Language Log

Among the little known stories circulating recently, we learn from The Anchorage Daily News that the California Milk Processor Board, representing eleven dairy processors that market milk, is planning to bring trademark infringement charges against a batik artist in Talkeetna, Alaska. A few years ago, the artist, Barbara Holmes, whose company is Mountntop Designs & Baby Bugs Clothing, produced and advertised the slogan, "Got Breastmilk?" on tee-shirts and one-piece baby clothing called "onesies." CMPB's Sacramento law firm sent her one of those typical cease-and-desist warning letters to Holmes, telling her that her slogan will cause confusion with their own widely publicized and trademarked slogan, "Got Milk?" And she'd better stop doing this now, before they sue her.

The case of Nick vs. Bethel, a lawsuit by Yup'ik Eskimos against the city of Bethel, Alaska, has elicited a good bit of comment recently due to a recent ruling that Yup'ik is not a "historically written language". A not atypical example is this comment on an indigenous language mailing list to which I subscribe:

This ruling seems to express a deep bias of Western culture. That is, written language is taken to be the model product of language/cultural evolution overall. Certainly, one could say that as a ruling it not just discriminates against Yup'ik speakers, but against most all indigenous languages in general as well as against oral-based cultures world wide.

Few people commenting on this ruling seem to be familiar with the details of the case, which it is helpful to understand before forming an opinon.

Just about 13 years ago, O.J. Simpson defense attorney Johnnie Cochran made news with these words from his closing argument:

Remember these words: "if it doesn't fit, you must acquit". (.wav)

I'm not saying that this useful rhyme was the key to Simpson's acquittal, but it certainly stuck in people's minds. Together with images of O.J. struggling to put the gloves on, the significance of the ill-fitting glove evidence to the outcome of the trial is not a matter of significant debate. It certainly didn't hurt that Cochran was an effective speaker.

Compare this with yesterday's news reports of the opening statements from the trial of Osama bin Laden's driver Salim Hamdan, whose civilian defense attorney Harry Schneider has been quoted as follows:

The evidence is that he worked for wages, he didn't wage attacks on America […] He had a job because he had to earn a living, not because he had a jihad against America.

Get it? "he worked for wages" vs. "he didn't wage attacks" — see? "He had a job vs. "not because he had a jihad". See?

If this is the best Schneider can do against the prosecution's argument that Hamdan knew about "the dome" — which the U.S. prosecution team is arguing refers to the U.S. Capitol building (Navy Lt. Cmdr. Timothy Stone: "Virtually no one knew the intended target, but the accused knew") — then Hamdan looks to be in big trouble.

Here at Language Log we've commented a lot about the media's coverage of animal communication (birds, monkeys, cows, etc.) but, as far as I know, none of this has dealt with animals that actually swear oaths of office. So I'll remedy this omission by referring to a few media articles about police dogs that swear.

From Decatur, Georgia we read that a police dog is a "sworn officer." This article doesn't explain how the dog did the swearing, but the police must believe that he raised his front forepaw and did it somehow. 

You wouldn't think you could get sued over a Bible translation, but one Bradley LaShawn Fowler has filed lawsuits against two publishers demanding a total of $70 million in damages. He claims that their versions of the Bible, which condemn homosexuality, violate his rights as a homosexual man. He is representing himself, and his handwritten complaints (Thomas Nelson and Zondervan) are difficult to understand, but that seems to be the gist of it.

I suppose sometimes it's only natural for us to use words or phrases even when we're not quite sure what they mean. Or maybe we have our own individual notion of their meanings. But one might expect law enforcement to use words that have some clearly agreed upon meaning when they talk openly in criminal investigations about the people who are their suspects, targets or even possible witnesses. In recent years, person of interest seems to have been added to this list of descriptors. But what, you may ask, is a person of interest?

Google provides 412,000 hits, so the phrase is not exactly a new kid on the street. We don't know exactly when person of interest elbowed its way into use by law enforcement but it's likely to have shown up sometime in the 1970s, and then it really got noticed about the time of the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta. You may recall that at that time the FBI leaked the name of Richard A. Jewell as a person of interest. Jewel was  eventually exonerated, sued the media rather successfully for tainting his reputation, and got a public apology from the then Attorney General, Janet Reno. 

At the How Appealing blawg, on June 25, Howard Bashman posted a passage from Judge Richard A. Posner's opinion in the Conrad Black case, including these sentences:

The reference of course is to the legend that ostriches when frightened bury their head in the sand. It is pure legend and a canard on a very distinguished bird.

Mr. Bashman's comment:

[W]hile we are debunking canards (which, by contrast, are birds that can fly), allow me to question the use of the singular "head" in the following sentence from Judge Posner's opinion: "The reference of course is to the legend that ostriches when frightened bury their head in the sand."

On June 26, Mr. Bashman posted an email from Judge Posner:

Dear Prof. Bashman, to say "ostriches hide their heads in the sand" would imply that each ostrich had more than one head.

In this case, my own intuitions are on Mr. Bashman's side. Under the theory that each ostrich has an individual and unique head, different from those of other ostriches, the phrase "Ostriches hide their heads in the sand" seems entirely appropriate, whereas "Ostriches hide their head in the sand" raises distracting questions. What is this head? Perhaps it's the shrunken head of a lion, handed down from their heroic ancestors; or perhaps this phrase refers to their elected or hereditary leader, the Head Ostrich, who must be protected in a siliceous bunker.

But as you know, we don't privilege any one person's linguistic whims, not even mine. Instead, let's look at the precedents.

One of our several goals here at Language Log Plaza is to help non-linguists understand the ways language is important in most (probably all) of our lives. A quick look at the categories we write about is evidence of this–language and science, education, advertising, politics, psychology, media, humor, law, etc. Since the role of linguistics in the legal area is one of these, I thought I'd call attention to a recent amicus brief that a few linguists helped a lawyer construct (see also here).

Neal Goldfarb, at Tighe Patton Armstrong Teasdale in Washington DC, had a strong concern about the statutory interpretation of a case before the US Supreme Court, US v. Randy Edward Hayes, and so he asked a few linguists and cognitive scientists to help him with his brief. Interestingly, this brief doesn't take a position on the legal questions before the Court. Instead, it presents some linguistic insights that differ from the usual modes of legal argument in the hope that lawyers and judges might begin to pay more attention to linguistics.

In connection with Bill Poser's post "What did it mean to 'bear arms' in 1791?", I searched the Literature Online database for instances of the phrase "bear arms" whose authors were alive between 1650 and 1791, adding the options of variant spellings (e.g. "beare arms") and variant forms (e.g. "bearing arms") . I got 36 entries in Poetry, 38 in Drama, and none in Prose. My opinion, after a quick read of the 74 hits, is that all of them occur in a military context and are used in a military sense.

Usually this is straightforward, as in Robert Anderson's "Fair Sally" (1798): "When Honour bade her sons bear arms, And boldly meet their country's foe …" Sometimes the implication of military or militia service is implicit, e.g. Wordsworth, in a footnote to "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle": "for the Earl was no child, as some writers would have him, but able to bear arms, being sixteen or seventeen years of age".

This sample is small, and weighted towards poetic language, so that I don't think it really contributes a great deal to the argument, except perhaps in a statistical sense. However, there were a number of examples whose content I thought was interesting, quite apart from any bearing they might have on D.C. v. Heller. I'll give one in this post, and perhaps some others later on.

I was kinda hoping that nobody would notice my recent lack of productivity here at Language Log Plaza but nay, not so. Arnold Zwicky must have observed how much time I've been spending playing ping-pong with Eric Backovic in the Plaza's well-equipped recreation and weigh-training room. So he sent me an interesting article from Law.com to prime my pump, I suppose. 

The article shows something that most of us already knew anyway–that language is central to the field of law. The latest development is that a number of courts in the US are now forbidding lawyers and witnesses to use certain words during trials. Words like "rape," "victim," "crime scene," "killer," "murder," "drunk," "homicide," "embezzle," "fraud," and "robbery" are now not allowed in some courtrooms.

In the case of D. C. v Heller shortly to be decided by the US Supreme Court, the central issue is the meaning of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

One of the issues is whether the Second Amendment guarantees a private right, that is, a right of individuals to own and carry arms, or a public right, that is, a right of militias to own and carry arms, or both. Many advocates of restrictions on the right of individuals to own and carry arms promote the interpretation that the Second Amendment is meant only to protect the organized militia units, which, they typically argue, are now subsumed under the National Guard. For advocates of this interpretation, there is no individual right to own and carry weapons.

Reuters' report on the trial of British mercenary Simon Mann in Equatorial Guinea for his role in a 2004 attempted coup indicates that:

Tuesday's trial was conducted in Spanish without translation… Mann… does not speak Spanish…Asked by reporters if he thought he was getting a fair trial he replied "No comment".

I'm not worried about offending the court or what passes for a government in Equatorial Guinea so I'll take the liberty of answering for him: No. A trial conducted in a language that the defendant does not understand without an interpreter cannot possibly be fair. You'd think even a tinpot dictatorship would be ashamed not to provide at least the pretense of a fair trial.

A message I recently received from an employee of the BBC ended with this piece of legal boilerplate below the name of the sender (I reproduce it exactly as it appeared in my mailer):

This e-mail (and any attachments) is confidential and may contain personal views which are not the views of the BBC unless specifically stated.
If you have received it in error, please delete it from your system.
Do not use, copy or disclose the information in any way nor act in reliance on it and notify the sender immediately.
Please note that the BBC monitors e-mails sent or received.
Further communication will signify your consent to this.

What strikes me about these absurd signoffs that more and more organizations seem to think they need to tack onto the end of every email is not just that they are quixotically absurd as a way of forfending unintended information release (if you are not allowed to read the above message please avert your gaze and do not look at it!) but also that they are often so appallingly written. You would think that if the legal department insists on them being appended for important legal reasons to perhaps millions of messages per day (and I cannot really believe they ever save anyone from anything), the matter would be important enough to occupy a quarter of an hour of someone's time to make them grammatical, coherent, and unambiguous.