Linguistic Freezes

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Dustin Aguilar. I’m calling from Denton, Texas.

Hey, Dustin, welcome from Denton.

What can we do for you, Dustin?

Well, I would like to know if you guys have heard of a linguistic phenomenon called freezes, where we tend to say word pairs in the same order, specifically like black and white. You don’t really hear people say white and black, white and black TV. It’s more black and white TV. Also something like spaghetti and meatballs opposed to meatballs and spaghetti. And so my question is, one, have you heard of this phenomenon? Two, what is your opinion about it? And three, is there some sort of age-related aspect to these freezes? Is there geographical aspects? And I ask because I heard a 12-year-old girl say that she wanted to eat eggs and bacon instead of what I would say, bacon and eggs. And so I had that question about the freezes to see what you guys thought about it.

That’s super cool. How did you hear about freezes?

I’ve heard of them, but most people don’t know that lingo. Are you a linguistics insider?

Yes. I got a master’s in linguistics from the University of North Texas in Denton, and one of my professors was Hodge Ross, who is one of two people who coined the phrase freezes and have written papers about it. So I’ve heard him give two talks on freezes, and I thought that would be a good A Way with Words topic.

Absolutely. Freezes are super interesting. Freezes are also known as binomials or irreversible pairs, right? And there may be some other terms for them. And there’s two really interesting things about your question. One is, yay, let’s talk about freezes. Things like when you say yes or no, we mostly don’t say no or yes, right? Some of this stuff is so ingrained we don’t even think about it. I say, oh, you know, I go to that park now and then. I don’t say then and now. There’s a ton of this.

The other thing that’s interesting about your question is we have talked on this show about bacon and eggs before, and I think you have zeroed in on one that is not as fixed as the others. It is sometimes eggs and bacon, and it’s not particularly age-graded. There’s nothing geographic to it. It’s just some people say bacon and eggs and some people say eggs and bacon. People say ham and eggs. I don’t hear eggs and ham unless you’re reading Dr. Seuss. There we go, right?

Yeah.

But in general, as you probably learned, freezes tend to follow some set, like certain things come before certain other things. For example, the definite thing comes before the indefinite, positive before negative, close comes before far away, above comes before below, on before under, up before down, large before small, male before female. They tend to do this. But with bacon and eggs, it doesn’t really fit any of those X before Y.

It doesn’t really. So it’s more tradition than it is like that internal word order thing that all native speakers of English develop automatically. Hodge mentioned that there tends to be a meat first rule. You mentioned meat first. And I’ve also noticed that we tend to mention, as far as food goes, main dish first and side item second. And that’s why I think we get the spaghetti and meatballs instead of meatballs and spaghetti because I think maybe we conceive of spaghetti as the main dish and meatballs as the side. Maybe that’s why bacon and eggs can go either way because bacon is the more meaty, but it seems like a side.

That’s right. You’ve really got it there, too. You’re just, I love your perceptions, Dustin. You’re really doing this right. Because we have bangers and mash, we have ham and eggs, we have meat and potatoes. These are kind of standard set. Burger and fry. Burger and fry, standard set constructions. But if I get three eggs with two slices of bacon, which one’s the most important, right? Or am I getting six slices of bacon and one egg, right? Maybe that has something to do with it.

But these X before Y, you know, new before old or definite before indefinite, those are just general and usual. They’re not absolute. For example, I said one of them was male before female. We will almost always say kings and queens, but we would say bride and groom, right? And also ladies and gentlemen.

Yeah, we say ladies and gentlemen. So there are other places where the order, and I don’t think this applies to bacon and eggs, but there are other places that the order has to do with phonology, what sounds better. It has to do with word stress, you know, what sounds better in another way, number of syllables, or even just plain politeness. And I think a bride and groom and ladies and gentlemen are about politeness. A wedding day is seen as the bride’s day more than it’s seen as the groom’s day, right?

Yeah, boys and girls. Boys and girls is one where the male is first kind of following the typical pattern. I feel like I hear girls and boys sometimes.

I’m hearing it more.

Yeah, and I left off the other one. There is a tradition of trying to upset these longstanding binomials or irreversible pairs in order to remove or reduce some of the inherent sexism in English.

Yeah, lesbian and gay versus gay and lesbian.

There we go. Girls and boys. So we’ll become used to saying girls and boys, and then boys and girls will sound really weird to our ears after a while. So I wanted to know, when people say your two names together, what’s the order that you say? What do people usually say?

Well, we established early on, I know we talked about it, it’s Martha and Grant. Martha has a little more experience in the world than I do. Notice how I said that. This is beauty and age is what we’re talking about. Beauty and age. Beauty and age. Also, she joined the program before I did. But we do mix it up from time to time.

Yeah, we do occasionally. But it depends what we’re doing. Mostly it’s Martha and Grant.

Right. Grant’s more meaty. I’m more eggy. Something like that.

Great. Well, thank you very much. Dustin, thank you so much for your call. Take care. Have a good day. Bye-bye.

All right. Bye-bye. Call us with what you’ve been thinking about when it comes to language. 877-929-9673 or email us. That address is words@waywordradio.org.