Down the rabbit hole

 A recent question in the UsingEnglish forum has got me thinking about the expression 'down the rabbit hole'; and, predictably enough, that's where I've gone.

'Down  the rabbit hole' - the wilderness years and sudden rise

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the source of the quote, was published in 1865, but apart from a few uses in the later years of the twentieth century it didn't take off until the turn of the millennium. And then the curve rose steeply. Why was that?

Most social media apps started in the new millennium, with one or two early starters in the '90s, and they were very good at spreading, misinterpreting, and amplifying wacky ideas. In the BBC podcast/Radio 4 programme  Things Fell Apart  (now in its second series) Jon Ronson looks at some of the results  (interestingly, if you can tolerate his voice – which for me is quite trying).

<alternative-meaning>
Later in that UsingEnglish discussion an alternative interpretation of the phrase was

mooted – if that's the word...

<passive-agression>
(more like ASSERTED, it seems to me; but I take it in my stride, as ever.  I'll not rise to it)
</passive-agression>

... in which  it refers simply to a series of digressions. But I think a more  useful interpretation of the phrase involves threads of an argument getting further and further away from reality (or, as Alice thought, "curiouser and curiouser".)

</alternative-meaning>

Anyway, it looks as though the expression "down the rabbit hole"  took off at about  the same time as the rise of social media – not that correlation has to imply causation. It seems plausible though. And I'd hazard a guess that very few of the users of this expression have any idea of its provenance.

But another issue turned up in my investigations – the appearance of a similar expression. but with "a" rather than "the".

The version with "a" is less than half as common as the version with "the". This makes sense, as "down a rabbit hole" invites a definition (such as "where black equals white amd white black').

But the Google Ngram Viewer makes it possible to focus the search on American/British English, and this shows an ineresting difference in usage: whereas in American English the version with just "a" is about a third as common as the "the" version, in British English it is well over half as common.

<proviso>
I have said elsewhere that there may be a subjective/dubious argument behind the AE/BE distinction, but in this case it seems to me that it is probably simply geographic.
</proviso>

Enough of this, or as Wordworth put it in The Tables Turned

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;

Or surely you'll grow double:

Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;

Why all this toil and trouble?

L'Envoi

I see The Times Feedback column has had to resurrect the Great Referendums Debate, a perennial so hardy that it merits capitals just as much as l'Affaire Dreyfus.

I addressed this issue in a post so old that a crucial link is now dead. So here it is again, in new words: English doesn't have to follow the rules of Latin grammar (as that Feedback column points out). But even if it did, Latin grammar requires that a gerund (which referendum is – an abbreviation of referendum ad populum [= 'the putting of a question to the people']) HAS NO PLURAL:

I. The Gerund 

The Gerund is a verbal noun, always active in force. The infintive of the verbs supplies the nominative case: Legere est difficile = To read is difficult (reading is difficult) The other cases are formed by adding -nd- to the present stem of the verb (-iend- for 3rd conjugation I-stems and all 4th conjugation verbs), plus the neuter singular endings of the second declension. The Gerund has no plural [my emphasis]. 

Source

 In an update to another post I wrote:

<reductio-ad-absurdum>
There are in principle four cases, each of which could have its own word:

• referendum (one of these things)

• referendums (two or more of these things)

• referenda (on the analogy of "agenda", a list of questions to be put to the people; to be clear, the usage would be "a referenda")

• referendas (two or more such lists)

Fortunately we don't live in a world where this could ever work.👺

</reductio-ad-absurdum>

Some dictionaries (unaccountably) say that referenda is an acceptable plural "in formal contexts", but – it being simply wrong both in English grammar and in Latin grammar – I don't see why formal contexts call for a display of ignorance.

b

As similar as so-and-so

In Saturday's Feedback section of The Times Rose Wild was (as quite often) saying 'Nothing to see here. Both versions are acceptable; calm down  everybody'.  And she cites a few Google searches to justify her equanimity.

A correspondent had objected to the phrase 'dull as dishwater', holding that the phrase should be 'dull as ditchwater' and that the 'dishwater' version was wrong. The columnist said it was all much of a muchness: '"Ditchwater" and "dishwater" have been interchangeably dull for more than 100 years.'

The Google Ngrams Viewer more or less confirms her position: 'dull as ditchwater' used to be the commoner, but recently there's no strong tendency either way – if anything, the trend is in favour of 'dull as dishwater':

The case for interchangeability

But that Viewer also lets you specify whether you are interested in British English or American English, and those results tell a different story.

In the one for American English there is a preference for the 'ditchwater' version until about the beginning of the Second World War, followed by a period of mixed fortunes for about twenty years, and then – since about 1960 – there is an increasingly strong preference for the 'dishwater' version. And since about 2010 the two have been diverging, with 'dishwater' waxing and 'ditchwater' waning:

The state of the nation

I wonder why. The recent (strong) preference for 'dishwater" might suggest some environmental explanation: could there be fewer ditches in the USA? Of course not. 

<parenthesis>
(Although I suppose there may be fewer miles of ditch per unit area or per capita, because of the distribution of farmland...? Perhaps I'm overthinking this.)
</parenthesis>

Besides, 'ditchwater' was the preferred comparator for over 100 years before that.

Meanwhile, in the Ngram for British English there is a marked preference for the 'ditchwater' version throughout the two phrases' coexistence, though the 'dishwater' version seems to have had a growth spurt after the war: in 1945 it was about ten times less common than the 'ditchwater' version, but by the time the Ngrams data runs out 'dishwater' has risen to about two thirds of the level of 'ditchwater'.

So it's tempting to conclude that the many contributors to The Times's online Comments (which I don't have access to) who decried 'dull as dishwater' as an error were sticklers for British English.

A preference for ditchwater

<shibboleth-warning>
Of course this all depends on how the Google Ngrams people define 'British/American English'. There's a whiff of the No true Scotsman ...

<glossary>
'No true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.'

'But what about N?'

'He can't be a true Scotsman.'

'Why not?'

'Because no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.'

</glossary>

...fallacy here. A lot of self-styled Guardians of the King's English call a lot of things 'American English' although they have strong and healthy roots in British English.

<autobiographical-note>
When I worked at OUP (whose house style was to use -ize endings where there was an option...

<innocent-bystanders>
(This is a crucial proviso, 'televize' is just wrong [and 'analyze' is an abomination – though admittedly {not to say lamentably} standard in some parts of the world]. Many innocent bystanders are caught in the zeal for 'modernizing' spellings by making s-endings zs)

</innocent-bystanders>

....) Professor Richard Cobb, a Francophile who wrote chiefly about things French (and in French there is no -izer option for -iser verbs), had a dispensation.

<suspicion>
I doubt if their present  editorial policies (presumably more automated and unbending than they were in the more humane [some would say wet] 1980s) would allow this if he were writing today.

</suspicion>

He alone among OUP authors was allowed to use '-ise' spllings. His editors knew this, but other departments (publicity, production etc.) occasionally caused friction by 'correcting' his aberrant ss.
</autobiographical-note>

In a previous post  I wrote: 

<prescript> 

In a UsingEnglish discussion many years ago on this sadly common issue I wrote

There's nothing unBritish about the spelling 'apologize'. It has been the house style of The Times for well over a hundred years, and is used by many large and influential publishers (Oxford University Press, for example). I'm tired of being accused of flirting with modernity and excessive American influence, just because I use a spelling that millions of British people use (so long as they haven't been got at by generations of school-teachers peddling misinformation).

That may have been true of The Times at the time of writing, but 'the times they are a-changin'. A few cases of '-ize' pass the scrutiny of the subs' eyes - especially when there is a strong etymological justification - as in the case of 'baptize' (where there is a zeta rather than a sigma in the original Greek); but fewer and fewer. 

</prescript>

But I suspect the Google Ngrams definitions of British and American English are purely geographic.

</shibboleth-warning> 

Later in the column she writes about her use of the expression 'carloads of cash', which had prompted a correspondent (who obviously has too much time on his hands) to point out that the usual metaphor for an inordinate amount was 'shedloads'. 'I'm not sure why I opted for carloads' she writes. Well  I have a possible answer: alliteration. And alliteration explains the popularity of 'dull as di...hwater'. Many other similes (most? Discuss) are alliterative– 'bold as brass', 'cool as a cucumber', 'dead as a dodo/doornail', 'fit as a fiddle', 'good as gold', 'hungry as a hunter'...

<admission-of-defeat type="alphabetical">
(And speaking of defeat, who does Pope Francis think he is – Pius XII? But I digress...)
J has me foxed, and I suspect that the second half of the alphabet is less fruitful, so I'll go on to a few digraphs.
</admission-of-defeat

'cheap as chips', 'thick as thieves'... (there must be more: where's Brewer when you need it?) 

But that's enough for the time being.

b

Update: 2024.03.12.19:50 – Added Pius XII link

A quickie...

 ... at least, that's the plan...

A few months ago, a Vodafone ad assailed my ears with the apparently meaningful (but it's up to the listener to put 2 and 2 together) line 'if you're out of contract you could be out of pocket". Hmm...? If you're out of pocket you end up with less money than you should after a deal; you don't pay more than you need to. So the ad produces a mindless jingle that sounds clever with its 'out of.../out of...' wordplay, and leaves the poor punter to do the mental arithmetic: 

<monthly salary> - <monthly payment> ⇒ 'less than I could have';  ∴  'I'm out of pocket'. 

But could isn't the same as should, so the wordplay doesn't really work if you think about it. As so often, the huckster relies on the fact that mostly punters don't think about stuff like this.

<autobiographical-note>
A similar near-miss struck me in the late '70s, when I first heard the album (not yet a stage show) Evita. In the song 'Don't cry for me Argentina' the lines  Dressed up to the nines/At sixes and sevens with you  don't quite work. You are 'at sixes and sevens' with a thing. You might say 'I'm at sixes and sevens with computers' or 'I'm at sixes and sevens with social stuff'; you can't be at sixes and sevens with a person...

<warning reason="neologists at work">
(or maybe you can since Tim Rice had his evil way – who knows what solecisms he held the door open for)
</warning>

But the lyricist wanted a clever-clever bit of wordplay (up to the nines/at sixes and sevens) so coined a new usage.
 </autobiographical-note>

The phrase 'out of contract' was once used almost exclusively, in British English, in sporting contexts. The British Natiional Corpus finds 22 instances of the phrase, and all but a handful are about sports (mostly football and rugby). By contrast the Corpus of Contemporary American English finds only 31, one of which is a misfire (...'walked out of contract talks'). This tally (30 in a billion-word corpus) is relatively much fewer, as COCA is ten times the size of BNC.  And only about a quarter of those deal with sports; the rest deal with screen actors, buildings, cell phones... – a much wider range of contexts than in British English.

So that Vodafone ad was adopting an American usage ...

<inline-ps>
To clarify (as  I'm usually annoyed...

<aside>
 (too strong? – well at least having to control a reflex lip-curl)
</aside>

... when people commenting on British English say 'This is an Americanism'. These so-called 'Americanisms' are often features of regional or historic forms of British English ('fall', 'gotten'...); in fact, somewhere (in  an Open University book that I did a Prospero on a few years ago [I didn't throw it in the sea, but I got rid of it]) I read of an eighteenth-century claim in Parliament that people should send their sons to America to learn proper English.

When I say Vodafone borrowed the phrase from America I mean that while the phrase did exist in British English (chiefly in the sporting context) the mobile phone provider (probably in an international company) knew of the American usage in the case of cell phones  and said 'I'll 'ave some of that', not being aware of the phrase's applicabilty in other contexts.
</inline-ps>

...and now I find that they're all doing it. On Saturday afternoon, looking for a provider who'd charge less than an arm and a leg for broadband, I saw that Plusnet were using exactly the same line:

Plusnet using the same line

But Vodafone may  not have been the first; they were just the first ones I noticed (and I may have noticed them only because of the ear-bleedingly awful woman who said it [and who has probably the most ubiquitous voice-over presence in the UK😖])

But that's enough; time to do a bit of note-bashing for this:

Update 2024.03.02.21:10 – Added <inline-ps />