This morning, I stumbled Adobe Systems Incorporated’s Permissions and Trademark Guidelines. This is basically Adobe’s way of dictating how it wants people to use and display its trademarks. Many companies have these, but Adobe’s policies regarding Photoshop are more restrictive (and thus, more laughable) then most.

Photoshop “to photoshop” out of your lexicon

They begin the Photoshop section with the phrase “Trademarks are not verbs”. Here, they’re objecting to the ubiquitous use of “to photoshop”, meaning “to use Adobe® Photoshop® software or similar image manipulation software to manipulate an image”. This prohibits phrases like “Dude, that is so photoshopped” or “the printing company photoshopped it for us”. This seems to be a common theme, with paralells to Xerox fighting to stop us from Xeroxing documents, but it’s still a bit crazy.

I think it’s ridiculous that they think they can stop this usage. One of the unifiying features of human language is our lazyness, and our desire to only do the minimum amount of speaking necessary. To think that we’ll gladly surrender “Could you photoshop this real quick?” in favor of “Could you enhance this image using Adobe® Photoshop® software real quick?” is completely insane.

The fact of the matter is that the verbed form is more versatile as well. In English, we can use other particles to change the meanings of an established verb, and “to photoshop” is no exception. One can photoshop something in, photoshop it out, photoshop something away, and so on. However, one cannot “enhance using Adobe® Photoshop® software out the guy in the background”. Instead, we’re asked to “enhance an image using Adobe® Photoshop® software in such a way that the guy in the background is removed from the picture”. Yeah, we’re going to do that, Adobe. Sure thing.

Adobe doesn’t know what they want

The real beauty comes in that the next heading: “Trademarks are not nouns”. Adobe, you’re in blatant violation of your own trademark policies on this very website.

…and Photoshop is one of Adobe’s most valuable trademarks…
…Adobe and Photoshop are either registered trademarks or trademarks…
…Get everything in Photoshop CS3 plus tools for editing 3D and motion-based content and performing image analysis….

In each of the above phrases, “Photoshop” is acting as a noun. So, I don’t think noun-like usage is what Adobe’s really worried about. Let’s look at their explanation:

CORRECT: The image pokes fun at the Senator.
INCORRECT: The photoshop pokes fun at the Senator.

It looks like what they’re really trying to ban is “Photoshop-Related Metonymy“. Metonymy is where a commonly associated element (or part of something) is used to refer to the whole thing. For instance, “The White House was silent on the corruption charges” or “The press is more and more biased every day” are both metonymic expressions, using parts of these establishments to represent the whole.

So, although I suspect they have no problem with noun form use (”Photoshop® is exceptionally good at what it does”), they’re worried about metonymy with manipulated images, like “Photoshops are causing more scandals every day for the embattled prince”. Perhaps they should be clarifying that on their website, lest they be forced to sue themselves.

Other miscellaneous escapes from reality

According to Adobe, “Trademarks may never be used as slang terms”. This is just charming because it’s an attempt to control casual usage. I can understand their not wanting an ad campaign with “Help Photoshoppers Photoshop better”, but trying to regulate casual conversation shows Adobe to be out of touch with not only language usage, but with reality.

Finally, I’m not sure I buy this “Proper Adjectives” thing. To claim that “Adobe Photoshop” is incorrect and meaningless without adding “software” is a bit ridiculous. Whether or not they want to pretend that Photoshop isn’t a noun, it won’t really change how speakers view and use the term. It just makes them seem stodgy and delusional.

Adobe Systems Incorporated v. Continental Drift

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: A speaker (or grammarian) trying to stop language from changing is like a gardener trying to stop continental drift.

Adobe can write this up, and heck, they can even try and enforce parts of it with marketing and high-profile cases. However, I hope they realize the folly of trying to change established words and constructions, especially when the ones suggested are longer and less useful than the originals. No matter what they do, in everyday speech, people will photoshop images, those images will be photoshops, and photoshopping will be an entertaining pastime on the internet.

Know, however, that we’re not doing it to hurt you, Adobe. Our language is a language of love for your software, and the fact that “Photoshop” is so ubiquitous is a sign of our respect for your work. So, dearest Adobe, please stick to manipulating images, and leave the language manipulation to us.

Hello everybody! Sorry for the recent lack of posts, it’s been a very crazy few days. I just wanted to pass along a pair of pictures which I think provide some great perspective.

We’re raised and taught that South America is generally a Spanish-speaking area, with Brazil as the Portuguese-speaking exception, and then a few other official languages. South American official languages could be mapped like this:

However, those are just the languages which were promoted with colonization. In reality, there are hundreds of languages and language families which developed and flourished in South America, some of which survive even today. So, if we were to redact just a small part of that map to show past and present native languages, it would look more like this (courtesy the Athena review language archive):

Impressive, isn’t it?

Many of these original languages are dying, but there are still tens of thousands (at least) of monolingual speakers of these native languages. So, yes, many Brazilians speak Portuguese. Many Colombians speak Spanish. However, not everybody in those countries speaks these main languages, and, well, those who don’t were there first.

So, I’ve discussed language change before, and I think it’s a really fascinating area of Linguistics, as it’s a good reminder that Linguistics isn’t just studying the past, but also the future. I made a few predictions about language change in English a while back in this post, and one of those predictions has just come to life again for me. In that post, I said…

However, it will happen. In the same way that “whom” is gradually fading from use, [usage of ‘their’ as a gender neutral pronoun] will fade in.

For as long as I’ve been looking, I’ve maintained (along with others) that “whom” is rapidly fading from use in the English language.

What is ‘whom’?

‘Whom’, for those of you who never had this pushed on you by your High School English teacher (or have replaced it with usable information), is/was both a relative and interrogative pronoun in English. It can be used in sentences such as “For whom were you looking?” and “The police are searching for the man whom Mike Tyson attacked”.

Where most people falter is differentiating it from “who”. Let’s talk about some terminology real quick so I can give it a nice, thorough, linguistic description:

In grammatical descriptions, there are several different ’semantic roles’, played by the different actors in a given sentence. The ‘agent’ is the person or thing that initiates the action (the dog in “the dog bit the man”). The ‘patient’ is the person or thing that is affected by the action done by the agent (the man in “the dog bit the man”). In all ‘transitive’ sentences, involving some sort of action done to somebody by somebody else, there is both an ‘agent’ and a ‘patient’.

Let’s make a sentence: “Janet Reno saw the penguin”. In that sentence, ‘Janet Reno’ is the agent, and ‘the penguin’ is the patient. Let’s ask some questions using that statement. In order to ask a question about it, we need to insert a question word (who or whom) in place of the part we want to ask about. So, if we want to ask about the agent in English, we use “who”, but, to ask about the patient, we use “whom”. We’d end up with either “Who saw the Penguin?” or “Whom did Janet Reno see?”. We could also go all out and say “Who saw whom?” So, in summary, in the glory days of Whom, we used “who” to replace the agent in a sentence, and “whom” to replace the patient.

Whom am I calling obsolete? Whom.

However, that’s rapidly going out of style. It’s not unusual to see “Who did you see?” or “Wait, who shot who?”, and really, “whom” shows up rarely in everyday usage. How rarely? Well, in the EnronSent Corpus of Enron’s corporate email, it shows up 991 times out of 13,810,266 total words. Compare that to 11,789 times for “who”. Of those 991 times, there are many “incorrect” uses (”This template is for participants, whom will be kept confidential at all times.”)

Many people don’t know when it’s actually supposed to be used, and even those who do are very seldom able to use it without seeming pretentious (or worse). Personally, I can’t imagine walking up to a girl in a bar and saying “You’re the girl for whom I’ve been waiting all my life”. So, whom is on the way out.

However, today, I saw something completely new. This was a headline submitted to fark.com today:

Submitter confuses golf story for NBA story, left confused as to who shot whome

The usage is actually classically correct, but the spelling isn’t. The submitter seems to have the idea of when to use it, but it’s gotten so rare that he or she (they!) haven’t gotten used to the usual spelling.

So, when everyday people stop using a term or grammar point, stop seeing it, and stop understanding how it works, it’s only a matter of time before it’s on its way out.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for ‘whom’.

PS: For those not familiar with the headline’s reference, it’s a play on Abbot and Costello’s “Who’s on first?” sketch which is definitely worth a read.