Language Log

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.

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 got a nice email from Joshua Fruhlinger about my post on Harper’s denial about having any content in their magazine. It seems that I’m a bit in the dark about how this word is being used in the tech industry these days, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Here’s what Joshua wrote to me:

The ad is a somewhat cheeky response to a particular way that the word “content” has come to be used in the publication industry in the last decade or so. As the internet has become the main (or at least the most novel and talked about) publishing platform, the tech folks who are designing the new infrastructure tend to label and lump together as “content” the stuff that isn’t in their department – the actual text, video, audio, or what have you that various exciting new publishing platforms are designed to present.

I was surprised when the mail brought me my October issue of Harper's, where on page 43 was Harper's full-page ad, defining the word, "content," in what seemed to me to be an unusual and counterproductive way.

The ad says:

WARNING! Harper's Magazine is 100% Content Free! Everybody gives you "content." But you'll never find that in Harper's Magazine. Instead, you'll get literature. Investigative reporting. Criticism. Photojournalism. Provocative adventures. Daring commentary. And truth-telling as only Harper's Magazine can tell it. Subscribe today and join the thoughtful, skeptical, witty people just like you who pay for culture, not content.

I once wrote a Language Log post called This isn't poetry, this is abuse. It was about a poem that had been sent to me by my mortgage company. I don't know why a mortgage company in 2004 was dabbling in poetry instead of inventing new sub-prime mortgage-based securities that could go off like time bombs under the entire banking establishment in 2008, but the results were pretty terrible. About as bad as poetry gets, I thought, except perhaps for Vogon poetry, and the two bodies of poetic art that are claimed in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to have been even worse — those of the Azgoths of Kria and Paul Neil Milne Johnstone). I was wrong. A company in Perthshire specializing in septic tanks and biowaste macerators (shitgrinders, to put it bluntly) supplies customers with a poem that is considerably worse. Bad enough that you really don't want to see it. Don't read on. Go somewhere else. Read something pleasant and interesting instead. You really do not want to see a poem about excrement disposal technology.