Language Log

Until today, I had never heard of "Dry January".  I learned about it this morning from an article in The Harvard Gazette:  "How to think about not drinking:  For starters, treat Dry January as an experiment, not a punishment, addiction specialist says."  

Remember Prohibition (in history; in the United States)?  It didn't work, did it?

Swarthmore, Pennsylvania was decidedly a dry town when I moved here half a century ago, but then a different sort of people than Quakers started to move in, until now the borough is decidedly wet.

I'm spending a couple of days at BioTechX2025, which is in Philadelphia this year. And one of the exhibitors is giving away Karst Stone Paper Notebooks, which have a wrapper telling us that

Charles B. writes:

Apparently, birds are not considered wild animals by law. Reference here, where apparently feeding them in parks in permitted except if they are red masked parakeets:

SEC. 486. FEEDING BIRDS AND WILD ANIMALS PROHIBITED.
It shall be unlawful for any person to feed or offer food to any bird or wild animal in or on any sidewalk, street or highway of the City and County of San Francisco. It shall be unlawful to feed or offer food to any Red Masked Parakeet in any park of the City and County of San Francisco.
(Added by Ord. 268-64, App. 10/2/64; Ord. 133-07, File No. 070467, App. 6/15/2007)

[This is a guest post by Barbara Phillips Long]

There is an interesting sidelight in commentary about an article in the New York Review of Books, which posits that the U.S. is two nations under one government, where the two entities exchange political power. The link to the NYRB (paywalled) article is here.

"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