Language Log

Some elderly guys in northeastern Georgia have apparently been  plotting diverse and extensive mayhem, in ways that I personally found surprising  (Scott Shane, "4 Georgia Men Arrested in Terror Plot", NYT 11/2/2011):

Four Georgia men who were part of a fringe militia group were arrested on Tuesday in what the Justice Department described as a plot to use guns, bombs and the toxin ricin to kill federal and state officials and spread terror.

The men, all aged 65 and over, were recorded telling an F.B.I. informant that they wanted to kill federal judges, Internal Revenue Service employees and agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to court documents.

“There is no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly, highly illegal: murder,” one of those charged, Frederick Thomas, 73, of Cleveland, Ga., was recorded telling the informant.

“When it comes time to saving the Constitution, that means some people have got to die,” he said.

David Starr Jordan, among other accomplishments, was president of Stanford University from 1891 to 1913, and then chancellor of Stanford until 1916. He was also director of the Sierra Club from 1892 to 1903. He chose Stanford's motto, "Die Luft der Freiheit weht" ("The winds of freedom blow"). Stanford's Jordan Hall is named for him, and now houses the psychology department.

In the course of randomly scanning the results of a query at bookworm.culturomics.org, I stumbled on Jordan's essay The Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races Through the Survival of the Unfit. This work was apparently published for the first time in 1901 by the Peace Association of Friends in America, as the "abstract of an address given at Stanford University, May 9, 1900". The whole thing was put out in 1902 by the American Unitarian Association in Boston, and in at least three other editions in later years

To today's reader, even the title is somewhat shocking; and the work itself fully delivers what the title promises.

Sometimes two fairly ordinary things combine to create something bizarre. Karen Davis writes:

It seems to me that there is something deeply strange in this quote, from a 1922 novel by Joseph S. Fletcher called The Middle of Things:

"Robbery wasn't the motive. Murder was the thing in view! And why? It may have been revenge. It may have been that Ashton had to be got out of the way. And I shouldn't wonder a bit if that wasn't at the bottom of it, which is at the top and bottom of pretty nearly everything!"

"And that, ma'am?" asked Mr. Pawle, who evidently admired Miss Penkridge's shrewd observations, "that is what, now?"

"Money!"

For the past couple of weeks, I've been getting a bunch of curious email messages that start like these:

Thank you for contacting the comics and features department at The Washington Post.  Even though this is an automatic reply to inform you that we have received your comment, we still want you to know that we read every comment individually.

Thank you for contacting the Death Notices Advertising Department of the Washington Post and allowing us to serve you.  Your email has been received.  Listed below you will find general and required information that you may find useful.

Every day I get four or five similar acknowledgments from the comics department or the death notices department over at the Washington Post, although I've never sent any messages to either entity, or to any other WaPo address.

To mark 20 years of the Theoretical Linguistics program at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, our friends there celebrated with remarkable panache:

Among the many things that we have to be thankful for is the interesting new web app that generated this fascinating list.  Two questions: (easy) what is the app? and (hard) what input resulted in this output?

In case that one's too easy, here's another.

There's a Facebook app called "What Geek Are You?"  If you let it digest the contents of your account, and perhaps answer some questions —  I haven't tried it, and don't know the details — it decides what (kind of) geek you are. David C reports that one of his friends, who is fluent or literate in five languages, was classified as "Geek in English/Language", with this description thereby posted to his wall:

Speaking or writing are your expertise. There's nothing you can't say or write that gets your point across in an easy to understand way. You are the master of whatever extra languages you study, whether its a romantic like Spanish or French, or something completly different.

Is this pathetic incompetence, or hip irony, or perhaps both?  I'm not sure.

A new Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market opened up in my corner of Language Log Plaza this week, and as I walked through the aisles on the day of the grand opening, I noticed signs that read "look up for savings". This company is apparently committed to green building, so they have a bunch of skylights on the ceiling that let in the abundant natural light that we have here in San Diego. The signs pointing this out continue: "our skylights save energy and you money". Others will no doubt disagree, but that conjunction between the direct object energy and the benefactive + direct object combination you money strikes me as very unnatural. I can't think of a single constituency test that establishes something like you money as a constituent to be coordinated, but then again I've been wrong about this sort of thing before.

An adventure in layered possessives, courtesy of Christopher Buckley, "No One Likes a Deficit Bore", The Atlantic, 9/20/2010:

Michael and our fellow commentators seem to go back and forth on the matter of whose deficit is it, anyway? Good arguments are made on both sides. But they're beside the point. The more pressing question is: Whose cliff is it we're driving off? And the answer to that is: ours. All ours.

Dan Bloom just sent me this photograph that is making news in Taiwan:

Riders are advised against taking bus no. 1203, because the authorities don't know where you might end up if you do.

Reader JL sent in a pointer to this wonderful picture from the blog The Thought Experiment:

It was December 2009 when the intrepid syntactic explorer Andrew Dowd, hacking his way through virgin grammatical jungle, came upon this astonishing specimen:

In Michigan and Minnesota, more people found Mr Bush's ads negative than they did Mr Kerry's.

And now, after a further half a year out in the field, he has found another one on this website:

there were more artists breaking on their own, with no technology, than they are now, with technology

Another spectacular case of an utterance that we understand without any real trouble, despite a dawning realization, if we ever look back at it, that it couldn't possibly be claimed to have the right syntax to say what we (wrongly) thought it said.

Forwarded to Victor Mair by Jeff DeMarco, two photos of English stream-of-consciousness signage on the window of a jazz bar in Xi'an. Above: