Language Log

Stephen Mouritsen, "Hard Cases and Hard Data: Assessing Corpus Linguistics as an Empirical Path to Plain Meaning", Columbia Science & Technology Law Review, 2/25/2012:

The Plain Meaning Rule is often assailed on the grounds that it is unprincipled—that it substitutes for careful analysis an interpreter’s ad hoc and impressionistic intuition about the meaning of legal texts. But what if judges and lawyers had the means to test their intuitions about plain meaning systematically? Then initial linguistic impressions about the meaning of a legal text might be viewed as hypotheses to be tested, rather than determinative criteria upon which to base important decisions.

Christopher Shea, "No Safe Harbor From Judge Posner’s Linguistic Googling", Wall Street Journal 3/1/2012:

From March 2006 to October 2006, an Illinois woman named Deanna Costello let her boyfriend live with her — a man she knew was in the country illegally.

The boyfriend was eventually convicted on drug charges, and Costello was convicted of “harboring” an illegal immigrant.

In a decision that overturned the conviction […] Judge Posner argued that prosecutors and the district court had stretched the meaning of the world “harbored” past the breaking point. And the esteemed judge and legal scholar turned to Google for some supporting evidence for his linguistic intuition.

Just a quick pointer to this fun post by Toma Tasovac, which discusses the removal of a term from WordNet, the best known and most widely used lexical database for English. Apparently DuPont, the huge chemical company, expressed displeasure about the entry for Teflon (oops, I mean Teflon^TM), which did not indicate its status as a registered trademark.

Christiane Fellbaum's mail to the WN-USERS mailing list indicates that, although DuPont had not yet actually requested removing the term, the WordNet folks "settled" by offering to do so as "the simplest solution". Tasovac suggests to DuPont that they follow up this clear success by following his generously contributed outline for setting up a Division for Lexicography, Trademark Enforcement and World Domination. He concludes, "I have three more killer tips for how to rule the world by means of lexicographic black magic, but they are patented and trademarked. I am willing to discuss business propositions with DuPont representatives in strictest confidence."

After teenager Casey-Lyanne Kearney was found dying in a park in the northern England town of Doncaster yesterday, 26-year-old Hannah Bonser was arrested and charged with murder; but according to various news sources (e.g., Sky News and The Telegraph) she was also "charged with two counts of possessing a bladed item." Why would anyone use such a strange and deliberately vague technical description of a knife?

Three linguistic offenses in the UK to report on this week: an injudicious noun choice, a highly illegal false assertion, and an obscene racist epithet. The latter two have led to criminal charges.

Joran van der Sloot, the leading suspect in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway in Aruba in 2005, was arrested in Peru in 2010 and charged with the murder of Stephany Tatiana Flores Ramírez in Lima. According to news reports, the reason that he has not yet come to trial is that there are no certified Spanish-Dutch interpreters in Peru.

Johanna Decorse, "Case of anti-white racism on trial in France", AP 12/14/2011:

TOULOUSE, France—As protesters massed outside, the spokeswoman for a movement representing immigrants from France's former colonies went on trial Wednesday for allegedly insulting white French in what may be the first anti-white racism case in France.

The verdict, expected Jan. 25, may turn on a hyphen.

The trial grew out of a legal complaint from a far-right group, the General Alliance Against Racism and Respect for French and Christian Identity, Agrif, against Houria Bouteldja for using a word she invented to refer to white French that she claims was misconstrued. She was charged with "racial injury" and, if convicted, risks up to six months in prison and a maximum €25,000 ($32,500) fine, though courts usually issue far lighter sentences.

Following up on Never fails: semantic over-achievers, Language Log reader John O'Meara told me that he recently received a gift voucher on which one of the legally binding conditions is the following:

6. Cash nor credit will not be issued for balance of gift voucher not redeemed in full.

He has absolutely no clear sense of what this does (or does not) entitle him to. Nor does Language Log. Not. One stares at it, and although one can guess at what was probably supposed to be the policy, one fails to extract a statement of it from the above wording using just the syntax and semantics of one's native language. At least, that's how it is for me (your mileage may differ). In particular, if you make the initial noun phrase grammatical by prefixing neither, you get something that is almost certainly the opposite of what was meant (Neither cash nor credit will not be issued for balance of gift voucher not redeemed in full means that both cash and credit will be issued).

The government of Canada, along with no doubt many others, frowns upon companies making health claims for which they have no evidence. This is supposed to nip in the bud deceptive practices like those exhibited in this pre-regulation 1652 handbill proclaiming the "vertues of coffee drink", in which the advertisement's author touted coffee as a prevention and cure for everything ranging from miscarriage to gout to "hypochondriack winds", whatever those may be. In that document, the claims were overt and brazen, with statements such as:

"It is excellent to prevent and cure the Dropsy, Gout and Scurvy."
"It is very good to prevent Mis-Carryings in Child-Bearing Women."

Yup, those are claims.

But in a recent case that's made headlines here in Canada, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has determined that the names of two brands of infant formula made by Enfamil, A+ and Gentlease A+, also amount to claims, the former constituting a claim about nutritional superiority to other brands, and the latter an additional claim about ease of digestibility.

Which begs the question: What counts as a claim?

Mark Knopfler's satirical Money For Nothing, banned in Canada since last January for having the word faggot in it, has now been unbanned. His gentle ribbing of working-class bigotry can once again be played on Canadian radio. (With that extraordinary opening guitar riff. How does he do it? He tries to explain in this YouTube clip, but really it's still magic.) However, meanwhile a South African court has banned a song: the Zulu apartheid-era call-and-response anthem Dubula ibhunu (or Dubul'ibhunu, given that the final vowel of the first word is elided in speech). So it's one song in, one song out. And on balance I think both decisions are exactly right.

There's nothing funny about the religiously-based sectarian strife between Protestant-associated and Catholic-associated soccer teams in Scotland. And there's nothing funny about a physical attack on a sports team manager by a fan at a game (especially a team manager who has already had a violent assault, death threats, bullets in the mail, and a parcel bomb). Yet the linguistic aspects of the story in UK newspapers today seem nonetheless unintentionally hilarious, and I think I wouldn't be doing my duty to Language Log if I didn't share them with you.

Kim Kardashian, the Armenian-American reality TV star, socialite, model, and actress, is suing the clothing store chain Old Navy in California for a sum in the tens of millions, on the grounds that they are using a Kardashian lookalike, Melissa Molinaro, in their advertising. But that's not the remarkable thing (this is Language Log, not Reality TV Financial Catfight Log). The remarkable thing is contained in a remark to the press by Kardashian's lawyer, Gary Hecker:

Kim Kardashian's identity and persona are valuable. When her intellectual property rights are violated, she intends to enforce them.

By now everyone knows that Mitt Romney has said, “Corporations are people,” and lots of jokes have been made about it: “Let my corporations go!” — Moses, and so on. Paul Krugman gives Romney the benefit of the doubt, giving him credit for meaning, not that corporations are flesh-and-blood folks, but rather that “corporations are organizations that consist of people.” Krugman then takes Romney to task soberly for his ideas about what happens to taxes on corporations, since these are not taxes on the corporate entity per se but only on its profits — the part that workers and suppliers don’t get. But I wonder if even Krugman is cutting Romney too much slack here. Our Supreme Court has held that money is speech in their ruling that restricting the money one can spend on political advertising is an unacceptable restraint of free speech. If a metaphor can be reified by five conservative justices to the point of holding that what is actually money counts in the real world as speech, why isn’t it natural for those of a like turn of mind to feel free to reify the metaphor that corporations are (legal) persons to the idea that they should count in the real world as individuals deserving of all the rights and privileges of actual people.

[Update 8/14/11 I think the bad links are now fixed. Thanks, SSH. Several commentators, and Eugene Volokh in an email, have pointed out that the Supreme Court decision holding that restricting political advertising expenditure is restricting free speech does not represent the unique occasion on which authorities have held that restriction of some non-speech behavior – for example, marching – counts as a restriction on free speech. In other words, the decision was not based on reification of the metaphor “money is speech’; rather the metaphor was a product of the decision. And of course neither I nor anyone else can know what was in Mitt Romney’s mind when he said “Corporations are people.” Points taken. PK]