Language Log

The Organization of the Islamic Conference renamed itself "The Organization of the Islamic Cooperation" on June 28th at its meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan according to this press release. As I write, the English version of their web site reflects the new name, but the French version does not, although the French version of the press release gives it the same name in French: "Organisation de la Coopération islamique".

R. Luke Dubois, "The first computer musician", NYT 6/9/2011:

If the difference between 1911 and 2011 is electricity and computation, then Max Mathews is one of the five most important musicians of the 20th Century. – Miller Puckette

It isn't exactly linguistics, but on the theory that some of our readers are interested in acoustics, here is what is reported to be the first video of the shock wave generated by a trombone. It is pretty faint so I suggest going to full screen.

Catherine Saint Louis, "Dessert, Laid-Back and Legal", NYT 5/14/2011:

Remember melatonin? In the 1990s, this over-the-counter dietary supplement was all the rage among frequent fliers, promoted as the miracle cure for jet lag. Now it is back in vogue, this time as a prominent ingredient in at least a half-dozen baked goods that flagrantly mimic the soothing effects of hash brownies — and do so legally. At least for now. […]

“A hangover effect has been reported” with large doses, said Anna Rouse Dulaney, a toxicologist with the Carolinas Poison Center. But she added, “I don’t want to go on the record saying this drug ‘can’ cause respiratory issues, that should be a ‘may.’ ”

Over at the Poetry Foundation's blog, poet D. A. Powell comments about time in Mandarin:

DA Powell:  Every sentence written in English contains some anxiety about time. I’d love to write a poem that was Time-Free. Is that possible?

ME [Rachel Zucker]: Why? Is this particular to English?

DA: I don’t think English is necessarily the only language in which time is embedded in the verbs. But I know that in Mandarin it’s easy to make a sentence that doesn’t tell you at what time things happened. And I wish that were possible in English. A sentence in English begins and ends; it has direction; it carries you, relentlessly, toward a period, a place of death. It’s why I avoided sentences for so long in my poems–because I didn’t want to feel like I was living out a sentence.

In "Roll out of here, Mubarak," I pointed out that gǔndàn 滾蛋 ("roll out of here like an egg") is highly insulting and indicated that I would write a separate post on the semantics of the invective usage of dàn 蛋 ("egg").  This is an early fulfillment of that promise.

I've always found gǔndàn 滾蛋 ("to roll [away] like an egg") to be a most curious expression. I've even heard people say Gǔn nǐ de dàn 滾你的蛋 ("roll your egg[s] out of here!!").  Of course, I know that gǔndàn 滾蛋 means something like "Get the hell out!", but I'm not quite sure what the egg imagery in this expression is all about.  I suspect that it may be related to wángbā dàn 王八蛋 [lit. "turtle's egg"] ／ wàng bà dàn 忘爸蛋 [lit., "egg that forgot its father"] ("bastard; son of a bitch").

David Moser has sent in another example for what he calls our xiaobian 小便 ("lesser convenience") collection:

The sign says: Xiǎobiàn bùshì rén 小便不是人. A literal translation would be "Urination is not a person." Since that doesn't make sense, we might reinterpret the sign as "Urination is not human." But that doesn't make sense either, since we all have to urinate at regular intervals: what could be more human?

(This post first appeared on 12/30/2004 under the heading "And a Right Guid Willie Waught to You, Too, Pal.")

We like the incantations we recite on ritual occasions to be linguistically opaque, from the unparsable "Star-Spangled Banner" (not many people can tell you what the object of watch is in the first verse) to the Pledge of Allegiance, with its orotund diction and its vague (and historically misanalyzed) "under God." But for sheer unfathomability, "Auld Lang Syne" is in a class by itself. Not that anybody can sing any of it beyond the first verse and the chorus, before the lyrics descend inscrutably into gowans, pint-stowps, willie-waughts and other items that would already have sounded pretty retro to Burns's contemporaries.

A painfully sad health story in today's news media. For some time now there have been suspicions that isotretinoin (= Roaccutane = Accutane = Amnesteem = Claravis = Clarus = Decutan — drugs have more names than the devil) tended to increase the risk of depression and suicide in its users. But it wasn't the drug. It was the acute acne (and of course the social consequences thereof). For once the familiar cliché is reversed: it turns out the disease was worse than the cure.

Donald G. McNeil, Jr., "New Lines of Attack in H.I.V. Prevention", NYT Science Times today:

Because 95 percent of gay men and 40 percent of heterosexual American women have had anal sex at least once during their lifetimes, according to surveys, rectal versions of the [microbocidal] gel are being developed.

Where to start?

Yesterday, a Beijing cabdriver made the following remark to David Moser, who reported it to me:

"A? Ni 50 sui le?  Zao zhidao wo jiu hui 'nin' ni le."

"啊？你50岁了？ 早知道我就会 ‘您’ 你了。“

"Ah?  You're 50 years old?  If I had known I would have 'nin'ed you."

Yesterday, I received this e-mail from a Chinese scholar in the PRC:

I'm very sorry that fax machine can’t receive your fax because of mishandled by pen pusher.

My goodness! How does he know such a colloquial expression as "pen pusher"?

When I asked that question of some friends, Brendan O'Kane wrote back:  "Online dictionaries are responsible for the occasional hypercolloquialism — http://www.nciku.com/search/en/detail/pen+pusher/1300456 . What I want to know is whether an analogous Chinese-Spanish dictionary will give 'cagatintas'."

The Language Log — well, Mark Liberman — tradition of recognizing international Talk Like a Pirate Day (19 September) by posting the Corsair Ergonomic Keyboard for Pirates along with digressions into other matters piratical came to a end in 2008, in a posting with links to earlier celebrations:

In TLAPD posts from earlier years, you can find instructions for the more difficult task of talking (as opposed to typing) like a pirate; the history of piratical r-fulness; and other goodies: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007.

There's actually some serious historical linguistics (and cultural history) involved here, as discussed in "R!?", 9/19/2005, and "Pirate R as in I-R-ELAND", 9/20/2006. And even a bit of mathematical linguistics.

This year I have a reason for returning to the pirate ship (though I'm a bit late in getting around to it): the delightful children's book Seadogs: An Epic Ocean Operetta ("composed by Lisa Wheeler, staged by Mark Siegel" and published in 2004 in hardback, in 2006 by Aladdin Paperbacks), which is at the moment my grand-daughter Opal's very favorite book in the whole world.