Noncompositional

Unable to think of original content, let’s consider the latest two The Good Word entries over at Slate.

The first, Suck it up (hat tip: Lindsay), is an essay on the verb suck in its meaning of ‘lame’…uh, I mean, ‘undesirable.’ Apparantly some people frown upon its use, because it’s vulgar/faddish/lewd/etc. Seth Stephenson argues against this position, and the basic point is one that any good student of semantic change (and sociolinguistics, which of course is a part of any curriculum on semantic change) could make: “You don’t like semantic change? Sucks to be you” (as the author puts it). The various arguments should be familiar: does the word evoke the supposed lewd act? (no, especially not in people who’ve never even heard of said act [though, a combination of the sort of linguistic stick-in-the-mud who doesn't like the word along with connectionist and/or exemplar-based models of the lexicon, I might be able to see how a snowball effect could result]); is the etymology of the word even related to fellatio? (origins are unclear, but other sources present themselves); can you change the trend? (no).

But in the course of arguing the first point, Seth makes this point:

When someone says Bill Gates is a geek, do you picture him as a circus performer biting the head off a live chicken?

So, the origin of modern geek ‘a not-very-sociable expert in some field’ is from a sort of sideshow performer? That’s interesting. The OED lists the sideshow use as early as 1911 (as US Slang), and the ‘nerd’ sense as appearing in 1957. However, they (implicitly) claim that this use derived from the much earlier meaning of ‘foolish/worthless person.’ The sideshow meaning is put under a separate subheading (i.e., “2″ instead of “1c”).

The article also engages in some interesting thoughts on the rhetorical function of simple intransitive clause: this sucks/blows/bites/rules. In particular Seth claims that one-syllable intransitive verbs are the most economical way to express things, moreso than predicate adjectives (which after all need to be supported by a copula) or transitive verbs (which take twice as many neurons to activate). Could be true, at least if “economical” means “less sounds” (rather than, say, “[less] underlying conceptual structure”). He then relates this to the lexical stratification that can be seen in English between Germanic and Latinate/Romance vocabulary; the former contains many colloquial and phonologically short words. All nice stuff. And he issues a challenge:

Can you find an intransitive verb that expresses the same idea [that something sucks], but in a manner that wouldn’t seem out of place in formal speech? Because I can’t.

The next article, You Need To Read This by Ben Yagoda also has some interesting observations regarding modal need. It is, he says, much more versatile than more traditional deontic modals like have, should and must (the last of which is, intuitively, pretty uncommon in speech as a deontic modal, except in some fixed expressions (must see) and recent movie titles). However, his very first argument is a bust:

Passive constructions in the form of “the floor needs to be washed” or “the video needs to be returned” deftly finesse the question of just who will be doing the washing or returning.

Points for correct recognition of real passives, but they get deducted for missing the fact that have and other auxiliaries are just as happy in passives. The next argument is more interesting:

And need to is just the thing for the currently very popular tense I call the kindergarten imperative, as in, “I need you to put away your crayons now.”

Certainly the sense of need meaning ‘cognizer thinks that some state-of-affairs is required’ is very useful as a way of giving commands or strong suggestions. In this sense it allows commands to be personalized (the “I messages” he talks about later in the article), which is certainly a persuasion strategy. However, he again loses points because (1) this is not the modal sense of need that is given in the first argument, (2) the example given is not an imperative, and (3) imperative is not a tense. I suppose I can relax a bit, since even linguists often do not distinguish the syntactic category imperative from the illocutionary category command/directive.

He then mentions something I’ve heard before from linguist friends, namely the flight attendent “go ahead and,” which also features prominently in doctor/nurse-patient interactions, and may have to do with some sort of power/face-maintenance doohickey (to be precise). Seth proceeds to talk about the sad decline of the “traditional imperative mood,” exemplified by the replacement of no smoking (a non-imperative command) with thank you for not smoking (another non-imperative, somewhat more indirect command). Whoops. It’s true that no X is a way to prescribe actions, but it is not an imperative. Again, I’m being nitpicky with terminology, so it slides. And while I’m being generous, I’ll note that he didn’t again say that imperative is a tense! Maybe he just wanted to vary his words, instead of using “mood” several times in a row.

I almost wish he had mentioned a new entry in the suggestion-giving arena, namely want. It can be seen in sentences like this:

To divide fractions you turn the second fraction [...] into it’s [sic] own reciprocal. Then you want to multiply the number that you didn’t turn into it’s reciprocal. (from this tutorial)

This led me to think of the sorts of instructions that I saw on my Japanese language tests. When I was attending Japanese classes in America, the most common construction was the polite imperative suffix nasai, which attaches to the ren’youkei form of the verb. Also common was seyo which is one of the imperative forms of suru ‘do.’ However, when I got to Japan I noticed a lot more non-polite imperatives, including the other variant of ‘do’: shiro. I suppose this is normal in Japan, but somehow my non-native intuition said that it was just too direct for exam instructions. I realize this doesn’t make sense, since English fill in the blanks given below is perfectly normal; I suppose I had just acquired the idea that in Japanese, straight-up imperative forms are only to be used when you’re about to punch someone out.

[edit: some additions and fixes in [square brackets]]