#geoff pullum

[gacorley]

Okay, there's a name for nip it in the butt and the minder bees examples. They're called eggcorns, as coined by Geoff Pullum on Language Log after one example, where a woman called acorns eggcorns.

Specifically, an eggcorn is an expression that is altered by replacing a word with a homphone or near-homophone that in some way makes more sense to the speaker. Hence, nip it in the butt used by people not familiar with flower gardening.

dead metaphors are really interesting honestly and specifically i’m interested in when they become malapropisms

like, the concept being, people are familiar with the phrase and what people use it to mean metaphorically, but it’s not common knowledge anymore what the metaphor was in literal reference to. people still say “toe the line” but don’t necessarily conjure up the image of people standing at the starting line of a race, forbidden from crossing over it. people still say “the cat is out of the bag” without necessarily knowing it’s a sailors’ expression referring to a whip being brought out for punishment. some metaphors are so dead we don’t even know where they come from; like, there are ideas about what “by hook or by crook” references, but no one is entirely sure. nobody knows what the whole nine yards are.

and then you throw in a malaprop or a mondegreen or two, where because people don’t know what the actual words of the expression refer to, they’re liable to replace them with similar sounding words (see “lack toast and tolerant”). so we can literally go from a phrase referencing a common, everyday part of life to a set of unfixed, contextless sounds with a completely different meaning. that’s fascinating. what an interesting piece of the way language and culture are living, changing, coevolving things.

maybe part of the reason we can’t figure out where some phrases come from is that over time the words themselves have changed! one of the theories about “the whole nine yards” is that it’s a variant of “the whole ball of wax,” which some people further theorize was originally “the whole bailiwick,” meaning just “the whole area”! the addition of “nine yards” might be related to “dressed to the nines,” which might reference the fucking Greek muses! language is so weird and cool! (and I only know any idioms in two languages!)

the point is. I just came across the words “nip it in the butt” in a piece of published, professional fiction, and now I can’t stop giggling.

[gramrgednangel]

Style Guides: A primer

Style Guides: A primer

I dare say everyone who writes at all regularly, even for casual purposes, knows that it’s vital to have access to a dictionary. And with so many of them now online for free, there’s really not much of an excuse not to use one.

But what about a style guide? Do you need to use one? And by “use,” I mean “have access to and perhaps own.” Isn’t that like a usage guide? No. A style guide is not a…

[allthingslinguistic]

Geoff Pullum has a good mythbusting description of sentence types on the Lingua Franca blog. 

Grammar books, and hundreds of websites out there, are appallingly confused about statements, questions, orders, and exclamations. Most of the problem lies in their failure to distinguish syntax from semantics. I want to try and sort things out a bit, and provide a little homework exercise.

Clause type is syntactic, not semantic. It shouldn’t be confused with any element of meaning or use. Standard English has four clause types (five if you treat 2a and 2b as separate), differing with respect to which words you put where:

Declarative   Characteristic use: making statements. Example: He was polite. Key syntactic properties: subject precedes auxiliary and/or predicate.

Interrogative   Characteristic use: asking questions.

Closed interrogative: for expressing questions having a fixed, finite list of answers that the form of the question suggests. Example: Was he polite? Key syntactic properties: auxiliary before subject.

Open interrogative: for expressing questions having an unbounded range of answers. Example: How polite was he? Key syntactic properties: wh-phrase at beginning of clause; auxiliary before subject if wh-phrase is not the subject of its clause.

Imperative   Characteristic use: issuing directives about desired behavior by others. Example: Be polite. Key syntactic properties: plain form of verb; subject often missing.

Exclamative   Characteristic illocutionary force: making exclamatory statements. Example: How polite he was! Key syntactic properties: wh-phrase at beginning of clause (headed by either how or what); subject before auxiliary.

Crucially, the characteristically associated meanings are only a default. Using an interrogative (e.g., What’s your name?) is the stereotypical way to express a question, but declaratives can also in effect convey questions, through a combination of literal meaning and pragmatic implication:

I want to know your name. I’m asking you to tell me your name.

Imperatives, too, can be used to convey the effect of questions:

Tell me your name. Tell me what your name is.

Even an exclamative can come pretty close to implying a question:

How I’d love to know what your name is.

Grammar books and grammar websites are particularly confused about exclamatives, which they often call “exclamatory sentences” (see the hopelessly confused page here for a random example). They imagine that any kind of sentence that might intuitively be used for exclaiming and/or ends with ‘!’ must belong, so they give examples like I can’t figure this out! (a declarative), or Out of my way! (not a clause at all).

Read the whole thing.

I’m a bit surprised that conditionals, subjunctives, counterfactuals and that whole set of commonly confused terms didn’t make the list, but perhaps that’s a topic for next week’s post. 

[specgram]

Linguistics Snowclone: If Eskimos have 100 words for snow, then Geoff Pullum surely has written 100 books about it.

[the-gwalla]

[a Twitter thread by Amelia Bloody Rose @AmeliaRoseWrite]

All right, gather 'round, all you #AmWriting clowns! Since she just got ANOTHER email with a writer/editor type misidentifying it, today Aunt Bloody Rose is gonna learn your ass what the hell the passive voice ACTUALLY IS!

There is a lot of confusion. Don't worry; it's not your fault! It's all the fault of grammar lunatics Strunk & White and their stupid-ass Elements of Style, in which they say "avoid passive voice" and then give you a bunch of "examples," 75% of which do not contain passive voice

I think it stems from the connotations of "active" and "passive." Passive is boring, right? Active is, well, dynamic! Avoid boring sentences! That's good advice!

BUT! Just because it's boring, doesn't mean a sentence is in passive voice. "Passive voice" refers very specifically to something in linguistics!

Put simply, * passive voice is when you turn the patient of a transitive verb into the subject of a sentence. *

So, to contrast: "Weasels ripped my flesh" is active voice. The weasels are the  agents (the verb-ers), AND they're the subjects. "My flesh" is the patient (the  verb-ee).

"My flesh was ripped by weasels" is passive. "My flesh" is still the patient, but now it's the subject

Note that this can be a USEFUL construction. Not just because changing the subject changes the focus, but because you can actually drop the agent entirely from a passive construction. ("Doctor! Help! My flesh was ripped!" You don't need to explain who did the ripping.)

If you don't know who did the action, it's useful, too. "Nurse! Help me out here. This extremely manly guy's flesh was ripped." Doctor doesn't know by what, but it doesn't matter, except insofar as he'd like a specimen to test for rabies probably

Now, as noted above, you can re-add the agent in with a "by" phrase. But it is optional. Often in this case, you're changing topicalization.

In English, the topic is usually the subject of a sentence. Then you comment on the topic with the "predicate."

"Weasels ripped my flesh" - the topic is weasels. You're commenting on their action.

"My flesh was ripped by weasels" - the topic is your flesh. You're commenting on the horrible ordeal it went through.

So! That's pretty much it. That's the passive voice. BUT I'M NOT DONE, DANGIT

Obviously, this is a lot simpler than people make it out to be. But as I mentioned, it's easily confused with other constructions. I think this is partly to do with English using "to be" (or sometimes "to get") in part of the passive construction

The English copula ("to be," "is," "am," "are," "was," "were," "been," etc.) is an incredibly busy critter. I can't possibly encapsulate it all. Look at this behemoth on Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/be

But there are a couple of things to note. First, "being" is not generally considered particularly dynamic, so people think of it as "passive." ("The weasels were hungry" doesn't really have the weasels DOING much. "I am a manly guy" likewise isn't very DO-y.)

That, plus the copula's use in other verb constructions ("the weasels WERE ripping my flesh" "there sure WERE a lot of weasels" "going into the weasel pit WAS like diving into a meat grinder") seems to be what confuses people into thinking they're passive voice

And note that ALL of these constructions are useful, depending on what you want to say and what part of the action you feel is important to focus on!

But--and in this I will agree with editors--it's also possible that there's a more dynamic way to say something. Just because a sentence has no passive constructions doesn't mean it might not be boring!

But please, PLEASE, when you comment on a sentence, make sure you're not misidentifying WHY it's a problem. "Passive voice" is not shorthand for "limp and boring." It's a specific thing! And useful!

Okay, That is my thread. I will now open the floor for questions. The first answer is: no, "weasel" does NOT look like a word anymore. Thanks for asking!

(Addendum: If you want to see a hilarious grammar fight, Google "fifty years of stupid grammar advice." Geoff K. Pullum wrote an anti-tribute to Strunk&White on their 50th anniversary, and BOY the grammar snob were mad. SO MANY REBUTTALS)

[asavakkit-jegelskerdig]

About the complexity of language because “YOU CANNOT draw conclusions about what a culture values, or what speakers perceive, or how a nation thinks, by selective comparison of the senses of a few lexical items.”- Geoff Pullum

Read more about ‘the importance of jokes’ at the Language Log

[sumpix]

Why Chinese Speakers Cut Their Hair Before New Year’s

Is the Chinese Language a Superstition Machine? How ambiguity in language can create unique taboos. By Julie Sedivy

But why is homophony deeply woven into Chinese traditions and symbols but not Western ones? Ambiguity and homophony are facts of life for all languages, on a scale that rarely enters the consciousness of their native speakers. In 1978 psycholinguist Bruce Britton sifted through a million-word body of English text and estimated—very conservatively—that at least 32 percent of English words have more than one meaning. Among the 100 most frequent words, he found that 93 percent have more than one meaning, some as many as 30. Linguist blogger Geoff Pullum captures this ambiguity with his question: “What do support poles, staff positions, battery terminals, army encampments, blog articles, earring stems, trading stations, and snail mail have in common with billboard advertising, accounts recording, making bail, and assigning diplomats?” It may take a few moments of pondering to realize that the word that makes strange bedfellows of all these notions is post.

(via Why Chinese Speakers Cut Their Hair Before New Year’s)

[mediabout-blog]

"Faux" Homosexual: A Coming Out Tale

https://www.mediabout.com/?p=27582 "Faux" Homosexual: A Coming Out Tale - Geoff Pullum, a statistician noted that “The genius of English is the way it updates itself every single day, with 20,000 new phrases a year”. ...

[edtrends]

The very idea of a Word of the Year suggests that words have an existence of their own and can do worthy things, like influence the tides of human affairs. Geoff Pullum didn't think much of that. But then ...

[benrleeusa]

[Eugene Volokh] Linguification

More than a decade ago, linguist Geoff Pullum (Language Log) coined the terms "linguify" and "linguification":

To linguify a claim about things in the world is to take that claim and construct from it an entirely different claim that makes reference to the words or other linguistic items used to talk about those things, and then use the latter claim in a context where the former would be appropriate.

His example:

A writer named Alexis Long apparently wanted to say that bisexuality was increasingly being seen by mainstream news media as fashionable. But what he actually wrote (in an Australian newsletter for bisexuals) was: "It's difficult to find a piece of writing in the mainstream press which mentions the word 'bisexual' without finding that it is immediately followed by the word 'chic'."

Now here he recognized that the linguification was meant to be jocular -- no-one really thinks that it's hard to find mainstream writing which uses "bisexual" without adding "chic." (I omit the possibility that the author meant "bisexual chick," a phrase that actually seems to have 8 times the Google hits of "bisexual chic.") But it occurs to me that the recent posts about the word "right" (inconceivable, superscript -1, rights vs. powers) as well as about "republic" and "democracy" are actually responses to serious examples of linguification:

People have a plausible claim about a morally significant distinction or principle (e.g., that governmental claims of right are often importantly different from individual claims of right, or that negative rights are often importantly different from positive rights).

But instead of casting these claims as moral, legal, or philosophical claims, or arguing about how certain terms should be defined, they cast those claims as claims about what the words actually mean. They set forth a definition of the word and claim that anyone who departs from the definition is actually misusing the word, or is a postmodernist, or is denying reality.

And these linguified claims are provably wrong, if one understands English words as meaning what actual English speakers have long used them to mean, and if one understands American legal or political terms as meaning what actual American legal or political figures, speaking to the American public, have long used them to mean.

Indeed, to accept those linguified claims, we have to conclude that the linguifiers actually are more authoritative explainers of American legal and political language than are Chief Justice Marshall, Alexander Hamilton, the drafters of the Articles of Confederation, and many more. And while we should always be open to the possibility that even an anonymous commenter has a better argument than Chief Justice Marshall, we should be skeptical of claims that an anonymous commenter is entitled to redefine a word in a way that makes Chief Justice Marshall's usage -- together with the usage of many people both before and after -- "wrong."

Just say no, friends, including friends from the libertarian and conservative movement (in many ways my ideological home, and yet the place where I have seen a disproportionate share of such linguification). Just say no to weakening your possibly valid substantive arguments by recasting then as patently invalid linguistic arguments. Explain what you think is normatively or legally right, and why you think it's right, without claiming authority over the definition of words, authority that you cannot possess.

[specgram]

Linguistic Snowclone

If Eskimos have 100 words for snow, then Geoff Pullum surely has written 100 books about it.

[belleandkurtbastian]

If you can't say something nice…: This is a guest post by Kirby Conrod. I'm sorry to see that the venerable Geoff Pullum is so desperately behind the times. I don't mean to be snarky, I genuinely am sad about it. It's not just a matter of being un-hip… https://t.co/z3Eyv91XS0

— Language Log (@LanguageLog) December 6, 2017

[jackson38toh]

Fifty shades of ‘they’

Q: I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard Pat defending the singular use of “they” on the radio. Say it ain’t so.

A: “They” is a legitimate way of referring back to an unknown person or persons, neither singular nor plural, masculine nor feminine.

So there’s nothing wrong with this kind of sentence: “Nobody eats kale because they like it.” There’s no need to use “he or she” instead (“Nobody eats kale because he or she likes it”).

Although some people object to the usage, the most respected modern grammarians now say this use of “they” with indefinite pronouns—“everybody,” “nobody,” “anyone,” and so on—is grammatically correct.

Why? Because indefinite pronouns are plural in meaning, even though they’re technically singular.

The argument is that “they” can refer back to “everybody” and the rest on grounds of notional agreement, by which a word’s real meaning outweighs its strict grammatical form. (We’ve discussed notional agreement several times on the blog, most recently in a post last month.)

By this reasoning, “everybody” and “nobody” and “anyone” are notionally plural, even though they’re used with singular verbs.

They don’t mean just one person, because when we use them we mean “all people,” “no people,” “any people.” That’s why there’s no conflict in referring back to them with “they.”

Here’s what language authorities are saying about the use of “they” (and its other forms, “them,” “their,” and “themselves”) in reference to indefinite nouns and pronouns.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage: “Notional agreement is in control, and its dictates must be followed.”

The usage guide says great writers have used “they” with indefinite nouns and pronouns since Chaucer’s time and such uses “are not lapses.” Rather, they “are uses following a normal pattern in English that was established” in the Middle Ages.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, written by Geoffrey K. Pullum and Rodney Huddleston: “The view taken here is that they, like you, can be either plural or singular.”

In another of their books, A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar, Pullum and Huddleston write: “Semantically singular they is well established in fine literature and completely natural in both conversation and writing.”

Pullum has written elsewhere that “like almost everyone else who uses English normally,” he would not hesitate to write a sentence like “Nobody ever thinks traffic congestion problems are their fault.”

A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, by Randolph Quirk and others: Indefinite pronouns “can refer to more than one entity, and be notionally plural.”

Although “they” in such references was once regarded as informal, the authors say, it’s now “increasingly accepted even in formal usage.”

Garner’s Modern English Usage (4th ed.): In cases where “they” and “them” refer back to indefinite pronouns, “synesis trumps the strict rules of grammar.” (“Synesis” is another term for notional agreement.)

The author, Bryan A. Garner, uses the example “Everybody was crouched behind furniture to surprise me, and they tried to. But I already knew they were there.” A rewording with “he,” Garner says, would result in “deranged writing.”

Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.): “The process [using forms of “they” with indefinite pronouns] now seems irreversible.”

Standard dictionaries, too, now regard this use of “they” as standard English. Here’s Merriam-Webster Unabridged, for example:

“The use of they, them, their, and themselves as pronouns of indefinite gender and indefinite number is well established in speech and writing, even in literary and formal contexts.”

The dictionary gives this example: “Everyone tries to make the person they love just like themselves.”

For convenience, many linguists and usage writers refer to this construction as “the singular they.” But that phrase is somewhat misleading.

“They” always has a plural verb—as in “they are”—and when it refers to a singular antecedent, that antecedent is meant in a plural sense. (The “antecedent” is what the later pronoun refers to.)

But whatever you choose to call it, this use of “they” and its other forms is so natural that even people who condemn it use it unconsciously themselves.

For instance, The Elements of Style, by E. B. White and William Strunk Jr., denounces the usage. But as Pullum has remarked, “when E. B. White got back to his own excellent writing he wrote lines like ‘But somebody taught you, didn’t they?’ ” (In White’s novel Charlotte’s Web, the very articulate Dr. Dorian speaks the line to Mrs. Arable.)

The linguist Geoff Nunberg has also written that “Everyone uses singular ‘they,’ whether they realize it or not.” He gives this example:

“In an engaging recent book called Between You & Me, the New Yorker‘s self-designated comma queen Mary Norris says that that use of ‘they’ is ‘just wrong.’ But flip back a few pages and you find her writing ‘Nobody wanted to think they were not essential.’ ”

The truth is that English has no better alternative—no generic, unisex singular pronoun. Nothing has ever filled the bill as satisfactorily as “they,” which no doubt explains its long and distinguished history.

For some 700 years, almost as long as “they” has been part of English, people have used it this way—even great writers. You can find it in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Austen, Byron, Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens, and too many others to mention.

The usage was considered normal until 18th-century grammarians decided that the use of “they,” a plural, was wrong with a technically singular antecedent.

Their solution was to use the singular “he” instead. They apparently felt it was better to be illogical with gender than with number.

But there was never any reason to avoid “they” in the first place. Those 18th-century fusspots should have left well enough alone.

Perhaps if they’d known more about the history of “they,” the pedants might have reconsidered.

This word is not native to English, which is unusual for a pronoun. “They” entered the language around 1200 or so, and most authorities trace it to early Scandinavian influences, probably Old Norse.

It may have been adopted, the Oxford English Dictionary suggests, because the previous third-person plural pronoun, the Old English hi or hie, was easily confused with the singular forms he (“he”) and heo (the early form of “she”).

In earliest uses, “they” was clearly plural. The first written usage on record is from the Ormolum, a religious work written around 1200 or earlier by a monk named Orm or Ormin. Here’s the OED citation:

“& swa þeȝȝ leddenn heore lif Till þatt teȝȝ wærenn alde” (“And so they led their lives until they were old”). Oxford notes that the various spellings of “they” in early Middle English included both þeȝȝ and teȝȝ.

In the early 1300s, singular uses of “they” began showing up in what are called anaphoric references (that is, pointing to an antecedent). The OED explains that “they” in this sense meant the same thing as “he or she.”

Oxford defines the usage this way: “In anaphoric reference to a singular noun or pronoun of undetermined gender: he or she. Especially in relation to a noun phrase involving one of the indefinite determiners or pronouns any, each, every, no, some, anybody, anyone, etc.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is a use of the possessive form, “their,” in the sense of “his or her.” It’s from Cursor Mundi, an anonymous Middle English poem written sometime before 1325. Here “their” refers to the singular antecedent “either”:

“Bath ware made sun and mon, / Aiþer wit þer ouen light” (“Both were made sun and moon, / Either with their own light”).

The first OED example using “they” with a singular antecedent is from a Middle English poem, The Romance of William of Palerne (also known as William and the Werwolf), translated from French sometime between 1350 and 1375. Here “they” refers back to “each man”:

“þan hastely hiȝed eche wiȝt on hors & on fote, / huntyng wiȝt houndes alle heie wodes, / til þei neyȝþed so neiȝh to nymphe þe soþe, / þere william & his worþi lef were liand i-fere” (“Then quickly hastened each man on horse & on foot, / hunting with hounds all the high woods, / till they came nearly, to tell the truth, / to where William and his worthy dear friend were hiding together”). We’ve expanded the citation to include more of the context.

Soon afterward Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, used “they” in reference to the singular “whoso” (whatever person). This is from the “Prologue of the Pardoner’s Tale” (circa 1380s):

“And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame, / They wol come up and offre a Goddés name” (“And whoso findeth him out of such blame, / They will come up and offer in God’s name”).

Since then, there’s been no looking back. As OED citations show, the singular use of “they” and “their” has been routine in written English—whether elevated or commonplace—since the late 1300s, and the singular use of “them” and “themselves” since the mid-1500s.

OED examples with indefinite pronouns are too numerous to mention. But there are also citations in which forms of “they” refer to indefinite nouns. We’ll quote just two:

“If … a psalme scape any person, or a lesson, or els yt they omyt one verse or twayne” (“If a psalm or a lesson escape any person, or else that they omit one or two verses”). This is from a religious treatise, William Bonde’s The Pylgrimage of Perfection, 1526.

“If a person is born of a … gloomy temper … they cannot help it.” The passage is from a letter written by Lord Chesterfield in 1759.

The OED, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, notes that this use of “they” has “sometimes been considered erroneous,” though it doesn’t label the usage nonstandard.

The misguided objections of those 18th-century grammarians are still with us. But over the last five years, several news organizations, magazines, and book publishers have become more tolerant of the singular “they.”

Both the Associated Press and the Chicago Manual of Style, for example, announced new policies on “they” in March 2017. Both now allow “they” in reference to singular antecedents if a rewording would be awkward or clumsy.

One final point should be made. As many modern grammarians have noted, the singular use of “they” is not unprecedented in the history of English pronouns.

The second-person pronoun once had four principal forms in English—“thou” (singular subject), “thee” (singular object), “ye” (plural subject), and “you” (plural object). Yes, the pronoun “you” was originally a plural object, parallel to “them” in the third person.

Beginning in the mid-1200s, according to OED citations, the “you” form began to replace the others. By the late 1500s, “you” was serving all four purposes (though the old singulars live on in religious language).

The evolution of the singular “you” only slightly preceded that of the singular “they,” and nobody noticed at the time.

When the 18th century rolled along, no grammarians suggested that we return to “ye,” “thou,” and “thee,” because those words were no longer in common use.

It was the singular “they” that the pedants jumped on, because the singular “he” (later “he or she”) was available.

In summary, whatever you think of the singular “they” it’s here to stay, so our advice is to make peace with it.

If you can’t bring yourself to use “they” in this way, nobody’s forcing you. And it’s easy enough to avoid.

Simply use a plural noun with “they” instead of an indefinite pronoun. Instead of “Nobody eats kale because they like it,” you can write “People don’t eat kale because they like it.”

Just don’t think you must resort to clunky singular substitutes to avoid “they” and its sidekicks “them,” “their,” and “themselves.”

Help support the Grammarphobia Blog with your donation And check out our books about the English language.

from Blog – Grammarphobia http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2017/05/they-4.html

[bestnewsmag-blog]

New Post has been published on Bestnewsmag

New Post has been published on https://bestnewsmag.com/blogger-ben-yagoda-on-false-titles/

Blogger Ben Yagoda on False Titles

A few years back, linguist and Lingua Franca contributor Geoffrey Pullum wrote a submit on Language Log wherein he set out the primary sentences of two books by way of Dan Brown Titles, The Da Vinci Code and Yagoda  Angels and Demons:

  Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery. Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it turned into his very own. Geoff went on to take a look at:

This use of a person’s name preceded by way of the name of an activity, without a preceding article (an anarthrous NP [nominal premodifier], as we grammarians say whilst speaking to our very own kind within the secretive cabals that we now and again maintain), is ordinary because occupational descriptions like “fertilizer salesman” aren’t typically used as titles. “Cardinal” is an identity; selling fertilizer is simply a job. It’s far proper that noun terms like “fertilizer salesman Scott Peterson” are located in newspaper articles … however, I have never but discovered absolutely everyone but Dan Brown the use of this creation to open a work of fiction. The construction sounds to me just like the beginning of an obituary in preference to an action collection. It’s now not ungrammatical; it just has the wrong experience and style for a unique. He also observed that in Brown’s books, this creation — additionally called a “false identity” — is grisly inform:

The easy reality is that if you are ever stated on Web page 1 of a Dan Brown novel you’ll be referred to with an anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier (“Renowned linguist Geoff Pullum staggered throughout the savage beauty of the forsaken Santa Cruz campus, suffering to put off the knife plunged unnaturally into his again by using a barbarous millionaire novelist”), and you will have died a painful and horrible dying through Web page 2, at the side of numerous apparently unwell-selected clichés and mangled idioms. I used such a offers on Geoff in the commencing line of this submit, so I hope he’s no longer lifeless meat.

As Geoff indicates, false titles are the province of journalism, however even in journalism circles, they’re debatable, in element because of Time magazine, from its founding in the 1920s till approximately 1960, turned into so notorious for abusing (and capitalizing) them. In his 1936 New Yorker profile of Time founder Henry Luce, Wolcott Gibbs had extraordinary recreation with the convention, at the side of the magazine’s piquant coinages (many of the more a success ones have been the pollster, racketeer, socialite, and televangelist) and peculiar dependency of inverting sentences. Right here Gibbs lists a number of Time‘s pinnacle executives:

• Inheritor apparent to a mantle of Luce is dapper, tennis-gambling, $35,000-a-year Roy Larsen, nimble in Radio- & Cinemark, vice-president & 2nd largest stockholder in Time, Inc. …

• Looming behind him is burly, able, tumbledown Yale man Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, former Fortune editor, now widespread supervisor of all Timenterprises, descendant of four hundred-famed Ward McAllister. Littered his desk with drugs, unguents, Kleenex, Socialite Ingersoll is Time’s No.1 hypochondriac, introduced ant palaces for having a look at & emulation of personnel, writes copious memoranda about submitting structures, different minutiae seldom misses a Yale football recreation. …

• Early in life Time editor John Stuart Martin misplaced his left arm in a twist of fate. Unhandicapped he, envious of sympathy, Martin performed par golfing at Princeton, is a crack shot with a rifle or shotgun, holds a phone without hands, the use of shoulder & chin, chews paperclips. The first cousin of Cofounder Hadden, joined in 2d marriage to a daughter of Cunard Multi-millionaire Sir Ashley Sparks, Martin is handling editor of a newsmagazine, has been nimble in Cinemark, different Timenterprises. Time has dialed way lower back at the exercise, however, it’s nonetheless frowned on in many newsrooms, inclusive of that of The Big apple Instances. In 2012, the paper’s standards editor, Philip B. Corbett wrote in a weblog publish, “We strive to keep away from the unnatural journalistic mannerism of the ‘fake title’ – that is, using an outline or task designation with a person’s call as though it have been a proper title. So we don’t talk over with ‘novelist Zadie Smith’ or ‘cellist Yo-Yo Ma.” The paper’s manual of fashion gives a clever manner of smoking out these terrible boys:

Do now not make titles out of mere descriptions, as in harpsichordist Dale S. Yagyonak. If unsure, try the “top morning” take a look at. If it is not possible to imagine pronouncing, “good morning, Harpsichordist Yagyonak,” the identity is false. Whether one is keen on false titles or not, I suppose we can agree that they ought to be punctuated effectively. And Right here there’s a hassle. whilst the usage of this construction, my (journalism) college students has a deuce of a time averting superfluous commas earlier than and after the man or woman’s call. And so they’ll write sentences like:

Cellist, Yo-Yo Ma, gave a concert.

Sophomore, Tiffany Jones, has the very best GPA in the college. It’s one thing for college kids to make the mistake. but I’ve seen it show up in more and more grown-up locations, inclusive of the internet site of a person providing his offerings as a style and writing guru. And, on Might also 1, this headline seemed

Galvanizing Thematic Grammar Challenges Via Catalyzing Titles

  “Above all, we have to go beyond words and images and concepts. No imaginative vision or conceptual framework is adequate to the great reality” – Bede Griffiths

Making a difference in the search for unique classroom materials to be able to maneuver students’ language engagement is a highly appreciated pedagogic move. This is an upshot of teachers’ creativity through eyeing appropriate resources of incomparable features that elicit thought-provoking instructions to enrich learners’ linguistic level for operative macro skills. It is a fact that speaking, listening, reading and writing require increasing grammar knowledge to communicatively serve. At this juncture, the main concern of this idea is to manipulate popular titles in a way that grammar is stimulated while the lesson’s theme is created through students’ constructed responses linked to titles contexts. In the real world, these may emerge from literary, fiction and non-fiction of varied genre and forms such as novels, fables, short stories, essays, biographies, poems, news, editorials, films, music, paintings, books, among others where they serve as arts’ driving power, to motivate audience’s or readers’ discoveries. They are the promises of any composition that are expressed literally or figuratively nevertheless lead to the establishment of common thoughts. In addition, it is recommended that teachers give backgrounds of the titles when considering these inputs. Background knowledge as operationally used in this model refers to the process of introducing what is behind a specific work which means that provision of surrounding information regarding a particular work triggers contextual comprehension and accentuates thematic responses absorbed between the lines by learners dependent upon the degree on how a language teacher activates them for possible grammatically rewarding outputs. It is also recommended that the derivation of themes should emanate from the students’ inferential skills activated by teachers’ motivation.

The worth- designing tasks

Language teachers can possibly perform these tasks in accordance with institutional curriculum mandates by relating them to their organizations’ academic practices stipulated under English language programs’ contents, course outlines, syllabi, delivery plans, time frame, expected learning outcomes, and assessment procedures. By doing so, incorporating this concept may establish feasibility to instructive interplay.

To appreciate the pedagogical purposes of incorporating these materials in language instructions, here are some postulated lessons that are to be exemplified through sequence components: (a) the title as a springboard, (b) theme (c) focus, (d) objective/s (e) facilitation of responses (f) probably alluded thematic responses, (g) implications to language study, and (h) stimulated allied lessons.

Lesson (1) one

a. the title as a springboard- play, Faust by Christopher Marlowe b. theme – the rise and fall of one’s power, the power of the evil can do to human beings c. focus – modification of titles through descriptions

d. objective-

Construct a title by providing a descriptive adjective before the stated noun of a single -word titled play.

  e. facilitation of responses

The teacher monitors responses. It is suggested that all answers are to be classified according to the classes of words as they are cited before emphasizing adjectives. The teacher can encourage two-word adjectives before the noun.

f. probably alluded thematic responses

“Poor Faust,” “One Famous Faust,” “Once Powerful Faust,” “The Mightiest Faust,” ” Mighty Faust,” “Doomed Faust,” “Strong Faust,” “Unfortunate Faust,” “Pitiful Faust,” “Old Wicked Faust,” “Unsatisfied Faust,” and “Power-hungry Faust.”

g. implications of language study

It elicits arriving at appropriate order or sequence of adjectives or location of adjectives before nouns.

h. Stimulated allied lesson

May serve as an opener for a succeeding lesson on prepositions of time and place where titles formulated such as, ” The Most Wicked Faust of the Century,” “The Mightiest Faust at Midnight,” and “Condemned Faust in a Fast-moving Time,” “Doomed Faust in a Strange Land,” among others.

Lesson (2) two

(a) the title as a springboard-poem, The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost (b) theme – there’s always an alternative to following one’s dream/s. (c) focus – vocabulary enrichment through rephrasing titles.

(d) objectives-

Rewrite the title through other words that mean the same. Apply figurative interpretations.

(e) facilitation of responses

Provide a background of the title. Present the title for analysis to elicit responses. The teacher uses guide questions. Reemphasize the themes that may enable acceptable answers.

(f) probably alluded thematic responses

“The Overlooked Way,” “The Unheeded Road,” “The Path Untaken,” “The Forgotten Road,” “The Dreamer’s Road,” “The Road to Dreams,” and “The Hidden Way to Success.”

(g) implications of language study

Formed responses denote the subject of attaining dreams. It paves one’s ability to assign words to relate meanings by attaching suitable vocabularies as replacement while the main line’s idea is retained. It also caters to the understanding or literal and denotative meanings of statements or literal and figurative interpretations of lines.

(h) stimulated allied lessons

This title can further lead to the study of language points such as irregular verbs, prepositions, noun phrases, indefinite articles, and descriptive adjectives.

Lesson (3) three

[harrypotterhousequotes]

[allthingslinguistic]

Whole books have been published on commonly believed fallacious (non-)knowledge...In the study of language, one case surpasses all others in its degree of ubiquity, and the present chapter is devoted to it: it is  the notion that Eskimos have bucketloads of different words for snow.    -Geoffrey Pullum, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax

Or, if you'd rather have this belief debunked by T-Rex:

This trope has inspired numerous sarcastic comics, the term "snowclone" ("If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z"), and in turn a whole snowclone database, illustrated, of course by an army of cloned snowpeople.

(Note that "Eskimo" is considered offensive by Inuit people in Canada and Greenland, but is accepted as a general term for Inuit and Yupik people in Alaska and Siberia. More information.)