Language Log

According to Heejin Lee and Jonathan Liebenau, "Time and the internet", in Hassan and Thomas, Eds., The New Media Theory Reader, "speed is contagious", and so everything is faster today, from plays and musical performances to Norwegian politicians:

Yesterday we discussed this puzzling passage from Ange Mlinko's 9/7/2010 review in The Nation of Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass:

Edward Sapir, Whorf's teacher, was an armchair linguist influenced by Bertrand Russell and Ludvig [sic] Wittgenstein's work on the limits of language.

Where in the world, I wondered, did Ms. Mlinko get the bizarre idea that Edward Sapir was an "armchair linguist"? Well, now we know.

President Obama went off script, briefly, on Labor Day in Milwaukee:

Despite the best efforts of two dozen stellar native and non-native scholars and teachers of Chinese, we still have not reached a consensus about the exact meaning and syntax of the sign at a Shanghai construction site presented in "Next Day's Chinese lesson":  Jìnzhǐ xiǎobiàn, fǒuzé sǐrén 禁止小便,否則死人 ("prohibit urine, otherwise die person").

Such is not the case with the sign in this photograph, taken a few years ago in Bohol in the central Philippines.  The photographer was Piers Kelly, editor of Fully (sic), and the language is Visayan (also called Cebuano).

Transcription:  Guinadili ang pag-pangihi dinhi. Ang silot [bang!]

At some point, I mean to get back to looking up the research that is said to support Matt Richtel's claims that "the brain is rewired when it is constantly inundated with new information". Right now, though, I'd like to point out that complaints about the distractions of modern life didn't begin when email, texting and hyperlinks started eating our brains.  I wouldn't be surprised to find similar sort of complaints from the 13th century about clock towers, but today I'm just going to take things back to 1924, and an article from the New York Times with the headline "This Machine-Made World Conquers One More Rebel".

Following up on "Chinese Lesson for Today," we have another specimen of writing on a wall related to the bodily functions that requires grammatical explanation. Here is a temporary sign at a construction site in Shanghai, taken by Mollie Kirk around '08:

Jìnzhǐ xiǎobiàn, fǒuzé sǐrén 禁止小便,否則死人

Direct translation: "It is prohibited to urinate, otherwise dead man."

Sign on the wall of a public toilet in China:

Yánjìn yòng dǎngbào dǎngkān dāng shǒuzhǐ yòng" 严禁用党报党刊当手纸用.

Smooth translation: “Use of Party newspapers and magazines as toilet paper is strictly forbidden.”

From xkcd a little while ago:

According to Douglas B. Brill, "Barack Obama image targeted in Roseto Big Time shooting game", 8/3/2010:

A game called "Alien Attack" at the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Big Time celebration in Roseto encouraged players to shoot darts at the head and heart of an image of a suited black man holding a health care bill and wearing a presidential seal.

Restaurant sign in Kashgar:

In The Glass Rainbow, James Lee Burke's latest, the protagonist, Dave Robicheaux, is arguing with his daughter Alafair about a novel written by an ex-con who's staying with her boyfriend:

"Have you read The Green Cage?" Alafair asked.

"I have. I got it from the library. I didn't buy it."

"You don't think it's a brilliant piece of writing?"

"Yeah, it is, for reasons the author and his admirers don't seem to understand."

She wasn't taking the bait, so I slogged on. "It's a great look inside the mind of a sociopath and narcissist and manipulator. Count the number of times the pronouns 'I,' 'me,' 'mine,' and 'myself' appear in every paragraph."

"Somebody must have liked it. Robbie was a finalist in the National Book Awards."

"Robbie?"

"Argue with someone else, Dave."

I'm all too familiar with the idea that people from such-and-such a country can't deal with concept X because they simply have no word for it. One common version of this is the idea that without a word for something bad like bribery, people are incapable of understanding that they shouldn't do it.  Alternatively, the idea may be turned around the other way — without a word for something bad like lying, people allegedly don't understand that it's even a possible option.

I wasn't aware, but it seems that until 1990 or so, a linguistic gap of this kind protected Australians from such social evils as begging and armed robbery.  As Andrew Herrick explains ("With American lingo, we've imported toxic US culture", The Age 8/6/2010):

When Australian vernacular is replaced by franchised American terms, exotic tropes are too often introduced into our social and political ecology. Twenty years ago, Australia didn't need the terms homey, mugging, drive-by shooting, gated community and panhandling because these were foreign concepts. But they are not so strange to us now.

We've imported America's toxic culture with its language, and react by resorting to a questionable American "solution".

Reader JL sent this picture, with some questions:

First of all, there's the word "jegging." A quick search tells me that it's a cross between "jeans" and "leggings." I might have been able to figure that out myself if they had gone with "jeggings"–but "jegging"? That sounds like some novel form of crime. ("I totally got jegged last night!")

But then there's also the "live in" part. Presumably this is an exhortation to wear your jegging all day and thus "live in" it. But when I first saw this I read it more in the "live in Tokyo" sense.

Or maybe the "live-in housekeeper" sense?  Amazingly enough, "live in jegging" isn't yet indexed by Google or Bing, so you lucky readers get first shot at figuring out what this means.