Language Log

Every so often we post here about baffling headlines — baffling to readers who don't have the real-world knowledge needed to interpret them. Most recently, Geoff Pullum posted about

Detective attacks jailed canoe wife who lied to sons

(which he used as a springboard for a discussion of noun-noun compounds like canoe wife). Today's delight (from Bruce Webster, who came across it on Dave Barry's blog) is

All Blacks lock rubbishes Wallabies poor form line

Without some context, this is impenetrable — unless you something about rugby (especially in the southern hempishere) and some British slang. It's significant that the headline comes from a New Zealand rugby site. And that All Blacks and Wallabies are capitalized; they refer to rugby teams (the All Blacks are the national team of New Zealand, and the Wallabies of Australia). So lock is not a verb, but a noun referring to a rugby position and the person playing it. And so on.

The slang is the verb rubbish, which means 'criticize severely and reject as worthless' (NOAD2) in British English and varieties influenced by British English (including at least Australian, New Zealand, South African, and Indian English).

(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)

Our recent adventures with the vaporware/demoware SpinSpotter (here and here), which purports to detect passages of untrustworthy spin, reminded me of last month's software delight, apostrophree, which, it was said, automatically and silently

corrects common errors of spelling, punctuation, grammar, and usage in blogs and especially comments and discussion forms.

(this from a Typical Programmer interview with apostrophree's founder John Scogan).

Mary Ellen Ryder, who taught English and linguistics at Boise State University (in Boise, Idaho) for roughly twenty years, died in a wildfire that consumed her house on Monday (two days ago). The news was reported in local newspapers yesterday and made it to the New York Times (National Briefing, p. A19) today; google on her name to get a variety of reports and an outpouring of grief from people at Boise State.

Mary Ellen investigated English morphology, arguing in several papers that both noun-noun compounding (the topic of her 1990 UCSD doctoral dissertation) and nominalizations in -er are multi-functional, with interpretations crucially dependent on context and background knowledge (along the lines of some recent postings here on Language Log). She was enormously enthusiastic, both in her public papers and in her teaching. Only 56, and a horrible death.

This just hit me in a blog my son Morriss just sent me a link to:

"I was going to post this as a comment there, but it’s rather long so I’ll just trackback it. "

My first reaction: no, it has to be "I'll just track it back".

Christine Ohuruogu, who Benjamin Zimmer described as "the world's fastest linguist", just won a gold in the Olympics 400m final, hence becoming the first British woman with a linguistics degree to win Olympic gold at this distance. Or any other, we assume. Ohuruogu commented "Take the word 'shit'. Does it mean a pile of faeces, or something is rubbish?" But that was a while ago. This is a great day for the linguistics of taboo vocabulary!

The Christian Science Monitor reports that the Army is so badly in need of Arabic interpreters ("linguists" in military-speak) that it is considering paying retention bonuses of as much as $150,000, on a par with what they pay members of the Special Forces. It's good to see some appreciation for language skills. Of course, the shortage would not be as great if they didn't keep firing interpreters who are gay.

Yesterday on WHYY's Radio Times, Marty Moss-Coane interviewed Victor Mair about his translation of The Art of War. You can listen to the interview here. (I've created a new URI for the interview, because the one in their archive for the interview has a bad time offset, and starts you off about 8 minutes in.)

A graph of the current Google hit counts for "N minutes", 2 ≤ N ≤ 66, expressed as a proportion of the total hits for all 65 searches, looks like this:

(As usual, click on the image for a larger version.)

Yesterday's NYT had a piece on Eliot Spitzer's e-mail while governor of New York: "Governor's Angry Moods Pour Forth in E-Mails", by Jeremy W. Peters (p. A17):

On e-mail he was "Laurence," [his middle name] a sloppy typist who often dashed off messages in fits, riddling them with typos, misspellings and terse abbreviations.

A sample of his on-line style, as printed in the Times:

"Why has the state pty not out out a full list if bruno fundraising and 1199 support for him etc as a way to respond to the fundraising bs?"

(The reference was to a Spitzer campaign to tarnish the reputation of Joseph L. Bruno, then the State Senate majority leader, in retaliation for attacks on Spitzer by Bruno.)

A few comments on his e-mail style…

I'm something of a fan of books that correct misinformation — about facts in general, about famous quotations, about medical matters, and so on. Among my latest acquisitions is John Lloyd and John Mitchinson's The Book of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong (2006) (with a foreword by Stephen Fry — yes, THAT Stephen Fry), a compendium of 230 misperceptions originally collected for the BBC panel game QI (Quite Interesting). As far as I can tell, it's pretty good (see some reservations below), but it has one serious defect: very few sources or references are given for the claims in the book. Lloyd and Mitchinson mostly just tell us what's so, and there's no way for us to check up on what they say. They do a good job on the Eskimo words for snow (p. 120), but how is the reader to know that what they claim (against "common knowledge") is right?

I've complained about such lack of scholarship at the low end of the literature on word and phrase origins, in particular Albert Jack's appalling Red Herrings and White Elephants (which I trashed here). But it's startling to see it in a book that purports to be authoritative.  And other recent misinformation-correcting books do considerably better: see Anahad O'Connor's Never Shower in a Thunderstorm ("surprising facts and misleading myths about our health and the world we live in") from 2007 and Nancy L. Snyderman's Medical Myths That Can Kill You ("and the 101 truths that will save, extend and improve your life"), published this year.

Now I'll turn to the coverage of language-related questions in The Book of General Ignorance.

Just a pointer to Dennis Baron's report on his Web of Language that

Manuel Castillo, a California trucker with twenty years experience, was stopped and ticketed [the maximum $500] by an Alabama state trooper for failure to speak English well enough.

… Castillo paid the ticket – tickets are part of the cost of doing business for a trucker – and drove on home.

Then there's the question of why Castillo was stopped in the first place. Baron notes that

17% of the nation’s truck drivers, and 11% of its bus drivers, are Hispanic, and authorities gave them 25,230 tickets for insufficient English last year. While government officials insist that they’re not waging a campaign against Mexican truck drivers, these numbers suggest a concerted effort by the Department of Transportation to criminalize driving while Spanish. 

To reinforce this message, the DOT pamphlet on the offense of insufficient English, with a picture of a happy Hispanic posing in front of a big rig, clearly suggests that the department’s English-only policy has quite a lot to do with “a person’s national origin.”

More details on Baron's blog (and comments are enabled there).

It's a very small point, but it annoys me, this fanaticism on Wikipedia for providing links to every mentioned entity that has a Wikipedia entry of its own. My own Wikipedia page is just a stub of five short sentences, but it has ten links, to:

linguistics, Stanford University, Distinguished University Professor, Ohio State University, Morris Halle, MIT, Edward Sapir, Linguistic Society of America, UIUC, Language Log

(plus an external link to my homepage and a "see also" link to Recency Illusion).

The problem is that these links are visually obtrusive. They scream. And they point you to webpages that you probably don't want to see (because they don't really provide any useful background information about me) and could in any case be accessed by a simple search on an obvious phrase in the text.

Link fanaticism is not some accident. As I discovered some time ago, it is PRESCRIBED Wikipedia style. There are people who view any unlinked reference as a FAULT, and edit pages to insert the (I'm sorry to say this) missing links. What the editors are after is perfect consistency and uniformity. But the point of links is that they should be useful and helpful — which means that the writer of an entry needs to take the readers' likely knowledge and interests into account and use JUDGMENT in inserting links. Skillful linking is, in a way, like the skillful deployment of anaphors in writing or speech.

Each year the United Nations declares that the next year will be an International Year of X, for several Xs; 2008 is the UN Year of Sanitation, the Reef, Planet Earth, the Potato, and… Languages. Heidi Harley reported on Language Log, in May 2007, on the UN declaration of IYL, but we haven't taken up the question of what you might DO for the occasion. (Heidi's posting was mainly taken up with the split focus of the official statements about the occasion — lauding multilingualism and linguistic diversity; and also urging that endangered and minority languages be protected and preserved.*)

Now, in a letter in the most recent issue (June 2008) of Language, David Crystal exhorts members of the Linguistic Society of America to find ways to promote IYL (even though it's more than half over). (Crystal's letter is an abridged version of a paper available here.)