Apropos of absolutely nothing, I’m sitting here giggling over grammar. Specifically, the breakage of stock phrases at a grammatically unsound point.

Seriously. This is the sort of thing that makes me laugh.

Example: “I can’t stand it.” Right. Everybody has this phrase in their arsenal — you don’t even have to think about it. It’s stock. It’s natural. You can manipulate it without effort, changing it around: “You know what I can’t stand?” “How can you stand it?” And so on.

There’s that central structure, that unbreakable connection of the ideas “can’t” and “stand”. Call it the Can’t-Stand structure. All the various renderings of the idea, as assertion or query, maintain that bond.

But that bond only exists because we’ve arbitrary generated and reinforced the bond through the use of those phrases. There’s nothing atomic in the English language about a connection between “can’t” and “stand” — we can generate all sorts of sentences using only one or the other, or even both in a different configuration, without error or tension. There’s no difficulty in saying, “I’m sorry, I can’t put the vase on the stand,” or even, “No, really, I can’t stand on my head.”

And so, hey, why not subvert that arbitrary bond? Why not intentionally change the glue-point of the canonical Can’t-Stand sentence? “I Can’t-Stand it” becomes “I can’t Stand-It”, for example, and then you can take this new sentence that, in it’s basic form, looks just like the original, and you can warp it into other forms and, well, hilarity ensues:

“You know what I can’t?”
“No, what?”
“Stand it!”

Ha! Okay, so after several paragraphs of prior explanation, it may not be so hilarious, but the point is that I’ve already thought about this a lot in the past, and so I just have these thoughts come flying unbidden to the forefront of my mind, and so my brain will, as it has this morning, just start throwing out these weird little one-liners until I’m just grinning like some linguophiliac monkey.

“You know what I can’t believe it’s not? Butter.

“What do we have to stand?”
“UP FOR OUR RIGHTS!”

Etc. I’m starting to think this post is pretty much unredeemable, but here we go: for significantly better lingual dorkery, you should really be reading The Language Log. You know what it’s a laugh? Riot, that’s what.