The Innovative Usage Thread

[linguoboy]

Aaaaah, so that's what “make amends” means!

I would say that's one meaning. More generally, it can refer to any attempt to mend a rupture in a relationship, regardless if any repayment (concrete or abstract) is involved or not.

[Vijay]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omanathinkal_Kidavo

The Irayimman Thampi Memorial Trust alleged that the first eight lines of the Oscar nominee Bombay Jayashri's song 'Pi's Lullaby' in the film Life of Pi were not an original composition but a translation into Tamil of the Omanathinkal Kidavo.

That has to be the first time I've ever encountered "the" used immediately before the name of a lullaby.

[Salmoneus]

I just went to a food place with an Indian professor, and he asked the server whether they are "getting off" for Thanksgiving. Is it just my perverted mind, or do "getting time off" and "getting off" mean completely different things?

I would interpret "getting off for Thanksgiving" to mean "taking time off work to go on holiday at Thanksgiving". But it could just mean "does your work rota give you Thanksgiving off?" - "getting off" is what shift workers do at the end of their shift.

EDIT: e.g., if you're talking to a friend of yours who is working at a bar and you ask "what time are you getting off?", it doesn't normally imply anything sexual, just that you want to know when their shift ends.

[Ryusenshi]

I recently heard an interesting form of code-switching. A woman was talking with a street vendor in Arabic. Then she took out her purse, and began counting her money in French.

My hunch is that she grew up in an Arabic-speaking family, so she speaks Arabic natively; but she learned to count in school, so she's more comfortable counting in French.

[Vijay]

She wasn't just from North Africa?

[Ryusenshi]

Then why did she count in French and not in Arabic? She was counting aloud, but still for herself: and the vendor spoke Arabic anyway.

[Vijay]

Because people from North Africa code-switch between French and Arabic all the time? Lots of Malayalees would do the same thing with English and Malayalam; they'd speak Malayalam with fellow Malayalees but count in English. I know Malayalees in Kerala who don't even know how to count in Malayalam, even if they're just kids and barely speak any English otherwise.

[Ryusenshi]

OK, but that doesn't contradict what I was saying : that she probably learned how to count in a French-speaking school, that's why she prefers to count in French. (I never said that I thought she was born in France.)

[Vijay]

True.

[linguoboy]

"I'm pretty for sure we won't be done by six."

I think I've been hearing people say "for sure" rather than just "sure" in this context for a while now, but I'm not for sure for sure.

[Vijay]

Fer sher fer sher? She's a Valley Girl, and there is no cure?

[Salmoneus]

Something that occured to me, from my father: the use (although in his case only when being jocular or nostalgic) of azzel for I, and likewise wuzzel and so forth. [so, wuzzel gaan? for standard "are we going?"] But it's only just occured to me: I don't know why?

I'd always assumed I think that this was reinforcement by a reflexive. But the reflexive/emphatic forms are normally created from the oblique: mizzel, not azzel. But maybe this is using the nominative form for a non-reflexive emphatic...

But then it occured to me: this is only in the present/future tense. So presumably it's a tense marker derived from will. But why the sibilant?

Well, I've heard that in other northern dialects - Is, wes, etc. But why? Is this a mysterious plural -s even in the singular? Or is this incorporation of either is or has, for no particular reason? Or something else?

[Ryusenshi]

What is this dialect?

[Salmoneus]

What is this dialect?

The remnants of Cumbrian. He's not a native Cumbrian speaker - I'm not sure anyone is anymore* - but he'd have grown up hearing Cumbrian from the older people around him. In his ordinary speech (after decades living down south), there are only subtle suggestions - most notably an inconsistent foot/strut split and sporadic double modals - but he throws in the odd snippet of dialect now and then.

*in the full dialect sense. Obviously locals, such as there still are, do still have some dialect features in their speech.

[Vijay]

My mom pronounces Uzbekistan [usbɛskisˈt̪aːn].

Apparently, she grew up thinking of Uzbekistan as the stereotypical "exotic country," kind of like how Azerbaijan is the stereotypical exotic country to my dad and Nicaragua apparently is to some other Malayalees.

[linguoboy]

"Supporters say the protests represent a realization of power and influence by young people raised on social media who have come of age in an era of never-ending wars, highly publicized mass shootings and virulent national politics."

I'm not sure what about the use of "virulent" strikes me so odd here. I guess I'm used to it being used to indicate a particularly heightened degree of malignancy from something which is negative and destructive by nature (e.g. diseases, anger) and not being applied to something essentially neutral to indicate a highly negative manifestation.

[Salmoneus]

"Supporters say the protests represent a realization of power and influence by young people raised on social media who have come of age in an era of never-ending wars, highly publicized mass shootings and virulent national politics."

I'm not sure what about the use of "virulent" strikes me so odd here. I guess I'm used to it being used to indicate a particularly heightened degree of malignancy from something which is negative and destructive by nature (e.g. diseases, anger) and not being applied to something essentially neutral to indicate a highly negative manifestation.

My only concern in that sentence is the pun/ambiguity on "realise".

[Vijay]

In a post I myself recently wrote on this forum, I used the words "immigrant population." Yet often, when I read it back to myself, even if I'm only reading it in my head, somehow I read it as "immigration population."

[zompist]

Something I saw on Twitter the other day:

This. So much this. All the this.

I'm pretty sure this is impossible according to X-bar theory.

[KathTheDragon]

I have written like that on occasion, but the phrase is highly specific.

[Circeus]

Something I saw on Twitter the other day:

This. So much this. All the this.

I'm pretty sure this is impossible according to X-bar theory.

I know you're being somewhat mischievous, but doesn't it follow right up from the assumption that "this" can now clearly be used as an onomatopoeia/sentence word? Just checking on my linguistic analysis instinct.

[zompist]

I know you're being somewhat mischievous, but doesn't it follow right up from the assumption that "this" can now clearly be used as an onomatopoeia/sentence word? Just checking on my linguistic analysis instinct.

Well, in standard English "this" is a pronoun— more precisely a pro-NP. Pronouns can't take determiners (*the we, *the everyone, *the those), much less two determiners (*all the we, *many the those).

The simplest explanation is that it's being treated here as a noun— cf. "so much money", "all the money".

("This" can also be a pro-Adj, but that doesn't help here.)

[linguoboy]

And while web search is far from a perfect technology, Google really does usually surface accurate, reliable information on the topics you search for. (Vox)

More interesting to me than the transitive use of surface is the choice of "web search" as the name of a particular type of technology.

[Zaarin]

Using surface as a transitive verb doesn't seem strange to me in the slightest; I wouldn't have even noticed it had you not pointed it out. Web search as a noun in place of the expected search engine, though, is odd.

I've started working as a transcriptionist, and something I've noticed is just how frequently people use a rather than an before a vowel, and not just in places where you might expect it, such as before a pause or false start, but even in normal-flowing speech.

[Circeus]

I know you're being somewhat mischievous, but doesn't it follow right up from the assumption that "this" can now clearly be used as an onomatopoeia/sentence word? Just checking on my linguistic analysis instinct.

Well, in standard English "this" is a pronoun— more precisely a pro-NP. Pronouns can't take determiners (*the we, *the everyone, *the those), much less two determiners (*all the we, *many the those).

The simplest explanation is that it's being treated here as a noun— cf. "so much money", "all the money".

("This" can also be a pro-Adj, but that doesn't help here.)

I thought sentence word because to me the parallel are words like "wow" with the same form, but I don't know if they are typically analysed as nominalized in such a construction.