mike's web log

The (lack of) dogs in the night

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 09:25:21 GMT

I get so distracted by things I hear in meetings that I sometimes wonder how I manage to get anything work-related out of them at all. (Perhaps my boss wonders that too, hmm.) Anyway, the other day someone said that we should put a work item on a "dogs not barking" list.

I pondered this while the other participants continued their conversation. I was pretty sure this was new to me. I thought of a possible meaning or two, but didn't feel confident that I had it.

Fortunately, the guy who'd uttered the phrase is friendly enough, so I popped into his office and just asked him outright. "Oh," he said, and kind of laughed. "It's a phrase I picked up around here from management."

He went on to explain that "dogs not barking" refers to looking out for what's not obvious. It's kind of the opposite of the squeaky wheel, was his (anti-?) analogy — in this context, a squeaky wheel is the customer who's complaining loudly about something they need. But what's out there that customers need but we're not hearing about?

His theory was that it derived from a situation where you'd expect dogs to be barking — at a burglar, say — but they're not. There are times, goes the theory, that you should be hearing dogs bark but you're not, and that means trouble.

Anyone else know this phrase?

Try and understand this

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:42:53 GMT

The legitimacy of try and in the sense of try to has been debated for a long time, but it's an established usage in informal English:

I'm going to try and be there at five o'clock.
Please try and understand my point of view.

(For a good summary, including OED cites, N-gram stats, corpus search results, and a blessing from Fowler, see the blog The Writing Resource.)

Objections to try and sometimes seem a little forced; for example, Grammar Girl posits an argument from logic: "If you use and, you are separating trying and calling. You're describing two things: trying and calling." She goes on to say that try-and versus try-to may be more of a pet peeve with her.

And yet. I ran across an interesting example today of try and where I had to read the sentence a number of times before I got it:

If you try and lose then it isn't your fault. But if you don't try and we lose, then it's all your fault.

This is from Orson Scott Card's book Ender's Game.

The intent, as I eventually deduced, was "If you try and [you] lose ...". For my first several attempts to read the sentence, I kept parsing it as "If you try to lose ...", which didn't completely make sense. But first readings are stubborn. In other words, the intent is per Grammar Girl's logical parsing (two actions), but I was not reading it that way.

I think some punctuation here might have helped — a comma after try. Or an extra you inserted after try and.

Speaking of [more]

People who work at "___" call themselves "___"

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 22:53:53 GMT
For Friday Fun this week, I asked around about what corporate employees use as their nickname. For example, I work at Microsoft; we call each other Microsofties. I have it on excellent authority that people who work at Amazon call each other Amazonians, and so on.

For help, I asked my Facebook Friends, who are mostly folks in high-tech. I also enlisted the aid of naming expert and well-connected word person Nancy Friedman, who took the question with success to various lists of which she is a member.

Here are some preliminary responses. Note that these are all self-reported names, so I can't vouch for their accuracy in every case.

6 March 2012 Update! Added several that folks have sent me.
Aldus: Aldusians
Amazon: Amazonians
Ammex: Ammexians
Arthur Andersen: Androids ("but not very loudly")
CIA: Spooks
Citrix Systems: Citrites (Thanks to Jenny in the comments)
General Magic: Magicians
Google: Googlers
Honeywell: Honeywellers
IBM: IBMers
Martin Marietta (pre-Lockheed): Martians
Microsoft: Microsofties
[more]

From functional to decorative

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:16:31 GMT
For Friday Fun, a word that's new to me (tho not a new word per se — in fact, it's from the 1800s). First: I really like the word retronym, which refers to a term that has to be amended due to a technological change. Thus before the invention of the electric guitar, there was no notion of an "acoustic" guitar; all guitars were acoustic. Likewise dial phones, analog clocks, Classic Coke, and so on. (List of retronyms)

The new word I just learned is semantically kinda-sorta in that camp. (Maybe it's kind of opposite-y.) The term is skeuomorph (Greek: "vessel-shape"), and it refers to a vestigial design feature that represents something that was once functional. A popular example is the buckles on shoes — originally used to, you know, buckle the shoe, now used just for looks. Other examples are faux wood or fabric patterns in plastic; light bulbs shaped like candle flames; fake shutters that people mount next to the windows of their house; fake spokes in a hubcap; the "wax" on a bottle of Maker's Mark bourbon; and (a famous example) the tiny and useless "handle" that's on virtually all bottles of maple syrup.

[more]

"Lazy" speech

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 09:02:41 GMT
Once again I have heard someone refer to a speech pattern as "lazy." Of all the complaints about the way other people speak (and by golly, there are plenty), the one that makes the least sense to me is that people's speech is lazy. And yet:
... my pet peeves. They’re about pronunciation, rather than grammar and news people on television are doing this more every day:

1. Fill, instead of feel.
2. Pill, instead of peel.
[etc.]

To me, this “sims” just lazy. [source]
Plural forms are always going to be determined by what the majority is used to or comfortable with, with a tendency towards laziness. Very few people are going to bother with Priora when Priuses is perfectly functional. However, that doesn't mean that words adopted into English should use regular plural forms; it simply means that they are likely to. [source]
If I'm talking with friends or sending a text, I don't use "proper" English grammar, but I do recognize that my grammar is incorrect. I just don't care, and I know that my listener will understand me even if I'm lazy. [source]
A split infinitive can be a lazy way not to write a better sentence. [source]
When a speaker or writer uses incorrect subject/verb agreement, it tells the audience that he is either lazy or does not care. [source]
[more]

The KJV in everyday speech

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:17:47 GMT
The King James Bible (alternately, the Authorized Version or King James Version or KJV) is 400 years old; it was originally printed in 1611. Many people have noted that the book -- specifically, the language of the translation -- has had a widespread impact on everyday English.

For some Friday Fun (tho it's Wednesday, it's a virtual Friday for many in the US), here's a pleasing observation from an article in the latest National Geographic about the creation of the King James Bible. This is by Adam Nicolson, whose book about the KJV is listed below.
If a child is ever the apple of her parents' eye or an idea seems as old as the hills, if we are at death's door or at our wits' end, if we have gone through a baptism of fire or are about to bite the dust, if it seems at times that the blind are leading the blind or we are casting pearls before swine, if you are either buttering someone up or casting the first stone, the King James Bible, whether we know it or not, is speaking through us. The haves and have-nots, heads on plates, thieves in the night, scum of the earth, best until last, sackcloth and ashes, streets paved in gold, and the skin of one's teeth: All of them have been transmitted to us by the translators who did their magnificent work 400 years ago.
Personal anecdote. In my grad school days, I was exposed to a variety of extinct Germanic languages, including Anglo-Saxon and Gothic [more]

I speak, therefore I am a linguist

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 09:41:24 GMT
From an article on Ebonics by Ronald Kephart:
If the topic is physics, most people are happy to defer to physicists; if the topic is digestion, even though most people can digest food, they still defer to the gastroenterologists. But if the topic is language, everyone thinks they’re a linguist.

Cohort party?

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 22:20:32 GMT
Do you know the term cohort party? Go talk to me over on the other blog:

Let's (cohort) party down

Yeah, I'm fluent in that

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 15:12:30 GMT
Among the many privacy-invading questions (haha) that Facebook asks you is what languages you speak. This is a slightly odd question to me, because I can't imagine why this is interesting information to post on a Facebook page. (On a LinkedIn profile, sure, where there might be professional advantages.) In cynical moments, I suspect that people sometimes fill this in to a) show off that they speak more than one language and b) neener-neener.

On the other hand, it turns out you probably know more languages than immediately come to mind. In fact, you're probably fluent in quite a few of them. Like which? Well, Colleague David discovered some of these recently when he was updating his profile:

"Whom" is moribund. And that's ok.

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 11:23:51 GMT
The other day I posted this on Facebook: "The thing I like best about LinkedIn is finding out who knows who(m)." The (m) on "who(m)" was intended to mean something like "I am showing that I know when to use "whom", but am nonetheless refusing to use it."

This inspired a surprisingly vigorous discussion about whom in general. I have opinions about this, so rather than leave them buried in the comments on a Facebook post, I thought I'd put them out there for discussion. Here's my position:

This inspired a surprisingly vigorous discussion about whom in general. I have opinions about this, so rather than leave them buried in the comments on a Facebook post, I thought I'd put them out there for discussion. Here's my position:

In conversational English, whom is moribund. People don't use it in everyday speech, or in written English that's essentially conversational, like email and Facebook posts.

And this is ok. It's not a crisis in English.

On the dying state of whom:

Point. You will not find native speakers hunting around for guidance on the difference between I and me or between he and him. That's because native speakers don't need that guidance. However, there are many pages on the web (example, example — see comments especially) that explain the distinction between who and whom [more]

Emoticonless?

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 05:56:40 GMT
Here's my unscientific and informal analysis of the use of emoticons online:
Email: Occasional, with incidence significantly higher in non-business email.
Facebook: Pervasive.
Twitter: Almost nil.
What is it about Twitter that discourages emoticon use? Or is it just the people I follow?

Browsers are smarter than ever

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 09:38:15 GMT
Google Chrome has many cool features, including the ability to translate pages on the fly:

One reason I like studying Spanish

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 22:59:12 GMT
One of the reasons I've always liked studying foreign languages is that it makes me think about English. A couple of small examples. The other day, Friend Saul and I were looking at some street directions that someone had sent him in Spanish. The heading above the instructions said Indicaciones, and Saul asked me whether I was familiar with that term. (I for one, as a rather poor speaker of Spanish, might have expected direcciones, I suppose.) So we looked it up, and indicaciones is indeed the word for instructions, in the sense of step-by-step procedures like recipes or directions. This then got us thinking about why we use the term directions in English when we tell someone where to go. Was it because you were being "directed" to go someplace, or because the instructions included specific orientations (left, north, whatever)? When someone asks us how to get to the nearest gas stations, why don't we give them instructions rather than directions? (To complicate matters, in Spanish, someone's street address is their dirección.)

Then I was recently reading about Enrico Fermi and the famous "atomic pile" that he created at the University of Chicago. The assemblage of graphite and uranium was, in a very literal sense, a pile. But Fermi was of course Italian. This make me think of the Spanish word for battery: pila [more]

Three editorial curiosities

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 15:57:30 GMT
Random editorial stuff that's grabbed my attention in the last few days.

+++

I was exchanging email with someone who spells the word blog as 'blog. I asked him about this, since it's, you know, not so common. He said that he'd started it back when it was still weblog and it's now become habitual. I have never, ever seen this elsewhere. Have you? Analogy, I guess: 'cello, 'phone.

+++

From an author bio: "Craig Sharkie’s intricate knowledge of best-practice JavaScript is apparent in his writing." I think that the subject of JavaScript can be intricate, but not your knowledge of it, which might be more, like, intimate.

+++

In an email: "[yack-yack ...] The last 6 months was no exception." I thought about that was for a while, since technically the subject is plural. It seemed to me that there is a distinction between singular and plural here:

The last 6 months was no exception.
The last 6 months were no exception.

The first (to me) implicitly is referring to the period ("last 6 months") as a unit. The second is referring to six months as individual months in which each one individually was not an exception. Any thots?

13 Mar: Fixed some typos.

When does a trademark end?

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:31:49 GMT
It's always interesting to read how some words in English were once trademarks, but no longer are, like aspirin, heroin (!), linoleum, thermos, and zipper. Companies work to preserve their trademarks, even as they benefit from the genericization of their product names. Examples of words that are caught in this gray linguistic space might include to hoover, to xerox, to fedex, to tivo (not yet a verb in this dictionary reference), and of course, to google.

In my world, a term that seems particularly caught in the middle is the word JavaScript, which is the name of a programming language that's used in browsers. JavaScript was invented at Netscape and was included in that browser; Netscape held a trademark on the name. This trademark somehow wended its way to Sun Microsystems; when Sun was bought by Oracle, Oracle inherited the name. As of right this second, Oracle is the official trademark holder.

Update 27 Feb 2011 Be sure you read the comments.

[more]

Achieving new levels of coffee

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 11:54:39 GMT
In spite of living in Seattle, I don't often get to Seattle's Best Coffee[1], so I was unaware that before Christmas they'd launched a new campaign: their "Level" system. According to a press release[2], they're after "a radically simplified packaged coffee line designed to change the conventions of the coffee category."

The "levels" are basically roasts, with Level 1 being "Mild, light, and crisp" and Level 5 being "Bold, dark, and intense." They say that the level comes from roasting lingo, which makes sense ... in roasting.

Where this sounds odd to me, though, is when they accompany this with their "Find Your Level" come-ons. The problem, I think, is that they don't seem to have accounted for the idea that "level" also means, in non-roasting talk, things like "achievement" and "expertise." (Think levels in a game.) Thus, if my coffee "Level" is 1, does that mean I'm a beginner? And I should strive to move to a new level until I get to Level 5?

To me, it seems very hard to get away from this idea. I bounced this off a couple of people and got basically the same reaction from my limited sampling. Apparently if I were inclined to ever actually buy packaged coffee from SBC, I'd be perpetually stuck in Level 1. Sad.

I suppose it goes without saying that I also don't get what they mean by "change the conventions of the coffee category," but that just sounds like normal marketing hand-waving, where every change in package design is a radical overhaul of the industry. (I think the only company that can probably claim anything remotely like that is Apple, haha.)

[more]

Coming ~~Xmas~~ ~~End of year~~ ... uh ... soon

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:23:38 GMT
Here's a picture (this one's from Facebook) of the early ad campaign for the forthcoming Windows Phone 7:

So, when will this be available? Well, ok, so it's not Christmas 2010. This one's easy -- Christmas seems to have become something of a charged term. Let's, uh, not use that one.

What about Holidays 2010? Dunno, seems ok to me. Is it perhaps not specific enough? Maybe Holiday Season 2010? Maybe that's too long?

So the solution is ... Holiday 2010? Which holiday? Are they maybe leaving themselves lots of room to release during some holiday in 2010? Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas-whatever?

The thing is, that's distracting me so much that I haven't actually read the ad copy.

Do Germans even speak German any more?

Sun, 23 May 2010 10:44:16 GMT
English has, of course, always been exceptionally hospitable to terms of foreign origin[1], notwithstanding the mutterings of the Cranky Contingent who are suspicious of any lexical innovation (not to mention anything foreign withal). As for the reverse -- other languages adopting our terms -- I tend to think about the French, who actively legislate against the incursion of English terms ("Franglais") into their otherwise pure (haha) tongue. Or even about the British, many of whom get theyselves all exercised about encroachments from American English (example, example, example).

So I always find it a bit surprising to see evidence that German seems to be so hospitable to English. This is so well known that it has a name (Denglish = Deutsch + English). Where it surprises me the most is when an English word pops up in a context in which, to the best of my (imperfect) understanding, a suitable German word exists.

This weekend I had cause to get some "thermal paste," which is goo that you smear between your computer's CPU chip and the big ol' heat sink (thing with fins) that sits on top of the chip. The packaging for this goo came in, like, five languages. The English section said this:

Heat is the enemy.
Here's your silver bullet.

Which alluded to the product's name, "Formula 5 Silver Thermal Compound."

In German, this was rendered as:

Das Problem: Hitze.
Die Lösung: Cool bleiben.

[more]

The third time it's enemy action

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 22:35:54 GMT
In the movie Goldfinger, the eponymous villian encounters James Bond multiple times, and upon their third encounter, makes this observation to our hero: "Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.'"

I know better than to spot three occurences of an editorial issue and declare enemy action (generally expressed as "the language, it's going to hell"). But I do find these odd. Draw your own conclusions.
Cars starting at $8999 or less. (Sign at car dealer in Renton WA)
Maximum capacity: up to 250 lbs. (Costco catalog)
An extensive On Demand library, now approaching more than 20,000 choices. (xfinity brochure[1])

[1] This appears to have been fixed in the online version.

Happy Annual Celebration of Syntax and Usage!

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:36:40 GMT
If you're wondering about the fireworks and the parade and about why your editor has brought a selection of festive and tasty treats to the office today[1], it's because it's National Grammar Day. (National Grammar Day!! What's next, National Punctuation Day?!? Yes.) National Grammar Day commemorates a famous battle in which the forces who were determined to stamp out "hopefully" as a sentence modifier were defeated by a valiant and plucky band of descriptive linguists and progressive editors.

Haha, not really.

In general, I cringe at anything that purports to "raise people's awareness" of grammar, because that generally devolves into the self-annointed experts whinging at length about how people's sloppy ways are ruining English. (Yawn.) Thus I was pleased to read two very good posts about NGD which seem, imo, to emphasize the good side of raising one's grammar awareness. The first post is by John McIntyre (who else), who notes that ...
One way to make [National Gramamr Day] substantial — no, not by acting as an officious prig and peever — is to practice the craft to produce more effective writing.
A laudable call to arms. Which he follows up with suggestions like getting yourself some decent writing advice, and of course, hiring an editor.

Then there is a post by Gabe Doyle that says everything I ever wanted to say about what it really [more]

"But we invented English!"

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 07:48:32 GMT
Now and again, an Englishperson will utter what they imagine to be the ultimate argument for why their particular brand of English is the One True Language: "But we invented English!"

This is, needless to say, a specious argument. Except apparently it is needful to say, because I keep running across this argument. (#, #, #, #, #, #, ...) Herewith, therefore, a short guide to just why the argument "But we invented English" is nonsense.

1. No one invented English. What, you did? You and your sisters, and your cousins, and your aunts? Not quite. English has been in development, via many fascinating historical and linguistic turns, since before the Saxons and Danes established themselves in the British Isles in pre-Medieval times. Since that time, this once purely Germanic language has taken on a heavy dose of Old French, a healthy helping of Latin and Greek, and some tang from practically every other language it's ever come into contact with. This was not exactly a guided enterprise.

[more]

Softening the blow

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 09:05:44 GMT
Raymond Chen has an amusing post about a sociolinguistic issue, namely the addition of a softener on a statement that conveys negative news. He observes (presumably while on vacation) that the Hawaiian word mahalo shows up on the end of signs like these:
We do not accept coupons at this location. Mahalo.
No refills. Mahalo.
This counter is closed. Mahalo.
As he suggests, mahalo might officially mean "thank you," but ...

Of course, we see this a lot:

Restrooms for customers only. Thank you.

Or, as I amuse myself to imagine:

Restrooms for customers only. Thank's!

And in these cases one might need to pause for a moment to sort out exactly what we're being thanked for.

There are variants on this technique. One of the commenters on the thread observes a particularly bureaucratic version of this:
In order to serve you better, we do not accept coupons at this location.
In order to serve you better, no refills.
And another commenter has a great one that is vaguely antiquated-souding, but oh, my:[1]

She is such a hussy, bless her heart.

You can prepend a softener as well:

IMHO, this entire discussion is lame.

What other variations are there?

[1] I imagine this as a Southernism. Any thots?

The which that restricts (The that which restricts)

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 09:38:43 GMT
It is a non-truth all too often acknowledged, that a clause in possession of a restrictive relationship must be in want of a that. Any conservative-leaning guide to grammar will insist that you introduce "restrictive" clauses with that, and "non-restrictive" ones with which. Our corporate style guide is no exception; here's our guidance on the matter:

Correct
You will need to supply information about applications that you want to run with Windows.

Incorrect
You will need to supply information about applications which you want to run with Windows.

Correct
Your package contains the subsidiary information card, which you can use to obtain device drivers or local technical support.

No professional linguist takes this seriously. There's no evidence from actual English usage, contemporary or historical, that which is not suitable for introducing restrictive clauses. (You can find recent talk about this on the Langauge Log here.)

Why am I blathering on this? Because I have yet again found something amusing on Facebook. This time it's a description of one of the innumerable games that you can play via Facebook. (As if FB just by itself were not already a yawning time suck.) This particular game appears to be a typing type of game, which is described thusly:
Typing maniac is a game which measures the typing skills and the ability to think fast that features multiple power ups!
There is editorial gold here, including a capitalization error (Typing Maniac). But more to the point, it's a rare instance where that and which [more]

Kinger. No, Kingite. No, Kingean.

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 11:13:56 GMT
In Facebook, one of my Friends noted that as a resident of Snohomish County[1] here in Western Washington, she's now a Snohomian. This is one county up from where Seattle is, which is King County. Which in turn led to the question, what do you call a resident of King County?[2]

English has a variety of ways to form a word that means "resident of," which the infallible Wikipedia lists as a demonym:

-ite: Seattleite, Manhattanite
-er: New Yorker, Dubliners
-an: Baltemorean, San Franciscan, Glaswegian
other: (Los) Angeleno (borrowed from Spanish, obviously)

I haven't investigated, but I suspect that any systematic set of rules for how to create a demonym is going to be complex at best and full of exceptions. Yet there must be rules, because it is possible to get it wrong. We're not Seattlers, for example, we just aren't.

So, here's your challenge: what do you call a resident of King County? The problem is that none of the normal rules result in a particularly satisfying name. What can we do about that?

[1] The -mish suffix is much used for placenames around here (Duwamish, Snohomish, Skykomish, Suquamish): "In the native Lushootseed language, the aboriginal inhabitants of the White River Valley were known as the Stkamish, the Smulkamish, and the Skopamish. (The common anglicization of the "amsh" suffix, which means "people of," resulted in many local tribes with the "mish" suffix, such as the Duwamish and Suquamish.)" [#]

[more]

Well, they've lost my business

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 08:44:56 GMT
The Ferrari web site lets you choose the language you want to shop for a car in:

All I can say is that if they're going to cop out and use only that effete British English, forget it -- I'll take my business elsewhere.

Hahaha.

mike's web log

The (lack of) dogs in the night

Try and understand this

People who work at "_" call themselves "_"

From functional to decorative

"Lazy" speech

The KJV in everyday speech

I speak, therefore I am a linguist

Cohort party?

Yeah, I'm fluent in that

"Whom" is moribund. And that's ok.

Emoticonless?

Browsers are smarter than ever

One reason I like studying Spanish

Three editorial curiosities

When does a trademark end?

Achieving new levels of coffee

Coming Xmas End of year ... uh ... soon

Do Germans even speak German any more?

The third time it's enemy action

Happy Annual Celebration of Syntax and Usage!

"But we invented English!"

Softening the blow

The which that restricts (The that which restricts)

Kinger. No, Kingite. No, Kingean.

Well, they've lost my business