a pretty, preettty, pretttty invented usage

a german exchange student i hosted in high school asked me, "what does 'pretty' mean?"
"schoen," i said. "beautiful."
"but you just said, 'it's a pretty good movie,'" she said.
"oh! that pretty..." and i discovered i really couldn't define what i'd meant.

not only that -- i wasn't completely sure what i'd meant in the first place. did i like the movie "to a fair or moderate degree" as per the dictionary.com definition of "pretty"? did i really dislike it, but want to avoid conflict with someone who may have liked it a lot? did my inflection rise from high to higher on "pretty," indicating that i was surprisingly impressed with the film? which of these meanings is conveyed by which prosodic pattern?

i can find surprisingly little information on the usage of "pretty" on the internet aside from the above dictionary definition, which isn't that helpful. "fairly" and "moderately" don't really answer the most basic semantic question, when i say something was "pretty good," to what degree did i like it? more than a lot? less than a little? a moderate amount?

some friends and i brainstormed and came up with at least a half-dozen meanings of "pretty" depending on context and inflection. some of these seemed to be ironic plays on each other. normally these things are considered adaptations or inflections on some basic semantic meaning. But i'd argue that there is no use in starting with the "original" or "normal" meaning of "pretty." we must consider apparently "external" things like context and inflection from the beginning when studying meaning. (and anyway, even language log says...)

using some humorous examples, i'd like to argue that we often deliberately use pretty to hedge or be unclear -- or uncertain -- about our meaning.

consider one of the most famous users of "pretty," Larry David of Curb Your Enthusiasm. a number of times throughout the series he says things are "pretty pretty preeeettttty, pretty good. pretty good," at pretty awkward and inappropriate times. hilarity ensues.

here, he's renewing his wedding vows. at a time when he should be as enthusiastic as possible, he mitigates his positive feelings by saying his relationship with his pretty wife is "pretty good."


in this scene, he's talking to a young man about his new relationship. the ambiguity of "pretty" makes for a very awkward situation.


in another scene that i couldn't find on youTube, larry gets reamed out by a near-stranger in a most extreme way, but when his wife asks, "how did it go?" he says "pretty, preettyy, pretty good."

i think those scenes are funny precisely because no one knows exactly what he means by "pretty." emphasizing the word that seems to have little to no meaning on its own is absurd and pretty funny.

i usually write these kinds of posts in response to a claim by someone i disagree with. but i wasn't able to find any in this case. i'd like to issue a challenge to any one out there in blogo-land to come up with a useful, semantic, non-usage based definition of "pretty."

Letter to Anheuser-Busch

Anheuser-Busch, Inc.

One Busch Place

St. Louis, MO 63118

May 1, 2008

To Whom It May Concern:

While enjoying one of your affordably priced, moderately quaffable beers the other day, I noticed Busch’s slogan. It read—and you’ll have to forgive my paraphrase—something along the lines of, “Refreshing as a mountain stream, smooth as its name.” With respect to the second clause, I couldn’t help but wonder if this is intended to be vaguely sexual? On the surface, it seems to indicate that “Busch” is a word that flows easily off the tongue. I think we both know that it is not. There may be something to say about the word’s sibilant conclusion, but the hard b and guttural u are anything but smooth. Personally, I think the phrase is suggestive of a certain part of the female anatomy that shares its name with your hops flavored brew. If this is the case, then I’d have to say that I believe your slogan is quite clever. If not, then I’d suggest changing it. Your marketing department, no doubt, can come up with something sexier or more ironic to slap on your cans. In fact, I might start there. Cans.

“Busch: We’ve got cans you can suck on all night long.”

Okay, maybe that’s a little weak, but you get the point. I’m not the person you pay ungodly sums of money to design your packaging.

All this nonsense aside, thank you for providing me and others with a thirty rack that can fuel any night of drunken depravity, and burden the next morning with the severest of hangovers.

Beer flavored regards,

Scott Kolp

the slow rise of the plingular

now that i'm working in a writing/editing setting, at some moments i get to discuss usage professionally. sometimes this is particularly interesting, since the News Editor to my Editorial Assistant is British. recently, he caught a 'mistake' in an ad. it was the sentence,

that's a savings of over $400!

"shouldn't it be 'that's a saving,'?" he said, very reasonably. 'why, yes,' i said, 'it probably should. '

but it just isn't.

comparative google stats bear out my assertion: 124,000 hits for "that's a savings" vs. 59,000 hits for "that's a saving." it's apparently not done across the pond, though.

similarly, while we were debating the capitalization of the following headline:

Why Are Operations the Forgotten Part of Firefighting?

i asked, "shouldn't it be 'Why is Operations...'?" and, sure enough, our intuitions and the rest of the article agreed. (otherwise, wouldn't it have to be 'Why Are Operations the Forgotten Parts of Firefighting?) it doesn't sound right, either (maybe this is just in the firefighting speech community?) to say, "Why is Operation the Forgotten Part..." it's also surprisingly hard to find a good standard for capitalization, but that's a whole nother post.

so, what's going on then, eh? somehow 'operations' and 'savings,' which both have legitimate s-less singular versions, have migrated over into singular territory themselves.

it strikes me that both of these singular nouns are parts of a whole. when they're not used that way, we naturally revert to the plural verb forms. 'operations are going well,' 'savings are hard to come by,' but in the original cases given, they're specifically a single part of a whole -- either part of a price or part of firefighting.

however, that doesn't seem to be a 'reason,' per se, and it seems to take some repeated use for nouns to wear down into this pattern. evidence for the slow, uneven (even unmotivated?) erosion of usage: these aberrant singulars are particular to speech communities (Americans, Firefighters) and i have trouble coming up with novel examples. 'flowers is a forgotten part of romance,' doesn't seem right. maybe it's the suffixes? no... 'mastications is an important part of digestion' doesn't sound good, either.

i'd love to hear them if you have other examples of s-ending singulars. the only other one i can think of, interestingly, is 'news,' which was originally the plural form of 'newe,' meaning a new thing or tiding. but that word had been in this grammatical predicament since it was middle english.

the prestige hierarchy of domain names

please slide your eyeballs on up to the top of your browser window and look at the url in your browser.

language in the realm of computers is particularly interesting because of its ability to command. one writes to a computer and, by doing so, actually acts. some liken this to the ancients' belief in the mystical power of language in the form of runes or charms.

the url is a particularly interesting example of computer language because it's not just words, or even just a command--it's both those instances of language, and a location as well.

everything between the http://and the next / is the name of/location of/directions to a particular website or server. after the /, each term is a directory or file. for instance, the website where i work runs a server machine called FireRescue1, which is our domain name. on that machine are folders corresponding to each of our topics: /products, /ems and so on.

as with any system of language, this one has a grammar that lets us understand the relationships of the parts. in many ways, they go from larger to smaller as you read from left to right, and the smaller parts are contained within the larger ones.

and of course, as in any system of language, even language that's seemingly written for machines, where there is hierarchy, there is prestige.

i recently laughed when a friend recently directed me to his old website, "phoenix web." "oh," I said, are you phoenixweb.com? and he said, "no, phoenix-web.us." and i was immediately struck by what a drop in prestige this was. similarly, this blog would be all the more professional if it were located at inuse.com. but of course, that kind of prestige costs money...

the basic idea for this post came, actually, from a woman's email address i saw: herfirstname@herhusband'slastname.com. would it ever be the other way around?

Introducing The Interrationale

Another shameless blog plug: I have recently started a new blog as a creative outlet as well: The Interrationale.

Unfortunately, I don't think it is very accessible, at all, since it is essentially just place to put detailed research notes as I read up on some schools of thought that I didn't get to study in college.

The result is all the clarity and cohesiveness of Western Marxist social theory expressed in the vivid, dynamic idiom of analytic philosophy.

That said, I would treat it as a personal favor if anybody read and reacted to it. It actually is going to have a lot to do with language and rhetoric, since one of my main sources is Habermas' The Theory of Communicative Action.

Ultimately, one goal I have is to build to a rigorous answer to this question: how is computing and especially the internet communication changing society?

Introducing Invented Versage

invented usage has, in more ways than one, spawned an offspring called Invented Versage (www.inversage.blogspot.com). inverse.blogspot was taken, so Invented Verses was out. No matter for the denizens of invented usage--we just make it up as we go along.

as of right now, my plan is to make Invented Versage a home solely for my poems and commentary about them. i'm in a narcissistic mood about them because i just participated in my first san francisco poetry reading last night at a bar in the mission called, forebodingly, 'amnesia.'

my poetry, to my great excitement, was pretty well received, and i met a few very nice people--including fellow readers--who asked whether my writing was online. so, now i was no longer lying.

i've only posted one poem so far, but my plan is to quickly post the bulk of my existing work and then be inspired to write more. and have the energy to maintain invented usage more than i have been... though, i may as well say, it's been harder to think deep thoughts about language since i was informed that i didn't get into berkeley. maybe i'll write some tragic poetry about it.

Invented Versage.

san francisco's pleasant rhetoric

the notion that san francisco is an unusually friendly big city has been one of those for which i had no evidence at all until one day, on the muni ([myOO-nee]: i basically ride a trolley to work everyday--quaint, no?), i noticed this sign on the driver's cab:

Information gladly given but safety requires avoiding unnecessary conversation

the first thing that struck me was, 'why is the print so small on that sign?' followed by, 'why is that sign so unnecessarily wordy?'

one can imagine a similar sign in another large city (i name no names) saying

Do not speak to driver

but not in san francisco! it is safety, not the driver herself, that objects to conversation. it is only 'unnecessary conversatoion' that should be avoided--don't hesitate to inform the driver of an emergency--though really, 'unnecessary' is unnecessary, since having a necessary statement to make to the driver would just force you to break the rules, anyway.

another highly unnecessary word merits mention: 'gladly.' information will not be given begrudgingly on the muni!

the driver isn't even 'shunning' unnecessary conversation or 'stopping' it or anything like that; just mildly avoiding it like a small, friendly child in the street, for safety's sake.

even consider the ordering of the sentence. the alternative, "safety requires avoiding unnecessary conversation, but information is gladly given," just really puts too much emphasis on the negative, doesn't it?

i'm still not sure it's exactly what i'd call 'evidence' for my friendly city theory, but it's definitely a good sign.