Language Log

Juliana Kim and Miguel Macias, "Satellite images show the devastation from Spain's deadly floods", NPR 11/2/2024 [emphasis added]:

Satellite images show a devastating transformation of eastern Spain, where catastrophic flash floods have killed more than 200 people and upended entire towns.

NASA Earth Observatory captured the image from its Landsat 8 satellite a day after the historic downpour. It showed parts of the eastern province of Valencia submerged in floodwaters. Meanwhile, the channel of the Turia river and the L'Albufera coastal wetlands were filled with the sentiment-laden deluge.

That'll be tough to explain…

[image or embed]

— George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) September 25, 2024 at 6:00 PM

Yesterday, Alejandra Caraballo tweeted:

The editor in chief of the National Review just said the N word in regards to Haitians and Megyn Kelly ignores it.

Andy McCarthy responded:

Ridiculous. @richlowry (not tagged here, natch) obviously got crossed up between 'immigrants' (short i) and migrants (long i) — started mispronouncing "migrants" with short i; instantly corrected himself with no embarrassment because it was patently a mispronunciation. Geez.

And Rich Lowry agreed:

Yep, this is exactly what happened—I began to mispronounce the word “migrants” and caught myself halfway through

Ben Zimmer emailed me:

Got sent this from a friend, who was hoping to see some analysis of whether the initial consonant on the misspeak here is /m/ or /n/. (Since the previous consonant is the final /n/ in "Haitian," there may be some gestural overlap.)

From Bill Clinton's 2024 DNC speech:

I mean look,
what does their opponent do with his voice? He mostly
talks about himself
right?
So the next time you
hear him, don't count the lies.
Count the I's.
Count the I's.
His
vendettas, his vengeance,
his complaints,
his conspiracies.
He's like one of those tenors
opening up
before he walks out on stage like I did, trying to get his
lungs open by singing, "Me, me, me, me, me, me."

(…and also more /bl/ lenition…)

For the latest problematic clip from J.D. Vance's past, see Hafiz Rashid, "J.D. Vance Bashed Immigration With Podcast Host Who Advocated for Rape", TNR 8/15/2024:

J.D. Vance’s 2021 appearance on a podcast episode is drawing some negative attention thanks to the extremist views of its host, as well as Vance’s own comments.

The podcast, Jack Murphy Live, interviewed Vance before his run for the Senate in Ohio. The host Jack Murphy, whose real name is John Goldman, has a history of expressing abhorrent views on rape and immigration.

In one since-deleted blog post, Murphy wrote that “behind even the most ardent feminist facade is a deep desire to be dominated and even degraded,” adding that “rape is the best therapy for the problem. Feminists need rape.” […]

Vance’s comments on Murphy’s podcast also decried what he believed were the negative aspects of immigration.

“You had this massive wave of Italian, Irish, and German immigration right? And that had its problems, its consequences,” Vance told Murphy. “You had higher crime rates, you had these ethnic enclaves, you had inter-ethnic conflict in the country where you really hadn’t had that before.”

The story has also been picked up by at least one overseas outlet so far — Alana Loftus, "JD Vance blames higher crime rates on 'wave of Irish immigration' in resurfaced clip", Irish Star 8/15/2024. But this is Language Log, not Political-Self-Foot-Shooting Log, so my focus will be on the some characteristics of how Vance talks in that podcast, not on the political content.

…vs. having a video conversation with her…

Attachment ambiguity of the week: "RFK Jr. says he dumped dead bear in Central Park after ditching plan to skin it in bizarre video with Roseanne Barr", NY Post 8/4/2024.

Do babies develop accents even before they can speak conventionally?

The short answer is yes… and these linguistic markers begin even sooner than you might think.

So many of you tagged me in this video yesterday featuring an infant that babbles with the same Scouse accent as… pic.twitter.com/EO5WJllRnE

— Dan Wuori (@DanWuori) June 22, 2024

Back in 2008, Arnold Zwicky described a category of typos that he called  "completion errors":

…a "completion error", a typo that results you start writing or typing a word and then drift part-way in to another word.  I do this all too often with -ation and -ating words — starting the verb COOPERATING but ending up with COOPERATION, for instance.  And several people have reported on the American Dialect Society mailing list that their intention to type LINGUISTS frequently leads them into LINGUISTICS, which then has to be truncated.  (This discussion on ADS-L followed my typing "original Broadway case", with CASE instead of CAST, and commenting on it.) 

26 years earlier, David Rumelhart and Donald Norman used the term "capture errors" for this phenomenon ("Simulating a skilled typist: A study of skilled cognitive-motor performance", Cognitive Science 1982:

This category of error occurs when one intends to type one sequence, but gets "captured" by another that has a similar beginning (Norman, 1981). Examples include:

efficiency – > efficient
incredibly – > incredible
normal – > norman

President Joe Biden is known for having overcome a serious stuttering problem as a child — see e.g. "Biden’s Stutter: How a Childhood Battle Shaped His Approach to Life & Politics", or "Joe Biden's history of stuttering sheds light on the condition". It also seems clear that the techniques that he developed to overcome the problem are still present in his speech today, as I discussed in "Calling all linguists", 10/21/2023. My conclusion in that article, agreeing with others more knowledgeable than I am, was that the main effect is selective lenition, probably related to what are called "gentle onset" techniques.

But what's less clear is whether this effect is different in kind from things that happen in (almost?) everyone's speech.

In a YouTube video yesterday, Michael Popok explained the differences (in New York State law) among a "verdict", a "decision and order", and a "judgment", in the context of the latest stage of Donald Trump's civil fraud case. Those intricacies are an interesting aspect of the sociolinguistics of the law, but the topic of this post is Popok's word-exchange speech error at about 4:45:

uh it crosses the i's and dots the t's
sorry
dots the i's and crosses the t's

Joe Biden recently said "the president of Mexico" when he meant "the president of Egypt". A couple of days earlier, he said "Mitterand" when he meant "Macron". Of course this fed into the flurry about his age, which was both-siderized by references to Donald Trump's calling Victor Orbán "the great leader of Turkey" when he should have said "Hungary", saying "Obama" when he should have said "Biden", saying "Nikki Haley" when he meant "Nancy Pelosi", and so on. And there've been lots of references to similar substitutions by other public figures like Sean Hannity.

However, my focus in this post is not political or journalistic, though there's plenty to be said about both of those topics. Rather, it's a question of psycholinguistic terminology. Similar proper-noun substitutions are common — but what should we call them?

From Jon Stewart's 1997 interview with George Carlin (starting at about 1:17.6):

well- well uh to- to go backward with the question,
don't forget, what we do is oratory.
It's rhetoric.
It's not just comedy, it's a form of rhetoric
and- and with rhetoric, you- you look and you listen for rhythms,
you- you look for ways
to sing at the same time you're talking, and to go
[skat-like phrases, based on rhythmic patterns of /d/-initial syllables…]

…in New Zealand. Phil Pennington, "Analysis: National opposed bilingual road signs, so what does the evidence say?", RNZ 62/2023:

Analysis – Bilingual road signs send a signal – that the country values te reo Māori. But going bilingual was confusing and National would not support it, National's Simeon Brown told voters in blue-ribbon Tauranga recently.

Accusations of racism and a walkback by the party leaders followed. But what evidence is the choice to go bilingual based on?

Helpfully, finding the answer to that is easy. The answer Waka Kotahi is relying on is in a 39-page "research note" into international experiences and outcomes.

However, a quick scan reveals the answer itself is not as straightforward as some of the commentary on the debate has suggested – that it is a straw man.