Word of the Day
prostration

Definition: (noun) An abrupt failure of function or complete physical exhaustion.
Synonyms: collapse.
Usage: The weakness of the young missionary became so extreme that they had to lay him again on the bed, where a prostration, lasting for several hours, held him like a dead man.
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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day
deference

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for June 28, 2024 is:

deference • \DEF-uh-runss\  • noun

Deference refers to respect and esteem that is appropriate to show to someone, such as a superior or elder. Something done in deference to, or out of deference to, someone or something is done in order to show respect for the opinions or influence of that person or thing.

// The children were taught to show proper deference to their elders.

// In deference to those who voted against the change, we'll be having another meeting to discuss how we can mitigate people's concerns.

See the entry >
Examples:

"The new bridge over the Colorado River linking Bullhead City and Laughlin officially has a name. It will be called Silver Copper Crossing.... The formal name was chosen in deference to the two states the bridge connects: Nevada is the Silver State and Arizona is the Copper State." — Bill McMillen, Mohave Valley Daily News (Bullhead City, Arizona), 21 May 2024
Did you know?

As you might have guessed, deference is related to the verb defer, meaning "to delegate" or "to submit to another's wishes." But we need to be specific when we tell you that both these words come from the Medieval Latin verb dēferre, which means "to convey, show respect, or submit to a decision," because there are two defers in the English language. The defer related to deference is typically used with to in contexts having to do either with allowing someone else to decide or choose something, as in "I'll defer to the dictionary," or with agreeing to follow someone else's decision, wish, etc., as when a court defers to precedent. The other defer traces to the Latin verb differre, meaning "to carry away in varying directions, spread abroad, postpone, delay, be unlike or distinct." That defer is typically used in contexts having to do with delaying or postponing something, as in "a willingness to defer the decision until next month."

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Idiom of the Day
Jill of all trades(, master of none)

A woman who is skilled in or adept at a wide variety of tasks or abilities (i.e., the female equivalent of "Jack of all trades"). If used with "master of none," it implies that while competent in a variety of things, she is not highly skilled in a particular one. Watch the video

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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
pull over

If you're driving a car and you pull over, you move over to the side of the road and stop.

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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: imperative

This word has appeared in 390 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?

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Language Log
Eggcorn of the week: "checks every block"

"Significant energy source found under US-Mexico border", KXAN 6/23/2024 [emphasis added]:

Researchers have found a significant source of geothermal energy underneath the U.S.-Mexico border along the Rio Grande, which could lead to promising clean energy developme
nt in the rural region. […]

“There’s a thin, 10- to 15-mile-wide region that runs parallel or along the Rio Grande that has very high heat by at least by most standards, and even in the interior part of the county, which is probably two-thirds of the county,” Ken Wisian, head of the research team, told NewsNation. […]

“Geothermal has a lot to offer rural communities, underserved communities, something like Presidio checks every block on the very large federal investment in production in tax credits on renewable energy,” Wisian said.
Wiktionary has an entry for tick all the boxes, with the gloss "(idiomatic) To fulfill all the requirements, especially as itemized in a list; to have all the needed characteristics; to complete all the steps in a process in an orderly manner", and cross-references to the source of the metaphor checkbox or tickbox:

1. A space on a paper form that can be optionally filled with a check mark.
2. (graphical user interface) An on-screen box that can be optionally filled with a check mark, to enable or disable a setting.

The 19-billion-word NOW corpus has 342 hits for "checks every box", all of which are consistent with the Wiktionary entry, e.g.

That nickel position is obviously a starting spot in today's NFL, and he checks every box teams are looking for in that role.

If you love being able to stretch out on a sectional-style sofa but also want the option of a pullout bed, this sleeper sofa checks every box.

He checks every box in general manager Andrew Berry's "tough, smart, and accountable" mantra

That same source has 0 hits for "checks every block" — though the 14-billion-word iWeb corpus, along with its 24 hits for "checks every box", has 2 hits for "checks every block". But neither of those connects to the same check-box metaphor — rather, they're references to "blocks" as digital units in computer systems:

What you want is to make sure that all of the features of the hardware execute the software correctly. Go through the PCB and develop a test that checks every block. First, check that the device powers up.

During null block compression, RMAN checks every block to see if it has ever contained data. Blocks that have never contained data are not backed up. Blocks that have contained data, either currently or in the past, are backed up.

A web search for {"checks every block"} adds links connected to blocks in Minecraft. Like Process Control Blocks and file-system blocks, Minecraft blocks are a quasi-metaphorical abstraction from material blocks of ice or stone, but there's no easy metaphorical path from there to a "fulfill all the requirements" idiom.

But the metaphorical basis of idiom gets bleached out over time, so maybe the the quoted researcher has substituted block for box in his mental lexicon for the check-box idiom. Given long experience with similar journalistic episodes, I think it's more likely that the journalist misquoted him, either because of their own mental lexicon, or through a slip of the fingers in writing the story. Either way, it's a case where an eggcorn-ish word substitution has taken place, even though the original version retains an accessible metaphor that the substituion lacks.

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Language Log
Diagramming: history of the visualization of grammar in the 19th century

Aside from etymology, one of my favorite language study activities before college was diagramming sentences.  Consequently, I was delighted to be reminded of those good old days by this new (June 19, 2024) article in The Public Domain Review:  "American Grammar: Diagraming Sentences in the 19th Century".  This is a magisterial collection of crisply photographed archival works that you can flip through page by page to study at your leisure.

The works collected are the following:

James Brown, The American Grammar (Philadelphia, PA: Clark and Raser, 1831).

Frederick A. P. Barnard, Analytic Grammar; with Symbolic Illustration (New York: E. French, 1836.

Oliver B. Peirce, The Grammar of the English Language (New York: Robinson and Franklin, 1839).

Solomon Barrett, The Principles of Grammar (Cambridge, MA: Metcalf and Co., 1857).

Charles Gauss and B. T. Hodge, A Comprehensive English Grammar (Baltimore, MD: Pan Publication Co., 1890)

Stephen Watkins Clark, A Practical Grammar (New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1847).

Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, Higher Lessons in English (New York: Clark and Maynard, 1880).
When I was in high school, we were still doing diagramming like that in Reed and Kellogg (1880), and I loved (almost) every minute of it, although sometimes it was vexatiously challenging to make everything fit in neatly and rigorously.

The text, by Hunter Dukes, is both entertaining and edifying, although the introductory quotation is rather impenetrable:
“Once you really know how to diagram a sentence really know it, you know practically all you have to know about English grammar”, Gertrude Stein once claimed. “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. . . . I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves.”
In my estimation, Stein's sentences would have benefited from the addition of a few commas.

Dukes follows thus:

While one student’s lexical excitement is surely another’s slow death by gerund, Stein cuts to the heart of the grammatical pull. Is grammar prescriptive and conventional, something one learns to impose on language through trial and error? Or do sentences, in a sense, diagram themselves, revealing an innate logic and latent structure in language and the mind? More than a century before Noam Chomsky popularized the idea of a universal grammar, linguists in the United States began diagramming sentences in an attempt to visualize the complex structure — of seemingly divine origins — at their mother tongue’s core.

The collection then proceeds, one book at a time.  It is interesting to observe how the explications and illustrations become increasingly clear and sophisticated through the years and decades.

Some highlights:

The history of diagramming sentences in the United States begins with James Brown’s American Grammar (1831). “Language is an emanation from God”, he writes. “As a gift, it claims our servitude; as a science, it demands our highest attention.” …  It was in American Grammar that Brown debuted construing as a method for parsing sentences using a system of square and round brackets to isolate major and minor sections. Major sections are “mechanically independent”; minor sections are “mechanically dependent”. Brown called this form of analysis close reading, but construing was only one half of the system. “As construing is a critical examination of the constructive relation between the sections of a sentence, so scanning is a critical investigation of the constructive relation between the words of a section.” Scanning involves ranking minor sections in ascending numerical order based on their relational[...]

distance from the major section. Playing a kind of grammarian god, Brown uses John 1 to demonstrate how his system can cleave sentential flesh. (In the beginning) [was the word] (and the word was) (with God) (and the word was God).

Barnard's presentation is so highly logographic and isolating that it almost makes me feel that he was influenced by common misunderstandings of the the Sinographic script, which puts him quite at odds with the formidable (pronounce it in French, please) lawyer and linguist, Peter Stephen Du Ponceau (born Pierre-Étienne du Ponceau, June 3, 1760 – April 1, 1844), whose revolutionary A Dissertation on the Nature and Character of the Chinese Writing System, published in Philadelphia by the American Philosophical Society in 1838 (almost the same time as Barnard's tome), focused on the sounds and words of the Chinese writing system, not on its alleged universal, ideographic nature.
Whereas Brown sought to reform an educational system plagued by “simplifiers”, “plagiarists”, and “new modellers”, Frederick A. P. Barnard’s Analytic Grammar; with Symbolic Illustration (1836) reported from the classroom on syntactic techniques “advantageously used in the instruction of the deaf and dumb”. His system for diagramming sentences is mildly pictographic, based off of six principal symbols for marking substantive, attributive, assertional, influential, connective, and temporal words and phrases. Each symbol, in turn, can accommodate a host of diacritical marks to further specify its function. In the sentence “A man goes into a house”, for example, “man” is marked with a vertical line, signifying the noun’s substantive property. Two feet are added to the line since “man” is the subject of this sentence, “the supporter of what follows”. Because the word is in the nominative case, it also receives a diagonal, accent aigu–like appendage, pointing the action forward. “Goes into” necessitates a confluence of connected marks that resemble the Eye of Horus. First, we start with a horizontal line, the attributive verb. Since it contains an intransitive assertion, it receives a v-shaped hat, whose right arm curls in on itself, signifying “the attribute exists merely in the agent himself, without regard to any outward object”. Interlocked to this arm is a spiral-like symbol that accounts for the preposition “into”, “a connecting link”. “House”, in turn, looks a lot like “man” — built on a substantive vertical line — but with a grave accent instead of acute, symbolizing the objective case: receiving the action thrown forward by the nominative subject. Curiously, whereas Brown turns toward scripture for his corpus, Barnard’s examples frequently express physical violence or categorical division, mirroring the two-fold sense of “articulation” that his system embodies: both a means of expression and a form of dissection at the joints. “The victor exceedingly rejoices in his conquest”; “He is about to tear a book”; “Negroes are habitant in Africa”.
Goodness gracious!  Barnard's "mildly pictographic" system even has six principal symbols for marking different types of words and phrases.  This reminds me of the liùshū 六書 ("six writings", i.e., six types of character composition) of the Chinese lexicographer Xu Shen (c. 58–c. 148 AD):  pictographic, indicatives, ideographs, phonetic compounds, mutual explanatory, and phonetic loans (source).  Of course, Barnard's six principal symbols for types of words and phrases and Xu Shen's six types of character composition are quite different in their referents, but so uncannily similar in their application it's possible that, if Barnard had looked into what was known about the construction of the Chinese writing system at his time, he might have been vaguely inspired by some of the basic concepts of Xu Shen.

Three years later, Oliver B. Peirce’s The Grammar of the English Language (1839) came on the scene with a fervent rhetoric that reads as hyperbolic even among hot-headed grammarians. “On this imperishable foundation — this rock of[...]

eternal endurance — I rear my superstructure, the edifice of scientific truth, the temple of Grammatical consistency.” Far less systematic than Barnard, Peirce arranged his sentences with a chain-link structure: assertives and relatives (verbs and prepositions) connect larger subject and object circles whose articles are attached to these nouns like keys on a ring. The visual conceit is apparent and didactic: appendant clauses are literally appended one onto the next; if one link grammatically falters, the whole chain of meaning becomes undone.

Such overwhelming confidence in the truth value of grammar is breathtaking!

God (the trunk of der Grammatikbaum) hath spoken.
Before “syntactic trees” became common parlance for linguists, Solomon Barrett’s Principles of Grammar (1845) used a similar metaphor and added bark. The frontispiece displays Hebrews 1 as an old-growth hardwood: “God” is the trunk, the predicates “who spake” and “hath spoken” form solid boughs, while prepositional phrases are figured as finer twigs, pruned of all foliage. Ranging beyond his peers into Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, and German grammar, Barrett’s arboreal figures suit his interest in language’s branching connections, the root-like structures of etymology and inheritance.
The central role of the tree metaphor is noteworthy in many of these 19th century presentations on grammar visualization.

It is not until Stephen Watkins Clark’s 1847 work, A Practical Grammar, however, that we find a system that strongly resembles sentence diagramming in its modern-day — though quickly fading — guise. Combining the divisional schema of Brown and Barnard with the visual style of Peirce’s scalar links, Clark’s method uses word balloons that resemble, in the words of Kitty Burns Florey, “elaborate systems of propane storage tanks — or possibly invading hordes of Goodyear blimps”. There are twelve general rules and scores of definitions that resemble mathematical proofs. A sentence’s principal elements occupy the highest row. Subject, predicate, object — there is a fixed order of operations. Adjuncts are placed below the words they limit or modify, conjunctions between the terms they join, and pronouns dangle from their antecedents by umbilical cords. Clark’s enduring innovation was attributing properties to “offices” rather than individual words — offices that could be occupied by words, phrases, or even entire sentences. Grammar thus becomes a system of scalable relations rather than a paint-by-numbers tool for classifying parts of speech. “Major grounding ideas still present in modern IC [immediate constituent] analyses and PSG [phrase structure grammar] were already present in Clark’s syntactic conception”, writes Nicolas Mazziotta. Comparing grammar to “the foundation of a building”, Clark gave his students a toolbox for dismantling faulty foundations and properly assembling sentential edifices of their own.

Now we come to the "modern" diagramming with which many of us are familiar.

Like the twisted balloon animals that they resemble, Clark’s annotations floated into his contemporaries’ linguistic consciousness. In Higher Lessons in English (1877), Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellog deflated his bubbles into lines but preserved many of their predecessor’s innovations. Returning to Enlightenment preoccupations, Reed and Kellog begin their treatise with a discussion of the natural language that “we never learned from a grammar or a book of any kind”: “the language of cries, laughter, and tones . . . the language of gestures by the hand, and postures by the body”. While this form of human signification is purely innate, they claim, spoken language (or “Word language”) must be governed by a grammatical “science which teaches the forms, uses, and relations of the words of the English language”. Their system and subsequent companion volumes were so popular that, for a time, the pair’s books sold a half-million copies per year. As Richard Hudson notes, the Reed-Kellog system for diagramming sentences is[...]

still taught in American schools.

At that point, the text comes to a close.  It is followed by a gallery of fourteen sentence diagrams gathered from the works discussed.

Visualization is a key component of Buddhist thought and practice, e.g., here.  "Visual metaphors, visionary literature, and visualization practices are pervasive in Buddhist traditions. Vision and seeing are dominant metaphors for knowledge, awakening, and insight."  Perhaps Western grammarians were also inspired by becoming familiar with this aspect of Eastern thought as well.

An added treat are links to eight visually oriented "related collections", several of which I find highly attractive: Mnemonic Alphabet of Jacobus Publicius (1482) A Dictionary of Victorian Slang (1909) Growing Things: A Film Lesson in “Nature Study” (1928) Arthur Wesley Dow’s Floating World: Composition (1905 edition) Punctuation Personified (1824) The History of Ink: Including its Etymology, Chemistry, and Bibliography (1860) Aspirated Aspirations: Alfred Leach’s The Letter H (1880) Humanity 101: The Syllabus of Frankenstein's Monster

Until I set about preparing this post, I had never heard of The Public Domain Review.  Now I must say that it has found a soft spot in my heart. Selected readings

* "Sentence length and syntactic complexity" (3/29/22)
* "Sentence diagramming" (1/1/14)
* "Personal and intellectual history of sentence diagrams" (10/14/04)
* "Diagramming Sentences" (4/14/13)
* "Putting grammar back in grammar schools: A modest proposal" (12/25/13)
* "School grammar, Round two" (12/30/12)
* "Diagrammatic excitement" (3/27/12)
* "Defiant diagramming" (10/5/08)
* "Not just Oxford commas" (6/25/24)
* "Peter Stephen Du Ponceau and Vietnamese dictionaries" (2/7/22)

[Thanks to Geoff Wade]

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Playing With Dolls In Middle School (Bless These Braces) #shorts


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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
grinding

dancing in a sexually arousing way

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Word of the Day
farcical

Definition: (adjective) Broadly or extravagantly humorous; resembling farce.
Synonyms: ludicrous, ridiculous.
Usage: The clown, with his farcical exuberance, rainbow striped hair, and poorly timed gags, drew enthusiastic applause and laughter from the audience.
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fecund

Idiom of the Day
Johnny One-Note

Someone who repeatedly expresses or maintains a strong opinion on a single or a few particular subjects. Primarily heard in US, Canada. Watch the video

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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
number among

to include something or someone in a class or group of similar things or people

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Language Log
Franklin (1773) on colonial obligations

A couple of days ago, I did a web search to find out how late the King of Prussia mall was open, and landed on the Wikipedia page for the "census-designated place" King of Prussia, which (as I knew) includes lots of stuff besides the mall. Reading the article and following links, as one does, I learned something new, namely why in the world an "edge city of Philadelphia" was named after Frederick the Great.
It all started with a tavern:

The eponymous King of Prussia Inn was originally constructed as a cottage in 1719 by the Welsh Quakers William and Janet Rees, founders of Reesville. The cottage was converted to an inn in 1769 and did a steady business in colonial times as it was approximately a day's travel by horse from Philadelphia. Settlers headed west to Ohio would sleep at the inn on their first night on the road. In 1774 the Rees family hired James Berry to manage the inn, which henceforth became known as "Berry's Tavern". General George Washington first visited the tavern on Thanksgiving Day in 1777 while the Continental Army was encamped at Whitemarsh; a few weeks later Washington and the army bivouacked at nearby Valley Forge.

Exactly how and when the name changed is apparently not entirely clear. But the reason for the change is clearly connected to Benjamin Franklin's 1773 satirical essay "An Edict by the King of Prussia", prepared "For the Public Advertiser" (and perhaps published there?).

That document argues that just as America's colonial ties to Britain give the British the right to impose taxes, duties, and regulations, so the Germanic origins of settlers in Britian gives Frederick analogous rights:

WHEREAS it is well known to all the World, that the first German Settlements made in the Island of Britain, were by Colonies of People, Subjects to our renowned Ducal Ancestors, and drawn from their Dominions, under the Conduct of Hengist, Horsa, Hella, Uffa, Cerdicus, Ida, and others; and that the said Colonies have flourished under the Protection of our august House, for Ages past, have never been emancipated therefrom, and yet have hitherto yielded little Profit to the same. And whereas We Ourself have in the last War fought for and defended the said Colonies against the Power of France, and thereby enabled them to make Conquests from the said Power in America, for which we have not yet received adequate Compensation. And whereas it is just and expedient that a Revenue should be raised from the said Colonies in Britain towards our Indemnification; and that those who are Descendants of our antient Subjects, and thence still owe us due Obedience, should contribute to the replenishing of our Royal Coffers, as they must have done had their Ancestors remained in the Territories now to us appertaining: WE do therefore hereby ordain and command, That from and after the Date of these Presents, there shall be levied and paid to our Officers of the Customs, on all Goods, Wares and Merchandizes, and on all Grain and other Produce of the Earth exported from the said Island of Britain, and on all Goods of whatever Kind imported into the same, a Duty of Four and an Half per Cent. ad Valorem, for the Use of us and our Successors. — And that the said Duty may more effectually be collected, We do hereby ordain, that all Ships or Vessels bound from Great Britain to any other Part of the World, or from any other Part of the World to Great Britain, shall in their respective Voyages touch at our Port of KONINGSBERG, there to be unladen, searched, and charged with the said Duties.

[…]

We flatter Ourselves that these Our Royal Regulations and Commands will be thought just and reasonable by Our much-favoured Colonists in England, the said Regulations being copied from their own Statutes of 10 and 11 Will. III. C. 10. — 5 Geo. II. C. 22. — 23 Geo. II. C. 29. — 4 G[...]

eo. I. C. 11. and from other equitable Laws made by their Parliaments, or from Instructions given by their Princes, or from Resolutions of both Houses entered into for the GOOD Government of their own Colonies in Ireland and America.

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Language Log
Acronymity

Abner Li, "Google Messages adopts double FAB to promote Gemini", 9to5google 6/26/2024:

Gemini in Google Messages exited beta at I/O 2024 last month and now features a double FAB design.

In a rather prominent push, the “Start chat” floating action button now has a smaller Gemini FAB just above it. When you’re dealing with the rectangle, the square looks misaligned. Everything is visually correct upon scrolling.

There’s some precedent for this look in Google Drive where the “New” FAB is paired with a scan shortcut. However, the camera disappears when scrolling.
I guessed after reading this passage that FAB is an acronym for "floating action button". Or rather, it can be. In a tech context it might also be (an abbreviation for) "A manufacturing plant which fabricates items, particularly silicon chips", which is how I first tried to interpret that article's headline. And it could also be at least 73 other acronyms, initialisms, or abbreviations, according to acronymfinder.com — a list that doesn't yet include "floating action button".

In fact, most 3-letter sequences have already got several interpretations Out There, as discussed in "Ambigous initialisms", 7/21/2019.  Here are 10 chosen literally at random, following by the number of interpretations available at acronymfinder.com:

MVX 2
XJR 1
IMC 143
FUH 0
WAW 19
ZXW 0
RVD 24
AVB 26
JJI 4
ESQ 9

And acronym-finder is far from complete, so that its 0 counts are often actually Out There — in this case FUH and ZXW.

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Everyone Was Grinding (Bless These Braces) #shorts


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