Language Log

From ABC World News, 3/22/2011, in a segment on the rescue of the downed American F-15 pilots in Libya, Diane Sawyer observes (about 6:55 into the program):

And it is hard to imagine
or to underestimate or overestimate
what it took in those heart-pounding moments when the pilots had to eject
the incredible velocity of that

Dick Margulis writes:

An NPR reporter this morning, talking about people in Libya: "…have never spoken to a Western reporter, much less seen one."

I hear this frequently (although I don't recall reading it). It is a reversal of what was intended: "have never seen a Western reporter, much less spoken to one."

This occurs with both "much less" and "let alone."

I wouldn't begin to know how to do a corpus search to detect the frequency with which people reverse the arguments of the expression in speech. It occurs to me, though, that the production error seems to be akin to the misnegation phenomenon that you've posted about more than once.

In this week's online BBC News magazine, Alan Metcalf reprises his recent book OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word. I haven't read the book, but Prof. Metcalf is an established scholar as well as a successful popularist, and I have every reason to think that the book is well worth reading. Still, I have a little semantic problem with the article.

The article mostly discusses the history of OK, saying that its widespread circulation probably dates back to an unfunny joke in an 1839 article in the Boston Morning Post. Fair enough: he and the OED agree on this point. Then he goes on:

But what makes OK so useful that we incorporate it into so many conversations?

From a recent Sore Thumbs:

"How the heck will Kinect swimming even work?" is a nice example of a use of even that I think is genuinely new. At  least, certain expressions like "what does that even mean?" and "how does that even work?"  have recently become common, and I can't find clear examples of them that are more than about 15 years old. But perhaps we should see this as rolling the clock back to the 16th century, and taking things up where they left off when even began a five-century detour as a scalar particle.

Yesterday's Beetle Bailey, pointed out by Karen Davis:

"In no uncertain terms" is an idiom in which the "no" and the "un-" cancel, so that the result means something like "in very specific and direct language", "very clearly", "in a strong and direct way", or perhaps "emphatically". In other words, "in no uncertain terms" means "in certain terms", construing "certain" as in certainty. The earliest example that I've been able to find is this sentence from the Chicago Tribune, July 20 1863:

Our dispatches contain another circular from the Provost Marshal General's office, and accompanying, the voice of the Government, couched in no uncertain terms, that the draft will be enforced in every loyal State, without fear or favor.

And "in no uncertain terms" is still being used that way, as in this example from today's New York Times:

After last week, the question now is: Why am I writing a post this week instead of sleeping?

When more than 200 people tell you, in no uncertain terms, that the first step to dealing with the exhaustion incurred when a child does not sleep is to find ways and moments for you, yourself, to sleep, that’s a fair question.

But recently, through the miracle of misnegation, this elderly cliché has found a new role in life.

My latest reader response for The New York Times Magazine's On Language column tackles a turn of phrase that has come up on Language Log many times: cannot be underestimated. The occasion is New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's inaugural address earlier this month, in which the governor used the magic phrase twice (and talked about "underestimating" a third time without the cannot). I give the requisite shout-out to Language Log, of course.

Miguel Helft, "Twins’ Facebook Fight Rages On", NYT 12/30/2010 (emphasis added):

As they talked about the Facebook case, no detail was too small to omit, from where they first met Mr. Zuckerberg (the Kirkland House dining room) to the layout of Mr. Zuckerberg’s dorm room, to the content of the e-mails he had sent them after they asked him to do computer programming for a Web site called Harvard Connection.

I'm still mulling over the blockbuster "culturomics" paper published in Science last week and ably addressed here by Geoff Nunberg and Mark Liberman. I'll have more to say about aspects of the paper having to do with the size of the English lexicon, but in the meantime let me direct you to my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, which takes up the more superficial question of nomenclature: both culturomics and ngram (as in the Ngram Viewer) are less than transparent to non-specialists (and even trouble some specialists). An excerpt follows below.

The "culturomics" paper that Geoff Nunberg posted about is getting a lot of well-deserved kudos.  Jean Véronis writes

When I was a student at the end of the 1970's, I never dared imagine, even in my wildest dreams, that the scientific community would one day have the means of analyzing computerized corpuses of texts of several hundreds of billions of words.

I've contributed my voice to the chorus — Robert Lee Holtz in the Wall Street Journal ("New Google Database Puts Centuries of Cultural Trends in Reach of Linguists", WSJ 12/17/2010) quotes me this way:

"We can see patterns in space, time and cultural context, on a scale a million times greater than in the past," said Mark Liberman, a computational linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, who wasn't involved in the project. "Everywhere you focus these new instruments, you see interesting patterns."

And I meant every word of that. But there's a worm in the bouquet of roses.

There was some grumbling on the American Dialect Society list last week after the New Oxford American Dictionary announced its selection of refudiate as Word of the Year (like Christmas decorations, these days the WOTYs go up before people have even ordered their Thanksgiving turkeys). The choice was a blatant publicity stunt, some said, and besides the word wasn't coined by Palin — indeed, it wasn't a coining at all, but a mistake. As Jonathan Lighter put it, "It's a gaffe no matter who uses it… So it isn't a good word for a serious dictionary to lionize, if you ask me."

But others defended the choice in the name of fair-&-balanced even-handedness. Ron Butters, a sometime NOAD consultant, charged that the critics were being selective:

So [the NOAD editors] are whores when they jump on Palin's word but not whores when they promote "truthiness"?…Why does it really matter that she misspoke–and was clever enough to make a virtue of it–whereas the "truthiness" people set out to find fame by promoting a stunt word… [Anyway] if linguists really believe that whatever it is that the people choose to say is OK–if we are really opposed to prescriptivism and proscriptivism–then how can we object even to a dictionary reporting a usage from a source that millions of Americans admire and respect, whether it is a right-wing entertainer such as Palin or a left-wing-beloved entertainer such as the truthiness guy?

Is any of this worth bothering about? Not for its own sake, but it foregrounds a paradox that runs deep in modern lexicography

"Pope condones condom use in exceptional cases", BBC News, 11/20/2010:

Catholic commentator Austen Ivereigh said that although this was the first time the Pope had voiced such an opinion, it was in line with what Catholic moral theologians have been saying for many years.

"The Church's teaching on contraception predates the discovery of Aids," Mr Ivereigh told the BBC news website. […]

"If the intention is to prevent transmission of the virus, rather than prevent contraception, moral theologians would say that was of a different moral order." [emphasis added]

As usual in such cases, we don't know whether this was Mr. Ivereigh's slip or the BBC's.  But on the basis of past performance, I'm not inclined to trust the press in cases like this one.

From a letter to the editor in the Nov. 8 New Yorker:

Such rhetoric then [by left-wing critics of George W. Bush] was hardly less corrosive, or less supported by scholarly reasoning, than the crackpot vitriol now spewed by Beck and his ilk.

As we've noted many times, combinations of negation and scalar predicates are hard for our poor monkey brains to process.