Noncompositional

There is a great literature out there on syntactic blends, most of which I’m frightfully unaware of (but see this LL post by Mark Liberman, the article he cites by Dwight Bolinger (a good and quick ready), and some recent work [like this piece] by Liz Coppock at “that school down the peninsula”). I suppose one of the most infamous of these (or at least the one that has caught some attention recently) is the double-is or is-is construction, as in

The thing is is that this only happens when unplugged.

which (some have said) blends “what (the thing / it) is is that…” and “the thing is that….”

Well, I noticed something searching on the ol’ internet the other day, and I’m not quite sure how to categorize it. It starts with two English idioms: (be) more like it (MLI) and (be) what I’m talking about (WITA). They are similar in meaning: they say that something (an item, an event, a situation) is very close to some ideal, perhaps closer than might have been expected, or closer than previous versions of it (whatever “it” is) had been. Nearly always, they are anchored with respect to “now” (adjusted for viewpoint) and “me.” MLI seems like it might be more flexible with respect to times and points of view than WITA. But back to that later.

Now, blends…well, maybe you can see where this is going. I’ll just give the hits from google:

That’s more like what I’m talking about :) The laps video was excellent: gain 200 feet, bring it around unpowered, do it again. Very cool. Then you hear tracks like “Sugarhill” or “Millenium Bug” and you say to yourself, “This is more like what I’m talking about”.

Yum. Blendy. You’ve got two idioms. One takes the form of a (predicative) headless relative (“what I’m talking about”). You’ve got another idiom (“more like it”) with a very similar meaning. It’s a PP with a specified object: it. But you bend the rules a bit, and stick the headless relative into the object of that preposition, and presto chango! I guess this is an idiom blend, of a decoding and an encoding idiom. (I think I’m right in classifying WITA as decoding, but MLI as encoding; but I could be wrong) The result is perfectly grammatically well-formed, and if you know both (or even either?) of the two idioms, perfectly understandable.

(What’s really amazing is that people actually type this stuff. It would be interesting to see what sorts of “on-the-fly” phenomena appear on which parts of the internet. [for a great example, search for outerer and see what you get])

Back to the viewpoint stuff. Consider the style of writing called third person limited omniscient, or “tight third person,” as in the following, where the viewpoint is ostensibly third-person and in the past, but the narrator is privy is information in a “here/now/self” sort of way.

Several people in the restaurant had stopped eating to stare at his conversation. Why did so many people have to be looking at him? He carefully placed his fork down on the platter. Couldn’t they see that he was just having a simple talk with his…

Then consider how well MLI and WITA could appear in these contexts. That is, how good does this passage sound?

Marie worried about James. Though her husband usually made top-notch, fancy-restaurant-calibur meals for them to eat, lately dinners had been rather poor. She suspected it had something to do with an argument she’d seen James having last week. A rather menacing-looking bearded man appeared to have been threatening James about something. But then, just the other day, things changed — or at least, they seemed to. James was back to his normal self, and had decided to prepare a special meal. [...] Marie took a bite of the quiche that James had prepared. It was delicious. This was definitely more like it / This was what she was talking about.

I’m no critic (nor writer, obviously) but these are a little weird. But hands down, the WITA version (here, WSTA) sounds a whole lot worse. To be fair, maybe the register of WITA is a bit off for a straight comparison to MLI. So if you can think of a good example of what s/he (is/was) talking about, please let me know.