Language Log

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:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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.

Several readers have sent me links to Lera Boroditsky's recent article in the Wall Street Journal, "Lost in Translation" (7/24/2010).  We've mentioned Prof. Boroditsky's work on LL several times, starting back in 2003, and so long-time readers won't be surprised to learn that I think this is an interesting popularization of solid work.  However, most LL readers will also know that there is probably no single linguistic idea that is more prone to exaggeration and mis-application than the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" about the relations between language and thought. And the WSJ editors' subhed for Boroditsky's article gives their readers a push down that road:

New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way people see the world; a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish.

A recent post on Arnold Zwicky's blog features Kevin Fowler's Pound Sign, which brings cartoon cussing to the medium of music for the first time (?):

Just in case there might be little ears around,
I won’t say it, I’ll just spell it out –
I feel like pound-sign, question mark, star, exclamation point,
Don’t give a blank, and a whole lot of other choice words I can’t say –
Today I feel like pound-sign, question mark, star, exclamation point.

A truly strange piece of euphemism came up in a UK newspaper interview with Justin Halpern, the creator of the hit Twitter page Shit My Dad Says:

One day we took the dog for a walk. My dad said: "Look at the dog's asshole — you can tell from the dilation that the dog is about to shit" and the dog went to the bathroom. He was incredibly impressed by his prediction.

The dog went to the bathroom? Not exactly a case of like father like son, linguistically.

For those of us in the unpleasant position of policing student essays for plagiarism, there's a familiar odor wafting off of the unfolding scandal involving Scott McGinnis, a former congressman and current candidate for governor in Colorado ("McInnis’ water writings mirror works published years ago by Justice Hobbs", Denver Post 7/12/2010):

Portions of essays on water submitted for publication by gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis are identical or nearly identical to work published years earlier by now-State Supreme Court Justice Gregory Hobbs. […]

In a memo accompanying the work when it was turned in to the Hasan Foundation for publication, McInnis wrote that it was all original work and in its final form.

McInnis refused to comment for this story. His campaign’s spokesman, Sean Duffy, acknowledged the similarities between the work of Hobbs and McInnis, and blamed a researcher who worked with McInnis on the articles.

Rolly Fischer, an engineer who worked at the Colorado River Water Conservation District, Duffy said, was the one who handled the portions that used Hobbs’ work without attribution.

“It should’ve been attributed properly and it was not,” Duffy said. “(McInnis) relied on the research and expertise” of Fischer.

Fischer did not immediately return a message for comment. His name appears nowhere on the work McInnis submitted as his own for publication by the Hasan Foundation.

Latest xkcd: