Jon Lighter on ADS-L comments on my usage:
Arnold’s unremarkable syntax from the “Chicano” thread: ”the first OED2 cite, from 1947 Arizona, is somewhat disparaging in tone.”
In case some young folks don’t realize it, this journalistic use of a year-date as an adjective [well, prenominal modifier] is pretty “new” …
The usage is so natural to me that I thought nothing of it, nor did I recognize it as a relatively recent innovation or associate it with journalists.
After seeing myself cited repeatedly as the source of
Zwicky’s Law, which states categorically that “The more irrelevant garbage you put into a sentence, the better it sounds.”
I pondered. This is from this source, but all the cites go back to John Lawler. The sentiment is one I’ve expressed several times (in connection with grammaticality judgments on specific sentences), though not in fact categorically, and usually light-heartedly, but I didn’t recognize this wording, and couldn’t find the source. So I wrote John to pin the thing down. Turns out it’s Linguists’ Lore.
Posted by Mike McKinley on Facebook this morning:
Ah, I recognized this as a variant of a quotation I have long admired. From Boswell’s Life of Johnson, courtesy of the Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page:
Johnson having argued for some time with a pertinacious gentleman; his opponent, who had talked in a very puzzling manner, happened to say, “I don’t understand you, Sir;” upon which Johnson observed, “Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.”
Reader Adrian e-mailed me yesterday to ask about John McPhee’s reminiscence in the New Yorker‘s July 2nd issue (“The name of the subject shall not be the title”) in The Writing Life department, in which McPhee claimed that the expression F-word wasn’t in use in 1975. Adrian had tried, unsuccessfully, to get Google N-gram to track the expression (but reported a Google Books hit from 1969, alas an artifact of the screwiness of GB searches) and now was asking me what I knew about the matter.
First, McPhee’s account, coming in the middle of a history of fuck at the magazine. Then, some usage data.
(About my life, not language.)
Benita Bendon Campbell writes from Colorado:
Not too long ago, while cleaning a bunch of neglected desk drawers, I happened upon a few sheets of faded pale-green scratch paper from your days at The Reading Eagle. Pure Proust.
Ah, the green headline pads!
The New York Times yesterday had its annual report on baby names in the city (“Prediction: You Will Meet Many Jaydens and Isabellas” by N. R. Kleinfeld). On top: Jayden for boys, Isabella for girls. Michael continues to decline (though it remains on top in New York State), as does Ashley.
Meanwhile, I’ve been coping with name puzzles in my research on the Daingerfield family and their kin: many names repeated over and over again across the generations, and many people referred to by different names.
In an extended vivid dream last night, some colleague said, bitingly, of a paper of mine:
I dislike what you say and how you say it, but I like that you said it.
The paper was about a dozen specific words (none of which I can remember, of course; I never think to take notes in dreams), but I can’t recall what aspect of them was at issue, beyond its not being their phonology: morphology, syntax, usage, sociolinguistic status, etymology, whatever.
In my dream, I did mount a reply, but that too has vanished in the mists of memory. I don’t think I commented on the metacritique — that there is value in clearly saying things that the critic believes to be wrong.
In the tradition of my Chicken Verdicchio, Peking on Mystic, and musical memories postings, more recollections of the Boston area in the early 60s. Something of a focus on food and dining, with occasional linguistic interludes.
As Christmas rolls upon us and I’m resurrecting memories of food in the Boston area in 1962-65 (here and here), I’ve come up with musical memories of the period, starting with the Christmas music of Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica (“Noah Greenberg thump”, as a friend referred to it), notably “Nova, Nova, Ave Fit Ex Eva” (‘Ave is made from Eva’: Ave ‘hail’, as in Ave, Maria, is an anagram of Eva ‘Eve’) and the equally rousing “Riu, Riu, Chiu”. And then on to Handel’s oratorio Acis and Galatea and a difference with a friend as to who introduced who to it. And then, non-musically, to a similar difference between Haj Ross and me as to who invented the playful technical term scanting out.
From the Summer 2011 issue (#42) of Cabinet magazine, this piece of found art:
by David Bunn, Forgetfulness (discarded catalogue card from the Los Angeles Central Library), 2011.
The special theme of the issue is forgetting, with pieces on censorship, document shredding, and the forgotten knowledge of herbal abortifacients, among other things.
