Indiana's News Center reports that a student, Austin Carroll, has been expelled from Garrett High School for posting this tweet on his own Twitter account:
Fuck is one of those fucking words you can fucking put anywhere in a fucking sentence and it still fucking makes sense.
The school says he posted from a school computer; he says he did it from home and it's none of their business.
What saddens me is that Austin was making a linguistic observation, and it's basically almost true. This may be a budding linguist, and he's been kicked out of his high school for a syntactic observation.
The latest sad story of trammeled speech in the UK comes from Northamptonshire, where there is a furniture company called The Sofa King. For years their advertisements and their vans have borne a legend stating that their prices are "Sofa King Low". But not any more: having escaped when they were reported to the police in 2004 (the Crown Prosecution Service wouldn't act), they have now met their come-uppance: their slogan has been branded offensive by the Advertising Standards Authority. I hope you can see why.
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.
