Language Log

We linguists know that the results of armchair reflection about one's own language are not always empirically reliable. In A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder – How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and on-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place, Eric Abrahamson and David Freeman attribute to Hans Rindisbacher, professor of German at Pomona, an empirically dubious reason for the stereotypical neatness of Germans:

There may be another language-related reason why Germans can be less tolerant of mess than others: they don't really have a word for it. The closest is the word unordnung, which means "unorder," but that leaves Germans able to think of mess only in terms of what it is not, rather than having a concept for mess as a condition in its own right. It's like understanding coolness only as "unwarmth." It may be harder to appreciate something when the only way to conceive of it is as the absence of something else, especially when that something else is generally cherished. Many English words and phrases that refer to mess-related concepts and processes are utterly untranslatable into German in any meaningful way, adds Rindisbacher. Yard sale is an example. Relatively few Germans have yards or garages, he notes, and if they did, they wouldn't have hundreds of excess possessions with which to fill them, let alone expect others to buy them.

Ardian Vehbiu wrote to draw my attention to a passage in Matthew Arnold's essay on Heinrich Heine:

Philistinism! — we have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.

Ardian wrote "I found this quote counter-intuitive and funny. (I like the idea of the Inuit having no word for snow.)"

Lareina Li called my attention to a delightful clip from the Matrix trilogy as dubbed in Japanese accented English. But before you watch it, try listening to the sound track to "see" how much of it you understand without looking at the subtitles.

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I've generally been skeptical of claims about counts of first-person singular pronouns as an index of self-involvement, mainly on empirical grounds. In particular, the pundits who beat this drum mostly make assertions without any counts, much less comparisons of counts.  For some of the Language Log coverage, with links to articles by George F. Will, Stanley Fish, and Peggy Noonan (among others), see "Fact-checking George F. Will" (6/7/2009);  "Obama's Imperial 'I': spreading the meme" (6/8/2009); "Inaugural pronouns" (6/8/2009); "Another pack member heard from" (6/9/2009); "I again" (7/13/2009); "'I' is a camera" (7/18/2009).

And there are problems with the theory as well, as Jamie Pennebaker explains here.

But look at this impressive graph, from C. Nathan DeWall, Richard S. Pond, Jr., W. Keith Campbell, and Jean M. Twenge, "Tuning in to psychological change: Linguistic markers of psychological traits and emotions over time in popular U.S. song lyrics", Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 3/21/2011:

Here we've got numbers galore — from the lyrics of Billboard's 10 top songs from each of 28 years, 88,621 total words — and comparison of numbers across time. There still might be some questions about the explanation, but at least we have a strong effect to explain, right?

Among a number of culturally and linguistically interesting points in the "Asians in the UCLA Library" rant, Jay Livingston focuses on the speaker's use of the phrase "the tsunami thing".

Last night, Connecticut beat Kentucky 56-55 and advanced to the NCAA title game in men's basketball.  As a hoops fan who grew up near UConn's campus, I was paying attention.  And I already knew that the two coaches, UConn's Jim Calhoun and Kentucky's John Calipari, had a long-standing personal rivalry. What I didn't know, until I read about in during the run-up to the game, was that the rivalry has a linguistic dimension.  According to Greg Bishop, "Coaches Calhoun and Calipari share a genuine dislike", NYT 4/1/2011:

The contentious relationship between Connecticut’s Jim Calhoun and Kentucky’s John Calipari is perhaps the longest and most entertaining coaching feud in college basketball. It started so long ago that Calipari has held five jobs since. […]

[T]heir first major act of competition […] went to Calipari, then a young, brash hotshot at the University of Massachusetts who in 1993 went to Calhoun’s state and plucked a high school center from Hartford named Marcus Camby. […]

Calhoun considered Calipari an outsider with no background to talk about basketball in New England. He mocked Calipari, calling him Johnny Clam Chowder — pronounced with an “er” at the end, not an “ah” — and not behind his back.

At this point, many readers will need some background on chowders and rhoticity.

A couple of days ago, Jessica Dweck wrote me with a question:

In the last few months there have been a couple of books out with "pants" in the title (Bossypants, Mr. Funnypants). So we were curious how people started adding "pants" to different words. In the OED, it looks like "fancy pants" came first, followed by "smarty pants." Using Google's n-gram (an admittedly imperfect tool), it looks like the use of "fancy pants" and "smarty pants" really took off around the year 1940. Do you have any theories as to why people started adding "pants" to words, and why the practice rose so precipitously in the latter half of the 20th century? Often the terms are paired with an honorific for comedic effect (e.g. Mr. Funnypants). How did that practice become popular?

I sent a quick answer, and a day later, sent a bit more. But meanwhile, Ms. Dweck's deadline had intervened ("How Did Tina Fey’s Pants Get So Bossy?", Slate 3/30/2011). So in keeping with my general practice, I'll post the rest of our Q&A.

I've gotten several requests from readers for a phonetic analysis of Rebecca Black's mega-viral hit Friday. I'm still thinking about that, but meanwhile, here's the Bad Lip-Reading version:

Reader JC reports getting an email with the subject line "New Unexpected Life Events Provider Effective 4/1". He was disappointed to learn that this "'new unexpected life events provider' will not, in fact, provide me with life events of any kind".

David Donnell has pointed out to me via email that Elizabeth Taylor was apparently the last of many things, including "Hollywood's great goddesses", "the Hollywood greats", "the silver screen goddesses", "the Real Movie Stars", "the truly larger-than-life glamorous, iconic women", "the true Hollywood icons", "the bona fide movie stars", "the legends", "the movie stars", "the great glamour stars", "the red-hot movie goddesses", "the real Hollywood", …

Kumail Nanjiani discusses the Karachi street signs in Call of Duty:

Some of Andrew Sullivan's readers debunk the notion that "Japanese has no word for looting", as well as the claim that no looting has taken place following the recent disaster ("Why no looting in Japan? Ctd.", The Daily Dish, 3/17/2011).

Coco Krumme, "Velvety Chocolate With a Silky Ruby Finish. Pair With Shellfish.", Slate 2/23/2011:

Using descriptions of 3,000 bottles, ranging from \$5 to \$200 in price from an online aggregator of reviews, I first derived a weight for every word, based on the frequency with which it appeared on cheap versus expensive bottles. I then looked at the combination of words used for each bottle, and calculated the probability that the wine would fall into a given price range. The result was, essentially, a Bayesian classifier for wine. In the same way that a spam filter considers the combination of words in an e-mail to predict the legitimacy of the message, the classifier estimates the price of a bottle using its descriptors.

The analysis revealed, first off, that "cheap" and "expensive" words are used differently. Cheap words are more likely to be recycled, while words correlated with expensive wines tend to be in the tail of the distribution. That is, reviewers are more likely to create new vocabulary for top-end wines. The classifier also showed that it's possible to guess the price range of a wine based on the words in the review.