Language Log

Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden are long-time collectors of arguments for the final serial comma. They're responsible for publicizing the most famous (if probably apocryphal) example, "This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God", as well as the equally remarkable (and apparently real) "The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector".

Now Patrick Nielsen Hayden ("The return of the final serial comma's vital necessity", Making Light 10/21/2010) has posted another, describing the recent documentary about Merle Haggard: "Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall".

Yesterday, Nick Clegg made news in England by announcing a new spending program ("Clegg unveils 'fairness premium'", ePolitix.com 10/15/2010):

Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has unveiled a £7bn 'fairness premium' to help disadvantaged children through the education system.

The plan, to be included in the comprehensive spending review, will contain an offer of 15 free hours of pre-school education a week to two year olds from poorer families in England.

In a speech at a junior school in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, Clegg also confirmed the Lib Dem pledge of a "pupil premium" while they are at schools, and a new "student premium" to help them through university.

With the coming of email, a vital resource that once had a real cost became essentially free for everyone. Once it used to cost at least a few pennies to send a communication through the mail, but now it is free. And one of the awful results is a new kind of deviant linguistic behavior in our culture: the mass-mailing of unsolicited loony outpourings. It needs a name; I suggest calling it nutspam.

I have been receiving nutspam from several clearly deranged and annoying citizens. Probably none of them are doing anything that's against any law anywhere. They might even be protected by the First Amendment. One guy, in particular (a total stranger to me), seems to be ramping up. He sends out wild political (and occasionally personal) discontented ravings several times a day, from many different and frequently changing free email addresses he has set up. It's just ordinary email to valid email addresses that he has found on websites, and he isn't selling anything. But it's not just a few addresses that he mails to.

Jean Véronis went to see Beatrice Uria-Monzon in Carmen a few days ago, and connects the experience to recent political events in France:

How ironic in these times of French Roma-phobia: the world's most-performed French work tells a gypsy story. Just like the Mérimée short novel from which it originates, the opera reflects the Romantic fascination with Roma […] Following perhaps in the footsteps of Cervantes (Little Gypsy), Bizet, Mérimée, Hugo, Borrow, Liszt and many others were charmed by this people living on the fringes of society, freedom incarnate – free to be on the move, free from work, free from fitting into society; all elements found in Carmen.

If you haven't been following the situation that Jean refers to, you could start here or here or here.

In response to Tom McCarthy's novel C being shortlisted for the Booker prize, abebooks.com has posted "The A to Z of the Shortest Book Titles".  A surprisingly large number of the letters of the alphabet are still available. Even if we ignore punctuation and superscripts, only A, C, E, G, H, K, M, N, O, P, Q, S, V, W, X, Y, and Z are taken — if you get to work quickly, you have a shot at being the first to publish a work with the title B, D, F, I, J, L, R, T, or U.

A few weeks after John McWhorter and I participated in a "diavlog" on Bloggingheads, the site is hosting another language-y conversation between Joshua Knobe of Yale and Lera Boroditsky of Stanford. Whereas the previous diavlog touched briefly on neo-Whorfian arguments about the culturally determined relations of language to thought (responding to a New York Times Magazine article by Guy Deutscher), this one is a full-on Whorf-o-rama, delving into Boroditsky's research on language and cognition (see her Wall Street Journal article, "Lost in Translation," for more).

Yesterday, the world rejoiced at the news of Liu Xiaobo's being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010.  In China, however, the cyber police and media censors swung into frantic action to prevent word of this important event from being communicated to its 1.4 billion citizens.  They cordoned off the area where Liu's wife, Liu Xia, lives, and then whisked her off to an undisclosed location so that the press and television could not interview her.  Liu himself may still not know that he is the Peace Prize laureate.  And anyone who celebrates the award or mentions Liu's name (certainly not approvingly) is likely to end up in prison just like him.  Even Han Han, China's most formidable blogger, who seems to be able to say more than anyone else about contemporary life in China (but always most subtly and indirectly), was extremely careful about how he broached the subject:  see here and here.  (You must look very carefully to see what Han Han wrote).

Barbara Wei told me about a kind of broad / lima bean crisps called "Only Puke."

When I tried to find out more about this unappetizing snack, I learned that it was featured earlier this year in a weblog post by that eminent linguist, Dave Barry ("Yum", 5/20/2010), following up on an article in the Daily Mail ("Fine Foods from Abroad", 5/20/2010). A bit later, Only Puke was the lead item in  an impressive catalogue of other bizarre product names  at the British web site Anorak News ("The World’s Worst Product Names, Presented By Only Puke Chips", 6/21/2010):

We now continue your look at nominative determinism in consumer goods with some more Sexy Foods and products. You will learn that Terror comes in a variety of flavours, an OAP tastes better in sauce, older boys love Oily Boy, Puke is served in bags and a Double Cock is a Keeper.

Ryan Y. wrote to ask about words for "the sounds instruments make". He points out that in English, "Drums go 'rat-a-tat' and 'bang,' bells go 'ding dong,' and sad trombones go 'wah wah'", but he notes that there are some gaps that he finds surprising:

Few instruments are as popular in the US as the guitar, but I have no idea what sound a guitar makes. There are gaps even for the standard high school band/orchestra instruments. What sound does a violin make? A flute? For that matter, what sound does an orchestra make? A rock group?

Is there a compelling explanation as to why we have words for the sounds of bells, trombones, and tubas, but not guitars? Why do we lack words for the sounds of groups of instruments? Do, say, Italians have a word for the sound a violin makes? Do the French have a word for the sound of a French Horn?

Hey, guess what! The cricket story about not having a word for "impossible" wasn't the last "no-word-for-X" story! Matthew Izzi, who writes from Boston, is a new reader of Language Log, and clearly a quick study, because he has already learned to be skeptical of things-people-have-no-words-for stories. His antennae went up when he read the following photo caption (slide 4 of 5) on The New Yorker's "Book Bench" blog this morning:

Pukapuka, also known as Danger Island, was, in the nineteen-twenties, a sanctuary for nudism, a place where "sex is a game, and jealousy has no place." There is no word for "virgin" in the language.

The latest, laziest, and most stupid things-there-are-no-words-for snowclone use I have seen in quite a while (contributed by a Language Log reader who supplies no name other than "Flintoff's Gusset"):

Herein lies a cricket tale of a heady concoction of exceptional talent laced with self-belief to match. Such gargantuan self-belief, in fact, that just as the Piraha tribe of northwest Brazil speak an obscure language in which there is no concept of numbers, so in the lexicon of Ian Botham's cricket existence, there is no word for "impossible". He does not, and never has done, "can't".

Thus Mike Selvey, writing about Ian Botham on the ESPN cricinfo site.

My note yesterday about Cantonese infixation into English words was written while changing planes on the way back from Hong Kong, and was somewhat rushed, not to say incoherent. Thanks to the commenters who helped clear things up! This morning, I'd like to add a few more references and observations about several interesting aspects of this phenomenon and its context.

One of the things that I learned during my recent short stay in Hong Kong is that there are some especially interesting ways of mixing English and Cantonese, including putting Cantonese in the middle of English words. One example (due to Bill Wang via Tan Lee):

so [mat1 je5] ry [aa3]
so 乜野 ry 啊
Why say sorry ? [Usually in an angry and unpleasant mood]