Language Log

Cosma Shalizi, "Lyric poetry in Pluto's Republic", 5/8/2011, considers DeWall et al. on pop-culture pronouns in the light of genre and style differences:

The empirical basis for inferring narcissism from using first person singular pronouns appears to be Robert Raskin and Robert Shaw, "Narcissism and the Use of Personal Pronouns", Journal of Personality 56 (1988): 393–404. This shows that, over twenty years ago, there was a modest positive correlation (+0.26) between scores on a quiz intended to measure narcissism, and how often 48 UC Santa Cruz undergrads used first-person singular pronouns in extemporized five minute monologues. Top 100 songs are not spontaneous monologues by undergrads looking for a painless way to get $5 and/or check off a Psych. 1 requirement, and DeWall et al. offer no evidence that this correlation generalizes to any other context. In particular they offer no reason to think that differences over time, as language and culture changes, should be explained in the same way as these differences across people, at a single time and in a single school.

On April 3, the Chinese artist Ai WeiWei was arrested In Beijing as he was about to board a plane for Hong Kong. And according to Natalie Wong, "Mark of defiance as cops chase Ai artist", The Standard 4/20/2011:

A young woman going by the moniker Chin Tangerine claims she is responsible for spray-painting images of arrested mainland artist Ai Weiwei on Hong Kong streets and buildings, as the police zero in on possible suspects.

The woman sent pictures of herself purportedly spray-painting the artwork to a Chinese-language newspaper. They have also been posted on the internet. […]

The manhunt by Yau Tsim Mong District Regional Crime Unit and Central District Criminal Investigation Team began after the Ai-inspired graffiti were discovered by patrol officers last week.

Like almost everyone else, I was happy to learn that Osama bin Laden is now an ex-terrorist; and I was mildly surprised to learn that he had been holed up in a large and luxurious compound located less than a mile by road from PMA Kakul, Pakistan's equivalent of West Point.

I'm in Minneapolis for a meeting of the LSA executive committee, and yesterday afternoon, on the plane from Philadelphia, I listened all the way through to Lee Atwater's extraordinary 1990 album, "Red, Hot and Blue". At the time these tracks were recorded, Atwater was chairman of the Republican National Committee, fresh from his successful role managing George H.W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign. And as you can hear if you listen to the guitar and vocal stylings on his signature tune Bad Boy, Atwater was also a pretty fair R&B musician:

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Language Log did of course have correspondents at the royal wedding of Prince William (now also the Duke of Cambridge) and Catherine Middleton (now the Duchess of Cambridge). And linguistically, our judgment is that all went well. Or at least, well enough.

One point to be made is that all the songs that use "when we say 'I do'" as a metonymy for "when we marry" (and that phrase even appears in some UK newspapers this afternoon) are plainly not in conformity with the language of the wedding service in the Church of England. There may be forms of the service where "I do" is said, but nobody said "I do" at this ceremony, and nobody was supposed to. When Prince William was asked the long question beginning "Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife…", his answer was of course, "I will". Or to be more phonetically precise, a very quiet and swift gulp from somewhat dry and nervous lips that sounded something like "Uh-wull".

Before (12/2010) & After (4/2011):

[Hat tip: "Thank you for not using a definite article", Bubo Blog 4/27/2011]

A week ago, Anne Henochowicz sent me the following illustrated introduction to devotees of the five most popular Social Networking Services in China — Facebook (which is off limits to Chinese, but expats and others who can figure out how to get around the Great Firewall are naturally fond of it) and the top four indigenous knock-offs:

I'm used to being solicited by email to submit papers to spamferences like WMSCI, and (less often) I'm solicited to contribute to spam journals. But the names of these conferences and journals are generally plausible idiomatic (if somewhat abstract) imitations of the genuine article. So I was surprised yesterday to get an invitation from a new journal with the extraordinary monicker Advances in Internet of Things.

According to Simon Denyer, "Libyan rebels seize western border crossing, as fighting in mountains intensifies", WaPo 4/21/2011:

Berbers have long faced suspicion and discrimination under the government of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, and many towns and villages took part in the uprising against his rule in mid-February. In recent days, the government has made a renewed bid to reclaim the Nafusa Mountains, which begin around 60 miles south of Tripoli and stretch westward to the Tunisian border, from rebel rule. […]

Gaddafi called Berbers, also known as Amazigh, a “product of colonialism” who were created by the West to divide Libya. The Berber language was not recognized or taught in schools, and it was forbidden in Libya to give children Berber names.

The policy was relaxed in 2007, but a U.S. embassy cable released by Wikileaks said this relaxation was limited, and quoted Gaddafi as telling community leaders: “You can call yourselves whatever you want inside your homes — Berbers, Children of Satan, whatever — but you are only Libyans when you leave your homes.”

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?