Language Log

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.)

Some time ago, we had a discussion on the American Dialect Society mailing list about the Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL). DSL consists of the Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue and the Scottish National Dictionary, together making 22 volumes in print (plus a 2005 supplement). These amazing resources are now available on-line, providing searchable electronic versions of the fruits of scholarship on the Scots language. For free, no strings, available to anyone with web access. (DSL is just part of a larger set of resources, the Scottish Language Dictionaries, or SLD.)

I was astounded, and said so to the list. How was this managed, when parallel resources in English (for instance, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Dictionary of American Regional English, and the Historical Dictionary of American Slang) had scant prospect of getting a similar treatment within the foreseeable future? (The monumental English Dialect Dictionary is apparently being digitized — at the University of Innsbruck!) I exchanged e-mail with DSL staff and discovered just how fragile the whole business was: a subvention from the Scottish Arts Council provided the backbone of the support, and private donors supplied some support, but the enterprise seemed to survive on a phalanx of (unpaid) volunteers (and I suspected that the staff was not very well paid).

I intended to post to Language Log at the time, just to alert people that DSL was available on-line, but the posting fell behind other things and I never got back to it. Now, it turns out, the dictionaries are threatened.

At lunch on Saturday, Paul Armstrong asked me about my ask 'my request'. A mutual friend (Tom Limoncelli, who I'll quote in a moment) had peeved on his blog the day before about this usage, and Paul was somewhat taken aback by Tom's rancor; Paul himself didn't find the usage so bad.

At the time, I didn't recall having heard things like my ask before, though it turns out I had — memory is a VERY tricky thing — but I opined that the noun ask was likely to be venerable, probably going back to Old English. And so it is and does, but the full story is more interesting than a simple survival of a lexical item from a millennium ago.

Yesterday evening, I watched the TF1 reality show (or émission, as the French so appropriately say) Secret Story. My purpose was to revive my knowledge of French, and perhaps to learn a few new words. I was pleased that I could understand most of the dialogue, if not the decor; but one thing that I didn't understand was why a French reality show has an English name.

On my recent trip to Paris, I took time out Wednesday evening to go to the Louvre, which is open until 10 (that's 22h for those unambiguous Europeans) on Wednesdays. My eyes happened to encounter Un jeune homme présenté par Venus (?) aux sept Arts libéraux, which reminded me that one of these lovely young ladies would represent Grammar. Here they are, with Venus (whose question mark is in the Louvre label — that's not my editorial addition¹); I've omitted to photograph the young man.


Since it's clear that the top middle one is Logic (aka Dialectic), with her scorpion, and since Logic is one of the three liberal arts in the Trivium, I assume that one of the women on either side of her is Grammar — let's say the lady to her left holding a scroll.² Here she is in close-up (you can click on this or the above image for a bigger version):


Quite a charming-looking person, perhaps a little shy and young, but not at all offensive, right?

Twice a day, walking between my hotel and Acoustics 2008 at the Palais des Congrès, I pass by the Place des États-Unis, which is four street-segments surrounding a block-long median strip, between Avenue Kléber and Avenue d'Iéna. At one end, appropriately enough, there's a statue of Lafayette shaking hands with Washington. At the other end, also appropriately, there's a memorial to the American volunteers who died while serving in the Légion Étrangère during the first world war. The base of the memorial is inscribed with verses from Alan Seeger's "Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France", as translated into French by Alain Rivoire. For example:

Salut frères, adieu grands morts, deux fois merci. Double à jamais est votre gloire d'être morts pour la France et d'être morts aussi pour l'honneur de notre mémoire.

In the original high-Romantic English this was:

Hail, brothers, and farewell; you are twice blest, brave hearts.
Double your glory is who perished thus,
For you have died for France and vindicated us.

In between, less obviously, there's a ten-foot-high plinth surmounted with a bust of Myron T. Herrick.

Letter to the editor in the New York Times of 27 June (from James Bloom of Bethlehem, Pa.):

Paul Krugman's observations ["Home Not-So-Sweet Home", column of 23 June] about our uncritical bias in favor of home ownership and the widespread attitude toward home renters as second-class citizens calls to mind an exchange I had several years ago while ordering a pizza.

When I told the delivery dispatcher my address, she asked, "Is that an apartment or a home?"

I still don't know what the right answer would have been, though the pizza did arrive.

I was at first baffled by Bloom's bafflement, until I realized he was understanding home to refer one's domicile, the place where one lives, which could be either a house or an apartment (he might also have been assuming — contrary to fact — that apartments are only rented rather than owned, but this isn't clear from his story). The delivery dispatcher, on the other hand, was using home to mean 'house', and was asking whether the delivery was to be made to a residence accessible from the street or whether the deliverer would have to gain access to the interior of the building.

From the 12 June issue of the Bay Area Reporter (all the LGBT news that's fit to print, and more), a fascinating story (with photo) headed "Naked men meet cop". In its entirety:

Two naked men, Rusty Mills, left, and Lloyd Fisher, were walking in front of LGBT Community Center Saturday, June 7 when a San Francisco Police Department cruiser pulled over and Officer Lorenzo Adamson got out. Photographer Jane Cleland captured this exchange:

Adamson: "You can't walk around naked! That's indecent exposure!"

Mills: "It's only 'indecent exposure' if you engage in lewd behavior, and we're not being lewd."

Adamson: "I don't care about all that legal mumbo-jumbo. It's not normal to be walking around naked!"

Mills: "We're supporting World Naked Bicycle Day."

Adamson: "I don't care what you say, it's not healthy and no other police officers would disagree with me. And besides, you don't seem to have any supporters here."

Mills and Fisher were not cited and soon were on their way.

Adamson was clearly affronted. What interests me in this is the shifting grounds that he offers for his objection to the men's nakedness: first, it's against the law; then, it's "not normal"; then, it's "not healthy" (suggesting, I suppose, that exposed naughty bits are a threat to public health); finally, the men have no supporters for it.  But, finding no grounds for issuing a citation (even though rejecting "all that legal mumbo-jumbo", not the best position for a cop to take), he has to let them go on their way.

World Naked Bicycle Day is a genuine event, by the way, and it was indeed on June 7 (which was also the kickoff day at the LGBT Community Center for Pride Month in San Francisco). No bicycles are visible in the photo, nor are any people other than Adamson and the two naked men. (I would have thought there'd be more people on Market Street in the middle of the day.) Also no word about where the men came from or where they went to.

(The photo shows the men from the rear, of course. Naked buttocks don't count as naughty bits.)

This is chapter 2 in the story of APA (Avoid Potential Ambiguity). Here I'm going to look at whether the advice is useful. Suppose you convince J. Doe that some usage is to be avoided because it "could lead to ambiguity". Will Doe's speech and writing now be clearer?

Well, no. (They could even be a little bit harder to understand.)