Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.

—Nick Caraway

Ian Parker, writing about George Clooney in the April 14 issue of The New Yorker, startled me by saying that when a star enables a film to be green-lit, he is a god feigning mortality for the duration of the shoot.

Setting aside any theological questions that might suggest themselves, the image this assertion called to mind was something like this:

In my grammar, anyway, if a film is green-lit, then someone was shining an actual green light on the set, whereas if it has been given the metaphorical green light, the go-ahead, it has been green-lighted.

This is part of a more general pattern in English word structure that arises from the interaction of a couple of phenomena:

1. It's very easy, in English, to coin a new word simply by converting an existing word from one part of speech to another. (This is the process famously exemplified and alluded to by the Calvinist dictum "Verbing weirds language," except of course that it's not just verbing—you can noun things, too, as in the case of turning the phrasal verb go ahead into the noun go-ahead.)
2. New words use the regular inflectional affixes to mark things like tense and number, unless they are directly and transparently derived from irregular words.

So, if you take a noun and verb it, it becomes a regular verb, even if it looks like an already existing irregular verb:

• If a baseball player hits a ball that is caught on the fly by a member of the opposing team, then the batter has flied out, not flown out.
• A politician who has been playing to the grandstand is said to have grandstanded, not to have grandstood.
• A plane that went into a dive either dived or dove, but if it went into a nosedive, then it nosedived; one wouldn't say that it nosedove.

Similarly, when a compound noun contains an irregular noun, the compound as a whole will not be irregular unless that noun is the head of the compound:

• A wisdom tooth is a kind of tooth, so the plural is wisdom teeth, but a sabretooth isn't, so the plural of that is sabretooths.
• If you have more than one maple leaf of the sort that grow on maple trees, then you have some maple leaves, but if you have more than one Maple Leaf of the sort that haven't won the Stanley Cup since 1967, then you have some Maple Leafs.

So if you take the compound noun green light and convert it into the verb green-light, then it will have the structure shown below, and the fact that the verb light has an irregular past tense will be quite irrelevant to how you form the past tense of green-light.

What I wonder, though, is whether Ian Parker's grammar actually works differently from this, or whether the appearance of green-lit in the article was some kind of hypercorrection. I'm reminded of the story of the zookeeper who couldn't decide whether to order "two mongooses" or "two mongeese"—neither looked right—and thus ended up asking for "one mongoose, and, while you're at it, another one." But The New Yorker, rather uncharacteristically, appears to have come down on the side of mongeese.

There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was much faster than light;
She set out one day,
In a relative way,
And returned on the previous night.

—A. R. Buller, 1923

Today a notice from the property manager came through the mail slot in the door to my apartment. It says, in part:

PARTIAL SHUTDOWN OF DRIVEWAY

From Monday, March 24, 2008 until repairs to basement roof concrete slab area is completed, which is anticipated to take plus or minus 1 month.

I'm guessing that the actual time needed to complete the work will be much closer to the high end of the range indicated in the estimate.

What to make of what life hands you

(a straightforward extrapolation from conventional wisdom)

	INPUT		OUTPUT
1		→
( There are (now 15) more ordered pairs where this one came from.... )

Overheard: a girl¹ with a cell phone, standing in the middle of Milton Street, yelling at the top of her lungs, "Matt! I'm calling you! Pick up!"

I'm not sure this is how the technology is supposed to work....

1. Old enough that I would have been inclined to call her a woman if she had been acting more like a grown-up.

If you are alphabetizing a list of, say, movie titles, the common practice of ignoring definite and indefinite articles is a sensible one. And, if you're ignoring the articles, then it does also make sense—and is also common practice—to shunt them off to the end, separated by a comma, so that the letters by which the title is being sorted are at the beginning, but the article is still recoverable by anyone who wants to know the full title.

It's just that sometimes it looks a little bit silly:

Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, The

What follows is the body of a letter I have just written to the director of circulation and reader services at The Atlantic Monthly. Because really, if I wanted to read the witless contumely of sexist trolls, I could do so for free on the Web; I don't need to pay to have the stuff delivered to my door.

I have just seen Lori Gottlieb’s piece titled “Marry Him” in The Atlantic’s March 2008 issue, and so I am writing to ask you to please cancel my subscription at your earliest convenience.

I am asking you to do this not merely because I disagree with the burden of Gottlieb’s article, which seems to be that women should abandon romantic views of marriage in favour of more pragmatic ones, and that they should “settle” for whatever sort of husband they can get. In fact, I think the time is ripe for a thoughtful reconsideration of what marriage means, and of whether it is reasonable to expect that domestic partnership should always be based on romantic love. Such serious analysis is not, of course, what Gottlieb offers; instead, she gives us a few shallow overgeneralizations based on the experiences of herself, her immediate circle of friends, and the characters in her favourite sitcoms, and patronizingly concludes that what every woman wants is a husband and children.

If this were all, then I could dismiss “Marry Him” as a piece of reactionary fluff—idiotic, but not important enough to warrant cancelling a subscription to a magazine that normally carries more substantial fare. What I cannot tolerate is the malicious false dichotomy Gottlieb directs against her readers in the following passage:

Oh, I know—I’m guessing there are single 30-year-old women reading this right now who will be writing letters to the editor to say that the women I know aren’t widely representative, that I’ve been co-opted by the cult of the feminist backlash, and basically, that I have no idea what I’m talking about. And all I can say is, if you say you’re not worried [about getting married], either you’re in denial or you’re lying. In fact, take a good look in the mirror and try to convince yourself that you’re not worried, because you’ll see how silly your face looks when you’re being disingenuous.

In other words, Gottlieb tells us that on the matter of her readers’ feelings, she is a greater authority than they are, and she pre-emptively attacks anyone who might dare to take issue with her. This verbal bullying is despicable, and the ostensibly light-hearted tone of the piece cannot excuse it. (“Can’t you take a joke?” is the transparent apologia of bullies everywhere.) The Atlantic’s decision to publish “Marry Him” was a reprehensible lapse of editorial judgement, and I have no desire to subscribe to a magazine that insults its readers.

Has it come to this, then? Is the semicolon now officially so obscure—is its proper deployment considered such arcane thaumaturgy—that when it is spotted in the subways of New York, it is no less to be remarked upon than the appearance of an ivory-billed woodpecker in the swamps of Arkansas?

Left: semicolon; right: ivory-billed woodpecker (♀)

How it all began

Neil Neches, a marketing manager who writes copy for New York City Transit, created an ad that exhorts subway passengers to dispose of their newspapers properly, rather than leaving them strewn willy-nilly about the trains. The ad includes the following sentence:

Please put it in a trash can; that’s good news for everyone.

This strikes me as a fine sentence, but not in any way an extraordinary one. Geoff Nunberg gave it what seemed to me to be about the right amount of mass-media attention: a three-sentence post on Language Log, remarking that amidst the grumbling of grouchy grammarians and pistol-packing pandas one seldom hears any praise for well-punctuated public signage, and that perhaps the written language is not going to hell in a handbasket quite so rapidly as the peevologists fear.

"A pretentious anachronism"

Then the New York Times picked up on the story, and devoted an article to it, with a photo of Neches and his handiwork, and quotations from miscellaneous experts. (The article was brought to my attention when Mark Liberman mentioned it on Language Log.) The subway ad is remarkable, the Times informs us, because "in literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism." Fortunately, the Times' own online search engine allows one to test this claim, at least with respect to journalism; one can, for example, search for semicolons in the past week's worth of articles. To be fair, I think the search returns quite a few false positives; on the other hand, when I tried it, the first result I got was a short AP item reporting on today's trading in the Chicago commodities markets, which included a couple of sentences like this:

Wheat for May delivery jumped 19 cents to $10.645 a bushel; March corn fell 2.25 cents to $5.2225 a bushel; March oats added 0.25 cent to $3.84 a bushel; May soybeans advanced 13.5 cents to $14.3825 a bushel.

Those are husky, big-shouldered, wheat-stacking semicolons, those are, without any whiff of literary pretension to them.

Still, there seems to be something about the semicolon in particular that strikes people as, if not pretentious, then perhaps just very markedly correct. Unlike some other punctuation marks, the semicolon does not tend to be overused. People who don't know how to use apostrophes scatter them all over the place like so many discarded newspapers; people who don't know how to use semicolons perpetrate comma splices instead. The result, I suppose, is that the semicolon has become the emblem of an inadvertently secret society of competent punctuators. If Neches had chosen any of the other three acceptable ways of separating those two independent clauses in his ad (a full stop, an em dash, or a colon), I doubt it would have provoked any comment whatsoever. (Well, maybe the colon would have.) It saddens me to think of the semicolon as ostentatiously correct, or ostentatiously anything; one thing I've always liked about the semicolon is that it is such an unobtrusive way of getting from one clause to another.

A cryptic comment from the sage of Building 20 the Stata Center

The experts of whom the Times made inquiries are a motley group, most of whom simply went along with the premise of the article and agreed that the semicolon in the subway ad was well placed. In Language Log's third post about the matter, Arnold Zwicky comments on the exception to this pattern. The Times reported:

The linguist Noam Chomsky sniffed, "I suppose Bush would claim it's the effect of No Child Left Behind."

Zwicky wonders:

What on earth did Sam Roberts (the writer of the story) ask Chomsky to elicit such a response?

The comment seems totally off-topic, given that neither President Bush nor the NCLB Act were in the context. What was Chomsky trying to say?

What I wonder is why on earth Roberts asked Chomsky to comment on the semicolon at all. Chomsky is a theoretical syntactician by profession and a castigator of U.S. government policy by avocation; his justly famous work does not to my knowledge touch on matters of punctuation, nor is he generally numbered among the great prose stylists. To my mind, it was Roberts who committed an irrelevancy in trying to bring Chomsky into the discussion of the semicolon; Chomsky, displaying his characteristic willingness to answer dumb questions, did his best to relate the topic to one of his areas of expertise.

When in doubt, blame teh intarwebs

Speaking of irrelevant things (how's that for a segue?), let's not overlook the following non sequitur, which Roberts manages to sneak in just after the sound bite from Chomsky:

New York City Transit's unintended agenda notwithstanding, e-mail messages and text-messaging may jeopardize the last vestiges of semicolons.

Oh noes! Technology will (mis)spell our doom! Seriously, though, this bit of alarmist nonsense comes out of nowhere, and it also goes nowhere; Roberts uses it mostly as a setup for the article's punch line, which is about how the semicolon represents a wink in emoticons. Maybe instead of bothering Chomsky, Roberts could have talked to someone who could have set him straight on the linguistics of instant messaging; I recommend L. M. Squires.

Here are some things that have been going on recently (for various values of 'recently') in regions of the blogosphere tangent to this one:

• Away With Words, Nancy Friedman's blog about "names, brands, writing, and the quirks of the English language," is now called Fritinancy—a delightfully evocative and tantalizingly obscure word meaning 'twittering'. ( Read more... )
• Meanwhile, Simon Holloway at Davar Akher has been tagged with a give-us-a-glimpse-of-your-library sort of meme. The instructions are to post the sixth, seventh, and eighth sentences on page 123 of the nearest book of sufficient length; Holloway comes up with a tome on Biblical Hebrew syntax, and provides not only the required passage, but also a neat scholarly exegesis of it. And then he tags, among others, me. ( Read more... )
• This reminds me that I've also been tagged by the polyglot conspirator, L. M. Squires, to do the "five things my readers don't know about me" meme. (The previous sentence assumes that the passage of a year does not trigger any statute of limitations on either the tagging or the present perfect tense.) ( Read more... )
• And, speaking of memes, both tahnan (in this post) and Heidi Harley have recently done the album meme. ( Read more... )

If you think that it would be fun to do any of the memes in this post, consider yourself tagged.

You know what I like about it when the campus closes because of snow?

It's not the part about not having to teach; I enjoy teaching. It's the part about not having to get on the subway at quarter to seven so as to get on the bus at quarter past seven so as to get to my office by quarter past eight so as to be ready to teach at nine.

You know what I like about it when the campus closes because of snow at 8:30 a.m.?

Absolutely nothing.

On the front page of my morning paper today, there was an article about the New Hampshire primaries. The article itself was titled "Hillary Clinton allows raw emotion to show: Question chokes her up on eve of critical vote," and I refer you to Echidne for a feminist response to another article of the same ilk. What I want to talk about just now is the sidebar, which was apparently supposed to impress upon us how important New Hampshire is.

The sidebar informs us that, in elections since 1952, 57% of Democrats who won the New Hampshire primary went on to win their party's nomination, and 79% of Republicans who won the New Hampshire primary went on to win their party's nomination. We are left to draw our own conclusions from this, but the implication seems to be that the New Hampshire primaries are a good predictor—or determinant—of the outcome of the whole nominating process.

Without having the numbers to hand, though, I think you could make just about any primary look equally influential and predictive—especially the ones that are held later on, when many of the losers have already dropped out of the race. Let's consider the sample:

We're dealing with 14 election years here. In those years, eleven Republicans who won in New Hampshire went on to be nominated; that's where the 79% figure comes from. Of those eleven, though, six were incumbent presidents, and their nominations were mostly foregone conclusions (with the exception of Gerald Ford, who was an unusual sort of incumbent, having never been elected either president or vice president). In the same period, eight Democrats who won in New Hampshire won the nomination; three of them were incumbent presidents.

If we factor out the incumbents, then five of eight non-incumbent Republicans who won New Hampshire won the nomination, and five of eleven non-incumbent Democrats who won New Hampshire won the nomination. So that brings the 79% and 57% figures down to 62.5% and 45.5%, respectively. Given the smallish numbers involved—and it doesn't make sense to try to add statistical power by bringing in figures from before 1952, because the nominating process was different then—it might be more honest to retreat from this level of precision and say simply that there's a roughly even chance that a non-incumbent who wins a New Hampshire primary will end up winning the nomination. That's still not bad, considering the number of candidates competing, but it's not necessarily worth making a sidebar about.

The folks at Celestial Seasonings want me to know that green tea—specifically, their green tea—has all sorts of salubrious properties and no harmful side effects. So they write (in an ad in The New Yorker):

[...B]e good to yourself and enjoy a cup of our Green Tea. We guarantee that you'll be able to drive a car and operate heavy machinery afterwards.

That's some tea!