From Max Vasilatos on Facebook, this sentence from the Wikipedia entry on laterality:
Some types of mastodon indicate laterality through the fossil remains having differing tusk lengths.
Max sent this to me not for its tortured syntax (though that’s interesting in itself) or for the technical term laterality ‘sidedness’ (a bit on that below), but because of my interest in mammuthiana (though that’s not the point of this posting).
Commenter James C. on my “Grammar shit” posting:
What would you propose instead of ‘grammar’ as a cover term for things like spelling, punctuation, and other topics of peeveology?
I’ve pondered about this for quite a few years now; my current position is to challenge the folk categorization of all these things as having something in common. But first, a little history of IAG (It’s All Grammar) on Language Log and this blog.
In the midst of the NYC Bedbug Panic of 2010 — see Tara Parker-Pope, “The Curious World of Bedbug Research” in the Health section of the NYT blog 8/30/10 and the full story, “They Crawl, They Bite, They Baffle Scientists”, by Donald G. McNeil Jr. in Science Times — came two comments in the blog on spelling:
[comment #19] I understand that entymologists refer to them as bed bugs (2 words) not bedbugs, as the author of this article uses. Apparently if the animal is an actual bug, it should be 2 words. Dragonfly is an example of an insect that is not really a fly, so they merge it into one word.
FROM TPP — Yes we have heard about this from a few readers. The Webster’s New World College Dictionary, which is our definitive source when something’s not specifically addressed by the NYT stylebook, spells it as one word. So for now, it’s bedbugs in the New York Times. But I agree the argument for bedbugs as two words is compelling. [AMZ: there is no argument here, only assertion.]
(Larry Horn on ADS-L waggishly suggested that entymologists constituted an instance of folk entomology. Certainly, some confusion between entomology and etymology is common, common enough to merit an entry in Brians. The orthographic combo entymology is also reasonably common, as you can see from a Google search — apparently as an error for entomology.)
[comment #74] Bed bugs is TWO words – not one. The general rule for writing out common names of insects is as follows. If the insect name is a misnomer (e.g., the dragonfly is NOT a fly and neither is a damselfly), then the whole name is written as one word. If it is not a misnomer, then it is written as two words (e.g., house fly, which is a real fly). The bed bug is a “true” bug and therefore is two words.
Drat! I missed the January 20 event. Got this FAIL Blog entry from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky only on Thursday:
Penguins are a kind of amphibian?
A recent addition to the menu at Three Seasons in Palo Alto: a rock shrimp appetizer. Yummy. But I wondered about the name rock shrimp: was the compound subsective (so that rock shrimp are a type of shrimp) or non-subsective (so that rock shrimp are distinct from (true) shrimp, the way that rock lobsters, aka spiny lobsters, are distinct from (true) lobsters, daylilies are distinct from (true) lilies, dwarf planets distinct from (true) planets, etc.)?
I asked the owner, John Le Hung, about rock shrimp. He told me that they were not shrimp, that they tasted more like lobster than shrimp (I verified this), and that they had very hard shells, hence the name (shells hard as rock). So: non-subsective.
Then I descended into a confusing landscape of culinary and biological terminology, as with my lobster adventures of a little while ago.
David Leonhardt in the NYT Sunday Review on October 9th, in “The Depression: If Only Things Were That Good”:
Economists often distinguish between cyclical trends and secular trends — which is to say, between short-term fluctuations and long-term changes in the basic structure of the economy. No decade points to the difference quite like the 1930s: cyclically, the worst decade of the 20th century, and yet, secularly, one of the best.
The cyclical/secular contrast is nice phonologically — though it’s always dangerous to have opposed technical terms that are phonologically similar and semantically related.
This use of secular was new to me, but then I’m not trained in economics. It seems it’s been around for over a century.
From the front page of the September 19th New York Times, “A British Soccer Team? What’s That? Say Scots, Welsh and Irish” (by Jeré Longman and Sarah Lyall):
LONDON — The plan seems eminently reasonable: field a soccer team to represent Britain at next year’s Olympics, which after all are being held here, the home of the modern game.
But there are several problems. For one thing, there is no such thing as a British soccer team. Instead, in a country where devotion to sports is fueled by ferocious regional and political rivalries, there are instead individual teams representing Britain’s fractious, proud and fiercely competitive constituent nations — namely England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Two things: First, the use of Britain to stand for the UK (the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland). Second, the reference to England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland as the constituent nations of Britain (a form of expression that is used throughout the article).
My posting on argument structure in porn (with a link to my posting on “Brads”) got picked up by Boing Boing, which brought me an enormous number of site views (7,201 on Friday, 3,225 on Saturday, 2,066 on Sunday, 1,075 on Monday, 717 on Tuesday; an ordinary day gets 200-300 views) and some new regular readers (and, so far, no vacuous or trash-talking comments on this blog).
My posting on formations in -tard elicited some Facebook comments that were facetious (reminders of leotard and custard) and some that were dismayed at the offensiveness of these formations and the noun retard from which they derive. All this stuff is indeed offensive and is so labeled by lexicographic sources.
And behind this lies a nasty jungle of technical terms, euphemisms, semantic shifts, lexical replacements, specific slurs, and generalized insults — such a tangle that there’s no easy way to even talk about the semantic domain in question, which has to do with what once was called mental defectiveness (itself a technical term covering various vernacular terms) and then mental retardation or simply retardation (with the image of slowness or being held back). The corresponding adjectival formations are mentally retarded or (later, in another euphemistic move) mentally challenged.
From the op-ed page of the NYT on January 18, “Me and My Algorithm” by Seth Freeman, which begins:
Algorithms, as you probably know, are the computer programs that infer from your profile (in the case of Facebook) and the content of your e-mails (in the case of Gmail) [or your pattern of searching and buying on Amazon.com] your interests and preferences, enabling ads to be displayed to the customers most likely to be interested in specific products.
… The algorithms are programmed, I believe, to get to know us better over time, and rather than resent the invasion of privacy I have come to feel a grudging respect for, and even a growing sense of intimacy with, my own personal algorithm. You have to admire, for example, the inventive audacity of a program that would read an e-mail someone sent me about “Holocaust deniers” and think that I might be shopping for a Holistic Dentist.
Freeman goes on in this vein with other entertaining examples.
The term algorithm has traveled a long way from its use as a technical term in mathematics to the much broader use illustrated in Freeman’s piece.
