Language Log

I haven't revisited the topic of nerdview for some time now, but I thought of it again when I saw the utter, dispiriting uselessness of the sticky label I saw on Thursday morning:

THIS REFUSE HAS BEEN CHECKED FOR ILLEGAL PRESENTATION.

What the hell, I hope you are asking yourself, is that about? You need to live in Edinburgh's New Town to figure it out instantly. For the rest of you, I will explain.

There are four parts to this very long post:  1. a message from a Shanghainese mother explaining her attitude toward the language she speaks with her little daughter, 2. the use of Shanghainese in the poster that I discussed in my previous post, 3. non-Mandarin college entrance exams, 4. an important resource for those interested in Wu topolects.

In writing a few days ago about "Word Attraction" — the irrational exuberance that particular words sometimes inspire — I failed to note the possibility that emotion might be associated with the pronunciation of particular words by particular people. This morning, I'll try to track down a specific example that I've wondered about for some time.

The specific speaker in question is the Reverend George Whitefield (1714-1770), whose statue is visible from my dining-room window. (The sculptor, R. Tait McKenzie, was a physician, a Penn professor, and a boyhood friend of James Naismith, the inventor of the game of basketball.)

Whitefield was a much-traveled evangelical preacher, one of the leaders of the Great Awakening, who played an indirect part in the beginnings of the University of Pennsylvania.  In implementing his 1749 Proposals for the Education of Youth in Pensilvania, Benjamin Franklin made use of a partly finished "New Building" that had been put up in 1740 to give Whitefield a place to preach.

Whitefield's published sermons seem rather ordinary — the printed texts don't convey, at least to me, what Benjamin Franklin called "the extraordinary influence of his oratory". Specifically, I recall reading somewhere that Whitefield could make audience-members faint merely by saying the word 'Mesopotamia'; and so today I thought I'd try to track down this story to its source.

Sally Thomason's puzzling comma-spotting reminds me of Louis Aragon's ambiguous invitation to his readers:

Je demande à ce que mes livres soient critiqués avec la dernière rigueur, par des gens qui s'y connaissent, et qui sachant la grammaire et la logique, chercheront sous le pas de mes virgules les poux de ma pensée dans la tête de mon style.

Or as translated in the Columbia dictionary of quotations:

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the off-beat placement of song syllables (and other other notes) in popular music of the past century. This can be seen as the displacement of events from an underlyingly regular meter, but often it can also be seen as a basic metrical pattern in which events don't fall at evenly-spaced time intervals  ("Rock syncopation: stress shifts or polyrhythms?", 11/26/2007).  The example that I looked at was a maximally simple one — the 3+3+2=4+4 "habanera" rhythm that rocked America in the late 19th century.

Today's post is about some rhythms that arrange events in a recurring cycle of 12 time-units. And although I'll start with another Afro-Cuban pattern, the Bembé, today's analysis will look at connections in renaissance Italy and ancient Rome, rather than in 20th-century America. (Attention conservation notice: unless you're interested in geeking out on a detailed analysis of metrical patterns, you'll probably want to skip onwards to some of our other fine posts…)

David Pesetsky, the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at MIT, is also the principal second violin in the New Philharmonia Orchestra of Massachusetts. For their 4/1/2009 rehearsal, he provided English translations for the sometimes-confusing performance instructions in Mahler's 1st Symphony.

Dave's sensitive interpretation of Mahler's artistic intent has been received with praise in musical circles. The first page is reproduced below, but any of you who plan to play or listen to this piece should read the whole thing.

We are painfully aware of the fondness of NBA players for sporting Chinese tattoos that they don't understand. The misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture has long been diligently documented at Hanzi Smatter.

But it wasn't until I read an article in my local newspaper and Benjamin Zimmer called a similar article in the Telegraph to my attention that I realized a similar phenomenon has been occurring in China recently.

Incidentally, Hellenophiles will be delighted to see in the Telegraph article that at least one person has some elegant Greek lettering on his / her derriere.

According to the Telegraph, Zhang Aiping, a tattooist at Tattoo 108 in Shanghai, said: "Around 30 per cent to 40 per cent of our customers are choosing tattoos in English letters now. This has happened really suddenly, since the beginning of this year."

The following poster is circulating among students from Shanghai, both inside and outside of China:

For a complete translation, go to the next page.

Even jezebel.com is getting into the S&W 50th anniversary act (Sadie, "Stylistas", 4/16/2009):

The Elements of Style, Strunk and White's timeless usage and composition handbook, is 50 today. Please place a preposition after the relative pronoun in its honor.

I applaud this attempt to re-purpose words that have otherwise lost their meaning in popular culture, but frankly, the results are a stylistic disappointment.

Geoff Pullum was on the NPR radio program Talk of the Nation yesterday, in a segment entitled "A Half-Century of Stupid Grammar Advice".

For those who want more, lists of past LL posts mentioning Strunk can be found here and here.

What do you call it when each player on a team is responsible for defending against just one specific player on the opposing team? If you're playing in such a system, what do you call the player you're responsible for guarding? OK, now what if the players are female? I asked myself such questions several times last week as I watched the final exciting games in the NCAA women's basketball tournament.

In the April 17th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Geoff Pullum meditates on Strunk & White ("50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice"):

April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.

I won't be celebrating.

Daniel Gross has a nice article in Slate called “Bubblespeak,” describing the way economists and politicians extend themselves, as Orwell put it, “to make lies sound truthful." Leading the list is “legacy loans,” “legacy securities,” and “legacy costs,” referring to those badly collateralized loans, mortgages, and problems of auto companies that we are hearing so much about in reports of the recent Federal Bank Rescue Plan. Linguist George Lakoff says “legacy” typically means something positive, while positive these financial instruments are not. Other current expressions, such as “troubled assets” (see the Troubled Asset Relief Program), “securitization” (redistribution of bad loans), and “sub-prime” (non-prime loans) come under similar fire.

Ah, semantics.