Language Log

Mark Pagel can take comfort in the fact that his remarks about phrase-books for time-travelers were far from the dumbest stuff from a famous scientist to be featured in the mass media last week. As Ben Goldacre explained on badscience.net:

Professor Susan Greenfield is the head of the Royal Institution and the person behind the Daily Mail headline "Social websites harm children’s brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist”, which has spread around the world (like the last time she said it, and the time before that).

It is my view that Professor Greenfield has been abusing her position as a professor, and head of the Royal Institution, for many years now, using these roles to give weight to her speculations and prejudices in a way that is entirely inappropriate. […]

We are all free to have fanciful ideas. Professor Greenfield’s stated aim, however, is to improve the public’s understanding of science: and yet repeatedly she appears in the media making wild headline-grabbing claims, without evidence, all the while telling us repeatedly that she is a scientist. By doing this, the head of the RI grossly misrepresents what it is that scientists do, and indeed the whole notion of what it means to have empirical evidence for a claim. It makes me quite sad, when the public’s understanding of science is in such a terrible state, that this is one of our most prominent and well funded champions.

A few days ago, Fev at Headsup: The Blog posted about the "Hed noun pileup of the morning", namely "Texting death crash peer jailed". His link actually points to a BBC News story whose headline now reads "Peer jailed for motorway texting". All the same, Fev's larger point seems to be exactly right: "American hed dialect just doesn't do this".

Does the network of journalistic credulousness still follow the connections established during the glory days of the British empire? I'm not sure how else to explain the diffusion pattern of Mark Pagel's little jokes about his estimates of cognate-replacement rates in language change.

In my post a couple of days ago ("Scrabble tips for time travelers"), I linked to a calvalcade of foolishness that included coverage in the Times ("A handy little guide to small talk in the Stone Age"), the BBC ("Oldest English words' identified"), the Guardian ("Word facing extinction: 'Dirty' will be scrubbed from the English dictionary"), and the Daily Mail ("Revealed: The world's oldest words… and the ones that will disappear"). And a Google News search yields a cornucopia of other giddy idiocies in British-empire media.

This morning's BBC's News Hour program featured one of the most densely nonsensical three-minute sequences that I can ever recall having heard from a respectable media outlet:

As Scott Simon reminds us on Weekend Edition Saturday this morning, The Linguists will premiere on PBS stations across the nation this Thursday. (Check and double-check your local listings for the exact time (or even the day) of the premiere, which may vary.)

I'm looking forward to finally seeing the film. I'm also looking forward to David Harrison's upcoming visit to my corner of Language Log Plaza on April 23 and 24. If you find yourself in the San Diego area around that time, come on by.

I have to add that I was a bit disappointed with Scott Simon's interview with David Harrison and Greg Anderson this morning. After a fairly good introduction and a good first couple of questions (asking what first brought David and Greg together, and what happens when a language dies), Scott decides to lighten things up a bit and chuckles to himself as he says: "May I ask, each of you in turn: what's the strangest language you think you've ever heard?" Greg (rather wisely) prompts David to go first, and David avoids immediately taking the bait by saying, "Well, they're all strange from a certain point of view, and English is strange, but…" — at which point Scott interjects: "English can be particularly strange." (David: "It can be, indeed.") Things devolve into a discussion of "strange language sounds", the idea that some technical linguistics terms sound obscene, and so on — it gets serious and picks up again towards the end, but Scott can't resist closing with more chuckles and another reference to the language Birhor (sounds like "beer whore"). Sigh.

Janet Maslin's New York Times review of Death by Leisure by Chris Ayres, a British journalist who reported on Hollywood for the (UK) Times, contains this puzzling passage:

The book also conveys his efforts to get in the Californian spirit (i.e., buying a plasma television he can't afford) or to trade on Anglophilia when it suits him. The snobbish pronunciation of his name may sound like a British synonym for derrière, but it helps him finagle his way into the gala opening of the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall. On the other hand, he makes sure to Americanize the R in “Ayres” and go native when crashing a movie-business party.

There's really no way to figure out what Maslin means here without consulting the book itself, and even then things are a bit murky.

A police spokesperson from Buffalo speaking about yesterday's plane crash on BBC Radio 4 this morning said that in addition to all the people on the plane (no one survived) there was "one subject in the residence". The baffled Radio 4 presenter had to repeat back a translation into normal English. What on earth is the function of this police jargon? Are we supposed to be comforted or protected by this talk of subjects suffering fatal incidents in residences? We know that people often die when planes crash right into their houses. Why does the police style of speaking to the media not allow us to be told about it in such simple terms? I'm not just pretending to be puzzled here; I truly do not understand this linguistic phenomenon.

It has now become clearer that Carol Thatcher, the broadcasting personality at the center of the Gollygate scandal, was indeed talking in racist terms. It seems (see this story in The Guardian) that she not only called Congolese-French tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga a golliwog (Americans often don't know this word, but it refers to a traditional style of stereotyped black-faced rag doll), and did so more than once, but also called him a "half-golliwog" and a "golliwog frog". These previously unreported details are crucial. They make it clear that it was not some innocent comment regarding visual resemblance to a children's toy. "Half-golliwog" makes it clear that she really was using "golliwog" for "person of (predominantly) negroid racial type". That's the only plausible way to make "half-golliwog" interpretable. She was referring to his mixed race, and defining him by it. That truly is racist talk. She'd call my son Calvin a half-golliwog given one more half glass of white wine.

I bring American readers news, not previously discussed on Language Log, of not just one or two but three scandals concerning public use of allegedly racist language in Britain that have been thought serious enough to merit the post-Nixonian word-formation suffix -gate. All three have been big stories for the newspapers and other media. They are known as Pakigate, Sootygate, and most recently Gollygate.

1. Prince Harry (one of the Queen's grandsons) was recently in deep trouble for uttering the word Paki on the soundtrack of a cell phone video of some of his army buddies.

2. Prince Charles (the Queen's son) was the subject of another newspaper outcry when it was learned that he followed others in addressing a long-time polo-playing Indian friend of his by the nickname Sooty.

3. Carol Thatcher (daughter of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher) used the word "gollywog" in conversation and has now been removed from her role on The One Show, a BBC program she regularly contributed to.

Last Sunday's Get Fuzzy:

As we've often observed, the semantic relationship between the elements of English complex nominals is very variable — consider for example olive oil, hair oil, and midnight oil. But my intuition, FWIW, says that "anger management" can't mean "management of angry people" — and not just because the phrase is already taken for another meaning. (Of course Satchel, who thinks that "jerk chicken" is a job description, is an amusingly unreliable lexicographer.)

Meanwhile, in other nominal news from unreliable sources, Daniel Schaefer in the Financial Times recently warned us about a German compound noun bubble ("The German language goes long"):

At first glance, Germany has avoided the sort of bubbles that have burst elsewhere. There was no house price inflation in a country lacking homeowners. Neither did the nation of savers have a decent credit bubble.

But beware. A dangerous bubble is taking over a country famed for its steadiness. The financial crisis and the notorious German Angst have combined to form an explosive boom: in compound nouns.

This verbal euphoria appears innocent when it comes to words such as Rettungsschirm (“rescue umbrella”), Rettungspaket (“rescue package”) or Kapitalspritze (“capital injection”). But it takes on ear-bursting brutality with words such as Abwrackprämie (“scrap premium”) – recently offered for trading in old cars to stimulate the automobile industry.

More worryingly, this passion for joining up nouns, albeit unlikely to spread around the world as fast as a subprime mortgage bond, is growing quickly in Germany.

Transcription practices are in the news (Patricia Cohen, "John Dean's Role at Issue in Nixon Tapes Feud". NYT 1/31/2009):

Scholarly feuds seldom end amicably, and nearly 35 years after President Richard M. Nixon resigned, a dispute involving his Watergate tapes would seem to be no exception.

A handful of historians and authors maintain that the most authoritative transcripts of those recordings include significant omissions and misrepresentations that could influence interpretations of the cover-up.

At the center of the quarrel is “Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes,” a 1997 collection of transcripts edited by Stanley I. Kutler, a pre-eminent historian of the Watergate era, that has become the standard reference. Mr. Kutler has been a hero to many people because of a lawsuit he brought with the nonprofit group Public Citizen that led to the release of 201 hours of recordings related to unethical or illegal activity in the Nixon White House.

But longtime critics of his transcripts say Mr. Kutler deliberately edited the tapes in ways that painted a more benign portrait of a central figure in the drama, the conspirator-turned-star-witness, John W. Dean III, the White House counsel who told Nixon that Watergate had become a “cancer” on his presidency.

To Mr. Kutler’s scholarly critics, though, the most serious failing is that excerpts from two separate conversations that took place on March 16 — one made during a face-to-face meeting in the morning, and a second over the telephone in the evening — were reversed in order and presented as part of one continuous meeting. Most of the evening conversation between Mr. Dean and Nixon was eliminated, as were any references to it.

Beginning with a few sneak previews at smaller film festivals prior to its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival a year ago, The Linguists has been touring around the world — sometimes with David or Greg available for discussion, sometimes without — with exclusive screenings for lucky audiences. There are still a few such screenings left in various places, but soon many more of us in the United States will be able to enjoy the television premiere of The Linguists on PBS: on or after February 26, depending on your local station.

Note: thus far only Alabama Public Television seems to be on the ball about posting the premiere in its online broadcast schedule. I welcome links to other updated PBS station schedules in the comments.

(The PBS premiere is noted at the end of yesterday's Q&A with David and Greg in GOOD Magazine; tip o' the hat to Ben Zimmer.)

Quotation marks (typically the single ones ‘ ’) that are used to mark the use of a word as not necessarily one that the present writer would endorse (The so-called ‘universal grammar ’ that linguists talk about) are standardly known as scare quotes. Those used (illiterately, it is often thought) simply to emphasize or call attention to a word (‘FRESH’ TOMATOES!) are sometimes, less standardly, called greengrocer's quotes. I think we need a third and separate name for the increasingly common journalistic use seen in this national science news story taken from a British newspaper today (I quote it in full, so nothing is being suppressed):

Hormone ‘makes women unfaithful’
WOMEN with high levels of one sex hormone are more likely to have affairs — and are considered more attractive by themselves and others. Those with the most oestradiol, a form of oestrogen, are less satisfied with their lovers and more likely to have a roving eye, a study suggests today. ‘Attractive women may not only have more alternatives but also high standards that are difficult to satisfy,’ said US psychologist Dr Katrina Durante, whose study is published by the Royal Society. ‘They may have fewer reasons to be committed to any partner if higher-quality potential mates are available.’

I am not commenting on the fact that the report says not a single word about the hormone causing infidelity. This is Language Log, not Endocrinology Log. What I'm pointing to is that the quoted words are not a quote: they never appear in the article at all.