Going to something and ruin

On ADS-L on Saturday, Jon Lighter mused about X and ruin (especially (go) to X and ruin) in the OED. There are three entries in the OED for different items X, glossed roughly as ‘destruction’, in such examples: wrack, rack, and wreck. The historical relationships between these items are very complex, but a few parts of it are clear.

The noun wrack ‘destruction’ is related to the noun wreck (and the verb wreck). Then there’s the noun rack, as in the torture instrument, which is etymologically tied to a ’stretch’ root; cf. the verb rack in such idioms rack one’s brains and nerve-racking.

So far so good. But there’s been plenty of traffic back and forth between wrack and rack. The OED (draft revision of June 2008) says that rack in rack and ruin is a variant of wrack, which is historically earlier. It has cites for to wrack in the relevant sense from 1412, and for to wrack and ruin from 1577; to rack in the relevant sense is attested from 1599, to rack and ruin from 1706. That is, the wrack of destruction got there first, but there’s been variation for a very long time. (In the other direction, wrack also impinged on rack’s territory.)

Meanwhile, to wreck ‘to destruction’ appeared in between wrack and rack (in about 1547). The OED has only one cite for wreck and ruin (from 1877), though Lighter unearthed one from H. G. Wells, Twelve Stories and a Dream (London, Macmillan, 1903), p. 297:

I…left all those things to wreck and ruin just to save a remnant at least of my life.

Usage on the web these days has to X and ruin with roughly comparable frequencies (in the hundreds of thousands of raw ghits) for the three variants, though rack is in the lead (if you put any faith at all in raw ghit numbers). The variant wreck is probably gaining on the others, because, for most modern speakers (who have rack/wrack ‘destruction’ virtually only in the X and ruin idioms) it makes more sense than the others.

Current dictionary practice seems to be to list only the rack variant, or to list it first, with wrack as an alternative (that’s what NOAD2 does, and the American Heritage Idioms Dictionary). Nobody mentions the wreck variant, much less recommends it.

Some commentators insist on historical fidelity, however. Paul Brians, for instance, in Common Errors:

If you are racked with pain or you feel nerve-racked, you are feeling as if you were being stretched on that Medieval instrument of torture, the rack. You rack your brains when you stretch them vigorously to search out the truth like a torturer. “Wrack” has to do with ruinous accidents, so if the stock market is wracked by rumors of imminent recession, it’s wrecked. If things are wrecked, they go to “wrack and ruin.” (link)

Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.) says much the same, while explicitly labeling both rack and ruin and wreck and ruin as errors for wrack and ruin.

In the face of such disorder, the eggcorn database hasn’t attempted an account of the X and ruin variants. We do have an entry for wreck havoc (for wreak havoc) and one for wreckless (for reckless), but who would take on X and ruin, except to pursue the program of One Right Way? MWDEU advises:

Probably the most sensible attitude would be to ignore the etymologies of rack and wrack (which, of course, is exactly what most people do) and regard them simply as spelling variants of one word.

As for the wreck variant, it looks like an eggcorn that is rapidly moving into the mainstream — a development that is taking the word back to its roots.

Postings on playful word formation

Language Log has had a small blossoming of postings on playful morphology, here and here. So here’s an inventory of postings, on Language Log and this blog, on the topic. (I might well have missed some items.)

The major background is the 1987 Zwicky & Pullum BLS paper, “Plain morphology and expressive morphology” (available on-line here), which looks at three English cases: Shm- Reduplication, Expletive Infixation, -(e)teria.

Postings on nounings

Another inventory of postings, this time on (zero) nouning. I started keeping a file on nounings a couple of years ago, and this inventory is pretty much restricted to recent postings. In addition to postings on Language Log and this blog, I’ve listed some postings closely linked to these, with no pretense to covering what’s out there in the blogosphere.

Note: this is not an inventory of nounings in English. There are many nounings in my files — including a fair number mentioned on ADS-L and some with OED entries — that escaped my linguablog net, and in any case I’ve never attempted to record every nouning in English (that would be a lunatic enterprise, it seems to me). Instead, I’ve noted a few items that for one (perhaps idiosyncratic) reason or another caught my eye.

The meta-euphemism

Over in the ADS mailing list, Randy Alexander reports on a development in the world of euphemisms, in particular euphemisms for (male) masturbation. Based on the playful pattern in

spanking the monkey, choking the chicken, beating the bishop, jerkin’ the gherkin, …

and hundreds of others (there are websites devoted to these things), some people have moved up one level, to verbing the noun. As the commenter Hypno-Toad said on the Straight Dope message board on 11/20/06,

My roomie and I decided many years ago that really just about any verb and noun can be used in this sense. We just call it “Verbing the Noun.”

Alexander’s finds:

[with reference to the website ChatRoulette, which brings strangers face to face via webcam] If it’s as much of an endless stream of guys verbing the noun as is claimed, it might be a neat CBT [Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy] tool for inducing social anxiety. (link)

[heading for a blog discussion about programs that generate euphemisms] Verbing the Noun, if you know what I mean, nudge nudge, wink wink (link)

How to Speak Nanny

The title of a story (by Hilary Stout) in the Home section of the NYT on February 4. It’s not about nanny-speak, but about communicating with your nanny, something that many professional women find difficult to do (their husbands seem to have little to do with these arrangements).

These women, feeling guilty about hiring their child care out to others and uncomfortable managing an employee in a domestic (rather than work) setting, often fail to give clear instructions to their nannies or to complain when the nannies do things they disapprove of. Lisa Spiegel, a director of a family counseling center in Manhattan,

witnesses such communication issues all the time. “I’ve seen C.E.O.’s, heads of companies, professors,” she said. “These are women who are very successful in work relationships, but the idea of talking to their baby sitter about unloading the dishwasher will give them cramps for a week.”

And then Stout tells the story of a nanny who trimmed a boy’s hair (at his request). The boy’s mother

planned a don’t-ever-do-it-again speech.

The nanny arrived the next morning. Ms. Quan said, “Good morning.” The nanny brought up the haircut immediately and explained the situation, as the son had done the night before: it was in his eyes, and he wanted it trimmed.

“O.K.,” Ms. Quan said. She thought the nanny understood that her look meant don’t do it again.

As so often happens, though, she was wrong.

As parents so often tell their children: use your words.

Double comparatives

Caught in a Lumber Liquidators ad in the New York Times Magazine on January 24, a testimonial from satisfied customer Aurelia C.:

We love our new floor, we couldn’t be any more happier …

A double comparative on the hoof.

MWDEU’s article on double comparatives notes that

“more and most came to be used in intensive function with adjectives already inflected for comparative and superlative” – “the most unkindest cut of all” (Julius Caesar) – from the 14th to the 17th century, after which criticisms by grammarians of the 18th century pretty much wiped it out from standard writing, and “the strictures on the double comparative and superlative became part of every schoolchild’s lessons—and they still are.”

(There’s another type of doubling in things like mostest, bestest, worser.)

Schoolteachers might still be striving to root out doublings, but the evidence from informal writing suggests that intensive more and most are flourishing. Googling on {“any more happier”} (as in the testimonial above), for instance, nets a huge number of examples, especially in negative and interrogative contexts, most of them exclamatory in tone. Apparently, a great many people feel that “I couldn’t be any happier” is insufficiently emphatic, so they need a more to get the full effect.

Short shot #35: paratactic conditionals

Conditionals can be expressed hypotactically, with the antecedent in a subordinate clause marked by if; or paratactically, with the antecedent and consequent simply juxtaposed:

[hypotaxis] If you break it, you bought it.

[parataxis] You break it, you bought it.

In paratactic examples the semantic relationship between the two clauses is not explicitly marked and has to be “worked out”.

Parataxis can be taken one step further, as in this example I overheard at a neighborhood restaurant last week, from a man interviewing a candidate for a job:

Any questions you have for me, just give me a call.

with the first part of the sentence conveying ‘if there are any questions you have for me; if you have any questions for me’.

I’m not sure what the range of such conditionals is. The any appears to be crucial, since some won’t do to convey ‘if there are some questions you have for me; if you have some questions for me’:

??Some questions you have for me, just give me a call.

But other any-words work:

Anything you want to know, just ask me.

Anyone you’d like to see, just tell me.

chillax(ious)

On-line discussion in my Choosing a Variant course turned recently to the verb chillax and an adjective chillaxious derived from it (the latter a find by one of the students). Some of the discussion turned on the status of either or both of these items as words.

When they consider the wordhood question, many people’s first impulse is to ask whether an item is “in the dictionary” — a move that drives professional lexicographers nutso. The pros point out, first, that there are lots of dictionaries, intended for different audiences and purposes; then, that including an item in any particular dictionary is not to confer some special status on the item, but only to record that it is used and how; next, that, for a variety of reasons, every dictionary omits a great many items that are actually in use; and, finally, that the larger the dictionary, the more likely it is to list items that are obsolete, dialectal, technical, or otherwise specialized.

Here’s lexicographer Erin McKean in a Boston Globe column entitled “Chillax”, recommending that “If it works like a word, just use it” and listing some items that fall under the rule:

Funner. Impactful. Blowiest. Territorialism. Multifunctionality. Dialoguey. Dancey. Thrifting. Chillaxing. Anonymized. Interestinger. Wackaloon. Updatelette. Noirish. Huger. Domainless. Delegator. Photocentric. Relationshippy. Bestest. Zoomable.

Chillax is not (yet) in the OED, nor is it in NOAD2 (which Erin edited), but it is listed in Wordnik (which Erin oversees), and it’s in the Merriam-Webster Online dictionary (labeled as slang) and of course in Grant Barrett’s Double-Tongued Dictionary (which describes itself as ”a growing lexicon of fringe English, focusing on slang, jargon, and new words”). The DTD entry labels it as U.S. slang (though it’s now found on U.K. and Irish sites) and gives citations (all from the web) from 1994, 1998, and 2004.

Chillax is not only a fairly recent innovation, it’s also a portmanteau (of chill and relax), and it’s primarily used by young people — three considerations that set many people dead against it.  One peever dismisses it as “a made-up word used by annoying Gen-Yers”.

There are plenty of web hits for chillax, but very few for chillaxious; mostly I get the same two over and over: an account of going for a run on “a chillaxious Friday” and an extension of “chillaxious greetings to all you good people”.

Chillaxious appears to be chillax plus the adjective-forming suffix -ious (which combines with the final [s] of chillax to yield [ʃƏs]. But this looks like playful word formation, rather than ordinary word formation, since -ious mostly combines with nominal stems (as in ambitious, with the ambit- of ambition) rather than verbal stems. Perhaps it’s related to playful word formation with -licious (links to postings on the topic here).

Child meets idiom

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky reports on her blog:

Opal: “I’m really tired.” Me: “Good, then get ready for bed spit-spot.” Opal, winsomely: “Sometimes when I’m really tired I don’t have to brush my teeth.” Me: “Those are times when you didn’t just eat a dried apricot.” Opal: “What difference does a dried apricot make?” Me: “They’re yummy, but they stick to your teeth something terrible.” Opal: “What?” Me: “The dried apricots.” Opal: “No, what thing terrible?” Me: “Umm, it’s difficult to explain.” Opal, astounded: “You don’t KNOW?” Me: “Ask your grandfather.” Opal: “You think he can explain it?” Me: “I’d certainly like to see him try.” Pause. Opal: “When I said ‘What thing terrible?’ I really meant ‘What terrible thing?’” Me: “Yes, I get that.” Opal: “Oh, good, you understood me.”

Well, the grandfather in question (me) doesn’t have a lot to say about the idiomatic adverbial something terrible ‘terribly, to a great degree’. It’s often hard to explain why idioms mean what they do, and it’s especially hard to give an explanation that will satisfy a child.

It’s not a lot of help to point out that something terrible is in a something Adj idiom family that also includes something fierce, something horrible, and something awful, as in these examples:

Try foliar feeding (I use fish/seaweed extract/kelp emulsion, sprayed on the leaves- it stinks something fierce but the plants love it!). (link)

But a serious part of the problem is how horrible most discount scents actually are. In particular, the new ‘body spray’ stuff for men stinks something horrible. (link)

If you’re willing to compound a developer from bulk chemicals, why not use good ones? This coffee stuff stinks something awful! (link)

I have no idea what the history of the idiom family is. But it’s clearly distinct from the NP construction with indefinite pronoun head and adjective postmodifier (“Something terrible happened to me yesterday”, “I met someone fascinating yesterday”, etc.) — the way Opal understood something terrible.

Talkin’ the talk

Today’s Zits: