Language Log

For those wondering why on earth an official announcement about the solemn business of executing a traitor would use wildly overheated language like "despicable human scum" and "worse than a dog" (especially about the uncle of the reigning monarch), the BBC has published a short article on the language of North Korean posthumous character assassination.

During a game on 11/28/2013 between the Baltimore Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers, Pittsburgh head coach Mike Tomlin got in the way of a kickoff return by Jacoby Jones, as a result of standing with one foot on the field of play as Jones ran up the sideline. Video of the original incident is here, and an animated gif of the crucial interaction is here.

At Tomlin's weekly press conference a few days later, he issued an elaborate apology, partly for getting in the way of the play, but even more strongly for not taking the ensuing fuss more seriously. His statement is reproduced in full here, but the most linguistically-relevant part is this:

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I think probably my biggest error on Thursday night was not realizing that that play jeopardized the integrity of the game from a perception standpoint.

Looking into the background of the idea that modifiers are immoral, I read Richard Lanham's Style: An Anti-Textbook (available as an ebook from amazon and google), and found this description of writing instruction:

What we have now is a tedious, repetitive, unoriginal body of dogma—clarity, sincerity, plainness, duty—tarted up every week in a new, disposable paperback dress. The dogma of clarity, as we shall see, is based on a false theory of knowledge; its scorn of ornament, on a misleading taxonomy of style; the frequent exhortations to sincerity, on a naïve theory of the self; and the unctuous moralizing, on a Boy Scout didacticism.

J. Eric Butler wrote:

As an academic in a humanities discipline, I read a lot of formal prose concerning historical subjects. I often come across the English future perfect in these contexts, which strikes me as odd, albeit easy enough to understand. So I usually just barely register it and then move on. But at some point it occurred to me that I have no idea what motivates this usage, so I thought LL would probably have some insight.

People are endlessly fascinated by average sex differences in cognitive measures, despite the fact that the between-sex differences are generally so small, relative to within-sex variation, that they have no consequential effects outside of the ideological realm. Here's a striking example — Hannah Fairfield, "Girls Lead in Science Exam, but Not in the United States", NYT 2/4/2013:

For years — and especially since 2005, when Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, made his notorious comments about women’s aptitude — researchers have been searching for ways to explain why there are so many more men than women in the top ranks of science.

Now comes an intriguing clue, in the form of a test given in 65 developed countries by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It finds that among a representative sample of 15-year-olds around the world, girls generally outperform boys in science — but not in the United States.

The arresting graphic that accompanies the text:

This post hits a trifecta of LLOG themes: the troublesome interaction of multiple negations with scalar predicates that we call "misnegation"; the flexible phrasal or conceptual templates we call "snowclones"; and the multiplication of careless variant quotations.

It started when a friend, in conversation, said something like "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. [pause] Or overestimating. Whatever."

Mark Liberman noted (as did Neal Whitman on his Literal-Minded blog) a case of syllepsis in an Atlantic piece by Conor Friedersdorf: "What conservative Washington Post readers got, when they traded in Dave Weigel for [Jennifer] Rubin, was a lot more hackery and a lot less informed about the presidential election." But Weigel offered up a nice syllepsis of his own on Twitter today:

Also, pants. RT @washingtonpost: With Paula Broadwell, Gen. David Petraeus let his guard down: wapo.st/ZoUvd0

— daveweigel (@daveweigel) November 11, 2012

Conor Friedersdorf, "How Conservative Media Lost to the MSM and Failed the Rank and File", The Atlantic 11/7/2012:

Conservatives were at a disadvantage because Romney supporters like Jennifer Rubin and Hugh Hewitt saw it as their duty to spin constantly for their favored candidate rather than being frank about his strengths and weaknesses. What conservative Washington Post readers got, when they traded in Dave Weigel for Rubin, was a lot more hackery and a lot less informed about the presidential election.

Uh-oh! A friend of mine who recently looked at the websites of the Departments of Linguistics at both the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania just pointed out to me that each of them claims to be the oldest department of linguistics in the USA. This is bad. Language Log is headquartered on a server at Penn. Now we don't know whether our home is the oldest department of linguistics in the USA or not.

A commenter on this post, "'All Japanese must be killed'", stated that he thought that the sentiments expressed were "a little extreme".

How seriously should we take what appear to be calls for genocide against the Japanese people?

Breffni O'Rourke writes:

Here's one for the 'cannot underestimate' files. The publicity material for the recently published Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (which may coincide with the printed blurb or the preface; I haven't been able to check) starts off with (variants of) this:

The Great Irish Famine is the most pivotal event in modern Irish history, with implications that cannot be underestimated.

Harry Reid has made a lot people mad, justifiably in my opinion, by saying that a Bain Capital investor told him that Romney didn't pay income tax for ten years. Reid has repeated his claim of being told this, and also said that he doesn't know whether or not to believe it.  To be sure, this is below-the-belt innuendo.  Politifact, however, has given Reid's claim its "pants on fire" rating. In Time Entertainment, James Poniewozik argues that in so doing Politfact is damaging its own reputation for probity, because "pants on fire" in the context of truth and falsity can only serve to evoke "Liar, liar, pants on fire!"  And Politifact has no way in the world of knowing whether or not Reid was lying in reporting that someone had told him something potentially damaging to Mitt Romney.  Furthermore, although in its full article Politifact reports accurately that Reid claims only to have been told the damaging story, in its list of pants-on-fire headlines, Politifact writes, next to a captioned thumbnail of Reid, "Mitt Romney did not pay taxes for 10 years," nine words in a box that accommodates an entry of twenty-five words in the box above with space to spare. Politifact seems to have forgotten to preface this with "said he has been told." Let's say this unfortunate inaccuracy was just an oversight on the part of Politifact and return to the issue of whether "pants on fire" was justified.

Lila Gleitman wrote:

I now happen to be reading "Team of Rivals," basically a history of Lincoln's cabinet.  Anyhow, there is constant mention (and pix of venues) showing Lincoln talking to very large indoor and outdoor audiences (at least once 2000 is the number of listeners mentioned).   They say he had a slightly high clear voice that carried very well, but still I can hardly conceive that he, and others of those times who are mentioned as speaking outdoors to multitudes too, notably Douglas of course., could be heard without amplification.   You must know all about this.  Can you tell me? or tell me how to look this up?   It flummoxes me every time I read of these seemingly prodigious feats of speaking-listening, the authors don't even seem to remark on how astounding it seems (or seems to seem, to me).