海角大神

With the Red Sox well over a dozen games behind in even the wild-card standings, this sometime sports fan is ready to declare baseball season over but for the linguistic analysis.

All this slicing and dicing of what was once two monolithic leagues into divisions, plus the establishment of the wild-card race, makes me think of those competitions for kids where everyone comes home with a prize. But even I can tell it hasn鈥檛 been a good season for the Red Sox.

Meanwhile, the Washington Nationals have clinched a berth in the National League鈥檚 playoffs, the first time a Washington team has accomplished such a thing since 1933. We wish our friends in the capital well. But in my journalistic experience, anything reported as happening 鈥渇or the first time since 1933鈥� tends not to be good news.

Over at Language Log, though, they鈥檙e all abuzz over a piece in The New York Times about Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees and his ability to levitate. (No wonder the Sox are so far behind.) The sentence in question read, 鈥淭hree batters later, the bases were loaded for Derek Jeter, but he flew out harmlessly to right field.鈥�

The reader who brought this to the collective attention of Language Log wrote, 鈥淚 watched the game on TV and I can tell you that Derek鈥檚 feet stayed firmly rooted on the ground. I thought Steve Pinker said this didn鈥檛 happen.鈥�

The point here isn鈥檛 really whether Jeter鈥檚 feet stayed on the ground during this particular 颅14-inning game. It鈥檚 whether he 鈥渇lew鈥� out or 鈥渇lied鈥� out. What 鈥淪teve鈥� Pinker 鈥� that would be Steven Pinker, Harvard professor of psychology and noted expert in psycholinguistics 鈥� says that鈥檚 relevant here is that 鈥渧erbs intuitively perceived as derived from nouns or adjectives are always regular, even if similar or identical to, an irregular verb. Thus one says [鈥�] flied out in baseball [from a fly (ball)], not flew out [鈥�].鈥�

It鈥檚 a process known as 鈥渞egularization.鈥� When 鈥渢o fly out鈥� is short for 鈥渢o be out in baseball because of having hit a fly ball that has been caught,鈥� fly is treated like, for instance, spy, with spied as its past tense.

So in proper baseballspeak, Jeter 鈥渇lied.鈥� Yes, but: Mark Liberman, the University of Pennsylvania phonetician who runs Language Log, points out that 鈥渇lied out,鈥� rather than 鈥渇lew out,鈥� is followed widely, but not universally.

His quick Google News check of the previous month found the phrase 鈥渇lied out to center鈥� appeared 161 times, whereas 鈥渇lew out to center鈥� appeared only 23 times. 鈥淔lied out鈥� clearly prevails; but 23 instances of 鈥渇lew out鈥� is more than can be ascribed just to typographical error.

Digging into the ProQuest archive, though, where he found some examples聽 鈥渟o old that baseball was still written 鈥榖ase-ball,鈥� 鈥� Liberman found 鈥渇lied鈥� beat 鈥渇lew鈥� 1,412 to 68. Moreover, 鈥渢he distributions over time suggest that regularization has increased rather than decreased.鈥�

When I clicked on the link Language Log provided to the Times piece, the quoted sentence wasn鈥檛 there. What appeared in its place was: 鈥淚n the 12th, the fans rose for Derek Jeter with the bases loaded, but Evan Scribner got him to fly out harmlessly to right field.鈥�

There鈥檚 no indication of any correction to what was originally published, but this version avoids flied/flew altogether 鈥� and even keeps the infinitive unsplit. Harmlessly.