Yuval Pinter

זוכרים את איצ’ה?

זורם לים.

"אחי, אתה נחל בשבת? אני מביא אבטיח ושש בש, תבוא!"

נתרם ע"י: עפרה יחיאל.
מקור: עפרה יחיאל/

יכולת של פריט, מכשיר או מערכת לפעול בקני מידה מגוונים.

תרגום עברי למונח "scalability" הנגזר מראשי התיבות ל-"קנה מידה". בהטיה, שם התואר הוא קָנִים (scalable).

- "לפני שאנחנו מחליטים ללכת על האופציה הזו, האם אתה בטוח שיש לתוכנה שלך קנימות -שתספיק לנו גם לקפיצה בכמות המשתמשים?"
- "בדקתי את כל האספקטים ואני יכול להבטיח לך שהקוד שלי קנים."

נתרם ע"י: יובל.

One of the highlights of this weekend's Saturday Night Live was a "Weekend Update" appearance by Taran Killam playing Jebidiah Atkinson, a 19th-century speech critic.

(Apologies to those outside of the U.S. who can't view Hulu videos.)

After thoroughly panning the Gettysburg Address, he moves on to other historical speeches (allowing for a bit of time travel), including FDR's Pearl Harbor address. Killam flubs the line and breaks character, which also cracks up "Weekend Update" host Seth Meyers, leading to a bit of improvisation.

Killam: You know what date will live in infamy for me? December 8th, 1941, when FDR gave a speech that was so boring-ass.
(Pause.) I think I misquoted myself.

Meyers: Yeah, I think you did. I was gonna say, that wasn't your best written one.

Killam: That was a rough draft. Coulda used a couple of kamikazes after that.

It's hard to say what line Killam was supposed to deliver. Perhaps it was written as "FDR gave a boring-ass speech," followed by the bit about kamikazes. Or perhaps the boring-ass was improvised entirely but inserted in the wrong place. Either way, the problem that Killam faced was that boring-ass sounds just fine when it's used attributively (pre-modifying speech), but sounds wrong as a predicate adjective.

We've looked at the "[adjective]-ass" combining form a few times in the past: "The intensified crack of dawn?" (ML, 6/7/05), "Root haughtiness" (GP, 8/20/11), "Is it a prosodic-ass constraint?" (GP, 8/25/11), "Rachel Jenteal's language in the Zimmerman trial" (JR, 7/10/13). But I don't think we've ever addressed the attributive vs. predicative issue. Neal Whitman tackled this on his Literal-Minded blog last year in his post "Ass/Fucking Intensification," in part inspired by a classic xkcd strip:

Neal writes:

Ass, however, can intensify only attributive adjectives. Put it with a predicative adjective and it's just silly:

*This car is sweet-ass.
He has a sweet-ass car.

Constraints on the predicative use of "[adjective]-ass" were noted as early as 1998, when Diana Elgersma presented a paper entitled "Serious-ass morphology:
The anal emphatic in English" at MILC 2. Elgersma's observation was limited to backward-ass, however:

Although the origin of the '-ass' suffix is unclear, it would seem to have spread from a more restricted nominalizing morpheme, which attaches not only to adjectives, but also to verbs: bad-ass ('Check the dude in the leather jacket – he's a total bad-ass!'), hard-ass, slack-ass, whup-ass ('If you don't shut up, I'm gonna open up a big can of Texas-style whup-ass on ya.'), lazy-ass, stupid-ass and kiss-ass, for example. Note that many of these can also be used as emphatic adjectives (stupid-ass, lazy-ass, slack-ass, hard-ass).

One interesting case is the word backward. There are several variants with this particular base, including bass-ackward, backasswards (infixation), or the prefixed ass-backward. This latter variant can potentially be explained as an iconic reversal; that is, putting the normally suffixed '-ass' in a prefixed position is in itself backward. It is possible to have the attributive variant backward-ass ('That's one backward-ass idea'), however, this particular construction cannot occur as a predicate adjective: * 'That idea is backward-ass.'

A more nuanced statement of the constraint is given by Daniel Sidiqqi in "The English intensifier ass" (Snippets, May 2011):

Ass seems to have a requirement that it appear right of the adjective that it is modifying AND left of the head the adjective modifies (i.e. it cannot be phrase final):

The only time that ass can appear phrase-finally is when attached to bad (e.g. That receiver is badass), but, in such cases it is always stressed (otherwise it is not). I expect badass is the source of the affix rather than an exception.

If the constraint is just that "[adjective]-ass" cannot be phrase-final, then that would allow predicative uses of this type (found on COCA):

The father would talk about how backward-ass the medical school was in its, say, treatment of severe high blood pressure…
—Brock Clarke, "The Son's Point of View," The Southern Review, 39(3):556 (Summer 2003).

…and possibly also this boring-ass example from Urban Dictionary:

That physics lecture was so boring ass, I fell asleep with my leg behind my ear and my finger in my ass.

If the UD example is acceptable (it's pretty borderline for me), then I wonder if Killam wanted to say:

FDR gave a speech that was so boring-ass (that) I needed a couple of kamikazes afterwards.

If he intended to phrase it that way, then he got into trouble by pausing after boring-ass, as if that were the end of the sentence. (Blame the cue cards?) But I'm glad he did pause, since breaking character made the bit even funnier, and also provided excellent material for another boring-ass Language Log post.

[Update Welcome, Geekosystem readers!]

Dedicated to Colin – happy birthday Colin!!

Here are more cats.

שלום, נעים מאוד, אנחנו "דגש קל", בלוג בלשנות בעברית וזה. לונג טיים נו פוסט.

אומרים שהכי טוב לשבור את הקרח עם מכתב למערכת מעידוק, ומי אני שאלך נגד המלצות אמורפיות שהרגע המצאתי. ובכן, עידוק דנן הביע תמיהה (לפני ארבעה חודשים. התיישנותיישן) על המשפט הבא בקומוניקט שהגיע לידיו:

כ-450 צילומים העלו מאות דיפלומטים דרך ממשק מיוחד שתוכנת במיוחד לצורך התערוכה באתר מועדון הדיפלומטים הישראלי.

זה מוזר זה זה. התבוננות מעמיקה יותר מראה שכל המסר מלא במשפטים פשוטים מהצורה מושא-נשוא-נושא, מה קוראים בעגה המקצועית OVS:

את הפרוייקט המיוחד הזה, יזם וביצע מועדון הדיפלומטים הישראלי, (…)

(יובל, תתעלם מהפסיק המיותר. אתה קורא את הפלוג כבר כמעט שנה, אתה אמור להיות מחוסן. לשאוף. לנשוף. לשאוף. לנשוף)

את 50 הצילומים הנבחרים בחרה ועדה מקצועית בת 10 שופטים (…)

(בלי מושא, כאלה יש הרבה בימינו): הצטרפו לפרויקט משרד התיירות ולשכת העיתונות הממשלתית (…)

והאמת שזהו. אבל זו הודעה נורא קצרה, ושלושה-ארבעה משפטים כאלה בהחלט מעידים על מאפיין של הכותב/ת. מה שמעלה היפותזה לפיה מדובר במישהו שאינו דובר עברית כשפת אם. האם נוכל לברר איזו שפה כן?

אז חשבתי על עברית מקראית, בגלל הדוגמה המפורסמת אבנים שחקו מים, אותו פסוק מאיוב שמתכוון לכך שמים שוחקים אבנים (בסופו של דבר, עם כוח רצון והתמדה וכו' וכו') ולא שהאבנים שוחקות את המים (שזה וט"פ רציני).

מפאת חוסר-סבירות מה של התיאוריה הזאת חיפשתי שפה אחרת. היו כמה רמזים בסביבות ההודעה ששלח עידוק לכך שדנמרק בעניינים פה (תמונה שהמילה דנמרק מופיעה בשמה), ואכן דנית היא שפה בה נהוג להשתמש לעתים ב-OVS כדי להעביר מסר (מקור: ערך הויקיפדיה על OVS! מי היה מאמין). אז אולי זה המקור. מצד שני, המייל נשלח ע"י חברת יחסי ציבור שנראית ישראלית לגמרי. אז קשה להחליט.

Allan Metcalf has a Lingua Franca column laying out the history of the word dude, as discovered by Barry Popik and Gerald Cohen and presented in the latest issue of Comments on Etymology:

Thanks to Popik and Cohen’s thorough investigation, it seems almost certain that “dude” derived from “doodle,” as in “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The original New England Yankee Doodle, Cohen notes, “was the country bumpkin who stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni; i.e., by sticking a feather in his cap, he imagined himself to be fashionable like the young men of his day known as ‘macaronis.’”

For some reason, early in 1883, this inspired someone to call foppish young men of New York City “doods,” with the alternate spelling “dudes” soon becoming the norm. Exactly what these fashionable fools were like unfolds copiously in the pages of Comments. Here there is room for just a small sample. [...]

IN YOUR KALFI, WATCHING YOU VOTE

קרדיט על צילום העיתון: Amihai Bannett, Omri S. M. Weil

Dedicated to recently married P and D, who met over a game of Scrabble! Belated congrats to you both!

Here’s more Scrabble.

This one is dedicated to Stacy! Hope you had a great birthday!

Here are more secrets.

We've all heard stories about family names that were "changed at Ellis Island" (where immigrants coming to New York were processed a century ago); allegedly, officials would change foreign-sounding names to something easier for Americans to deal with. Well, those stories are all the bunk. Philip Sutton, of the Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy at the New York Public Library, has written an informative post on the subject, showing that "Names were not changed at Ellis Island. ... Inspectors did not create records of immigration; rather they checked the names of the people moving through Ellis Island against those recorded in the ship's passenger list, or manifest. ... The manifest was presented to the officials at Ellis Island when the ship arrived. If anything, Ellis Island officials were known to correct mistakes in passenger lists." People sometimes changed their name before making the journey; "[m]ore commonly, immigrants would change their names themselves when they had arrived in the United States."

But don't just absorb that nugget of information and move on. The main reason I'm posting this is the astounding story of Frank Woodhull, told in the latter part of Sutton's account. You owe it to yourself to read it. As Monk used to say, "You'll thank me later."