Noncompositional

Over at Language Log, Geoff Pullum has posted on the ongoing story of Gillian Gibons, a schoolteacher teaching in Khartoum, Sudan. She has been charged with blasphemy for naming (actually, for accepting the class’ suggestion for naming) a teddy bear “Muhammad,” apparently after one of the most popular boys in the class.

I don’t want to get into the details of this particular case, but I do want to comment on something in Geoff’s final paragraph, which begins:

Here on the Linguistic Crimes desk we try to highlight the lighter side of language offenses: the zany character of victimless criminality that amount to no more than uttering strings of letters of syllables, the mad asterisking of words too awful to print, the giggleworthy character of loony attempts to suppress free speech.

Now I am sure Geoff has thought about the philosophy of language, and in particular the philosophy of what language “means,” far more than I could have if I had started when I was born and not stopped until last night, but there is something interesting in this particular statement. That is, on the one hand, we have the fact that “uttering of strings of letters and syllables” cannot reasonably constitute victim-ful criminality (being inherently meaningless, one presumes). On the other hand, we have the importance of the freedom of speech, which one presumes is an important thing to do because sometimes speech is meaningful or somehow experienced as meaningful.

But like I said, I’m no philosopher.

It seems as though we have Lewis Carroll to thank for the word chortle. He coined it in his poem Jabberwocky, apparently as a blend of the words snort and chuckle. We also have him to thank for the application of the word portmanteau to linguistic forms that contain multiple parts–though the morphologist’s use of the word usually refers to morphemes with specifications across multiple grammatical categories (number/gender/tense/etc.), while in common (?) parlance a portmanteau word is a blend of multiple words, like chortle.

You may have noticed a theme change around here. Basically it’s because the theme I was using (and which I still do like very much) didn’t support some recent wordpress features. I’ve temporarily gone back to the WP default theme until I have time to figure out what actually to do.

Superlative descriptions like to be limited to a particular groups of things to be compared. People are best in their class, a mountain might be the tallest in the lower 48 states, and several things are no doubt the best inventions since sliced bread. Of course, something could always just be the worst idea ever. One way to express how you’re limited the domain of compared items is to use the phrase this side of X. Now, you can’t go around using this for just any sort of domain limitation. It works really well when you’re talking about geographically limiting the domain of comparison to…well, shouldn’t it be obvious? Here’s some old timey examples from the OED.

1840 T. C. HALIBURTON Clockmaker III. xviii, He is..the best live one that ever cut dirt this side of the big pond.

1914 Sat. Even. Post 4 Apr. 10/2 There ain’t a kid like him this side of the Hump [sc. mountain range in west of N. America]–nor t’other side either.

Big, or at least salient, geographic features seem to work well - oceans, mountain ranges, mason-dixon lines. Also good are salient locations. Nearby pizza favorite Zachary’s has been lauded as the best pizza this side of Chicago. A place at Tahoe seems to have the best mesquite tri-tip and ribs this side of Texas. Now, it’s not clear to me that these claims are about, for example, taking the area between Chicago and the SF Bay Area and saying that there’s no better pizza in that region. It’s rather that they’re picking a place famous for pizza (or ribs), and saying that their own pizza may not be quite as good (or authentic), but it’s pretty darned close.

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