Being Human

Yesterday, I received this message from a young person who has been corresponding with me about ancient DNA and the movements of peoples across Eurasia during the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age:

The police reaved my computer due to I reprinted a news report of US about the National Day of China yesterday. I came back home from police department just now. They said they will check my computer exhaustively. I'm afraid about my thesises on each area. It is not constitutional to do like that. All acts in violation of the Constitution and the law must be investigated. But this is in China. I doubt [VHM: he means "I suspect / fear"] that they will install a detectaphone on my computer and destroy my essays. I feel like crying but shed no tears. The only feeling is indignation for an intellectual.

Although the young man's English is generally quite good, my immediate assumption was that the third word of his message was a typing error for "removed" or that he simply misremembered some other word meaning "seize." However, considering that quirky archaisms are rampant in Chinese use of English, a phenomenon that I have often documented on Language Log, e.g. here and here, I thought that I had better give the young man the benefit of the doubt, so I trudged over to my dictionary and looked up "reave."

Sure enough, there it was: reave "to seize and carry off forcibly". That immediately led me to think of "bereave," which comes from the same Germanic root (< IE reup- / reub- "snatch"), and then I remembered William Faulkner's novel The Reivers, based on another spelling of the same root, meaning "the robbers".

But where had my young Chinese correspondent unearthed this archaic term? Surely any Chinese-English dictionary worth its salt would offer for QIANG3ZOU3 搶走, which is the Mandarin term he must have been thinking of, something like "take away by force." However, when we turn to Kingsoft, which is far and away the most popular translation software in China, this is what we find:

It seems that my young Chinese correspondent avoided the first definition proffered by Kingsoft, "go off with," because it didn't sound forcible enough for what the police did to his computer. Moreover, the phrasal verb "go off with" primarily means "elope" or "run away with someone," though it could also signify "leave with" or "steal." None of these are satisfactory for what my young Chinese correspondent wanted to express.

He then would have turned to "rap," the second suggested translation for QIANG3ZOU3. Being in his early twenties, he is certainly aware of rap music, which is extremely popular in China, so he would shy away from that translation too. Not what happened to his precious computer! Nor is "rap" appropriate in its primary sense of "hit or strike sharply."

"Rap" in the sense of "seize" is either the present tense or a back formation from "rapt" (past participle), which indicates that one's soul or spirit has been carried away. The American Heritage Dictionary appendix of IE roots lists "rapt" as deriving from a separate IE root, rep-, meaning "snatch," but I'd wager that it is from the same root as "reave" (IE reup- / reub- "snatch").

Poor young man! Kingsoft left him with no other choice to represent QIANG3ZOU3 in English but as "reave." Why couldn't they have given correct, accurate, appropriate English terms such as "confiscate, appropriate, seize," and so forth? Remember, this is the same ubiquitous software that spawned the epidemic of mistranslations of GAN1 ("dry") and GAN4 ("do") as "fuck."

Listen, if someone with computer skills and linguistic acumen is out of work and / or wants not only to become fabulously wealthy but perform the humanitarian service of rescuing China from embarrassment and English from abuse, I suggest that he or she create a credible, reliable alternative to Kingsoft. I'd be happy to serve on your board of advisers / trustees and invest several thousand dollars to boot — for a fair return!

[Hat tip to Stefan Krasowski for the screen shot].

[Update — The three definitions, or rather English translations (1. go off with, 2. rap, 3. reave), for QIANG3ZOU3 offered by the current version of Kingsoft must be considered by the proprietors to be an improvement over the 2002 version, which has "rend away":

I find "rend away" primarily in Biblical contexts with the meaning of "tear away," i.e., (forcibly) detach. ]

A crash blossom, you'll recall, is an infelicitously worded headline that leads the reader down the garden path. Here's a fine example from today's Associated Press headlines:

(Hat tip: Stephen Anderson via Larry Horn.)

According to Michael Goldstein, writing one of the opinion pieces in the NYT's 9/22/2009 symposium on "National Academic Standards: The First Test":

The politics has changed. All governors now recognize a problem: incentives to set low passing scores. Currently, a kid in Alabama might pass a 4th grade reading test that, if he lived in Massachusetts and took our version, he would fail.

You could add a resumptive pronoun: "a kid in Alabama might pass a 4th grade reading test that, if he lived in Massachusetts and took our version [of it], he would fail".

For some background, read "Ask Language Log: Gapless Relatives" and "More gapless relatives", 10/14/2007. This case is especially interesting because it might alternatively be construed as having a gap after fail, though that would seem to make the sentence self-refuting.

Please note that the Fellowship of the Gapless Relative, like the Fellowship of the Predicative Adjunct, is devoted to celebrating the glories of English syntax through contemplation of especially interesting examples of certain constructions, not to censuring any particular choices that speakers and writers may make.

One is in favor of diversity in the blogosphere, of course. And yet somehow, when one learns that there now exists a blog entirely devoted to pictures of signs in which quotation marks are used incorrectly (used as if they were some sort of special font face like italics), one is somehow tempted to think that we are in danger of running out of words like esoteric and arcane. Still, check it out. Some of the pictures are quite astonishing. Keep in mind that in many cases people paid good money to have these signs made. They may even have paid a dime or two extra per quotation mark. Or "quotation mark", as they would put it. All one can tell you about one's own reaction is that one found some of them jaw-dropping. One's jaw actually dropped.

[Memo to self: NEVER get stuck in a clause sequence using indefinite-reference one. There is no way out. One ends up sounding like an inexperienced member of the royal family being interviewed on TV. And one hates that.]

Today's Sally Forth:

Negative polarity items have been extensively studied, but I invite readers to point us to studies on phenomena of the type displayed in the last panel.

[Update — some of the examples of "just croak already" from the web:

So Fidel, please - do us all a favor and just croak already so that Cuba may live again.
I sometimes wish she would just croak already…!
Will you just croak already?
It's his fault I'm in this mess to begin with — is it any wonder sons wish their fathers dead? Why can't he just croak already? (from a translation of Molière's L'avare)
Oh, just croak already, you evil repuglican financier.
Yeah, I was actually hoping Big Boss would just croak already…a few times I thought he was gone.
I wish old Teddy would just croak already!
Amy do us all a favor and just croak already.
Why don?t Cheney just croak already? I have never said that about anyone but he has done enough already to bring this country down.
why can't Kim Jong Il just croak already?
Ultimately, though, the show had me fervently wishing that Floyd would just croak already: not exactly a glowing recommendation.
I'm sorry folks, I just have to say it: When will this guy just croak already??? What a bunch of white bread garbage!!!
Given by the same dull principal (why couldn't he just croak already?), in the same, bland auditorium.

Imperatives and "will you __" constructions; complements of wish, hope, etc.; "why doesn't/couldn't/can't" constructions. Commonly used for political leaders, parents, other authority figures. ]

If I and my friends and colleagues could just have found the strength of will to not talk about Dan Brown's new novel The Lost Symbol, perhaps we could have stopped his march to inevitable victory as the fastest-selling and most renowned novelist in human history, and The Lost Symbol could have just faded away to become his Lost Novel. If only we could just have shut up. And we tried. But we just couldn't resist the temptation to gabble on about the new blockbuster. Sam Anderson at New York Magazine has set up a discussion salon devoted to The Lost Symbol, under the title the Vulture Reading Room, to allow us to tell each other (and you, and the world) what we think about the book. Already Sam's own weakness has become clear: he struggled mightily to avoid doing the obvious — a Dan Brown parody — and of course he failed. His cringingly funny parody is already up on the site (as of about 4 p.m. Eastern time on September 22). Soon my own first post there will be up. I know that Sarah Weinman (the crime reviewer) will not be far behind, and Matt Taibbi (the political journalist) and NYM's own contributing editor Boris Kachka will not be far behind her.

We know we are fueling the eternal flame that keeps the Dan Brown pot boiling. But we just can't help ourselves. We have the willpower of a bunch of butterflies. Stop us, someone, before we write again. Because I'm sure we will.

The next-to-latest xkcd:

There must have been many SF stories based on the premise that searchers for ET signaling Just Don't Get It, but I can't think of any.

Probably related: I can't think of any scientifically-plausible way to cash that premise in, other than dull things like really slow-moving sentients using nanohertz-range modulation of a spectrally prominent carrier.

No doubt some readers can remedy these deficiencies of memory and imagination.

[Update — I didn't mean stories about how ETs might actively prevent us from seeing their signals, or the signals of others; nor stories about how ETs might be so alien that communication would be impossible, so that even when we find their signals, we can't make sense of them, or perhaps completely misunderstand them. Those are both good themes, found in lots of stories that I can think of, and no doubt many more that I don't know.

What I had in mind was something more strictly analogous to the plight of the ants, who have looked carefully for chemical signals, but (presumably) have failed to consider the intrinsically implausible hypothesis that an intelligent and social species might make use of frequency-and-amplitude modulation of air-pressure variation at time scales of a hundred microseconds to 10 seconds or so.]

Normal 0 0 1 572 3263 27 6 4007 11.1282 0 0 0

I got a nice email from Joshua Fruhlinger about my post on Harper’s denial about having any content in their magazine. It seems that I’m a bit in the dark about how this word is being used in the tech industry these days, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Here’s what Joshua wrote to me:

The ad is a somewhat cheeky response to a particular way that the word “content” has come to be used in the publication industry in the last decade or so. As the internet has become the main (or at least the most novel and talked about) publishing platform, the tech folks who are designing the new infrastructure tend to label and lump together as “content” the stuff that isn’t in their department – the actual text, video, audio, or what have you that various exciting new publishing platforms are designed to present.

I see, so the tech folks think of “content” as the stuff that’s not in their infrastructure. So far, so good. Joshua continues:

Some people whose job it is to create that content sort of see this terminology as a symptom that the shoe is on the wrong foot.

I can certainly understand that reaction. Joshua explains more:

Web sites can become well known and get venture funding because they’re designed or structured in some exciting way, and are sold around the design and structure, because the people who designed them and structured them are the ones selling them. The people in the traditional media would normally be thought of as the whole purpose and selling point of the exercise – and the writers or filmmakers or artists are just called “content providers,” and are something of an afterthought.

It’s something of a specialized debate, and it was probably a more keenly felt issue back during the first dot-com boom, when people were really trying to sell web sites just because they were web sites, without regard for what information they actually conveyed. But Harper’s is basically saying that, for them, the actual writing is at the forefront of their enterprise; they’re not focusing on improving the packaging of some “content” they’re buying from the lowest bidder.

If I understand this properly, Harper’s wants to tell us that what really matters is the original content that is in the magazine, not the way the magazine is packaged and not the content that they could (but don’t) buy from others. So why then, does the ad tell us that Harper’s has no content? Why not tell us that it contains only original content written by their good writers? But the really interesting part comes next in Joshua’s email:

You have to be a little involved in the industry to get the nuance, which is always a mistake for an ad. People who write ads assume their readers are going to be just like them.

Ah-hah. Now we may be getting to the problem. Insiders use language the way other insiders use it. It’s efficient and appropriate for medical specialists to use shorthand terms, abbreviations, and terminology among themselves. There’s nothing wrong with this as long as they don’t expect outsiders to understand them. The same goes for many lawyers, accountants, mechanics, engineers, and, I hate to admit it, linguists.

The ad writing team may have used the meaning of “content” in the way those in the design and packaging business use it – to mean the opposite of content packaging. But, like Joshua, I wonder if Harper’s thought it was using “content” to mean original writing rather than stuff purchased from outside sources. The problem with both senses is that most of us (I think) don’t even know about the specialized meaning of “content” held by the packaging industry and we can be equally confused if Harper’s really meant that they use only original material. Either way, by advertising that Harper’s has no content, many readers are likely to be mystified.

Insider words can get you in trouble. Good ads see life from the perspective of their readers. Like Joshua, I still believe this ad didn’t do this.

In response to my (admittedly feeble) garden-path post a couple of days ago, Tim Leonard writes:

Ha!  That's not a garden-path sentence.  This is a garden path sentence:

"Police in Washington state captured a schizophrenic killer who had escaped during an outing from the mental hospital where he had been committed to a state fair."

Source: Dean Schabner, "Escaped Insane Killer Captured After Four-Day Manhunt", ABC News, 9/20/2009.

And for lagniappe, I don't think we've previously noted the "That's not a ___, this/that is a ___" phrasal template, which (I think) originated with this passage in the movie Crocodile Dundee:

What may be the most widely-discussed statistical over-interpretation in history is coming around for the third time. The first gust front of commentary blew in with David Leonhardt in the NYT Business Section in September of 2007, echoed a few days later by Steven Leavitt in the Freakonomics blog. In May of 2009, Ross Douthat's NYT column recycled the same research for another round of thumb-sucking. And the same material has just been promoted again by Arianna Huffington ("The Sad, Shocking Truth About How Women Are Feeling", "What's Happening to Women's Happiness?", etc.), with an assist by Maureen Dowd ("Blue is the New Black", 9/19/2009).

Ms. Huffington tells us that

According to study after study, women are becoming more and more unhappy. This drop in happiness is found in women across the social and economic landscape. It doesn't matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk.

And it's not because of the multitude of crises we are facing. Women's happiness has been on a downward trend since the early 1970s, when the General Social Survey, a landmark study, began examining the social attitudes of women and men — who, by the way, have gotten progressively happier over the years.

MoDo chimes in:

According to the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, and five other major studies around the world, women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier.

Before the ’70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there’s a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives.

People love this story. They love to speculate about the reasons for the trend — the favorites are variants of "too much feminism" and "not enough feminism" — and to tell us about their own happiness or lack thereof. Tens of thousands of readers, across the repeated reprises of this story in the mass media, have commented on various newspaper and weblog sites.  In a certain sense, this tidal wave of response validates the story, which clearly resonates with something in the spirit of the times.  But in fact, the empirical basis for all this fuss is so thin as to be practically non-existent.

I'll focus on the General Social Survey results, since I've looked into them in detail, but the rest of the worldwide background is similar.

One way to see what's happening is to look at this graph of General Social Survey results, from the preprint that kicked it all off in 2007:

Those who prefer tables may like to see it this way (taken from an earlier post on the subject):

If we sum up all the GSS responses across years, we get these proportions of answers to the question "Taken all together, how would you say things are these days — would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?"

In the responses for 1972, 1973, and 1974 (the earliest dates available), the overall proportions were:

In the responses for 2004, 2006, and 2008 (the most recent dates available), the proportions were:

The best way to describe this, I think, would be to say something like:

In the early 70s, women self-reported their happiness at levels somewhat higher than men did. Specifically, 5.1% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 1.5% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

30-odd years later, in the mid 00s, women's self-reported happiness was closer to men's, though it was still slightly higher. 1.4% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 0.1% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

To Arianna Huffington, this means that "women are becoming more and more unhappy", while "men … have gotten progressively happier over the years". To Maureen Dowd, this means that "Before the ’70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there’s a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives."  Ross Douthat described these numbers with the generalization "In postfeminist America, men are happier than women."

All of these statements are either false or seriously misleading.  Maybe, if you look at the data through a sophisticated statistical model, you can support a conclusion about the relative signs of the long-term-trends for males and females.  But any way you slice and dice it, there's not much there there.

I've cited the earlier stages in this discussion as motivation for a moratorium on using generic plurals to describe small statistical differences.  The contributions of Arianna Huffington and Maureen Dowd are, if anything, even better arguments for this (hopeless) cause.

Past LL happiness-gap posts:

"The 'Happiness Gap' and the rhetoric of statistics" (9/26/2007)
"Gender-role resentment and Rorschach-blot news reports" (9/27/2007)
"Why are economists so misleading?" (10/1/2007)
"The gender happiness gap: statistical, practical and rhetorical significance", 10/4/2007
"The happiness gap returns" (7/26/2008)
"The happiness gap is back" (5/26/2009)
"Women's happiness and pundits' accuracy" (5/27/2009)

Also maybe relevant, if you're not completely sick of the whole topic:

"Myth is truth (p < .05)" (12/23/2007)

If you want to do your own modeling, a csv file of the GSS happiness answers is here (some background on the data is here).

[I also note a certain lack of journalistic courtesy — Douthat didn't mention that Leonhardt and Leavitt had covered the same material a year and a half earlier, and Huffington doesn't mention Douthat, Leavitt or Leonhardt.  I know that journalists don't need footnotes, but if a pundit reprises a story that's previously been featured by other pundits, doesn't journalistic etiquette suggest a tip of the hat to the earlier authors? Dowd does cite Huffington, which seems like the normal practice.]

That's not a-the-indefinite-article, it's a-the-immediate-future-marker, as in Kanye West's infamous "I'm a let you finish" interruption at the MTV awards. Steven Poole at Unspeak has a poll, where you can register your preference for how to spell it. (So far, "I'ma" has a plurality of 45%, with "I'm'a" next at 20%.)

Steven links to the discussion that Ella and I had about this back in 2005.

Garden-path photo caption of the day:

Reading this, I spent a few seconds trying to figure out how fans could catch a walk, off a home run or in any other circumstance.

I knew the phrase "walk-off home run", meaning a home run that puts the home team ahead in the bottom of the final inning of a baseball game, and thus permits them (and everybody else) to walk off the field without any further game-play. But by the time my on-line sentence processing system got to "off", it was too late.

A hyphen in "walk-off" would have helped.

Commenters on this blog and others, and many of my correspondents, have been asking: "Where is Pullum?"

I am on a train in England, using unspeakably slow wireless Internet. And I have a copy of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol cradled in my palms.

Yesterday's 9 Chickweed Lane:

And today's strip:

Read the whole sequence (to date): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

I especially like this exchange:

Juliette: Your only actual qualification is one of manifest insanity.
Thorax: "Broad experience" would be the term then.

I'm not usually on the Dan Brown desk here at Language Log Plaza — that's Geoff Pullum's domain — but this one came to me (from Bruce Webster). By Tom Chivers on the Telegraph's site:

The Lost Symbol, the latest novel by The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, has gone on sale. We pick 20 of the clumsiest phrases from it and from his earlier works.

Chivers quotes Geoff P. on Brown's writing. And there's space for comments and for nominations of further regrettable quotes from the Brownian oeuvre.

Recently, we've been talking, here and here, about the choice of preposition to go with the adjective bored: the older with (or by) or the innovative (and now spreading) of. Commenters added some other choices of of where another preposition might have been expected: with the adjectives concerned, embarrassed, and fed up; and with verbs in appreciate of and succumb of. There are several possible routes to these usages — analogy with P choice for semantically similar words (bored of on analogy with tired of), blending (bored of = bored with x tired of), and reversion to of as the default P in English — but the cases are at least superficially similar (though they are probably not related at a deeper level; people with one of these usages can't be expected to have any, or all, of the others).

And then a commenter (on the first of these postings) moved to a very different case; dw asked about off of, adding, "It drives me nuts". The only thing that this case — of what some handbooks term "intrusive" of in combination with certain prepositions — has to do with things like bored of is that the word of is involved. Still, people like dw, and a great many usage critics as well, are inclined to "bundle" disparate phenomena under a single heading for no reason beyond the involvement of a particular word. As I said recently, people are inclined to "blame it on a word".

I'll say a bit about "intrusive" of in a moment, but first another case of P choice in which of is one of the possibilities: in time expressions like a quarter to/till/before/of 2, discussed on Language Log a couple of years ago. (Here, of is a distinctly American option.) But I don't see that there's any relationship between this case and P choice with adjectives and verbs.

On to "intrusive" of. Here, many commenters bundle P + of (in alongside/inside/off/out/outside of) together the of that appears in one variant of exceptional degree modification (the much-reviled too big of a dog as an alternative to too big a dog), but the two phenomena have nothing to do with one another beyond that of.

There's extensive discussion of the five P + of cases above in this course handout of mine. For these, there’s a separate story for each one (though some handbooks recommend against P + of in general): plain out is extremely restricted; outside of is not colloquial (except in one sense); off of is somewhat on the conversational side; etc. Off of is the combination that gets the heaviest criticism, though I don't think that on the evidence of actual use, it can be classified as non-standard — on the colloquial side, but not non-standard.

My 2007 posting on prepositions in time expressions went on to unearth some genuinely non-standard occurrences of P + of (underneath of and others) and to examine a relatively extreme case of bundling, in Rudolf Flesch's entry for of in The ABC of Style. Flesch sternly pronounces that "of is a weed that should be pulled out of all sentences where it doesn't belong" and gives a series of examples, of three very different sorts (though Flesch doesn't label them): repeated partitives ("Of all the objections, not one (of them) was cogent"; of with superlatives ("one of the most hazardous (of) medical episodes"); and of in WH-clause complements of abstract nouns ("the issue (of) whether such behavior is permissible"). Details in the 2007 posting.

This is beautiful work, showing that certain areas in the brain of mature Atlantic Salmon "light up" when the animal is asked to categorize the emotions expressed by a set of (human) faces:

More amazing still is the fact that the fish performed this task while dead. Specifically:

Note that SPM ("statistical parametric mapping"), the analysis software used, is pretty much the standard way of determining significance thresholds in fMRI studies.

The first author, Craig Bennett, has a blog at prefrontal.org, where you can find some further discussion, including the raw data from this experiment.

[Hat tip: Stefano Bartolo, also Neuroskeptic, who also cites a representative recent paper that fails to do the recommended multiple-comparison correction.]

Following up on this morning's "bored" post, I wrote a little script to query the NYT's index for the number of uses of "bored of" vs. "bored with" from 1981 to the present. Although the number are fairly small and thus somewhat unstable (in 1981 there were 72 instances of "bored with" and none of "bored of"; in 2008 there were 48 instances of "bored with" and 12 of "bored of"), the results lend further plausibility to the idea that there's a change in progress, with of gaining ground on with during the past decade:

[Update — Ray Girvan has supplied a table of numbers from  NewsBank (UK and Ireland newspaper online archive), which shows much the same pattern as the NYT, but with an apparently faster rate of change. (Or perhaps an earlier onset — the data is noisy enough that it's hard to tell…)

It's not clear whether this reflects a difference in regional varieties of English, with the UK and Ireland in the lead on this change, or a difference in local copyediting practices, with the NYT's copyeditors more conservative or more careful. I'm inclined to think that it's a genuine geographical difference — comparison with another U.S. paper, or a collection of papers, would help.]

Additional evidence for a change in progress comes from an examination of apparent-time effects in the LDC's collection of conversational telephone speech:

In this case, males seem to be leading the change (though I haven't verified that the effect is not due to a difference in age distribution in the fairly small subset of speakers who used either of these sequences — maybe younger men and older women are more likely to express boredom…):

It might be interesting to take a look at some other sources with reliable dating.

[Update — as evidence that the (perception of) change is a both-sides-of-the-Atlantic thing, here's a paragraph from a long "kids these days" groaner in the (London) Times, "A levels: what is behind the falling standards?", July 10, 1976:

And Literature Online turns up 257 instances of "bored with", compared to only 6 instances of "bored of", three of which are bogus — Henry Howard Brownell's 1866 poem Lines, Kimposed A Bored of a Californy Male-Steemer. By a Parsinger., a mention elsewhere of "the most bored of women", and a 1991 poem containing this passage:

25   You'll fear some stroke has left me dumb,
26   bucolic, inward-looking, glum;
27      irrelevant, to boot.
28   It seems some others think this too;
29   each morning brings some short review,
30      bored, of my selected
31   verses, calls them 'quiet', 'true',
32   a man who woos a rural muse
33      and suitably dejected.

But one of the 3 genuine hits for "bored of" is Ezra Pound ranting about politics, from Redondillas, or something of that sort:

36   I demonstrate the breadth of my vision.
37   I am bored of this talk of the tariff,
38   I too have heard of T. Roosevelt.
39   I have met with the "Common Man,"
40   I admit that he usually bores me,
41   He is usually stupid or smug.
42   I praise God for a few royal fellows
43   like Plarr and Fred Vance and Whiteside,
44   I grant them fullest indulgence
45   each one for his own special queerness.

The date of composition is not clear, but the first cited copyright is 1926. (Pound also used "bored with" 7 times in other poems.)

The other two genuine "bored of" hits are a 1991 poem and 1994 novel.

This evidence, though thin, is consistent with a long-standing low rate of usage, whether by analogy to e.g. "tired of" or by reversion to the unmarked preposition "of", followed by recent vernacular change that started to leak into the written language in the 1990s. ]

I was surprised when the mail brought me my October issue of Harper's, where on page 43 was Harper's full-page ad, defining the word, "content," in what seemed to me to be an unusual and counterproductive way.

The ad says:

WARNING! Harper's Magazine is 100% Content Free! Everybody gives you "content." But you'll never find that in Harper's Magazine. Instead, you'll get literature. Investigative reporting. Criticism. Photojournalism. Provocative adventures. Daring commentary. And truth-telling as only Harper's Magazine can tell it. Subscribe today and join the thoughtful, skeptical, witty people just like you who pay for culture, not content.

After telling readers how to subscribe, the ad then says:

HARPER'S  Proudly "content free" for more than 150 years!

All these years I've been using and understanding "content" to mean substance, the matter being dealt with, information and details about topics that matter. You know, like Language Log. And I've been reading Harper's because I thought it contained the very things it now denies. But being a thoughtful, skeptical, and sometimes witty person, maybe I'll need to rethink my subscription. Or buy a better dictionary. Or something.

What will ad-writers think of next?

Sarah Currier asked:

Last night I was reading a beautifully written, prize-nominated novel, but was thrown out of my immersion in it by what I thought was an anachronistic bit of language. I do have a particular fingernails-down-the-blackboard reaction to "bored of" and I am convinced it is fairly recent as common usage. I am 43, grew up in New Zealand, but now live in Scotland.

This passage is set in 1960 and is between the narrator and his then elderly mother:

"She is too sincere for you," she said after a short pause.
"Sincere?"
"You will become bored of her, just as I became bored of your father".

The woman using "bored of" is also an Austrian Jew who escaped to England during WWII. So English is her second language.

I just found that really jarring, especially in such a beautifully written literary novel. My partner thinks I am mad.

I just found a small posting of yours from 2004 where you seem to be saying that "bored of" is in fact ungrammatical. What is your take on how recent it is, and when it started becoming so common that you read it in serious newspapers and in other public commentary a lot (in the UK at least)? Do you agree that the passage quoted is anachronistic?

BTW the book is Samantha Harvey's 'The Wilderness' which was nominated for the Orange Prize 2009. The passage quoted is p.12 of the British Cape paperback edition.

The LL post in question is "Bored of", 3/25/2004; also marginally relevant are two later posts, "Am I boring, or are you?", 10/20/2004, and "Etymology porn", 10/21/2004.

I do believe that the widespread use of "bored of" (rather than "bored with") is a fairly recent development, though I haven't done the research needed to prove it. In addition to Michael Rundell's observation, quoted in the earlier post, that the spread of "bored of" seems to have happened after the early-1990s collection period of the British National Corpus, I'm also encouraged in this view by the fact that OED has no examples of "bored of" among its citations, except a single example where bored is the past participle of the historically-unrelated verb bore meaning "To pierce, perforate, make a hole in or through":

a1877 KNIGHT Dict. Mech. I. 682/2 Deep-well pump, a pump specifically adapted for oil and brine wells which are bored of small diameters and to great depths.

In comparison, there are 24 citations for "bored with" in the ennui sense, e.g.

1837 Fraser's Mag. 16 640 They are sufficiently bored with the solemn noodledoms of pretension.

(A careful survey of the time course of "bored of" relative to "bored with" would be a fun Breakfast Experiment™ in cultural dynamics, using online newspaper archives and similar well-dated sources — unfortunately I don't have a spare hour this morning.)

But even if its spread is recent, it's not hard to find evidence that the "bored of" trait has been hanging around for a long time in the linguistic gene pool.

In the first place, it's a likely mutation, through childish overgeneralization of of as the default preposition for expressing adjectival arguments. Thus in Patricia Wentworth's novel The Devil's Wind, set in British India and published in 1912 (and this is not just the opinion of Google Books' metadata, which got this date right — I checked the title page), 5-year-old Miss Margaret Elizabeth Monson comes to pay a call on grown-up Helen Wilmot:

And there have probably been individual or regional pockets where adults exhibit this trait at least to some extent. Thus I found a letter from Sir Walter Scott to a Miss Edgeworth,  dated 1824,which includes this passage:

So I think that Samantha Harvey can be declared innocent of anachronism — it's highly plausible that a fluent but non-native speaker of English might have over-generalized of in this case.

On the other hand, I can see that the passage is confusing for a reader who's aware of (and irked by) the modern vernacular trend towards "bored of", since her reaction suggests anachronism rather than foreignism.  Perhaps Ms. Harvey was unaware of the vernacular trend when she wrote the passage in question.

[Update: More here.]