Language 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.]

On 30 Rock's "Christmas Special" episode this past Thursday, Tracy Morgan's character (Tracy Jordan) says to Tina Fey's character (Liz Lemon): "What's the past tense for scam? Is it scrumped? Liz Lemon, I think you just got scrumped!" See it at the end of this clip here (or better yet, watch the whole episode):

The intended joke here is that scrump (or skrump; the alternative spelling is irrelevant) is a slang term for sex, with more precise popular definitions ranging from the relatively benign "to have convenient sex; usually brief and decidedly unromantic" to the more disturbing "[t]o physically violate". (Some believe the word to be a blend of "screw" and "hump"; others assume a biblical link to the story of Adam & Eve, euphemistically speaking of stealing fruit/apples.) So, Tracy Jordan is informing Liz Lemon that she just got fucked.

In connection with the previous post, and in the spirit of the season, I can't resist adding this:

The latest episode of Comedy Central's "Sarah Silverman Program" (first aired Dec. 4, check your local listings for repeats) is sure to warm the hearts of neologophiles. Here's the blurb:

In this week's episode, "Kangamangus," Sarah strives to leave a legacy by creating a popular slang word, "Ozay." While she struggles to get others interested, Brian effortlessly succeeds in the same pursuit with his word, "Dot-nose." Also, British actor, Matt Berry, ("The IT Crowd") makes a guest appearance.

Matt Berry, awesomely enough, plays the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, who arrives to tell Brian that dot-nose is entering the dictionary, complete with a Word Induction Ceremony. Video clips after the jump.

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.