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.

Mark Liberman recently asked, "What was the earliest use of mixed typographical symbols (as opposed to uniform asterisks or underlining) to represent (part or all of) taboo words?" The use of such symbols appears to have originated as a comic-strip convention. Comic strip fans, following Mort Walker's Lexicon of Comicana, have often called these cursing characters grawlixes, though I prefer the term obscenicons. In Gwillim Law's history of grawlixes, he lists examples of cartoon cursing going back to the Sep. 3, 1911 installment of "The Katzenjammer Kids." Here is the panel in question (which I found in the Washington Post archives):

Along with a sequence of asterisk-dash-exclamation point-dash-exclamation point, the speech balloon also features what appears to be a stick-figure devil firing a cannon, with three more exclamation points for good measure. As delightful as this example is, it's not the earliest use of obscenicons on the comics page. I found another "Katzenjammer Kids" strip using them, from two years earlier.

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.

The BBC, perennially careless on language issues, incorrectly states here that radio talk show host Jon Gaunt was disciplined by Ofcom (the UK communications regulation authority) for calling a local councillor a Nazi. The error is repeated by The Times here, and by The Independent's headline here (and there may be many more). They misreport Gaunt's alleged offense. As the BBC article reports further down the page:

The pair had been debating Redbridge Council's decision to ban smokers from fostering children when Mr Gaunt called Mr Stark a "health Nazi" and an "ignorant pig".

I don't know the extent to which "ignorant pig" was the issue, but I do want to point out that "health Nazi" is not to be equated with "Nazi". The longer phrase evokes the bad-tempered and bossy lunch counter boss in Seinfeld — the one that they referred to with awe, though only when out of earshot of the awful man, as "the Soup Nazi".

Adrian Bailey passes along an interesting bit of editorial excision that appeared in a Washington Post article about Craig "Lazie" Lynch, who recently escaped from a prison outside of in Suffolk, England. Lynch has been leaving taunting messages on his Facebook page. The Post quotes Lynch as follows:

"I had a funny feelin that my door was going to come off this mornin," he wrote in one smug post guaranteed to torque law enforcement officials everywhere. "Then I remembered the [police] are thick as [dung]. And went back to sleep."

At FanNation ("the Republic of Sport"), in reference to the fact that Texas Tech fired coach Mike Leach, Haledorn from Flower Mound, TX, commented:

Let me tell you as a Tech Alum that this is about traditional football. This is the only football in the area entrenched in traditional football ideals set in stone by Spike **** running an I formation and handing the ball to Bam Morris on 3 down and 8. This is about who gets credit for the rise of a program. Gerald Myers wants it and Leach should get it, so the man in power finds a way to cut him loose. I call it "Jerry Jones Syndrome".

John McIntyre, "Meep me daddy, eight to the bar":

The principal of a high school in Massachusetts recently banned the word meep in his school, threatening any student who used it, spoken or written, with expulsion. His rationale is that the students were using the word in a disruptive manner.

Of course they were. That is what adolescents do. Few teen pleasures are keener than getting under the skin of officious adults. And the principal, one Thomas Murray, lost composure sufficiently to forward e-mails containing meep to the local police.

Top story of the morning in the UK for the serious language scientist must surely be the report in The Sun concerning a children's toy mouse that is supposed to sing "Jingle bells, jingle bells" but instead sings "Pedophile, pedophile". Said one appalled mother who squeezed the mouse, "Luckily my children are too young to understand." The distributors, a company called Humatt, of Ferndown in Dorset, claims that the man in China who recorded the voice for the toy "could not pronounce certain sounds." And the singing that he recorded "was then speeded up to make it higher-pitched — distorting the result further." (A good MP3 of the result can be found here.) They have recalled the toy.

Shocked listeners to BBC Radio 4 this morning heard the presenters read this story out while collapsing with laughter. Language Log is not amused. If there was ever a more serious confluence of issues in speech technology, the Chinese language, freedom of speech, taboo language, and the protection of children, I don't know when.

Peter Baker, "How Obama Came to Plan for ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan", New York Times, 12/5/2009:

The leak of Ambassador Eikenberry’s Nov. 6 cable stirred another storm within the administration because the cable had been requested by the White House. The National Security Council had told the ambassador to put his views in writing. But someone else then passed word of the cable to reporters in what some in the process took to be a calculated attempt to head off a big troop buildup.

The cable stunned some in the military. The reaction at the Pentagon, said one official, was “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” — military slang for an expression of shock. Among the officers caught off guard were General McChrystal and his staff, for whom the cable was “a complete surprise,” said another official, even though the commander and the ambassador meet three times a week.

"Military slang for an expression of shock". Right.

In a November 14 comment on Mark Liberman's "Going rogue" posting, David Gustav Anderson says:

In many parts of the English speaking world (UK and Commonwealth), "going rogue" is a euphemism for heterosexual women engaging in anal intercourse.

(I was at first suspicious, since the comment appeared over a year after the original posting, and many such long-delayed comments are spam, but this one looks legit.)

[Added 11/18: As I say in a follow-up posting, DGA is legit, and so is the comment, in the sense that he did post the comment and did so earnestly. But it turns out that his sources were playing a prank on him.]

Such a euphemistic use of going rogue was news to me, but then there are lots of usages I haven't noticed. Anderson didn't give any cites, and I haven't been able to find any, so that for the moment I suspect that euphemistic uses are neither widespread nor frequent, but I'm open for evidence (beyond some individual readers saying that they're familiar with the use).

[Added 11/18: I'm now convinced that claims about this use are sheer invention.]

The Taboo Desk here at Language Log Plaza is piled high with reports about taboo language and offensive language — about the classification of particular expressions as obscene/profane or otherwise offensive, about the open use of such expressions, about ways people avoid them, and so on. Now, on the front page of the New York Times on November 14, a story ("It Turns Out You Can Say That On Television, Over and Over", by Edward Wyatt) about expressions that don't reach the level of obscenity or profanity but are offensive to many people — and have now been appearing with increasing frequency on television (in prime-time network series), where they can serve as approximations to even stronger stuff.

Via The Swamp, the Chicago Tribune's political blog, comes news of an awesome (if spiteful) bit of gubernatorial wordplay from the office of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:

Michael Quinion reports in his latest World Wide Words (#661, October 17):

TWINKLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE TWINK  It's amazing what you can learn from e-mail error messages. The issue last week was blocked by one site in the UK because it had a rude word in the message body. Do you recall reading any rude words? I don't remember writing any. It transpired that the offending "word" was in the title of a nursery rhyme I listed: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. The filtering system spotted the first five letters of the first word and pounced. I had to look it up: TWINK is gay slang (I quote Wikipedia) for "a young or young-looking gay man (usually white and in his late teens or early twenties) with a slender build, little or no body hair, and no facial hair."