premise(s)

Ned Deily reports coming across this sign in a San Francisco store window:

THIS PREMISE
IS UNDER 24 HR.
VIDEO SURVEILLANCE

Yes, this premise is, rather than these premises are. The result is something that looks like an instance of the logical term premise (so that Deily posted a photo of the sign on Facebook under the heading “department of rhetorical security”), rather than the ‘house or building’ word.

The ways of plurals in English are intricate indeed, and premise(s) exhibits several of these intricacies.

Ask AZBlog: googled maps NP

Ben lee Volk writes:

A friend of mine showed me the following post from the blog “texts from last night”:

(480): I just googled maps his house, and took the virtual tour back to my apartment, just so I could visualize the walk of shame in the morning. (link)

and asked: “googled maps? I’d probably say “google mapped”. I googled (not maps) for more hits, and there are few relevant ones…

This form reminded me your post on internal inflection only with “ed” suffix for past tense, rather than “s” suffix for plural (as in “shouts out”). Would you agree, or do you believe it to be something else?

My first idea was that the “last night” example was just missing a preposition: “maps of/for/from his house”. Inadvertent omissions like this do happen, after all.

Then I looked at some of those relevant hits, for instance some with “googled maps it” (where “it” is the direct object):

Beautiful place! I just googled maps it and turns out we’re only 8.5 hours away.. (link)

when i googled maps it, it brought me somewhere else.  not the other location though.  strange. (link)

There are suspiciously many relevant hits, in fact.

Then I came across examples like the following:

I also googled(maps) the NY address she gave me and it says it doesn’t exists. I personally won’t proceed with them..I think it’s a scam, so.. check it out. (link)

The form made me a bit suspicious; I googled/maps their RETURN address, several financial businesses appeared at the SAME address:… (link)

Ah. You can google maps ‘google up maps’, but you can also google (up) places or addresses using Google Maps, and some people apparently can refer to this latter activity by the verb google(maps), google (maps), google/maps, or just plain google maps:

Rich, Google maps the address once you enter it [the Toronto subway]. (link)

Hope this helps, you should be able to google maps the address. (link)

(and a number of others).

Google maps can then be used as an idiomatic combination of a head verb and a following noun; compare take part and take place. So inflection is on the head, internal to the idiom. The past tense of google maps the address is googled maps the address.

Postings on internal/external inflection

Here are some postings, on Language Log and on this blog, on internal and external inflection. This inventory is probably incomplete.

(Note: the case of noun-noun compounds with a plural as first element — activities center, Mets fan, etc. — is a separate topic from this one and is not covered in this posting.)

EB, 5/28/06: And the plural of MacBook Pro is …:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003195.html

GP, 8/10/06: The dying adjective laureate:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003438.html
poet laureate (vs. Nobel laureate)

ML, 8/21/06: Term for shifting plural s to the end of initialisms and acronyms?:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003484.html
WMD etc.

GP, 8/21/06: No plural shifting term:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003486.html
follow-up to 3484

ML, 4/22/07: Cavett’s comforting cavils:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004433.html
attorney general, film noir, and more

http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/external-internal-and-double-inflection/
ticking off

http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2009/07/11/more-internal-inflection/
shout-out; in comments: Whopper Junior, fuck-up, Chicken-In-A-Biskit

More internal inflection

Cartoonist Ryan North wrote me on 9 July about a posting of mine reproducing one of his Dinosaur Comic strips:

… Also, thanks for the shouts out to my comic – I really appreciate it and am also flattered!

North and I both understood this to be an “internal plural” of the composite noun shout-out ‘a favorable mention’ (though that interpretation might not be immediately obvious to all readers; I’ll get to that in a moment). (Earlier discussion of external, internal, and double plurals here — including a somewhat surprising internal plural hards-on for hard-on ‘erection of the penis’.)

External, internal, and double inflection

Meg Worley commented yesterday on my inventory of two-part back-formed verbs:

One that doesn’t quite fit the form but keeps company in spirit, due to the verb coming first: “to drag-ass.” I’ve noticed this quite a bit over the last couple of years, mainly in the present progressive or the imperfect (”I was drag-assing all day today”).

I’m not sure I can think of any other verb-first back formations like this one.

I suspect that such examples are of a rather different phenomenon from the cases I’ve been looking at in my recent postings on back formation

Stick to those good old irregular plurals

Back on 7 April, Philip B. Corbett’s “After Deadline” column in the NYT (which “examines questions of grammar, usage and style encountered by writers and editors of The Times”) noted a new stylebook entry on dwarf, which begins:

dwarf(s) (n.) Use this as the usual term for people with a genetic condition resulting in unusually short stature. Midget, once used to describe dwarfs of otherwise normal proportions …

Two commenters objected strongly to dwarfs as a plural of dwarf. These objections surely arise in part from an adherence to One Right Way: variant usages are not allowed, so if the writers themselves use dwarves, dwarfs must be wrong. But something further is going on here: a belief in the superiority of irregular forms over regular forms, especially where the writer believes the irregulars are older. (At least some usage critics seem to think that regularization is the work of the ignorant, the less educated, the lazy, and so on.)

But sometimes, as in this case, critics are wrong about the history and about current usage.

Showed up

Adrian Bailey wrote me this morning about a headline in the Times (of London) from 16 April:

Paula and Noorul showed up on The Apprentice

(Paula and Noorul are competitors on the television show The Apprentice.) Bailey, blogging under the name Dadge, balked at the headline, taking it to be an error:

Nice of them to show up

… Oh dear. Could The Times be running their headlines through some naff commercially available grammar checker? (link)

In fact, the Times headline is ambiguous. The two relevant interpretations have showed as a past participle in transitive show up (the interpretation the headline writer intended) and as a past tense in intransitive show up (the interpretation Bailey got). I’m supposing that Bailey dislikes showed as a past participle (preferring shown instead), so that the second interpretation is the one most easily available to him. The usage facts about the past participle turn out to have some interesting twists, though.