Language Log

Above is the cover of John DeFrancis's magnum opus, Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1989).  It has a stunning illustration consisting of the phonetic representation of the first six words of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address transcribed as follows: acoustic wave graph of the voice of William S.-Y. Wang, IPA, roman letters, Cyrillic, devanagari, hangul, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Arabic, katakana, Yi (Lolo, Nuosu, etc.), cuneiform, and sinographs (a fuller version of the cover illustration may be found on the frontispiece [facing the title page] and there is a generous explanation on pp. 248-251).

Reading PRC articles, they strike me as mostly propagandistic hype and rhetoric, but very little substance.  Simon Cox recognizes that in his "China’s inscrutable economic policy","Drum Tower", Eonomist:

F.R. Leavis, an English-literature don, used to complain about something he called “adjectival insistence”. He was thinking of Joseph Conrad, who was a bit too fond of words like inscrutable, implacable and unspeakable. The effect, Leavis said, was not to magnify but to muffle.

Leavis’s complaint came to my mind recently when I was parsing the latest official statements on China’s economic policy for an article about the tasks policymakers face in the year ahead. The country’s rulers have woken up to the fact that the economy needs help. Many businesses lack consumers and consumers lack confidence. Prices are flat or falling.

Sarah Posner on Bluesky, linking to a kamalahq tweet and a kamalahq Instagram post:

In the thread below: a completely rambling, unhinged, incomprehensible quote from Trump at his Flint town hall with Sarah Huckabee Sanders that the Harris campaign distributed, then news headlines about same event.

Where is all the coverage that Trump is old and can't speak a coherent sentence?

I've been defending Donald Trump against similar accusations since my exchange with Geoff Pullum in 2015 — "Trump's aphasia" vs. "Trump's eloquence". Has anything changed?

My debate analysis for The Economist included these charts:
:

Following up on "Type-token plots in The Economist" (9/6/2024), I lost some sleep last night doing some analyses of the presidential debate, which I shared with writers at The Economist to be published as "An alternative look at the Trump-Harris debate, in five charts",  9/11/2024. They lead with another type-token graph:

According to Wikipedia, word salad

is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases", most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The name schizophasia is used in particular to describe the confused language that may be evident in schizophrenia. The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but they are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them. The term is often used in psychiatry as well as in theoretical linguistics to describe a type of grammatical acceptability judgement by native speakers, and in computer programming to describe textual randomization.

The phrase {word salad} has become increasingly common recently in the popular press, most often as an insulting description of Donald Trump's spontaneous speech. See for example Sahil Kapur and Peter Nicholas, "'Incoherent word salad': Trump stumbles when asked how he'd tackle child care", NBC News 9/6/2024.

Justin Weinberg, "Analytic Philosophy's Best Unintentional (?) Self-Parodying", Daily Nous 9/6/2024:

“Someone, let’s say a baby, is born; his parents call him by a certain name.”

That line–recently circulated on social media by Eric Winsberg (South Florida / Cambridge) as “the funniest sentence in the history of philosophy”—is from Saul Kripke‘s Naming and Necessity.

I’m not sure its the funniest sentence in the history of philosophy, but it is pure poetry.

From "The Harris-Trump debate will be a clash of speaking styles", The Economist 9/6/2024:

Shawn McCreesh, "Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His ‘Weave’ Is Oratorical Genius." NYT 9/1/2024:

For weeks, former President Donald J. Trump’s advisers have urged him to be more disciplined and to stop straying off-message.

But on Friday, while speaking at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., Mr. Trump insisted that his oratory is not a campaign distraction but rather a rhetorical triumph.

“You know, I do the weave,” he said. “You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”

Most rhetorical devices have classical Greek names, arriving in English through Latin and French: analepsis, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, … But there are some common cases, like personification, where the English word is entirely Latinate, although the Greeks certainly used knew and used the technique. The OED's etymology is "Formed within English, by derivation", and the earliest OED citation is from 1728.

Like some others, I have an (empirically unsupported) impression that features of Donald Trump's speaking style have changed recently. I first noticed this in listening to his 8/8/2024 press conference in Mar-a-lago — which seems rather different from e.g. his 7/21/2015 rally speech in Sun City., or the many other samples in "Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric", 1/5/2024.

At some point before long, I'll provide some numbers to support or undermine this impression. Meanwhile, the comments section is open for your reactions.

Marilyn Singer is reponsible for the local (re-)invention of "Reverso Poetry: Writing Verse in Reverse":

A reverso is a poem with two halves. In a reverso, the second half reverses the lines from the first half, with changes only in punctuation and capitalization — and it has to say something completely different from the first half (otherwise it becomes what one blogger’s kid called a “same-o.”)

Wikipedia uses the term "Reversible poem", and tells us that

A reversible poem, also called a palindrome poem or a reverso poem, is a poem that can be read both forwards and backwards, with a different meaning in each direction, like this:

Reversible poems, called hui-wen shih poems, were a Classical Chinese artform. The most famous poet using this style was the 4th-century poet Su Hui, who wrote an untitled poem now called "Star Gauge" (Chinese: 璇璣圖; pinyin: xuán jī tú).This poem contains 841 characters in a square grid that can be read backwards, forwards, and diagonally, with new and sometimes contradictory meanings in each direction.[2] Reversible poems in Chinese may depend not only on the words themselves, but also on the tone to produce a sense of poetry. Beginning in the 1920s, punctuation (which is uncommon in Chinese) was sometimes added to clarify Chinese palindromic poems.

The focus of this post is Brian Bilston's Reverso Poem "Refugees".

It's surprising (at least to me) that this seemingly oxymoronic belief is so widespread.  Check out this quote from Christopher Hitchens in “Religion Kills” from his 2007 book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything: 

…the Greek demigod Perseus was born when the god Jupiter visited the virgin Danae as a shower of gold…The god Buddha was born through an opening in his mother’s flank. Catlicus the serpent-skirted caught a little ball of feathers from the sky and hid it in her bosom, and the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli was thus conceived. The virgin Nana took a pomegranate from the tree water by the blood of the slain Agdestris, laid it in her bosom, and gave birth to the god Attis.  The virgin daughter of a Mongol king awoke one night and found herself bathed in a great light, which caused her to give birth to Genghis Khan. Krishna was born of the virgin Devaka. Horus was born of the virgin Isis. Mercury was born of the virgin Maia. Romulus was born of the virgin Rhea Sylvia.