Short shot #29: a big give

More on the nouning front, continuing the theme from recent postings on the nouns open (as in “a cold open”, here) and quit (as in “your next quit”, here) and harking back to a Language Log posting from last year on the noun ask (as in “a big ask”): the noun give, which got some press last year thanks to Oprah Winfrey’s (short-lived) reality series Big Give, in which contestants (supplied with a considerable amount of money) vied for the title of America’s greatest unknown philanthropist.

There are quite a few sites devoted to giving challenges and reports of gifts and using expressions like “a big give” and “a huge give”, as in these comments here:

Giving gifts instead of receiving gifts for your birthday … someone else on here said they started doing that, and I think it is an awesome idea.
It’s cool that you got a huge give from a stranger …

simply wonderful!!! what a good man and a loving give to a stranger.

super birthday present and give!

Some of these sites use all three of the nouns gift, give, and giving, and sometimes present or contribution as well. These might be subtly different in meaning.

(OED2 has a noun give, but in the sense ‘a yielding, giving way’, a nouning of the verb give ‘yield, give way’.)

Short shot #28: your next quit

Caught in an television commercial this morning, the expression “your next quit”, referring to your next attempt to quit smoking. Fair number of occurrences of this expression on the web, for example:

To make your next quit the last, learn everything you can about the process — yes, quitting is a process — before you take your last puff. (link)

The same site also has “My Quit Place”  and “every quit attempt”.

The nouning quit isn’t new — the OED (draft revision of December 2007) has cites from 1918 on — but this use seems like a specialization of the sense given by the OED (where it’s marked as U.S.):

The action or an instance of quitting, spec. of leaving a job or of departing a place. Also a person who quits.

Short shot #27: to queen-wave

Chris Ambidge writes to tell me about an early Xmas present he got from a friend:

It’s a 20cm tall mannikin of The Queen: with usual hairdo, peach coloured dress & coat, sensible shoes, smile, white gloves, handbag & (of course) pearls. But wait — there’s much more. Her handbag is a solar cell, so put her someplace bright & it works — to cause her up-held hand to queen-wave.

Ah, the back-formed verb to queen-wave, based on the synthetic compound queen-waving ‘waving (one’s hand) like the Queen’. An entertaining survey of years of Queen-waving (from the Onion News Network) can be seen here.

Singular, plural, collective

A follow-up to my posting on Ned Halley’s Dictionary of Modern English Grammar, about plurals and collectives.

The issue comes up in Halley’s entry on apostrophe (the mark of punctuation), where he writes (punctuation as in the original):

There remains the little problem of where the apostrophe goes according to single [I assume he's (incorrectly) treating single and singular as interchangeable technical terms] and plural possessive use. But again, it’s simple. If the possessor is single, as in “the girl’s hat” the apostrophe is placed before the ’s.’ If the possessor is plural, as in “the girls’ school” the apostrophe goes after the ’s’ because it is, in effect, abbreviating what would otherwise be “the girls’s school.” Remember that collective words, such as children, crowd, and people, are singular, so in the possessive are written as “the children’s party”, “the crowd’s favourite”, “the people’s friend” and so on. [The emphasis is mine.]

This is seriously confused. I’m guessing that, as with single and singular, Halley is confusing characterizations of meaning (reference to an individual, as with single) and characterizations of grammatical properties (allowing an expression to take part in various syntactic constructions, for example subject-verb agreement, as with singular). There are excellent reasons why individuated reference and singular grammatical number should be distinguished — though they are obviously related — and I suppose it’s too much to expect that your typical person on the street would appreciate this point, but it’s utterly crucial for someone who hangs out a shingle saying they’re offering advice on grammar, syntax, and usage (as Halley does).

Here are the facts: the English nouns children and people are grammatically plural –

these/*this children/people [determiner agreement]

The children/people were/*was shouting. [subject-verb agreement]

(and refer to collectivities), but the noun crowd (which also refers to a collectivity) is grammatically singular, as can be seen from determiner agreement:

this/*these crowd of well-wishers

A complication: collective nouns like crowd sometimes show mixed behavior with respect to other sorts of agreement, allowing “notional” plural agreement in certain circumstances. But the facts about determiner agreement are clear, and indeed collective nouns are count nouns and have ordinary plural forms (crowds, for instance).

What sets children and people apart from most plural nouns is that they don’t have the -s suffix of regular plurals. Children is one of a number of irregular plurals, of several types (women, teeth, alumni, and more). People is one of a number of plural-only nouns with no suffix -s (cattle and police are two others). And there are zero-plural (or “base-plural”) nouns as well (like sheep), with the plural form identical to the singular. These are well-known phenomena, described (along with some other anomalies in the English system of number in nouns) in every reasonably extensive reference work on the structure of English. It’s inexcusable that Halley should not know about them.

spork

Today’s Bizarro takes on the spork, a portmanteau implement with a portmanteau name:

The spork manages to be neither a fully satisfying spoon nor a fully satisfying fork. (I enjoy the word, though.) Its virtue is that it allows places that supply eating utensils to get by with fewer of them.

The playpus has not evolved a spork bill, no doubt because its spoon-like bill works so well in scooping up small creatures from riverbeds and catching them while swimming.

Short shot #24: douchefag

A recent Language Log posting of mine on the rise of douche as an insult (directed at people) elicited a number of comments on the older, longer insult douchebag. And now (I suppose predictably) we have the portmanteau douchefag, which I came across in a feature in the December 2009 issue of Details magazine but which seems to have been around for a while.

(Details is aimed at cool guys, both straight and gay.)

The piece is entitled “The Rise of the Douchefag” — announced on the cover as “Introducing the G-Bag: A Guide to the Gay Douchebag” and summarized inside this way:

The fist-bumping, Bluetooth-wearing dude’s dude isn’t the only tool in the box. Meet the douchefag–a plucked, preened party boy who’s taken being gay to new depths of tackiness.

After that it’s a side-by-side snarky comparison between Gay and Gay Douchebag, with items like:

Bleaches teeth VS. Bleaches anus

Dead lifts to shape his butt VS. Buys shapewear to dead lift his butt

Buys a Beckham jersey on eBay VS. Buys Beckham’s underwear on eBay

Posts sleeveless pictures on Connexion VS. Posts pantsless pictures on Manhunt

It goes on and on.

On the noun watch

A nouning, open (in a cold open), and a mass-to-count conversion, a slang ‘a slang word/expression’, that recently came to my attention, plus a digression on the nouning reveal and a bonus find of new uses of lingo.

Gender troubles 2: emeriti faculty

Item 2 from Chris Laning, who came across the following in a piece of “bureaucratic prose describing the benefits of being a faculty member emeritus”. (It’s in a draft text, so I’m concealing the name of the university in question.)

As a [University X] emeriti faculty, you are eligible for …

Laning saw this, probably correctly, as an attempt to achieve a sex-neutral term, choosing neither emeritus nor emerita. But it clanged in her ear.

sauced

Ann Burlingham has written to report on a conversation with a co-worker who asked about sauced meaning ‘drunk’. When Ann told him that the word was soused, he maintained that he’d never heard that word (or the noun souse) in his 32 years of life.

But sauced ‘drunk’ is all over the net, though not in OED2 (which has only the sense ’seasoned, flavored’) or NOAD2 or AHD4. It is in the Random House Dictionary (2009) and at least one slang dictionary, Spears’s Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions (4th ed., 2007).

Given the noun sauce ‘alcoholic liquor’ (slang, originally U.S., attested in OED2 from 1940 on), occurring in idioms like on the sauce and hit the sauce, sauced meaning ‘drunk’ makes a lot of sense. In fact, it could arise in two different ways.

Ask AZBlog: metanalysis

Tom Limoncelli has passed on to me a query from a friend of his:

I have found myself running syllables together in unexpected ways:

instead of “hobo beans” I might say “hobob eans”

or instead of “Jon Bon Jovi” “Jon Bonge Ovi”

or instead of “soup and sandwich” “soups and which” (which is another set of problems, perhaps)

Do you or any linguists of your acquaintance know of this phenomenon?

It happens only orally, and not in writing.

The short answer is: metanalysis, a.k.a. recutting, though the third example seems to involve omission of and followed by recutting. But there’s more to be said here.