Language Log

Robert James Hargrave has pointed out to Language Log that several regional councils in England are prohibiting their employees from using "elitist" Latinate phrases like "bona fide" or "vice versa" The Daily Telegraph has an article about it. I quote:

Bournemouth Council, which has the Latin motto Pulchritudo et Salubritas, meaning beauty and health, has listed 19 terms it no longer considers acceptable for use.

This includes bona fide, eg (exempli gratia), prima facie, ad lib or ad libitum, etc or et cetera, ie or id est, inter alia, NB or nota bene, per, per se, pro rata, quid pro quo, vis-a-vis, vice versa and even via.

Its list of more verbose alternatives, includes "for this special purpose", in place of ad hoc and "existing condition" or "state of things", instead of status quo.

In instructions to staff, the council said: "Not everyone knows Latin. Many readers do not have English as their first language so using Latin can be particularly difficult."

Two more takes on teenage communication. First, a Bizarro playing on the widespread idea that teenagers' texting is packed with non-standard spelling and punctuation. Then a Zits on communicative multitasking. (Click on an image to get a larger version.)

Ever wonder what Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" would look like overlaid with electronic text markup? Well, wonder no more!

(Source text here.)

More on the evils of texting, with a predictable response by authorities: there oughta be a law (or at least an administrative ban). From the New York Times:

California Bans Texting by Operators of Trains
By JESSE McKINLEY and MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: September 18, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — A day after federal investigators said an engineer in last week’s deadly train collision outside Los Angeles had been text-messaging on the job, California’s railroad regulators temporarily banned the use of all cellular devices by anyone at the controls of a moving train.

The emergency order was passed unanimously by the five-person California Public Utilities Commission, which noted the lack of federal or state rules regarding the use of such devices by on-duty train personnel.

Michael R. Peevey, the president of the commission, which oversees rail traffic in the state, said in a statement that the prohibition on cellular use was “necessary and reasonable.”

Notice that the ban is on all cellular devices.

Now comes a fresh bulletin on the Texting While Xing front.

The Zippy take on the baleful effects of electronic communication:

Here, Bill Griffith mocks the alarm over what electronic communication is leading to, as discussed in David Crystal's new book Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, which Ben Zimmer has begun posting about here on Language Log.

In my capacity as executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, I recently had the opportunity to interview David Crystal about his new book, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, a careful demolition of the myths surrounding text messaging. You can read the first part of my interview on the Visual Thesaurus website here, with parts two and three to follow in coming weeks. As Mark Liberman has noted, texting is only now achieving levels of popularity in the US that Europe and parts of Asia saw about five years ago. That also means that the US is also about five years behind the curve on the concomitant hysteria over how texting presages the death of the language.

Time and time again we've seen this strain of "hell in a handbasket" degenerationism pervading attitudes about contemporary language use (e.g., here, here, here, and here). But the furore over texting in the United Kingdom, which Crystal says began with a 2003 Internet myth about a school essay written entirely in textisms, takes this alarmism to new levels. Will the U.S. be whipped up into the same fervor, five years later? Geoff Nunberg gave some indications of this possibility in a "Fresh Air" commentary a few months ago about excessive reactions to a Pew Research Center study on texting. The publication of Crystal's book in the US is therefore remarkably well-timed, since it can serve as a useful antidote to this sort of overheated discourse.

Many commentators have observed that John McCain is campaigning as if it were the Democrats, not the Republicans, who had been in office for the last eight years, hoping that voters will forget about George Bush and view the Republicans as the party of reform. If only more people had a classical education, McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate would have provided yet another point for the Democrats: the Ancient Greek word whose transliteration is the same as her family name, πάλιν, means "again" or "back".

Sir William Jones, the great scholar of "eastern" languages routinely (though incorrectly) credited with discovering the Indo-European language family and founding modern historical linguistics, was by profession a lawyer. He learned Sanskrit as a judge in India. In his book Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents, Robert Irwin reports (pp. 123-4) that:

At an early stage in his life, Jones's father had considered attaching him to a chambers to get a legal education, but Jones had resisted this on the understandable grounds that the quality of the Latin used in English law books was so very bad.

I don't think this excuse will work anymore.

Yes, of course, it happens all the time. But not often to two men, and it usually doesn't get reported in the New York Times. Entirely by accident, I came across the announcement (Sunday 10 August, p. 14 of the Style section) of the marriage of Michael Flier and David Trueblood. Flier

is the Oleksandr Potebnja professor of Ukrainian philology in the Slavic languages and literatures department at Harvard and is the director of its Ukrainian Research Institute. He was the chairman of Harvard's linguistics department from 1994 to 1999.

Trueblood

is the director of public relations at the Boston Foundation, which makes grants to nonprofit organizations in the Boston area and …

At some time after my breakfast tomorrow morning, as I get ready to leave for my office at the University of Edinburgh, the moment will suddenly arrive when the exact time and date (in all day/month/year syntax formats) is 08:08:08 08/08/08. Why does that seem so special and noteworthy?

I know that in Chinese the number 8 sounds like the word meaning "prosperous"; but that can't be relevant, because I know almost nothing of Chinese — I can't even tell whether a sign says ‘dining hall’ or ‘translate server error’. And of course there is nothing cosmically interesting about any particular date or time: the time will be different in each different time zone, and the date will be different in some of them. It's not a matter of rarity either: every time/date combination is exactly as rare as every other. Yet it still seems like it would be really cool to send out an email, or post to Language Log, with a 08:08:08 08/08/08 time stamp (though the server would probably have the time wrong by a few seconds, which would screw things up)… or to take Barbara her morning coffee at exactly 08:08:08 on the morning of 08/08/08.

Most of the spam that I receive is in English, but I have also received spam in French and Chinese. A moment ago I received for the first time a spam message in Hungarian (a language that I do not understand). I can't decide whether or not to be pleased.

Although unintentionally humorous unilingual signs and labels are not as numerous as those that are bilingual, one does come upon them from time to time. Randy Alexander sent me this notice that he saw on a shop front window in Changchun, Jilin. It may be translated: "Starting from today, it is forbidden to urinate or defecate anywhere you please in this place. Fine 200-500 RMB." I get the "anywhere you please" from SUI2DI4 随地 ("anywhere; everywhere; any old place; wherever you please"), which is widely used in such phrases as SUI2DI4 TU3TAN2 随地吐痰 ("spit any old place"). The latter, by the way, is one form of Pekingese behavior that the authorities are trying to curb before the fast-approaching Olympics.

Last Sunday's Foxtrot tries to explain the popularity of texting among teens:

It's a cute theory, but it's almost certainly false.