Spectacular spelling fail

A Wisconsin highway sign, noted on The Smallest Minority site on July 30:

(under the heading “Guvernment Skools” and filed under “Education”). The company that made the sign quickly fixed it (the instructions to the company had everything spelled correctly).

The spectacular spelling fail — all three words on the main sign are misspelled — is, you will see, attributed to the school system; it’s framed as yet another symptom of the appalling decline in the quality of schooling. (Some of the comments also snipe at Wisconsinites.)

For some people, everything bad in language is the fault of the schools, or of young people, or both, and these opinions seem to be immune to facts. In the case at hand, there’s an obvious alternative hypothesis.

All three errors are letter inversions: IS for SI, IE for EI, EI for IE. This is just too perfect (well, too perfectly wrong). It’s what you see in the spelling of many dyslexics (I’ve had dyslexic students who spelled like this — very bright students, I hasten to add). If that’s the root cause, then we might wonder how a dyslexic came to be making up highway signs.

(Hat tip to Victor Steinbok.)

X can’t mean Y

Back on 23 May on ADS-L, I noted an occurrence (in speech) of “The military can do so much”, clearly intended to mean, in the context, ‘the military can do only so much’ (i.e., not everything, or not a lot, while “the military can do so much” otherwise conveys ‘the military can do a lot’). Not long after, a poster wrote:

If “can do so much” can actually mean “can do only so much”, then perhaps Churchill really meant “Never have only so few owed only so much to only so many”? I don’t think so. The sentence really needs “only” in there to make sense.

This is one version of the “X can’t mean Y” (sometimes “X doesn’t mean Y”) reaction to reports that some people sometimes use X to mean Y: flat rejection of the pairing of form X with meaning Y, usually on the basis that the objector wouldn’t use X that way (grammatical egocentrism). Note that the objection is framed as statement of fact (about the language in general, not just about the objector’s variety of the language), though actually it serves as a normative judgment (that X shouldn’t be used to mean Y).

A celebration of American English

Political consultant, pollster, and sloganeer Frank Luntz, in Words That Work (2007), pp. xiv-xv:

IN DEFENSE OF LANGUAGE

For the record, I love the English language. I have built a career attending to matters of rhetoric, to the painstaking and deliberate choice of words. I love the soft twang of Southern belles and the gum-popping slang of Southern California valley girls, the gentle lyricism of the upper Midwest and the in-your-face bluntness of Brooklyn cabbies. I’m enthralled by the bass rumble of James Earl Jones, the velvet smoothness of Steve Wynn, the upper-crust sophistication of Orson Welles and Richard Burton, and the sexy intonations of Lauren Bacall, Sally Kellerman, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. When spoken well, the language of America is a language of hope, of everyday heroes, of faith in the goodness of people.

At its best, American English is also the practical language of commerce. The most effective communication is the unadorned, unpretentious language of farmers, mom-and-pop shopkeepers, and the thousands of businesses located on the hundreds of Main Street USAs, as well as the no-nonsense, matter-of-fact, bottom-line language of men and women who built the greatest companies the world has ever seen.

This is meant to be celebratory and to sound heartfelt, but it strikes me as patronizing and overwrought. But then it’s Luntz.

(Richard Burton, by the way, was a child of the Welsh working class.)

Attititudes and attributions

A Language Log posting by Geoff Pullum  that started with the pronunciation of the composer Sibelius’s name in Finnish has diverged in many directions, one of them having to do with word-initial [h] in varieties of English. The presence or absence of this [h] is noticeable to most speakers, since the difference is phonemic, potentially distinguishing otherwise identical words (ham vs. am, heart vs. art, hail vs. ail, etc.). You are especially likely to notice an [h] where you don’t have one yourself or the absence of [h] where you have one yourself. Here’s the commenter Noetica on the subject:

In Australia we notice the American way with ‘erbs, and it sounds strange and pretentious to us.

This comment, clearly from someone who has an initial [h] in herb, both expresses an attitude about the (common American) [h]-less variant (“it sounds strange”) and attributes a motive to those who use it (it sounds “pretentious”). The attribution of pretentiousness was a surprise to me; it’s a reversal of the usual judgements about [h]-less herb from people who have an [h] in this word.