At about 6:38 a.m. today Jak Beula, chairman of a community trust, was talking on BBC Radio 4's "Today" program about Smethwick, a town in the Midlands of England, where there were famous incidents of racism in the 1960s, leading to an important visit by Malcolm X nine days before his assassination in New York. Beula wanted to explain about a disgracefully racist election leaflet that was going around at the time, aimed at discrediting the Labour Party. He knew that because he was on the BBC he was under a constraint (which Language Log does not impose on itself): he must not utter the word nigger. So he struggled to walk round what he had to say without ever uttering that word. And the result was a total disaster of mis-speech.
Three linguistic offenses in the UK to report on this week: an injudicious noun choice, a highly illegal false assertion, and an obscene racist epithet. The latter two have led to criminal charges.
In other language news today (Language Log tries to bring you all the important linguistic news of the day), an Australian snack food company has won the right to trademark the name Nuckin Futs for a nutty snack to be sold to adults in bars.
Following the wreck of the Costa Concordia last weekend (one Italian comic suggested it should be renamed Costa Codardia, where codardia means "cowardice"), I've been temporarily taken on as a correspondent by Language Log's Italian desk in order to report on a few linguistic aspects of the already notorious telephone call between the Coast Guard captain De Falco and the ship's much criticized captain Schettino.
This bit of social commentary comes from the Latino Rebels website. Like many brilliant ads, its impact is multiplied by the fact that, even after you've had the Aha! instant of "getting it", your mind continues to unspool a series of relevant inferences.
I bet if you sat down and started listing them, you could easily reel off a good dozen or so.
There's nothing funny about the religiously-based sectarian strife between Protestant-associated and Catholic-associated soccer teams in Scotland. And there's nothing funny about a physical attack on a sports team manager by a fan at a game (especially a team manager who has already had a violent assault, death threats, bullets in the mail, and a parcel bomb). Yet the linguistic aspects of the story in UK newspapers today seem nonetheless unintentionally hilarious, and I think I wouldn't be doing my duty to Language Log if I didn't share them with you.
Apple employees are banned from saying "unfortunately" when delivering bad news to a customer, urged instead to replace it with the more positive "as it turns out." And management apparently takes the ban seriously: One former Apple employee tells us that his coworker was put under a 90-day probationary period because he said "unfortunately" too much at the Genius Bar.
Language Log has not yet commented on the most stupid recent case of censorship in the arts motivated by vocabulary taboos. The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC), an independent broadcasting agency charged with overseeing private radio stations in Canada, has banned Mark Knopfler's wonderful 1985 Dire Straits rock anthem "Money For Nothing" from the airwaves. The reason? The word faggot appears in three of the song's lines (as originally written), and the CBSC believes that this lexical item should never again sully Canadian air.
I was amused this morning by the headline on William D. Cohan's opinion piece in the New York Times about Goldman Sachs' investment in Facebook: "Friends With Benefits". Standard dictionaries haven't picked up on this phrase yet, but Wikipedia tells us that it means "non-exclusive recurring sexual (or near-sexual) relationships", and offers links to a telenovela, a sitcom soundtrack CD, an independent film, an upcoming TV series, and a big-time Hollywood movie due out this summer. The Urban Dictionary, though not always reliable, nails it this time: "Two friends who have a sexual realtionship without being emotionally involved. Typically two good friends who have casual sex without a monogomous relationship or any kind of commitment." (Well, "realtionship" is slightly under-proofread, but you can't have everything.)
It was a disappointment to find that Cohan didn't do anything further with this metaphor in the body of the article. I thought about blogging the headline, but decided not to.
Thanks to Sean H, Mike Fourman, Ian Leslie, Eddie, Electric Dragon, Lizzie, Jayarava, KGR, Will Watts, Alex, DW, Sean Case, (and probably many others still typing their comments) who commented on my earlier version of this post, for confirming that around 8 a.m. this morning James Naughtie of the BBC Radio 4 news magazine program "Today" suffered (or very nearly suffered) a catastrophic obscene spoonerism followed by an obliterative ill-muffled giggling fit. What a pity a coughing fit didn't halt the dumb discussion of nouns and verbs elsewhere in the program.
