Language Log

"‘Kolaveri Di’ Goes Viral. But Why?", WSJ 11/22/2011; "Kolaveri di next big thing in popular culture", DNA 11/25/2011; "With millions of hits, 'Kolaveri Di' on song", The Times of India 11/25/2011; and so on:

Why can't we all get along? Let's end the argument about whether the Word Of The Year should sometimes be a phrase by having a separate competition for Phrase Of The Year.

And we can divide the POTY prize further into two categories: one category for phrases that remain entirely compositional in meaning, but are newly-common terms for newly-popular concepts; and another category for newly-popular phrases whose common usage is an opaque metaphorical or metonymic extension of its basic compositional meaning.

This doesn't end all possible arguments — the boundary between words and phrases is historically as contested as the boundary between Germany and Poland or Armenia and Azerbaijan. But it should restore relative peace to the Language Log Senior Common Room, as well as giving lexicographers more journalistic shelf space by multiplying the number of linguistic X-OTY items to display. (Next: Catch-phrase Of The Year; Genericide Of The Year; … We can use all 26 letters of the alphabet, from Allomorph Of The Year to Zeugma of the Year, and then we can start on the likely initial clusters, like Structural Metaphor Of The Year. )

Like Geoff and Ben, I was puzzled by choice of "squeezed middle" as the OED's WOTY. But I agree with Ben that it's reasonable as well as traditional for dictionaries to include semi-compositional compounds and phrases among their entries. In such cases, a word-combination X Y has a common meaning that's an unpredictable specialization of its compositional meaning, so that you may not be able to figure out what X Y means, even in context, and you're even less likely to be able to guess that X Y is the term that you should use to convey the concept in question.

Forget Watson. Forget Siri. Forget even Twitterology in the New York Times (though make sure to read Ben Zimmer's article first). You know natural language processing has really hit the big time when it's featured in a story in Entertainment Weekly.

Last Friday, I heard Sarah-Jane Leslie talk about "Generics and Generalization":

Generic sentences express generalizations about kinds, such as "tigers are striped", "ducks lay eggs", and "ticks carry Lyme disease". I present and review emerging evidence from adults and children that suggests that generics articulate cognitively default generalizations — i.e., they express basic, early-developing inductive generalizations concerning kinds. Further evidence suggests that these generalizations don't depend solely on information about prevalence. For example, "ticks carry Lyme disease" is accepted, but "books are paperbacks" is not, despite the fact – well-known and acknowledged by participants – that paperbacks are much more prevalent among books than Lyme-disease-carrying is among ticks. Similarly, both adults and preschoolers understand that, e.g., only female ducks lay eggs, yet they are more likely to accept "ducks lay eggs" than "ducks are female". Rather than depending solely on information about prevalence, these primitive generic generalizations are sensitive to a number of content-based factors, such as whether the property in question is dangerous or otherwise striking (as in "ticks carry Lyme disease"), or is an essential or characteristic property of the kind (as in "ducks lay eggs"). This suggests that our most basic means of forming inductive generalizations about kinds is not guided by prevalence alone, but also reflects our nature as learners.

The most recent xkcd:

The mouseover title: "If you identified with the kids from The Breakfast Club when it came out, you're now much closer to the age of Principal Vernon."

The Breakfast Club, in case you happen to have missed it, was a 1985 movie about high-school detention.^* And the guy who played Principal Vernon was born in 1939 and died in 2006 at the age of 67, so he was 45 or 46 in 1985; and someone who was 15 or 16 then would be 41 or 42 now, so Randall's guess turns out to be quantitatively exact pretty close.

Lucy Jones, "Ralph Fiennes blames Twitter for 'eroding' language", The Telegraph 10/28/2011:

Speaking at the BFI London Film Festival awards in Old Street, London, the actor said that modern language "is being eroded" and blamed "a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter."

"Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us," he said.

This sort of thing always makes me suspect that it's really our veracity and our ease with facts that is being diluted.

Tonight is the opening night for a new Broadway play called "Chinglish." I first heard "Chinglish" was coming to Broadway from, appropriately enough, Victor Mair, Language Log's resident expert on the tricky Mandarin-English translational divide. At first all I knew about it was the stylized logo for the show, with the title as Ch'ing·lish. (I thought the diacritic in the first syllable might be some sort of homage to the old Wade-Giles romanization of the aspirated voiceless alveopalatal affricate / t͡ɕʰ/ as ch', as in the Ch'ing Dynasty, now pinyinized as q. But I think it's also supposed to evoke the syllabic stress mark used for headwords in English dictionaries, since the syllable break has the conventional dictionary-style centered dot.) When I saw that the play was written by David Henry Hwang, who won a Tony Award for "M. Butterfly," I was hopeful. And now that I've seen the play and had a chance to interview Hwang about it, I can report that there is much about this funny, poignant play for Language Log fans to love.

From Laine Gates and Dolly Hayde:

One sentence from your recent post on Wernicke's aphasia (" . . . we here at Language Log are committed to taxonomies of nonsense that are as elaborate as possible") made us hopeful that you might be interested in the "salvage ethnography" project we've begun with the Google Reader Lexicon at http://googlereaderlexicon.wikispaces.com/.

See also "Please don't kill our last enlightenment tool", Dust and Trash 2/22/2011.; Sarah Perez, "Iranians Upset Over Google Reader Changes", TechCrunch 2/24/2011:

Linguist Llama:

Eugene Volokh has suggested a new piece of socio-grammatical terminology ('Descriptivism, Prescriptivism and Assertionism", 10/4/2011):

Our readers likely know that I have many disagreements with prescriptivists when it comes to English usage. But while I have philosophical disagreements with prescriptivists in general, my main practical disagreements are with people who might best be labeled “assertionists” — people who don’t just say that prescriptions set forth by some supposed authorities define what is “right” in English, but who simply assert a prescription even in the face of what those supposed authorities say. Usage X is wrong, they say. Why? Because it violates this rule. What’s your authority for the proposition that this is a rule? Well, it violates the rule.

Half a million people watched this on YouTube over the past couple of weeks:

That's the title of a post (October 13, 2011) on "Letters of Note: Correspondence deserving of a wider audience," a fascinating website hosted by Shaun Usher. It refers to this letter sent to the British Embassy in Calabar, Nigeria in 1929 by a disgruntled employee named Asuquo Okon Inyang who had been fired, apparently for slacking off on the job: