It's Language Change, Dude

Favoring Language Change - Idioms

This topic seems to be more controversial than a simple dictionary definition would lead one to believe.

At issue: If a man is favoring his right leg because of an injury, which leg was injured, his right leg or his left?

Idiomatically speaking, dictionaries seem to favor the interpretation that the the right leg is the injured one.

Here are the pertinent entries from merriam-webster.com and dictionary.com respectively:

favor verb

1. a : to regard or treat with favor
b (1) : to do a kindness for : oblige (2) : endow
c : to treat gently or carefully <favored her injured leg>

and

14. to deal with, treat, or use gently: to favor a lame leg.

However, consider these responses from a similar question posed on Yahoo:

"When you favor a leg, you give it more work. example: if you injured your left leg, you would favor your right leg so you didn't have to use your left as much." - Lackadaisical.One

"Essentially the same thing here. If you favour your right leg, that means it is your favourite leg to use, i.e. you prefer using it to your left leg. That means you put MORE weight on it." - Amanda

And my favorite:

"my advice would be to ask a question that makes sense next time" - bluffenw/maimuffin

The analogy I have always used when told that I have it all wrong is this -

A teacher's pet is a favorite; therefore, the teacher favors that student by calling on said student more frequently than other students.

For this reason, I call on my right leg more frequently when my left leg is injured.

Either way you look at it, I believe that the examples of language in use coupled with the way language is constantly changing allow for both versions to be favorable.

Contractional Language Change in the Movies

1968 Charles Portis novel

1969 Henry Hathaway film

2010 Coen brother's film

I realize I am way behind the times, but I just saw the Coen brother's remake of True Grit. The lack of use of contractions in the movie jumped out at me so much that I googled the phenomenon immediately. The number of returns on the subject emphasized how behind the times I am. There have been numerous posts about the subject, beginning in December 2010.

Here is an excerpt from Mark Liberman's Language Log post:

What about the current movie version? Does it really avoid contractions entirely, or limit them even more than Portis did? Would such contractionless speech really be an accurate reflection of the way Americans talked in Arkansas and Oklahoma in the 1870s?

I don't know what Portis intended, and I don't know what the Coen brothers did. But I know that that informal American speech in the 1870s was far from contractionless, and in fact I suspect that it had roughly the same proportion of contractions as it does today. Therefore, what Portis (and the Coens?) did was either false archaism or poetic truth — or both.

If you are interested in further analysis of contractions in the 2010 movie as well as some comparisons of contraction usage in the 1968 novel to two other novels, Tom Sawyer and Swan Peak, I highly recommend the Language Log post.

Additionally, Grammar Girl has a related post that covers more about the history of contractions, "there were even contractions before the 1600's, but they usually weren't indicated with an apostrophe", and when to use contractions.

A New Weather Term Pops Up

Last Friday in northern Michigan my husband and I were on an inland lakes waterway cruise with a group of friends. The weather was supposed to be perfect so we were all surprised when the sky turned dark shortly after launching the boat. We turned on the radio to check the weather and heard that some storms had been spotted over Wisconsin and a "pop-up storm" would not be out of the question for our location.

Having never heard the word 'pop-up' used in relation to weather I decided to google "pop-up storm". There were 21,200,000 hits; however, none of those on the first few pages included a definition, they were simply excerpts from weather forecasts that included the term. I next googled "pop-up storm definition" and the closest google hit was for the term "popcorn storm" from Double-Tongued Dictionary. The definition is as follows:

popcorn storm: n. a brief, unexpected rain shower or thunderstorm. Also, collectively and more formally, popcorn convection.

I then searched the National Weather Service's weather terms and definitions page and found this definition:

Popcorn Convection: Slang for showers and thunderstorms that form on a scattered basis with little or no apparent organization, usually during the afternoon in response to diurnal heating. Individual thunderstorms typically are of the type sometimes referred to as air-mass thunderstorms: they are small, short-lived, very rarely severe, and they almost always dissipate near or just after sunset.

Amazing how technology influences language use.

Thankfully, the storm never did hit...probably because we turned on our pop-up blocker.

The Evolution of Language - A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

According to an article in the March 9th Newsweek, the phrase "terrible, horrible, no good very bad day" has made appearances in 50 news stories about certain politicians since the spring of 2007. The article also mentions that references to the phrase, "all but disappear," a few years prior to that.



The phrase "terrible, horrible, no good very bad day" originated in 1972 as part of the title of a book by Judith Viorst, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.


The author's theory about why the phrase is being used on a recurring basis now, according to the Newsweek article, is that the children who were raised on the book are now the adults who are, "running the world."

Amazing how certain words and phrases come and go and come again. The evolution of language sure is fascinating.