Language Log

What it says on the license plates of cars registered in the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan is more or less indistinguishable from many other provincial or state slogans: Land of the Living Skies. The point here seems to be to give you a succinct summary of the geography of the place so that you have some idea of where you are if you find yourself on an ill-advised cross-country road trip involving too much drinking in the off-driving hours. Hence, you get the rather obvious Grand Canyon State (Arizona), The Ocean State (Rhode Island), The Green Mountain State (Vermont) and Explore Canada's Arctic (Northwest Territories). At least Saskatchewan adds a small pinch of poetry.

Enigma is clearly under-valued in these slogans, with the exception of Quebec's Je Me Souviens ("I remember"), whose meaning is elusive to outsiders or residents with shallow historical roots in the province. Though I lived there from 1971 to 1984, I never did figure out what it's supposed to mean, though I suspect that it means something like I remember how to order hamburgers and fries in French, or I remember when the Habs were the greatest hockey team on the planet. Or perhaps it's shorthand for something slightly more sinister, as in I remember how the English bastards smashed us in battle and oppressed us economically, and I promise to counter their linguistic imperialism using all means necessary, including enforcing legal requirements that English appear on Montreal restaurant menus only in microscopic font guaranteed to make anglo eyeballs bug out. Or something to that effect.

But Saskatchewan's unofficial motto, which you'll see imprinted on T-shirts or tourism signs is: Hard to spell. Easy to draw. This is often accompanied by the following image, registered as a trademark by the Government of Saskatchewan:

It's always fun to spot lingquirks in ads, and this one, pictured in its natural habitat in Bancroft, Ontario, offers two of them for the price of a moment's attention:

A full page advertisement for Nature Valley granola bars on the front of the Metro free newspaper in the UK this morning carries the legend:

Most people believe they're better-than-average drivers. They also believe that, while many others are taken in by advertising messages, they themselves remain immune to persuasion unless it's with the full consent of their rational and thoughtful selves. Charming delusions. But surely we're not left defenseless, and awareness of the persuasive intentions of advertising must provide some sort of skeptical buffer against the daily onslaught of commercial messages that don't necessarily have our best interests at heart. Enough so, argued the late free marketeer Jack Calfee, that the myth of the vulnerable consumer is just that, and advertising should be regulated as little as possible in order to allow its salutary effects to permeate the economy. In his book Fear of Persuasion, Calfee wrote:

Advertising seeks to persuade, and everyone knows it. The typical ad tries to induce a customer to do one thing—usually, buy a product —instead of a thousand other things. There is nothing obscure about this purpose or what it means for buyers. Consumers obtain immense amounts of information from a process in which the providers of information are blatantly self-interested and the recipients fundamentally skeptical.

The Federal Trade Commission, which is in the business of regulating advertising, happens to agree with Calfee about the protective effects of identifying persuasion for what it is. Which is one reason why it's recently clarified its guidelines on endorsements to require that bloggers and social media users disclose any pecuniary relationship with the makers of the products they're shilling for—even if free stuff is all they're getting for their efforts.

Michelle Rafferty at OUPblog has a post on "Why the Trenta?" (1/24/2011), which includes this interesting Google Chat exchange with her friend Gabe, who "specializes in buying and selling unroasted green coffee from all over the world and loves discussing anything and everything related to coffee":

Me: So you work in coffee. What do you think of this whole Trenta thing?
Gabe: Honestly, this is about McDonald’s. They are very successful with their iced coffee and Sbucks is trying to compete. […] They have already lost a lot of customers to McDonalds/ McCafe due to quality and price. McDonalds has better coffee.
Me: Whoa, really?
Gabe: Yeah, McDs has won numerous blind tasting competitions and they have cheaper prices.

We've often seen how pop-Whorfian depictions of linguistic difference rely on the facile "no word for X" trope — see our long list of examples here. Frequently the trope imagines a vast cultural gap between Western modernity and various exotic Others. The latest entry comes via Ron Stack, who points us to this television commercial from the Aruba Tourism Authority (reported by MediaPost). In the commercial, Ian Wright, the British host of the adventure tourism show "Globe Trekker," learns from an Aruban fisherman that the local creole language, Papiamento, has no word for "work-related stress."

Several weeks ago, Ian Mair sent me this enigmatic photograph from Hangzhou.

The sign intrigued me as much as it did Ian. I could see what looked like a marijuana leaf and the name HANP, so I assumed that it was a Chinglishy misspelling of "hemp." But tree foliage covered up the bottom of the sign, so I didn't feel confident about trying to figure out if this was an ad for Mary Jane (highly unlikely in the PRC) or something else entirely (e.g., was HANP an acronym?).

Curious to get to the bottom of the sign, Ian took the time to go back to that part of the city and take another photograph from up close and looking up from below.

Ads for the Confucius Institutes show up all over the Web. At times they seem to be virtually ubiquitous, at least on sites that I visit. One that I've been encountering frequently of late shows a sculpture of Confucius, at the bottom of which are written the words "Kongzi Xueyuan" 孔子學院, translated below that as "Confucius Institute," followed by the words "Teach you pure Chinese."

Aside from the fact that "Teach you pure Chinese" as a whole strikes me as an odd locution, the notion of "pure Chinese" by itself gives me pause. If the Confucius Institutes are going to teach you "pure Chinese," they must have in mind one or more kinds of "impure Chinese" that they do not want you to learn. Are there opposing institutions that are out there teaching "impure Chinese"?

Spotted by Jonathan Lighter on a recent trip to Iceland: "A big ad for 66°North fashions, prominently displayed at Keflavik Airport, telling passengers everywhere that

There are over [a] 100 words for snow in Icelandic.
Only one for what to wear."

This is from an actual job listing on BusinessWorkforce.com, advertising a position at the "marketing innovations agency" Ignited:

Integrated Copywriter/Etymologist
Sure, the Eskimos have 40 words for “snow,” but Ignited has 40 words for “next.” That’s because we’re kind of obsessed with what’s next, whether that be in technology or media or Eskimo etymology. If you’ve got that same kind of curiosity and you fit the bill of skills below, you may be the next person we think of when we hear the words “Integrated Copywriter.”

Actual etymologists need not apply.

(See links here and here for more on the much-abused "Eskimo words for snow" trope. Hat tip, Nancy Friedman.)

Here's a sign for a McDonald's in the Guangzhou (Canton) Airport:

The English slogan, "i'm lovin' it," is followed by the standard Chinese version:  "WO3 JIU4 XI3HUAN1 我就喜歡 ("I just love [it])."  To the right of the arches and the slogan, the sign gives directions for how to get there:  "Go out at gate 9; walk forward, turn left, 100 meters (not "100 rice" for "100 MI3 米," though I have seen such translations on Chinglish signs), at gate 5 (next to the WC)."

As Stefan Krasowski, a Wharton grad working in China who sent me the message wrote:  "Great marketing: 'Yes, I'd like to eat at the McDonald's next to the public toilet.'"

What does "Complimentary High-speed Internet access on the lobby level" mean? You can see the phrase on the website of the Hilton Washington Dulles Airport hotel. Did you imagine it meant that if you opened your laptop on the lobby level of the hotel a wireless Internet network would come up and you could connect for free? Oh, you are so naive. You are not a sophisticated jet-setter like Robert Langdon and me.

From a NYT story (Shaila Dewan, "Pollster's Censure Jolts News Organizations", October 3) on the polling company Strategic Vision, which has been reprimanded by a professional society of pollsters for failing to disclose "essential facts" about its methods:

As for the accusation that the company's claim to be based in Atlanta was misleading, Mr. Johnson [David E. Johnson, the founder and chief executive of Strategic Vision] acknowledged that the main Strategic Vision office was in Blairsville, Ga., 115 miles away, but said the difference was "semantic".

Yeah, yeah, blame it on the words. "Semantic" here means 'only semantic, not substantive' and locates the problem not in differences of matters of fact but in differences in the meanings of linguistic expressions. The claim is that some people use certain expressions (like based in Atlanta) one way, while other people use these expressions somewhat differently, so that any dispute about the state of things is "just / merely / only" a dispute about word meanings.