Language Log

your welcome and it’s package

Posted by

1

While I was drafting my previous post, I pondered whether people are more likely to write or type its instead of it’s or or your instead of you’re or vice versa. 

Firstly, by themselves its is far more common than it’s (and some of those are obviously it has), and your is even more common that you’re (Google Ngram Viewer). Its has declined slightly since about 2005, and it’s has increased slightly since about 1980 and steadily since about 2000, though that might be more about increasing informality in writing (using it’s rather than it is and it has). Your has increased significantly since about 1980 and you’re also slightly since about 1980 and steadily since about 2005.

The Language Log commenter I quoted in my previous post complained about your welcome and it’s own package. You’re welcome is far more common, and has increased steadily since about 1980 and significantly since about 2000. Your welcome has increased slightly since about 2000. Note that your welcome is correct in a longer sentence like Thank you for your welcome. Ngrams has no results for it’s own package. its own is far far more common than it’s own, which increased from the early 1960s to early 2000s, then has been decreasing. Of the most common next words (accord, way, weight, sake, reward, right, nature, peculiar, proper, axis) only peculiar and proper are correct (if they are followed by a head noun). But even they are all far less common than the versions with its. I think the Language Log commenter is worrying too much about the wrong things. 

A general Google search for “your welcome” shows mainly discussions/explanations about why it’s incorrect, but also a podcast/Youtube with that title (I can’t tell whether that’s a mistake or a deliberate play) and an unauthorised video of the song You’re Welcome from the movie Moana. A search for “it’s package” shows mainly longer phrases like “It’s package sorting time” and the computer terms “it’s package module” and “it’s package variant”, but also an answer to a question on Reddit “Should I open it, or leave it, in it’s original package” – “I would say keep it closed and take care of it’s package”.

Continue reading →

It’s its or its it’s

Posted by

6

Late last year Language Log had a post about about a movie titled Rebel with a Clause, about a linguaphile named Ellen Jovin who sets up a “grammar table” in public places, at which passerbys ask questions, tell stories and voice their complaints about “grammar”. I use quotations marks because at least some of the questions aren’t about grammar (but are about language). The first pair in the trailer ask about “the proper way to use y’all … does the apostrophe go before or after the a?”. It goes before; it is a contraction of you all and the apostrophe replaces the ou. But this question is about punctuation, which of course intersects with grammar, especially in written language, but we could expunge our written language of all punctuation and still have grammar, and spoken language doesn’t have punctuation at all.

I was surprised that y’all v ya’ll is a question at all, but there are various discussions of it on the internet. Y’all isn’t used much in Australian English, and certainly not by the people I interact with.* Perhaps people are getting misled by ’ll as the contraction of will. Ya’ll = you will???? I don’t think anyone uses that. (Yall have a good time = You all have a good time or You will have a good time????) (*During my first stay in Korea a young American woman colleague came into the staff room, saw a box of donuts and said “Who all’s been to Dunkin’ Donuts?”. I asked whether that was standard ussage for her, and she said yes. Possible answer: “We all (w’all) have been to Dunkin’ Donuts”?)

Continue reading →

Corflute(s)

Posted by

0

A few days ago, Language Log had a discussion of Australian election slang (we had a national election on 3 May; the overall result is known, but the final count continues). One commenter linked to a similar discussion on Language Hat, which in turn links to an article on The Guardian. Out of all the terms discussed (I would call them jargon rather than slang), my eye was caught by corflute. This term is used by some people for what I would call an election poster, named for the particular material used. I first became aware of this term either during the last national election in 2022 or the last state election in 2023. 

There are four steps here: corrugated plastic > Corflute® > corflute > a corflute/corflutes. Corrugated plastic is “a wide range of extruded twin-wall plastic-sheet products produced from high-impact polypropylene resin”, which are light, strong and weather-resistant, and used for packaging, storage and, relevantly, posters for indoor or outdoor use, including advertising and political campaigning. Various trademarked names include trade names of Correx, Biplex, Cartonplast, Polyflute, Coroplast, FlutePlast, IntePro, Proplex, Twinplast, Corriflute and Corflute (all ®). In Australia, the most common name is Corflute®, which has become a genericised trademark, so that all corrugated plastic is called corflute, whether it’s Corflute® or something else. 

Election posters generally fall into two categories: those advertising a party and those advertising an individual candidate, representing a party or standing as an independent (does one stand or run?). These are seen as a necessary evil: part of the campaign process, but an eyesore and contributor to environmental pollution. Parties and individuals are quicker to put them up than they are to take them down. One state limits their use, passing the Electoral (Control of Corflutes) Amendment Act 2024 (SA). The word corflute(s) doesn’t appear in the text of the act. Rather, it specifies “an electoral advertising poster”, defined as ” a poster, notice or sign displaying an electoral advertisement” without reference to the material (so that people can’t say “This is not a corflute because it’s made of paper/cardboard/some other plastic/some other material”).

I asked my Facebook friends if they knew about the term. Their answers varied according to their own experience. Some knew it as a generic product but not as a trademarked name or its use in election posters. Others knew it as election posters, but not as a product name. One hobby artist said it’s often used as a support for paintings or sketches. One USA friend better knew the name coroplast, which seems to be the generic name there. Google Ngrams shows the use of corflute increasing since 1990 and especially 2010, while coroplast dates from 1880s, which needs some explanation, and peaked between 1980 and 2000. Wikipedia has a separate article for coroplast, but corflute redirects to corrugated plastic. Pages for Mac and WordPress don’t recognise any of the trademarked names, either in upper case or lower case text. 

ASSOL and Assol

Posted by

3

(strong language warning – you can probably see where this is heading)

Sometimes I encounter a word in two different contexts which can’t be explained by collusion between YouTwitFaceGoogle (or YouXFaceGoogle these days).

A recent Language Log post discussed the fact that one acronym can have many different meanings, after Mark Liberman encountered FAB (in this case, ‘floating action button’) in a tech news article (in fact there’s a ‘double FAB’). He linked to a previous post on the same topic, where, in response to a comment, he said that a famous local example is ASSOL. I couldn’t even guess at the meaning of that, but an internet search came to the rescue finding:

Assol is the female protagonist in the novel Scarlet Sails by Alexander Grin and derived works.

Assol or ASSOL may also refer to:

  • Assol, a 1965 opera by Eugen Kapp
  • Assol, a 1982 animated film by Boris Stepantsev
  • Antonin Scalia School of Law, a law school in Arlington, Virginia, United States
  • Daewoo Lanos, a 1997–2002 South Korean subcompact car, sold in Russia as the Doninvest Assol

The obviously intended one is the second last one but obviously I noticed the first one first. Officially, ASSOL is the Antonin Scalia Law School (presumably abbreviated as ASLS). Wikipedia’s article on the school doesn’t mention if it was ever officially the Antonin Scalia School of Law or the acronym of that, but obviously it’s used enough to be included on this page, possibly by people who don’t agree with the late justice’s legal stances, or don’t like the kinds of students who choose to be educated there. ASLS may not be that much better.

A few days later, I was browsing TV Tropes. One topic page, Promoted to Love Interest, includes an example from the novel The Scarlet Sails, which became the movie Assol. There are two movies, a musical, various plays and summer festival in St Petersburg. In the novel, the two main characters don’t meet until right at the end, so in various adaptions a minor character is given a larger, romantic role in the meantime (for some measure of ‘romantic’ – in the musical her coerces her into agreeing to marry him).

I don’t think this was collusion between TV Tropes and YouTwitFaceGoogle. If it was, I probably would have been taken straight to that page. As it was, I clicked from main browse page to the topic page. 

I don’t say assol or even asshole. If anything, I (very occasionally) say (or write, or think) arsehole. (The interplay between arse and ass is long and complicated.) However, I’m not sure that I’d be able to read or watch the novel or movie with a completely straight face. TV Tropes reported that for one English dub, she became Isolde. Assol doesn’t seem to have any meaning, but two names websites suggest a connection with salt or the sun.

(For the record, Youtube is owned by Google, and Facebook and Twitter/X aren’t. I don’t use Twitter/X anyway. I could reduce my expose to this by using a browser and search engine which aren’t provided by Google.) 

Either way, don’t beg the question

Posted by

0

Some prescriptivists insist that beg the question means, and can only mean, assume the conclusion of a philosophical argument, and doesn’t mean, and cannot mean, raise the question. The esteemed Mark Liberman of Language Log traces the whole history from Greek to Latin to English in probably more detail than you will ever need or want (brief summary: almost everyone now uses it to mean raise the question) and concludes: 

If you use the phrase to mean “raise the question”, some pedants will silently dismiss you as a dunce, while others will complain loudly, thus distracting everyone else from whatever you wanted to say. If you complain about others’ “misuse”, you come across as an annoying pedant. And if you use the phrase to mean “assume the conclusion”, almost no one will understand you.

My recommendation: Never use the phrase yourself — use “assume the conclusion” or “raise the question”, depending on what you mean — and cultivate an attitude of serene detachment in the face of its use by others.

The reason I am mentioning this is that a few days ago I was watching a TED-X Talk in which the (native US English) speaker said:

Which begs me to ask another question …

No it doesn’t.

PS 26 Aug: A commenter on a Language Log post seems to have used the phrase in its original sense, judging by his punctuation: “”Is this the best way to approach the problem of the lack of scientific terminology in African languages ?”. I think that this begs the question. Is there any evidence that the lack of scientific terminology in African languages is a problem ?”

More biblical Greek

Posted by

0

About six weeks ago I wrote about four words in biblical Greek, namely μαθητής mathetes (singular), μᾰθηταί mathetai (plural), usually translated as disciple (from Latin discipulus), απόστολος apostolos (singular), απόστολοι apostoloi (plural), usually apostle, γραμματέας grammateas (singular), γραμματείς grammateis (plural), usually scribe, and ῥαββί rhabbí, rabbi.

About a week ago there was a post on Language log about “A revolutionary, new translation of the gospels” by Sarah Ruden. It links to the Kindle sample of her book, including an extensive introduction in which she explains some of the principles she developed to guide her work (among them “to deal with the Gospels more straightforwardly than is customary”), and “A discursive glossary of unfamiliar word choices in English”, including the four words I wrote about.

One noticeable choice she made is to render the names of people and places as straight transliterations of the Greek, so she has Iēsous travelling from Galilaia through Ioudaia to Ierousalēm with Simōn Petros, Andreas, Iakōbos and Iōannēs (and others), making them all sound rather more Greek than they actually were.

Some people may find her translation too straightforward, but they should not let that stop them from reading and reflecting.

chew/eat the carpet

Posted by

0

A discussion on Language Log considered the expression chew/eat the carpet. One definition is, in the words of Oxford Reference, “to lose emotional control, to suffer a temper tantrum”. 

I got thinking about temper tantrum. I would say, simply, tantrum. Temper tantrum has always sounded redundant to me. What other kinds of tantra are there? It also sounds vaguely American. 

Google Ngrams shows that a tantrum is used about 2 to 6 times as often as a temper tantrum in British English, and about 2 to 3 times as often in American English. In other words, a tantrum is the number one choice, but a temper tantrum is a strong alternative, especially in American English. 

It also shows that temper tantrum sprang into being in 1916, and then increased in use in 1923. I can’t find any reason for this. A discussion on English Language and Usage Stack Exchange cites a psychiatric case at Johns Hopkins University in 1918, where it is rendered in scare quotes, which suggests it was new and unusual then. (That discussion is more about the word tantrum (origin unknown) than it is about the expression temper tantrum.)

The other kinds of noun tantra are toddler, morning and childhood ones, all of which have a minuscule usage compared with temper tantrum. (I’m being silly in using tantra as the plural of tantrum. Whatever its origin, it’s not Latin, so the plural is tantrums.)

A kind of affliction

Posted by

1

Last Tuesday was an interesting day linguistically, even if it was a slow day work-wise. I noticed three separate issues twice each in different contexts. The first time each, I thought “Oh, that’s interesting” and the second time I thought “Hang on, I’ve seen that before”.

During a lull in my work, I was browsing through some of Geoffrey Pullum’s old Language Log posts. In one, titled ‘Another victim of oversimplified rules‘, he discusses a sentence which he found in a free newspaper on Edinburgh’s buses:

A record number of companies has been formed by Edinburgh University in the past 12 months.

Continue reading →

or

Posted by

0

Many years ago, air hostesses archetypally asked passengers

“Tea or coffee?”

The possible answers were

“No, (thank you)”
“(Yes), tea(, please)”
“(Yes), coffee(, please)”
or
“Yes.”

In the last case, the air hostess would then ask

“Tea? Or coffee?”

This can also be written as “Tea or coffee?” but is distinguished by a rising intonation on “tea”, followed by a small pause, then a falling intonation on “coffee”, compared to an overall upward intonation for the first “Tea or coffee?”.

English grammar distinguishes polar (or yes/no) questions and alternative questions. The answers to “Do you want a hot drink?” are “Yes(, I want a hot drink)(, please)” and “No(, I don’t want a hot drink)(, thank you)”. Offering tea and coffee as a choice doesn’t fundamentally change that. Strictly speaking, the only two answers are “yes” and “no”. Answering “yes” is not non-cooperative; answering “yes, tea” or “yes, coffee” is cooperative, but not required.

On the other hand, the answers to “Do you want tea? or coffee (?)” are “Tea(, please)” and “Coffee(, please). Answering “Yes(, please)” is decidedly non-cooperative, and may result in a cup of coftea. (There are more choices; I found a 50-page academic paper titled Responding to alternative and polar questions. And less academically:

C48qEQRUkAAxGS9)

Continue reading →