Language Log

William J. Broad, "Doubts Raised on Book's Tale of Atom Bomb", NYT 2/20/2010, discusses a minor scandal of historical documentation: the descriptions of a claimed "secret accident with the [Hiroshima] atom bomb", revealed in a recent non-fiction best-seller, turn out to have been based on lies and fabrications.

That part didn't especially surprise me, but this quotation brought me up short:

“This book is a Toyota,” said Robert S. Norris, the author of “Racing for the Bomb” and an atomic historian. “The publisher should recall it, issue an apology and fix the parts that endanger the historical record.”

Last year the most popular new New Year's greeting in China was "Happy NIU2 Year!" where NIU2 ("cow") supposedly sounds like "new."

This year, the most popular new Valentine's greeting in China is "I LAO3HU3 老虎 U," where LAO3HU3 (which means "tiger") allegedly sounds like "love" to Chinese speakers.

Of course, this cute slogan, "I LAO3HU3 / Tiger U," which was probably dreamed up by an advertising firm, reminds one of (and may well have been inspired by) the wildly famous "I Chocolate You" campaign for the LG Chocolate cellphone, in which one of the most memorable images was this voluptuous photograph of the Korean actress, Kim Tai-hee.

One of Language Log's early posts linked to Daniel Zettwoch's Deadlock, which illustrates in cartoon form Jason Shiga's application of game theory to the dynamics of relationship formation. But Shiga's research represented only an individual-investigator approach to the problem. Now, just in time for Valentine's day, The Onion shows us what Big Science can do:

"Stakeholders" is a 25-year-old piece of management-speak that has been adopted enthusiastically by some software professionals. Thus "Understanding Organizational Stakeholders for Design Success":

The term was introduced in a seminal book by R. Edward Freeman called Strategic Management (1984). The word stakeholder was used to stand in contrast to the neoclassical view of the firm as catering to stockholders. Freeman used the term stakeholder analysis to remind management that it was in the long-term interests of the company to pay attention to the interests of those who have an impact on or are impacted by the activities of the company. The present article uses the “stakeholder analysis” concept to extend the focus of user experience practitioners beyond the end user, to the organizational context of the [software] project.

This leads to a pun that (like most flashes of inspiration) is obvious in retrospect:

The people who have come to rely on features that are actually implementation errors are called ‘mistakeholders’.

Suppose you had 100 digital recorders and 800 small languages, all in a country the size of California, but in one of the remotest parts of the planet.  What would you do?  What would it take to identify and train a small army of language workers?  How could the recordings they collect be accessible to people who don't speak the language?  My answer to this question is linked below – but spend a moment thinking how you might do this before looking.  One inspiration for this work was Mark Liberman's talk The problems of scale in language documentation at the Texas Linguistics Society meeting in 2006, in a workshop on Computational Linguistics for Less-Studied Languages.  Another inspiration was observing the enthusiasm of the remaining speakers of the Usarufa language to maintain their language (see this earlier post).  About 9 months ago, I decided to ask Olympus if they would give me 100 of their latest model digital voice recorders.  They did, and the BOLD:PNG Project starts next week.  Please sign the guestbook on that site, or post a comment here, if you'd like to encourage the speakers of these languages who are getting involved in this new project.

According to Dave Itzkoff, "Abandon All Poetry, but Enter Hell With Attitude", NYT 1/29/2010:

There’s a new edition of Dante’s "Inferno" that’s recently begun appearing in bookstores. Same words. Different cover. It’s got a big picture of a muscular fellow in a spiky crown and an overline that says, "The literary classic that inspired the epic video game."

It’s true. "Inferno" is now a video game, with a brawny, armor-clad Dante as its protagonist.

The guys at Electronic Arts' Visceral Games studio found it necessary to give Dante a little help:

"If you’re trying to make an action game, it’s thin," Jonathan Knight, the game’s executive producer, said of the original text. "It’s Dante, who’s kind of passive, and he’s a poet and he’s philosophical. We had to take the bold step of saying, ‘How do we make this guy an action hero?’" […]

"It’s a highbrow/lowbrow project by design," Mr. Knight said. "If you know the poem, the game has a lot to offer. If you just want to mash buttons and kill demons, that’s all it has to be for you."

In his latest On Language column, Ben Zimmer examines "Crash Blossoms", and introduces the topic with a literary allusion:

Elizabeth Barrett Browning once gave the poetry of her husband, Robert, a harsh assessment, criticizing his habit of excessively paring down his syntax with opaque results. “You sometimes make a dust, a dark dust,” she wrote him, “by sweeping away your little words.”

Several readers have written to suggest LL coverage of the latest viral site, "Sleep Talkin' Man". So if you're one of the half-dozen netizens who haven't yet browsed this compendium of oneirophonic entertainment, by all means do so now.

I haven't written about this because I don't have much to say, except that it's interesting how interested people are in such things. In some Elysian bistro, André Breton and Philippe Soupault are doubtless kicking themselves for being born too early to publish in the t-shirt and coffee-mug market:

That's the tagline for Banksy's soon to be released film Exit Through the Gift Shop. This is turning out to be a good day for sentences you need to read twice. And it's rare to find one which says nothing and everything (about street art, grammar, movies, you name it) so precisely.

[via the Guardian]

Fans of Conan O'Brien, who announced he wouldn't accept NBC's plan to move "The Tonight Show" to midnight, have flooded Twitter with the #TeamConan hashtag. In my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, I trace the evolution of the "Team X" meme (what Arnold Zwicky would call a snowclonelet composite) — from Team Xerox to Team Aniston to Team Edward. An excerpt:

"Team X" didn't cross over into pop-cultural usage until the summer of 2005, when Brad Pitt began appearing in public with Angelina Jolie, soon after his divorce from Jennifer Aniston. Ah, the mid-aughts, when the "Brangelina" portmanteau was inescapable. This celebrity coupling generated huge amounts of fodder for the tabloids and the budding blogosphere. On June 14, 2005, the New York Daily News reported that T-shirts reading "Team Aniston" or "Team Jolie" were all the rage in Los Angeles. There was even a three-month waiting list for the shirts (with Team Aniston "overwhelmingly" outselling Team Jolie, according to manufacturer White Trash Charms).

Read the rest here. (And compare the similar snowclonelet "X Nation," discussed a few years ago on the American Dialect Society mailing list here and here.)

(Tip of the hat to Rubrick for the title.)

OK, I'm in room Key 5 (I guess that's Francis Scott Key) at the Baltimore Hilton, where the LSA symposium "Medialingual: Representing Language in Film and Television", organized by Walt Wolfram, is just getting started.

Jack Lynch's recent book The Lexicographer's Dilemma was featured last week in the New York Times' Books section, in a review by Neil Genzlinger under the headline "This is English, Rules are Optional".  Arnold Zwicky recommended Lynch's book enthusiastically, back in December, and I agree with his opinion. Genzlinger also liked the book, and his review should be worth a well-deserved boost in sales. But there was something about Genzlinger's perspective that struck me as odd.

John Bainbridge's 1961 book The super-Americans: a picture of life in the United States, as Brought into Focus, Bigger than Life, in the Land of the Millionaires — Texas was originally published as a series of articles in the New Yorker. The first installment (March 11, 1961: p. 47) began with this sentence:

It is currently fashionable among the more advanced spirits in this country to look upon Texas with an air of amused condescension.

And a few pages later, Bainbridge underlined the advancement of his own spirit as follows:

At a recent cocktail party in Dallas, a visiting journalist was introduced to a handsome, impeccably groomed young matron with golden hair, velvety eyes the color of wood violets, and a becomingly superbious air. She seemed a sublime specimen of the Super-American until, as so often happens, she elected to open her mouth. "Mistah," she said, "Ah'm sick and tahed of readin' those trashy stories you-all keep writin' ahbowt Texas. They ah just so unfaih they make mah blood boil."