The shifting ground of backshifting

Recently, a correspondent asked about fall in Aristotle said that heavy things fall quicker than lighter things. Should fall be fell, he wondered.


I responded that the simple present tense is fine here, even preferred. I went on to say that backshifting is rarely obligatory and that, generally speaking, backshifting seems to be more common when talking about discrete events than general facts or states.


But then another participant in the discussion brought up the sentence People thought the earth was flat. In this sentence, the present tense of be just doesn't work. So what's the difference?

Owning the podium (or not)

For any hard-up Canadian headline writers thinking the unthinkable about the Canadian men's Olympic hockey team, I offer the following:

Pwned! The odium!

The power of you and me

The Canadian Press is responsible for publishing the following foolishness:

"'For some reason, polite Canadians do not seem to think that "me" is acceptable,' says Joanne Buckley, a professor at the Centre for Student Development at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., and one of the country's pre-eminent grammarians.

"'Of course, we grammarians know that the words should be "believe in the power of you and me" since "of" is a preposition and takes an object.'"

For some reason, Joanne Buckley seems to be an incurious, self-agrandizing pedant who has memorized some rules of thumb about grammar but has not had the wherewithal to consider what lies behind those rules and how they play out in the real world.

OK doing

A few years ago, I wrote about allowed doing. The other day, I heard for the first time (I think), "It's OK playing Wii." This was not an evaluative comment on the relative enjoyment of playing Wii but rather a claim that they were permitted to play Wii. My corpus searches have turned up almost no relevant examples, and as I've said, I don't think I've heard it before, but I'll keep my ears tuned.

Having the audacity to play with audio speed

I have a student in my current class who told me that she simply couldn't understand the audio recordings we're using in class. That's not so unusual, but after working with her for a bit in my office, I came to believe she has an unusual disjunction between her reading ability and listening ability. So I whipped out Audacity and started playing around with the files.

There is an option to change the tempo (i.e., make it slower without changing the pitch), but it introduces an odd distortion to the voice. Instead, I found it better change the speed and then boost the pitch back up. To do this, you begin by opening your file (after you've downloaded and installed Audacity). Step 2 is to select the portion of the file you'd like to slow down. In most cases this will be the whole recording. Step 3 is to click on Effect from the menu bar, and choose change speed, perhaps by 33%. Once this completed, you need to once more click on Effect and then choose change pitch. I found the pitch needed to be boosted slightly more than the amount of the speed reduction (if you can compare those two things). So, a speed change of -33% would require a pitch boost of roughly 43%.

Here's are some samples:
-basic recording
-change tempo
-change speed
-fix pitch

Wonky content clauses

For quite some time I've been noticing clauses of the type exemplified in this sentence: "Mr. McCain was asked what would Republicans do in response." (from the NY Times here). Traditional grammatical description often calls the bolded clause a noun clause, but following the CGEL, and for good reason, I'll call it a content clause.


The thing that's wonky about it, if you haven't noticed, is that interrogative content clauses don't typically undergo subject-auxiliary inversion. That is, you would expect Mr. McCain was asked what Republicans would do in response, with would following the subject instead of preceding it. I hear these on the radio all the time, but they're ephemeral, and I'm rarely positive that what I've heard is reported speech as opposed to a quotation or pseudo-quotation along the lines of Mr. McCain was asked, "what will Republicans do in response." 

'Unique', how far you've come

Merriam Webster's Online Dictionary gives the following definition for unique:

1 : being the only one : sole "his unique concern was his own comfort" "I can't walk away with a unique copy. Suppose I lost it? — Kingsley Amis" "the unique factorization of a number into prime factors"
2 a : being without a like or equal : unequaled "could stare at the flames, each one new, violent, unique — Robert Coover" b : distinctively characteristic : peculiar 1 "this is not a condition unique to California — Ronald Reagan"
3 : unusual "a very unique ball-point pen" "we were fairly unique, the sixty of us, in that there wasn't one good mixer in the bunch — J. D. Salinger"
synonyms see strange
— unique·ly adverb
— unique·ness noun
usage Many commentators have objected to the comparison or modification (as by somewhat or very) of unique, often asserting that a thing is either unique or it is not. Objections are based chiefly on the assumption that unique has but a single absolute sense, an assumption contradicted by information readily available in a dictionary. Unique dates back to the 17th century but was little used until the end of the 18th when, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was reacquired from French. H. J. Todd entered it as a foreign word in his edition (1818) of Johnson's Dictionary, characterizing it as “affected and useless.” Around the middle of the 19th century it ceased to be considered foreign and came into considerable popular use. With popular use came a broadening of application beyond the original two meanings (here numbered 1 and 2a). In modern use both comparison and modification are widespread and standard but are confined to the extended senses 2b and 3. When sense 1 or sense 2a is intended, unique is used without qualifying modifiers.

Generally, I'm in agreement, but the following from the New York Times, gave me pause:

The organ, the Craighead-Saunders, is a unique instrument, not only because of its lovely sound, but also because it is a nearly exact copy of a late Baroque organ built by Adam Gottlob Casparini of East Prussia in 1776. The original stands in the Holy Ghost Church in Vilnius, Lithuania.

I suppose one could argue that it is the one and only copy, (i.e., that the original is not a copy), or that being only a "nearly exact copy" it had no twin, but were either of these blanched meanings really the one intended?

Google chooses Collins COBUILD dictionary

Google launched its new dictionary service this week. Poking around, I randomly came up with the word attribute and tried it out. The defining style was immediately familiar, so I jumped over to the Collins website, and searched for attribute there. The two entries are not identical, but they're close enough as to show this is almost certainly Google's source. Here's Google's entry:

If you attribute something to an event or situation, you think that it was caused by that event or situation. VERB

• Synonym 
  ascribe

• Women tend to attribute their success to external causes such as luck. V n + 'to'

If you attribute a particular quality or feature to someone or something, you think that they have got it. VERB

• Synonym 
  ascribe

• People were beginning to attribute superhuman qualities to him. V n + 'to'

• attribution N-UNCOUNT oft N 'of' n   /'ætrɪbj'uːʃən/
  • There's usually a lot of attribution of evil intent to those who have different views.

If a piece of writing, a work of art, or a remark is attributed to someone, people say that they wrote it, created it, or said it. VERB usu passive

• This, and the remaining frescoes, are not attributed to Giotto. 'be' V-ed + 'to'
• ...a Madonna and Child attributed to Pietro Lorenzetti. V-ed

An attribute is a quality or feature that someone or something has. N-COUNT usu with supp

• Synonym 
  characteristic

• Cruelty is a normal attribute of human behaviour.
• He has every attribute you could want and could play for any team.

Followed by the Collins COBUILD entry:

(FORMAL)If you attribute something to a person, thing, or event, you believethat they cause it or have it. Women tend to attribute their successto luck... People were beginning to attribute superhuman qualitiesto him.verbIf a piece of writing or a remark is attributed to someone, peoplesay that that person created it or said it. ...a play attributed toWilliam Shakespeare.n-count[ˈætrɪbjuːt]An attribute is a quality or feature. Cruelty is a normal attribute ofhuman behaviour.

What do you think? Notice that while the wording differs here and there, and Google has more senses listed, it's strikingly similar. Even some of the examples are the same.

I think it's a great choice. The COBUILD was revolutionary when it came out, and it's still a damn fine dictionary.