Language Log

David Brooks, starting his conversation with Gail Collins on why "Western Men are Doomed" (NYT, 11/19/2009):

China always gets me thinking big. I look at the long history and bright future of that civilization-state and suddenly you’ve got to chase me down with a butterfly net to impose the grip of reality on my grandiose and free-floating ideas.

Wielding a butterfly net would be a welcome change, in my opinion — I feel more like the guy with a shovel assigned to follow behind a circus elephant.  Luckily the elephant is putting out pretty much the same old stuff, which makes the clean-up easier.

I'm thankful that I live in a country where not even Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck want to imprison people for using unsanctioned letters like ñ and í.  This occurred to me yesterday evening as I was making the cranberry sauce and listening on the radio to "Illegal letters in Turkey":

In Turkey, a law dating back to the 1920’s bans the use of the letters Q, W and X. The law was created for Turkey’s transition from the Arabic alphabet to the Latin one. But today, it’s used against Turkey’s ethnic Kurds.

This is a video clip provided by Dan Everett, in which he interviews Kaioá, a Pirahã man in his 30s.   Dan's transcription, translation, and discussion can be found here.

In today's Stone Soup, Val tries to catch up:

Steve Pinker's recent NYT review of Malcolm Gladwell's latest book suggests a valuable coinage ("Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective", 11/7/2009; emphasis added) :

An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

In support of creative lexicography, I plan to be on the look-out for future opportunities to refer to the Igon Value Problem.

Ethan Forman broke the Danvers High School meep-ban story in the Salem News on 11/10/2009 (See "Meep: Truth or Onion?").   Over the past few days, the story has been picked up by several wire services and other outlets, none of whom provided any information beyond what was in Forman's original story.

Yesterday, NPR's All Things Considered looked into it, and actually added something to the story by interviewing a student, Mike Spiewak ("Principal Tells Students 'Meep' Is Off-Limits"):

Jonathan Raban, "Summer with Empson", London Review of Books, 11/5/2009:

For an English-born reader, America is written in a language deceptively similar to one’s own and full of pitfalls and ‘false friends’. The word nature, for instance, means something different here – so do community, class, friend, tradition, home (think of the implications beneath the surface of the peculiarly American phrase ‘He makes his home in …’). These I’ve learned to recognise, but the longer I stay here the more conscious I am of nuances to which I must still remain deaf. The altered meanings and associations of American English, as it has parted company from its parent language over 400 years, reflect as great a difference in experience of the world as that between, say, the Germans and the French, but in this case the words are identical in form and so the difference is largely lost to sight.

Andrew Gelman, justifiably puzzled ("Two countries separated etc etc", 11/11/2009):

I can't tell if Raban is being serious or if he is making some sort of joke. The paradox of the statement above is that very few readers will be qualified to assess it.

In any case, if someone can explain to me how nature, community, class, friend, tradition, and home have different meanings in English and American, I'd appreciate it. I've read a lot of things written by English people but I have no idea whatsoever what he's taking about.

This story ("What's wrong with 'meep'? It's all in how you say it", 11/10/2009) comes from a real newspaper rather than from the Onion, but sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.

Yesterday's South Park episode features an elaborate drama of grass-roots lexicography.  The wikipedia entry gives some details:

In an earlier post, I observed that the phrase "the United States" — regardless of whether it is treated as singular or plural — seems to have become more likely, over time, to occur in subject position ("The United States as a subject", 10/6/2009).  My (admittedly slim) evidence for this hypothesis came from some searches in newspaper archives, where the process of gathering data is painfully slow, because I was forced to search interactively via a web interface, and to check out the grammatical status of hits by wearing out my eyes on the article images that are returned.

Historians may find this complaint churlish, since they're used to an even more painful process. Traditionally, scholars have needed to travel to the local of a physical archive, and to read every dusty document as a whole in order to find the relevant pages.  (Well, maybe in recent years the process might involve reading dusty microfiche cards in some slightly more convenient location.)  All I have to do is to open a web browser, run a text search to find the relevant articles, and examine the page images that are returned!

But yes, I'm still complaining.

In a comment on my post "Metapun", John S. Wilkins traced the phrase "missing link" back, conceptually if not literally,  to the  "great chain of being" metaphor featured in Alexander Pope's 1744 Essay on Man:

[…] On superior powers
Were we to press, inferior might on ours;
Or in the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroyed:
From Nature's chain whatever link you like,
Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.

I'm at the AACL 2009 meeting in Edmonton — that's the meeting of the American Association for Corpus Linguistics, which is neither American nor an Association, as John Newman explained to me.  I'll report later on some of what I see and hear.

So far, the most notable thing has been the outside temperature of 20 F or so, experienced on a morning walk around campus — the conference itself hasn't started yet — but the program looks interesting.

The widely-watched PBS documentary The Civil War included this commentary by Shelby Foote:

Before the war, it was said "the United States are." Grammatically, it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war, it was always "the United States is," as we say today without being self-conscious at all. And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an "is."

Innumerable history lectures have featured similar rhetoric, but as a biologist friend of mine once said about a popular but flamboyantly inventive documentary in his area of specialization, "this is, well, poetically true". In real life, that is, it's false. The civil war may have "made us an 'is'", but it doesn't seem to have brought about any abrupt change in the grammar of "the United States".

I write "doesn't seem to" because no one seems ever to have checked, at least not very thoroughly. So after a few years of intending to get to it, I've done a bit of poking around. And I've discovered two things. First, we need a change in how historical text archives are managed. (At least, I do.) And second, number-agreement — on whatever time scale it happened — is not at all, in my opinion, the most interesting historical change in the grammatical treatment of "the United States".