Language Log

Geoff Pullum was rightly baffled by Simon Heffer's recent pronouncement that sentences like The Prime Minister has warned that spending cuts are necessary are ungrammatical, since the verb warn, Heffer imagines, must always be transitive. But the objection doesn't come completely out of nowhere. As commenter iching noted, there's an entry on warn in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, which suggests that the intransitive use "seems to have originated in American English in the early 20th century."

The perceived American-ness of intransitive warn may explain lingering resentment in British quarters (despite the much older precedent of Spenser cited by Geoff). Another commenter, Terry Collmann, says that the style guide of the Times of London maintained a proscription against intransitive warn until a recent revision, belatedly catching up with what has now been recognized as accepted usage on both sides of the Atlantic. MWDEU points out that the 1965 edition of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, edited by Sir Ernest Gowers, already viewed intransitive warn as "common in journalism."

To continue the process of footnoting Matt Richtel, here's a passage from a bit later in the (online description of his) interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air ("Digital Overload: Your Brain On Gadgets", 8/24/2010):

He points to one study [1] conducted at Stanford University, which showed that heavy multimedia users have trouble filtering out irrelevant information — and trouble focusing on tasks. Other research [2], he says, says that heavy video game playing may release dopamine, which is thought to be involved with addictive behaviors.

"When you check your information, when you get a buzz in your pocket, when you get a ring — you get what they call a dopamine squirt. You get a little rush of adrenaline," he says. "Well, guess what happens in its absence? You feel bored. You're conditioned by a neurological response: 'Check me check me check me check me.' "

Richtel says that research is ongoing, particularly into how heavy technology may fundamentally alter the frontal lobe during childhood[3], how addictive behavior can lead to poor decision-making[4] and how the brain is rewired when it is constantly inundated with new information[5].

Pakistan is playing England in a series of cricket matches, and on Sunday, August 29, Mike Brearley filed from the famous Lord's cricket ground an unbearably pompous article in The Observer about how things are going. "Cricket is the cruellest game," he began; "It is also, by the same token, the kindest" — I will spare you the rest of the self-contradictory pseudo-literary drivel of his first paragraph. But with his second paragraph he moves into linguistics and theology, and I think Language Log has to comment on the former:

There is no future tense in Urdu; the future is in the hands of Allah, it is not for mortal men to speak as if they presume to know what it holds. But Pakistan's players must at least have feared for their future as the day wore on.

Can you guess what I did on seeing this, Language Log readers? (Apart, that is, from muttering imprecations under my breath, not for the first time, about how I simply do not understand the tendency for people to talk about language as if they can just make stuff up and nothing needs to be fact-checked.) I know a little about the Indic languages, and I do have some of the right books. So I got up, walked across my office, and plucked my rather ancient (1962) copy of Teach Yourself Urdu from the shelf.

Matt Richtel, one of the leading current peddlers of the "technology is eating our brains" meme, is fond of this assertion:

The average person today consumes almost three times as much information as what the typical person consumed in 1960, according to research at the University of California, San Diego.

That version is the lead paragraph of the online site for his appearance on Fresh Air, "Digital Overload: Your Brain On Gadgets", 8/24/2010.  I was curious about what this sentence could mean, and more specifically, I wondered which UCSD researchers did the measurements, and what they they measured. Usually I can track down the source of a factoid from the scant clues typically left by passing journalists, but this one has defeated me, so I'm asking for help.

From Tom Scott, a set of useful warning labels to stick on newspaper articles.

Now, to be fair, we need a set of similar warning labels for scientific papers and their presentation to the press.

I'll suggest a few after the jump. I'm sure that you'll be able to think of others, or better wording for mine.

James McElvenney comes to the defense of Andrew Herrick ("Linguistic border security", Fully (sic) 8/16/2010).

Shorter version: Herrick argued that Americanisms are polluting the clear pool of Australian English, and bringing social ills like mugging in their wake ("With American lingo, we've imported toxic US culture", The Age, 8/6/2010); I suggested that Herrick was prejudiced, illogical, and deluded ("'America's toxic culture' invaded Oz — in words?", 8/6/2010); McElvenney presents evidence that Herrick was not entirely deluded.

One of the strangest stories gets one of the strangest headlines in a strange, strange August. The headline is from CBC in Canada, and the story is from the strange state of Florida:

Days from death, Fla. wildlife officials free plastic jar that was stuck on bear cub's head

Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty that plastic jar is free at last! Though the news about the Florida wildlife officials being close to death is alarming, of course. You may find you need some explanations. If you don't, my compliments. But read on if you do.

A few days ago, mild-mannered editor John E. McIntyre let out his inner @GRAMMARHULK ("Chairman Wednesday", You Don't Say 8/8/2010):

Must stay calm. Must not let little things get under one’s skin. Must keep a sense of proportion.

And yet, day after day, journalists everywhere keep turning out sentences in which, in defiance of English syntax, they insist on inserting the day of the week between the subject and the verb. Who tells them to write like this? Yesterday, from Reuters:

SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro Wednesday listed some technical areas that
 might yet need rule changes, including the use of market orders, “stub quotes,” price
 collars, and self-help rules used by the dozen U.S. exchanges where today’s high-speed trading is done.

And searching the COCA corpus for the sequence weekday-name past-tense-verb reveals that this is indeed a journalismism:

The Guardian has an article today entitled, "Linguist on mission to save Inuit 'fossil language' disappearing with the ice," about a forthcoming research trip by University of Cambridge linguist Stephen Pax Leonard to study Inuktun, an endangered Polar Inuit language spoken by the Inughuit community of northwest Greenland.

It's always great to see this kind of coverage for anthropological linguistics, and the article is worth a read — though I'm a bit suspicious of the claim that Inuktun "is regarded as something of a linguistic 'fossil' and one of the oldest and most 'pure' Inuit dialects." Regarded by whom? The scare quotes (or claim quotes) around "fossil" and "pure" fail to indicate whose notion of ethnolinguistic purity is at play here. (The "language" vs. "dialect" confusion throughout the article doesn't help, either.)

But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the news article is what it doesn't include. From the Guardian Style Guide's Twitter feed:

We have managed to carry a story on Inuit language without the cliche "number of words for snow". Well done Mark Brown.

Well done, indeed. Once again, it's good to know that our perpetual gripes about the snow-word myth are not just empty howls echoing across the tundra.

Perhaps you saw the outrageous headline from The Daily Telegraph last week: "Secret vault of words rejected by the Oxford English Dictionary uncovered"! Michael Quinion called it "quite the daftest dictionary-related story I've ever read," and I tend to agree. In my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, I take a look at just how daft the story is, with its suggestion of a Dan Brown-style Dictionary Cabal locking up failed words. (Actually, Dan Brown could probably write a better story — that's how laughable it is.)

The Associated Press obituary for Mitch Miller includes this highly questionable tidbit:

Miller's square reputation in the post-rock era brought his name and music to unexpected places… During Queen's nonsensical camp classic, "Bohemian Rhapsody," the group chants "Mitch MILL-uh!" as if to affirm the song's absurdity.

Surely that's a mondegreen. The AP would have been well-served to consult Am I Right or Kiss This Guy, online repositories of misheard lyrics. It's not "Mitch Miller" that Queen is singing, but bismillah, the formulaic utterance in Classical Arabic that introduces each sura (chapter) of the Qur'an. (It means "In the name of God"; the full formula is bismi-llāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm, "In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.")

A couple of days ago, the Toronto Star completely screwed up its explanation of the IELTS English proficiency test, by presenting as "an example of Part 1 of the writing test" some badly-designed material from a training booklet not even published by the test designers, asking questions of a kind that are apparently never found on the test.

Arnold Zwicky reminds me that the same newspaper did essentially the same thing a little more than two years ago, as Arnold documented in "Do you speak Canadian?", 6/4/2008.

Since BP is "refusing to confirm the widespread reports" that CEO Tony Hayward is just about to be fired, I assume he will be out by the end of the day (if you get up in the morning and find your employer is refusing to confirm reports that you are on the way out, start removing passives from your resume, because you're already toast). Hayward is the man who incautiously said to the press that no one wanted the oil spill cleaned up more than he did: "I want my life back", he said, disastrously misjudging America's attitude toward the ecological catastrophe his company had wrought. And from the hour of that incautiously casual and selfish remark onward, he was toast. But I find myself wondering: whose remark was it, originally?