Militant Linguists

Posted on July 28, 2006 by Tito

Will Shortz Must Be Stopped

And this is not the first time, my friend Aaron Kaplan points out to me. The New York Times crossword puzzle for last December 30 had the clue “Lord’s Prayer adjective,” and the answer is 3 letters long. The answer is supposed to by thy. But thy is not an adjective. It is the genitive form of a (now archaic) pronoun. It can be used as a determiner just as the children’s can. Old-fashioned traditional grammars err grievously in representing anything that can occur before the noun in a noun phrase (or anything that can modify a noun) as an “adjective”: it gives you a huge class of “adjectives” with members that have almost nothing syntactic or semantic in common. As Aaron notes, the error here may be the fault of the original puzzle author. But Shortz is ultimately in charge, and is paid to be. This man needs a linguist on call.

Why do people neglect the informational resources that are available to them? I do not know. Shortz could have just called the main switchboard at Language Log Plaza and ask to be put through to the grammar staff.

What next? Will there be a puzzle of the week that preupposes terror is not a noun?

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