There's a special place in purgatory reserved for scientists who make bold claims based on tiny effects of uncertain origin; and an extra-long sentence is imposed on those who also keep their data secret, publishing only hard-to-interpret summaries of statistical modeling. The flames that purify their scientific souls will rise from the lake of lava that eternally consumes the journalists who further exaggerate their dubious claims. Those fires, alas, await Drew P. Cingel and S. Shyam Sundar, the authors of "Texting, techspeak, and tweens: The relationship between text messaging and English grammar skills", New Media & Society 5/11/2012:
The perpetual use of mobile devices by adolescents has fueled a culture of text messaging, with abbreviations and grammatical shortcuts, thus raising the following question in the minds of parents and teachers: Does increased use of text messaging engender greater reliance on such ‘textual adaptations’ to the point of altering one’s sense of written grammar? A survey (N = 228) was conducted to test the association between text message usage of sixth, seventh and eighth grade students and their scores on an offline, age-appropriate grammar assessment test. Results show broad support for a general negative relationship between the use of techspeak in text messages and scores on a grammar assessment.
Yesterday's Missoulian, reporting on a non-shy mountain lion that was hanging around a campground in western Montana, had the following memorable sentence: `The kids were playing and Gerhard was stashing something in the minivan when her cousin hollered, "Holy (appropriate word under the circumstances), that's a mountain lion!"' So the newspaper's editors don't want to print a classic four-letter cuss word, but surely there's a way to keep the sentence from sounding quite so silly? Even "s***" wouldn't look as ridiculous as "(appropriate word under the circumstances)". Better yet, they could just give up their aversion to including vulgarities in direct quotations.
As I write these words, the number of comments posted below Kyle Wiens's strangely contentless piece in Harvard Business Review, "I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here's Why", is just coasting up toward 1200 (yes, one thousand two hundred; that's not a typo). This cannot be out of any enthusiasm for grammar: the number of grammar issues mentioned in the piece is zero. Wiens says or implies that he wants employees who know the difference between apostrophes and apostles; between semicolons and colons; between to and too; between its and it's; and between their, there, and they're. But this isn't about grammar; these are just elementary vocabulary and spelling distinctions. How could it possibly be of interest to Harvard Business Review readers that the CEO of a technical documentation company expects his employees to be able to spell different words differently? I like literacy too, but why this fiddling with spelling shibboleths while the economy burns?
Perhaps it is because I'm at the Computability in Europe 2012 conference, a big meeting honoring the centenary of Alan Turing's birth, that I was reflecting on algorithms today. My phone answering machine at home is programmed to count the number of messages waiting to be listened to, storing the total in a variable I will call N, and then set another variable that I will call M to the initial value of 1; and the playback button causes the running of a routine of which the pseudo-code would be this:
if N = 1 speak "You have one new message." else speak "You have N new messages." end if for each M from 1 to N speak "Message M:" play message M end for speak "End of messages." speak "To delete all messages, press Delete."
Can you see what's so incredibly annoying here, to a linguist, or anyone with some basic common sense about pragmatics?
While shopping for a card for my dad the other day (he will be 90 on August 7) I noticed a sign of the times: a birthday card with a big silver "100" on it — one of quite a few, in fact, manufactured specifically for birthdays of people who reach that age. The extreme longevity made possible by modern medicine, nutrition, and social care may be a disaster for pension plans and health insurance companies, but it has inspired a new niche product for card manufacturers. They didn't make Happy 100th Birthday cards fifty years ago. I was puzzled, though, when I looked inside. The inscription was distinctly peculiar.
The Queen's English Society (QES), mentioned only a couple of times here on Language Log over the past few years, is no more. It has ceased to be. On the last day of this month they will ring down the curtain and it will join the choir invisible. It will be an ex-society. Said Rhea Williams, chairman of QES, in a letter to the membership of which I have seen a facsimile copy:
At yesterday's SGM there were 22 people present, including the 10 members of your committee. Three members had sent their apologies. Not a very good showing out of a membership of 560 plus!
Time was spent discussing what to do about QES given the forthcoming resignations of so many committee members. Despite the sending out of a request for nominations for chairman, vice-chairman, administrator, web master, and membership secretary no one came forward to fill any role. So I have to inform you that QES will no longer exist. There will be one more Quest then all activity will cease and the society will be wound up. The effective date will be 30th June 2012
(Quest is the society's magazine.) Is this a sad day for defenders of English? Not in my view. I don't think it was a serious enterprise at all. I don't think the members cared about what they said they cared about. And I will present linguistic evidence for this thesis.
Earlier today, AFP photographer Alex Ogle posted on Twitter what looked like an outrageous typo in a column by Lisa de Moraes of the Washington Post: the name of Benedict Cumberbatch, star of the BBC/PBS show Sherlock, got transmogrified into "Bandersnatch Cummerbund" on second mention.
Let the record show that in the post advertising Passive Voice Day 2012 on Shaun's Blog (April 27), which was naturally crying out to be written entirely in the passive voice, the writer, shaunm, has not made a single slip. Every single transitive verb in his post is in the passive. (There is one intransitive subordinate clause in addition, "that April 27th will be passive voice day", but the main clause of that sentence is a passive, with the verb decide, so I'm giving that a pass.) In a world where hardly anyone knows what a passive clause is, and pontificating critics of other people's prose get it wildly wrong over and over again, this is truly amazing.
I'm going to play this for my morphology class next week when we start talking about affixation… but there's no reason why you all shouldn't enjoy it now, now, now!
Thanks to Alex Trueman.
If you enjoyed this, you may also want to check out this oldie but goodie: How I met my wife. Happy Valentine's, if you're into that sort of thing!
"As Eskimos do with snow," wrote Emma Brockes yesterday in a New York Times review of Alan Hollinghurst's new novel (and the hairs rose on the back of my neck as I saw those words), "the English see gradations of social inadequacy invisible to the rest of the world; Mr. Hollinghurst separates them with a very sharp knife."
If Emma Brockes were one of the sharper knives in the journalistic cutlery drawer she might have avoided becoming the 4,285th writer since the 21st century began who has used in print some variant of the original snowclone. (I didn't count to get that figure of 4,285, I just chose a number at random. Why the hell not? People make up the number of words for snow found in Eskimoan languages that they know absolutely nothing about. I might as well just make stuff up like everybody else.)
The lower-grade newspapers in Britain this morning have been making much of what happened to a group of birdwatchers, gathered excitedly in a coastal area for a rare chance to photograph a Hume's leaf warbler. It seems they happened upon a calendar photo shoot and had a rare chance to also snap a blonde model, draped over a motorcycle, wearing nothing but a thong.
Language Log readers may be wondering why there has been no coverage of the achievement of Jesse Anderson, who has managed to get millions of monkeys, as computationally simulated on Amazon servers, to reproduce 99.9 percent of the works of Shakespeare (his own account is here on his blog, and various journalistic sheep have obediently reproduced his account in the newspapers). I'll tell you why.
There's a special place in purgatory reserved for scientists who make bold claims based on tiny effects of uncertain origin; and an extra-long sentence is imposed on those who also keep their data secret, publishing only hard-to-interpret summaries of statistical modeling. The flames that purify their scientific souls will rise from the lake of lava that eternally consumes the journalists who further exaggerate their dubious claims. Those fires, alas, await Drew P. Cingel and S. Shyam Sundar, the authors of "Texting, techspeak, and tweens: The relationship between text messaging and English grammar skills", New Media & Society 5/11/2012: