Language Log

From the web page advertising the new Asus bamboo series:

Mature Moso bamboo, around 2 years old, is used in the Bamboo notebooks. This aligns with the natural lifespan of the bamboo, and the manufacturing process uses less energy than traditional metal alloys that are refined from petrol.

If you want a sense of just what a hole the right finds itself in these days, consider the recent press release from the anti-abortion American Life League  headed "KRISPY KREME CELEBRATES OBAMA WITH PRO-ABORTION DOUGHNUTS." It goes on to say:

The next time you stare down a conveyor belt of slow-moving, hot, sugary glazed donuts at your local Krispy Kreme you just might be supporting President-elect Barack Obama's radical support for abortion on demand… The doughnut giant released the following statement yesterday:

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American's sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day, Jan. 20. By doing so, participating Krispy Kreme stores nationwide are making an oath to tasty goodies — just another reminder of how oh-so-sweet "free" can be.

…The unfortunate reality of a post Roe v. Wade America is that "choice" is synonymous with abortion access and celebration of 'freedom of choice' is a tacit endorsement of abortion rights on demand…. Celebrating [Obama's] inauguration with "Freedom of Choice" doughnuts – only two days before the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision to decriminalize abortion – is not only extremely tacky, it's disrespectful and insensitive and makes a mockery of a national tragedy.

A number of anti-abortion bloggers have joined the ALL in urging readers to make their indignation known to the company, while others have confined themselves to suggesting that the promotion was at best clueless. "To a majority of Americans," the commenter on one blog wrote, "the words ['freedom of choice'] do not connote liberty, or 'tasty goodies' or patriotism at all.  These words are synonymous with the painful tragedy of abortion."

And conservatives wonder why their movement is in trouble?

In a series of comments on a recent post, Stephen Jones observed that "The Iranians have a detergent called 'Barf'"; and Language Hat explained that "That would be because barf is the Farsi word for 'snow'"; and Merri added this:

Speaking of modified brand names, this is a good place to recall that the washing stuff "Dreft" -a purely arbitrary name- was at first coined as Drek, until somebody at P&G realized that this is the Yiddish word for s**t.

The trouble is, these stories about cross-language branding disasters generally turn out to be urban legends. I dissected one of them a few months ago, dealing with the alleged fate of the Ford Pinto brand in Brazil ("The Factoid Acquisition Device"). And we've discussed a number of other such legends over the years, with the result so that I've come to wonder whether any of the language-related stories that marketing professors tell their students are ever true.

So this morning, purely as an academic exercise, I decided to spend a few minutes looking into the legend of Dreft and Dreck.

The television commercial asks:

What happens if you take remote Chiang Mai villagers who have never seen a burger? Who don’t even have a word for burger?  And ask them to compare a Whopper versus Big Mac?

Imagine that: so isolated and primitive that they don't even have a word for burger! Yet another instance of the "Language L has no word for X" trope.

This site has a description of Burger King's "Whopper virgins will decide" campaign, along with two of the teaser ads (including the one from Chiang Mai in Thailand) and some (negative) responses from viewers. The brief description:

Burger King travels in 13 planes, 2 dog sleds and 1 helicopter over 20,000 miles to find people who have never heard of the WHOPPER and perform the world’s purest taste test. Locations visited include a remote hill village in north Thailand, a rural farming community in Romania and icy tundra of Greenland.

Apparently, Burger King didn't ask the Greenlanders about their words for snow.

The Tesco supermarket company defines its values by a slogan that, as my American undergraduate student Denise Wood pointed out to me yesterday, simply doesn't seem (to her or to me) grammatical:

British students seem inclined to accept this phrase — possibly because they've been seeing it on bags and till slips for years (Tesco is still a mostly UK company). But there seems to be an isogloss here (a boundary between dialects determined by the use of some particular word or phrase), with me and Denise on one side and possibly (we don't know yet) most British speakers on the other. What does seem clear is that this is not a productive or extensible pattern. You just can't get away with other noun phrases formed, like every little, from a determinative and an adjective. You really can't say *Every big is desirable, or *Each generous gets us closer to the goal. The phrase every little, considered as a noun phrase, has to be some kind of special sui generis construction. It's not just a regular normal deployment of determinative and adjective.

Today saw the release of the anxiously awaited T-Mobile G1, the first phone to use Google's Android software. On T-Mobile's website, the first ad for the phone was unveiled, and it's packed with jocular comparative adjectives: smarterer, connecteder, funnerer.

This isn't just an homage to Dumb and Dumberer, the even more dim-witted sequel to Dumb and Dumber. Rather, it's being recognized by many in the techie community as a pointed jab at Apple honcho Steve Jobs, who recently enthused about "the funnest iPod ever." (That's still the tagline on the website for the iPod Touch.)

The LPGA has announced that it is backing down from its "plans to suspend players who could not efficiently speak English at tournaments" (which I posted about here).

[Democratic California State Sen. Leland] Yee said he understood the tour's goal of boosting financial support, but disagreed with the method. "In 2008, I didn’t think an international group like the LPGA would come up with a policy like that," Yee said. "But at the end of the rainbow, the LPGA did understand the harm that they did."

This understanding is indirectly reflected in a statement from the LPGA:

"We have decided to rescind those penalty provisions," [LPGA Tour commissioner Carolyn] Bivens said in a statement. "After hearing the concerns, we believe there are other ways to achieve our shared objective of supporting and enhancing the business opportunities for every tour player."

[ Hat tip to Ben Zimmer. ]

This just in (well, a couple of days ago): the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) "has warned its members that they must become conversant in English by 2009 or face suspension". According to the NYT article, this policy is "believed to be the only such policy in a major sport". Three other North America-based major sports organizations (Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the National Basketball Association) have no such policy: "Given the diverse nature of our sport, we don't require that players speak English," says MLB; "This is not something we have contemplated," says the NBA.

Many of the comments on the article are crying foul, claiming discrimination, xenophobia, racism, ethnocentrism, whathaveyou. The common denominator of all of these evils, ignorance, is almost certainly at play in the decision to adopt this policy as opposed to other ways to get what the LPGA claims to be aiming for with the policy: more sponsorship opportunities. Unlike larger, better-established sports organizations like MLB, the NHL, and the NBA, the LPGA "is a group of individual players from diverse backgrounds whose success as an organization depends on its ability to attract sponsorships from companies looking to use the tour for corporate entertainment and advertisement." The geniuses at the LPGA appear to think that the money will flow a lot better if only their excellent South Korean players can answer post-game interview questions in English.

It's bad enough that we have to deal with struggles over the use of trademarks that have become generic terms, like "Xerox" and "Coke", and trademarks that were already generic terms among specialists, such as "Windows", but a new low in trademarking has been reached by the joint efforts of Dell and the US Patent and Trademark Office. Cyndy Aleo-Carreira reports that Dell has applied for a trademark on the term "cloud computing". The opposition period has already passed and a notice of allowance has been issued. That means that it is very likely that the application will soon receive final approval.

Ilan Bouchard writes:

I've noticed recently that motivational slogans have a specific sentence syntax that seems to make them more inspirational. A few examples:

In God We Trust.
United We Stand.
In Valor There Is Hope.

Uninverted, these three phrases seem to lack luster:

We Trust In God.
We Stand United.
There Is Hope In Valor.

Do you think you can shed any light on this?

A bit of spam that somehow got past all my filters this morning suggests that Barnes & Noble is generating its unsolicited commercial emails by means of a process that 1) involves some fairly dumb rewriting rules (here turning "++" into "andand") and 2) does not involve any sentient editorial oversight:

(As usual, click for a larger image.)

"Are you a different person when you speak a different language?" That's the headline of the press release, released from embargo on June 17, describing David Luna, Torsten Ringberg & Laura Peracchio, "One Individual, Two Identities", Journal of Consumer Research, August 2008.

The press headlines (not many, so far) echo the same idea: "How Switching Language Can Change Your Personality" (Reuters and New Scientist, published at ABC News); "Switching languages could cause you to switch personalities" (Discovery Reports, Canada); "Change in language alters personality" (IT Examiner, India — subhead "Oh, fickle woman"); "People switch personality with language" (Times of India);  "For bilinguals, a distinct personality for each language" (Agence France Presse).

The Times of India took this language = personality concept as the basis for an editorial, "Why not adopt American English?":

Many Indians consider American English infra dig. But it's time we got over this distaste. A recent survey has found that people unconsciously switch their personality when they change languages.

Since American English is by far the most dominant language today, anyone who wants to be a confident player in a globalised world has to speak the American lingo.

But in fact, as the press release and most of the articles explain, it's only bicultural individuals who were found to change their personality when changing languages (where "bicultural" means not identifying strongly with the dominant culture of either language). And it was only certain bilingual individuals who were studied: Hispanic-American women living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And it was only certain aspects of their personality that were measured: degree of self-sufficiency vs. other-dependence, along with some related gender-role associations. And (as the press release and the articles don't tell us) those aspects of their personality didn't change all that much.

Scotland's most popular soft drink is a local one, called Irn-Bru (pronounced "iron brew"). It rivals or outstrips even Coca Cola in sales. Many much-loved humorous TV commercials for Irn Bru have run over the years, some of them offering wonderful parodic introductions to Scottish life and culture (watch this one, for example). Print ads echoing them were also published. Some of the ideas the ad agency came up with were judged funny but a bit too raunchy, tasteless, or controversial for public release. Recently, though, the company (A. G. Barr) released on its website a gallery of suppressed ads. Several involve silly-naughty double entendres of a typically British sort (a crustacean saying "I'm into Irn-Bru and hard-core prawn sites"; a gorilla saying, "Gimme Irn-Bru or I'll shuffle my nuts in front of your mother"; an old man pointing to his guffawing donkey and saying "If it ain't Irn-Bru you can kiss my ass"). Some seem a bit bleak (a ragged and unshaven man with a desperate down-and-out look saying: "Irn-Bru's never let me down. Not like mum, dad, Terry, and the wife"). And at least one of them provides (for yes, this is Language Log, not Scottish Soft-drink Industry Advertising Log) a lovely illustration of an important and linguistically interesting syntactico-semantic point: