Mr. Verb

This was fun (well, for a language nerd, anyway). I spotted this eggcorn in an article about Wisconsin's education-destroying governor:  "... or who serve at the leisure of these appointees." I was really baffled because that only works as an eggcorn if you pronounce "leisure" to rhyme with "pleasure" - and what American does??? Surely an article about Scotty-boy Walker has to be written by an American? Then I scrolled up and noticed that it was in the US Edition of The Guardian. How funny that I went through that whole train of thought based on an assumption about the dialect of the writers. (BTW, 5,020 results for "serve at the leisure of" on google.)

There's a lot of cool research on intoxicated speech and I figured it'd be in the news as progress is made, but I didn't particularly expect it to come like this article called 'Hey, y'all!' Why 'yous guys' accents come back when you're drinking". Here's the quote about the effects of alcohol (and other things):

“We slur our words, and it’s harder to maintain the motor coordination and control needed for effective fine motor execution needed for speech production,” explains Amee Shah, director of Cleveland State University’s Research Laboratory in Speech Acoustics & Perception.

That's surely part of what's going on. Maybe the Wisconsin linguists working on inebriated speech will comment on that. And maybe Shah will have more to say on this ... the piece is so short that it can't really cover much.

But — assuming that we do become more dialectal when we drink — how much of that is about motor control? I know that when people get really upset, their speech can become much more dialectal. (You know who you are.) That's not motor control. What else is at work?  What's worrisome about the way the article presents it is that it really feeds the stereotype that dialect is lazy speech.

Today's NYT Book Review covers Gregg Allman's new autobiography. The book was co-authored with Alan Light, and the review addresses some of the issues that come with that particular kind of collaboration:

“My Cross to Bear” has all the earmarks of a text dictated by its subject and cleaned up by someone else, meaning it has too many ho-hum moments but also the charm of a real voice. In Allman’s case, that’s a lot of correct Good Old Boy usages (“you didn’t want to wear no pair of wool pants without no drawers on”) that may challenge readers not conversant with that tongue. 

Now,  it's not my place to judge whether "you didn’t want to wear no pair of wool pants without no drawers on" is 'correct' Good Old Boy. I'm not even sure exactly what parameters define Good Old Boy as a tongue. I'm thinking 'tongue' means sociolect, and I've got some hunches about its characteristics.

But does that sentence actually challenge any native speaker of American English?  I think that 'drawers' is still widely known as a term for 'underwear', right? And the negative concord has got to be easily interpretable by native speakers of any kind of English. Colorful, yeah, but challenging to understand? Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure the sentence is all that charming. And be that as it may, I sure ain't wearing no wool pants without no drawers on. 

It's perfectly normal for me to talk about the delicious stuff you buy at a bakery as "bakery."  As in, They sell the best bakery there!  Judging by Joe's reaction, this is not standard.  Just now I discovered it's not alone - here's a blurb about a place to buy food on campus:

Carson's Carryout will close for renovations at 1:30 p.m. on Friday, March 30. Carson's will reopen in fall 2013. Until then, there will be expanded services at Common Grounds in lower Frank's starting on Sunday, April 8, and will include grocery, pizzas, sandwiches and more.

"Grocery" works for me too - less usual, but acceptable. Joe looked it up in DARE but they don't list it.  (They do list this use of "bakery," though - and note "chiefly German settlement areas.")

I've been trying to figure out what this is - it's use of the name of the source as the name of the goods bought there.  Not quite metonymy, I don't think, although I never really learned the fine points of all those poetic terms.

And it's definitely a mass noun.  I bought bakery at Lane's but not *I bought five bakeries at Lane's.  (The latter could only refer to a massive real estate deal.)

So what's the range of this?  Anybody have any idea?

Who knows why but I've gotten into KenKen ... it started with Sudoku, but they got kind of boring after a while. So, for the first time in decades (since I abandoned crosswords as an undergrad), I'm looking at the puzzles-games page in the local paper. The word games generally strike me as kind of cute but not not really engaging. One, though, bugs me about every time I look at it. Usually it's that I don't find the solution of the puzzle to have any umpf to it or any cleverness. This morning, it was worse:

If you solve it, or look at the solution, you see that the intent is to get you to read "On S - T is the best policy". I'm pretty sure I would never describe the picture that way, even if prompted very directly. I might say that 'best and policy are over S and T' or something. The noun phrase ("the best policy") is impossible for me here, maybe because they don't seem like a unit in any way. That's kind of how this puzzle usually works, though. (For other examples, see here.)

But my real annoyance at this particular one is dialectal: "On S - T" sounds like honesty only if you pronounce on to rhyme with Ron and not like the word own. This holds for a relatively small area of the United States, if a heavily populated one. According to the Atlas of North American English (Map 14.2, p. 189 — if you have a university account, you can probably download a full pdf of it, and access the whole Atlas on-line, with stuff even the printed book doesn't have), a strip from New York City through basically the Northern Cities area and somewhat farther west into Iowa and Minnesota.

We need dialect awareness in the Whatzit!

When Jon Stewart declares something the "most immature montage ever", he's certainly got our attention here in Verbville. So, the president of these United States argued a few days ago that we should support weatherization. Building on 'cash for clunkers', and the fact that much weatherizing is done with a caulk gun, this was labeled 'Cash for Caulkers'. As someone with a robust distinction between /a/ and /ɔ/, I never would have thought to see this as grade school joke material, but lo and behold, if you have the low back merger (pronouncing 'cot' and 'caught' the same, for example), this is the old comedy goldmine …

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Most Immature Montage Ever - Cash for Caulkers
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

H.T. to R.C.

Well, it's October 10 again. Frederic Cassidy was born on this day 102 years ago. As the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) draws close to 'Z', Cassidy's legacy and the importance of DARE are greater than ever, especially here at the University of Wisconsin.

I'm amazed at how often DARE figures in discussions of all sorts, often far from lexicography and dialectology. I picked up some Jamaican rum this week to be able to raise a glass in honor of him and the project tonight.

A poll on what Voinovich meant with his remarks about Southerners going 'errrr, errrr' on the teevee is now up. (See earlier post, here.)

Of course I've posted this poll at the moment when our readership appears to have slipped to a long-time low, but, hey, we're just in it for the yucks.

Maybe I'm no longer up on how Americans talk and think others talk, but this piece from the Columbus Dispatch with U.S. Sen. George V. Voinovich is unsettling. Under "other tidbits from the session with the two-term Republican senator", we read this:

The GOP’s biggest problem? “We got too many Jim DeMints (R-S.C.) and Tom Coburns (R-Ok.). It’s the southerners. They get on TV and go 'errrr, errrrr.' People hear them and say, ‘These people, they’re southerners. The party’s being taken over by southerners. What they [sic] hell they got to do with Ohio?’”

They 'go errrr, errrr'? Time for a reader poll, methinks.

Image from here, of the senator cuddling with a Texan, not a Southerner, I guess.

This article from the Tageszeitung in Berlin highlights an unusual language dispute. In Germany, many street names and a fair amount of public signage is done, to one extent or other, in dialect. For those who don't read German, the piece reports on efforts to change Low German street names into German ones. Low German — spoken in the north — is, from a linguist's perspective, a distinct language from what we call German, but they are closely related. One example from the piece is Schoosterstraat 'Shoemaker Street', which presumably would be changed to Schusterstraße. The claim is that southern Germans could have trouble pronouncing and understanding the current forms.

I don't doubt for a second that people are complaining (as reported), but it's hard to imagine serious pronunciation difficulties — German and Low German spelling conventions have basically very good sound-symbol correlations. And it seems nonsensical to talk about 'understanding' street names.

Wat en ding.

Image from here.

The ever-perceptive Prof. U. emailed a couple days back with this:

I'm sitting here listening to NPR, which was quoting bits of the Obama speech - the one with lipstick in it - but prior to the lovely lipstick line, he was using the word 'policy' quite a bit, and I noticed that the final vowel sounded rather reduced - not all the way but definitely on the way - much as the final schwa or barred 'i' in the word "Missouri" as pronounced by some local speakers there.

Hmmmm, there's something to that. With Palin's accent, I cooked a big batch of stone soup — throwing the question out there and listening to wide array of interesting and often really insightful responses. So …

What else is salient about his English? I don't recall him having Low Back Merger (cot/caught), though he uses the word daughter(s) often, of course.

Whatever his dialect, he's about change, and I'm waiting to hear him questioned earnestly about his views on change in contemporary American English.

I'm on the run and can't chase down details now, but Anonymous just posted this comment about Palin's accent, worth really highlighting:

I just went and listened to some older interviews - they sounded completely western, no real accent at all.

Seems she picked up a little Minnesota while in the neighborhood ...

Seriously? That would be wild. So, it comes down to her versus Pawlenty for Veep and she offers to throw in a fake Minnesota accent to sweeten the deal? I know all about accent REDUCTION, but an adult accent IMPLANT?

By the way, Joe says he didn't have time to link the sound file and track down the time on the Palin quote, but that it's fairly early on.

Stop emailing me, folks, I got no clue where Mr. V is — has he ever gone a week without a post?

In the meantime, did you catch this line from Nancy Pelosi?

You know, God bless him, bless his heart, president of the United States, a total failure, losing all credibility with the American people on the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject.

She's been declared an honorary southerner here. As it happens, I was just talking to a fellow North Carolina ex-pat about this very phrase last night. He was commenting on the fact that in the third person (as opposed to second person 'bless your heart' or 'bless ya'll's hearts'), this is a brutal turn of phrase. It's good old downhome talk, but has made the transition to Urban Dictionary, here. (Google the phrase and you'll see plenty.)

Now, let's see if we can find Mr. Verb.

In her "Questions for …" piece in today's NYT Magazine, Deborah Solomon interviews John Hagee. He's the preacher whose endorsement McCain sought, and who has been quoted as calling the Catholic Church "the great whore" and proclaiming that Hurricane Katrina was "God's judgment" on a sinful city of New Orleans, etc. (See here, or poke around for his interviews.) But I don't want to talk about his politics;* I want to talk about his language, and in particular how it's being represented in this piece. Look at this, with Deborah Solomon's questions in blue and his responses in red:

What about your observation in a recent book that “most readers will be shocked by the clear record of history linking Adolf Hitler and the Roman Catholic Church in a conspiracy to exterminate the Jews”? What I was trying to express was the fact that Christian anti-Semitism — both Catholic and Protestant — contributed to an environment in which Nazi racial anti-Semitism could flourish.

But why bring all of that up now? ’Cause most of the world don’t know it. Christians don’t know it at all.

Look at the difference in language between those two quotes. The first doesn't exactly sound like he was burning up the thesaurus or anything, but it's syntactically complex and standard, even formal, English. The second, however, is written without the unstressed initial syllable of because and has distinctly non-standard subject-verb agreement. In fact, that's the only sentence in the interview that's like that. There is something that strikes me as regional ("our church is not hard against the gay people" — that use of hard sounds southern to me), but nothing else that looks like it would get a red mark from a copy editor in this particular context.

My question is if he style-/code-switched here or if the NYT (or Solomon?) chose to represent this line this way. In the videos of him on YouTube, he seems to pretty consistently use the velar nasal in -ing (that is, he doesn't 'drop his g's'), and he often doesn't flap t (so, he says the t in atom like you would in atomic, not rhyming the word with Adam), and so on. Maybe he switched for dramatic effect?

*Actually, I'd talk about his politics and those of Rod Parsley (see here) as well, but it's too depressing: Both Hagee and Parsley have said things that strike many people as truly outrageous, and McCain has been eagerly seeking their approval.