Language Log

Don't get me wrong: I am entirely positive about octopus porn. Graphically depicted sex with our multiply-tentacled cephalopod friends is cool as far as I'm concerned.

Joel Martinsen writes:

Here's a comment I came across on Sina's microblog service today from someone reading various terms used by the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese media to report Kim Jong-il's death and inferring politeness based on the Chinese usage of the terms. Is there a name for this sort of phenomenon?

Johanna Decorse, "Case of anti-white racism on trial in France", AP 12/14/2011:

TOULOUSE, France—As protesters massed outside, the spokeswoman for a movement representing immigrants from France's former colonies went on trial Wednesday for allegedly insulting white French in what may be the first anti-white racism case in France.

The verdict, expected Jan. 25, may turn on a hyphen.

The trial grew out of a legal complaint from a far-right group, the General Alliance Against Racism and Respect for French and Christian Identity, Agrif, against Houria Bouteldja for using a word she invented to refer to white French that she claims was misconstrued. She was charged with "racial injury" and, if convicted, risks up to six months in prison and a maximum €25,000 ($32,500) fine, though courts usually issue far lighter sentences.

In the tumultuous run-up to the momentous announcement of the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year (to be proclaimed on January 6, 2012), Language Log's own Ben Zimmer is the main point-man with the media.  See here, here, and here.

The Chinese, of course, are not to be outdone, so they have for the past few years been choosing a "Character of the Year."  This year, 2011, the character selected is kòng 控.  Everybody seems to think that kòng 控 means "control".  In this post, however, I'm going to question that assumption, and I'm also going to cast doubt upon the whole usefulness and validity of choosing a "Character of the Year".

I just heard a report on a Beijing radio station about a nearby town being turned into an English-only enclave.  Not believing my ears, I looked it up online and found that, sure enough, there is such a plan afoot.  This report from People's Daily Online (originally published In Shanghai Daily) (December 16, 2011) is succinct enough that I will quote the whole article:

According to Marissa Fessenden, "'Vocal Fry' Creeping into U.S. Speech", Science Now 12/9/2011:

A curious vocal pattern has crept into the speech of young adult women who speak American English: low, creaky vibrations, also called vocal fry. Pop singers, such as Britney Spears, slip vocal fry into their music as a way to reach low notes and add style. Now, a new study of young women in New York state shows that the same guttural vibration—once considered a speech disorder—has become a language fad.

This story has been picked up elsewhere, e.g. Cory Doctorow, "Deep-voiced 'vocal fry' thought to be creeping into American women's speech", BoingBoing 12/11/2011; Ben Flanagan, "Vocal Fry a new language fad mainly among college females", AI.com 12/12/2011; Meredith Engel, "Vocal fry: Your creaky throat noises are now an actual scientific trend", Jezebel 12/12/2011; "‘Vocal Fry’ Is the Hot New Linguistic Fad Among Women", Gawker 12/12/2011; Melissa Dahl, "More college women speak in creaks, thanks to pop stars", MSNBC 12/12/2011.

It's nice to see a piece of phonetics research getting this kind of play. But Fessenden's take on this story will be surprising to those who have looked at a few pitch contours — these "low creaky vibrations" have been  common since forever. And moderate use, especially at the ends of phrases, has never been considered a speech disorder.

Puzzlement increases after reading the cited paper.

"As Eskimos do with snow," wrote Emma Brockes yesterday in a New York Times review of Alan Hollinghurst's new novel (and the hairs rose on the back of my neck as I saw those words), "the English see gradations of social inadequacy invisible to the rest of the world; Mr. Hollinghurst separates them with a very sharp knife."

If Emma Brockes were one of the sharper knives in the journalistic cutlery drawer she might have avoided becoming the 4,285th writer since the 21st century began who has used in print some variant of the original snowclone. (I didn't count to get that figure of 4,285, I just chose a number at random. Why the hell not? People make up the number of words for snow found in Eskimoan languages that they know absolutely nothing about. I might as well just make stuff up like everybody else.)

The misconception that language and culture march in lockstep fashion is so prevalent that pronouncements about grammar can often be used as a sort of Rorschach test to reveal how people really feel about a particular culture. I suspect it's more socially acceptable to vent indirectly about a culture by denouncing its grammar than it is to comment bluntly on the culture itself. Ergo, innocent grammar ends up shouldering the blame for the sins of its speakers.

Journalist Christie Blatchford indulged recently in a bit of linguistic finger-pointing while covering the trial of Mohammad Shafia, an Afghan-born Montreal resident. Shafia, together with his wife (Tooba Mohammad Yahya) and son (Hamed Shafia), has been charged with murdering his three daughters and first wife in an alleged "honor" killing. Blatchford reports the following from the testimony of a relative of the slain wife (Ms. Amir):

Winter has definitely come to Scotland. It is cold, and when light first returns to the sky around 9 a.m. I can see snow on the cars outside my apartment that have driven in from out of town. The winter silly season in the UK newspapers has begun. Here is Charles Nevin in a putatively quite serious newspaper, The Independent:

Minor British Institutions: The white hell

The most unexpected regular event in Britain is on its way, if it hasn't already arrived.

The Inuit may have more than a few words for snow, but so do we: transport chaos, hundreds stranded in sub-zero misery, grounds to a halt, disrupted flights, mass cancellations, forced to spend another night, enjoying another day off school, clear or don't clear the pavement outside your house if you don't want to be sued, it doesn't happen in Norway.

"‘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.