Language Log

Under the rubric "Kerning 101: I rest my case on the importance of spacing", Toni Tan, Director of Cambria Press, sent me this photograph:

The Daily Mail has this terse and unpunctuated notice below one of its stories today:

Sorry we are unable to accept comments for legal reasons.

Why this departure from the open comments policy that is the right of every online reader of anything in the 21st century?

From Shay Cohen, via Lyle Ungar, some output from a PCFG ("probabilistic context-free grammar") trained on the Wall Street Journal part of the Penn Treebank:

A manager is a better value of well-polished desks .

I have been able to force to be more receptive to therapy , and to keep the committee informed , usually in advance , of covert actions : ; the victims are large and costly machines .

The purchase of all women is in September .

Their museum had been dumping their securities for comment .

It can remember one million truly inspiring teachers from Rainbow Technologies .

Via Rick Rubenstein, a nomination for the Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding: Josh Fruhlinger, The Comics Curmudgeon 3/3/2012:

Seriously, I assume that whoever hacked into servers of the market research company that’s asking newspaper readers about what they want to see in Apartment 3-G and replaced all the survey responses with “PREGO PORN” is one of my readers, and I just want you to know that you’re my hero.

[Tip of the hat to Andrea Mazzucchi.]

Senator Rick Santorum has taken over the lead in national polling for the Republican presidential nomination; and so there is increasing interest in his ideas for new national policies, for example as he explains them in this October 2011 interview with Shane Vander Hart.  As a linguist and a true conservative, I'm especially intrigued by a section that starts at around 25:50, where Senator Santorum promises to protect us against government interference in education by mandating an federal accreditation program to ensure ideological balance among teachers.

I'm going to play this for my morphology class next week when we start talking about affixation… but there's no reason why you all shouldn't enjoy it now, now, now!

Thanks to Alex Trueman.

If you enjoyed this, you may also want to check out this oldie but goodie: How I met my wife. Happy Valentine's, if you're into that sort of thing!

"The pit in Thomas Friedman's stomach" (5/23/2011) is back:

To observe the democratic awakenings happening in places like Egypt, Syria and Russia is to travel with a glow in your heart and a pit in your stomach. […]

But that pit in the stomach comes from knowing that while the protests are propelled by deep aspirations for dignity, justice and self-determination, such heroic emotions have to compete with other less noble impulses and embedded interests in these societies.
[Thomas Friedman, "Freedom at 4 Below", NYT 2/7/2012]

We inaugurated "The Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding" back in 2005 to honor this inspired effort:

When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I'd love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie.

While I don't think that we've actually ever gotten around to awarding the prize again, we've nominated other candidates intermittently over the years. The latest to deserve nomination is Mark Steyn, for his channeling of Mitt Romney in "The Man Who Gave Us Newt", National Review 1/22/2012 (emphasis added):

Why is the stump speech so awful? “I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.” Mitt paid some guy to write this insipid pap. And he paid others to approve it. Not only is it bland and generic, it’s lethal to him in a way that it wouldn’t be to Gingrich or Perry or Bachmann or Paul because it plays to his caricature — as a synthetic, stage-managed hollow man of no fixed beliefs. And, when Ron Paul’s going on about “fiat money” and Newt’s brimming with specifics on everything (he was great on the pipeline last night), Mitt’s generalities are awfully condescending: The finely calibrated inoffensiveness is kind of offensive.

Another linguistically interesting passage from Ed McBain's Long Time No See:

This bit of social commentary comes from the Latino Rebels website. Like many brilliant ads, its impact is multiplied by the fact that, even after you've had the Aha! instant of "getting it", your mind continues to unspool a series of relevant inferences.

I bet if you sat down and started listing them, you could easily reel off a good dozen or so.

I'm in Portland for the 2012 edition of the annual secret cabal.  This is what I had for lunch today:

From quickmeme:

[Tip of the hat to Dan Scherlis.]