Stefan Fatsis (seen here repeatedly, e.g. in 2015 and last year) writes for Defector about an amazing guy:
In competitive Scrabble, there’s Nigel Richards and everyone else. The 57-year-old New Zealander has won 11 North American and world championships combined; no one else has won more than three. He is widely believed to have memorized the entire international-English Scrabble lexicon, more than 280,000 words. He crafts strategic sequences that outperform the best bots. He’s a gentle, mild-mannered, private, witty, unflappable enigma—the undisputed Scrabble GOAT, and one of the most dominant players of any game ever.
Nigel—one name, like Serena or Michelangelo—went viral in 2015 after winning the French world championship even though he didn’t speak French. He inhaled some large chunk of the 386,000 words on the Francophone list, and did it in a mind-boggling nine weeks. That same year, he won a tournament in Bangalore, India, with a 30-3 record. In one of those games, Nigel extended ZAP to ZAPATEADOS (the plural of a Latin American dance). In another, he threaded ASAFETIDA (a resin used in Indian cooking) through the F and the D. Those words likely had never been played in Scrabble before, and likely won’t be again.
In late January, Nigel returned to Bangalore, and this time he out-Nigeled himself. Here’s what happened. Round 3 of the four-day event, held in the cafeteria of a data analytics firm, matched Nigel against a longtime Indian player, Rajiv Antao. After a few low-scoring moves, Antao dropped the game’s first bingo, a play using all seven tiles and netting a 50-point bonus: LOOTERS. The placement dangled the L in the triple-word-score column. When Antao didn’t block the risky spot on his next turn, Nigel laid down INFLUXES through the L, covering two triple-word squares at once, a play known as a triple-triple or nine-timer. It scored 221 points.
“The game was over right there,” Antao told me in an email. “But not for Nigel.”
Nigel’s three subsequent moves were also bingos: GRADINS (a series of steps), ALENGTH (a full length), and ERUPTION. “I was a spectator,” Antao said. After his next play, the score was 583-237. Here’s how the board looked: […]
Nigel now held the letters ACENORT (Scrabble players often arrange their letters in alphabetical order). The only seven-letter word in that rack, ENACTOR, played for 70 points. But three eight-letter words scored more: COPARENT for 82, SORTANCE (an obsolete word meaning suitableness) for 83, and SARCONET (a silk fabric) for 89. A good player would spot all of those. Nigel’s fifth consecutive bingo was guaranteed.
But Nigel didn’t play any of those words. Look at the board again. Find the P in ERUPTION. Count the number of squares down to TED (to spread hay for drying). There are seven, the same number as tiles on a rack. Then look one square up and one square over from the T in TED—the word NON. Nigel placed all of his letters between the P and TED, spelling out PERNOCTATED and turning NON into ANON. The play tallied 92 points. In Scrabble notation, it’s represented like this: (P)ERNOCTA(TED).
That’s a bloodless way to describe the play. Here are some other ways: The Exploding Head Emoji. John McEnroe screaming “YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS!” Holy fucking shit! This ridiculously obscure 11-letter word formed by sandwiching a bunch of letters between a bunch of other letters captures everything that makes Scrabble so addictive to tournament players like me and compelling to obsessives who play and watch livestreams and videos online. (P)ERNOCTA(TED) is a dizzying feat not only of anagramming and word knowledge but of spatial relations, visual awareness, imagination, creativity, and sangfroid. It is, in its own way, art.
News of Nigel’s play quickly spread around the world, literally. After the game, Antao posted a photo of the board in a WhatsApp group for players at the tournament. Another player dropped it in a Singaporean Scrabble chat. Someone there shared it in Scrabble groups on Facebook. At a tournament in Sydney, Australia, “it was all anyone was talking about,” veteran player Howard Warner of New Zealand said. “Wowsers!!” one player wrote on Facebook. “It’s simply frightening,” said another.
Josh Sokol, the current North American champion, told me that (P)ERNOCTA(TED) is even more than that: “Possibly the best play of all time.” […]
(P)ERNOCTA(TED) is the latest example of why Nigel even has memes. Pernoctate means to pass the night in vigil or prayer. It’s derived from Latin. The very few Google hits that aren’t about the word’s definition or etymology include floor-mop-haired ex-British prime minister Boris Johnson showing off his vocabulary and a book about Etruscan cities and cemeteries published in 1848. (“Let no one conceive that he may pernoctate at the Ponte della Badia with impunity.”) […]
The returns on memorizing words longer than eight letters diminish rapidly; they just aren’t playable often enough to justify the study time or brain space. While a few top players try to learn the nine-letter words—almost 43,000 on the Collins list—pernoctate is a 10-letter word, and pernoctated is an 11. The only way for a Scrabble player to know this fancy old word—which, like the aforementioned ALENGTH, SORTANCE, SARCONET, and NON, isn’t on the slimmer word lists governing play in North America—is to have studied it. Nigel knew the word. Ergo, Nigel had studied the word. Ergo, Nigel knows the 10-letter words, and probably the 11s, too, and likely more. […]
Words longer than nine letters are shooting stars. In the Macondo analysis, a 10-letter bingo came down once every 376 player-games and an 11-letter bingo once every 6,646 player-games. According to the Scrabble information website Cross-Tables, only six people have played more rated tournament games in North America than that. The bot has perfect word knowledge; non-Nigel humans wouldn’t know enough 11-letter words to plop down a theoretically available one even that frequently. (Long words that do get played tend to be common—including one last weekend in a tournament in Charlottesville, Va., where PERC, a chemical used in dry cleaning, was extended to PERCOLATING.)
“I could solve ACDEENOPRTT 100 times in an anagram quiz and never see the spot for it on that board,” Sokol, currently the top-ranked player in North America, who describes himself as a Scrabble influencer, said. “That’s part of the reason that I don’t study long words. So what if I know this word? I’ll probably never play it. And if I can possibly get into a position where it’s available, I would almost certainly not see it.”
There’s much more at the link, including images, lots more links than I’ve bothered to carry over, Nigel’s background, and tidbits like this:
After conquering the game in French, Nigel told Carter he was considering Spanish. Carter suggested trying Kham Khom—Scrabble in Thai, which has a script of more than 40 consonant symbols and 30 vowel forms. “He said he might one day,” Carter said.
It may not be in a league with curing cancer or ending war, but this guy is seriously impressive.
The highest-recorded single-word score, 365 for QUIXOTRY, is described here. What I like about that one, as well as the story of the noble PERNOCTATED, is how much the narration resembles that of boxing, or other one-on-one physical sports.
He crafts strategic sequences that outperform the best bots
Surprises me: I’d naively have expected that Scrabble would be the sort of thing that could be done relatively easily by a machine. On reflection, I may be seriously underestimating the complexity of the game space, what with 27 possible plays on each square of a 15×15 board.
I’m going to guess that PERNOCTATE is not in the _Official Scrabble Players’ Dictionary_ because why would it devote space to obscure 10-letter words rather than obscure three-letter words given the statistics outlined above. Which raises the question of who at the scene determined that PERNOCTATED was legitimate based on which previously announced convention(s) re what dictionary/ies are treated as authoritative.
“Sorry, must run along
Chuck Norris wants a Scrabble lesson.”
“Once played Scrabble with Superman…
Loser had to wear his underwear outside of his pants.”
“The English alphabet has 31 letters.
Only I know the other 5.”
“I reviewed my 2’s through 9’s
while you were shaving.”
“POGONOTOMY?
The only word not in my vocabulary.”
Another example of ex- being a phrasal clitic like -‘s.
Perchloromethane?
The text mentions “the slimmer word lists governing play in North America”. Maybe the Official Scrabble Players’ Dictionary is just one of those.
Phylogenetics by parsimony is like that. Computers have no trouble coming up with all mathematically possible trees for a given number of terminal taxa and then keeping only the shortest ones – but the number of possible trees increases with the number of terminal taxa faster than exponentially, so good luck dealing with 30 taxa on a desktop before your grant runs out (and my current work has over 220; that’s on the large side but by no means unheard of). The solution has been to develop heuristic algorithms that don’t look at all possible trees (my dataset runs in less than a day).
He crafts strategic sequences that outperform the best bots
I think that these days, when people say “bots” they are thinking of general purpose neural network–based problem solvers, not of programs specifically designed to play the likes of chess or checkers or go. I imagine Scrabble is no harder than those.
Ha, there I was actually thinking of branch-and-bound, which doesn’t qualify as heuristic but doesn’t look at all mathematically possible trees either. Actually looking at all of them becomes practically impossible around 15 taxa at most.
The highest-recorded single-word score, 365 for QUIXOTRY, is described here
And adumbrated here:
As of two years ago apparently even specialized algorithms weren’t playing Scrabble at a truly superhuman level. That could be outdated though, probably someone at DeepMind has since sicced AlphaZero on it and solved it over lunch break.
Are competitive scrabble tournaments done solely or primarily through one-on-one games? Obviously in an informal social setting playing with three or four is quite common, but maybe the pace or strategic element shifts in one-on-one games. Or maybe it’s just easier to administer a formal multi-round tournament where you don’t have to figure out what to do in the next round with people who finished second or third out of four but everyone is instead either the winner or the loser of any specific game.
More players increases the element of luck, and makes it easier for the Soviets to collude to push their captain ahead of the Western contender.
The QUIXOTRY story also involves the well-worn but always pleasing trope of someone taking a gamble against impossible odds and winning. The story of Churchill’s entrance exam at Sandhurst also comes to mind.
pogonotomy
Limited Pogonotomy is OK. However, I hold the practice of Radical Pogonotomy in abhorrence.
News stories about Scrabble always tend to annoy me. Like this one, they tend to assume that any seven-letter words score bingos, and that most bingos are seven letters. I don’t have any stats, but I would guess eight-letter bingo words are quite a bit more common. Fatsis also claims that it would be impossible to know the word pernoctate except as something from a memorized word list; that well may be where Nigel Richards got the word, but there are people who actually know it organically.
More players increases the element of luck, and makes it easier for the Soviets to collude to push their captain ahead of the Western contender.
Ah, the confluence of geopolitical word games and roller derby. For such moments do alchemists and metaphysicians yearn.
PERC … Perchloromethane?
Perchloroethylene, so not as bad. Wikipedia tells us only North Korean still uses carbon tet for dry cleaning.
Wiki page on Bingo claims that CAZIQUES was/is the highest scored word in a tournament. Quixotry is imho stylistically more pleasing.
they tend to assume that any seven-letter words score bingos, and that most bingos are seven letters
Um, the author of the piece wrote an entire book about competitive Scrabble. I’m sure he knows perfectly well how bingos are scored. The one “assuming” facts not in evidence is you, not he.
Also, I’d be curious to learn how anyone ever learned the word pernoctated “organically.” Even if one somehow chanced across it in the wild, it’d still send 99.9% of the population to a dictionary.
“Are competitive scrabble tournaments done solely or primarily through one-on-one games?”
Yes.
“Obviously in an informal social setting playing with three or four is quite common”
Perhaps in contexts where there are three or four times as many people who want to play as Scrabble sets.
“maybe the pace or strategic element shifts in one-on-one games”
It does. In a 2-player game, each player has more control, and is less likely to find that a tactic they had planned on their previous turn has since been foiled.
Perhaps in contexts where there are three or four times as many people who want to play as Scrabble sets.
Which I assume is the usual situation except in scrabble-mad households that have more than one board? We were four at home and had one set, so 3-4 persons playing at one time was the usual thing, not the exception, and that was also usually the case when we played at friends’ places.
Also, I’d be curious to learn how anyone ever learned the word pernoctated “organically.”
Far more easily than one would think, as it turns out. Boris Johnson no doubt learned it when he was living a dissolute student’s life at Oxford:
“Ransom says, remembering, from his own student days in England, that “pernoctated” was Oxford slang for staying out all night”
That’s the first hit when you put “pernoctated” into Google Books.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Fugitive_Poets/PncrKNjzmBcC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22pernoctated%22&pg=PR40&printsec=frontcover
Þ, Ƿ, Ð, Æ, and, obviously, the other one.
Andrew Dunbar: Ȝ, innit?
Glory, laud and honor to Nat Shockley for spotting John Crowe Ransom’s use, although it might be worth noting that Ransom finished his time at Oxford in 1913, a full seven decades before BoJo matriculated. It’s just possible that student slang was not entirely lexically stable over the intervening time period, especially since it was over that intervening time period that the percentage of Oxford students for whom obscure Latinate words were etymologically transparent began to decline significantly.
When i lived in the UK, I managed to register a car, rent a flat, get a bank account and credit card, get a prescription and fill it on the NHS, even pay poll taxes — without ever talking to the immigration people or being asked for a residency permit. The car thing may have been facilitated by the secretaries at my employer, which was established by treaty and bestowed the equivalent of expat embassy staff status on us, but the other things were just me walking up and giving my name and address. EDIT: Maybe the centre also called the bank and vouched for me.
But that was 25 years ago. I understand that things have changed.
Tetraklorkulstof it was called WIWAL. We had a bottle in the boller room, it worked great for grease spots. Also spirit of ammonia (salmiakspiritus), pure benzene (stenkulsnafta) and benzine (benzin). Those were the days.
At least it wasn’t a CFC. Interestingly, da.WP says that it was being phased out from the drycleaning industry starting in 1940, and en.WP says it saw widespread use in the drycleaning industry starting in the 60’s. So what sort of insta-cancer stuff did the US use before tet? (On general matters, en.WP is essentially US PoV, except when some hindutva type inserts facts about subcontinental usage in the wrong section).
We had petroleum ether at home, which I forget what you called in Hebrew. My mom showed me that if you poured some on a sheet of paper, the paper became translucent but not softened until the solvent evaporated, so you could use it for tracing things out of books.
I understand that things have changed
Yes, as a result of the “Hostile Environment” (her term) created by the fragrant Theresa May when she was Home Secretary. It is a measure of how very far the Tories have moved to the far right that May now counts as a sweetly reasonable Tory moderate. She hasn’t changed.
The Tories have been cultivating the sought-after racist arsehole vote for a very long time now.
So what sort of insta-cancer stuff did the US use before tet?
Various highly flammable hydrocarbons, I believe. (Bonus: everyone smoked.)
While we’re at it, HF makes strikingly beautiful glass pieces.
Do you think the anti-woke mob might bring those simpler days back?
it might be worth noting that Ransom finished his time at Oxford in 1913, a full seven decades before BoJo matriculated.
A bit more searching on Google Books reveals many further uses associated one way or another with Oxford (and one from Rachel Johnson, Boris’s sister, who, like him, studied classics there). From the dates of those, it seems to have been in use in Oxford until at least the 1960s, although the meaning may have shifted somewhat since Ransom’s time: the Johnsons both use it to mean simply staying the night somewhere other than where you would normally sleep.
Obviously university slang can be conservative in a particular area, and some of its more Latinate lexemes may on a given campus survive the general sharp decline of Latinity. When I were an undergraduate, coming on 40 years ago, the good old Oxbridge Latinism “to rusticate” [make a note of it, Scrabble competitors!] remained in active local use. Although possibly in New Haven dialect it had a narrower sense than it may have had in Oxbridge dialect – being rusticated was specifically distinct from being expelled; it meant you were temporarily barred from living (and I think eating) on campus because of some disciplinary infraction that was deemed to make you an unsuitable residential neighbor of your fellow students but you were still permitted/expected to attend your classes after having figured out somewhere else to sleep.
the Johnsons both use it to mean simply staying the night somewhere other than where you would normally sleep.
Interesting. That sounds like the meaning of German übernachten, Russian (пере)ночевать. Now I’m wondering if those are calqued after Latin pernoctare.
Shouldn’t it be “asafoetida”, anyway?
Honestly, I don’t know what the world is coming to. I blame violent video games and Noah Webster.
The Johnson meaning is the one of Italian pernottare and Spanish pernoctar, which don’t strike me as particularly fancy verbs, just somewhat technical ones — they more usually describe what a representative tourist does than what you do yourself.
DE:
Shouldn’t it be “asafoetida”, anyway?
No more than fetus should be foetus. Classical Latin has fētus and fētidus, wherefore I reserve my irritation for f[o]etid and asaf[o]etida pronounced with /fe/ – and penultimate stress in asaf[o]etida (the norm in Australia). Then of course there’s feral (fērālis).
And another thing: some woman presenters* on Australian ABC RN arts programs habitually pronounce words ending in d with gemination and a hard release appropriate to /t/. Even and is sometimes made prominent as a whole, and rendered supercautiously as if it were somehow andt.
* If that weren’t enough, why is “women Xs” standard and not “woman Xs”? For X as musician compare slave musicians. We live in grim times. I blame the rise of printing.
@hans
Re übernachten, I think this should probably be compared with überwintern. So not necessarily a calque (or does Latin also have perhibernate?).
@Noetica. Can’t you call them “lady presenters”? If that sounds too old-fashioned but their non-maleness is salient, maybe “female presenters.” I assume “presentresses” is not on an option.
Thus Richard Scarry (in a book that a social-media post from March 2010 suggests I was reading to one of my kids at the time): “The lady pirate was furious. ‘You have ruined my sugar doughnuts,’ she said. ‘Now they are all wet.'”
Can’t you call them “lady presenters”?
One can call them all sorts of ways, but that’s not the point. Why the plural women as modifier, seemingly without parallel among other nouns as modifiers?
Of course we rarely speak of either “man presenters” or “men presenters”. Why? Because men are scandalously still taken as of the unmarked Beauvoirian “first sex”, so such modifiers still ring strange where women presenters does not.
We find very many books (some recent) with “women composers” in the title, and just one with “woman composers”. There are only a handful for “female composers”, and not one referring to man, men, gentleman, gentlemen, or male composers. Same for “lady composers”. There are two Google book hits for “lady composer” (same book, found twice) and one for “gentleman composer”.
Gender politics all the way down. (Again, I tentatively blame the Gutenberg revolution – but it’s too early to tell.)
@PP: I can’t find a *perhiberno in Lewis & Short, but it is of course possible that such a word exists, maybe in nonclassical varieties of Latin. In any case, my assumption would be that übernachten came first and überwintern was modeled on it. Maybe I’ll find some time to look up the history.
PP and Hans:
For perhibernare see here, and here with überwintern as a translation and perhiemare as a variant.
@hans
I suppose I was thinking of an inner German pattern “eine (schwierige/gefährliche) Zeitlang überbrücken/überdauern/überleben” > übernachten, überwintern, but such a pattern (if it exists) could be formed after the creation of übernachten via Latin calque. DWDS has first attestation for übernachten in 1472, more than a hundred years before überwintern. Of course, printing presses came on stream during the interval.
FWIW, overnatte in Danish is just spending the night somewhere that is not your fixed abode, anything from couch surfing and roughing it in the woods to booking a hotel room, but when the Hotel and Restaurant Trade Association counts overnatninger; it’s only the paid ones, not my niece spending the night with her boyfriend. (I don’t know if they even count the cruise ships docked out past the Little Mermaid — the operators are probably not members).
@Lars: it’s the same for übernachten and Übernachtungen in German.
You can find parallel/cognate (and non-Latinate!) verbs in English. E.g. (poking around Google books): “From there we eventually arrived in Puerto Vallarta where we overnighted and enjoyed a city tour before boarding our cruise ship.” Or “We were made aware that it was possible to go there by an amazingly helpful Icelandic guy who looked after our boat when we overwintered it in Reykjavik.”
These uses are perfectly comprehensible to me and I expect most other Anglophones, yet I personally (YMMV) get an odd feeling each time I see one that I’m seeing an improvised nonce coinage by the particular writer rather than a stable pre-existing lexicalized compound. I may be quite wrong about that but that’s the vibe I get.
Overnight is completely unremarkable as a modifier, a bit less commonplace as a noun, and (as it is for J.W. Brewer) somewhat odd sounding as a verb. Inversely however, I find overwinter sounds totally fine as a verb, either solid or separable/phrasal; yet I find it odd in other grammatical roles.
At the risk of offtopicking, has anyone else spent enough time in the everyday bits of the Internet, such as YouTube, to notice that plural noun modifiers seem to be on the rise lately? Only in the last year or so have I noticed it spread from ESLers to native English speakers. Peeving about it or observing it as interesting language change does not seem to be on the rise, though perhaps I just rose both by posting this.
Overnight is … a bit less commonplace as a noun
I have noticed that TV weatherpeople have taken up the noun form with some frequency, as in “we’re expecting moderate snow during the overnight.” “During the” can be omitted with no loss of meaning, so I don’t know why they say this.
The verb “to overwinter” is separately odd because there’s already an English verb “to winter” which means more or less the same thing, which you would think would render the longer option unnecessary. Wiktionary gives the perfectly idiomatic-sounding example sentence “When they retired, they hoped to winter in Florida.” That verb can also be used with a direct object, e.g. “They wintered the flock in Edgar County, Illinois, and on account of the opening of the civil war decided it was unsafe to go further.” [That was of course the winter of 1860-61, they had originally been planning to take the flock — 1,500 head of sheep — all the way to Texas once the winter was over.]
You can of course also summer, but springing and falling are a different sort of thing.
For the record (to aid searching, when archaeologists come to explore the Hattery) we should inscribe the verbs hibernate and aestivate (estivate) in this thread.
Andrew Dunbar:
… has anyone else spent enough time in the everyday bits of the Internet, such as YouTube, to notice that plural noun modifiers seem to be on the rise lately?
Hmm, not sure that I’ve noticed this trend. But there are interesting distinctions to make among types of plurals here. Pinker (following others) notes that irregular plurals such as mice often figure as elements in compounds where regular plurals normally do not (and as plain modifiers, we can comfortably add):
Easy to construct or find similar examples: like oxen path as opposed to cows path.
I don’t know whether he remarks on it anywhere, but teethmarks (teeth marks) is more likely than feetmarks (feet marks) for example, because teeth form a normally indiscerptible array where feet do not. And even those of us who keep data as a plural against the tide of inevitable change are happy with data-crunching and data accumulation rather than *datum-crunching and *datum accumulation. Teeth deformation would be understood as affecting an array of teeth, and tooth deformation as a disorder of just one tooth or several teeth individually.
But women versus woman as a modifier is different. It’s deeply sociological and attitudinal.
teethmarks (teeth marks) is more likely than feetmarks (feet marks)
But footsteps more likely than (?)feetsteps — even though stepping with one foot is nigh on impossible.
those of us who keep data as a plural …
are just plain antediluvian. data in that sense is a mass noun.
tooth deformation as a disorder of just one tooth or several teeth individually.
tooth decay more likely than teeth decay “ is the breakdown of teeth ” (plural)
So Pinker’s “often” is by no means always. I’m failing to see a regular pattern.
Searching reveals that teeth deformation occurs often in mechanical and engineering texts, though it is not always clear exactly what gets deformed:
Here is a difficult paragraph that includes teeth deformation, probably involving non‑L1 English. Is there deformation of individual teeth, with consequent disruption in the whole array?
The phrase occurs, often with similar uncertainty through imprecision (or intended multivalency, in cases where some teeth are knocked out and some are reshaped by filing), in anthropological reports (typically of initiation rites). In rhinology, dentistry, pharmacology and the like it is only through context and background knowledge that the intent can be worked out: if the topic is tetracycline, it’s most likely a matter of individual teeth first of all; if it’s about thumb-sucking, it’s certainly the array of teeth.
More thorough research would require searches on “tooth deformation” also.
I’m more puzzled by Noetica’s contention that “women versus woman as a modifier is different,” since it seems to me like Pinker’s interesting observation/generalization, if valid, would sufficiently account for it without any need for any additional “sociological and attitudinal” motivation for the usage. I do think that in most cases “female” as a modifier would work equally well – why enlist a noun (sing or pl) as modifier when you have a suitable adjective ready to hand? I shouldn’t think that “female” would be an adjective that “feminists” would eschew on ideological grounds, but maybe I’m missing something.
To switch around the gender-marking of the google ngram data I shared above, as Pinker might have predicted “men composers” does seem to be more frequent than “man composers” (or “gentlemen composers”), but “male composers” is notably more frequent than “men composers.” If frequencywise “male composers” > “men composers” but “women composers” > “female composers” it does appear that some sort of political/social/cultural factor is likely causing the asymmetry.
A toothbrush is normally used on more than one tooth, and I think I’d be more likely to say “toothmarks” than “teethmarks”.
UK speakers do seem to use regular plurals attributively more than US speakers, though still rarely. The only example I can think of at the moment is “drugs”, as “drug(s) cartel”, but I’m sure I’ve run across a least one other.
JWB:
I’m more puzzled by Noetica’s contention that “women versus woman as a modifier is different,” since it seems to me like Pinker’s interesting observation/generalization, if valid, would sufficiently account for it without any need for any additional “sociological and attitudinal” motivation for the usage.
My contention is founded on far more than I have adduced here. In any case, it’s doubtful that Pinker’s observation would “sufficiently account” for the overwhelming predominance of “women composers” [or poets, presenters, musicians, etc.] over “woman composer”.
If an appeal to Pinker were sufficient, shouldn’t we expect some titles that include “children prodigies”, rather than “child prodigies”? And where are the titles with either “man nurses” or “men nurses”, as opposed to “male nurses“?
I do think that in most cases “female” as a modifier would work equally well – why enlist a noun (sing or pl) as modifier when you have a suitable adjective ready to hand?
Right, why? A good question! And a sociologically interesting one.
I shouldn’t think that “female” would be an adjective that “feminists” would eschew on ideological grounds, but maybe I’m missing something.
Well, that calls for further probing and elaboration. It’s likely that women as a modifier of composer and the like is positively favoured for political reasons, at least as much as female is merely deprecated.
Keith:
A toothbrush is normally used on more than one tooth, and I think I’d be more likely to say “toothmarks” than “teethmarks”.
Fair enough. There might be a difference in meaning though, since one could have several instances in which there is the mark of just one tooth.
Note that the far more recent phenomenon of whitening as opposed to brushing generates many Google book hits on teeth whitening, as opposed to tooth whitening (which is also found, however). Another handy ngram; the curves support Andrew’s observation of a trend.
I’ve just realised that Kusaal naaf bin’isim “cow’s milk”, which I have been assuming for years was a noun compound with the first element irregularly retaining its class suffix, is not a compound at all but a possessive construction with a generic possessor. Exactly like the corresponding English expression, in fact.
Don’t mind me. Carry on.
I go my own way and treat male Xes and female Xes as the preferred form in all contexts where for some reason plain Xes will not do. Let others speak of women Xes or (shudder) lady Xes if they will or must; I will not.
In German, the compound stem often looks like the plural because the plural is often the old Germanic oblique stem with the original plural endings lost due to apocope. Maybe the use of irregular plurals in English compounds goes back to a similar situation in some older phase of English?
[Kusaal “cow’s milk”] not a compound at all but a possessive construction with a generic possessor.
Does sheep’s/goat’s milk work the same way? Any other animal’s milk? [**] (buffalo?) [I speak not of soy milk, almond milk or other offences against gastronomy.]
This wp in English seems to be all over the place wrt using possessive or not. sheep[‘s]/goat[‘s]/cow[‘s] milk/cheese. There’s also a ewes’ and/or goats’ milk.
[**] Or should that be “Any other animals’ milk?”
Maybe I am missing something, but weren’t “woman” and “female” deprecated until early 20C, i.e., likely to appear in police reports to denote suspects, accomplices and demi-monde rather than witnesses, victims or bystanders? Maybe the plural escaped this? Others have pointed out that a tooth is not a solo actor when causing bites, as opposed to toothaches. No one says feetball (it is agreed that the foot is a solo actor, except when one performs a bicycle kick, as one does). What else have you got, Noetica?
Does sheep’s/goat’s milk work the same way?
Yes. E.g. bʋʋg bin’isim “goat’s milk.” Which makes me all the stupider for having misparsed these constructions for so long.
I do have some excuse: there actually are noun-noun compounds like ba’akɔlʋg “diviner’s bag” (that he keeps his divining kit in.) On reflection, though, I think you can analyse all those as having the first element in a quasi-adjectival role rather than possessive: thus nasaabugum “electricity” (“European fire”, but probably bought from the Electric Company of Ghana), bifuug “children’s shirt” (i.e. child-sized – might actually belong to a small adult woman), mabiig “sibling” (“maternal child”, not “child of a mother”, which doesn’t narrow the scope of the description a lot …)
I should know by now not to project the syntax of the English translation on to the Kusaal: ba’akɔlʋg is a “diviner bag” (as opposed to a bag to put your lunch in, say) rather than a bag belonging to some diviner (even though it probably does belong to one.)
And it just so happens that Kusaal and English both conceptualise the relationship between the cow and the milk in “cow’s milk” as possessive.
Little did I know when I started LH that it would become a vehicle for the analysis of Kusaal.
Indeed, Hat. I think it’s remarkable how DE has rendered explicit and obvious something the rest of us had sensed only vaguely: the universal relevance of Kusaal linguistics, and its role as an Ur- or underlying topic for Hattery discussions of every superficial hue and appearance.
PP:
What else have you got, Noetica?
Plenty. What would you like?
@Noetica
I suppose the examples I have seen so far (and ones I think of, like cattle farmer/fence as opposed to chicken wire/coop, although there is also cowshed) would seem to be covered by the Pinker observation. The cattle example throws up for me what is another possibility, that there may be a separate plural that is abstracter and therefore more purged of individual characteristics and therefore more suitable for abstract compounds. Maybe women is abstracter than woman for some speakers.
One could have a more modest version of the Pinker observation/generalization that doesn’t so much claim that the plural form is necessarily or systematically *preferred* over the singular for use as a modifier for “irregular” nouns, only that that the “regular” plural form in -s is blocked for use as a modifier. So for nouns pluralizing in -s you rarely/never see the plural used as a modifier because it’s unavailable, but any specific decision to use plural form v. singular form for nouns that don’t pluralize w/ -s (such that both options are available) may be driven by other factors, which may or may not fit into some coherent pattern explaining all the varied data alluded to above.
Cattle is formerly a mass noun and is still not a “normal” plural even if it is now typically used with plural verb agreement. (Its etymological doublet “chattel” has the regular plural “chattels.”)
I can imagine that some avoid the adjective female because they don’t want to apply the homonymous noun to people.
While for many German nouns the plural is identical to the prefix form as Hans said – Ochsen, Ratten, Drogen are in fact examples – and no way of plural formation can claim to be regular, there is still a far-reaching preference for singulars in compounds even when the plural would make more sense and even though plurals do occur in a few such cases. Some are even on the increase: of Maus, Mause- occurs in a few fossilized compounds, while Mäuse-, identical to the plural, is productive.
I obviously don’t know the thought processes (conscious or otherwise) involved here, but I would think “the composer, who is female” [ADJ] to be a more obvious paraphrase of “the female composer” than “the composer, who is a female.” [NOUN] In a construction that shifts the head of the noun phrase, “women who compose music” strikes me as more natural than “females who compose music,” but in much the same way that “female composers” strikes me as more natural than “women composers” yet in that last instance we have some empirical evidence that actual usage patterns deviate from my sense of what’s more natural-sounding.
ETA: Here’s a fun datapoint. The wiki article for the “National Association of Women Judges” has multiple instances of the NP “female judges” in its text, as well as somewhat more abstract phrases like “female participation in the judiciary” (NB: NOT “participation in the judiciary by females.”) I doubt that this is a result of editing by saboteurs with different lexical/stylistic priorities than the organization? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Association_of_Women_Judges
Though “women who compose music” and “female composers” are identical as sets they are different (at least for me) as subsets. The first one is a subset of women, while the second is a subset of composers.
Data on data and “data” in CGEL
Datum occurs 4 times, only in mentions or examples.
Data occurs 12 times in mentions or examples, and 40 times it is used in the text itself.
Some relevant instances:
(Data? A tad.)
Now, when I edit world-leading authors in their fields I at least help them achieve consistency. If I were editing Huddleston I would make no exception. But the clearest message from this quick survey is that plural data enjoys vibrant health in top-level academic English – despite what black-and-whiters may aver without evidence.
(Tada!)
Some peer reviewers insist on it.