You could also ask your colleagues this question: 

How many of you are going to the meeting this afternoon?

That might be fairly neutral and you just want to know how many of them will be there, or not available at the alternative event at the same time, or whatever. You definitely imply that you think at least some of them will be going to the meeting. You could also ask a question like this:

How many of you learnt about grammar in English lessons at school?

Now, the answer is expected to be pretty low, and is a rhetorical device to lead into your lecture on the importance of grammar or the fact that they have tacit knowledge of grammar despite the lack of formal teaching, or whatever. If more than about one person answers 'me' now, it actually spoils your flow. 

So we can ask a 'how many' question with an expected answer of everyone, no one, or anything in between, or a neutral non-expectation. 

I now present you with a lesson in asking about Millennials on twitter: this tweet got 2,700 responses and a fair number of those were people who were pretty cross about this man supposedly thinking that Millennials are kids who don't remember this stuff when in fact they're in their 30s and maybe even 40 years old now, and of course they remember it. I've tried to think of any possible syntactic or semantic reason for the question being interpreted this way, and I can't. It's purely a result of the frequent co-occurrence of the term 'Millennial' with 'kids these days' messages and the resulting knee-jerk reaction to this that you get after the billionth time of seeing it. In this case, I think it was misplaced, but you can understand it.