Language Log

First, a new twist on a story that our legal desk covered back in February: at the annual Ig Nobel awards ceremony earlier tonight, the Prize for Literature was awarded to the Garda Síochána na hÉireann (i.e. the Irish Police Force) for the 50 or more speeding tickets they've issued in the name "Prawo Jazdy", Polish for "driver's license."

And as if that wasn't enough onomastic excitement, the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for Veterinary Medicine was awarded for work reported in Bertenshaw, C. and Rowlinson, P., Exploring Stock Managers' Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production, Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People and Animals 22:1, pp. 59-69, 2009. Specifically, Dr. Bertenshaw and Dr. Rowlinson share the prize for their demonstration that (and here I quote from the article's abstract): "On farms where cows were called by name, milk yield was 258 liters higher than on farms where this was not the case (p < 0.001)."

Yet all this groundbreaking research leaves me with more questions than answers. What is the causal direction behind the correlation? And if my cow produced 238 liters too little milk, would I admit to the researchers the names I used for her? And how much milk can an Irish policeman get from a speeding Polish cow?

A couple of days ago, Olivia Judson discussed the effects on science writing of the execrable state of English libel law, with some details of the British Chiropractic Association's libel case against Simon Singh, and a bit about Mattias Rath's case against Ben Goldacre: "Cracking the Spine of Libel", NYT, 9/15/2009. There's an excellent list of links at the end of her post.

We discussed a central linguistic aspect of the case against Singh here a few months ago ("Knowing bogosity", 4/11/2009).

I was just looking for something in international mail regulations and stumbled on something curious. Among the items that it is prohibited to send to Brazil are: "Primary educational books not written in Portuguese". I have no desire to send any such textbooks to Brazil – in fact I'm not planning on sending anything to Brazil – I noticed this while looking for something else – but I'm curious as to the reason for this prohibition. It stands to reason that in a country whose primary language is Portuguese most primary textbooks will be in Portuguese, but I should think that there would be some schools in which some textbooks are not, such as international schools. And even if no schools use such textbooks, I can imagine foreign residents importing books in their own language for the use of their children, or teachers and educationists who want to examine textbooks from other countries. Against these legimitate uses for non-Portuguese textbooks, it is hard to imagine the threat posed by non-Portuguese textbooks. Do any of our readers know what this is about?

For people interested in language, linguistically-interesting bits grow on  pretty much all of the trees in the forest of communicative interaction. In order to get on with life, we let most of the specimens pass without comment. But the first two segments of this week's Car Talk radio show, which I listened to with half an ear while I waited for a computer program to finish running, rose to the threshold of bloggability: the first segment because it offered a nice exchange on what an "accent" is, suitable for use in my new lecture notes for this year's Linguistics 001;  and the second segment bcause it relates to a recent and celebrated British libel case.

Barbara Phillips Long pointed me to Prof. James Maule's  tax-law blog, Mauled Again, because, she wrote, "he touches on three areas that intrigue me –language, teaching and economics". So I followed the link and read a few pages, and I was struck by a number of implicit connections. For example, his approach to teaching the tax code reminded me of the way I was taught, many years ago, to "construe" Latin texts:

I take the students through an analysis of how Code sections and Treasury regulation sections are constructed, showing them that the secret to parsing the language is … to break the conglomeration of words into phrases and other segments and then to re-connect them, preferably in a manner that resembles English more than what I call "tax-ese."

Don Asmussen's Bad Reporter for 5/27/2009:

This reminds me of some of the discussions of California's ballot proposition system — and since the cartoon came out the day after the California Supreme Court ruled on Proposition 8, I guess that it was supposed to.

A few years ago, before my wife was released from the hospital after hip replacement surgery, her leg began swelling up and she had great pain and discomfort. Quickly she was sent back to surgery to have a previously undetected bleeder repaired. The highly respected surgeon obviously missed it. Next day a huge bouquet of roses appeared in her hospital room, sent by that very doctor. And then, perhaps coincidentally, he retired from practice within the next few weeks. I don’t recall now whether he actually said he was sorry for his error, but the roses gave us every indication that he was. It was a malpractice suit waiting to happen.

It's common practice in the trademark world to never, never, never use your trademarked name as a verb or a noun. If you do this, you'll be committing genericide, because your brand name will surely lose its distinctiveness and pretty soon you'll be losing your market edge. Why else would Xerox try so hard to teach us to say " to photocopy" rather than "to xerox"? Always use your name as an adjective, "Xerox photocopiers." But the New York Times reports that Microsoft's Steve Ballmer doesn't much believe in common practice, and he's now busily ignoring what everyone else is doing. He wants us to say, "he will bing you tomorrow," which more problematically might lead to, "he banged you yesterday."   

People have begun to ask why Language Log hasn't yet commented on the remarks of Sonia Sotomayor about the sterling value of (you guessed it) Strunk & White. One recent commenter (here) actually seems to imply that we have jumped all over Charles Krauthammer solely because he is conservative, and shielded Sotomayor from criticism because she is the nominee of a Democratic president! Come on, you know us better than that. Sotomayor has come up in the comments area a few times (here and here, for example), and the only reason there hasn't been a full post on her remarks is — speaking for myself — lack of time (I don't know if you have any idea what early June is like for academics with administrative duties) plus a dearth of interesting things to say. You can read this piece on The National Review site for quotes and links to the relevant speeches. What she said about grammar in one speech (PDF here) was this:

If you have read Strunk and White, Elements of Style, reread it every two years. If you have never read it, do so now. This book is only 77 pages and it manages, succinctly, precisely and elegantly to convey the essence of good writing. Go back and read a couple of basic grammar books. Most people never go back to basic principles of grammar after their first six years in elementary school. Each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister. These are basic errors that with self-editing, more often than not, are avoidable.

If you're in a hurry, just follow this link and (if you agree with it) add your name to a statement, hosted at Sense about Science, arguing that "The law has no place in scientific disputes".

If you've got a little extra time to spend, read on.

Adam Cohen wrote a piece in the 1 June NYT (on the editorial page) that is both delightful and thought-provoking: "The Lord Justice Hath Ruled: Pringles Are Potato Chips", about a series of British legal decisions.

The question: is a Pringle a potato chip (crisp, in British usage) or (as Procter & Gamble, which makes Pringles, maintained) a "savoury snack". [Cohen reported that P&G claimed that Pringles was a "savory snack", but of course the case was heard in British courts, and the dispute in those courts was about crisps vs. "savoury snacks" — as in SNACMA (the Snack Nut & Crisp Manufacturers Association), which "represents the interest of the savoury snack industry in the UK". Note that in this usage "savoury snack" is the higher-order category; crisps are savoury snacks, but so are other things.]

There was real money on the line, about $160 million, as Cohen notes:

In Britain, most foods are exempt from the value-added tax, but potato … crisps … and "similar products made from the potato, or from potato flour," are taxable.

Some of the things that proponents of the English Only movement say strike me as pretty strange, but today I stumbled on a truly mind-boggling claim by Supremacy Claus, namely that:

All Latin violates the Establishment Clause, being the foreign language of a church.

An article today’s NY Times and another in WalesOnline tell us about a linguist in Wales who was praised for discovering that a murderer — who had been having an affair with his victim — unconsciously revealed his identity as the writer of a fake text message that included either the phrases, “need to sort my head out” and “sorting my life out” (according to WalesOnline) or “sorted her life out” and “head sorted out” (according  to the NY Times). Regardless of which quotation is accurate (assuming that one of them got it right), this can sound like something from an ill-conceived TV cop show and hardly something that would cause the linguist to “jump out of” his skin.