Language Log

Lena H. Sun and Juliet Eilperin, "CDC gets list of forbidden words: fetus, transgender, diversity", Washington Post 12/15/2017:

The Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases — including “fetus” and “transgender” — in any official documents being prepared for next year’s budget.

Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden words at a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing. The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

Tara Golshan, "Republicans are following the same strategy on taxes that doomed Obamacare repeal", Vox 11/1/2017:

“I think it would be intellectually dishonest to suggest that if we had had a bunch of wins on a whole bunch of items at this point, we perhaps would have been a little bit more deliberate in our negotiations,” Meadows, who chairs the Freedom Caucus, said.

In case you missed it — yesterday's tweet from Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Principal Deputy White House Press Secretary:

⚓️⚓️ :/9//&⛩
#lolaklkk⛲️

— Sarah H. Sanders (@SHSanders45) June 10, 2017

CNN now stands for Cardiac Care Network because their ppl are having heart attacks over Trump doing what Dems once demanded-fire Comey.

— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) May 10, 2017

CNN, CCN, whatever…

More evidence for the Conservation of Gemination.

I'm used to getting spammed about every plausibly product-related web search I do. But I'm at a loss to understand what triggered an email this morning with the Subject line "Trending Just For You: Be Yourself: A Journal for Catholic Girls". The body of the message:

SoraNews24 (4/20/17) has an article by Scott Wilson titled "W.T.F. Japan: Top 5 kanji with the longest readings【Weird Top Five】 ".  Before attempting to read and critique this article, we need to familiarize ourselves with some basic terms and concepts about the modern Japanese writing system.  It basically consists of thousands of kanji (Chinese characters) and kana (a syllabary of 48 symbols, of which there are two different types, cursive hiragana and angular katakana).  As the name "syllabary" indicates, each of the kana symbols is pronounced as a syllable, except for one, which indicates the sound "n".

This is weird, and even slightly creepy — paste a list of countries like

Costa Rica, Argentina, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ethiopia, France, Germany, England, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Peru, Puerto Rico, Scotland, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, Uruguay, Venezuela, USA

into Google Translate English-to-Spanish, and a parallel-universe list emerges:

An acquaintance of mine has a new iPhone, which he carries in a pocket that is (relevantly) below waist level. He has discovered something that dramatically illustrates the difference between (i) responding to speech and (ii) responding to speech as humans do, on the basis of knowing that it is speech.

We received the following intriguing note at Language Log Plaza:

Hey there, my name's Dan and I work at the Calistoga library. I found this little note in a book that was returned and I'm curious what script it's in.
At first I thought it was in Cherokee, but then looked closely and saw it wasn't.
It was returned in a Spanish-language book, if that's any clue.

A cursory look through writing systems on Omniglot didn't turn up a match. Can Language Log readers identify the script (assuming it's a script)?

Charles Belov was surprised by the featured story in the Health section of his Google News index. It was Chhavi Goel, "Surprising Theory About The Cats Which Make The Scientist Stunned", The News Recorder 12/26/2016:

A theory which make the scientists and major medical team shocked came in front that your cat can also become the reason of bird flu to you. The study came in front about the cats the bird flu virus can also affect a home cat which can be termed as dangerous for everyone. The study is also termed into many conclusion that tells that how strong is a bird flu virus can be.

Charles ponders:

It's bad enough that the syntax and word choices are odd, but why Google should promote this to the top is beyond me. Or am I just having a xenophobic reaction to Indian English (the domain ownership is in New Delhi and the author's name appears Indian)?

A neighbor of mine, a respectable woman retired from medical practice, set a number of friends of hers a one-question quiz this week. The puzzle was to identify an item she recently purchased, based solely on what was stated on the tag attached to it. The tag said this (I reproduce it carefully, preserving the strange punctuation, line breaks, capitalization, and grammar, but replacing two searchable proper nouns by xxxxxxxx because they might provide clues):

ABOUT xxxxxxxx
He comfortable
He elastic
He quickly dry
He let you unfettered experience and indulgence. Please! Hurry up
No matter where you are. No matter what you do.
Let xxxxxxxx Change your life,
Become your friends, Partner,
Part of life

Almost every day, when looking through the headlines on Google News, I see one or two stories where what's meant to be a snippet from the first paragraph of the story contains not a single word from the story but instead says this:

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On the fence around a construction site that I walk past every day is this sign: