Lately I'm just feeling bad

While I am usually ignorant of my own mistakes, I am one of those people who, for some reason, are tuned into others mistakes. I never used this power for evil, the way some people do. But, I did once naivly tell a baker at an outdoor market that he had mispelled 'foccacia' on his sign. Fortunately, he was baker and not a butcher.

There's a guy in my neighborhood who seems to have a pretty good dj business going on. He's got a shiny white van with tinted windows, his name and phone number printed on them. He goes by the name "Khaleel the Enertainer" and every time I see his van parked on the street I feel sad--not for the English language, not for the decline of standards, or the end of the world as we know it, but for him. Not only did poor Khaleel misspell the most important part of his name, but he did it so publicly, with his phone number right below. I can just imagine how many calls he gets from self-appointed grammar police and other assorted assholes judging him.

And/or redux

Geoff Pullum has been posting a bit about and/or.

So my guess would be that and/or is a way of underlining the point that the or is to be understood in its inclusive sense rather than its exclusive sense. Sometimes you want to explicitly indicate “or more than one of the above”, and and/or does that.

I posted about this a while ago. In my original post I think I confused my exclusives and inclusives.

Anyway, one of the arguments I tried out on them was that no language has a lexical distinction between inclusive or and exlusive or. One of my bosses immediately responded, "English does, or is exclusive and and/or is inclusive." My response was that and/or isn't a word. We left it at that.But I thought to myself, I bet and/or ends up being just like or by taking on an exclusive meaning.
I was vindicated last night. I was sitting on the can reading What to Expect When You're Expecting (It's good bathroom literature!) when I came across the following in a recipe for oatmeal cookies on p. 94:

"add ground cinnamon and/or salt to taste (both optional) when you add the milk."

I was thinking or was inclusive and and/or was exclusive. My boss was thinking the other way around, but I wasn't paying attention. (Maybe that's why she's not my boss anymore.) Anyway, I now understand that and/or is inclusive, which I think is what the cookie recipe shows.

WTF Typo

From the Bella Vista Town Watch eNews of Bella Vista:

3/15, 9:09 p.m. - 9XX Carpenter, complainant states that he was sitting in can when an attempt was made to snatch his cell phone leading to a beating and slashing of all four tires.

Obligatory prescriptivist rant

Yesterday Leonard Lopate had Patricia T. O'Connor on for a regular language discussion, this time on pronunciation errors. I caught the tail end of the show and was predictably incensed. You can listen to the show here.

I posted some comments on the discussion board. It's moderated, so I don't know if they will make it on there (update: that was quick!). Here they are:

As a phonologist, I'm pretty disappointed by the lack of expertise of your expert, Ms. O'Conner. Especially when it comes to basic phonetics, phonology, and American dialect differences. Many of the questions listeners brought up have been studied extensively by American dialectologists and linguists. I suggest she look into that work before the next scheduled appearance. A good place to start is the American Dialect Society (on the web at www.americandialect.org).
In response to Jim's question above: the pronunciation of [or] as [ar] in NY (and other parts of the mid Atlantic] happens when the the [r] starts a new syllable in the word. You get it in 'sorry' but not 'for'. That said, all Americans pretty much have the [ar] in 'sorry' (unlike Canadians) but only some dialects extend it to other words like 'orange', 'Florida', or 'moral'. And many people have some idiosyncratic uses. For example, I (a native of SE Pennsylvania) have it in most of these words except 'moral'.
Some Brits may also have this pronunciation, although the only evidence I have for that claim is Roger Daltry's pronunciation of 'moral' in "Won't get fooled again". He clearly sings 'The m[ar]als that we worshipped were all gone.' I don't know if that is him affecting an American pronunciation or his native one.

On the show a caller asked about [shtreet] for [street]. This is also a common phonological variation in American speech. It appears to be anticipatory assimilation of the [s] to the place of articulation of the [r]. A similar rule is found in Swedish where an [s] following an [r] is pronounced as [sh], for example [morshan] meaning "Mother".

Embarrasing mistakes

OK, one more from the advertising/marketing perspective.

I once worked at a pharmacy benefit manager, that regularly sent out letters to their "members" about different aspects of the benefit. These letters were highly regulated. We had writers, editors, and managers all looking at them. In addition there was a team of medical, legal, and sales people who reviewed and approved the letters before they went out. Needless to say there were mistakes.

The best one was when a letter went out with a toll-free number for members to call if they had any further questions. Only on this particular letter, the toll-free number was not toll-free. And the questions members got answers to were probably not the ones they called with. Somewhere along the line an 876 prefix got switched to a 976 prefix.