Noncompositional

Perhaps you’ve noticed a slight dropoff from the normally low-frequency posting here. Well, whatever it is that caused it, it’s also causing more cars to be on the road every day, and more people to be on various college campuses. In any case, I have a question. It involves things like this:

For example, in the item description she busts out with the following paragraph: “If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me! I do have cats, but I keep them away from the fabrics/craft area.” Uh… non sequitur much? (link)

Your writer’s true colors are revealed when they refer to a Big Mac as “charred flesh”. Ummm, vegan much? Thank you, and have a nice day. (link)

Uh, okay. Prejudiced much? (link)

Beetle: uh, hmmm…literate much? (link)

Not part of my idiolect much? I have to admit that this is not really part of my speech, and I don’t have a good grasp on how to use it and what phrases can the much-ified (thus leaning on the crutch of there sometimes being as uh/um before the item in question). And it sure seems like there must have been some popular or cult individual who popularized this sort of thing - any ideas?

And it could be that I’m not really all that sure what these things mean, at least in the semantic details. That is to day, in something like busy much? or come here much?, you’re asking about frequency. In enjoy movies much? you’re asking about degree/extent (or possibly frequency…I suppose). In something like non sequitur much? is the person (sarcastically) asking about the frequency of non sequiturs (by some individual), or is that not really what’s going on?

About a month ago I wrote about what seems to be the more prevalent pronunciation of Beijing, namely that involving the postalveolar voiced fricative [ʒ]. Recently an AP article was written that aims to clear everything up and explain that, in fact the “hard j” sound in English is a closer approximation to the Mandarin pronunciation than the “soft j” sound that I (and others) find so frustrating. The main source of the article is not native Mandarin speakers, but S. Robert Ramsey (whose book on Chinese I mentioned about three years ago). Bill Poser discusses the article on LL.

So, this is all to the good, no? I suppose…but then again, I find I usually pronounce the name of the city Shanghai so that the first vowel is that of hang or fang, not that of father. This despite knowing full well the Mandarin pronunciation (which, as the official language, I would take to be the expected way for a foreigner to say the word, rather than in Shanghainese). In this case, the low mid-vowel is both the more proper and more foreign sounding option, and yet I do not frequently use it (at least, I don’t think I do, unless speaking with, say, a Chinese-speaker). Is Shanghai really that different from Beijing? And this is to say nothing of Seoul (which I render with a single syllable). Maybe I’m just a super-Anglicizer, and in the case of Beijing it happens to work out.

And for some sane arguments in favor of Beizhing, I recommend this entry in Beijing Sounds.

On a lark I decided to switch my Facebook interface to use Japanese. I noticed today that on a particular day when I befriended several people

Russellさんが Aさん、 Bさんさん、 Cさん、 Dさん、 Eさんさんさんと他1人さんと友達になりました。

That’s “Russell-san became friends with A-san, B-san-san, C-san, D-san, E-san-san-san, and one other person-san.”

Aside from the strangeness (to me) of adding the honorific -san to the phrase 他1人 ‘one other person’, there is the extreme strangeness of the multiple -sans appended to some of the names. I looked at some other people’s front pages, and found the same pattern exhibited two other times, as well as a slightly different pattern: A-san, B-san, C-san-san, D-san, E-san-san, and F-san (no ‘others’ mentioned).

At first I thought it might be that some of the -sans got omitted for some names and then stacked up somewhere else, but in no case was someone’s name missing the honorific suffix.

A few days after I got done saying that as used in the “speech act” sense was nearly impossible, though not uncommon in play-by-play commentary, I encountered an example.

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