eruthros

1) So, the tea party protests. Okay, so, there's a lot to be said about the fakeness of it, about the way it makes little to no sense, about the Fox News promotions of the tea parties. But what bothers me most of all? Is how some proponents of the parties are calling it teabagging. Like, mostly, they stick to "tea party," but occasionally there's a teabagging or two, and seriously, guys, that's not what I think of when I hear the word teabagging.

Fortunately, Rachel Maddow has already attempted to get through a description of the teabagging tea parties without laughing, and failed miserably, so I don't feel alone in this:

2) The National Organization for Marriage -- an anti-gay-rights group -- is starting a new campaign. It is about how lots of people are against gay marriage. They are calling it "2 Million for Marriage." They are abbreviating it 2M4M. Which, hmm, M4M stands for Men for Men -- there's actually even a dating website named M4M, so it's not exactly UNDERGROUND SLANG. And, even better, 2M4M is when you're a couple looking for another guy to have sex with. Well DONE, National Organization for Marriage! (They also forgot to register possible variations of their domain name, such that 2M4M.org now points to a pro-gay-marriage site.)

Over the loudspeaker, regarding my flight, which has been delayed for ages: "If you're waiting for flight whatever, we are under an aircraft maintenance delay."

graycastle, over IM: "They are under it? How are they under it?"

So, what do you think? How exactly are they under it?

(Bored at airport, can you tell?)

Hi, Geoff Pullum! Fancy meeting you in a silly story about a mother banning adjectives.

Yep, apparently someone overheard a woman telling her son "we do not use adjectives," and of course it ended up on Language Log.

So I once again caught myself saying "thank you kindly" to the fellow at the Green Line Cafe. Verbal Tics Learned From Television apparently stick around; I mean, I'm not Southern, so I have no excuse at all for this. (Then again, when I was a kid I somehow developed a substitution problem, "briefly" for "shortly" -- I would say "I'll be there briefly" and mean "in a minute" -- so perhaps I shouldn't blame my adverb abuse solely on due South. I worked very hard to expunge that usage of briefly from my vocabulary, but it still happens sometimes.)

Also, I refuse to use either past participle of "to get." Because I ... just don't get it. This is one of those absorbed grammar lessons that just completely fails to take when you read both American and British English as a kid. He's got? He's gotten? Okay, sure, you can tell me that in American English the first means "he possesses" and the second means "he acquired," and that in British English the first means "he possesses" and the second doesn't exist, but frankly a sentence like "they've gotten the check" freaks me out. Except in idiomatic usage that has to take "to get" (like "got married," and even then I'll avoid the probably correct "they've gotten married"), "gotten" doesn't exist in my dialect and "got" appears rarely. Sad but true.

Also, I find myself pondering the usage of "woman" as an adjective. Remember that scene in Gaudy Night, in which Harriet Vane writes a stern letter to a newspaper saying something like "woman students would be seemlier than undergraduettes?" I hit the same usage in one of the first Amanda Cross mystery, c. 1968: Kate Fansler talks about the sudden interest in "woman writers." We certainly still talk about women who write, but I don't think that the phrase "woman writers" would be as likely as "female writers." Is this just my dialect? Or is "woman" as a collective adjective out of fashion? (A quick google picks up several pages, though the text on most of them actually says "women writers." Google informs me that there are 38,000 pages using "wome/an writers" and 232,000 using "female writers.")

Also, I have decided to start using the word "eesome" in casual conversation.

Ooooh! I just realized that the dialect survey now has different pages for the responses from each state.

Dialect Survey Responses By State. Click "state data" for the breakdown on each question.

Thus, I can now tell you the following:

Although the majority of my home state (54.39%) says "cray-awn," where the second syllable rhymes with "dawn," I say "cray-ahn."
A plurality (46.59%) of responders from California say "reely" (as in "see"); I say "rilly" (as in "sit").
Tons (75.60%) of Californians pronounce "cot" and "caught" the same. I pronounce them differently.
Most Californians (63.16%) say "kwarter." I say "cor-ter."
55.31% of Californians say "ampitheater." I say "ampfitheater."

All of the attempted-"phonetic" spellings are from the dialect survey's questions.

Now I want everyone else to go and do this and tell me what they say differently. :)