Language Log

Even though I've been reading that headline on my portal page for 3 days now and know what it's really supposed to be saying, I still can't read it the way they intended. The first sentence of the actual article:

The World Health Organization says your daily sugar intake should be just 5 percent of your total calories — half of what the agency previously recommended, according to new draft guidelines published Wednesday.

Even that sentence doesn't really say they'd be happy with 4 percent, or would previously have been happy with less than 10%. But at least the "just" cancels an otherwise implicit "at least". There's a lot of literature about when numbers are interpreted as "exactly" and when as "at least", and about where exactly those two kinds of interpretations come from. But unless they occur with suitable modifiers or in particular constructions, they are never freely interpreted as "at most". So unless we're supposed to believe that WHO wants everyone to get exactly 5% from sugar, that headline is just wrong, I believe.

No big deal. I just had to say it after three days of suffering in silence.

MSNBC Hardball with Chris Matthews 2/26/2014:

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It's been uh nearly impossible to understate the far right's hatred
of President Obama's health care law.

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That would be the flood of misnegations… John Shinal, "Analysis: Will too many cooks spoil a Microsoft revival?", USA Today 2/14/2014:

Nokia and Microsoft have both been drowned out in a market flood that neither Elop nor anyone at Microsoft, including outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer, has been unable to stem.

 [Tip of the hat to Rick Rubenstein]

Arnold Zwicky shares the sad news that the Berkeley linguist Charles J. "Chuck" Fillmore passed away yesterday. Arnold quotes Amy Dahlstrom's Facebook update:

Charles Fillmore died yesterday at age 84 after a long battle with cancer. A brilliant linguist, especially in the field of lexical semantics, who influenced so many of us Berkeley students and colleagues elsewhere. He was sweet and funny and loving, and deeply devoted to [his wife, Berkeley linguist] Lily Wong Fillmore. The loss of my Doktorvater feels like the loss of a parent.

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The "Say What?" feature on the Doonesbury site quotes this error correction from the New Jersey Star-Ledger newspaper, about the misreporting of something Governor Chris Christie's chief spokesman Michael Drewniak said:

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated Drewniak referred to the Port Authority's executive director as a 'piece of crap.' While Drewniak did call him a 'piece of excrement,' it was David Wildstein who referred to the executive director as a 'piece of crap.'

What do we learn from this? (Remember, this is Language Log, not New Jersey Politics Log.)

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"Woody Allen Speaks Out", NYT 2/7/2014:

Not that I doubt Dylan hasn’t come to believe she’s been molested, but if from the age of 7 a vulnerable child is taught by a strong mother to hate her father because he is a monster who abused her, is it so inconceivable that after many years of this indoctrination the image of me Mia wanted to establish had taken root?

As usual, it's hard to keep score, but there might be an extra negative in that first clause.

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From reader GW:

If a misnegation contains conflicting indicators of polarity, what is an expression that contains conflicting indicators of intensity?

I’ve been noticing expressions containing the ngram “by far one of the” followed by a superlative. COCA has twelve of them. A typical example is “I mean, it was by far one of the best nights of my life.” Such expressions seem odd to me. Imagine the goodness of someone’s nights plotted on a vertical axis. “By far the best night” would be a lone outlier at the top. “One of the best nights” would lie in a small cluster of outliers, but it wouldn’t be the topmost; if it were, it should simply be called “the best.” (Is that Grice’s Maxim of Quantity?) I can’t visualize where to plot “by far one of the best nights.”

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"Reason For Optimism? Two Sides Talking On Debt Ceiling", NPR Morning Edition, 10/11/2013:

STEVE INSKEEP: What prompted Republicans to change course?

MARA LIASSON: They were losing. They were just getting battered politically. And here's a pretty good example of what was happening to the Republican political position. This is a new Wall Street Journal-NBC poll. By a 22 point margin the public thinks the Republican Party is more to blame for the shutdown than President Obama. That's a bigger margin of blame than the Republicans received during the last shutdown in 1995. The Republican Party is now at record low levels of unpopularity. Only 24 percent of people have a favorable opinion of the Republican Party. The Democrats aren't doing much better, but at least they have a 39 percent favorable rating and they're not dropping like the Republicans. And here's the other thing. The president's approval rating actually went up in this poll.

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The mess in Washington is providing plenty of opportunities for misnegation. Today, John Bresnahan at Politico got tangled up in budging and cut loose with a classic — "Bad blood: Four feuding leaders":

But the personal animus extends beyond the leaders. Along with their bosses, aides to Boehner and Reid are in an undeclared war and neither is refusing to budge an inch.

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A recent statement to the Washington Examiner about the U.S. government shutdown, by Representative Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., has been widely reported:

“We’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

Senate Democrats featured the quote on a display outside their press conference. This is an indication of how Rep. Stuzman's words were generally received, and helps explain why he quickly released a statement walking the quote back:

"Yesterday, I carelessly misrepresented the ongoing budget debate and Speaker Boehner’s work on behalf of the American people. Despite my remarks it’s clear that the American people want both parties to come to the table to reopen the government, tackle this nation’s debt crisis, and stop ObamaCare’s pain."

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"Welcome at Cologne Airport," said the co-pilot of my flight as we taxied in to the gate and my current visit to Germany began. And of course what he said is ungrammatical.

"Arrived safely at Cologne Airport," said my email to my partner a few minutes later; and of course what I wrote is grammatical.

Aren't languages unfair?

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Professor Pauline Jacobson of Brown University asks Language Log whether Dana Bash, CNN's chief congressional correspondent, is saying the government will shut down or that it won't. Language Log likes to go back to primary sources, so here is a verified direct quotation from Ms. Bash on this topic that appeared on the website of Fox6Now.com in Milwaukee:

"I've not talked to anybody here who doesn't think it's a very, very big possibility, even Republicans, that the government won't shut down — even for a short time," Bash said.

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J. Eric Butler wrote:

As an academic in a humanities discipline, I read a lot of formal prose concerning historical subjects. I often come across the English future perfect in these contexts, which strikes me as odd, albeit easy enough to understand. So I usually just barely register it and then move on. But at some point it occurred to me that I have no idea what motivates this usage, so I thought LL would probably have some insight.

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This is something that you don't see every day. It works pretty well in this case, considering… David Kirkpatrick, Ben Hubbard and Alan Cowell, "Army Ousts Egypt’s President", NYT 7/3/2013:

The general, who had issued a 48-hour ultimatum to Mr. Morsi on Monday to respond to what he called widespread anger over his administration’s troubled one-year-old tenure, said the president’s defiant response in a televised address on Tuesday had failed “to meet the demands of the masses of the people.”

From reader V.D.:

Justice Kennedy got himself tangled in a quasi-double negative in today's DOMA decision:

Windsor suffered a redressable injury when she was required to pay a tax from which, in her view, she was exempt but for the alleged invalidity of § 3 of DOMA.

Either "but for" or "invalidity" is wrong.  If DOMA is invalid, she is exempt from the tax.

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