Language Log

In my role as self-appointed David Brooks watcher, I wearily contemplated his latest masterpiece of misunderstanding, and wondered whether the linguistic angles justified a post. Imagine my relief when I discovered this lovely dissection in cartoon form at chaospet (click on the image for a larger version):

Geoff Pullum gave us a really neat lesson on Finnish short vowels a few months ago, pointing out things that nobody but native speakers have ever known — that Finns produce a subtle duration of short /Ih/ vowels that the rest of us don’t even hear. But hey, The Finnish vowel duration distinction doesn’t come close to what’s going on in a remote part of Tanzania.

A really, really short /Ih/ has been discovered by phonetic scientists who study vowel duration. Phoneticians in East Africa recently have stumbled upon the shortest vowel ever known to humankind. They discovered that the duration of the /Ih/ vowel, already known for its very short length in languages like English (to say nothing about it’s tremendous importance in Finnish), is produced in .11 hundredths of a second by a small band of speakers of Kwatnaksa, who live on an otherwise unoccupied island in the Indian Ocean.

In the beginning, there were lolcats; now, there are Яolcats!

Translation provided: "Is most powerful laptop in all of Tbilisi, can it be?"
Comment: "(The cat, he is quoting famous Russian comedian)"

TIME Magazine's Claire Suddath commented on Яolcats last week, claiming that it is funny (she's right) but that lolcats are not (she's wrong). Suddaths's (tongue-in-cheek?) complaint about lolcats is most relevant here on Language Log:

Lolcats is stupid. There, I said it. People who attribute grammatically incorrect statements to unsuspecting housecats are the same people who speak to children in baby voices and pat pregnant women's bellies without asking permission. Besides, even if your cat could speak, and it happened to ask for a cheeseburger, why would it spell "cheez" with a "Z?" Why? It's one thing to pretend that your cat can talk, but it's another thing to pretend that it has a debilitating speech impediment.

If Suddath pronounces "cheese" in any way that sounds different from what "cheez" is meant to represent, then I hate to tell her, but she's the one with the speech impediment.

According to this morning's After Deadline post, that's what Philip B. Corbett at the New York Times calls "rules that aren't", following the lead of Theodore M. Bernstein:

Another pet peeve of some After Deadline commenters is the use of “but” or “and” to begin a sentence — as in the third sentence of the previous section. Obviously, I don’t share their aversion.

It shouldn’t be overdone, but using coordinating conjunctions this way can provide a handy and very efficient transition. “But” is certainly preferable in many cases to the stilted “however,” and “and” is simpler than “in addition” or similar phrases.

I’d put this objection in the category of “Miss Thistlebottom’s hobgoblins.” That’s how the former Times language guru Theodore M. Bernstein described overly fastidious rules and usage myths a grade-school English teacher might invoke to keep her pupils’ prose on a very narrow path. (Familiar examples include “Never split an infinitive” and “Never end a sentence with a preposition.”)

Over on his You Don't Say blog, John McIntyre has been preparing for National Grammar Day (4 March) by spinning a hard-boiled murder mystery involving an editor protagonist; Martha Brockenbrough (of NGD); a victim stabbed to death by red pencil ("an Eberhard Faber Col-erase number 1277 pencil, carmine red, protruded from his chest, just over the heart"); and the Fat Man. The serial is up to its third installment, in which the Fat Man is introduced:

I’d known him for years. We’d been honor students together — teacher’s pets — and then he started his slide. It began innocently enough, with a little amateur lexicography. But then he fell in with that hard set at Language Log. He was pals with both the Geoffs — Pullum and Nunberg — Arnold Zwicky, the lot. Before you could say lexeme, he was too deep into descriptivism to ever come back. But, maybe because of our old school ties, we had always managed a gingerly balance.

More to come.

[Update: Jan Freeman notes with pleasure the split infinitive in "too deep into descriptivism to ever come back". Not an obligatorily split infinitive, but to my ear certainly preferable to "too deep into descriptivism ever to come back".]

You know, I don't feel so good today (streaming cold, much work to do, no energy, and a foreign trip coming up on Thursday), but the extraordinarily stupid re-subtitled war film video snippet Mark just posted, featuring Hitler going into a wild tirade over having his grammar corrected, made me laugh out loud. Thank you, Mark. It was perfect for me, because (I have to admit this) I mostly don't understand spoken German at speed, especially when shouted in an apoplectic fury. Having a good passive knowledge of spoken German would kill it stone dead, I would guess. My ignorance made it absolute bliss.

Bill Benzon writes that "This video embodies a pun so wonderfully awful that it deserves mention on the Log."

Two items on the pop-cultural neologism front. First, the Cleveland Cavaliers are pretty upset that point guard Mo Williams hasn't been selected for the NBA All-Star game. Teammate Ben Wallace sounded off to the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

"It's a tragedy," Ben Wallace said. "I think it's an injustice. It's a fraud. We've got the best record in the league, and we've only got one guy going. You always make it the next year, after the year you were supposed to make it. It's a travesty and a sham and a mockery. It's a shamockery."

And when Williams wasn't even selected to be an All-Star reserve, team owner Dan Gilbert continued the neologistic assault in an email to the AP:

"Ben Wallace was right when he called Mo originally being passed over for the All-Star game a shamockery," Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert said in a tongue-in-cheek e-mail to The Associated Press. "But not naming him as the natural and obvious replacement for the unfortunately injured Jameer Nelson is stupidiculous, idillogical and preposterageous."

Shamockery, or more fully traveshamockery (also spelled travishamockery), goes back to a 2004 ad campaign for Miller Lite, specifically this campaign-themed "President of Beers" spot featuring comedian Bob Odenkirk:

What? You haven't heard of the Pomegranate phone? It's "[t]he ultimate all-in-one device", going "where no phone has gone before". It's amazing. I want one, even more than I want an iPhone (and I want one of those pretty bad, so you can just imagine).

The Pomegranate's niftiest feature is probably the Global Voice Translator, illustrated here:

(I say "probably" because the niftiest feature is really the coffee brewer, but this is Language Log, so I had to go with the GVT.)

[ Hat-tip: Andy Kehler. ]

In a NYT Op-Ed yesterday, Iain Gately described finding himself at a loss for words in Spanish ("Besotted — Etymologically, That Is", 12/31/2008):

I cleared my hangover on Boxing Day by going for a surf at Espasante, near my home in Galicia, northern Spain. […]

A fisherman — with Anton, the town pig by his side — had been watching me and he asked, “What happened to you out there?” I tried to explain, but my Spanish was inadequate. The only way I could say I’d drunk too much the day before was “estuve borracho” but borracho wasn’t the word I wanted. To me it implies a bestial, slobbering sort of drunkenness, which wasn’t quite how it had seemed when I was celebrating Yuletide with family and friends.

We’d feasted, played games with the children, danced, decorated each other with fluorescent paint, and drank: beer and Cava for the race down the stream, Albarino with the salmon, Priorat with the suckling pig, more Cava for musical chairs, Port with the Stilton and roasted chestnuts, a cleansing ale during the treasure hunt, brandy with the Christmas pudding, then back to wine and anything else that was open for dancing. When I fell into bed with my partner I was happy: inebriated yes, wasted, no. Squiffy rather than sloshed, trashed or flayed. But how do you say squiffy in Spanish?

A couple of days ago, I drove up to Los Angeles from my Language Log Plaza basement office in San Diego, for a quick visit with my grad school classmate Ed Keer. Ed lives in Philly (where Mark Liberman's swank executive suite is located), and was in LA on business. I've visited Ed a few times back East since I moved to California, but this is the first time he's come out here — he says his excuse is that he's got a "real" job and "kids" — so I felt it was worth the 5-6 hours of total driving time to have dinner with Ed (and two of his co-workers, as it turned out) and drive him to the airport to catch his red-eye flight back East.

Ed ended up missing his flight, which is why I thought he had announced to the (twittering) world that I am dead to him, but it turns out that he's just upset with me for not posting the latest in his comic series, Pigeontown. "Arnold posts Zippy and Mark posts Zits; why don't you post Pigeontown already?", Ed said to me, apparently while his plane was leaving the gate at LAX. So, in part to get myself back in Ed's good graces (maybe) but also because it happens to have actual linguistics content (about which see below the fold), here's the latest Pigeontown (click image to enlarge):

In the tradition of Woody Allen's "Slang Origins" (chapter 18 of his 1975 collection Without Feathers), John Kenney has written a hilarious op-ed piece for The New York Times ("The Shoe Heard Around the World", published Dec. 16, 2008), which is of course — obliquely but not quite so — about the shoes thrown at George W. Bush during his recent visit to Iraq. I highly recommend Kenney's piece for those LL readers (not so) interested in the origins of words, phrases, and other cultural artifacts, and to anyone who just wants a good laugh.

I'd never heard of Kenney before, but I'm certainly going to keep an eye out for his writings. The top hit in my quick-and-dirty "john kenney writer" Google search was to another, equally hilarious opinion piece, "How Gatsby Got Wild" (published May 3, 2006), about the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism affair discussed the previous month on LL Classic (see this post for links).

Geoff Pullum argues that the bleeping of Rod Blagojevich shields him from a full public appreciation of his foul-mouthedness: "somehow you don't get the measure of Rod Blagofuckinjevich's coarseness and contempt for the public by merely learning that he regarded his gubernatorial privilege as valuable; 'a fuckin' valuable thing' gets across more of the flavor of the man." Quite true. On the other hand, Americans have gotten so used to reading between the bleeps that it's still possible to appreciate (and satirize) Blago's coarseness in censored mode. Nightly satirists like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have already taken their shots, and now Saturday Night Live plays on his bleepability. [We had a link to the video here, but it has been killed off by an NBC copyright claim.]