Language Log

Here are two anniversarial tweets that appeared Friday evening. The first is from the WhiteHouse.gov Technology account, celebrating the anniversary of the release of the source code for We the People:

Happy #OpenSource-iversary @wethepeople! A year ago today we released the code, see what we've been up to since: http://t.co/Bvwu35xh8h

— WH.gov Technology (@WHWeb) August 23, 2013

The second is from Chris Messina, a.k.a. the hashtag godfather, on the occasion of the sixth anniversary of his proposal of the hashtag convention on Twitter:

BTW, little secret: TODAY is the 6th #hashtagiversary. I totally punk'd CNBC. DON'T TELL ANYONE!!!!!!!

— Chris Messina™ (@chrismessina) August 24, 2013

(Messina didn't actually coin hashtag on that fateful day in 2007 — that was done a few days later by Stowe Boyd, another early Twitter adopter. See the Spring 2013 installment of "Among the New Words" in American Speech [pdf], which I co-wrote with Charles Carson, as well as Boyd's own recent post on the subject.)

I don't have much to say about the latest tempest in a teapot over the non-literal use of "literally." It started, as such things often do these days, on Reddit, where a participant in the /r/funny subreddit posted an imgur image showing Google's dictionary entry for "literally" that pops up when you search on the word. The second definition reads, "Used for emphasis or to express strong feeling while not being literally true." That was enough for the redditor to declare, "We did it guys, we finally killed English." As the news pinged around the blogosphere, we got such fire-breathing headlines as "Society Crumbles as Google Admits 'Literally' Now Means 'Figuratively'," "Google Sides With Traitors To The English Language Over Dictionary Definition Of 'Literally'," "I Could Literally Die Right Now," and "It’s Official: The Internet Has Broken the English Language."

The outrage was further heightened by the realization that (gasp!) pretty much every major dictionary from the OED on down now recognizes this sense of the word. So now we get vitriol directed toward the OED's lexicographers, who revised the entry for "literally" back in September 2011, coming from such sources as The Times, The Daily Mail, The Guardian, and The Telegraph. [Update: As Fiona McPherson points out on the OxfordWords blog, the usage was actually noted in the "literally" entry when it was first published in 1903. The 2011 revision reorganized the entry and expanded the historical record.]

Recently I've been hearing about a Japanese electronic device called a "garakei ガラケイ". Mystified by this katakana word, which I assumed to be at least partially the transcription of some foreign term, I set about trying to find out more about it.

It wasn't hard to discover (here and here) that the word basically means "Galapagos cell phone". What a strange name for a kind of cell phone!

Today's Bad Machinery, in which Charlotte and Mildred explore a wormhole into the past (?) under the fume hood in their school's chemistry lab, includes these panels:

Anne Curzan, "What to do about 'impactful'?", Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/19/2013:

If I were asked to rate new words on a scale from 1-10 based on their aesthetic appeal (note: words’ aesthetic appeal in my opinion—this scale cannot possibly be objective), with 10 being the most appealing and 1 being the least, I would give impactful about a 3. In other words, I notice the word, and I don’t especially like it.

Now, let’s be clear: There is no particularly good reason for my displeasure with this word. There are plenty of similar adjectives in the language, formed by a noun + -ful to mean “full of or having a lot of [the noun]”: for example, playful, joyful, eventful. The adjective impactful is relatively new to the language, but that’s not a good reason for my distaste either—there are lots of other new words that I like (e.g., the wonderfully playful recombobulate). The meaning of impactful is a bit vague (for example, is the impact good or bad?), but the same critique could be made of well-accepted adjectives like influential. The word may sound business jargony to some, but the data no longer fully support this connotation, as I’ll get to.

Amber Woodward, an attorney for the federal government living in Dallas, TX (originally from the Kansas City area), recently had a run-in with her father-in-law when she called him "ornery". I'll let her tell her own story in a moment, but first I want to say that I personally never use "ornery" in a pejorative sense. In fact, I always use it to convey affection. For example, if I say "ornery little fellow" about a child, I mean that he is mischievous but loveable, and I'll go up and hug him after I call him that. If I say it about an animal (e.g., "ornery critter"), I intend to convey the notion that I respect it for its strength, agility, wiliness, etc., not that I despise it for being hard to handle. Even when I declare that someone is an "ornery old cuss", I usually want to let him know that I like him for being the curmudgeon that he is (cf. this Language Log comment [near the end, in red]).

By the way, I normally pronounce "ornery" with three syllables, but occasionally will lapse into two syllables ("orn-ree") when I'm relaxed or in a hurry. Oh, yeah, I'm from Ohio.

The Visual Thesaurus gives "cantankerous; crotchety" as first level synonyms for "ornery", and pronounces the word with three syllables. These seem to be standard for dictionary definitions of the word.

In "Why so little Chinese in English?", Robert Lane Greene ponders the paucity of recent Chinese loanwords in English, and there is a further discussion on Language Hat.   English loves to borrow far and wide, yet it is strange how few words of Chinese origin there are in English. This is particularly odd for recent times, when there has been so much contact between Chinese and English speakers, and there have even been campaigns on the part of Chinese officials, journalists, and netizens to promote particular expressions for adoption into English.

Philip Maughan, "Colum McCann: 'What could be worse that [sic] being called a historical novelist?'", The New Stateman 7/4/2013:

For the past couple of years I've been writing a language column for The Boston Globe (and before that for The New York Times Magazine). Now I'm starting a new language column for The Wall Street Journal, called "Word on the Street." Each week I'll be focusing on a word in the news and examining its history. First up, cyber, which is showing up with increasing frequency as a noun.

Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent in the DOMA decision had some harsh words, to say the least, for the majority opinion. But the word everyone has been fixated on is rather light-hearted: argle-bargle.

As I have said, the real rationale of today’s opinion, whatever disappearing trail of its legalistic argle-bargle one chooses to follow, is that DOMA is motivated by '"bare . . . desire to harm"' couples in same-sex marriages.

Sybil Shaver writes:

Reading Stephen White's novel Line of Fire I encountered the following: (in the middle of a discussion of a death which is either accidental or suicide, p. 51 of the hardcover)

"What do you mean 'if she intends to die'? Isn't dying always intent?"

I shook my head. "It helps to think about suicidal behavior having two pairs of defining variables. Picture a simple chi square – a two-by-two graph. On one axis is the dichotomy of intent – the person intends either to die or to survive. On the other axis is the dichotomy of lethality – the person chooses either a method of high lethality or one of low lethality.

"The two-by-two chi square allows for four possible combinations." I turned over our grocery list and sketched a chi-square with four boxes. "People with low intent sometimes choose methods of high lethality. They can end up dying, almost by accident, because death wasn't what they were seeking. The opposite is people who intended to die, but they chose a low-lethality method. They're the ones who believed that five aspirin and two shots of vodka would kill them. But they end up surviving, again, almost by accident."

"You drew four boxes. What are the other two?"

I squeezed water from a rag to use to wipe the counter. "I described low intent/high lethality, and high intent/low lethality. The other two are low intent/low lethality, and high intent/high lethality. People in both those categories get the outcome they intended. Low intent/low lethality is the classic 'cry for help' suicide attempt-someone who intends to survive but is eager for someone else to know about the gesture. That person doesn't wish to die, and she chooses a method that makes death unlikely. High intent/high lethality is the guy who puts a shotgun barrel in his mouth and pulls the trigger with his toes. He intends to die and chooses a method that is damn near certain to do it.'

Practically everybody has heard of the fabled Grass Mud Horse (cǎonímǎ 草泥马), which is a pun for "f*ck your mother" (cào nǐ mā 肏你妈). China Digital Times, which pioneered research on "sensitive words", including "Grass Mud Horse", has just introduced a new feature, which should prove to be a useful resource for China scholars and journalists: "Two Years of Sensitive Words: Grass-Mud Horse List".

You will observe that not one of the tones of cǎonímǎ 草泥马 ("Grass Mud Horse") matches the corresponding tone in the original cào nǐ mā 肏你妈 ("f*ck your mother"), yet no one has the slightest difficulty in comprehending that the former is meant as a pun for the latter.

Forrest Wickman, "This Is a Blog Post. It Is Not a 'Blog.'" Slate 5/24/2013:

Let’s get this straight up front: I am now writing a blog post, not blogging a blog.

For many, using the word blog when you mean blog post is an understandable mistake. Most who make it are new to blogging, or aren’t fluent in the language of the Web. But over the last several months it’s become clear to me that the tendency to make this error has infected even some of the most Internet-savvy denizens of the Web. And it needs to stop.

I hit my breaking point a few weeks back with—who else?—Amanda Palmer. Of all the irritating things in her blog post about “A Poem for Dzhokhar,” the most irritating was the title: “A Blog About ‘A Poem for Dzhokhar.’ ” Palmer, of course, had not created a whole blog about her poem “A Poem for Dzhokhar.” (Even she’s not self-involved enough to do that.) Instead, she’d written a 2,000-word blog post about the poem.