Language Log

My latest On Language column for The New York Times Magazine celebrates the fifth anniversary of Stephen Colbert's (re)invention of "truthiness" — a word we began tracking here on Language Log soon after it appeared on the premiere episode of "The Colbert Report." (See this post and links therein.) I got a chance to interview Colbert himself, and my latest Word Routes column for the Visual Thesaurus features an extended excerpt of the interview. Here's an excerpt of the excerpt:

BZ: I was a big supporter of "truthiness" from the early days, back when it was selected as Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. I was there lobbying for it.

SC: Really? You were there, literally?

BZ: I was on the scene, yes.

SC: You're a member of the American Dialect Society?

BZ: I'm on the Executive Council of the American Dialect Society.

SC: Holy cow. Well then, thank you for pushing for it, because I married an English major. Getting a Word of the Year is the closest I'll ever come to having six-pack abs. That's maybe the sexiest thing I could do, to have a word recognized.

BZ: Now that it's in the New Oxford American Dictionary, that's got to be even better. You're even mentioned in the entry.

SC: Yeah. That's a real turn-on.

Read the rest here.

There's a Facebook app called "What Geek Are You?"  If you let it digest the contents of your account, and perhaps answer some questions —  I haven't tried it, and don't know the details — it decides what (kind of) geek you are. David C reports that one of his friends, who is fluent or literate in five languages, was classified as "Geek in English/Language", with this description thereby posted to his wall:

Speaking or writing are your expertise. There's nothing you can't say or write that gets your point across in an easy to understand way. You are the master of whatever extra languages you study, whether its a romantic like Spanish or French, or something completly different.

Is this pathetic incompetence, or hip irony, or perhaps both?  I'm not sure.

Years ago, I once saw a sign on a psycholinguist's door saying ‘DEPARTMENT OF REDUNDANCY DEPARTMENT’, and I smiled at the joke. But today I happened to notice that the Jersey City corporate seal says ‘CITY OF JERSEY CITY’, and the city website is cityofjerseycity.com; I assume I am not meant to smile at that.

The granddaddy of all snowclones has often been expressed here at Language Log Plaza as a formula with variables:

If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z.

So it's pleasing to see this iteration of the ur-snowclone, from Jeff Potter's new book, Cooking for Geeks (p. 258):

If Eskimos have N words for describing snow, the French and
Italians have N+1 words for describing dishes involving egg yolks.

Mandarin nǎlǐ 哪里 "surely not" or "make no mention of it," "not at all," etc. goes back to at least the Qing period (1644-1912), where we find it in novels. I usually explain it thus: "where?" –> "in what way?" –> "no way, not at all," etc.  Thus, there is a natural progression from informational "where?" to rhetorical "how (in the world)?" and from rhetorical "how (in the world)?" to polite negative.  Furthermore, this progression is not that unusual. For example we see at least the first part of it in the classical Chinese interrogative word ān 安 ("where？"). Compare:

Zi jiāng ān zhī 子將安之  ("Where will you go?")

Zǐ ān zhī zhī 子安知之  ("How [the devil] do you know it?") — expressing disbelief and contrasting with Zi hé zhī zhī 子何知之 ("How do you know it?") — which really asks for information about the listener's source of his knowledge.  This question (Zǐ ān zhī zhī 子安知之  ("How [the devil] do you know it?" i.e., "whence / from what vantage point do you know it?") comes from a famous passage in chapter 17 of the Zhuang Zi (Master Zhuang; Wandering on the Way) about the happiness of fish.

When the stresses and strains of university department administration get me down, when I need a break and I really want to giggle till I'm helpless, I simply close my office door, bring a box of Kleenex over to near the computer so I can wipe off the tears running down my cheeks, and watch, once again, the Facebook ranting toddler video. Victor Mair first brought it to our attention here at One Language Log Plaza, and we have been watching it occasionally ever since. The extraordinary intensity of this little girl's concentration on the nonsense she is babbling, together with the strange fantasy of the wandering themes in the subtitles, yields an experience the like of which I have never seen anywhere.

The popular sports blog Deadspin isn't the first place you'd expect to find a lesson in inflectional morphology. So it was a bit of a surprise to see the recent post "Learn Linguistics the Latrell Sprewell Way," featuring this shot of a linguistics textbook:

According to Richard Lederer (Anguished English, 1989, p. 29), a lawyer in a courtroom once asked this question:

When he went, had you gone, and had she, if she wanted to and were able, for the time being excluding all the restraints on her not to go also, would he have brought you, meaning you and she, with him to the station?

And at that point the opposing attorney, a Mr. Brooks, rose to say:

Objection: That question should be taken out and shot.

Although this sign over a children's clothing shop in Hangzhou is fairly simple, it offers much food for thought.

Last week I posted about the early history of cartoon cursing characters, aka grawlixes, aka obscenicons. I had managed to unearth examples of obscenicons on comics pages going back to 1909, from Rudolph Dirks' "The Katzenjammer Kids." I've had a chance to do some more digging, and I've found that Dirks was getting creative with obscenicons as early as 1902 — and he wasn't the only cartoonist indulging in them.

Mark Liberman recently asked, "What was the earliest use of mixed typographical symbols (as opposed to uniform asterisks or underlining) to represent (part or all of) taboo words?" The use of such symbols appears to have originated as a comic-strip convention. Comic strip fans, following Mort Walker's Lexicon of Comicana, have often called these cursing characters grawlixes, though I prefer the term obscenicons. In Gwillim Law's history of grawlixes, he lists examples of cartoon cursing going back to the Sep. 3, 1911 installment of "The Katzenjammer Kids." Here is the panel in question (which I found in the Washington Post archives):

Along with a sequence of asterisk-dash-exclamation point-dash-exclamation point, the speech balloon also features what appears to be a stick-figure devil firing a cannon, with three more exclamation points for good measure. As delightful as this example is, it's not the earliest use of obscenicons on the comics page. I found another "Katzenjammer Kids" strip using them, from two years earlier.

Latest xkcd:

In beginning Mandarin courses, teachers often use the four syllables mā 媽 ("mom"), má 麻 ("hemp"), mǎ 馬 ("horse"), mà 罵 ("curse") to introduce the four tones.  Since the four syllables in sequence do not make any sense, a very clever wit has proposed that we now replace 媽 麻馬 罵 with 通 同 統 痛.  Here is his reasoning.