Language Log

When I tried to take a look at my calendar this morning, I got a little box that told me, in red letters:

Error:
There was a network error while attempting to log you in. Please try again. If this problem persists, please contact your network administrator.

Administrator diagnostic information: Failure logged on 21 Nov 2008 07:35:21,243 as incident 15,241; the original exception text is:

com.meetingmaker.sys.RpcException: Server execution error: 9334: Server is currently quiesced (auto-shutdown)

The server log has more information on this error.

(Emphasis added.)

No, sorry, I don't have any updates on the brain region named by Dan Hodgins after the eponymous and legendary Dr. Alfred Crockus. But the Neuroskeptic has picked up on some "Educational neuro-nonsense" voiced on the BBC's morning Today Program by Vicky Tuck, president of the (British) Girls' Schools Association:

If you look at the girls they sort of approach maths through the cerebral cortex, which means that to get them going you really need to sort of paint a picture, put it in context, relate it to the real world, while boys sort of approach maths through the hippocampus, therefore they're very happy and interested in the core properties of numbers and can sort of dive straight in …

…in the study of literature, in English, again a different kind of approach is needed. Girls are very good at empathizing, attuning to things via the emotions, the cerebral cortex again, whereas the boys come at things… it's the amygdala is very strong in the boy, and he will you know find it hard to tune in in that way and needs a different approach.

As NS notes, "This is, to put it kindly, confused."

There was rather an unfortunate fracas in the sherry lounge at Language Log Plaza yesterday. Liberman was still throwing his weight around with evidence that attacks on Palin's language are mostly ill-informed linguistic snobbery, when Pullum, who is much better informed than most snobs, pulled the rug out from under his feet.

Now, at last, we can get discussion of political language from an expert whose credentials are not open to question. Here is presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota (quoted at the Huffington Post, by his mouthpiece Andy Borowitz):

Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement….

Now, it's true that this apposite little witticism reinforces a stereotype (i.e. Obama speaks fluently compared to certain other salient politicos). And it's also true that no evidence at all is offered for the generalization. But it's important to keep in mind that the expert providing the quote, Davis Logsdon, is a distinguished university professor. And Professor Logsdon's primary distinction… is that he doesn't exist.

I've recently received an email offering me, for a mere $245, a yearly subscription to Surgical Technology International. As a teaser, the journal's marketing department invites me to view an online copy of "Site-Specific Rectocele Repair with Dermal Graft Augmentation: Comparison of Porcine Dermal Xenograft (Pelvicol®) and Human Dermal Allograft", by a long list of authors whose affiliations include not only the Harvard Medical School but also the Carolina Continence Center.

After I saw a Youtube clip of British comedian and quiz show host Stephen Fry pedantically insisting that none requires a singular verb, I was sincerely disappointed that this intelligent man evinced exactly the kind of "linguistic martyrdom" that Thomas Lounsbury ridiculed a century ago in The Standard of Usage in English.

My spirits lifted when I saw another Youtube clip (via the Tensor) wherein Fry and his comedic partner Hugh Laurie hilariously hold forth on language:

For my money, "Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers" trumps colorless green ideas sleeping furiously any day. And now comes more heartening evidence that Fry is a true language lover and no prescriptivist stick-in-the-mud. On his newly redesigned blog, The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry, he kicks things off with a wonderfully rambling post entitled "Don't Mind Your Language…". A choice excerpt follows below.

It is only natural that just months before the current administration packs up to leave the White House, various branches of government would be scurrying to set their favorite programs in concrete for the incoming president and his staff to have to address as best they can. The Department of Education is no different from the others. Since numerous self-inflicted setbacks have left the No Child Left Behind effort with a less than positive heritage, today the Secretary released a report that includes dire warnings of impending doom.

This guy Bob Schieffer did a nice little webcast tonight with a couple of friends, and I think it was covered on tv too. Maybe you watched? Or read a transcript, even? Anyhow, Bob, he says:

… we must reduce our dependence on foreign oil. When Nixon said it, we imported from 17 to 34 percent of our foreign oil. Now, we're importing more than 60 percent.

And I'm like, yeah, I can accept that last claim. An understatement, if anything. But what I can't figure out is what he says about Nixon. Foreign oil is one of those things that's sort of like didgeridoos, communism, and extraterrestrials, at least in this respect: they come from somewhere else.

So where the hell did Tricky Dicky find between 66 and 83 percent of his nation's foreign oil if he didn't import it?

Another one from the news yesterday: at 6pm every weekday, my local public radio station broadcasts one of the three daily editions of the BBC's The World Today. In one of the interviews (at around 20 mins. after the hour, if anyone finds the audio), an American whose name I unfortunately didn't catch was comparing the U.S. bank bailout plan with the corresponding plan in the U.K., and he was attempting to argue that the U.S. plan was somehow "less socialist" than the U.K. plan because (for various reasons I'm ill-equipped to understand or critique) the U.S. plan is deliberately temporary in a way that the U.K. plan is supposedly not. Anyway, he summed up his argument like this:

This is a temporary situation and we'd like to keep it that way.

And I suppose that the British are in a permanent situation that they'd like to change at some point?

I'm in Oxford for one of the events commemorating the 80th anniversary of the release of the Oxford English Dictionary, and one of the things that I've learned is an amusing anecdote about the work's title.

Ever wonder what Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" would look like overlaid with electronic text markup? Well, wonder no more!

(Source text here.)

In response to a recent Language Log post that mentioned Belgium as the New Jersey of Europe ("Willimantic", 9/27/2008), Cosma Shalizi wrote to draw my attention to the Belgian joke embedded in Robert Pinsky's poem "Impossible to Tell".

The most recent xkcd:

Couldn't happen to anyone we know, of course.

A bit of frivolity…

As the spam queue on New Language Log approaches 9,000 items (rapidly), I offer four comments from my favorite spammer, which combine the congratulatory content of so much spam commentary with astonishing syntax:

I is pleasantly amazd! Thank!!!

This simply prodigy!

There was merrily!

The Good lad an author! I much like site!

There's more, of course. This particular spammer hasn't been around for a while, so that the minute or so I take each day to mark items as spam and to de-spam misclassified items  is more boring than it was for a while.

Note to commenters: if you put a URI "in the clear" (printed out, rather than inserted into an "a" tag) in your comment, Akismet is likely to mark your comment as spam (because one variety of spam comments consists almost entirely of lists of such URIs). I sometimes do that myself, when the URI is the main content of my comment; but then I expect to have to de-spam my own comment.