Language Log

We’ve had more than enough bad news lately about the economy, loss of jobs, fraud in the marketplace, and our various wars, so maybe talking about how to give bad news seems timely. Now CNN.com has published an article about the problems that law enforcement officers experience when it’s their job to give the bad news to relatives about murder victims and other tragedies. Giving the bad news is hard on the police. Some do it well; others don’t. But giving the ultimate bad news is necessary, no matter how hard we stuggle to do it.

Most of us have to communicate bad news to suffering people at some time in our lives, whether it’s the type that police have to announce, the type that financial advisors have to give clients who have just lost their life savings in a stockmarket dive, or the type that physicians sadly have to give their patients. No bad news giving is easy.

It isn't often that I learn a new English word while reading the newspaper, but today's New York Times contains one: snarge. It means "the residue of birds that have struck an airplane" and is used by, and apparently was coined by, the people at the National Museum of Natural History who try to identify the birds that have had fatal encounters with airplanes. I leave to the imagination what future anthropologists will make of the existence of this term. They'll probably decide that 21st century Americans practiced a peculiar high-tech form of divination.

Yuval Pinter writes:

When an English speaker doesn't understand a word one says, it's "Greek to me". When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it "sounds like Chinese". I've been told the Korean equivalent is "sounds like Hebrew".

Has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph?

The latest xkcd:

(Click for a larger version.)

The mouseover title is "Sadly, this is a true story. At least I learned about the OS X 'say' command."

Arnold's post on linguistic(s) put me in mind of something I never got around to blogging last year. The hook was Richard Zoglin's appreciation of George Carlin in Time:

Most famously, Carlin talked about the "seven words you can never say on television," foisting the verboten few into his audience's face with the glee of a classroom cutup and the scrupulousness of a social linguist.

"Social linguist" — I had an image of Geoff Pullum at a cocktail party, with one hand in his blazer pocket and the other wrapped around a martini glass. But on reflection I figured the phrase was what the writer had made of hearing sociolinguist. In fact social linguist gets 700+ Google hits, most of them almost certainly the products of mishearings:

"Language is never about language," said social linguist Walt Wolfram. (Associated Press)

Barbara Kannapell, a social linguist based in Washington, said the shortage of sign-language interpreters is a national problem. (New York Times)

In a popular book of that name, social linguist Deborah Tannen has documented just how much our culture is dominated by an "adversarial frame of mind." Kenneth Plummer, Intimate Citizenship (U of Washington Press)

You'd have to say, then, that these are eggcorns in the technical sense. But does it really matter? I mean, "social linguist" could have been the standard term, right?

At the bottom of our New Year's greeting letter to friends, I put this picture of a very special Dutch Belted cow:

When I looked at a few of the letters my wife had signed, I noticed that she had added "Happy" on one side of the cow and "Year" on the other side of the cow. I thought that was extremely clever, because she was using the cow as a cross-lingual pun: "Happy 牛 Year!" Upon being read out as "Happy NIU2 Year," any speaker of English will immediately understand the greeting. And, this being the Chinese "Year of the NIU2," which was why I put that animal at the bottom of our New Year's message in the first place, Liqing's formulation is particularly fitting for the beginning of 2009.

In "Burlesque Matinée at the Max Planck Gesellschaft", I detailed the unfortunate appearance of a rather unseemly Chinese text on the cover of the flagship journal (3/2008) of the Max Planck Institut. As evidenced by the enormous outpouring of comments on this subject here at Language Log and across the Internet, people were perplexed, titillated, amused, and outraged that such a strange event could have occurred. All sorts of explanations were proffered, from accusations that somebody was trying to make fun of Chinese to insinuations that nefarious persons wished to make fools of the Germans. After weeks of further investigation, I can now say with confidence that the real cause for what happened was sheer ineptitude.

George McAllister (comment number 75) was right when he said, "Given that the only evidence we have is the cover itself and a generic 'we're sorry' statement, it seems to me we should turn to statistics to solve the 'incompetence v. very clever trick' debate." There was no dirty trick to make fun of Chinese or to deride Germans / Westerners — at least not on the part of the editorial staff of MPF.

I've been reading David Laitin's Politics, Language and Thought: The Somali Experience, which discusses a kind of linguistic determinism that (in my opinion) hasn't gotten the attention it deserves.  So in keeping with my third annual New Year's resolution to emphasize positive blogging about linguistic issues, I'm going to tell you about some fascinating 35-year-old experiments described in Laitin's book,  in the context of some more recent work on related issues.

I'll frame the discussion in terms of a deceptively simple question: do the results of public opinion polling depend on the language of the interview? The answer, it seems, is often "yes", and the effects are sometimes very large. This immediately raises a more difficult question: why?

On Christmas eve we went to Abbraccio with some friends for the festa dei sette pesci. This was our second seven-fish feast of 2008, since some other friends had their traditionally non-traditional big-party version last Saturday.  Over the years, I've heard several different explanations for the fish and for the number, and a quick internet search turns up many other examples of the post hoc explanations that people routinely develop to give meaning to facts. But I've so far failed to find even a speculative answer to the sette pesci question that really interests me.

Renowned broadcaster (and part-time word maven) John Humphrys gives a quick summary of the weather forecast just before the 7:30 news summary on the BBC Radio 4 "Today" program in the UK each morning; and what he said this morning was a classic of the genre: "Pretty miserable by and large." A charming example, I thought, of the tradition of extremely vague weather-forecast language in the blustery British Isles.

The latest issue of MaxPlanckForschung, the flagship journal of the Max Planck Institute, has China as its focus. To honor the theme of the issue, the editors asked one of the journalists who worked for the magazine to find an elegant Chinese poem to grace the cover. This was the result:

No sooner had the journal fallen into the hands of Chinese readers than it set off a frenzy of indignation, uproarious laughter, and animated discussion.

The television commercial asks:

What happens if you take remote Chiang Mai villagers who have never seen a burger? Who don’t even have a word for burger?  And ask them to compare a Whopper versus Big Mac?

Imagine that: so isolated and primitive that they don't even have a word for burger! Yet another instance of the "Language L has no word for X" trope.

This site has a description of Burger King's "Whopper virgins will decide" campaign, along with two of the teaser ads (including the one from Chiang Mai in Thailand) and some (negative) responses from viewers. The brief description:

Burger King travels in 13 planes, 2 dog sleds and 1 helicopter over 20,000 miles to find people who have never heard of the WHOPPER and perform the world’s purest taste test. Locations visited include a remote hill village in north Thailand, a rural farming community in Romania and icy tundra of Greenland.

Apparently, Burger King didn't ask the Greenlanders about their words for snow.

I just returned from a linguistics conference in China. I won’t even try to compete with Victor Mair’s reports (here and here and here, for example) about the way English is fractured there, but a taxi ride in Guangzhou provided me with a few bits of interesting language information.