Language Log

It's bad enough to have to weather a disastrous economic crisis, but now the Greeks are faced with a frog crisis.  Millions of migrating frogs — a veritable carpet of the slippery, slimy fellows — have closed down a major Greek highway near Thessaloniki.

I believe that the usual word for "frog" in modern Greek is batrachos, but all of Greece is referring to the current batrachian horde with the Biblical word tzfardei'a.  In so doing, I suppose they wish to recall the Biblical plague of frogs that God inflicted on Egypt (the second of ten plagues that he sent against the Egyptians).  In fact, the plague of frogs was meant as an attack on the Egyptian frog goddess Heqt, whose job it was to assist women in labor.

Most Americans visiting the Netherlands feel pretty much at home, I think, although there are a few oddities, like the large number of bicyclists and the fact that the trains run on time. But at a deeper level, the Netherlands is really a very foreign country.

Last fall, the editors of Onze Taal ("Our Language") asked readers for their favorite German word. They got 3,358 responses, with a suprisingly clear winner, as they explained in an article earlier this year:

(The English translations are mine, and therefore not to be relied on, since I know little German and less Dutch.)

Robin Lane Fox is the gardening correspondent for the Financial Times, as well as a lecturer in Ancient History at Exeter College, Oxford. A few days ago, he reviewed an exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden, Emily Dickinson's Garden: The Poetry of Flowers. He liked the exhibition (calling it "unmissable" and "an essential destination for gardeners who are caught in downtown Manhattan as the weather starts to warm"), but he makes it clear that he doesn't like what he calls Emily Dickinson's "cryptic little poems, which have become exalted as triumphs of US female writing" ("Poetic Nature", FT 5/15/2010).

In fact he seems to dislike her Americanness as much as her femaleness, but it soon develops that he finds just about everything about her annoying, including the fact that her poems don't conform to the norms that he expects of his pupils' essays.

Jean-Paul Nerrière's "Globish" hits the media again, this time because Robert McCrum is using his space at the Guardian to push a new book with the same title. According to McCrum, "the globalisation of English, and English literature, law, money and values, is the cultural revolution of my generation" ("How English erased its roots to become the global tongue of the 21st Century", 5/9/2010).

The last time I posted about Globish ("Another day, another reprinted press release", 4/24/2005), I complained that the International Herald Tribune uncritically reprinted a nearly contentless press release promoting Nerrière's books and other products.  McCrum's book excerpt in the Guardian is quite different — it's chock full of what looks to me like a lot of mutually incompatible information, opinion, and analysis, most of it old news being passed off as the new new thing.

On John McIntyre's blog You Don't Say, I recently learned about a site where you can search 43 different stylebooks at once.  These run the gamut from the recommendations of the American Anthropological Association to those of the World Health Organization, by way of The Economist Style Guide, Jack Lynch's Guide to Grammar and Style,  the Oregon Department of Human Services, and The Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual.

The site is OnlineStylebooks.com, and as John notes, "This should help you to learn how to live with inconsistency".  Which is ironic, since the purpose of stylebooks is to help achieve consistency.

One of the many difficult things about English spelling is that you can't choose the right letter for an unstressed vowel unless you know the word, or guess its etymology, or get lucky. Everybody gets the wrong end of this one from time to time — certainly I do — and that's why dictionaries and the internet are especially helpful for those of us who occasionally display our orthographic guesses in public. Last week, someone at Fox News got overconfident:

Today's Guardian offers Improbable research: The repetitive physics of Om. Tantalizing. In turn, this links to Ajay Anil Gurjar and Siddharth A. Ladhak, Time-Frequency Analysis of Chanting Sanskrit Divine Sound "OM" Mantra, International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security, VOL.8 No.8, August 2008. Even more tantalizing. A new field of theophonetics!

Unfortunately,  the article is not divine.

In one of the comments on my recent "begging the question" post, Samantha asked:

Could someone give me a concrete example of this fallacy (the simpler, the better?) It would be especially great if it was an example like what Aristotle had in mind, something that showed "how such arguments can be disguised so as to appear persuasive." I've read the Wikipedia articles about the fallacy but I still can't wrap my mind around it.

As far as I know, Aristotle's discussion (e.g. in Part 16 of Book II of the Prior Analytics) is entirely abstract. However, others have supplied plenty of concrete illustrations of the concept over the centuries: here's an example from Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics for 1/5/2006:

Macy Halford, of The Book Bench at the New Yorker, wrote to me with a question about "begs the question":

Recently, one of our posts caused quite a stir by misusing the phrase (to mean “raises the question”), and many discussions ensued, the result of which was that we all realized that even though we (kind of) understand the phrase in the Latin, we really don’t understand, etymologically, the English translation—either “begs the question” or “petitions for the principle,” though the latter makes more sense. And we all wondered whether the Latin was used only in the context of formalized debate or argument. It seems like a fairly complex concept, with a complex definition—it makes me wonder why we use or misuse it at all, since the need to use it in everyday speech (or blogging) would seem not very great.

(FWIW, the offending post was apparently this one, with the original "this begs questions like …" quickly amended to "this raises questions like…")

Jonathan Weinberg wrote to suggest that perhaps "explanatory neurophilia" (the fact that people tend to be impressed and persuaded by neuroscientific details even if they provide no explanatory value) is part of a larger phenomenon that also includes "physics envy" (the desire to achieve in other sciences the success of mathematical reasoning from first principles that Newton brought to physics).

In reference to the witticism "Anything you can do, I can do meta", cited in "Doing Meta: from meta-language to meta-clippy", 1/32/3007, Michael Smith asked:

I was wondering whether you were ever given, or able to find, a citation for "Anything you can do, I can do meta" earlier than the reported use by Samuel Hahn in 1991.

Let me explain my interest.  Each year the Department of Philosophy at Princeton makes a t-shirt for the graduating class with a quotation of their choice on it.  This year they've chosen "Anything you can do, I can do meta", but of course they have no idea who said it.  I'd quite like to be able to tell them when it first appeared in print, if that's known.

Prof. Smith followed up with this post scriptum:

After a little further searching on Google I came up with the attached article from 1979 (see p.1230, footnote 2).  However, if you know of an earlier citation, or of a credit to someone other than Lipson, I'd be grateful if you would let me know.

Jesse Sheidlower points out a "VERY strongly worded spelling/punctuation rant", to be found here.

(Unless you have a very large screen, you'll want to use "right-click>>Open link in new window", or maybe try this link instead. Warning: some NSFW text in VERY large type…)

This seems to reach rage-o-meter values not seen since the "pilotless drone" episode.

According to CNN ("At least 7 arrested after raids in three states", 3/28/1010):

Federal authorities plan to unseal charges Monday against several people arrested in a series of weekend raids in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, prosecutors in Detroit said Sunday. […]

Mike Lackomar, a county leader for the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia, said the target of the raid was a Christian militia group called the Hutaree. The group proclaims on a Web site that it is "preparing for the end time battles to keep the testimony of Jesus Christ alive."

The origin of the group's name, Hutaree, is not explained on what seems to be their web site. And there are other linguistic mysteries to be found there, including their system of paramilitary ranks.