Innovative Usage Thread

[Travis B.]

anyone here besides me say hamburg to mean ground beef? is it a New England localism? Might it even be all traceable to a single supermarket chain that one day decided to trim its label just a tiny bit so they could make the text stand out more?

Ground beef is either "ground beef" or "hamburger meat" for me.

I've heard it from New Englanders (upper New Englanders, maybe), Pennsylvanians, UP'ers and a Minnesotan, and in Canada from a couple people from the Maritimes. It does feel regional to me but I can't see an obvious continuity in it.

I've never heard hamburg used to refer to ground beef (as opposed to Hamburg the city) here in southeastern Wisconsin.

[Nortaneous]

Two years ago a British transgender women sook asylum in New Zealand

[fusijui]

Two years ago a British transgender women sook asylum in New Zealand

Sook << sought?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

That's what I read it as, probably analogous with forsake, forsook or something similar? I didn't realise it was odd till I looked at it (I use sought, though).

[Nortaneous]

Two years ago a British transgender women sook asylum in New Zealand

Sook << sought?

that's what the poster later edited it to, so yes

That's what I read it as, probably analogous with forsake, forsook or something similar? I didn't realise it was odd till I looked at it (I use sought, though).

too obscure, probably rather from the nominal system where this ablaut is robustly attested (with a present habitual analogous to the plural)

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Also from verbs — shake, shook; take, took; I guess foot, feet follows the pattern more closely, but I find the transference... weird.

[Ares Land]

Not sure in which thread to put it... but I've seen some people on Reddit use moimoi instead of meme and I think it's sort of cute.

[Moose-tache]

I find that some patterns of strong verb are more spready than others. I had to stop myself the other day from saying "He prode himself on being on time" (class 1), and I've said "twoze" as the past tense of tweeze before (class 2). But some other classes don't spread. I never accidentally say "They declore their intentions openly" (class 4), or "I blank and it was gone" (class 3). The only case of class 4 spreading I've experienced is that I constantly try to conjugate succumb as if it were suc-come, but that's obviously a more specific type of analogy. It seems that simple pasts formed with o are more salient than those formed with a, but I'm not sure if that's what is causing the difference since many class 4 verbs have o in the simple past. It's surprising to me that class 3 is not spready, since it contains the sing-sang-sung paradigm that is most often used to show off English strong verb forms.

[Sol717]

I find that some patterns of strong verb are more spready than others. I had to stop myself the other day from saying "He prode himself on being on time" (class 1), and I've said "twoze" as the past tense of tweeze before (class 2). But some other classes don't spread. I never accidentally say "They declore their intentions openly" (class 4), or "I blank and it was gone" (class 3). The only case of class 4 spreading I've experienced is that I constantly try to conjugate succumb as if it were suc-come, but that's obviously a more specific type of analogy. It seems that simple pasts formed with o are more salient than those formed with a, but I'm not sure if that's what is causing the difference since many class 4 verbs have o in the simple past. It's surprising to me that class 3 is not spready, since it contains the sing-sang-sung paradigm that is most often used to show off English strong verb forms.

I don't think you're right about class 3 not being susceptible to analogical expansion; I've occasionally seen wung for both the simple past and past participle of wing. The first two classes definitely spread more (dove, squoze "squeezed", snoze¹ "sneezed"), but that's because class 3 is now only productive for verbs ending in velar nasals, meaning there's hardly any verbs available for remodelling.

1. However, snoze could actually be inherited; in OE, fneosan "to sneeze" was a class 2 verb in the same way as freosan "to freeze".

[Nortaneous]

Also from verbs — shake, shook; take, took; I guess foot, feet follows the pattern more closely, but I find the transference... weird.

Different vowel, but that seems like a possible alternate explanation

[LingEarth]

I find that some patterns of strong verb are more spready than others. I had to stop myself the other day from saying "He prode himself on being on time" (class 1), and I've said "twoze" as the past tense of tweeze before (class 2). But some other classes don't spread. I never accidentally say "They declore their intentions openly" (class 4), or "I blank and it was gone" (class 3). The only case of class 4 spreading I've experienced is that I constantly try to conjugate succumb as if it were suc-come, but that's obviously a more specific type of analogy. It seems that simple pasts formed with o are more salient than those formed with a, but I'm not sure if that's what is causing the difference since many class 4 verbs have o in the simple past. It's surprising to me that class 3 is not spready, since it contains the sing-sang-sung paradigm that is most often used to show off English strong verb forms.

I find myself wanting to use "mound" as the past tense of the verb "mind", on the very rare occasion that I'd want a past tense of that verb, by analogy with find/found and so forth.

[Pabappa]

I did say mound once when I was about 10 years old, well aware that it was wrong, but it just came naturally to me and I knew that there was no chance of misinterpretation. I put it in the same category as my mother's skun your knee .... not correct, and not even colloquially acceptable, but at the same time, clearly understandable.

[axolotl]

re: mind, above. I've never thought of "mound," but sometimes I have to stop myself from saying "remound" as a past tense of "remind."

Anyway, what I was going to say:

There's a distinct usage of the word "city" in Utah that is hard to describe, but I'll try to describe it here.

First of all, you never hear "city of." The word "city" always comes after the name, never before, regardless of if "city" is actually part of the name.

Signs at municipal boundaries always say things like - for example - "Welcome to Lehi City" rather than "Welcome to Lehi," even though it's not called Lehi City, it's called Lehi. (example) It's like there's an underlying "city" at the end of every city name that isn't pronounced.

There are six well-known places in the state that actually have "city" in the name - Salt Lake City, West Valley City, Heber City, Brigham City, Cedar City, and Park City. In casual speech, the "city" in the first four is almost universally dropped, even though it actually is part of the name - everyone says Salt Lake, West Valley, Heber, and Brigham (and there is a huge sign over a road in central Brigham City that says "welcome to Brigham"). Park City and Cedar City always retain the "city," though. Perhaps a weird linguist could analyze their names as "underlyingly" Park City City and Cedar City City.

There seems to be a connotation thing happening, where the name alone refers to a city "vaguely" or "generally," while saying it with "city" at the end implies "specifically within the boundaries of a city," not just generally within the area (that is, the governmental boundary rather than the cultural boundary, or, the urbanized area rather than surrounding closely-connected rural areas). "Salt Lake" often refers to the entire Great Salt Lake Valley and/or all of Salt Lake County, while "Salt Lake City" refers to the city itself by its legal definition (which is where I live - it's actually pretty small, it only occupies about 20% of the whole valley's land area, and by my estimation, as much as half of the area enclosed by the city boundaries is actually unpopulated because it's either mountains or areas near the lake where you can't put anything because flood risk is too high for buildings and the soil is too salty for agriculture).

I heard a conversation a few days ago, someone was going to drive from Salt Lake City to St. George, and someone was describing to him where the speed traps typically are on the highway between the two. He said something like "There's usually one at the beginning and one at the end of Fillmore, but I've never seen one in Fillmore city." "City" is not part of the name - if you're sending something there, you write "Fillmore, Utah" on it.

[Moose-tache]

I've been thinking a lot lately about the English colloquialism "excuse you." In some dialects of American English you might say "excuse you" to someone who has performed some faux pas for which they should be ashamed. The formula is clear: excuse me indicates that the speaker has made a social error, so excuse you indicates the same about the listener. But the grammar is doing my head in.

First of all, the lack of a reflexive pronoun may seem obvious if the verb is subjunctive and not imperative. After all, we say "bless you." But "bless you" historically comes from "may God bless you," and I doubt that a similar third person subject is at play with the phrase "excuse me/you." In a subjunctive subclause like "I ask that you excuse yourself," we still need a reflexive pronoun.

So that raises the possibility that "excuse" might be some kind of (functionally finite but morphologically non-finite) predicate that just says "the following actor has committed a faux pas." Except there's not much precedent for this kind of invariable-predicate-plus-pronoun complex. The closest thing I can think of is certain constructions relating to reported speech, like "says you." This is also an example of colloquial subject dropping with third person singular subject agreement (e.g. "Goes to show" but never * "Go to show.")

So if the verb is imperative, the lack of reflexive marking is weird. If it's indicative, the absence of a subject or subject marking is weird. If it's subjunctive, both facts are weird. Am I overthinking this? Is there a clear grammatical path in English that lets you build verbs that are simultaneously immune to both subject agreement and the normal rules of reflexivity?

[Pabappa]

i'd put it in the imperative category .... there are at least a few other examples of phrases like that, and though some have more positive meanings .... "go me!" and "yay me!" for example .... they seem to be used sarcastically as often as not, and to seem particularly rude when used with the second person.

"go" is an active verb, and "yay" not typically considered a verb at all, but ... still .... i'm not sure that's important. i would classify all words like this as interjections, just as I consider "please", "of course", and the like to be interjections .... but that's flatly against traditional English grammar so I can't really say how my analysis of excuse~go~yay would fit into traditional grammar either where we need to find a verb.

[Otto Kretschmer]

Any contractions of you guys already on use?

[Travis B.]

Any contractions of you guys already on use?

The only reductions I've heard are to pronounce you as [jə] and to pronounce the /g/ in guys as [ɣ] or even [ɰ].

[zompist]

I've been thinking a lot lately about the English colloquialism "excuse you." In some dialects of American English you might say "excuse you" to someone who has performed some faux pas for which they should be ashamed. The formula is clear: excuse me indicates that the speaker has made a social error, so excuse you indicates the same about the listener. But the grammar is doing my head in. [...]

So if the verb is imperative, the lack of reflexive marking is weird. If it's indicative, the absence of a subject or subject marking is weird. If it's subjunctive, both facts are weird. Am I overthinking this? Is there a clear grammatical path in English that lets you build verbs that are simultaneously immune to both subject agreement and the normal rules of reflexivity?

Yes, expressions like "fuck you!" and "damn him!" And maybe Snoop Dogg's "I wanna thank me."

I think "excuse you" is jocular, and the syntactic oddity might be part of the point. But it might also be evidence that "excuse me" is no longer thought of as an imperative, just as a construction where the pronoun can be freely replaced.

Pabappa's "Go me" may fit too, though it's even odder, since "go" isn't even transitive. But sports cheers fit this construction: "Go Bears!"

[Moose-tache]

Very interesting responses, thank you both.

Zompist: I'm not so convinced that "excuse me" was originally imperative. For one, it's just as likely that the original phrase used the subjunctive. Also, an overt imperative would not get away with avoiding the reflexive like this (e.g. "Excuse yourself from gym class"), so even if it was historically an imperative, it hasn't been parsed that way for some time.

The question of "go me" is also fascinating. There's no transitivity involved. "Go Bears" and other phrases are simply transformations with the subject at the end. I don't think the use of "me" in "go me" is meant to indicate a direct object, but an emphatic form, i.e. the default first person form (no one raises their hand in a classroom and shouts "Ooh! I! I!"). So it's not that the valency of the verb has changed, but that the pronoun has moved from a nominative to simply a main argument/topic, and we're left with an uninflecting predicate and an unchanging pronoun very similar to "excuse me/you." It's almost as if there is an emerging pattern of comment-topic using verbs that cannot be distinguished as subjunctives or imperatives, and pronouns that happen to be formally identical to object pronouns. Any Future English conlangers, take note!

[hwhatting]

Zompist: I'm not so convinced that "excuse me" was originally imperative. For one, it's just as likely that the original phrase used the subjunctive. Also, an overt imperative would not get away with avoiding the reflexive like this (e.g. "Excuse yourself from gym class"), so even if it was historically an imperative, it hasn't been parsed that way for some time.

In European lanuages, subjunctives and imperatives are close in function; subjunctives often serve as "polite" imperatives or as imperatives where the (polite) 2nd person pronoun is formally a 3rd person pronoun (e.g. German polite Entschuldigen Sie bitte vs. informal Entschuldige bitte, Italian scusi (3rd sg. subj. referring polite pronoun Lei) vs.2nd sg. imperative scusa referring to informal tu. Like these constructions, "excuse me" is historically a request (whether in the imperative or a polite subjunctive) to excuse / pardon / forgive the requesters actions. So a reflexive pronoun is not even to be expected here. That this is not parsed as an imperative any more is what makes a construction like "excuse you" possible.

The question of "go me" is also fascinating. There's no transitivity involved. "Go Bears" and other phrases are simply transformations with the subject at the end. I don't think the use of "me" in "go me" is meant to indicate a direct object, but an emphatic form, i.e. the default first person form (no one raises their hand in a classroom and shouts "Ooh! I! I!"). So it's not that the valency of the verb has changed, but that the pronoun has moved from a nominative to simply a main argument/topic, and we're left with an uninflecting predicate and an unchanging pronoun very similar to "excuse me/you." It's almost as if there is an emerging pattern of comment-topic using verbs that cannot be distinguished as subjunctives or imperatives, and pronouns that happen to be formally identical to object pronouns. Any Future English conlangers, take note!

I'd say that "bears", "me", etc, in the "go x" is functionally a vocative.