Andrew Dunbar wrote me:
I wonder if you have seen this in the wild yet. We all have seen the noun spellings of phrasal verbs like “work out”, “break up”, and “knock out” etc being more and more spelled as single units when there is also a related noun “workout”, “breakup”, and “knock out”, etc.
I often point out that a new class of irregular verbs has emerged, since not many people complain about this like they still do the established proscribed “errors” like split infinitives. The result being that the infinitive and present non-third persons now have a spelling as a single word where all other inflected forms retain their two-word spellings.
And I also joke about how the regular versions if we wanted to avoid introducing many new irregular verbs would be like “I workouted”, “they are breakuping” (or breakupping?), “he knockouts the other guy”, etc. But what I’ve actually seen in the wild, two times now, is internal inflection! The new third person present form of “to break down” is “he breaksdown”: Colion Noir Breaksdown Gun Laws & Gun Crime Statistics.
To be fair, the previous time I saw it was also in the title of another Joe Rogan podcast video. So maybe it’s just a quirk of one person on his team. Maybe they’re intentionally playing with the language? I wonder if you or anyone in Hattery has seen other examples yet?
I hadn’t noticed it, but Andrew’s right, it must be new if people haven’t been peeving about it yet.
Have never seen the forms like “breaksdown” and have no expectation that I will see it become more common, but isn’t variable attachment/detachment of prepositions for phrasal verbs taking on different forms a pretty common feature in Germanic languages? Is it just that the prepositions are suffixed rather than prefixed here while still being used in verbal form? If so, isn’t it only in cases where the active form is identical to the infinitive which is identical to the nominalized form of the original phrasal verb? Rather than awkwardly inflected forms like “breaksdown,” I imagine you would start to see this being worked out in other special cases where the form is identical to the infinitive/nominal. For example, how do we see “setup” being used in infinitive vs. present vs simple past vs past participle?
“I will setup the computer in my new office.”
“I setup my own computer whenever I move to a new office.”
“I setup the computer in my new office yesterday.”
“I have setup the computer in my new office.”
I don’t know if any of these feel more or less awkward than the others to me at a gut level, though none of them seem great.
The attached forms seem mostly like a writer is using the shortest path towards domain specific senses of the phrasal combo, leveraging reader’s familiarity with the nominal form.
“I didn’t workout yesterday” seems unpolished to me, but quickly and clearly gestures that this is exercise-related.
“My plan didn’t work out” is clearly not exercise-related.
“My plan didn’t workout” is befuddling and seems like an error.
“Worksout” or “workedout” would make me feel like additional parsing was necessary, not less.
Unfortunately, doch: http://www.notaverb.com/
Ha! The peevers have already struck!
At first glance I thought “breaksdown” was a fancy plural noun, in imitation of “attorneys general” vs. “attorney generals”.
The peevers have already struck!
One down, two to go. I secretly sympathize, although they rarely win. Occasionally I send them cards of condolence: “I hope you feel surrounded by much love.”
I nearly mentioned notaverb.com in my email but I thought everybody here would probably already be acquainted with it. I actually used to send my new finds to its maintainer until he seemed to lose interest and stopped adding new ones.
Anyway, the site does of course peeve about the conjoined spellings and make fun of what the regular inflections would be if those spellings were legit. But it doesn’t mention the internal inflection. Because I don’t think it was yet happening.
As for comparisons with internally inflecting noun plurals, the best example would be “passersby” since it is written as a single word without even hyphens.
I riffled through my old emails and found that I sent him attestations for “breakup”, “roundup”, “takeoff”, and “fallback” in the last couple of years that he didn’t reply to or add. But between 2018 and 2020 he did add “splashdown”, “slowdown”, “comeback”, and “takedown” on my suggestion.
I even sent him a photo I took from a sign I passed outside a gym that proudly used both “breakup” and “workout” as verbs in the same sentence that I thought would look pretty on his site.
Oh, I found the previous occurrence which was exactly three months ago. Sadly, or interestingly, it was the same word: “Daryl Davis Breaksdown His Technique for Talking to Klan Members”
Not quite the same thing, but both my children have at various points in their development said things like “I’m becarefulling!”
Remember Winston C? The sort of language up with which he would not put.
As for comparisons with internally inflecting noun plurals, the best example would be “passersby” since it is written as a single word without even hyphens.
I disagree, since there is no standard “passerbys” alternative – probably precisely because “passerby” nowadays has a life of its own. At any rate it is not a conflation of the corresponding verbal phrase “pass by”. The noun is not found by writing the verb phrase as a single word. [I may have seen “passer-by” or “passers-by” in some 19C novel – the kind I read most]
This is in contrast with “breakdown” as a noun. It has no internally inflected plural, of course. That was just my little joke using the example of “attorneys general” vs “attorney generals”.
As for “breaksdown” written together as a verb form: what a fuss about a missing space ! I myself am of course above writing such a thing. I would not withhold any child’s allowance for his having used it, not for more than a week anyway.
Lookingforward to comingacross examples madewith irregular past tenses or past participles. For example “brokeup”.
Thinkingabout it, shouldn’t that be “peevingabout it”?
What is that old song with the refrain sung like that: “Thinkingabout you, thinkingabout how …” ? Over the past 50 years there have been so many pop songs written with such words that I can’t find it.
Maybe it’s some other two-syllable word, not “thinking”: “[da-da]about you …”. I’ve got the melody in my head. In C major: E-F-G C _ C _ / E-F-G C C / E G _ G _. [nonce notation, my Bösendorfer is on the blink]
I haven’t come across this, but I’ve encountered tons of people – or spellcheckers – who seem to believe that if a sequence of letters can ever be written solid (or with hyphens in some cases), it must always be written that way. That’s not just random internet commenters, it’s also journalism below the biggest names. Every day seems moribund, X years old likewise.
Surely this is a mere spelling mistake, not an incipient language change?
Spelling mistakes are the vanguard of decay.
It’s an orthography change, de facto – and one I want to complain about because it hampers understanding pretty seriously sometimes.
“becarefulling” sounds like a useful word.
—
And interesting as a derivation from imperative.
If you must have it as one word, I feel like it should be ‘downbreaks’. Although I don’t really know why. Am I unconciously modelling on (most likely) Norwegian?
Ha! The peevers have already struck
But they haven’t! ‘Breakdown’ doesn’t appear on their list. (‘Lockdown’, ‘Meltdown’, ‘Slowdown’, ‘Splashdown’, ‘Takedown’ are “not verbs” — allegedly.) Don’t tell them!
NZ Sky TV has a sports commentary programme ‘The Breakdown’. ‘Breakdown’ being a technical term for a phase in Rugby.
But they haven’t!
Indeed not.
The site confuses “misuse as a verb” with “misspell a verb as a noun” (a confusion all too typical of such people.)
Until such time as I hear the Young People of Today talking about how they are “loginning” or “breakdowning”, or have “loginned” or “breakdowned”, I shall not be clutching my pearls.
Spelling is (a) hard and (b) not very important at all compared with other forms of linguistic activity anyway. Word division, especially so. Given the actual real problems with the very definition of “word” in linguistics, dogmatism on these issues seems even more wrong-headed than usual.
[The word-division conventions in the standard Kusaal orthography are consistently wrong. However, the fact that they are consistent is almost certainly more important than the wrongness, in practical terms.]
Stu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_to_Know_You_(song)
Isnt’t it to do with pronunciation?
Eg.
– breakdown is pronounced as one word with the accent on the first syllable
– break down is pronounced with an accent on each word
Yes: that’s why I call “breakdown”, used for “break down” a spelling mistake. I very much doubt whether those who write (say) We will breakdown this issue to its essentials are actually pronouncing “break down” like the noun “breakdown”, with greater stress on “break” than “down”; though, given the fact that English happily verbs nouns, that may happen one day. When it does, the verb will be not “irregular”, but regular and weak: “he breakdowns”, “he breakdowned.” All this stuff about “irregular verbs” is either facetious or a complete confusion of mistakes in writing with mistakes in speech.
No native English speaker says “He breaks down this issue to its essentials” with “breaks down” stressed like the noun “breakdown.” Writing “breaksdown” is therefore a spelling mistake. That is all. There is nothing morphologically innovative going on here at all.
The failure of English orthography to mark stress is pretty much parallel to the failure of Kusaal orthography to mark tone: it leads to little practical difficulty for native speakers (partly because careful writing works around the deficiency), but nevertheless does lose significant information. It also misleads the linguistically unsophisticated* into supposing that certain forms are homophonous when in fact they are regularly and consistently distinguished in actual speech.
(There is a further, if accidental parallel: like Kusaal tone, English stress is more important for distinguishing syntactic constructions than lexical items. A lot of Chomskyan examples, it seems to me, would much more obviously fail in their purpose if stress were regularly marked in English. “Focus”, in particular, would be much more of an obvious phenomenon in their beloved written specimens. I suspect the relative neglect of focus in their kind of work is a direct consequence of the lack of stress marking in English orthography.)
* A category which includes virtually all language-peevers.
I suspect the relative neglect of focus in their kind of work is a direct consequence of …
their heads being full of words they’ve only ever seen written. In case of A.N.C. himself, I dispute that he can even speak English. (I don’t doubt he can write it.) He seems utterly incapable of mastering prosody in the spoken form; can’t finish a sentence for the life of him; always has to insert a parenthetical qualification; by the time he gets to some sort of cadence just before he runs out of breath, I’ve clear forgotten what he started by saying — and I suspect so has he.
“Writing “breaksdown” is therefore a spelling mistake. That is all. There is nothing morphologically innovative going on here at all.”
(1) “mistake” is undefined…
(2) if speakers do not associate bd and b d in stress, it does not imply (logically) that they only associate them visually.
(just pedantism:-E)
About mistakes, I do use the word, but I imply a convention… particularly the situation when a speaker wanted to achive a specific goal, based her choice on a wrong hypothesis about other people’s usage (a “target” that she was imitating) or used a form thoughtlessly and would correct herself.
But this approach does not produce any linguistically meaningful concept of a mistake (other than: “when speakers do what they don’t want to do”).
“mistake” is undefined…
“Undefined” is undefined …
(As is “is.”)
I’m not ready to add “mistake” to the list of basic undefinable notions of linguistics:(
Yeah, well. The mistake may still say something interesting, but maybe not more than that English already fails to discern prosidically marked compounds consistently in writing.
@David W: thanks for the link clearing that up ! It was driving me crazy.
“becarefulling” sounds like a useful word.
—
And interesting as a derivation from imperative.
“I am being haive!”
Another example* – and yes, stress marking would have prevented it: “A draft majority opinion is ultimately what that judge believes is the right thing to say in this case tempered by the judge’s beliefs about what her colleagues would be willing to sign onto given the initial discussion about the case.” Because the word onto exists (rare as it is), it has become unimaginable that sign on might ever be randomly followed by to.
This is reinforced by the existence of ambiguous cases like log into.
* I can’t link to it more directly. It’s close to halfway down the page under the heading “Legal matters”.
@David Marjanović: I find “sign onto” better there than ?”sign on to,” which looks subtly wrong to my eye. Of course, in context, both are inferior to plain old “sign.”
Misuse of hyphens is widerspread that misuse of spaces, but people misspell “every day” “everyday” every day.
I prefer BrE “any more” to AmE “anymore” because the space hints at the stress; cf. “any way” vs “anyway”.
Was the distinction between “for ever” [for all time] and “forever” [all the time] ever a matter of stress or never more than an artificial Useful Distinction enforced by arbitrary spacing?
This is reinforced by the existence of ambiguous cases like log into.
“Is it “to login to my PC”, “to log in to my PC”, or “to log into my PC”? Well, the noun is one word, a “login”; but for the verb, since you can “log yourself in” it must be two words (the same rule applies for “backup”, “breakdown”, “checkout”, “logout”, “lookup”, “setup”, and “shutdown”). Then the “in to” isn’t the kind that means “into”; it’s just a coincidental sequence of “in” and “to” (compare “giving in to temptation”), so the form I’d recommend is “log in to”.”
– Justin B. Rye, English for Software Localisation (section B4)
An excellent analysis, and I join him in his recommendation.
It presupposes that “words” are continuous:-E
Absobloodylutely.
Is this emphatic infixation of bloody intensifiers related to phrasal verbs, auxilliaries, prepositions that behave strange?
(Actually “not bloody likely!” is an intermediate stage)
I do not know how do you pronounce it, but -bsoblood- in the middle reminds me about speaking with ones mouth full…
As three words: “abso bloody lutely”. It is said more than read.
There is a join between the 3 bits, so maybe abso[1 STRESS blood]y[2 STRESS lute]ly
“Bloody” can’t be inserted between any old syllables, else it sounds dumb. It seems to me that the rhythm of the result with insertion is not supposed to “deviate too far” from that of the original word.
“Ab bloody solutely” and “absolute bloody ly” are dumb.
“Pan bloody demic” yes, “pandem bloody ic” no.
“Ali bloody mony” yes, “alimon bloody y” and “a bloody limony” no.
@stu
Very true. I just think I may hear a stop between y and m in any more but not between o and bloody in abso bloody lutely.
In short, just before the stressed syllable. In AmE it is “goddam”, as in “inde-goddam-pendent” and “obli-goddam-nation”. There is a single known instance of “imma-bloody-material” from Australia, which violates the stress rule, but then again “ma” appears on both sides of the expletive.
Stu’s “alibloodymony” (which seems cromulent to me, too) suggests that secondary stress will do.
A further difficulty: I think “unbloodybelievable” is OK, whereas “unbebloodylievable” is questionable.
“Unbebloodylievable” doesn’t work for me either (maybe the two successive syllables with an initial ‘b’?), but when I try to say “unbloodybelievable”, I find myself dropping the ‘be’, which I think supports the only-before-a-stressed-syllable theory.
@bt
I could imagine un-bloody[DRAMATIC PAUSE]beLIEVable or un-bloody-B’LIEVable with elision of the e after b.
@PP
Yes, those work for me too.
Or to make un believable and ali mony two prosodic words, which is what I instinctively do, in which case the fuccative infix becomes one too.
I wanted to add that while I haven’t heard anybody pronounce “breakdown” or “breaksdown” as a noun when they intend the verb that I have actually heard this relatively commonly with other phrasal verbs written in their noun spelling. It’s not rare on YouTube because many people read from their own scripts but do not real aloud with a natural intonation. I even think L2 English speakers are picking up this wrong “reading” intonation in their natural English speech. I think I’ve at least once or twice heard younger native English speakers us it in natural speech when not reading. But that’s still rare. I’ll keep my ears open.
I don’t claim there’s an incipient morphological change but the fact that few peevers complain about this while ancient peeves are still going strong means that they’re pretty much already accepted as alternative spellings, or even preferred spellings.
It’s happening (orthographically) with other compounds besides phrasal verbs but not as commonly. “Atleast” springs to mind. One that does bother me because it merges two almost opposite meanings is “apart” and “a part”. I’ve seen this by both L2 and native English speakers and think it’s going to get more common. I haven’t seen anyone peeve about it.
The opposite is also happening where less common compound words are written with spaces where they were traditionally written with no breaks or with hyphens. I don’t see this likely to affect pronunciation so it’s less interesting.
I perceive it to be related to spellcheckers. If there’s no red squiggly line it must be right. Most (but not all) spellcheckers and most users don’t take context into account. This is why it’s still rare for novel compounds to appear that don’t also have an accepted counterpart written without breaks. So “everyday” passes but “everynight” doesn’t. I think it’s exacerbated by text-to-speech on our phones and computers. My phone always puts “to” instead of “too”.
While the notaverb website is pure peeve and while I admit being peeved by this one, I’m posting as a language enthusiast and not as a peever.
I perceive it to be related to spellcheckers
Seems very likely. (I’ve seen “prophesy” written for “prophecy” throughout in printed books, even, presumably for the very reason that spellcheckers won’t catch the error.)
You’d expect even a fairly braindead spellchecker to object to e.g. “breaksdown”, though.
The failure of English orthography to mark stress …
Another example from a non-native speaker here, first time about 2:45.
“Diverse nutrition is hard to COME by.” — would be the right way. (‘… hard to discover’)
‘Tomorrow I’ll come BY’ (your house) — is the one she’s using. There’s several similar examples later, so it’s not a slip of the tongue.
I suspect Ms Hossenfelder reads a lot of (academic) English, but hears it not so much. The Youtube videos are attempting to explain complex science less formally, but still precisely. So I’m using all my brain power to understand it. Then a strange usage throws me off.
@David M: Ms Hossenfelder’s first language being German, is that influencing the stress patterns?
I’ve seen atleast, but always thought it must be a random typo. Maybe it’s lexicalization after all…
But a while seems to have downright died out in favor of awhile, which used to be an extremely rare word – just common enough to be known to spellcheckers, I guess.
Probably. I didn’t know “COME by” existed and would not have guessed it exists, so thanks.
German does have minimal pairs for stress, but they all seem to be separable vs. inseparable verbs (umgehen) or native words vs. loans.
As memorably described in McCawley, James D. (1978). Where you can shove infixes. In Bell, A. & Hooper, J. B. (eds.), Syllables and Segments (pp. 213–221). Amsterdam: North-Holland.
I suspect Ms Hossenfelder reads a lot of (academic) English, but hears it not so much.
She speaks with clenched teech, making everything sound a bit hissy and muffled. Could be overcorrection after working with a speech coach. It looks and sounds to me like an attempt to “speak proper English”.
German does have minimal pairs for stress, but they all seem to be separable vs. inseparable verbs (umgehen) or native words vs. loans.
I don’t know about “minimal” and “pair”, but “Das weise ich VON mir” is a curious stress pattern. As if there were or had been a separable verb *vonweisen. I can’t think of other examples, except perhaps the (tendenziell donnish?) “AN und FÜR sich” or “an und FÜR sich” , whereas everday people around here usually say “an und für SICH“, This may not be a good example of anything apart from freedom to stress as you want – although I don’t imagine “AN und für sich” would occur.
@Stu Clayton: I think it’s unlikely that speech coaching is responsible. Hossenfelder has always sounded roughly like that, even back when she was doing actual physics, rather than trying to monetize YouTube videos and publicity stunts.
I have wondered, however, what changes in stress pattern accompanied the transitions in German from verbs with prepositional adjuncts to verbs with separable prefixes. It seems an obvious question, but I wonder what remaining minimal pairs their are.
Yes, and it’s regionally limited; you’re not going to hear it in Austria for example.
Interesting. I’d use the last one if I only knew the phrase from reading; I’ve never heard it. Instead, I heard it for years before I first read it, and I’d never have guessed it’s not a single unanalyzable word, precisely because of its stress on what would otherwise be a preposition.
(…also because the /d/ drops out, which otherwise happens only in numerals.)
Changes in stress pattern can’t turn wohin gehst du into wo gehst du hin.
The trend goes on, BTW, and has begun to extend into noun incorporation: autofahren “go (explicitly) by car”, staubsaugen “vacuum”, haarewaschen “wash one’s hair”…
Relatedly, I just came across the new irregular past tense of “to work around” as “workarounded” for the first time. I must’ve closed the tab but the context was computer programming and the writer didn’t seem to be a native speaker. In case it’s not used in other fields, it means to find an alternative way to solve a problem that cannot be done the obvious or natural way due to a bug or missing feature, etc.
Not all uses seem to obviously be by non-native speakers. Its users presumably only know it as a noun and are verbing it.
But I was more surprised to find that Google knows of over one hundred uses of it, going back twenty-two years. I was also surprised to find zero hits for “workarounding”.
I too am surprised… but not surprised, if you know what I mean.