Caught on a Law & Order episode, something like:

The third name on that list died.

This is not an exact quote, but in the actual line, name was used to refer to a person, and that’s the point of linguistic interest. This is a word/thing metonymy, a phenomenon last mentioned on this blog in the most recent “Cheese or font?” posting.

I’m not at all sure what the limits of this sort of metonymy are (though contextualization helps a lot), nor do I know if it’s been studied.

On the occasion of Warren Buffett’s purchase of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation, Dan Barry did an “Ideas & Trends” piece (“Awesome Train Set, Mr. Buffett”) in the New York Times on November 8 about the intense railfans sometimes known as foamers — a topic last discussed in this blog in April.

Interviews with Steve Barry, the managing editor of Railfan & Railroad magazine, and Steve Glischinski, who’s written several books about trains, touched on the name foamers:

Both Mr. Barry and Mr. Glischinski acknowledged that railroad employees long ago christened railfans as “foamers,” though they differ in their understanding of the term’s origin. Mr. Barry said it derives from Foamite, which stands for “Far Out and Mentally Incompetent Train Enthusiasts”; Mr. Glischinski said it comes from the notion of foaming-at-the-mouth craziness.

Mr. Barry said that some railfans now proudly declare themselves foamers to deny the term its derogatory intent. Even so, Mr. Glischinski doesn’t care for enthusiasts who say “I went foaming today.”

“I find that weird,” he said. “I am just a railroad fan.”

He also noted that some railroad employees have other acronymic readings, one of which (in Dan Barry’s phrasing) “uses a very, very bad word”.

There’s a lot here, from the rejection of the label foamer by some railfans to the attempt to reclaim it by others, plus the coining of a verb foam for engaging in railfan activities, not to mention another piece of NYT indirection in the avoidance of fuck.

But my focus in this posting is on people’s attempts to compose etymologies for foamer. The obvious source involves a reference to foaming at the mouth (as Glischinski suggests). But many people find straightforward accounts like this one unsatisfying, so they search for something more interesting.

Stories — especially complex ones with specific persons mentioned and other specific details provided — are satisfying. People love stories, as I said in my earlier foamer posting (where I called this love of stories narratophilia), and so they concoct etymythological narratives. (The term etymythology is Larry Horn’s, from a 2004 American Speech article, “Spitten image: Etymythology and fluid dynamics”.) The scholarly literature on word and phrase origins is chock-full of thoughtful discussions of etymythologies, especially narrative ones, like the foamer story I posted about earlier.

Another popular type of etymythology is the (false) acronym, like the one offered for foamer by Steve Barry. A passion for acronymic etymologies seems to be a modern phenomenon (if an intellectual historian hasn’t looked into the history, it would make a nice, but challenging, project), but by now they’re rampant; it’s easy to collect hundreds of them.

You can see the attraction of acronymic etymologies: they seem to provide some sense for material that is otherwise just arbitrarily associated with meaning. (Borrowing from another language is yet another route to etymythology. There are lots of fanciful borrowing accounts out there.)

The acronym account above for foamer, treating the term as a shortening of an acronym FOAMITE, is especially devious and implausible. As far as I can tell, foamite as a term for railfans is rare, much rarer than foamer, and appears to have been devised as a variant of foamer, not the other way around. In any case, it’s really hard for me to imagine Far [or in some accounts, Freaked] Out And Mentally Incompetent Train Enthusiasts being used as a label for railfans.

Some acronym fans have been more ingenious. There are reports of foamer being derived directly as an acronym: Foaming-Over-At-the-Mouth Excited Railfan.

As for the acronym with a “very, very bad word” concealed in it, that would appear to FRN (Fucking Rail Nuts), which is not an acronym in the strict sense, but in my terms an initialism (read as a sequence of letter names). But it’s at least plausible as a piece of initialistic avoidance (cf. WTF), and fucking rail nuts is imaginable as a contemptuous epithet.

A Brainwaves cartoon about distracted driving:

(Hat tip to Karen Davis.)

Having posted on the back-formed verb shirt-lift a while ago — a verb based on the synthetic compounds shirt-lifting and shirt-lifter (in two families of senses) — I had hopes of coming across the corresponding verb pants-lower (with pants either in the mostly U.S. sense ‘trousers’ or in the sense ‘underpants’). Certainly, visual depictions of the act in question are easy to find in some places, and you can find plenty of references to pants-lowering on the web, indeed references to many different kinds of pants-lowering, from hip-hop pants-lowering to ordinary pants-lowering in undressing and the like.

I was particularly interested in pants-lowering as a sexual display, analogous to the “torso display” kind of shirt-lifting. Here’s a relatively modest example from an underwear ad (primarily aimed at a gay male audience — men who can both appreciate the display and identify with the model):

The model is shown on the right performing a first-stage pants-lowering maneuver, the beginning of a strip tease. We don’t see any pubic hair (but maybe he shaves his pubes), and not even the base of his penis.

On linguistic matters: lots of relevant hits for the synthetic compound pants-lowering, but (unsurprisingly) none for the awkward synthetic compound pants-lowerer. And none for back-formed verb to pants-lower, though you can imagine situations where it could be useful. Maybe it will crop up eventually; fresh 2-part back-formed verbs turn up with some regularity.

The November 7 New Scientist article “Inject cells to stop body attacking self” (by Jessica Hamzelou) twice refers to cells (regulatory T-cells) that “dampen down the body’s immune response”. I would have used damp down or plain dampen (without the particle down), or even plain damp. Dampen down struck me as overkill.

Dampen down turns out to be reasonably common on the web, and from a variety of  sources, e.g.:

[Times Online] Jack Straw tries to dampen down claims of a plot against Gordon Brown (link)

[Birmingham Mail] Blues felt compelled to dampen down fresh speculation about Patrick Vieira … (link)

[House of Commons debate] Will the Prime Minister dampen down the hysteria in this country about Irish-American support for violence in Northern Ireland …? (link)

[Harper's Magazine] The insurgents have made it pretty clear in a series of public statements and private communications that they’re willing to start talking and dampen down the violence if the United States commits to withdrawing from Iraq. (link)

These have the transitive verb dampen in the sense ‘dull, deaden, diminish the force or ardour of, depress’ (OED2) rather than in the sense ‘make damp’. There are also intransitive uses, as in this quotation from the Harper’s article linked to above:

… make a credible commitment to withdrawing and the insurgency will dampen down and we’ll …

The hits for dampen down are very heavily (but not entirely) from British sources — this despite the fact that OED2 labels plain dampen (it doesn’t have cites for dampen down) as “now chiefly U.S.” Of course, that was 20 years ago.

Damp down (in the relevant sense) is of course reasonably common in both American and British sources. There’s even at least one New Scientist cite:

Body’s natural painkillers may damp down phobias (link)

[Historical notes. The noun damp, the adjective damp, the verb damp, and the verb dampen all have a variety of senses, some now obsolete or used only in special contexts. The noun damp is the first attested (but only from 1480, though it has correspondents in a number of Germanic languages, back to Middle Low German and Middle High German) and the verb dampen is the most recent (17th century). All these items are historically related, in a complex way.

Because of this historical relatedness, the senses 'make slightly wet' and 'make less strong or intense' (NOAD2) for dampen are put together in a single entry in most dictionaries, even though the first seems clearly to be the adjective damp plus causative -en and the second looks like an extended variant of the verb damp -- with the result that modern speakers have trouble seeing items with such divergent meanings as being "the same" verb.]

In the first installment on this topic, I looked at pasttimes presenting players with a disjunctive questions: Is this thing an X or a Y? These questions are framed so that they’ll be taken as involving exclusive disjunction; the answer “both” isn’t offered.

Sometimes this seems reasonable. For X-Face or O-Face?, it’s unlikely (though not impossible) for a guitarist, say, to be expressing great emotional involvement with the music and experiencing sexual climax at the very same moment, so that the answer “both” would very rarely be appropriate. Things are different for Gay or Eurotrash?, and different in another way for Cheese or Font?

It is certainly possible for someone to be both gay and Eurotrash, and in such cases the answer “both” to the question “Is Gilles gay or Eurotrash?”, conveying ‘Gilles is gay and Gilles is Eurotrash’, would be accurate.

(In fact, Gay or Eurotrash? usually doesn’t come with real-world answers, but is played as a game of opinion. For each photograph, a program tots up the judgments given by a number of players and then reports the group opinion. Gay or Metrosexual? is usually played the same way.)

However, for Cheese or Font?, the answer “both” is the right answer in some cases, but that answer doesn’t mean that there is some referent that is both a cheese and a font (hard to imagine what such a thing would be like). Instead, it means that there’s a cheese with some name and there’s also a font with this name; strictly speaking, we’re dealing with homophonous names here.

Romano is a cheese, and Romano is a font — meaning that Romano is the name of a type of cheese and Romano is the name of a type of font. Saying that Romano is both a cheese and a font exploits the very frequent metonymy of name and thing.

Similarly, if there’s a disease and a plant with the same name. (There probably are, but I haven’t yet found them.) A game of Disease or Plant? would then have to admit the answer “both” in this case.

Following up on my brief posting on the NYT story “When Texting Kills”, two things: some comments on the way the story was framed, as about the bad consequences of texting, when in fact the root problem is distracted driving, whatever the source; and notes on the expression distracted driving.

The bones of the story: one driver, engrossed in texting and therefore inattentive to what was going on, ran into a car and killed its driver, and got a prison sentence as a result.

The Times story took a gratuitous swipe at texting and texters, as if texting by itself would lead to such such dire consequences. The story then fits into a larger set of attitudes than damns texting (and Twitter, and Facebook, and more) as a destructive attitude and digs at those who engage in it (typically characterized as young and mostly female). There’s a long series of Language Log postings casting a cold eye on these attitudes.

Now, of course it wasn’t texting per se that led to the death of a driver, but prolonged texting while driving. Texting demands attention, it’s a distraction from the task of driving, so of course if you try to text a lot while driving, you’re likely to be dangerous.

Just so with using a cellphone for talking (rather than texting), though I don’t see anyone condemning cellphones as the implements of the devil, or of airheaded young women. The fact is that these days pretty much everyone uses cellphones for talking — to the point where they’re considered virtually an essential element of modern life.

But talking on a cellphone can be just as much a distraction from driving as texting on a cellphone, and hands-on use of cellphones while driving, for any purpose (talking, texting, playing games, watching movies, whatever), has been banned in many jurisdictions:

(This is a wonderful sign, but it’s not a real one. It’s just a demo of one style of sign you can order up on the Danger Sign Generator site. Hat tip to Chris Ambidge, who also tells me that Ontario provincial law changed recently to make hands-on cellphone use while operating a motor vehicle illegal.)

On to the expression distracted driving, which made it into the news (well, the dictionary news) recently when it was named the 2009 Word of the Year by the New World College Dictionary (hat tip to Ben Zimmer). From the web site:

A sign of the times surely, distracted driving is another reflection – and consequence – of our ongoing romance with all things digital and mobile and the enhanced capabilities they provide. While it now may be easier and quicker to feed our multitasking habits, it is not always safe, and many jurisdictions are formalizing that position by making it a crime to text or otherwise use a cellphone while driving. In other words, CrackBerry users beware, lest a charge of DWD (driving while distracted) or DWT (driving while texting) stain your record, not to mention endanger yourself and others. (CrackBerry – the mocking term for the BlackBerry™ and its “addicts” – was the 2006 Word of the Year.)

The term distracted driving is also a linguistic catch, note Webster’s New World® editors. As with drunk driving, it is not the driving that is drunk or distracted, but rather the driver. The target of the modifier distracted has been changed. Called hypallage, this twist is frequently seen in poetry, but as terms like restless night, juvenile detention center, and careless remark attest, such semantic inversion is not limited to the heights of language use.

As I explained on Language Log a couple of years ago, in hypallage (or “transferred epithet”), an adjective that syntactically modifies a noun is understood as applying semantically not to the referent of that noun but to some other referent (one not necessarily denoted by a noun in the discourse). My examples at the time included free-range mayonnaise (mayonnaise made with eggs from free-range chickens), dodged a narrow bullet (narrowly dodged a bullet), turned the complete game around (turned the game around completely), and the colorful suck extramarital toes (suck toes extramaritally, outside of marriage).

Hypallage is one type of non-predicating modification (recent discussion, with links, here), and it can be difficult indeed to decide when non-predicating modification should be categorized as hypallage — in indigenous nudity and contagious countries (from the posting I just linked to), for instance.

The November 9 New Yorker has a fascinating piece by Alec Wilkinson: “Talk This Way: The man who makes Hollywood sound right”, about dialect coach to the stars Tim Monich. (An abbreviated version is available on-line here; the full version is only available to subscribers.)

Monich is versatile: he taught Donald Sutherland, a Canadian,

to speak like a South African in “A Dry White Season,” then like an Englishman, a wealthy New Yorker, a New Englander, a Kansan, a Georgian, an Oregonian, a North Carolinian, a Mississippian, a Michigander, a Minnesotan, and a member of the Polish politburo

In fact, what he aims to teach is not some generic accent, but an accent appropriate to a specific character (though of course no coach can teach someone to reproduce an accent perfect in every detail). So in teaching Hilary Swank to speak like Amelia Earhart, Monich took into consideration that she

was from Kansas but had gone to boarding school near Philadelphia, and so had elements of a period upper-class accent

Monich has a huge archive of “recordings of talkers whose speech represents a particular place, period, or social station.”  And he goes around the world collecting additions to this archive.

There’s an interesting account of a coaching session with actor Gerard Butler, in which Wilkinson struggles with the task of representing details of pronunciation for New Yorker readers without using the technical terminology or transcription schemes of phonetics.

From Will Leben, via the Stanford linguistics department newsletter (on November 6), a pointer to the entertaining site Cheese or Font?, where you are given proper nouns and asked to decide whether they refer to cheeses or to fonts. Something of a challenge.

Lots of people have noticed that names of diseases and names of plants are often very similar, but I don’t know if anyone has put together a Plant or Disease? test.

For visual material, there are several X or Y? tests and games out there. For several years, various versions of Gay or Eurotrash? have been available on the net, often billed as a test of gaydar. The player is offered a set of photos (usually of young men) and asked to decide whether the person in the picture is gay or Eurotrash.

(In case you’re not familiar with Eurotrash, or eurotrash, according to the March 2009 draft revision of the OED’s Euro- entry, the term is originally and chiefly U.S., is “depreciative”, and refers to “rich European socialites collectively, esp. those living or working in the U.S.” The deprecatory tone comes from a suggestion that these socialites are living an idle and dissipated life. The OED has cites from 1980 on.)

Then there’s the series of X Face or O-Face? tests in Details magazine a few years ago, reported on in a Language Log posting here. The player is given a display of faces, some of them of people in a moment of exertion or great emotion (for instance, athletes, American Idol contestants, guitarists), some of them of people at the moment of sexual climax. The player’s task is to decide which photos show X Face (Game Face, Idol Face, Guitar Face) and which O-Face.

(Why, you might be wondering, did the topic come up on Language Log? Because of the term O-face, which seems to be a relatively recently coined, or at least recently popular, alternative to the older term come face. Details on Language Log.)

It’s a sad story. As reported by Elisabeth Rosenthal in the New York Times (“When Texting Kills, Britain Offers Path to Prison”, November 2):

OXFORD, England — Inside the imposing British Crown Court here, Phillipa Curtis, 22, and her parents cried as she was remanded for 21 months to a high-security women’s prison, for killing someone much like herself. The victim was Victoria McBryde, an up-and-coming university-trained fashion designer.

Ms. Curtis had plowed her Peugeot into the rear end of Ms. McBride’s neon yellow Fiat, which had broken down on the A40 Motorway, killing Ms. McBryde, 24, instantly.

Curtis was driving while distracted — by the many text messages she was exchanging with friends. A 2008 British government directive treats prolonged texting as a serious aggravating factor in “death by dangerous driving”.

Rosenthal was unable to report this story without the ritual dig at texting and texters:

[The text messages Curtis exchanged] are filled with the mangled spellings and abbreviations that typify the new lingua franca of the young.

Rosenthal cites LOL and an expletive (not specified; this is the NYT, after all), but nothing more.

Language Log has reported many times on characterizations of texting (and electronic communications in general) as evil in various ways. A small sampling of postings: here, here, here. (There’s also a long series of cartoons on texting and so on, mostly about teens).