William Safire Remembered, but Best Remembranced Elsewhere

Ben Zimmer, contributor to Language Log and to Far from the Madding Gerund (and occasional sub at the NYT "On Language" desk), writes two remembrances of William Safire and points to a column where the late, great gray eminence references the work of Language Log in defining the phenomenon known as "snowclones," a term actually coined by Glen Whitman rather than a staffer at Language Log.

Look everywhere else for remembrances of Safire (I'll ignore much of his political opinion except as it relates to civil liberties and media conglomeration), and also look around for discussions of what a snowclone is. As far as I know, Safire never plugged that other phenomenon noted and popularized at Language Log, the eggcorn.

As far as I know, Safire never gave mention to Paul Brians' Common Errors in English Usage, which would have seemed a natural for him, but once upon a time he did give mention to Brad Hansen's Dictionary of Computing and Digital Media, published by our own selves. To him the book was "catnip for netties."

Colorless green ideas do not sleep furiously—or do they?

Noam Chomsky’s most famous sentence is also one of the strangest ever constructed: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” His point, in contrasting the syntax of this sentence with a variation, “Furiously sleep ideas green colorless,” was that while the former is grammatical and the latter is not, the latter is no less probable to appear in English language than the former.

Because he asserted his point so audaciously—claiming that no statistical model for grammaticalness would show otherwise—he left himself open to Fernando Pereira’s 2000 report on his own analysis. It turned out that a simple statistical model showed the grammatical version to be 200,000 times more likely to appear than the ungrammatical version.

All of this was described by Mark Liberman in a Language Log post which was reprinted in Far from the Madding Gerund.

So it seems Mr. Chomsky was wrong in that particular assertion, but then along came Mikael Parkvall to seal the deal, showing us once and for all that colorless green ideas do, in fact, sleep furiously. His illustration serves as the punch line for this post:

This illustration appeared on the back cover of the original UK edition of Limits of Language, but for some reason was dropped for the US edition. Since I was involved in the decision, I ought to be able to explain, but for some reason I cannot. Take another look at that beautiful rendition and tell me I’m not crazy.

Limits of Language - a wealth of information

Swedish linguist, Mikael Parvall, has written a fascinating book about languages for the general public. It is part “Book of Lists,” part “Guinness Book of World Records,” and part "Visual Encyclopedia," and it contains information on over one thousand languages! The subtitle of the book is "almost everything you didn't know you didn't know about language and languages." Parkvall answers questions such as these: Are there native speakers of Klingon? Has there ever been a state with Esperanto as its official language? What is the least useful dictionary ever produced? What is the world's smallest language? Does English have more words than other languages? In what country are people the most polyglot? Can words consist of consonants alone? He answers these questions and many more, providing an illuminating introduction to linguistics that all readers can appreciate and enjoy. Parkvall teaches and does research at Stockholm University, and has authored four other books on linguistics. He has expertise in Pidgin and Creole languages and the historical and geopolitical influences that affected their development.