Language Log

Years ago Bob Ramsey was highly amused by a tee shirt (of course!) in Korea with the slogan "SKY HIGH HORSE FAT".   Some time later he learned that that enigmatic slogan was nothing more than a direct translation of the much-loved (and to Koreans romantic) idiom referring to the bountiful harvest season, tiān gāo mǎ féi 天高馬肥.  Google Translate lamely renders that as "The days of horse manure", Baidu Fanyi gives the more terse "The horse manure", and Babel Fish hopelessly offers "Day Gao Mafei".  But what does tiān gāo mǎ féi 天高馬肥 (literally, "sky high horse fat") really mean?

Yesterday's Morning Edition took up the question of how "Bribery Accusations Hurt Wal-Mart's Stock Price". The segment takes the form of a conversation between NPR's Chris Arnold and Charles Elson, director of the Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, in which a metaphorically sticky wicket plays an important role. Like many Americans who use that phrase, Chris Arnold re-interprets the metaphor in a way that makes sense to those who are innocent of cricket:

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ARNOLD: It's, of course, too early to say what will happen at Wal-Mart. There many of the payments appear to have been aimed at getting building permits more quickly. And actually there is a grey area there in U.S. law. Companies are permitted to make what are called facilitating payments, quote-unquote, to avoid getting something like a building permit stuck on a minor bureaucrat's desk. But Charles Elson says that can be a sticky wicket to try to go through.

ELSON: When you cross the line from the payment which is acceptable, to a bribe, that's where you have your problems.

ARNOLD: What is the difference, though, between a facilitating payment and a bribe? I mean a bribe is a payment that uh facilitates something, right?

ELSON: Well, that's- that's why ((as I said)) – that's why it's such a sticky wicket.

ARNOLD: Legal experts say lately the Justice Department has been making that wicket even stickier. That is, it's been showing less tolerance for companies to make under the table payments of any kind.

John Barth is visiting Penn, and so I took the opportunity to catch up on his most recent meta-fictions, specifically The Development and Every Third Thought.  I read the second one first, and will make no comment on it here, except to note that (while suitably Barthian) it lacked the feature that struck me so forcefully in reading the first one.

We're about 29 minutes into the first episode, Rose, of the series featuring the ninth Doctor Who, played by Christopher Eccleston. Rose Tyler, a London department-store  clerk who's been caught up in an interdimensional adventure by accident, realizes that her boyfriend — turned into a plastic replica by the Nestene Consciousness — is probably dead.

I've been collecting wine tasting notes as part of an exploration of evaluative language, and have learned some new words as a result, among them leesy.

"Simple Tweets Of Fate: Teju Cole's Condensed News", NPR Morning Edition 4/9/2012:

Blaise Pascal once wrote that writing succinctly can be hard. […]

The Nigerian writer Teju Cole recently devoted himself to the goal of writing in brief. On his Twitter account, he crafts compact stories based on small news items, things you might overlook in the metro section of a newspaper. And with brevity, his stories gain deeper meaning. […]

"Recently I decided to switch up the project and do something a little bit different … Now I'm writing Small Fates about New York City, which is where I live. But I'm writing Tweets based on newspapers of exactly 100 years ago — so, exactly on the anniversary of whenever it came out in the New York Sun, or the New York Tribune or Evening World News. I go to the Library of Congress newspaper archive, which is wonderful. I go to the relevant date, and I basically trawl through the newspaper looking for interesting stories."

This is a great idea, and easy to do. From the front page of the New York Tribune, 4/9/1912:

There are two basic reasons for the increased interest in "text analytics" and "sentiment analysis": In the first place, there's more and more data available to analyze; and second, the basic techniques are pretty easy.

This is not to deny the benefits of sophisticated statistical and text-processing methods. But algorithmic sophistication adds value to simple-minded baselines that are often pretty good to start with.  In particular, simple "bag of words" techniques can be surprisingly effective. I'll illustrate this point with a simple Breakfast Experiment™.

Aayesha Siddiqui, "How Western Psychology Needs To Rethink Depression", WBUR 4/2/2012, quoting Jerome Kagan in an interview with Meghna Chakrabarti, "Psychology Is In Crisis", 3/29/2012:

How the English language falls short: “Let’s take the field of personality. Right now we have terms like introvert, extrovert, shy, anxious. Notice those words are naked. They don’t say with whom you’re introverted, when you’re introverted, in what settings you’re introverted. In other languages — take Japanese for example. There’s no word for “leader” in Japanese. There’s only a word for leader of a corporation, leader of a radio station, leader of a platoon. Because they understand that a person who’s a good leader of a radio station might be a lousy leader of a platoon. And the same thing for extroversion, introversion, shyness. And that’s a problem with the English language. And the problem is that 80 percent of research on personality is done by Americans using the English language. The English language is a very bad language for talking about personality because it doesn’t tell you the context, the setting.”

Lately I've been trying to explain to my friends who don't know Chinese what fèihuà 废话 means.  Basically it is composed of the two morphemes "waste / useless / abandoned / ruined / maimed" and "talk", i.e., "nonsense".  To give a sense of its implications, here is a longer list of English definitions:  nonsense, rubbish, garbage, bullshit, bunkum, buncombe, claptrap, blah, stuff, bunk, trash, guff, twaddle, tripe, bull, poppycock, inanity, piffle, yap, absurdity, empty talk, balderdash, yackety-yak, yak, yack, tootle, blab, haver, codswallop, prattle, gab, blabber, fiddlestick, fiddle-faddle, overtalk, babble, blather.

Farhad Manjoo, "Apple Doesn’t Need To Make the TV of the Future: The revolution is already here—and it’s called the Xbox", Slate 3/27/2012.

If the rumors are true, Apple will release a television set later this year that it will tout as the most amazing boob tube ever invented.

The biggest selling point will be Apple’s promise to make navigating our viewing choices easier. Say you want to watch Tower Heist on a Saturday night. You’d first check Netflix, because if it’s there, it’ll be streamed free for members. If it’s not, and if you subscribe to Amazon’s Prime service, you ought to check there, because you might get a discount. If that fails, you’ll look for the movie on iTunes, Hulu Plus, or Comcast in whatever order is most convenient for you. The whole process is a frustrating mess, one that Apple will likely try to solve by building a cross-platform search engine into its TV. Instead of going to every service separately, you’ll just say, “Hey TV, I’d like to watch Tower Heist!” and the screen will show you where the flick is playing, and for how much. You’ll just have to choose one and press Play.

When CEO Tim Cook shows off Apple’s TV set this fall, I bet he’ll call voice-activated universal search a revolutionary way to interact with your television. What Cook probably won’t mention is that it already exists. Indeed, much of what Apple is likely to build into its TV is available today on a gadget whose interface is just as easy to use as anything Apple will cook up. The device is called the Xbox 360.

Over the last few months, Microsoft has turned its video-game console into your TV’s best friend.

Recently, a disagreement about the syntactic analysis of certain aspects of an obscure language has achieved an unusual degree of public interest: Tom Bartlett, "Angry words", The Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/20/2012; Jenny Schuessler, "How do you say 'disagreement' in Pirahã?", NYT, 3/21/2012; etc.  Of course, as those articles explain, this is all part of a broader controversy about the nature of language, whose latest round was kicked off by  the publication of Dan Everett's new book, Language: The Cultural Tool.

Geoff Pullum's latest Lingua Franca column, "The Rise and Fall of a Venomous Dispute", puts this dispute into historical and intellectual perspective. If what you've learned of the squabble's linguistic, philosophical, or political aspects interests you at all, Geoff's essay is the thing to read.  In case you want more, I've collected a list of links below.

From California, Julie Wei sends me "tidbits:  curious words":

An interesting Op-Ed in the NYT today by Kitty Burns Florey — "A Picture of Language", about the history of sentence diagramming:

The curious art of diagramming sentences was invented 165 years ago by S.W. Clark, a schoolmaster in Homer, N.Y.  His book, published in 1847, was called “A Practical Grammar: In which Words, Phrases, and Sentences Are Classified According to Their Offices and Their Various Relations to One Another.” His goal was to simplify the teaching of English grammar. It was more than 300 pages long, contained information on such things as unipersonal verbs and “rhetorico-grammatical figures,” and provided a long section on Prosody, which he defined as “that part of the Science of Language which treats of utterance.”