Language Log

Among a number of culturally and linguistically interesting points in the "Asians in the UCLA Library" rant, Jay Livingston focuses on the speaker's use of the phrase "the tsunami thing".

Last night, Connecticut beat Kentucky 56-55 and advanced to the NCAA title game in men's basketball.  As a hoops fan who grew up near UConn's campus, I was paying attention.  And I already knew that the two coaches, UConn's Jim Calhoun and Kentucky's John Calipari, had a long-standing personal rivalry. What I didn't know, until I read about in during the run-up to the game, was that the rivalry has a linguistic dimension.  According to Greg Bishop, "Coaches Calhoun and Calipari share a genuine dislike", NYT 4/1/2011:

The contentious relationship between Connecticut’s Jim Calhoun and Kentucky’s John Calipari is perhaps the longest and most entertaining coaching feud in college basketball. It started so long ago that Calipari has held five jobs since. […]

[T]heir first major act of competition […] went to Calipari, then a young, brash hotshot at the University of Massachusetts who in 1993 went to Calhoun’s state and plucked a high school center from Hartford named Marcus Camby. […]

Calhoun considered Calipari an outsider with no background to talk about basketball in New England. He mocked Calipari, calling him Johnny Clam Chowder — pronounced with an “er” at the end, not an “ah” — and not behind his back.

At this point, many readers will need some background on chowders and rhoticity.

A couple of days ago, Jessica Dweck wrote me with a question:

In the last few months there have been a couple of books out with "pants" in the title (Bossypants, Mr. Funnypants). So we were curious how people started adding "pants" to different words. In the OED, it looks like "fancy pants" came first, followed by "smarty pants." Using Google's n-gram (an admittedly imperfect tool), it looks like the use of "fancy pants" and "smarty pants" really took off around the year 1940. Do you have any theories as to why people started adding "pants" to words, and why the practice rose so precipitously in the latter half of the 20th century? Often the terms are paired with an honorific for comedic effect (e.g. Mr. Funnypants). How did that practice become popular?

I sent a quick answer, and a day later, sent a bit more. But meanwhile, Ms. Dweck's deadline had intervened ("How Did Tina Fey’s Pants Get So Bossy?", Slate 3/30/2011). So in keeping with my general practice, I'll post the rest of our Q&A.

I've gotten several requests from readers for a phonetic analysis of Rebecca Black's mega-viral hit Friday. I'm still thinking about that, but meanwhile, here's the Bad Lip-Reading version:

Reader JC reports getting an email with the subject line "New Unexpected Life Events Provider Effective 4/1". He was disappointed to learn that this "'new unexpected life events provider' will not, in fact, provide me with life events of any kind".

David Donnell has pointed out to me via email that Elizabeth Taylor was apparently the last of many things, including "Hollywood's great goddesses", "the Hollywood greats", "the silver screen goddesses", "the Real Movie Stars", "the truly larger-than-life glamorous, iconic women", "the true Hollywood icons", "the bona fide movie stars", "the legends", "the movie stars", "the great glamour stars", "the red-hot movie goddesses", "the real Hollywood", …

Kumail Nanjiani discusses the Karachi street signs in Call of Duty:

Some of Andrew Sullivan's readers debunk the notion that "Japanese has no word for looting", as well as the claim that no looting has taken place following the recent disaster ("Why no looting in Japan? Ctd.", The Daily Dish, 3/17/2011).

Coco Krumme, "Velvety Chocolate With a Silky Ruby Finish. Pair With Shellfish.", Slate 2/23/2011:

Using descriptions of 3,000 bottles, ranging from \$5 to \$200 in price from an online aggregator of reviews, I first derived a weight for every word, based on the frequency with which it appeared on cheap versus expensive bottles. I then looked at the combination of words used for each bottle, and calculated the probability that the wine would fall into a given price range. The result was, essentially, a Bayesian classifier for wine. In the same way that a spam filter considers the combination of words in an e-mail to predict the legitimacy of the message, the classifier estimates the price of a bottle using its descriptors.

The analysis revealed, first off, that "cheap" and "expensive" words are used differently. Cheap words are more likely to be recycled, while words correlated with expensive wines tend to be in the tail of the distribution. That is, reviewers are more likely to create new vocabulary for top-end wines. The classifier also showed that it's possible to guess the price range of a wine based on the words in the review.

I've stolen the title of this post from the subject line of a message from Hal Daumé, who has invited folks at University of Maryland to a huge Jeopardy-watching party he's organizing tonight. Today is February 14, so for at least some of the audience, Jeopardy might indeed jeopardize Valentine's Day, substituting geeky fun (I use the term fondly) for candle-lit dinners.

In case you hadn't heard, the reason for the excitement, pizza parties, and so forth is that tonight's episode will, for the first time, feature a computer competing against human players — and not just any human players, but the two best known Jeopardy champions. This is stirring up a new round of popular discussion about artificial intelligence, as Mark noted a few days ago. Many in the media — not to mention IBM, whose computer is doing the playing — are happy to play up the "smartest machine on earth", dawn-of-a-new-age angle. Though, to be fair, David Ferrucci, the IBMer who came up with the idea of building a Jeopardy-playing computer and led the project, does point out quite responsibly that this is only one step on the way to true natural language understanding by machine (e.g. at one point in this promotional video).

Regardless of how the game turns out, it's true that tonight will be a great achievement for language technology. Though I would also argue that the achievement is as much in the choice of problem as in the technology itself.

I doubt that it has the staying power of lolcats, but for the moment, people are having a lot of fun mocking Bill O'Reilly's puzzling argument for the existence of God:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I'll tell you why it's not a scam, in my opinion. Right?
Tides goes in, tide goes out, never a miscommunication.
YOU can't explain that.

Language Log has not yet commented on the most stupid recent case of censorship in the arts motivated by vocabulary taboos. The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC), an independent broadcasting agency charged with overseeing private radio stations in Canada, has banned Mark Knopfler's wonderful 1985 Dire Straits rock anthem "Money For Nothing" from the airwaves. The reason? The word faggot appears in three of the song's lines (as originally written), and the CBSC believes that this lexical item should never again sully Canadian air.

Following up on his tip about  "bomb-diffusing" at the Telegraph, Robert Ayers sent me a link to an unexpected verbal inflection from the same source ("Icelandic volcano 'set to erupt''", 2/8/2011):

By comparison, Bárdarbunga dwarves the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which shutdown most of Europe's airspace last year after its ash cloud drifted across the continent's skies.

A few years ago ("Dwarfs vs. dwarves", 1/3/2004), a small amount of research convinced me that the plural noun "dwarves" is mainly used for members of the fantasy race, partly but not exclusively due to the influence of J.R.R. Tolkien, with "dwarfs" being the standard plural form (it's the only one that the OED gives), and therefore the one used in standard English for real-world referents, whether human or astronomical.

It never even occurred to me that anyone would use "dwarves" as the third singular form of the verb dwarf "To cause to be or seem small". So much for confident assumptions.