Language Log

The comments on my post "The inherent ambiguity of WTF" drifted to other possible expansions of WTF, like the World Taekwondo Federation. That reminded me of something I saw back in July on the blog Your Logo Makes Me Barf, mocking the abbreviatory logo of the Wisconsin Tourism Federation. The ridicule got some attention from local Wisconsin media, such as Kathy Flanigan of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Folks at the Wisconsin Tourism Federation couldn't possibly have seen how the Internet would change the lingo when it was established in 1979.
But now that it's been pointed out, the lobbying coalition might want to rethink using an acronym in the logo. To anyone online, WTF has a different meaning these days. And it's not the kind of thing you want visitors thinking about when they think Wisconsin.

I decided to check out the tourism board's website, and lo and behold, they've bowed to pressure and changed their name to the Tourism Federation of Wisconsin. The old logo lives on, however, at the Internet Archive. Compare:

I'd like to echo Arnold Zwicky's praise for the third edition of Jesse Sheidlower's fan-fucking-tastic dictionary, The F Word. (See page 33 to read the entry for fan-fucking-tastic, dated to 1970 in Terry Southern's Blue Movie. And see page 143 for the more general use of -fucking- as an infix, in use at least since World War I.) Full disclosure: I made some contributions to this edition, suggesting possible new entries and digging up earlier citations ("antedatings") for various words and phrases. I took a particular interest in researching effing acronyms and initialisms. For instance, I was pleased to contribute the earliest known appearance of the now-ubiquitous MILF — and no, I'm not talking about the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. (For the record, a Buffalo-based rock band adopted the name MILF in early 1991, based on slang used by lifeguards at Fort Niagara State Park.) Another entry I helped out on is the endlessly flexible expression of bewilderment, WTF.

The third edition of Jesse Sheidlower's dictionary The F Word is now out, to much (and much-deserved) acclaim. The book has a scholarly introduction (of 33 pages) on the etymology of fuck; its taboo status; its appearance in print (including in dictionaries) and movies; euphemism and taboo avoidance; and this dictionary and its policies. The many uses of fuck are then covered in detail in the main entries.

There's an excellent review of the book by slang scholar Jonathon Green on the World Wide Words site. From Green's review:

… as a fellow lexicographer (and, I must admit, a friend — slang is a small world) what impresses me most is the excellence of the overall treatment. The subject happens to be fuck, but this is how any such study should be conducted and sadly so rarely is. Not via the slipshod infantilism of the Net’s Urban Dictionary, but disinterestedly, seriously and in depth. The F Word, I would suggest, is a template that we would all be wise to follow.

Website for the book here.

The Irish singer Van Morrison was well into his set at a concert in his native isle before a crowd in high spirits. Enthusiastic applause followed every song. At one point in the excited hubbub as Van tried to signal the band to start a new song, a voice yelled out over the crowd, "We love you, Van!". This moved the dour and laconic performer to make his only remark of the evening to his audience. Said Van emphatically to his adoringly ebullient fan: "Fucking shut the fuck up."

This post combines three LL themes into one peculiar anecdote — with added beer. We've often analyzed cases where a phrase seems to come out with one negation too many or too few; we've tried to follow the FCC's reasoning about the "inherent sexual connotations" of the "F-word"; and we've devoted many posts to untangling confused translations.  Today's trifecta winner comes courtesy of two edgy young Scottish brewers, the European Entrepreneur of the Year competition, and former Roumanian president Emil Constantinescu.

Two items: a Rubes cartoon (by Leigh Rubin) on avoidance characters in cartoons, and a story from a while back on taboo vocabulary in a Batman comic.

At first sight the headline suggested a case for the Language Log UK Free Speech Watch Desk and the Abusive Epithets Work Group: Mother fined £250 for 'poof' abuse of gay son. A $370 fine just for using the word 'poof', even within the family? What next? Jail time just for calling one's clumsy husband a stupid bastard? Family life would collapse. Intrafamilial insults are part of a great British tradition.

But no, studying of the fine detail of the article (in the Metro, a free UK newspaper) revealed that it wasn't a matter of word use at all.

It's really hard to write a story about an obscene pun in a foreign language, when your publication won't let you say anything about the pun except to give the English translation of its innocuous side. That's the unenviable task attempted by Michael Wines in today's NYT ("A Dirty Pun Tweaks China’s Online Censors", 3/12/2009):

Since its first unheralded appearance in January on a Chinese Web page, the grass-mud horse has become nothing less than a phenomenon. A YouTube children’s song about the beast has drawn nearly 1.4 million viewers. A grass-mud horse cartoon has logged a quarter million more views. A nature documentary on its habits attracted 180,000 more. Stores are selling grass-mud horse dolls. Chinese intellectuals are writing treatises on the grass-mud horse’s social importance. The story of the grass-mud horse’s struggle against the evil river crab has spread far and wide across the Chinese online community.

Not bad for a mythical creature whose name, in Chinese, sounds very much like an especially vile obscenity. Which is precisely the point.

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.

American readers are likely to be truly amazed to learn what has just happened to a senior British diplomat, Mr Rowan Laxton. He was on an exercise bike at a gym in the Regent's Park area of London, and he got angry as he watched film of the destruction in Gaza, and shouted: "Fucking Israelis! Fucking Jews!" — adding that they should be "wiped off the face of the earth."

Mr Laxton is head of diplomatic policy in South Asia at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the UK government. He reports directly to brief the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. (In one of those twists that fiction has to avoid on grounds of implausibility but real life allows, Mr Miliband is Jewish.) But he was not merely reprimanded, or sent for anger management, or removed from his post, or dropped from a BBC talk program over this. The police came and arrested him. He faces a criminal charge of inciting religious hatred, which can carry a seven-year prison term. (For a newspaper account, see this report in The Times.)

Those seriously interested in the meaning and the politics of racial epithets (as some of the commenters on Pakigate, Sootygate, Gollygate seem to be) should take a look at a paper called "The semantics of racial epithets", published by Christopher Hom in The Journal of Philosophy CV [= 105], no. 8 (August 2008), pp. 416-440. This is a technical paper in philosophical semantics (it's philosophy, not linguistics; and let me say that I do not necessarily endorse the view that it defends). Hom outlines its aim on his website thus:

Racial epithets are derogatory expressions, understood to convey contempt toward their targets. But what do they actually mean, if anything? While the prevailing view is that epithets are to be explained pragmatically, I argue that a careful consideration of the data strongly supports a particular semantic theory. I call this view Combinatorial Externalism (CE). CE holds that epithets express complex properties that are determined by the discriminatory practices and stereotypes of their corresponding racist institutions. Depending on the character of the institution, the complex semantic value can be composed of a variety of components. The account has significant implications on theoretical, as well as, practical dimensions, providing new arguments against radical contextualism, and for the exclusion of certain epithets from First Amendment speech protection.

Thus Hom is offering a reasoned case that it is best to see the denigratory character of racial epithets as built into their actual conventional meanings, and not just as a possible concomitant of some of their occasional uses. (Many of commenters seem to align with this view, though they tend to just assert it and call any other views absurd, rather than present arguments.)

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.