Language Log

If you open this file in your browser, you'll see only an an left square bracket followed by a right square bracket, with nothing in between:

But if I run the file through a perl script that I wrote long ago to print out character codes and their names, I get

|[| 0x005B "LEFT SQUARE BRACKET"
|| 0xE004C "TAG LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L"
|| 0xE0061 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER A"
|| 0xE006E "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER N"
|| 0xE0067 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER G"
|| 0xE0075 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER U"
|| 0xE0061 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER A"
|| 0xE0067 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER G"
|| 0xE0065 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER E"
|| 0xE0020 "TAG SPACE"
|| 0xE004C "TAG LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L"
|| 0xE006F "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER O"
|| 0xE0067 "TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER G"
|]| 0x005D "RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET"

Watching this this CNN story on YouTube I noticed some really weird closed-captioning. You can try it for yourself — open the story on YouTube, turn CC on using the controls on the bottom right of the video panel, and see what you get.

In case it gets fixed, or your environment is different for some reason, I recorded a short sample:

Tweet by Eddie Zipperer:

https://twitter.com/EddieZipperer/status/1322218253247303681

Recently I was doing some background research on Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD), and one of the references that Google Scholar handed me was a Semantic Scholar page for J.A. Willeford and J. Burleigh, "Handbook of central auditory processing disorders in children", 1985, with the following abstract:

The handbook of central auditory processing disorders in children that we provide for you will be ultimate to give preference. This reading book is your chosen book to accompany you when in your free time, in your lonely. This kind of book can help you to heal the lonely and get or add the inspirations to be more inoperative. Yeah, book as the widow of the world can be very inspiring manners. As here, this book is also created by an inspiring author that can make influences of you to do more.

A new kind of Artificial non-Intelligence? A subversive easter egg of human origin? I'm not sure, but in the course of researching preposition usage, I discovered an odd result of Google searches for terms in various languages for dish soap — a panel (in English), attributed to Wikipedia, explaining that

Dishwashing liquid, known as dishwashing soap, dish detergent and dish soap, is a detergent used to assist in boredom.

Trump mispronounces Thailand as "Thighland" pic.twitter.com/PgTRnHpAA8

— The Recount (@therecount) August 6, 2020

David Brooks is working hard to maintain his reputation for always being wrong about things that are easy to check:

If you lived your life on Twitter you would never know music existed.

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) April 18, 2020

Tweet from Joshua Wong 黃之鋒, Secretary-General of Demosistō:

Here is Winnie The Flu that we call as #WTF

Credit to Yeahman Tse via Legend Bricks LEGO Forum pic.twitter.com/q04K7QfAku

— Joshua Wong 黃之鋒 😷 (@joshuawongcf) February 24, 2020

I just got an email from WordPress notifying me of a comment awaiting approval at LAWnLinguistics. Here is the comment, in full:

This is Pam, and English is my 1st language. I'm for real, and would like you to get back in touch with me.

The comment makes four assertions:

1. This is Pam
2. English is my 1st language.
3. I'm for real,
4. and would like you to get back in touch with me.

It's almost certain that three of those four assertions are false. Does anyone want to guess which is the one that is true?

CLARIFICATION (after reading the first five or six comments, all guessing wrong): For the benefit of those who want to submit a guess, note that what prompted this post was the content of the comment, not anything about its word choice, syntax, punctuation, etc.

HINT (after reading more wrong guesses): Pragmatics.

HINT IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION (after reading still more guesses that are not only wrong but aren't even close): How often have you encountered a situation in which, upon your initial contact with someone who is a complete stranger, the first thing they say after introducing themself is "English [or some other language] is my 1st language?

"Dubstep artist Skrillex could protect against mosquito bites", BBC News 4/1/2019:

The sun is shining on your skin, there's a breeze in your hair and someone has just handed you a coconut with a straw sticking out of it. This is living.

But just as you start to relax you find yourself clawing at your own skin, scratching at the mosquito bites that have developed on your body over the past few days.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

According to a recent scientific study, the way to avoid mosquito bites is to listen to electronic music – specifically dubstep, specifically by US artist Skrillex.

OK, it's April Fool's Day. And BBC Science Reporting is traditionally prone to credulous Weird Science stories, especially about animals ("It's always silly season in the (BBC) science section", 8/26/2006). So this will turn out to be a joke, or maybe click-bait exaggeration of some marginal results about mosquitoes' response to sounds, right?

Wikipedia describes academia.edu as a for-profit "social networking site for academics", whose misleading .edu domain name "was registered in 1999, prior to the regulations requiring .edu domain names to be held solely by accredited post-secondary institutions". For my part, I'd describe academia.edu as "a source of large volumes of annoying unsolicited email".

Yes, I know that I should unsubscribe — but this is harder to do than you might think, since they have registered me under a number of different email addresses, and add new ones when I tell them to unsubscribe the old ones. Anyhow, academia.edu seems recently to have achieved a level of transcendent fakery that almost makes me glad that that they're still spamming me.

The content management system at The Atlantic magazine seems to have slipped a cog or two, and associated one story's headline with another story's subhead. Either that, or ticks play a larger role in American social mobility than I would have guessed.

The image on the right appeared in my email inbox this morning, along with a dozen others promoting "A selection of top stories from The Atlantic this week". Turns out it combines

• the headline from Joe Pinsker, "The ‘Hidden Mechanisms’ That Help Those Born Rich to Excel in Elite Jobs", whose actual subhead is "When two sociologists interviewed highly paid architects, TV producers, actors, and accountants, they encountered work cultures that favor the already affluent";
• and the subhead from David Dobbs, "Climate Change Enters Its Blood-Sucking Phase", about health threats to moose in Vermont, with the subhead "As winters grow warmer in North America, thirsty ticks are on the move".

But until I did a bit of searching and link-following, I wondered.

How many redundant letters are there in the English Alphabet? What would be the ideal of a perfect alphabet, and how far does the English Alphabet fall short of that ideal?

— The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) January 30, 2019

[h/t Stan Carey]