Language Log

According to Martin Snapp, "At 75, it's been a long, strange trip for Berkeley's Wavy Gravy", San Jose Mercury News 5/6/2011:

In 1965, when he and his wife, Jahanara (then called Bonnie Jean), were living in a one-room cabin outside Los Angeles with about 40 friends, including fellow ice cream flavor and Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, they all posed for a Life magazine cover photo.

I've been reading Stanley Fish's recent booklet "How to Write a Sentence: And How To Read One", seduced by passages like this one on page 2:

… just piling up words, one after the other, won't do much of anything until something else has been added. That something is named quite precisely by Anthony Burgess in this sentence from his novel Enderby Outside (1968):

And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning.

Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere. Once the words are nestled in the placed "ordained" for them — "ordained" is a wonderful word that points to the inexorable logic of syntactic structures — they are tied by ligatures of relationships to one another. They are subjects or objects or actions or descriptives or indications of manner, and as such they combine into a statement about the world, that is, into a meaning that one can contemplate, admire, reject, or refine.

Nina Totenberg, "Skip the Legalese And Keep It Short, Justices Say", Morning Edition, 6/12/2011:

Most of the U.S. Supreme Court's work is in writing. The words on the page become the law of the land, but the justices have no uniform approach to the way they do that job. Indeed, each seems to have his or her own inspiration or pet peeve.

Much of this is laid out is a series of interviews conducted with the justices in 2007 and consigned to obscurity on a little-known website. Now those interviews have been published in the Scribes Journal of Legal Writing, and they show some of the justices in an unusually revealing light.

Reader KH asks:

I currently have a number of people trying to convince me that the phrase "that's mighty white of you" originated in the American South in the ~1920s, deriving from racial ideas of whiteness and white supremacy.  It was my understanding that "white" in this phrase derived from completely non-racial ideas correlating whiteness with purity or goodness.  Do you know of any source that might settle this?  I have not been able to find anything reliable on my own and thought you might have more extensive resources at your disposal.

Gil Scott-Heron died yesterday at the age of 62 — a remarkable performer whose politically charged combination of music and poetry had an enormous influence on the development of hip-hop culture. One of my favorite spoken-word performances by Scott-Heron appeared on the 1978 compilation, The Mind of Gil Scott-Heron: " The Ghetto Code (Dot Dot Dit Dot Dot Dit Dot Dot Dash)." It's full of linguistic play, including an explanation of "old-fashioned ghetto code" used to mask phone conversations from snooping authorities.

The code involved infixation of "ee-iz" [i:ɪz] between the onset and nucleus of stressed syllables. So-called "[IZ]-infixation" would later become popular in rap music (particularly as used by Snoop Dogg), though OED editor at large Jesse Sheidlower has found examples back to a 1972 glossary on New York drug slang. There was also a predecessor in the talk of carnival workers (carnies), with the word carn(e)y represented in the code as kizarney. (See Joshua Viau's "Introducing English [IZ]-Infixation: Snoop Dogg and bey-[IZ]-ond" for some background.)

You can hear the whole performance on YouTube here. The relevant part starts at about 6:28:

Today's Doonesbury:

Recently, the media have been bombarding us with stories about Harold Camping's calculations that the end of the world will start tomorrow: Ashley Parker, "Make My Bed? But You Say the World’s Ending", NYT 5/19/2011; Mark Washburn, "With Rapture at hand, why bother flossing?", The Charlotte Observer, 5/20/2011; Abby Sewell, "Entreprenuers offer post-'rapture' services", L.A. Times 5/19/2011; David Barnett, "Apocalypse now? Christian Rapture fiction and the end of the world", 5/20/2001; etc.

But this being Language Log rather than Eschatology Log, my interest this morning is in the word rapture and in various associated verbs, such as rapted and raptured. Somewhat to my surprise, it appears that the sense glossed by the OED as "A state, condition, or fit of intense delight or enthusiasm" is a couple of centuries older than the sense glossed as "the transport of believers to heaven at the Second Coming of Christ".

Iowa is home to the famous Iowa Writers' Workshop, which is located at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Over the years, many aspiring Chinese writers who later became outstanding poets and authors have enjoyed residencies there, and many of China's and Taiwan's most distinguished authors have come to the Writers' Workshop for shorter stays, to attend conferences, and to give lectures.

Here is a 1993 account of "Chinese Writers in Iowa" by Peter Xinping Zhou that gives a good idea of the importance of the Writers' Workshop for the Sinophone literary realm.  This essay mentions only a fraction of the Chinese writers who had come to the Workshop by 1993, and, needless to say, the number who have passed through the Workshop since 1993 is even greater.  As Peter Xinping Zhou begins his essay, it is no exaggeration to say that "To many people in China, the name of the University of Iowa is just as familiar as that of Harvard or Oxford."

Matthew Edney, who describes himself as "a British-born academic who now, 27 years after first arrival, is linguistically located somewhere in the general confusion of the mid-Atlantic", sent me an interesting query about the history of English spelling. Since I know almost nothing about this subject, I'm forwarding the question to LL readers, who are likely among them to have the answers, or at least some useful observations.

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".