Possible World Words

Posted on July 29, 2010 by achouston

Someone mentioned hearing an interview on the radio in which a native Spanish speaker (who was speaking English in the interview) used the word conspiration when referring to conspiracy.  Interesting.  There is no word in any English dictionary for the word conspiration. However, our conspiracy is derived from Anglo-Norman conspiracie, an alteration of Old French conspiration.  In modern Spanish the word is conspiración.  All of these come from the Latin conspiratio (agreement, union).  So, the Spanish speaker apparently mapped the current Spanish word into a parallel English form,  utilizing English rules of pronunciation.  So, why isn’t conpiration a word in current English usage?  Good question.

As speakers of English we know how to create sets of related words by employing different endings or suffixes. For example, the verb hesitate is related to the noun hesitation by the suffix –ion; this pattern is quite general:

  • levitate/levitation, gravitate/gravitation, elevate/elevation, exterminate/extermination, radiate/radiation, etc..

One might wonder why it’s retire/retirement and not retire/retiracy by analogy to conspire/conspiracy. Indeed, why not allow conspirement?  The patterns do reveal underlying consistencies: many nouns ending in -acy refer to the state of some social group:

  • democracy/theocracy/piracy/advocacy/conspiracy

Other nouns ending in -acy that are related to adjectives refer to a state of having the property described by the adjective:

  • obstinate/obstinacy, intimate/intimacy, primal/primacy, efficacious/efficacy, accurate/accuracy

What about secrecy?  The state or quality of being secret entered English from Old French (secré – variant of secret). In the 15th century the English noun appeared as secretee.  About a hundred years later secrecy appears, believed to have formed on the model of existing primacy.  Another example of language’s fluid and changing nature.

But, could we have secretness?  We do have efficaciousness even though we also have efficacy. What is the difference in meaning between these two nouns? The root in both cases has Latin origin, but the first suffix (-ness) is about as Germanic a suffix as English possesses, unlike the Latinate (-acy) of efficacy.  Secretness does not currently have the credentials of a proper dictionary entry (at least to my knowledge), but -ness is a highly productive noun-forming suffix in Modern English.

One envisionment (it’s becoming a word!) of word patterns is to imagine a 2-dimensional matrix with all the possible roots represented along one axis and all possible suffixes  (in our case) along the other. At any given time in the history of the language a subset of the possible combinations (each cell in the matrix is a possible combination of root + suffix) will actually be in current usage; over time some combinations will fade from currency and others become ‘activated’.  Such a model would allow for words such as secretism and secretude (both presumably meaning a state of being secret).  Is such a model realistic? It doesn’t predict which combinations will occur, but only which ones could occur.  Perhaps it fails to capture important real constraints that would always ‘black out’ many of the possible combinations. Notice that it doesn’t predict combinations such as determinationness (determine + -tion + -ness). This latter example seems to truly violate English word-formation rules in a way that is different from the above examples. Understanding what makes a linguistic ‘boundary’ hard or dynamic is an interesting question — there is still much to be learned.

I’ll end with some candidate possible words; let your own intuitions be the judge. 🙂

  • redundantness
  • alcoholive
  • scareable
  • simplific
  • horritude
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What’s a Disney Ride?

Posted on July 27, 2010 by achouston

Recently some friends were out sailing with us in Boston Harbor; as we sailed homeward we approached an extremely dark cloud — just one all by itself.  The light was dramatic behind it and under it the sea and outlines of distant objects were nearly obscured. As we passed under the cloud, the winds suddenly picked up dramatically to 40 knots or so. We tried to pull in the sails, but the winds were too strong, so we motored on, lines and canvas snapping fiercely. There were some adrenalin-shot moments and then the winds abruptly died and the sun came out as we passed from under the cloud. As we tidied our sails and lines and realized all was well, one person joked, ‘can we do that again?’  We all laughed and someone else replied that we’d have to wait in line again and get a ticket – an E-ticket.

There’s a lot of cultural information packed into the term ‘E-ticket’.  The origin (I believe) comes from tickets purchased at Disneyland and Disney World; different classes of amusement rides in these parks have different classes of tickets associated with them — E-tickets are the priciest because they are for the best and most interesting rides. The lines for those rides can often be very long, too. Referring to a real-life experience as involving an E-ticket implies that the experience can be compared to a Disney ride — this is an instance of a trope, a figurative/metaphoric use of a term. It’s one that requires some fairly specific cultural knowledge about a specific society and a specific era in it. Consider a second case of using this particular trope.

I was waiting at a bus stop yesterday in a pleasant, affluent community west of Boston. While I waited a group passed by: two thirty-something adult women followed by eight or nine preschool-aged children, with one adult female bringing up the rear.  What was striking and unusual was that the children were all tethered together on a long line as they walked, their wrists tied to the tether. It was certainly an efficient way to keep them in tow, and they didn’t look unhappy, but they behaved less boisterously than what I’ve observed other times with young children on outings and field trips with adult supervision. A lady who was also waiting for the bus seemed surprised by the setup as well, and we discussed it after the group was out of earshot. I said to her, ‘Are children now just supposed to be living a Disney ride?’  She nodded, she knew exactly what I meant, and mused on the potential downside of never letting children experience dangers around them in their world, of not letting them develop intuitions and judgment based on experience confronting such things. Is that what was going on with these kids — were they being kept on a Disney ride? (It’s possible the tether was some sort of game or learning experience.) The point is that using the trope ‘Disney ride’ in this context was not intended in a positive sense as it was in the boat situation described earlier.  The expression still refers to an amusement ride, but is highlighting not the attributes of ‘fun’ and ‘excitement’, but the attributes of ‘unreal’ and ‘controlled, circumscribed’.  I didn’t have to explain myself to the lady at the bus stop, she knew exactly what I meant by ‘Disney ride’ in that context.  So, ‘Disney ride’ can refer to a potentially dangerous situation in a praiseworthy way, and an overly-protective situation in a pejorative one.  It illustrates the dynamic nature of word usage and meaning.

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More Word Jumbles

Posted on July 22, 2010 by achouston

  • TRENTOR
  • ROPEDAL
  • LOTWE
  • RABYVER
  • KOICASEPODLE

Answers published tomorrow. Enjoy.

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The Allure of Color Terms

Posted on July 21, 2010 by achouston

I’m a little fascinated by the specific names for colors that are chosen in clothing and home furnishing catalogs (both online and paper). It would be fun to collect some of these catalogs over the past fifty years and see what changes have occurred in the color terms that are used.  The terms need to be informative of course, but a small inventory of basic color terms would suffice for that purpose. The catalog’s purpose is to persuade the prospective buyer to purchase something, and the choice of color terms can help. Knowing who the buyers are probably shapes these choices — are they gals, guys, outdoorsy, haute couture, teens, baby boomers, etc.. Are the terms chosen to validate and reflect current broader trends in society? Why is it that certain decorating colors come into style and then go out? Is there a parallel process occurring with color terms?  Here is a sampling of color terms I’ve encounteres in recent women’s fashion catalogs and mid-market (yuppie, not luxury) home decor catalogs to describe colors in the basic categories of ‘light green’, ‘medium green’, ‘light blue’ and ‘medium blue’.

  • light green: celery, fennel, kiwi, sea glass, lettuce, grass, sage.
  • medium green: basil, caper, moss, fern, chive, leaf, stem green.
  • light blue: pool, lagoon, mineral blue, sky, sea mist, oasis.
  • medium blue: wave, aegean, peacock, blueberry, chalk blue.

Nature is appearing heavily in these terms as basic forms and elements — and a lot of edible plants! These choices may reflect the current interest in eco-friendly living and organic whole food diets with an emphasis on vegetables. These are chic veggies, mind you, ‘basil’ ‘fennel’ and ‘grass’ (did you know sugarcane is a grass?). Are there unchic vegetables and fruits that wouldn’t make the grade? Would a green fabric cover in ‘pickle’ be appealing, or a light beige sweater in ‘potato’? What about curtains in ‘gooseberry’?   For yellow the terms ‘lemon’, ‘butter’, ‘tumeric’, ‘cumin’, and ‘sunflower’ are acceptable, but I haven’t seen ‘egg yolk’ or ‘sulfur’.  The references to nature are kept general; ‘mineral blue’ sounds like some interesting rock that you admire on an outcrop during a mountain hike, so does ‘azurite’. Doesn’t that sound like an earthy gem?  The chosen names today avoid references to industrial processes, somehow ‘mineral’ is a good word and ‘chemical’ is a bad one; ‘copper hydroxl carbonate’ won’t be replacing ‘azurite’ any time soon (they are the same substance). Copper sulfate is a gorgeous blue, but probably won’t make the cut either, as a fashion term.

Animal terms for colors don’t seem as popular as in earlier decades – it’s less common to see ‘oxblood’ as a term for ‘dark red’ nowadays, and one doesn’t see ‘heron blue’ or ‘kingfisher blue’ much. What about ‘fawn’ for ‘light beige’ and ‘dove’ for ‘light gray’? I think they are less common than they used to be. Men’s clothing may point to a whole different cluster of terms, and cars and electronic gadgetry may lead to yet others, perhaps less earthy and more techno in the images they conjure. One fairly recent term I’ve seen for men’s jeans and women’s sportswear is ‘storm’. It’s a kind of dark gray and I love the word – who knew an event could serve as a color term?

I’ll end the post with a few suggestions of my own.

  • eclipse – dark bluish-black
  • summer – bright golden yellow
  • passion – deep, ruby red
  • hurricane – blue w/graygreen
  • meditation – deep emerald green

Catalogs, feel free to use these. 🙂

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Linguistic Intuition

Posted on July 20, 2010 by achouston

What is linguistic intuition? As native speakers of languages we all possess it, but what is it? For linguists, it’s a powerful methodology to explore the limits of grammatical structure allowed in a language, to articulate the rules that determine what is and is not part of a given language’s grammar. A simple example will illustrate this technique.

  • Elena chopped up the parsley/Elena chopped the parsley up.  Both okay
  • Elena walked up the stairs/Elena walked the stairs up. 1st yes/2nd no

The jarring impression that ‘Elena walked the stairs up’ makes on us is our linguistic intuition. By manipulating phrases, transforming them in various ways, and noting the resulting acceptability of the results, we come to discover phrasal boundaries; ‘chop up’ forms a unit and can move its particle ‘up’ beyond the object of the verb (German can do this sort of thing with verbs), but in the second pair of examples, ‘up’  is inside the unit ‘up the stairs’ and is a directional preposition, not part of the preceding verb. We have strong intuitions about how prepositional units should occur in English.

Linguistic intuition is not perfectly aligned with proper ‘schoolbook’ grammar. How many times a day do you hear or read ‘it’s I’ or ‘it was not they’?  Probably almost not at all in American English. These are the correct forms of the pronoun, because the verb is ‘to be’ and the pronoun is really the subject and should take the nominative forms: I, he, she, they.  I’m guessing your intuition is not too jarred when you hear ‘It’s me’ or ‘It was not them’,  right? But what about, ‘Me is not going’ or ‘Them were with us’?  No way. This shows we still distinguish our subject pronouns from our object pronouns. The fact that ‘It’s me’ sounds natural to most speakers (I’ve overheard even quite eloquent, educated English speakers saying this on occasion) is probably because of another intuition we have about English – the order of the words in a sentence indicates the subject and the object. The default word order for English is subject-verb-object:  ‘John plays the fiddle’, ‘She followed them up the path’. In phrases such as ‘It’s me’ and ‘It was not them’, the equational meaning of  ‘to be’ is getting trumped by the word order — the true subject of the sentence occurs after the verb, and even though semantically it is not an object, recipient, patient, etc., it feels object-like because of its position.

Linguistic intuitions are not infallible in every case (especially at the fringes where changes may be ongoing), nor are they the only method available to study the properties of language.  Consider more cases of examples related to those above.

  • not I/not me  (it was not I, it was not me)  both okay?
  • happy is he who finds his own way/happy is him who finds his own way ??
  • it was indeed they/it was indeed them   both okay?
  • it were they/it were them   both bad, right?  The verb ‘to be’ is felt to agree with ‘it’, not the extraposed subject.

I’ll leave you with one more set of examples to exercise your linguistic intuition.  These engage both word order (syntax) and meaning (semantics).

  • a big red ball/a red big ball
  • a small yellow satin purse/a yellow small satin purse/a satin yellow small purse
  • the tallest biggest strongest gladiator/the biggest strongest tallest gladiator/the strongest biggest tallest gladiator
  • the strangest prettier blue flower/the prettier strangest blue flower
  • a tall smart young woman/a young smart tall woman/a smart young tall woman

Are your intuitions clear cut for each case? Do the meanings change as the modifiers get rearranged? Are all the meanings acceptable and natural?

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What’s up with up

Posted on July 19, 2010 by achouston

The word ‘up’ in English has many uses and functions: it occurs as an adverb  (we need to liven up our presentation),  a preposition  (the mouse crawled up the drainpipe), an adjective (the mood was definitely up at the meeting), a noun (we’ve had some ups and downs with this thing), and even a verb  (they’ve upped the ante).  The Online Etymology Dictionary cites the earliest (1560) recorded use of ‘up’ in the verb sense as meaning ‘to drive and catch swans’.  Man, those were some gutsy lads and lasses bringing that verb into the world; if you’ve ever had a close encounter with these powerhouse waterfowl, you’ll appreciate just how gutsy. 🙂 The adverbial sense which meant ‘to rise up physically, get on your feet’ occurred in expressions such as ‘up and leave’ and apparently expanded to allow ‘she up and told him’  and  ‘they up and died’.  These sound decidedly old-fashioned nowadays.

Nevertheless,  ‘up’ continues to expand its domain, including its appearance in compound words. But what exactly is the semantics of ‘up’ in these various compounds — are they extrapolating or employing one of the uses from the existing inventory of senses that ‘up’ possesses?  Let’s consider some examples. These, by the way, are nominalizations — nouns that refer to events or activities. Verby stuff in noun’s clothing.

  • holdup – can mean either a delay in some process or undertaking, or an armed robbery.  Why ‘up’ here?  Does the robbery sense refer to the victims positioning their arms up in the air and not moving? Is the delay sense an abstraction of the ‘not moving’ implication of the robbery sense? Or, is the above explanation a just-so story?
  • hangup – can mean a telephone call where one of the parties doesn’t speak, but just terminates the call, or it can mean a personal phobia, concern, worry. What does ‘up’ contribute to the meaning in these cases? If I contemplate it much, I almost prefer ‘down’ to ‘up’  — he has a lot of hangdowns from his childhood.  What do you think?
  • flareup – or is this one ‘flare-up’? The use of a hyphen is an interesting indicator of how strongly bonded the components of a compound word are felt to be – is it still more of a phrase in the language, or is it a word. Would ‘flare-out’ work as well here? My intuitions feel ‘flare-out’ as an ending of a flare incident, and ‘flare-up’ as the beginning of one. Maybe ‘burnout’ is contributing to this distinction, but ‘burn-up’ doesn’t follow the pattern. So, the intuitions are there, but the semantic ground on which they stand is a bit shaky.
  • hookup – as a nominalization, this word has come to mean a casual sexual encounter.  An earlier, more generalized (non-sexual) sense of getting together occurs only as a verb, ‘we hooked up with them at the airport’.  A ‘hookup at the airport’ means something else. Again, why not ‘hook-in’ or ‘hook-on’?  What is ‘up’ signifying here that ‘hook’ is not conveying by itself?
  • meetup – an impromptu gathering, often in a public place. ‘Up’ sounds so natural in this fairly new compound. Is it simply by analogy to the earlier ‘hookup’? It might have been ‘meet-in’, after all, by analogy to the ‘be-ins’ and ‘love-ins’ coined a generation ago.

Could it be that ‘up’ in the cases above is an abstract ‘event’ indicator? The expression ‘what’s up’ is close to ‘what’s happening’, and ‘happen’ is about as pure an event/occurrence verb as English owns.  ‘What’s up with John’ carries this sense, too.

‘Up’ as the prefix of compounds is more uniform in meaning; ‘uptown’ and ‘upriver’ both refer to directional locations, and ‘upscale’ and ‘upmarket’ are metaphoric extensions of direction used in a quantitative context. Likewise for ‘upbeat’ (meaning happy, exuberant) as a direction along an emotional scale. And the ultimate stretch with this notion — ‘on the up and up’ (honest, sincere).  Notice these words are all adjectives, not nominalizations.  Does ‘up’ in the context of ‘John wasn’t up for going out last night’ illustrate the adjectival sense of enthusiasm, related to ‘upbeat’?  Or is it an abstract ‘event-available’ sense, more closely aligned with ‘meetup’ and ‘what’s up’?

We’ll take a look at some of the other prepositional/adverbial forms in later posts.

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Word Jumbles

Posted on July 16, 2010 by achouston

Just for fun here are five jumbled words (English). Unscramble them, and for extra credit, try to create a clever saying using only the inventory of letters included in the five words. So that means you may use up to three ‘L’s in your clever saying because there is a total of three ‘L’s among the five words, and you may use two ‘C’s, and so forth. Hint: I haven’t worked out an underlying phrase to be discovered — this is an exercise in creative writing!  Please share your witty output!

  • CALLEPS
  • RUSSED
  • NOTOWN
  • FROPTHICK
  • AIMLAS

Solutions posted tomorrow.

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First or Last Syllable?

Posted on July 15, 2010 by achouston

What’s the underlying logic for choosing the first versus the last syllable in abbreviated English words? I have a feeling that using the last syllable is more recently popular than in earlier times, e.g. ‘rents’ (parents)  ‘zine’ (magazine)  ‘za’ (pizza)  ‘blog’ (weblog) have entered the language in the past couple of decades. However, ‘ludes’ (Quaaludes) has been around longer and, in contrast, the current term ‘peeps’ (people) uses the first syllable.  Then, too, we hear and read  ‘mac&cheese’  (not ‘roni&cheese’).  Americans call bratwurst ‘brats’  (not ‘wurst’),  and it’s ‘veggies’ (not ‘tables’). With family ties it’s ‘sibs’ for brothers and sisters (not ‘lings’) — note the contrast to ‘rents’ in this case.

All the short forms above refer to nouns. The only adjectives I could think of were ‘rad’ (radical) and ‘favs’ (favorites).  Are there others? What about verbs? Does every noun have a natural-sounding short form?  Which way would ‘faucet’, ‘diamond’ and ‘pancake’ go?  What about ‘avatars’?  Would it be ‘avs’ or ‘tars’?

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Begged, Borrowed or Stolen?

Posted on July 14, 2010 by achouston

Actually just borrowed — in the linguistic sense. We’re doing more lists today, this time a brief inventory of words which English has borrowed from various other languages over the centuries. Unlike economic imports and exports, linguistic borrowing occurs below the radar of trade agreements and trade tariffs and, thankfully, no one needs to ‘repay’ these borrowed terms, so there is no accumulating linguistic deficit. 🙂  In fact, these borrowings have enriched the vocabulary and expressive power of English.

As you can see from the ‘trade routes’ of these words, the path into English sometimes stopped at several linguistic ‘ports’ along the way. The borrowings listed below entered English over a period that stretches from the time of Old English (around 900 AD) to the 19th century.

  • From Hebrew (via Latin and Greek): hemp, cherubim, amen, sabbath
  • From Hebrew (via French): jubilee, babel, cinnamon, sapphire, leviathan
  • From Persian (via Latin): tiger, paradise
  • From Persian (via French): chess, checkmate, arsenic, salamander, scarlet
  • From Sanskrit/Hindi/Romany (via Latin): ginger, pepper, panther
  • From Turkic: tulip,  vampire, horde
  • From Dravidian (Tamil/Malay/Telegu): curry, calico, mango
  • From Japanese: tycoon, zen
  • From Arabic (via French and Italian): hazard, alchemy, saffron, lemon, admiral
  • From Slavic: robot, polka, mammoth, steppe
  • From German: saber, hamster, quartz, zig-zag, protein, poker
  • From Dutch: kit, groove, walrus, boss
  • From Afrikaans: aardvark
  • From Spanish: vanilla, barbecue, cigar, cork, jade, cargo
  • From Italian: bandit, concert, ghetto, balcony, firm, artichoke

The above list is conspicuously missing borrowings from French. This is because such an enormous percentage of modern English vocabulary is borrowed from French. That can be the subject of another post entirely.

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Words without Pictures

Posted on July 13, 2010 by achouston

A lot of lists get published on blogs and twitter feeds. The 10-item list seems to be especially popular: the 10 things you need to know before the market opens each day, the 10 stupid mistakes made when pitching to venture capitalists, the 10 questions that a hip company asks job candidates that will make you feel intellectually inadequate. Nothing wrong with ten (or 10) and often these are witty, fun little exercises, and sometimes damn useful. Can you tell I’ve looked at a few myself? But, what is with the stupid pictures?  Almost inevitably these little gems of insight or curiosity are associated with a photograph or graphic of something that the author (or someone) deems relevant. So, for a quantitative puzzler about how many ping pong balls fit into a school bus, we must also be served a photo of — you guessed it — a school bus. Or an observation about competitive advantage displays a picture of Superman flying along in his blue suit. Whhyyy? I’m all for interesting visuals, but the digital landscape is awash in visual litter; jpegs scattered around like discarded candy wrappers, thumbnail video clips looping mindlessly on news sites, reams of twitpics taken in terrible light of banal subject matter. This is really dumb stuff, people.

So, I’m going to post the following list entitled: Ten Things To Consider About English.  No pictures though, you’ll have to visualize your own, or better yet, just exercise the pure joy of your linguistic facilities. 🙂

  • You can have a spoonful, a bowlful, a roomful, a houseful, an eyeful, an armful and a lungful; why not also a spatulaful,  a noseful, a shoeful, a planeful, and a heartful?     (I’m so glad we’re not doing a picture here!)
  • ‘mail’ is a mass noun (no distinction between singular/plural), but ’email’ has become a count noun – despite the ire of some, the term ’emails’ is now ubiquitous.
  • ‘Shall’ occurs far more often nowadays in questions only, not in statements — at least in informal speech.
  • ‘Pitted cherries’ are cherries with the pits removed, ‘boned chicken’ is chicken with the bones removed, but ‘seeded buns’ are buns that have seeds added.  (You didn’t really need a picture to think about these, did you?)
  • ‘Inflammable’ and ‘flammable’  have the same meaning  ‘easily set on fire’, but ‘impervious’ and ‘pervious’  have opposite meanings — the former doesn’t allow liquid to pass through, but the latter does.
  • The solution to the apparent inconsistency above: two different prefixes. ‘Inflammable’ comes from French ‘enflame’ where the en- prefix indicates a change of state. ‘Impervious’ uses a different prefix from Latin  in- meaning ‘not’.  ‘Ennoble’ is another instance of en- (change of state), so its meaning is related closely to ‘noble’, whereas the ‘not noble’ meaning uses the in- prefix (not) + the earlier Latin variant ‘gnobilis’, which results in ‘ignoble’.
  • ‘way’ is supplanting ‘very’ — it’s way cool, that would be way expensive.
  • ‘vibe’ is probably a toxic word at this point. Does anyone say ‘The place had good vibes’ nowadays?
  • The plain occurrence of the reflexive/emphatic pronoun ‘myself’ is on the rise: ‘John and myself were the only ones who went’  in contrast to  ‘John and I were the only ones who went.’   The reflexive/emphatic usages traditionally employ two pronouns, ‘I hurt myself accidentally’ (reflexive) and ‘I, myself, would never do such a thing’ (emphatic). My intuitions feel that this new ‘bald’ usage is an attempt to be more polite, distancing the speaker from referring to themselves, it’s the first person reflexive that is used this way, you don’t hear ‘Themselves and I were invited’ or ‘Only I and himself went to the beach’.
  • Finally, and I love this old chestnut (a comedian is the author, who is it?) We park in the driveway and drive on the parkway.
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