Language Log

"Why the president must not be lexicographer-in-chief", The Economist 5/30/2025:

ON MAY 28TH a specialist American court for international trade struck down many of Donald Trump’s tariffs. It did so on several legal grounds, including linguistic ones. As in so many cases, the two sides in the case presented different views on what several words mean. The next day another court temporarily stayed the decision. The tariffs remain in effect but the legal question remains.

Many of the tariffs rest on a law Congress passed in 1977, giving the president the authority to “regulate” aspects of American trade “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat”. The first court found that “regulate” did not include the power to impose tariffs. Tariffs are not mentioned anywhere in the relevant parts of the law. The Trump administration naturally disagreed. Under such a view “regulate” would mean what the president says it does, a worrisome precedent. […]

Reconsider “any unusual and extraordinary threat”. The “and” makes clear that both tests of “unusual” and “extraordinary” must be met. Are America’s trade deficits either? They are not: America last ran a trade surplus in goods when Led Zeppelin were at the height of their powers, in 1973. The worst years for the trade balance, as a share of GDP, were in the middle of the George W. Bush administration, two decades ago; the deficit has shrunk as a share of the economy since.

Trump’s favorite verbal tic is now 1,000 pages of legislation
He keeps using that word. I do not think it means what he thinks it means.
Monica Hesse, WP (5/29/25)

Everybody has what I call a kǒutóuchán 口頭禪 (lit., "oral zen", i.e., "favorite expression", kind of like a mantra).  Mine, in Nepali, is "bāphre bāph!"; Pinkie Wu's, in Cantonese, is "wah!"; a Harvard historian I know loves to say "precisely!"; and so forth and so on.  President Trump's is "beautiful".

Paul Krugman, "Is There a Dignified Legal Way, Preferably in Latin, to say 'Holy Shit'?", 5/28/2025:

A court just threw out Trump's whole trade agenda.

It will take me a while to digest this […]

Some more coherent thoughts in the morning, after a gallon or so of coffee.

John Brewer writes:

Today's majority opinion by Justice Gorsuch in Bondi v. Vanderstok cites (on its page 10 of the opinion, which is the 13th page of the linked pdf) "S. Grimm & B. Levin, Artifact Nouns: Reference and Countability, in 2 Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 47) 55 (2017)."  That's a pretty unusual sort of citation to see in a judicial opinion, in my experience.

He also drops a footnote mentioning the amicus brief filed by various "Professors and Scholars of Linguistics and Law," which in turn cites authorities ranging from the SCOTUS-friendly (Scalia & Garner) to the perhaps less-known-in-those-circles Huddleston & Pullum.

Is Taishanese Cantonese?

Legally, in Canada, no.

[Preface:  This is one of the eeriest posts I've ever written, where thoughts I had about a student two decades ago while I was teaching her in my classes at Penn have become reality today, in a conspicuous, public way.  The realization of mental projection into the future.]

The material for this post came to me by a curious path.  From Bruce Rusk:

My father is a retired journalist in Toronto and one of his hobbies is tracking Ontario appeal court decisions. He came across a case that is of potential relevance to those interested in the status of Sinitic languages and the nature of fangyan. I thought that you (and perhaps Language Log readers) would find it interesting.

Because it was about Sinitic languages and fangyan ("topolects"), I was moderately interested, but because the written decision, like most judicial documents, was long and tediously detailed, I thought I'd just skim through it quickly.

The implications of this case are enormous, so I will quote extensively from the following account, while noting there are many paragraphs with important content that I have merely mentioned or summarized.  Those who are seriously interested in whether this decision constitutes compelling precedent for future jurisprudence should read the whole account.  Those who are themselves responsible for making such decisions in the courts may wish to take a look at the original Case Citation: Achter Land & Cattle Ltd. v South West Terminal Ltd., 2024 SKCA 115.

"Thumbs-Up Emoji Formed Binding Sales Contract in Canada–Achter v. South West Terminal", by Eric Goldman, Technology & Marketing Law Blog (December 20, 2024)

"Australian man claiming language mix-up jailed over Tokyo break-in", By Himari Semans, The Japan Times (10/18/24)

The behavior of the defendant was so peculiar that, even if he was not intending to rob or injure the old man into whose house he broke, he deserves the 240 days detention plus 490 days for a total of two years jail time to which he was sentenced today.

The report repeatedly mentioned that the defendant smelled "gasoline".  I wonder if what he was really trying to say was that he smelled "gas".

"gasu ガス" ("gas")

"gasorin ガソリン" ("gasoline")

"The Best New Book Written Entirely in Latin You’ll Try to Read This Year:  Why Donatien Grau, an adviser at the Louvre, decided to write 'De Civitate Angelorum,' a book about Los Angeles, the Roman way."  By Fergus McIntosh, New Yorker (September 16, 2024)

Since even elite schools like Penn and Princeton no longer have a language requirement in their Classics departments, I doubt that many people, other than a few extraordinarily conscientious lawyers and biological taxonomists, will understand much of what Grau has written.  Still, it's an interesting experiment to see how much of his book fluent speakers of French, Spanish, and Italian comprehend.

The PRC does have a word for "citizen", namely, "guómín 國民" (lit., "person of a country"), but it is a bit more problematic to find a Chinese word equivalent to the abstract concept of "citizenship".  If we mean by "citizenship", "the status / condition of being a citizen of a certain country", the legal term "guójí 國籍", which signifies the country in / to which an individual enjoys certain rights, duties, and privileges, will suffice.  If, however, we are searching for a term that conveys the notion of "a person's conduct as a citizen" (Collins) or "the character of an individual viewed as a member of society" (Random House), it is difficult to find a comparable Chinese term.

It is interesting that PRC citizenship in the latter respect is defined pretty much in terms of its absence

Matthew Erskine, "The Meaning of Conservative: Lessons from the Valparaiso University Dispute", Forbes 7/25/2024:

Valparaiso University is seeking to sell three valuable paintings, including a Georgia O'Keeffe, to fund renovations for freshman dormitories. The university argues that two of the paintings, purchased with funds from a 1953 donation by Percy Sloan, do not meet the donor's stipulation for "conservative" art. The donation specified that the funds be used to acquire "conservative" American art, which the university claims does not include modernist works like O'Keeffe's "Rust Red Hills" and Childe Hassam's "The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate."

"Mandarin Leaves a Manhattan Courtroom Lost in Translation:  Trial of Guo Wengui shows how linguistic issues can trip up China-related cases", by James T. Areddy, WSJ (6/18/24)

———

The New York trial of a Chinese businessman is Exhibit A for how language issues are gumming up federal prosecutions of Mandarin-speaking defendants.

Nearly everyone in the lower Manhattan courtroom appears frustrated by a halting process that requires translation of Chinese-language videos, documents and witness testimony.

It is one in a series of high-profile China-linked cases that are similarly getting lost in translation. Chinese-language evidence is piling up, unintelligible to attorneys. Translations are slow, and sometimes wrong. There is a limited pool of top-tier Mandarin court interpreters, and they can disagree on English translations. And for both sides in a trial, the work of interpreters provides ammunition for legal wrangling, from gamesmanship to courtroom objections and possible appeals.

Jonathan Weinberg sent in a link to this article — Molly Redden, "How A Luxury Trip For Trump Judges Doomed The Federal Mask Mandate", Huffington Post 6/3/2024:

Buried in the April 2022 ruling that struck down the Biden administration’s mask mandate was a section that was unusual for a court decision.

The outcome itself was far from surprising. Places all over the country were dropping local mask requirements, and the judge hearing this case — a challenge to the federal mandate to mask on planes and other public transportation — was a conservative Trump appointee, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle for the Middle District of Florida. Mizelle ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s mask requirement overstepped the agency’s legal authority.

What was eye-catching was her explanation of why. In her ruling, Mizelle wrote she had consulted the Corpus of Historical American English, an academic search engine that returns examples of how words and phrases are used in select historical texts. Mizelle searched “sanitation,” a crucial word in the 1944 statute that authorizes the CDC to issue disease-prevention rules, and found it generally was used to describe the act of making something clean. “Wearing a mask,” she wrote, “cleans nothing.”

Searching large linguistic databases is a relatively new approach to judicial analysis called legal corpus linguistics. Although it has gained in popularity over the last decade, it is barely discussed outside of an enthusiastic group of right-wing conservative legal scholars. Which raises the question: How did this niche concept wind up driving such a consequential decision in the country’s health policy?

Kevin Newsom serves as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit (of which there are a total of 13 across the country; since they are the next level below the Supreme Court, their practices and opinions are of great importance).

Judge Suggests Courts Should Consider Using "AI-Powered Large Language Models" in Interpreting "Ordinary Meaning", Eugene Volokh, The Volokh Conspiracy | 5.30.2024

That's from Judge Kevin Newsom's concurrence yesterday in Snell v. United Specialty Ins. Co.; the opinion is quite detailed and thoughtful, so people interested in the subject should read the whole thing. Here, though, is the introduction and the conclusion: