Language Log

Yesterday evening, before the first game of the 2011 World Series, Scotty McCreery sang the national anthem.  He started out fine:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

But in the next-to-last line (of the first verse, the only verse normally performed on such occasions), he did something odd:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

What should have been

O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave

seems to have become

No Jose does that star-spangled banner yet wave

That's the title of a post (October 13, 2011) on "Letters of Note: Correspondence deserving of a wider audience," a fascinating website hosted by Shaun Usher. It refers to this letter sent to the British Embassy in Calabar, Nigeria in 1929 by a disgruntled employee named Asuquo Okon Inyang who had been fired, apparently for slacking off on the job:

A posthumous collection of Shel Silverstein's poems and drawings has just been published, with the title Every Thing On It. That's also the title of a poem contained in the collection, and Buzzfeed reproduced it in a post today. The verse displays the kind of lightly subversive wordplay that Silverstein is famous for.

EVERY THING ON IT
I asked for a hot dog
With everything on it
And that was my big mistake,
'Cause it came with a parrot,
A bee in a bonnet,
A wristwatch, a wrench, and a rake.
It came with a goldfish,
A flag, and a fiddle,
A frog, and a front porch swing,
And a mouse in a mask—
That's the last time I ask
For a hot dog with everything.

From the Guardian's Books Blog ("Shift dropped on author after typo in her romantic novel"):

Bounty hunter Sam McKade is the new breed of hero. Tall? Undoubtedly. Handsome and chiselled? For sure. Incontinent? Erm – possibly. Author Susan Andersen was horrified to discover an unfortunate typo in the ebook edition of her new novel Baby, I'm Yours, which takes the novel out of the romance category and into something rather darker.

"I apologise to anyone who bought my on-sale ebook of Baby, I'm Yours and read on pg 293: 'He stiffened for a moment but then she felt his muscles loosen as he shitted on the ground'," says Andersen. "Shifted – he SHIFTED!

If nothing else, Hurricane Irene leaves us with the legacy of a fine fake-Twitter account, @ElBloombito (aka "Miguel Bloombito"), which takes satirical aim at the Spanish-language announcements that New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg appended to the end of his many hurricane-related press conferences. Bloomberg has been working on his Spanish public speaking for years (and has even received intensive tutoring sessions), but his very Bloombergian enunciation was too good a target to pass up for Rachel Figueroa-Levin, the creator of the @ElBloombito Twitter account.

The Telegraph argues that "the inability to speak a host country's language […] is a very reasonable requirement of any immigrant":

Thanks to Graeme Forbes for alerting me to this! He has given me permission to post his note to his pro-compositionality friends. [For readers for whom compositionality is a new concept: it's a central tenet of formal semantics, usually credited to Gottlob Frege (but not without some controversy): The meaning of the whole is a function of the meaning of the parts and of the way they are syntactically combined. See, for instance: this introductory handout or the entry on Compositionality in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.]

From Graeme Forbes:

You may have already seen this, but in case not, here's an excerpt from an article in the current New Yorker, "Easy, Tiger", by David Sedaris (July 11/18 2011, p.40). It's an entertaining piece about how he "mastered" Mandarin, Japanese and German with the aid of tourist-courses on his iPod, including one from a company called Pimsleur. The "Easy, Tiger" alludes to a phrase in the section on romance in the Mandarin course. Or was it the German course? Surely not!

Today's Dilbert:

We're a bit behind the curve on this one — Verity Stob, "Verity Stob and the super subjunction", The Register, 6/1/2011:

Just downloaded the beta version of English V3.31, and I have to say I am very excited about it. This is definitely going to be a feather in the cap of Anglophones everywhere, and way better than the notorious V2.99 release of French (or the 'deux point neufty-neuf' as it has become known). There's a ton of new features to talk about, so let me dive in right away with some toothsome details.

A clip from Australian TV is rapidly becoming viral. Karl Stefanovic, a TV journalist on Australia's Today show, running out of topics in an interview with the Dalai Lama, tried to tell him a familiar Buddhism joke — a very good one (he says he had heard it the previous night from his 12-year-old son). The joke is brief and simple: The Dalai Lama walks into a pizza joint and says, "Make me one with everything." What's either uproariously funny or twitchingly embarrassing about the video clip (your mileage may differ) is that the Dalai Lama simply doesn't get the joke at all; he has no idea what's going on.

I spend a lot of time these days (now that it's June and the long winter is nearly over) walking around Edinburgh alone, letting the architecture of the city and its myriad pleasant surprises inspire and comfort me. (There is pain to be grappled with: my lovely philosopher partner Barbara died of cancer on May 14, exactly a month ago, and the grief will take a long, long time to fade even slightly. Language Log kindly gave me four weeks of compassionate leave.) Sometimes there are little linguistic things to make me smile. There was one today. I had often walked past it but never noticed it before. On St. Stephen Street in the New Town there is a modest little shopfront divided between two businesses, the one on the left a bijou real estate office and the one on the right a boutique selling fancy infusion-beverage products. I don't know if they colluded, or if one chose a name based on the other, but the real estate office is named "The Property Shop" and the adjacent business calls itself "The Proper Tea Shop".

Jason Eisner writes:

Language Log readers might enjoy the syllabic /l/ extravaganza from the most recent Prairie Home Companion.

Gil Scott-Heron died yesterday at the age of 62 — a remarkable performer whose politically charged combination of music and poetry had an enormous influence on the development of hip-hop culture. One of my favorite spoken-word performances by Scott-Heron appeared on the 1978 compilation, The Mind of Gil Scott-Heron: " The Ghetto Code (Dot Dot Dit Dot Dot Dit Dot Dot Dash)." It's full of linguistic play, including an explanation of "old-fashioned ghetto code" used to mask phone conversations from snooping authorities.

The code involved infixation of "ee-iz" [i:ɪz] between the onset and nucleus of stressed syllables. So-called "[IZ]-infixation" would later become popular in rap music (particularly as used by Snoop Dogg), though OED editor at large Jesse Sheidlower has found examples back to a 1972 glossary on New York drug slang. There was also a predecessor in the talk of carnival workers (carnies), with the word carn(e)y represented in the code as kizarney. (See Joshua Viau's "Introducing English [IZ]-Infixation: Snoop Dogg and bey-[IZ]-ond" for some background.)

You can hear the whole performance on YouTube here. The relevant part starts at about 6:28: