You could face certain death. Maybe.

Today the news keeps mentioning how Hurricane Ike is bearing down on the Texas coast. Their repeated quote is that

The National Weather Service warned residents of smaller structures on Galveston they could "face certain death" if they ignored an order to evacuate.

Why is everyone saying "could face certain death"? Shouldn't it be "will face certain death"? If you could face it (but maybe not), then it's not really certain, is it. And if they really do think it's certain death, they should probably be using more unambiguous language.

Google Tech Talk: Hacking English

Since my last post on a Google tech talk was such a hit (well, as much as anything on a blog that averages 10 visits/day can be considered "a hit"), I've been meaning to blog about another great talk I attended. It was called "Wordmaking: What it takes to succeed in hacking English and invent a new word," and was much more light-hearted than the talk on plurilingualism. Here's the abstract:

Learn the basics of word formation in English, get "raw materials" for new words, and invent your own word (and have it critiqued) before you let it loose into the English language. The maker of the "best new word" (as voted on by the participants) will win a new dictionary.

The speaker was Erin McKean, a dictionary evangelist, lexicographer and editor of dictionaries. She's a very entertaining speaker, and even has a Murphy's Law-style law named after her:

McKean's Law: Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error.

The talk was about the productivity of English (the degree to which it lends itself to making up new words that other English-speakers can understand), and the building blocks that make that possible. English has inherited a lot of words and grammar from various language families (principally Germanic and Latinate), so English speakers have a lot of morphemes (the building blocks of words) to play around with—prefixes, suffixes, different roots that mean the same thing.

I think my favorite part of the talk was the obvious glee that Erin took in playing with language, and all the new words I learned (both "real" and made-up) from her talk. Here are my favorites, which I encourage you to incorporate into your daily speech:

catachresis (n.)

A linguistic error that comes to be accepted as "correct," usually because it's so common.
Examples: apron used to be napron, but people heard "a napron" and started interpreting it as "an apron." Strait-laced is more commonly misspelled as straight-laced than correctly spelled; so who's to say how long the "incorrect" version remains incorrect, if a majority of people are using it?

epicene (adj.)

Gender-neutral.
Example: English-speakers have been trying to invent an epicene singular pronoun for years, but none have ever really stuck so we usually end up saying "they" even for singular referents.

nonce (adj.)

A nonce word is a particularly time- or place-specific word (which is thus unlikely to catch on as a word that survives the test of time).
Examples: Excaliburger, comcastic.

pregret (n.)

The knowledge that you're about to do something you will later regret having done.
See also: prevenge.

The word that I'd like to get traction for is kez, meaning "fake cheese, or any plastic-like substance trying to pass itself off as cheese." Which brings me to this great website I heard of recently via Says You, a public radio show that every linguaphile should check out: Addictionary.org, where you can make up words, vote on other people's submissions, or submit definitions in search of words. Go to Addictionary and vote for my word.

Have you coined any words?

Calling Ondrej Elleder

Let's do an experiment.

I have a Google Alert set up on my name, so (presumably) whenever someone blogs about me I'll get an email with the link and can check it out. I'm wondering whether this is somewhat common, or just among tech geeks. So let's drop the name of one of my friends from college, and see if this post makes its way to him across the internet.

His name is Ondrej Elleder (read a bit about him here), and this postcard that he sent me was another find while I was cleaning out old papers this week. One of the biggest things I miss about college is living and socializing with such fascinating, diverse and entertaining people. Linguaphiles who would write postcards like this:

To: The discreditable SUSAN MOSKWA

Susan! Hail, by mail, from the city of the FLAIL! Whyever the FLAIL? This be the reason, Missus: It was the favourite weapon of the Hussites. And don't you ask me who the Hussites were! :-S Contemplate instead the Freudian symbolism of having the flail for a weapon.

Happy New Year,
Ondřej

Google Tech Talk: Plurilingualism on the internet

Google hosts a surprising number of really interesting tech talks about language. Back in July I attended a particularly good one by Stephanie Booth, about plurilingualism on the internet. Here's the abstract:

More people are multilingual than purely monolingual. Yet the internet is a collection of monolingual silos. Where are the multilingual spaces? How can online applications assist the people who bridge the linguistic chasms, instead of hindering them? How do present applications decide what language to present? IP address or keyboard locale detection are clearly bad solutions. How could this be done better? This talk addresses some localization issues, but beyond that, questions the very way languages are dealt with on the internet.

It's definitely worth watching in full, but if you want the highlights, these are some of the more interesting ideas I took away from it:

• Code-switching! I'd forgotten there was a term for it. Code-switching is awesome, especially as a form of word-play. Everyone should try it.
• Stephanie is multilingual, and when she blogs she prefaces each post with a short summary in the language in which it wasn't posted (that is, posts in English get a synopsis in French, and vice versa). This lets her reach two language communities at once, without the tedium and mess of double-posting each post in full. Check out these recent examples.
• "Some people really resent being shown languages they don't understand."
  Google develops software with a global reach, and we put a lot of care into trying to make sure users get our products in the right languages; but this quote was an interesting reminder that getting it wrong can provide a very negative experience for a particular user. Right now, for example, we use IP address as a factor in determining which version of Google search to show. If you're browsing from a US IP, we'll show you www.google.com in English; if you're browsing from a French IP, we'll show you www.google.fr in French. But what if you're browsing in Switzerland? We'll show you www.google.ch, but should we show the German, French, Italian, or Rumantsch version? We generally default to German, which—statistically—is the right answer, but for all the French/Italian/Rumantsch speakers is clearly the wrong answer. And what about someone from China who's road-tripping across Europe? She's probably going to want to see Google in Chinese, rather than being served a different language every time she logs on.
• The lang and hreflang attributes are underutilized and offer some really cool potential for ways of understanding documents and hyperlinks. The most common use of lang is in the <html> tag, to define the language of an entire webpage: <html lang="en-US">. But you could also use it to define smaller subsections: stick it in a <blockquote> tag when you're quoting a different language; stick it in a <div> or a <p> if you have a section of text in a different language (for example, a summary at the top of a blog post!).
  
  The hreflang attribute is even more interesting to me, since I'd never heard of it before. From W3C:

  The hreflang attribute provides user agents with information about the language of a resource at the end of a link, just as the lang attribute provides information about the language of an element's content or attribute values.

  So if you link to a cool website in Spanish, you could throw <a hreflang="es" href="www.example.es"> in the <a> tag. The thing about these attributes, though—especially hreflang—is that they're underutilized because no technology takes advantage of them. But no technology takes advantage of them because they're underutilized. If we ever find a way to break out of this Catch 22, I could imagine some cool opportunities (visualizations for language targets, applications in search and social networking... the sky's the limit!).

You say potato, I say linguistic train wreck

While checking out the new search queries data in Google Webmaster Tools this week, I noticed that I rank #2 for [separate wheat from chafe] (thanks to my last grammar rant). I was all ready to draft a follow-up post in the hopes of reaching a few more unenlightened searchers:

• e + s is not pronounced [ex].
  So stop saying 'excape' instead of 'escape', and please stop saying 'expresso' instead of 'espresso'. Look it up. Really. It's espresso.
• fiancé != fiancée
  If you choose to use the French word for "person to whom I am engaged", please be aware that (although they sound the same when spoken) there are two versions of the written word: fiancé is masculine, fiancée is feminine. A pre-husband is not a fiancée, nor is a pre-wife a fiancé, unless there's something they haven't been telling you.
• nuclear
  I might be able to forgive him for stealing the election... twice... invading Iraq, ruining our international reputation, destroying the environment, attempting to constitutionally ban gay marriage, running our debt sky-high, and spending most of his time on vacation, if only Bush would stop saying 'nucular'. There's no vowel between the 'c' and the 'l', buddy. It's 'new' + 'clear'.
  ...Though on second thought, I probably wouldn't forgive him even then.

Yup, I was ready. But then I saw this article on YOUmoz. It argues that one man's grammar tragedy is another man's wordplay (using the examples of mondegreens, snowclones, and eggcorns):

You'll find these linguistic occurrences are popular on satirical websites like Fark and SomethingAwful, in cartoons and TV comedies, on the radio and in movies. Custodians of grammar may frown at the decay of 'proper English' but the laziness of online writers is a boon for observing the hyper-evolution of our language.

I shelved my draft and lamented having become a codger at 25.

But I think this commenter summed it up well for me: it's not that I don't like change in language. I love linguistic puns, code-switching, and other creative forms of breaking the "rules". I love hearing language twisted for clever or comedic effect; I just don't like hearing it twisted out of ignorance.

My phonetics professor in college used to dream of the day when everyone would learn the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) in school and mispronunciation would become a thing of the past. News anchors would no longer hesitate over the pronunciation of foreign names. You would no longer be asked to phonetically transcribe your name using English characters (most frustrating exercise ever!) so that the principal can read it out correctly at graduation. And Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! wouldn't get to make fun of Bush for needing a phonetic cheat-sheet in his speeches.

While we're on the subject of language, I found this article on the language of the Berkshire Hathaway annual report both insightful and reassuring. At least I'm not the only neurotic out there.

The world in your radio... literally.

Today our local NPR station finished its week-long pledge drive (thank gods). Of course I dislike pledge drives as much as the next person, but I'm proud to say that Nick and I donated to the station on the first day of the drive. Last year's drive finally got to us and we decided that after years of avid NPR-listening it was time to become members. (And yes, even though it's hooooorribly cheesy to say so, you do listen differently once you've pledged. But only during the pledge drive, when you get to feel smarmy and superior for having donated. After that it feels like normal again.) :-P

Then on Saturday I considered taking it all back when, during the inane motivational prattle that inevitably accompanies pledge drives, one of the announcers said (during the Rick Steves travel show), "KUOW's in-depth reporting brings you the world through your radio. And right now we're literally bringing you the world with Rick Steves."

Literally? Really? I'm still waiting for someone from KUOW to show up at my door with the world. Maybe that was the thank-you gift for my particular pledge level?

Happily, however, I am not alone in my grammatical neuroses: there exists a blog all about misuse of the word "literally". I'm glad someone else is writing this sort of thing so that I don't have to.

It's on its way

Whats on it's way? The grammar apocalypse, thats what. And if the egregious misuse of apostrophes in those sentences made you want to tear out your eyes, I want you on my side when the End comes.

Yes, as a linguist I've learned how prescriptivism is bogus and language is constantly evolving and that if we try to codify unbreakable rules we'll just end up like France, where the language spoken in the streets is practically unintelligible to anyone who learned "proper French" from a textbook. But all I'm asking (for now) is that we stop letting people graduate from high school until they can demonstrate the ability to correctly differentiate it's from its. This particular grammar faux pas (and il ne le faut absolument pas) has been driving me crazy lately. Once you start noticing it, it's everywhere. So here's the rule, people—repeat after me, memorize, tattoo this somewhere, whatever you need to do to remember:

If you could replace [it's] with [it is] in your sentence, then you need the apostrophe version (it's).
If your sentence stops making sense when you replace [its] with [it is], then you need the non-apostrophe version (its).

The former is a contraction meaning "it is", the latter indicates possession ("belonging to it"). Get it right or feel my wrath.

While we're at it, here are a few other gems you might want to avoid if you value the esteem of your grammar-sensitive friends:

• Irregardless
  At the behest of Merriam-Webster, I'll refrain from saying that 'irregardless' is not actually a word. However, you definitely meant to use 'regardless'. Princeton says that 'irregardless' makes you sound like a joke.
• Separating the wheat from the chafe
  Wheat and chafe? Sounds painful. While it's probably a good idea to separate wheat and chafing as often as possible, try "wheat and chaff" in your next metaphor.
• Shot across the bough
  Unless you're shooting at squirrels (a bough is a tree branch), you probably meant "shot across the bow". It's a naval expression. Think pirates. (Though I don't know if pirates give warning shots, come to think of it.)
• Bare with me, here!
  This one's my favourite. Are you seriously asking me to strip down? Together with you?? 'Cuz I'm a pretty patient person, and I'm willing to bear with a lot, but I only bare for a select few. (Yes, I know, damn those homophones.)

Please accept these suggestions as a token of my esteem for you, and my continued desire to read your writing without instinctively reaching for the Tipp-Ex.

Regnant

Last Wednesday I participated in the Kirkland Adult Spelling Bee. Unlike the traditional 'individual' bees that you may remember from middle school, this bee was played in teams of three, and you could confer on the spelling of the words with your team members. My teammates were Brian (a Googler) and Gretta (girlfriend of a Googler). Both were way better spellers than I; we quickly came to the end of the words I recognized (these weren't middle school words!), though I did manage to save us on fetial.

We ended up getting spelled out in the first half on the word regnant (French origin! Shame on me for not knowing that!), but the whole evening was a lot of fun. The team play and the generally laid-back atmosphere of the event made it a lot more relaxed and fun than the middle school bees I remember. And it turns out there's a monthly bee in a Seattle bar... Maybe this is my new subculture. :-)