Language Log

Conversations among linguists may sometimes be interesting to non-linguists for reasons that are not entirely the same as those that appeal to insiders. As an example, I present without further comment a recent back-and-forth on Facebook between Linguist X and Linguist Y, slightly redacted to preserve anonymity.

Earlier today, "Patriot Voices" (Rick Santorum's PAC) sent out an email containing the following paragraph:

I strongly oppose President Obama's nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense because his confirmation would send a dangerous signal to Iran and other radical Islamic elements which would make our country and our allies less secure. Not only did Senator Hagel tip off the Iranians that he would not use strength to prevent them from obtaining nuclear weapons, he disrespects our strongest ally in the middle east, Israel. Time after time, Sen. Hagel has sought to distance the United States from Israel and refused to stop efforts to end terrorist attacks on Israel. [emphasis added]

This is my nomination for misnegation of the month.

Here are some items sent in by readers over the past few weeks, to add to our list of misnegations. Larry Horn, on ADS-L:

"We'll see the fate of the coaching staff of Dallas…This cannot be understated, though, or overstated: whether it's his fault or not, Tony Romo is now 1-6 in win or go home games, either in Week 17 or the playoffs."

–ESPN SportsCenter anchor Steve Levy following another last-game elimination of the Dallas Cowboys

Maybe that should be the general strategy for all hypernegations:

"No head injury is too trivial to ignore, or to pay attention to."

"His problems can't be underestimated, or overestimated."

John Podheretz, tweeting about Wayne LaPierre's proposal to put armed guards in every American school:

The awful part of what LaPierre just did is until he spoke there was nothing uncontroversial about having security at schools

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) December 21, 2012

When he wrote "… there was nothing uncontroversial about …", he clearly meant "… there was nothing controversial about …"

Where did the extra un- come from? A blend of "uncontroversial" and "nothing controversial"? A bit of emphatic overnegation? Both?

Jonah Goldberg, "Whither the Toaster?", NRO 9/10/2012:

It’s not like there isn’t a market for such things. I’d wager more Americans own toasters than iPhones. It’s not like heating bread is a realm of human technological knowledge that cannot be further advanced (if such a realm exists). More plainly, it is not as if there aren’t technologies at hand today that wouldn’t improve the toasting experience if thoughtfully incorporated into a new generation of toasting devices. [emphasis added]

Reader AW, who sent this one in, suspects that "if you dissect it, it ends up NOT saying what Jonah wants to say".

So Pete Wells (who is the NYT's restaurant critic) wrote an epically bad review of Guy Fieri's American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square (sample line: "Somewhere within the yawning, three-level interior of Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, is there a long refrigerated tunnel that servers have to pass through to make sure that the French fries, already limp and oil-sogged, are also served cold?").

And Guy Fieri, who has a regular show on the Food Network ("Guy's Big Bite"), struck back with an interview on the Today Show (""I just thought it was ridiculous," Fieri, 44, said Thursday. "I've read reviews. There's good and there's bad in the restaurant business. But that, to me, went so overboard. It really seemed like there was another agenda.")

So does Pete Wells indeed have another agenda?

A striking misnegation from Josh Marshall, poetically reflecting his confusion about levels of belief, deception, and presentation in the recent presidential campaign — "Disturbing", TPM 11/12/2012:

As you know, the great question that faces the nation today is this: were Republicans, particularly Mitt Romney, really “shell shocked” by the results of Tuesday’s election or is this just some elaborate con-job for reasons as yet unknown. […]

I think at this point, I give up. I give in. I can’t maintain my skepticism. I don’t know quite how shell shocked Mitt and his crew were. But I don’t see how not to believe that Republicans as a group were not working on the basis of internal polls that were just totally wrong. Cui Bono? Why lie this much? I simply don’t see any purpose being served. I’ve heard many suggest that they need to keep up this pretense because these are the bogus numbers they were serving up to Adelson and the other multi-billionaires to keep the money coming in. But this doesn’t really make sense. Are these guys going to react worse because they were lied to than they are if they think the guys they gave their money to are a bunch of incompetents and morons? [emphasis added]

Uh-oh! A friend of mine who recently looked at the websites of the Departments of Linguistics at both the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania just pointed out to me that each of them claims to be the oldest department of linguistics in the USA. This is bad. Language Log is headquartered on a server at Penn. Now we don't know whether our home is the oldest department of linguistics in the USA or not.

Reader Jacob Baskin wrote with an interesting ambiguity that he was reminded of reading my recent post about "the wife and mother of two men killed in a fire". He writes

In the context of third-world development, I recently heard the factoid that "$1 in the hands of a woman is, on average, worth $10 in the hands of a man" (here, for instance).

Does this mean, "Each dollar that a woman has is worth, to her, what ten dollars would be to a man"? Or, "Each dollar that a woman has would be worth, if it were in the hands of a man, ten dollars"? Clearly the former meaning is intended, but as with that "duck/rabbit" optical illusion, I can make myself see the sentence in either way.

I'm hard pressed to think of other sentences with two possible meanings in direct opposition to each other. I also can't quite figure out what's going on with the sentence to create this ambiguity. Just thought this might be interesting to you.

Yes, it’s interesting! Here are my first thoughts, for what they’re worth. I also easily hear both meanings, (plus a third, I discovered as I wrote this) and I think both (maybe all three) patterns are probably common.

Local radio station WFCR on Thursday, October 11 started a report with a sentence that gave me a big double-take:

“The wife and mother of two men killed in a fire in Northampton has filed suit …”

And the next morning, October 12, I saw almost the same words in the local paper, the Hampshire Gazette:

Photo caption:

Alleged arsonist Anthony Baye has been sued by Elaine Yeskie, the widow and mother of the two men killed in a Northampton house fire he allegedly set.

Beginning of story:

The widow and mother of men killed in a house fire in 2009 filed a wrongful death lawsuit Wednesday against alleged fire-starter Anthony P. Baye. Elaine Yeskie, 77, is seeking monetary and punitive damages against Baye, …

The version under the photo caption makes the description an appositive phrase, so we already know that it’s a description of one person. But the beginning of the radio story really took me by surprise and made me grab my pen. I feel subjectively sure, though I could of course be wrong, that I could never say that that way. All the ways I could express it take more words; about the shortest acceptable version I can find is “The wife of one and mother of the other of two men killed in a fire …”

Some news about the presidential debates from Politico, as reported by Dylan Byers:

Philips pulls presidential debate sponsorship

Philips Electronics has dropped its sponsorship of the 2012 presidential debates, citing a desire not to associate itself with bipartisanship, POLITICO has learned.

That lede might cause many readers to do a double-take. If bipartisanship is conventionally understood to mean "cooperation between the two major political parties," why would Philips be opposed to such cooperation? If they don't favor bipartisanship, doesn't that mean they favor partisanship instead? But no: in this case, bipartisanship is actually the equivalent of partisanship, which are both in opposition to nonpartisanship.

Katie Rogers-Follow, "Facebook is not leaking your private messages – though you once did", The Guardian (US News Blog) 9/24/2012:

Monday afternoon, Facebook spokesperson Frederic Wolens added that Facebook hadn't been unable to confirm any issue related to a leakage of private messages.

Probably this is just a typo — though at the moment it's been up on the Grauniad's website for almost a week, suggesting that it's the kind of typo that's easy to fail to miss. Anyhow, it's one for the misnegation archives.

Reader MD sent in another contribution to the misnegation archives — Lydia Polgreen, "A Murder Sentence Underlines South African Inequality", New York Times, 8/22/2012:

The death of Eugène Terre’Blanche, the leader of the militant white separatist group known as the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, seemed an ominous sign that the era of racial harmony that began in 1994 with the end of apartheid and the beginning of nonracial democracy was in peril. […]

The government rushed to investigate the case thoroughly, eager to dispel any notion that it took lightly the killing of one of its citizens, even one opposed to majority rule.

MD notes that "the international print edition must have been printed before an error was noticed. I read it a few times after my initial interpretation seemed wrong." The version that he read had this in place of the last sentence quoted above:

The government rushed to investigate the case thoroughly, eager to dispel any appearance that it did not take the murder of one of its citizens lightly, even one opposed to majority rule.