Language Log

Reading through Étienne de La Vaissière's massive magnum opus, Asie Centrale 300-850:  Des routes et des royaumes (2024), I came to a screeching halt when my gaze alighted on this photograph (III.6, p. 71):

Limestone relief of Saluzi ("Autumn Dew"), one of the Six Steeds of Zhao Mausoleum, along with an unknown human general. The general switched horses with the emperor and cared for Saluzi; he is seen here pulling an arrow out of Saluzi's chest. On display at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (source)

This is something I was going to write about in the early part of December, 2023, but got sidetracked by too many other things.  Now I'm going through my e-mail clutter to clean out old messages that I had neglected to take care of back then.  At that time, more than half a year ago, "PUA" was still very popular.  Although speech fashions change rapidly in China, it was so viral then that I suspect it is still relevant today, so let's take a good look at it.

When I first encountered "PUA", I had no idea what it meant nor how to pronounce it (the same sort of feeling of being at sea when I initially heard "hawk tuah"), so I started looking around for what it might mean.  Clearly, from the contexts in which I was hearing it, PUA was not "Pandemic Unemployment Assistance", which was a federal and state government program back in the day.

I fairly quickly came to the realization that the term "PUA" is derived from the American English phrase “pick-up artist”.  Well, I'd never heard of that either, so had to educate myself about that too.

Marilyn Singer is reponsible for the local (re-)invention of "Reverso Poetry: Writing Verse in Reverse":

A reverso is a poem with two halves. In a reverso, the second half reverses the lines from the first half, with changes only in punctuation and capitalization — and it has to say something completely different from the first half (otherwise it becomes what one blogger’s kid called a “same-o.”)

Wikipedia uses the term "Reversible poem", and tells us that

A reversible poem, also called a palindrome poem or a reverso poem, is a poem that can be read both forwards and backwards, with a different meaning in each direction, like this:

Reversible poems, called hui-wen shih poems, were a Classical Chinese artform. The most famous poet using this style was the 4th-century poet Su Hui, who wrote an untitled poem now called "Star Gauge" (Chinese: 璇璣圖; pinyin: xuán jī tú).This poem contains 841 characters in a square grid that can be read backwards, forwards, and diagonally, with new and sometimes contradictory meanings in each direction.[2] Reversible poems in Chinese may depend not only on the words themselves, but also on the tone to produce a sense of poetry. Beginning in the 1920s, punctuation (which is uncommon in Chinese) was sometimes added to clarify Chinese palindromic poems.

The focus of this post is Brian Bilston's Reverso Poem "Refugees".

…vs. having a video conversation with her…

Attachment ambiguity of the week: "RFK Jr. says he dumped dead bear in Central Park after ditching plan to skin it in bizarre video with Roseanne Barr", NY Post 8/4/2024.

The use of the verb positioned in this sentence, part of an article quoted in "'Dutch roll'", puzzled some commenters:

The aircraft remained on the ground in Oakland until Jun 6th 2024, then positioned to Everett,WA (USA), ATS facilities, and is still on the ground in Everett 6 days later.

But there are general processes in English morpho-syntax that validate the sentence as published.

To start with, there are various ways to verbify nouns. In particular, it's common to turn a noun denoting a place into a verb meaning "cause something to come to be in/on/at that place" — as in position N. → position V. 

There's also the question of static vs. dynamic placement, which might have suggested "was re-positioned to Everett" rather than "was positioned to Everett" — but a Google search for {"then positioned to the"} demonstrates that the dynamic interpretation of position V. is entirely normal, especially in various technical domains.

Some speculated  that this sentence might have been a typo for "was positioned to Everett" — but there's the causative/inchoative alternation involved in things like

(a) The pilot moved the plane to Gate 37.
(b) The plane moved to Gate 37.

Derivational morphology is quasi-regular, so new applications of these various processes tend to become normalized in particular fields, but then surprise outsiders. Which is what seems to have happened in this case…

Lately I've been seeing greater use of this kind of sentence structure:  "He is an awesome hero — not".  And (mis)negation has always been a favorite topic for discussion on Language Log.  Consequently, I'm calling to your attention two recent publications on "not".

"'Not' in the Brain and Behavior." Cas W. Coopmans, Anna Mai, Andrea E. Martin, PLOS Biology 22, no. 5 (May 31, 2024): e3002656.

Negation is key for cognition but has no physical basis, raising questions about its neural origins. A new study in PLOS Biology on the negation of scalar adjectives shows that negation acts in part by altering the response to the adjective it negates.

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002656.

Language fundamentally abstracts from what is observable in the environment, and it does so often in ways that are difficult to see without careful analysis. Consider a child annoying their sibling by holding their finger very close to the sibling’s arm. If asked what they were doing, the child would likely say, “I’m not touching them.” Here, the distinction between the physical environment and the abstraction of negation is thrown into relief. Although “not touching” is consistent with the situation, “not touching” is not literally what one observes because an absence is definitionally something that is not there. The sibling’s annoyance speaks to the actual situation: A finger is very close to their arm. This kind of scenario illustrates how natural language negation is truly a product of the human brain, abstracting away from physical conditions in the world.

…

There have been many LLOG posts on misuse of the term "passive voice", going back to 2003. As far as I can tell, the most recent post was "'Is it the passive voice you don't like?'", 8/11/2021.

In "'Passive Voice' — 1397-2009 — R.I.P", I wrote that

the traditional sense of passive voice has died after a long illness. It has ceased to be; it's expired and gone to meet its maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It's an ex-grammatical term.

Its ghost walks in the linguistics literature and in the usage of a few exceptionally old-fashioned intellectuals. For everyone else, what passive voice now means is "construction that is vague as to agency".

Today, Ambarish Sridharanarayanan sent me a link to a piece of writing that illustrates the issue perfectly:

The press release makes heroic use of the passive voice to obscure the actors: “an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription.”

In a comment on "Inerrancy and prescriptivism", Philip Minden wrote that "'just because… doesn't mean' is chalk drawn slowly down the blackboard", referring to the panel on the right.

The traditional reference is to fingernails on a chalkboard, not chalk on a blackboard — if chalk on a blackboard produced that irritating visceral response, mid-20th-century school days would have been a (greater) source of trauma.

But tangled idioms aside, there's an interesting socio-syntactic point here, namely whether and why it's OK for certain subordinate clauses to serve as subjects, as if they were noun phrases — and whether (and when) that works for clauses introduced by just because.

Chrisma Madarang, "Man Accusing CPAC Chair Matt Schlapp of Sexual Assault Was Paid $480,000: Report", Rolling Stone 3/27/2024:

Huffman claimed Mrs. Schlapp attempted to “impugn” his character in her response to the allegations against her husband, calling him a “troubled individual,” and alleged he had been dismissed from the campaign after lying on his resume in a group chat with neighbors.

From shaing tai, via a group on Facebook, photograph taken at the New Otani Inn in Tokyo:

From John Bell:

I thought of you and your interest in the oddities of linguistic expression a few days ago when I noticed that the local Safeway supermarket had large signs up saying "RE-GRAND OPENING".   They had recently done some renovation in a corner of the store — enlarging the self-checkout and the Starbucks counter, so I think that was the impetus for the sign, but I also liked the way it made sure you knew this was not the first GRAND OPENING.

"Alligator Kills 69-Year-Old Woman in South Carolina", NYT 7/4/2023:

A 69-year-old woman was attacked and killed by an alligator on Tuesday as she was walking her dog in her neighborhood in Hilton Head Island, S.C., the authorities said.

The Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office said it was the second fatal alligator attack in the county in less than a year. […]

Jay Butfiloski, the furbearer and alligator program coordinator with the state’s Natural Resources Department, could not be reached on Tuesday.

The most recent Trump indictment reproduces this exchange of text messages (p. 11) :

Trump Employee 2:

We can definitely make it work if we move his
papers into the lake room?

Trump Employee 1:

There is still a little room in the shower where his
other stuff is. Is it only his papers he cares about?
Theres some other stuff in there that are not papers.
Could that go to storage? Or does he want everything
in there on property

Trump Employee 2:

Yes – anything that's not the beautiful mind paper
boxes can definitely go to storage. Want to take a
look at the space and start moving tomorrow AM?