Language Log

Master Sgt. Jeffrey Sarver has filed a lawsuit against the makers of the film The Hurt Locker, claiming that screenwriter Mark Boal based the film's central character on him after Boal was embedded in Sarver's bomb squad unit in Iraq. I can't speak to the overall merits of the case, but one claim rings particularly hollow. The Detroit News reports:

Sarver said the very title of the movie was a phrase he coined in Iraq, and that Boal asked its meaning after hearing him use it. Boal has since copyrighted the phrase, Fieger said.
Sarver explained today that the term is akin to Davy Jones Locker, where legend says drowned sailors are kept.
"It's just a horrible place you go when you mess up," Sarver said. "It's a mental state. A place that's full of pain and hurt."

Unfortunately for Sarver, (in the) hurt locker is military slang dating back to 1966, as a quick trip to Google News Archive readily shows. I give the full history of the expression in my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus. Check it out.

[Update: For more on the supposed "copyright" of the phrase, see Dave Wilton's post on Wordorigins.org.]

We've previously covered the British Chiropractic Association's libel suit against Simon Singh, and the successful effort by Nemesysco to force a critical article to be withdrawn from the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law. Both of these cases involved the peculiar situation of English libel law, which (in the opinion of many) makes it too easy for wealthy plaintiffs to bully authors and publishers into silence.

An interesting case now in process involves an even more straightforward threat to intellectual discourse, in that both the plaintiff and the defendent are academics, and the contested writing is a critical book review in an academic journal. And this time the court is in France, not England.

[Guest post by Neal Goldfarb.]

The United States Tax Court recently decided that payments for sex-reassignment surgery are deductible as medical expenses. Among the 15 judges, there were six separate opinions, with five of the judges dissenting. Most of the debate dealt with questions like whether Gender Identity Disorder is a “disease” (a key term in the statue) and if so whether sex-reassignment surgery, which doesn’t change the patient’s subjective sense of gender identity, constitutes a “treatment” for the disease (ditto).

Those are issues with interesting linguistic dimensions, but what I want to talk about here is a different aspect of the case: the dispute about how to interpret disjunction under negation—i.e., how to interpret expressions such as I don’t know anything about linguistics or tax law (with don’t signaling negation and or signaling disjunction).

The BBC, perennially careless on language issues, incorrectly states here that radio talk show host Jon Gaunt was disciplined by Ofcom (the UK communications regulation authority) for calling a local councillor a Nazi. The error is repeated by The Times here, and by The Independent's headline here (and there may be many more). They misreport Gaunt's alleged offense. As the BBC article reports further down the page:

The pair had been debating Redbridge Council's decision to ban smokers from fostering children when Mr Gaunt called Mr Stark a "health Nazi" and an "ignorant pig".

I don't know the extent to which "ignorant pig" was the issue, but I do want to point out that "health Nazi" is not to be equated with "Nazi". The longer phrase evokes the bad-tempered and bossy lunch counter boss in Seinfeld — the one that they referred to with awe, though only when out of earshot of the awful man, as "the Soup Nazi".

[This is a guest post by Neal Goldfarb.]

While the Linguistic Society of America was holding its annual meeting last weekend in Baltimore, the nation’s law professors assembled in New Orleans for the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. We know that some of the linguists talked about law; did any of law professors talk about linguistics?

A comment on my post "No understandings not specified here" points us to an article (Jef Feeley and Jason Kelly, "United Rentals Can't Force $4 Billion Cerberus Buyout", Bloomberg, 12/21/2009) about a case where "some of the best lawyers in the world, and the Delaware courts, couldn't work out the meaning of what they had written". A bit of internet search turns up a link to the opinion in that case, in a post by Peter Lattman at the WSJ Law Blog, "Chancellor Chandler Hands Cerberus a Big Win", 12/21/2007, which quote the first two paragraphs of the opinion's opening:

Creative Commons is a "nonprofit organization that increases sharing and improves collaboration" by providing "free, easy-to-use legal tools … [that] give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work". In particular, many Open Access journals now use a Creative Commons license, among them the new eLanguage initiative of the Linguistic Society of America.

But yesterday, at the LSA's annual meeting, someone raised a question about the use of Creative Commons licenses for this purpose. The question has an interesting linguistic aspect — I'd describe it as a matter of pragmatic scope — which I thought I'd explain to you here.

Thanks to reader DS, following up on this morning's post on the Philadelphia Newspapers' bankruptcy case ("The indubitable equivalent of such claims"), I now know which commas were at stake, and why.  The critical commas were these, in 1129(b)(2)(A)(ii) of Chapter 11, subchapter II, of U.S. Code Title 11:

(ii) for the sale, subject to section 363 (k) of this title, of any property that is subject to the liens securing such claims, …

As to why and how the commas allegedly matter, DS drew my attention to dueling footnotes in the briefs.

Discussing our local newspapers' bankruptcy case, Steve Tawa explained today ("Newspaper Bankruptcy Ruling Could Hinge on 'Or,' Or a Comma", KYW Newsradio 1060, 12/15/2009) that:

Lawyers argued over complex bankruptcy code phrases like "indubitable equivalent."  They also vetted the word "or" in the language, and a certain comma's placement in the statute.

Josh Rosenberg was puzzled — which "or", which comma, and why? The rest of the article doesn't say.

So Josh wrote and asked me. It's a linguistic question, right? But I have no clue — I'm in Landsdowne VA for a conference. Not that I would have been in court anyhow.

Questions about disclosure of possible conflicts of interest don't arise very often in our field. I take that as that as a testament to the economic insignificance of our results. There are plenty of people who have a financial interest in linguistic research, but they rarely have a stake in having it come out one way rather than another, the way a pharmaceutical company does if it can show that drug X is more effective than drug Y. You don’t have to worry about ethical conflicts when the author can be presumed to have an unequivocal interest in doing the science right. They only become important when the author might conceivably have an interest in doing the science wrong.

But these questions can arise when a linguist is engaged to testify as an expert witness in a legal proceding and decides to revisit the issue later in a scholarly talk or publication. In fact it was a disagreement about just such a situation that provided the impetus for a symposium at last January's LSA meeting on "Ethical Issues in Forensic Linguistic Consulting."

From Dave Montgomery, "Texas marriages in legal limbo because of constitutional amendment, candidate says", Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 11/17/2009:

Texans: Are you really married?

Maybe not.

Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a Houston lawyer and Democratic candidate for attorney general, says that a 22-word clause in a 2005 constitutional amendment designed to ban gay marriages erroneously endangers the legal status of all marriages in the state.

… [T]he troublemaking phrase, as Radnofsky sees it, is Subsection B, which declares:

"This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage."

Architects of the amendment included the clause to ban same-sex civil unions and domestic partnerships. But Radnofsky, who was a member of the powerhouse Vinson & Elkins law firm in Houston for 27 years until retiring in 2006, says the wording of Subsection B effectively "eliminates marriage in Texas," including common-law marriages.

Anita Krishnakumar posts at Concurring Opinions on November 2 about a Supreme Court judgment by Justice Anthony Kennedy that turned quite crucially on the distinction between active and passive voice in the language of criminal statutes, only (you're ahead of me already aren't you, Language Log readers?) Justice Kennedy doesn't know his passive from a hole in the ground, so the claims made are nonsense. I see no way to read what he says that does not involve assuming that he thinks if serious bodily injury results and if death injury results are passive clauses. And the point is a general one, crucially tied to grammar: Kennedy thinks that in general "criminal statutes use the active voice to define prohibited conduct" and use the passive voice to specify mere sentencing factors associated therewith, and courts should pay attention to that distinction. Only there isn't a distinction in the statute he cites. I won't go on about it, since a couple of sensible commenters do my work for me right after the post, citing Language Log, where so many posts have been devoted to this topic (I aggregate them for reference here). But heavens above: You can get to be a Supreme Court justice, and write about actives and passives, without having any clue how that distinction is normally defined by grammarians, and without giving any alternative definition? Could we perhaps organize a few lunches at which linguistics department chairs meet with law school deans or something?

In the celebrated libel case brought by the British Chiropractic Association against Simon Singh, Singh has won a round in court. Or rather, he's won the right to appeal a previous loss in court.