Language Log

My latest "On Language" column in The New York Times Magazine (along with a followup Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus) takes an in-depth look at the language of "Mad Men," the critically acclaimed AMC series that begins its fourth season on Sunday. Though I'm not as hard on the show as fellow Language Logger John McWhorter, I do single out various linguistic anachronisms (or at least potential ones) that have cropped up thus far.

Despite this caviling, I was impressed to hear from the show's creator and head writer Matthew Weiner about the extent to which words and phrases are researched during the vetting of the scripts. He even revealed two such words that were checked out for inclusion in coming episodes, despite the code of silence surrounding Season 4 in advance of the premiere. I was unable to make explicit mention of one of those words in The Times, so I'll come clean here.

A reader asks the NYT Science Times (in C. Claiborne Ray's "Q+a" column on July 13):

Q. How does the weather service determine whether it was a tornado that caused the kind of destruction that recently occurred in Bridgeport, Conn.?

Before I go on, step back and ask yourself what sort of answer the reader was expecting.

A truly strange piece of euphemism came up in a UK newspaper interview with Justin Halpern, the creator of the hit Twitter page Shit My Dad Says:

One day we took the dog for a walk. My dad said: "Look at the dog's asshole — you can tell from the dilation that the dog is about to shit" and the dog went to the bathroom. He was incredibly impressed by his prediction.

The dog went to the bathroom? Not exactly a case of like father like son, linguistically.

We post a lot of crash blossoms here on Language Log — appallingly worded headlines that slow down your parsing and (whether intendedly or not) have crazy extra meanings. But let's hand out some kudos occasionally for totally wonderful headlines: clever, appropriate, amusing, terse, eye-catching, and appropriate. There was one in The Scotsman today. Here in Britain all the newspapers are making front page stories out of the discovery that one of the members of the Russian spy ring just dicovered in the USA was a good-looking redhead with sultry boudoir portraits posted on her Facebook page. And The Scotsman's choice of a headline was absolutely wonderful…

The latest installment of WNYC's show Radiolab is entitled "Oops," and it's about how we so often get tripped up by the unintended consequences of our actions. Hosts Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad brought me in to the studio to share some classic word-processing Oops-es. I talk about various search-and-replace howlers, including the spellchecker-aided miscorrections known in these parts as "Cupertinos." Have a listen here.

Loyal Language Log readers will be familiar with many of my examples. They're sprinkled throughout the first half-hour of the show, so I've put together a listening guide with links to relevant posts.

The Economist article whose first sentence I quoted in this post about inverting subject and verb in dialog reporting frames ends with a textbook example of a very different kind of inversion:

Harder still than understanding the significance of such barbarism may be accepting that it can never be completely prevented.

This is a case of what The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (p.1385) calls subject-dependent inversion. It involves switching places between the subject of a main clause and some dependent from within the verb phrase (often a complement of the copula). In the above example, the subject is the subjectless gerund-participial clause accepting that it can never be completely prevented. The adjective phrase harder still than understanding the significance of such barbarism is a predicative complement licensed by the copular verb be. They have been switched. The most straightforward order of constituents would have been this:

Accepting that it can never be completely prevented may be harder still than understanding the significance of such barbarism.

[Update 6/20/2010 — The linked CNN story has been extensively modified, for the better. The headline is now "Language mavens exchange words over Obama's Oval Office speech," and the article now highlights Ron Yaros along with Payack, and incorporates some information from this post. Fev at headsuptheblog has some before-and-after analysis.]

It's amazing what a grip Received Perceptions have on what passes for journalism these days.  Today, CNN enlisted Paul Payack to lead us through an unusually contentless version of one of the standard categories of Obama  criticism  ("Language guru: Obama speech too 'professorial' for his target audience", 6/17/2010):

President Obama's speech on the gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.

How can we tell? Well, for a start,

Tuesday night's speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. The Austin, Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture.

Wait, what? Text at a ninth-grade reading level is too professorial for the American people to understand? When it's read out loud to them? Color me skeptical. But wait, there's more…

I think I've gotten this one wrong a few times myself:

(The headline was corrected a few minutes ago…)

Derrick Bird, a divorced man living with his mother in a small town in northwest England, was said to have been having a row with his brother about a will, and had mentioned to his workmates that he was worried about a possible $100,000 tax bill or even a jail sentence for tax evasion. His workmates teased him about being a loser with women. Then the day came when he told a friend darkly, "You won't be seeing me again". He said his last words to fellow taxi drivers: "There's going to be a rampage tomorrow." And although they knew Mr Bird owned a collection of guns, his friends and workmates did nothing about what he said. They told no one. The next day he shot and killed his twin brother, and the family solicitor, and two of his fellow cabbies, and then drove around several small towns for three hours shooting people at random. He killed eight more innocent strangers: a realtor, a farmer, a retired couple, a mole catcher, a woman shopping, an unmarried senior citizen delivering leaflets, a couple of retired workers… He wounded a dozen more. Blood ran in the streets of tiny rural towns where everyone knew everyone. Finally he drove to some woodland and (you can feel the usual journalistic cliché coming up) he turned the gun on himself. He had actually used the stock word rampage in his warning to his workmates; but they didn't listen, and didn't tell the police. We should pay much closer attention to the words people actually use.

A video from Today's Big Thing, under the headline, "Soccer Reporter Invents New Kind of English":

David Craig was puzzled by this AP News headline:

Christopher Beam, in a Slate magazine last Wednesday (published while I was winging my way back to the UK by a modified air route far south of Iceland), connects the strange business of birtherism (the political perversion of believing, or pretending to believe, that President Obama doesn't have a US birth certificate and thus isn't constitutionally allowed to serve) to lexical semantics:

Birtherism is here to stay. And not because more people are going crazy, but because crazy has been redefined. Birtherism isn't the only example. Consider how conservatives accuse Obama of peddling "socialism." Sure, some of them genuinely think that Obama is going to usher in a new Soviet state in which the government owns all means of production. But most right-wingers use it as shorthand for government overreach. So now that's what "socialism" means.

There is a fairly major difference between birtherism and the socialism charge: Birtherism has been disproved by facts. But they're similar in the way they get tossed around without much connection to their original meaning.

He isn't very clear in the way he puts this: "crazy has been redefined" isn't quite right, because everyone agrees that craziness is irrationality or mental disorder of a sort that gives rise to unpredictably strange behavior. But the idea that the word socialism has actually changed its denotation in modern American English might not be so crazy.

Back at the beginning of the volcano ash cloud flight chaos news story event sequence, on April 15, Bob Ladd sent me this quote from an item on the BBC News web site:

Philip Avery from the Met Office said: "It is showing up on imagery at the moment, extending down as far as the Pharoahs but it looks as though the wind will drag it a good deal further south.

Bob is a reliable witness, but unfortunately, by the time I found the article in question, the "Pharoahs" had turned into the Faroes.

When I notice a notable typo in a normally well-edited publication, I try to get a screen shot, as I did in the case of this striking New York Times headline: