Language Log

Charles Lewis wrote to draw my attention to an Op-Ed by Danielle Allen in the Washington Post ("Red-State Army?", 12/19/2008). Allen discusses the social effects of the change to a smaller and all-volunteer military in the U.S. over the past 35 years, from what used to be a larger force mainly made up of draftees. She argues that "the map of military service since 1973 aligns closely with electoral maps distinguishing red from blue states"; and she suggests that this is a bad thing, because

Military institutions across nations and throughout time have always been important creators of culture. They strive to develop unbreakable bonds of solidarity among their members based on shared values, experiences and outlooks.

Her conclusion is that there should be "a new structure for national service" — though she avoids the issue of whether it should be mandatory — in order to "weave a fabric of shared citizenship anew".

I agree with her general position about the value of military service in creating a shared culture. But she gives a prominent role to a linguistic argument that I found unconvincing.

A couple of days ago, I drove up to Los Angeles from my Language Log Plaza basement office in San Diego, for a quick visit with my grad school classmate Ed Keer. Ed lives in Philly (where Mark Liberman's swank executive suite is located), and was in LA on business. I've visited Ed a few times back East since I moved to California, but this is the first time he's come out here — he says his excuse is that he's got a "real" job and "kids" — so I felt it was worth the 5-6 hours of total driving time to have dinner with Ed (and two of his co-workers, as it turned out) and drive him to the airport to catch his red-eye flight back East.

Ed ended up missing his flight, which is why I thought he had announced to the (twittering) world that I am dead to him, but it turns out that he's just upset with me for not posting the latest in his comic series, Pigeontown. "Arnold posts Zippy and Mark posts Zits; why don't you post Pigeontown already?", Ed said to me, apparently while his plane was leaving the gate at LAX. So, in part to get myself back in Ed's good graces (maybe) but also because it happens to have actual linguistics content (about which see below the fold), here's the latest Pigeontown (click image to enlarge):

Due to a scheduled power interruption in the building where our server is located, Language Log will be unavailable between approximately 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. tomorrow, Dec. 20. (That would be 3:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. GMT, if I've done the arithmetic right.)

[Update 12:07 12/20: Or maybe not — in fact, things seemed to go down in the wee hours of the morning, and they're back as now, which is noon, and might be down later. Anyhow, everything seems to be OK…]

Swearing is risky behavior. Many of its implications are out of the speaker's control. Thus, it is advisable to know your audience well before, say, dropping the F-bomb. I think this is basically true in any setting, and I expect it to be even more powerfully felt in situations where swearing is highly transgressive.

The Enron email dataset provides a nice chance to test out these claims. It is large (about 250,000 distinct messages, sent and received by over 11,000 distinct email addresses), and it contains a moderate amount of bad language. Not everyone swears, but a fair number of people do. The topics range widely: fantasy football, faith, energy markets, vacation time (and of course bankruptcy and the FERC). So, with some qualifications that I'll get to, it is a useful testing ground for claims about swearing and risky verbal behavior. The following email network graph is my first stab at conducting such a test:

The latest xkcd:

The mouseover title: "And the ten minutes striking up a conversation with that strange kid in homeroom sometimes matters more than every other part of high school combined."

… now available here.

Those interested in the FCC's defense of our electromagnetic spectrum against taboo language will be following the forthcoming consideration of Chase Utley's remarks on the Phillies' World Series victory, which Chris Potts discussed here and here. (The YouTube video is reposted here, since the copy that Chris linked to was taken down.)

Everyone who's anyone in British higher education knows that today at one minute past midnight the results of the latest Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) were released. And as I believe I have occasionally mentioned here, in the small part of my life that is not devoted to Language Log, I moonlight as Head of Linguistics and English Language (known as LEL) at the University of Edinburgh. So you'll naturally want to know how well we did in the RAE. That's why I'm still up after midnight (Greenwich Mean Time).

Well, you can easily check the published details for yourself now, at the relevant RAE results web page, as soon as their server stops crashing (it was a bit over-excited just after midnight). So it would be silly for me to let my natural innate modesty hold me back. The truth is out there: LEL ranks absolute highest in the UK for the proportion of its work falling in the 4* "world-leading" category. And not only that, but its numbers are so strong that if you compute a sort of absolute volume of world-leading-research by multiplying the number of Edinburgh linguists considered in the exercise (36) by the percentage of their work that was considered world-leading (30%), you get a number (10.8) that cannot be matched even by adding together the figures for any two other departments of linguistics in the United Kingdom.

In the tradition of Woody Allen's "Slang Origins" (chapter 18 of his 1975 collection Without Feathers), John Kenney has written a hilarious op-ed piece for The New York Times ("The Shoe Heard Around the World", published Dec. 16, 2008), which is of course — obliquely but not quite so — about the shoes thrown at George W. Bush during his recent visit to Iraq. I highly recommend Kenney's piece for those LL readers (not so) interested in the origins of words, phrases, and other cultural artifacts, and to anyone who just wants a good laugh.

I'd never heard of Kenney before, but I'm certainly going to keep an eye out for his writings. The top hit in my quick-and-dirty "john kenney writer" Google search was to another, equally hilarious opinion piece, "How Gatsby Got Wild" (published May 3, 2006), about the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism affair discussed the previous month on LL Classic (see this post for links).

This morning's serendipity is the history of gas, which turns out to come from chaos, and to have been coined almost 400 years ago by J. B. Van Helmont in association with another word, blas, that never caught on.

I was curious about a slang use of gas in Edith Nesbit's The Magic City, to mean something like "boastful talk". So I looked it up in the OED, where I was waylaid by the etymology:

[A word invented by the Dutch chemist, J. B. Van Helmont (1577-1644), but avowedly based upon the Gr. χάος (‘halitum illum Gas vocavi, non longe a Chao veterum secretum.’ Ortus Medicinæ, ed. 1652, p. 59a); the Dutch pronunciation of g as a spirant accounts for its being employed to represent Gr. χ; perh. suggested by Paracelsus's use of chaos for the proper element of spirits such as gnomes: see GNOME².

Van Helmont's statement having been overlooked, it has been very commonly supposed that he modelled his word on Du. geest spirit, an idea found at least as early as 1775 (Priestley On Air Introd. 3). Van H. also invented the term BLAS, which has not survived, while gas has been adopted (usually in the same form) in most European languages; the spelling in F. and Pg. is gaz, which was also employed by English writers for a time.]

The famous Jamaican bobsled team is here in British Columbia to train, suitable facilities in Jamaica being somewhat lacking. I was surprised to learn that one of the bobsledders is named Hannukkah Wallace. Not only are few Jamaicans Jewish, but Hanukkah, though a Jewish word, is not normally used as a name. Does anyone know how he got this name?

[Update: I've emended his name to "Hannukkah" in response to Language Hat's comment.]

Clifford Coonan's byline is on The Independent's story about the Max Planck Institute strip-club ad ("Chinese 'classical poem' was brothel ad", 12/9/2008), covered earlier by Victor Mair here at Language Log (Burlesque Matinée at the Max Planck Gesellschaft, 12/4/2008). And Coonan, who seems to be The Independent's regular China correspondent, must be quite well informed about Chinese culture, politics and language.  But given his broad experience in China, and his status as an experienced writer for a major newpaper, I found some things in his article surprising.

Earlier today, someone calling himself (?) Baishui submitted this comment on Victor Mair's post Burlesque Matinée at the Max Planck Gesellschaft:

My comments were deleted twice here. Apparently, someone is offended by me saying 'this incident shows how ignorant the West (and its academics) are of the non-Western world'. What pettiness!

I deleted this comment, just as I had deleted the same individual's first attempt, which consisted only of a one-sentence indictment of Western academics, and the second attempt, which added the accusation of censorship.

In an attempt to maintain a reasonable signal-to-noise ratio in the comments section, I'll continue to be skeptical of comments that lack specific and relevant content. To put this skepticism into context, though, you need to understand something about how comments work in a standard WordPress blog.