The epiglottis qua severe throat infection

I was amused to see mentioned in an article the other day "epiglottis (severe throat infection)". The author was referring (or attempting to refer, depending on your opinion of how reference functions) to epiglottitis, inflammation of the epiglottis, which I imagine is indeed a fairly severe throat infection. So why the misspelling? (Note: I'll admit I had to look up whether there are one or two s's in "misspelling". While the answer turned out to be two, "mispelling" is actually more common, at least in terms of ghits.) My guess is copy editing and/or spell checking. Epiglottitis just looks too look, and like it has way too many t's. My guess is that -titi- sequence threw someone off. Who knows if it it was a person or a computer program, but either way it resulted in a rather humorous typo. Guess I'll have to wait until my next bout with strep before I can practice my Haida. (Obscurity rating: 10/10)

mail vs. email

I was struck the other day by the difference in both the noun and verb forms for "mail" vs. "email". First, let's talk about the nouns. Mail is strictly a mass noun: we say I got some mail, not *I got a mail. Email, on the other hand, is different in two ways: (1) it's generally a count noun, but (2) not strictly so. While it's more common to say I got an email (1,390,000 ghits), we can also say I got email or I got some email (I'm not putting a ghit # for these because it would take forever to tease out, in the former, non-native speakers leaving out the article, and, in the latter, referential as opposed to partitive some). Email is a thing that you can send: I sent him an email. Mail seems less so. To me, I sent him mail implies that perhaps a roommate that moved out continued receiving mail at my house, and so I forwarded it to him. Less likely to me is the reading that I sent him something by mail.

Now on to the verbs. For mail the primary object is the thing being sent, not the sender: I mailed him a letter, I mailed a letter, ??I mailed him (meaning I sent something to him). If I say I mailed him it sounds more like I put him in a box and sent him something than that I sent him a package. Email is the reverse: the primary object is the receiver of the email, not the message itself. I emailed him an article is fine, as is plain I emailed him, whereas ?I emailed an article is grammatically fine but pragmatically odd: who did you send it to? (Note: I really like using whom, not because I like to be pretentious, but because it's part of my native grammar, but "to whom did you send it" sounds just too stilted for me to utter it in public.)

Mail and email also seem to differ with regards to telicity. At least for me, "I'm emailing him right now" indicates that you are in the actual process of emailing, i.e., the process of emailing someone consists not only of hitting send, but the writing of the message which leads up to that point. It is one of Vendler's accomplishments, whereby an action consists of some activity leading up to some culmination point. "I'm mailing a letter to him right now", on the other hand, seems to only admit the possibility that you are about to mail the letter. Mail seems to be one of Vendler's achievements: a singular event with no activity leading up to it. You can't be said to be literally in the process of mailing a letter. Either you haven't mailed it yet or you have.

If you...then it

President Obama said in an interview with CNN (I think at the time this was President-elect Obama), "If you think about the journey that this country has made, then it can't help but stir your heart." However much I may agree with his sentiment, I can't help but be put off by the phrasing.

I think the problem for me is the use of "then". With if-then sentences, I seem to want the subjects to be coreferential. Without "then" they don't need to be at all. "If you think...it can't help..." sounds fine to me. But "If you...then it" strikes me as off somehow. As far as I know there's no prescriptivist rule regarding anything like this. In fact, I'm sure prescriptivists would always want us to include the "then", citing some nonsense about ambiguity or form. It's not "then" I have a problem with either, because "If you eat now, then you won't be hungry later" is fine, because the subjects are coreferential. But for some reason my language faculty doesn't like non-coreferential if-then sentences with an explicity subordinator. It's a mystery.

A new area of responsibility

I was struck by a CNN headline a few days ago that mentioned Obama's presidency and "a new area of responsibility". Obviously they meant "era", but "area" was in both the headline and the text of the article. It was corrected within a few hours, but left me wondering if the writer actually thought or meant "area" of if it was a typo.

I seriously doubt the writer meant "area". A "new era of responsibility" is certainly a phrase that's been going around recently, so "area" must be a typo. I tried a bunch of different misspellings in Word, but didn't get any that list "area" as a suggestion. One thing I typed, that I was unable to recreate, resulted in the sequence "a rea" or something similar being automatically changed to "area", so that's one possibility, but it rests on leaving the "n" off of "an", misspelling "era", and furthmore leaving out "new" and just talking about "an era of responsibility". That seems like too many steps to me.

Another possibility is that it was a phonological mishap because of the pronunciation similarities between "era" and "area". This happens to me all the time. My fingers often type what I hear in my head as opposed to what I'm actually thinking, so that while I would never mess up there/their/they're in a paper, I often do so in quick IM typing. I once answered "know" to a polar question.

This blog believed read, I say

If you're anything like me, you may have had a bit of trouble interpreting the title of this post to reflect my belief that people read this blog. I modelled this odd phrasing after a headline that caught my eye the other day, about the pilot of a plane who bailed out in Florida after falsely stating that his plane was crashing: "Mystery pilot believed found, authorities say". I think the problem here is some kind of collapsed double passive construction.

The original statement is something like "It is believed that the mystery pilot is found", in turn reflecting some statement on the part of authorities like "We believe we have found the mystery pilot." The first sentence, with two passives (one in the main clause and one in a subordinate clause), isn't that difficult to comprehend. But when you don't have any expletive subjects, articles, or auxiliaries, it's a bit difficult to parse.

I think another part of the difficulty is that we are loath to interpret "found" as an adjective. For me "mystery pilot believed dead" isn't nearly as bad a sentence as "mystery pilot believed found". It's those two passives crammed together without any auxiliaries that does it in for me.

Thank you for selecting

Here in Missoula the movie theater choices are fairly limited: two Carmike theaters, and the Wilma theater, in the old Wilma hotel in downtown Missoula. I've always been struck by a line on the Carmike cinemas intro screen: "Thank you for selecting Carmike Cinemas". Let me tell you why I find this a little annoying.

To me selection has to do with being presented equivalent options and choosing one of them based on certain criteria. A dictator is not selected, and if I'm starving in the woods and can't find any food, I'm not selecting berries if I stumble across a blackberry patch. Likewise, the movie choices in Missoula, though there are multiple venues, don't really allow for selection. The Wilma only shows indie films, and the Carmikes only show mainstream releases. Furthermore, the two Carmike theaters usually show different movies so that they aren't competing for the limited business in town. So if there's a given movie you want to see, chances are good that there is only one place to see it. I don't consider that selection.

Obviously not all markets are as small as Missoula. However, many markets are smaller than Missoula, and Carmike, as far as I know, only builds theaters in rural areas or suburbs of smaller cities. It seems that their business model is built on the premise of limited competition in out-of-the-way places. So I wonder if people ever "select" Carmike Cinemas. "Thank you for choosing" would be much more felicitous for me, and I'm not sure why. In terms of denotation, "choose" and "select" are essentially the same: you are presented with options and you pick one of them. Yet for some reason "Thank you for choosing to eat berries" wouldn't be as infelicitous in my above described survival scenario. Perhaps it has to do with "Thank you for choosing..." as a more set phrase in our society, whereas "Thank you for selecting" is essentially purely compositional for me, e.g., "...choosing..." for me is like "blue ribbon" (a coherent concept in our society), whereas "...selecting..." for me is like "green ribbon"; it doesn't really mean anything other than the sum of its parts.

If I were X and Y

Today's topic comes from an episode of Friends. One of the (male) characters is discussing a hypothetical situation and says "If I were a man..." and then trails off, the audience laughs, and he continues, "Did I just say 'If I were a man'?"

The intended sentence, of course, would have been, "If I were a man and X", where X is some hypothetical situation. This is an example of a counterfactual, where the protasis (the if clause) contains a hypothetical situation which is counter to fact. The sitcom character takes the counterfactual in his dialogue to be "If I were a man", i.e., "If X" where X = "I am a man". In fact, the counter to fact clause is "If I were a man and X", where X is the hypothetical situation in question. Since this is a counterfactual, we know that the protasis must be false, but the protasis is not "If X", but rather "If X and Y". While the opposite of X is ~X (where ~ is the negative quantifier), the opposite of (X and Y) is ~X or ~Y, not necessarily ~X and ~Y. Thus in the dialogue, the speaker can of course still be a man and say "If I were a man and Y". All this means is that one of the conditions be false, in this case presumably Y.