From blog to book: linguists' look at language is lively

By Nathan Bierma
"On Language"
Chicago Tribune
May 17, 2006

The first potentially bad idea they had, say linguists Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum, was to start Language Log, a Web log written by linguists for non-linguists.

That, Liberman and Pullum say, was "roughly as sensible as starting a little on-line magazine written entirely by periodontists ... devoted entirely to periodontological topics like root planing and bacterial plaque but aimed entirely at a general non-dentist readership."

But it worked. Language Log (www.languagelog.com) was a hit; after nearly three years of existence, it gets thousands of hits per day, and its group of more than a dozen blogging linguists receive e-mail responses from readers of all stripes.

Now for the second potentially bad idea: turn this Web log -- with all of its links and different font colors and sense of timeliness -- into a book.

But that idea turned out to be another gem. Thanks to "Far from the Madding Gerund and other dispatches from Language Log," (William, James and Company, 368 pages, $22), new readers can pick it up and see what they've been missing -- and fans can enjoy a version of Language Log in handy printed form.

"Except for [the loss of] clickable hyperlinks, most of the changes seem positive," Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, writes by e-mail. "A book continues to work even when the power goes off, it's safe for bathtub use, and it's recyclable."

The key to Language Log's successful transformation from Internet to print is the way it is written: The blog has the feel of an online magazine, not, as Liberman and Pullum put it, "an electronic toilet wall to write graffiti on." The bloggers use an informal and sometimes caustic tone that makes their prose leap off the screen and now the page.

"Here and there," the authors write in their introduction to the book, "we venture to predict you will actually giggle."

The book's selections show that nothing raises the ire of Language Log bloggers as much as linguistic ignorance and error among people who should know better.

Contrary to what many teachers and authors think, for example, good English writers were splitting infinitives and using "that" and "which" interchangeably long before anyone came along and tried to ban those practices.

"Incorrectly framed or completely mythical rules have ... a vise-like grip on the minds of educated Americans," the Language Log linguists write.

Even worse is ignorance about the basic properties of language. The authors scratched their heads at Jon Stewart's statement, "We declared war on terror--it's not even a noun." Terror may be more of an emotion than an enemy, but the word "terror" is unquestionably a noun. The authors howled over a recent book review in The Economist that praised an author for his use of "the passive tense." It should be "the passive voice."

This gaffe, in a reputable international magazine, is like referring to "the Declamation of Independence, as written by Benjamin Hamilton," Liberman wrote at Language Log.

Language Log has also had a hand in coining a couple of English words, although they are obscure, and inventing words is far down the authors' to-do list.

The first is "eggcorn," meaning a misspelling of a word based on a mis-hearing of it (named for a woman who thought "acorn" was spelled "eggcorn"; other examples include "inclimate weather" instead of "inclement weather").

The second is "snowclone," meaning a cliche formula, such as "X is the new Y" or "Will the real X please stand up?" (named for the snowclone "If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z," which is based on the false belief that languages in the Eskimo-Aleut family have more words for snow than English does).

But more important to Liberman and Pullum, they say, is the cause of contributing knowledgeable and lively discussion of linguistics to public discourse.

"Linguistics has always been a source of fascination and pleasure for us," the authors write. "We'd like to share."

Endings: Michael Schmidt's "The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets," (Vintage, 448 pages, $16.95), recently released in paperback, may be mostly about Greek poets and poetry, but it is also about English translations of that poetry.

Schmidt writes that his book "both affirms the importance of the Greek texts and believes in the possibility of English vernacular access to them." ...

Phrase origins are even more elusive -- and prone to urban legend -- than word origins, but Georgia Hole ventures her educated guesses in "The Real McCoy: The Stories Behind Our Everyday Phrases" (Oxford University Press, 208 pages, $19.95). "The real McCoy," she says, may have started in Scotland, where distiller G. Mackay and Co. used the slogan "the real Mackay" in 19th Century advertisements, or in the U.S., where boxer Charles `Kid' McCoy was said to often feign illness up until the day of a big bout. Then he would surprise competitors by coming at them full strength.

Contact Nathan Bierma at onlanguage@gmail.com.

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