Language Log

On the Wall Street Journal's Emerging Europe blog, Emre Peker reports on a case of linguistic chicanery, with none other than Noam Chomsky as its victim.

Coming from Noam Chomsky, the following sentences may look as if the famed American linguist was seeking to develop a new syntax: “While there have been tampered with, sometimes with the Republic of Turkey won democracy. It ruled democratic elections.”

Except they didn’t belong to Mr. Chomsky, but to an imaginative Turkish newspaper, while the quotes appear to have been translated into English using Google’s translation tool.

On August 27, Turkish daily Yeni Safak, or New Dawn, published a front page article headlined–“The Arab Spring Has Now Found Its True Spirit”–which it claimed was based on an e-mailed exchange with Mr. Chomsky. The interview, which was conducted in English and centered on the crisis in Egypt, had taken place two weeks previously, the story said.

According to Yeni Safak, the renowned antiwar activist spent a considerable part of the exchange defending policies parallel to those of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The newspaper also cited several answers by the world’s most famous linguistics professor in unintelligible English.

“This complexity in the Middle East, do you think the Western states flapping because of this chaos? Contrary to what happens when everything that milk port, enters the work order, then begins to bustle in the West. I’ve seen the plans works,” Mr. Chomsky allegedly said in an answer to one question.

The text, however, flows perfectly in Turkish. Plugging the Turkish content into Google Translate shows that Mr. Chomsky was left uttering phrases like “milk port”–a direct translation of an idiom derived from sailing that means “calm.”

Paul Jump, "Cut the Clutter", Times Higher Education:

Is there something unforgivably, infuriatingly obfuscatory about the unrestrained use of adjectives and adverbs?

In a word, no.  But Mr. Jump is about to tell us, approvingly, about some "science" on the subject:

Zinsser and Twain are quoted by Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, assistant professor of public policy at Rutgers University Camden, in support of his view that the greater the number of adjectives and adverbs in academic writing, the harder it is to read.

Okulicz-Kozaryn has published a paper in the journal Scientometrics that analyzes adjectival and adverbial density in about 1,000 papers published between 2000 and 2010 from across the disciplines.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the paper, "Cluttered Writing: Adjectives and Adverbs in academia," finds that social science papers contain the highest density, followed by humanities and history. Natural science and mathematics contain the lowest frequency, followed by medicine and business and economics.

The difference between the social and the natural sciences is about 15 percent. "Is there a reason that a social scientist cannot write as clearly as a natural scientist?" the paper asks.

I'm not going to discuss the neurotic aversion to modification.  Instead, I'm going to explore Paul Jump's apparent ignorance of the norms of scientific communication and of standard English prose, and the much more surprising parallel failures of the editors of the Springer journal Scientometrics.

Bradley Manning, just recently sentenced for leaking classified documents to Wikileaks, has released a statement announcing, "I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female." Manning also gave instructions on his-now-her preferred personal pronouns:

I hope that you will support me in this transition. I also request that, starting today, you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun (except in official mail to the confinement facility).

News organizations are struggling today with the pronominal quandary in reporting on Manning's new transgender identity. On Slate's XX Factor blog, Amanda Marcotte writes:

The transition is already awkward. Earlier today, the New York Times headline on a Reuters story on Manning's announcement danced around gender pronouns: "Manning Says Is Female and Wants to Live as a Woman." Clearing up the grammar for an updated headline just made the situation worse: "Manning Says He Is Female and Wants to Lives as a Woman." Well, if "he" is female, then isn't the word "she"? Manning has finally had a chance to express her gender preferences. Since most journalists had a notion this was coming, using confusion or surprise as an excuse for those headlines isn't an option.

Aaron Dinkin (formerly known as Dr. Whom) on Facebook:

Just got unexpectedly interviewed by Global News. Topic: Is social media ruining the English language? My answer: no.

He adds:

Just you watch, everyone, they'll edit it to take whatever I say out of context and make it sound like I'm buying into the premise.

And after the piece appeared:

Yep, that's what happened:

So here's how Maureen Dowd quoted Charline McCray. And here's the actual audio https://t.co/O7oXItZTDp Huh. pic.twitter.com/zx4AeQdgwH

— Jody Avirgan (@jodyavirgan) August 21, 2013

Yesterday I wrote about a recent scientific paper that looks for evidence of the cultural effects of American urbanization in word counts from the Google ngram viewer. The paper was Patricia Greenfield, "The Changing Psychology of Culture From 1800 Through 2000", Psychological Science 8/7/2013, and my post about it is "The culturomic psychology of urbanization",  8/18/2013.

I learned about Greenfield's paper indirectly, when a reader sent a link to a daytime TV discussion, "Selfish U.S.?: Study says country becoming more self-centered", on CBS This Morning, 8/15/2013.   Charlie Rose and Norah O'Donnell were the show's co-hosts, and their guests were  John Tierney and Anne Fulenwider.

It didn't surprise me to find that neither the show's video nor its online context provided a reference to Greenfield's paper, or even the name of the author.  Judging from the content of the discussion, I suspect that none of the four talking heads had read anything except a press release — in any case, they mostly ignored the paper, and instead offered various associated ideas of their own.  For them, the role of the paper was  to add scientific gravitas to their opinions about the selfishness of Americans today, the importance of self-esteem, or the role of women in society.

As I observed a few years ago, "scientific studies"  have taken over the place that bible stories used to occupy. It's only fundamentalists like me who worry about whether they're true. For most people, it's enough that they can be interpreted to be morally instructive.

On Headsup: The Blog, FEV (Fred Vultee) notes a remarkable confluence of nouns (and one adjective) on the front page of Sunday's New York Post:

Toxic grammar alert for Australians: Rodney Huddleston informs me that the ABC Radio breakfast show celebrated International Apostrophe Day on 16 August 2013 with disastrous results. Huddleston reports:

The presenter had brought in someone he called a grammar nerd/specialist and asked her about the use of the apostrophe. She managed to deal with dog's bowl and dogs' bowls, but when he asked her about children she said this was a collective noun, not a strictly plural and that in children's playgrounds and children's dreams the apostrophe should come AFTER the s.

I will not expose the grammar specialist's family to humiliation by naming her; I do have a heart. But this is really staggering misinformation. The apostrophe should never come after the s in cases of irregular pluralization. The genitive suffix is ’s unless the regular plural s immediately precedes it (in which case the genitive marker is simply the apostrophe alone). In irregular plurals like children, oxen, cacti, foci, phenomena, etc., there is no immediately preceding plural s, so the default holds: it's the children’s playgrounds, and likewise the cacti’s watering schedule, and these phenomena’s importance.

Beware of nonlinguists who appear on radio programs as grammar experts; they sometimes simply make stuff up.

I don't have much to say about the latest tempest in a teapot over the non-literal use of "literally." It started, as such things often do these days, on Reddit, where a participant in the /r/funny subreddit posted an imgur image showing Google's dictionary entry for "literally" that pops up when you search on the word. The second definition reads, "Used for emphasis or to express strong feeling while not being literally true." That was enough for the redditor to declare, "We did it guys, we finally killed English." As the news pinged around the blogosphere, we got such fire-breathing headlines as "Society Crumbles as Google Admits 'Literally' Now Means 'Figuratively'," "Google Sides With Traitors To The English Language Over Dictionary Definition Of 'Literally'," "I Could Literally Die Right Now," and "It’s Official: The Internet Has Broken the English Language."

The outrage was further heightened by the realization that (gasp!) pretty much every major dictionary from the OED on down now recognizes this sense of the word. So now we get vitriol directed toward the OED's lexicographers, who revised the entry for "literally" back in September 2011, coming from such sources as The Times, The Daily Mail, The Guardian, and The Telegraph. [Update: As Fiona McPherson points out on the OxfordWords blog, the usage was actually noted in the "literally" entry when it was first published in 1903. The 2011 revision reorganized the entry and expanded the historical record.]

Dean Baker, "Brooks and Marcus on PBS News: Getting Just About Everything Wrong on the Economy", Beat The Press 8/3/2013:

The PBS Newshour won the gold medal for journalistic malpractice on Friday by having David Brooks and Ruth Marcus tell the country what the Friday jobs report means. Brooks and Marcus got just about everything they said completely wrong.

Starting at the beginning, Brooks noted the slower than projected job growth and told listeners:

"Yes, I think there's a consensus growing both on left and right that we — the structural problems are becoming super obvious.

Paul Krugman, "Structural Humbug", NYT 8/3/2013:

In short, the data strongly point toward a cyclical, not a structural story — and there is broad agreement, for once, among economists on this point. Yet somehow, it’s clear, Beltway groupthink has arrived at the opposite conclusion — so much so that the actual economic consensus on this issue wasn’t even represented on the Newshour.

As we have frequently noted here on Language Log, science stories on the BBC News website are (how to put this politely?) not always of prize-winning standard with respect to originality, timeliness, reliability, or attention to the relevant literature. In fact some of them show signs of being written by kids in junior high school. Way back in 2006 Mark Liberman commented on a BBC News story about the notion that dolphins have and use "names" for each other. He expressed skepticism, but the BBC forged ahead without paying any heed, and today, more than seven years later, we learn from the same BBC site once again that Dolphins 'call each other by name'. Yes, it's the same story, citing the same academic at the University of St Andrews, Dr Vincent Janik. (Mark's link in 2006 was unfortunately to a Google search on {Janik, dolphins}, which today brings up the current stories rather than the ones he was commenting on then.) And you don't need to leave the BBC page to see that the story contradicts itself.

In case you haven't already seen it, here's a news story that KTVU-TV in San Francisco ran on Friday, purporting to give the names of the four pilots of the Asiana plane that crashed at SFO on July 6:

Back in June, Sally Thomason noted that Carmel O'Shannessy's paper in the June issue of Language, "The role of multiple sources in the formation of an innovative auxiliary category in Light Warlpiri, a new Australian mixed language", was getting widespread press coverage ("A new mixed language in the news", 6/18/2013). Sally flagged stories by Denise Chow, "Australia's Mixed Language, 'Light Warlpiri,' Discovered In Remote Desert Community", Live Science  6/18/2013, and by Enrico de Lazaro, "Light Warlpiri: New Study Sheds Light on Origins of Recently Discovered Australian Language", sci-news.com 6/18/2013.

We can add Paul Hamaker, "Light Warlpiri is the newest language on earth", The Examiner 6/18/2013; Joanna Egan, "New Aboriginal language born in the NT", Australian Geographic 6/20/2013; and reprints of Denise Chow's piece in the Huffington Post and on Fox News. And an excellent article by Olga Khazan in The Atlantic, "How the World's Newest 'Mixed' Language Was Invented", 6/18/2013.

Update — and now Nicholas Bakalar, "Linguist Finds a Language in its Infancy", NYT 7/14/2013.