Language Log

An acquaintance of mine has a new iPhone, which he carries in a pocket that is (relevantly) below waist level. He has discovered something that dramatically illustrates the difference between (i) responding to speech and (ii) responding to speech as humans do, on the basis of knowing that it is speech.

At the Writers Guild of America Awards on Sunday night, host Patton Oswalt predictably made some Trump jokes in his opening monologue. What wasn't so predictable was an extended analogy involving '80s hard rocker David Lee Roth and the linguistics department at Rutgers University. The key line: "Donald Trump taking Obama's job would be like if the head of linguistics at Rutgers made fun of David Lee Roth, and David Lee Roth was like, 'I'm gonna take his job.'" A shout-out to Bruce Tesar, chair of the Rutgers linguistics department?

Oswalt's bit starts around 5 minutes into the monologue, after some banter with James Woods, who was in the audience.

One of the most widely noted aspects of Donald Trump's campaign rally yesterday in Florida was his reference to a terrorist incident the night before in Sweden:

You look at what's happening in Germany,
you look at what's happening last night in Sweden —
Sweden!
Who would believe this? Sweden!
They took in large numbers, they're having problems like they never thought possible.
You look at what's happening in Brussels,
you look at what's happening all over the world, take a look at Nice,
take a look at Paris.

Since no plausibly relevant incident actually occurred the previous evening in Sweden, some people have suggested that the president's remark might refer to a documentary mentioned the night before on Fox. (See also here.) But most of the reaction took the form of jokes, many of them available on Twitter as #LastNightInSweden.

A friend of Anne Henochowicz spotted this T-shirt in an Akihabara, Tokyo shop:

Now that a black man is no longer president, George Will has stopped obsessing about presidential overuse of first-person singular pronouns, and has turned his attention to other pressing matters, such as the role of liberal higher education in promoting the political ascension of Donald Trump ("Trump and academia actually have a lot in common", 1/27/2017):

Much attention has been given to the non-college-educated voters who rallied to President Trump. Insufficient attention is given to the role of the college miseducated. They, too, are complicit in our current condition because they emerged from their expensive “college experiences” neither disposed nor able to conduct civil, informed arguments. They are thus disarmed when confronted by political people who consider evidence, data and reasoning to be mere conveniences and optional.

"Evidence, data, and reasoning". Good to hear that Mr. Will remains committed in principle to the virtues that he routinely subverts in practice.

First it was "The Netherlands Second". Now it's Switzerland making a bid:

[fbvideo link="https://www.facebook.com/srf1/videos/vb.104971002870361/1464882490212532/" width="500" height="400" onlyvideo="1"]

Jack Maloney sent in a link to a talk at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute about "Plant Soil Microbiomes in Perineal Agriculture":

Switching from an annual agriculture system to a perineal agriculture system that most closely resembles natural prairies will include changes to the way we manage soil, the lifespan of the plants, and the diversity of the crops there. KU Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Ben Sikes will talk about how each of these changes will influence diseases and the beneficial partners that live in the soil.

Presumably "perineal" in this context is a Cupertino for "perennial". Jack's comment:

'Perineal agriculture': not a subject I even want to think about, much less attend a lecture about!

This will always be funny to me 😂#newyorkersbelike pic.twitter.com/fd4YFPGWHo

— Kelly (@KellyShahbazian) September 9, 2016

For more, see #newyorkersbelike …

I'm in Groningen for the celebration of the 30-year anniversary of Alfa-Informatica.

So this is appropriate:

The linguistic highlight of Steven Mnuchin's confirmation hearing:

Barbara Philips Long writes:

Apple and other autofill writing software have contributed a lot to eggcorns, I suspect. I enjoyed this comment about supply-siders, which called them "supply spiders":

I am now imagining Carl Icahn as a supply spider.

I suspect that Barbara is right to attribute this coinage to someone's autocorrect function, in which case it would be an example of what Ben Zimmer suggested we call a Cupertino ("The Cupertino Effect", 3/9/2006). Of course it might also be a consciously-intended insult.

From an anonymous reader, who spotted this photograph on Instagram, where it was posted by nanorie, who has given her permission to repost it:

A friend of mine who does research on the history of tea in China recently shared the following photo in a WeChat group that focuses on Chinese food culture: