Language Log

[Background: in inventorying postings with linguistically interesting cartoons, for a Language of Comics project at Stanford (directed by Elizabeth Traugott and me), the project intern has been unearthing postings from Language Log Classic whose image links no longer work. Here's one of Mark Liberman's from 2005 — "Illustrations" of 8/2/05, with two Get Fuzzy strips. I'm reproducing the posting here, with fresh, working links.

Back in 2005, we didn't have comments open on postings. But I've opened them now. Just remember: This posting is by Mark, not me. I'm just a typist.]

Jeff Tomczek has an article in the Huffington Post on the things people didn't tell him about getting cancer and undergoing the treatment. It's very good (those who have been through it or are very close to people who did will find much that resonates). But his title is a botch that I think must be due to the myth that English has a "past subjunctive" (which it does not). Here is the title under which his article was published:

The Things I Wish I Were Told When I Was Diagnosed With Cancer

That isn't well-formed English as I understand it. And I have used this language for quite a few years; I'm kind of used to it. I realize that your mileage may differ, but I would judge the above to be actually disallowed by the grammar.

Following on from Barbara Partee's example of Kruschev not banging his shoe, I just came across a great example of chained hypothetical negative events. It was during Bonnie Webber's plenary address here in Austin yesterday, at the NASSLLI Summer School. (BTW, if you'll be in the Austin area on Saturday, I have an announcement for you: NASSLLI is hosting a big event commemorating the centenary of Turing's birth, and it's free and open to the public.) But without more ado, here's the "Not raising hogs" text, a good Texas story of how to get something from nothing:

THE NOT RAISING HOGS BUSINESS

To: Mr. Clayton Yeutter
Secretary of Agriculture
Washington, D.C.

Tom Roeper sent the following "Summer question" around to the UMass Linguistics Department the other day, and I offered to put it onto Language Log as a guest post. What follows is all Tom's. (I've never worked on this topic myself).

For anybody who is intrigued: This is a summer question because you might have time in the summer to devote 10 minutes to it — if it captures your fancy. For several years [too many actually] in my various explorations of recursion, I have looked at cases like: hero after hero after dead hero => all the heroes are dead.

Today in the NYT, I read this quote from Ray Bradbury who just died: "it was one frenzy after one elation after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another" My question is: what does this sentence mean?  Is it a set of frenzies followed by a set of elations followed by a set of enthusiasms or are they systematically interspersed, or randomly interspersed? Any comments welcome– Tom

Reader JB described a visit to the Peabody Museum in New Haven, "where in addition to the classic dinosaur bones and so on they had a temporary exhibit aimed at educating kids about the nation’s burgeoning obesity problem and its (per sort of unreflective conventional wisdom) causes". One feature of this exhibit was "a set of wooden doors concealing popular snack foods where you could read a blowup of the ingredients list from the package and then open the door to see what it described".

The associated legend explained:

Remember: snacks with few ingredients that you can pronounce are usually the best choices.

Preet Bharara, "Asleep at the Laptop", NYT 6/3/2012:

THE alarm bells sound regularly: cybergeddon; the next Pearl Harbor; one of the greatest existential threats facing the United States. With increasing frequency, these are the grave terms officials invoke about the menace of cybercrime — and they’re not understating the threat.

I just found that sentence in the first footnote to William Taubman's "Khrushchev: The Man and his Era" (2003). It's a great example of a "negative event" – we call them "negative events" with scare quotes because it remains controversial whether there are any such things. How can not doing something be an event?

First a clarification: I realize from Googling that there's a completely different sense of "negative event" which is more common and not controversial at all – that's something bad that happens to you, an event with "negative" effects. What linguists and philosophers worry about are sentences or phrases containing negation that seem to denote events, like the one that heads this post.

We chatted a bit about it around the water cooler at Language Log Plaza yesterday, and David Beaver contributed the following nice link:

http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/nikita-khrushchev-and-his-shoe/

The discussion there and in Taubman's footnote of the events at the UN General Assembly on October 13, 1960 makes it clear that on the one hand, Khrushchev's banging his shoe on the desk became famous and iconic, and that on the other hand, there is a real dispute about whether it actually happened. That seems to be one circumstance in which something not happening can be described as an event.

Although the popular discussion of hopefully often refers to "grammar", in fact no general point of grammar is usually at issue — the (now moribund) hopefully controversy was about the usage of a single word. And the genesis of the controversy, as discussed here and here, was clearly a rapid change between about 1960 and 1975 in the relative frequency of hopefully in the evaluative sense "it is to be hoped". However, one of the common rationalizations for this novelty-aversion does raise some grammatical questions of a more general nature.

Today's Scenes from a Multiverse:

Daniel J. Wakin, "Met Reverses Itself on Reviews Ban by Opera News", NYT 5/22/2012:

The Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday backed away from its decision to bar reviews of its productions in Opera News, its affiliated magazine and the leading opera publication in the country.

The Met said an “outpouring of reaction” from opera fans on the Internet caused it to change course a day after The New York Times reported that Met officials and the publishers of Opera News had decided to stop reviewing Met shows.

“I think I made a mistake,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “The Metropolitan Opera only exists with the good will of the public. Clearly the public would miss Opera News not being able to review the Met, and we are responding to that,” he added, referring to a “groundswell of disappointment.”

Reader PN wrote to comment on the first sentence of  a story by Andres Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald, "US unlikely to condemn Argentina’s ‘outlaw behavior’ — yet", Miami Herald 5/16/2012:

A U.S. congressional proposal aimed at expelling Argentina’s populist-leftist government from the G-20 group of the world’s leading economies faces an uncertain future, not the least because it lacks significant support from unexpected quarters — conservative Cuban-American Republican lawmakers.

PN's comment:

From the rest of the article — and typical attitudes of Cuban-American Republicans to leftist Latin American governments — it seems clear that they are trying to say that the *lack* of support was unexpected. But what a strange way to put it.

Semantics in the John Edwards trial (James Hill and Beth Lloyd, "John Edwards Defense Relies on Definition of 'The'", Good Morning America 5/13/2012):

Not since Bill Clinton challenged the definition of "is" has so much hinged on a very short word.

John Edwards appears to basing much of his defense, which begins today in a North Carolina courtroom, on the legal interpretation of the word "the." […]

The statute governing illegal receipt of campaign contributions "means any gift, subscription, loan, advance, or deposit of money… for the purpose of influencing any election for federal office."

The words "the purpose" suggests that in order for a conviction, the sole reason for the money would have to be to finance a presidential campaign.

Edwards' legal team has argued … that his main reason for hiding Hunter was to keep her secret from his wife, Elizabeth.

Prosecutors, however, are arguing the law should be interpreted to mean "a purpose," meaning use of the donations does not have to be solely for a political campaign.

From Lauri Karttunen (via Arnold Zwicky):

I have come to realize that there are a lot of examples on the web of the type "not want to not X" that seem to say the opposite of what they mean. Here are a few:

She failed to give the patient CPR and turned an ambulance away in the mistaken belief that the elderly woman’s had said she did not want not to be resuscitated. (Cambridge, UK, newspaper article)

If a guest does not want not to be disturbed they need only to place the 'Do Not Disturb" sign on the door and their wishes will be respected. (Florida motel)

In the first case, the mistaken belief was that the elderly woman did not want to be resuscitated. In the second case it should say "If a guest does not want to be disturbed …"