grammatici ordinis parvuli

Henry Alford, Dean of Canterbury, [ 1810–71] in his A Plea for the Queen’s English: Stray Notes on Speaking and Spelling (1881), pp.154–7. (link), champions the oft-maligned construction it is me from hordes of peevers:

192. The mention of the nominative and accusative of the personal pronoun seems not inaptly to introduce a discussion of the well-known and much controverted phrase, “It is me.” Now this is an expression which every one uses. Grammarians (of the smaller order) protest: schoolmasters (of the lower kind) prohibit and chastise; but English men, women, aud children go on saying it, and will go on saying it as long as the English language is spoken. Here is a phenomenon worth accounting for. “Not at all so,” say our censors: “don’t trouble yourself about it; it is a mere vulgarism. Leave it off yourself, and try to persuade every one else to leave it off.”

193. But, my good censors, I cannot. I did what I could. I wrote a letter inviting the chief of you to come to Canterbury and hear my third lecture. I wrote in some fear and trembling. All my adverbs were (what I should call) misplaced, that I might not offend him. But at last, I was obliged to transgress, in spite of my good resolutions. I was promising to meet him at the station, and I was going to write: “if you see on the platform ‘an old party in a shovel’ that will be I.” But my pen refused to sanction (to endorse, I believe I ought to say, but I cannot) the construction. “That will be me” came from it, in spite, as I said, of my resolve of the best possible behaviour.

194. Let us see what a real grammarian says on the matter: one who does not lay opinion, down rules only, but is anxious to ascertain on what usages are founded. Dr. Latham, in his admirable History of the English Language, p. 586, says, “We may .... call the word me a secondary nominative: inasmuch as such phrases as it is me = it is I, are common. To call such expressions incorrect English, is to assume the point. No one says that c’est moi is bad French, and c’est je is good. The fact is that, with us, the whole question is a question of degree. Has or has not the custom been sufficiently prevalent to have transferred the forms me, ye, and you, from one case to another ? Or perhaps we may say, is there any real custom at all in favour of I, except so far as the grammarians have made one? It is clear that the French analogy is against it. It is also clear that the personal pronoun as a predicate may be in a different analogy from the personal pronoun as a subject.”

195. And in another place, p. 584, he says: “What if the current objections to such expressions as it is me (which the ordinary grammarians would change into it is I), be unfounded, or rather founded upon the ignorance of this difference (the difference between the use of the pronoun as subject and as predicate)? That the present writer, defends this (so-called) vulgarism may be seen elsewhere. It may be seen elsewhere, that he finds nothing worse in it than a Frenchman finds in c’est moi, where, according to the English dogma, c’est je would be the light expression. Both constructions, the English and the French, are predicative: and when constructions are predicative, a change is what we must expect rather than be surprised at.”

oel ngati kameie

In keeping with all the now-vanished merriment, V. & I found ourselves on Xmas eve standing in line a 1830 hours waiting with the rest of the crowd to be let in to see Avatar in IMAX 3D. We usually go see some blockbuster du jour on Xmas morning for matinée prices, but this year, in keeping with our efforts to shore up the Californian economy during the Great Recession, we plunked down over thirty bucks and waited to get our 3D specs and a seat not too far in the back of the theater. I wanted to see it because I had been intrigued by interviews with Paul Frommer, a USC linguist, who had designed the Na'vi conlang used in the movie. Frommer had even guest blogged over at Language Log (link) about it. We had fun. The story is a simple morality tale with kick-ass 3D effects. The best take I’ve seen so far online is by James Kunstler (link). There were some obvious bits retreaded from Aliens, and V. noticed that the pacing was similar to Titanic, a film that I never got around to seeing. When we got home we were not sleepy enough yet to go to bed, so we watched another film, Ein Frau in Berlin. It’s based on a memoir published in 1954 (in English and in the USA) about the events in one neighborhood during the Battle for Berlin during the period from 20 April to 22 June 1945. Its publication caused outcries in Germany about the honor of German women being besmirched.

learning standard english as second dialect

While enjoying a funny entry on Language Log (link) about a recent story arc thread on the Non Sequitur comic strip, I came across the following in the commentary:

I took a Russian course in the 1980s, and helped out a classmate who was struggling with the material. He had graduated with excellent marks from an American high school, but I quickly discovered that the reason he couldn't make his adjectives agree with his nouns, or choose the correct noun case, was that he did not know what a noun was.

I spent hours in Canadian grade school, circling nouns, underlining verbs and drawing boxes around articles and squiggly lines under adverbs. I had to memorize and parrot on exams lists of relative pronouns and prepositions.

It fascinated me that my classmate could speak coherently and write essays in his native language without knowing what the components are.

It’s that last sentence that struck me as odd. The idea that a person could not speak or write a language without knowing its grammar (in this case defined as being able to identify parts of speech) does not make sense to me. The grammar of a language has many components: phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. To many of my co-Anglophones, grammar instead means usage, orthography, etymology, and punctuation. This latter non-linguistic view of grammar is a holdover from the days when Latin and Greek were the languages being taught in grammar schools. And, pedagogically speaking, when you’re learning a new language (as an adult), it helps to be able to speak about its grammar using some terms, hopefully from the language grammatical tradition itself. (I have been thinking about this because recently I have been slowly learning Japanese linguistic terms in my Japanese class.) Latin these days has been replaced by General American English in US schools. And GAE is for many speakers in this country a different dialect of English than the one they learned on their mother’s lap.

floppy ears

Thanks to Languagehat, I’ve started to read a Greek linguistics blog, Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος (link) and immediately got caught up in a thread about a rare (Modern Greek) word for the European ground squirrel (Spermophilus citellus) λαγόγηρως which occurs in Suidas. Read about it at Old Man Hare (link). There’s a Bulgarian word for the animal лалугер (variant лагудер) that looks like a loan from Greek. There are minor difficulties such as the γ mapping to the л that could be explained by dissimilation from the second γ (and the dialectal variant has the second γ becoming д). The word analyses morphologically into λαγώς ‘hare’ and γῆρας ‘old age’ hence the entry’s title. Greek λαγώς is usually traced to two PIE roots *(s)lēg (*(s)ləg, *(s)leg) ‘limp, floppy; soft’ and *ōus (*əus, *us) ‘ear’. The ο rather than an ω as in other Greek compounds with λαγώς, e.g., λαγωφόνος ‘har-killer’ , λαγώπους ‘hare-footed’ is not a problem as there are some compounds with ο, e.g., λαγοδαίτης ‘hare-devourer’. Greek γῆρας traces back to PIE *grē ‘mature, rotten’.

mandelshtam et trubetskoj

Mr Verb posted an entry (link) about a passage from a book he’s reading, The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell.

"I overheard a lady mention what the professor was a professor of. It turned out to be something called linguistics. The lady said that he was famous for figuring out the difference between languages and dialects—languages were spoken by people with armies, dialects by people without."

It’s in the context of Osip Mandelshtam in transit to a correction camp where he would die of an unspecified illness. We’ve all heard the aphorism, and it has been attributed to Antoine Meillet and Max Weinreich, though the latter gave it its first appearance in the literature, and that in Yiddish (link).

So, just who is that professor linguistics supposed to be? Since it’s a work of fiction, I’d like to add my candidate to the offerings in the commentary: Nikolai Trubetzkoy (link). He too died in ’38 and likewise at the hands of a totalitarian regime, this time the Gestapo in Austria, rather than the NKVD in the USSR. And somehow I’d like to fit Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Mikołaj Kruszewski in therre, too.

erzjan' kel'

The Russian Orthodox Church has its 16th patriarch, Kiril I (né Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev; Wikipedia; Novinite). According to the Wikipedia article he is of Erzya-Mordvin ethnic origin. Erzya (Эрзянь кель) is a Finno-Ugric language with about half a million speakers. Reading up on Erzya led me to the Finno-Ugric Electronic Library (link). (The English interface has some problems, but for those who read Russian it’s a good resource.)

mapping bad habits

Cartocacoethes :- a mania, uncontrollable urge, compulsion or itch to see maps everywhere. John Krygier discusses the world’s allegedly oldest map from Çatalhöyük (link).

The Çatalhöyük “map” provides a great case study of the perils of prehistoric map hunting.

The Çatalhöyük map was first brought to attention in a 1964 article entitled “Excavations at Çatal Höyük, 1963, Third Preliminary Report” by James Mellaart Anatolian Studies 14 (1964, pp. 39–119).

Image by John Swogger via Flickr.

[Via Grant Barrett’s Double-Tongued Dictionary (link) via Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words Newsletter (link).]

ick bin ein lexikon

Languagehat recently posted about reading Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (link), and that got me to started wondering about the Berlin dialect. Long post short, I found a Berlinisch Lexikon online (link).

be all like

Two things about seeing Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York in a Berkeley multiplex cinema yesterday: (1) the small theater in which we saw the movie was furnished with a small number of comfy chairs and couches, and (2) I found myself drawn into the conversation of a couple of strangers sitting behind me. It started with one fellow’s lament about the abuse of like as a discourse marker, a quotative, and a linguistic hedge or filler (link, link, and link). I held my silence, but when they were all like: “And then there’s go for said!” Still I ignored them. Mainly because I could not remember the linguistics term quotative go for this grammatical feature of the informal register in my own ideolect. But, they did not stop there, and finally they wondered, just a bit too loudly, about using the present tense to report something that had happened in the past. “It’s called the historic present,” I said (link). And then after a awkward pause, I added: “It’s good to finally get some use out of my linguistic degree.” We all of us laughed nervously and then lapsed into silence and waited for the movie to begin. It was wonderful.

denominal adjectival suffices

What is it about words changing their lexical category (or part-of-speech-hood), especially by way of zero morphology, that lights a fire under the tails of word snoots and their ilk? Somebody was just blogging about the use of crater as a verb (as in something the world economy just did), and just generally pissing and moaning about language change and word use. The first thing I thought about was Greek κρατηρ ‘mixing bowl’, which in turn led to a reverie on the sacro catino in the Duomo di San Lorenzo in Genova, one of four or so candidates for the Holy Grail. But when my mind returned to linguistics, I marveled how the participial suffix -ed in English could be applied to nouns to create adjectives. (What is it about adjectives and verbs and their transgressive relationship with one another?) For example, cratered, bearded, horned, etc. Then I realized something similar happens in Latin: aurītus ‘long-eared’ < auris ‘ear’, barbātus ‘bearded’ < barba ‘beard’. This was not the first time I had wondered about verbal suffixes pulling double duty with nouns and adjectives: cf. -l- and -n-.

creamling

Over at Bradshaw of the Future, goofy has a post about the etymology of butterfly (link). I looked in a bunch of books and googled about online, and here’s some of the stuff I ran across.

• The idea of butterflies stealing milk or butter is is connected with a dialectal German word for the insect Molkendieb ‘milk-thief’. I found a great collection of German archaic and dialect words for butterfly (link). Some connect schmetterling with the German Schmetten ‘cream’, cf. Schmand ‘sour cream’, Czech. smetana, but others with the verb schmettern ‘to gossip, prattle; dash (in sports)’.
• The Dutch word butterschijte ‘butter-shit’ has a curious parallel in Slavic: Russian мотыль, Polish motyl, et al. Here’s what Vasmer has to say about its etymology Wohl aus ‘Mistfalter’ mit -jo-Bildung zu aruss. motyla f. motylo n. ‘Mist’, ksl. motylo κοπρος r.-kslav. Motylьnikъ κοπρωνυμος (s. Srezn. Wb. 2, 179), das zu abg. metǫ, mesti ‘werfen, fegen’ gehört, vgl. MiEW. 194, Meillet MSL. 14, 333, Brandt RFV. 22, 156 (nach ihm: ‘sich hin- u. herwerfen’), Brückner KZ. 42, 342ff. (als ‘Krautscheißer’).
• Pokorny IEW p.801: Wörter für ‘Schmetterling’: redupliziert lat. pāpiliō, -ōnis m. (*pā-pil-); germ. *fīfalðrōn- in aisl. fīfrildi n., ags. fīfealde, ahd. fīfaltra, mhd. fīfalter, nhd. Falter; lit. petelìškė ds., lett. petelîgs ‘flatterhaft’ (*pel-tel-); von derselben Wurzel die balto-slav. Wörter (*paipalā-) für ‘Wachtel’: lit. píepala f., lett. paîpala, apr. penpalo (dazu apr. pepelis, Pl. pippalins ‘Vogel’); čech. přepel, křepel, slov. prepeliíca (auch ‘Schmetterling’) usw. The PIE root in Pokorny is *pel- ‘to pour, flow, fill’ whence English fleet, float, and flutter. (Shades of the folk etymological flutter by.)
• Latin pāpiliō means both butterfly and tent. (It’s from the latter meaning that our pavilion comes.) Some think there is a parallel between Greek σκηνη ‘tent, booth; stage’ and σκην ‘butterfly’. The Classical Greek word for butterfly is ψυχη and the Modern Greek word is πεταλουδα.

nzadi

Languagehat’s recent posting (link) on an article in the San Francisco Chronicle (link) got me wandering down memory lane. Why? Because I took an earlier incarnation of this self-same Introduction to Field Methods class at Cal almost thirty years ago. Jesse O. Sawyer taught it then. Our informant was a grad student in the math depart, and the language he spoke (his fourth) was Kiswahili. We used old reel-to-reel analog tape recorders. But, there was one high tech innovation: our class had a joint UNIX account. I was the only one who ever logged in or used it, including Jesse. I used it to write papers (marked up in troff and edited with vi). (Bill Joy wrote vi while he was at Berkeley, and years later I would work at a company he co-founded, Sun.) I could log in in the linguistics department office (in Dwinelle) using a huge terminal with an acoustic-coupled 100-baud modem, or I could trudge off to the basement of Evans and sit at one of the faster and smaller terminals there. I really had no concept of an operating system at the time, and I thought the computer itself was called Eunuchs, which I thought was a pretty cool name for a computer. I just printed those papers off at the printing-terminals located the ends of the tables on which the CRT terminals sat. Two things stand out in that article: (1) that they still teach a field methods class in my old linguistics department and (2) that there are still “unknown” languages to be recorded.

moderate minusculization

Anybody having a passing acquaintance with the German language knows that all nouns are capitalized and not just proper ones as in English. Over the past decade or two, I have noticed a tendency in some 19th century German books towards only capitalizing words which begin a sentence and proper nouns (e.g., this page from the forward to Jacob Grimm’s deutsche grammatik (link). I had asked a couple of Germans (though not Germanists or linguists) if they knew why this was, but none of them even knew about it. So, it was only today that I finally decided to look into it.

This article in the Berliner Zeitung (August 13, 2004, link) is a good place to start. It turns out that capitalizing nouns is a fairly recent event. It started in the Baroque period and its origins seems to have been one of the fear of upsetting God (Gottesfurcht). In fact, in some Baroque texts, Gott is spelled with two initial capitals GOtt. Reading this and some German Wikipedia articles increased my vocabulary by quite a bit. First we have Majuskel and Minuskel for an upper- or lowercase letter, though the former can also be called Versal (in printers’ terminology) or Großbuchstabe for a more German look and feel, and the latter Kleinbuchstabe. Capitalization is Großschreibung and its antonym (which we don’t really have a word for in English) is Kleinschreibung, though I have seen minusculize for the verb and minusculization for the abstract noun). And because this is German we’re talking about there is something called gemäßigte Kleinschreibung (which yields the title for this blog entry), and furthermore, as soon as I started off down this slippery slope I ran across some groups advocating moderate and radical minusculization reforms for German orthography (d.h., deutsche Rechtschreibung): der bund für vereinfachte rechtschreibung (link and die kleinschriftbewegung (link). Finally, CamelCase (or NerdCaps) is Binnenmajuskeln or Binnenversalien.

tenebrae

Adyates over at De Grypis blog has a post (link) about the etymology of Latin tenebrae. It’s an extended comment on Chris Jones’ post at the LatinLaguage.us blog (link). Let’s see what some of the authorities have to say.

Alois Walde offers this (in the 2nd edition of Lateinisches etymologisches Wörterbuch): “Lat. tenebrae zunächst aus *temefrā (*temafrā) durch Dissimilation von m gegen folgenden Labial (Niedermann BB.XXV, 87, Contrib. à la crit. de gloses lat. 31)”.

Ernout & Meillet (in their Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine: Histoire des mots): “Lat. tenebrae repose sur *temə-s-rā-; le passage de -m- à -n- fait difficulté; car il suppose l’intervention d’une forme où la voyelle de syllable intérieure était syncopée, à moins qu’on n’admette une dissimilation, tout hypothétique, de m en n par la labiale *f, d’où est sorti b; on ne peut restituer le détail des faits”.

Tucker (in his A Concise Etymological Dictionary of Latin 1931): “Possibly *temsrā > *tensrā & anaptyxis occured (v. umerus). [It is not, however, entirely out of the question to suppose a compound t-enebh- (cf. nebula, νεφος), similar to δ-νοφος, κ-νεφας]”. But, Chaintraine (in his Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque) discusses these two Greek words: “Fait penser à la fois à ζοφος, à κνεφας : les mots de ce genre se prêtent à prendre des formes variées par une tabou linguistique. Tout effort pour préciser (croisements des mots, etc. ?) est malaisé, v. Güntert, Reimwortbildungen 112 sq., Petersen, Am. J. Ph. 56, 1935, 57 sqq.”.

Finally, Mallory & Adams (in their Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture) reconstruct the PIE root tómh_xes- ‘dark’ with an unknown laryngeal.

-ize write

To the second rancke of reprehenders, that complain of my boystrous compound wordes, and ending my Italionate coyned verbes all in ize, thus I replie: That no winde that blowes strong but is boystrous ; no speech or wordes of any power or force to confute or perswade, but must be swelling and boystrous. For the compounding of my wordes, therein I imitate rich men, who, having store of white single money together, convert a number of those small little sentes into great peeces of gold, such as double pistoles and portugues. Our English tongue, of all languages, most swarmeth with the single money of monosillables, which are the onely scandal of it. Bookes written in them, and no other, seeme like shop-keepers’ boxes, that containe nothing else saue halfe-pence, three-farthings, and two pences. Therefore what did me I, but, having a huge heape of those worthlesse shreds of small English in my pia maters purse, to make the royaller shew with them to men’s eyes, had them to the compounders immediately, and exchanged them foure into one. and others into more, according to the Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian.

Thomas Nashe, Introduction to Sydney’s Astrophel & Stella Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem 1593.

Jeopardize. This is a modern word which we could easily do without, as it is neither more nor less than its venerable progenitor to jeopard, which is greatly preferred by all careful writers.

Alfred Ayres, The Verbalist, 1895, p.109

jeopardize. Richard Grant White called jeopardize “a foolish and intolerable word” in 1879, and he was not the only one who thought so. A popular view among American critics in the 19th century was that the proper verb was jeopard, an older word which, according to the OED, had fallen into disuse by the end of the 1600s. The first record of jeopardize is from 1646, but there is no further evidence of its use until it turns up in Noah Webster’s American Dictionary in 1828 with the note, “This is a modern word used by respectable writers in America, but synonymous with jeopard, and therefore useless.” Useless or not, jeopardize became increasingly common, both in America and in Great Britain, as attempts to resurrect jeopard met with predictable failure. The voices of protest against jeopardize, all of which have been American, began to die down by about 1900, and it was not long before this minor controversy was entirely forgotten. It has now been many decades since anyone found anything wrong with jeopardize.

Merriam-Webster‘s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994, pp.570f.

-ize; -ise. But neologisms ending in -ize are generally to be discouraged, for they are invariably ungainly and often superfluous. Thus we have no use for accessorize, artificialize, , audiblize, cubiclize, fenderize (= to fix a dented fender), funeralize, ghettoize, Mirandize, nakedize, and so on. Careful writers are wary of new words formed with this suffix.

Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, 1998, p.389.

Addendum. Thanks to Conrad over at the simply marvelous blog Varieties of Unreligious Experience (link) for the Nashe attribution correction; see commentary hereunder.]

a budget of grammatical peeves

A discussion I had recently online about what peevologist meant (see this Wishydig blog entry for a discussion of its origin) revealed to me a great truth about soi disant snoots: they are as lacking in their quivering aggregate of absolutist rules of “grammar” as they are in their erudition and scholarship. (Well, perhaps I’d already had an inkling of that.) Their Weltanschauung causes them to hound anybody who uses a word with a slightly different meaning to the one which their grammar teacher beat into them, e.g., decimate to mean destroy. Any whiff of semantic drift causes the customary ejaculation “And look at how gay was co-opted! It used to mean merry or joyful!” Some say it still does in some contexts. I usually try to explain to them that gay has had a long and varied semantic drift since emigrating from Normandy to England about a millennium ago.
From Partridge A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (in two volumes), Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961:

Gay. (Of women) leading an immoral, or a harlot’s, life: 1825, Westmacott (OED), In C. 20, coll., on verge of SE.—2. Slightly intoxicated; ob. C.19–20; Perhaps orig. a euphemism.—3. Impudent, impertinent, presumptuous: US (—1899), anglicized in 1915 by PG Wodehouse, OED (Sup.).

Also, gay house ‘brothel’, gay in the arse ‘(Of women) loose’, to lead a gay life ‘to live immorally’, the gay instrument ‘the male member’, gaying it ‘sexual intercourse’.
The grammar mavens’ll have nothing of the sort, thankee. They’ll blink myopically and tell you that though they have nothing against homosexuals personally, but they do want their word back. Yeah, right. Why are similarly polysemous words like symbology not being ranted about? I count at least three meanings of the word: (1) The study of symbols; (2) the use of symbols; and (3) a collection or system of symbols. And don’t even ask them about mole or put.

txting the fall of the rome

One of the fun things to do in museums is to try to read and decipher ancient inscriptions. Just knowing Latin or Greek is not enough, because of the extensive use of abbreviations in monumental inscriptions. Marble being an expensive material on which to write, the messages needed to be brief. Take for example, a milestone from the Via Trajana in Italy from the early second century CE. First is the original message, second is the unabbreviated version in Latin, and third is an English translation:

LXXIX
IMP CAESAR
DIVI NERVAE F
NERVA TRAIANVS
AVG GERM DACIC
PONT MAX TR POT
XIII IMP VI COS V
P P
VIAM A BENEVENTO
BRVNDISIVM PECVN
SVA FECIT

LXXIX
Imperator Caesar
divi Nervae filius
Nerva Trajanus
Augustus Germanicus Dacicus
pontifex maximus tribunitia potestate
XIII imperator VI consul V
pater patriae
viam a Benevento
Brundisium pecunia
sua fecit.

79
The emperor Caesar,
son of the deified Nerva,
Nerva Trajanus
Augustus, victor over the Germans and the Dacians,
chief priest,
holder of the tribunician power 13 times, saluted emperor 6 times, consul 5 times,
father of his country,
made the road from Beneventum
to Brindisium
at his own expense.

[From Lawrence Keppie (1991) Understanding Roman Inscriptions, pp.65-6.]

So, it occurred to me, that the Roman Empire fell, not because of lead poisoning, moral turpitude, or invading Goths and Vandals, but as a result of their language being diluted and degraded by a plague not unlike text messaging abbreviations. This also explains how the noble tongue Latin devolved into the barbarous jargons that are Italian, French, Provençal, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Romantsh, and Romanian. (Published on the InterWeb earlier. And a tip of an iceberg to Professor Pullum over in the UK for posting this and jogging my memory.)

lexica supina

More and more dictionaries have been showing up on my browser. Here’s a list:

1. John Florio. 1611. Queen Anna’s / New World / of Words, / or / Dictionarie / of Italian and English / Tongues, / Collected, and newly much augmented by / Iohn Florio, / Reader of Italian vnto the Soueraigne / Maiestie of Anna / Crowned Queene of England, Scotland, France, / and Ireland, &c. / And one of the Gentlemen of hir Royal Priuie / Chamber.
2. Edward Robert Tregear. 1891. Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary.
3. Ralph Lilley Turner. 1962–1966. A comparative dictionary of Indo-Aryan languages.
4. Woxikon, the Online Dictionary. German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Swedish.

bleedin pony, innit?

We all know that English is going to wrack and ruin, and that the road to its destruction was paved by descriptivist linguists and skulking lexicographers. And the media are doing their part preaching to choir:

It had four wheels and cost a lot of money but, sadly for one impatient teenager, the similarity ended there.

A teenager was greeted by a display cabinet instead of a taxi because her Ali G-style slang confused a series of phone operators.

The girl hurriedly dialled directory inquiries to book a taxi from her home in London to Bristol airport, using the cockney rhyming slang Joe Baxi.

Yesterday when the “story” broke, there were along a score or so of ghits. Today, we’re up to 2,670 ghits. More blogging and bloviating. But there is some debunking is going on, too, at Five Chinese Crackers (link), Obsolete (link), and Chimp Media Monitor (link) blogs. A likely origin seems to be a press release (link).

certitudo indoctorum

It’s the sort of grammatical rule that’s easy to remember: use between with two conjoined noun phrases, but among with three or more. It also has nothing to do with English grammar or usage, but that does not stop the learnèd ignorant from foisting it upon you. It is an example of the etymological fallacy. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (link) quotes J A H Murray (the first editor of the OED):

[Between] is still the only word available to express the relation of a thing to many surrounding things severally and individually, among expressing a relation to them collectively and vaguely.

The editors go on to say The OED shows citations for between used of more than two from 971 to 1885. 971 is the date the Bickling Homilies were composed (link). I took a look at the index. The entries for betweonum show that it is used four times as a postposition (probably more of a verbal particle), and a couple of times split with its complement coming between the two parts. For example:

þa cwædon þa apostolas to þæm folce, ‘Heo bið swiþor gestrangod be us tweonum þurh Drihtnes gehát’. p.143.ll.11f.

then said the Apostles to the people, ‘She shall be much more strengthened among us by God’s promise’.

In other words, pretty much since English has been written down, between has been used with more than three items.