Language Log

Virtually zero linguistic content in this story (unless you count the tie between language and other aspects of presentation of self), though it's an ACADEMIC story, and the Language Loggers all have academic associations (we're in the academy or in associated technological fields or participate in the Industry of the Intellect in some other way).

(If you feel cheated by this failure to follow the Language Log charter, as you understand it, then apply for a refund of your fees — we guarantee full money back — by submitting the relevant forms to our local planning department, on Alpha Centauri.)

On to the story, from the NYT Magazine of Sunday 21 September, where the Style section (pp. 88-91) is a fashion spread ("Class Acts") featuring professors. On-line slide show here.

David Crystal laments on his blog:

it's going to be difficult to dispel the urban myths about texting. Here’s an example of the problem. Txtng came out on 5th July. On the 6th there was a report in Scotland on Sunday headed ‘Professor spreads the word on joy of text’. That sounds good, and the report did summarize quite well the six main points …

At the end, the reporter asked for a reaction from the Headteachers’ Association of Scotland. This is what the spokesman said: ‘Because of the rate in which text-speak is taking hold I shudder to think what letters will look like in 10 years’ time.’

The spokesman obviously hadn’t paid any attention at all to the report.

Not an uncommon scenario. An expert — someone with detailed knowledge in some domain and with evidence bearing on a question in that domain — speaks authoritatively on that question. Some members of the public who have an opinion on the question then simply disregard the expert's testimony. What's going on here?

Over on the American Dialect Society mailing list, we've returned to the topic of illeism, the use of third-person expressions to refer to oneself (treated on Language Log last year), in particular, illeism in speech to or from young children, as in:

[mother to child] Mommy has to go now.

[from child named Kim] Can Kim have ice cream?

As Larry Horn noted, such illeism seems to be a way of coping with the difficulty that young language-learners have with first- and second-person pronouns, which famously are "shifters", with reference that shifts from context to context. Ordinary proper names (like Kim) and kin-terms used as proper names (like Mommy) have a reference that doesn't depend on context the way the reference of first- and second-person pronouns does. Horn recollected:

I recall a Sesame Street episode when our own children were at the appropriate tender age that attempted to "teach", or at least play on, such issues involving the proper use of "I"/"you", "my"/"your", etc.

Carrying the Sesame Street theme in a different direction, I added that Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky reported to me some time ago that toddlers' use of their names for self-reference comes up repeatedly on parenting discussion sites, usually in the context of blaming Elmo for it. Elmo refers to himself as "Elmo", and parents reason that their kids picked up their illeism from Elmo. Where else could it have come from?

There's a suppressed premise in that reasoning, and when it's exposed we can see that this way of looking at things is pretty much backwards. And that it ties in with other widespread beliefs about what happens in child language acquisition.

Because I seldom listen to the news on the radio or watch it on TV, most of what I know about happenings in the world is gleaned from print media:  books, magazines, papers, and so forth.  Consequently, I occasionally adopt a "reading pronunciation" for the name of a person or place that is at variance with the actual spoken pronunciation of the name.  Such is the case with a place name that is currently prominent in the news:  Ossetia.  In my mind, and even when speaking to others, I have been blithely and happily saying Os-sĕ-ti-a.  After all, I thought to myself, the people who live there are Os-set(e)s, and their language is Os-sĕt-ic or, so I thought, Os-sĕ-ti-an.

From the LiveJournal of lord_whimsy, a social report, with amateur dialectology. The setting:

Last week, the Missus and I attended Interview's relaunch party, held on the top floor of the partially-completed Standard New York, a retro-brutalist sort of structure which towers on tall stilts over the Meatpacking District.

and now the observation:

we followed the gaggle of impossibly tall, thin models and sundry gay boys through the construction site to the elevators, whose walls were still bare plywood. We literally came up to the waist of some of these striking extraterrestrials. I calculated the lisp per capita ratio in the elevator to be an astounding 3:1, which had a similar aural effect as a swarm of summer locusts. My ears literally hurt from the insectoid crispness of the diction being volleyed overhead. I've long suspected that there's a third dimension to regional dialects: not just geographical, but vertical. Someone should do a linguistic field study of New York elevators that lead to media offices: A much overlooked micro-dialect is thriving in elevator shafts all over Midtown Manhattan. 

Some of this — in particular, the hyperbolic "my ears literally hurt from the insectoid crispness" — is just routine disdain for the gay voice (similar to the intense disdain many people freely express about the speech of young women, various social and geographical dialects, and so on). But there's a small chance that lord_whimsy was on to something about the vertical dimension in this particular case.

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.)