Language Log

Listening to this recent Freakonomics podcast episode, I heard a word variant that I'd never heard before: longetivity, being used to mean longevity. You can hear it at about the 8:35 mark of the podcast — I was listening on Stitcher, in case that matters. Coincidentally, the relevant portion of the podcast (from an interview with Dick Yuengling, beer lovers!) is transcribed on the episode's webpage, with the word "corrected" to longevity.

Fans of noun piles will enjoy the recent blog post by Mike Pope, a technical editor at Microsoft, "Fun (or not) with noun stacks." Mike shares a few of the lovely compound noun pileups he's encountered on the job:

• data bound control table row action links
• failed password security question answer attempts limit
• reduced minimum OS partition space available requirement

Mike goes on to explain why he thinks these problematic constructions continue to crop up in technical writing, driven by imperatives of terseness and concision at the expense of comprehensibility. He also gives helpful advice for untangling technical noun piles into something more user-friendly. That's all well and good, but you have to wonder just how deeply enmeshed in nerdview a writer must be to produce a whopper like "failed password security question answer attempts limit."

In the NYT this weekend, Ben Zimmer has a great piece on new horizons in humanities computing:  "The Jargon of the Novel, Computed", 7/29/2011. The article is illustrated with a bar chart of the frequency in COCA of "bolt upright" in various genres:

Among the nuggets you can find in Ben's article is an allusion to David Bamman and Gregory Crane, "The Logic and Discovery of Textual Allusion", LaTeCH2008, which alone is worth the price of admission. But the thing that mainly struck me was the possibility that I'd gotten "bolt upright" wrong, all these years.

A few days ago, Larry Horn sent this note to the  American Dialect Society's discussion list:

On an article lauding the Texas Rangers’ defense in today’s NYT sports section, I did a double-take on reading that

The defense—anchored by shortstop Elvis Andrus and the impregnable glove of Adrian Beltre at third base—has saved more runs above average than any other team but the Rays.

Once I got past the metaphor in which baseball gloves may or may not become pregnant, my first thought was that the writer (Neil Payne) had meant “unimpregnable”, i.e. incapable of being impregnated, just as “uninflammable” means 'incapable of becoming inflamed'.  I checked the OED and found to my surprise that, as they say, “there is no such word” as unimpregnable, and that the im- (i.e. iN-) of impregnable can only be a negative prefix, so that impregnable already (officially) means what I had thought unimpregnable would mean, rendering the doubly-prefixed form otiose.  Evidently, unimpregnable does not and never did exist.

Are we losing it? [*] It's been almost three weeks since the latest and greatest episode in the News Corporation phone-hacking scandal began dominating the world's news, and no one at Language Log has yet found a linguistic angle. I mean, Geoff Pullum connected a World Series victory with Strunk & White; I found a way to put Paris Hilton together with birdsong syntax; surely we can relate Rupert Murdoch to hypotaxis, or Rebekah Brooks to FOXP2?

Well, not so far. But this morning, I've got at least the peripheral glimmer of a connection.

Last night, with some diffidence, for the first time since Barbara's death, I made an attempt at cooking the excellent mushroom risotto that she used to do. I knew how to do it in broad outline. But through a careless fumble when adding more olive oil to the pan at the sauteeing stage, I put way too much olive oil in — like about half a cup too much. Barbara (mistress of delicious low-fat cooking) would have thrown the whole mess in the bin. I made a different decision. I decided to reconceptualize. This was not going to be Barbara's mushroom risotto at all; this was an olive oil risotto with mushrooms. Qua mushroom risotto it would not have ranked highly, but qua olive oil risotto it wasn't too bad.

"Switching strength on and off", Nature 6/9/2011:

A material has been designed to switch back and forth between a strong, brittle state and a weak, ductile one.

Hai-Jun Jin at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shenyang and Jörg Weissmüller at the Technical University of Hamburg in Germany made their composite by imbibing nanoporous gold (pictured) with an electrolyte. When the applied electrical potential shifted, the material showed distinct and reversible changes in strength, flow stress and ductility.

Andrew Rotherham, "A looming shadow over No Child Left Behind", Time Magazine, 6/16/2011:

The chattering class was even sourer. American Enterprise Institute scholar and pundit Rick Hess accused Duncan of trammeling on the Constitution.

Typo for trampling? Maybe, but this word-confusion  is commoner than I would have expected.

Reader CL writes:

I've been using "lengthly" all this time; my mother used it; I believe her mother, an English teacher at a high school in Brooklyn, used it. Today, at almost 33, I saw a wiggly line from a word processor that was my first clue it's not actually a word. Wiktionary says "misspelled form of lengthy."

How did this happen? Is it widespread though (prescriptively) wrong?

A couple of months ago, an Italian friend brought to my attention a quirk of Italian usage. Like English, Italian has adopted the Latin word forum to mean "a place for public discussion".  In English, as usual with borrowed Latin words, the plural is sometimes "fora" (the original Latin plural) and sometimes "forums" (the regular English form). In Italian, borrowed words are often treated as invariabile ("invariant"), so that the plural is the same as the singular. For forum this yields the plural "forum", and (for example) "in tutti i forum" (meaning "in all forums") is common on the web.

But there are also two Italian words foro, plural "fori": one means "hole, opening", and the other means "court, tribunal".

Following up on my post "Counterfeit cultural capital" (5/11/2011), David Russinoff sent some additional information about the early history of expressions like "angles comprised of equal right lines" in English translations of Euclid.  I reproduce his note in full below, in order to make his efforts available to other interested scholars, while adding a warning to others that this may go a bit deep in the historical-lexicography weeds even for hardened LL readers.

Around the water cooler at Language Log Plaza yesterday, David Beaver noted a HuffPo headline "With Pitfalls Abound For Prosecutors, Could Edwards Case Fall Apart?", where abound is used like aplenty. He also reported that a quick web search turns up many examples where abound is used like afoot: "speculation is abound", "excitement is abound".

Today's political buzz is all about the win by Democrat Kathy Hochul in New York's 26th congressional district, encompassing suburbs northeast of Buffalo and west of Rochester. National issues, particularly the debate over Medicare, played a big part in the race, but local factors were key as well, with the Republican candidate, Jane Corwin, losing votes to Jack Davis, a third-party spoiler running on the Tea Party line. Hochul was helped by squabbles between the Corwin and Davis campaigns, most notably a confrontation between Davis and Corwin's chief of staff outside a veteran's event a couple of weeks ago. The video of the confrontation memorably featured Jack Davis saying, "You want punched out?"