Language Log

It's a class-conscious respelling that's not used "to indicate that the speaker is uneducated or using colloquial, dialectal, or nonstandard speech".

(Click on the image for a larger version, as usual.)

From Robert Rummel-Hudson's blog Fighting Monsters with Rubber Swords, under the heading "What could I possibly add to this?":

(Hat tip to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky.)

Last week, I discussed some of the things that Rev. Jeremiah Wright had to say at the National Press Club about race, language, and the brain ("Wright on language and linguistics", 4/29/2008). But I didn't discuss the passage that many journalists identified as the rhetorical and emotional core of his outburst. (Click the link to hear the audio.)

This is the transcript:

In our community, we have something called playing the dozens.
If you think I'm going to let you talk about my momma,
and her religious tradition, and my daddy, and his religious tradition, and my grandpa,
you got another think coming.

Or is it?

[Update 4/28/2008: Let me spoil the fun by pointing out that this post was supposed to be a joke. Apologies, for being excessively indirect again, to the half-a-dozen commenters who have earnestly informed me that English-language puzzles limit themselves to our standard 26 letters. I was just trying to underline, jocularly, Roger Shuy's jocular point that analogous limiting conventions in texting will probably not destroy … Oh, never mind.]

In a recent post, Roger Shuy warned us about the threat to civilization posed by the New York Times crossword puzzle:

Correct answers to the Times puzzles require no apostrophes to mark the important distinction between “its” from “it’s” or even to indicate possessive nouns. No correctly hyphenated words are permitted. And even though you know better, have you ever been able to use a comma, colon, semicolon, quotation mark, virgule, or question mark in a New York Times crossword puzzle? No, you haven’t! Not even periods after abbreviations. No spaces between words in phrases. No dashes in front of suffixes. How’s that for creeping whateverism?

As Roger observed, it's striking that those who urge action against the barbarian hordes of txters are unconcerned about the fifth column of crossworders in our midst. But Joe Gordon is sounding the tocsin. A long-time Language Log correspondent, Joe has sent me a series of notes on this subject, focusing especially on the New York Times crossword for Thursday, April 24, in which the clue to 28 across was "Mayo can be found in it", and the required answer is A-N-O. As Joe explains:

This is wrong … N is not the same letter as the one that appears in the word Year translated into Spanish. It is a different letter. I swear. Look it up.

Given the error, the clue reads, translated, "Mayo can be found in it", answer, "Anus".

Students of speech errors have long observed that they provide insight into the way language is organized mentally; the inadvertent slips that people make show that they know (tacitly) enormous amounts of stuff about their language. So do mistakes of another sort, in which people produce what they intend to, but this diverges in some way from what they are expected to produce in some community or context: persistent misspellings (not typos) like loose for lose, for example (discussed here). Many of these mistakes are "smart mistakes", which show that those who produce them know a lot about the standard system; at the same time, they are "mistakes of ignorance", meaning ignorance of the complete standard system — but actually ignorance of just one or two relevant details.

You might have thought that the Roman empire was doomed by barbarian invasions, lead poisoning, the loss of masculine values, or climate change. But Jim Bisso at Epea Pteroenta has pointed out that at the very height of the empire's power, in the reign of Trajan, Roman culture had already been compromised by an insidious agent that you probably have never considered, though it's obvious in retrospect.

One of the sturdiest linguistic canards is that George Bernard Shaw facetiously proposed spelling fish as ghoti, with gh pronounced as in laugh, o as in women, and ti as in nation. This respelling, the story goes, was intended by Shaw to highlight the absurdity of English orthography. But ghoti appears nowhere in Shaw's writings, according to devoted Shavians who have thoroughly scoured his works. The earliest attribution of ghoti to Shaw that I've found is from 1946, and the attributor is Mario Pei, not always the most reliable source when it comes to language-related information. By that point, ghoti had been circulating in the popular press for nearly a decade. Previously, the earliest known appearance of ghoti was from a 1937 newspaper article discovered by the redoubtable Fred Shapiro. That still allows for the slight possibility that Shaw was the originator, if unnamed. But now Matthew Gordon of the University of Missouri-Columbia has antedated ghoti — all the way back to 1874. And the 1874 article is quoting a source from 1855, a year before Shaw was born.

We discovered in the Linguistics and English Language department at the University of Edinburgh today that the draft handbook for our honours students was stuffed with occurrences of the nonexistent words programmeme and programmemes. The secretarial staff were baffled. Can you figure out the origin of this strange and unwelcome neologism? (A hint: Dawkins's invented term meme appears to have no relevance whatsoever.)

From The Unspeakable Vault (of Doom), a warning about using spellcheckers when summoning Elder Gods…