Language Log

Coby Lubliner was puzzled by this passage in Ginia Bellafante's review of Jennifer Beals in Chicago Code ("Stirring Chicago's Corruption Stockpot", NYT 2/6/2011):

On cable we might also have received a police superintendent with the creased skin and poor muscle-to-fat ratio to actually look like a bureaucrat. At 47 Ms. Beals remains ageless and stunning, but her placid beauty could not suit the character, Teresa Colvin, any less than if producers had scoured juice bars looking for a pretty server of antioxidant smoothies. It is hard to endure as Ms. Beals tough-talks her way to the appearance of managerial self-confidence and harder still to bear witness to a Chicago accent she can neither master nor even momentarily sustain.

Did she grow up in Dallas? No, Ms. Beals, alas, is from Chicago. Whether she once spoke with flat A’s and ditched them at Yale, where she studied in the ’80s, is hard to know, but there seems little hope of her ever authentically retrieving them.

Coby asked "Can you explain what is meant by ditching flat A's at Yale?"

This started out to be a short report on some cool, socially relevant crowdsourcing for Egyptian Arabic. Somehow it morphed into a set of musings about the (near-) future of natural language processing…

A statistical revolution in natural language processing (henceforth NLP) took place in the late 1980s up to the mid 90s or so. Knowledge based methods of the previous several decades were overtaken by data-driven statistical techniques, thanks to increases in computing power, better availability of data, and, perhaps most of all, the (largely DARPA-imposed) re-introduction of the natural language processing community to their colleagues doing speech recognition and machine learning.

There was another revolution that took place around the same time, though. When I started out in NLP, the big dream for language technology was centered on human-computer interaction: we'd be able to speak to our machines, in order to ask them questions and tell them what we wanted them to do. (My first job out of college involved a project where the goal was to take natural language queries, turn them into SQL, and pull the answers out of databases.) This idea has retained its appeal for some people, e.g., Bill Gates, but in the mid 1990s something truly changed the landscape, pushing that particular dream into the background: the Web made text important again. If the statistical revolution was about the methods, the Internet revolution was about the needs. All of a sudden there was a world of information out there, and we needed ways to locate relevant Web pages, to summarize, to translate, to ask questions and pinpoint the answers.

Fifteen years or so later, the next revolution is already well underway.

William Page, in his comment on "Happy New Year Rabbit You," correctly informs us that it is au courant to refer to gay men as "rabbits" (tùzǐ 兔子).  As for why gay men are referred to as "rabbits," this custom is said to have its basis in "Tale of the Rabbit God," about a deity who protected homosexuals, from Zǐbùyǔ 子不語 (What the Master [i.e., Confucius] Did Not Talk About), an old collection of strange stories by the famous Qing Dynasty author, Yuan Mei (1716-1797).  There are other speculations about the origins of using tùzǐ 兔子 ("rabbit") to refer to male homosexuals, but none of them seems as convincing to me as the one I have just offered.

There are many related terms, such as tùerye 兔兒爺 ("wabbit dad"), which refers to a gay. And tù bǎobǎo 兔寶寶 ("bunny darling / precious") refers to someone who is the girl boy in a gay relationship.

A widely-reprinted picture from Danny-Ahmed Ramadan's twitpic feed, wtih the caption "on Qasr Nil bridge the lion says: Game Over Mubarak":

John Hill kindly sent me this photograph of a sign that he took at Tsokar in Ladakh:

Intrigued by the name of the establishment, I wondered just what sort of services Wild Ass Homestay offers.

I thought that Tucker Carlson was being lexically creative when he walked back his statement that Michael Vick should have been executed for his dogfighting sins:

"This is what happens when you get too emotional," Carlson said […] "I'm a dog lover…I love them and I know a lot about what Michael Vick did … I overspoke. I'm uncomfortable with the death penalty in any circumstance. Of course I don't think he should be executed, but I do think that what he did is truly appalling."

Two years ago, the favored lunar New Year's greeting in China was "Happy 牛 Year!" where 牛 ("bovine") is pronounced niú in Mandarin and is standing in for "New" in the Year of the Ox / Bull / Cow.

Last year, the Year of the Tiger, "I 老虎 U", where lǎohǔ 老虎 (which means "tiger") sounds like "love" to some Chinese speakers, was conveniently and concurrently being used to celebrate the New Year, Valentine's Day, and a famous golfer's amorous escapades.

Well, this is the year of the rabbit, so you can be sure the Chinese would come up with a clever way to incorporate their word for rabbit (or hare) in this year's favored New Year's greeting, and indeed they have.

Will Brockman of Google explains that

There was a problem with apostrophes in the Ngram viewer front end – my fault, and I corrected it yesterday (1/1/2011).

In yesterday's "auldies but guidies" post, Geoff Nunberg observed that in "the unparsable 'Star-Spangled Banner' … not many people can tell you what the object of watch is in the first verse". As the subsequent discussion demonstrated, this is roughly as true of LL commenters as it is of the public at large.

In discussing the relatively low rate of contraction in Charles Portis's novel True Grit, I suggested several different explanations. It might be false archaism, or it might be a way to bring out the personality of the narrator, Mattie Ross. Another option, of course, would be that it's a quirk of the author's style. We can eliminate this last possibility by checking another of his novels, Norwood, which (according to Wikipedia)

… follows its namesake protagonist on a misadventurous road trip from his hometown of Ralph, Texas, to New York City and back. During the trip, Norwood is exposed to a comic array of personalities and lifestyles. The novel is a noteworthy example of Portis' particular skill rendering Southern dialect and conversation.

It isn't linguistically true, at least. David Fried writes:

What’s with the movie convention of representing 19th century American speech as lacking contractions? I was just enjoying the new version of “True Grit” by the Coen brothers—in fact it’s been a long time since I had so much fun at a movie. As I figure it the action is set in 1878. Much of the pleasure of the movie is the oddly formal and elaborate diction of the characters, taken straight from the Charles Portis novel. I actually find a lot of it true to my conception of the period, if rather stylized, except for the absurdity of pronouncing all contracted auxiliaries in full. Ethan Coen was specifically asked about this in a Newsweek review, and replied rather ambiguously “We’ve been told that the language and all that formality is faithful to how people talked in the period.”

Andrew Gelman has some interesting things to say about "Brow Inflation" on his blog Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science. He quotes Brooks Barnes ("Hollywood moves away from middlebrow", 12/26/2010),

"Inception," a complicated thriller about dream invaders, racked up more than $825 million in global ticket sales; "The Social Network" has so far delivered $192 million, a stellar result for a highbrow drama. . . . the message that the year sent about quality and originality is real enough that studios are tweaking their operating strategies.

and observes that

Standards have certainly changed when a Spiderman sequel, and a 21 Jump Street remake, and a ride at Disneyland are defined as "highbrow."

The cultural products described in the article–big-money popular entertainments that are well-reviewed and have some association with quality–are classic middlebrow. Back around 1950, Russell Lynes and Dwight Macdonald were all over this.

I'm still mulling over the blockbuster "culturomics" paper published in Science last week and ably addressed here by Geoff Nunberg and Mark Liberman. I'll have more to say about aspects of the paper having to do with the size of the English lexicon, but in the meantime let me direct you to my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, which takes up the more superficial question of nomenclature: both culturomics and ngram (as in the Ngram Viewer) are less than transparent to non-specialists (and even trouble some specialists). An excerpt follows below.