Language Log

At some point, I mean to get back to looking up the research that is said to support Matt Richtel's claims that "the brain is rewired when it is constantly inundated with new information". Right now, though, I'd like to point out that complaints about the distractions of modern life didn't begin when email, texting and hyperlinks started eating our brains.  I wouldn't be surprised to find similar sort of complaints from the 13th century about clock towers, but today I'm just going to take things back to 1924, and an article from the New York Times with the headline "This Machine-Made World Conquers One More Rebel".

Following up on "Chinese Lesson for Today," we have another specimen of writing on a wall related to the bodily functions that requires grammatical explanation. Here is a temporary sign at a construction site in Shanghai, taken by Mollie Kirk around '08:

Jìnzhǐ xiǎobiàn, fǒuzé sǐrén 禁止小便,否則死人

Direct translation: "It is prohibited to urinate, otherwise dead man."

Sign on the wall of a public toilet in China:

Yánjìn yòng dǎngbào dǎngkān dāng shǒuzhǐ yòng" 严禁用党报党刊当手纸用.

Smooth translation: “Use of Party newspapers and magazines as toilet paper is strictly forbidden.”

From xkcd a little while ago:

According to Douglas B. Brill, "Barack Obama image targeted in Roseto Big Time shooting game", 8/3/2010:

A game called "Alien Attack" at the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Big Time celebration in Roseto encouraged players to shoot darts at the head and heart of an image of a suited black man holding a health care bill and wearing a presidential seal.

Restaurant sign in Kashgar:

In The Glass Rainbow, James Lee Burke's latest, the protagonist, Dave Robicheaux, is arguing with his daughter Alafair about a novel written by an ex-con who's staying with her boyfriend:

"Have you read The Green Cage?" Alafair asked.

"I have. I got it from the library. I didn't buy it."

"You don't think it's a brilliant piece of writing?"

"Yeah, it is, for reasons the author and his admirers don't seem to understand."

She wasn't taking the bait, so I slogged on. "It's a great look inside the mind of a sociopath and narcissist and manipulator. Count the number of times the pronouns 'I,' 'me,' 'mine,' and 'myself' appear in every paragraph."

"Somebody must have liked it. Robbie was a finalist in the National Book Awards."

"Robbie?"

"Argue with someone else, Dave."

I'm all too familiar with the idea that people from such-and-such a country can't deal with concept X because they simply have no word for it. One common version of this is the idea that without a word for something bad like bribery, people are incapable of understanding that they shouldn't do it.  Alternatively, the idea may be turned around the other way — without a word for something bad like lying, people allegedly don't understand that it's even a possible option.

I wasn't aware, but it seems that until 1990 or so, a linguistic gap of this kind protected Australians from such social evils as begging and armed robbery.  As Andrew Herrick explains ("With American lingo, we've imported toxic US culture", The Age 8/6/2010):

When Australian vernacular is replaced by franchised American terms, exotic tropes are too often introduced into our social and political ecology. Twenty years ago, Australia didn't need the terms homey, mugging, drive-by shooting, gated community and panhandling because these were foreign concepts. But they are not so strange to us now.

We've imported America's toxic culture with its language, and react by resorting to a questionable American "solution".

Reader JL sent this picture, with some questions:

First of all, there's the word "jegging." A quick search tells me that it's a cross between "jeans" and "leggings." I might have been able to figure that out myself if they had gone with "jeggings"–but "jegging"? That sounds like some novel form of crime. ("I totally got jegged last night!")

But then there's also the "live in" part. Presumably this is an exhortation to wear your jegging all day and thus "live in" it. But when I first saw this I read it more in the "live in Tokyo" sense.

Or maybe the "live-in housekeeper" sense?  Amazingly enough, "live in jegging" isn't yet indexed by Google or Bing, so you lucky readers get first shot at figuring out what this means.

From this week's Studio 360, in an interesting interview with John Irving, this interesting evidence about the meaning of most:

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One of the puzzles of the whole "Plastic Bertrand" drama for Americans is that we don't like plastic. In a famous scene from The Graduate (1967), "plastics" is a one-word symbol for the emptiness of mainstream success:

According to the Guardian,

The Belgian singer Plastic Bertrand has admitted that the voice that gave the world the 1977 Euro-punk anthem Ça Plane Pour Moi was not his. Roger Jouret, the man behind the Plastic Bertrand persona, had previously denied that he was not the singer on the record. But in an interview with the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, he admitted it had been another singer – and laid the blame at the door of his former producer, Lou Deprijck. His admission came a day after a linguist commissioned by a judge concluded that the singer's accent did not match the voice on the record.

Yesterday here in Prince George I overheard a young woman on her cell phone complaining about the heat: "It's plus 29 here!". [That's 84.2 in Antique American temperature units.] I suspect that this would not be felicitous in, say, Phoenix or Riyadh.