There is no signature idea or doctrine or accomplishment that Tillerson can point to as part of his legacy. He was woefully unprepared for the job on Day One and barely moved down the learning curve. His incompetence undercut his ability to advance any worthwhile policy instinct.
My reaction on reading this passage was that Drezner should have written that Tillerson "barely moved up the learning curve". As we'll see, this opposition in directional metaphors is apparently a cultural difference between psychology and economics, or maybe among a more complicated set of academic subgroups. And while I was looking into this issue of directionality, I was reminded of another curious quirk of learning-curve metaphors that I've been meaning to write about for a while, namely the inverted meaning of "steep".
I have recently become aware that files that in English are too "big" (for example, to send as email attachments) are too "heavy" in French (lourd) and Italian (pesante). Any chance you can post a note asking for the metaphors in all the other languages that LgLog commenters speak?
Update — Based on the comments, there are several other languages where files can be too "heavy". But what about "long", as in tl;dr? That would be another natural metaphor, either in the spatial or the temporal sense.
After coverage of dotage and DOLtage, as diagnosed by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Victor Mair's latest Korean-themed post deals with a more serious condition: headlessness.
Varieties of the ailment have been reported in, e.g., chickens and compound nouns, but the latter sense would be out of place in KCNA vocabulary; (at least South) Korean linguists would talk of nouns 'lacking a nucleus' (핵어(核語) 없는 haegeo eomneun / 무핵(無核) muhaek 합성명사(合成名詞) hapseong myeongsa) rather than a 'head'. Another candidate for headlessness is the North Korean state itself, per OPLAN 5015 (작전계획(作戰計劃) 5015 jakjeon-gyehoek ogong-iro). Said PLAN involves a 'decapitation' (참수(斬首) chamsu) strike against Kim Jong-un. He's supposedly familiar with the nitty-gritty of the PLAN, reportedly obtained by hacking into South Korean military networks. The South Koreans, rumour has it, are speeding up their defence upgrade plans, so it's understandable any potential decapitees would feel uneasy.
The most pervasive metaphor in English may be the use of "higher" to mean "better" (e.g., stronger or more moral), which has spawned endless figures of speech. It's hard to avoid those metaphorical phrases, although that might be wise in situations in which "higher" also has a relevant physical meaning. The New York Times on Saturday ran the following headline:
(1) As Trump Takes On Athletes, Watch Them Rise
Indeed, these athletes may be rising metaphorically as a political force. But they're refusing to rise physically for the singing of the U.S. national anthem. On the same day, the New York Times wrote (in this article, though it has now been edited away):
(2) Some people urged more players to kneel or sit during the anthem at football stadiums on Sunday as a way to reinforce their First Amendment rights. Others urged more white players to stand with black players who have knelt or sat during the anthem.
How confusing! White players are urged to stand metaphorically with their black teammates … by physically kneeling or sitting with them, or by speaking out afterwards.
But how do we readers know that "stand with" in (2) is metaphorical? Why couldn't the second sentence be about white players standing physically?
A friend points out to me that according to this Abe Books description of a hardback copy of Jane Jacobs' classic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, on the back cover it is reported that Toronto Life made the following assertion:
Jane Jacobs has become more than a person. She is an adjective.
If you care to read on, I will do my best to explain the meaning of this comment.
A friend of mine who works in the Federal government recently received an email posing this rhetorical question:
How do agencies mitigate risks and achieve FedRAMP compliance in multi-tenant environments to successfully pave their way to the cloud?
He naturally wondered whether there can ever be a paved road leading to a cloud. And I naturally wondered how anyone could get paid for writing jargon-laden garbage as bad as this. We can but wonder.
(I actually live in a multi-tenant environment. It's great; all the other tenants are lovely people. But I'm not sure whether I am FedRAMP-compliant. I hope I am.)
I commented back in 2008 on the ridiculous vagueness of some of the brief weather forecast summaries on BBC radio ("pretty miserable by and large," and so on). I do sometimes miss the calm, scientific character of American weather forecasts, with their precise temperature range predictions and exact precipitation probabilities. In recent days, on BBC Radio 4's morning news magazine program, I have heard an official meteorologist guy from the weather center saying not just vague things like "a weather front trying to get in from the north Atlantic," or "heading for something a little bit warmer as we move toward the weekend," but (more than once) a total baffler: "The temperature is going to be struggling." What the hell is that about?
We call people "swine", "pigs", "dogs", "curs", "rats", even "water buffalo" when we want to disparage them.
The latter epithet was uttered in the famous "water buffalo incident" that took place at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993, when an Israeli-born Jewish student, translating from Hebrew slang behema ("animal; beast" — used by Israelis to refer to loud, unruly people) shouted "Shut up, you water buffalo" out his window at a noisy group of students who were disturbing him and others in his building at midnight. The controversy was exacerbated by alleged racial overtones of "water buffalo", though the student who yelled the phrase denied that he meant it to have racial implications.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan spoke at the GOP “Fall Fest” unity event in his home district in Wisconsin. While he did not directly address Donald Trump’s crude and sexually aggressive remarks about women in a 2005 recording, he did refer to the furor over the comments as “a bit of an elephant in the room.” Ryan did hear boos, as did Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, who was heckled by a Trump supporter.
The passage in question:
look let me just start off by saying there is a bit of an elephant in the room and it is a troubling situation I'm serious it is I put out a statement about this last night I meant what I said and it's still how I feel
I have lately been teaching myself Korean and have become quite interested in Sino-Korean vocabulary. Recently two words in particular caught my attention: samchon 삼촌 ("paternal uncle"), from Chinese s ān cùn 三寸 ("three inches"), and sachon 사촌 ("cousin"), from Chinese sì cùn 四寸 ("four inches"). I wondered how "three inches" and "four inches" could turn into family members. According to one website I found, chon 寸 can refer to "degree (of kinship)", which makes some sense. But when I looked on ctext.org (Chinese Text Project), I couldn't find classical Chinese examples of this usage, so I'm thinking maybe it's a Korean invention.
Have you ever encountered cùn 寸 ("inch") in Classical Chinese to refer to degree of kinship? Do you think it's a Korean invention? And does "third degree of kinship" for uncle and "fourth degree of kinship" for cousin have any roots that you can think of in the Confucian tradition, or is that also a native Korean concept?
British comedian Richard Herring is the author of a 2003 book entitled Talking Cock: A Celebration of Man and his Manhood, so he naturally seized upon the republicization opportunity provided by the recent story of the world's first successful penis transplant. He made it the topic of his weekly humor column in The Metro, the trashy free newspaper that I sometimes reluctantly peruse in my constant search for linguistic developments that might be of interest to Language Log readers.
In a bravura display of diversity of lexical choice, Herring contrived to use a different euphemism for the anatomical organ every time he could find an excuse for mentioning it, which, believe me, was a lot. And he left me pondering a serious lexicographical question: just how many euphemisms are there for the appendage in question?
[Unusually, this post is restricted to adult males. Please click "Read the rest of this entry" to confirm that you are male and over 18.]
A week or so ago, I wrote a post about the notion of "mother" in Indian phonology (with a link to an earlier post written over a year ago about the concept of "mother" in linguistics more generally):
Ben Buckner has called additional information to my attention. Because the new material is fairly substantial, I did not want it to get buried as a comment to the previous post, which is no longer active. Consequently, I am presenting this additional material from Ben as a separate post of its own.