Active Daydreaming in San Francisco

One of my favorite cookbooks is a compilation of recipes from Cooking Light magazine. My favorite thing that it has taught me how to make is nasi goreng:

Poking around on the Cooking Light website, I found that my hometown of San Francisco ranks 5th on their list of “Cooking Light Best Cities” for healthy eating. Before getting into the foody fun, the article gives an overview of life in the city and includes a striking instruction with a predicted outcome:

Ask residents what they love about the city by the bay, and many will tell you that it’s that ‘daydream’ is an active verb here.

Whoa, really? I’ve never heard of such a study!

There are several reasons why this sentence is so interesting, but just doesn't work for me...

Daydream as an active verb?
A verb is traditionally said to be in the active voice when the subject is the agent or actor of the verb. In the sentence Alex bakes that cake once a year, bakes is an active verb because Alex, the subject, is the one doing the action of baking. A corresponding passive sentence would be That cake was baked by Alex, in which the subject of the sentence is that cake and it is the one that is having the action done to.

How about when we talk about the activeness or passiveness of daydreaming? In the sentence Rudy daydreams about Golden Gate Park, daydream is an active verb. How about a corresponding passive version? ?Golden Gate Park is daydreamed about by many people sounds a little awkward, but could work. In these sentences, daydream takes an indirect object - would a direct object make any difference? Well, *Rudy daydreams Golden Gate Park doesn’t sound right, and neither does its passive version, *Golden Gate Park was daydreamed by Rudy.

So if I did ask the question that Cooking Light suggests and residents really responded in the described manner, what would these residents possibly mean? In San Francisco, you can daydream about things, but nothing can be daydreamed about? What?

To be sure, Cooking Light did not specify the lexical category of the word they quote - they could be telling us that the noun, daydream, (not the verb, as I’ve interpreted it) is an active verb. They could therefore be reporting a change in lexical category of daydream, which brings this discussion even closer in line with Mark Liberman's and Geoff Nunberg’s analyses of claims such as, “Faith is a verb,” and, “Friendship is a verb” (see here, here, and here).

What is probably happening, really, is the writer has a vague memory of the term active verb and has since assumed that an active verb is one that refers to physical activity. The attempted “cleverness” would be that in San Francisco, people live out their daydreams in a physically active way. But that is not what an active verb is, Cooking Light.

Why would one daydream in San Francisco?
Whatever it is they are trying to say about daydreaming, I’m confused as to why an article meant to praise San Francisco would emphasize residents’ daydreaming at all. If you live in San Francisco and San Francisco is so great, why would you be daydreaming about anything? Wouldn’t you be out enjoying the city? If you are daydreaming (even if you are doing it “actively”), doesn’t that mean you are imagining yourself somewhere else? Perhaps the use of daydream is supposed to elicit thoughts of things sometimes associated with daydreaming - misty clouds, surreal beauty, and carefreeness - albeit with complete disregard for what the word means to most people.

A linguified claim
Regardless of whatever the folks at Cooking Light think they are saying about the activeness of daydreaming, I hope they don’t really expect us to believe that one can ask San Francisco residents what they love about their city and expect to get some answer about active daydreaming. This is an example of something Geoffrey Pullum has written about, and which I find fascinating: linguification. When a claim (claim 1, let’s say) about something in the world is linguified, it is seated in a completely different claim (claim 2) that makes reference to words or other linguistic items associated with claim 1.

An example that Pullum found:

It's difficult to find a piece of writing in the mainstream press which mentions the word 'bisexual' without finding that it is immediately followed by the word 'chic'.

The writer of this sentence is trying to say something about an allegedly prevalent view of bisexuality as "chic" (claim 1), but does so with a completely different claim (claim 2) about obligatory word adjacency. This second claim is linguified version of the first.

In Cooking Light, the writer takes a claim about San Francisco, which itself is unclear for all the reasons above. Let’s pretend we get it, and call claim 1: “There are a lot of outdoorsy things to do in San Francisco.” Then, in claim 2, the writer makes a statement about the grammatical voice of a verb (daydream) that is ambiguously related to claim 1. The writer couldn’t possibly think that the statement is true, but for some reason decided to make a point about San Francisco in the form of a made-up pseudoscientific survey in which a question about a city’s appeal was answered by “many” in terms of the grammatical voice of a verb.

I fail to see how this linguification enriches this article in any way - I could see how some of Pullum’s examples of linguification could be humorous to some people, but this just doesn’t work here. It reeks of BS and hokeyness.

Thanks, Cooking Light, for at least talking about the joys of my city, but please, let’s spend more time working on those recipes and food travel tips and a little less on grammar. I need to figure out why my eggplant always turns brown and never stays purple - get to work on that, will you?

P.S. This post is getting long, but a topic for a future post: all the other things that are revealed to be "active verbs" by a Google search for "is an active verb," like aging, educate, and hope.

Toll-free Commands

Quick quiz: how many toll-free phone numbers can you think of that contain words? The first one that comes to my mind is the old 1-800-94-JENNY for Jenny Craig, along with that delightful little jingle. I'll bet you can think of three or four - the fact that they contain words and not a random string of numbers no doubt helped you to remember them, which was likely the company's intention.

Sometimes, though, these phone numbers contain words linked together in interesting ways - some even look like commands. How do we think about the words in these phone numbers linguistically? Who is the issuer and the receiver of the command, and what purpose does it serve a company or organization to nest a command within a phone number?

Let's look at a handful of such phone numbers:

1-800-PICK-UPS (for U.P.S.)

1-800-CALL-ATT (for AT&T)

1-800-TRY-TO-STOP (Rhode Island's smoking cessation help hotline)

1-800-8-DÉJALO (same hotline, but for Spanish-speakers)

My first question is - are these, indeed, imperatives? The first three certainly look a lot like imperatives with an implied you as the subject - the standard form of imperatives in English. We could, however, view them as isolated verb phrases. The final phone number, however, is unarguably in the imperative. The Spanish verb dejar (meaning to quit), inflected for 2nd-person singular and with a direct object, lo (meaning it), as an enclitic can mean nothing other than the command Quit it. The fact that try to quit is translated into Spanish as a command leads me to interpret try to quit, and other similarly formed numbers, as commands and not isolated VP's.

Going on the assumption that these are intended as commands, we have to ask: who is issuing these commands, and to whom? These phone numbers are presented in ways such as this, from the U.P.S. website:

Call 1-800-PICK-UPS to find the Authorized Shipping Outlet nearest you.

On their website, U.P.S. is not ostensibly instructing us to pick U.P.S. by giving us this phone number. They are telling the customer essentially to use the command Pick U.P.S. as part of a key for getting in touch with the company. So the customer is really the one giving the command, but to whom? To his/her phone? Or to him/herself? Perhaps U.P.S. would like the customer, in entering these words into his/her phone, to internalize this as a command to him/herself - just as one might say to oneself Calm down! in a tense situation. Is the customer supposed to be commanding him/herself to pick U.P.S.?

This could be one reason why U.P.S. chose to nest a command in their phone number. Another reason could be that Pick U.P.S. stands as a command directed to the customer if we strip away the surrounding text:

Call 1-800-PICK-UPS to find the Authorized Shipping Outlet nearest you.

Perhaps the company hopes that the nested command stands out among the rest of the text, and that we understand it to be a command straight to us (and that we comply with it). This does not strike me as too dissimilar from parodies of subliminal advertising as seen on shows like Saturday Night Live:

Hiiii Daaad! Give me 50 dollars. How are you doing today?

It sure would be interesting to talk to whoever picked these phone numbers to try to understand how they see the function of these commands. Whatever their intentions, what an interesting place to squeeze in a little nugget of advertisement by exploiting the correspondence between numbers and letters on the phone dial.

Putting these real phone numbers aside, I'm sure we could apply the same interpretations to this little instruction: