Language Log

A few days ago, Michelle Pauli in the Guardian's Books Blog asked "Which words make you wince?":

'What word do you hate and why?' is the intriguing question put to a selection of poets by the Ledbury festival. Philip Wells's reply is the winner for me – 'pulchritude' is certainly up there on my blacklist. He even explains his animosity in suitably poetic terms:

"it violates all the magical impulses of balanced onomatopoeic language – it of course means "beautiful", but its meaning is nothing of the sort, being stuffed to the brim with a brutally latinate cudgel of barbaric consonants. If consonants represent riverbanks and vowels the river's flow, this is the word equivalent of the bottomless abyss of dry bones, where demons gather to spit acid."

For Geraldine Monk, "it's got to be 'redacted' which makes me feel totally sick. It's a brutish sounding word. It doesn't flow, it prods at you in a nasty manner."

Both these poets understand that the key to words that make you feel nauseous is not the meaning – it's easy, after all, to hate the word 'torture' – but something else entirely. Something idiosyncratic, something about the way the word feels in your mouth as you say it. The horrors of 'membrane', for instance. Or the eccentricity of 'gusset'.

I've observed from time to time, half-seriously, that the ambiguity of plural noun-phrase comparison ("women have better hearing than men") causes — as well as results from — the tendency to interpret small group differences as essential group characteristics (e.g. "The Pirahã and us", 10/6/2007; "Annals of essentialism: sexual orientation and rhetorical assymmetry", 6/18/2008; "Pop platonism and unrepresentative samples", 7/26/2008; 'The happiness gap returns", 7/26/2008;. "Reverse Whorfianism and SHAs", 12/23/2008).

But there are other, more lexically specific, sources of confusion about statistical concepts and statements. One that I noticed for the first time yesterday is an ambiguity in the word chance. Its popular use in the sense of probabilistic odds ("little chance of success"; "his chances are good" , etc.) is relatively recent, and has always overlapped with an older meaning that emphasizes complete unpredictability and the lack of any discernable cause.

This history helps explain the shocking sentence that I read yesterday on the online front page of the New York Times; "A longtime trainer uses an actuarial approach to predict injuries, defying the assumption that what happens to players is a matter of chance".

Near the end of 1801, his first year as president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson got a letter from Robert Patterson, professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, containing a page encrypted according to a new method. Patterson described his cryptosystem in detail, and boasted that without the key — which he didn't provide — decryption of his message would "defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race".

After more than 200 years, the code was finally broken by Dr. Lawren Smithline, a mathematician at the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, N.J., using a technique originally developed for biological sequence comparison.

This could be the premise for a new Dan Brown novel, if Patterson's message were sufficiently bizarre and consequential.

A note from Bob Ladd:

I just picked up and put away a book I'd bought in a second-hand bookstore before going to Romania in 1978, called "The Balkans in our Time", by Robert Lee Wolff, a mid-century Harvard historian.  I realized that he's yet another example of a generalization that must somehow tell us something about how language works: Anglo-elite American academic historians often use their full middle name.  Samuel Eliot Morrison and Henry Steele Commager come readily to mind, but Robert Lee Wolff fits the pattern, as does another more recent writer, Walter Russell Mead.  And Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell, was a historian. It's hard to search for these on Google, but I'm pretty sure I've noticed others, and I can't think of people who use their middle name and *aren't* American academic historians, except for good ol' boys like Billy Bob Thornton and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Hannah Poturalski, "Basketball legend visits Kenton", Lima News, 6/19/2009:

Thursday evening nearly 70 members of the Ohio State Alumni Club of Hardin County, as well as community members, saw an animated presentation by [Jerry] Lucas on the new way he plans on revolutionizing learning.

Lucas, now 69, said he's been involved in memory training his entire life. As a boy he invented mind games to keep himself entertained.

Through conditioning his mind with new ways to learn and memorize things, Lucas has established the Lucas Learning System. The system focuses on linking visuals with things that don't have an identity, such as pronouns and Arkansas.

To remember a pronoun, Lucas created an image of a Catholic nun with a golf club. She was a professional golf player, hence pro-nun. Lucas ingrains that image in the mind, so every time you hear pronoun, you see the visual.

When the U.S. soccer team plays Brazil this afternoon in the Confederations Cup final,  the stadium will be buzzing with the sound of plastic trumpets called vuvuzelas. (See Delia Robertson "Vuvuzela: Popular Symbol of South African Football", VOA News, 6/25/2009).

Here's an example (with simulated crowd noise) of how a vuvuzela sounds:

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Yesterday, Ben Zimmer traced the nonsense-syllable chant at the end of Michael Jackson's Wanna Be Startin Somethin back to its roots in Manu Dibango's Soul Makossa, a 1973 Cameroonian hit that played a role in the origins of disco in New York City. The chants in these songs are nice examples of a phenomenon that I discussed a couple of years ago ("Rock syncopation: stress shifts or polyrhythms?", 11/26/2007), where linguistic accents and musical beats start off aligned at the beginning of a phrase, and then go out of sync, typically with one or more of the later textual accents shifted "to the left", i.e. ahead in time, relative to the apparent musical beat.

Tomorrow is the U.S. release of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. (Warning: clicking on that link will cause Linkin Park to start playing the chorus of New Divide through your computer's sound system, which may not be what you want…)

Some parts of the movie were shot here at Penn — including one scene in the Quad, where I live:

In this screenshot from the trailer, the (added by me) red ellipse marks my dining room window, next to which I generally sit while blogging at breakfast. The trailer suggests that I can expect to get cinematically blown to CGI bits along with pretty much every everything else in the movie.

Usarufa is a language of Papua New Guinea with just 1200 speakers (ISO-639 code "usa").  There's no fluent speakers under the age of 25, so the language must be considered moribund.  Before posting recordings of this language online, I needed to get informed consent, so I introduced some speakers to the World Wide Web.  We poked around for a while, finding useful sites about about insecticides for dealing with the taro beetle.  Then we turned our attention to audio.

I played them a recording of the "last words" of the Jiwarli language of Western Australia.  After some questioning looks I explained that this language is now dead, and we were listening to its last speaker before he died.  As one they all looked down, shaking their heads in disbelief and saying sorry, sorry, sorry….  It was as if I told them a mutual friend had died.  They urged me to put that recording on a cassette tape so they could take it back to their village.  That way, everyone would surely understand what will happen to the Usarufa language unless there are serious attempts to revitalize it.

I wasn't prepared for the intensity of their response.  Now I'm wondering if a collection of such recordings might be a useful tool in promoting language revitalization, and also in explaining the concept of language archiving.  (Thanks to Ima'o Ta'asata, James Warebu, Sivini Ikilele, and Waks Mark for their dedication to the preservation of Usarufa oral culture, and to Aaron Willems and SIL-PNG for facilitating this work.)

In "Keepin' it real fake, part CCXVII: Not even Obama can sell us on BlockBerry", most of the folks at endgadget seem to think that the following ad is some sort of joke or an invitation to political demagoguery:

A song performed by Mohsen Namjoo, whose title is transliterated as "Hamrah Sho Aziz", has been posted a number of times on YouTube with different images. The earliest one that I've found is from 6/20/2008. There's a version posted on 5/27/2009 that seems to have released by Mir Hossein Mousavi's campaign, with some added strings and speeches. Since the election, there have been several versions with different images and mixed-in audio, on 6/13/2009 and 6/16/2009. The last half of the latest one (below) is a TV interview with Mousavi.

Like many others, I've spent much of the past few days reading the sites that offer news about events in Iran; and I appreciate the depth of information that the "New Media" collectively provide, including transcriptions and translations of many of the slogans. Thus Nader Uskowi's weblog features a YouTube video of a wounded girl being loaded into an ambulance ("Casualties in Teheran", 6/15/2009), and also transcribes and translates the chants of the crowd:

Protestors chanting: Mikosham, Mikosham, Ankeh Baradaram Kosht (“Will Kill, Kill, Those Who Killed My Brother”) and Marg Bar Dictator (“Death to Dictator”)

Using the first of these chants as a Google probe, thinking to find other reports and commentary on current events, I stumbled on an interesting account of exactly the same chant being used against the Shah in 1978.

Yesterday, I posted about an Iranian government entity whose Persian name, Majma'a Tash-khees Maslahat Nezam (مجمع تشخیص مصلحت نظام), literally means something like "The Council for Discerning the System's Interest", but is normally given in English as "The Expediency Discernment Council of the System", or the "Expediency Council" for short. I found this translation to be odd, because expediency often has rather negative connotations in English, especially in a context where it might be implicitly opposed to concepts like principle, justice, duty, or honor. As evidence (or at least illustration) for these connotations, I offered a few quotations chosen more or less at random from a search of Literature Online.

One of these quotations set off a different sort of bizarreness reaction in John V. Burke, who wrote:

I never thought to see Robert Montgomery's name outside The Stuffed Owl, an Anthology of Bad Verse, edited by D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee.

Well, bad poetry may be a better source for stereotypical associations than good poetry is — though my first randomly-chosen example came from Hugh MacDiarmid, who was a very good poet indeed.