Innovative Usage Thread

[Salmoneus]

I saw cooking instructions on something the other day that referred to "fan forced" ovens.

I think the product may have been American - is this an American expression?

In England, the expression is instead "fan assisted", and I though that was a lovely cultural contrast...

(they're also of course just called 'fan ovens', or increasingly these days just 'oven's...)

[Vijay]

I think those are called convection ovens here. "Fan-forced oven" is apparently an Australian term.

[alynnidalar]

I've never heard that term in the US. I concur that here we refer to them as "convection" ovens.

[äreo]

Someone may have brought this up already, but I've noticed this tendency, at least in American English, in both writing and speech:

When a singular noun is part of a phrase that ends with a plural noun, the verb will agree in number not with the former noun but with the latter. For example:

"The new user interface with countless customizable features are going to revolutionize..."
"One of the issues facing so many of our clients have been that..."

It seems to happen with longish noun phrases where the speaker/writer seems to "forget" where the real subject of the verb went and just makes the verb agree with the most proximal noun. I wonder, though, whether with time this will lead to a confusion between "is" and "are" in certain situations, ultimately precipitating a replacement of all present-tense forms of to be with "are," which AFAIK is basically what happened in Swedish.

Has anyone else noticed this? I can't be taking crazy pills here.

[Pabappa]

Thats just wrong. Im a sloppy writer but even I would not make that mistake. I dont doubt that people are doing it, but in sentences like that ... which sound like theyre aimed at businesspeople ... they really should pay more attention to what theyre saying.

[KathTheDragon]

I've noticed I sometimes use the wrong number agreement, but I've never been able to figure out what the exact conditioning is other than the subject's head is of a different number to a noun later in the phrase. Mostly because it's hard to catch myself doing it.

[Vijay]

I thought this was a thing in British English (EDIT: I might be remembering that part wrong) and that we've even talked about it before.

[akam chinjir]

I believe this sort of thing is attested in quite a few languages, and that it can be a significant issue in making syntactic sense of agreement---since it seems to imply that agreement relationships can be determined by linear order rather than structure.

(Which is partly to say that it's only a mistake granted some account of what agreement is doing in syntax, and that account might be wrong.)

Though, I can't for the life of me remember where I read about this.

[Nortaneous]

I believe this sort of thing is attested in quite a few languages, and that it can be a significant issue in making syntactic sense of agreement---since it seems to imply that agreement relationships can be determined by linear order rather than structure.

cf. the Northern Subject Rule, and the Coptic pattern where you only mark case after the verb

[finlay]

I thought this was a thing in British English (EDIT: I might be remembering that part wrong) and that we've even talked about it before.

That's different- we'd say things like "my bank are awful" or "England are a good team" when talking about teams or organizations because they're semantically (although not morphologically) plural

[Linguoboy]

I believe this sort of thing is attested in quite a few languages, and that it can be a significant issue in making syntactic sense of agreement---since it seems to imply that agreement relationships can be determined by linear order rather than structure.

All I can add to this is that it's a curious feature of the modern Celtic languages that verbs only take 3P agreement with pronominal subjects. Plural NPs take singular agreement, e.g.:

Bhí na caoirigh go léir caillte. "All the sheep were lost."
Bhíodar go léir caillte. "They were all lost."
Bhí na bocairí sin ar fheabhas ar fad. "Those muffins were excellent."
Bhíodar sin ar fheabhas ar fad. "Those were excellent."

As for English, this is not a new issue. I was being warned against (and tested on) doing it back in grammar school. Hell, Fowler condemns it and that book's just shy of its centennial.

[missals]

I recently saw a reddit comment featuring "he literally post it on Facebook" - i.e. the past tense of post as post, not posted. This reflects an ongoing (centuries-long) trend of English verbs ending in /t/ and /d/ taking past tense forms identical to the stem. (I helped open the thread with a similar observation about the verb nut, but it got a cool reception...)

Also, again not a new phenomenon as a whole, but I am noticing more and more that people are replacing the perfect form with the simple past, where it differs from the simple past: "I've never ran there before..." Apparently this has been ongoing in North America for some time. As for myself, I don't even think I can say "swum" at all (anymore?) - saying "I've already swum today" sounds comical, it has to be "I've already swam."

Lastly, though again probably not strictly new, I did overhear quite a fantastic instance of the adjectival -ass the other day: "can't-cook-rice-ass nigga" - I don't know if I've ever heard it attach to a verb phrase like that before.

[Kuchigakatai]

In a conversation about borrowings and linguistic purism, it occurred to me to mention some examples of the high amount of borrowing from English going on in Spanish at the moment.

<Ser> Legion: let me scroll on facebook and see what English borrowings I find in Spanish posts
<Ser> ven rainau 'come here right now' (<- well, this one's adapted)
<Ser> ser mexicano es bien savage 'being Mexican is such a problem' (<- I don't think "savage" can even be used that way in English??)
<Ser> the guy who is quoted saying that was telling a story where some American girl who stayed at his AirBnB place rated it with 2 stars
<Ser> because he had a Veracruz tamale in the fridge, and the girl thought it was a package of rotten plants
<Ser> oye, pásame tu pack 'hey, can you send me your starter pack?' (where "starter pack" is a clothing attire)
<Ser> tu amigo te desafía a un lip sync 'your friend challenges you to do some lip sync'
<Ser> (in the same post) te reto, sashay away 'I challenge you, sashay away' ("sashay away" is a RuPaul expression meaning 'you're defeated, now walk like a proper sexy girl', sashay itself is a deformation of French enchanté since people get charmed by the sexy walk)
<Ser> Sorry not sorry, peros los ingenieros somos más en plan de: [Funcional > Estético]. 'Sorry but not sorry. We engineers are more of a [functional > aesthetic] mentality'
<Ser> this sentence also has some interesting contamination of pero 'but' with plural -s due to the following words
<Ser> too many -os words maybe
<Ser> Yo, empoderada, perra, diva y potra después de tomarme mi herbalife 'Me, empowered, slutty, a diva and a mare after drinking my herbalife'
<Ser> and the funny thing is, knowing Spanish speakers I'm sure "herbalife" here is pronounced [eɾβaˈlaif] with the last syllable stressed
<Ser> because we suck at maintaining English stress, especially when the last or second-to-last syllables are pretty heavy
<Ser> Ojalá en tu streaming de twitch no te me apenes 'I hope that when you stream on Twitch you won't feel embarassed'
<Ser> Esos de Overwatch son unos grammar nazi 'Overwatch guys are a bunch of grammar nazis'
<Ser> anyway, I think this is enough


I didn't even make an effort to find these examples. I just scrolled down my Facebook feed and tried to notice English borrowings.

[MacAnDàil]

I believe this sort of thing is attested in quite a few languages, and that it can be a significant issue in making syntactic sense of agreement---since it seems to imply that agreement relationships can be determined by linear order rather than structure.

All I can add to this is that it's a curious feature of the modern Celtic languages that verbs only take 3P agreement with pronominal subjects. Plural NPs take singular agreement, e.g.:

Bhí na caoirigh go léir caillte. "All the sheep were lost."
Bhíodar go léir caillte. "They were all lost."
Bhí na bocairí sin ar fheabhas ar fad. "Those muffins were excellent."
Bhíodar sin ar fheabhas ar fad. "Those were excellent."

As for English, this is not a new issue. I was being warned against (and tested on) doing it back in grammar school. Hell, Fowler condemns it and that book's just shy of its centennial.

Wow so just like the Northern subject rule? I downloaded an article about the origins of the rule the other day, but I'm yet to read it.

[Vijay]

I didn't even make an effort to find these examples. I just scrolled down my Facebook feed and tried to notice English borrowings.

That's like me trying to find code-switching between Malayalam and English on a Malayalee forum.

[akam chinjir]

All I can add to this is that it's a curious feature of the modern Celtic languages that verbs only take 3P agreement with pronominal subjects. Plural NPs take singular agreement, e.g.:

It looks to me as if in the examples you give, it's an alternation between, first, a full NP subject and no subject marking on the verb, and, second, no separate subject and subject marking on the verb. My (very limited) understanding is that in Irish, you also don't get agreement (in either person or number) when the subject is represented by a separate pronoun. Is that right? Could you, say, include a 3p pronoun in the examples given, and if you did, would you still get plural agreement?

[MacAnDàil]

@Ser: Which Spanish speakers are these exactly? Native speakers living in America? or El Salvador? or elsewhere? Is this only young people that hang around on internet forums or other people too? How does usage vary across these groups?

[Kuchigakatai]

@Ser: Which Spanish speakers are these exactly? Native speakers living in America? or El Salvador? or elsewhere? Is this only young people that hang around on internet forums or other people too? How does usage vary across these groups?

They are young native speakers in their 20s living in Mexico City or San Salvador. They don't hang out on Internet forums unless you count the occasional Facebook group as a "forum".

I don't read people of my parents' generation on Facebook much, but for what it's worth my parents tell me people their age nowadays are also using a surprisingly high number of English borrowings.

[Linguoboy]

It looks to me as if in the examples you give, it's an alternation between, first, a full NP subject and no subject marking on the verb, and, second, no separate subject and subject marking on the verb. My (very limited) understanding is that in Irish, you also don't get agreement (in either person or number) when the subject is represented by a separate pronoun. Is that right? Could you, say, include a 3p pronoun in the examples given, and if you did, would you still get plural agreement?

You could. This is a nonstandard feature, confined to some Munster varieties. Ó Siadhail says it can be found in all tense/aspect combinations, but Bhíodar siad go léir caillte isn't something I'd say or that I'd expect to hear spoken. On the other hand, Táid siad go léir caillte is the most natural way for me to say "They are all lost". (Standard Irish: Tá siad go léir caillte.)

In modern colloquial Welsh, by contrast, inflected forms are never used without an explicit subject (pronominal or otherwise). Equivalents to the sentences above:

Oedd y defaid i gyd ar goll. "All the sheep were lost."
Oeddyn nhw i gyd ar goll. "They were all lost."
Oedd y chwiogod 'na heb eu tebyg. "Those muffins were excellent."
Oedd y rheina heb eu tebyg. "Those were excellent."

And a present tense[*] example:

Daw ei rhieni os daw hi. "Her parents will come if she comes."
Dôn nhw os daw hi. "They'll come if she comes."

[*] Historically a simple present, this inflection serves as a synthetic future in Modern Welsh.

[Salmoneus]

In a conversation about borrowings and linguistic purism, it occurred to me to mention some examples of the high amount of borrowing from English going on in Spanish at the moment.

To be fair, a lot of these either aren't exactly borrowings or aren't really from English...

<Ser> ser mexicano es bien savage 'being Mexican is such a problem' (<- I don't think "savage" can even be used that way in English??)

"Well savage" to mean "very unpleasant"? You can use that in English if you're 20 and live in London. At least it's better than being bare savage, though. [and I'm guessing I've just terribly aged myself and that adding 'bare' to every fucking adjective is no longer bare sick, and is instead SO five years ago, but...]

<Ser> oye, pásame tu pack 'hey, can you send me your starter pack?' (where "starter pack" is a clothing attire)

I have never seen either 'pack' or 'starter pack' used in that sense in English. Although admittedly, teenage fashion discussions are something I don't have a lot of experience of.

<Ser> tu amigo te desafía a un lip sync 'your friend challenges you to do some lip sync'

This seems like a very reasonable "borrowing" for a new concept that English doesn't really have a word for either. [I mean, "lip synch" can't be much older in English than it is in Spanish... we didn't have it when I were a lad (people would just be miming); I think I first started hearing it from anime fans?]

<Ser> (in the same post) te reto, sashay away 'I challenge you, sashay away' ("sashay away" is a RuPaul expression meaning 'you're defeated, now walk like a proper sexy girl', sashay itself is a deformation of French enchanté since people get charmed by the sexy walk)

I seriously doubt the latter! It sounds like a folk etymology. [a) that's really semantically stressed, b) that's very mangled diachronics, and c) the 'sexy walk' meaning of 'sashay' is secondary; it can also just mean to move in a quick and lively manner, particularly to move sideways, particularly with a sense of freedom and ease. In England, it's not (all that) infrequently used to describe men playing sports]

Wiktionary and etymonline both have it from chassé, the name of a French dance move, via metathesis.

I'm not familiar with this particular phrase, but if it's a catchphrase of a specific US comedian I guess that would explain it. I'm not sure it really counts as "borrowing from English" if you're borrowing something from the idiosyncratic speech of a single English speaker, that most people wouldn't understand as having that meaning...

<Ser> Sorry not sorry, peros los ingenieros somos más en plan de: [Funcional > Estético]. 'Sorry but not sorry. We engineers are more of a [functional > aesthetic] mentality'

Interestingly, this is in my experience only something said by people in internet forums, who are just as likely not to be native speakers; it's not grammatical English.

<Ser> Yo, empoderada, perra, diva y potra después de tomarme mi herbalife 'Me, empowered, slutty, a diva and a mare after drinking my herbalife'

That's not a borrowing, that's a proper name. Yes, the company is from an English-speaking country, but it's not an English word, neither in origin nor to my knowledge has it become one. If I say "I'm thinking of buying a Renault", that's not English borrowing from French!

<Ser> Ojalá en tu streaming de twitch no te me apenes 'I hope that when you stream on Twitch you won't feel embarassed'

"Twitch" again is a proper name. "Stream" is a borrowing, but not a normal sort of one, since "streaming" is in effect a product provided by "Twitch", and product names borrow much more easily. [that is, there's a difference between borrowing "stream" for "what people do on Twitch", and borrowing "stream" in a much broader sense whenever semantically similar to what's done on Twitch]

Also, of course, this is borrowing a word for an extremely new technological phenomenon, which is kind of "fair", I think... at least, it's a different sort of borrowing from blanket cultural borrowing...

<Ser> Esos de Overwatch son unos grammar nazi 'Overwatch guys are a bunch of grammar nazis'

Overwatch is a proper name; I'll give you 'grammar Nazi', although again I'd point out that this is a recent term and very rarely heard outside the internet.

I think most of these borrowings are just, as it were, evanescent "coolth" markers, which have to be continually regenerated, and which as a result do indeed very often get borrowed from other language, but only a small number of which will leave any lasting impact, or else are technological terms for things that didn't yet have a fully established term in the language...