Language Log

Michael Yoshikami "JC Penney's Troubles: The Power of Adjectives", CNBC 4/30/2013:

As you read news headlines and listen to and watch media reports on the market, it's important to recognize that language may have different meanings depending on your perspective. Just last week the media reported that J.C. Penney stock "soared" 11 percent—on the surface that seems to be a positive enough development.

While "soaring" is certainly more positive than "plunging," soaring suggests good news at J.C. Penney and for most investors this is how they will take the headline. Those investors will not look below the surface for the complete story.

Alex Baumans asks, "Could this be a Cupertino?" Liz Rafferty, "Oops! Zooey Deschanel Captioned as Boston Marathon Bombing Suspect", TV Guide 4/21/2013:

Who's that girl? It's … the Boston Marathon bomber?

During the intense lockdown and manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects Friday, a local Fox affiliate in Dallas, Texas misidentified one of the suspects as none other than New Girl star Zooey Deschanel. The closed-captioning error came as the station was attempting to name Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second suspect in the attack who was being hunted by police on Friday.

"He is 19-year-old Zooey Deschanel," the caption faux pas read.

From the University of Winnipeg News Centre, a press release dated 04/11/2013, "Study Supports Theory On Teen Texting And Shallow Thought":

A University of Winnipeg study finds that students who are heavy texters place less importance on moral, aesthetic, and spiritual goals, and greater importance on wealth and image. Those who texted more than 100 times a day were 30 per cent less likely to feel strongly that leading an ethical, principled life was important to them, in comparison to those who texted 50 times or less a day. Higher texting frequency was also consistently associated with higher levels of ethnic prejudice. […]

The main goal of the study was to test the so-called ”shallowing hypothesis,” described in the Nicholas Carr bestseller, The Shallows, and by some social neuroscientists. According to the shallowing hypothesis, ultra-brief social media like texting and Twitter encourages rapid, relatively shallow thought and consequently very frequent daily use of such media should be associated with cognitive and moral shallowness.

Geoff Wade sent in the following banner:

Annie Lowrey, "As Automatic Budget Cuts Go Into Effect, Poor May Be Hit Particularly Hard", NYT 3/3/2013:

“President Obama proclaimed that the sequester’s ‘brutal’ and ‘severe’ cuts will ‘eviscerate’ America’s domestic spending,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, wrote in a recent article published by Investors.com. “But ‘eviscerate’ is not the adjective I would use; in fact, I believe the sequester is a pittance.”

The cited article is Rand Paul, "Rand Paul Says Sequester is the First Step to Solving Spending Problem", Investors' Business Daily 2/28/2013.

In the current Italian election campaign, Mario Monti's slogan has been "L'Italia che sale":

Although Google Translate thinks that this means "Italy and salt", in fact it means "The Italy that moves up" or "The Italy that rises", or something along those lines. (The verb is salire, which can mean "rise", "come/go up", "increase", "grow", "advance", "progress", etc.)

Those who are interested in pictographic and ideographic writing systems should take careful note of Rudyard Kipling's 1902 Just So Story "How the first letter was written". It starts like this:

ONCE upon a most early time was a Neolithic man. He was not a Jute or an Angle, or even a Dravidian, which he might well have been, Best Beloved, but never mind why. He was a Primitive, and he lived cavily in a Cave, and he wore very few clothes, and he couldn't read and he couldn't write and he didn't want to, and except when he was hungry he was quite happy. His name was Tegumai Bopsulai, and that means, 'Man-who-does-not-put-his-foot- forward-in-a-hurry'; but we, O Best Beloved, will call him Tegumai, for short. And his wife's name was Teshumai Tewindrow, and that means, 'Lady-who-asks-a-very-many-questions'; but we, O Best Beloved, will call her Teshumai, for short. And his little girl-daughter's name was Taffimai Metallumai, and that means, 'Small-person-without-any-manners-who-ought-to-be-spanked'; but I'm going to call her Taffy. And she was Tegumai Bopsulai's Best Beloved and her own Mummy's Best Beloved, and she was not spanked half as much as was good for her; and they were all three very happy. As soon as Taffy could run about she went everywhere with her Daddy Tegumai, and sometimes they would not come home to the Cave till they were hungry, and then Teshumai Tewindrow would say, 'Where in the world have you two been to, to get so shocking dirty? Really, my Tegumai, you're no better than my Taffy.'

Somehow, Language Log has yet to take notice of the international sensation that is "Gangnam Style," the deliciously weird Korean pop video that currently has more than 560 million views on YouTube. Here's a good opportunity to rectify that oversight: among the countless spoofs of the video is this one by enterprising MIT students, featuring a cameo by Noam Chomsky at 3:20.

"The beautiful white dialect", Les blanches exotiques 8/22/2012:

I love how beautiful and simple the exotic white dialect is. Because it has less words and lacks any logical grammar, it just sounds so peaceful, calming, and real. You can just feel the emotion when you listen to them speak. It varies from tribe to tribe, but throughout the white motherland is basically the same. I took a two-week service trip to build a McDonalds with authentic white food and lived with an authentic white family, so I know. It’s so sad that they’ve started using civilized words from modern languages, “cash” and “pajama.” It must be because there’s no concept of cash in white culture. Did you know they have twenty different words for “coffee” but no word for “self-aware?”

Today's Doonesbury Flashbacks, 35 years ago (July 30, 1977): Trudeau here has made clever use of the fact that normally, with VP-ellipsis, the presuppositions of the antecedent VP are preserved …

The late-night shows on Comedy Central both took a linguistic turn last night. First, on "The Daily Show," Jon Stewart managed to give himself a "grammar wedgie" trying to explain how President Obama's now-infamous line "You didn't build that" has been willfully misconstrued by his critics. Then, on "The Colbert Report," Stephen Colbert crafted an Old English riff off of the recent comment by one of Mitt Romney's advisors that Romney is somehow more appreciative than Obama of the "Anglo-Saxon heritage" shared by the US and the UK.

In the spring of 1995, I was serving on an academic "Planning and Priorities" committee, and some of my fellow committee-members became concerned that there were too many graduate courses, and that this was a symptom of inadequate focus on undergraduate education. I agreed on both counts, though I also felt that an excessive number of grad courses was — and is — generally a bad thing for graduate programs as well.

Anyhow, I became curious about what the distribution of course registrations was actually like. The following note, unearthed after 17 years and recycled as a Language Log post, was the result.  I fished it out of the midden-heap of old email because of its marginal relevance to the July 4 announcement from CERN. It turns out that graduate students, like the Higgs particle, are bosons — or at least, their course-registration choices obey Bose-Einstein statistics…

As background, we had been given some historical data that included a disturbing table showing the distribution of student enrollments over graduate courses. Expressed as a percentage of all graduate courses offered during the time-period in question, the numbers were:

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.